Living art

A scroll from India unfurls discussion among professors

Song and scroll by artist Momi Chitrakar
(Lyrics translated by Professor Navine Murshid)

On December 26, 2004, an earthquake in Sumatra, Indonesia, set in motion a series of tsunamis that bulldozed areas of southeast Asia and killed more than 220,000 people in 12 countries.

Eight years later, Colgate professors on a faculty development trip to India stopped in the Delhi Craft Museum, where a 7-foot–tall scroll depicting the tsunami caught their attention. Its creator, Momi Chitrakar, performed for them a mournful song about the painting. The moment sparked a lively, on-the-spot exchange among the professors, who shared their own academic perspectives on the tsunami and the art it inspired. They decided to buy the scroll and brought it back to campus, where they began passing it around for further discussion in classrooms and at professional conferences.

This past January, thanks to art and art history professor Liz Marlowe and support from the Teagle Foundation (see sidebar), the scroll took up residence in Case Library, in a specially built case. As part of the display, Marlowe also reignited the conversation that began in the Delhi museum by inviting professors from around campus to write mini-commentaries from the perspective of their disciplines. “Powerful objects like the tsunami scroll can pull people together in shared wonderment, curiosity, and inspiration,” Marlowe said.

— Aleta Mayne

Christian DuComb, theater

Like the script of a play, the scroll shapes but does not entirely determine the performance, which depends as much upon the singer’s voice as upon the painting itself.

By unrolling, holding, and pointing to the scroll as she sings, Momi offers her audience an aural and gestural interpretation of the imagery. Together, the words, the painting, and the singer’s voice and actions create a multisensory performance of the trauma wrought by the tsunami.

Padma Kaimal, art and art history

The vertical layout of the scroll presents a coherent visual narrative of an incomprehensible tragedy.

At the top, a frightening deity with red eyes, fangs, and a gaping mouth personifies the tsunami itself. Halfway down the scroll, a helicopter lifts a woman from the water. The helicopter’s front half takes on a human form, a magical hybrid accomplishing a miraculous rescue. To the right, a bearded, holy ascetic touches his forehead in wonderment at the sight. Television cameras operated by two women on the left, two men on the right, flank the scene. Families at home watch the disaster unfold on their TVs. Those who die in the water join the goddess at the bottom of the scroll. The vertical third eye in her forehead marks her connection to Shiva, a god who governs the cycle of life, from life to death and rebirth.

Maureen Hays-Mitchell, geography

The 2004 tsunami left a gendered landscape of disaster in its wake.

All across the Indian Ocean, the death toll among women far exceeded that of men, as this painting accurately reflects. In many regions, women were less likely to know how to swim or climb a tree. Flowing dresses hindered rapid flight. In southeast India, December 26 was a festival day. Crowds of women brought offerings of food and flowers to the seaside. When the water suddenly retreated, many women and children rushed out onto the exposed sands to see the surprises the water had left behind. When the wave returned, it swept them and their bowls of offerings — also depicted in the painting — out to sea.

Naomi Rood, classics

Momi Chitrakar’s practices and philosophical questions have much in common with those of ancient bards such as Homer.

Both traveled around to religious festivals. Both adapted traditional songs, making modern notions of authorship and originality inappropriate lenses through which to view their work. Both seek to make meaning in the aftermath of chaos and catastrophe in order to preserve and shape cultural memory, and to explore human relations with the gods. Both ask what it means to be mortal.

Joel Bordeaux, religion

Scroll paintings are typically connected to medieval storytelling traditions.

They served as visual aids during lengthy recitations of folk epics at temples and festivals. They often told stories about local deities who caused natural disasters to get people’s attention and spur them to worship.

Karen Harpp, geology

This scroll and song are a cultural form of scientific record.

Details like the “break in the ground” and the painting’s squiggly lines radiating outward from the god’s head accurately capture the tsunami’s cause — the shockwaves that radiated out from a major earthquake on the Indian Ocean floor. Geologists have only recently begun to realize the wealth of information that can be learned from ancestral stories, songs, and artwork about natural disasters, the largest and most dangerous of which may only occur at intervals of hundreds or thousands of years. Fortunately, people have been preserving information about natural disasters since long before the first geologist tied her hiking boots.

Liz Marlowe, museum studies

Powerful objects like the tsunami scroll can pull people together in shared wonderment, curiosity, and inspiration.

The insights offered here reflect extended conversations we’ve had in front of the painting, both in India and on campus. These conversations were greatly enriched by the diversity of our perspectives and ways of knowing. This display thus celebrates the fruitfulness of intellectual inquiry across disciplines, a central tenet of the liberal arts.

This project was generously sponsored by President Brian Casey and by the Teagle Foundation.

Additional faculty write-ups: