Georg Feuerstein notes "Hindu Tantra.. was introduced to the Western World through the writings of Sir John Woodroffe.. in 1913" (Tantra 1999 xi) after recounting "..within the field of Hinduism, Tantra gradually fell into disrepute.. During the Victorian colonization of India, puritanism drove Tantric practitioners underground. Today, Tantra survives mainly in the conservative (samaya) molds of th the Shri-Vidya tradition of South India and the Buddhist tradition of Tibet, though both heritages also have their more radical practitioners who understandably prefer to stay out of the limelight".. Feuerstein's Yoga Tradition from the same year recounts "opposition in conventional Hindu and Buddhist circles.. Today Tantra is held in low esteem in India."
Rawson's earlier book strikes a similar note: "(Sir John Woodroffe, Calcutta Chief Justice and early translator of tantra) "was writing for a double audience: there were the Europeans deeply infected with Victorian prudery; and then there were the English-speaking Indians who were mostly under the influence of their caste-prejudices, ashamed and violently critical of elements in their own culture, and hence anxious to seem even more puritan than their Western rulers.. (Woodroffe) was standing out against a vocal alliance between an Indian caste élite and Western missionaries who were aiming to get Tantra outlawed.."
It is hard to reconstruct what prevailing attitudes predated British colonization, but Ajit Mookerjee and Madhu Khana's 1977 The Tantric Way suggests "Tantra.. grew out of the mainstream of Indian thought, yet in the course of time it received its nourishment from its own sources, which were not only radically different from the parent doctrine but often heretical and directly opposed to it. In this way tantra developed largely outside the establishment, and in the course of a dialectical process acquired its own outlook. The tantric approach is anti-ascetic, anti-speculative and entirely without conventional perfectionist clichés." (14)
Tantric art in exile inevitably finds itself in a reverse bind: the curiosity and sensationalism directed at its sensuality. "We could compare the state of Tantra in the West with that of Yoga, with which it is related. Like Tantra, the physical side of Yoga is emphasized.. even though those represent a small part of classical Yoga, whose main concern is meditation" (Frawley 21) After making his way to tantrism by representing urban architecture, his earliest subject, as sex organs (above), Chandra's saṃsāra content focuses increasingly on the natural world during the years Pop Art was pre-eminant, moving from figures outside social contexts to the uninhabited landscape.
Rawson wrote about ancient Tantra painting "the objective colored surface was never meant to challenge comparison with any sensuously derived image of external reality. It was meant to stimulate radiant inner icons.. to produce a higher key or grade of objectivity than any transient reflection on the retina of the eye, a consistent world of the imagination against which visual phenomena seem grey and pale." (21) If that reminds one of Duchamp's statement that his art "depended on something other than the retina," Octavio Paz wrote a year before Rawson's book ".. in both cases (Duchamp's Large Glass and 'the Tantric imagery of Bengal represent(ing) Kali') we are present at the representation of a circular operation that unveils the phenomenal reality of the world.. and simultaneously denies it all true reality." (65) Chandra's paintings of grouped figures actually resemble Duchamp's 'Fauvist' phase of 1910-11 before he encountered Cubism and Picabia, inspired, by Duchamp's reportage "Obviously it's Matisse. Yes, it was him at the beginning." Chandra features a Joy of Spring..
De Chirico, featured prominently at Helly Nahmad until Dec 23 and in the Surrealist Landscape show next door til Dec 18 (both unsurprisingly Piri' Miri Muli' recommended), called Matisse a "pseudo-painter" but Riopelle, at Acquavella til Dec 11, countered "the greatest is still Matisse, the only painter to have explored all possible techniques.. Luckily for the abstractionists, Matisse did no abstracts: he would have demolished everyone."
