Ecstatic Delight

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The delightful ecstasy or the mega-delight, as manifests in the painting here, whatever may claim man for dictions and media are exclusively his instruments, is essentially an element of the animal world. Whatever its kind, the delight is instinctive, a raw unbuilt experience of blood, which intellect only blurs. Bliss is the share of ignorance, 'where ignorance is a bliss, it's folly to be wise' is the principle of the divine. Adam and Eve, the delightful creatures of Paradise, are deprived of their heavenly bliss the moment they eat the apple of knowledge. When man's diction fails in defining the vehemence of an experience, he calls it 'animal passion'. Man has feelings of delight for the animal in him is not fully eliminated but the animal has delightful ecstasy for the man has not yet born in him. The artist seeking to express the experience of vehement delight has resorted to paint horses, the animal known to be the strongest in instincts, instead the man conditioned within and tabooed without.

Erected like marble statues the figures of the horses represent the moments when they are either in leisure after some tedious assignment or in a mood to impress a mare to have sex with it. When the mare is one and the male more than one, the display of agility and sportiveness is more competitive as here in this painting. The horse on extreme left rises straight to sky on only one leg and powerfully displays all bodily skills and charms as against the horse next to it. This other one stands instead on two legs and seems to be facing difficulty in balancing itself though it has not risen even to an eighty degree angle. It fails to project its muscles and undo its flabbiness as is able to do the former. The third horse with its head buried into the ground in its preparedness to bear the brunt of its male partner, as usually does a mare before it conciliates to its male's cajoling, seems to be only a male, imitating, perhaps, only a female, or doing just a mare's role. Whatever the kind of instinct, that which seems to burst from the figures of the horses might only be defined as the ecstatic delight or the delightful ecstasy.

This description by Prof. P.C. Jain and Dr Daljeet. Prof. Jain specializes on the aesthetics of ancient Indian literature. Dr Daljeet is the chief curator of the Visual Arts Gallery at the National Museum of India, New Delhi. They have both collaborated on numerous books on Indian art and culture.