Of Capacities and Containment: 

Poetry and politics in the art of Subodh Gupta

By S. Kalidas

iss ghat antar baag bagiche In this vessel lie groves and gardens
iss hi mein sirjanhaara,            In it, too, lives the creator

iss ghat antar saat samundar In this vessel lie the seven seas
iss hi mein nau lakh taara,        In it, too, the nine hundred thousand stars

iss ghat antar paaras moti        In this vessel lies the paaras*1 pearl
iss hi mein parkhan haara,   In it, too, the diviner

iss ghat antar anhad garje       In this vessel sheer silence reverberates
iss hi mein urat phoohaara       In it, too, gushes the fountain,

kahat Kabir suno bhaai saadho  Says Kabir*2, listen dear wise men
iss hi mein saain hamaara. In this alone is the Lord we seek.

                                                                        (translation by S.K.)



Geeta Kapur*3: “I propose situating the Indian artist in an uneasy ‘subterrain’, in the ‘dug-outs’ of the contemporary, where s/he reclaims memory and history; where the levelling effect of the no-history, no-nation, no-place phenomena promoted by globalized exhibition and market circuits is upturned to rework a passage back into the politics of place.”


Steel, I think, first started seeping into Indian households when I was a boy of about eleven or twelve. Somewhat typical of post-independence urban India, ours, too, was a middle-class joint-family home where traditional Hindu beliefs and practices constantly negotiated for space with city living and modern western education. Steel, was the new metal that our pro-socialist chaacha (uncle) Nehru’s*4 suspicious (as my grand father was convinced) new Temples of Modernity were churning out in the remote tribal bowels of Bhillai and Bokaro*4 with the help of an un-godly Soviet Union. And now, insidiously, it was entering our hearth and home. In a corner of our house used to be a rickety reed basket reserved for torn and worn-out clothing. About once or twice every year, my grandmother would wait for the call of her favourite itinerant ‘bartan-wala’ (utensils seller), a wizened Muslim from Muradabad*5 with a huge load of brass and steel utensils slung on his bicycle, to pass down the street singing his sing-song sales pitch, “bartan wala!!!! issteel ke bartan lelo (utensil seller! Come and get your steel utensils)”.

To the wondrous amusement of us children, the next hour would be spent watching our grand mother drive a hard bargain over what she was convinced was but a fair barter. One slightly torn silk saree for a small steel bowl, four thin cotton school shirts for a set of two steel plates, an embroidered table cloth for four serving spoons... In the evening as we sat cross-legged on reed mats for dinner on the kitchen floor, fights would break out among the children over who was served on the new, bright, shining steel thaali (plate with a rim). Grand father, of course, never ate off steel. He was served on a bronze thaali and brass bowls with a sliver tumbler and a copper lota (small pot bellied vessel) for water-- all placed on a low wooden stool called the pirha or  chowki.*6 Till he had his way, our house did not get a gas stove or a pressure cooker. Coal or wood fire in a stove made of bricks, mud and cow dung*7 was the altar of my grandmother’s ever busy kitchen.

To say today, that Subodh Gupta has become the ‘bartan-wala’ of the global art scene might sound as a facetious truism.  But he does lug loads of Indian brass and steel utensils, much like the utensil-seller of my childhood, to far and distant places of the world; and I am told, like my grand mother’s humble protagonist, drives a hard bargain for what he thinks is a just deal. Also, like the ‘marginal/outcaste’ Muslim Muradabadi utensil-seller on the threshold of my grand father’s Tamil Brahmin abode, Gupta, too, tests the colonial/racial guilt and teases the aesthetic/consumerist desires of the ‘other’*8 Developed/Western World.

With India’s emerging strength in global economy, it is easy to see the ‘news-value’ of placing Subodh Gupta’s success in the global art scene in the notion of ‘identity’. Claiming for him thus a ‘national’ context; one that is seen as analogous to the rise of a Lakshmi Mittal as the world’s largest steel producer, or Ratan Tata’s takeover of the multinational steel giant Corus. Just as the established global orders of economy are learning to do business with China and India, the global aspirations of ‘conceptual art’ are leading it to constantly discourse and debate the notions of ‘identity’ and ‘self’ within the ‘contemporary’ space. However, unlike the stiff initial resistance encountered by Mittal and Tata in global markets, Subodh Gupta’s increasing incursions into the western/global art scene have so far not been met with any nuance of cultural chauvinism. On the contrary, his reception has been rather surprisingly celebratory. What distinguish him perhaps, are his tantalising feats of time-space crossovers crafted with formal ingenuity, imaginative acumen and dexterity of execution. By some visual magic, his iconic installations of Indian utensils manage to evoke the same innocent sense of wonder and delight in his foreign patrons that the itinerant bartan-wala did in me some four decades years ago.

Many Indians, though, might find the word ‘utensil’ too coldly clinical a term for the objects sought to be described in Subodh Gupta’s art. It does not quite connote the value endowed to these objects by the power of myth, legend, daily ritual and intimate usage. It is true that all these objects are widely used for cooking, serving or storing food in Indian kitchens. What is often overlooked is that in the Indian space these utensils have a secret, sacred life of their own. These objects – the lota (squat pitcher), the kumbha, the kalasham or the ghara (large pot-bellied pitcher), the pateela (pan), the thaali (plate) and the chimtaa (tongs)--  are also signifiers of widespread cultural, mystical and religious practices in rural and urban middle class India even today. This is the 250 million-strong middle class India with a sharply rising purchasing surplus that the business magazines are talking about and this is the India that Subodh so dramatically first seeks to recover and represent-- with all its chaotic contradictions and baffling complexities-- in his persona and in his art; and then diametrically (almost diabolically) seeks to universalise for the “other/contemporary” world.

Some have termed Subodh Gupta’s use of utensils (and other objects of daily use) as the use of “stereotypes and clichés”. But in Subodh’s context, ‘archetype’ would be the better word. In Sanskrit the generic word is paatram, meaning a vessel or a container. A paatram can be of many shapes, sizes, types and functions. The kumbha or the kalasham (pot-bellied pitcher) is the archetypal Indian paatram invoking the amrita kalasham – the vessel containing amritam, the nectar of immortality, over which the gods and the demons fought only to be seduced by the Lord Vishnu who dressed in drag to become Mohini, the Enchatress, thus saving the nectar for the gods.*9 Or then there is the akshaya paatram -- a vessel of food which never empties, like the one given to Draupadi the shared wife of the five heroes (the Pandavas) in the epic Mahabhatra by the Sun God Surya.*10

The basic design of the Indian lota/kalasham/ghara has not changed in at least three to four thousand years. The pot-bellied shape of the vessel is symbolic of the pregnant womb and thereby of the body of the Mother Goddess. The lota and the kalasham are the vessels in which water and other liquids, both secular and sacred, are served. In the holy city of Banaras (Varanasi) for example, thousands of sealed lota-s filled with gangajal (the water of the sacred river Ganga which is said to wash away all mortal sins) are sold everyday to be carried to homes in every nook and cranny of India for ritual purifications and funerals. As the sacred and the profane are never completely segregated in India, today Benaras is also a very dirty, hugely criminalised city, and the Ganga is an extremely over-used and over-polluted river. The lota is also, frequently, the vessel in which we carry water to the woods/fields for washing up after defecating. Indoor toilets with underground sewage are a luxury that less than 30 per cent Indians benefit from even today.

Food, implements of cooking and vessels to store and cook food; and ritual feeding (of the needy, the knowledgeable and the holy—including animals) have formed a central and recurrent motif in Indian life– both religious and cultural-- from the earliest times and continue till today. One of Subodh’s earliest video installations recalls the ritual feeding of Brahmins commemorating the death of a parent or a spouse in what is called the shraaddha ceremony. Then he gave a radical interventionist spin to this ritual of feeding and remembrance in 2006 when he fed soup that he had cooked to hundreds of people, in the process commemorating the siege of ‘sans papier’ immigrants (who had been suddenly and unjustly denied their rights to live in France) at the Eglise Saint-Bernard in Paris where he first showed his monumental sculpture A Very Hungry God at the White Night (La Nuit Blanche). With his mammoth skull crafted from scores of pots and pans and buckets, he not only evokes awe through scale, but also implies a ‘fearful’ hunger through the use of upturned and empty steel vessels that go to make the skull. The skull, as we know, is central to the occultist practices of Shivism and the Tantra. The begging bowl of Indian saadhu-s (wandering holy men) is also usually made of the cup of bones that cover the human brain.

Each day the Hindu venerates his 360 million gods and goddesses with many big and small gestures and rituals where such vessels made of leaf, straw, terracotta, iron, copper, bronze, brass and now steel and plastic are used in a number of symbolic  ways. In traditional homes across India every morning, the kitchen floor and stove are first cleaned, applied with a layer of purifying grey-green cow dung and anointed with sacred marks and designs of white powdered rice by hand. Then the fire is lit and propitiated ritually, usually with a pot of milk to be boiled on it. A small portion is “fed” to Agni, the Fire God, before it can be used for the family’s consumption. After the meal is over these kitchen utensils are hand cleaned, polished with ash from the stove fire and then arranged on the wall or a ledge in a reverential display. In the bucolic idyll of rural and semi-urban India hundreds of such installations and performances are played out daily, not only for reasons of religion, caste or status, but also for deep personal (almost artistic) pleasure.

Interestingly, according to the classical Indian tradition, the rasa *11 or the emotional response to a work of art is not a value inherent per se in the work itself. A work of art in itself is like an empty vessel, into which the empathetic viewer/ reader by the virtue of his or her imagination, associations and references causes the emotional response to take place. The rasa is the unquantifiable sum of resonances evoked by the work of art and its admirer in each other. The artist merely arranges the elements in his work in such a manner as to suggest the sentiments desired in the mind of his or her viewer. It is also an accepted practice in India that an artist, a teacher, a shaman or a guru only offers so much to his disciple, patron or audience as much as he or she has the capacity to retain, absorb, appreciate and make good use of. This has been understood as the ‘principle of capacity’ (paatrata siddhaanta) of one who receives/beholds/listens to the work of divinity, art, poetry, science or metaphysics.

So how does Subodh Gupta manage to address both the culture-specific and the universal/global audiences at once? Most obviously, his art shows the capacity to move audiences from beyond his socio-cultural context. Like all true art, at all times and in all places, Gupta’s art too has the capacity to uncover the ‘self’ that is ever present in the ‘other’.  In making this art Gupta employs the device of changing the role, context, size and scale (including in-versing time scale/frame in his videos) of the ubiquitous to effect the evoking of the iconic. More subtly, he may ‘re-incarnate’ an object by infusing it with memories/ associations/ functions from his cultural landscape. In many Indian homes, milk comes from the baalti (bucket) into which it has been collected from udders of the much loved household cow. In cities where cows are no longer permitted in residential areas, milk arrives in those typically shaped modern milk canisters that Subodh so imaginatively transposes in his series of works like the Two Cows. Or take his hut made of cow dung cakes (used for burning in kitchen stoves) that he so emblematically calls My Mother and Me.

At the same time, Subodh never loses sight of the possibilities of the erotic in his work. From his voluptuously rounded pateela-s signifying a womb pregnant with hundreds of possibilities, to his un-self-consciously sexy nayak-nayika*12 (hero-heroine) type self-portraits in works like Bihari and Vilas, the erotic is very much a part of Subodh Gupta’s chamatkaar (spectacle).  Actually, by the constant invocation of the many metaphors of food and its containers, the sensual is never far from Subodh Gupta’s ever hospitable high table. His amazing work Silk Route (2007) comprising a huge, slowly moving sushi belt fitted with scores of tiffin boxes of varying sizes on the one hand is reminiscent of an urban hi-rise skyline as if seen from the deck of an approaching ship at sea (New York Here I Come!); on the other, it recalls the dabba-wallas of metropolitan Mumbai manually transporting wheel-barrows of tiffin boxes filled with home cooked food for white collar workers in a fast changing urban reality where packaged industrially cooked foods soon threaten to become the convenient norm. In this seductive formalisation of the ‘moveable feast’, the mantra for nirvana is a clever combination of eros and astonishment. By vividly unleashing these subliminally absorbed concepts of capacity and containment in his reductionist yet layered art, Subodh Gupta nimbly seeks to stride the trapeze so tenuously stretched between the poco-pomo global and the naïve-kitsch Bihari local with the panache of a mad man, a magician or a prophet.

Leela: a passion play of transgressions

This panache or ‘attitude’ strikes one even more in Subodh Gupta’s performance and video works. This ‘attitude’ can be traced to the Indian concept of leela. Leela was originally used in the ancient purana-s*13 to describe the heroic, amorous and pastoral dalliances of the cowherd God, Krishna. Over time, leela has acquired more secular nuances and is now widely used as a generic term for passion plays, spectacles and performances of all sorts, including politics.

Before he turned to pursue art full time, Subodh Gupta had been an active member of a street theatre group in his native Bihar, performing political leela-s of social unrest. Even today, Subodh maintains an acute sense of the dramatic and invariably devises ingenious gestures and/or minimalist visual emblems to encapsulate the whole experience of a lifestyle or a belief system. By smearing his naked body with fresh cow dung, Subodh seems to revel in the mock-pastoral leela-s of a nostalgic mythical time-space set squarely, and often harshly, within a circle of alien, concrete, post-industrial environment. Riding naked and mud covered on a cow in the grounds of an obsolete and abandoned factory (as in the work Cowboy, 1996) Subodh Gupta is ready to rodeo from Modinagar (an industrial city near Delhi) where he did his first performance, to Manhattan where his next showing is slated.

Here, he may also unload quirky visual metaphors and contrasting cultural idioms drawn as much from the ‘classical/ folk Indian’ as from the post-internet, Pop ‘global’ imagination. This sense of the ‘spectacle’ permeates a video work like the Irresistible Attack (2006) where the action in the field of a 21st century war– both so real and yet so completely virtual, toy-like and ‘other worldly’—is seen to end as an obeisance to a slowly deflating lingam, the phallic symbol of Shiva and macho masculinity.

Subodh Gupta’s most evolved video work for me till date is the one he has done for the global mega-brand Chanel in 2007. Asked to make a work on handbags, Gupta has made this wonderfully bitter-sweet 4.6-minute video where clips from real life and popular Hindi cinema face off each other in a two-screen format. Those who have grown up in rural and small town India will recall the primitive, hand-cranked ‘bioscope’*14 that held such a thrill for all children till it was replaced by the proliferation of the television in the late 1980s. By a shrewd juxtaposition of shots, sequences, songs and dialogues from various Hindi films relating to ladies’ purses/hand bags/ hold alls/travel bags/bundles of possessions tied up in rags and sheets, Subodh Gupta plays on the etymology of both the words bioscope (bios= life + scope= look at) and hand bag. On the second screen he shows a group of unskilled Indian immigrant workers in the Middle East packing their ‘foreign shopping’ and personal effects in large and small packages in preparation of their long journey home. Skilled and unskilled Indian workers outnumber the local Arab population in the middle-east by many times and work under harsh conditions at the best of circumstances.

Having grown up in a railway enclave as the son of a railway employee the possibilities of seeing the act of travel as theatre must have occurred early in Gupta’s mind. There is a simultaneous presentation of the real and the fictional in this video work that not only showcases the culture of bags and baggage in India, but also comments obliquely on the inequities of class, life of immigrant workers and the general Indian proclivity to travel with huge and heavy loads. Metaphorically, it could also be seen to allude to all the civilisational baggage we carry in our transit through life and place.

Baggages, migrations and ‘the return home’ have been enduring concerns of Subodh Gupta.  It is a theme that crystallised in works such as Saat Samundar Paar (Across the Seven Seas, 2005) where he uses baggage trolleys of modern airports to allude to the grim historical reality of migrations from India, especially his home state of Bihar. From the 1860s when indentured labour was sent from here to work the sugarcane fields of Mauritius, Guyana, Surinam, Trinidad and other British and Dutch colonies, Bihar has seen migration of male workers in such a scale and for such a long time that a hugely popular folk musical theatre called the bidesia (the migrant)*15 has developed around the experience that seems to epitomise every Bihari’s fate. Sample the bidesia lament of young brides whose husbands have deserted them to work abroad: railiya na bairi se jahajawa na bairi se / mor saiyan ke bilmawe se paiswa bairi hamar (It is not the train, it is not the ship that is our enemy, but rather the money that compels our husbands to migrate to other lands).

Transits and transfers are disorienting and uprooting events. They easily voyage into violence. The culture of anarchy, crime and lawlessness in Bihar is by now legendary. With early works that showed the katta (home-made pistol) as a generous offering in a ritualised banquet (installation The Way Home) and paintings like Let Me Make My Damned Art Gupta mythologises the violence inherent in his environment in a localised dialect. Nonetheless, the echoes these works have evoked in non-Indian audiences may point to the fact that violence in its ‘perfected purity’ is after all, a timeless and universal rite.

Subodh Gupta makes a transition of sorts in his own idiom and dialect in his latest work Gandhi’s Three Monkeys.*16 Here a tragic-comic Playstation War Game is conjured up by sculptures of three soldier heads that are trimmed with eye shades, mask and helmet made of Indian brass utensils. The irony and wit in turning the mascot of a Man of Peace into a testament of violence apart, these bronze sculptures embody more subversive possibilities. In a personalised Pop patois these could be the idols of the new sightless, silent and deaf trinity of distilled violence-- the 360 million-plus-1th mutation in Subodh’s crowded pantheon of holy hybrids. This trinity is not the harbinger of the Apocalypse promised by the End of (a linear) History. Rather, it is the formal manifestation of the frightening realisation of the cyclicity of time-- a 21st century re-envisioning of the kalachakra*17, if you will. In this kool kat kurukshetra *18 (holy battle field), Subodh Gupta navigates his chariot of transgressions in a cathartic pageant –that of a world constantly being lost /destroyed and yet emerging anew, reconfigured, reconstructed from its own debris.

Om Shantih Shantih Snhantihi! *19 (Let there be peace, let there be peace, let there be peace).

NOTES

1* paaras moti is a mythical pearl (moti) that turns anything that it is touch to into gold.

2* Kabir (circa 1440-1518) was one of the most luminous voices of the Bhakti Movement that swept across medieval India between the 12th and the 18th centuries.

3* Geeta Kapur is an eminent Indian art historian, independent curator and cultural theorist. The quotation is from the catalogue essay for subTerrain: artworks in the city fold curated by Kapur for The House of World Cultures, Berlin, 2003

4* chacha is the Hindi word for father’s younger brother. Jawahar Lal Nehru liked to be called as ‘uncle’ by the children of India. His birthday is celebrated as Children‘s Day. He set up the first Public Sector steel mills in the tribal belts of Bokaro and Bhillai with Soviet help in the late 1950s and early 1960s and called them the ‘Temples of Modernity’.

5* Muradabad (Moradabad) is an old centre of brass and (now) steel utensil industry in northern India.

6*Subodh Gupta’s work with chowki-s

7* cow dung and cow urine are considered purifying and vested with medicinal properties in Hindu tradition and a part of many daily rituals.

8* The Sanskrit word would be mlechchha: people of foreign extraction in ancient India. mlechchha was used by the Aryans much as the ancient Greeks used barbaros, originally to indicate the uncouth and incomprehensible speech of foreigners and then extended to their unfamiliar behaviour. As a mlechchha, any foreigner stood completely outside the caste system and the ritual ambience. Thus, historically, contact with them was viewed by the caste Hindu as polluting. Encyclopaedia Brittanica

9* Mohini, lit. the enchantress, was the alluring female ‘rupa’ (form) that the male god Vishnu took in order to seduce the asura-s (demons) and divert their attention from the pot of elixir that emerged out of the churning of the milky ocean, sheersaagar, in Hindu mythology.

10* a+ kshaya = that which does not finish (kshaya), empty, or end. paatram= vessel.

The story from the Mahabharata related to akshaya paatram: The five Pandava princes are in exile in forest. Draupadi, the shared wife of the five Pandavas, has an akshaya pathram given to her by Surya, the Sun God. This vessel can produce any number of servings of food as long as it is not washed and rested upturned for that particular day. One day, the easily angered sage Sri Durvasa arrived with his 10000 disciples visit the Pandava brothers  in the forest in exile. Custom dictated that Draupadi, feed all her unexpected guests. But she had already washed the akshya paatram for that day. She became worried that she may incur the curse of the notorious Sage and prays to Lord Krishna, who appears and "inspects" the akshaya paatram. The Lord finds a small fragment of a leaf still attached to it. When the Lord tastes the morsel, the hunger of all 10001 rishis (sages) is satiated.

11* First articulated and discussed in the Natya Shastra (2nd cent BC) of Bharata, the nine rasa-s are: Shringaram (erotic), Adbhutam (wonderment), Karunayam (empathy), Hasyam (comic), Raudram (anger), Vibhatsam (disdain/dislike), Veeram (valour), Bhayam (fear) and  Shantam (peace).

12* nayak-nayika. Loosely translated as hero-heroine, actor-actress or man-woman. In classical and medieval poetry and painting this relationship was highly discussed, theorised and stylised. Medieval aesthetics devised ashta nayika-s or eight archetypal heroines classified by their states and temperaments. The allusion to nayak-nayika-s of desi (Bollywood) films is obvious and not excluded.

13* purana-s are a genre of Hindu text telling the stories of Gods and Goddesses, genealogies of the kings, heroes and demigods, and descriptions of Hindu cosmology, philosophy and geography. Puranas are written in the form of narrative stories related by one person to another. The saint Vyasa is considered to be the complier of the purana-s.

14* The rural Indian ‘bioscope’ was a large box (very brightly painted on the outside) with a small film or slide projector inside and three or four peep-holes in its body for children to peer through. The biscope-wala would play his reel of spliced unrelated film clips to popular film songs from a78 rpm vinyl record player set on top of the bioscope for a charge of two or four ana-s (now obsolete Indian coins. An ana was worth six paise) and let children watch the film clips through the peep-holes.

15* bidesia: the folk theatre of migrant lower caste/Dalit workers of Bihar deal with issues of confrontation: between the traditional and the modern, between urban and rural, between the haves and the have-nots.

16* Gandhi’s Three Monkeys: The story of the three monkeys is always mentioned along with Mahatma Gandhi's name. According to Majorie Sykes (1905-1996) who worked with both Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi, one day a party of visitors from China came to visit Gandhi. "Gandhiji, we have brought you a small gift," they said. "It is a child's toy, but it is famous in our country. One monkey has his eyes covered, one covers his ears and one his mouth; together they proclaim: See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Say No Evil.” Gandhi was so delighted with the set of the three monkeys that he made it his mascot and kept it carefully by him for the rest of his life.

17* Kurukshetra: the place in North India where the war in Mahabharata was fought. It is also now a generic term for contested spaces of any type. Lord Krishna, as the charioteer of the Pandava hero Arjuna, imparted the Bhagawat Gita (a discourse on morality, life and death) in Kurukshetra.

18* Kalachakra: is a term used in Tantric Buddhism that means "time-wheel" or "time-cycles". It refers both to a Tantric deity and to the philosophies and meditation practices; it is one of the most complex systems within tantric Buddhism. The Kalachakra tradition revolves around the concept of time (kala) and cycles (chakra): from the cycles of the planets, to the cycles of human breathing.

19* From the Upanishads, a body Sanskrit verses that form the core thoughts of Vedantic Hinduism. Considered as mystic or spiritual contemplations of the Vedas, their putative end and essence, the Upanishads are known as Vedanta --the end/culmination of the Vedas.

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.