Column

The encounter between east and west has long been somewhat tricky. Good old Rudyard Kipling’s endlessly quoted line “Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” from his late 19th century The Ballad of East and West clouded the prism through which many occidentals (and indeed some desis too) saw the Orientals.

(The writer did not quite mean it that way if you read on — but that’s not the point of this column.)

East eventually met west head-on in the arena of the arts, including the gastronomic.

Fusion became a buzz word, whether it was music or dance: think jugalbandi between Kathak and Flamingo, or Ravi Shankar and the Beatles. Sometimes it worked, but for the most part the tête-à-tête resulted in confusion. Fusion food has had a bumpy ride, with plenty of gastronomic horror stories en route.

But when the collaboration between the two works, the result is almost sublime. Such as the towering The Precious Stonewall installation, the wondrous 14-foot high wall made from 4,200 glass bricks-and draped with 150 glass bead necklaces. Conceived by French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel and made by the glass artisans of Firozabad and Purdil Nagar, this shimmering wall comprises blown glass bricks so well polished that they resemble “burnished ingots”.

The Frenchman’s installation in the foyer of Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi is a delightfully idiosyncratic rendering of his impression of contemporary India.

It was the sight of the ubiquitous piles of bricks lying about everywhere he went in India that spurred him on to make a wall to incarnate his idea of a rapidly growing India: the building boom in fourth gear represented for him a nation on a quick-step march to prosperity.

Interestingly, M Othoniel has orchestrated quite a literal homage to the slogan of India Shining. The bricks of the voluminous wall seem to glow from within, like liquid gold.

While it is the New India that inspired the artist to build his wall, it is the old and traditional India that helped him to do so. The glass blowers of Firozabad with their long pipes still use centuries-old techniques, long abandoned by the famed glass blowers of Murano.

M Othoniel is also intrigued by the differences in the approach to glass between European and Indian glass artisans. The Indians look at glass as if it were something to fashion jewellery out of, according to him. They cut it like diamonds. The huge-but-delicate bead necklaces adorning his wall bear this out.

M Othoniel has worked with glass artisans of Murano. But many of the glass factories have closed down because the Chinese have learnt the glass craft and taken over, like everything else — including our very own Kanjeevaram silk sarees.

Initially, it reminded me of the formidable brick wall in the film Anarkali. For a journalist friend who was quite enraptured by it, the wall looked like honey: “I feel like licking it,” he said.

In his poem Mending Wall, the American poet Robert Frost writes: “Something there is that does not like a wall… good fences make good neighbours”. Perhaps, glass walls would inspire different sentiments.

This installation will be showcased at the Centre George Pompidou next year as part of a major exhibition titled ‘Paris-Delhi-Bombay’.

Wonder if it beats ping-pong diplomacy.