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Aryan and pre-Aryan rituals and lore were thus woven seamlessly into
the intricate fabric of an ethos that’s bewilderingly heterogeneous.
The two epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, bear testimony to a
process of fascinating acculturation and accretion. Interestingly,
though the nature gods of the early Aryans lost their primacy in time,
the astonished awe of nature, their primitive animism lived on.
Mountains, rivers, stones, plants, birds and animals found their way
into enduring myths and legends that inspire contemporary writers and
artists still.
When Islam came into the subcontinent, a break with the past could
well have come about. But that did not happen. Because, firstly, along
with Sunni orthodoxy Sufi mysticism came, too, and found a most
congenial home in a country where wandering mendicants—whether
Buddhist, Jain, Hindu or freethinker—and fringe cults with arcane
rituals and yogic practices were accepted religious expressions. Both
communities thus had pervious borders for exchanges to seep both ways.
Asraf Mirani’s Impact of Sufism in India, for example, stresses the
contact between the Sufis and yogis, pointing out the similarity in
belief, as identified by Al-Bireuni, between the former and different
local cults.
Like in the language of dance mudras and abhinaya, for example, where
stylized gestures can convey the rasas. In Bengali folk theatre,
Jatra, for example, vivek or conscience may admonish protagonists
onstage but villagers, interestingly enough, have no difficulty in
grasping this two-level mechanism: symbolic motif and realistic
situation. This sensibility, this inheritance of the adbhuta, this
sense of gauche wonder and playful fancy has been stimulated further
by postmodern theory. The new media and material, the hectic pace
of change, the mediation of identities—communal, regional, Indian,
international, particularly in those settled abroad—confront the
artist with a fresh dare, and win for contemporary Indian art new
frontiers, scripting a complex of variegated, nuanced responses much
beyond what the Natyasashtra had anticipated.
But for a vintage Indian vision you have to first go to S. H. Raza. The
seniormost artist on the list remains timelessly Indian both in
embodying the pluralism of this culture and in his philosophic wonder.
Rendering a profound concept in the simplest geometric terms shows his
stupendous imaginative leap. To meditate on his Vikiran—another
“bindu” painting—is to experience the idea of essence illustrated in
Chandogya Upanishad and quoted by A. L. Basham in The Wonder That Was
India. A father asks his son to bring the fruit of a banyan and break
it. The latter does so to discover its tiny seeds. When he breaks one
of the seeds the father asks,
“Now what do you see?”
“Nothing, Sir.”
“What you do not perceive is the essence….in that essence is the self
of all that is…” What you sense in Raza is a journey that recedes
inwards from the cluttered peripheries of existence to a dark, central
void, the silent essence of consciousness, from where radiates
outwards the very life force of the universe, the “vikiran”. But the
grey concentric circles with neither beginning nor end aren’t stable;
their frayed edges suggest friction and motion: life itself in
self-renewing patterns.
Not for nothing has Ganesh Pyne been described as a fabulist. The
depths of his tremulous being harbour inchoate anxieties and fears
that could be traced to his childhood—particularly his encounter with
death and violence—mythologized in his creative crucible as macabre,
cadaverous images that seem to mourn life and mock death at once. The
work on view is very Pynesque with its bleached head and open,
mouthless mouth. An enigmatic presence that defies distinctions of
animate and inanimate, an idea inherent not only in Hindu, Buddhist
and Jain beliefs but most ancient peoples also. By calling his work
The Speaking Stone, the artist suggests a narrative of allusions in a
culture where the Shiva linga and the shalgram shila are objects of
worship; where the story of Ahalya from the Ramayana is a living
tradition in north Indian villages. What ultimately emerges is the
allegory of ageless stone pronouncing an oracle.
Chintan Upadhyay thrusts you into a brave new world of cloned babies
that’s chilling in its grim unreality. But in this sculpture they neither dance nor
pose with fiendishly cute gestures because they’ve been devoured by a
billowing cloud from which stare out their unseeing eyes. Is it an encounter
with extra-terrestrial forces? Or a mushroom cloud blooming with radioactive
particles? Or a memorial to violence, with the severed heads of his smart
alecs? With dark shadows hemming
in a circle of strident light beneath it, uneasy suggestions are
awakened by this doomsday metaphor.
Yet marriage, the big fat colourful social occasion that it is, is an
enduring Indian shibboleth. Abir Karmakar builds up a cinematic
illusion to represent, with ironic wit and sentimental kitsch, the
peculiar flavour of a wedding celebration in Gujarat, complete with
film music. The faces of two male singers, caught at a lens-worthy
moment as it were, hold fluid, earnest expressions, befitting the
occasion. But the name of the work posits a universal conundrum: the
souring of love relationships.
Sumitro Basak’s recent series, Amar Sonar Bangla, bristles with irony,
too. What he sees around him—the bizarre contradictions, the comic
rituals of consumerism—can only be treated as black farce, he seems to
imply. Hence, he lampoons the notions society lives by. Like the
sanctity of marriage, for example, in Akkhoy Hok Tomar Alta Sindur,
with its capricious play of intricate, cacophonous, images, puns, and
references. Or the nature of dharma, which could be translated in this
context, as justice. Rizwanur Rehman’s ill-fated love story, which had
the makings of an enduring urban legend, and invites parallels with
the Behula tale, is again the point of departure in his Pakshi Rupi
Dharma. Alluding to the animal forms dharma assumed in the
Mahabharata—a stork, a dog—the artist sees dharma as a gigantic bird
that, unaffected by the omnipresence of Fux advertisements (which
banter a men’s undergarment company, owned by the family accused of
killing Rehman) makes a meal of these clothing items, resisting, or maybe
devouring the magic of the market.
Cloth and stitch are what give body to Shreyasi Chatterjee’s vision
which combines beguiling details with a panoramic sweep in portraying
the incredible diversity of adbhuta India. Her romanticism
transcends the logic of space and scale, perspective and episodic time
so that an intricate montage unfolds a vast landscape of playful
juxtapositions and improbable overlaps. Here is a celebration of India
that’s not without an elegiac undertone as picturesque
icons—whether period ruins or the striped beauty—face extinction as
the juggernaut of progress rolls relentlessly.
But Kolte’s simmering flux is replaced in Gigi Scaria’s digital print by the
contours of an aloof city—Shanghai’s, actually—without the warm chaos of
human presence, without the clutter of cultural identity. The distant view of
coldly-brooding buildings pronounces the city as forbiddingly anonymous,
although its stunted reflection—of Delhi, actually—perhaps aspires to bloat
into a global urban monster. Becasue, after all, citis are symbolic of material
aspirations in developing countries, the hub of rags-to-riches myths. Where
traditional hierarchies are scrambled by the fiction of equal opportunity.
Hence the name, Equator, the earth’s notional centre equidistant from both
poles.
Pratima Naithani has the eye to tease out the exotic in the everyday.
A bus painted an improbable blue becomes the display surface for
visual quips: a leaping red Hanuman, say, or a white silhouette of the
Taj Mahal. The Sweet Shop and the paan shop with its vertical strips
of foil packs hung like festoons are bleached in the manner of
solarization or computer graphics, to seem spookily insubstantial, as
sudden flashes of colour pick out bits of imagery to highlight.
The human brain continually seeks the anchor of references from the
past, particularly from childhood memories, in organizing its response
to reality. By plucking a child’s game of hopscotch for her motif in
the video, Between Fire and Sky, Surekha thus lulls the viewer with
his Edenic associations only to jolt him into a keener awareness of a
woman’s besieged identity. The tense balance of one-legged
hops and the protagonist’s frantic urge to carry on the game according
to immutable rules, loose hair flapping, takes on a meaning more
menacing when the hopscotch lines burn and smoulder, recalling the
burning insignia of the Ku Klux Klan, and traps the girl in. The same
action in space promises liberty but, anonymous as she is, it only enhances
her vertiginous vulnerability.