by Victoria Emily Jones
Last November I visited the artist Jyoti Sahi, who lives in Silvepura Village near Bangalore in southern India. A self-identified “nonconformist Catholic,” Jyoti has been active for the past fifty years as a painter and printmaker, developing images of Jesus as Indian and opening up dialogue between Christianity, Hinduism, and Adivasi (tribal) cultures.
Dance, which is at the heart of almost all culture in India, figures prominently in Jyoti’s art. He shows Jesus dancing at creation, on the Sea of Galilee, on Mount Tabor, on the cross, in resurrection.
One of the paintings of his I bought while I was there is a gouache that shows Christ as cosmic drummer, beating out the rhythms of creation, and opposite him, a human figure emerging from a lotus. It’s a design for a stained glass window that was intended for the chapel at the Vidyajyoti College of Theology in New Delhi but was never realized.
“Lord of Creation” (1982) by Jyoti Sahi
On the back of the paper, in Jyoti’s hand, is written, “Theme: Man inspired and drawn into the dance of God.”
This dynamic image, with its organic, swirling forms in green and yellow, celebrates the creative activity of Christ: at the foundation of the universe, in his ongoing re-creation of human hearts, and in his bringing about a total world transformation at the end of time. The figures are near mirrors of each other, with one foot on the ground and the other lifted in a dancelike pose, balanced between heaven and earth. The blossoming man is at once Christ leaping up out of his tomb—the firstfruits of the resurrection—and humanity being reborn, opening up to her true design, to life in God. As with the water lotus, life emerges from the dark and muddy depths.
In his book Stepping Stones: Reflections on the Theology of Indian Christian Culture, Jyoti writes how mission is sometimes thought of “in rather dead and dreary terms.” But, he continues,
the mission of Jesus, as I have tried to picture it, has been like a joyous dance. It is as though the Lord by saying “Go and proclaim My Gospel to all nations” sent his troupe of dancers out to the ends of the world. Mission must be filled with joy and beauty, it must reveal the Glory of God, which is the beauty and radiance of the Most High, and must invite all people to the festival, and dance, of a new creation.
Everywhere in Indian art we see the forms of dancing figures. The very essence of art, according to Indian aesthetics, is Anandam, or Joy. It is this joyful, liberating aspect of the Gospel which Christian art should proclaim. The dancing body is the liberated body. Those who are sad and oppressed do not feel like dancing. One might suggest that the most important symbol of inspiration and freedom in Indian art is the form of the ecstatic dancer. (75–76)
Robert Farrar Capon says something similar in The Mystery of Christ . . . And Why We Don’t Get It: “The dance of the Mystery of Christ is always going on: the band playing the music of forgiveness never takes a break. . . . The real job of Christians . . . is simply to dance to the hidden music—and to try, by the joy of their dancing, to wake the world up to the party it is already at” (170).
Also on the back of the gouache, besides Psalm 29:5–6, Jyoti quotes a set of lines by the eighteenth-century Bengali poet Ramprasad Sen:
Because you love the burning-grounds,
I have made one of my heart,
that you may dance therein your eternal dance.
This is from a hymn to Kali, destroyer of evil, whose dance burns away that which prevents us from being free. Jyoti sees in it a resonance with the work Christ does in destroying sin. From that destruction proceeds creation.
Full of vibrancy and play, Lord of Creation opens my eyes to the joy at the heart of the gospel, where Jesus leads the dance of new creation. Through the Spirit and through his church, Jesus is ever-active in drawing the whole cosmos into this dance, and Jyoti’s painting renews my excitement about that work, summoning me back in step.
Victoria Emily Jones is a freelance editor and a writer on Christianity and the arts, blogging at ArtandTheology.org. She serves on the board of the Eliot Society, a Baltimore-Washington-area nonprofit that promotes spiritual formation through the arts, and is a contributor to ArtWay and to the Visual Commentary on Scripture, an online biblical art project spearheaded by King’s College London. Follow her on Twitter @artandtheology or on Instagram @art_and_theology.
This post is part of an ongoing series where we ask artists and arts professionals to share a piece of artwork that has significantly impacted their formation as a Christian.