She Sees Her Lover See Her
My focus in graduate school has been on Indian art and people often ask what drew me to that field. The exoticism of India initially attracted my attention in high school and I enjoyed looking at the intriguing artworks in museums because they fascinated and mystified me. But my interest was more on the level of a hobby, not the scholarly attention that I devoted to the canon of European Art.
I didn’t actually study Indian art with any seriousness until I took a class on Couples in Art for graduate school. My research for that presentation introduced me to the subtlety and humor that make Indian paintings so rich and wonderful. There are often multiple levels of meaning, sly puns and beautifully executed details.
One of my favorite paintings is referred to as “A Glimpse of the Loved One,” or at times, “She Sees Her Lover See Her.” It is part of the collection at the San Diego Museum of Art and has a slightly fuzzy provenance. It is most likely from Rajasthan in Northern India and was painted in the mid-18th century. In the painting, a young woman sits in a courtyard getting ready after a bath and a maid holds a mirror in front of her. A gust of wind has suddenly pulled aside a curtain, revealing a man who is spying on the scene.
Lovers are a major theme of Rajasthani paintings. These works were painted for the rajas (kings) and their courtiers and often depict scenes of pleasure and opulence. But few things in Indian art exist on merely one level of interpretation. Lovers often serve as a metaphor for religious devotion – the desire for the worshipper to become one with the divine is likened to the human experience of sexual union. The act of “seeing” also has religious significance, since part of the Hindu rituals of worship involve looking upon the god to become closer to him.
The brilliance of the painting is in the interplay of gazes. The woman looks into the mirror expecting her own face, but we can see that the mirror holds the man’s face. She blushes and pulls her knees over her bare breasts as she sees him seeing her. In turn, the man can see that he has been caught out and recognizes a flush in the woman’s reflection that is at once embarrassment and pleasure. The maid too is involved – she is facing the man and has perhaps turned the mirror to quietly alert her mistress to his presence.
This work is to be considered on both the human level and on a metaphorically divine level. While this could just be a voyeur’s delight, it also can be seen as the curtain of mystery being lifted away from the face of the divinity. In a moment of religious clarity, the woman is united with her god. But these moments are rare and fleeting. The gust of wind passes, the curtain falls back into place, the mirror is tilted back toward the woman’s own face. But in that one moment, she sees him seeing her.
Karla
