“Art is life and life is art,” says Lok Chitrakar, a Nepali folk artist and teacher whose smile lights up his face as he talks to the camera. What Chitrakar is trying to put into words, I imagine, is the unconscious act of ‘losing oneself’ in creative and spiritual joy, the mystical state of ‘bhakti’ or selfless devotion through which all ritualistic art is expressed and experienced.
This notion lies at the heart of Darshan, a new film from journalist Vikram Zutshi and art historian Debashish Banerji that pulsates with a robust tribe of artists like Lok, painters, stone carvers, woodworkers, conjurors, acrobats and musicians, all of whom congregate at sacred sites to proffer their art to the fiery spirit Gods and multi-limbed Goddesses in residence.
Production took the filmmakers on a three-month long quasi-pilgrimage across the Indian subcontinent from the Hindu temples of southern Tamil Nadu, western Rajasthan and eastern Orissa all the way up north to the Buddhist monasteries of Himalayan Kathmandu. The effort and attention to detail is evident; Darshan is an enthralling cinematic experience, a vortex of vivid colours, operatic spectacle and vaudeville performance.
