"A Complete Essay on Contemporary Indian Painting Sltould Undol.Tbtenly
"A complete essay on contemporary Indian painting sltould undol.tbtenly . cover the work of 18 painters·at the very !east and should make reference to- 10 more .... "-So begins GIETh PATEL's original essay on the subjeet, in which he narrows his field of discussion to the five contemporary painters_ whose work has made the greatest impact on his own work, over the years. This essay .was first published in Daedalus, the Journal of the American Acc.demy of Arts and Sciences (Fall '89}, a special issue on Indian ·art and ~ culture. w~ bring you a ·s~rtened version. -,/
-, -~ ~ started in the early ·ros by trying to paint exactly like Akbar Padamsee_ Fortunately for him. I did n
Opposite, Head (1980)and above, Metascape (1977) by Padamsee isolate it as such) must carry its own authentic poetry, which naked human -body of no specific race, is nature as lakes, will have nothing to do with the imaging of well-worn common- rivers, mountains of rto specific geographic location and build- places. ing structures that do not correspond to a particular city. Attempting to distill this vision still further, I hazard the view Such a choice has an asceticism about it, a stern turning that it is an aspiration for unity. It is one way of confronting away from the particularities that the eye would almost natural fragmentation, personal and social, a malady most of us in ly pick up and the abstracting of them into a unified central today's world carry within us in varying degrees. There is _. essential, therebydenyingthetasteandflavoroflocality. This another way of confronting this problem, and we shall examine asceticism is denied by a great elemental sensuality. Ultimate it when we speak of other painters. In the meantime we see ly, this sensuality takes possession and triumphs over all the Akbar Padamsee making a daunting armoury of means and preparatory calculation. The lakes, rivers, mountains are de bringing it in:to service for paintings that are simple in their pictions of primal water, earth, air, trembling and shimmering. immediate imagery but complex in their execution. The sun and the moon are great fires. The human body is flesh, Padamsee works with diagrams, grids, colour charts, comprised of these elements. I have said this elsewhere, and it mathematical structures; he digests Paul Klee's tome on paint- bears repeating: Padamsee is a materio,list if you define matter ing _.:__ The Thinking Eye, a quietly revolutionary book demon- as the few irreducible things our life is made of.... · strating that. poetry and philosophy inhere in grammar. He studies Sanskrit. The equivocal grammatical structures of that I n 1968, Nissim Ezekiel, poet and art critic, said to me: _language, devoid of rigid punctuation, stimulate his own un- "Indian reality does not have to be village women at the orthodox reading of traditional verses; and this results in one well. If some have seen it so, does it invalidate a more real whole set of paintings on the sun and the moon as the twin . search for it?" The statement resulted in my taking a close look movers of time. at newspaper photographs, and I discovered that most of them I sometimes nurse an irreverent thought: What kind of depicted statesmen being garlanded, feted, and applauded. paintings would Padamsee produce, had he· allowed himself to The endlessly repeated unction of the ceremony impressed me jettison some of this baggage early in his career? I do not have a a great deal and became subject matter for a set of paintings. view of artists as holy ignorants, spontaneous and unin- I took the photographs and translated them into paintings ..If structed. Great artists are almost always greatly literate. · in the photograph the statesman looked pleased and reassured .· ~ Therefore, ' to .me, · Padamsee's ·extrapainter)y mncerns do · at being congratulated (and he often did); I wanted him pleased - · ~ speak of the high level of his personal culture. But I am now and reassured in the pairiting as well, without extra comment ·-·- ' exploring the ·outer, slightly desperate edge of this culture. He from myself, and without employing caricature. The paintings . has ,himself admitted that after setting up a schema on his became a "double-see" through which the viewer quickly iden- . . canvas, obtained .by much structural calculation, he has not , tifies the images with things he is used to seeing repeatedly in .infrequently.contradicted it during the actual working out of the the pa{>ers. He also r_egisters with a slight shock that this time painting. .I suspect that contradiction happens more frequently they are presented to him as paintings, ostensibly works of art · . than he would admit. His "subject-matter" (quotes again) is the meant to lend dignity and gra~~ to the occasiofi: And Y(!t. whil~ -
, DEBONl\.IR APRIL 1~ - . - :';..._.- . •· .. ,r I ·I
- AboPr,. My Dear Friend (1983- wzftnished)?md belcw, Cabinet witliSbiVa0977) bj KhakJzar ... J • . • - presenting them withou1 an arch wink, weren't the dignity and grace actually being withheld? And something more lethal being hinted at, behind the ceremoniousness? It is in the -, double-take that some of the irony of the message is conveyed. 'In the late '50s and early '60s Bhupen Khakhar, working in Baroda. systematically lift~ images from shrines, middle class interiors. popular posters, and salesmen's charts in bazaars. He created a whole new iconography for Indian paint ing. These works imply an attitnde that differentiates Khakhar frorr. an earlier generation of post-Independence painters this artist -was not going to be oh so serious about it all! The earlier p2~.ers saw themselves as rebel prie.~ts. . Khakhzr decided to take no shade of the clergy seriously. He voluntar;Jy stepped down from high concerns of the art of painting and let the middle middle class into his work, the class of his ov.-n i origin. He copied its decor and celebrated its members' Iistle_'S - I lives. Wi!E::.gly and happily, he identified with their bad taste 1 !the garish .:-olour schemes in their horr:es, the gewgaws a 1 showcases_ But somewhere along the way the mischievo·..:s l schoolboy c;-uality of the work began to acquire unforesee:1 I depths, sooett 'ng like compassion for tllis life he was descr~j j ing. Dra"W-:J cheeks, dark hollows under the eyes contradicterl the sumptuousness of the colours. We begin to see behind it ~ I. the desper:2te struggle to keep afloat that plagues low-income people in t:::.s country. Also, the spiritu2l dessication of urbc· rjtes puz:z!ed by the increasing emptiness they encounter zs traditional h<>.Jiefs are slowly eroded. · ~ Remenner Padamsee's response to fragmentation- bl;; unified abs::actions. After guilt and the prohibition to work. image cf his problematic.al ti::::-le and country. He has use: the how to res;:>ond to fragmentation is the next most importa:::: potent ~sion~ of this stru6.;le to create his images. hurdie the Indian painter faces. I must ner..essarily leave mo:-e Pad2r::.see, "ve said, heels himsetf by deiJ1..anding :Cty. .c specialize ex it ultimat~-y does not fall apart is why the Indian painter -: tends aso to :.."-:e way he w:c:-ks on :is paintings. He i3 ~lf today ha:s :s:1cceeded in creating a troubled, true, and ri::.1 taugbt Ld has ~etained as a <:ct of w::: ·-~e "clumsy-'' dra\,~ of lO the nonprofessional. The manner of laying on paint too is ''unpainterly". And this is no mere pose. The untutored look goes well with the direction of the subject matter and his uncompromisingly fresh look at the things he paints. Retained now over a working life of more than 25 years, this exquisite . style has become to our eyes a new professionalism, .one he has earned painstakingly, constantly eschewing the slickness one associates with an easy manner. The entry to people's homes started as a descriptive ven ture. The artist visited to record, to comment, to criticize, and to participate. The next step, which may. have been latently present from the beginning, was to snoop. In an occasional painting we catch glimpses of furtive things happening between two persons, behind lattices and screens. Those two persons are men. Within three or four years of this kind of presentation, overt depiction of homosexual love appeared. At the same time the landscape acquired a new richness, responding to the feeling of the protagonists, which is something close to a hushed, sometimes a tragic, but always a tender and vibrant communion. ndigenism was the great issue of the '60s. I have shown Sheikh's Tree of Two (1970) how Khakhar responded to it. It had a variety of spokes None of the painters who were outside this movement were I men, each with his own perspective on the issue. Eze actually abandoning local inspiration. Some of them were wary kiel's critical writings from this period make an insistent de of the overheated emphasis, the jingoistic edge. Padamsee mand for commitment to the local. Art critic Geeta Kapur's might have said that the local, as the international, is to be writings of the period add up to a theoretical frainework sup internalized, not flaunted. Some of the more brash examples of porting such a demand, which she makes independently. ]. loyalty to the local in painting would certainly bear out these Swaminathan edited the magazine Contra from New Delhi and fears- the construction of vision till it mirrors one's own small drew attention to the transcendent aspect of a great deal of backyard, for instance. But the movement had much more to it imagery in Indian art. And K.G. Subramanyan, then dean of than that and has emerged triumphant, to the extent that this the· Fine Art School at Baroda University, influenced a whole entire issue has ceased to be a vexatious point of discussion. generation of painters to see the link between craft and art as The point has been made, errors absorbed, apd the area freed \ one of the permanent glories of this country. He called for the of tension. Artists now explore the ground freely, taking from revitalization of this link iii the context of contemporary Indian it what they need. They stride with assurance over foreign painting. territory as well, and experience no contradiction in borrowing Sheikh's Speaking Street (1981) from there. This too is a great gain won from the debate, the l ease of movement acquired across the art of different nations and various periods, ·without the hang-up of nationalism and without the necessity of using art history for fashionable quot l ing material in your own work. With, concurrently, a matter ! of-fact deepening of commitment to the artist's experience of 1 his own country.. .. Gulam Mohammed Sheikh would not have needed much to rope him in as a devoted advocate of indigenous art. Brought i up in a small town in Gujarat, he continues to retain impress ions and sensations of the place as part of his waking and dreaming' adult life. I have heard few painters talk of the physical environment as a "full-body experience" - why see \ only with your eyes, says Sheikh, when you can see with so many other organs as well? I quote from an interview: It is not that if you see pink you paint ·pink. A Mewar painter does not use red because there is red earth around him. It has something to do with full-body experience of the environment... this is what makes traditional Indian painting savourable, continuously and repeatedly savourable. Even the space in these paintings is experienced space space as it is experienced through walks, or from horseback, camel- .back, seen from various points of view and seen not only as a human being would but also as various other creatures see. The scientists tell us, don't they, that the way a frog or a fish .recognizes space is very different from the way we do, and which perception would you Call · 'real'? A plant that doesn't have eyes can grab at an insect. It too has a sense of space through special organs of its owri. I am stretching the point a .bit to assert that there are many ways in which a painting may c extend our perceptio~ · · >: _ Returning Home After Long Absence (1973) by Sheikh
Trained in Baroda under the tutelage of K.G. Subraman relationships between cells, and between cells and visions, and yan, Sheikh readily absorbed many of his mentor's ideas. They all of these together add up and present a unified painting. were utterly congenial to his own temperament and aspira The visual routes indicated to the viewer's eyes may be fluid tions. And like many truly creative students, he has fruitfully and sequential, or they may overlap, or the panels may require extended these ideas. Subramanyan's cautious and persistent a reading from one horizontal plane to the next, with constant pointing toward local norms and ideals becomes with Sheikh a reading back and forth. The painting is to be read substantially rapture of identification. And the validity of this rapture is through the viewer's own movement. He undertakes a jour ultimately borne out because of its further extension, now ney. He may choose his itinerary and, with each viewing of the outside the country! When he speaks of Sienese painting or of painting, may undertake a different journey. Sheikh calls it "a Persian miniatures, work of schools for which he has great geography of thought". _ affinity, it is no longer foreign work that is being discussed. So Viewed as a whole, the painting is a controlled display of immediate is his apprehension of it that he might as well be coloured sparks that draw you closer and closer, till you begin talking about a much-favoured Indian contemporary. to identify the details: Residency Bungalow, the old British ·Equipped with a .full-bodied response· to the environment building where Sheikh lives · with his .family; 'Islamic angels and having decided to paint not any distillation of an experience hovering over the building; ' the monkeys of Baroda springing but to paint "it all", Sheikh has worked out a structure that from tree to blossoming tree; lovers absorbed in each other in - comes built of a multiplicity of space cells. The inspiration for the cool depths of a room; a public auto-rickshaw fanatically · this comes from various schools of traditional Indian painting tearing through a crowded street; and suddenly, a rioting mob, that divide the picture space for the narration of a story, except men being chased, someone set on fire to become an agonized that Sheikh is not relating a clear, sequential story. His canvas living torch. In this hive of cells, activity is. simultaneous, grows from detail to detail as the visuals overflow on all sides inclusive, in ~ach painting spelling-out a large, important chunk . into contiguous · cells. There is great inventiveness in the · of experience in this country today. · · ;16 DEBONAIR APRIL 1990
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