P. T. Reddy, Neo-Tantrism, and Modern Art in India

Abstract

The July 1969 moon landing represents a canonical moment for modernity. For the United States, it meant a battle victory in the space race and a triumph of American science and ingenuity. P.T. Reddy (1915–1996), an artist then living in Hyderabad, India, saw these aspects of the moon landing, certainly, but he also acknowledged the cosmic importance of that moment, using it as a springboard for a series of etchings and oil paintings on the theme of humans on the moon. Reddy's series reclaims the moon landing for the world rather than solely for Americans—fulfilling Neil Armstrong's “for mankind”—and recenters the iconography of the moon landing away from the iconic figure planting the flag in the lunar soil (although he does use that as well) toward a more symbolic, universalizing representation of the unions of microcosm and macrocosm, humanity and god, the human body and the celestial body. Reddy images this modern moment through the symbols and concepts of Tantra, an element of both Hinduism and Buddhism focused on a cosmology of union, made popular in the 1960s and 1970s. He thus takes the central concepts of modernity—scientific progress and inquiry, humanity's control of nature, the search for universality through abstraction—and articulates them through his personal interpretation of the South Asian visual culture of Tantra.