A day at the museums

My piece for India Today magazine:

Connoisseurs can once again visit the National Museum and the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi to gaze at some of India’s most iconic artefacts and works of art.
 

Visitors at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi admire Amrita Sher-Gil’s painting 'Young Girls'

The National Museum New Delhi had never felt this intimate. I was in the Miniature Gallery when a robust male voice began to sing loudly: “Tu hi pyaar, tu hi chaahat, tu hi aashiqui hai”. I had been admiring Radha and Krishna admiring their own reflection in a mirror: a pre-digital couplefie aided by an attendant, and the painter. Now the 1640 Mewar miniature seemed illuminated by the security guard’s rendition of the song from Mahesh Bhatt’s 1990 romantic superhit, Aashiqui.

It was 3 pm on the first Sunday after India’s premier museum reopened on November 10, but only 23 ticketed visitors before me had entered the grand old building on New Delhi’s Janpath. Inaugurated in 1960, the museum complex is being revamped since 2017, and I have often found the upper floors closed for renovation.

On Sunday, you could again climb the grand staircase to the second floor, but the only gallery open was ‘Tribal Lifestyle of North East India’: unreconstructed old-style anthropology running rampant, though there are some striking Monpa and Naga masks and headdresses. Sections of the open corridor display were cordoned off, but visitors might enjoy the 10th century South Indian stone sculptures of zodiac signs. On the first floor, I followed two reluctant men into the Ajanta Paintings gallery at a guard’s urging, but the lights were all off. Tanjore Paintings, too, was closed. But you could visit Central Asian Antiquities, Maritime Heritage and the Coins Gallery, which I have always thought an attractively condensed history of South Asia. Watch out for the 3rd-5th century CE Gupta emperors, who chose this most public canvas to enshrine themselves in the popular imagination as ‘Rhinoceros-slayer’, ‘Swordsman’ and my favourite, ‘Lyrist’: the conqueror Samudragupta proclaiming his mastery of the veena. Post-demonetisation currency isn’t a patch on Gupta coinage.

On the ground floor, I paid a visit to the Harappan Dancing Girl, tiny and insouciant as ever, before ambling into the sculptures, where a stunning buffalo-headed female figure caught my eye. “Vrishanana Yogini. Pratihara, 10th -11th cent. A.D. Lokhari, Distt. Banda, Uttar Pradesh,” said the label. It was only later that the internet told me this was one of the museum’s most treasured new acquisitions. Illegally trafficked out of an Uttar Pradesh temple, this example of the powerful female-centric Yogini cult was returned to the Indian embassy in Paris in 2008 by the widow of a French collector and acquired by the museum in 2013, under the then director general, Venu V. If only our curators understood: this is the story that should be on the plaque. The nation would want to know.

“Sixteen of the museum’s 27 galleries are accessible in this first phase of reopening,” the museum’s education officer Rige Shiba wrote in an email. Many new arrangements are in place: the ticket counter is now outside the entry gate to the complex, and temperature checks, sanitisation and security screening take place before you walk in. Following the ministry of culture’s guidelines for post-Covid reopening, free volunteer-led tours are currently suspended. So is one of the museum’s innovations for visually-disabled visitors: touch tours of the 22-item Anubhav gallery. Audio guides are also out for the moment “unless these can be disinfected after every single use”.

Curatorial tours are also suspended at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), where daily ticketed visitors are down from 250-500 in pre-Covid times to about 70. The gallery is discouraging group visits, with curators offering customised digital walkthroughs instead. There’s also a free virtual tour. But on Sunday evening, having scurried through November rain, I could not have found happier shelter than the beauteous airy interiors of the NGMA. Anupam Sud’s Ceremony of Unmasking triptych made me smile at its new relevance. Bhupen Khakhar’s miniature-inspired Hamam Khana (1982) seemed prescient about our strange faux-sanitised times: a naked woman standing rigidly to attention in a bare, controlled enclosure, as if waiting to be allowed to bathe.

I took the empty elevator upstairs, discovering the Mexican mural-like joys of Pran Nath Mago’s Rice Planters (1952), before arriving at his Delhi Shilpi Chakra collective contemporary, the underrated modernist B.C. Sanyal (1901-2003). I stood forever in front of Sanyal’s stunning At the Nizamuddin Fair and his seductively lungi-clad self-portrait, Old Man and the Bird. “Now that’s the old man of love to become,” a friend texted back.

A masked boy and girl stopped at an M.F. Husain. “Yeh Picasso hain (this is a Picasso),” the boy said. “Kehte hain inki chai bhi gir jaati thi, toh painting ban jaati thi (they say if he dropped his tea, it would also become a painting).” They held hands tightly. The world fell away.
 

Published in India Today magazine, 20 Nov 2020

Bhupen Khakhar: The Autodidact

Published in Open magazine, 19 Feb 2016.

A new Bhupen Khakhar exhibition showcases a painter of rich interminglings, in whose work the sacred could overlap with the erotic, modern mass culture with medieval miniatures.

The Bhupen Khakhar exhibition at Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), which runs until the end of March, is not as exhaustive as it might have been. It is, however, well timed. Khakhar, as even this limited selection of his work makes clear, was a remarkable artist— a self-taught painter with little fear of formal experimentation and a playful approach to artistic traditions. But he will always be especially remembered for being the first Indian painter to openly express his gayness.

On 2 February this year, the Supreme Court of India referred a curative petition about Section 377 to a five-judge bench, setting the stage for a potential rethink of the 1860 law barring ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’ that turns consenting homosexual adults into criminals. Other than a brief window between July 2009, when the Delhi High Court read down Section 377 (rendering it ineffective), and December 2013, when the Supreme Court over- turned that judgment, homosexuality has been illegal in independent India. It was in this India that Bhupen Khakhar, born in 1934, came of age, lived and loved.

The youngest child of a not-very-well-off Gujarati family in what was then Bombay, Khakhar’s father died when he was four, and he was brought up by his mother, a housewife. He studied Economics, and qualified as a chartered accountant in 1956. Four years after that, in 1960, he started to attend evening classes at the JJ School of Art. Although he had already begun to paint seriously and was friends with several artists, most significantly fellow-Gujarati Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh, it was a huge decision for Khakhar to leave the hard-earned financial security of his job. He finally moved to Baroda in 1964, enrolling for a Masters at MS University. But he specialised in Art Criticism, thus remaining strictly self-taught as an artist.

At a symposium held just before the NGMA show opened, the artist Nilima Sheikh —married to Ghulam Sheikh and a close friend of Khakhar’s —spoke of how he turned his limited drawing abilities around to create “one of the most unique figurations in modern Indian art”. The artist Nalini Malani, also a good friend, agreed that Khakhar was painfully conscious that he didn’t quite have the craft down pat: “In order to learn, Bhupen drew from life all the time—the people he met, the clothes they wore, the food they ate...”

But Khakhar’s self-taught-ness, it seems to me, revealed itself not so much in his almost naïve human figures, but in his openness to experimentation. The NGMA exhibition includes etchings, lino-cuts, watercolours and oil paintings— and you can see the immense variety of registers he tried out, from the realistic to the quixotically surreal, from small-scale sketches in black-and-white to giant canvases in unapologetically brilliant hues. The artist was also a collector, and the NGMA show puts on display two sections of this personal archive, which reveal the eclecticism of his engagement with existing visual culture: painted Hindi film posters from the 60s to the 80s, and paintings from the Nathdwara tradition, depicting Krishna as Shrinathji. 

Though primarily a painter, he made joyful forays into all sorts of forms: the NGMA show itself has samples of his work in ceramic, two upholstered chairs he painted on, two giant cutouts of Amitabh Bachchan and Rekha with Khakhar’s art on the reverse, and a proto-installation called Paan Beedi Shop. This last is a life-size model of a streetside shop stocked with cigarette and tobacco packets. One outer wall is covered with a painting of two men puffing away in companionable silence: one wears a kurta-pyjama, the other a baniaan and dhoti. The delightful caption—for that seems the appropriate word—reads: ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’.

Paan Beedi Shop also points us to two of Khakhar’s preoccupations. One is stylistic, the other thematic. The stylistic device I speak of is his use of text to annotate, underline, or playfully subvert his visuals. Among the early untitled etchings at the NGMA is one of a face with protruding teeth, caught in a web of Gujarati text. Sometimes words serve as signage, like in his portrait of an auto driver: a Gujarati road sign locates the auto somewhere between Vadodara and Ahmedabad. Another etching plays cheekily on the calendar print: a god-like being holding a sudarshan chakra and a sword, surrounded by phrases like ‘Shubh’ and ‘Jai Bharat’, is rivalled by a pair of clocks. Other etchings use English. In one, two men wearing identical clothes sit together on a sofa, tender and dreamy-eyed. The handwritten scrawl below them reads, ‘They loved each other so much that they wore the suit boot of the same design’. Khakhar’s later works didn’t use text as much, but his tongue-in-cheek, free-form, Indian idiom began to appear in titles—the iconic You Can’t Please All, or Good Taste Can Be Very Killing.

The thematic preoccupation that Paan Beedi Shop underlines is the life of the Indian street. As illustrated by some of his most famous paintings, such A View From the Tea Shop (1972), Khakhar was a ceaseless observer of our urban spaces, of those who inhabit them and make them habitable for others—tailors, barbers, sweetsellers, auto-drivers, wandering sadhus. Several works at the NGMA show share this theme. In one untitled pen-and-ink sketch, a man gets a haircut from a roadside barber. Sadhu with Red Towel focuses our attention on the specifically Indian ways in which nakedness is made unremarkable. Several works portray places of commensality: teashops, streetside eateries, cigarette stalls. In one lovely etching, two men share a mound of food, one of them leaning back with an air of contentment even as a server seems to approach with more. In one large sketch called Celebration of Guru Jayanti (the NGMA curators should have clarified that this is an outline study for Khakhar’s 1980 oil painting of the same name), men occupy the streetscape in groups—chatting, smoking, eating, resting in companionable silence.

Khakhar’s exploration of this male homosociality—for this is the Indian street, of course, and women rarely lay claim to it—seems to me organically linked to his depictions of the homoerotic. Some of these latter images are oblique: consider one pale watercolour image of a pair of men—one half-hidden under a car, the other standing atop it with a hose in his hand. Or the celebrated oil painting Sewa, also on show here, in which a younger man presses the legs of an older one, in the manner of a devoted shishya for his guru. Set in a magical garden setting, Sewa glows with a certain beatitude. It also captures something of Khakhar’s attachment to the figure of the older man: a relationship of love, but also of care.

Khakhar’s own long-term relationships were with older men, usually Gujarati men from the lower middle class: figures often enshrined in his painting. Portrait of Shri Shankarbhai V Patel near the Red Fort is one such early work, on view at the NGMA show. Large, flat areas of colour alternate with precisely rendered trees, the fort’s wall marks the skyline. The bespectacled Shankarbhai is thus inserted into a miniature setting, looking in the direction of a temptingly laid out dish of fruit. At the symposium, the artist Vivan Sundaram spoke of Ranchhodbhai, who ran a teashop next to Khakhar’s house, and was the subject of Ranchhodbhai Relaxing in Bed (1975). Not on view at NGMA, it is a painting that the artist Atul Dodiya remembers making a huge impact on him when he saw it at Bombay’s Jehangir Art Gallery as an art student in 1979. “I felt,‘Wow, I know three Ranchhodbhais in the chawl where I live. And all three look the same.’ I thought, ‘I have never seen anything like this before—the white space, the little colour, the subject.’ This was a Gujarati painting.”

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Khakhar’s resistance to the usual social barriers was integral to his everyday life. The doctor Harsha Hegde, one of his much younger friends who is now part of the trust from which Khakhar’s work is on loan, remembers how the artist actually preferred to work surrounded by people: “He would be helping the children— the neighbours’, or those of his cook— solve mathematical problems, while also painting explicitly gay paintings in the same space. Dinner [at his house] could include me, an artist,and also a gardener, or a gentleman who was serving tea.” He lived what was, to the outward eye, an ordinary middle-class Gujarati life. The refusal to compartmentalise the different parts of his experience extended to his art. He may have fallen in with a crowd of modernist artists, but he retained a profound interest in the religious. This remarkable openness led him both to visual traditions—Nathdwara miniatures, or pilgrimage maps, like the one of Junagarh in which he painted the saint-poet Narsi Mehta—and to lived experience. One of his lovers was a Radhasoami follower, and Khakhar accompanied him to Agra to attend the sect’s gatherings. For Khakhar, sexuality could not, would not, be divorced from other aspects of his being.

Towards the end of his life, Khakhar battled cancer, the motif of suffering entered his work. The exhibition has examples of this theme: the stunning Blind Babubhai (2001), its bright yellows mottled with red; the placid but bloody Injured Head of Raju (2001); the massive diptych Beauty is Skin Deep Only (2000), which opens up the skin’s surface to show us the nerves and tendons beneath; and Bullet Shoot, perhaps the largest frame on show, in which one figure shoots at another, spilling a mass of guts and blood. Perhaps these are mirror images of each other? The shooter, too, has injuries: the body is destroying itself. Even on the verge of breakdown, the self is multiple. 

Published in Open magazine, 19 February 2016. 

Secular Deities, Enchanted Plants: the art of Mrinalini Mukherjee

My essay on the late sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee, published in the newly launched website The Wire.



In one of AS Byatt’s Matisse Stories (1995), a self-declared “artistic family” is stunned to discover that their silent, reliable, long-time housekeeper Mrs. Brown has been making more with their cast-off clothes than the patchwork tea-cosies they grudgingly display. The person most in shock is Robin, serious artist and irritable man of the house, whose repetitive paintings of single objects – ‘problems of colour’, he calls them – are summarily rejected by a fashionable London gallerist. In favour of Mrs. Brown’s dazzling cavern of creatures, knitted and stitched from scraps of wool and cloth.

Mrinalini Mukherjee was no Mrs. Brown. She was the only daughter of the artists Benode Bihari and Leela Mukherjee, and trained in fine arts at Baroda’s MS University. Today, her work is part of the public collections at Bharat Bhavan and Lalit Kala Akademi, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Tate Modern in London–and international interest is only getting stronger. But as the artist Nilima Sheikh, Mukherjee’s close friend and contemporary, points out, “For a very long time, the sculpture world, especially in Delhi and Baroda, didn’t accept her as a sculptor, because ‘woh toh kucch craft mein kar rahi hai‘. But she kept improvising, and pushing the boundaries. Her work became much more relevant [than theirs].”

Peter Nagy, curator of the Mukherjee retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art that opened on 27 January 2015, a week before her unexpected death, goes further. “She got her final revenge,” he chuckles. “Because all those men chiselling away at their chunks of marble in Garhi studio, who pooh-poohed her – very few have gone anywhere, really. In terms of scale, her work just kicks sand in their faces.”

Female, not feminine

Walking into ‘Transfigurations’, as the show at the NGMA is titled, there can be not the slightest doubt that one is in the presence of a brilliantly assured artist. The largest pieces here are the hemp-fibre sculptures that were Mukherjee’s signature for a quarter century, from the early 70s to the mid-90s. The painstaking knotted construction and fluid organic forms may have been responsible for that early, wounding dismissal of this work as ‘craft’, but what leaps out at you is Mukherjee’s ability to turn her malleable, ‘female’ material into stable, imposing, often monumental forms. Frequently, these also display a powerful sense of the sexual.

Close to the entrance, for instance, we are met by ‘Pushp’ (1993) and ‘Adi Pushp’ (1991), which despite their names, belie any idea of the floral as we usually think of it: pretty, summery, sweet-smelling. ‘Adi Pushp’, ‘the first flower’, in particular, is a marvellous evocation of organic growth, the tubular black forms at its centre unfurling into impressive red and brown ‘petals’. Nature in Mukherjee’s conception is no mild, tameable thing. Yet what also emerges from many of her figures is a harmonious continuum between plant, animal and human form; sometimes with the addition of a superhuman element.

The arresting reds and purples of ‘Aranyani’ (1996) combine the sense of some forest flower writ large with that of a female sexual form, and an enthroned regal figure. The three free-standing figures that make up ‘Vruksha Nata’ (1991-92) appear plant-like at first, with their layered stems and fronds in light brown and lime green. But as one looks at them again, their inescapably humanoid qualities come to the fore: a sad, drooping head, a bent back, what seems like the start of a slow, painful hobble towards the other.

The forest is never far away, and Mukherjee’s forms of divinity are often particular to it. ‘Vanshree’ (1994), woven of yellow and mauve, has what seems undeniably like a face. Her eyes are sunken in, or perhaps hooded, with age, or sleep. Her lips protrude, sulkily. An umbrella above her, she sits grandly upon a golden throne, and may or may not grant you an audience. ‘Van Raja’ (1991-94) is even grander. Placed in a woven alcove arched like a temple is a standing figure, very definitely male, but also animal. Is this a tiger turned god, his golden body made erect, to be worshipped amidst his unruly jungle of green?

Crafting Art

For Mrinalini Mukherjee, refusing the hierarchy of high art and low art came naturally. Seeing craft and art as parallel to each other was part of her artistic legacy, both from her parents, and from her mentor at Baroda, Prof. KG Subramanyan. Subramanyan himself had studied at Shantiniketan, and been Benode Behari Mukherjee’s student. “So there was a sort of lineage going on,” says Sheikh. Shaped by Tagore’s rejection of the colonial aesthetic, Shantiniketan’s teachers and practitioners had long taken interest in Indian art forms and indigenous materials. While primarily a painter, Subramanyan took craft seriously enough to have left his teaching job and joined the All India Handloom Board as a Deputy Director for a couple of years in the 1960s. Later, in 1975-76, he was also elected a member of the World Crafts Council.

But how did Mukherjee arrive at her unusual material? In the late 1960s, says Sheikh, during MS University’s annual Fine Arts Fair, the campus was thrown open to the public. Students would often make “gateways, sculptural forms, design units… to make things more festive.” One of the materials used for these was hemp fibre, and even as an undergraduate, Mukherjee was drawn to the possibilities of the material. So she chose mural design as the option for her MA, and asked Subramanyan whether she could specialise only in hemp in the final year.
Subramanyan himself had worked a little in hemp, but Mukherjee’s conception of the material was very much her own. For one, she was remarkably invested in scale. As early as 1972, she was commissioned to produce a 30-foot fibre sculpture for the DCM pavilion at the Asia 72 trade fair. She then did a 45 X 4 foot one for the Ashoka Hotel, and a 14 X 70 foot mural for the Gandhi Memorial Institute at Mauritius. (The Mauritius work still exists, it has recently been photographed by an art enthusiast, hung on the wall on either side of what appears to be an auditorium stage—sadly somewhat robbed of its original grandeur by large black speakers.)
Her second crucial departure was to make her sculptures freestanding, or at least viewable in the round. Mural design, which she trained in, involves working on walls or ceilings: think Italian frescoes, or the Ajanta caves. But after early works, like the Mauritius one, and another on display here, Water Fall (1975), Mukherjee seems to have consciously abandoned murals.

A couple of other works at NGMA do lean against a wall, like Sitting Deity (1981), whose trunk-like form and playfully disc-shaped ‘stomach’ gesture to the elephant-headed, pot-bellied Ganesh. On the whole, though, there is a clear progression being marked from hemp netting as a ‘decorative’ element—something to enhance the look of an already existing structure, like a doorway or wall—to independent forms with a definite structure, shape, bulk. Mukherjee’s work gave hemp heft, metaphorically and literally.

Material matters

But it wasn’t quite enough. In the 1990s, Mukherjee slowly stopped working with hemp. We don’t quite know why. She had been working in a single material since the beginning of her career. Also, from the mid-70s, she had been aided in the laborious knotting and twisting by a woman she had trained, known as Budhiya. By the 90s, Budhiya was too old to assist her, and the work seemed tedious to do alone. There is something interesting here, about the collective labour demanded by craft.

Whatever the reasons, a chance workshop at the Sanskriti Kendra in Anandgram, followed by an invitation to the renowned European Ceramic Work Centre in Den Bosch, the Netherlands, enabled her to explore ceramics. Almost immediately, she began making larger works than most ceramic artists do. A decade or so later, in the early 2000s, she moved into bronze, perhaps the most traditional material for sculptors. “She chose bronze for its longevity, its stature, its seriousness,” says Nagy, who showed her bronzes at a solo show at Nature Morte in 2013, and had earlier curated her ceramics at Lokayata Gallery in Delhi’s Hauz Khas Village.
Looking at the bronzes, one feels, first and foremost, a sense of loss at the disappearance of the deep reds, forest greens and coal blacks that had made her hemp work so vivid. The ceramics, happily, are a mix of unglazed flesh tones and glazed vermilions and purples. All her work is striking, but to me the hemp sculptures remain the most memorable. I would even say she went from a complex mediation of organic forms (in hemp fibre) to a more simple translation of them (in ceramic and bronze).

Natural, sexual, human

But it is nature that brings her work together. The lovely arrangement of ceramics called ‘Lotus Pond’, Nos. I to VIII, gives us overlapping lotus leaves on the water surface, tubular stems turning into chutes and spongy thalamus-like forms. Several of the glazed ceramics are cabbage-like, with veined leaves. Others are flowers opening slowly to the sun, upturned half-globes erupting into life—and yet preserving a sense of hidden orifices.

That keen eye for the voluptuous complexities of nature also extends to the cast bronzes. Most of these are purely vegetal in inspiration, the pleasure of them arising from making us see naturally-occurring textures and shapes anew: the stippled interior of a calyx, the gleaming smoothness of an outer stem, the single palm frond slowly detaching itself from a trunk. Here, too, you see a scalar progression, from the smaller Natural History series (2003-2004) to the bronzed plant limbs of Palm Scapes (exhibited in 2013), massive pieces whose precise sense of balance once led Peter Nagy to describe them as “only slightly perturbed by gravity”.
Speaking at the inauguration of the NGMA retrospective, with her friend Mrinalini in hospital, Nilima Sheikh spoke of the child ‘Dillu’ growing up between Shantiniketan and Dehradun (she studied at Welham School, where her mother Leela taught art). Both were places where people went to be with nature, where artists lived with flowers. “Flowers were planted and grown in gardens, worn, sung in praise of, painted, worked into shorthand in textile and rangolis.” But that childhood love of plants and flowers was transformed, in the artist’s hands, into something anthropomorphic and awe-inspiring.

Talking about art

Mukherjee rarely spoke of her artistic process, and even less of what her art ‘meant’. “No, she would never explain the themes,” laughs Pankaj Guru, her assistant on the bronzes for the last sixteen years. “She would just come to the studio and say, I want to do this. She dreamed those works.”

“She used to resist interpretations of her work at first, even the gender politics in it,” agrees Sheikh. “Later she came to accept various interpretations, and was helped by it, I’m sure.” But on the whole, Sheikh suggests, Mukherjee prized spontaneity. Like her mother, who sculpted in wood and later in bronze, (and unlike her more famous father), she was averse to theorising. “Her intellect, her judgement, her connoisseurship was unparallelled. But she didn’t intellectualise.” In a world in which visual art seems increasingly dependent on the words through which it is mediated, Mrinalini Mukherjee’s art manages to make you ask the question: are words the only way to think?

The Mrinalini Mukherjee retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, continues until May 31, 2015.

Life in a Dream: Project Cinema City

Project Cinema City excavates quirky connections between the Hindi film industry and the city of Bombay.



Recently, at a Rajesh Khanna retrospective at Delhi’s Siri Fort Auditorium, I sat next to a woman and her young—perhaps seven-year-old—daughter. The child watched a film about 36 years older than her—it was Aradhana—with a raptness that was rather lovely, only interrupting occasionally to confirm with her mother her sense of what had just taken place on screen: “Ab usko pata chal gaya ki woh uski maa hai? (Now he’s found out that she’s his mother?)” When the lights came on, she realised the three-hour-film had ended—and there hadn’t been an interval. “Par humne mall mein toh khaaya hi nahi! (But we didn’t even eat anything in the mall),” she exclaimed. “Beta, yeh mall nahin hai (My dear, this is not a mall),” laughed her mother, catching my eye. “Baahar jaake khayenge, chalo (We’ll eat outside, let’s go).”

Wandering through the multifarious attractions of Project Cinema City—a show curated by Madhusree Dutta that emerges out of four years of interdisciplinary research on the production and reception of cinema in urban space by the arts initiative Majlis and KRVIA (the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture)—my thoughts returned to that little girl, for whom the experience of cinema in the city is so completely mediated by the idea of the mall. As one fragment in a massive file kept on the show’s Table of Miscellany reads: ‘Why Go Out? (When there’s a multiplex inside)’.

The multiplex is just one of the sites of cinema in this file, which is a collection of maps and photographs and snatches of conversation about the Mumbai film industry threaded together by Hansa Thapliyal’s wryly matter-of-fact commentary. (Sample: in the section Photo Studios, documenting people posing with filmstars as backdrops: ‘Perhaps following the known codes of payment in the film industry, it costs more to be photographed with the men.’) The file provides a superb introduction to the exhibition, sharing with it an encyclopaedic sensibility that is alternately serious and playful. Browsing through it, you might encounter spot boy Bhaiyalal N Patel telling you what you need to do to create an artificial Juhu beach for a film set, or find yourself looking at studio versions of the locales that you’ve seen in so many Hindi films: ‘the den’, ‘the village’, ‘police station and lock-up’, ‘Krishna Cottage’. You might also find, in the Bar Dancers section, this unannotated poignant timeline of a woman’s life:

2002 Permanent dancer in beer bar
2005 Jobless due to ban on beer bars
2006 Casual and freelance sex worker

Organised by the National Gallery of Modern Art and Ministry of Culture to commemorate 100 years of Indian cinema, Project Cinema City brings together more than 20 artists, designers, technicians and architects in a collaborative show that excavates the connections between the Hindi film industry and the city of Bombay/Bambai/Mumbai, which is both the real-life site of its birth and the imaginary locale where so many of its narratives unfold.

The traits of urban modernity—anonymity, artifice, technology, speed—are echoed in our experience of cinema. Project Cinema City contains several art works that draw on these connections, inviting us to enter a space of fantasy that’s as much about the excitement and frisson of the city as it is about the pleasures of the cinematic. The first of these is a collaborative audio-visual piece that involves a series of women talking of the experience of watching films. One woman talks of how she missed out on a family expedition to the first air-conditioned theatre (Liberty) to show a Hindi film, yet another reminisces about the women of the family doing ‘full-make-up’ in the cinema bathroom so that they were actually late for the movie.

The most marvellous work is documentary filmmaker Paromita Vohra’s So Near yet So Far, composed of three different kinds of phone boxes—a switchboard-era box with various lines for operators, a yellow coin-operated pay phone, and a small red plastic-dial telephone—each of which provides instructions to connect to various kinds of soundtracks. On the switchboard phone, you can listen to fragments of interviews with real-life operators, as well as a text by Baburao Patel which reads like the memoir of an office secretary. The yellow pay phone provides a more workaday, cheerful introduction to what it calls ‘long-distance love’: pressing 3 for Babli will bring you a song that goes “Babli tero mobile, wah re teri ismile (Babli your mobile, and wow, your smile)”, while pressing another number leads you to an exhausted man coming up against the recorded female voice of a BSNL broadband complaint system.

Vohra’s work encourages laughter—the red telephone for example, comes with a written direction in Bambaiyya Hindi ‘Saala phone nahin chala toh ek phatka dene ka (If the bloody phone doesn’t work, give it one whack)’—but it is also a beautifully thought out meditation on the telephone’s role in romance. Once thwacked, the red phone, for instance, conjures up the excitement, urgency and danger of the phone booth and the cross-connection. Partly it’s the use of the Aaj ki Raat soundtrack from the film Anamika (1973), which originally accompanied a vivid, aestheticised picturisation that involves Helen being sexually attacked in a phone booth. But partly it’s just that the exhibit’s sense of mystery and interactivity replicates the delicious sensation of picking up a telephone receiver and finding yourself connected to an unseen world.

Another such interactive work is Archana Hande’s Of Panorama, an exercycle on which the viewer perches to find a life-size image of herself projected onto a series of outdoor backdrops that change and move as you push the pedals. What the photo studio does in still form is here achieved in mobile form, enabling the viewer to actually enter a fantasy world, some of whose frames seem adapted from Hande’s own earlier part-animated artwork for All Is Fair in Magic White, a quirky 2009 show which drew unexpected connections between our dreams of clean cities and our fair-and-lovely obsession.

A lot of space is taken up by a collaborative work called Cinema City Live. This consists of an intricate arrangement of large grey PVC pipes where the mouth of each pipe works as a viewfinder for an image. It’s obvious that the network of pipes is meant to represent the real-life network of places and people that is the film industry. But somehow the piece fails to draw you in.

Some of the more famous names from the art world—Pushpamala N and Atul Dodiya —have contributed more traditional pieces. Dodiya’s disappointingly flat 14 Stations consists of large signboards for stations on Mumbai’s Central Railway line, each anointed by a Hindi film villain of old: so Rehman ponders above Chinchpokli, a young Shatrughan Sinha gets Parel, while Dadar goes to Ajit. The associations between the place and the persona aren’t obvious, at least not to a non-Mumbai denizen—and the work itself, while fun to look at, seems a trifle pointless. The effect is made even more grating by a wall text that has to inform us that the opaque patches of red on the signboards are a gesture to Mumbai’s recent history of violence in public spaces.

Pushpamala N, on the other hand, gives us a performance photography piece that’s a fitting sequel to her 1996–98 work Phantom Lady or Kismet. The current work, Return of the Phantom Lady or Sinful City, again features Pushpamala as Fearless Nadia in a mask and cape, this time rescuing an orphaned girl from a rather impressive top-hatted villain. The photographs take their heroine—and us—through a range of Mumbai locales, new and old and in-between. In one image, three villains in silhouette on a parapet aim their guns at our escaping heroine in a hilarious tableaux set against a new glass building and a construction site strewn with trucks and bulldozers. In another, the Phantom Lady awaits the arrival of the top-hatted villain in a derelict old theatre. The desired effect may be an obvious one, but there is something charming about the way the image achieves a kind of perfect blend of fantasy and realism: the real cinema theatre as a site of fantasy—off-screen.

 Shreyas Karle’s Vastusangrahalaya ki Dukaan, which describes itself as a ‘speculative museum of cinema at a time of post-cinema’, is another version of fantasy-made-real. Karle takes what he calls ‘fetishes foregrounded by Bollywood’ and casts them as sculptural objects. So there is Hands Up, which playfully gestures to a feedback loop between the performativity of real-life Mumbai goons and their on-screen avatars. There’s a multiple place-of-worship locket, and the bottle of Ma ka Doodh (mother’s milk), with a fictitious history: ‘MK Milk, which proved to be a big hit till the Censor Board and GOI decided to ban it…’

Karle’s work has a jokey charm, but draws on a familiar mode of nudge-nudge-wink-wink engagement with Hindi cinema. Only its sculptural form sets it apart from The Calendar Project, a kind of homage to popular calendar art. The calendars, created by different artists, vary in the quality of their wit but add a plethora of visual detail to the show. An imagined 1953 calendar ad for walking sticks features Gandhi (obviously), but also includes a small photo of Gandhi with Charlie Chaplin with the legend ‘the great stick figures of our times?’, while Sashikant Thavudoz’s faux ad for a possibly fictitious tonic—‘Aapko chahiye City Life (You need City Life)’—makes quietly strategic use of a bindi-wearing Rekha as the wife waiting for you at home.

The pleasures of Cinema City, as is probably apparent, are often the pleasures of nostalgia. While there’s a strong archival sensibility at work, the historical gets treated with a wink and smile. It never appears as an object of criticism. The accompanying book-length timeline (though I’ve only glanced through it) may avoid such pitfalls by dint of sheer exhaustiveness, but the art reveals a tendency to romanticise the past, both of the city and of cinema. “Nowadays the hero and the villain are the same colour,” complains an old poster painter. There is the clearly-displayed love-affair with early technology (panorama, telephone, old ads, older films) and the suspicion of the transformations that are altering our experience of the urban (Pushpamala’s construction sites as a place of villainy, the multiplex seen only as a space that insulates us from the ‘real’ city). It’s important to look at our past selves with affection. But coming out of Cinema City, the present seems like a foreign country. The present, though, is all we have. If she’d hated the multiplex, where would the little girl go?

Read the piece on the Open site here.

(Project Cinema City is on at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi until 23 September 2012.)

Ramkinkar Baij: The World according to a Cat Lover

The fate of both peasants and animals in Ramkinkar Baij’s art is a record of change in a post-industrial world.



Walking through the seemingly interminable galleries that house the Ramkinkar Baij retrospective, I overhear a conversation between two stylishly turned out women who appear to have made a Thursday afternoon trip to the NGMA gift shop and walked into the exhibition as an afterthought. “No, no, this can’t still be the same artist,” says Woman 1, puzzled. “Arrey, but see his name is here, Ram Kinkar. Same guy who has done those sculptures, yaar,” says Lady 2. “But these watercolours of his are very pretty,” says the first lady in some surprise.

For the unwarned visitor, Ramkinkar Baij’s oeuvre is indeed bafflingly uncategorisable. He sculpted, he painted, he sketched. He worked in watercolour, in oils and in pen and ink. Also in bronze, terracotta, plaster of paris and what looks like rough-hewn stone but turns out to be concrete. He was famous for throwing cement mortar and laterite pebbles directly onto a frame, creating larger-than-life sculptures so huge, so rugged that they seem almost like natural occurrences—but he also did delicate little sketches, barely a few centimetres square. If you happen to walk around with a canon of Western art in your head, you will find Baij images that look distinctly Cubist and others whose round fleshy bodies might remind you of Matisse. There are rooms full of paintings that could be called ‘pretty’, and other rooms that provide a glimpse of his more elemental work, usually in sculpture.

The changeability of his ouevre seems to echo the changeability of the man himself—at least as far as he is revealed to us in photographic portraits. There is the iconic image where he looks rather wildly out of the frame, his curly hair dishevelled, his torso bare—but there is also the gentle, almost drowsy old man of the (also iconic) image, ever so softly petting a cat on his lap. In an early photograph, we see him in Shillong with Binodini—his muse and long-time companion—almost foppish in a white kurta-pajama, a pristine shawl draped over his shoulders, hand perched on his hip in an attitude of studied insouciance. In others, we see a rather different Ramkinkar: clad in bush shirt and trousers, a deliberate departure, one presumes, from the kurtas, pajamas, dhotis that were de rigueur at Santiniketan. Then, in an image where he poses next to one of his more abstract sculptures, Speed, the plain, practical, artist-at-work quality of the shirt-and-trousers is all but erased by the flamboyant addition of sunglasses—and quite brilliantly, a conical straw hat. It is as if Ramkinkar assembled a ‘modern’ look, a half-joking challenge to anyone who might slot him as a peasant—and then, chuckling to himself, added the Chinese rice farmer hat.

The playful deliberateness of that Chinese straw hat—which he actually used quite often, whether he was wearing trousers and a shirt and teaching students at Visva Bharati, or wandering lungi-clad through the villages around Santiniketan, finding new things to make art out of—is of a piece with Ramkinkar’s approach to his art.

So, for example, in the footage he shot for a documentary about Ramkinkar, another great Bengali maverick modernist, the filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, quizzes the artist about his famed sculpture Mill Call. Among the six gigantic outdoor pieces on the Visva Bharati University campus, Mill Call consists of two adult figures taking a giant stride forward, their muscular bodies stretched to capacity. But even as they seem to move ahead, with a child following close on their heels, one of them turns back, looking at something that’s flying out behind them. “What’s going on here, Kinkar da?” asks Ghatak. “These are coolies, they work in the rice mill,” says Ramkinkar. “They have heard the whistle and are running to work. But they have to go so early that their clothes aren’t dry yet. They dry their clothes while running to the mill.”

Looking at a massive photographic reproduction of Mill Call earlier at the NGMA (the original sculpture is immovable), I had seen those powerful arms held aloft and imagined them to be holding weapons, or tools of trade. To be told that they are clothes drying in the breeze is to suddenly encounter Baij’s incongruous laughter.

And yet Mill Call (1956), like its predecessor Santhal Family (1938), derives its iconicity precisely from Baij’s clear-eyed representation of a social transformation: of the local Santhal tribals from forest gatherers and agriculturists to factory hands. If the Santhal family is migrating with all its meagre belongings (and dog), the explanation Ramkinkar gave to Ghatak suggests that Mill Call, rather than being simply another innately heroic socialist image of the worker, stems from a recognition of how the rhythms of human life are irrevocably altered by industrial time. At one level it is a straightforward image about capitalism’s takeover of everyday time; at another, it is about hurtling into the future even as you look back at the past—blown irresistibly forward by the storm of progress, like Paul Klee’s Angel of History.

And it is not just the experience of time that is transformed with modernity, Ramkinkar seems to say, it is the human body, and sometimes, our way of seeing itself. With The Harvester (1943), he created a labouring body that was almost machine-like in its angularity and power. The natural gesture—of lifting up the scythe and bending backward to gain maximum momentum—is crystallised into an idealised form that is nearly abstract. In the painting Palm Grove (1960), he takes the bottom section of a grove of palm trees and creates from the criss-crossing trunks a vivid, almost geometrical image. Then there is his thoroughly abstract depiction of Spring, as also his two 1969 paintings At the Foot of the Arakan Hills and Atomica, which seem to owe a little too much to the style and imagery of Picasso’s Guernica.

And yet, the same Ramkinkar has also left behind a vast collection of paintings and sketches which seem very much to be drawn from life: deft little landscapes and portraits, in which we get a clear sense of light and colour and movement, bodies, gaits, even expressions. How are these seemingly contradictory styles to be explained? This “oscillating between representation and abstraction,” says Professor A Ramachandran on one of the exhibition’s explanatory plaques, “has been the characteristic of Kinkar da’s works.”

Certainly Ramkinkar’s early watercolours, starting in the 1940s, seem much less preoccupied with being conceptual than representational. His sense of colour is instinctive and always vivid, if often slapdash; his fluid, quick-drawn lines never fail to evoke a posture, a gesture, though also—almost unfailingly—a mood. Girls walking up a mountain path in Kullu, the only splash of red in a blue-green landscape, effortlessly communicate cheerfulness. His yellow-ghomta’d Standing Woman, one hand with palm open, almost in supplication, the other bent at an impossible angle, as if about to open the door and retreat out of our sight, seems uncomfortable, fretful.

Several other portraits are what might be called ethnographic, where the individual subject seems subsumed into a regional—and physical—type. Bhutia (1949), for example, is the very image of stolidity: a grizzled man swaddled in a coat or maybe two, his feet planted deliberately on the ground like tree trunks, as if he might keel over under his own weight. In stark contrast is Assam Tribesman (1950), a figure Ramkinkar chooses to etch in profile: his long lithe legs exposed under a colourful upper garment, the very picture of grace.

The largest group of works in this retrospective probably comprises Ramkinkar’s depictions of birds and animals. The relatively few sculpted creatures do not seem to aim for realism: like Horse, a wonderful piece in plaster where two human figures seem attached to the horse, so that all three together come across as a single living being, or the almost cartoonish, yet affectingly tender, terracotta Dog. The most famous of Ramkinkar’s sculpted animals are at the exhibition only in photographs, and these, too, in different ways, are not quite lifelike. The first of these is the massive dog that accompanies his Santhal family on their travels: an open-mouthed, snouty creature whose presence lends Ramkinkar’s vision of migration a mythical dimension—one thinks of Yudhishtira and the dog at the end of the Mahabharata. The second is his buffaloes, sculpted for a fountain outside a Santiniketan girls’ hostel. At first glance, the two animals at the base of the fountain seem like normal buffaloes, wallowing in shallow water, chewing the cud. The swishing tails of buffaloes shooing away flies on a hot summer day, are a common enough sight in India. But Ramkinkar’s playful gaze has turned them into fishtails. So the creatures we see are like hybrids out of Abol-Tabol—if Sukumar Ray imagined a half-duck-half-porcupine, haansh-jaru, these could be half-buffalo-half-fish, mosh-maachh.

But many more of Ramkinkar’s animals and birds are watercolours or pen-and-ink studies, and these are almost always ‘realistic’ renderings. Domesticated animals appear consistently: dogs, cats, horses, donkeys , pigs and most frequently cattle. A cow turning its head, a calf tied to a stake, buffaloes with people on their backs, bullocks ploughing a field: these are unsentimental portraits, the animals seem merely part of a rural landscape: creatures that are of interest only because they are integral to a peasant economy, not individuals in their own right. Then suddenly, amid all these working beasts, a gesture brings you up short: a woman in a field, petting a cow.

In a marvellous essay called ‘Why Look at Animals’, John Berger has written of how the advent of modernity has transformed our relationship with animals. The internal combustion engine displaced draught animals in streets and factories, while expanding cities transformed more and more of the surrounding countryside into suburbs ‘where field animals, wild or domesticated, became rare’. As animals disappear from daily life, they become less and less real to us; they are no longer creatures whose otherness we recognise. Families of all classes earlier kept animals because they served a domestic purpose—guard dogs, hunting dogs, mice-killing cats, and so on, but as Berger points out, ‘the practice of keeping animals regardless of their usefulness, the keeping, exactly, of pets… is a modern innovation’. As pets, deprived of almost all other animal contact, they necessarily become ‘creatures of their owners’ way of life’. And the zoo, where most of us must now go to observe wild animals, exists as a monument to the impossibility of any real encounter between animals and us.

R Siva Kumar has suggested that Ramkinkar saw animals through the intimate but unsentimental eyes of a peasant, whose ‘interaction with the animal world is more constant, he not only knows his animals better, but also experiences them as sentient beings without the least amount of romanticism’. But to me, Ramkinkar’s lifelong preoccupation with animals seems to stand on the threshold, forming a cusp between that older peasant world and an emerging modern world of pets and zoos. On the one hand he captured with lucidity the unremarkable sight of pigs and dogs and cattle wandering freely through his beloved Santhal villages; on the other, on a trip to Baroda, he seems to have spent most of his time in the zoo, sketching lions and monkeys and the hulking immobility of baboons. Most revealing of all are Ramkinkar’s many sketches of cats and kittens: Cat Family, Three Kittens, Three Cats. Unlike any of his other animals, they have personalities. In one famous image called Artist and his Models (Kittens), a lithograph from 1968, several large, unruly kittens with big expressive faces play a game of rough-and-tumble, dwarfing the artist, a rather crazed-looking black figure without a face. They have exaggerated facial expressions, almost like the anthropomorphic features of cartoon animals. They seem, in other words, like pets.

Towards the end of his magisterial essay, John Berger writes: ‘The marginalisation of animals is today being followed by the marginalisation and disposal of the only class who, throughout history, has remained familiar with animals and maintained the wisdom which accompanies that familiarity: the middle and small peasant.’ The fate of both animals and peasants in the art of Ramkinkar Baij is a record of the same inevitable trajectory—of disappearance and co-option in a post-industrial universe.

Published in Open magazine.

Delhi: Postcards from the Last Century

On a photography exhibition:


Images courtesy of Alkazi Foundation for the Arts

The Alkazi Foundation’s newest exhibition of vintage photographs is an ambitious one: it takes as its subject a much-photographed city, while limiting itself to images from a time that ensures that very few visitors to the show will recognize that city as one they know. 'Historic Delhi: Early Explorations of the Camera c. 1860-1950', showing at the National Gallery of Modern Art, consists almost entirely of photographs from the last century of colonial rule. But under that broad rubric is a variety of pictures.

There are memorable – if strangely empty – images of Delhi’s monuments after 1857 for example, created by pioneering photographers like Samuel Bourne and Felice Beato, and there are high-quality photographs, often of the same monuments, taken for documentary purposes by the Archaeological Survey of India. There are photographs by the famous pre-independence studios, like Lala Deen Dayal, documenting with aplomb such grand affairs as the Delhi Durbars of 1903 and 1911, or showing troops being dispatched along the Grand Trunk Road, a cloud of dust rising around the horses’ feet. There are a few lovely, carefully chosen pictures from the 1940s and 1950s, mostly taken by the news photographer couple Maneckshaw and Homai Vyarawalla – these include some haunting images of Ramlila performers. And finally, there are the anonymous images – annotated, if we’re lucky, with a year and a subject.

In some ways, it is these last that are the most interesting, because they fit less easily into any preconceived category in our heads. Looking at an image like ‘Miss Azijan of Delhi, c.1905’ – a young and pretty woman, photographed without purdah and alone, in 1905 – one imagines she must be a courtesan. But not knowing the photographer or his purpose – British or Indian, old or young, official or tourist, admirer or anthropologist – sharpens our interest. One’s eyes linger longer on Miss Azijan’s carefully arranged pose: one knee placed perfectly upon another, the self-possessed finger on her chin, and the face that remains somehow towards the camera – even as her gaze turns intriguingly away.

Sometimes, of course, a mere caption is enough to slot the image: a shy looking young girl with large earrings, dressed in gypsy fashion, can never escape the words, ‘Delhi Dancing Girl, c. 1905’. It was Jean-Luc Godard who once pointed out that the photograph is “physically mute”. “It talks,” he said, “through the mouth of the text beneath it.” Sometimes, I suppose, that can be a good thing. There are certainly moments when this exhibition comes to life through the inscriptions. Not contemporary curatorial ones (though those are informative enough), but old inscriptions that mark the image, conjuring up with great immediacy the past that lies congealed within it. A postcard with an image of the Mutiny Memorial that bears an exceptionally clear Leighton Buzzard postmark for May 23, 3pm (though the year was illegible to me) – and this laconic message: “Dear Flo, This place was put up by comrades of the men who died in the mutiny.” Closer to the bone is the image of Bara Hindu Rao, with a handwritten inscription as follows: “Our main picquet during the siege. Very hard fighting all round this place.”

Whether the past you’re looking for lies in the stately and studiously composed archival image, or in the postcard accidentally discovered, this is an exhibition worth visiting.

(Published in The India Tube)