Naldehra Nostalgia: A Tale of Two Cities

By S. Kalidas

Places and people mix in mysterious ways. Sometimes they combine to make history. At others, their encounter serves to subvert it. As Pakistani and Indian teams, their families and friends gathered at the greens of the Naldehra Golf Course near Shimla in Himachal Pradesh last month, excitement and bonhomie were tinged with just the right measure of nostalgia and remorse. Here we were, like two sets of errant children of the British Raj, encountering our past at Shimla, the erstwhile Summer Capital of the undivided Empire. Heightening the emotional pitch was the fact that the Pakistani team was from Lahore, a city known to be the cultural capital of north India till the partition. It was for so many of us, re-living the memories of our parents and grandparents half a century after independence.

We were staying at the Chalets Naldehra, some 300 metres from the golf course and 21 Kilometres from Shimla city. Before the bonfire and cocktails the first evening, formal speeches were made. Lt Gen Muhammad Tariq, President of the Pakistan Golf Federation, raised a toast to the peace process and people‑to‑people contact saying: “We have the same history, heritage, culture and languages although we may live in two different countries today. Every step taken by you in this path of friendship shall be reciprocated more than equally by us.” Someone recalled that exactly on this date (July 3) Indira Gandhi and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto met a few miles down the road at the Wild Flower Hall to sign the Shimla Accord in 1972. “But unlike 1971 when I was swinging a gun, this time round the irons we are holding are golf clubs,” smiled Tariq. The golf tournament is the idea of KC Anand, a Shimla businessman who migrated here from Lahore: “Like me there are several people who settled in Shimla after migrating from Lahore. And there are many in Lahore today whose families had lived in Shimla before partition. So I thought it would be nice to arrange a golf tournament here and later a return match in Lahore so that we may meet as friends and also get to see our mutual homelands again.”

Shimla and Lahore. One was a centre of imperial power. The other­‑- immortalised by the legends of Anarkali^* and Ranjit Singh^*— a crucible of education, arts and culture. Half of Lahore today is mujahir (as migrants from India are called in Pakistan). Half of Shimla now comprises Punjabi refugees (as migrants from Western Punjab were called in India). When the two meet in the hindsight of history, the wisdom of civilisation tends to nullify —at least in the verdant landscape of mutual imaginations— the mad fury of fanatical politics. Almost each one of us had our own tale of the two cities; quite distant from the real world that had changed so radically.

^{*Anarkali was a legendary16th century courtesan who was a lover of Prince Salim (later Emperor Jegangir) who was put to death by Akbar the Great (1542 –1605).}

^{*The Sikh Warrior King Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1780–1839) made a Sikh empire comprising Punjab, Kashnir and Afghanistan with Lahore as his Capital.}

As the music group engaged for the party belted out old favourites from another era —Summer Wine, Jamaica Farewell— and wine made the full moon mellow, I met Sadia and Mehmud, a young golfer couple from Pakistan. She is a charming radiologist and he runs his own business in plastics. Sadia’s family, like mine, used to spend six months each year in Shimla. Now, the Ancient Mariner^* in me prompts me to share my own tale of Lahore and Shimla with them. As it is a poignant one, perhaps it will bear repetition here too.

^{*The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in 1797–98}

Rao Sahib Jagadisa Iyer, my grandfather, came to Shimla as a civil servant from Madras in the first decade of the 20th century. My father, his eighth child, was born here in 1928. Just before World War II, my grandmother’s sister, Aunt Parvati (Papu to family) joined the family.  A young widow, aunt Papu, had just returned from England after finishing her Masters in Education from Leeds. She soon found a job at Lady Maclaren’s College in Lahore and was dispatched there with my father’s elder sister for company. Among her many students in Lahore was Kamini Kaushal the film actress and a certain Miss Zohra. The latter became a close friend and aunt Papu came to depend on her for practically everything.

When the pre-partition Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in Lahore, Zohra looked after aunt Papu. After partition was announced, the day aunt Papu went to retrieve her jewellery from her locker, the bank manager was murdered in front of her eyes. She left her locker keys with Zohra and somehow managed to reach my grandmother’s home at Shimla. A few months later, she was transferred to a college in Amritsar where she stayed at the women’s hostel. One night, some months after Partition, she was woken up by the night watchman and informed that there was a man at the gate to see her. She went out fearfully, for the times were such, wondering who it could be. Imagine her surprise when she saw faithful Zohra’s brother standing there with a casket under his shawl. The young man had risked his life to cross the border at night with her jewels to return them to her!

Sadia and Mehmud are moved by my story. We drank a toast again at Naldehra to Zohra and her brother —whose name did not reach me down the generations even if his deed got enshrined in our family’s annals.

As a reserved, reasoning Tamil, aunt Papu always found the passionate Punjabis --both Hindu and Muslim--a bit too robust and hyper. “They never look before they leap,” she would say. Yet, she must have loved them for she never returned to Madras since her return from England in 1939. After Partition she lived in Shimla as Principal of the Women's Training College. Even after retirement she continued to stay alone in Shimla till her eventual death aged 92. All those years she continued to miss Lahore and lament the fall of the British Empire.

The next day, while the men went off to play golf and the ladies to stroll the Mall (the main promenade in Shimla, once restricted to Whites Only) in Shimla, I decided to do my native Himachali number with an Italian doctor/photographer friend. We drove down to visit an apple orchard that my father had owned in the valley of Kotkhai some two hours drive away.  While Shimla is so overrun by tourists, I have always wondered why Himachal does not diversify more into rural tourism or agro-tourism as the Europeans call it. By any standards, Himachal is a prosperous state. There is no dearth of electricity and the roads are extensive and well maintained.  Although even after more than a decade since it was started the 11-kilometre stretch of kuchcha road to Purag (our village) from Gumma on the Himachal Tibet highway is still unmetalled. But now there are three daily buses, full electrification and both landline and mobile phone connectivity. Besides, Himachali culture is rich, diverse and colourful. If only someone would help remodel some of the old palaces and farm houses in interior Himachal and turn them into comfortable guest houses there is a lot of scope for angling, river rafting, visiting rural fairs, ancient temples and monasteries… the list could be endless. Recently, Pragpur in Kangra has been developed as one such hub. Though in that case perhaps the initiative lay more with the dynamic owners of the Judge’s Court hotel, which is now a heritage resort.

The orchard that my father owned, neglected by its new owners, is in a dire state. But the rest of the village seems to be flourishing. From the road I spy an old comrade in arms nimbly negotiating the hillside. “Kerkha chaala Mangtu pandata, khar duporo pagada (Where are you heading in the mid-day sun, Mangtu Pandit, with your turban on your head)?” I call out, borrowing the line from a popular folk song of the Mahasu region. Mangtu, our old mali (gardener), is amazed by my unannounced appearance. He looks good after all these years and has built himself a comfortable home of bricks and cement. His old stone hut with sloping slate roof is taken over by a younger brother. His new sitting room has white plastic chairs and a television set inside a locked glass cabinet. “There is no cable here,” he tells me, “we have to make do with Doordarshan.” His third and newest wife offers us tea and Mangtu wants us to stay the night with them. But I have promises to keep…

I climb the steep hill to meet headmaster Ram Dayal, who knows all about orcharding and was a mentor to me. He too is now living in a new reinforced concrete house. “The old house is beyond repair,” he complained, referring to the magnificent three storey stone and wood house that his forefathers had built in the heart of the village. Unable to maintain or remodel it, he is just waiting for it to crumble and whither away. Though given the sheer solidity of the old structure and the high quality workmanship of its builders it will be a long time before it falls apart.

I ask him about the apple crop and he is pessimistic. “It has not rained in two months I fear the worst,” he bemoans pointing to the trees where the apple size is still the size of lemons. They need water to fatten with juice. While he organises tea and freshly picked pears for us, we walk up to the village temple. It used to be a beautifully carved old wooden edifice dedicated to Shiva and Nag devta. In its slate-lined courtyard every March the annual mela (fair) is held. It is still beautiful but cement and aluminium are fast replacing carved wood and stones in virtually all Himachali buildings. My Italian friend is aghast at the architectural vandalism. “Is this the price of progress?” I wonder.

If we were bemoaning the architectural vandalism in the countryside, the venue for the last banquet for the Pakistani and Indian teams at an upwardly mobile Shimla hotel that evening, was an eye opener. During the Raj and till well into my youth, there used to be a seasonal nullah (brook) called the Combermere waterfall on the Mall.  By its side used to be a tiny, quaint red and green post office called the Combermere Post Office. The two together made for a sight pretty as a picture-postcard. Today the Combermere Brook does not exist. Multi-storied concrete buildings have snaked up its course right from the lowest level of the Cart Road at the bottom of the Shimla hill. One is a hotel replete with private lifts, lounges and banquet hall--the venue of our Last Supper.

The view from the hotel's cantilevered veranda is impressive. Across the valley one can see all the levels of the main Shimla ridge with the lights of the Mall, the Middle Bazaar, Lower bazaar and Cart Road all tiered up one over the other. Also across the valley lies the British built Cecil Hotel from where M.S. Oberoi first started out as an hotelier in the 1930s. The Cecil too, is built over many tiers up the hillside. But the difference in scale, temperament and civic responsibility between the Cecil and the folly that passes for a hotel at Combermere is a yawning chasm of sensibilities. My reverie is broken by a melodious voice singing a sad old Hindi film song: “loot kar mera jahan, chhup gaye ho tum kahan (having destroyed my world, where have you disappeared).” It is Gazala, the wife of a Lahori Banker singing with tears in her eyes. There were lumps in many a throat. We are a sentimental sub-continent. And yes, each of us has his or her own tale of the two cities. Hopefully, from now on, we'll be listening to each other more often.

Art Mart: Rising Tide

By S. Kalidas

If you thought the Mumbai stock exchange was the biggest feel good story emanating out of India, you can think again. The real show stopper in the last year or two has been contemporary Indian art. From a modest eight to ten crores in 2000, the total annual turnover of the Indian art mart shot up to a whopping Rs 2000 crore last year. Half of this is in documented public transactions such as open auctions and recorded sales, while an equal amount is attributed to direct cash purchases either from the producer or his dealer. A giant leap indeed from the time — just a few years ago— when almost 70-80 percent of all art purchases used to be in cash and hence beyond the purview of accountibility. However, the party, all experts agree, is just beginning.

Take the signifiers: till just five or six years ago, virtually all international auction houses would deal mainly in Indian antiquities (of mostly of doubtful provenance) and the decorative arts with the odd Ravi Varma, Jamini Roy or AR Chughtai thrown in towards the end of the sale. Today, the order is reversed. It is names like Tyeb Mehta, MF Husain, SH Raza and FN Souza  that lead the list now. Last week saw New York again hosting yet another round of Indian contemporary art auctions. Over March 29 and 30, the Sotheby’s and the Christies in the course of two hectic sessions of global bidding (including incessant phone  bids from India) sold off 368 art works for a whopping sum totalling to US $ 29.27 million. In the last few years, not only have these auction houses doubled their Indian art auctions from one each to now four a year, they have been joined by others like Bonhams, Bowerings, Neville Tuli's Osians and Dinesh Vazirani's Saffronart, the last two being fully swadeshi enterprises.

With octogenarian Mumbai artist Tyeb Mehta’s now historic Mahishasura already having broken the million dollar barrier (it went for US $ 1.54 million) just six months ago at the Christies September ’05 auction, there were no new benchmarks left to ford. However, while Mehta repeated his million-dollar-plus performance, an untitled canvas by Vasudeo Narayan Gaitonde fetched US $ 1.47 million st Christies and Syed Haider Raza’s  Tapovan went for US$ 1.472 million. Souza’s Pope and his Nephews was sold for  US$ 508,000 and an untitled abstract by J. Swaminathan notched US $ 800,000 double than its estimated US $ 300,000 - 400,000. And that is not taking into account the OSIANs New Delhi sale of Masterpieces and Museum Quality Works (totaling Rs 417,260,250) in New Delhi— where A Village Scene by the legendary Amrita Sher-Gil went for Rs 6.9 crores —and Saffronart’s in online auction of younger and lesser known artists in Mumbai that netted Rs 17.66 crore. 

With Lakshmi, the goddess of good fortune smiling on Indian art, it is not surprising that everyone who’s anyone wants a slice of the pie. Or, if that is too expensive, at least catch a wiff of its tantalising aroma. You have only to mention that you posess a few paintings or are ‘in the know’ of matters artistic and suddenly you find yourself very popular. They corner you at parties for tips, they invite you to dinners for deep discussions, they call you up at all hours of the day and the night (it is day in New York when it’s night in Delhi)— now they have even started accosting me at street corners. And they come in many disguises. They come as suave NRI patrons out to set out on their Discover of India and they come as friendly local acquaintances dropping in casually for a drink. One even came in as a carpenter offering to frame a painting before he bared his greed and offered to buy the painting for “a good price”. My poor till-lately-impoverished artist friends are now looking worn out  with fatigue running from this gallery opening to that auction sale; they are all bleary-eyed and heavy headed with a combination of jet-lag and champagne overdose. Two Delhi painters even had to get themselves hospitalised due to stress and anxiety. In fact, my painter brother regularly sweeps under his bed to dispel any lurking agents and gallerists. Spurred by a feeding frenzy escalated by highly publicised public auctions, our new rich elite's new-found art fad is displaying all signs of an obsession that is bound to last for some time yet.

“I know it seems like a mad and crazy market but it is for real,” sighs Bangalore based Abhishek Poddar, an old time collector who started buying art in the late 1980s when “you could easily pick up a Manjit Bawa or a Jagdish Swaminathan for a few thousand rupees”. Poddar says, “While initially a few market savvy dealers might have jacked up the prices, combined with the strengthening Indian economy it has gathered a momentum that now has the impetus of an avalanche.”  Like most serious buyers of pre-stock market boom era, Poddar has almost stopped collecting today: “We used to  fall in love with the work, then met and got to know the artist and connected to his thought process. One looked for the soul of the artist in a work. Whereas today, anonymous bidders tend to merely see the signature of a brand name.”  Most old time patrons find their powers of patronage suddenly passé, usurped by a new and brash generation of buyers who are ready to buy them out. In fact many sophisticates in Mumbai and Delhi who had bought masters like Husain and Souza after striking bitter bargains with the artists and dealers through the ’70s and ’80s are now unloading their tidy hoards on the scalding market, making a neat pile in the process.

So how did this spurt in the art mart come about? Who are the big players in the field? Who are the new cash rich buyers? And who are the blue-chip artists to invest in the future?

Well, for one let us not be coy about the fact that Indian art is very good and comparable to the best produced anywhere. This may come as surprise to some but artists and serious critics knew it all along and have assiduoudly worked to have it so accepted in the western art scene. Three Indian painters—MF Husain, Francis Newton Souza and Jaghdish Swaminathan —passionately articulated this all their lives. Husain had even predicted a long time ago that Indian art would truly prosper only when financial speculators entered the market. Today there are already a couple of Art Funds — like mutual funds— in operation (see box). jagdish Swaminathan— to quote New York based art historian Vidya Dahejia— “talked about going beyond the West by going through the West”. 

As our economy gained muscle and Indians started taking pride in things Indian. “Although he has nothing to do with art, Narayanamurthy and the likes of him have shown that we can be proud of the made-in-India brand in the global context,” says Amit Judge of Bodhi Art. It was thus but natural that Indian art got its rightful place under the sun. Says critic Suneet Chopra: “From the very begining, I told people that Indian art was priced at a sixth of its true value. Even today, it is about half its value. That is why I tell cynics who think that the bubble is going to burst, that there is another good 100 per cent more to go.” 

That potential will be realised when our big industrial houses start professionally advised and managed programs of art acquisition and display. This is happening but is still not professionalised. “It is still left to the wives or to other relatives,” says an artist referring to some leading business groups’s efforts in the sphere. The first major corporate buyers of Indian art were MNCs like the Schlumberger whose Jean Riboud and his Indian wife Krishna collected a huge body of excellent works from 1960s –till the 1980s.  The other major collector was Holk Larsen of Larsen and Tubro. Later Texan billionaire Chester and wife Davida Herwitz went about collecting a huge body of Indian art that is now partly housed at the Peabody Essex Museum Salem Masachusetts. Then there is the irrepressible Masanori Fukuoka, a Japanese tycoon, who now leads the Indian art lovers’ club buying a large numbers of works every year for his Glenbarra Art Museum at Jihoji Himeji, Japan. Amongst the few Indian corporates seriously interested in art are the ITC and The Times of India Group who also acquired art in significant quantities. The new Times Internet Building in Gurgaon has in fact been designed specially to display their large art collection. Both have built up sizable and carefully chosen collections which are now worth in hundreds of crores, many times the value they were acquired for. The Government of India, too, through Air India, the ITDC and the MEA, bought good contemporary art but it has neither taken pride in it nor promoted it in any significant way. In fact, today one can easily see the sorry state of art works by famous painters at ITDC hotels if they have not been entirely destroyed or, worse, pilfered.

However, the arrival of the new breed of art buyers on the scene in the last three or four years has pushed prices well beyond he Government of India purchase budgets. It is widely presumed that it is the Non Resident Indian market that is escalating the art prices. While NRI collectors like hedge fund manager Rajiv Choudhury (he bought Tyeb Mehta’s  Mahisasura) and realtor Umesh Garg have definitely upped the ante, Arun Vadehra insists that more than 50 percent of his buyers are in India. “NRIs and foreign individuals and mueums only account for less than 25 percent each,” he says. For example, Delhi businessman Nand Khemka was the most prolific bidder at OSIANs auction, reportedly picking up both the Amrita Sher-Gil (6.8 crores) and the Gaitonde (2.3 crore). Yamini Mehta, senior specialist, Modern and Indian contemporary Art at Christies, New York, says, “What I have been seeing is that collectors are not only the NRIs but also resident Indians. For the March sale we also strong bids from some American collectors. At the same time, we have noticed that buyers are beginning to discern quality and hence every piece of art is not selling at a crazy price.” Indeed the Indian art collector is at last coming of age.

It is interesting that much like the development of India, in the art scene too, the problem area is the infrastructure. “We have always had excellent art and now there is a hungry market, but the problem lies in the channel connecting the two,” says Amit Judge of Bodhi Art, easily India’s most robust and audacious art gallery. Similarly, Arun Vadehra of Vadehra Gallery has been publishing books on the artists that he represents for many years now. Neville Tuli of OSIANs has also been absorbed with the need of building a proper documentation and archiving centre for over a decade now. In fact this is the area that the government art bodies should be attending to instead of taking on promotional and curatorial roles. The other thing that the state could do is the in-explicably high import duty of 17.5 percent on bringing back Indian art from abroad. Some gallerists even go to the extent of asking for the removal of sales tax on art purchase. At the same time the government should also enforce the Intellectual Property Right Law forcefully including the artists’ share on resale of his or her work.

So where is this market heading? “We are yet to reach the levels of Chinese art,  European and American art so there is a long way to go,” says Vadehra. With proper promotion and infrastructure support there is no reason why that should not happen. Of course, periodically there will be rationalisation of individual artists’ works depending on their stature, quality and numbers. Let me end with sharing a phone conversation I had with a friend who owns a resplendent work by my father, J. Swaminathan. She has been  wanting to buy a flat in Delhi’s fashionable enclave overlooking the Humayun’s Tomb but could not get one at a price she could afford. When she read that a Swaminathan had gone for US $ 800,000 at the Sotheby’s, I called her up and said, “Now you can sell your Swaminathan and buy that flat you have always wanted.” “Silly Boy,” She replied, “Now I wait another few years and aspire to buying the tomb itself.” Amen.

M F Husain: Relentless Iconist

By S.Kalidas

Even before you have met him or seen his resplendent (and highly priced) works­­— be they on canvas, paper, metal— you have heard legends about his life, loves, antics, skirmishes and triumphs. Reams of print have chronicled his barefoot stylish stance, his unabashed love for (and celebration of) the feminine form, his disappearing acts, his unforeseen arrivals, his quicksilver wit, his painting of horses and his paintings on horses. To confound or to confuse, or merely to suit the need of the moment, he enjoys playing many roles—the artist, the buffoon, the patriarch, the fakir. 

When you do encounter the silver-maned superstar of Indian art, what strikes you most is his indomitable spirit and indefatigable energy. As he steps into his 90^th year, Maqbool Fida Husain, easily the tallest iconist of our times, packs the panache of a Picasso and the drama of a Dali in his trim, lithe frame.      

           

On an overcast morning in Mumbai, I venture out to seek the man behind the enigma. The day’s DNA has announced that the master is not entertaining the press or the public on his birthday, just two days away. “Just a family dinner at a venue to be decided on the spur of the moment,” said the report quoting his elder daughter Raeesa. However, bigger celebrations are in store. Beginning with Singapore on October 4, the grapevine informs a host of exhibitions is being planned across the country slated for later in the year.

Theatre director Nadira Babbar is said to be working on a play to be culled from his absolutely riveting autobiography M F Husain Ki Kahani, Apni Zubaani (The M F Husain story, in his own words). While at least one big Bollywood producer is believed to be interested in making a feature film based on it, Husain has his own plans too.

Husain is notorious for not keeping appointments. This son of a factory timekeeper is never fettered by the hands of the clock.  I am apprehensive as I approach the Kohinoor Empress, a tall pencil shaped apartment building just off Worli Naka where we are to meet. The lift stops on the second floor and facing me is a large canvas in the familiar signature style on one wall of the narrow corridor. On the other, is a shoe rack with three or four pairs of sundry footwear. This is just one of many homes spread around the globe that the gypsy-at-heart painter might use as night shelter, if he happens to be in the vicinity. Otherwise, it serves as home to his younger daughter Aqeela. M F Husain does not have a permanent address.

In his bedroom-cum-studio, Husain sahab, is at his sprightly best. He is surrounded by his latest set of serigraphs inspired by Nagesh Kukunoor’s Iqbal. He is completely smitten by the film, and wants to cast the lead actor Sheryas Talpade, as the young Husain in an autobiographical film. As India Today photographer, Bhaskar Paul, asks him pose for photographs, he opens his wardrobe and exults, “Let me put on something special. Look what they gave me for my birthday!” He brings out an exquisite Mughal choga (gown), very finely embroidered with motifs from his own paintings and a verse from the Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib. The robe took six months to finish and is a present from his admirers in Pakistan. His glee at receiving the gift is infectious and I read out the lines inscribed on it: “Hai kahan tamanna ka doosara qadam yaarab, Hamne to dashq-e-imqan ko naqsh-e-pa paya (Where does ambition cast its next step, dear friend, I found a forest of desires in but a foot print).”  When people compliment him on his zest for life, he says, “I was a late beginner in the voyage of desires, so I conserved my energy.”

A fast and prodigious painter, Husain has reputedly painted over 25,000 paintings over 70 odd years. “Yet, I feel that is not even ten percent of what I have bubbling inside me,” he asserts. He paints compulsively and furiously, anywhere and everywhere. Art galleries, cinema houses, public platforms and friends’ homes-- Husain has painted in all of them and painted them all as well. One well-known Delhi journalist postponed vacating her rented flat for years giving the plea that Husain had painted her bedroom wall and the worth of that was greater than the price of the appartment. For Husain the act of painting is fulfilling in itself. “I am not afraid to confront my weaknesses in public. I do not need to isolate my self in an ivory tower to paint like some painters do. I like to paint in front of people. Like a musician, I can concentrate in the midst of a crowd and also communicate with them in the process,” he says. The boot of his Mercedes S 350 always has some canvas, paper, paint and brushes tucked away for such creative emergencies. “These can easily fit into my jhola (cloth bag), too, and I could leave for New York with nothing else,” he assures me.

Husain is believed to have developed this capacity to be able to concentrate amid chaos during his long years of struggle when he painted cinema hoardings to eke out a precarious living. He tells you about the time when he painted 40 foot hoardings for four annas a foot under the blazing sun in the open foot path in front of Badar Bagh, a chawl in central Mumbai where he lived for many years. From painting hoardings he progressed to designing toys and painting children’s furniture for Rs 300 a month. “But even at that time I knew that time I would be an artist one day,” he says, adding, “There was a time when I painted furniture by day and my own art by night. I painted non stop.”

The times started to change slowly around the time of Independence. Francis Newton Souza (1924-2002), the enfant terrible of Sir JJ School of Art, spotted Husain painting away one day by chance and immediately included him in his Progressive Artists Group (PAG). The PAG entered the art world with the manifesto of aspiring to overthrow the reign of the second hand European academic realists a la Raja Ravi Varma on one hand and the “wishy washy Indianism” of the Bengal School on the other. The PAG held its first group show in 1947 and Husain’s work was noticed right from that first show. On the encouragement of Rudi von Leyden, the German Jewish émigré who served as the art critic for The Times of India, he held his first one-man show in Mumbai in 1950. With prices ranging from Rs 50 to Rs 300 the show sold out. Husain chuckles, “I was a best seller right from start.”

What differentiates Husain from his PAG contemporaries is his deeply rooted ‘Indianness’ and his celebration of life and people. Whereas Souza and Raza were busily assimilating European art from Byzantium downwards, Husain sought out his sources in the temple sculptures (Mathura and Khajuraho), Pahari miniature paintings and Indian folk art. “Although I owed my initial understanding of European art greatly to Souza, I also realised one did not have to paint or think like Europeans to be modern,” he says. Nor did he, at any time, understand the angst of existentialism. “Alienation as a concept is alien to my nature,” he maintains. In the mid-1950s Husain got national recognition with two very special canvases Zameen and Between the Spider and the Lamp. Zameen, which won the first prize at the first National Art Exhibition in ’55, was inspired by Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen. But instead of bemoaning rural poverty and indebtedness, it presents a symbolic celebration of life in rural India with a vibrancy that had never been seen before.

The next year he painted a more enigmatic work and cryptically called it Between the Spider and the Lamp. This picture features five women reminiscent of ancient Indian sculpture with an oil lamp hanging from the top of canvas and some unintelligible words in a script that looks like ancient Sanskrit or Magadhi or some long forgotten dialect. From the hand of one woman, painted as if frozen in a mudra (ritualistic gesture), hangs a large spider by its thread. Some critics have alluded the women as pancha kanyas (Ahalya, Kunti, Draupadi, Tara, Mandodari) of Hindu mythology. When this painting was first shown, despite the ripples it created, no one came forth to buy it for Rs 800. Now Husain would not part with it for any price. A living icon of Hindu-Muslim, ganga-jamni culture, Husain’s art is quintessentially Indian in form and content and yet fully global in its relevance and appeal.

As modern Indian art gained wider acceptance through the ’60s and the ’70s Husain was steadily scaling up his prices and using the media to create hype around his colourful persona and his escapades. “Life without drama is too drab,” he is wont to say. Detractors screamed hoarse and friends frowned in exasperation. “When I hiked up my prices to over a lakh, one of my closest friends Tyeb Mehta said I was finished as a painter,” he shrugs, adding, “The fiscal worth of a painting is in the eyes of the buyer.” And buyers came in droves to Husain. From Badri Vishal Pitti, a Hyderabad businessman for whom he painted 150 paintings based on the Ramayana at the behest of the late Ram Manohar Lohia, to Chester Herwitz a handbag tycoon from Boston who bought up anything that Husain produced through the ’70s. The latest in this list is the Kolkata industrialist G S Srivastava who has reputedly struck a deal for 124 Husain paintings for Rs 100 crores. Srivastava has done so not for the love of art but on the advice of an investment banker who convinced him that Indian art was appreciating at a higher rate than most stocks. M F Husain the brand is now Husain Inc. Despite all his celebrity and wealth Husain, is personally untouched by both. “He can be as comfortable in a dhaba dipping his roti in a glass of tea as in a five star relishing an expensive meal,” says the veteran painter Ram Kumar.

No success story is ever smooth or without blemish. And Husain has had more than his share of controversies and brickbats. Many artists accuse him of commercialising art at worst and wasting his creative energies in stunts and gimmicks at best. Then there was the instance of depicting Indira Gandhi as Bharat Mata during the Emergency which made Husain look like a political stooge. But his main antagonists have been from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh who vandalized his paintings and threatened his life for having painted the goddess Saraswati in nude. Husain reportedly apologized for the hurt caused and the controversy died its natural death. Seeing LK Advani face similar ire from the same people over his Jinnah remarks might bring some solace to the bemused painter, but today, Husain brushes these criticisms off with a shrug of his still broad and straight shoulders. “I hold nothing against my critics. But, I do not feel the need to respond to them,” he says.

At present he is too busy planning his fourth film (see box), preparing for future exhibitions, traveling and searching for a new muse. He meets them by the droves at every crossroad he says. As I prepare to wind up the interview he recites a poem he wrote four decades ago:

“As I begin to paint,

Hold the sky in your hands

As the stretch of my canvass

Is unknown to me”

With a flick of his long brush he waves me adieu. 

Husain the Wealth Creator 

MF Husain’s father worked as a timekeeper and accountant all his life but dreamed of becoming a businessman. “He would buy ‘How to Become a Businessman’ books and make my uncle try his hand at one business after another. But invariably the ventures failed,” recalls Husain. But his son did not do badly when it came to marketing his art. Combining his charisma with his painterly talent, Husain learnt early how to find promoters and win the attention of buyers. What is more, he created collectors out of the innocent rich looking to acquire class or prestige. This is corroborated by India’s first professional art gallery owner Kekoo Gandhy, of Mumbai’s Chemould Gallery. In his memoirs Gandhy says: “At our first Husain exhibition, I looked out of the window and saw my wife’s uncle passing by. I just pulled him in and said we needed a crowd. The poor man had no idea what was going on. But Husain sold so well that we were flooded with work from artists from all over the India. After that exhibition, our sales fo frames and art shot up from Rs 5000 per year to rs 20,000 per year.” Gandhy was in the business of manufacturing picture frames, so it made sense to start an art gallery as well.

Husain is a firm proponent of the gallery system even today when he, as the biggest brand in Indian art, no longer needs galleries to promote him. Over the decades he not only made established galleries make good money, but also helped set up new galleries all over the country. When he tired of Chemould in 1968, he helped a watch seller by the name of Kali Pundole to open a gallery at Flora Fountain.Today the Pundole Gallery is run by Kali’s son Dadibhai, who also represents Sothebys in India. In Delhi he shifted from the Dhoomimals in Connaught Place to support Virender Kumar with his Kumar Gallery that started in a loft and then later shifted to the rich neighborhood of Sundar Nagar. Over the decades, it was Husain who upped and upped the prices of his paintings much to the mirth of gallery owners and the chagrin of his contemporaries who accused him of turning too commercial. It is another matter that many of these artists would bank on Husain to find them buyers when their works did not sell. And magnanimously, Husain invariably obliged.

Going by today’s prices an average Husain painting fetches anything between 75 Lakh to 2 crores. “Multiply that by half the number of oils he has painted – say ten thousand—and you begin to get an idea of the wealth he has created,” says Arun Vadehra of the Vadehra Gallery and representative of the Christies in India.

Love of Cinema 

Cinema has been M F Husain’s biggest passion after painting. Right from the time when he saw his first silent movie to the time he saw Ham Aapke hain Kaun a record 65 times and then followed it by making Gajagamini, a cinematic ode to womanhood in the person of Madhuri Dikshit. In fact he says that the only silver lining during the time he painted cinema hoardings for Bollywood producers was that he would get to watch some shooting to sketch the lead stars of the day. Today, after having made his third film Menaxi- a tale of three cities, he calls cinema the highest form of art: “Cinema has everything—form, movement, space and time.” 

But Husain’s entree as a director was sheerly by chance. In 1967, the Government of India decided to bring in two advisors for its Films Division (FD). The new advisors-- Jahangir Bhowanagary from Paris and the Canadian James Beveridge-- decided to bring a sea change in the way FD developed projects. Bhowanagary had made documentaries on Indian art earlier, and they decided to get a short film made by Husain. The rest of the FD was not very happy with the fact that Husain had been assigned such a project, but Husain went ahead with his usual gusto. The result was Through The Eyes Of A Painter a black and white short film shot in Rajasthan.

According to veteran director Mrinal Sen, after the film was completed, it baffled most people at the FD. Sen did not know Husain at that point and was himself skeptical about it, given that filmmaking is a hugely technical exercise that Husain had no knowledge of. “As chance would have it, I was in Bombay the day the final print came out. So I decided to see the film myself,” recalls Sen. The film was a documentary on how an artist goes to Rajasthan to paint and the visual impulses he records. Sen recalls coming out of the auditorium, his eyes moist, and saying, “After watching this film I liked Rajasthan a lot more than I had ever did.” He set about writing a letter to the Films Division explaining why the film was so remarkable. As luck would have it, the film was sent to Berlin that year, and won the Silver Bear, the best short film award.

“I wouldn’t say it was a perfect film but it was certainly a work of art. There were times when Husain had been pretentious, times when some things were over the top. But every frame of the film was like an artist’s canvas,” says Sen. He hadn’t even met Husain then.

Later that year, Sen received an invitation from Films Division to celebrate the film’s winning the award and he met Husain for the first time. “We have remained friends since. Every time he makes a film, he shows it to me. I have liked them in bits and pieces. Some frames have stuck in my mind. But overall, none of his films have been able to reach the remarkable quality of his first film,” says the filmmaker.

Be as that may, Sen shall have one more Husain film to watch soon. Never one to give up a good thing easily, Husain is now planning to render his autobiography in celluloid and wants the Shreyas Talpade the actor in Nagesh Kukunoor’s Iqbal to play the role.

Bismillah Khan:The Piper Of Benaras

By S. Kalidas

In the passing away of Ustad Bismillah Khan on August 21, India has lost an enduring mascot that epitomised the very idea of the Nehruvian, composite and secular India. For the Khan sahib was not only an eminent and much loved classical musician, but also through his charismatic persona symbolised the syncretised Ganga-Jamni  tehzeeb (Hindu-Muslim culture) of this land as few others did for well over half a century. His very name, Bismillah, evoked a relationship to The Creator and indeed to all creation and creativity.

True to his name, the ustad proved to be an august beginning for the loud but once humble shehnai, the north Indian reed pipe. Till Bismillah burst on the scene around the early 1940s, the shenai had been widely used to herald auspicious occasions like court festivities, marriages and mundans. Yet, despite its universal usage as an instrument to herald good luck and festivities, the status of the shenai-player in the musical hierarchy was lowly. The shenai was ubiquitously heard, but the shehnai nawaz (player) was hardly ever seen. Through his talent and hardwork, Bismillah Khan changed that dramatically, making shenai an equal of the sitar or the sarod on the classical music platform.

Born in a small village, Dumraon, in the Buxar district of Bihar in 1916, Bismillah was initiated to shenai playing by his uncle Ali Buksh, who was attached to the Balaji temple in Varanasi. It was here that young Bismillah honed his skill and came to stay for the rest of his long and eventful life. In many ways over the decades, Banaras and Bismillah became synonymous. A devout Shia Muslim (he was for many years the President of the World Shia Conference and led the Moharram procession every year through the streets with his shenai), he was also the chosen shenai player for an ancient Hindu temple. From Banaras, too, he imbibed the rich folk music of eastern Uttar Pradesh like thumri, chaiti, kajri and dhuns that were to immortalise his repertoire all over the world including Bollywood. In his lexicon, music was the highest form of spirituality. “How can you call music haram (sinful),” he constantly argued with the orthodox Islamic clerics, adding, “If this is haram then let there be more of it.”

A gentle, simple man, Bimillah Khan lived in a large old house in Sarai Harha locality of Benaras and till his death was the main bread-winner for a joint family comprising over a hundred relatives. He was the happiest in that environment surrounded by innumerable sons, daughters, nephews and grandchildren, clad in his checked lungi and a vest smoking a beedi (in other cities he smoked Wills cigarettes) and humming a tune. In his last years, his simple lifestyle used to become an issue with the media and one television channel even made out that the government of India should take better care of this national treasure. But money was never an issue for the last many decades. Bismillah Khan was a star performer who knew his monetary worth quite well and was not shy about charging high fees professionally. Besides successive governments had bestowed the highest civilian honours on him from the Padma Shri to Bharat Ratna.

Bismillah Khansaheb’s musical legacy is more complex. That he was a virtuoso par excellence cannot be doubted. His technique and tone became the aspirational benchmarks for all shehnai players who came after him. He created a new baaj (way of playing) for shehnai by adopting many techniques of presentation and elaboration of the raga that were more usually heard on the sitar or in vocal khayal. His duets with the late sitar wizard Ustad Vilayat Khan and violinist Pandit V.G. Jog are most memorable. But yet, he was not considered by the cognoscenti as any great repository of raga vidya or traditional knowledge. He was more popular for his rustic folksy medleys. However, such was his magic that the simplest tune from Bismillah's shehnai could wash away the impact that any better pedigreed Pandit or Ustad created in the listeners mind with their complex raagdari (command over raga) or layakari (dexterity with rhythm).

“Banaras mein hi ras ghusa hai (Banaras itself has rasa —mood, colour or essence— we don't have to add it,”he used to say. With him now gone, Banaras will be for ever a trifle  colourless.                       

Viswanadhan: Geometry of Colour

 By S. Kalidas

In 1976 Paris based Indian painter V. Viswanadhan met with a near fatal accident on a German autobahn. The car he was driving was completely crushed and the artist himself spent many months recuperating from his wounds. The works he was driving with to show to a German gallerist survived but he says he never sold them  or even showed them in any exhibition for the last thirty odd years.  “Whenever I showed them informally to people they invariably offered to buy them off and I suspected there was something wrong somewhere,” jokes the Kerala born, Chennai-trained artist who made Paris his home way back in the late 1960s. Perhaps he kept them as a talisman of his survival; perhaps he wanted to hang on to these works as they served as kernels for growth as a whole lot of other paintings would emerge out of these over the following decades.  

Now Ashish Anand, director of the Delhi Art Gallery, has not only persuaded the veteran painter to show this hidden opus, but has also brought out a handsome book of essays on his life and work. The exhibition titled Viswanadhan: early years comprises small, jewel-like mixed media works on paper and will be on view from April 26 till June 30 at the gallery in the ethnic-chic Hauz Khas Village.

Edited by art critic Roobina Karode and with contributions by the senior Keralite artist  A. Ramachandran, Karode, Madhu Jain, Jean Marie Baron, Philip Golub and the artist himself, the hard cover publication Viswanadhan throws light on the artist’s s life and work with just the right mix of text, photographs  and reproductions of works. Jain, who has been a close friend of the painter for decades, traces his life—from his difficult birth in a small village in lush and emerald Kerala in 1940 to his years of struggle and training under the famous teacher and artist K.C.S. Paniker who headed the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Madras, and then on to his early years in Paris the birth place of modernism and surrealism, the two art movements that changed the way the world looked at art and artists for all times. 

There were other Indian artists who had reached Paris long before Viswa, as he is called fondly, wandered into it practically penniless. Paritosh Sen, another alumnus of the Madras Arts College had been there as early as the late 1930s and so had the passionate Punjabi-Hungarian Amrita Shergil. Just preceding Vsiwa were the two ‘Progrssives’ from Mumbai S.H. Raza and Akbar Padamsee. There was also  the writer-painter Ramkumar from Delhi and others. But there was a big difference. While all these painters had gone to Paris to study art under Parisian masters and strove hard to acquire what is called the French ‘sens plastique’ (visual sensibility), Viswanadhan arrived as a practising artist on his own terms. He not only brought his own sense of colour and imagery to the French capital, but also over the decades, got it accepted by mainstream French gallerists, critics  and collectors. 

As Jain writes in her engaging essay, Viswa’s generation of Indian painters was no longer ready to accept European artistic norms verbatim. Theirs was a quest for an indigenous modernism. As he tells Jain: “We realised that American Pop Art at the time was looking for something similar to what we were doing with our mandalas. Artists like Paniker in the south and J. Swaminathan in the north were already talking about it. They discovered that we could keep our native identity and also be modern.” Viswa’s success in the citadel of European modernism signalled not only the arrival of Indian art on its own terms but also heralded the  re-conversion of the Mumbai Progressives like Raza and Padamsee to Indian aesthetic and cultural moorings.

Hailing from a family of vsiwakarmas, or craftsmen, Viswanadhan sought inspiration in Tantric mandalas but did away with their religious symbolism. He delved into their plastic  form almost in purely painterly terms; what J. Swaminathan had called the “colour geometry of space” and Viswanadhan refers to as the “inner structure of things”. The result is an extremely sophisticated use of colour and basic geometric forms like the triangle, the circle and the square, informed by an ingrained sense of the Tantric tradition but not bound by it. Besides, as a scion of the viswakarma lineage, Viswa’s sense of geometric abstraction is not derived from  an acquired vocabulary and grammar, as such it needs no pseudo-religious props to make its mark.

What makes the present exhibition important is that the works being shown here are from a seminal period of Viswa’s creative evolution. No wonder then, Ashish Anand wants to take this exhibition to other centres not only in India, but also to Paris and New York as well. Amen..

Subodh Gupta: Global Native

By S, Kalidas

There is a new bartan-walla (utensil seller) from the backyards of Patna who is 'wow'-ing international art curators and collectors from Paris to Singapore. With his amazingly imaginative sculptural forms of human skulls and UFOs— made of kitchen utensils— being snapped up by serious European collectors like Pierre Huber (the visionary Geneva gallerist and collector),  Francois Pinault (who owns Gucci, Balenciaga and the Christie’s besides other brands) and Bernard Arnauld (of LVMH, the group that owns Luis Vuitton among other businesses), Subodh Gupta, 43, is making making a niche for himself and for Indian Art in spaces where few Indian artists have made a dent in the past.

“He is quite fantastic and hugely desirable. As Husain was the ambassador of Indian art abroad in the 1960s and ’70s, today it is Subodh who is the new face of Indian art globally,” says Sharmishtha Ray, manager of the Bodhi Art gallery in Mumbai, where Gupta’s latest offerings are on view till the end of the month. More significantly, Gupta is appealing not to the expected crowd of Indophiles and orientalists (they are in fact a bit bewildered by his sudden success) in the west but mainstream museums,  galleries and art fairs where few Indians, including Husain, have tread before.

Gupta’s work these days is all about surprise and scale: Huge monumental works that inspire awe while evoking amazement. His current show in Mumbai, for example, has only four objects— the UFO (uran khatola) made of brass lotas (common Indian water vessel) some four metres across in diameter, a simple “door-to-nowhere” cast in brass, a corner piece collage of steel utensils and his piece de resistance, the ‘tiffin-box sushi belt’. “I love food and I cook it too… in a manner of speaking I use utensils as a metaphor for food and the way it has travelled across cultures and countries in my work,” says Gupta. Interestingly, the fundamental concept of rasa (essence, juice, mood) in Indian aesthetics is food-inspired too. His earlier works have been made of milk cans and buckets, some of them GIANT milk cans and towers of buckets rising high into the sky.

Last year for just a 12-hour showing during la Nuit Blanche (White Night) in Paris Gupta combined his culinary skills and sculptural art to great effect. He was asked to create an installation at the church of St. Bernard in north Paris which was occupied by  hundreds of  immigrants in 1997 in what was called the movement “sans papiers” to protest against the change in immigration laws that made the status of thousands of French residents illegal. “It was a house of god and the site of protests by immigrants,” recalls Gupta, “I also remembered an episode from our own scriptures where a whole forest was once cut down to appease the hunger of one of our gods. So I thought of serving soup cooked by me to all visitors and make a mammoth human skull from dabbas (boxes) and baltis (pails).” The work titled A Very Hungry God took three months to construct and was snapped up by Pinault in a pre-breakfast viewing that lasted just 15 minutes for an alleged 500,000 Euros.

Born in Khargaul, a small village in Bihar, Gupta lost his railway man father when still young. As a teenager, he joined a street theatre group where apart from acting, he also designed posters and brochures. His sense of design caught the eye of a mentor in who got him admitted to the Patna Art College. After passing out from art college he came to delhi in 1987 and after a decade of struggle and trying to find his feet in the art world was discovered by Khoj, an international artists’ workshop in Delhi and Peter Nagy, an artist, curator and critic who runs the cutting edge Nature Morte gallery. According to Nagy, “Gupta’s works combine a theatrical sense of scale with a performative aspect, be it his own or that of the audience... His art seeks to energise all that we encounter and forces us to re-evaluate our own aesthetic parameters. He has found a way to speak of the local to the global and to teach the disenfranchised the language of the empowered.” Lately, Gupta is being promoted by the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud and gallerist Fabienne Leclerc who have been placing him at important European venues.

Vibrantly imaginative yet firmly rooted in his ethos, Subodh Gupta straddles the native and the global without the least self-consciousness. Not unlike his fellow Bihari, Lalu Yadav in politics, Gupta, too, is bound to serve up more surprises in future.

Somenath Hore: Minimalist Genius

By S.Kalidas

Eminent sculptor and printmaker Somnath Hore died on October 1, after protracted illness in his idyllic and rustic home in Lalbandh village, Shantiniketan. Artists, art lovers and leaders of the CPI (M) mourned the passing away of the low-profile genius whose sketches recording the tebhaga peasant movement in Bengal first drew attention as powerful political art in 1946.  Leaders including the Communist Party patriarch Jyoti Basu, Lok Sabha speaker Somnath Chatterjee and West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya recalled that Hore had started making posters for the Communist party from an early age and that it was on the recommendation of the CPI leader PC Joshi that he was admitted to the Government College of Art and Craft in Kolkata.

Born in 1921 in Barama in Chittagong, Hore was deeply affected by the plight of peasants during the Bengal Famine in 1943. In the winter of 1946, Hore was assigned by the Communist Party to document the Tebhaga peasant movement in North Bengal. This movement of tenant cultivators demanded a radical revision of the crop-sharing system so as to reduce the landlord’s share of the produce from half to one-third. As critic Samik Bandhopadhyay puts it: “A young art student at the time, Hore witnessed the massive mobilization taking place in a network of villages, and captured the widespread spirit of peasant consciousness and militant solidarity.” His personal diary and sketches of those days, says Bandhopadhyay, “are an unusual social document of a peasant movement seen through the eyes of a committed artist. Closely involved in the struggle, the Tebhaga experience remained a source of inspiration for him. One can see in these sketches the rugged lines since transformed into sculptured forms, but charged with the same intensity of anguish and anger.”

From 1954 onwards, Hore started experimenting significantly with printmaking. Between 1954 and 1958, he lectured at the Indian College of Art & Draughtsmanship in Calcutta. From 1958 to 1967, he held several posts such as in-charge of the graphic section of the Delhi College of Arts, Visiting Professor at the M S University, Baroda and then returned to Bengal to join the Visva Bharati, Santiniketan as head of the graphic art department of Kala Bhavan. He was also a founder member of the Society of Contemporary Artists when it formed in 1960. In the 1970s he not only added sculpture to his opus but also attained much fame with his minimalist white-on-white paper-pulp series of prints titled “Wounds”. 

Pranabranjan Ray, curator and art critic, was associated with Hore for over half a century. They met due to their association with the Communst movement, and then stayed in touch due to their interest in art. Ray had gone to see him a month back, because he felt that Hore will not be there for long. He says, “We have definitely lost a significant artist and a great teacher. Not only is he one of India’s most versatile printmakers, but he, along with sculptors such as Mira Mukherjee and KG Subramanium, had ruled India’s sculpture scene. He had a deep commitment to the human condition all his life and that had shaped his artistic vision.”

Satish Gujral: Material Man

By S. Kalidas

“Khudi ko kar buland itna ke har taqdeer se pehle,
Khuda banday se khud poochay, bata teri raza kya hai”

“Make your self so tall that before every decision of fate

God himself asks of the man, what is your pleasure” 

                                                                                   Allama Iqbal

When the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) opens the Satish Gujral Retrospective on February 1, the nation shall be celebrating a man whom the writer Khushwant Singh has called “the most outstanding man I have met in my life”.  For straddling the fields of drawing, painting, mural, sculpture and architecture, Satish Gujral, 81, is a slight, short man who has towered over the Indian art world for over five decades with much determination, ever bubbling bonhomie and, periodically, some raging controversy.

As if inspired by Sir Mohammed Iqbal’s famous couplet, Gujral’s story is one of man conquering all odds that fate and history conspired to pile up against him. A childhood accident ensured that Gujral had a leg infected with painful and incurable infection of osteomyelitis and lost his sense of hearing for life when he was just seven years old. However, overcoming this handicap, he went on to study at Lahore’s Mayo School of Art and then at Sir JJ School of Art, Mumbai, before going to Mexico to apprentice under the famous muralist and painter David Alfaro Siqueiros. Between these stints of studying art came the partition with all its attendant horrors of communal genocide and displacement. Gujral has himself written eloquently about these in his moving autobiography A Brush With Life (Viking 1997).  To coincide with the present retrospective Roli Books is bringing out another book on him Satish Gujral: an artography with essays on his oeuvre by Santo Dutta, Gayatri Sinha and Gautam Bhatia.

Any retrospective of Gujaral’s should be interesting sheerly because of his vast output in a variety of mediums. From his anguished expressionist oils in the post-partition era to paper collages to burnt wood sculptures to ceramic murals to granite figures to buildings including the Belgian Embassy— Gujral has not only worked in a host of materials but also changed his imagery and style to suit his medium in each phase. In fact his main complaint against most other artists including his bete noir M.F. Husain has been that they tend to cash in on an established style mainly because of the pressures on the market. Nor has that been his only tirade. For a person with speech disability Gujral has been incredibly vocal in taking on virtually every other celebrated artist of his generation from Francis Newton Souza to S.H. Raza in his autobiography. He maintains that the claim of the Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG,  of which Husain, Raza and Souza were the leading lights) to having ushered in modernism in Indian art is both hollow and untrue as the Kolkata painters a la Paritosh Sen and Gaganendranath Tagore had preceded the Mumbai group. Besides, Gujral maintains, there was  Roop Krishna, a Lahore painter, who had studied in Europe in the 1920s and worked in the modernist style long before the second world war when American soldiers and European émigrés taught modernist fashions to the Mumbai Progressives.

Gujaral, having studied in Mexico, was hugely influenced – curiously not by his teacher Siqueiros or by Firda Kahlo and Diego Rivera with whom he interacted—but by Jose Clemente Orozco (1883- 1949) who had died just a few years before he landed in Mexico in 1952. The Mexican masters had grappled with the problem of modernism and indigenous cultural moorings at least one generation before Indian artists faced the same dilemma. Besides, the Mexican artists with their strong revolutionary leanings had a political involvement that was far deeper than Indian artist ever could aspire to, leave alone try and emulate or match. No wonder that Gujral has been most contemptuous of the simplistic and borrowed revolutionary rhetoric spewed by some of his contemporaries and juniors.

So what does this retrospective portend? Will it rake up all the old controversies and debates that this master of the brush has whipped up in past? Will it lead to a new reading of his work? Material Man still needs to be re-evaluated. 

Life Between the Lines

By S. Kalidas

Britsh rule contained the tribal regions of the Northeast between two lines: The McMahon Line and the Inner Line. The first demarcated colonial India’s border with Tibet and the other kept the ‘mainstream’ people of the plains of India from over-running the indigenous communities and safeguarding them from ‘foreign’ influences. After independence, Prime Minister Nehru set up the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) on the advice of anthropologist Verrier Elwin and continued the policy of ‘protective isolation’.  How well either of the lines served its purpose can be a subject of much debate but the policy ensured that these areas remain at best exotic and unknown for the rest of the country.

Since 2002, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, has been conducting a five-year project to document the dynamics of cultural change among the tribes of Arunachal Pradesh.  The first small sample of their work has just been put on show by the British Council at Delhi’s Crafts Museum (Dec 7-26). The exhibition, aptly titled Tribal Transitions, comprises of some absolutely riveting photographs shot by Michael Aram Tarr in the last three years. More interestingly, they have been juxtaposed with pictures that got taken during the few recorded encounters that the British Raj had with the hapless tirbals between 1862 and 1945. The show also has a few rather hastily collected crafts objects on display that have little relevance to the show other than perhaps to justify its location in the Crafts Museum.

Other than Sunil Jana in the 1960s and Pablo Bartholomew two decades later, few Indian lensmen have done any significant work with tribal cultures. For that reason alone Tarr’s muse puts him a rarefied category. But that is not to apologise for the aesthetic worth his frames. Tarr has just the eye for the picture that tells more that the proverbial “hundred lines” and lends itself to readings well beyond the anthropological. Seeing the exhibits one cannot but reflect that tribal traditions maintain amazing elements of continuity. Whether it is the communal building of the bamboo bridge across a river or the pattern of the textiles they use, Tarr traces the placid trajectory of transition with a benign and rapturous gaze. A very significant show indeed, for both the ethnographer and the photography buff .  The show will travel to Kolkata and Itanagar, and eventually to the British Museum, London.

Dhruva Mistry: Forged Dualities

By S. Kalidas

On till February 23: By displaying the sculptures of one of India’s most celebrated sculptors, Dhruva Mistry, at the colonial palace of the erstwhile Maharaja of Travancore in the very heart of Lutyen’s Delhi, Bodhi Art has scored another high: A stunning show in a splendorous setting. With its Palladian façade and large halls with high ceilings, this gem of a building which now belongs to the Kerala government is superbly suited to house art, and viewing Mistry’s modernist steel works in it is sheer delight.

Born in a Gujarati carpenter’s family and trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda and Royal College of Art, London, Mistry revels in forging seemingly disparate elements into objects of dialectical fluidity. Here he presents his recurring muse, the human body, in multi-lateral and multi-layered dimensions. The hard, tensile strength of steel sheets is cut and welded to reveal the sensuous figures that his imagination—informed as much by the Greco-Roman tradition as by native Indian practice— conjures up with an impish sense of play or leela.

Last year, Pablo Picasso paid Mistry a mind-visit. The encounter resulted in Mistry evoking the Guernica in a seminal work titled Expulsion of Pain that fused the Spaniard’s masterpiece with Paolo Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano and the image of Kali slaying the demons as seen in a Pahari miniature.

In the present exhibition, Mistry’s figures and torsos are neo-cubist constructs with a third mystical dimension. In effecting this spatial and temporal transformation, it seems Mistry has brought the power of  Shiva’s third (all revealing and all destroying) eye to work. These figures are  not static pieces; they appear to be contorting, moving or at rest as if in an asana. The show also has a series of charming wall hangings that he calls maya-medallions and some Miro-esque steel collages.

Atul Dodia: Hanging Intent

By S.Kalidas

The small but stunningly designed studio in the neecha nagar (lower depths) of Mumbai’s northern suburb of Ghatkopar is bare but for a noose swinging from a solitary scaffold behind an iron door. As if playing out a one-actor play on a Brechtian stage set, Atul Dodiya, easily India’s most wanted artist of his generation, goes through the pantomime of posing for our photographer’s voracious lens. But there is more to this minimalist macabre work. The eye wanders to the text of an Allama Prabhu poem attached like a sign-post to the gallows. It reads:

A wilderness grew

 in the sky

 in that wilderness

a hunter.

In that hunter's hands

a deer.

The hunter will not die

till the beast

is killed.

Awareness is not easy,

is it,

O Lord of the Caves?

Like the 12th century Kannada mystic translated by A.K. Ramanajuam in Speaking of Shiva, Dodiya conceals his intent in a forest of metaphors and references drawn as much from classical Indian literature as from post-modernist western rhetoric. And, much like the veerashaiva poet, Dodiya too, has an agenda that is as politically subversive as that of the Bhakti Movement. And it is equally nuanced.

As we meet to talk of his art and his life, the reservation debate is raging on the streets of Mumbai and Delhi. Dodiya’s admiration for the Bhakti poets resonates in my mind as my eyes and ears pick up the pro and anti reservation din from television images and newspaper headlines. Was the caste and class issue not addressed well enough by the four centuries of militant Bhakti literature, I wonder. But this suburban master of the multi-media is no pamphleteer. His intent is not to make facile accessories for fashionable politics. But instead, it may be to create an art that at once mocks,  informs, lightens, illumines and perhaps, in a grandly dramatic moment, gesticulates with an agile sleight of hand that French call “the error of the eye”.

Born in a middle-class Gujarati family in 1959, Dodiya grew up in the wadi (small communal tenement dwellings) where he still works. He says he knew by age 11 that he would be a painter. “My father was a building contractor so my elder sister thought maybe I could train in architecture, but I was hopeless in mathematics and my family resigned to the idea of my becoming an artist,” he says as he recalls his admission to Mumbai’s Sir JJ School of Arts from where he passed out having won the gold medal by topping the class of ’82.

That was also the time when his father got him a first class pass for the suburban train so that he could traverse the class divide to distant and classy south Mumbai to see exhibitions and visit galleries. And that was the time when he met Anju, later to be his artist wife. Dodiya’s dextrous knack for creating haunting images out of the ordinary and the ubiquitous, even at that early stage, caught the eye of his peers and he started getting included in important exhibitions like the 25th anniversary show of Gallery Chemould, Mumbai’s oldest and most widely respected art gallery, way back in 1988.

Then came a two-year stint at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris, thanks to a French government fellowship. “As I saw the art of the old masters and modernists in Europe, I was silenced by the sheer mastery of image-making that had preceded my time. I had to do something different,” he reminisces modestly, adding, “I felt that I had little to add to all that had already been achieved. I could not paint for the two years that I stayed in Paris.”

Dodiya then went about creating a visual language that is his oeuvre today. Going well beyond plain picture making, his art practice now evolved into complex installations that include childhood memories, political comment, photography, painting, sculpture, texts, arrangements of objects, appropriations from other masters’ works, et al. Atul Dodiya, the tall serious-looking suburban Gujarati lad had arrived as a grand sorcerer of concepts on the globalised arena. What sets this soft-spoken art maker apart from his usually loud post-modernist confreres is the quiet depth of his fecund imagination and the subtle affinities he conjures up— somewhat like a street acrobat— by juxtaposing seemingly contradictory and whimsical popular images in his layered works.

With his current multi-crore (yes, he sells rather well, thank you) show— enigmatically titiled The Wet Sleeves of My Paper Robe: Shabari in her Youth after Nandalal Bose– at Bodhi Art’s plush, new gallery at Kala Ghoda, Dodiya has displayed perhaps his most politically nuanced yet poetically subversive opus. Already seen in Singapore and New Delhi, the works will next travel to New York where Bodhi Art is opening its new space in downtown Manhattan. Yet, according to those in the know, Dodiya is far from being a perfectly packaged product of the globalised art mart. “Atul’s rise has not been caused by his success in the market so much as through the testimonials of critics and the art world,” says Dinesh Vazirani  of Saffronart, the online art auction house and gallery.

Dodiya’s future offerings are going to be a major winter showing at New Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery on the theme of marriage and a solo exhibition at Chicago’s Walsh Gallery of collected works. And till then, the art world awaits.

Female Sexual Fantasies

By S. Kalidas

The male establishment, having effectively controlled the woman's imagination for centuries, has shaped her fantasies to conform to its own rigid parameters

No, they do not surf porn sites, 29 per cent hold that pornography is morally wrong, 82 per cent have never masturbated and only 24 per cent admit to having sex. Thirty-five years after feminists burnt their bras in the western world, the single Indian woman could well be the prototype for Germaine Greer's Female Eunuch looking back in anger. Nancy Friday's My Secret Garden is still something that adolescent boys and perverse men furtively peruse in the secrecy of bathrooms and Women On Top is understood to be the nice lady neighbours living on the floor above. Bipasha Basu and Mallika Sherawat notwithstanding, our seductive Menakas and Urvashis are definitely not wannabe Madonnas. The latest readings of sexual iconographies show that even in the West, the "new woman" by proclaiming sexual autonomy has only fuelled male fears by becoming an emasculating temptress or, as veteran art historian Bram Dijkstra puts it in his Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil, "the femme fatale in search of the perpetually tumescent male". So trying to map the single Indian woman's realm of sexual fantasy is probably like chasing a chimera created mainly by a masochistic male mindset out to beguile or punish his own penis. After all, we keep hearing that it has a mind of its own. Oh yeah, the consort-killing Alpha Female is a concept deeply denied in any patriarchal paradise. In India, too, history saw Razia Sultan murdered for wanting to be sultan and Rani Jhansi is eulogised only because she fought for the rights of her male heir, not herself. There are more luscious mythologies, like those of the Devi creating a male son/bodyguard (Ganesha) by rubbing into shape the soil from the skin of her sakhis (female companions) mainly to keep her husband (Shiva) out of her pleasure pool while she bathed and frolicked with her female friends and attendants. Or of Kali as Chhinnamasta, who sits astride her passive male consort in an unending act of sexual conquest, while lopping off her own head and drinking her own blood. Middle-class urban India does not easily recall such macabre in-your-face images even in its most private mindspace. They remain buried, deep under layers of comforting, colonial legacies.