Goan sunset

Edge of faith
By Prabuddha Dasgupta (photographs), William Dalrymple (text),
Seagull Books
Rs 1,495, pp.140

Tenderness, antiquity and humanism stream out from Prabuddha Dasgupta’s photographs in Edge of Faith, with a brilliant piece of prose by William Dalrymple. This study of blacks and whites is a mixed blend of art and document.
Classical subjects, particularly old people and their homes, still fascinate contemporary photographers and Prabuddha’s study is no less notable. If the surreal looking twins give us a lonesome yet modernist poetic take on the aftermath of an aeon, then the mirror that reflects the cobsweb filled stilted and frozen in time scene has much to say about a Goa that was indeed more like a lyrical recreation.
The grand themes of the Anglo-Indian background are sketched out with the vividness and contours of the original, as befits a reshaping of the spiritual and cultural epic. Prabuddha captures a world in which the mores of the Eucharist driven Catholics seem natural and obvious, suspending with a lightness of touch the weight of the intervening millennia.
Yet Prabuddha’s master-stroke is to add an “untold” element to the scenes of decadence and intense pathos. The memorabilia in the discarded world in Saligao is one of gravitas, it echoes the power of ceremony, and the ritual of duty.
Progressing to the homes of these old people, Prabuddha is brought gently into contact with the real world: as dust and the rites of time nibble at the interiors of the homes and the bric-a-brac on the tables, you can almost whiff the aura of delicious homespun cooking.
These old people, time eked into their wrinkled hands and faces, have lost sons and daughters to more mundane causes than the battles of terrorism today and this shared grief, writ large on their countenance, and the sense of love of elders for their young ones bring the subject and the common viewer together.
The overturning of established practice, the thinking of what had hitherto been an everyday symbol is another of this book’s principal themes. It is almost as if time has been ransomed, as the subjects sit and gaze into the sunset of their lives you can see their journey unfolding in reverse; normal codes of behaviour and the brooding uncertainty of today’s lives reassert themselves.
Prabuddha succeeds beautifully in transporting the viewer into the world and thought patterns of archaic Goa and then in part subverting them by presenting them in the glory of its decadence.
Dalrymple’s elegant prose is delightful, imbued with just a touch of the stylised vigour of a doha (couplet), perhaps of Kabir.
In some of the studies it is almost as if a blanket of dust swirls and thickens as if at that spot in the home a storm had gathered and for long minutes raged and twisted while all around the world remained still.
The slow, unhurried pace of this book may not appeal to all readers. But in bringing something radically old, yet sensitively overlaid, to an epic note of misty nostalgia, Prabuddha proves that an “untold tale” may be every bit as rewarding as its ancient original and Tania Dasgupta’s design unfolds like the night that descends.