Goswamy, who was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2008, is the author of several authoritative books on Indian art, including Essence of Indian Art (Asian Art Museum of San Francisco) and The Spirit of Indian Painting (Penguin). With the cat, the author says, “this is the first time I have strayed from the area of Indian art”.
"A cat’s a cat; and that’s that.” Eminent art historian and critic BN Goswamy’s latest book, The Indian Cat: Stories, Paintings, Poetry, and Proverbs (Aleph), begins with this common saying. The book itself is a truly uncommon record of the varied ways in which cats have made themselves a home in Indian art, literature and culture. Bringing together stories from texts as old as the Jataka Tales and Anwar-i Suhayli, poetry from various languages including Urdu, Hindi, Persian and Bengali, a wide-ranging catalogue of paintings, and a collection of proverbs, sayings and idioms, the book traces how the animal was seen and represented across history, in the subcontinent.
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Excerpts from a conversation with the author:
You write that you are not a cat lover, “strictly speaking”. Why then did you write a book on them?
Quite a few years ago, I visited a friend in Zurich. At the time, she had six or seven cats at her home. They were always following her around, clambering to her shoulders. I was slightly annoyed as we couldn’t have a decent conversation without the cats disrupting it. Noticing this, she mockingly told me that art historians are meant to love cats. She cited the example of the highly regarded art historian Stella Kramrisch, who was a great lover of cats. The next day, she sent me a copy of Die Orientalische Katze, The Oriental Cat, by Annemarie Schimmel, another respected German art historian. Slowly, they began to take up space in my awareness. Years later, C Sivaramamurti, a great Sanskrit scholar and a good friend of mine, told me about the marjara-nyaya, a theory in the Vaishnava Bhakti tradition, about surrendering oneself to God, like a kitten does to her mother. Marjara is the Sanskrit word for cat. He also mentioned marjara-vrata, which means someone is hiding their true intentions. All this added to my interest in cats. Finally, one day, while I was sitting around at home, looking at my son’s Persian cats, I decided to write a book on cats set in our history. I took it up as a challenge. Rather than being a book on cats, it is a book on the idea of the cat.
How hard was it to find the cat in Indian art? Did you research this book differently from the others you’ve worked on?
Very hard. I have dealt with Indian paintings for the major part of my life. From Pahari to Rajasthani and Mughal to Deccani. But when I close my eyes, I cannot recall seeing cats in any of the works. For the book, I started looking intently. I worked on it for nearly two years and found over 58 paintings, from various artistic traditions. And I’m sure there is more. It was hard work but very satisfying. Also, I did not want to give detailed and critical descriptions of the paintings. The accompanying text to each painting tries to guess at what the cat might have been thinking or feeling.
An entire section is from the cat’s perspective.
There is a chapter with a collection of proverbs and common sayings about cats that we hear and use all the time. In it, the cat is at the mic, and talks its mind about how it is represented in each of the sayings.
What would you say is the most interesting thing that struck you about the animal, historically speaking?
Cats figure in eastern literature from around 4th century BC, as seen in the Buddhist Jataka Tales. They were seen as clever, pretentious and manipulative creatures. They were also the subject of many superstitions. But there was no real enmity towards cats. How cats were seen in Europe during the Middle Ages was different. A pope had declared them to be witches who had to be burned. Eventually, this animosity tapered off and cats were domesticated. But this contrast between the extreme view taken by Europeans and the relatively milder view taken by us towards cats had struck me as interesting. Also, the view of cats in Islam differed considerably in comparison to other religions. Cats were never seen as having any negative connotations. The prophet himself had great affection for the animal. My son once pointed out to me that the majority of cat breeders in India are Muslims.
Who is the book for?
Cat lovers. Cat haters. Anybody who enjoys a good story. Anybody who is curious. Like a cat. (He laughs). The book contains philosophical explorations on the one hand, and on the other, it is funny and whimsical.