EPHEMERAL EARTH |Mandalas, Land Art, and the Spiritual Ecology in South Asia

Before the West gave it a name, the earth was already being honored.

Long before "land art" entered the vocabulary of galleries and critics, South Asian hands were already at work — at thresholds, in courtyards, at the edge of the sacred and the everyday — drawing circles in rice flour and flower petals, tracing the shape of the universe onto the ground before sunrise. Not as monument. Not as statement. As offering.

The mandala. The word itself comes from Sanskrit: circle, disc. But to call it merely a shape is to miss everything. It is a cosmology. A reckoning. A map of where the human sits inside the divine order — not above it, not apart from it, but nested within, the way a child is nested inside the memory of those who came before.

These designs are old. They appear in ancient Hindu scriptures, in the concentric architectures of temple cosmology, in the slow, devastating beauty of Tibetan sand mandalas — built over days and weeks with a patience that humbles — and then swept away. Gone. That is the point. The dissolution is not failure. It is the teaching.

In everyday Indian life, these patterns have other names: rangoli, kolam, alpana, muggu. Regional tongues giving local breath to the same ancient knowing. Made at doorways. Made at festivals. Made from what the earth already provides — rice flour, spice, petal — and returned to the earth when the day is done. Art as reciprocity. Creativity as an act of care rather than conquest.

The West arrived at land art differently. Through scale. Through intervention. Through the gesture of the lone artist imposing vision onto landscape. There is another way.

Contemporary South Asian artists working in this tradition understand something that the monument does not: that impermanence is not loss. That process is not lesser than product. That the work dissolving back into the earth is not the work failing — it is the work completing itself.

Subodh Kerkar works along the coastline of Goa, shaping large-scale installations from shells, fishing nets, and sand. His Earth Bowl breathes with the ocean's rhythms, rooted in sacred geometry and attuned to a landscape that has its own memory. The work does not dominate the shore. It listens to it.

Navjot Altaf moves differently — through collaboration, through community, through the Indigenous knowledge systems of Bastar, Chhattisgarh. Her circular forms and site-specific interventions do not arrive from outside. They emerge from within. From the cyclical understanding of human and natural world as bound, as kin, as responsible to one another.

Hemali Bhuta works with wax, turmeric, ash, earth — substances that know how to disappear. Her installations remember ritual. They understand that what melts, what fades, what returns to powder is not diminished but transformed. There is a profound theological seriousness to this, the kind that organized religion sometimes loses but that certain artists never do.

Reetu Sattar, in Bangladesh, builds performances from repetition and gradual disintegration. Her piece Harano Sur — the lost melody — dissolves the way memory dissolves: slowly, painfully, inevitably, and with great beauty. Siddhartha Kararwal, working in biodegradable materials, invites his audience to witness both emergence and decay as a single continuous truth. Not opposites. Not tragedy and triumph. One thing.

These artists are not nostalgists. They are not simply reaching backward into tradition for the comfort of the familiar. They are doing something far more demanding: they are insisting that what the ancient world understood about the earth has not become irrelevant. That it has, in fact, become urgent.

The ecological crisis is a crisis of relation. Of having forgotten — or chosen to forget — that nothing taken from the land is free, that no beauty built on extraction is sustainable, that the civilizations most certain of their permanence are often the most fragile.

The mandala knew this. The kolam drawn at dawn and dissolved by dusk knew this. The sand swept into a river at the ceremony's end knew this.

What these artists carry forward is not merely aesthetic inheritance. It is an ethics. A way of making that refuses to separate beauty from responsibility, creation from care, the artist from the earth she stands on.

In a time when the ground itself is changing beneath our feet — rising seas, failing seasons, the slow grief of ecological unraveling — these practices offer something rarer than a solution. They offer a different way of knowing. One that has always understood that we do not own the land. We are, if we are fortunate, briefly tended by it.

The circle closes. The pattern dissolves. The earth remains — asking, always, whether we will finally learn to honor what we cannot keep.