Art: Gestures Speak ~ an essay on M. Shanthamani's art, 2007

Gestures Speak:

a one-off take on Brand Bangalore

 

A CITY. A map. A reckoning of the past, present and future. Each can be read, deciphered, decoded by a sensitized individual ~ with as much insight and intuition as a palmist reads the tracery on the soft inner spread of a hand.

The hand, thus visualized, can evoke an individual within a city, a country, a globe. It can trace the trajectory of a human being, an artist, a poet, an architect, often tantalizingly on a parallel track to a city like Bangalore. M. Shanthamani’s current show ~ titled Gestures Speak ~ brings this home conceptually and visually, pregnant with layered significance.

On her large, brooding acrylic canvases, the local and the global, the insider and the outsider battle, collide and jostle for co-existence, defragmenting life cycles and existential notions long imbued with history by association with the onlooker and the activist alike.   

Shanthamani’s stances stem from her multiplicity of experiences as a rural-born individual, now an urban being. As a young woman who made the transition in 1992 from the arts schools of Mysore and Baroda to a burgeoning, IT-propelled Bangalore. As a girl rooted in the rustic soil outside Mysore, warding off suitable matches as a pre-teen, able to identify with the indomitable womenfolk who cared for their households and 30 cattle, toiled in the fields, committed to life in a deep, essential sense. As a questing mind enriched by the company of strong, emancipated woman artists. Even as an artist who once couched herself thus:

“Painting became an important space for me to get out of all this. It gave me freedom ~ physically, mentally, financially. My canvas is now a surface that constantly questions and looks for answers in that space.”

 

Shanthamani’s questions on Greater Bangalore, even as Bengalooru, are imbued with reflections from her journey into the future. To her, it matters that the Garden City is now almost invisible ~ cloaked in dense vehicular pollution that chokes plant and human life alike. And that the genteel norms that governed the pensioner’s paradise have been overtaken by a high-speed youth-centric buzz, as set-back bungalows are gobbled up by high-rises blocks, gated communities, and malls. Even the fact that the silk-weavers of the old city have vanished as big brands lure the new, well-heeled customer with global mantras.

Is the constantly-morphing city redefining who we are? Is technology creating a rift between those with insider information, and the tech-deprived? Are our bodies changing as shrinking city spaces crowd us into personal cocoons not of our making? Perhaps. Through giant acrylic canvases melded with stencilled photo-verity images, water colours and body/ hand casts, Shanthamani creates parallel city narratives. Of the migrant street woman who vends mallige flowers. Or the labourers who shape the new city. All those unknown, unseen, unsung stories beyond the hype. Those women who also work round-the-clock, expressing themselves through their working hands, their inherited classical postures.

What does the hand stand for within the big frame, Shantamani wonders. In an age of body-shopping, has it become a mere appendage? Have we outsourced our bodies, our minds, our spirits, our culture, in the incessant 24/7/365 rat-race that is the new face of our globalized city?

 

These issues are the raison d’etre of Gestures Speak, contextualizing the individual within the city. As we celebrate the economic boom, are we neglecting a vital angle ~ that former strategic colonial pawns today provide cheap brainpower to big first-world players? Why is IT the most visible face of Bangalore today? Within the multinational marketplace, have we been reduced to invisible working hands, shadowy presences often unacknowledged?

Questions of identity surge beneath the rippled cityscape. Is Bangalore in danger of losing its past inheritance as it speeds towards modernization and westernization? Why does it so seldom glance back at the riches that migrants have brought into its cosmopolitan domain over the past 350 years, including their living skills, rituals, crafts, cuisines and languages? Such as the Tigalas from Tamil Nadu who set up Lalbagh for Haider Ali, the Devangas from Andhra Pradesh at the heart of the silk industry, the Bengali karigars who are the mainstay of gold craft. Or even the Anglo-Indians, the cantonment culture, and missionary schools at the core of the city’s skill in a global tongue now outsourced. Or the brilliant scientists who were behind the Bangalore torpedo or India’s first indigenous helicopter.  

Other facts, other faces, call for equal attention. On an average, over 2,500 white-collar IT workers, often with partners in the same industry, have flocked to Bangalore every month since the early Nineties. This youth brigade, often dubbed Gen-Next by the media, heralds new consumer trends, crisscrossing culture, food and housing, bypassing traditions and local habits. Their lifestyles are buttressed by invisible lives ~ those of construction labourers from north Karnataka and Tamilnadu, carpenters from Kerala, Rajasthan and Bihar, and marble workers from Rajasthan and UP. These migrants, of a transient mindset, identify with little of Bangalore’s culture. Are they a malaise or migratory beings of benefit to the city, whose population has multiplied five-fold in just a decade-plus? How do these citizens identify with Kempe Gowda or the Roman coins once found in the Cauvery?  

Shanthamani brings her concentrated gaze to bear on these inner city issues in Gestures Speak. Migrant-centric lives need multiple narratives within a city that lives in different time zones simultaneously. Within the digital landscape, the hand has assumed the role of a giant cultural element. Growing beyond her earlier conceptual and metaphorical work, facts and human stories assume a new centrality. For instance, the fact that in 2004, Bangalore’s 200,000 textile workers contributed approximately a tenth of India’s textile exports of $13.5 billion. The tension between these cities, old and new, underline her explorations. 

Beyond these conflicting cities, past cultural nuances and social conditioning, she once observed, “At Baroda, I realized I was a very tactile person. My central reference point is always my body. I believe in doing things with my hands. I want to project myself as a worker, maybe a painting worker. I like to smear paint with my hands, mould things.”

The body, a central metaphor in Shanthamani’s often-autobiographical work, is here symbolically the hand, representing the many Bangaloreans who seem misplaced, not recognized by global perceptions of the city in transition. The layered myth-making continues.

Her acrylic diptychs and triptychs, often billboard-like, evoke the new affluence of glass and metal-facade towers, but question why those who build these faceless, overnight cities, identified perhaps by a barcode, are invisible. They summon up the ravages of cultural imperialism in an age of pixellation, when we allow a Bamiyan Buddha to be blown up without global protest because we imagine we have the power to create. Through buttons that spell: Stop. Pause. Rewind. Save. Trash.

What would we trash in an era when every brown-skinned worker is first regarded as either a wannabe terrorist or a cyber coolie? Drawing on her experiences during a papermaking workshop in Glasgow with British expert Jacky Parry in 2004, Shanthamani self-reflects on identity and belonging, negotiating contemporary art practice.

Veering between the literal and the symbolic, she invokes the giant creator’s hand from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, looming over call centres, their staff caught in the cross-hairs of cultural conflict. Against a landscape of beeping electronic pulses, hands as huge as an adult human being foreground a question: have we lost our memory of agricultural origins? A yoga-centric canvas, dotted with stick figure asanas suggesting inner calm, subverts the inner resonance with the intrusion of  itinerant child jugglers/ acrobats who today perform for a living at traffic lights.

The series, eclectic in its inspiration, draws on sources as varied as John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero,’ Nina Simone’s soul-rich ‘Four Women, brilliant black-and-white industrial photographs by economist-turned-photographer Sebastiao Salgado, even encounters with dynamic young women from Canada, Norway and Ireland during the Parry stint. Like Salgado, Shanthamani interrogates the eroded status of the manual worker in our age of technology.

Mating with, often masking, text with colour, connecting with her earlier painterly and pictorial work, Shanthamani couches her overview thus: “I’m talking about being reduced to a pair of hands, constantly working for economic reasons since your product is removed from personal, cultural and spiritual moorings. We’ve become a cheap market product to use and throw.  But even cheap labour consumes all that their money can buy – including cheap microchips or pirated products. Within our city, everything is for sale, and everyone is a slave. We’re removed from living. We now have only two mantras: Work and Money.”

 Rhetorically, even ironically, Shanthamani adds: “Is Bangalore, then, really an urban space? Or a mere conglomeration of overgrown villages? Let’s face it. Even an IT guy here is not known because he’s a great programmer, but because of his willingness to work 14 hours a day. As a result, so much is being sidelined, like our crafts traditions. The city’s only focus is on construction labour or software labour. I’m consciously trying to accept that I’m a painting labourer.”

Like her earlier shows in 1994 and 1996, the artist as migrant continues to react to Bangalore, to its manmade objects, its creation of urban waste, its loss of human touch. Have people become mere objects en route to the time of the cyborgs?

Shanthamani’s identity reasserts itself as she opts to paint once more. She highlights almost iconic Indian gestures: the hand in meditation, mudras, the outstretched palm that begs. Her choices are buoyed by an almost atavistic consciousness. She asks, “Painting as a human skill is losing ground in the face of technology. It was important for me to paint these working hands within the context of Bangalore. But I did question whether I’m painting photo-realistically, or whether these works were a collage. To me, technology can never be a solution to sweat, hunger and pain. How can it replace basic urges like wanting to play with colours or indulging in rituals that soothe?”

Perhaps her most rooted work in the series is a woven tapestry embroidered with the words, ‘Made in India,’ a label often exported to the first world. An intermediate space where Indians hire out the cheap hand skills that the west has lost to industrialization.

To Shanthamani, it matters how her body is read by the world at large. Or how she is often viewed as an aspiring immigrant while in the first world, threading through her layered engagements with Indian life in flux. 

She reiterates: “Gestures Speak is not about opposing growth. It’s about recognizing what’s happening, placing myself within it, hanging onto what I hold dear…”

Finally, the viewer and the artist revisit the crux of the interchange. In the age of the cyborg and the cyber coolie, they examine the sites of human endeavour through the lens of history. In our context, within our city, do our gestures speak? Or are they symbolic of mere tokenism that so marks our place in the globalized world? Each hand could change the course of this great charge forward into the unknown. And thus, the lifeline of Bangalore as we interpret it today. 

 (This essay was originally commissioned by Gallery Sumukha, Bangalore, in 2007)

Art: Achuthan Kudallur ~ The ache of abstraction

A CEREBRAL vibrancy. That’s the first impression communicated in a conversation with Achuthan Kudallur. His mind is restless, darting from Rabindranath Tagore to Picasso, delving into the microcosm of abstract art. His is a ceaseless search for raison d’etre. He adheres to a fundamental honesty, intolerant of cant. He speaks in muted cadences. Even in anger, he retains an inner quiet.

Born in Kerala in 1945, Achuthan’s desire for self-expression originally took the shape of Malayalam short stories. Opting for art in 1972, his self-taught medium has since run the gamut from landscapes and portraits through blazing abstracts to infinitely detailed drawings. Change, to him, seems intrinsic to life.

Achuthan’s earlier work summons up images of nudes that are raw, tantalizing, seething with urgency and a certain edge of courage. Blazing across outsize canvases, insistent upon attention, they intermingled poignancy and contemplation equally ~ despite still seeking footsure colour equations, despite the tentative quality of the drawing. From 1976 onwards, the imagery took on overtones of melodrama, sifted rather self-consciously, and shades of surrealism crept in.

But the ache of abstraction is at the core of Achuthan’s existence today. Shunning geometry, bypassing naturalistic representations, he has chosen to unravel the secret life of colours on canvas after canvas, as if caught in an irresistible continuum. Unlike practitioners of portraiture or figurative art, he compares the  very lack of discernible patterns in abstract art to the strains of Indian classical music, dependent more on tapestries of sound than on lyrics.

An abstract artist, Achuthan emphasizes, can execute realistic interpretations with ease, and does not consider his choice an escape from weak drawing or painting skills. The evidence? The sheer range of magazine and book jacket illustrations to the artist’s credit. Why else would Achuthan once try to capture the final moments of Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek, as the protagonist in the novel looks at the mountains beyond his window, his nails digging into the ledge, before he breathes his last? But realistic renditions failed to evoke the emotion he felt.

Though his one-man show at the local Max Mueller Bhavan in 1977 featured primarily figurative work, he felt stifled by the monotony of placing a figure or two against balanced spatial backdrops. Today, intuition guides him through his abstracts. If the feedback from the canvas proves negative, the artist often abandons his pursuit. And tries afresh, riddled with the anxieties of charting his course through the unknown, away from the security of formulaic paintings.  

His room, at a lodge in Madras’s bustling Royapettah area, reflects the man. An array of drawings cascade over the bed, offering images both private and primordial. Abstracts paintings in vivid oils, varied in hue and size, vie for space with earlier realistic compositions. Books on philosophy, literature and art are piled high on a shelf. Some crop up singly on window-sills and chairs. An abundance of creative talent assails the eye.

Achuthan’s present job in a government department allows him a means to his vital other life ~ in the realm of the paint, brush and canvas. One day, he knows for sure, he will be living his life in art full time. For that is his dream, his vision, his passion.  He has both the will to wait for this dream to be realized and the willingness to let life unwind to its own tune.

In Achuthan, a critic in Madras noted one who “enters into calm discussions of serious (pictorial) problems.” So he does, even in excerpted eloquence:

What drives you to engage with art?

I started sketching at a very young age. While teaching me the alphabet, my father drew a face and I copied it. I used to caricature all the people I knew. In my high school days, I didn’t have any colour sense, actually. My passion was literature. There was some discussion of literature in our household, and poets were revered. Naturally, I took to writing.

Perhaps like venom in a snake, it was somewhere within me, because when I started painting again in my twenty-seventh year, I found I was being dragged to the medium by its own power. I think my mood is better suited to painting than to writing because I can’t plan anything.

(Thoughtfully) Because I can’t be serious about two media at the same time, I can now say I have settled down to painting. Without art or any other creative activity, I may even commit suicide. I do not exist.

I am not saying this for effect. I have been doing this out of dire necessity. Even now, death and sex bewilder me a lot. So far, I have no answers to certain questions of life. So, I can even say art is an excuse. It is an escape from these questions.

How would you define a modern artist in today’s context?

I am against schools and granting a particular group of artists a particular label. It is the critics who demand such labels.

One can define a modern artist as one who searches for his own identity. As the world retina is looking at you, it’s important to belong to humanity, not to a nationality. I do not believe in patriotism and all that.

Are there any artists whom you admire in particular?

I can say I have a great love for Henri Rousseau, especially for his Sleeping Gypsy. I think that painting is a very great work. If I grow rich and if I can afford it, I will buy that work. There are also some very brilliant works by Paul Klee. And Chagall I like.

Pablo Picasso was a great disturbance because he touched everything and took it to an extreme, thus rendering most of his contemporaries derivative.

Rabindranath Tagore’s paintings came purely from the instinct of a highly sensitive mind. In a way, he revolutionized existing norms. For years, artists were governed by the rule of the Golden Section and the principles of harmony. But Tagore’s compositions stand out in a very different way. He was a not a dandy twiddling with his brush. I have seen the same freedom in the works of Sailoz Mukherjee.

Ravi Varma was a great misfortune in Indian art. His contemporaries just sat back and watched the royal man. He spoilt our concept of gods and goddesses by dressing them up in Kanjeevaram sarees and pearls.

Do you ever feel indebted to other artists?

I am terribly indebted. It is not a direct influence. I must thank all those who took the brush before me. When I take the brush, they must be turning in their graves. (Shyly) It is a great feeling to think, when I pull out a line, that the line has been taken by so many of my ancestors.

How do you feel about art in the social context? And censorship?

Art has no direct purpose. I don’t remember any work of art influencing the public. Art is not supposed to. It gives a brighter light. You start seeing better. But the world can do without art. You know, in China and Russia, you can’t find any modern art.

In fact, we are very fortunate to have freedom (in India). So, without being inhibited by anybody’s presence, I can create… (Passionately) I don’t understand why art is censored when there is uncensored science. No one censors the Theory of Relativity.

Actually, I’m anxious about whether I can exist in a changing society. If India veers to the left, and all abstract, modern work is censored, how much will my work be worth in a junkyard? I used to think it would be no more significant than a floor-tile removed from a mansion. I used to cry, thinking of that horror.

Can you justify the system of exhibiting art?

Fundamentally, I used to question the gallery-oriented system. It has become a ritual ~ hiring gallery walls and inviting some people, who are genuinely indifferent to my art. The critics come and write something. Then, bringing all the works back and turning them against my walls… For art, this is not required. I might as well paint in my room and keep quiet.

Yet, after I paint for two or three years, I exhibit for just five days. It is only for these five days that the paintings are alive. When I keep them in my room, they are totally dead even to me because I don’t remember painting them.

Do you have a strong stance on pricing a work of art and exhibiting to sell?

There is something unethical about selling. The pricing of a painting pains me. I can put on a price tag. If somebody buys the painting, I can get money to buy canvas and to meet part of my expenditure. But I can never impress myself by saying, “This is a good work. You take it.” Because it is something I have done for my own pleasure. There are some works I cannot bear to part with. There are others I don’t want to keep. If I sell these, a question arises ~ if I don’t like them, how can I sell them to others?

Somebody else may ask, “After all, it is four annas worth of paper. Why are you selling it for Rs. 400?” I reply, “It is the first time this is being impressed upon the human retina. For that alone, the work is worth a huge amount.” But in order to appreciate these things, one must belong to a visual culture.

How do you feel about the organised art set-up, especially the Lalit Kala Akademi? Is it a boon to artists?

The Lalit Kala Akademi began with great intentions, but it has become a degenerate body. It can annihilate isolated art activities in the country by collective neglect. It has never got to the grassroots. (Angrily) In a democracy like India, even now Mussolini’s children are living in the Akademi set-up. They are unapproachable. If you write, they will not reply. If you protest, they will send you a regret letter.

Its annual exhibition in Delhi is a major thing. Once you exhibit your work there, you are put on an electoral roll for their general council, exhibition committee, purchasing committee. In such circumstances, manipulation of the voter’s list gains more importance than the country’s art.

Personally, I have not benefited (from the Akademi). You might misinterpret this and say I am talking out of vendetta. But even if I am given an award, I will always be critical because, in the end, all academies pollute the set-up.

Why does the public response to art in India tend towards apathy?

I do not blame the public. The education system is to be blamed for this. At school, I studied Moghul history at least five times. Instead, if they had introduced one lesson on art or artists, it would have been helpful. Here, people talk about plastic heroes and film stars in daily conversation. No one talks of a painter.

Is art criticism and art writing relevant to your world?

Personally, no artist is benefited by criticism. In fact, the critic is a great nuisance, a peeping Tom. But when he writes well about me, I’m happy about it. (Laughing aloud) It affects my ego. When he writes adversely or ignores me, I think he is a ridiculous fellow. However, even when he praises me, I fear he is consecrating a particular approach to my art. I don’t want to be contained by any canon or dogma.

In the long run, certain critics have been helpful in creating a movement. And how would we know about the art being done in other parts of the world without writing on art?

Critics are always talking about technique. They can only see what is happening on the surface of an artist’s world. When a man pours out red on his canvas, it may be due to some personal tragedy. When the land under his feet erodes, something very vital happens to his art. This is dictated by the very source of his life, not by any external agency. The critic will never be able to understand the biological processes behind art.

(Reflectively) A funny thing happened last year. I was planning to write about my experiences as an artist. I wrote quite a lot. Then, I came across what Wassily Kandinsky had written on art. I found that 50 years ago, he had written all that I wanted to say. So, I tore up all I had written.

Do you consider your own work inspired?

Because I didn’t study under any particular teacher, I think all my works are inspired. I’m very lucky that I didn’t study anywhere. I have no regard for fine art being taught, and a degree being awarded for it. Fine art cannot be taught, though that may be required for other disciplines.

Would you like to talk about your recent series of symbolic drawings?

It is always a great test, how to control a thin line. In drawing, you cannot bluff. In painting, you can always do some patchwork. But a line is a very honest thing. (Intensely) It is something like your signature. You can’t correct it. You have only the strength of your line to guide you.

In the meantime, a lot of my dream images have surfaced. If I render my dreams as drawings, they will be just illustrations. I have tried to substitute a sense of order through stylization. If you see five or six scattered images, you immediately want to form a relationship between them. They form a certain pattern. The rhythm is always there. As I draw, forms emerge. I love these forms.

When I was young, I used to dream of a reptile that looked like a hydra. I do not know where these primordial memories came from. For years, it haunted me. But slowly I refined it. I trimmed it as a child trims paper patterns. Then, it resembled a reptile one could love.

What does this abstract phase in your work mean to you?

In 1977, I was working on a large canvas. I sketched the main figures. But when I was filling up the blank spaces with an eye to a beautiful composition, it came to me too easily. There was no feedback, except a whitewasher’s delight in covering up a surface.

I was at a loss. Then, life gave me a catharsis. I found myself entering an argument with colour. I followed my instinct, the need of the hour, pouring out reds and mauves and blues. I started talking to myself in small, inaudible whispers. That was the beginning of my abstract phase.

By abstraction, I don’t mean spoofing reality. (Pausing to think) The world and semblances are all forgotten. I worshipped at the shrine of colour. When one goes to the essence of colour, one enters the fringes of light. I tried to tame this light.

At one stage, I felt a feedback like a fish nibbling at a bait. You can pull in the cord, the fish and bait, all intact. But you can never hold the live fish in your hand. Either you tear its mouth or you set free the fish, the hook and the bait. Such is abstraction.

The best abstracts are never painted. They are held in the painter’s vision, casting a spell on all that he sees. In a painting, abstraction is a great ideal. I repeat myself till I am tired, like a great tree gone mad with flowers. A tree doesn’t count its flowers.

When I took to abstraction, I found that by a juxtaposition of certain colours a new harmony comes to the canvas. People point out that it doesn’t refer to anything. Then, what is the norm? In fact, there is no norm in abstraction. Abstraction is but a total disembodied reality. That is because painting is a very autonomous thing. It exists for itself. If it comes to a question of what guides me, I reply: my total visual sense.

But from the moment I took to colour, like a mighty river entering a gorge, I have felt the fullness of life within me. If I were asked to stop painting completely, I would sprinkle colour on a mountain stream and watch it flow.

(Indian Express, Madras/ Chennai, 1980)

Art: Jatin Das ~ Fanning the fires within

Jatin Das at Sarala Art Centre, Madras/ Chennai

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to separate the public and private persona of Jatin Das. They shade into one another indivisibly. Whether gauged by his life or his art, he emerges as a larger-than-life, electrifying personality.  His paintings and drawings have a restless energy, an almost palpable flow of coursing colour, like blood  through the veins. His focus is Man. He crams into the human form all life, both within and without it.

His nudes ~ whether as supple line drawings or earthy oils on canvas ~ flow from reservoirs unseen, encounters uncharted, passions unquenched. His hunger for life, for experience, for rewarding relationships, is torrid, tangible and occasionally teasing. What fuels his burning pace? What music palpitates through his being? Can he cram all he wants to into a single, stratified life?

His paintings have proved to be best-sellers in New Delhi, where he lives. Every alternate interview he’s done has proved controversial ~ for Jatin does not mince words, whether about inter-personal relationships or sharing views on current politics or the commerce of art.

In person, this recurrently angry, middle-aged man’s interests flow into all matters that touch the human discourse.  His artist’s soul analyses subjects as diverse as Indian classical music, art education, the cut-and-thrust of living in real and surreal time. His pride in his Indian roots surfaces at the most unlikely times. Delta-like, Jatin encompasses as much as he can within the surge of a river in spate.

“Why can’t a drawing or painting be accepted for what it is? My work never has an agenda,” he protests, his hands agitating the air in a flurry of gesture. “I don’t set out to do anything. My work is not narrative. It’s not telling a story. I paint first, then draw the outline. I see something and just feel like translating that onto paper. That’s it.”

Jatin’s subject matter is derived from everyday inroads into life. From the intense colours of a sunset over his terrace. From the ecstatic shrieks and cries of children at play outside his door. From the captivating body language of sweepers, construction workers and domestic help.

“I take photographs of trivial things ~ when a tree is cut down, when new sprouts of sienna and shades of browns and greens appear on a dead log,” reveals Jatin the individual. “These photographs are just manifestations of my concern. They are never enlarged. I write a bit of free verse occasionally. I listen to a lot of music. I am open, willing and ready to be exposed anything and any influence which comes my way.”

But why is the human body a constant in his art? Is that an obsession? “I have been painting human figures for many years. So many works get cancelled in my mind. It is not the fear of death, but that the factual linear time is short. Every time I finish a work, I feel it is a starting point, and the feeling continues,” Jatin explains. “Usually, I like working on a single figure. Now and then, two figures together have periodically emerged unintentionally. Recently, I’ve become conscious of it as a series. I suppose I’ve become more and more conscious about human relationships and our predicament, with the man-woman relationship as the most complex of them all. But it’s in no way a documentary of anything.”  

Is the sheer physicality of his renditions deliberate? “I try to capture a mood, an emotion. And the body, the form, the physicality is accidential,” Jatin avers.

Jatin’s words flow torrentially, changing colour and direction in response to moods. He is as quick to disgust as to laughter. He enters the spark and fusion of discussion almost with glee. Phrases from Bengali, Oriya, Hindi and French dapple his conversation. The poetic, rather than the prosaic, is his chosen metier, whether verbally or visually. 

Winding through the diverse bylanes of his life, he recalls Mayurbhanj in Orissa, where he was born in December 1941: “A small town with mountains and rivers and ponds and fish and dance and music all around… a solid traditional and natural locale.” From there, he moved on to study art at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay, to live and teach in Delhi, and to exhibit widely at home and abroad.

Here are fragments from Jatin’s world, in his own verbal strokes:

How would you render yourself through the prism of art?

I am a contemporary painter. The traditional painter did paintings or sculptures or etchings for religion or worship. He was the product of a homogenous society. The nawab or the king or the temple looked after him. It was a collective approach that was congenial to him.

Today, it is tougher because of the pressure of the industrial situation. Besides, there’s your ambition and the fight for survival. I work alone. My work is not religion-bound, but every work of art is bound by the spiritual.

Are working conditions in India conducive to your art?

In our country, compared to the rest of the world, we have a lot of freedom that we are not using. We do not have state patronage or pressures, like in the socialist countries, of what art should be. Know what kind of freedom I am talking about? Lack of concern. The indifference of society is a freedom in itself, na?

Our media is totally indifferent to the visual arts. Our government does not have a cultural policy. Any committed, serious-minded, involved artist here works in a state of vacuum. Whether you have a good write-up on your paintings or a bad write-up, whether you sell or don’t sell, whether you exist or don’t, nobody will worry. Uday Shankar died, a great genius; but nobody cared. In our country, you need sustaining power. You have to burn your own fuel and fall back on yourself because we do not have proper criticism.

There are many good artists here who realize we are the product of a bastard situation. (With mounting excitement) Who is aware that at Bombay and Calcutta and Madras ~ you know, the 150-year-old British schools ~ we learnt of Michelangelo and the Greek concept of sculpture and figuration that the proportion for a beautiful body is seven-and-a-half heads?

In our iconography, we have five-head, ten-head concepts. Fantastic! Concepts which have not dated. I’m surprised that few Indian artists are working with the virgin material available. I’m not talking of bringing in Indianness by copying, by aping it. I am talking about digesting or imbibing all this to do what you want to do.

I’m not saying this only as an Indian. I’m saying this as an artist.

What do you feel you have contributed to Indian art?

Oh my god! Oh my god! That’s such a heavy question! (Laughing aloud) I don’t think I have contributed anything at all to Indian art. No, no, I am purely responsible for myself.  All my work ~ good or bad, whether you like it or don’t ~ I don’t blame anybody or the situation or anything for it.

Mind you, many people think I am a painter, so I should be concerned about the sensibility of Pattachitra or Pichwai or Kangra miniatures only. Personally, I feel if Kumar Gandharva has arrived at such a stage that, when I listen to him I sit at the edge of my chair in the audience, I’m terribly envious that I have not reached there yet. He was lucky because Indian classical music has flowed like a river, uninterrupted, till today. Contemporary art has had no continuous flow. It has taken off from the colonial period, from Ravi Varma.

What I am saying is: contributing to Indian art is all bullshit. I haven’t done a thing. I’m just waking up gradually. I’m frustrated that I haven’t done enough. And so much has been done already. In any discipline of art or science, if you knew how much has been done, you would stop working. It’s only because you have a compulsion, for no reason, you paint or draw…

How do you select your themes?

The landscape (in my paintings) is now contained in the human form. In the past, if this was the format (hands block spaces in the air), there were landscapes and smaller figures. What has happened in the last 18 years or so is that the human form has enlarged and occupied full space in the canvas and the landscape has been contained within.

When anybody does a Ganesh, Shiva or Parvati, he is representing iconographic codification or simplifying it. When I paint a human form, I try to give it an attitude of charge or energy. Because my paintings are only bare human forms. They are not clothed. They are not naked. There’s no locale. There’s no architecture. There’s no vegetation around it. Just the minimal human body.

What’s the impetus for your art? Are you conscious of any outside influences?

When I paint a human form, why should I be influenced by a painter who is painting human forms? Why not by human beings themselves? It is a wrong notion that an artist has to be influenced by another artist. My experiences are also derived from theatre, music, dance, painting and poetry… and cobblers and basketry-makers.

There are many persons you have been carrying around with you to your bed or to your house. I don’t know much about how work evolves, but I do know some aspect of it ~ from eating, from drinking, from gardening, from making love, from taking a walk or from being concerned with other people or picking up the suitcase of an old lady who can’t carry it…

My work has evolved in different directions within the main current. I have not yet exhausted that direction. When I do, whether the public like it or not, I will go on to another. But I will go naturally; I will not force myself. Each canvas differs in terms of handling. But they are not very different because I am the same person. I have the same expertise in my fingers, in my muscles.

Now, I look back and find different rhythms at different periods. This rhythm is unknown to the artist and (vehemently) I don’t want to find out. It is not necessary. Believe me, all this analysis is meaningless… I don’t know my work fully well. By indirect observation, I find I am pre-occupied with the human predicament or charge and energy, that is the governing pivot around which the human being lives.

How important is technique to you?

I believe every medium has innumerable possibilities. It is the journey of the artist, what he or she discovers. The technique is just a vehicle. It’s your mind, the spiritual content of your work that’s important. Technique is not important, but the whole of the western world is caught up with the innovation of newer techniques for the sake of newness.

I am open and willing to try different mediums or techniques if I can make them my own, to say what I want to say.

Is this business of exhibitions important to you?

When I exhibit, it is a fraction of the total body of my work in the studio. The total body of studio work is a fraction of my total thinking. So, it is a fractional thing you are seeing. On the other hand, there are many paintings you may have in your mind that you just cancel in your mind. You never do them. How about that?

One is caught up in the vulgarity and basic dichotomy of modern living. I’m not living in the Himalayas and I’m not being looked after by society and the state. I paint and I sign on my paintings.(Furiously)  One has imbibed the western manifestations of a gallery and museum and selling and cataloguing and all that nonsense which, personally, I don’t believe in but, for my own survival, I have to be a part of.

When I paint, nothing matters. But it is also human that I should like people to see my work. I would like my work to be sold and written about, but I’m not ambitious at any cost.

How do you feel about the morality of selling paintings?

Everybody has to sell their commodity to survive. The only difference is I am not selling my soul. I am not making sweet, romantic Indian landscapes for foreigners and Indians to buy, those who will match their curtains and carpets with my paintings. My paintings pose a great problem for people to buy because they are stark and confront you. If you have one in your house, it will demand your attention. You can’t ignore it as a wall hanging.

I have given away my work free to very close friends. I have sold my work at half-price or in installments. Sometimes, I don’t sell or show a work to some people. (Sadly) But I have also learnt a lesson. I have given away drawings that are still rolled up or left on a shelf.

Now, I even want to price my lovely brochures nominally, so that you won’t throw them away. This is the modern situation. I am not living in the 18^th century or the 6^th century or whatever…

How do you relate to your viewing public?

Intellectual understanding is a nonsensical thing, a false western attitude. What is important is exposure and familiarity, not understanding.

In 1976, I was taking my drawings to the Kumar Gallery in Delhi in an autorickshaw for an exhibition. The rickshawallah said: “What are these? Can I see?” So, I took him along before the opening and he went around. He said, “It’s the first time I’m looking at such work.” And in his own simple Hindi, he realized that the figures were tense and full of energy.

Let me give you another situation. I was holding a show in England. People arrived. Just before entering the gallery, they asked me, “Are you a cubist? Are you an expressionist?” They want to term me, to place me. It’s like westerners expecting Indians to be snake-charmers or elephant-riders or, maximum, painters of miniatures and temple sculptors. (Indignantly) They are not ready to accept that contemporary Indian art exists.

How important is art education?

Our total education system is faulty. The British made a hotchpotch of it to churn out clerks, not to educate people. Schools and colleges should be centres where you are longing to go, to learn. The bridge between school and home and society, between art and science, should be deeply embedded in the system. All the allied arts ~ tribal, classical, folk, contemporary ~ should be shown to children at the primary level without force.

What is the point of going to Ikebana classes for a young, sophisticated lady who does not even water her plants at home? We are aping the superficial western world of the 1930s and 1940s. The government is doing nothing to curb video games. They don’t realise it will create generations with all kinds of aggression. It is vulgar. (With agitation) These days, people are buying real-looking plastic pistols for their children!

Does the art critic have a major role to play in the Indian context?

It is his role to bridge the gap between the artist and the viewer or listener, to put himself in the shoes of the artist and find his pulse. He should be educated, sensitive, ready, willing to travel with the artist. He should start out with humility, not with arrogance. Only if you have artists do the historian and the critic and the buyer and the onlooker come in.

The critic’s role is also to go in search of the artist. His personal viewpoint is of no consequence. He should be so enlightened that his personal viewpoint becomes a total viewpoint with a knowledge of the art world, the art situation, the social surroundings in which the artist lives.

Is there more that you’d like to share of yourself?

Sometimes, I’m so frustrated by my own situation that I feel I should give up painting and go and work in a village. But I’m not cynical. I still have the energy to bulldoze or fight. Or dash off a letter to the (Lalit Kala) Akademi or to the government blindly, to register my protest.

I’m concerned about everything. I go and spy if someone is beating up a child. My friends complain that I indulge too much, dissipating energy. That’s how I am and it’s too late in the day to change.

I’m also very impatient ~ not scared ~ that time is running out. There is so much one is capable of, that one hasn’t done. So much one wants to do that one hasn’t done…

(Originally published in Indian Express, Chennai/ Madras, in September 1983)

Art: Nilima Sheikh ~ Between the lines of lineages

Nilima Sheikh: Remapping the familiar

“MY MOTHER had, as a child, cherished a desire to be an artist. We say a lifeline passes from mother to daughter. It is difficult to know sometimes where one starts and the other ends. Did I become a painter because of my mother? Because of her, with her, I went wandering every year in the Himalayas. Because of her I learnt to love travel to new places or re-mapping the familiar. Every time I travelled without her, I wanted to bring the landscape back to her because she had taught me to make the natural world intelligible. Because, without her, I was handicapped…”

Nilima Sheikh’s Garden for Mother, brush drawings since 1997, gather depth from the emotion invested in her words from the catalogue for a precious being who is no more. As much as from the tendril-like nuanced figures, ethereal jewel-pure colours and the restrained silences that wash through the current display at the Sakshi gallery in Bangalore from February 9 to March 6 ~ harking back to Asian traditions of painting from China, Japan, Tibet and Sri Lanka, to Indian miniature and narrative legacies, to the primal bonding between art and craft,  perhaps even to beauty as a defining quality. Her enthusiasm now enfolds the post-Ajanta Buddhist cave paintings of Dunhuang in China.

In an age when attitudes dictate a turning away from conventional aesthetics, when to be tradition-bound is to invite derision, when stridency often substitutes for creativity, Nilima Sheikh ~ born in New Delhi in 1945 and trained in painting at Baroda from 1967 to 1971 ~ stands apart. Primarily because she’s serenely at ease with herself, and is proud to be a woman and an artist in a generation that paved the way for today’s flowering across the land.

Nilima’s artistic lineage, her mother apart, draws from her inspiring teacher at Baroda, K G Subramanyan, who was in turn influenced by Binode Behari Mukherjee, his shaping force at Shantiniketan. And Nilima recognises the importance of excursions with her teacher at Baroda, now her husband, the celebrated artist Gulammohammed Sheikh.

Captured in personalised hieroglyphics and vari-planed perspectives through the symbolic naturalism of an animal, unspecific vegetation or coupled figures swathed in intensity, Nilima shared slides of her recent journeys of self-discovery one evening. Inclined to work on cycles of paintings, as in the calendric series of the narrative of Song-Space, she explains, “Maybe I’m uncomfortable with a single piece. I’m constantly trying to resolve that.”

Re-mapping the familiar, to her, is a major area of engagement. In her works, whether casein in canvas or tempera on paper, her focus is on the everyday, but not on the banal. The intensity of Baroda-based Nilima’s transcreative powers is mesmerising in the 1984 series of 12 small tempera paintings, When Champa grew up, which retells with psychological truth the nurturing of a young girl in Nilima’s neighbourhood, her marriage and premature end for dowry, a very Indian tale. But in Nilima’s poetic narrative, the sequence grows beyond illustration, beyond the commonplace, to a universal plane.

Her works, whether based on personal experience or timeless legends like that of Sohni-Mahiwal, encompass the drama of the domestic or the strains of human interaction. The resulting amalgam often captures the commonplace ~ a crouching woman washing clothes or scrubbing vessels, a courtyard peopled with family interactions, a pharmacy of yore, a child at a sweet stall. Extending her canvas as in Shamiana, her 1996 work for the Second Asia Pacific Triennial at Brisbane that depicted “interior things inside and exterior things outside” in its tent-like space, she renders both sides of each huge panel with tantalizing intricacy.

Linked but not chained to Asian traditions, Nilima refers equally to Far Eastern paintings like Ukioye or Pictures of the Floating World, as to the Nathdwara paintings of Rajasthan. Whether in her miniature-scale works or her screen-like sets for the 1993 Vivadi theatre production of Umrao, Nilima’s work has a striking evocative grace, occasionally breaking through singular space into panels that enhance simultaneity of perception. She acknowledges a penchant for illustration, perhaps even for school textbooks, because “I think my children’s perceptions grew with the books they looked at, even more than their parents’ paintings.” Sweeping past the peripheral, Nilima thus connects the past with the present, the traditional with the contemporary. For doesn’t the test of today’s truth lie in the brush of the creator?

Garden for Mother, 1997

Her effects seem deliberately poetic, with extended abstract notations rendered hers with time ~ a dash of colour, a form that could be a being or a leaf or beating wings. Just as personal is her choice of media ~ her decade-long choice of gum and casein tempera, with the textured compositional propositions thus enhanced. And her preference for the age-old Indian miniaturist’s handmade wasli paper, made at Sanganer near Jaipur. Nilima’s crusade could be interpreted as a championing of the traditional Indian painter who, by virtue of his current form, is construed as relevant to her view.

Nilima, who studied pictorial concepts of Indian miniature painting and the tradition of tempera for its relevance to a personal contemporary context on a government fellowship from 1982-85and from 1988-90, has participated in solo and group shows all over India and in West Germany, Belgrade, Titograd, Istanbul, Ankara, Dhaka, Johannesburg, the UK and the US. Her work was featured in the 1988 Christie’s catalogue in aid of Helpage, and ‘Artist Alert,’ organised by Sahmat in 1989.

Her stances, as vocalised beyond her art, reflect a process of internalisation in a voice both sensitive and sure. Here are excerpts from a recent conversation in Bangalore:

There are so many images of the garden in your exhibition, and tender references to your late mother in your catalogue. I believe she was a pathologist, though she painted. Do you see yourself as living her dreams?

In some ways, yes. There’s this whole question of how a mother’s life is so interconnected with her child, especially a girl child. After my mother passed away, the memories were so intense. Whether it was my life or hers, there was such a blurring over. It was my childhood, my children’s childhood, my recollections of her telling me about her childhood, a continuing convergence. Through these images, I was perhaps also referring to other lineages of art history, like the Shantiniketan school, which referred through the nationalist proposition at the time to an Asiatic lineage.

What do you recall of K G Subramanyan as your teacher?

Many things. (Reflectively) One was the question of languages in the visual arts. How a thing is said through the way it is said. The question of construction. That the visual arts language is as important as that of literary or other arts. To have any kind of expression, one has to develop this.

Through his reference back to his teachers, to the work of Binode Behari Mukherjee or Ramkinkar Baij or Nandalal Bose or Abanindranath Tagore, these became for me a way of discovering an identity connected with the Asian tradition.

The way he broke hierarchy was important for me. Believing in praxis and practise was a major way of dealing with art. In his work, his ideas and his writing ~ this is not something he personally instructed me about ~ the differences between craft and art, between major and minor art, the polarity was diffused. I’m not saying that I refer specifically to craft in my work, but crafting became an important way for me to look at art, even objects of everyday use.

When you taught painting at Baroda from 1977 to 1981, what tenets did you base your teaching on?

It’s very difficult to think of one’s individuation. I can think of all the ways that other people have influenced me. In my own ideas, I can see the influence of Subramanyan or Gulam, who I live with.

That’s the time that a lot of fresh students came to Baroda from Karnataka and Kerala, including Pushpamala and Suresh, with a skill structure that was different from artists of Gujarat. It became a challenge to me to encourage that, rather than just what I was familiar with. There was already a tradition at Baroda of not giving prescriptions, trying to allow students to see the proposition within their own work. This was Subramanyan's greatest belief.

I taught the first year. The modernist idea was to try and purify that, to rid them of their preconceptions. I tried to encourage students not to repudiate their ideas and backgrounds without questioning.

With Gulam in your life, how have your interactions shaped both your lives as artists?

Gulam was my teacher. He taught art history.  He opened up the world of art today and in the past. After we got married, we found we got so much pleasure out of seeing art together, whether in India or abroad.

At a more personal level, Gulam always pushes himself and others around him to their optimum. Gulam ran a magazine out of the house when our children were very small. He was teaching and painting. Through that, I was bringing up little kids. There was hardly any parental support. There didn’t seem to be other artists around with small children whom I could share these things with. Such a hurly-burly! I used to get exasperated. (Laughs) I still do. But he’s made me a much more active person than I was in the past.

How did you go about your study of India miniature and tempera traditions?

It’s been an ongoing thing, but during the Eighties I actually got an opportunity to travel and study the techniques of various kinds of tempera painting, particularly at Nathdwara and Jaipur in Rajasthan. There might be questions of whether these traditional painters are imitating themselves. I don’t think the problems are only with them, but also in the way we regard them, the way we don’t include them in contemporary art. Contrary to myth, these practitioners are fairly open about their techniques and materials. As soon as they realise you’re a painter, they don’t mystify anything. They allow you to watch them paint, they allow you to use their materials on a trial basis. And I made good friends, especially in Nathdwara, the centre of Pichwai painting.

I met a very old painter through Amit Ambalal. His name was Dwarkalal Jangid, a fine painter. He’s a practical man. When he feels there’s something in modern methods,  that’s good enough. He told me of how the traditional pigments are prepared. I’ve tried to record as much as I could, but there’s far more to be done.

In India, we need to pay more attention to paintmaking. In Nathdwara, the process of preparing paint is very much within our abilities. But we don’t have access to either the range of raw material or to the technology; they are not marketed. It’s not necessary that you should do every part of the process yourself. Pigments can be prepared upto a point, and the rest you do yourself. Within families at Nathdwara, somebody would prepare some colour and keep it ready for use by everybody else. Powdered pigments would be kept ready in the form of a ball or a cake. When you need it, you just dissolve it and add the glues. It works within the community because of its cooperative nature. But this information doesn’t get out.

Even with papermaking, we have so much of traditional information. Papermaking is a sorry state of affairs. (Excitedly) Think of the vasli papers from Sanganer that the traditional miniature painters used. Every time you visit Sanganer, you realise that fewer papermakers are making vasli paper and the quality of the paper is deteriorating. There’s plenty of papermaking on in Sanganer, but of a commercial kind. The vasli paper is dried on fresco walls, so it takes on a patina. It is not bleached. That’s what makes it special. The local artists still use old papers that are in circulation because they want their pictures to look old. So, the new papers are only used maybe by art students studying the miniature or some Japanese commissioner choosing paper for special work. It’s really very sad.

Unfortunately, papermaking is considered a small-scale industry, not a craft. (With concern) So, you can’t get the Crafts Museum to help out. I believe Pune is making wonderful paper now. But we do have traditional skills. Why are we allowing those to go waste?

Was it the narrative quality of the Rajasthan, Pahari and Mughal miniature schools that drew you to them?

The narrative quality may be one factor. Maybe it’s the other way round. It could be that miniature painting attracted me to the narrative. Perhaps also medieval European painting, Italian paintings or Flemish paintings of the early Renaissance. But there always has been an interest in narrative painting through traditional sources at Baroda. As in Subramanyan’s early Lucknow mural. That was the entry and I got involved in it.

In what way did ‘When Champa grew up’ prove to be a turning point?

When I started working on paper in 1982, I began thinking on a more intimate scale. It throws up possibilities which might not have seemed right on a large painting hanging on a wall. I had planned to work on this real life story that had taken place literally in my backyard, but it was important to find a vehicle for that.

 (With intensity)  How could I talk about these things without making it banal or seeming righteous or pompous? Looking at it from the outside and making a declaration about it? There had to be some way I could enter it. One way was to look at it as a book or unfolding story. I considered using text along with it. I realised, with Gulam’s help, that there were garba songs on bride-burning. That became a clinching fact. I tried to visually translate the way the voice had been traditionally used. After I did these paintings, we located some texts that could alternate with the visual images. It was almost as if the paintings were illustrations for the songs.

In contemporary art, there appear to be stances against the beautiful. Yet, in your work, there’s a quality of accessible, acceptable aesthetics. Is this an offshoot of your personality?

Perhaps it comes quite naturally. I think modernism is full of guilts. Guilts of overcoming realism by modernism. It’s as if you have to repudiate something to discover the real thing. You shouldn’t feel guilty about the means that you use. It should be natural and integral to you. Take the notion of illustration. I believe that most of the best paintings in the world are done as illustration. I think beauty can be a vehicle for the most violent of sentiments or attitudes, it should be allowed to contain other things.

(Passionately) Or take the guilt about sentiment, which I feel is a false guilt. You don’t want to make sentimental paintings, but sentiment is part of your life. Perhaps certain attitudes have come into modernism because art was primarily being practised by men. So, the notion of strength became tied up with more male virtues. I think that strength needs to be redefined.

How would you assess today’s generation of Indian woman artists?

I think they’re fairly individualistic. Without taking on a heavily feminist agenda, they’ve learnt a lot from each other ~ by linking together, by staying together, by writing about each other.

(Thoughtfully) Today, my one big regret is that I couldn’t meet Meera Mukherjee before she died. She needs to be talked about far more; she’s a very major woman artist. Though she’s a sculptress ~ it always takes me a little more effort to relate to a sculptor than a painter ~ I feel she’s someone from whom I could have learnt a lot. She’s able to talk in one breath of the monumental and the iconic, the mundane and the personal, even the minor. It’s remarkable. I don’t think a male artist could have done that. That’s special to being a woman. That’s the kind of pleasure we take in each other’s work.

Over the last ten years, looking at other women’s work has given me enormous strength. Our concerns are very different from those in the west. Many of us come from very privileged situations because we have family support. Many of us have married artists or people connected with the arts. Many young woman are daughters of artists.

It would be wrong to say woman artists have no problems in India. We certainly do. Getting to a professional stage might be a problem… I think Amrita Sher-Gil did us a lot of good. Having got into the mainstream early on, that position of the woman as a professional practitioner was established.

But there would still be problems with the kind of work one does or the kind of groupings one makes. When I was painting in the 1970s, a very major artist said to me, “It’s all very nice. You paint very well. But why should you always put your children into your paintings?”

Do you feel that being a woman is an asset to being an artist?

I’d say that, I’d say that. (Chuckling) To find my own voice, it was important that I was a woman. It has to do with ownness. If I was a man, then perhaps I’d have far less resources.

What made you choose tempera and casein as your medium?

I started working with tempera on paper in 1982 because my paintings before that were beginning to look like tempera paintings. It seemed necessary to make this shift. I was also getting more interested in the traditions of Indian and Asian painting, which used tempera.

Later, I began to enjoy the medium for itself. I mix my colours myself when I work on a large scale. These colours have an intrinsic quality of their own, which gets neutralised by a medium like oil or acrylic. The colour quality remains the same, but the surface qualities tend to get neutralised. But in tempera, a terra verte would be different from a crimson. An earth colour would be different from a dye colour.

I’ve often thought I would like to work on a very large scale and casein has become a wonderful solution. It is more user-friendly than gum tempera. It’s waterproof.

To shift from miniature painting to the ‘Shamiana’ and your screen-like work in theatre… The scale changed dramatically, but the concerns remained similar. Were you testing your reach?

Strangely, there’s a similarity between a very small work and a very large work. I think it’s to do with realism. When you’re working on an easel painting, it’s connected with the human scale which the Renaissance developed. When you’re working on a scale that has potentially a different relationship to the human body, a standing relationship, it’s different. Whether it is a hand-held painting or a room-sized mural, the way you deal with representational gestalt can have commonalities.

I enjoy a physical relationship with my work. I think it’s more difficult to work on a small scale than on a large scale, apart from the problems of an ageing body. Because it’s not just your hand that can lead you on. It’s your body that is in it.

(Originally published in Sunday Herald, 1998)