This manuscript is the penultimate form of the essay as it appeared in the publication cited below. The text is one stage short of the final version agreed upon by the author and editor of the particular publication.
If the essay was published in more than one publication, versions of the form it finally assumed are available in the books/anthologies/catalogs listed below.
Publication(s): • ‘Bhupen Khakhar’, in Bhupen Khakhar, in retrospective exh. cat., Museo Nacional, Centro de Arte, Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2002.
Bhupen Khakhar Geeta Kapur
Strategies Bhupen Khakhar’s entry into the art scene in the mid-1960s sets up radically different representational modalities in relation to the existing tendencies in twentieth-century Indian art. It also establishes a different set of equations between Indian and contemporary western art. (1)
The two-sided critique, of Indian and western modernism, retrospectively readable in Khakhar’s work may be collapsed into a single event: the ‘crisis’ within modernist art by the 1960s . But today this self-referring art-historical explanation can hardly suffice. The process of deconstructing the universalist claims of modernism, underway in postwar/ mid-century rearticulations of art and politics, has been further charged by the century-long struggle against colonialism and the volatile nature of cultural alternatives that emerge thereon. The current rewriting of cultural (consequently, literature, cinema and art ) histories will show that the decisive break in modernist art practices in the 1960s requires an inscription of the unique role of artists from outside the western mainstream. These artists have questioned, from their own historical vantage point, the fact of a modernist hegemony with the aim of loosening the hold of a one-dimensional (western) internationalism. From a third world perspective, the position of alterity comes to provide the key to a multivalent understanding of
1 modernity itself. Such a perspective, tilted in favour of India, will place Khakhar among major dissenting figures of the postcolonial world, especially with regard to the problematic of representation.
From the beginning of his career Khakhar took a position against the dichotomous designation of aesthetic attitudes, as for example between avantgarde and kitsch, seen as opposed values by Clement Greenberg in his famous essay of that title. (2) Khakhar preferred the Pop artists’ option of a teasing ambivalence where the avantgarde is in actual fact produced precisely in a partnership between the popular and high art codes. And he took a decisive step forward by pushing the Pop artists’ mandate for making counter-commodities, or radical fetishes, into a full-fledged genre where a new representational agency found its own narrative form.
In the Indian context there is no other way but to call Khakhar a vanguard figure thumbing his nose at high art -- its modernist aesthetic and its progressive ideology. And doing this by mockery and masquerade, literally. In the early 1970s he posed for photographs in absurd roles, wrote mischievous texts in the catalogue, donned fancy dress and held fake salon parties at his exhibitions. Khakhar sought to upturn cultural assumptions of modernist art ; at the same time, in his characteristic role as ‘double agent’, he cocked a snook at the very notion of the avantgarde by adopting the ethnographic mode of the kind of nineteenth-century Indian painter who was employed by the British in India to chronicle their stay in this ethnically bewildering and, for them, bizarre country. Khakhar thus came to occupy a peculiar ‘political’ position in the decade of the 1970s. Indian art, after its modernist winnings, was seeking a new turn and Khakhar was among those who defined that turn by opening up local geographies with mock-mythic or, more properly, allegorical narratives within the space. Without actually knowing the developing discourse around nation and subject, Khakhar acted as the archetypal postcolonial artist, establishing and inverting his relationship to the twin legacies of the colonial and the modern in Indian art.
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Sequence Khakhar came to Baroda in 1962 to become an artist.(3) He made his first breakthrough in the mid-1960s by referring to popular art in the form of calendars and posters, ‘god pictures’ and wall graffiti. He broke the barrier of taste and introduced popular language and iconography through a cut-paste job: paper collage with enamel paint, sometimes plaster-relief on board, made up rough and ready ensembles that mimicked the wayside shrines of popular gods.
He familiarized himself with the Pop movement through his studies in art history and through direct contact with (among others) a young English artist, Jim Donavan, who lived in Baroda during 1963-64 and drew everyone’s attention to the spectacle of the Indian street. The 1960s were marked by the widespread anti- bourgeois phenomenon of beat culture and India was part of the itinerary, as a place conducive for rethinking conventional lifestyles and ideologies. Alan Ginsberg stopped here, and waves of hippies poured in for over a decade. India also became a site for testing the oncoming discursive shift in cultural readings that ultimately fed the postmodern phenomenon. Khakhar was scarcely aware of the actual political radicalism of the 1960s, but in his special way he was able to sniff the transgressive possibilities in the historical moment. He imbibed these within his own art practice, naïvely at first, then provocatively enough to destabilize the modernist aesthetic as it prevailed in India . Khakhar’s own peers had just launched Group 1890; it exhibited in 1963 and saw itself inaugurating something of an avantgarde movement interested in ‘primitivist’ uses of materials and surfaces, symbologies and signs. Interestingly, this group (led by the ideologue-artist, J.Swaminathan) excluded Khakhar on the grounds that he indulged in low art and poor taste.
Through his reference to street art Khakhar produced a sign system for denoting, thus signifying, kitsch. He gave his version Pop art a definite local meaning (long before the term local gained currency as a binary of global). Over and above this, he
3 historicized the phenomenon by linking it to the nineteenth and early twentieth century history of stylistic hybrids in Indian art. (4) Since the 1960s, Khakhar has himself collected contemporary popular (oil and gouache) paintings, cheap ( lithographic/ oleographic ) prints and posters with subjects ranging from genre scenes to landscapes to mythological pictures, penny-icons, and film stars. In subsequent years there has been a punctual appearance of all these languages, categorized as the popular, in Khakhar’s oeuvre, making him a masterful manipulator of the ‘naive’ image for his own increasingly more subtle forms of representation.
The second phase or layer in Khakhar’s work appeared in 1972 when he developed a definite representational project. Khakhar’s emphasis now shifted from an interest in the language of popular culture to the subject appropriate to that language and, slowly, to the subjectivity that can be elicited from the depiction of that subject in the language appropriate to it. In painting what he himself called his ‘trade series’ he acknowledged the influence of the Company School paintings which were often painted in series, sometimes presented as albums, and consisted of stereotyped subjects: Indian ethnic and religious ‘types’; scheduled tribes and castes including, often, untouchables; people in varied professions including categories of humble artisans at their work. Just as a depiction of the lowly members in the social hierarchy gave the Company School paintings a documentary value, Khakhar, following the naïvely ‘naturalistic’ tradition of the historical style, provided himself with a language, with a parity in skills and, analogically and pictorially, a kind of comradeship, an unsung brotherhood, of common men. The reference is to paintings like Janata Watch Reparing (1972), Factory Strike (1972), Assistant Accountant: Mr. I.M. Shah ( 972 ).
But there is a paradox here. While opening up the possibility of bringing to attention the life-world of various small- time professionals, Khakhar found himself an ironical convention for presenting the man without subjectivity, without face and without the privilege of revolutionary intent and backing. Consider a seminal painting like Man with Bouquet of Plastic Flowers ( 1976 ). Wrapped in humour, the artist’s viewpoint smuggled in considerable compassion (Henri Rousseau in India! )
4 but not so much as to appear partisan in any radical sense of the word. As a result of this ruse, Khakhar was quickly seen as a satirist drawing on the account of the common man himself. In retrospect, we would do better to see him as laying the ground for a counter class-culture, one rebuking the very class of viewers to whom high art is addressed and to whom at any rate it is accessible and available. Slowly a more pointed subversionist intent did surface in Khakhar’s work which undermined not only a class-based aesthetic but certain existential presuppositions about the modern artist. The subversion was widely noticed and produced considerable discomfiture among artists and viewers/ buyers alike, but it was not quite identified for what it was until his more provocative, explicitly (homo)sexual paintings came into place. I shall speak more about this later.
By the mid-late 1970s and into the 80s, Khakhar was expanding the pictorial field around and beyond his subjects and constructing a genre about everyday life in a provincial city where the townscape shades into the farmer’s fields. These paintings were often long-distance panoramic views of strange beauty where the diminutive scale of the people going about their daily chores made for a kind of charade, the inspiration for which may well have come from Khakhar’s delight at seeing Bruegel in the original during his (first ever) travels in Europe in 1976 and 1979. Khakhar now privileged a form of narration where individual presence gave way to a notational definition of lived life exemplified by the work of men -- artisanal work for the most part but also the labour of love in the performance of ritual in secular and religious ceremonies. See paintings like View from a Teashop ( 1972), Death in the Family (1978), The Celebration of Guru Jayanti (1980), Road Building Work at Kalka (1984).
At this time Khakhar’s pictorial vocabulary was flowering, he was looking at a number of very varied sources among which the most prominent were the Italian Primitives, seen to complement certain late medieval traditions of Indian paintings. This was a reading encouraged by his artist friend, Gulammohammed Sheikh and later by the English artist-critic and close friend, Timothy Hyman. (5) Khakhar began looking at the exquisite interlinking of the sacred and secular cultures within the common genre of
5 everyday life as for example in Sassetta and the Lorenzettis. The Italians gave him the sanction for narrating the rhythm of humble lives and within that rhythm to locate that particular pathos that never ceases to surprise beholders of Khakhar’s paintings, a pathos that comes not from sentimentality but from a sublimity worthy of the saints.
Sexuality [Please Note: This is a new sub-head] From 1980 the evidence of Khakhar’s gay sexuality came to be included in the paintings. (6) It is then that the modestly, industriously, garnered grace within and around his paintings began to quiver in a disturbing way. On occasion the working and seemingly worshipful life seemed to come to a halt: a gathering of men addressed a plea for sexual dalliance at the very threshold of the wide-angle scenario offered by the painting as in The Celebration of Guru Jayanti. .Starting cryptically, his compassion and subversion now came into full play as closely interwoven categories. The figures became large and naked and in a state of immediate desire. The sexual imagery was in this phase iconic, and it was mythologized -- as if to ward off the evil eye. I am referring to paintings like You Can’t Please All ( 1981), Two Men in Benaras (1982), and Yayati ( 1987). From the gentle, puppet-like shoemaker, or watch repairer or barber or tailor, to the looming man holding his penis, there is at once a de-classification of social types into an existential rendering of gender identity; and a re-classification of subjectivity in peculiar terms, where the maleness of the figure is crucial and yet heavily (dis)qualified: the male characters are old and, in one way or another, decrepit. They are expressly men whom the artist Bhupen desires. Here is a presentation of lust that is in one sense a counterpart of heterosexual relations but with a particularly transgressive twist of a double inversion. The older, frailer, sometimes deformed and pallid men lead the viewer right into Khakhar’s private labyrinth where a necromantic embrace awaits the pilgrim of forbidden love. In mythic terms, lust and necromancy might make a haloed pair and Khakhar paints this as his very subject in Yayati.
6 The idiosyncrasy of the lovers is the sign of true intersubjectivity. A shared stigmata is worn with pride by the lover/ beloved. Khakhar appears in the paintings as both lover and beloved and he is seen in thinly camouflaged roles giving and receiving pleasures (sometimes anal sex and fellatio ). If there is a scene of singular devotion between two men as in My Dear Friend (1983), and in the extraordinary Seva (1986) , there is also sexual sleaze heightened by the performative act of transvestite masquerade. I am referring to the painting, In a Boat (1984 ). The artist is as if seeking redemption in the very narcissism of the masturbatory act, even as he is offering coy promiscuity in the manner of a harjai ( a female beloved, a beloved flirt) committed to the vocation of dispersing and sharing amorous pleasure. Except that the seducers are all male, and the painterly effervescence comes from the eroticism of same-sex love.
At this point one needs to ask why the staging of male sexuality is so often within a religious setting: the sanctum-like space where the guru and disciple meet intimately, stealthily, like forsworn lovers as in Seva; or a temple compound, the courtyard in a pilgrims’ encampment, where there is an assembly of devotees as in The Celebration of Guru Jayanti, Jatra ( 1997), and the vast Yagna/ Marriage (2000). At a simple level this could be part of a relentless hunt among strangers for a lover. Congregations of men in religious places ( temples and mosques, shrines and dargahs), offer occasions to touch and caress the limbs of an assortment of men. They are what Khakhar unabashedly calls ‘pick-up’ spots. For many years, and especially since the late 1970s, when he started accompanying his dear companion Vallavbhai to the satsangs of the Radhaswami sect (in Baroda and Agra), Hindu religious sites have given him an occasion to present a spectacle of suppressed promiscuity. In the guise of a faithful flock, a shambolic populace acts out its libertarian impulse. The rituals themselves can seen to be full of paradoxes including ardour and folly and actual ‘perversion’. (The term is throughout used not pejoratively but as a clinical designation in psychoanalytic practice. ) Not least of these is the open transvestitism in some versions of Vaishnavism where men woo the divine by assuming the persona of the female beloved and dress themselves so, contriving a fusion of male body and female soul exteriorized in the act of cross-
7 dressing. The masquerade is not so different from gay behavior and indeed from the existential and public stance of the hermaphrodite/ eunuch who, while enacting the ‘freak’, suffers the anguish of being the ‘third sex’. Khakhar’s paintings of men dressed as women, like Sakhibhav ( 1995), The Picture of Their 30th Wedding Anniversary ( 1998), Pregnant Devotee (c.1995 ), have this shuddering ambiguity between means and ends, between piety and prostitution.
This is an intense, almost existential need, this linking of holiness and degeneracy, sin and salvation, adoration and iconoclasm. This could be read as reparation of guilt through a penitent’s acceptance of the sacral order. More likely it is a secret desire to present god’s devotee as a ‘pervert’ that Khakhar cherishes: see, Ram Embracing Hanuman ( 1998) . Or could it be that he sees an irreversible overlap between homosexuality and sainthood, that the canonization of Jean Genet by Sartre haunts Khakhar, that he hopes to gain the possibility of a great redemption through openly confessing a ‘sinful’ truth?
[Please Note: the long para from here has been removed and taken to the very end of the essay where it is split into two paras. ]
The phase of work in the 1990s continues the theme of the sexual encounter but in the changed medium and format of watercolour on paper (also drawings and watercolours) . This changes in turn the entire shape and visage of the image. For it should be emphasized that Khakhar achieves his ends as much through devising figural and bodily forms of representation as he does by the gross and subtle and everchanging handling of actual paint matter, of pigment and medium, of surface and support.
Easel painting, with its rich medium of oils, with Khakhar’s own thickly, creamily overpainted layers of pigment on canvas, carries over the heavy breathing of an idee fixe. Released from the viscous, visceral, gleaming materiality of oils, the watercolour image appears like a float, a backlit figure in its afterlife of fantasy — of sexual fancy. Not a trapped secret (or sin) but a glimpse of the voyeur’s fleeting vision.
8 The image quickly put down in a series of transparent washes, is luminescent since the white of the paper shows through and lightens the painting. For precisely that reason it breathes differently, it is economical and graceful. And its very informality offers a claim to painterly transcendence. I am referring to watercolours like How Many Hands Do I Need to Declare My Love to You ( 1994), Bathing Man ( 1995), And His Son Also Had Black Teeth ( 1995), Chillum ( 1996).
In Khakhar’s work the size and proportion of the figures in any one painting varies from very large to miniscule; in the watercolours this is even more the case because the paintings are usually without horizon, without any gravitational pull. Everything is adrift, often topsy turvy. One moves in scale from a freak icon like An Old Man from Vasad Who Had Five Penises Suffered from Runny Nose (1995), to pictures with swarming, tadpole-like figures, their rudimentary limbs pulled out from a rubber mould, frolicking, sleeping, embracing, drowning and almost as if dying in a would-be garden of earthly delights or a hellish vortex of permanent lust.
Some of the watercolours have the aspect of a votive image, where the devotee seeking favours from god presents him with a naïve image of wishes and desire, disease and suffering, and to win his attention paints these in a totemic form that almost makes up a separate genre of the holy macabre. Like the votive image-maker, Khakhar chooses and then exaggerates the limb or object to which he wants to call immediate attention, to what fixates him with its ‘magic’ potency. Equivalent to the obsession across centuries in the male heterosexual imagination ( with female breasts, belly, feet, vagina, ornamentally displayed, fetishized, stretched out for penetration), real and metaphorical versions of male genitalia clearly obsess Khakhar and extend to all parts of the body. A large pink flaccid hand hangs at the end of a long arm, nose and ear are dilated orifices, a blooming bouquet of dismembered limbs resembles a bunch of inflated penises. There is also a dovetailing of limb and object as for example when he paints, repeatedly, a man’s hand with a big thumb holding fish, eating a curled sweetmeat or a roll of kebab, repairing a shoe, blowing into a bicycle pipe. Man Eating Jalebee ( 1974), Fishermen in Goa (1985), are among such examples. You get in
9 Khakhar’s oeuvre a plethora of fetishes forming a metonymic chain that binds and holds a universe dominated by the erect phallus — the essential votive image that is at once toy, tool and emblem of homosexual desire. It is addressed to a god of some kind, or the persecutory superego whose sovereignty and authority, dreaded, hated and reviled in the heart of hearts, has somehow also to be always appeased.
Abjection [Please Note: subtitle shortened and moved from a para below to here.] The year 1999 marks another phase in his work. Coinciding with his recent illness, and the experience of hospitals and surgery, there is a return to oils confirming in some fortuitous way the relationship of oil paint with visceral matters: Khakhar’s imagery is now oozing blood and entrails. There is a fascination among painters (from Goya to Gericault, from the early expressionists to Francis Bacon) for a menacing form of mortality, the repugnant aspects of human existence, and the blinding darkness of actual death. There is also and equally a fascination with turning pigment and medium into a literal, material, metaphorical analogue for the body: its inner substances (spilt gore), outer deformation (skin eruptions) and wounded limbs (amputations). The desire to match painting skills with gruesome ‘wonders of nature’ is a perverse kind of hubris that artists have always practised . In an open display of subjectivity in extremis, Khakhar tries his hand at a show of virtuosity in large oils like Beauty is Skin Deep Only ( 999), Bullet Shot in Stomach ( 2000), and in watercolours such as Blind Babubhai (2001), Manilal with Measles (2001), Injured Head of Raju (2001).
Genre painting treats subject-matter as the lowest common denominator, and a narrative form derived from that level has to accomplish an extraordinary catapulting act to arrive, as Khakhar’s paintings do, at a critique of taste, protocol and morality. That is, in effect, a critique of the conventional values of aesthetics, class and gender. In such a case the painter opens up a way to transgress the very norms of genre painting and thus arrive at a paradoxical status: a new representational regime with, above all, new forms of subjectivity. Like the chrysalis turning into a butterfly, the satirist in Khakhar
10 turns into a guilty sinner, then into a martyr, the bearer of pain and fear…. Gradually, too, Khakhar, inflicted with cancer (and a form of mutilation), develops an aesthetic of cruelty matching his melancholy and you realize more fully than ever before that not only are cruelty and melancholy paired, but that the riddle of simultaneous births includes beauty as a third child in the miracle of triplicates! . There is a need on Khakhar’s part for an intersubjective portrayal and the representational means derived for this kind of encountering mode work towards an inevitable excess: an excess of means, also a surfeit of content. And, in reverse: the (naïve) conventions of representation and the intersubjectivity gained (or lost) therein, results in caricature. If all ‘normal’ subjects in his generic scheme are prone to be framed by otherness (and this includes women, upper-class men, westerners, other religious communities) then there is a problem. Turning the tables on what the heterosexual may regard as the ‘other’, Khakhar flaunts his belonging by gathering a flock of look-alikes and seeks their sexual possession. Thereby he places everyone who is not part of the inner cult, who is outside the pale of gay imaginings, as the other. Thus the hardwon subjectivity that I spoke of above is vulnerable material in Khakhar’s hands. He can occasionally lose the very subject while playing a sly chess-game of inclusion and exclusion.
In other words, Khakhar works best in conditions where he can be compassionate and complicit with his subjects. And I would like to conclude by suggesting that he can be that when there is a play of the abject in the drama of existence: of abjection in the lives of his characters that is a reflection of the drama of his own existence. In fact the subjective was not fully explored in Khakhar’s work until the abject , the real and contrived sense of degradation, had not come to be exteriorized through his ‘perverse’ sexuality. Now this same sense of abjection/ perversion comes through in the manifest forms of disease, mutilation and a menacing presentiment of death.
If the abject male is his protagonist, then Khakhar has succeeded in making this subject’s meekness into theatre, almost at times into spectacle. Tableaux of mating
11 men compensate the artist for the sexual (spiritual) wounds suffered in enforced secrecy. Presented in excess, the subject’s body is seen in a state of exaggerated intimacy and recoil –- consider the outrageous Next Morning (1999). When the abject (anti) hero acquires a performer’s aura, he can tear open the seams of the wound. Along with this exhibitionism, there is a sanguine, yet gentle, almost placid equation with the actual practice of art. There is the sophisticated handling of the language in plastic and painterly terms. By the sheer pleasure of the painted surface, by its chromatic brilliance, he holds the viewer in a thrall. One can select many such paintings from his oeuvre; here I point briefly to some exceptionally tender paintings, like Ghost City Night (1992), White Angel (1995), Elephants Sporting in River (1998), and his glorious chronicle of art and life, The Goldsmith ( 1997 ).
That also allows him to slip in a cunning indictment of the cruel norms of heterosexual normalcy. The abject, or rather the state of abjection, is a marker of difference, it is also a condition of being. It is the place where identity is recognized, but where categorical claims for that identity collapse. In a way the space of difference is the space of collapse, of non-being. In that space — between the pathetic and the spectacular — the well-known liminal space of the social outsider (here, obviously, the homosexual) lies also the ground for debonding with the social order, for untethering the self. And gaining thereby a bid for transcendence. Here is then a subjectivity that is so stressed it can will its own apotheosis.
[Please Note: the para from the earlier page, marked with a note, has been placed here and split into two paras]
It could also be, and this would be a more sustainable interpretation: that while Khakhar’s sexuality swings from possession to alienation to resocialization; while he pollutes social spaces with erotic excess, Khakhar seeks to rehabilitate the ‘sinning’ protagonists in the given world with a full claim to normalcy. Indeed Khakhar, like other members of the gay community today, reclaims his place in the material and spiritual universe on his own terms as an ‘outsider’. This may also be something of an
12 Indian contribution to the gay discourse: where permissiveness flourishes in the default mode, where rights are never won, yet perhaps granted, or bestowed, by custom and a seemingly libertarian tradition. Homosexuality in India is part of the ubiquitous system of lies and deprivation, part of religious performance, part of married life, part of popular culture -- especially of mass film culture where same- sex love is intricately encoded.
Here, in this space, the sacred and the profane merge through suitably fuzzy definitions and with the possibility of subversive inputs from the victims of majoritarian morality. This is the space in which Khakhar finds a way to heal the wounds left by his masked torturers who appear, he says, in the early hours of his dream life, whip in hand; this is the space where he avenges his vulnerability, then leads his own persecutory instincts from malice into a state of indifferent grace. It is the space where he makes a bold, brave intervention in favour of a pragmatic truce with everyday life and the norms of social relationships which he translates, quite uniquely, into forms of myriad companionship. This is, in an ultimate eccentricity, his ‘experiment with truth’ held in place by the singular, irrepressible, act of painting. ------
Notes and References
1. A brief bibliography pertinent to this essay is suggested here: (a) For an important and comprehensive discussion on Khakhar’s life and art, and a detailed chronology and bibliography including catalogues, interviews and articles, see the monograph by Timothy Hyman, Bhupen Khakhar, Chemould Publication and Arts, Mumbai / Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad, 1998. (b) For contextual references to Khakhar, see Contemporary Art in Baroda, edited by Gulammohammed Sheikh, Tulika, New Delhi, 1997. (c) See also, Geeta Kapur, ‘Bhupen Khakhar: View from the Teashop’ in Contemporary Indian Artists, Vikas, New Delhi, 1978; Geeta Kapur, ‘Bhupen Khakhar’ in Six Indian Painters, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London, 1982; Geeta Kapur, ‘Bhupen Khakhar: The Lightness of Being’ in The Other Self, exhibition catalogue, Foundation for Indian Artists, Amsterdam, 1996.
2. Clement Greenberg, Art & Culture, Beacon Press, Boston, 1968.
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3. To situate Khakhar in the art scene in Baroda, see Contemporary Art in Baroda, ibid. I include a synoptic view of the artist’s development. Khakhar’s family , artisans by profession on his father’s side, had moved from Daman to Bombay where his father became a woodwork instructor in an engineering college. Bhupen’s maternal grandfather was a teacher in Bombay while the rest of the mother’s family were employed as textile woodblock printers. The family was impoverished after his father’s early death; Bhupen , the studious youngest son, went on to obtain several degrees from the University of Bombay and became a chartered accountant. Meanwhile, Bhupen’s amateur interest in painting also matured . Contrary to plan, he came to Baroda in 1962 and joined the art school in the art criticism department (encouraged by the young artist-teacher, Gulammohammed Sheikh). Although Bhupen was soon recognized as an artist, he continued to practice as a chartered account to earn a living well until he was fifty years old.
Baroda has been a city especially attractive to artists ever since 1950 when the Faculty of Fine Arts situated within the M.S University was founded. The nation- wide appeal of the art school’s progressive curriculum, and the distinguished artist (and art history) faculty has much to do with it. This medium-sized city is situated in the heart of the mercantile region of Gujarat, not far from the great metropolis of Bombay. Baroda developed a modern urban culture of distinction in the pre- Independence era under the long rein of the exceptionally enlightened Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad-III (1881-1939), whose involvement in the educational infrastructure of the city is legendary, as also his patronage of significant art and artists though several decades. The city, as it developed in the post-Independence period, nurtured a broadly progressive business community, a small but significant intelligentsia associated with the academic life at the university, and a close-knit community of artists. Moreover, Baroda developed a peculiarly apt form of cosmopolitanism because of the art school and the coming and going of artists from all over India and indeed from around the world. Consequently, some of the newer developments in Indian art were initiated in laboratory-like conditions in Baroda.
A few of these changes are directly connected with Khakhar, as for example the dramatic makeover of the more conventional forms of modernist painting into an eclectic language incorporating the urban popular in its emerging vocabulary. There was already in Baroda a figure like K.G. Subramanyan (alumni of Rabindranath Tagore’s university and art school at Santiniketan, Bengal) whose pedagogy and art practice underline the importance of a contextual modernism. The context was defined to include modern and contemporary world art but also the range of Indian art: folk and tribal to urban art in both its popular and elite aspects. This contextualizing made the ground easy for the turn of events in favour of the popular that Khakhar initiated. The glittering plethora of calendars, film posters, ‘god pictures’ and popular shrines, indeed the whole long nineteenth century tradition of a hybrid culture and its pictorial forms, began to spark the
14 imagination of Baroda artists around 1963. Khakhar, Jyoti Bhatt, Vivan Sundaram and, on his return from the Royal College in 1966, Gulammohammed Sheikh , turned the gaze upon alternative sources, alternative to proper art history and to the ruling aesthetic of international modernism. Local picture-making practices, and the excesses of kitsch that distinguishes visual culture of urban India, caught the artists’ fancy, and there was a happy and long-due surrender to the pictorial seductions of India’s common culture. The results of these forays into the street linked these Indian artists to their cultural histories and lived environment even as it linked them to the flamboyant Pop movement in international art of the 1960s. Soon Khakhar was at the head of this turn in India. He became king of the popular domain and prime mediator of India’s urban culture to the somewhat horrified priesthood of Modern Indian Art.
The second turn that Khakhar navigated, along with artist colleagues from Baroda and Bombay, was not unconnected to the first, though it came more than a decade later. This was a declared interest in the narrative element in art, anathema to the modernists right up till Francis Bacon ( who regarded it as retrograde illustration) and scorned by artists of Minimalist/ conceptual persuasion ( as one of postmodernism’s follies). Narrative art had a multiple legacy: it related to a strand of ‘realist’ painting of the inter-war years of the twentieth century (which included Mexican Muralismo, German New Objectivity, Italian neo-Realism , as also American Regionalism in the decade of the great Depression) . On the other hand, narrativity was interwoven within the Pop movement which had already questioned a universal aesthetic and localized art and its objects by bringing in aspects of (western, Euro-American) vernacular pictography, metropolitan street signage for consumer commodities, youth-cults and fetishes. But there was an another tradition that came into the fore at this time and this was the narrativity embedded in the traditions of non-western cultures (like India).Third world art, film, and literature were impelled, precisely in the 1960s, by the agenda to reclaim a politics of place and assert a ‘cultural difference’ in the life-worlds of the world’s infinitely varied civilizations. Brought into focus by postcolonial politics and discourse, this legacy of the narrative form, entangled western Pop-and- postmodern art into intricate coils of a historically changing world.
From the early 1970s, a group of Baroda and Bombay artists inaugurated a new phase of figuration based on culture-and-class- specific subjects, and by 1981 the partisan view of the human figure was declared to be something of a manifesto in the seminal exhibition, Place for People, of which Khakhar was a member (along with his peers, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Jogen Chowdhury, Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malani and Sudhir Patwardhan). The group had inherited the debates around national/ progressive and third world politics; it was sympathetic to the feminist slogan, the personal is political; it had its ideological priorities generally in place. Their legatees, students and young artists, made the 1980s a decade favouring the School of Baroda.
15 In the late 1970s and 80s there was a distinct leaning towards narrative figuration in Britain designated as the School of London by R.B. Kitaj. This tendency found a correspondence in India. It was noticed by the artist-critic, Timothy Hyman ( close to the Baroda artists, especially to Khakhar and Gulam Sheikh) who sought to make a tendentious link between these putative School(s). It is also at this time that Khakhar in particular received great admiration in Britain, via Hyman, and via Khakhar’s good friend Howard Hodgkin, a leading artist of the period. The links with London were reinforced when younger artist-students went to the Royal College of Art under the tutelage of Peter de Francia and of Ken Kiff to become, in some way, part of the larger narrative movement of the 1980s.
The story of Baroda split into different parts in the late 1980s. On the one hand there was a staging of leftwing dissent among young artists from Kerala (trained for the most part in Baroda or otherwise living there as self-appointed ‘exiles’) against the ideology and aesthetic of the Place for People artists (with Khakhar often exempted from the critique in that he was seen to have done so much to democratize the subject-matter of Indian art even if he did this from a subversive/libertarian instinct than any political stance). And there was a breaking up of the narrative schema into complex (auto) biographical modes of self -representation whereby a new subjectivity, not necessarily framed by the national/ progressive ideology, began to be foregrounded. The social narrative was subsumed into a compressed allegory around the actual body. Khakhar’s moment of ‘coming out’ (You Can’t Please All , 1981 ), his increasing assertion of his gay identity, was part of the drive and it offered a new form of radicalism matching the positions taken by women artists on the representation of the female body.
Thereon, Indian art began to take several turns not easily recountable as a cumulative discourse. For example the 1990s is marked by a major disjuncture in the use of materials and mediums including, especially, photography and installation. And, in the very recent years, there has been an increasing use of video and digital/ virtual technologies or what is now called new media art. These developments fall in a sense beyond the premise of Khakhar’s oeuvre based so commitedly on the painted ( drawn, etched) image. This essay seeks to confirm Khakhar’s commitment to painting and to the palpable body, a commitment that places him among the masters of contemporary figurative painting.
(4) Khakhar’s master’s thesis at the Fine Arts Faculty looked at (eighteenth and) nineteenth century Company School paintings (mostly watercolour pictures on paper) which I have already mentioned; it included the master, ‘Raja’ Ravi Varma of Travancore (1848-1906), who trained himself to paint salon-style oils but went so far as to develop a quasi-realist genre for Indian art; it referred to images received like a windfall of superb kitsch when the techniques of mechanical reproduction ( like the lithograph / oleograph) took over the urban image-market. At later stages in his career, Khakhar’s Indian art-historical references have included two
16 celebrated vernacular traditions of painting in their later, nineteenth and early twentieth century, phases: the school of Nathdvara in Rajasthan, and Kalighat paintings from Calcutta. What especially interests Khakhar in the Nathdvara paintings (wall murals, cloth hangings and folio pictures on paper) is how the deity-worship (of Krishna as Shrinathji) is set up and portrayed; how the priest- devotees (their portraits sometimes based on actual photographs) configure themselves as signs in a mise en scene that privileges their own worshipful desire but, equally, their social merit ; how the entire painting is signatured as a public (pictorial) evidence of an opportune presence. On the other hand, Kalighat watercolours, exuberant, light-handed penny-icons painted by disinherited folk artists and sold in Calcutta’s Kalighat bazaar to itinerant pilgrims, offer an extraordinary array of images: resplendent personages from Hindu mythology, lecherous and cowardly men, beautiful adulterous women. The entire ephemeral output serves to establish a fully developed school of urban-popular pictures with an elegant and witty proto-modern stylistics of pictorial abbreviation.
The aforementioned art-historical references can be further pursed on the lines of this brief bibliography: (a) On Company School paintings, see Mildred Archer, Company Paintings: Indian Paintings from the British Period, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in association with Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad, rpt.1992; Stuart Cary Welch, Room for Wonder: Indian Painting during the British Period, 1760-1880, American Federation for the Arts, New York, 1978. (b) On popular painting in India, see Mildred Archer, Indian Popular Painting in the India Office Library, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, 1977; a contemporary upsurge of interest in the urban popular and kitsch has produced new research and exhibition material. For some examples of this trend, see Kajri Jain, ‘ Producing the Sacred: The Subjects of Calendar Art’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, Nos. 30-31, 1997; From Goddess to Pin-Up: Icons of Femininity in Indian Calendar Art ( The Uberoi Collection of Indian Calendar Art), exhibition catalogue (with texts by Patricia Uberoi and Kajri Jain), Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan, 2000; and The Historical Mela: The ABC of India, The Art, Book & Cinema, exhibition and auction catalogue edited by Neville Tuli, Osian’s, Mumbai, 2002. (b) A brief selection from the growing material on Ravi Varma includes: E.M. J. Venniyoor, Raja Ravi Varma, The Govt of Kerala, Trivandrum, 1981; Raja Ravi Varma: New Perspectives, exhibition catalogue, (with essays, among many others, by art- historians, Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Partha Mitter, who have written at length about Ravi Varma in their respective books on nineteenth and early twentieth century Indian art ), National Museum, New Delhi, 1993; Geeta Kapur, ‘ Representational Dilemmas of a Nineteenth-Century Painter: Raja Ravi Varma’, in When Was Modernism, Tulika, New Delhi, 2000. (c) For a most recent and comprehensive treatment of the widely researched subject of Kalighat painting, see Jyotindra Jain, Kalighat Painting: Images from a Changing World, Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad, 1999. (d) For a detailed exposition on the Nathdvara School see, Amit Ambalal, Krishna as Shrinathji: Rajasthani Paintings from Nathdvara, Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad, 1987.
17 5. Timothy Hyman, Bhupen Khakhar, ibid.
6. This was related to his going to England and Europe in the late 1970s and early 80s, where he found himself right in the middle of gay politics in art. This was also the result of his opening himself out to the ( British, German and Italian) New Image painters of the 1980s. It should be noted, however, that any further consideration of the relationship between contemporary Indian and western art should include, first, a critique of the older notion of influence (still too carelessly folded into art-historical discussions) in the context of an unprecedented cultural eclecticism of the postmodern era. More specifically, any possible connection between selected artists, Francisco Clemente and Bhupen Khakhar, for example, requires an understanding of quite disparate issues: how each of them is pitched into eccentric forms of subjectivity from widely different biographies yet gratuitously similar source material (situated, in this case within Indian ‘culture’); what it means to be part of a new nexus between the local and the global and therefore from what vantage point should the cross-referencing between Indian and western artists be viewed; how contemporary artists rearticulate issues around source, intent, subjectivity and language, and what are those maneuvers these artists conduct to distinguish themselves from one another in the current era of global exchange. ------Geeta Kapur, New Delhi , April 26, 2002. ------
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