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Mithila Art and Artists: the Present Continuous… Chapter VI Mithila Art and Artists: The Present Continuous… Exploration of the complex world of Mithila art and society has provided us with several significant insights. When art is looked at from a critical lens of social structures, institutions and processes and their historical evolution, it gets demystified to a huge extent. It tells us that art and society mirror each other. On the one hand, art imitates life, and on the other, life expresses itself through the forms that art provides it. The perspective provided by the field of Cultural Studies has given us the tools to study art or any other cultural production as a means to recognize and identify power relations embedded in society. Since artistic production, like any other cultural artefact, is a creation of human labour and imagination, it’s forms, careers, flows, destinies- is mired in networks of capital, social relations, political formations and so on. At the same time, as we have seen, art brings about massive transformations in the economy, polity and society of a region. This approach sharpens our sensibilities to understand the processes of marginalization through the establishment of ‘centres’ and formation of ‘peripheries’ both at the level of discourse as well as practice. The nexus between knowledge and power creates and sustains hegemonic forms of control of certain groups over cultures of others. In the process, the culture of the dominant group assumes a representative status- of standing for all cultures. Infact, it becomes the ‘authentic’ culture, subsuming within itself not only variations and versions but also contestations and subversions, posed by resisting subjectivities. The question of authenticity is linked to the question of identity. Whose art is ‘authentic’ art? How does that art acquire authenticity or what is the process through which that art becomes or gets designated as ‘authentic’? What are the institutional practices and policies that contribute to the making of ‘authentic’ art? 137 One of the ways in which this is done is by invoking ‘tradition’ at will, and mobilizing it to produce a particular kind of effect, for instance, to generate a particular canon of art. This creates and sustains the dominance of a genre or style, practiced by a particular group or individual. It is not that marginalized identities and cultures do not resist cultural interpellation. But canons have a way of dealing with them, by either appropriating within their fold or completely sidelining and ghettoizing. In the context of Mithila art, many of these questions have got unfolded in various ways. The category of ‘folk’ got superimposed onto the category of ‘nation’ when tradition was invoked, masking the differences and hierarchies existing within both these categories. In an act of post-colonial self-fashioning of a nascent nation, women’s everyday art of rural India became the inheritors of a glorious culture and tradition, steadfastly staying impervious to the influences of Western colonialism. The independent nation-state’s adherence to secularism brought about a shift in perspective towards the rural arts from the symbol of Hindu art traditions to that of a secular, democratic culture. As part of drought-relief measure, commoditization of Mithila art led to some foundational changes in the way it had been practiced till then. The change in the context of the art practice- from ritual and decoration to products for sale and exhibition; from walls and floors to paper, canvas, papier mache articles, textile, furniture, and what not; from fingers and twigs to brush, felt pen and increasingly more sophisticated tools; and finally, from colours obtained from plants and articles of everyday use to chemical paints- has altered the art form and the consciousness of the artists alike. Mithila art has moved from the rendering of fertility, ritual and decorative motifs to complex narratives and commentaries, in the hands of artists who appear to be highly self-conscious of their practice, generating through their art, a discourse that is forcing both cultural policies of the State and the discursive landscape of the mainstream artworld to take notice and introspect. The advocacy by cultural activists for including ‘folk’ within the larger ambit of ‘culture’ on the one hand, and with ‘fine’ art on the other, is opening spaces and blurring genres. 138 While the Ministry of Culture’s Lalit Kala Akademi has started providing space to artists from non-metropolitan, rural ‘folk’ and ‘tribal’ contexts, some art galleries have found interesting ways to showcase this kind of art, at par with ‘contemporary’, ‘modern’ and ‘fine’ art. In the contemporary artworld, demarcations among different forms of art seem to be disappearing. The ‘folk’ is entering into the domain of the ‘fine’ through solo and collective shows and exhibitions of Mithila artists, in galleries at both national and global platforms. On the other hand, the ‘fine’ borrows from the ‘folk’ in many different ways. One of the ways in which this kind of art which is traditional, but has undergone transformation to acquire a powerful contemporary idiom is being configured as, is what critics have termed the ‘vernacular in the contemporary’. The term ‘vernacular’ is used for ‘folk’ and ‘tribal’ art in ways similar to its usage in the context of non-English, regional language. In this sense, ‘vernacular’ art conveys the positionality of its practitioner as distinct from Anglophone (English-speaking) artists, residing in metropolitan spaces. ‘Vernacular’ art is supposed to be ‘rooted’ in rural/ ‘tribal’ contexts, where extant community beliefs and shared pictorial vocabulary is depicted, wedded with contemporary sensibilities. A few recent exhibitions, prominent amongst which is that of the Devi Art Foundation in New Delhi in 2011, has experimented with curatorial practices to show an innovative way of not just exhibiting artworks of this kind but also engaging with these artists in new and mutually-enriching ways. This kind of curatorial activism provides legitimacy to these artists as ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary’ artists rather than ‘anonymous, timeless, artisanal communities’, or even ‘folk’ and ‘tribal’ artists, by hosting them in a space of the modern art gallery, hitherto considered to be a bastion of avant-garde, Modernist art. It also provides a way, in which old and re-configured binaries can be challenged, broken, and new identities created. Finally, experimental curatorial practices of this kind work as a potent tool to engage with the community of artists as articulators and agents of an entirely new kind of practice. 139 Public response towards many of these efforts has been varied, since this kind of art is still largely perceived as ‘tourist’ art/ curio rather than works of ‘fine’ art. Of late, some of the younger artists of the Mithila form have been struggling within the space of the metropolitan art gallery. Rambharos and his sister Amrita Jha shifted from their home in Madhubani to Delhi for an year in an attempt to enter into this space but were forced to return to their village. The mainstream art market, by and large, is still not porous enough to absorb these artists. Besides, these artists also lack the kind of resources that is required to persevere in those spaces. On the other hand, the demand for ‘innovatively contemporized traditional crafts’ has increased considerably over the years. Festivals such as Kala Ghoda in Mumbai, online bazaars, and several such spaces have come up. Various organizations such as Dastkaar, Dastkaari Haat Samiti and several others have been experimenting with Mithila art in various ways by creating a market for utility items, such as furniture, painted in Mithila motifs. Their sale in recent years has increased manifold, as they are seen as inexpensive, unique gift items and collectibles. The unique selling point of these articles, just like most handicraft items, is the connection that the urban buyer experiences with the rural/ ‘tribal’ ethos. The steep increase over the years in the footfall at the Surajkund Crafts Mela, Delhi or at the numerous crafts bazaar in several cities organized by groups working with artisan and craft clusters is testament to the high growth potential of this sector. However, many cultural activists have been arguing for government and other stakeholder intervention in enabling artisans to develop their full potential, so that they can tap the burgeoning market. A significant move towards the recognition of the handicrafts sector by the State can be seen in the recent announcement of a Hastkala Academy- a nodal institution for the preservation, revival, and documentation of the handicrafts (as well as handloom) sector, though in the private public partnership mode. The Academy is supposed to come up in place of the government-run Crafts Museum. Though there is a lot of interest in the handicrafts sector owing to its demand, one wonders what the destiny of this kind of an 140 institution will be, in the hands of private players as well as a government such as the present one. Recently, in an attempt to dismantle the Crafts Museum, in order to make way for the Hastkala Academy, bureaucratic machinery of the present government wiped out one of the most treasured artworks from its walls- kohbar painting in the Mithila style done by Ganga Devi. It was painted by her when Jyotindra Jain was the Director of the Crafts Museum. As discussed earlier, Jain recounts in his book on Ganga Devi that he had provided her space in the precincts of the Museum to stay during the time she was undergoing treatment for cancer at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. In order to battle with the pain that she experienced as a result of chemotherapy, she took to painting the walls of the Museum. Her painting had been preserved for the last many years, as a testament to the creativity and will power of the most well-known artist of Mithila art.
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