The wonder of India is that, while the movement of peoples in ancient

times gifted the subcontinent its ethnological diversity, civilization

here has been evolving continuously for over several millennia. No
sharp break with the past disrupts its narrative flow. On the
contrary, intrusions—whether military, commercial or
religio-cultural—invariably imported fresh elements that were in time
absorbed into the fascinating composite of Indian culture.

Aryans colonized Europe, too, which later came to be Christianized.

But the structured world view of the Semitic religions made it
difficult to absorb the pantheistic beliefs and archaic rituals of its
ancient peoples. Thus, paganism with its sense of wonder and magic,
its quaint superstitions and rituals were marginalized as Christianity
and later Islam—monotheistic, largely humanistic and
democratic—established their hold in Europe and large parts of Asia.

The tussle between polytheism and monotheism seems to have veered

between either/or, inferior/superior, form/formless alternatives in
history. Akhenaton’s attempt at supplanting the religion of the
Egyptian priests with the worship of one god ended in his disgrace.
The Judeo-Christian weltanschauung swung the other way.

In the Indian subcontinent, however, what happened was different. The

Aryans—pastoral nomads who settled down to agrarian, territorial
states—being pagan and polytheistic, quite naturally co-opted the gods
and beliefs of the indigenous peoples. Like Shiva, for example, or
Kali. Or the snake goddess, Manasha. Indeed, two of the most
important Hindu gods are decidedly non-Aryan in appearance for
they are dark: Rama and Krishna. The latter’s weapon, the discus, was
probably pre-Aryan, as D. D. Kosambi points out in his Myth and Reality.

With neither a single scripture nor church, neither a supreme deity

nor idolatry, the religion of the Aryans was amorphous enough for
contraries to cohabit; for the sublime (the agnostic Hymn of Creation)
and the ridiculous (the Purusha Shukta) to reside in the same body of
hymns, the Rig Veda. And because they didn’t have a script till well
into the 1st millennium BCE, the merging of their evolving myths
with the oral traditions of local tribes was a natural, fluid process.
So food-gatherers and food-growers, pre-Aryan communities and
monarchical states continued to exist in this vast land, defying
linear progress, yoking different eras.

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.

The spectrum of philosophic speculation that sprang from the social

churning prior to the 6th century BCE ranged from fatalistic
spiritualism to rational materialism. Inevitably, idolatry and
monotheist thought also arose at certain points in time. But the
contradictions between polytheistic paganism and monotheism came to be
resolved at a philosophic level. Thus the either/or,
superior/inferior, sakar/nirakar extremes of theism didn’t call for the
rejection of one or the other position.

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.

Secondly, converts carried over to the new society their persistent

tribal and caste memory. Indian Islam came to accommodate indigenous
elements, therefore, which gave it a distinct form as new myths were
forged. Observes Shaikh Muhammad Ikram in Muslim Civilization in India
that, “since one is confronted not just with the problem of
identifying Islamic influence on Hinduism but also Hindu influences on
Islam, it is clear that the process of interaction may be complicated
by a double movement.” Nowhere is this seen as clearly as in the Rishi
order of Sufis in Kashmir whose founder, Sheikh Noor-ud-din Wali
(1378-1438), alias Nund Rishi, the patron saint of Kashmir, wrote,
“There is one God/But with a hundred names…” which is exactly how
Hinduism fits its gallery of gods into a monotheistic framework.

In fact, so dominant was the syncretic culture in a marginal region

like Bengal—because it was far away from both the Hindu and upcountry
Muslim heartland—that it led poet Saiyid Sultan to include Hindu
terminology and practices in his Nabi Bansa. If his Eve wore a bun and
a sindur bindi it was because, as Richard Maxwell Eaton says in The
Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, the “rural population of
nominal Muslims (were) saturated with folk Bengali and Hindu religious
ideas.” This tradition of eclectic spiritualism, seen in regional
ballads like Nizam Dacoit, still thrives among the bauls and fakirs of
Bengal and Bangladesh.

All kinds of rituals and myths, runes and incantations—however

strange, quaint or bizarre—coalesced, therefore, in a process so
complex and subterranean that they survived the colonial intervention
and continue to defy the rational thinking of the modern age.
Contrasted with the aseptic uniformity of the West, India is a living
museum of fascinating overlaps of time and poise of contraries. Its
creative expressions, thus, quite naturally touch upon a range of
moods and emotional tenors, codified in traditional aesthetics as
rasas.

Rural Indian artists, born to this colourful tradition, imbibe it in

an umbilical way, so to say. Those from urban art schools, exposed
to Western art in their training must, in their search for identity,
confront its layered, rainbow splendour because it touches their
sensibility somewhere deep down. And it’s a sensibility that combines
with ease the real and the extra-real. Naturalism and distortion.
Details and their stylized distillation. The mundane and the magical.
A sensibility we encounter in different creative forms.

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.

Somewhat similar in temperament is V. S. Gaitonde (died 2001). For

here is an artist whose non-objective oeuvre is marked by a
self-contained solitude and intensity often categorized as a Zen
vision. Yet, the work on view, though pensively meditative, is ruled
by a red that’s more passionate than philosophic. While its structural
mooring has a comforting sense of stability, the corroded corners and
textured layers, edged with yellow, speak of controlled tension.

J. Swaminathan (died 1994), however, traverses a wide span of

concerns. Challenging the writ of the West in modern art, he explored
an idiom that, while loosely geometric, had a profoundly Indian
texture in its creative thinking, merging philosophic awareness with
tribal symbolism. Indeed, his role in recognizing the vigour of
India’s tribal legacy would have a lasting impact on others.
In the work on view, for example, a rough pattern of rectangular
mandalas protectively enclose what could be quaint hills in the
centre, both drawing you in and conspiring to keep
you out at the same time. Lively doodlings that refer to his intimacy
with the tribal tradition of Madhya Pradesh give the work its spark of
energy.

In a way, his senior contemporary K. G. Subramanyan complements

Swaminathan’s approach because, like the latter, he rejected the
unspoken caste distinction between mainstream and tribal art as
between art and craft. What engages this theoretician, writer,
teacher and artist, is another area of adbhuta: the wonder of art
language, its syntactical roots. His tone thus remains detached and
degage as it does here, not allowing artifice to be swamped by
illusion and emotion.

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.

To contemporary rural artists, however, pantheistic myths are a creed

to live by. Adbhuta is a way of life, as the present examples show. In
Mayank Shyam you see how discipline tones poetic imagination; how
simple imagery turns fabulous through his treatment; how a pattern of
fine lines and subtle palette can evoke volume and a wealth of
textures; how his meditative economy leads to striking sophistication.
He isn’t immune to urban influences. But what he’s taken from his own
tradition and from contemporary art has been moulded to express a
clearly individual vision.

Tradition inspiring individual vision is also what you see in the

amazing scroll patachitras of Midnapore’s Madhu and Hazra Chitrakar. A
mind-boggling weave of Hindu and Islamic lore stimulates the epic
imagination of the artists to create colourful patachitras that leave
viewers mesmerized. Or should you call them audience, since narration,
the living voice, suggests itself as an essential dimension of this
kind of art? Hindu deities and Muslim pirs, monster serpents and
mythical demons, wondrous birds and animals jostle with contemporary
imagery like the Howrah Bridge or cars or high-rises in
densely-packed compositions that use space vertically and play with
random perspectives.

Urban artists, like Thota Vaikuntham and Ravinder Reddy of Hyderabad,

have also sought to explore folk vocabulary. The former’s nut-brown
women gain their earthy eroticism from both the rhythm of
fluent, virile lines and a palette of high tones. The latter’s
sculptures, especially his heads in polyester resin fibreglass, are a
clever combination of traditional iconography with its wide-eyed
goddesses and tongue-in-cheek kitsch.
The universal concept of The Tree of Life has been reinvented by Manisha
Jha as the Feminine Tree, declaring a subtle shift in stress from
traditional thinking. An architect by training, the artist brings to
her acrylic the meticulous detailing of a scientific blueprint and an
extravagant composition that mines both the Madhubani and Tibetan thankha
traditions. The austere palette—black and white—enhances the dramatic
charge of a feminine deity who, presiding over life and the elements,
seems to represent the cosmic power of creative energy with
clearly-defined crown and sacral chakras of tiny, dancing figures. A
ceaseless pattern, again, with no beginning and no end.

Although the Monkey and the Moon by S. Nandagopal seeks to portray an

idea so simple in its appeal as to be universal—a man’s grasp always
falls short of his aspiration—the disarming colloquialism of his
language, his device of adopting a village raconteur’s earthy
wit gives the work its identity. The signature “frontal narrative” of
his sculpture, by rejecting modelled dimensions, instantly affirms its
affinity with the wry, linear distillation of folk imagery. As wry is
the tone of Kristine Michael who seems to experiment with urban folk in
sculpting two nestling peppers, the feminine grace of their form belying the
pungency of their nature. Called Fire and Water, it quotes Pop art in its
amusing banality.

Another urban artist who’s searched the lexicon of folk imagery to

nudge his creative energy is Viren Tanwar. Thus, gods and yogis,
idealized in the Miniaturist manner, are as living in his art as are
the elastic calisthenics of supple humans. In Sankat Mochan the artist
seems to toast Hanuman, known as brave and strong, for he is
depicted at impossible feats. But is the artist in earnest or in jest?
For isn’t the apparent viram rasa evoked in the oils undermined by a
delightful levity—hasyam or humour—when you see the demi-god perched
on a tower of his own, spiralling tail?

But the most disarmingly catchy of contemporary India’s urban folk

idioms is popular cinema, particularly Bollywood. Thota Tharrani
tangentially celebrates cinema, with12 watercolours. They are a
montage of staccato frames with summary lines and rough patches of
colour, as sketchy as a storyboard. That gives way to hyperbolic
poster splendour in New York-based Uday Dhar’s darkly witty collage,
Masala, Masti, Madness. In a way, the collage exactly echoes the
patchwork of cultures an artist like Dhar has negotiated all along in
a world of spiritual tramps who feel both alienated and at home
everywhere. Hence, not surprisingly, his subversive squint is trained
on the curious ways in which societies evolve and cultures impact
each other. His tour de force, however, is the multi-media,
multi-panel The Wondrous History of an Enchanted Bunny, the exile’s
attempt to embrace India as idea and substance, as an inexplicable,
overwhelming, contrarious and crazy Wonderland, broken down into neat
segments, each embedded with signifiers.

It’s a different sort of Wonderland that Sanam C. N. depicts. For his

aerial view of fingers of land that clasp the sea, threaded together
by a long, looping highway-cum-bridge, are dotted with enigmatic metal
installations. Somewhere, a vehicle is up in flames, elsewhere burns a
spot of red, like an explosion. Is this, then, a futuristic fable of
insidious lull, pretending to be an innocent landscape? The dense naturescape
of Rajan Krishnan isn’t quite what it seems, either. A tree laden with
jackfruit evokes the lush greenery in Kerala. But there’s a sinister fecundity
about it. As though the lure of burgeoning growth in a bare land is a ploy to
poison the unsuspecting. An environmental message—against chemical
fertilizer and pesticide, perhaps—is only part of its strange, disturbing, surreal
appeal.

His environmental conscience leads Suresh K. Nair beyond the

anthropocentric focus of humanism in his homage to the cow. A beast that’s
unusually meek and mild and routinely exploited, the way it was by the early
Hindus, both for its milk and its flesh till the myth of divinity transformed its
status. Trained as he is in both the mural tradition of his native Kerala and in
miniature painting, he has been given the vision and confidence to handle
large surfaces together with an eye for delicate details, as one sees in the
work on view. That the artist’s expansive spirit strives “to feel one with the
whole of creation” is articulated in the way an atlas of the world and Hindu
gods share the same space, as the cow becomes an icon of peace, inheriting
the world as the meek ought to.

Environmental concerns move Shantamani Muddaiah also, for whom the

medium is as much the message as the metaphor: man’s irrepressible faith in
impossible dreams. Dreams of soaring above the ordinary; of vaulting
ambitions; of liberty. Dreams of taking wing, in other words. But a wing can
be chopped as Jatayu’s was, or burnt, which is the fate Icarus faced, because
he’d flown too near the sun. Her remarkable work, called Icarus/Jatayu,
declares the
legacy of both the Western and the Indian traditions. The medium,
charcoal, being midway between a burning tree and its ashes, reminds
people that they’ve taken their ambition of exploiting nature for
their own advantage to a dystopian brink.
With Tarun Jung Rawat, it’s not so much what he says as how he says it
that buoys his kinetic assemblage. Confronting the authoritarian
patriarchal hierarchy that keeps a tight leash on the girl child, the
artist argues for her untrammelled liberty. But what impacts the
viewer is his quirky, richly-naive fancy, breathed into life by
stirring spry, chatty, surreal phrases, spiced with disarming
childlike craft and motorized movement. His manifesto, composed in
rhyme, boosts the succinct recall of the message.

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.

Arpita Singh, though, identifies a register of rasas in the everyday,

in the life of Everywoman, who is often seen, as in this work, as a
victim of a subtle violence. Prone on a heap of folds much like a vanquished
enemy, the prize scalp of a trophy hunter perhaps, the woman is at the mercy
of
a man whose puny size is compensated by his gun. While he is fully
clothed, her flaccid, middle-aged nakedness makes her an image of mute
vulnerability. Words like “sea” and “boat”, “ bed sheet” and “pillow”
seem to suggest how a woman’s journey across life must negotiate the
intimate, intemperate zone of the bedroom.

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.

Raol Hemant’s voice isn’t without an undertow of banter, either, in

his finely executed paintings. Coming to Mumbai from the banks of the
Subarnarekha, in Orissa, he could look at life in a big city as
something adbhuta to an awed, rural outsider. While his brushwork
recreates untidy knots of people, all speaking on the mobile phone—a
veritable “babble”, as he says—his experience of mural painting turns
the latter into corroded fragments of images, like an aged fresco’s,
but with dappled colours like those of computer graphics. Corrugated
sheets warp frayed posters and damp, sentient patches invade human
space, as ground seems to merge with figures on the same surface,
pronouncing the street as a fraught, heated zone.

Sumedh Rajendran’s image of walking legs brings to mind city sidewalks,

too, sidewalks that echo with footfalls. The purposeful legs—that are like a
stark, unadorned cutout—are busy with their schedule that, paradoxically, is
anonymous in the routineness of the act. It’s a mechanical act, therefore,
shorn of conscious choice, for there’s no torso, no individual, only legs. The
bottom pair, like a rebellious shadow, strides in the other direction: a situation
of conflict. Perhaps Rajendran, concerned with social hierarchies, examines
the immanent codes of exploitation societies are built on. But the contrary
impulses of urgent movement and a helpless rootedness, of isolation and
alienation, of the loss of direction, narrate a fable of contemporary life.

The rural tradition of stitching and embroidering swaddling clothes

for babies or floor rugs from old rags yields a rich store of home
fabrics like the Saami quilts on view. That a community of snake
charmers in Gujarat crafted cloth of such sedate splendour speaks
of the imbibed taste in uncultivated folk. Set against black, the
colours of the threads and the riff of their regular patterns,
honeycombed in places to echo snake scales, contribute to their
riveting presence. What particularly fascinates the viewer is the
sophisticated geometry of the layout.

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 cloth—if it’s a namabali—or even just strands of thread—like

janeu—may be imbued with great significance. New York-based artist
Nandini Chirimar’s interest in the extra-real dimension invested by
social values in everyday objects takes her to the sacred thread as a
visual entity, torn from its socio-religious connotation. The red
bangles, an “auspicious” sign of married women in parts of north
India, are a counterpoint in terms of material, colour, shape and
texture, to the elegant disarray of the thread.

If Chirimar extracts abstract form from objects charged with

socio-religious meaning, Prabhakar Kolte’s abstractions of sensuous
layers and scaffolds of paint investigate colour relationships, and
archly insinuate the representational: usually cityscapes of chaos and
clutter, pulsating with energy, pregnant with hidden signs of tensile
menace.

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.

Form as both tactile experience and autonomous entity, as both intimate

physicality and transcendental mystique is suggested by Bandeep Singh’s
archival digital prints. From his series Sa—or She in Sanskrit—come these
seductive images of the female body that, echoed by earthen pitchers, opens
up a spell-binding landscape of gravid shadows, lambent outlines and lyrical
eroticism. The voluptuous pitcher with its dark cavity and textural feel
symbolizes the female principle in its expectant poise of a recepticle. Hence
the name, Antarghat (the vessel within).The two Mudras explore gestures of
the hand and feet to conjure patterns of shape and void, richly sensuous,
invoking subtle shades of the srngaram rasa and beyond.

Man’s fascination with fire is tapped by Arjun Swaminathan who

attempts to “explore the relationship between, man, god and myth” in
his photos of villagers—all men—in coastal Karnataka, engaged in a
semi-martial ritual during their Durga festival. They cleanse
themselves in the village pond in which the deity is bathed first and
then engage in a theatrical ritual of flinging flaming coconut fronds
towards each other. Thus, another element, water—duly sanctified—and
ablutions, important in most religions, also have a significant place
in this festival.
Like air, fire is without substance but with awesome powers of
destruction, ingeniously harnessed by mankind. No wonder it’s a
recurring motif in all ancient myths, including the Mahabharata, for
its role in the evolution of civilization has been critical. The
evanescent dance of flames, frozen by Swaminathan’s lens, induces a
fervent trance that goes beyond logic and inhibition as the shadowy
figures, muffled by billowing smoke, move about like beings possessed.

With Baiju Parthan, it’s not just the certitude of meta-narratives

that’s questioned and upturned but also, in this digital age,
the very nature of human perception itself, however fragmentary or
provisional that may be. For, the problem isn’t with a limited
understanding that once believed the earth was flat but with how
that understanding is manipulated by the very tools of technology
manipulated by human agencies so that the planet earth becomes Google
Earth, the reality of the world digitally mediated for human
consumption/perception.
Parthan’s fascination with the camera and the cogent load of
the frozen moment is complemented by digital images which, even
as they record scenes, have no objective existence. As an artist trained
in painting he explores, as have such redoubtable forerunners as
Warhol , the interface between painting and photography. Currently
taken up with Google’s Street Views which often offer a multiplicity
of perspectives, Parthan seems to spoof digital photos by inserting
computer code graffiti. If reworking digital photos into paintings
reclaims their tangibility, asserting their identity as objects,
reworking paintings to echo jpeg images keys in a reminder of their
impermanence. An ironic aside on the dichotomous link between
master-man and machine-master.

British by birth, photographer Clare Arni grew up in Peru and India

and has lived for the best part of her life in Bangalore, articulating
different identities and cultures in this age of a shrinking globe.
The subject of her photo series, a sadhvi Meera is, like the lenslady
herself, an individual of different avatars: European by the accident
of her birth, Hindu sadhvi by choice, who lived in a Hampi cave for
many years, and is now a social worker with an NGO. Her transitions from
one self to the other imply both breaks with the past and underlying
bonds that may persist.
In this series, Arni catches her at a crucial juncture: when Meera
sheds her previous identity of a cave hermit to return to life in
society. The shaving off of her dreadlocks thus takes on the weight
of a ritual that’s partly funereal since it brings an earlier self to
an end, and partly baptismal as liquids are poured over her as though
she were being anointed for her new life. Meera’s meditative stillness
reveals the emotional depth this exercise touched in her.

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.

Since metaphors are a key to unravelling social values, words like

“inhuman” or “beastly” expose man’s construct of scales in
civilization. But the animal in man hasn’t succeeded in sublimating
aggression and violence; in fact violence, guided by intelligence and
culture, has sought social sanction for it, so that some forms are
accepted and even honoured. This is what comes to mind when you view
Kingshuk Sarkar’s astounding video, The Pigeon Eaters, where yogis
slaughter pigeons with nature’s weapon: their own teeth! They believe
that God possesses them during this ritual in Kamakhya, Assam, and so
do devotees who seek their intervention with the divine powers to earn
boons.
The artist, who’s lately been reworking the image of bared
teeth—whether in aggression or anguish or argument—plays with
disembodied dentures to extend their import beyond rituals. From his
theme of teeth, therefore, Sarkar extracts the weird and the macabre:
what would be deemed both bibhatsam and bhayanakam. And that has long
been the preserve of Jogen Chowdhury. Whether gaunt and weathered—like
the two heads on view—or flabby and tumescent, his misshapen figures often
mirror both the rot in the soul, as Dorian Gray’s picture did, and in society.