Azur vivace d’un espace
Ou chaque arbre se hausse
A la recherché de son âme.
Jules Supervielle
Around a year ago I made the following comments on this blog about Jakhoo forest in relation to Christ Chruch:
‘Although Christ Church is the icon of Shimla it is dwarfed by the mountains all around, the geography of Shimla mall soars up behind Christchurch like a wall which leads to Jakhoo peak, home of Hanuman. Now, Jakhoo temple can’t really be seen from the Mall, or the lift, unlike Christ Church, because it is hidden behind a covering of sacred deodars... Jakhoo then does not stand (as Christ Church does) proudly for all to see as a man made construction that reminds us of Divine creation, rather it sits engulfed in the Divinity of the natural world. As such it mirrors the mountains that are visible surrounding Shimla, many of them topped with temples whose beauty and serenity far surpasses that of Jakhoo in my opinion, but nevertheless operate in a similar way’.
How times change, now, ushered in by a movie star, Hanuman towers over the trees and looks down on the town below. So, my theory is clearly shot, but given this I now have questions for all my Shimla friends: how are people on the ground seeing this transition? Is the explicit branding of the forest landscape as the realm of Hanuman more favourable than the previous implicit (yet widely recognised association)? Is Hanuman now the focus of man’s tribute to Divinity in Shimla, not Christchurch? Is this a bold symbol of postcolonial identity, or simply a act of piety? Has the statue changed the character and feel of Shimla? What sort of visual dialogue does the statue have with Christ Church? Is it harmonious, hierarchical, or hostile?
Surely when the British architects built Christchurch in that spot they must have had it in mind to exploit its height to establish a physical symbol of their religion's preeminence. The mandir on Jakhoo Hill was higher and probably older than Christchurch, but hidden within the trees and guarded by monkeys, and so it was no challenge to the physically apparent symbol of Christchurch. When after almost two centuries of colonial landscaping, the hill finally produces its own giant emblem, it's hard not to appreciate how that logic of height and power has resulted in the visible usurpation of the colonial landscape.
ReplyDeleteThen again, it's not like the patrons of Christchurch are somehow more colonial than the patrons of Jakhoo. And just having a tree-covered mountain horizon wasn't so bad either. Shimla's reputation has been that of a naturally beautiful place. Jakhoo's cloak of deodars is part of that romance; and likewise, the colonial architecture of the town has been integrated into it. The new Hanuman sort of disrupts that romance, for me.
What with the emphasis on developing the tourist potential of Shimla (it's all in the city development plan!), it might be that Hanumanji towering over the treeline is a reflection of the changing character of the folks who visit Shimla as tourists, the people who really matter to the economy: middle and upper class flatlanders and metropolitanites who apparently appreciate the aesthetics of size and physical presence. (Or at least, it demonstrates one very wealthy man's appreciation for this kind of architecture, but I doubt it.) This business of building giant Hanumans is competitive and, being that it is at heart about physical prominence, masculine: I see a giant, muscle-bound Hanuman and I can't help but to think of the overt chauvinism of many of the ways in which Hanuman's image gets deployed by the Bajrang Dal, as an ideal of masculine beauty, as the hero of an imaginary Hindu femininity who has no other defense against alien invaders (demons, Muslims, whatever) . . .
(I like the image of older Hanuman, sitting and writing as a monk.)
When you ask somebody what they like about Jakhoo, they'll point out the views or remark on its peacefulness, or they'll say they like being in nature, away from pollution, among the monkeys. Whether it's really a natural site is beside the point, I guess. But maybe as the municipality keeps pumping rupees into developing the temple site, it'll swell up into a pop pilgrimage site – and you know the problem with pop media; it's all production value. Or, maybe big, wise Hanumanji might lend his presence towards a sense of cosmic peacefulness centered on the hilltop. I can see it. Who knows?
Don't any Shimlawale have anything to say about it?
- Danny
Thank you for this detailed comment.
ReplyDeleteYou are right that from the start this seems to have been an initiative from outside of Shimla and here we are now discussing it from outside of Shimla, while the people of Shimla seem to be more apathetic - perhaps most people there just don't care about this representation of Hanuman one way or another?
I find your suggestions about the angle of this development as a tourist commodity enticing. On the hand of course it does help to brand Shimla as a location within Dev Bhoomi, on the other hand I am not sure how it fits with the idea of Shimla as a tourist destination where people can go and see something of old Simla.
When thinking about pilgrims it seems to me that, as you say, many of them are searching more for Divinity as implied within the natural landscape of Dev Bhoomi and this would especially be the case I would think, with the kind of plains dwellers that criticises Shimla for being too built up.
So logically, although I would love to get some comments on here to test this logic, the increased construction on the hill could be seen as a further encroachment on that realm, albeit one that is intended to blatantly highlight the Divine presence there.
Perhaps it comes down to a question of if the statue draws our attention to the Divinity that implicitly dwells on the mountain, or is a distraction from this?
Also Danny, I would be particularly interested to hear from you (for those readers who do not know, Danny is an expert on Shimla's monkeys) if you know what the monkeys make to these developments, after all it is their hill as well.
Excellent post, Jonathan! And kudos also to Danny for a brilliant response.
ReplyDeleteMy concerns are aesthetic, rather than anthropological. Christ Church has been for so long a part of Shimla's visual history that it has ceased to be an emblem of an alien faith or of alien rule. It has melded happily into the landscape. The Hanuman, on the other hand, is an eye-sore. The orange or saffron or whatever shade you may choose to call it clashes hideously with the lovely emerald green of the woods around it. The figure itself is deeply unattractive and slightly disproportionate. The head is funnily elongated, the face unlike that of any man or monkey you'd ever see.
Sadly, Hanuman, a loveable, playful character, a symbol of unwavering loyalty and devotion has been appropriated by the lunatic fringe of the Hindu extreme right wing; in the process, he has been robbed of his more humane characteristics and rendered faintly demoniacal!
Sorry, I don't like looking out of my window and seeing that orange splash on the sky-line.
Thank you for such an honest and insightful comment. I think that you are not alone in feeling that it is somewhat out of place and I have heard privately from other people who were not willing to speak openly about this that they are also far from taken with the latest addition to Shimla’s skyline. In fact, inspired by you, I am going to come off the fence a little here and say that I preferred being able to simply look at the forest and consider Hanuman rather than have that relationship made explicit (and perhaps limited) by a physical image of him towering over the trees. Our unease with this is perhaps partly to do with the way that the statue alters the relationship of existing structures to the environment and perhaps partly approached by Lutengdorf in an excellent article on Hanuman that Danny brought to my attention. In this Lutengdorf suggests that despite the ambitious designs of new patrons the effectiveness of any given Hanuman image may depend less on its size than on its awakeness (jagrti).
ReplyDeleteWell, if jagriti is any criterion of effectiveness, than I'm sorry to say that this one's a goner! Your reference to this spirit reminds me of some lines from Arun Kolatkar's poem "A Scratch":
ReplyDeletewhat is god
and what is stone
the dividing line
if it exists
is very thin
at jejuri
and every stone is god or his cousin
there is no crop
other than god
and god is harvested here
around the year
and round the clock
out of bad earth
and the hard rock
that giant hunk of rock
the size of a bedroom
is khandoba's wife turned into tone
that crack that runs across
is the scar from his broadsword
he struck her down with
once in a fit of rage
scratch a rock
and a legend springs...