Project Proposal for Kala Ghoda Festival 2002. Mumbai.

'The Seven Faces Of Dust'

When I began conceptualizing this work, I was thinking of the seven islands that originally made up the island city of Bombay. The constellation of seven floor drawings, are made using sand (a residue of degraded materials, derived from the wearing down of rocks). The act of laying the sand while executing the work, resembled that of making rangolis . Like the rangoli, this work will be effaced at the end of the exhibition.

It is made to commemorate ‘the individual’s wish’ in a city that is inhabited by large numbers of anonymous people.

Cities as we know get defined and shaped by people as extensions of their needs, aspirations, desires and fears. The seven islands can be seen as points of convergence where people from several communities are drawn everyday and get absorbed and assimilated. The uterus islands are looked upon as sites for the symbolic cross fertilization of wishes. As I went along making the work, I wanted it to be less about the city in a physical sense as it were and attempted to seek the immense complexity of real places in essence. The various candles, carrying inscriptions/coded messages by people, are planted on the leaf patterns that map the uterus islands. However, this map is ephemeral and subject to constant change, like the changing face of the city, that does not pretend to provide the full and definitive picture. It speaks its own destiny of transformation, its ultimate formlessness.

Seven Faces Of Dust is a reminder of the hidden silences, the secret hopes and desires, impulses, ideas and realities that may never be heard.

Reena Saini Kallat

NOTES

We know that great prominence has been attached to numbers in their application to religious observances, the establishment of festival days, symbols, dogmas and even the geographical distribution of empires.

My interest in the number ‘seven’ grew out of the need to explore the diverse nature of this city through the resonance of its spirit, ranging an entire spectrum.

‘Seven’ is known for its characteristic quality of synthesis. It is regarded as a symbol of the transformation and integration of all hierarchical orders as a whole; hence there are seven notes in the diatonic scale, seven colours in the rainbow and seven planetary spheres with their seven planets as numbered in antiquity.

What was of particular interest to me was to try and discover the equivalences and transformations that link the mundane city and the divine macrocosm into one complex whole.

The individual human body is believed to have seven senses ie. sight, smell, sound, taste, touch, mind and the intellect.Tantra (doctrine of Hindu or Buddhist mystical and magical writings) has created a system of psychic cross points in which the infinite world of time and space are seen as reflected in the psycho-physical structure of man. The cosmos, according to the Tantras, consists of seven ascending planes of existence, starting from earthly, gross existence, and this hierarchy is mirrored in the psychic vortices functioning as invisible yantras in the human body.

Nowhere did the number seven play so prominent a part as with the old Aryas in India. We have but to think of the seven sages – the Sapta Rishis; the Sapta Loka – the seven worlds; the Sapta Pura – the seven holy cities; the Sapta Dvipa--the seven holy islands; the Sapta Samudra--the seven holy seas; the Sapta Parvatta – the seven holy mountains; the Sapta Arania--the seven deserts; the Sapta Vriksha--the seven sacred trees; and so on, to see the probability of the hypothesis.The mother goddesses are associated with certain maladies/diseases, and yet they are worshipped for being sacred; the seven mother goddesses are, represented by seven trees, known for their restorative and remedial uses.

SEPTENARY: is an order composed of seven elements, which is ultimately founded upon the seven ‘directions of space’: two opposite directions for each dimension, plus the centre. This spatial order of six dynamic elements, plus one, which is static is projected into the week as a model of the septenary in the passage of time.

The Egyptians had seven original and higher gods; the Phœnicians seven kabiris; the Persians, seven sacred horses of Mithra; the Parsees, seven angels opposed by seven demons, and seven celestial abodes paralleled by seven lower regions. The whole heaven was subjected to the seven planets; hence, in nearly all the religious systems we find seven heavens.

The Jewish Cabala provides a link between the mythological deities, in so far as they are creative and beneficient and the seven celestial hierarchies: the Sun-the angel of light-Michael; the Moon-the angel of hope and dreams-Gabriel; Mercury-the civilizing angel-Raphael; Venus-the angel of love-Anael; Mars-the angel of destruction-Samael; Jupiter-the administering angel-Zachariel; Saturn-the angel of solitude-Oriphiel.

In Tibet, there are seven emblems of Buddha….In the sacred pyramids of Mocha, on the Peruvian coast, the guaca (Indian tomb) of the sun has seven steps.

In Islam, the number seven enjoys great popularity : there are seven heavens, seven earths, seven seas ; pilgrims walk seven times round the temple of Mecca ; there are seven days of ill-omen ; man is composed of seven substances; seven in the number of the foods gathered from the fields…’

If the Egyptian dogma of the metempsychosis or the transmigration of soul taught that there were seven states of purification and progressive perfection, it is also true that the Buddhists took from the Aryans of India, not from Egypt, their idea of seven stages of progressive development of the disembodied soul, allegorized by the seven stories and umbrellas, gradually diminishing towards the top on their pagodas.

I would like to end by mentioning the Jaina perspectives of syadavada which hold, that a proposition is true only conditionally and not absolutely. This is because it depends on the particular standpoint, naya, from which it is being made; that logically a thing can be perceived from at least seven different standpoints, saptabhangi-naya; which lead us to the awareness of the many-sidedness of reality, or truth, anekanta-vada.