A house for the Goddess

Eberhard Fischer is a long-time collector of textile art and a trained cultural anthropologist. Perhaps this explains the mixed genre of his book, which is both a coffee-table art catalogue and a scholarly tome reporting a piece of serious cultural anthropology.

Fischer catalogues 52 chandarvos large canopies (4&rsquox7&rsquo) dense with exquisite art, either block-printed or painted, most about 100 years old. These depict a pantheon of about a dozen goddesses worshipped by the Dalit castes of Gujarat the Bhangis, Vaghris, Chamars, Kolis etc. He reveals the oyster from whence arise these lustrous chandarvos the pigments made from old horse-shoes and tamarind flour, the cramped warren of artists&rsquo dens and  men hunched over yards of cloth painting freehand, the textiles rinsed in the Sabarmati and dried on a dusty Ahmedabad footpath. Fischer also provides two detailed reports of ritual use of these canopies in ceremonies performed at a Vaghri colony in 1973 and at a Bhangi colony in 1977, both in the outskirts of Ahmedabad. The photographs accompanying the reports are graphic, including those of animal sacrifice and ritual consumption of fresh blood. These practices have since been banned by the Gujarat government, which is part of the point of the book to pre-empt the death of a living culture through documentation.

As an art catalogue, Niyogi&rsquos production is nonpareil, with magnificent replicas of the canopies. As a text of cultural anthropology, Fischer is in the lineage of prominent predecessors who have studied, for example, the Draupadi cult of Tamil Nadu or Bengal&rsquos Charak festival &mdash subjects intensely colourful and suitably bloody. The gaze can be troubling and makes one wonder if there is a way to do cultural anthropology without the subjects coming off as zoo animals.

Be that as it may, the Gujarati Dalit pantheon is a powerful reminder that gods are mirrors there is a goddess of the lame and one (her sister) of the ugly, a goddess of the hijras, one of the sailors, and one of rabies who rides a chariot pulled by three rabid dogs. These are the central figures in the intricate canopies the gods from the Hindu canon &mdash the epics and Puranas &mdash are the margins and fillers. The chandarvo artists marginalize the gods of those who marginalise them. That is an enduring vision.