The Pain of Others: a short review essay on Somnath Hore

Somnath Hore was a great artist of collective hope and hardship, but his abiding legacy is to make us feel each human tragedy as our own.

(My India Today review of a Somnath Hore retrospective 'Birth of a White Rose', held at the Kiran Nader Museum of Art in the summer of 2022. To see some images from the exhibition, click here.)

What makes someone become an artist? Somnath Hore, who would have been 101 this summer, was first moved to draw in December 1942 by a moment of violence: the Japanese bombing of a village called Patia in what is now Bangladesh. Hore was then a B.Sc. student at City College in Calcutta, but World War II evacuation had forced him to return to his Chittagong home. The ghastly sight of Patia’s dead and wounded seemed to demand recording in some way, and it was images to which the young man turned.

In Calcutta, he had begun to design posters for the Communist Party, but it was Chittagong that really put Hore on his political and artistic path. Two things happened in 1943: the Bengal famine began, and Hore met Chittaprosad. Six years Hore’s senior and also from Chittagong, Chittaprosad was already a prolific artist documenting the lives of Bengal’s rural poor. As a man-made colonial tragedy killed millions around them, Chittaprosad encouraged Hore to draw portraits of the hungry, sick and dying. “From morning to evening I used to accompany him on his rounds,” Hore wrote later. “He initiated me into directly sketching the people I saw on streets and hospitals.”

In 1945, Hore enrolled for formal art training at the Government College of Art and Craft. In 1946, the Communist party sent him off to Tebhaga in North Bengal, where he created a diary-like documentation of the massive peasant protests. It was a tumultuous decade, moving between politics and art while having to make a living by teaching school students art. When the government again banned the Communist party, he went underground. It was not until 1957-58 that Hore got his diploma, and left Calcutta and politics to become a lecturer at the future Delhi College of Art.

The show at Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art is superb; its gravitas undimmed by ill-advised curatorial versifying: sample “He witnessed as a child a world not so fair,/ Disparities between rich and poor had no compare....” 

It’s clear that Hore experimented with form and material through his six decades of art-making. It’s also clear how much his lifelong sensibility was sculpted by the tragic events of his youth. Over and over, you see him depict the suffering human body. Until the 1950s, he also depicts the magical charge of hope produced when these same bodies come together—to plant seeds, flags, ideas. But the stunning realism of the early woodcuts and linocuts gives way to abstraction, and a greater economy of the line. His figures are all concave stomachs, stick-like limbs and begging hands. 

They transition into the jagged, torn, blistered bodies of his bronze phase (animals, too, show effects of violence), and an almost meditative late style, using pulped paper. Here the lacerated body is conceived as texture rather than as line: white on white, paper scored, torn and moulded back into paper. The pain of others remained, forever, under his skin.  

(Birth of a White Rose is on at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, until June 30, 2022.) 

A day at the museums

My piece for India Today magazine:

Connoisseurs can once again visit the National Museum and the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi to gaze at some of India’s most iconic artefacts and works of art.
 

Visitors at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi admire Amrita Sher-Gil’s painting 'Young Girls'

The National Museum New Delhi had never felt this intimate. I was in the Miniature Gallery when a robust male voice began to sing loudly: “Tu hi pyaar, tu hi chaahat, tu hi aashiqui hai”. I had been admiring Radha and Krishna admiring their own reflection in a mirror: a pre-digital couplefie aided by an attendant, and the painter. Now the 1640 Mewar miniature seemed illuminated by the security guard’s rendition of the song from Mahesh Bhatt’s 1990 romantic superhit, Aashiqui.

It was 3 pm on the first Sunday after India’s premier museum reopened on November 10, but only 23 ticketed visitors before me had entered the grand old building on New Delhi’s Janpath. Inaugurated in 1960, the museum complex is being revamped since 2017, and I have often found the upper floors closed for renovation.

On Sunday, you could again climb the grand staircase to the second floor, but the only gallery open was ‘Tribal Lifestyle of North East India’: unreconstructed old-style anthropology running rampant, though there are some striking Monpa and Naga masks and headdresses. Sections of the open corridor display were cordoned off, but visitors might enjoy the 10th century South Indian stone sculptures of zodiac signs. On the first floor, I followed two reluctant men into the Ajanta Paintings gallery at a guard’s urging, but the lights were all off. Tanjore Paintings, too, was closed. But you could visit Central Asian Antiquities, Maritime Heritage and the Coins Gallery, which I have always thought an attractively condensed history of South Asia. Watch out for the 3rd-5th century CE Gupta emperors, who chose this most public canvas to enshrine themselves in the popular imagination as ‘Rhinoceros-slayer’, ‘Swordsman’ and my favourite, ‘Lyrist’: the conqueror Samudragupta proclaiming his mastery of the veena. Post-demonetisation currency isn’t a patch on Gupta coinage.

On the ground floor, I paid a visit to the Harappan Dancing Girl, tiny and insouciant as ever, before ambling into the sculptures, where a stunning buffalo-headed female figure caught my eye. “Vrishanana Yogini. Pratihara, 10th -11th cent. A.D. Lokhari, Distt. Banda, Uttar Pradesh,” said the label. It was only later that the internet told me this was one of the museum’s most treasured new acquisitions. Illegally trafficked out of an Uttar Pradesh temple, this example of the powerful female-centric Yogini cult was returned to the Indian embassy in Paris in 2008 by the widow of a French collector and acquired by the museum in 2013, under the then director general, Venu V. If only our curators understood: this is the story that should be on the plaque. The nation would want to know.

“Sixteen of the museum’s 27 galleries are accessible in this first phase of reopening,” the museum’s education officer Rige Shiba wrote in an email. Many new arrangements are in place: the ticket counter is now outside the entry gate to the complex, and temperature checks, sanitisation and security screening take place before you walk in. Following the ministry of culture’s guidelines for post-Covid reopening, free volunteer-led tours are currently suspended. So is one of the museum’s innovations for visually-disabled visitors: touch tours of the 22-item Anubhav gallery. Audio guides are also out for the moment “unless these can be disinfected after every single use”.

Curatorial tours are also suspended at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), where daily ticketed visitors are down from 250-500 in pre-Covid times to about 70. The gallery is discouraging group visits, with curators offering customised digital walkthroughs instead. There’s also a free virtual tour. But on Sunday evening, having scurried through November rain, I could not have found happier shelter than the beauteous airy interiors of the NGMA. Anupam Sud’s Ceremony of Unmasking triptych made me smile at its new relevance. Bhupen Khakhar’s miniature-inspired Hamam Khana (1982) seemed prescient about our strange faux-sanitised times: a naked woman standing rigidly to attention in a bare, controlled enclosure, as if waiting to be allowed to bathe.

I took the empty elevator upstairs, discovering the Mexican mural-like joys of Pran Nath Mago’s Rice Planters (1952), before arriving at his Delhi Shilpi Chakra collective contemporary, the underrated modernist B.C. Sanyal (1901-2003). I stood forever in front of Sanyal’s stunning At the Nizamuddin Fair and his seductively lungi-clad self-portrait, Old Man and the Bird. “Now that’s the old man of love to become,” a friend texted back.

A masked boy and girl stopped at an M.F. Husain. “Yeh Picasso hain (this is a Picasso),” the boy said. “Kehte hain inki chai bhi gir jaati thi, toh painting ban jaati thi (they say if he dropped his tea, it would also become a painting).” They held hands tightly. The world fell away.
 

Published in India Today magazine, 20 Nov 2020

Secular Deities, Enchanted Plants: the art of Mrinalini Mukherjee

My essay on the late sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee, published in the newly launched website The Wire.



In one of AS Byatt’s Matisse Stories (1995), a self-declared “artistic family” is stunned to discover that their silent, reliable, long-time housekeeper Mrs. Brown has been making more with their cast-off clothes than the patchwork tea-cosies they grudgingly display. The person most in shock is Robin, serious artist and irritable man of the house, whose repetitive paintings of single objects – ‘problems of colour’, he calls them – are summarily rejected by a fashionable London gallerist. In favour of Mrs. Brown’s dazzling cavern of creatures, knitted and stitched from scraps of wool and cloth.

Mrinalini Mukherjee was no Mrs. Brown. She was the only daughter of the artists Benode Bihari and Leela Mukherjee, and trained in fine arts at Baroda’s MS University. Today, her work is part of the public collections at Bharat Bhavan and Lalit Kala Akademi, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Tate Modern in London–and international interest is only getting stronger. But as the artist Nilima Sheikh, Mukherjee’s close friend and contemporary, points out, “For a very long time, the sculpture world, especially in Delhi and Baroda, didn’t accept her as a sculptor, because ‘woh toh kucch craft mein kar rahi hai‘. But she kept improvising, and pushing the boundaries. Her work became much more relevant [than theirs].”

Peter Nagy, curator of the Mukherjee retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art that opened on 27 January 2015, a week before her unexpected death, goes further. “She got her final revenge,” he chuckles. “Because all those men chiselling away at their chunks of marble in Garhi studio, who pooh-poohed her – very few have gone anywhere, really. In terms of scale, her work just kicks sand in their faces.”

Female, not feminine

Walking into ‘Transfigurations’, as the show at the NGMA is titled, there can be not the slightest doubt that one is in the presence of a brilliantly assured artist. The largest pieces here are the hemp-fibre sculptures that were Mukherjee’s signature for a quarter century, from the early 70s to the mid-90s. The painstaking knotted construction and fluid organic forms may have been responsible for that early, wounding dismissal of this work as ‘craft’, but what leaps out at you is Mukherjee’s ability to turn her malleable, ‘female’ material into stable, imposing, often monumental forms. Frequently, these also display a powerful sense of the sexual.

Close to the entrance, for instance, we are met by ‘Pushp’ (1993) and ‘Adi Pushp’ (1991), which despite their names, belie any idea of the floral as we usually think of it: pretty, summery, sweet-smelling. ‘Adi Pushp’, ‘the first flower’, in particular, is a marvellous evocation of organic growth, the tubular black forms at its centre unfurling into impressive red and brown ‘petals’. Nature in Mukherjee’s conception is no mild, tameable thing. Yet what also emerges from many of her figures is a harmonious continuum between plant, animal and human form; sometimes with the addition of a superhuman element.

The arresting reds and purples of ‘Aranyani’ (1996) combine the sense of some forest flower writ large with that of a female sexual form, and an enthroned regal figure. The three free-standing figures that make up ‘Vruksha Nata’ (1991-92) appear plant-like at first, with their layered stems and fronds in light brown and lime green. But as one looks at them again, their inescapably humanoid qualities come to the fore: a sad, drooping head, a bent back, what seems like the start of a slow, painful hobble towards the other.

The forest is never far away, and Mukherjee’s forms of divinity are often particular to it. ‘Vanshree’ (1994), woven of yellow and mauve, has what seems undeniably like a face. Her eyes are sunken in, or perhaps hooded, with age, or sleep. Her lips protrude, sulkily. An umbrella above her, she sits grandly upon a golden throne, and may or may not grant you an audience. ‘Van Raja’ (1991-94) is even grander. Placed in a woven alcove arched like a temple is a standing figure, very definitely male, but also animal. Is this a tiger turned god, his golden body made erect, to be worshipped amidst his unruly jungle of green?

Crafting Art

For Mrinalini Mukherjee, refusing the hierarchy of high art and low art came naturally. Seeing craft and art as parallel to each other was part of her artistic legacy, both from her parents, and from her mentor at Baroda, Prof. KG Subramanyan. Subramanyan himself had studied at Shantiniketan, and been Benode Behari Mukherjee’s student. “So there was a sort of lineage going on,” says Sheikh. Shaped by Tagore’s rejection of the colonial aesthetic, Shantiniketan’s teachers and practitioners had long taken interest in Indian art forms and indigenous materials. While primarily a painter, Subramanyan took craft seriously enough to have left his teaching job and joined the All India Handloom Board as a Deputy Director for a couple of years in the 1960s. Later, in 1975-76, he was also elected a member of the World Crafts Council.

But how did Mukherjee arrive at her unusual material? In the late 1960s, says Sheikh, during MS University’s annual Fine Arts Fair, the campus was thrown open to the public. Students would often make “gateways, sculptural forms, design units… to make things more festive.” One of the materials used for these was hemp fibre, and even as an undergraduate, Mukherjee was drawn to the possibilities of the material. So she chose mural design as the option for her MA, and asked Subramanyan whether she could specialise only in hemp in the final year.
Subramanyan himself had worked a little in hemp, but Mukherjee’s conception of the material was very much her own. For one, she was remarkably invested in scale. As early as 1972, she was commissioned to produce a 30-foot fibre sculpture for the DCM pavilion at the Asia 72 trade fair. She then did a 45 X 4 foot one for the Ashoka Hotel, and a 14 X 70 foot mural for the Gandhi Memorial Institute at Mauritius. (The Mauritius work still exists, it has recently been photographed by an art enthusiast, hung on the wall on either side of what appears to be an auditorium stage—sadly somewhat robbed of its original grandeur by large black speakers.)
Her second crucial departure was to make her sculptures freestanding, or at least viewable in the round. Mural design, which she trained in, involves working on walls or ceilings: think Italian frescoes, or the Ajanta caves. But after early works, like the Mauritius one, and another on display here, Water Fall (1975), Mukherjee seems to have consciously abandoned murals.

A couple of other works at NGMA do lean against a wall, like Sitting Deity (1981), whose trunk-like form and playfully disc-shaped ‘stomach’ gesture to the elephant-headed, pot-bellied Ganesh. On the whole, though, there is a clear progression being marked from hemp netting as a ‘decorative’ element—something to enhance the look of an already existing structure, like a doorway or wall—to independent forms with a definite structure, shape, bulk. Mukherjee’s work gave hemp heft, metaphorically and literally.

Material matters

But it wasn’t quite enough. In the 1990s, Mukherjee slowly stopped working with hemp. We don’t quite know why. She had been working in a single material since the beginning of her career. Also, from the mid-70s, she had been aided in the laborious knotting and twisting by a woman she had trained, known as Budhiya. By the 90s, Budhiya was too old to assist her, and the work seemed tedious to do alone. There is something interesting here, about the collective labour demanded by craft.

Whatever the reasons, a chance workshop at the Sanskriti Kendra in Anandgram, followed by an invitation to the renowned European Ceramic Work Centre in Den Bosch, the Netherlands, enabled her to explore ceramics. Almost immediately, she began making larger works than most ceramic artists do. A decade or so later, in the early 2000s, she moved into bronze, perhaps the most traditional material for sculptors. “She chose bronze for its longevity, its stature, its seriousness,” says Nagy, who showed her bronzes at a solo show at Nature Morte in 2013, and had earlier curated her ceramics at Lokayata Gallery in Delhi’s Hauz Khas Village.
Looking at the bronzes, one feels, first and foremost, a sense of loss at the disappearance of the deep reds, forest greens and coal blacks that had made her hemp work so vivid. The ceramics, happily, are a mix of unglazed flesh tones and glazed vermilions and purples. All her work is striking, but to me the hemp sculptures remain the most memorable. I would even say she went from a complex mediation of organic forms (in hemp fibre) to a more simple translation of them (in ceramic and bronze).

Natural, sexual, human

But it is nature that brings her work together. The lovely arrangement of ceramics called ‘Lotus Pond’, Nos. I to VIII, gives us overlapping lotus leaves on the water surface, tubular stems turning into chutes and spongy thalamus-like forms. Several of the glazed ceramics are cabbage-like, with veined leaves. Others are flowers opening slowly to the sun, upturned half-globes erupting into life—and yet preserving a sense of hidden orifices.

That keen eye for the voluptuous complexities of nature also extends to the cast bronzes. Most of these are purely vegetal in inspiration, the pleasure of them arising from making us see naturally-occurring textures and shapes anew: the stippled interior of a calyx, the gleaming smoothness of an outer stem, the single palm frond slowly detaching itself from a trunk. Here, too, you see a scalar progression, from the smaller Natural History series (2003-2004) to the bronzed plant limbs of Palm Scapes (exhibited in 2013), massive pieces whose precise sense of balance once led Peter Nagy to describe them as “only slightly perturbed by gravity”.
Speaking at the inauguration of the NGMA retrospective, with her friend Mrinalini in hospital, Nilima Sheikh spoke of the child ‘Dillu’ growing up between Shantiniketan and Dehradun (she studied at Welham School, where her mother Leela taught art). Both were places where people went to be with nature, where artists lived with flowers. “Flowers were planted and grown in gardens, worn, sung in praise of, painted, worked into shorthand in textile and rangolis.” But that childhood love of plants and flowers was transformed, in the artist’s hands, into something anthropomorphic and awe-inspiring.

Talking about art

Mukherjee rarely spoke of her artistic process, and even less of what her art ‘meant’. “No, she would never explain the themes,” laughs Pankaj Guru, her assistant on the bronzes for the last sixteen years. “She would just come to the studio and say, I want to do this. She dreamed those works.”

“She used to resist interpretations of her work at first, even the gender politics in it,” agrees Sheikh. “Later she came to accept various interpretations, and was helped by it, I’m sure.” But on the whole, Sheikh suggests, Mukherjee prized spontaneity. Like her mother, who sculpted in wood and later in bronze, (and unlike her more famous father), she was averse to theorising. “Her intellect, her judgement, her connoisseurship was unparallelled. But she didn’t intellectualise.” In a world in which visual art seems increasingly dependent on the words through which it is mediated, Mrinalini Mukherjee’s art manages to make you ask the question: are words the only way to think?

The Mrinalini Mukherjee retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, continues until May 31, 2015.

Ramkinkar Baij: The World according to a Cat Lover

The fate of both peasants and animals in Ramkinkar Baij’s art is a record of change in a post-industrial world.



Walking through the seemingly interminable galleries that house the Ramkinkar Baij retrospective, I overhear a conversation between two stylishly turned out women who appear to have made a Thursday afternoon trip to the NGMA gift shop and walked into the exhibition as an afterthought. “No, no, this can’t still be the same artist,” says Woman 1, puzzled. “Arrey, but see his name is here, Ram Kinkar. Same guy who has done those sculptures, yaar,” says Lady 2. “But these watercolours of his are very pretty,” says the first lady in some surprise.

For the unwarned visitor, Ramkinkar Baij’s oeuvre is indeed bafflingly uncategorisable. He sculpted, he painted, he sketched. He worked in watercolour, in oils and in pen and ink. Also in bronze, terracotta, plaster of paris and what looks like rough-hewn stone but turns out to be concrete. He was famous for throwing cement mortar and laterite pebbles directly onto a frame, creating larger-than-life sculptures so huge, so rugged that they seem almost like natural occurrences—but he also did delicate little sketches, barely a few centimetres square. If you happen to walk around with a canon of Western art in your head, you will find Baij images that look distinctly Cubist and others whose round fleshy bodies might remind you of Matisse. There are rooms full of paintings that could be called ‘pretty’, and other rooms that provide a glimpse of his more elemental work, usually in sculpture.

The changeability of his ouevre seems to echo the changeability of the man himself—at least as far as he is revealed to us in photographic portraits. There is the iconic image where he looks rather wildly out of the frame, his curly hair dishevelled, his torso bare—but there is also the gentle, almost drowsy old man of the (also iconic) image, ever so softly petting a cat on his lap. In an early photograph, we see him in Shillong with Binodini—his muse and long-time companion—almost foppish in a white kurta-pajama, a pristine shawl draped over his shoulders, hand perched on his hip in an attitude of studied insouciance. In others, we see a rather different Ramkinkar: clad in bush shirt and trousers, a deliberate departure, one presumes, from the kurtas, pajamas, dhotis that were de rigueur at Santiniketan. Then, in an image where he poses next to one of his more abstract sculptures, Speed, the plain, practical, artist-at-work quality of the shirt-and-trousers is all but erased by the flamboyant addition of sunglasses—and quite brilliantly, a conical straw hat. It is as if Ramkinkar assembled a ‘modern’ look, a half-joking challenge to anyone who might slot him as a peasant—and then, chuckling to himself, added the Chinese rice farmer hat.

The playful deliberateness of that Chinese straw hat—which he actually used quite often, whether he was wearing trousers and a shirt and teaching students at Visva Bharati, or wandering lungi-clad through the villages around Santiniketan, finding new things to make art out of—is of a piece with Ramkinkar’s approach to his art.

So, for example, in the footage he shot for a documentary about Ramkinkar, another great Bengali maverick modernist, the filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, quizzes the artist about his famed sculpture Mill Call. Among the six gigantic outdoor pieces on the Visva Bharati University campus, Mill Call consists of two adult figures taking a giant stride forward, their muscular bodies stretched to capacity. But even as they seem to move ahead, with a child following close on their heels, one of them turns back, looking at something that’s flying out behind them. “What’s going on here, Kinkar da?” asks Ghatak. “These are coolies, they work in the rice mill,” says Ramkinkar. “They have heard the whistle and are running to work. But they have to go so early that their clothes aren’t dry yet. They dry their clothes while running to the mill.”

Looking at a massive photographic reproduction of Mill Call earlier at the NGMA (the original sculpture is immovable), I had seen those powerful arms held aloft and imagined them to be holding weapons, or tools of trade. To be told that they are clothes drying in the breeze is to suddenly encounter Baij’s incongruous laughter.

And yet Mill Call (1956), like its predecessor Santhal Family (1938), derives its iconicity precisely from Baij’s clear-eyed representation of a social transformation: of the local Santhal tribals from forest gatherers and agriculturists to factory hands. If the Santhal family is migrating with all its meagre belongings (and dog), the explanation Ramkinkar gave to Ghatak suggests that Mill Call, rather than being simply another innately heroic socialist image of the worker, stems from a recognition of how the rhythms of human life are irrevocably altered by industrial time. At one level it is a straightforward image about capitalism’s takeover of everyday time; at another, it is about hurtling into the future even as you look back at the past—blown irresistibly forward by the storm of progress, like Paul Klee’s Angel of History.

And it is not just the experience of time that is transformed with modernity, Ramkinkar seems to say, it is the human body, and sometimes, our way of seeing itself. With The Harvester (1943), he created a labouring body that was almost machine-like in its angularity and power. The natural gesture—of lifting up the scythe and bending backward to gain maximum momentum—is crystallised into an idealised form that is nearly abstract. In the painting Palm Grove (1960), he takes the bottom section of a grove of palm trees and creates from the criss-crossing trunks a vivid, almost geometrical image. Then there is his thoroughly abstract depiction of Spring, as also his two 1969 paintings At the Foot of the Arakan Hills and Atomica, which seem to owe a little too much to the style and imagery of Picasso’s Guernica.

And yet, the same Ramkinkar has also left behind a vast collection of paintings and sketches which seem very much to be drawn from life: deft little landscapes and portraits, in which we get a clear sense of light and colour and movement, bodies, gaits, even expressions. How are these seemingly contradictory styles to be explained? This “oscillating between representation and abstraction,” says Professor A Ramachandran on one of the exhibition’s explanatory plaques, “has been the characteristic of Kinkar da’s works.”

Certainly Ramkinkar’s early watercolours, starting in the 1940s, seem much less preoccupied with being conceptual than representational. His sense of colour is instinctive and always vivid, if often slapdash; his fluid, quick-drawn lines never fail to evoke a posture, a gesture, though also—almost unfailingly—a mood. Girls walking up a mountain path in Kullu, the only splash of red in a blue-green landscape, effortlessly communicate cheerfulness. His yellow-ghomta’d Standing Woman, one hand with palm open, almost in supplication, the other bent at an impossible angle, as if about to open the door and retreat out of our sight, seems uncomfortable, fretful.

Several other portraits are what might be called ethnographic, where the individual subject seems subsumed into a regional—and physical—type. Bhutia (1949), for example, is the very image of stolidity: a grizzled man swaddled in a coat or maybe two, his feet planted deliberately on the ground like tree trunks, as if he might keel over under his own weight. In stark contrast is Assam Tribesman (1950), a figure Ramkinkar chooses to etch in profile: his long lithe legs exposed under a colourful upper garment, the very picture of grace.

The largest group of works in this retrospective probably comprises Ramkinkar’s depictions of birds and animals. The relatively few sculpted creatures do not seem to aim for realism: like Horse, a wonderful piece in plaster where two human figures seem attached to the horse, so that all three together come across as a single living being, or the almost cartoonish, yet affectingly tender, terracotta Dog. The most famous of Ramkinkar’s sculpted animals are at the exhibition only in photographs, and these, too, in different ways, are not quite lifelike. The first of these is the massive dog that accompanies his Santhal family on their travels: an open-mouthed, snouty creature whose presence lends Ramkinkar’s vision of migration a mythical dimension—one thinks of Yudhishtira and the dog at the end of the Mahabharata. The second is his buffaloes, sculpted for a fountain outside a Santiniketan girls’ hostel. At first glance, the two animals at the base of the fountain seem like normal buffaloes, wallowing in shallow water, chewing the cud. The swishing tails of buffaloes shooing away flies on a hot summer day, are a common enough sight in India. But Ramkinkar’s playful gaze has turned them into fishtails. So the creatures we see are like hybrids out of Abol-Tabol—if Sukumar Ray imagined a half-duck-half-porcupine, haansh-jaru, these could be half-buffalo-half-fish, mosh-maachh.

But many more of Ramkinkar’s animals and birds are watercolours or pen-and-ink studies, and these are almost always ‘realistic’ renderings. Domesticated animals appear consistently: dogs, cats, horses, donkeys , pigs and most frequently cattle. A cow turning its head, a calf tied to a stake, buffaloes with people on their backs, bullocks ploughing a field: these are unsentimental portraits, the animals seem merely part of a rural landscape: creatures that are of interest only because they are integral to a peasant economy, not individuals in their own right. Then suddenly, amid all these working beasts, a gesture brings you up short: a woman in a field, petting a cow.

In a marvellous essay called ‘Why Look at Animals’, John Berger has written of how the advent of modernity has transformed our relationship with animals. The internal combustion engine displaced draught animals in streets and factories, while expanding cities transformed more and more of the surrounding countryside into suburbs ‘where field animals, wild or domesticated, became rare’. As animals disappear from daily life, they become less and less real to us; they are no longer creatures whose otherness we recognise. Families of all classes earlier kept animals because they served a domestic purpose—guard dogs, hunting dogs, mice-killing cats, and so on, but as Berger points out, ‘the practice of keeping animals regardless of their usefulness, the keeping, exactly, of pets… is a modern innovation’. As pets, deprived of almost all other animal contact, they necessarily become ‘creatures of their owners’ way of life’. And the zoo, where most of us must now go to observe wild animals, exists as a monument to the impossibility of any real encounter between animals and us.

R Siva Kumar has suggested that Ramkinkar saw animals through the intimate but unsentimental eyes of a peasant, whose ‘interaction with the animal world is more constant, he not only knows his animals better, but also experiences them as sentient beings without the least amount of romanticism’. But to me, Ramkinkar’s lifelong preoccupation with animals seems to stand on the threshold, forming a cusp between that older peasant world and an emerging modern world of pets and zoos. On the one hand he captured with lucidity the unremarkable sight of pigs and dogs and cattle wandering freely through his beloved Santhal villages; on the other, on a trip to Baroda, he seems to have spent most of his time in the zoo, sketching lions and monkeys and the hulking immobility of baboons. Most revealing of all are Ramkinkar’s many sketches of cats and kittens: Cat Family, Three Kittens, Three Cats. Unlike any of his other animals, they have personalities. In one famous image called Artist and his Models (Kittens), a lithograph from 1968, several large, unruly kittens with big expressive faces play a game of rough-and-tumble, dwarfing the artist, a rather crazed-looking black figure without a face. They have exaggerated facial expressions, almost like the anthropomorphic features of cartoon animals. They seem, in other words, like pets.

Towards the end of his magisterial essay, John Berger writes: ‘The marginalisation of animals is today being followed by the marginalisation and disposal of the only class who, throughout history, has remained familiar with animals and maintained the wisdom which accompanies that familiarity: the middle and small peasant.’ The fate of both animals and peasants in the art of Ramkinkar Baij is a record of the same inevitable trajectory—of disappearance and co-option in a post-industrial universe.

Published in Open magazine.

Breaking Open Compartments: The Art of Sukhnandi Vyam

My essay on a fascinating Indian sculptor, for The Caravan: 

Sukhnandi Vyam’s art reminds us that all creative work is in some way or other an engagement with a tradition.

What you first see is one man gleefully perched atop another’s shoulders, weapon at the ready, while the man below seems to be shepherding two animals. It is only on reading the catalogue that you realise that the gleeful figure is of Bageshwar, the Gond god of fertility, waiting to turn into a tiger and kill the hapless bridegroom if he fails to sacrifice the traditional wedding boar. The arresting Bageshwar image is by Sukhnandi Vyam, whose wood sculptures form part of one of the most remarkable movements in contemporary Indian visual history: the rise of Pardhan Gond art. Sukhnandi’s first solo exhibition, titled Dog Father, Fox Mother, Their Daughter & Other Stories, opened at Delhi’s W+K Exp gallery the last week of March and ran through April.

As illustrated by the reference above, Sukhnandi’s work, while by no means exhausted by its historical-cultural context, cannot be understood without it. So bear with me while I take a brief detour.

The Gonds are an Adivasi community spread over Madhya Pradesh, eastern Maharashtra (Vidarbha), Chhattisgarh, northern Andhra Pradesh and western Orissa. With over four million people, they are arguably the largest tribe in India. In contrast to the traditional anthropological idea of the tribe as a homogenous, egalitarian community, however, the Gonds are internally stratified. Occupational castes include Agarias, or ironworkers; Ojhas, or soothsayers; Solahas, or carpenters; Koilabhutis, dancers or prostitutes; and Pardhans, or bardic priests. Traditionally, the Pardhan would visit the houses of his yajmaans, or patrons, every three years, playing the bana, the magic fiddle, and singing in praise of Bada Dev, the most important Gond deity, or of the brave deeds of the Gond rajas. He would also visit after a death in the household and perform the requisite functions. The Pardhans were, in the words of writer Udayan Vajpeyi, “the musicians, genealogists and storytellers of the Gonds.”

By the late-20th century, the importance of this ritualistic bardic tradition had dwindled. Unable to sustain themselves financially as performers, many Pardhans took to farming or manual labour. Into this tragic, almost inevitable narrative of dying tradition, there entered something strange and new: the national-cultural institutions of the Indian state. In the 1980s, Bharat Bhavan, a newly established arts centre created by the Madhya Pradesh government, was handed over to a visionary artist called Jagdish Swaminathan. A key figure in modern Indian art, Swaminathan decided that Bharat Bhavan must become a space as open to traditional Indian cultural forms as it was to Modernist movements. Under his auspices, teams of young artists were sent into the villages of Madhya Pradesh in search of local art and talented artists. It was on one such trip, the story goes, that they met Jangarh.

It started with a painting on the wall of a house in the village of Patangarh. They were fascinated. When they asked who the artist was, they were directed to a Pardhan Gond boy of about 12, Jangarh Singh Shyam. Jangarh agreed to go to Bhopal with them. Back in Bharat Bhavan, Swaminathan, impressed and intrigued by the boy’s talent, gave him art materials and a free hand—and Jangarh began to paint. He painted birds and animals, rivers and mountains, flowers and fruits and trees. He painted the stories of the Gond kings and the Gond gods and goddesses. He painted, in fact, the whole of the Gond lifeworld—that had, until then, been painted in song.

The process initiated by Jangarh has brought about the remarkable, almost magical transformation of a primarily oral culture into a visual one. Drawing on the rudimentary forms of bhittichitra (wall painting), he became the first to enshrine the Gond imaginary on canvas. Jangarh continued to work on buildings, however, putting his stamp on the MP State Legislative Assembly and the dome of Bharat Bhavan. Inspired by his enormous success, dozens of Pardhan men and women started to follow in his footsteps, moving to Bhopal and turning their talents to art.

Sukhnandi Vyam is one of them.

Sukhnandi’s initiation into artistic practice began with the terracotta sculptures he created at the age of eight, while taking part in a 1991 art and craft workshop at Bhopal’s Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya (or Museum of Man). “They were liked,” he says softly. “After that I started to work with my uncle.” His uncle and aunt, Subhash and Durgabai Vyam, were already well-regarded artists and Sukhnandi was a willing and able apprentice. In 1997, he relocated from his village, Sonpuri, to Bhopal, and experimented with clay, canvas and metal before settling on wood as his medium of choice.

It has not been an easy decision, primarily because the combined cost of the raw material, storage and transportation is much more than it would be for canvases. But Sukhnandi’s three-dimensional wooden pieces single him out among Pardhan Gond artists. His themes range from myths and folktales to depictions of everyday life in the Gond village, where animals are part of the landscape. He doesn’t paint on the sculptures instead, he lets the natural differences of shade and texture in the wood create the desired contrasts. His choice of medium and technique echo the world he seeks to evoke: a world where the natural, the mythical and the cultural are inseparable from each other.

In fact, Sukhnandi’s work challenges many cultural binaries we tend to accept unquestioningly: metropolitan and rural, traditional and (Post) Modern, art and craft. In being attributed simultaneously to a folk tradition that goes back millennia and to a single visionary practitioner (in whose honour it is sometimes called Jangarh Kalam), Pardhan Gond art is perhaps unique. But the really crucial thing it allows us to do is to break open the watertight compartments to which Modernist notions of art have confined us, where being part of a tradition is merely to practice a craft, which is assumed to mean that one mechanically recreates the same thing over and over, while being an artist is somehow sui generis. Neither, of course, is true. But the premium placed on originality, newness and individuality is such that we are unable to see that all creative work is in some way or other an engagement with a tradition.

Art historian Michael Baxandall, discussing the social milieu of art in the now-classic Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, argued that while the painter may have been accepted as the “professional visualizer” of the holy stories, “the public mind was not a blank tablet on which the painters’ representations of a story or person could impress themselves.” The painter’s “exterior visualizations” had to get along with an ongoing process of “interior visualizations” by his public. But this did not mean the painter brought nothing to the table. It only meant that his originality and innovativeness lay in building upon the “cognitive style” he shared with his public.

What happens when an artist’s ‘exterior visualisations’ cannot be mirrored in the minds of his public, because they share with him almost none of his cultural context? I do not know. What I do know is that over the last two decades, Pardhan Gond artists have been slowly gaining access to the metropolitan worlds of museums, galleries and publishing houses, in India and abroad. Sukhnandi Vyam is in the slightly different position of representing a whole tradition to a world that doesn’t know it—while also bringing his own take on it to the table. And he does it remarkably well. His ‘Mangrohi’—a mandap of sal wood to which coconuts and mahua liquor are offered—transports us to the joyous atmosphere of a Gond wedding. But next to it we have ‘Wedding Ritual,’ where the Suvash and Suvashin, representing the bride and groom’s sides respectively, battle it out over the mangrohi in a full-scale tug-of-war. The competitive glint in everyone’s eyes—and the determined set of their jaws—dispels any simplistic notions we may have been nursing of the tribal life as egalitarian and conflictless. Then there are his images of deities: Bada Deo, who created the world, or Mallu Deo, to whom one prays when children are sick. To the ignorant eye they may seem the most traditional of all, but in fact they are a radical departure. Because, as Sukhnandi points out gently, they are traditionally formless, “Inka koi aakaar nahi hai. Yeh toh hum man se banaate hain, bhaav se.”

Even as the artists’ imaginations soar beyond the assumed parameters of Gond tradition, their work retains a unique voice and vision. Crucial to that vision is an understanding of the universe not as something fragmented, alienated or alienating, but as something in whose multiplicity there is a profound and irrevocable interconnectedness. Think, for example, of Gond artist Bhajju Shyam’s exquisite, playful re-imagining of the Western metropolis in The London Jungle Book (Tara Books, 2008) where Big Ben is a rooster, by whose call one times one’s day — while a red doubledecker bus becomes a dependable canine companion called Loyal Friend No. 30.

Within Sukhnandi’s work, it could be his ‘Thinking Man’ that best represents this vision. The piece is a wonderfully idiosyncratic re-interpretation of the artist as Rodin’s Thinker. Instead of the abstract form of thought that we are invited to imagine by Rodin’s legendary sculpture, here the concreteness of the things thought about presses in on us.

The world crowds in around the artist, even as he sits quietly there hunched, the paintbrush in his hand pointing upward like some ersatz spear—an improvised defense against the world, should it choose to attack. But it is when you start to look at the objects that float about his head—like thought bubbles in a cartoon strip—that you begin to see the playful conjunction of multiple worlds. At first glance, there appears to be an aeroplane at one end and a jungle at the other: human civilisation juxtaposed with nature. Then one begins to see that the plane is much like a fish, down to the tail and fin-like wings. And perched on the man’s forehead is a bird, resembling the plane in form—and of course, in function. But even as it seems to gently mock technology as nothing more than the mimicry of nature, what ‘Thinking Man’ retains is a sense of wonder about the world—and keeping that intact has got to be the most challenging task of our times.

Published in The Caravan, May 2010.