Many shades of the mountains

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Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947), the venerable Russian master of landscapes, has inspired a legion of artists. His paintings — Tibetan, Chinese, Indian, Russian and Japanese — are steeped in divergent cultures and stand out for their blend of Eastern and Western aesthetics.

Delhi-based photographer Ashok Dilwali draws on Roerich’s mountain paintings and tries to find the parallels in the lap of the Himalayas in Nicholas Roerich/Ashok Dilwali: Inspired by the Himalayas (Niyogi Books). The book brings together Dilwali’s photographs that lend Roerich’s canvas a dash of reality.
The Roerich spirit echoes through Dilwali’s shutters. His snapshots celebrate the majesty of the mountains. His lens becomes a route to the realisation of Roerich’s vision, evident in the scores of his paintings, through photographs.
Inspired by Roerich’s riot of colours portraying the many shades of the mountains, Dilwali zooms in on the very landscapes that came alive on the master’s canvas. In Dilwali’s frames, they come alive, again: the snow-capped mountain peaks and pinnacles, the rugged ranges, floating monsoon clouds, sunrise and moonrise in the hills, clear blue sky, the serenity of the mystic expanse and the whispering meadows, ridges, rocks and valleys.
In her foreword to the book, critic Alka Pande writes: “Ashok Dilwali’s photographs of the Himalayas recapture the magic and majesty of Roerich’s genius. Following the same arduous path of the Russ-ian master, Ashok evokes the splendour and spirit of these awe-inspiring mountains by photographing the luminous landscapes that Roerich painted.”
She added that in these photographs the photographer takes off from the “Roerich moment,” but then “gladly takes the plunge, moving more into the realm of the Indian rasa theory, where colour, sensuality and perception trot along with the Merleau-Ponty theory of perception and phenomenology”.
Merleau-Ponty’s theory concludes that perception occurs through the body and is mediated only by our experience of it as a whole, in relation to other whole objects. The bottomline is: Our body is what keeps the “visible spectacles” of the world “constantly alive”. Dilwali’s photographs keep alive the “spectacles” of the mountain in us. What we see and perceive becomes somewhat of a “bodily experience”. In his note, Dilwali writes: “Roerich’s paintings are infinitely sublime, inspiring and soul-lifting. Above all, they capture the very soul of the Himalayas.”
The photographer adds that he has sought to find the elements that may have inspired the great master to paint. In his photographs, you will see the same Roerich features: “clouds, sheer mountain faces, valleys, snowscapes dawns and dusks etc.”
At `3,000, this coffee-table book with 125 photographs is quiet a treasure for lovers of art and photography. With a sample of Roerich’s 10 paintings, it explores the different moods of the mountain that might have inspired the master himself.