Darshan is a 37:30 minute documentary on a number of regional traditions of art practice in India produced by art historian Debashish Banerji and directed by photojournalist and filmmaker Vikram Zutshi.
This film was in part inspired by the exhibition “Puja and Piety” curated by Dr. Pratapaditya Pal and displayed at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art from April 17 to August 28, 2016. It features the narrative voices of Pratapaditya Pal, Debashish Banerji, a variety of regional master artists and art collector Julia Emerson. Art in our times is received and consumed in the form of stand-alone objects of aesthetic appreciation, displayed in museums and collected and exchanged in the art market. The film “Darshan” presents an alternative model of artistic production and reception, as an integral part of Indic communitarian spiritual practice. It does this by looking at a number of regional artistic traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism in their living contexts, as practiced in Odisha, Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan and Nepal. In these contexts, art is shown to assume a different meaning, that of darshan, or intimate devotional relation facilitated by the act of seeing. The two art worlds, that in which art objects are displayed, bought and sold as individual items of aesthetic enjoyment and that in which objects of beauty are part of a lived communitarian relation with spirituality, have sometimes been segregated in the modern mind as modern and premodern, the modern being the secular norm of our time, and the premodern seen as inferior “folk art,” “craft” or “religion,” belonging to anachronistic and illiterate populations and fated to subordination or obsolescence. Darshan, the film, challenges this perception, showing the ways in which these vital living traditions continue in our times and how they have changed to become relevant, blurring the boundaries between religions, genres, media, cultures and between modernity and tradition.