Banatanwi Dasmahapatra received her doctorate in Exact Humanities (EH). Her research work was supervised by late Prof Navjyoti Singh and Dr. Vinoo Alluri and thesis reviewed by Prof. Dipti M Sharma, Prof. Nandkishore Acharya and Prof. Ritwik Sanyal, Banaras Hindu University Varanasi (BHU)
Here’s a summary of Banatanwi’s thesis, Fibre, Fabricator and Fabric: A Study of Form, Space and Time, as explained by her:
There are various conceptual and philosophical issues involved in arts which trigger the human mind to enquire. The purpose of this research is to analyze, examine and establish the origin, foundation and fundamentals of arts in relation with space and time. A creative mind evolves with the spatial, temporal or spatio – temporal being of an art form in the process from imagination to re-creation. Creator is the only witness in the process of re-creation who plays the role of a spectator at the same time. And the unity between a creator and spectator from the imaginary reality to experiential reality gives birth to the idea of aesthetic judgment to transcend the reality in re-creation. I started with the question of plurality in arts. Investigation of the plurality in arts led to enquire their origin, fundamentals and formal foundations in association with the diachronicity of space and synchronicity of time. And the understanding of diachronicity of space and synchronicity of time led to instigate the potential features of rāgamālā (mostly of 17th C. A.D) paintings done in relation with the North Indian classical music to understand the transcendental space where synchronically enclosed sounds get transformed into the diachronically enclosed vision to make sonic and visual blending possible. The blending between site and architecture in the visualization of installation as a form of art has also been conceived in the thesis. It will enable us to re-create the memory of society in future. The concept of form is conceived differently in different traditions. Form is conceived as akṣara in the Indian tradition, proposition and idea in the Greek tradition and void in the Far-Eastern tradition. Form is intangible by nature and devoid of saṁskāra-s. But every formal action necessarily depends on the saṁskāra-s. All art forms are the form of punctuation. They punctuate the multi-layered reality in folds. The formal features of painting, sculpture, music, poetry, drama, dance, architecture and movie in the framework of space-time relations have been worked out to understand the nature of punctuation associated in every formal action in arts.
The study of rāgamālā paintings covers a large area of the thesis. The potential visual occurrences to visualize a rāga have been identified in the four cognitive/perceptual interiors of its musical compositions to understand the blending between music, poetry, drama and painting in the rāgamālā-s. They are as follows: 1. Discriminated textures of the timbres in apprehended sounds to identify the temporal gaps within a musical structure 2. Conceptual characterization of perceptual constant from expressions to the constitution of a felt stasis 3. Poetic cognition in the melody of a song in connection with the dohā-s and chaupayi-s written on the rāga-paintings 4. Contemplative apperception of visual elements in synesthetic associations to unfold a multilayered narrative space I have studied and analyzed the ten qualities for rāga visualization given by Nārada in his Nāradīya Śikṣā and identified their relations in those four interiors of a rāga composition. So the theoretical and visual gamut created in this work would allow us to unveil the multi-layered correspondence between sound and vision and thus enable us to create new rāgamālā paintings and sound art installations.