Art For the Binge-Watcher

A quick wrap of the current art scene for India Today magazine:

Virtual platforms are breaking the barriers of social distancing with new ways of exhibiting art

'The Half Of It', a painting from Nityan Unnikrishnan's upcoming solo show, It Is Getting Louder,
opening on Nov 13, 2020 at Chatterjee and Lal Gallery, Mumbai

You might think that visual artists have had it better than most during the Covid-propelled lockdown, and you would be right. Most artists work alone, and display only needs to shift from the clean white 3D cube of the art gallery to the 2D rectangle of the digital screen. So even as the lockdown left a series of shuttered shows in its wake, many galleries rose to the challenge. One exciting development has been In Touch, a digital platform created collaboratively by galleries across India (Artintouch.in/).

Edition 4 of In Touch, which runs till November 10, includes Rustom Siodia’s little-seen 1920s and ’30s watercolours on the Chatterjee and Lal site, Kanu Gandhi’s astonishingly intimate photographs of the Mahatma on PhotoInk, Dhruvi Acharya’s arresting pandemic-inspired work at Nature Morte, and Buddhadev Mukherjee’s marvellously humorous human figures, playful studies in scale, at Mirchandani + Steinruecke. Chemould Prescott Road is showing Lavanya Mani’s ‘Game of Chance’, mixing science with miracles and omens in a manner perfect for a pandemic year. In ‘Miraculous Sights 2’, a town floats into the sea aboard a ship, which itself hovers over the scaly back of a submarine creature. In the hypnotic ‘Portents’, a gigantic red flower opens a bleeding glass eye to a world buffeted by strange animal-headed comets.

In Touch’s on-screen display is effective: you can see a chosen artwork as it might look on a wall (with a virtual chair for scale) and zoom in. I wish, though, that more galleries had done what Gallery Espace has with Manjunath Kamath’s dream-like pastiches, to identify sections of each work for higher-resolution reproduction. It feels like a privilege to have his strange, vivid imagination enlargeable on one’s private screen: a pile of books in flames as an elephant grazes placidly in a field outside, a television splashing into a bathtub, an angel approaching a Mumbai taxi, or a giraffe a buffet.

Others, too, have made efforts online. The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art has a superb virtual tour. Kolkata’s CIMA has a new website. The uncertainty of recent months seems to have pushed the artistic process into the foreground. Mumbai’s Tarq Gallery is presenting Garima Gupta’s notes and sketches from the Southeast Asian wildlife trade, “unarchived fragments of a conflict that is pushing us into a war with the very world we inhabit”. Nature Morte offers up a downloadable colouring book by Acharya, while Kolkata’s Emami Gallery has devised a virtual flipbook. The flipbook is a great format both for Prasanta Sahu’s Suburban Shadows (see below) and Aroh, a group show that came out of Emami’s open call for lockdown work by young artists (I particularly liked Arindam Sinha’s ‘Marking’, Arpita Akhanda’s ‘Hung Up On the Past’ and Jahnavi Khemka’s ‘Lockdown 1’). Finally, the digital crossing of geographical limits allowed us to view, sitting in India, 35 sketches from the late great modernist Ram Kumar’s 1960s and ’70s notebooks on Art Basel’s Online Viewing Rooms.

But while the hushed silences and ‘no touching’ rules of the gallery may feel only a step away from the literal untouchability of a virtual display, an aura still clings to the work of art in the era of digital reproduction. Three of the five shows to look out for this month, at DAG and Art Heritage Galleries in Delhi, and at Chatterjee and Lal in Mumbai, are open for offline visitors.

From Prasanta Sahu's ongoing show 'Suburban Shadows', online on the website of Emami Art Gallery, Kolkata

ART RESTART: Five art events to keep an eye out for

Nityan Unnikrishnan’s solo show It is Getting Louder, showing at Mumbai’s Chatterjee and Lal gallery from November 13 to January 2, feels very much like India right now. The acrylic images on khadi spill over with people: reading, eating, dreaming, waiting. The other set of the images, graphite on muslin or bamboo fibre paper, are abstract, filled with black and white forms which could be anything: masts, mountains, plants, porcupines. All that unites them is their jaggedness.

Art Heritage Gallery, Delhi, together with Kolkata’s Seagull Foundation, is showing The Self Portrait, a show of early and rare woodblock prints, sketches and watercolours by the late K.G. Subramanyan, who died in 2016, aged 92. They aren’t all depictions of the artist: watch out for ‘Jangpura Women’ (1950), and many striking untitled linocuts and litho prints of seated women. Open by appointment till December 15.

DAG’s The World Will Go On, on view online since October 25, will be open to visitors at The Claridges, Delhi, between November 2 and 12. Highlights include a 1980 Raza, an M.F. Husain Hanuman, Nandalal Bose’s ‘Diwali’, and one of Krishen Khanna’s bandwalla images.

Prasanta Sahu’s Suburban Shadows, on the Emami Gallery website till November 30, visibilises the links between rural and urban through his studies of food and farming: a lettuce in a shopping cart, vegetables sprouting from human limbs, a bhindi as skeleton, shadows of the labouring body.

Five Million Incidents, a set of public art interventions funded by the Goethe Institute, has been reconceptualised in digital form. Visit Goethe.de/ins/in/en/ver.cfm to join the imaginary chatroom of Ranjana Dave’s Age Sex Location, add to Sultana Zana’s Fieldness, a collaborative digital archive of time spent in nature in the city, or log in to play Shraddha Borawake’s virtual game Chaat Meets... A New World Order on November 7.

 Published in India Today magazine, 8 Nov 2020. (Two separate links)

Virtually Masterful: Raja Ravi Varma on Google Arts and Culture

A piece for the latest issue of India Today, on a new Raja Ravi Varma exhibition -- online.

In Reena Mohan’s 1992 documentary about Kamlabai Gokhale, there’s a moment when the remarkably lively nonagenarian actor remembers Dadasaheb Phalke, the father of Indian cinema, whose 1913 mythological Mohini Bhasmasur made Gokhale one of the first Indian women to appear on screen. Her gaze settles contentedly on an image she has clearly held in her mind for nearly 80 years. “Black sherwani, pagri on his head, spectacles,” she says. “He was like someone in a Ravi Varma painting. It made you happy to see him.”

Raja Ravi Varma may well be the only Indian artist to have achieved such instant recall, and retained it for a century and a half. Born in 1848 into a family close to the Travancore royals, he was already a household name in Gokhale’s turn-of-the-century childhood. Starting as a portraitist to princes, Varma’s printing press made his work wildly popular in reproduction. His chromolithographs of Hindu deities and his scenes from the epics and myths became calendar art and advertisements. Millions were happy to see them.

On April 29 this year, Ravi Varma’s 172nd birth anniversary, Google Arts and Culture unveiled a massive digital retrospective of his work, with over 700 images and videos. Although many of these were already online, the Google exhibit offers higher resolution images and new kinds of access by grouping works from across museums into thematic ‘stories’, creating a display that caters to a wide range of visitors.

You can choose, for instance, to go on a photographic tour of the Kilimanoor Palace in Kerala, Varma’s home. You can attend to his realistic detailing of jewellery, or look at plants in his images. You can focus on a particular painting, like ‘The Bombay Songstress’—displayed here with a brief musical clip from the classical singer Anjanibai Malpekar, who may have been its subject. You can go beyond Varma to works stylistically inspired by him, in portraiture or in popular advertising, where his style was copied as standard form. You can watch a video about designer khadi saris that duplicate Varma paintings. You can run a search for all the green images, or all the yellow ones. The ‘Art Transfer’ feature turns your photos into artworks, while ‘Art Projector’ can bring a work into your living room. “We aim to develop technology that lowers some of the barriers to accessing culture, and is playful and engaging,” Simon Rein, program manager at Google Arts and Culture, told me on email. “People who know and love Ravi Varma’s work already will have plenty to find when reading the stories and zooming into his masterpieces. But for everyone else, browsing by colour, to take your example, might just be the starting point to discover the beauty of his art for the first time.”

Google names nine partner organisations for this online exhibition, of whom the most important appear to be the Ganesh Shivaswamy Foundation, with eight stories, and the Raja Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation, with 20. Each individual image is usefully annotated, but curatorial text across stories is marred by repetition, contradiction, non-standardised spelling and even typos. 

For instance, a panel in one story reads: “Repeated demand for copies of his paintings led Sir Madhava Rao, the diwan of Travancore, to suggest that Varma have some of his paintings reproduced as prints. Although paintings were earlier sent to Europe, mainly Germany, to be lithographed... Ravi Varma chose to set up his own printing press in Maharashtra in 1894 instead.” Another story narrates the same thing differently, and with alternate spellings: “It was the repeated demand for copies of his paintings which led to the suggestion by Dewan Sir Tanjavur Madhava Row that Ravi Varma send some of his paintings to Europe to have them oleographed.”

Elsewhere, the facts get confusing: “The Ravi Varma Fine Art Lithographic Press was set up in first in Ghatkopar and eventually in Lonavala”, we read in ‘The Gods Came Home’. But another story on the press states equally categorically that “The Ravi Varma Fine Art Lithographic Press was set up in Girgaum, Bombay, and commenced its operations.” These may seem like quibbles, but they represent a wider tendency, especially rife online. Google Arts and Culture wants its India-specific exhibitions to match those in the world’s great brick-and-mortar museums, more editorial oversight is needed.

 

SIDEBAR:

Three more Google Arts and Culture Themes Relating to India

Women in India: Unheard Stories is a marvellously thoughtful response to the skewed coverage of women in the media. Online exhibits range from "Inspirational Firsts' like Dr. Rakhmabai, the first practicing woman doctor in India to present-day women scientists, from depictions of the female body in Indian temple art to stories about women artists

Crafted in India, created in collaboration with the Dastkari Haat Samiti and others, is a rare virtual engagement with the stunning variety of artisanal skills that still survive in India. With videos that take you from a wood-carving town in UP to an Assamese organisation making paper from rhino and elephant dung, this is the best kind of travel, and not just in Covid-19 times.

The brilliant Indian Railways exhibit caters as much to history and engineering nerds as to wannabe virtual travellers, introducing you to station-masters and historic architecture as well allowing you to travel famous Indian railway routes in 360 degree glory.

Published in India Today, Sat 27 June 2020. 

The page as it appears in print below:

Gulabo Sitabo mines what remains of old Lucknow for visual a

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/minding-the-gap/articleshow/76668202.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Gulabo Sitabo mines what remains of old Lucknow for visual a

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/minding-the-gap/articleshow/76668202.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Art stops at nothing

A short feature for India Today magazine.

Displaying work created during the lockdown, a virtual initiative proves the pandemic won’t stymie art.

As the weeks of India’s coronavirus lockdown dragged into months, many of those privileged enough to isolate started to chafe at the bit. But not artists. Almost all those involved in Art Alive Gallery’s #ArtForHope initiative confess that their working lives are less disrupted than most people’s. Virus or no virus, visual artists are so used to days spent in splendid isolation that they exhibit few signs of cabin fever.

Many of the senior names, Krishen Khanna (b. 1925), Maite Delteil (b. 1933), Sakti Burman (b. 1935), Gopi Gajwani (b. 1938) and Jogen Chowdhury (b.1939), had already retreated from the hubbub of gallery openings and art fairs. They are devoting themselves to work with enviable focus and often childlike enthusiasm. Gajwani, for instance, has been drawing after many years, describing these solitary times with impish humour. In one of his drawings, a man at his window ignores a curious crow and an expectant dog. In another, a man has tied himself into a knot: a large ball of thread that rolls on even as he tries to unravel it. In a third, a painter baulks at the sight of his own easel, like it is a mirror.

Others, too, speak of the lockdown as a time of greater reflection. “As artists, we like our solitude,” painter Jayasri Burman says on the phone. “Yes, first I was confused, I was crying. What is this coronavirus? What will happen? Artistically, I responded as I had during the tsunami and 9/11. I started making abstract drawings. They’re like my private diary. I might show that work some day, but not now.” Burman, who draws on the Indian epics and myths for her jewel-like canvases filled with dreamy women, says she settled down when the Navaratras began. “I painted Durga, who is important to me. Then I came back to my Dharitri, the universe,” she says. Like her goddesses who often shelter other creatures even as they are themselves sheltered, by the multi-headed Shesh Nag, trees filled with birds, or cornucopias of lotuses, her current work is a world map on a sea of blue, protected by mandala-like rings of ducks and fish. “Nature is now protesting. And she decides how she will clean up,” Burman says. “All we can do is maintain harmony and try to improve. Humans need to learn that you cannot take any panga with nature.”

Several artists have responded to the unseeable threat by envisioning the virus. Kolkata-based Chandra Bhattacharya, who speaks of a constant “uneasy feeling” during these months, offers up the image of a man emerging from a tunnel, a flaming blue torch in his hand, the virus blooming, or being conquered?

Debasish Mukherjee’s series of inky blobs with ragged edges seem to suggest the virus is embodied in other human beings: now faceless, now utterly real.

Jogen Chowdhury extends his distinctive visual vocabulary of men and beasts to create drawings in which the human figure cowers in the face of a demonic presence that is all claws and tongues.

But in ‘Corona Vs Man-Man Vs Corona I’, the creature who holds up the virus for examination has turned into a beast himself, ridges running down his back.

US-based Tara Sabharwal, who is recovering from (untested) pneumonia, has been doing ink drawings of “menacingly beautiful cellular creatures in armour, with jelly-like frightened interiors”.

“The way to keep hope alive is to actually feel this moment... It is so heavy, it gets one down. But to run away from it would be to not be able to go to the next step,” says Sabharwal.

SIDEBAR: "THIS IS NOT A WAR"
 

Krishen Khanna is 95 and still paints daily. “It’s like a demon inside me that wants it,” he says on the phone. “I have been through more than one migration, seen how people are forced to live in new situations. And this is not new, pushing people around: think Tughlaq. But this is probably the worst.”

Born in Faisalabad in what is now Pakistani Punjab, Khanna was a schoolboy in England during World War II and his vivid memories of war and Partition offer sobering comparison and perspective.

“The people in charge are still talking of winning the “battle” against coronavirus. As if it is a war. But it is not. This is our overreach. We are the sole generators of this. There is a need for re-examination of the human spirit.”

Published in India Today magazine, 6 June 2020.

The Krishen Khanna sidebar appeared in the same spread, in print. 

Coffee Break: thoughts on Stuart Freedman's pictures of Indian Coffee Houses

The Palaces of Memory: Tales from the Indian Coffee House is Stuart Freedman's visual journey of urban India.

 

The Indian Coffee House, Kollam (now closed), 2013

When Stuart Freedman first arrived in Delhi in the mid-90s, it felt overwhelming. "I'd been to Pakistan, I'd been at the siege of Kabul, but India was something else," laughs the British photographer, now a veteran of many visits. "When I needed a break from the relentless push and pull of the city, I'd go to the Coffee House and be quiet. It was a refuge." But it wasn't till about 2010 that he picked up his camera inside one of them. Soon after, on assignments in Jaipur and Kolkata, he ended up photographing the Indian Coffee Houses there. "Then I knew it was a book," says Freedman, in Delhi for the Indian launch of his photo-exhibition and accompanying book, The Palaces of Memory: Tales from the Indian Coffee House (Tasveer/ Dauble, 2017).

If you grew up in urban India before liberalisation, the Coffee House, or at least the idea of it, is likely to have been part of your coming of age. Set up by the British government in the 1930s as a response to the Depression-era decline in coffee exports, the India(n) Coffee House chain did much more than create a local demand for the beverage. Its outposts across India became places where middle-class people met, to drink coffee, yes, but also to discuss politics and poetry and the day's gossip, to meet classmates after class or colleagues after work, or to conduct a romantic rendezvous in a place that offered anonymity but also safety. In short, to do all those things that not many places in the 20th century Indian city yet enabled, and to do so in a public place, inexpensively.

Yet, while the Coffee House experience captured something of modern western urbanity, it also represented India's unabashed, wholehearted claiming of it. Here, we produced our own version of modernity: where the coffee came in white ceramic cups (with saucers) but the kettles were aluminium; where you might cut up a mutton cutlet with a knife and fork but happily eat sambar-vada with your hands. Palaces of Memory does the much-needed job of making us look afresh at these remarkable places in our midst, their unpretentious formica tables and faded Gandhi-Nehru images offering a magical window into a vanished past. As the post-liberalisation city around it grows ever more brash and shiny, the more the Coffee House seems like a holdout: the last surviving outpost of what Amit Chaudhuri's 'Prologue' calls a "deliberately, almost jealously protected austerity".

A waiter serves schoolgirls beneath a portrait of Rabindranath Tagore in the Indian Coffee House, Kolkata, 2013

Freedman's images do not shy away from this plainness, or signs of age: the peeling walls, the fraying pockets of uniforms, the blackened switchboards, table legs balanced in empty Amul cheese tins. But his gaze is affectionate, forgiving, even celebratory. Even a fly sitting in a bowl of sugar seems innocuous, yet another visitor to the Coffee House who hasn't been turned away. "I'm not romantic about India, the nonsense about elephants and maharajas. But there is a romance about what the Coffee Houses allow people to do. You can sit all afternoon with a cup of coffee and no one's going to tell you to leave," Freedman says. "I'm from Hackney, from a working class background. The Coffee House became this kind of translation device for me because I saw the same people there as in the cafes at home."

Of course, Coffee Houses are not all the same. "South Indian ones have much more substantial food," says Freedman. And one Coffee House might cater to different constituencies: retired old men, college students, middle-aged couples or a family on a ritual outing, young lovebirds. But what all these people are likely to have in common is that they are lower middle class.

Men sit and talk in the Indian Coffee House, Baba Kharak Singh Marg, New Delhi, 2010

Freedman is clearly drawn to places that democratise leisure. If England's greasy spoon cafes summon up an era of post-war rationing that he didn't quite witness, his book on another dying British institution, the Eel, Pie and Mash shop, "is really about [his] past" and "that section of London's working class that feels dislocated". He has also photographed the cafes of Cairo "as a way to examine the Egyptian revolution". Does he see Indian Coffee Houses as resisting the neoliberal economy? "Modern cities privatise space," Freedman agrees. "Places where people gather and are not monetised like Starbucks are places where people discuss. And discussion is dangerous to the state. Indira Gandhi knew this; she closed the Coffee House during Emergency, saying it was seditious."

Indian Coffee House, Chandigarh, India, 2013

What also makes the Indian Coffee Houses unique is that they are worker-run. In the 1950s, after the Coffee Board decided to privatise 43 outlets and fired many employees, the workers formed cooperative societies and persuaded the management to let them run the outlets.

Freedman's many superb portraits of waiters and kitchen staff are testament to the wonderful sense of ownership that pervades the Coffee Houses as a result. In one image in Palaces, a frail old man in a dhoti sits with his back to a man in collared shirt and trousers. As they raise their identical cups of coffee to their lips, one has the sense of a world in perfect balance, something sadly missing in the world outside.

Published in India Today magazine, 16 Mar 2018.

Stepping out of story

My Mirror column:

MF Husain’s transporting 1967 short film ‘Through the Eyes of a Painter’ seems to laugh at our desire for narrative, yet teases us with a million possible stories.

MF Husain’s ‘Through the Eyes of a Painter’ won the National Award for experimental film in 1967. It was also shown at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it won a Golden Bear award in the Short Film category. It’s not hard to see why. In the space of barely 17 minutes, it manages to evoke an entire universe. That universe is rural Rajasthan, and it is signposted by recurring visual markers. Husain picks them out of the landscape with such precision that it instantly begins to feel as if these indeed are what makes up life in Rajasthan: a cow, an umbrella, the hurricane lamp better known as laltain, a handmade leather shoe delicately upturned at the toe...

But is Husain really picking these images out of the landscape, or is he populating the landscape with them? It’s hard to be sure. Perhaps both? Everywhere, Pandit Vijay Raghava Rao’s brilliant background score makes the gaze flow in a certain way, and seems to make the image move at a certain speed.

A cow appears to charge in our direction; a hurricane lamp waits in a natural alcove formed in a wall of rock; a black umbrella, a single jooti and another lantern are poised expectantly on a ledge. The camera glides up to the top of the fort walls, the lookout from which the royal inhabitants would look down at the ordinary folk below. And in perfect progression, we start to see the ordinary people. A man hurries through a barren landscape with an earthen pot held aloft; a series of women walking on the street find themselves captured, in succession, in the natural frame created by a door.

Then Husain starts to combine his camera images with painted figures. His almost life-size sketches appear, propped up against real walls, with real people beside them. A man with a moustache and earring is followed by Husain’s depiction of the type. A woman fastens the string of her ghaghra, laughing: the camera is flirtatious but not quite intrusive. It takes in, from a just-decent distance, a row of women bathing and washing clothes, squatting along the edge of a large water tank. The next thing we see is the painter’s brush, using just a few strokes of black on white to conjure up the female body in a choli.

‘Through the Eyes of a Painter’ was made under the auspices of the Films Division, in a time when it had a remarkable director called Jean Bhownagary – credited in this film with “Experimentation” (Husain gets “Creation”). If you watch the film on Youtube, you will see below it the following comments: “I am not understanding this video. is there any one who can explain", followed by “samaj me ni aaya koi bata dega story kya thi plz......”, not to mention a request for “Please English sub”, mysterious for a film with no dialogue except Husain’s brief introduction, which is in English. These comments are made funnier by the fact that the film starts with a disclaimer that could not be clearer: “No story. Impressions of painter Husain as he passes through Bundi, Chitor, Jaisalmer in Rajasthan”.

What is this desperation for story in cinema? In one of those serendipitous sequences that life sometimes offers, I watched Husain’s film on Friday, and on Saturday morning, found myself at a symposium in Delhi at which the filmmaker Gurvinder Singh (Anhe Ghore da Daan, Chauthi Koot) was discussing his relationship with narrative. “There are two kinds of films,” he said. “There are films which record events, and there are films which use the camera to create narrative.”

Singh’s films are meditative and evocative, with the plot and characters often intentionally not foregrounded. He studied filmmaking under the late Mani Kaul, who once described himself in an interview (published in the book Uncloven Space) as having spent all his life “trying to find different ways to do away with a linear narrative”. The linear narrative – which is the basis of all fiction, including the fiction film – puts “a bug in your mind” that “it should start from here and finish there”. But, said Kaul, “the experience of life is not like this. A person tries to say one thing and fifty other things come in the way.” Which is why, Kaul said, he was interested in documentary.

To take that thought and return to Husain's film is to realise that while there is no story, the possibility of a story is contained in every image. The little girl trailing her mother is shadowing the possibility of a future life. The little boy listening to the old man suggests a cycle of generations. Sometimes the story is contained in forms: the hand swirling jalebis is echoed by a man winding a turban. A black chhatri (umbrella) falls from an architectural chhatri (pavilion).

Tightening the screws on a single story means having to carve out most of the multiplicity of experience. No film can ever hope to contain everything. And all art is artifice. But watching the gentle wizardry of Husain’s 50-year-old film, one wonders: does art really need to step so far away from life as it has done in our time?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Feb 2018.

Thin Grey Line

An essay I wrote for the Taj Magazine.

Is photography a science or an art? And how does a photo change if it is posed or embellished? Is image manipulation part of a larger artistic progression? Trisha Gupta maps the long history of the Indian photograph. 

Waswo X. Waswo, Night Prowl, 2008, Black and white pigment print hand-coloured by Rajesh Soni. Courtesy: Tasveer

Photography is a strange art. After the camera was developed in the mid-19th century, photographs began to replace paintings, especially in portraiture. But unlike the other visual arts (drawing, painting, engraving ), the photograph has always been understood as giving us direct access to the real. As Susan Sontag wrote in her classic book On Photography: “A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image ), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask”.

The strangeness of photography as an art, then, stems from its parallel status as a science: the idea that the camera is a transparent medium, and that photographs actually capture experience –rather than producing an artistic response to it. The history of Indian photography, as the Bangalore-based gallery Tasveer’s recently concluded exhibition in New York showed, is particularly shaped by this split identity–suspended between artifice and reality, embellishment and documentation, theatre and truth.

Photography arrived in India in 1840, only a few months after its European beginnings, and was “taken up with alacrity by amateurs, aspirant professionals, individuals with ‘scientific’ agendas and within two decades, by the apparatus of the colonial state,” writes the anthropologist Christopher Pinney in his 1997 book Camera Indica. The Indian context was particularly ripe for photography’s arrival, as Pinney’s archival sources reveal. British colonisers, confronted with India’s insurmountable otherness and near-infinite anthropological variety, had long been anxious about the accuracy of native reproductions – whether written or drawn or engraved – as a way of transmitting knowledge. Photographs – with the ‘stern fidelity’ evoked by the Reverend Joseph Mullins in his 1857 address to the Photographic Society of Bengal – seemed just the solution. Mid-19th century manuals of medical jurisprudence and criminal investigation alike had already begun to recommend photography as an evidentiary tool that was, like fingerprinting and cranial measurements, “almost absolutely free from the personal equation of the observer”. Photography for identificatory purposes was already understood as a measure of control: “No measure would... impress more vividly, even upon the minds of the ignorant and superstitious common people, a conviction of the difficulty of eluding our vigilance,” wrote Dr. Norman Chevers, Principal of the Calcutta Medical College, in 1856. A century and a half later, by imposing Aadhaar’s non-voluntary photographic and biometric identification upon its citizens, the Indian government is bringing that surveillance state to final fruition.

Yet alongside this history, in which the photograph was held up as the very embodiment of truth, ran another Indian history of photography as art – and this was, more so than in the rest of the world, a history of photographic manipulation. The hundreds of photo studios that had come into being across India by the 1880s often advertised themselves as “Artists and Photographers” – some of them actually put images of paintbrushes and palette on their cabinet cards, like the EOS Photographic Company, or the Vanguard Studio, Bombay. The artistry of these Indian images involved not just studio backdrops and carefully arranged props, but also the application of paint. European photographers also used paint to retouch negatives and enhance colour on the final print, writes Pinney, but painted photographs in India were a whole different order of business. Studios produced numerous images in which paint overlaid and obscured the photograph – rather than merely supplementing it. Given the tremendous popularity of the painted photograph it comes as no surprise that Judith Gutman’s study, Through Indian Eyes, documents some studios as having up to twenty-nine painters “to do outlining, background scenery, retouching and oil painting”. The Indian photographic studio was a successor to the miniature painter’s karkhana.

The new show put on display many such painted photographs – mostly Indian princes and princelings posing for what Andrew Wilton has appropriately called the “swagger portrait”: a style that “puts public display before the values of personality and domesticity.” Dressed in their finest clothes and richest jewels, the princes in these images allowed studio artists to glory in their skilled reproduction of detail – whether it be the carpet under their subject’s feet, the patterned curtain behind him, or the feathered, bejewelled headdresses that propelled their attire from being merely clothes to costume. A princeling in a posed studio photograph had already been inserted into a coded fiction of rulership – the embellishment provided by the painter made that fiction even more elaborate.

D. Nusserwanji Studio Bombay, Rajasthani merchant with his son, 1940, Overpainted silver gelatin print. Courtesy: Tasveer

WaswoXWaswo. Zakir and Tarif Smoking. (2008), Black and white pigment print, hand-coloured by Rajesh Soni, 20 × 13 in. Courtesy: Tasveer

But those images, embellished though they were, involved rulers (or rulers-to-be) posing in finery they actually owned, signalling the social and political status they wished to lay claim to. The painted photograph was theatre in whose truth we were meant to believe. In WaswoXWaswo’s playful reimagining of the painted studio portrait, his subjects appear much more clearly to have ‘dressed up’. Whether it is the archly half-turning Chandra “with a Shell Headdress”, or the bearded ascetic in ‘Another Follower of Shiva’ who holds up a trident – painted in tiger stripes, presumably after the photograph was taken – and a bunch of peacock feathers, we are now clearly in a conscious realm of make-believe.

WaswoXWaswo’s images are a homage to the painted photographs of the 19th century Indian studio, and in fact they are the product of collaboration with Rajesh Soni, an artist who handpaints digital photographs. He is the grandson of Prabhu Lal Soni (Verma). who was also a renowned hand colourist of photographs - once court photographer to the Maharana Bhopal Singh of Mewar. Soni and WaswoXWaswo’s images are fantastic in the proper etymological sense of that word: dreamlike, phantasms that take in all possible Orientalist signifiers of Indianness: tigers, peacocks, jungles, tribals, ascetics, maharajas, rural belles. But part of the effectiveness of these images as dreams derives from containing within themselves a pinprick that brings you back to reality. So the peacock feathers which seem to vie with the backdrop for tropical lushness are held aloft by a suspicious looking travelling salesman with a cycle and a Vimal shopping bag – signs of unposh urbanity that quickly unravel the forested dream the image has partially built up. In ‘Zakir and Tarif Smoking’, the subversion is much more in-your-face – the two sombre young men framed against a red velvet curtain and a richly patterned carpet could have played at being princelings, but instead they sit there in plain white kurta-pyjamas, a cigarette dangling from each of their mouths with careful casualness. ‘Tribal Dreams’ and ‘Night Prowl’ escort us into the jungle more mysteriously. In the first image, the subject’s face is hidden – we see only his body, illuminated with golden dots. In the second, too, the body is painted, this time with yellow stripes, to evoke a tiger. The figure is on all fours, staring out at the viewer through the eyeholes of a tiger mask. Masks, of course, are metaphors for many things – most commonly, theatre. The Tasveer show contained another young boy with a mask – in the memorable image shot by the Ahmedabad-based photographer Jyoti Bhatt, the young tribal boy seems dwarfed by the huge earthen mask he holds. The 1934-born Bhatt spent several decades from the mid-1960s onwards photographing folk and indigenous art forms in rural India, and his work is a marvellous glimpse of that archive.

Jyoti Bhatt. 'Three Oriya women in front of their house with a wall painted.' Courtesy: Tasveer

Bhatt’s photographs are the opposite of theatrical. But as he places his shy, mostly reluctant subjects – women and children half-covering their faces, or looking studiously away from the camera, a cow that seems to be trying to curl itself into nothingness – against walls of the homes and barns in which they live, one’s attention is drawn constantly to the traditional artistic practices of embellishment that turn those walls into such arresting backdrops for everyday life.

The work of Dutch artist Bas Meeuws invokes a different Indian artistic history – Mughal floral motifs as they appear in inlay work on monuments, and in the borders of paintings and manuscripts. Meeuws’ digitally manipulated ‘still lifes’ of these individually photographed flowers – poppies, carnations, cornflowers, canna lilies – have a strangely hypnotic quality: petals rich and glossy against a pitch black backdrop, leaves glowing a preturnatural green. The Tasveer show gestures to complex Indian histories of embellishment: either carried out before the picture was taken, or involving the manipulation of the photographic image. The images here declare their created-ness, but we live in a world in which fake images proliferate. Every photographic documentation must compete against the manipulated fictions floating up as fact in the nebulous sea of WhatsApp forwards.

© Bas Meeuws, Mughal Botanical (#03),2015, C-print on dibond behind acrylic. Courtesy: Tasveer

In this post-factual world, the line between fact and fiction can sometime seem a blurred matter of artistic license. Recently, an award-winning photojournalist called Souvid Datta admitted to Time magazine that he had “foolishly doctored images” in 2013-15, infringing on the work of well-known photographers including Mary Ellen Mark. Asked why he had done it, the 1999-born Datta replied: “In part, I was also discovering the technology of Photoshop... and the creation of something new excited me. It felt like a very basic artistic achievement. There are other images... not intended as journalistic work, which have also been altered using post-production techniques... I didn’t understand what a photojournalist was for a long time, let alone the weight of trying to assume that title.” Photography is indeed a strange art. Because it is so often also called upon to be a science -- and the burden of being both is too much to bear.

Published in the Taj Magazine, June 2017 issue.

The Eyes of the Beholder

My Mirror column:

On watching Mirch Masala 30 years after Smita Patil’s death, and being struck by the film’s complicated relationship with the male gaze.

Smita Patil died in Mumbai on December 13, 1986. She was 31 and had just given birth to the child we now know as Prateik Babbar. My mother, I remember, was as saddened as one can be by the death of someone one does not know personally. I was a child, but even I had grasped the power of Patil's screen presence, and experienced the loss vicariously, through my parents and my masi, who was the same age as Patil and had been a theatre actor herself.

30 years after her demise, Patil's incandescent energy still lights up the screen like no one else. How, one wonders, can this tremendous vitality be gone forever? There have been other great actresses on the Indian screen, and there will be more. But there is something about Patil that ensures that even if she appears in the corner of the frame, it is her smouldering presence that catches your attention and holds it.

Watching Ketan Mehta's Mirch Masala again recently, I realised that the film is practically shaped around this quality of Patil's. Early on, when the moustachioed Subedar (Naseeruddin Shah producing a strange performative excess as a man drunk on his own power) rides his merry men and horses into a gaggle of women, all of them flee in terror, except one. Thus, the Subedar's eye is drawn to Sonbai, and so is ours.

Patil seems born to play the woman who stands her ground when others run around shrieking. Not only does she return the Subedar's frank stare with the cool, steady glance of one used to being admired, but also gives the big man some lip: “In this village, only human beings drink on this side of the water. Animals drink over there.”

The Subedar's men are ready to run her down for this, but he stops them. He gives Sonbai a long look, and asks cockily: “Can this animal get some water to drink here?” “To drink water like a human being, you have to first spread your hands,” answers Sonbai. The phrase she uses, “Haath phailaana”, is a commonly used Hindi expression for displaying neediness, and when the Subedar cups his hands before her, there is indeed a limited reversal of roles. Watching the Subedar gulp down the entire contents of her smaller pitcher, Sonbai curls her lip into a haughty smile that exudes sexual power.

Mehta's film is set in a world in which all power rests in male hands, making sexuality the only possible way for women to wrest some. Mirch Masala refers to Sonbai's sexuality often. The village seth, complaining about Sonbai's husband not being at work again, makes a bawdy joke -- “Saari raat jagaati hogi susri, subah marad ki aankh kaise khulegi? [This dame must keep him awake all night, how can the man's eyes open in the morning?]”. Sonbai takes it in her stride, as she does the unsolicited evaluations that come her way. “Is soney mein ratti bhar bhi milavat nahi [This gold has not an ounce of impurity in it],” says one man as she walks past, his eyes applauding the long, loping gait produced by the weight she invariably carries. The Subedar's gaze, too, fetishizes the physical exertions of the labouring woman. He watches her hungrily through his hand-held durbeen (telescope), as she washes clothes by the water's edge.

The gaze, of course, is the very premise of the film -- the Subedar's eyes closing in pleasure as he is shaved by a barber, and the way his head still turns as Sonbai walks past in the distance; the repeated use of the telescope and the magnifying glass, visual devices of modernity that strip the world of its mystery. In a late scene, the village Mukhi (Suresh Oberoi, in a performance that won him a Best Supporting Actor National Award) is asked by the Subedar whether Sonbai hasn't ever caught his eye. “Nazar par bhi nazar rakhni padti hai [One has to keep an eye on one's gaze as well],” answers the Mukhi pointedly. The film's end, too, is a symbolic attack on the rapacious gazes of men.

And yet, does not Mehta's film itself focus needlessly on Patil's shapely bare back, encased in a backless choli, but often left exposed to the Subedar's gaze – and ours? The tendency to present Patil as an overtly sexual being was there right from Benegal's Manthan (1976), in which Patil as the feisty Bindu, a rural Gujarati woman out talking to Girish Karnad's dapper young vet, suddenly sits down by a water spout and starts rubbing her legs with a pumice stone. That line of sight, so to speak, reached its acme in the controversial pavement bathing sequence in Rabindra Dharmraj's Chakra (1981).

Towards the end of Mirch Masala, the village women, now afraid for their own safety, begin to blame Sonbai for having attracted attention. “Galti tere roop mein hai [The fault is in your form],” says an old Dina Pathak.

Quick comes Sonbai's tart retort, “Uske dekhne mein nahi? [And not in his looking?]”

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 Dec 2016.  

Tripping the Light Fantastic

My Mirror column:

An evocative new non-fiction film immerses us in the enchanting world of Chandannagar's light artists.

Almost all religious festivals in India, when being celebrated in the public domain, now rely on technology to amplify the experience. The bhajans or kirtans once actually sung live in the sanctum sanctorum have been replaced, or at least supplemented, by recorded T-series versions playable on loop. And in a bald metaphor for the public religiosity that new India foists on and increasingly demands of its citizens, that technologically amplified sound is now blasted from the inner religious precinct into the street, and often into your bedroom.

If that sound technology — the booming loudspeakers, the tinny microphones, the expectant crackling of static — now feels as familiar and integral to the Durga Puja experience as Dhunuchi Naach, so does another technological addition that's only a few decades old: decorative street lighting.

There is, it turns out, a whole industry devoted to decorative lighting, and it is the subject of Supriyo Sen's lovely documentary Let There Be Light. Recently screened in Delhi at Open Frame, the Public Service Broadcasting Trust's yearly film festival, Sen's film is set entirely in Chandannagar in West Bengal.

Indigenous technology and local cultural innovation have made Chandannagar a lighting industry hub. The town's annual Jagaddhatri Puja celebration is a time when new lighting creations are displayed — both for the pleasure of the locals and as a real-life marketplace for buyers who want to replicate these designs in melas or festivals across India.

And what designs they are! From a rotating Manipuri dancer to a forest of gently swaying giraffes, a glittering Taj Mahal on water to an excruciatingly slow ball-game between two children, Chandannagar's alok shilpis, as these light artists are locally referred to, can seemingly marshal their combination of "motion, circuitry and artistry" into creating just about anything.

Among the attractions of the Durga Puja lighting I remember from my '80s Calcutta childhood was the light artist's ability to zero in on the political event of the moment. I'm pretty sure, for instance, that I once saw Indira Gandhi's assassination enshrined in a pujo display of moving light: a shocking but hypnotic loop of her walking down a path, a man aiming a gun at her, the bullet hitting her, and her body crumpling to the ground, only to rise and be felled again.

Chandannagar's alok shilpis do partake of this characteristically Bengali tendency for contemporary comment incorporated into popular culture. We hear, for instance, of the year 1999, when Kargil was the most prominent theme for lighting displays. But we hear of this from Kashinath Neogy, a wiry man with floppy salt-and-pepper hair who is one of Chandannagar's lighting pioneers. He decided to buck that Kargil trend by creating a giant moving frog the same year. The frog apparently did service for the 12 years that followed. It was such a huge hit that younger men in the business can still recount the exact things that it did. Among them was sticking out a long tongue and then flicking it back to ingest a passing fly.

Animation, in fact, has been at the centre of Chandannagar's innovations with lighting. But that animation technology could be put in the service of either laughter, or a sense of wonder, or what someone in the film calls "a message to the nation".

What Sen's rich conversations also manage to elicit, though, is a more philosophical core that underlies efforts in these various registers. At one level, this is about how these spectacular lighting displays — by their fantastic scale and creativity — straddle the boundary between science and magic. The same lighting technicians who work laboriously to produce these circuits clearly remember the enchantment the lights had for them when they were young. And their efforts seem consciously or unconsciously directed at recreating that magic for children now.

The leap from the magical to the divine is easily taken. When Kashi Da of 'Kargil versus Giant Frog' fame describes his lighting circuitry as a way of controlling danger (electricity) to create beauty, he adds a serene comment: "Eta onaari roop [This is a form of Her]," implying the goddess in whose honour the lighting displays are created.

But even without Kashi Da's smiling perception of what his work means in some larger scheme of things, Sen's film is remarkable for the stunning convergence it reveals between religion, popular culture and science.

Looking closely at these self-taught Bengali men doing what they do offers us a glimpse of a milieu that somehow encouraged curiosity and scientific application and persistent innovation on a third-world budget, while also being thoroughly immersed in a deeply felt popular religiosity. It's powerful stuff and yet, wonderfully fun, a little like the lights it's about.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Sep 2016.

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.