Chapter Ten: An Invocation to India
“Bharat Mata, Mother India,
My own Mother-heart-ambrosia.”
- Sri Chinmoy [12]
As a special feature of his third million series, Sri Chinmoy had been saving the exotic handmade papers from around the world that his students had gathered. Now their moment had come. Each one was mounted on foam core to display to full advantage their distinctive deckled and sometimes torn edges, and to lend strength to the often fragile surface tension between the fibres.
At 3:30 in the afternoon of Friday, July 8th, the artist settled himself on his front porch and asked for the first of these papers. Significantly, it was one that had come from India, his Motherland. The paper was the colour of the desert sands of Rajasthan and it was flecked with marigold petals. Sri Chinmoy selected a brilliant pink marker pen and began his drawing. Suddenly, we noticed that we could scarcely see the artist through the encroaching gloom. The sky, which had been overcast with clouds, was now engulfed in darkness. The porch lights were turned on in order that Sri Chinmoy might see his drawing more clearly. Someone remarked jokingly that by thinking of India the artist had invoked an Indian monsoon.
Sri Chinmoy smiled and echoed the thought. “Yes, Indian monsoon has come,” he said, without lifting his head from his task. In a matter of minutes, jagged spears of lightning pierced the sky, followed by loud cracks of thunder. Marooned by the pounding at the windowpanes, as much as by his own silent contemplation, the artist completed his detailed work in one sitting.
Over the next two days, he finished seventeen of these drawings on handmade paper. They included a gossamer-like sheet inlaid with rose petals from the USA, Thai paper made from the pulp of mulberry trees, papyrus from Egypt, heavy cream parchment from Germany, Japanese paper with long, exposed silken fibres and other papers from Canada, France and China embedded with botanical specimens.
Most of the paper that is manufactured commercially today is believed to have a life expectancy of less than fifty years. Handmade papers, on the other hand, have been known to last up to 2,000 years – and papyrus even longer. Despairingly, archivists have referred to the era from 1850 to the present as “the era of bad paper”. During this period, the quality of paper has progressively declined because of the high degree of acidity that has been introduced into the paper-making process. This causes the paper to become weak, brittle and stained over time. Often, the words or images on it are obliterated entirely.
It is quite possible that many of Sri Chinmoy’s soul-bird drawings will be adversely affected simply by the passing of time. The paper may deteriorate; the ballpoint inks are, as we have already experienced, fugitive to light; unfavourable environmental conditions, such as the humidity of New York City, may hasten the aging process. And so it is not inconceivable that Sri Chinmoy’s seventeen drawings from July 8th, 1994 that were done on paper that had been handmade according to older methods may one day stand as the foundation of his enduring art legacy to the future.
