S.Kalidas' Archive

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.