Painter Satwant Singh

Passion Play

Nirupama Dutt
Junoon mein jitni bhi guzri bakaar guzri haiAgarche dil pe kharabi hazaar guzri hai
(Every moment spent in passion was rewarding/ Although the heart had to endure much pain) — Faiz Ahmad Faiz
Coming face-to-face with the paintings of Satwant Singh is an intense experience. For his work is the purest play of passion, worked with intensity found only in masterstrokes. Having shared a long and close association with the artist and his work, what one feels seeing a fresh work by this artist is that each work is painted with energy that ordinary souls would find hard to muster.
But here we are not dealing with the ordinary. Satwant is an extraordinary artist born with gift of art nurtured lovingly for nearly half a century. No, the painter is no old man. The fact is that he started painting when but a boy. For him it was the only way to relate with this delightful and at the same time disturbing world this boy stepped into out of the dark comfort of his mother’s womb. “I was a lonely child and I started speaking late. So even before I spoke, I had started drawing. I didn’t make friends easily. I kept myself engrossed with the goats, roosters and sparrows. Or I escaped into fantasy,” says Satwant. This world of childhood still presents itself in his work which is a wonderful mix of reality and fantasy.
A man of many talents, one could wax eloquent on his many contributions to different forms like caricature illustration, narrative and poetry. The present collection of works that come so like winsome wine that was maturing in the cellar for long and suddenly it has poured out in good measure, with passion put to the finest use.
The viewer is transported into the complex symbology of the inner world of the artist and the erotic that meets the eye is a metaphor for his own creative urge. It is worked out so magically in a harmonious coming together of line, form, colour and texture. All this has been achieved with the long labour of love. The joy and the passion this artist feels in communion with his medium is communicated ever so spontaneously to the viewer.
For passion is indeed a universal humanity, that imparts meaning to art and life. Move from the large paintings to the smaller works painted on discarded brown office files and Satwant’s art comes a full circle. If his forms shimmer in the outburst of colour, the tonal effect takes the viewer to the deep and ponderous layers of the artist’s mind. “Whenever I see a slip of paper lying around, I cannot help but draw on it. Drawing and painting are compulsive acts for me and what you see now has half a century of discipline and dedication behind it,” says Satwant.
His painting on files is in a way symbolic of a freedom that he has recently found from long years of work to earn his daily bread and fend for his family. Now he is back to doing that what comes most naturally to him. Art is a meditation for our ‘Saint’ Satwant who combines the serene and the ardent; the painful and the pleasure giving so with radiance that sparks light the gaze the way of seeing.

Maqbool Fida Husain

Artist in exile

Exile and the artist are something new for a country like ours known for its liberalism and tolerance. Has M.F. Husain actually chosen to flee or is it a new marketing technique by this artist who has always thrived on controversy? Nirupama Dutt probes this question as Husain fails to return home on promised dates

Maqbool Fida Husain, undoubtedly the most popular and prolific contemporary Indian artist, laughs at the word ‘exile’. His is a full-throated laughter of a man who has seen 90 plus one seasons of life and creativity. The irony is that he says this while in exile of sorts, away from his home country.
Is it a willing suspension of disbelief when the maverick painter, whose one canvas fetches a crore and more, says: "What is ‘exile’? Because I’ve been wandering all over the world for the last 50 years? I have been working all the time, there is no such thing as exile.
In fact, my exhibition is opening on December 30 in Kolkata. And I’ll be there." He said so to Shekhar Gupta walking the talk with him in Dubai last year. However, it was not Gupta who walked the talk but Husain who did so. December came and went, and January is almost gone but Abba Husain is still to return home.
Shrieking silence
His family is sadly silent, his friends vocal and angry, and a handful of intellectuals and artists who are trying to raise the conscience of the nation to bring back a beloved painter home find their voices drowning in slogans of hate. Following Barkha Dutt’s debate on NDTV, an angered man cries out against her defense of his bare-bodied paintings: "How will she react if Husain paints a nude portrait of Barkha Dutt and auctions it in an art exhibition." There is much else, too unfit to print.

When such a tone takes over, all reason is lost. It is Hai! Husain in ways more than one. His detractors want him done to death and finished, and they are even announcing awards and rewards ranging from lakhs to crores. His admirers are crying out against such treatment meted out to a painter who has perhaps contributed the most in putting modern Indian painting on the international art map. His is also an amazing story of struggle, courage and resilience, rising as he actually did from the streets.
The painter of hoardings has came a long way but he is now an outsider to not only to the land that he was born to but also to its life and beliefs that spread themselves on his canvases.
Changing colours
The Husain story is probably the saddest reflection on our times and their growing intolerance. Terror unleashed on art and artists, writers and writing, singers and music is not something new to the world. We have seen it all too often but it happened in climes that were fundamentalist and totalitarian. Fatwas to death are issued against artists and writers as in the case of Salman Rushdie, Taslima Nasreen or Orhan Pamuk.
Surprised at the upsurge of intolerance in India, a Pakistani poet, who had once sought exile in India, on a visit in the late 1990s, read out a very satirical poem on the changed mood of the country. The poem went something like this: Tum bhi ham jaise nikale/ Ab tak kahan chuppe thhe bhai... (So you too turned to be like us/ Where were you hiding all this while brother`85) Proving her words true, some persons tried to assault her when she was reciting in a symposium organised at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
That was a time when increasing attacks on art and artists had begun in India. Theatres showing Deepa Mehta’s very fine film Fire were defaced and she was not allowed to film Water in India. Her statements on gender issues were seen as a grave threat to our ancient civilisation by the morality brigade. Husain’s painting of Saraswati in bold simple lines and a bared body had already been destroyed by the Bajrang Dal in 1996. In 1998, the wrath was turned on a painting titled Sita Rescued. And last year it was anger unleashed at Bharat Mata, a painting meant to go on auction to raise funds for victims of the Kashmir earthquake but the Apparao gallery was pressured into withdrawing it. Husain said he had never given the title but that did not change matters. Interestingly, the titles given to Husain’s anti-Hindu paintings on the Sanatan website and Sanskar Bharati pamphlets are not Husain originals but those given by Prafull Goradia in his book Anti Hindus.
Twist in the tale
Husain’s rather serene and symbolic portrayal of a bare-bodied woman on the map of India was too much to take. What followed was unprecedented. In May 2006, the Home Ministry advised the police chiefs of Delhi and Mumbai to take ‘appropriate action’ against the artist. The Hindu Personal Law Board president Ashok Pandey announced a Rs 51 crore reward for eliminating artist M F Husain. Congress Minority Cell leader Akhtar Baig offered Rs 11 lakh to any ‘patriot’ to chop off the painter’s hands for hurting Hindu sentiments. His apology and subsequent departure from the country did not end the witch-hunt and a gallery holding an exhibition of his works was vandalised in London and forced to remove the show.
Ironically, all this when the ‘liberal’ Congress is in power and Husain was always close to the party. Recall his painting of Indira Gandhi as Durga and the title of ‘court painter’ that he earned during the Emergency. When the controversy arose about the Sita painting, painter Vivan Sundaram went on record saying: "The intimidation is fascist in nature. This attack has crossed all barriers. They have intruded into a person’s private space—an artist’s home. The state must to do something about this. This is becoming a kind of rallying action. They are targeting art and artists because they have no political agenda to pursue." This was said of the Bharatiya Janata Party but what about the Congress or the climate under Congress rule.
Prolific painter
There is much more to Husain than the controversy. A prolif ic painter, he painted by the streetlights at night in Mumbai of old, He overcame much with struggle, labour and an immense talent to become the country’s foremost artist. The long and hard practice of painting cinema hoardings turned his brush into a magic wand of sorts. It is sheer pleasure to watch him work and he has often worked in full public view.
The Indian art market has never been as prosperous as it is now and to Husain should go much credit for bringing artists to such a position. Many art galleries received encouragement and support from the painter. Besides, he is as good a showman as he is a painter. He knows how to be in news whether it means perching his frail frame on a scaffolding to paint the forehead of a tall building, or making quite a splash with his bare feet, painting a horseback in the middle of the white cube of a gallery or putting much of his money in celluloid to celebrate his fetish for Madhuri Dixit’s derri`E8re. He is only being honest when he says: "Even marketing is an art form. I’ve created a whole new phenomenon of how to market. And I am not defensive about that. I do market my work. Also, because all these big dealers are now becoming defunct."
There are advantages of riding controversial waves but the dangers, too, are there. There are some in the art world and outside who still hold that this ‘exile’ is yet another Husain tamasha, which will further hike the prices of his paintings. Is this naughty white-haired wizard, who is a veteran at the game of art, having a last laugh as he paints on and into immortality? Perhaps so but he is also proving a point that there never was an artistic period or an art-loving nation for that matter.
SINGING HUSAINAS
Husain has no case to answer. For, there is nothing restrictive or self-limiting about the Indian identity the Mahabharata asserts: it is large, eclectic and flexible, containing multitudes. This is why I have been particularly happy to add my name to the petition circulated by many of our country’s leading artists and writers, asking the President to confer upon Husain the highest award of the land, the Bharat Ratna.
—Novelist Shashi Tharoor
Husain must speak, must lead, must stand by his art — not apologise and withdraw. Most importantly, he must return to the place of his roots. To apologise is to give the lie to his art, cheapen it as a shallow thing.
—Shoma Chaudhry, Tehelka
It is sad that a painter whose portrayal of Hindus gods and goddesses was next in popularity to the calendar art of Raja Ravi Varma has been banished as anti-Hindu.
—Shamsul Islam, theatre activist
When future scholars write the social history of this past decade in India, a major trend they will undoubtedly note is the upsurge of intolerance. Right since the Babri Masjid was demolished in December, 1992 by a frenzied mob out to settle "scores with history", there has been unrelenting violence, discrimination and humiliation against groups of people. They are vilified simply because they happen to disagree with something, or have different beliefs, faiths, or ethnic origins. Books are burned (e.g. Ambedkar’s Riddles of Hinduism), eminent artists (M.F. Husain) attacked, and newspaper offices (Mahanagar and Outlook) ransacked.
—Praful Bidwai, columnist
The Husain controversy is no longer a predictable Hindu-Muslim debate nor is it only about the orthodoxy of the BJP. The Congress party is just as accountable.
—Barkha Dutt, Managing Editor, NDTV

January 21, 2007

Painter Veer Munshi

Artist as painter of zodiac signs
Veer Munshi in his artistic take-off on the zodiac signs makes and breaks icons and popular beliefs, writes Nirupama Dutt
WHAT is common between Lord Shiva, Shakespeare, Satyajit Ray and Sachin Tendulkar? A funny question indeed. Ask Veer Munshi, our Chitranjan Park neighbourhood painter in New Delhi, and he will run his hand over his receding hairline and say in all wisdom: "They are Taurians pushing and bold; As it has been told." Munshi’s recent body of work finds him unravelling the world of the zodiac signs with painterly aplomb and, in the process, painting images that please the eye and stimulate the mind.
The abstract world of the Zodiac signs, indeed, makes for a fantastic study and also one of the most popular ones. The success of the fortune columns in newspapers is such, perhaps the best-read column after the weather report, that many papers now carry it every day instead of just the weekend. Thus, the Zodiac signs become for this artist a metaphor through which he communicates the mood of our times by making and breaking icons. And his achievement is that he transcends mere classification to put a question mark on the generalisations the Zodiac signs make. Munshi’s interpretation of the characteristics of a sign is often a strong commentary on the human journey.

Let’s go over some of the interpretations of the signs and traits of those born under it to see the interesting mind game that the artist plays. Munshi starts with the Ram, the happy Aries who wish to assert their identity by saying ‘I Exist!’ and what we have is fine painting a tribute to the great Impressionist, Vincent Van Gogh. The caption to this painting and others have been written in the poetic idiom of a wise one, be it Linda Goodman, Bejan Daruwala or Veer Munshi, holding forth on what is or will be. The caption to Aries sun sign going over the impulsive and challenging nature of Aries who are ever pining for love says, "A Van Gogh turns a yellow spot into a sun coldly burning and becomes immortal." The painting shows the famous self-portrait of Van Gogh and the artist posing before it with his head sprouting the famous sun flowers and a pistol, the one with which the artist was to shoot himself, lying on a chair to be found in the Van Gogh paintings.
What is very interesting is that the works of famous artists, perhaps those who always fascinated Munshi, and their lives are interwoven in these paintings. We have Salvador Dali as the thrusting bull for Taurus, leading as though the rogue gallery of others born under this sign. Other artists who figure in these series are Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, M.F. Husain, Bhupen Khakhar and Munshi himself.
Born at Srinagar, Kashmir and schooled in art at the M.S. University, Baroda, Munshi has been sensitive to the politics of violence and displacement. His installations and art works exhibited in group shows have shown him commenting strongly on the politics of the time. The artist says of these works, "Many of them have been like slogans made for shows specially designed to protest against events." However, in these works it is the emergence of metaphor that encases his philosophy. These paintings work at many levels — enjoy the visual delight of iconography if you will; lose yourself in the mystery of the sun signs or look beyond and see what the artist says between the strokes as it were.
Very interesting indeed is the depiction of the Aquarius mystery. Aquarius is the sign of the New Age — the evolving sign that feels it must return to life what it has gathered from it down the centuries. Thus the painting has images of the Charles Darwin Theory of Evolution along with a pitcher of the Good Earth for the Aquarian is the water-bearer. What is returned to the Earth is, however, violence in the image of a terrorist. It is here that the artist is brilliant in envisaging, what could be and what is. Politicians too figure in these series most interestingly.
To represent the Capriconian we have none other than Atal Bihari Vajpayee with the head replaced by the lotus flower and the many arms holding symbols of different faiths but the trident somewhat more prominent than the others. The Leo prowess is featured by Bill Clinton and Mandela for talking of Cancer, the artist says: ‘A Mandela is always on the round somewhere...’
Munshi made these twelve large and complex canvases over a period of two to three years. However, the research and study took up a much longer time. "I read so much about the Zodiac philosophy. Not just that in delineating personality types. I started reading about Van Gogh. Then I read his letters to his brother Theo. So I gathered a lot of knowledge in the process." It is the artist’s accomplishment that nowhere does he brother the viewer with all the acquired knowledge but invites him to embark on this fascinating journey using symbols in economy. The result is aesthetically very pleasing.
A challenge, indeed, but then what would art be if there were no challenges ahead?

September 7, 2003

Brush with Women

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Re-imaging the Indian Woman
The past three decades have seen the women artists succeeding in reinventing the Indian woman, writes Nirupama Dutt

IT is the artist who gives a face to the gods and many times also to the human beings. The image of the Indian woman so celebrated painting, theatre, literature and cinema owes much to the great painter Raja Ravi Varma (1848 to 1906). It was Varma who gave a form to Sita, Damayanti, Shakuntala, Mohini and many others. Prints of his paintings still grace temples including the little pooja alcoves in homes. These images had an impact on early cinema and theatre and the image of the beautiful and fair woman wrapped in silk and loaded with ornaments became the popular image of the Bharatiya nari. The power of his creations was such that many painters like Dhurandar of Maharashtra and G. Thakur Singh and subsequently Sobha Singh were greatly influenced by him.
In modern times we have seen the swing of taste and this style falling out of favour and the emergence of the lyrical bare-bodied women by M.F. Husain, the voluptuous damsels made by F.N. Souza and lank nudes by Jatin Das. These are the women made by men. But the past 30 years have also seen the emergence of the women artists in large numbers all over India and they have made a mark by re-imaging women.
Mother and child
What is the basic difference between women made by men and women made by women? Woman as represented by men is an issue that has generated a lot of scholarly works the world over. Commenting on a male artist painting a female nude, world-renowned art critic John Berger made a relevant point. He said: "You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure."
Closer home, leading artist Anjolie Ela Menon puts the women's vision in perspective by saying: "We view the female figure and the preoccupations of our gender with empathy as distinct from the voyeuristic nature of the male gaze." If we get to the work of the first lady of the Indian canvas, Amrita Sher-Gil, we see that she was not able to subvert the male gaze or the phenomenon of spectatorship. The women painted by Amrita seem to be offering themselves for gaze. After Amrita's early death in 1941, there is a long gap in which there were hardly any women artists on the scene. Amrita with her Indo-European parentage and European training in art was in a way a unique 'occurrence'.
Besides the folk artists, art training for the average urban Indian woman was an accomplishment for the matrimonial market. Accomplishment meant knowing how to cook, sing, embroider and paint a little. It was only in the 1970s of the last century that a virtual flood of women artists appeared on the scene, equipped with degrees in art and ready to take up art as a vocation. The rise of the woman artist coincides with the rise of the women's movement. And from among these women we have today artists who have made a name for themselves home and abroad like Arpita Singh, Nalini Malani, Arpana Caur, Gogi Saroj Pal and many others. And the next generation has given many more women practicing in different areas of art with the way made easier for them by the pioneers.
Interestingly, Bombay-based Nalini Malani took up a virtual fight with Ravi Varma in a very famous water colour of hers called ‘Re-thinking Raja Ravi Varma’ in which the musical beauties of the painter were pushed to the margin by flesh-and-blood women. And the centre space was taken by a supportive mother figure. The clear message was that women were no longer content to be the Barbie dolls of male fantasy.
Sohni
Ask Arpana Caur what she thinks of the women as painted by Ravi Varma and her reply is, "Those women were not true to life at all. They were painted dolls and bedecked with ornaments like a Christmas tree. They were not working women like you and me."
If Nalini re-thought Ravi Varma, in recent times we have seen Arpana re-invent Sohni of the Sohni-Mahiwal fame with a sure hand and heart. Sohni as depicted by Sobha Singh is a popular image and till some years ago the print of this painting used to be found in nearly every Punjabi middle-class home. This was Sohni beautiful and bedecked drowning with ecstasy in the Chenab. Arpana in her series of paintings on the theme, shows Sohni as a strong brave and earthy woman who defied the social norms and remained true to her love. Taking a cue from an eighteenth century miniature painting by Nain Sukh, Arpana has painted a brave woman battling against the waters of the turbulent river Chenab and meeting her end. Sohni is the very embodiment of female energy.
Gogi's portrayal of woman has been very bold and strong. In her ‘Aaag ka Dariya’ series, she shows the woman crossing the river of fire of her existence by carrying a small female form in her hands. The woman thus takes the responsibility for herself and her daughters. What is very interesting is that women as painted by are contemporary woman artists are not static beings just content to sit or stand pretty. They are active beings shaping their destiny as also the world around them. If nothing else, they are at least brooding! In her beautiful series ‘Embroidering Phulkari and Memories’, Gogi's nayika does not embroider phulkaris merely to be stored in tin trunks but she embroiders the phulkari motifs on her own being and the environment around her.
Anjolie who has painted brooding nudes, Madonnas with children and also female empowerment as Shakti says, " ‘She is me’ is often implicit, at least metaphorically, in the work of most women artists." The autobiographical narrative, as it were, runs parallel to the fabric of painting.

Painting of a Love Legend

The saga of Sohni

Nirupama Dutt recounts how artists have represented the legend of Sohni Mahiwal

OF the famed love-legends of Punjab, the story of Heer-Ranjha is the most celebrated but perhaps most poignant and picturesque is the saga of Sohni-Mahiwal. This love legend has the Chenab river as the central motif and the water of the river plays the role of bringing together the lovers and then parting them forever.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in his famous qawwali sung of Sohni as the one who lost her all for love. As the tale goes, Sohni, a potter’s daughter in Gujarat and an artist in her own right, baked the most beautiful pots ever. Mahiwal, the prince of Bukharo, came to Gujarat and saw the pots made by Sohni and led from the pots to Sohni, he fell in love with her. Sohni too gave her heart away to the prince charming. The social order would not accept this love for a man from afar and so to be near her, he became a buffalo herd, thus the name Mahiwal.
However, Sohni was married off to someone else but the lovers continued to meet. Sohni would swim past midnight with an earthen pitcher for support to meet her Mahiwal on the other side of the Chenab. He would await her arrival with a fire lit outside his hut. However, her sister-in-law discovered this secret rendezvous and one ill-fated night replaced the earthen pitcher with a half-baked one. Sohni was drowned in the Chenab and her corpse reached her lover.
The legend of Sohni-Mahiwal first captured the imagination of poets like Fazal Shah and Qadir Yaar who are considered the "Sohni specialists", just as Waris Shah and Damodar are the specialists of the saga of Heer.
Qadir Yaar (1802-1892) wrote of the love of Sohni in the Sufi strains where Ishq Majazi (human love) is considered a shortcut to Ishq Haqiqi (love for God) poignantly penned the last night of the qissa of Sohni thus:
Satish Gujral’s version is stylised and romanticManjit Bawa’s painting portrays a pensive SohniArpana Caur depicts the legend through a woman’s eyes
Across the Chenab his hut beckoned her
Like a lamp flickering on a grave
On that stormy night the breath of the
Chenab was torn, clouds screamed
To test Sohni, God created this night
Cold, violent and strangely rain-drenched
Speaking Allah’s name she lifts her pot
Knowing intuitively it is half-baked…
The saga of Sohni has also attracted painters of Punjab through the centuries. The first-known painting on Sohni is that by an 18th century pahari painter, Sen-Nainsukh. Thus miniature in gouache on paper shows a bare-breasted Sohni with her wet hair falling on her shoulders smiling and swimming across the Chenab. On the edges of the water are stylised rocks and dwarfed exotic trees so typical of the miniatures. In the fifties, the painting of Sohni-Mahiwal was painted by Andretta-based painter Sobha Singh, showing the two lovers in ecstasy in the waters of the Chenab.

Recently, other Punjabi painters like Satish Gujral, Manjit Bawa and Arpana Caur have re-painted the romance. In late 19th Century we have the painting by Pakistani painter Ustad Allah Bux. This painting shows an aghast Mahiwal receiving the corpse of the drowned Sohni. The painting enjoys a place of pride in the Lahore Museum.
It is Sobha Singh’s painting of 1957, in the collection of Karan Singh, former heir to the Jammu and Kashmir throne, which captured popular imagination the most. Sobha Singh moved from Lahore and set up his studio at Andretta, a pretty little village in the Kangra valley. While art connoisseurs dismiss the work of Sobha Singh as kitsch yet his print of Sohni-Mahiwal was to be found in every middle-class home till the seventies. Commenting on this work, Mehr Singh, a pulil of Sobha Singh and former president of the Punjab Lalit Kala Akademi, says:
"Many modern artists try to dismiss this work. But it is one of the most outstanding paintings done by an Indian artist in the 20th century. No other work has evoked such an enthusiastic response. New editions of prints are still being taken out and are in wide circulation."
This painting shows Sohni with her wet garment clinging to her shapely body being received by Mahiwal in a half-embrace as both of them, ecstatic, go to the bank of the Chenab. There one can see a glow of the fire that Mahiwal has lit to warm his drenched beloved. Sohni in this painting is fair and lovely and Mahiwal dark and handsome. Mehr Singh once again goes gaga over the form of Sohni, "How beautiful Sobha Singh has made her. She looks to be a naddi (belle) of West Punjab."
After Sobha Singh, the first painter who turned to this theme was Satish Gujral, a product of the Mayo School of Art. His rendering of the theme is lyrical and stylised. Within the rectangles and circles of a square canvas rises a half-bent form of Sohni with Mahiwal sprawled below at her feet and a peacock perched on the green and gold foliage and a pitcher resting below. The pitcher, of course, is integral to any painting of Sohni. When asked how Gujral decided to paint of this theme, his reply is, "I took the legend because it is a part of our heritage — a glorious past when one lived and died for love. The artist turns to the past time and again because without a past there is no present."
After Gujral’s work comes the rather pensive portrayal of Sohni by Manjit Bawa. Done in his own special style, Sohni floats across a placid blue rectangle and the ripples of the water are seen on her pink and peach garments. The pitcher under one arm, she floats along as though propelled by destiny. The work certainly is an engaging one and his Sohni has an ethereal charm. And that is how the nayika called Sohni journeys from the 18th through the 20th Century.

But the real blossoming of this theme as far as the Indian canvas goes comes in the opening years of the 21st century with a woman artist wielding the brush. Arpana Caur in a series of paintings on the theme has re-painted the love legend as seen through a woman’s eyes.
Her paintings of Sohni are earthy, vigorous and there is an empathy with the subject. Arpana says: "Sohni was a very brave and strong woman and her story is indeed inspiring. She defied social norms and swam across the river to be with the one she loved. She swam while others slept."
Thus the connection between the two lovers in her works is seen through a series of pitchers of which one is broken. Her Sohni has the plain looks of the girl next door but her spirit is spectacular as she battles against the waves bare-bodied. In one painting the image of the traffic lights intervenes and Sohni has no care be the light at red or green, she has to reach her love and then return before the sun rises. In another, she dances on the waves and in yet another she sings the song of the waters with the fish.

Amrita Sher-gil

First Lady of the Modern Canvas

Nirupama Dutt

``The span of Sher-Gil's genius was limited to but seven years...the sheer power of her finest canvases transcended anything that had hitherto been achieved in modern painting even by the most notable pioneers of Bengal Renaissance''. This was written of legendary painter Amrita Sher-Gil by her friend and chronicler, Karl Khandalavala.
Sher-Gil born in 1913, in Budapest, had a Sikh aristocrat for a father and a Hungarian mother. Schooled in art in the West, she came to India to paint Indian life and people and became one of the pioneers of modern art whose paintings created in a span of seven years from 1935 to her death in 1941 at the age of 28 still remain unparalleled in their sheer genius even when many have found technical faults with her paintings which have required restoration.
This painter remembered for her outstanding beauty spent five years of her adolescence in India and then went to study art in Paris. Completing a training of five years under Pierre Vasillant at the Grand Chaumiere andthen under Lucien Simon at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, she returned to India. It is in this period that she created an amazing body of work in which one sees a fine blend of Western education and an Indian sensibility.
Her seven years of productivity had her painting villagescapes, mendicants, bride's toilet, villagers going to the market, a woman sprawled on a charpai or an ancient story-teller in the backdrop of a Sikh temple. She also made some fine self-portraits which reflect her as a vibrant woman alive to life and alive to art. It is not that Amrita did not face opposition in her times for art was certainly a male domain. But Amrita had strong belief in her talent and vision which sustained her work.
In fact, an unashamed exploration of the sensuous marked a turning point for modern painting. In a letter to Khandalwala, she wrote: ``...Erotic painting and sculpture could not possibly have been inspired by religious fervour. As a matter of fact I think all art, not excluding religious art has comeinto being because of sensuality: a sensuality so great that it overflows the boundaries of the mere physical''. The artist was able to think ahead of her times.
After her death, there came a long gap in which women artists were absent from the scene of modern art. But the Seventies saw an upsurge and now at the end of the century women artists are dominating the contemporary art scene. One of the greatest compliments even now is to be considered a successor to Amrita Sher-Gil, the beautiful woman who died young but died painting.
Commenting on her art, Geeta Kapur, art historian, says, ``Her art language involved the use of indigenous resource in the context of her nascent sympathy for the modernising nation; she hoped to use it as a critical reflex against her personal narcissism.'' Her death cut short what may have been a more meaningful exploration of art. She remains, however, one of the most loved icons of the sub-continent.

October 17, 1999

Amrita Shergil Re-visited

Amrita Shergil (1913-1941), the canvas queen of modern Indian art, enjoys iconic status over sixty years after her death. Even now, in a world that has seen huge upheaval, both male and female artists acknowledge her influence on their work. Now we have a deluge of Indian women artists, many of whom have worked consistently for three decades, yet the Shergil charisma remains unsurpassed. Her mixed Indo-Hungarian parentage, her remarkable paintings, her beauty and unconventional lifestyle, and her tragic death aged twenty-eight, have all contributed towards creating her legend.
Amrita was extraordinarily beautiful, and quite spunky in her personal life, considering she lived in the India of the thirties. She made many brave choices in her life, one of which was marrying her cousin Victor Egan, a young doctor. In 1938 she left for Hungary to marry him and both returned to India the next year. In 1941 she moved to Lahore where she died on December 27 due to loss of blood following a clumsy abortion. At 28—when most artist have barely begun to find themselves – Amrita had blazed a fiery trail. Her short stay in Lahore was quite eventful and she became the talk of the town with her bohemian lifestyle and many paramours. The late Badruddin Tyabji of Lahore, a senior bureaucrat, had interesting stories to tell in his artists but I did not want to just collect their works and hang them. I wanted to do something new and meaningful. So I gave them a print of the painting and told them to react to it. `Amrita Shergil: Revisited' captures the process of contemporary women artists reaching out to a forerunner of yesteryear.

While Shergil's status as an icon remains untouched, it is not that she did not have detractors. The well-known painter KG Subramanyan found her conviction that the Indian art scene belonged only to her rather pompous. We must remember that before Shergil arrived in Lahore and Simla, Raja Ravi Varma had already made his mark and the Bengal School had made its presence felt.
However the leadingpainter Anojolie Ela Menon who, like Shergil, studied art in Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts, says: ``In seven working years, from 1935 to her tragic death in 1941, she created an astounding body of work in which she clearly established a style of her own. One must remember, of course, that she faced stiff opposition and much criticism but she continued to be sustained by a strong helief in her own genius.'' Her friend and chronicler Karl Khandalwala wrote of her contribution to modern art: ``The span of Shergil's genius was limited to but seven years… the sheer power of her finest canvases transcended anything that had, hitherto, been achieved in modern painting even by the most notable pioneers of the Bengal Renaissance.''
The seventies in India saw a tide of women artists, equipped with degrees in art and determined to make it as professionals. Many of them did make it, and in the process moved from the feminization of Shergil to feminism and other socially relevant statements. Thus revisiting the pioneer is not bouquets all the way. Many artists have dared to incorporate a critical comment in their take-off on the `Three sisters'.
Take, for instance, the work of Gogi Saroj Pal, an artist known for painting woman in myriad forms. The three sisters, who sit placid as though posing for a studio photograph in the Shergil original, have been regrouped to relate to one another. And their garments have been filled with flowers for, in her current work, Gogi has been experimenting with flowered fabric. Gogi restores the hand of one sister that was chopped off in the original painting. ``The re-grouping of the women to suggest an interaction is the crucial point. The strength of the Indian women and also their tool for survival through the centuries is their ability to bare their souls to one another. Amrita Shergil was fine when she was doing self-portraiture or painting her own aristocratic class. When it came to painting the common people of India she could well have been painting still life.''

Other painters have dealt with the Shergil in different ways. Young Pooja Iranna has covered the print partially with a blind suggesting seclusion and thus making it a period piece. Arpana Caur, who acknowledges Shergil as a source of Ainspiration, has painted a fresh canvas with three female forms. Two are asleep in the background and one rises awake with the spotlight on her bare body. Delhi-based Damyanti has painted two women and a lamb. One woman has wings and is holding an apple. Of her reaction to the Shergil painting Damyanti sways: ``Women artists still have to struggle hard, and in Amrita's times it must have been more difficult. My central figure suggests that since then women artists have grown wings, and the apple is a gift of creativity and not the forbidden fruit in this work.''
Vijaya Bagai has paintede small male forms encircling the blurred images of the three sisters and Shobha Broota has taken the colours of the garments of the three women and painted an abstract canvas with light filtering in. Among the artists who form a part of this unique show are Lalitha Lajmi, Rini Dhumal, Naina Kanodia, Kanchan Chander, Yuriko Lochan and Pritam Bhatty.
Amrita Shergil has certainly come a long way. Amidst the bouquets and brickbats, it is perhaps art historian Geeta Kapur who makes the most balanced assessment of Shergil the painter. ``Shergil was deeply protective of her women subjects and allowed them their seclusion; functioning without the feminist discourse, she dramatized her own self instead. Her project was just beginning when she died. She was struggling with a form of her chosen subject matter—Indian women in their secluded setting. She was trying to both mimic and question the hold of eternity on their bodies.''

In this context it is heartening to note that Indian women artists who were to come after her have struggled and taken her work forward. Radhika shrinagesh, who curated this collection at the Maati Ghar at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts, plans now to take it to Mumbai, Kolkata and Bangalore later this year. ``The response of the artists and the viewers has been tremendous. I am even working out modalities to take the exhibition to Lahore in Pakistan. For it was Lahore that she made her home and where she breathed her last.'' If Amrita could see how her legacy has survived, she would have been proud. As her Hungarian mother Marie Antoinette said: ``Her great ambition was to create something noble, permanent and significant.'' It seems she has done just that.

The Raja's Women

Women in Raja Ravi Varma Mold

Nirupama Dutt

It is Indi-pop time on MTV. The song by rising star Phalguni Pathak opens with a svelte woman walking out of a painting. What follows is a seductive unveiling to the number 'Meri Chunar Ud Ud Jaaye' (My veil keeps flying away). The painting is by none other than the famed and damned Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906). His portrayal of Shakuntala is the inspiration for the pop music number. The women painted by the Raja have never been as much in demand in the art market as they are today. The revival took place in the 1990s with international auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's showing a great deal of interest in his works. Then came the big-time art dealers and small antique shops selling crude representations of his works or prints supposedly credited to the Chitrashala Press founded by him. What all these people are catering to is an immense interest in the works of the Raja. Clearly it is 'in' to possess a Ravi Varma. If not in the original form then even a pirated one will do. In fact, Varma is one artist who was the greatest victim of piracy in his lifetime. Ask Almona Bhatia, who thrives on selling prints and oleographs by Varma on the web, on what she thinks of the representation of women by the artist and she is quick to gush, "They are just wonderful: His Mohini, his Damyanti, his Shakuntala and so many others. He paints a woman as the seductress and temptress. What more can one ask for? And these sell like hot cakes."
This is an honest remark given the post-feminism phase and times that are so guided by market forces. But ask a senior woman painter like Arpana Caur and the response is very different. Says she, "I have never liked the representation of women by Varma. It is too calendar-like. Women in his works are much like the ornaments they wear. They are either idealized or turned into objects of desire with their clinging wet saris. These are not down-to-earth women who work like you and me." In fact a decade ago, well-known Mumbai-based painter Nalini Malani had picked a quarrel with Varma and gave expression to it through a painting called 'Re-thinking Varma'. This was a strong reaction to his painting, 'Galaxy of Musicians'. Pushing Varma's musicians to the margins of the canvas, Malani instead has youthful full-bodied women and a powerful mother figure occupying centre stage. Varma's women are generally laden with ornaments and follow the colonial stereotypes of oriental femininity. The rich costumes, ornate jewelry and lavish backdrops are all designed with a special appeal. It is exotica at its best and it still continues to excite the western eye. And the eastern eye is quick to ape the west. Says Pran Neville, author of books like 'The Nautch Girls of India' and 'Beyond the Veil -Indian Women in the Raj', "His women, be they goddesses or village belles, are not true to life. They are what an ideal woman should be. And as far as the embellishment of women goes, he surpasses all artists in the East or the West." Caur on the other hand says, "His women are decorated like Christmas trees." There are several Varma opponents among the intelligentsia. Senior painter Ghulam Mohammad Sheikh says that thousands of works have given him sensuous pleasure and have stayed in his consciousness but not a single one of these has been painted by Varma. A balanced appraisal of Varma's representation of women comes from Gogi Saroj Pal, a painter who has constantly worked on the image of women: "Varma painted a certain class and mostly commissioned works. He belonged to another era and two World Wars separate him from us. We make statements. He did not. But he was a skilled craftsman and his eye for detail of the Indian skin, textiles and jewelry is exceptional." The painter's life and times played a major role in the shaping of the women he painted. He belonged to a feudal family in the small state of Kilmanoor in present-day Kerala, which specialised in rearing bridegrooms for the Travancore royalty. But Varma was rejected by the princess of Travancore when he was just 14. His uncle decided to take this talented boy to the world of art although these were times when no artists came from the aristocracy. This lad could not be a prince; instead he became an artist painting out feminine fantasies. And these fantasies became a part of the national imagination. Even in his lifetime, his images of women became the unique selling point of the indigenous consumer industry and were to be found on match boxes, cosmetics and fabric labels.Varma's images have not just survived, they have thrived over a century. The image of his "Bharatiya nari" has influenced theatre, cinema, television and popular art (posters and calendars) in a big way. His portrayal of women has also influenced a number of painters who followed like Dhurandar in Maharashtra, Hemendranath Mazumdar in Bengal and G Thakur Singh in Punjab. These artists have in turn influenced many others and the Ravi Varma `gharana' is well-entrenched.
Mythological cinema and television too have thrived on the image of goddesses and gods as created by this visual wizard from Kerala. Even social cinema has not been able to escape him. The wet saris that Raj Kapoor draped on his heroines in films like `Satyam Shivam Sundaram' and 'Ram Teri Ganga Maili' are the Raja's legacy. So also the goddess-like appearance of Meena Kumari in Guru Dutt's 'Sahib, Bibi Aur Ghulam'. Theatre, too, has taken a leaf out of Varma's book. He has been one of the greatest influences on costumes on the Marathi and Gujarati stage: the famed female impersonators of the early 20th century, Bal Gandharva and Jaishankar Sundari, seemed to have walked out of the frames of his paintings. Despite the annoyance of his detractors, women in the Raja Ravi Varma mould are hard to drive away. Their fascination - and his art - endure. They are everywhere: from our puja rooms to the Ramlila grounds; from the big screen to the small screen; from advertisement labels to seasonal greeting cards.
January 20, 2002