Page 44 - Studio International - December1996

non-figurative imagery. Mr Ajit Mookerjee, the author have corresponding colours according to the vibration of
of this book under review, claims that Tantra is made up the hue. This sound-form system of Tantric Art can
of fifty sounds, each corresponding to a particular colour, perhaps be better understood from what Dr Timothy
and Tantric Art is more or less a reproduction of a Leary, in a recent interview in Playboy (September 1966)
sound in form and colour. I cannot fall in with this described as the effect of LSD 25 while listening to
theory, and it has been attempted in Paris in the 1920's music: 'You not only hear but see the music emerging
in a movement called Orphism, and before that, even from the speaker system—like dancing particles, like
by Goethe and Rimbaud. Such attempts are surely squirming curls of toothpaste. You actually see the sound,
arbitrary and therefore fail. Because if you imagine the in multicoloured patterns while you're hearing it. At the
vowel A to be of a yellow colour, I can equally imagine it same time, you are the sound, you are the note, you are
to be blue. the string of the violin or the piano. And everyone of
I got some of my historical details on Tantrism from A your organs is pulsating and having orgasms in rhythm
History of India by Romila Thapar and some of the best with it.' (Dr Leary describes himself as a Hindu, but
information I could find on Tantric Art itself was in an this could hardly be possible because it would create the
old volume of 'Indian Art and Letters', in an article by problem of providing him with an appropriate caste,
Sir John Woodruff: The Psychology of Hindu Religious and caste depends entirely on birth.)
Ritual, published in 1925. I also found that Mulk Raj Tantra is a vedantic logic that mind and matter, e.g.
Anand in his Hindu View of Art (1957) quotes from this thought and form, are one : and that mind is always an
article at length. object, that is to say, there is no vacuous mind. It is
Indian mystics believe that thoughts and sounds are further held that the mind is not a conscious mental
material and can be transmuted into matter: syllables entity, but an unconscious, quasi-material force, having