The Moors Last Sigh

Raja Ravi Verma’s Woman Holding a Fruit , that young bejewelled temptress whose sidelong gaze of open sensuality reminds me of pictures of the young Aurora herself; turn the corner at Gaganendranath Tagore’s spooky water-colour Jadoogar (Magician) , in which a monochrome Indian version of the distorted world of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari stands upon a shocking orange carpet (and, I confess, I am reminded of the house on Cabral Island by the harsh shadows, skulking figures and shifting perspectives of this picture, to say nothing of the strange, half-screened figure, at its heart, of a gowned’n’crowned giantess); and- turn away quickly now! This is not the moment to get into the arch-cosmopolitan Aurora Zogoiby’s contemptuous opinion of the work of her older, and determinedly village-oriented rival for the title of Greatest Woman Painter! – facing Amrita Sher-Gil’s masterpiece The Ancient Story-Teller , there it is: Aurora at her best, in my humble or maybe not-so-humble opinion the equal for colour and movement of any Matisse dance-circle, only in this densely crowded picture with its deliberately garish magentas, its scandalous neon greens, the dance is not of bodies but of tongues, and all the tongues of the highly coloured figures whispering lick-lick-lick into one another’s ears are black, black, black.
    I will not speak here of the picture’s painterly qualities, but simply point out some of its thousand-and-one anecdotes, for as we know Aurora had learned much from the narrative-painting traditions of the South: see, here is the repeated and cryptic figure of a ginger-coloured, sweating priest with the head of a dog, and we can agree, I hope, that this is, in many ways, the figure which orchestrates the action of the painting. Look! There he is, a splash of ginger lurking in the blue tiles of the synagogue; and again, at the Santa Cruz Cathedral, painted from top to bottom with fake balconies, fake garlands and of course the Stations of the Cross, there! You can see the dog-vicar whispering in the ear of a shocked Catholic Bishop, represented as a Fish, in full regalia.
    The scandal – I should say The Scandal–is a great spiral of a scene, into which Aurora has woven both the scandals that enveloped the da Gamas of Cochin, both the burning spice-fields and the lovers whose smell of spices gave their game away. Warring Lobo and Menezes clans can be spotted on the mountains that form the backdrop for the spiralling throng: the Menezes people all have serpents’ heads and tails and the Lobos, of course, are wolves. But in the foreground are the streets and waterways of Cochin, and they teem with scandalised congregations: fish-Catholics, dog-Anglicans, and the Jews all painted Delft blue, like figures in Chinese tiles. The Maharaja, the Resident, various officers of law are shown receiving petitions; action of various sorts is being demanded. Li ck-lick-lick! Placards are carried, burning torches raised. There are armed men defending godowns against the righteous arsonists of the town. Yes, tempers are running high in this painting: as in life. Aurora always said that the picture had its origins in her family history, irritating those critics who objected to such historicising, which reduced art to mere ‘gossip’ … but she never denied that the figures at the heart of the angrily swirling spiral were based upon Abraham and herself. They are the still heart of the whirlwind, asleep on a peaceful island at the centre of the storm; they lie with their bodies entwined in an open pavilion set in a formal garden of waterfalls and willow-trees and flowers, and if you look closely at them, for they are small, you will see that they have feathers instead of skin: and their heads are the heads of eagles, and their eagerly licking tongues are not black, but juicy, plump, and red. ‘The storm died down,’ my father told me when he took me to see this picture as a boy. ‘But we soared above it, we defied the lot of them, and we endured.’

    I want – finally! – to say something good at this point about Great-Uncle Aires and his wife, Carmen/Sahara. I want to offer arguments in extenuation of their behaviour: that in fact they had been genuinely worried on Aurora’s behalf when they burst in on her little love-nest, that after all it is no simple matter for a penniless thirty-six-year-old man to deflower a fifteen-year-old millionairess. I want to say that Aires and Carmen’s lives were