ArtShaart

The Chandigarh Canvas

2009-03-17T15:09:00.000-07:00

The Geometry of Perception

Chandigarh, with its rectangles, squares and circles imposes a geometric vision to the inner dreams of local painters, says Nirupama Dutt

There are cities and cities. And each city has its own unique architecture. There are cross-and-circle town plans, cityscapes of domes and arches or slope-roofed hill towns. And then there are colours. Pink is the colour of the traditionally designed buildings of Jaipur, the roofs of old Shimla town were green and red and yellow sandstone structures went into the building of Jaisalmer.
Come to Le Corbusier's Chandigarh with its rectangles, squares and circles connected by straight roads interesting at right angles. The dominant colours are grey of concrete and burnished red of brick. Such is the architectural legacy of a painter born to this city. The inner visions and dreams of the artist constantly meet a given geometrical vision which seems to push away even the gentle contours of the Shivalik hills. The scale of this city is described as ``monumental and daunting''.
How can an artist living here not be influenced by the precisely measured 1,200 by 800 meters dimensions of a sector, space organized in frames, all facades controlled by sharp angles? So geometric patterns and organized interiors peep out of the work of painters here.
From among the works, the canvases of the Chandigarh artists can be picked out by their characteristic geometrical patterns. Ishwar Dayal, a city artist who teaches in Government College of Art, remarks: ``Most images of artists who have grown up in this city are in frames. Inside the window and outside it is the dominant theme. And looking at the rows of paintings, the truth of this observation meets the eye time and again.
The window symbol is used repeatedly and in Ishwar's own work in shades of aqua green, chrome and deep blue, the theme is woven through the sights inside the window and outside. The rectangular frame of the window is to be found in the paintings of Malkit Singh, Prakash and many others. Shattered seas of dreams and flying fish surround the theme man and woman in limbo in the beautifully painted canvas by S Raj Kumar. Geometric shapes are juxtaposed against flowing contours of the human body.
The broken steel frame of the aquarium strikes the eye as do many triangular bits of broken glass. These symbols of the city shapes seem to be piercing a languid and lazy dream.
Sensuality characterizes the female figures by Satwant Singh and in his painting of white looking out of yellows and reds in the background woman is at her most erotic, riding a rooster. Even this very open image is not shorn of patterns of interiors in the background.
And geometrical lines are well delineated in a canvas by Viren Tanwar in which the human body is invisible but underclothes parade boldly in a pattern of diagonal stripes and a double frame, understating the rectangular space provided by the canvas. Raj K Jain has often explored the subtle shadings and textures that emerge from the play of light on brick.
Thus the artists re-work the visual world bequeathed to the city artists by Corbusier.

The Indian Brush

2009-02-23T14:29:00.000-08:00

An end of the century art review by Nirupama Dutt

The dancing girl fetched out of the excavations of the Idus Valley civilization, the frescoes in the Ajanta caves, the temples of the South and tribal artists scattered in different places tell that the story of Indian art is as old as the Indian civilization. But it is this century which ends in a day which has given a distinct character to the Indian brush. It is the modern artist who comes centre stage with a vision born of the encounter of the east witgh the West to what Steven Connor said was ``Discovery or rediscovery of those real intensities of experience which had for long been concealed or distorted by false structures of under-standing’’.
The turn of the century sees the rise of the Bengal School which ironically was born under the guidance of E.B. Havell, Principal, Government School of Art, Calcutta. This was the time of the celebrated Abanindranath Tagore and Nand Lal Bose. Rejecting the British influences, they struggles to evolve a synbthesis of the Asian techniques to arrive at the Indian idiom. Commenting on the early work by Abanindranath, wrote Benode Behari Mukherjee, ``He has indeed, effected a fusion of western and oriental techniques to evolve a new style of painting’’. But it is the painter-poet Rabindranath Tagore who is recognised as first of the Indian moderns and it was he who said, ``Art is the response of man’s creative soul to the call of the real’’. The real can also be taken as one opposed to the rich and romantic paintings by Raja Ravi Varma of the princely state of Travancore in Kerala.
Interestingly, in an international volume 20th century Art, the only Indian artist to get a place is Rabindranath who the nation knows better as the poet. International prices for his work have always been higher than others and not just because they are a part of national treasure. Trying to place him in the right context Satyasri Unkil says, ``Rabindranath was an auto-didactic artist. Yet the nonformality of being self taught was a boon rather than a hindrance for his art is figurative, but he uses effects which are usually out of bounds for formally trained artists’’. It is a unique vision which marks for the painter-poet a special place in art.
The other artist who made a remarkable impact on modern Indian art and many contemporary artists still consider it flattering to count as one of the influences on them is Amrita Sher-Gil who arrived on the Indian art scene in the mid-1930s. Born of Indo-Hungarian parentage, Amrita combined a European education and an intense Indian experience. In a seven-year creative span, she painted Indian life and ensured for herself a place for all times with one room in the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi specially reserved for her paintings. Her beauty, individuality and freedom went into making the Amrita Sher-Gil legend and she is one of the most cherished icons of the century. In a critique on her work, art historian Geeta Kapur writes, ``Her art language involved the use of indigenous resource in the context of her nascent sympathy of the modernizing nation; she hoped to use it as a critical reflex against her personal narcissism’’.
However, it is Maqbool Fida Husain of the progressive group who makes the most significant impact in modern art in post-Independence India and gives to the artist a stature that was not known before. Whatever be the reservations about Husain’s idiosyncracies which have included going barefoot to a prestigious club and making news, having a post-menopause romance with film star Madhuri Dixit or painting Indira Gandhi as Durga, his importance in popularizing modern art in a combination of a felicity with line and great showmanship cannot be denied starting at a cinema hoarding artist, Husain remains the most in artist at the age of 84 when the century ends paving the way for many a new stroke for the Indian brush.

Good God, Ganesha

2009-02-07T01:22:00.000-08:00

Ganesha's image is more popular than that of Krishna

What Ganpatyas were to Ganesha, artists in modern times are to the elephant-headed deity as the trend of painting everyone's favourite God acquires epidemic proportions, reports Nirupama Dutt
Come September and the predominant motif meeting the eye is that of Lord Ganesha. In the Capital, 15 artists painted Ganesha for a show at the Little Theatre Gallery held in the first two weeks of the month. And the many moods of the Vinayaka were portrayed by Dehra Dun-based artist D N. Mishra for a show at the Le Meridien Hotel. If there be one Hindu deity who has captured the national imagination in an unparalleled manner literally from the Indian Ocean to the Kashmir highland; from Brahmaputra to Mumbai island – it is none other than the cuddly, happy Ganesha.
The elephant-headed, potbellied, happy-go-lucky deity seems to have upstaged far greater deities of Hindu mythology as far as pure popularity goes. In these, our modern times, this God was the centre of a miracle which sent Hindus allover the world into a tizzy, for their favourite devta had accepted to be spoon-fed with milk by them. Idols of Ganesha in temples and homes were reported to have accepted milk offered to them.
Not that other deities have not been in the news but it has taken much more than a fe3sw spoons of milk to do so. It took the infamous Rath Yatra and finally the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya to bring into focus the mighty Ram, the most popular of all the incarnations of Vishnu. Not so with the friendly neighbourhood Ganesha. He is not the God of kings or priests. No great temples have been built for him either. He belongs in all simplicity to everyone. W J Wilkins in his book, Hindu Mythology, says: ``The Deo eats, sleeps, marries, and lives the life of an ordinary mortal; and though he is regarded as a fool in worldly matters, he is worshipped as a God. On special occasions, his actions and movements are most carefully watched, as they are transient manifestations of the divine will, and are regarded as prophetic. Thus on a particular night of the year, should he remain in peaceful sleep, national repose is predicted; should his slumbers or his waking moments be disturbed, national calamities are expected. If he starts wildly from his seat, seize a sword, or make any warlike movement, war may be looked for.''
Goodness, Gracious, Ganesha! Given such a reputation, it is little wonder that all want this deity to be happy riding his vehicle of a rat, gorging on laddoos and drinking rivers of milk. The deity is pan-Indian with special pockets, of course, where he sends his devotees into rapture. Just recall the frenzy Ganpati Bappa Morea causes in Maharashtra. One of the most popular astrologers of our times, Bejan Daruwala is a self-confessed Ganesha devotee. He will no predict without adding the famous phrase of his, `Ganesha willing'. Lord Ganesha's blessings are sought before starting any venture from a journey to a new job, from a business enterprise to marriage.
So it is really not very surprising that he should also be the most popular image to figure in calendars sold on pavements and pricey works of art hanging in posh galleries. He also forms part of the popular Puja show, which has a re-run next spring at the Smithsonian in the US, along with his parents, Shiva and Parvati.
Many people recognize the works of F N Souza, the patron saint of the progressive group, by his paintings of Christ. But just go to Dhoomi Mal Art Gallery in New Delhi and there are a number of works by Souza in which he has painted the ganpati. Says Mona Mehta, whomanages the gallery: ``We always have buyers for Ganesha. Last year, the Indian Farmers and Fertilisers Corporation bought eight Ganesha paintings from us. They even brought out a calendar on the deity.''

Maqbool Fida Husain too has painted Ganesha and this is one time when he has not run into any trouble. For, here is a deity who, according to one legend, was made of the herbal scrub that parvati, wife of Lord Shiva, peeled off her body during a bath.
Jogen Chowdhury is yet another artist who humanized ganesha, taking away the embellishments and ornaments. In some works, he even presents the deity as emaciated.
Anupam Sud makes a broad social statement in painting the immersion of the idols of Ganesha in a work titled my God, your God. It is the surprised look on the face of one idol and surrender on part of the other with the human faces completely earnest which add to the power of the work.
Thus it is the dictate of the market which seems to decide the theme an artist must adopt. So next time one walks into a gallery and finds that all the 40 works on display by a young artist feature Ganesha, there's no need to buy the mumbo-jumbo: ``This form interests me so. There are so many possibilities in it… The simple truth is that this is what sells or may sell. And no harm done. But, perhaps, Ganesha has been repeated all too often in contemporary art not just because there is a market for it but also because buyers will not haggle over the price of the Hindu God of Prudence, Policy and Prosperity. Not only do people believe in keeping an image of Ganesha in the home but it is also believed by some that it is auspicious to keep as many as 108 reproductions at home. So artists have a valid reason for painting him over and again.

Interestingly, the Puranas have a few legends testifying to his miraculous powers. Perhaps, it is the corpulence and tragic-comic tale of his birth and how he got the elephant head on his human body that make him most endearing. And then girth has its uses, otherwise why would the image of the Laughing Buddha be so popular?
Many are the names with which this deity is addressed in the Mudgala Purana. Some of the names used most often for him are Vinayaka (remover of Obstacles), Vighneshwara (Lord of Obstacles), Siddhidata ( Bestower of Obstacles), Vighneshwara (Lord of Obstacles), Siddhidata (Bestower of Success) and Ganpati (Leader of Ganas). Yuvraj Krishnan who has written a book on the deity, Ganesa: Unravelling An Enigma, holds that here is a deity whose public relations were handled most effectively by the Ganpatyas, worshippers of Ganpati, as well as the Aryans, who admitted Ganesha to the fold of the Brahmanical gods, to be able to win over the local population.
Delhi-based painter Narendra Pal Singh, who recently made two dozen versions of Ganesha, says: `` enjoyed every moment of it but I related his form to modern life.'' Art critic Vinod Bhardwaj, who has written a dictionary of contemporary Indian art in Hindi, says: ``Jogen (Chowdhury) is perhaps one of the few artists who has given a new dimension to the Ganesha form. Much of the rest is kitsch.'' But then there are takers aplenty for kitsch.
Playing Second Flute
One legend has it that Ganesha was supposed to be an incarnation of Lord Krishna. The Brahmavaivarta Purana says that Parvati performed the worship of Vishnu on the banks of the Ganga and as a reward she got a boon that she would have a son who would be the incarnation of Krishna. Interestingly, however, Krishna plays second flute to Ganesha as far as the sheer volume of work by contemporary artists goes. .
Of course, Krishna has been a popular image with modern artists. Jamini Roy painted him as a deity in veneration. Husain dwelt on his babyhood with Yashodha as mother. Manjit Bawa brought forth his playful aspects with a difference. His painting of young Krishna with a banana in hand instead of butter was one which excited the imagination of the viewers. More recently, he merges the Blue God with Ranjha, the folk hero of Punjab. But Krishna's image has not kept pace with that of Ganesha. This even when Krishna is the most interesting incarnation of Vishnu with valour, courage and a beautiful Radhika thrown in. In folk art, Ganesha is part of religious ritual and thus retains an original flavour which contemporary art has not been able to replicate. To the folk and tribal artist, the elephant-god is the lord of the forest who, if he so wills, can destroy the standing crops. So he is worshipped and more so at the time of harvest.

Dreamscapes

2009-01-15T02:55:00.000-08:00

The book on Shuvaprasanna goes far beyond art for the coffee table, says Nirupama dutt

A Book about an artist is the most in thing these days. The past few years have seen quite a few brought out glossy and well bound. Well, a share of contemporary Indian art for the coffee table. But let some of them not just be condemned to decorate the coffee table as men and women (why just women dear T.S.Eliot?) come and go talking of Michaelangelo open some of these books what opens is a world far beyond pretty pictures and the trappings of a 21st century boudoir. One of these is a book on a Calcutta artist who belongs to the generation of the Seventies and it is called: SHUVAPRASANNA-Vision: Reality and Beyond. Published by Art Indus, it speaks to us of our times with a vision which has the power to look before and after. This essentially made so by the subject who makes the book.
The response to Shuvaprasanna's work is not always one of adulation. An invite to his recent show inh the Capital had an art critic moaning, ``Oh! Please, not more crows.'' Yet he remains one of the foremost painters of his generation being as old as the Independence of the country. To know why these crows one must got to the very beautiful and pointed foreword by Samik Bandyopadhyay to the book. He described Shuvaprasanna as a product of the Seventies as they were lived and experienced in Calcutta and goes on to say: ``What Shuvaprasanna gathers from the post-seventies wasteland is the sense of a crumbling space with an accumulation of signs of decay and exhaustion, and signs of a difficult life emerging out of a cityscape left in shambles.''

A little onto the making of Shuvaprasanna, who is often referred to as the artist with whom the Nobel Guenter Grass stays in Calcutta, was a child prodigy in times when child prodigies were not so common nor either their pushy parents as of today. In a rather simple and unpretentious account of his life and art, the author of the book, Chitropala Mukherjee, takes us to the beginnings. Born to a conservative professional Bhatpara family, he liked to sketch his father's patients when hardly four. This led to his painting portraits of politicians and ambassadors. The family was quite proud to have him photographed with President Rajendra Prasad, USSR president Voroshilov or the American ambassador to India in late Fifties. But when it came to take up art as a vocation, father frowned. Shuvaprasanna had his way and a patch-up was to come about later. He graduated from the Indian College of Art a d Draughtsman ship in 1969.
Chitropala writes thus of the times which shaped Shuvaprasanna: ``Pete Seeger strummed his guitar and sang,
Where have all the flowers gone? To rapt audiences in the Park Cireus Maidanin Caleutta, a popular site of political rallies. Allen Ginsberg was well settled in Calcutta smoking pot and writing poetry. There was energy commitment, fire and idealism. Politics was still respected and taken seriously. Poets, painters, writers, art critics and creative minds met in euphemistically named coffee houses (New York Soda Fountain!) and talked fast and furious over cups and cups of tea…''
When Shuvaprasanna started his Lament series in 1970/71, these were described as grim. As grim as Mrinal Sen's film Calcutta 71 was and Sen chose a canvas from these series for his film. From lament to the Crows and to his recent un-iconic icons, Shuvaprasanna has kept his individuality without allowing himself to be labeled. This journey of images through dream and reality has evolved in different ways and Bandyopadhyay says: ``He has retained what may be described as his mastery over the dreamscaping of the flotsam and jetsam of a sloppily developing and meandering city, its feverish culture, and its terrifying poverty; the dreamscape holding together the disparates and sharp contradictions in an uneasy tension, and raising super-ambient icons.

Paramjit Singh's Invented Landscapes

2009-01-05T02:26:00.000-08:00

Nature’s strokes

The landscapes by the artist reaffirm his painterly prowess and a rare feel for the textures of nature, writes Nirupama Dutt

The colour of the earth is a yellow-gold. Auburn shadows fall on frail trees that elegantly sway with the breeze. Patches of dark green make the suggestion of a wild forest. The sky is filled with clouds and looks dark and promising. In this painting, titled Monsoon Light, Paramjit Singh, the master of stroke, captures a rare moment of a sunshine shower that probably would not last beyond half an hour. But that quaint twinkling when the clouds ad sunrays challenge one another to a game of hide and seek is captured beautifully in rapid brush strokes. It is landscape at it its purest form. No human presence intrudes but, of course, for the viewer who stands gasping at the spectacle of nature recreated by a fine and practiced brush.

Singh is famous for the magical quality of his landscapes. His works reaffirm his painterly prowess and the ease with which he is able to translate nature into oil on canvas. He is a landscape artist with a difference, for—but for his student days—he does not go to a spot and paint it at a given time. His landscapes are the result of a long communion with nature. He has absorbed nature deeply ad when he faces the empty canvas, the conscious and the subconscious combine in creating these ecstatic landscapes of the mind. Talking of his works, Singh says: ``These are invented landscapes no doubt but the feel of nature is real.’’

The love for nature took root in his mind when he was a young boy. Singh, who grew up in a large joint family in Amritsar, in the 1940s, recalls: ``My father was a religious person. My childhood was enriched by the stories he would tell me. I remember when he told me stories from the life of Guru Nanak, I would imagine a landscape. This so because Nanak was a traveler and the anecdotes from his life included rivers, rocks, mountains and the sky. Also, as children, we were mostly outdoors as there were no televisions and computers to trap us at home.’’ Bathing at the tube-well in the fields as a young boy or cycling long distances as a student of Khalsa School, Amritsar, was among his main joys. This passion for outdoors continued when he joined the Delhi Polytechinc School of Arts in 1953. ``It was a beautiful un-crowded Delhi and we would cycle on the ridge or walk through the wilds which were later tamed into the Buddha Jayanti Gardens. The ruins and old monuments were another attraction,’’ says the painter.

The environment at the art school was very charged ad the faculty included famed artists like B.C. Sanyal, Biren De, Sailoz Mukherjee, Dhan Raj Bhagat and Jaya Appaswamy. His college-mates included Suraj Ghai, R K Dhawan, Eric Bowin and, of course, Arpita Singh, who was to become his muse and later his partner in life. ``It was the right guidance and the right climate which we found as students and this helped us to pick up the right nuances which were to bloom later. We were indeed well-bitten by the art bug,’’ says Singh, It is here that the world of art opened up before this Amritsar lad who was among the first crop of painters of Independent India. Like most artists of the time, he too was deeply influenced by the French Impressionists and in his case the influence went into shaping his early works.

Singh did figurative work and was acknowledged as a fine portrait painter in his early days. But when he set o to become a professional painter, it was nature that inspired him the most. ``Art has to become a part of you. And truly with me are the rivers, the fields, the rocks and the skies. I have never ceased to enjoy the mysteries and marvels of nature,’’ says the artist.

Primarily he is a colourist but in the early days, he painted some still life juxtaposed with elements of nature or rocks looming over the landscapes, Gradually, however, the sheer pleasure of colour and brush-work took over. Commenting on his work, fellow artist and a former colleague at Jamia Milia, A Ramachandran, says, ``It is natural that in the art arena of today’s cerebral circus, Singh’s paintings do not receive the attention they deserve because they are pure works of art. Rising above the thin dividing line between realism and abstraction, Singh transforms his picture-space into an animated painting-space with an abundance of brushstrokes which have become his signature.’’

Singh has been witness to the Capital’s art scene since the 1950s and he takes the changes in his stride. ``One does miss the good old days but then the interest in art has grown and the number of galleries and shows is phenomenal. In the early days, we ever missed a show and these days it is impossible to see everything!’’ he points out.

On his marriage to Arpita, one of the country’s leading painters, he says that it has been held together by art. ``We have appreciated each other’s work and even offered critical appraisal when required,’’ he says. Interestingly, a couple of years ago an art gallery invited couples to create one work. The painting by the Singhs showed a couple on a bench in a garden and an aeroplane flying across the sky. Singh says, ``The aeroplane, the couple and the bench were Arpita’s, I provided only the sky and the patch of green.’’ Well, the patch of green is certainly his forte and he knows how to make it work, by the lake, along the river, in the waves or in the monsoon light.

The Inimmitable Gogi Saroj Pal

2009-01-02T03:44:00.001-08:00

Paint like a Woman

Gogi Saroj Pal creates a new visual vocabulary in her bold and sensitive portrayals, writes Nirupama Dutt

What do women like to paint? The instant association is that of a well brought-up young lady painting blooms and landscapes in the Victorian age. Closer home it is that of young ladies painting a deity on an earthen pot or a floral spray on fabric. Ancient Indian texts of the Eighth to the Twelfth Century have references of young women painting portraits of one another for matrimonial purposes; with the advent of photography came the Zenana Studios.

The Twentieth century saw the short but brilliant spell of Amrita Sher-Gil, who was schooled in art in Paris and is remembered for her paintings of people. After her death in 1941, came a long lull till there was an upsurge of women artists in the 1970s.

The path for the pioneers is never easy. ``Write like a man,’’ said Kamla Das, one of the pioneers of Indian poetry in English, and she stuck her tongue firmly in her cheek and wrote a poem on the theme. Gender stereotypes provoked Mahesh Dattani to pro to produce the play. Dance Like A Man.

In the field of visual arts, Gogi Saroj Pal made a virtue of not just painting like a woman but also painting women. ``I have never felt apologetic for making woman the main focus of my work. I am rather proud of being a woman and trying to unravel through my work what makes a woman, how much of a woman is conditioned and how much natural.’’

Refreshing indeed in a scenario where women painters feel afraid of being labeled as mere painters of women. It has been a long journey for Gogi, struggling not just to establish herself as an artist but also to achieve perfection of her own imagery.

In Gogi’s earlier works, one finds etchings of the sad-faced brooding feminine profile, the single woman nursing a child or a woman lying motionless, like in her series: The story and the story teller.

The viewer is struck by a delicate sensitivity even when the conviction is firm. But it is the growth of her work and the rare spontaneity that she achieves in a brilliant iconography of women which give her a place as one of the most remarkable woman painters in the country today.

While still in school, Gogi, who comes from a family of revolutionaries and her father, was arrested for making a bomb, made up her mind to be an artist. How come she did not opt to be a writer given the literary environment at home? ``I was always a great individualist and wanted to do things my own way. I preferred being the first artist in the family,’’ says Gogi. One only has to see Gogi’s paintings to understand the determination of this rather frail, young girl.

``I always had in me persistence. I would do things my way even if it meant enduring hardships,’’ she says. And so she did in her long years studying art and then practicing it, staying in the midst of the crowd and clutter of the walled city of Delhi or working in the Lalit Kala Akademi studios at Garhi. Gogi was among the first to do installations in Delhi. ``Now installations are much in vogue. But the words was not known in the early 1980s and we called the work assemblage’’ Gogi recalls.

This assemblage paved the way for Swayamvaram. This widely-travelled installation earned her a place in Oxford History of Modern Art along with masters like Raja Ravi Varma ad Rabindranath Tagore as well as the celebrated London-based artist Anish Kapoor.

Deep study, research and meditation and also a questioning mind, which gave a hard time to her art teachers, pay a role in the selection of her themes. Take, for instance her series, Aag ka Dariya, inspired by the Jigar Moradabadi couplet: ``Yeh Ishq Nahin Aasan bas Itna Samajh Leeje; Ik Aag Ka Dariya Hai Aur Doob Ke Jaana Hai. (Love is not easy; it’s like an ocean of fire and one has to drown in it.)’’ She shows a woman crossing a turbulent river with a little girl in her arms on a paper boat.

This journey is a contrast to the journey I which Vasudev saves baby boy Krishna whereas the baby girl Rajni is killed. ``This was my way of saying that women have to bear the responsibility of saving their daughters and the paper boat symbolizes childhood and dreams,’’ explains Gogi.

Inspired by the miniature painting of Bride’s Toilet, in one of her series, Gogi makes her Nayika use products like Ganga soap or Kesh Nikhar oil, having a dig at the market forces that promote stereotypes. ``The market decides what a woman must use, eat or even how she should look like. It was in reaction to the Barbie Doll that I made the Big-B dolls of Painted canvas,’’ says Gogi.

The Big B dolls have been a hit. Her latest series of painting have the woman embroidering Phulkari motifs o her body. These motifs are scattered in the backdrop too. All this is done with an accomplished flourish. The woman Gogi paints is rooted and yet has wings. Not a mean achievement this.

Painter Sohan Qadri

2009-01-01T11:05:00.000-08:00

On form and the formless

Nirupama Dutt

From Chachoki village on the outskirts of Phagwara to Copenhagen was the long journey for artist Sohan Qadri, a person who refused to he dated whether in aesthetics or metaphysics. Journeying through the world of dots, lines, colour and form, his search was for the beyond. This was the theme of hislecture given at CRRID in Chandigarh on Tuesday evening.

A Qadri lecture is quite an event and so was this one titled `Aesthetics and Metaphysics'. For one Qadri invites a motely crowd of artists, writers, scholars, spiritualists and eccentrics. His old Doaba friends were there and so were younger artists. It began with a rather poor showing of a Jalandhar Doordarshan telefilm on him. But a film made very coherently by Harjit Singh brought forth a Qadri not obscure but alive and throbbing as he painted or spoke about his creative process or roamed by fields of sunflowers in his colourful kurtas. And Qadri himself was communicable in Punjabi.

To do him credit in his presentation, he was lucid and brief beginning with the primeval hunger of the human species and the invention of the sharp-edged exe going on to the sexual needs, then the yearning for self-expression and finally the ultimate in creativity which transcends into the metaphysical experience.

The question session which followed had more spiritualists rather than artists active in asking questions and sharing their own ethereal experiences making the whole affair an exercise in sky-walking. One of the more earthly persons tried to come back to the topic of the lecture which was the relationship of aesthetics to metaphysics. But that was not to be and he was scolded for being materialistic by the listeners Naturally, what is `Anand' when the ultimate goal is `Parmanand'?

The lecture over, the presidential remarks came from the poet and bureaucrat, Manmohan Singh, who said that he had got the invitation late or he would have written and brought along a poem on Qadri. He compensated with a two-liner, ``Qadri's life is a dance of dots. He is the darling of tiny tots''. One does not know about the tiny tots but the elders could not resist him and artist Balvinder caricatured him through the lecture with his receding hairline, fuzzy hair and the witch doctor look

Qadri's trip to the country this time was to attend the sexology conference in Delhi. ``The doctors were there to talk of their experiences with guinea pigs but I was there as a guinea pig.'' He promises to reveal it all in the next meeting. Until then it is metaphysically yours.

Oh! My Ganesha

2008-12-16T13:20:00.000-08:00

Most-gifted God

Knowledge gets the better of wealth as Ganesha images are more in demand than those of Lakshmi, says Nirupama Dutt

The first European Embassy in Delhi to install Ganesha at its entrance was that of Ireland.
Ours is a culture of gods aplenty. But the most gifted-god remains the good old Ganesha, Ganapati or Vinayak for there are actually 1000 names for him. Gifted, of course, in ways more than one. The lovely elephant-head god with a potbelly and happily riding a mouse far too small for him is the lord of knowledge and wisdom. He is also the lord of prosperity and the symbol for anything auspicious and also the deity who presides over new beginnings.
Come Diwali and he literally becomes the most-gifted as a festival gift. In fact, it even has an edge over Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, as far as its popularity goes Images of Ganesha are wrought in gold, silver, brass, copper and what other metal one may fancy. He is moulded in crystal, sculpted in marble, cast in clay and woven in fabric. This so because he is considered the most auspicious. In fact, he has a romantic Bollywood song of yore dedicated to him: Yadi aap hamein aadesh karein to prem ka ham Shri Ganesh karein...
As the belief goes, gifting this friendly god brings good luck. K. Anuradha, a Tamilian living in Chandigarh says: "The gift of a Ganesha figurine always thrills me. I have nearly 60 Ganeshas at home. My aunt, however, has a collection of 108 for that is the most auspicious number."
Go to the google and enter Ganesha God and there are as many as 86, 143 sites available on him. And this Diwali Ganeshaonline limited is offering the god in 1000 different blessing moods. The gallery promo adds: "The idols and paintings of Ganesha of our Art Gallery are sculpted and painted by devotees of Lord Ganesha. So spread happiness in the lives of your friends and relatives by gifting them idol or painting of Lord Ganesha...and it will add to your happiness."
Interestingly, Ganesha is the most-painted god as far as the contemporary art scene goes. New Delhi has a well-known art gallery called Gallerie Ganesha. And doesn’t it do good business! Online there are as many as 35, 081 galleries selling art inspired by this benevolent son of Parvatil. Other gods like the more worshipped Rama and Krishna trail way behind.
Ask painters why they choose to paint Ganapati and the reply invariably is: "It is such an interesting form and one can play with it so well." Sounds convincing but asked city-based artist Balvinder, who has also painted Ganesha and his reply is: "The form is interesting but the real reason is that Ganesha is wanted even in art. So artists turn to him so that their works sell and they survive."

Global Ganesha
There are as many as 250 temples of Ganesha in Japan. He is known there as Kangiten who brings good fortune and happiness.
Ganesha is the presiding deity at the Silicon Valley in the USA because he is the god of knowledge and innovation.
Ancient Ganesha statues have been found in Afghanistan, Iran, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Mongolia, Japan, Indonesia, Boreni, Bulgaria, and Mexico and other Latin American countries.
The first European Embassy in Delhi to install Ganesha at its entrance was that of Ireland.

Satish Gujaral on the Old and the New

2008-12-14T13:04:00.000-08:00

Sounding A New Start

Nirupama Dutt

The colours are brighter. The mood of the compositions is playful. Singing sparrows, chattering parrots, bleating goats, blowing horns and tinkling bells have found their way onto the canvases as the native returns to his studio from the oblivion of silence to the world of marginal sound.

``I am more keenly aware of the sounds around me,’’ says Gujral. ``I cannot decipher voices, but merely hearing my own voice has made a difference. I am more in control of my voice and able to use a varying pitch. And I think the lightness that I feel is reflected in my paintings, too. Earlier, I had to imagine the world of sound. Now I am well within it.’’

Gujral chooses not to label his works and also makes no intellectual pretensions. Each work has resulted from a mood that in turn had evolved from an aesthetic experience. The ultimate expression is a celebration of life.
But the celebration is in no way superficial. It has its roots. Roots that run deep into a tradition of art. ``Artistically, as I grow older, my adoration for craftsmanship is becoming more intense, as does my search for a new identity,’’ says Gujral. ``For the past few years, I’ve been trying to re-establish the lost link with the Indian kalam (Gujral’s metaphor for old Indian styles). It is towards this direction that I seem to be turning to in this phase of my life. I seem to be looking more and more towards our tradition of miniature painting.’’

Gujral has been fully aware of the dangers of addressing the past. There’s a certain risk of seeming pretentious or repetitive. But the artist argues, as though with himself: ``Rejection of the past is worse than the imitation of it. I am not much attracted to futurism. All this futuristic talk of the new century or, still more, the next millennium, leaves me cold. The future has nothing to give you. It is you who builds the future. And what you build the future with is your past.’’

It is the dilemma of a creative person who belongs to a culture that has a rather heavy burden of traditions. There’s a hesitation that borders on fear the fear of referring to traditions, lest one is entrapped in them. ``No, I believe this to be absolutely wrong,’’ explains Gujral. ``The reward in harking back to the past is that by doing so, one gets an identity. And this can be had in no other way. Before me was the example of architecture. Architects stopped using the features of our great monuments of the past: the domes, the arches, the decorative details. These were shunned like the plague. The result was the architecture of today which has no identity. I tried to violate these rules by using domes and arches. They were made fun of an I was called a `pseudo’. But these lived to see acceptance.’’

His experiments with architecture made him bolder when he returned to his paintings choosing the way of the Indian Kalam, with its emphasis on detail, its decorative elements, its realism, and an exquisite order of craftsmanship. These paintings follow a style that is to be seen in his canvases of the past decade and have yet a great emphasis on detail as well as the joy of working minutely in the cult of a craftsman of yore. Not just the paintings, his granite sculptures, too, which are very modern in form and yet embellished with the fine work that comes from tradition. ``One of the casualties of modernism has been craftsmanship,’’ laments the artist. ``In the name of abstraction, workmanship was cast aside.’’

But what about his own experience, for abstraction is very much a part of his creative journey, and it is evident even in his present work? ``Abstraction, yes. But not at the cost of workmanship,’’ emphasises Gujral. ``I have never surrendered to this temptation. I started, in fact, with figurative work. The Partition paintings stand testimony to the fact that I know how to draw. In later years, just as a poet breaks lines to infuse them with rhythm, I mixed abstraction with reality. The point is that faulty language does not make poetry. A faulty drawing similarly, cannot get away in the name of abstraction.’’

Coming to the new thematic elements in Gujral’s work, which reflect the joy of hearing after a long silence spanning over six decades, one cannot but ask him this question. No matter how tormented he was by his disability, yet if it were not for this, he may never have been an artist.

Gujral is quick with a reply: ``Sure, I wouldn’t have been an artist. I would never have gone to Lahore’s Mayo School of Arts. Like any other middleclass family. Mine would have liked to see me in a profession that earned me a good living.”

Satish Gujral on the Partition

Days of Freedom

Satish Gujral recounts the traumatic days of Partition and the paintings born out of the experience to Nirupama Dutt

It takes times for the images to crystallize in the mind and move onto the canvas. More so if one is right in the midst of the catastrophe. So it was with Gujral who thus recalls the holocaust: ``With unceasing catastrophes as the backdrop, millions were moving. With frightening regularity, the stress would be accentuated, much like the scratchy interruptions in an old movie, which blur the vision and distract the mind yet keep alive one's awareness of reality by giving way occasionally to short, clear footage.''

It was five years later that the artist gave one of the most memorable paintings on the theme: `Days of Freedom'. There is just the suggestion of the health in the background and two figures shrouded in shawls sit outside, their entire being distorted by grief. The hands of one figure are concealed and eyes covered. Yet, the twisted lips shriek out a silent scream. The hands of the other figure are exposed—one stretched out and the other holding back with the taut muscles and the bulging knuckles bearing witness to the humiliation.

``In August, 1947, I came back to Lahore after completing my course at the JJ School of Arts, Bombay. I was all set to open a Graphics' studio to provide multimedia training. My father was a member of the Constituent Assembly. With the Partition, his home constituency having fallen on the Pakistani side, his membership was transferred to Parliament of the new dominion of Karachi. My parents and all other family members were in Karachi. I was in Lahore with the old family servant, Partap, as companion,'' recalled Gujral seated at the long banquet table in the beautiful dining room of his redbrick mansion at Lajpat Nagar.

What was Lahore like then? ``It was burning. It seemed that nothing would be left of it. When Lord Mountbatten visited Lahore in the third week of July,5 per cent of the inner town and 1 per cent of the total city had been destroyed. Half the Hindu population had already fled. Many had just gone to drop their families and valuables on the safer side for no one knew where Lahore would go. In July, Jawaharlal Nehru had said the Ravi river be considered the boundary line so the Hindus continued to stay in Lahore,'' said Gujral.
But with the advent of the blood-soaked August, it became clear that Lahore would go to Pakistan. Gujral said, ``Things flared up and Hindus were fleeing with what they could on their heads. I decided to move too but to the interiors of Pakistan, my village Jhelum. Since there was no money with me, I asked our servant Partap to go to the railway station with our bags and I would arrange for some money and join him there. That was not to be. For whoever went to the railway station never came back as it was the scene of the worst killings. That was the last I saw of Partap.''

Gujra, made his way to the Lajpat Rai Bhawan, which was some three to four kilometers away from his home to meet Lala Achint Ram, a friend of his father's and also the father of Vice-President Krishan Kant. ``His home was overflowing with people who had moved there from other parts of the city. Lalaji was making forays into the subrbs to bring people to safety. The DAV college hostel had been converted into a refugee camp of sorts overflowing with some 50,000 people,'' Gujral remembered.

From that day Gujral's education had begun in human misery: death, destruction and desolation. The next eight months he spent with his father in rescuing abducted girls and taking them across the border. ``Every time we were able to rescue a girl, we drove down straight to Amritsar or Jalandhar. The tragedy was doubled when these girls would not be accepted by their families,'' said the artist who was to be nicknamed in the next few years as the Painter of the Partition.

Partition was the theme of the paintings Gujral did from 1947 to 1950 working with intensity and passion. Uma Vasudev commented thus on the work of this period, ``The material for his inspiration was at hand; the disaster of the Partition of India and its attendant personal tragedies for a multitude of uprooted people. This was no drawing room art. It hurt – could suffering be so inevitable? It offended – could man do this to man?''
Canvas after canvas, he relived the pain of the worst kind of bloodshed in history. `Mourning', `Return of the Abducted', Dance of Destruction', The Rehabilitated' and `The Condemned' are the very well-known works of these three years. He then went to Mexico and the sad experiences of these days followed him and were reborn with heightened intensity and a breakthrough in the form in works like `Snare of Memory' and much later `The Shrine'.
Years later Gujral wondered on contemplating on the Partition paintings whether the element of despair was induced by his experience of the Holocaust or whether it was the trauma of his own inner compulsions. He grew up speechless and ridiculed in a world which has little care for the deaf and dumb. Gujral's answer to his own query was that these works were born of his own compulsions within for no external happening could have triggered them. But what comes closer to the truth is that he internalized the external and thus these paintings of the partition were born.

Feminine Fables

2008-12-10T05:55:00.000-08:00

Kanchan Chandra celebrates feminine mystique , writes Nirupama Dutt

The torso is a much-celebrated form in sculpture since ancient times in both classical and folksy traditions with the unclothed human figure worked out in perfect proportions in a symphony of harmonious beauty. One of the most famous torsos of the Greek Hellenistic period is that of Goddess Aphrodite. It dates back to 4th century BC. The torso is worked out in fascinating positions in the tradition of Indian iconography. Seeking inspiration from the allure of the headless busts, painter Kanchan Chander has used this form to make a contemporary statement, both as an artist and as a woman. There is an amazing simplicity as well as delicacy as she tackles the monumental proportions of the female bust.
In her creative journey, this artist moves through layers of experience to celebrate the feminine mystique. Born in Delhi’s Karol Bagh, Chander got a chance to study art in Germany and Chile as her father was in the Indian Foreign Service. Later she got a scholarship to study printmaking at Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris. In 1993, she got a British Council fellowship to visit art institutions in London and study contemporary art. The exposure provided to her abroad, Along with an intense Indian experience, has gone into shaping her work. Chander seeks forms from Shakti and then moves to the experience of motherhood, which is both personal and universal.
In the female torsos, she address both sexuality and fertility – the female energy that shapes the world of Indian textiles in her art. ``This happens because I have been translating the femainine experience in my works,’’ says Chander. ``It is amazing to see the trouble women take to search out these embellishments from shops tucked away in narrow lanes. For many women, adorning the self is power.’’Her recent torsos are worked in silver and gold leaf on painted canvas. In these works she reaches out to a fine abstraction from within the figurative form.
She has also been adventurious in the frames and supports for her paintings. When she renovated her home, she did not feel like discarding the doors and windows. And these became props for her paintings. Her painted windows and doors were a complete sellout. ``But I did not repeat the exercise because just in case they had remained with me, how would I have stored them,’’she says with a laugh. Yet another of her experiment which has come in for a log of appreciation is painting on thakktis or wooden boards which are still used as slates by primary school children in remote areas.
Flor Chander, the aesthetic experience is never at odds with her social responses. Art for her cannot exist in a vacuum and both the creator and the creation are placed in a given social situation. Yet as a woman, she shows the openness of the post-feminist times in which she does not shy away from reclaiming the skills which old granny knew so well. Thus the brilliant poetry of her sequined cow by the vivid blue river or beads which clothe her torso.
Here is an artist who celebrates feminity in form and content: the painter of the new century who is not apologetic for being a woman and painting like one. As her friend and collaborative artist Helen Geier puts it: ``The ebbs and flows of Kanchan’s life have spilled over in her work, both consciously and subconsciously.’’ The outcome is as pleasing to the eye as it is to the mind.

On Manjit Bawa in better days

2008-12-09T06:25:00.000-08:00

'Me Elephant, He Dog': Manjit loved playing the showman , says Nirupama Dutt

Master painter Manjit Bawa strikes a pose with muse Ina Puri, both dressed in gala white --striking against the vivid red of a painted canvas. The caption to this story in a national daily goes thus: ``Me elephant, he dog.’’

Now what could the matter be? Perhaps the reference is to the year-long controversy in which Manjit’s apprentice, Mahender Soni, alleged that he had painted many of the master’s paintings. Manjit had kept a staid silence for long, only choosing to break it now that his recent show of drawing and paintings at Maurya Sheraton has been received with unprecedented enthusiasm.

The Tamasha of Indian Art

Artists, for they deal a lifetime in human emotions, are closer to the felt rather than the cerebral. Our artists give a fine display of it well into their silver-haired years. Take the inimitable
Abba Husain who spent a fortune just trying to prove a point of fetish with `Gaja Gamini’. Then there is Chacha Satish Gujral who pouted unhappily when the NGMA didn’t put up a retrospective in honour of his ----birthday. A before Checni (elder sister in Malayalam) Anjolie Ela menon had actually cut through a woman’s torso-breasts, navel et al ---in delicious sponge and chocolate icing at her 60th birthday bash. Given this merry scenario, Bhatija Manjit Bawa can get away cavorting with current muse Ina Puri.
Mirth apart, it is Manjit’s talent as a painter and draughtsman which causes one to dismiss what he has said, to see what he has drawn. Everything is achieved in minimal form, with great economy of line in his special style-- the outcome of a lifetime of struggle with form and medium. An apprentice can assist in it, he can also make pale copies but the credit for the form is with the master painter. Coming at a time such as this, the exhibition just crushes the controversy. The importance of being Manjit Bawa lies in the fact that his work has to be seen, not heard, to be believed.

When the cows came home

His journey began with the cows of Dhuri, a small town in the Malwa region of Punjab. ``My father was a timber merchant there and he used to regularly patronize the Goshala. So I learnt to love for animals early enough,’’ recalls Manjit. A slump in his father’s business made them move to Delhi where his father worked as a construction contractor. ``My father would always bring home an interestingly shaped stone or a piece of wood. Thus I learnt to be aware to shapes.’’ He studied in Delhi Polytechinc’s School of Art but went there first to be a model to his older brother who was studying drawing.
``A tall gangly youth with a turban on my head, I used to feel shy among the artists. So I’d doodle in my sketchbook as I posed for them. These sketches interested my guru Abani Sen. Bengalis dominated the art scene in Delhi. I would often be sniggered at for being a Punjabi and dreaming of learning art. But I was determined to show them. When my show at Calcutta some three years ago was a great success, I felt I had done my Master Babu proud,’’ he says. Well, that’s Manjit all over for you--happy as a child at making a point.

All you Need is Love

Talking of his early days, Majnjit says, ``In the late fifties, I started cycling through the plains and hills of India -- a great experience. Come holidays, and I would start my cycling expeditions aimed at seeing new sights and bringing them home in my sketchbooks.’’ In 1964, he did an overland journey from India to England and taught painting at the Institute of Adult Education there and also worked as a silkscreen painter, evolving new techniques. After returning, he worked in the silk screen workshop which he established at the Garhi studios for many years it was here that he started attracting notice for his painting and befriended artists like J. Swaminathan, Krishen Khanna, Paramjit Singh and Arpita Singh, friendships that lasted a lifetime.

``If one is to look for a turning point in my career, it came with the November 1984 riots which disturbed me as much as the killing of innocents in Punjab by terrorists. In life, I started singing
Sufi poetry that spoke of love for all. Instead of painting hatred, I started painting love,’’ recounts Manjit. Thus it was a new coming in Sufi robes. It was also when corporate funds flowed into contemporary art. Manjit Bawa’s art, as well as his colourful personality, stood out. Soon he was the painter to look for after Husain.

Did he have to pay a price for being a celebrity? ``You see there is always a price. One wants to be known a little more and then a little more and before one knows, one is caught. However, my hotel in Dalhousie always remained a fine retreat after an overdose of socializing. And some things never changed. I still like to wash my clothes myself and all through I took care of my physically challenged son who was born deaf and dumb. My son also taught me patience, which is crucial to an artist. I have never talked of this for I do not like to draw sympathy,’’ says Manjit.
Another much-envied aspect of his life are the pretty women who have surrounded him all his life. Blushing, Manjit says: ``You see an artist cannot escape women. They are the buyers, promoters and critics.’’ Ina Puri, who has him by his painting, chips in, ``That’s all a thing of the past and now there is only one woman.’’

In their pact of art and more, she is the youthful and supportive anchor he needs and she is quite right when she declares, ``I am the woman behind Manjit’s show.’’ The difference is showing for sure.
January 11, 1999
Wishing Manjit Bawa Well
The critical medical condition of celebrated painter Manjit Bawa at the peak of the art season has cast a gloom in the art circles. City artists wish him well and recount his achievements to Nirupama Dutt
The past two decades that saw a major boom for contemporary art in the country have in a way had painter Manjit Bawa as a central player. The talented painter made long strides in achieving a celebrity status home and abroad, crossing over from pure art to a showmanship of a kind that such fame usually entails. Controversy surrounded him in the past few years, as there were accusations against him for hiring junior artists to do his works. However, Manjit continued painting and showing, inaugurating events in his silk kurtas and pashmina shawls, singing Sufiana songs and cooking Punjabi food at Lohrhi and Baisakhi festival dos and winning over feminine hearts even though he had stepped into his Sixties.
The painter born at Dhuri in 1941 always had very close ties with Pun jab and the city and many of his friends, associates and admirers were shocked when he was moved to a super-specialty hospital in Delhi following a brain haemorrage on December 17. Put on life-support systems, his condition remains critical still and many are voicing their concern for one of the finest painters of our times and wishing him well. Chandigarh-based painter Balvinder, who also belongs to Dhuri, says: “Manjit is one of our best painters and we hope that he will recover and get back to his work. He was the first to make the flat use of colour, inspired by the traditional miniatures. He remained an inspiration to many and he was a trendsetter.”
Manjit’s figurative work and use of bright colours is daring and impressive. A master colourist, his figures of Krishna with the flute or eating a banana short him into recognition. He was at equal ease painting acrobats as well as animal figures ranging from the mighty lone to the holy cow and the docile goat. Deeply disturbed by communal rioting and violence, he, however, never reacted directly but chose the artist’s way by showing harmony of the animal world or gentle figures culled from folk legends and myth. Commenting on his work and persona, theatre director Neelam Mansingh says, “I wish he comes back to his own. I got to know him at the Bharat Bhavan at Bhopal in the Eighties. He would sing Sufi songs and was the life and soul of any party. His paintings too are very special and he is one of the leading artists of our times.”
Painter Malkit Singh, who spoke to the painter’s older brother Manmohan Singh, says: “The news is very depressing. I have had a very fond association with him. He is a great painter and also a great friend exuding Punjabiat.” .Manjit is a major painter and one wishes him well.” Yes, one does hope that Manjit recovers and gets back to his painting and singing. Of course, his cooking too and one waits for a Lohrhi when he will play chef with aplomb with his favourite menu of ‘Machhli Amritsari’, ‘Jallandhari Chicken Tikka’, ‘Punjab Kadhi’ and much more.

2008-11-28T10:49:00.000-08:00

Every life has a story…

…and the art lies in the fact that how well can it be told on paper, canvas or stage. Viren Tanwar is one of the few artists who has done his city proud by painting well the saga of life, says Nirupama Dutt

They come in a horde to study at the Chandigarh’s College of Art. The reasons for being here vary. Some come to make a career in teaching, others merely because they somehow managed to get admission here and some just to while away their time. There are very few who come here with the dream of becoming an artist. Or for that matter, very few have the ability to be an artist. But in every other batch there are one or two students who find the place conducive for their talent to take wing and fly and one gasps and says: One flew over the painter’s nest.
SHOW MUST GO ON: ‘Circus-Circus’ is the name of the show of some 20 paintings that Viren Tanwar has painted under the collective title of ‘Story without an end’. The works highlight the balancing act that the human species are always performing either alone or in unison.This show will open at the Apparao Galleries at Chennai on November 27.
Class of 1974
The Class of 1974 had one such bright boy, surprisingly a Jaat from an aristocratic family of Hisar. While other boys of the family chose to study law and engineering, this one would settle for nothing but art. His name was Viren Tanwar and when one came out as reporter covering the city’s art scene in the late-Seventies, Viren with his lean-and-tall aesthetic looks was already towering over it. One knew him less but his paintings stood out in the group shows and one could not but, call them ‘outstanding’ in the limited art vocabulary at hand.
Viren was as painterly as he came and this made him a favourite teacher to many as well as inspiration when he started teaching in the same college that had groomed him. But now looking back, one feels that what was most striking was the dignity that he imparted to the human form even when he was dealing with the gross. And this week one is face-to-face with the canvases of this painter who has indeed done the city, his friends and family as well as his faithful students proud by passing through the rough and tumble of life to paint the ‘Story without an end…’
Art & life
This is the title of the paintings that Viren has put together in a show at the Apparao Galleries in Chennai on November 27 and Viren is at his narrative best and his work has matured in the cellar of his creativity and what makes him special is that he retains his ability to laugh at life and what it brings; sometimes the smile of his five-month-young grandson and sometimes the hurt of recalling the past, which can only be described by the title of a Dostoevsky novel: ‘Insulted and Humiliated’. But it was not Viren’s lot alone. We all dreamy-eyed children of the Seventies suffered so in one way or the other. Some got lost on the way, others called it quits and some were destined to live through it all and rise phoenix-like from the ashes.
Anyway the only humiliation for a creative spirit is that she/he be alienated from one’s own art. “Well, it nearly happened and making a living and looking after the more worldly needs there were times I felt that I would never be able to paint with the fervour that I had in youth,” says Viren. But it has happened and once again this blue-eyed artist of the city is soaring in ‘Circus-Circus’, the title for his show that is going to Chennai. One chuckles with Viren, for taking the Circus to Chennai is typically ‘ulate baans Bareli ko’ and that is what has been more challenging to the artist as he has struck balance with the acrobats, mind you the girls have blossoms in their hair. And the colours, Viren has used are the bright and vivid hues of Kanchivaram silks. So there is a riot of oranges, reds, greens, blues magentas and what have you.
A jingle again
Yes, Viren haven’t these fifty odd years of our lot been such a circus! We were condemned not just to watch from the wings Kabir-like the ‘jag ka mujra’ but very often wear the bells on our ankles and go ajingle right there midst the jeering crowd. But it has been worth it for the moments lived in life and art. Knowing the likes of us, we may yet again get down to acrobatics. But Viren would say that when did we ever leave the acrobatics. We were performing the Circus and we continue to do so. Ours is indeed a story without an end: happy or sad!

Baroda Blues

2008-11-27T05:10:00.001-08:00

Washed, wrung and hung by Yunus Khimani (top) and Muslims around the Mosque by Bhupen Khakhar

Tree of Fire: Baroda after the Gujarat carnage

This story was written by Nirupama Dutt in the summer of 2002, based on the reaction of artists and writers to the unprecedented violence in Gujarat

There is an uneasy calm in Baroda this summer. The ancient, emaciated Vishwamitri meanders silently below the ornate bridge of the city. The old banyan trees with their long beards digging into the soil slumber amidst the shrieks of crows. These trees gave Baroda its original name. The Vadodara of today gets its name from the ancient Vatapadraka--`home of the banyan trees’.

But with the slightest caress of the summer breeze the banyans wake up startled, their leaves rustling. They seem to be deciphering the language of the winds. Does the breeze bring tidings of good seasons or of more sorrow? These wise old trees had never seen such a season of grief. Many a sad tale can be read on the green leaves, of the events that took place in this Sanskar Nagri (cultural city) of Gujarat.

Baroda is back in the business of living. But the grand dome of the university and the tall, embellished tower that crowns the sprawling Laxmi Vilas Palace, lending an old-world charm to the city’s skyline, now intruded upon by high-rises, have a forlorn air. They have seen the proud Barodans humbled and fear instilled in the very air they breathe. At Tandalja Road, sadly referred to as `Mini Pakistan” because it is a suburb inhabited by Muslims, one sees many new huts and shanties. They belong to the people who fled their homes in the walled city and nearby villages this March for fear of being lynched or burnt alive. The mosque in the heart of the colony wears a vibrant coat of green paint, but there is a note of anxiety in the voice of the Mullah as it rises in azaan at the evening hour. People sit around the mosque but there are no smiles, no laughter, only tired faces and vacant eyes.
Is life imitating art? For the scene has something familiar about it. In March this year, we saw two large paintings by Bhupen Khakhar, the famous artist of this city, exhibited in Delhi. Titled Muslims around the mosque I & II, these paintings in blue and green tones capture the everyday scenes of Muslim life. A woman in a burqa, elders in conference, a man eating a rumali roti, or yet another reading the holy Quran. The painted scenes are calm and the colour tones are of dreams and innocence. Yet the artist conveys a sense of apprehension with the scenes divided into frames, a suggestion of distant horizons and a few flowers fallen from a vase onto the tablecloth. It is as though the peace of this everyday life could be disrupted at any moment. What is visible may be lost all too soon. They are like painted prayers for the joy of living. Executed in 2001, these paintings came to Delhi after the carnage had begun in Gujarat. There was something prophetic about them. Poets and painters are prophets of a kind. Seated on a mat in his home in Madhuram Mohalla off Tandalja road, Aziz Qadri—a respected poet of the progressive tradition—recites verses against the khoon ki Holi (bloodbath). It was written months before the bloodshed actually took place. ``It is not as though I am a prophet. The mood was tense in Gujarat. And these tensions are created by politicians—otherwise what happened is unthinkable in our Sanskar nagri.’’

The sculptor nagji patel echoes Qadri’s sentiments. An alumnus of the famed Faculty of Fine Arts of the Maharaj Sayajirao University, he says, ``This violent Baroda is not the city we know. But the whole business is political.’’ Nagji patel gave a contemporary symbol to the banyan city. At the Fatehganj Chowk on the Ahmedabad road stands his tall sculpture of twin banyan trees, sculpted in pale pink sandstone. In the exquisitely carved foliage are birds, bees and monkeys in happy togetherness. Hailing from a small village in Karjan Taluka, Nagji recalls his days in the College of Fine
Arts: ``Every day, we would go to Kamati Bagh and do our exercises in sculpting birds and animals in the zoo. And these friends of my youth found their way into the banyan Tree sculpture that I made in 1992.’’

This princely town in southern Gujarat has nurtured many an artistic talent and been a home to some famous artists and poets. It is a beautiful city of gardens, campuses, museums, palaces, playing fields and libraries. The secular traditions of art is has nurtured make it difficult to associate Baroda with violence. But for the past few decades, this city too has been enveloped by flames the violated its essential character. The city came into prominence in the 18th century and most of its monuments were built in the following century, during the enlightened rule of maharaja Sayaji Rao Gaekward III (1881-1939). The Maharaja appointed two British engineers, R.F. Chisolm and Major R.N. Mant, as state architects. And the architectural landmarks of the city have a happy and picturesque blending of the East, with both Hindu and Muslim elements, and the West. Baroda’s artistic tradition dates back to ancient times: bronze sculptures have been excavated in the western suburb of Akota. This was the site of the ancient Ankotakka, which flourished between 2000 BC and 1100 AD. The Tambedkar Wada, built in the mid-19th century, has murals depicting both Hindu myths and the changing lifestyles of the Parsis, who became Westernised long before other Gujaratis. The list of luminaries in art, literature and other fields who were invited to live and work in Baroda is quite impressive. The M.S. University is unique in many ways —it is the only fully residential varsity with all affiliated colleges on campus, and completely autonomous since the chancellor is not the governor of the state, as in other universities. Aurobindo Ghose, the revolutionary freedom fighter who later became a seer, was on its facultyu and his residence in Baroda is now a museum. Hakim Kale, the poet who taught Emperor bahadur Shah Zafar, belonged to this city. The legendary Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib was his guest in Baroda for six months after the 1857 siege of Delhi.

Faiyaz Khan, the founder of the Agra gharana, was invited by the Maharaja to move to Baroda and he lived, sang and taught here till his death in the 1950s. The city paid him homage by building a mausoleum over his grave. Qadri recalls, ``It was a delight to hear Faiyaz Khan Sahib sing raga jaijaiwanti. Khan Sahib kept his doors open to all music lovers. You could just to in and sit by his side as he did his riyaz (practice).’’ It was his mazar that the riote3rs desecrated by flinging burning tyres on it. But that’s not as had as what happened in Ahmedabad, where the tomb of the much –loved poet Wali Dakhani, also known as Wali Gujarati, was completely destroyed by rioters. And the administration was quick to erase all traces of the tomb by laying a tarred road over it, right in the thick of the riots. Qadri reads out a poem called Wali Dakhani ka Shehar Ahmedabad, in which he reiterates that he has no desire, no wish and no intention of visiting the city. The poet Ehsan Jafri was killed along with eighteen people in Ahmedabad, and the house of another well-known poet, Kismet Qureshi, was burnt down.

Holding back his angry tears, Qadri says, ``When the situation returned to normal, I had someone calling on me and asking me to recite a poem at a qaumi ekta (communal unity) meeting. I told them that unity is fine, but do not use the word `communal’, for communal unity would now mean burning me alive at Liberty Fountain.’’ He points to rare manuscripts and books, the only treasures of his poor home, and says, ``My fear is that these too may be burnt one day.’’

The fear is not unfounded. Outside the city, in the posh and cosmopolitan area of Sama Road, Physics professor J.S. Bandukwala’s house—complete with its large library—was burnt down. An activist of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, he was a marked man. When the rioters first came to burn down the house, his Hindu neighbours prevented it. They the neighbours were threatened and all they could do was help the professor and his daughter escape, even as their home was reduced to ashes. The professor has gone to see his son in the US. Will he return, and will the house be rebuilt? Maybe, but something very vital has been burnt down for all times.
Fire has become the obvious symbol in the works of many Baroda artists who, like Qadri, seek catharsis through creativity. No, the muses are not silent in Baroda, for this is a city which has long nurtured the traditions of art. Unhappily, the frames today encase symbols of the stove, the gas cylinder or the burning cigarette. Vasudev Akkitham’s watercoour, Dawn, shows two people from two different faiths, holding onto each other and watching their city burn. While the work spells some hope in togetherness, there is also a feeling of helplessness in not being able to quell the fire. Debraj Goswami shows a uniformed phantom figure riding a white horse while a cigarette burns the very body of the horse. A mixed-media work by Vijay Bagodi, in which Gandhi is shown with his back turned to a scene of death and violence. The recurring image of Gandhi is only natural, for the land of his birth has seen the worst violence since Partition. Is it the land of the Mahatma who preached non-violence? Where and how does an artist find a positive image? In Trupti Patel’s mixed media work…that humanity forgot the pain is reflected in figures sprawled on the ground, each systematically burned with a lit agarbati. Fluttering birds, a pyramid of blood and a woman in water are images K. K .Muhammed uses with a touch of irony in A Course in General Guilt. However, artist Rekha Rodwittia offers hope in the symbol of a nurturing woman swallowing the fire that surrounds her, an invocation to mother earth, as it were.

That image has another resonance too. One of Raja Ravi Verma’s most famous paintings, Sita Bhumi Pravesh, which he painted during his stay in baroda, depicts mother earth coming to the rescue of Sita. The Baroda court artists have included well-known names like the Italian painter Augusto Felici and the mother and daughter team of Sass and Elizabeth Brunner. The German art historian and Indologist Herman Goetz refashioned the Baroda Museum and later joined the Faculty of Fine Arts. A very important phase in the art history of Baroda is the period of Raja Ravi Varma, who took up residence here on the invitation of the Maharaja. He painted some of his best-known works here. If the maharaja, on the one hand, patronized the Western, derivative art of Ravi Varma, he also had the vision to take note of the upsurge of talent in the Bengal school and invited Nandalal Bose to make the murals in the Kirti mandir.

The faculty of Fine Arts, set up soon after Independence, drew on the rich artistic heritage of the city to create one of the finest art institutions in the country. Hansa Mehta, the first vice chancellor, laid down the territory that contemporary artists were to explore: `We have lost our originality and either copy the Western forms of art or the ancient Indian forms. The student is expected to study both these forms but is also expected to strike out on a new path if he wishes to contribute his share in the advancement of art…’ The best names in the field of art and culture were associated with the establishment of the art college. In 1949, Markand Bhatt, who had done a stint at the Barner Foundation in Philadelphia, was invited to set up the faculty. Some of the most talented artists from all over the country were invited to come and teach. They included N.S. Bendre, Prodosh Dasgupta, Sankho Chaudhuri and, some time later, K G Subramanyan. It was the relentless effort of these pioneering artist-teachers and their successors that resulted in a contemporary gharana of visual art—the Baroda School.
It is interesting to view the artistic journey of two towering artists of the Boroda School – Gulammohammed Sheikh, who is today a father figure, and Bhupen Khakhar, a celebrated painter who charted his own course and remains a close associate and friend of Sheikh. A writer, critic and painter, Sheikh—after Behdre and Subramanyan – has been a major influence on the Baroda artists. Sheikh’s paintings have a rich narrative style with elements taken from Indian miniatures but intermingled with his personal and social concerns. Sheikh focuses on land-scapes, but they are never without human presence – there is either an actual human figure or part of the human dwelling:the hut, the door, the wall or courtyard. And there is a very interesting relationship between the outer and the inner worlds, beginning at a tangible point and suggesting the intangible.

Sheikh’s artistic journey, which began when he was a small boy in Kathiawar and took flight in the city of Baroda, has been a long one. Among his most significant works is City for Sale, executed on an epic scale in 1981-84, which is now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Communal riots are its theme and the painter confronts the chaos, disaster and blasphemy. The irony of the situation comes through in the vegetables bouncing out of the pushcart and men being stripped to ascertain whether they are Hindu or Muslim! Discussing the painting, Sheikh says, ``our rich and valuable experience of diversity in faiths, ideologies, attitudes, has been brutalized by successive bands of Mafiosi, who have subverted the process of continuous transformation that this wonderful mix should normally lead to. My painting is about the irony and absurdity of this brutalization. This is how my city of Baroda, like other Indian cities, has been brutalized.’’

What makes it a sad journey for the painter or writer of the subcontinent is the fact that the brutalization is a continuous process with fires of communal discord moving from city to city, village to village. One painting is not enough, even if it is on an epic scale. The creative person is compelled to return to the same theme time and again. The historian, the activist, the journalist and the artist are forced to seek out secular symbols and throw them up to the world. The past and present, the inner and the outer mingle as they do on Sheikh’s canvas. The people of Gujarat have relived the terror of Partition this spring. Talking of the trauma, Qadri invokes Manto:``Manto had said at the time of Partition, don’t say five lakh Hindus have died or five lakh Muslims have died. Say ten lakh human beings have died.’’ Saadat Hasan Manto, chronicler of the horrors of partition in Urdu prose, remains relevant till date. Though I am a Manto fan, a question nags me every time I see yet another production of Tuba Tek Singh on stage, or yet another translation of his writings – is it the power of his pen that moves us or is it that we have refused to learn from history? Perhaps a bit of both. Or perhaps it suits the powers that be to repeat history, regardless of human agony?
It is here that the painter or the writer comes in, in the gap that even the historian shies away from. For some years, Sheikh has been contesting the claim of the political over the religious domain by reclaiming the sacred space. The result has been a series of evocative Kabir paintings in which the artist seeks to represent the saint as an icon of the age. But in times that are so brutalized that the unborn child is the target of rioters, the scheming fundamentalist is the hero, and all human values are up for sale, does anyone care for a Kabir or a manto? A burning tyre would probably have been the lot of kabir in India today, as the mental asylum was the lot of a Manto in the Pakistan of yesterday. But Kabir will sing a secular song, mando will write of rivers changing their course and Sheikh will pant The Flock and the Guardian, taking the cue from Kabir in which the wonder of a lion guarding a herd of cattle is reconstructed in the present context. It is a dismal canvas of life that Sheikh confronts in his Pratapganj home in Baroda: ``We may try to console ourselves by saying that what happened in Baroda is less in magnitude than what happened in Ahmedabad. Violence has become a part of this city. Baroda has a strong secular tradition but we artists, writers and academics are confined to art colleges, little magazines and seminar halls. We have little contact with the masses. The national press, however, played a good role in the Gujarat violence. The only ray of hope is that even through all this Saurashtra saw no violence.’’

Bhupen Khakhar was a chartered accountant in Bombay till he came to Baroda to study art criticism. And he stayed on to become one of the leading artists of the country. Free of a conventional art training, Khakhar dared to experiment freely, using popular images and materials. He delights in calling himself a completely apolitical artist and has shocked many by painting images of homosexual life. The human predicament shown in an ironic light is his forte. However, his recent works have strong images of violence. Commenting on this, the social historian Sudhir Chandra says, ``Never before was it so black as it is in the paintings here… Is there some threshold of pain beyond which – even for an inveterate teaser like Bhupen Khakhar – no alleviation, no laughing device, remains within reach? In our time, this is an unnerving thought: the exhaustion of the possibility to laugh or laugh off.’’ Committed, like Sheikh, to painting the Indian reality, Khakhar cannot but find violence and death invading the frames of his paintings. Along with his portrayal of the Muslims around the mosque, that was discussed earlier, are paintings like Bullet Shot in the Stomach and Beauty is Skin Deep Only in which death and destruction loom large. Recently, he also exhibited huge cutouts with garishly painted cine-stars on one side and images of violence on the other.

It is not easy for the artist to find the imagery to paint the terror of butchered innocents. One of the most horrifying instances of violence was the burning down of the Best Bakery at Hanuman Tekhri on March 1. All the Muslims had moved out of that area except the baker’s widow and his family, who were still running the bakery. The family stayed on because an influential person of the area assured them safety and protection. However, it was that very person who led a mob and 14 persons were brutally burnt alive or hacked to pieces while the police looked the other way. Zahira Habihullah’s account of the violence is repelling: ``My mother kept begging that she had no support except for her sons. Our three Hindu servants’ stomachs were slit open. Two of my brothers were burnt alive; two others were tied up and torched …’’ But such are the things that happened, and worse too.
Any artistic intervention in such a situation must go beyond cliché. And how do aesthetics figure in the orgy of death and destruction? However, the Baroda artists , many of them young, have shown sensitivity in dealing with the onslaught of violence and honesty in facing it. Accepting the reality of this one-sided killing of members of the minority community, Sheikh says, ``Some of us are condemned to live in terror and the divide between the two communities has become very deep.’’ Says Nita Thakore, an artist whose medium is fabric, needle and thread, ``Baroda had never seen violence such as this. The pushcart of my sabziwali (vegetable vendor ) was burnt. In an amazing show of courage and resilience, she was back on the street, and selling vegetables, within 24 hours. What is disturbing is that many people have stopped reacting and have started accepting the violence.’’

But not the artists, at least. An exhibition was visualized by Baroda artists Anandjit Ray and Nagji patel in early February, much before the violence broke out, for the local Nazar Gallery. Termed ``The Banyan City’, the group show called upon the artists to focus on their local environment. That is what they did but there is a great difference in the works painted before the Godhra incident, and those executed afterwards. The earlier works show the artists happy and at ease, as is seen in Ratan Parimoo’s work Aishwariya as Gaekward maharanim, a tongue-in-cheek take-off on Ravi Varma’s princely portraits. And then hot winds that scorched Gujarat in spring and do not spare the Sanskar nagri. Most of the works painted in this period protest against the violence in different ways and try to make some sense of chaos. The banyan is the obvious symbol, yet artists have dealt with it in differing ways. There is the very eloquent mixed-media work by Yunus Khimani, There stands our blackened banyan. Nita Thakore builds the trunk of the banyan by entwining calligraphic symbols – both Hindu and Muslim – and buds and leaves from embroidery motifs of Kutch and Saurashtra.

Thakore recalls, ``My mother had clearly told me not to bring a Muslim boy home or she would throw both of us out. I wish the generation after partition had encouraged social and family ties between the two communities.’’ Now, the guardians of Hindutva have started targeting couples of mixed marriages and members of the artist and intellectual community in Baroda too have been threatened. Sad, indeed, given the city’s secular and liberal tradition. In an easy, `A post-Independence Initiative in Art’ included in the volume Contemporary Art of Baroda, Nilima Sheikh writes, ``Education in Gujarat, more particularly at the M.S. University in Boaroda, was mainly in the hands of educationists who came from the Nagar Brahmin stock of administrators. Enlightened and progressive, they had led with the righteous assurance of those who believe they have the generic claim to mould the intelligentsia, their caste authority remained intact despite the pervasive Gandhianism … In the early years at Baroda, however, it had to take a back-seat, owing to the cosmopolitan ambience at the Faculty of Fine Arts. Its finest qualities got filtered through this ethos into a more progressive significance. As an amusing but not irrelevant aside, one might recount that Markand Bhatt, Bendre, Sankho Chaudhuri and Subramanyan, the four main protagonists at Baroda, had all married on the basis of their own choice, across caste, community and even religious lines. A multicultural secularism became quite the norm within the Faculty, and survived almost four decades.’’
Baroda’s lament is a soulful cry for multicultural secularism everywhere. The rise of fundamentalism first hits pride and progress. The self-appointed guardians of religion decide who one must love and what must one paint or create – recall the controversy over MF Husain’s portrayal of Hindu myths, or the row over Deepa Mehta’s films Fire and Water. It was Faiz Ahmed Faiz who had said the climate in his country demanded that no head be held high and that a lover must lurk like a thief. The artist community and intelligentsia are gearing up to remove the black stains that have encrusted their banyan by organising an exhibition of paintings by Baroda alumni scattered all over the country. Raga jaijaiwanti must be redeemed, so a concert is to be held at Ustad Faiyaz khan’s tomb in October.

The lovers of Baroda refuse to go into hiding, and there is a valiant attempt to hold the head high in spite of what happened. I return again to the home of Aziz Qadri off Tandalja Road. The poet is calligraphing dohas in Urdu and says, ``I have lived in Baroda before the Partition and after. There was no question of any rift between the Hindus and the Muslims. We all lived together in peace. Didn’t I tell you that ours is a Sankar nagri, even Ghalib lived here for full six months? And you know our Maharaj Mallerao was a nationalist and gave shelter to Tantia Tope’s soldiers during the First War of Independence in 1857.’’

Why do I keep returning to the poet? Isn’t he rambling, perched as he is on a precarious peace in `Mini Pakistan? He is like the character played by the late Kaifi Azmi in Sayeed Mirza’s Naseem, a film on the demolition of the Babri Masjid seen through the eyes of an adolescent girl. The changed times have rendered such liberals, who relate anecdotes of past glory and bonhomie, quite irrelevant. Or are they still relevant?

Painter Satwant Singh

2008-10-31T11:59:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-29T15:16:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-29T14:34:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-20T16:19:00.000-07:00

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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

2008-10-20T15:08:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-20T14:18:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-20T14:11:00.000-07:00

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