RATI CHAKRAVYUH: DISSOLVING NOTHINGNESS INTO NOTHINGNESS, शून्य में शून्य का विसर्जन चक्र
Amrit Gangar Finding a form, a cinematographic Mandala! सिनेमॅटोग्राफिक मंडलः स्वरूप का निजी आत्मसात और निरंतर खोज़। All of Ashish Avikunthak’s cinematographic work seems to be held by a common thread,by an invisible sutradhāra, the thread-holder, and that sutradhāra is kāla or time, which in turn,is held by Kāli – his consistent faith in the Tāntric Sakta cult.[1] From his very first work Etcetera (1997) to Rati Chakravyuh (2013), Avikunthak, as i have been watching him since he started making films, is constantly in search of a formal energy (not just ‘form’ per se), a swaroopasakti, and in that sense Rati Chakravyuh is not an accident, it is a consequence of his praxis, his belief system.[2] About an hour-long meandering single-take in Katho Upanishad elongates itself to a circular 102-minute in Rati Chakravyuh through Avikunthak’s temporal engagement.[3] However, what i find interesting is his increasing employment of the spoken word, the sabda and its sensorium.[4] As if the silent eloquence of Etcetera had to become vāchik (verbal) eloquence of Rati Chakravyuh and some of its predecessors. But it is still within a certain body, the sarira that its enconsity is retained. This enconsity he might call religiosity but it is, i think, more of an ongoing dharma. Once translated into a ‘religion’, the term dharma tends to lose its true edge. Worse, it becomes a static and dogmatic corpus rather than a dynamic concept-in-action.[5] My usage of the word ‘religion’ henceforth will be in the sense of dharma, which could itself take a form of sound (sabda).[6] In his films, Avikunthak’ssabda of silence (Etcetera) to sabda of dhwani, sound (Kalighat Fetish, 2000) to sabda of mrityu, death and its rahasya or mystery (Katho Upanishad) has been increasingly acquiring an abundance (Rati Chakravyuh); this is also an interesting part of his journey towards finding a form, as if a cinematographic Mandala, where sabda rings like a rhythmic chant!Rati Chakravyuh is a chakra (circle) within a Mandala of chakra that embeds a triangle, the trikona and a central dot, a bindu, seed or a beej as it were! Broadly speaking, and as M Esther Harding in his essay, The Reconciliation of the Opposites: The Mandala, mentions, the Oriental thought concedes to the unconscious much greater place in the psyche than in the West; consequently ‘evil’, the destructive aspect of the life force, is not excluded or repressed but is recognized as the negative or dark aspect of the deities. So Kāli is but the devouring aspect of the Mother Goddess, while Siva is both Creator and Destroyer.[7] “The goal of perfection for the Oriental is not identification with the All-Good, as it so often is with us; rather, he seeks that enlightenment through which good and evil are recognized to be relative, a pair of opposites, from whose domination the individual can be released by acquiring a new standpoint and a new centre of consciousness.”[8] Mandala, the Practice, the Significance मंडलः अनुष्ठान,सारगर्भिता Simply stated, the mandala would mean a ‘circle’ or a ‘holy circle’ or even a ‘charmed circle’! In the sense of Yantra, it is a two- or three-dimensional geometric composition considered to represent the abode of the deity, within the broad sense of Sacred Geometry. The word appears in the Rig Veda and the Tibetan Buddhism has adopted it in its spiritual practice.[9]In his autobiography, Memories. Dreams. Reflections., C.G. Jung, describes Mandala at length. It is a graphical representation of the centre, which Jung calls ‘seat of the Self’ or the archetype of wholeness. However, in association with the film Rati Chakravyuh, besides Tantra, what i find fascinating is the way the Mithila tradition imagines ‘Kohbar’ or the nuptial room. In Mithila’s folk tradition, the priest or bhagat draws a circle about his place, chanting appropriate mantras. That prevents the evil from causing any harm or hindrance to his performance. The bhagat’s place is called gahbar (cave). Kohbar, the nuptial room, where the newly-wed couple perform the garbhadhānam rite, is also made a ‘protection space’. Like the nontribal priest, the Oraon Mati makes a ‘protection space’.[10] Talking about geometry would be a long debate for the specialists but what i find interesting is Plato’s imagination of the cosmogony, he said, ‘God geometrizes continually’ (as attributed to him by Plutarch). My hypothesis is that it could be interesting to contextualize or even problematize the continual circularization of Rati Chakravyuh within the Renaissance Perspective-cinematography debate. In his paper Seen From Nowhere, Mani Kaul, deals with this aspect.[11] By continual circularization, Rati Chakravyuh, defies a convergence presumed by the perspectival perception, and even the presence or the notion of conventional ‘frame’, which is significant.[12] Again, what interests me is the sub-texts and their randomness: a sub-text of the sabda and the sub-text of the circularity or the cycle of movement-image and time-image, in their randomness. In this essay, i propose to discuss these aspects of Avikunthak’s cinematographic work, particularly with reference to his film Rati Chakravyuh. Graveyard / Space.Death / Time.Goddess of Love / Rati: The Life-Cycle. स्मशान (आकाश). मृत्यु (काल). रतिःसर्जनविसर्जनचक्र। It begins with the graveyard (space) in Etcetera and passes through death (time), which could be sacrificial or suicidal (Kalighat Fetish, Vakratunda Swāhā, 2010), through sensuality of the sarira (body) or Rati (Nirākār Chhāyā, 2007). The philosophy of Tantra would suppose that the body is the link between the terrestrial world and the cosmos, the body is the theatre in which the psycho-cosmic drama is enacted. Rati, the Goddess of Love is the female erotic energy, when Sakti sees Siva, rati becomes active. Rati represents kinetic energy too; the couple’s union, completeness, and this has been depicted in different schools of the Indian miniature and other painting. However, Sakti of the Saktas is not the consort of Siva. In her cosmic self, Sakti-Siva are eternally conjoined. “The significance of viparita-rati in the copulative cosmogony is of the feminine principle constantly aspiring to unite, the feminine urge to create unity from duality, whereas the masculine principle, with each thrust, invariably separates, representing