Читать книгу Caricature and Other Comic Art in All Times and Many Lands - James Parton - Страница 9

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If we go farther back into antiquity, it is India which first arrests and longest absorbs our attention—India, fecund mother of tradition, the source of almost all the rites, beliefs, and observances of the ancient nations. When we visit the collections of the India House, the British Museum, the Mission Rooms, or turn over the startling pages of "The Hindu Pantheon" of Major Edward Moor, we are ready to exclaim, Here all is caricature! This brazen image, for example, of a partly naked man with an elephant's head and trunk, seated upon a huge rat, and feeding himself with his trunk from a bowl held in his hand—surely this is caricature. By no means. It is an image of the most popular of the Hindoo deities—Ganesa, god of prudence and policy, invoked at the beginning of all enterprises, and over whose head is written the sacred word Aum, never uttered by a Hindoo except with awe and veneration. If a man begins to build a house, he calls on Ganesa, and sets up an image of him near the spot. Mile-stones are fashioned in his likeness, and he serves as the road-side god, even if the pious peasants who place him where two roads cross can only afford the rudest resemblance to an elephant's head daubed with oil and red ochre. Rude as it may be, a passing traveler will occasionally hang upon it a wreath of flowers. Major Moor gives us a hideous picture of Maha-Kala, with huge mouth and enormous protruding tongue, squat, naked, upon the ground, and holding up a large sword. This preposterous figure is still farther removed from the burlesque. It is the Hindoo mode of representing Eternity, whose vast insatiate maw devours men, cities, kingdoms, and will at length swallow the universe; then all the crowd of inferior deities, and finally itself, leaving only Brahm, the One Eternal, to inhabit the infinite void. Hundreds of such revolting crudities meet the eye in every extensive Indian collection.

But the element of fun and burlesque is not wanting in the Hindoo Pantheon. Krishna is the jolly Bacchus, the Don Juan, of the Indian deities. Behold him on his travels mounted upon an elephant, which is formed of the bodies of the obliging damsels who accompany him!

The Hindoo God Krishna on his Travels.

There is no end to the tales related of the mischievous, jovial, irrepressible Krishna. The ladies who go with him everywhere, a countless multitude, are so accommodating as to wreathe and twist themselves into the form of any creature he may wish to ride; sometimes into that of a horse, sometimes into that of a bird.

Krishna's Attendants assuming the Form of a Bird.

In other pictures he appears riding in a palanquin, which is likewise composed of girls, and the bearers are girls also. In the course of one adventure, being in great danger from the wrath of his numerous enemies, he created an enormous snake, in whose vast interior his flocks, his herds, his followers, and himself found refuge. At a festival held in his honor, which was attended by a great number of damsels, he suddenly appeared in the midst of the company and proposed a dance; and, that each of them might be provided with a partner, he divided himself into as many complete and captivating Krishnas as there were ladies. One summer, when he was passing the hot season on the sea-shore with his retinue of ladies, his musical comrade, Nareda, hinted to him that, since he had such a multitude of wives, it would be no great stretch of generosity to spare one to a poor musician who had no wife at all. "Court any one you please," said the merry god. So Nareda went wooing from house to house, but in every house he found Krishna perfectly domesticated, the ever-attentive husband, and the lady quite sure that she had him all to herself. Nareda continued his quest until he had visited precisely sixteen thousand and eight houses, in each and all of which, at one and the same time, Krishna was the established lord. Then he gave it up. One of the pictures which illustrate the endless biography of this entertaining deity represents him going through the ceremony of marriage with a bear, both squatting upon a carpet in the prescribed attitude, the bear grinning satisfaction, two bears in attendance standing on their hind-feet, and two priests blessing the union. This picture is more spirited, is more like art, than any other yet copied from Hindoo originals.

Krishna in his Palanquin.

To this day, as the missionaries report, the people of India are excessively addicted to every kind of jesting which is within their capacity, and delight especially in all the monstrous comicalities of their mythology. No matter how serious an impression a speaker may have made upon a village group, let him but use a word in a manner which suggests a ludicrous image or ridiculous pun, and the assembly at once breaks up in laughter, not to be gathered again.

In late years, those of the inhabitants of India who read the language of their conquerors have had an opportunity of becoming acquainted with their humor. Wherever a hundred English officers are gathered, there is the possibility of an illustrated comic periodical, and, accordingly, we find one such in several of the garrisoned places held by the English in remote parts of the world. Calcutta, as the Athenæum informs us, "has its Punch, or Indian Charivari," which is not unworthy of its English namesake.