By All Means Necessary

Sounds get

Translated into

An inky silence

From downstairs

An alien language

Climbs up to the library

Just a glance, then

It walks out murmuring

Buddha complains

That he could have

Avoided enlightenment

Giving his begging bowl

And robe, he walks into

An ocean of nakedness

Wrongs that do not have rights

Rights that do not have wrongs

Stand trembling before the red light

Three….two …one

Time is the green light

That never comes alive

Don’t

Don’t salivate in words

When a platter of life is

Served on the dinner table.

(The cover page of the controversial college magazine in Kerala)

College magazines are little tinder boxes of passion and righteousness. Two things feature prominently in them; love and revolution. Both these passions that the young generations value most all over the world especially when they are in the college campuses need not necessarily be expressed in the matured frame of mind. Ignited by the idea of establishing a world which is devoid of all censorships and creating a society that functions on the dictums of equal rights and justice for all genders, students bring forth college magazines, which are often circulated amongst the students, enjoyed, critiqued, trashed and at times archived. This is a romantic web which is created out of the fine threads of utopian thoughts and seen from the perspective of a student it is not a bad idea to be a part of the production of a college magazine.

(The Editorial Board)

Abundance of revolution and romance never discounts a college magazine of its serious intent. There are several college magazines published in the world, meticulously handwritten and finely illustrated by the best talents of a given time in the campus and many cherish them for their content and production. Cheap production and printing technologies have changed the look and finish of the college magazines that often reflect the editor’s and the production team’s familiarity with the magazines that they admire or the magazines that cater to their political affinities. In the pre-internet days, college magazines were the avenues where the ‘silent and deceptive’ ones amongst the students came out with their real talents in writing poems, stories, essays and so on, though many of them would put their authors into pure shame in their matured years. At the same time, so many established writers too have done their debut publishing in the college magazines, handwritten or printed.

(a page from the magazine)

In Kerala, handwritten magazines and college magazines have always been a craze. With the arrival of blogs and social media, almost every literate Malayalee with a facebook account attempts some kind of creative writing on a daily basis. Some of them almost take revenge on the college magazine editors who had discarded their ‘masterpieces’ when they were in college, while writing in the social media. However, in the days of intolerance, at least in Kerala, a college magazine has hurt the sentiments of the, yes, the right wing people. The controversial magazine has come out from the Zamorine Guruvayoorappan College in Kozhikode, North Kerala. A cursory google search tells me that the magazines that had come out of this college before too have rubbed many people wrongly. Today, anything that refers to Rohit Vemula, Death Sentence, Bharat Mata, Islam, Beef, JNU and so on could create some tension in the social sphere only because some sections of the Indian society feel that uttering these words are as good as sedition or as good as hurting the sentiments of some religious groups.

(a page from the magazine)

The magazine in question is titled ‘Viswavikhyathamaya Theri’, which could be roughly translated as ‘Illustrious Expletives’ or Universally known Abuses. I would go by ‘Illustrious Expletives’. The crux of the editorial content of this magazine is how ideology has subordinated language into a sort of oppressive tool and derived expletives from the words that were once used to connote the downtrodden, Dalit and other fringe communities. India tops amongst the world countries in using expletives in daily parlance. In North India, each sentence that is exchanged between people both in the public and private domain is underlined by a word of abuse, which in fact refers to the subordinate position of women in the society. It is ironical that a dominant society that calls the country a ‘mata’ (mother) and even resorts to honor killing to protect the gene pool of the family through denying the women of their conjugal rights, turns its daily language into a basket of expletives that highlight the private parts and incestuous relationships of women absolutely objectifying them into usable and transferable commodities, by excluding them even from their physical agencies.

(from the magazine)

Such naturalization has happened almost in all the societies in India and elsewhere where the male folks have taken the reigns of the society. Language is a primary tool of control and subjugation and Malayalam, the native language of the Keralites, is not different from such ideological and chauvinistic co-optation. The magazine deals with the history of such co-optations and analyses how this linguistic turns had taken place over a period of time by slow, steady but violent exclusion of the subject communities. The magazine analyses various such manifestations in the articles written by the student writers and some of them are written by in-house scholars. To be very frank, while going through essays and expressions, what I could gather was the passion and angst with which those articles were written and I should appreciate it. But if someone asks, whether they are the ultimate critique, well researched and well argued to establish the counter points, I would say, most of them have failed miserably. But one should not avoid the passion with which these articles are written and they should be respected for the very intention.

(from the magazine)

While I appreciate the choice of the content that includes the mandatory translation of Rohit Vemula’s last letter where he quotes Carl Sagan (that gives the dead a sort of super sensitive and imaginative qualities and his aspiration to become a poetic writer of scientific matters stands justified despite the absence of his such writings in the public domain for qualitative scrutiny), a debate on death row, a discussion on the Kodungalloor Bharani festival where songs created out of expletives are sung as a ritual, mandatory discussion on theatre and films. Etymological origins of certain words that are currently used as abusive words in Malayalam language also are brought into the ken of discussion to prove that it too has happened as a result of the linguistic apartheid. As a neutralizing point, I came across extremely ‘natural’ romantic poems, stories and notes which perhaps, I should say, did not have any literary merit. The illustrations go well with the sloganeering attitude of the articles but not so commendable when compared to the illustration that the Kerala populace is familiar with.

(a page from the magazine)

I am surprised why the ABVP, the student wing of the BJP took this magazine as an offence to the public or private sentiments and even went to the extent of burning a copy of it within the college premises. Like the cases that are highlighted in the vigilant media dominated by the debate television, this magazine is lionized beyond proportion. It could have been avoided by sensible people even within the ABVP (right wing does not mean being dumb). A college is an expression of the general sentiments of the students who have elected a college union. Had it been an ABVP led union, the magazine would have been of a different sort and wouldn’t have even been noticed by many. First of all by making something like an ‘internal’ college issue into a public matter it at once causes a fruitless debate and also gives a lot of media space to the not so talented people. If ABVP thinks that a magazine like this could hurt them, then what about all the mainstream magazines published in Kerala? They are much more vocal and critical about the issues. A right wing party, though logic is the last thing that they would listen to, should heed to the apparent and visible fact that censoring by force will never suppress the rebellious thoughts generated in the minds of the young people who are instrumental in producing this college magazine. Amongst them, the really talented and rigorous ones would migrate into the mainstream politics, literature and academics. And they will demolish the illogical right wing sentiments, if not today, tomorrow.

(An Off Day Game publicity still)

Time-1970s. Location- A local reading room in Kerala. Camera-Start-Action. Five young men sit around a table and discuss Kafka, Camus, Freud, Marx, Kerala Politics, National politics and international politics. They argue vehemently on the merit of the recently published ‘Legend of Khasak’ (Khasakkinte Ithihasam) by O.V.Vijayan. Two boys strike at the carom board and two others sit in deep meditation on either side of a Chess board, contemplating the next move.

Fast forward. Time any time from 2000 to now. Location- an apartment or house or lodge or bar. Five men sit around with a few beer bottles and all other hot drinks that they could gather from the beverages shops. They discuss anything under sun without making any sense. Eat, drink and be merry is their motto. Politics, love, sex and literature come in between in their discussion but with no anchor. They do not know what they are doing or talking. Fights erupt, truce called, once again drinks are poured into glass till most of them black out.

(Director Sanal Kumar Sasidharan)

In the eyes of the Nobel laureate economist, Dr.Amartya Sen, Kerala tops both in education and health index. The fancy data tell that the living style and per capita income could match proportionately to the individual lives in the New York City. Malayalees are famous for their ability to speak in English, adopt new ways of life and for being intelligent and industrious. Yes, they have a ‘God’s own Country’ too to promote tourism. Young boys from the poor northern states migrate to this state and do all the jobs what once Malayalees used to do and they huge remittance back homes. In the meanwhile Malayalee do the same in the countries that they have migrated to. Rest of the Malayalee men who are left back in Kerala spend their time in political gossiping, in pornographic dreams, comedy movies and heavy boozing.

The tragic transition of the intellectual Malayalee or Intelligent Malayalee is almost complete for his vacant moments are spent in boozing. ‘Ozhivu Divasathe Kali’ (An Off Day Game), a Kerala State Award Winning movie for the year 2015, produced by Delhi’s Niv Art Movies and directed by the young filmmaker Sanal Kumar Sasidharan captures the tragedy of contemporary Malayalee society and its political and moral degeneration in no uncertain terms and interestingly by keeping the whole movie in the context of one single drinking session by five friends accompanied by a sixth side kick on an election day. They are there in an abandoned Inspection Bungalow near a river and their day’s agenda is just to drink and enjoy.

(Geetha, the character)

Politics, sexual desire, conquest of women by using force and a lot of aimless jabbering enliven their session and the moment the issue of caste and complexion of skin is brought out for discussion (which happens as an aberration) suddenly the scenario changes. When a story written by the noted short story writer Unni R with the same title is made into a movie both the banality and poignancy of the uprooted and unanchored life of a contemporary Malayalee unravels before us sending most of us into the zones of discomfort. On that day there is an Assembly by-election in one of the constituencies in Kerala. These friends, who are good householders and law abiding citizens otherwise, decide to celebrate that day. The very decision is a pointer to the collapse of the political discourse in a state that claims total literacy. The joke that does the rounds in Kerala is that all the drunkards are the most disciplined people because they stand in a queue before the beverage shops without creating any ruckus. The film however unveils the other side of the discipline; once they are in possession of the drinks, they turn the worst specimens of human beings in a beautiful way.

Geetha, a young woman in her late thirties come to cook chicken for them. Each person has an on her and each of them take turns to seduce her in his typical way only to meet a firewall that burns out their advances. She is a no-nonsense woman, yet she is a pray. Her ability to choose to work and resist the sexual advances of strangers commands appreciation and at the same time it shows how pathetically the ‘literate’ Malayalee slips into sexual predation once a couple of drinks are consumed. Geetha does not want to kill the live hen and the responsibility falls on Dasan, a dark and stout youth who often becomes the butt of their racial remarks. Dasan, finding no way to kill the live chicken finally decides to execute it by ‘hanging’. The scene evokes laughter amongst audience and the very laughter sets the tone of the later catharsis.

(A scene from the movie)

Popular Malayalam films, like the mainstream films made elsewhere in the world, have the tendency to strategically allocate caste and class identities to the heroes, heroines, villains and other characters. In a state like Kerala where religious demography is unsettlingly precarious with no religious denomination gets an upper hand in terms of demographic strength, the villainizing and trivializing of religious and castes are rotationally (and democratically too) done in the movies so that nobody’s sentiments are not easily hurt. In ‘An Off Day Game’ we have mostly a Hindu gathering with no substantial character from any other religion. The slow but steady and conscious self-exclusionary practice of the Hindu society is perhaps suggested but interestingly, the hierarchy with in the Hindu fold is subtly mentioned by the caste identities attributed to the main characters.

The equation is very precarious; on the one hand, the inclusion of a Namboothiri (Brahman) in the pack shows how Kerala has evolved caste-wise and is able to transcend the erstwhile caste exclusions within the Hindu fold. Dharman, who commands power amongst the friends as his money and muscle power, with his fair complexion stands out as an upper caste man. Vinayan and Prakash are understood to be from the middle castes (the OBCs in Kerala) while Dasan, by virtue of his name, physique and complexion is obviously from the lower caste. Dasan is made to do the menial jobs and we have to understand he is the only one amongst the friends who does not make any sexual move towards the similarly dark complexioned and tough Geetha.

(Story writer Unni R)

Egos fly while they drink. They try to talk politics and everything falls flat. Dharman’s effort to seduce Geetha is met with a violent retaliation from her. Vinayan’s views on seduction are logical and ‘democratic’ but Prakash believes in conquests via physical force. However, when Vinayan mentions Prakashan’s wife, who could also be a pray of such conquests of other men, Prakash loses his cool. The hypocrisy of the pack slowly unrolls and as expected it reaches to the level of someone making a direct reference to the ‘darkness’ of Dasan’s body. An emotional Dasan gets up and recites a poem in ‘English’. ‘When born I am black, When I grow up I am black, When I am sick I am black, When I die I am black. When you are born you are pink, when you grow up you are white, when you are sick you are blue, when you die you are brown, Yet you call me colored?’ This brings a deep silence and they all hang their heads in shame. Dasan’s preference to English for reciting the poem should be noticed as it shows his educational reach which has not helped him transcend his caste identity.

To lighten up the scene, Prakash suggests a game. They make a lottery with names ‘King, Minister, Police and Robber’ and the one who gets ‘police’ should find the robber. If he points the wrong person, he could punish the police by caning. This is a four persons’ game but they are five. Hence, they introduce a Supreme Court judge and they unanimously select Namboothiri (Brahmin) as the Judge. The social selection is self-evidential in this choice. Prakash gets the lot of the police and he makes two mistakes. Each times he bribes the king who is hand in glove with the Judge. Finally Dasan turns out to be the one with the lot ‘robber’. Drunken with frivolity and hollowness (a la La Dolce Vita), they ask the Judge to declare the sentence and he does declare; Hang him until death. They hang him; the mock drama ends brutally.

(Abhija Sivakala who essayed the role of Geetha)

With a shudder the audience realizes that it was Dasan who hanged the chicken and in a cruel game he is now hanged by his own friends. In the height of merry making, the friends accuse Dasan of sedition and they bray for his death. They tie his hands, strip him and use the same cloth to hang him from the balcony as if it was so natural to deliver justice in that manner. When the film was made India was not boiling with the issue of sedition. An Off Day Game becomes prophetic in many ways as less than six months after its release Rohit Vemula committed suicide by hanging and it is dubbed as a murder by an unkind state. Kanaiah Kumar became a traitor because he was ‘dark, short, backward and a communist’. The film is a political satire and at the same time, a real time documentation of the most degenerating society in India, Malayalee society. Perhaps, this film should be seen by each Malayalee with his or her family and hang their heads in shame. The victory of art can be proved only by such shaming, at times.

On the final round of my daily jog

He stops me, curiosity in his eyes

“You look old but not that too old

Yet you look fit with a good gait,”

Says he with some smile and hope

“Not so fit, yet I try to do my bit

To keep things in one place,” say I

He moves his huge frame to side

Makes way for me to pass ahead

“Would you help me to run a round?”

Asks he again, forcing me to doubt

His intentions, yet I give him my ears

“Want to shed it,” says he showing

Me his growing paunch all around

“Like you,” he pants, I cover shyness

“Breath slow but steady, I tell him

Shut up your mouth and run on”

He now hangs all hopes in his pursed lips

And throws his extra weight all around

Each time he pushes himself up to me

He looks at me like a child seeking approval

My aching legs plough the track heavy

Already I know this cannot be too long

But I run all the way keeping pain aside

For at least he could feel better tonight.

(An STD Booth in India)

In early 1990s, India underwent a total revolution; a revolution in telecommunications. Sam Pitroda, a visionary technocrat who came into the national attention with Rajiv Gandhi’s ascension to power was the chief architect of this revolution. Perhaps, Pitroda was the man who rang the death-knell of the Indian post and telegraph service, inadvertently. Indian people knew that a new change was in when they all could get a landline connection provided if they had the right documents and right connections. Another revolution was on via kitchen where millions of women belted out the sighs of relief when cooking gas connections became a reality; once again with the right documents and right connections. The ‘license-Permit-Quota’ Raj that had become the hallmark of Indian politics was refusing to go. People knew the communication revolution was in when they could make calls to their near and dear ones (even if against a racing ‘pulse’ rate) from the vertical and narrow yellow boxes sprang all over India. These boxes were called STD booths. These extremely poor cousins of Britain’s royal pay phone booths in red were low in style but high in demand.

The abbreviation, STD in the medical parlance was not something to be flaunted with pride. But when it came to the telecommunications, it attained a new status. Like many Indians who just do not know the expansion of certain abbreviations yet use them lavishly, the new STD too got currency in daily parlance without most knowing what it stood for (I just took the help of google to know what it is. It is Subscriber Trunk Dialing). But these booths that once played a pivotal role in changing India’s social as well as economic life fell defunct with the advent of cellular phones or the mobile phone by the end of 1990s and the unprecedented proliferation of it in the Indian sub-continent thanks to the competitive allowance of the private service provider companies in the market by the relaxation of government rules (which caused phenomenal corruption cases in Indian politics). The market for cellular phone became so expanded that even in the remotest areas in India, today it is difficult to see an STD booth. It was not just a communication revolution but the introduction of a new job sector. The collapse of it however brought in a new job sector providing jobs to millions of educated and semi-literate people with adequate income.

(Sam Pitroda- the architect of Indian communication revolution)

This preamble is however is not to go further into the details of India’s growth potential in the mobile phone sector nor do I want to delve deep into the nuances of new age communication leaps that are fast making the existing communications systems rather crude if not defunct. But this example could be used to understand the gallery system in India and elsewhere. In our country, after the global melt down in 2008, the art market has not substantially gotten back to the tracks. Though there has been continuous soothsaying during the art fairs and auction days that the market has finally here, the truth is this: the market for Indian contemporary art is abysmally low all over the world. If you ask, I would say, this scenario has not affected the artists though it has affected the scale of the art that they have been doing. The real victims of this market collapse are the galleries. Though we could say that the better days would bring them back on track, my observations tell me that the gallery system in India or elsewhere will never be the same as before. Exactly the way the STD booths went out of existence, the galleries also would perhaps cease to exist. It is not really a doomsday prophesying but a reality check. Let me explain further.

Galleries are a 19^th century phenomenon and it is intricately connected with colonial power, economics of looting, growing of aesthetic finesse of the old time pirates and the post-industrial individualism and proliferation of capital that enabled the upper middle class and the middle class buy works of art for keep sake. The participants in the colonial project of various kinds had collected arts and artifacts from their subject countries and also had commissioned artists to make interesting works of art. These were shown to their guests in the galleries. The collapse of monarchies made the palaces into veritable museums where the art collections amassed for opulence and private contemplation were thrown open to the public. Galleries got their names from the architectural components in the palaces where the works of art were displayed in those days. Exactly the way, the sculptures liberated from architecture became ‘modern’ independent sculptures the galleries when plucked out of the museum parlance became commercial outlets from where one could buy the works of art based on personal choice. Buying art was at once a cultural partaking and an expression of aspirational behavior. Art as an investment came much later.

(An 19th century salon in Paris)

The establishment of galleries as commercial outlets invariably brings out the fact, in fact the other side of it, that galleries could exist only when there are buyers. If we see the same through the basic market logic, galleries are the results of the demand-supply logic. People wanted to buy art and they did not know where to look for. To cater to this growing demand, entrepreneurs started private salons where they could show the works of art to the prospective clients. The salons that are freed from larger organizational structures or the state itself became controlled private affairs where people could see and buy works of art at their own pace and leisure. The very same entrepreneurs soon understood to cater to the demand they need a steady supply of the wares/works of art. That was why they started looking for the alcoholic, deranged and even mad artists who lurked in the shady parts of the city (most of them could not afford to live in better places as they were not economically productive. Even today we could see why artists are gravitated towards economically viable areas as in a city) and converted them into real ‘modern’ artists. In those days, artists who were devoid of their erstwhile royal patronage and also less anchored by the doubts they had about religious and political establishments, they were also like the writers who did ‘economically unviable works’.

These pre-fine-tuned and pre-sophisticated days of galleries make one thing clear to us: if there are no buyers the very idea of supply collapses rendering the producers absolutely ‘useless economically’. The logic of existence as far as a gallery is concerned is based on the demand created by the buyer/collector and if the buyer/collector reduces the demand or rather finds other avenues to procure his wares, then gallery as an intermediary becomes automatically defunct. If we go by the telecommunication revolution logic, we understand that people have not stopped communicating with the advent of mobile phones, on the contrary the communications became multi-dimensional and paved the way for a very vigorous economic activity around it. The same is applicable in the case of art and galleries. The buyers and collectors have not stopped buying or collecting art. They are still doing it is the fact. But they have migrated to new interfaces from where they collect better products. One may doubt this argument citing the fact that now the contemporary artists are not selling that much as they used to during the market boom days. But the reality is different. During the market boom days, the investment potential of/on market was shown exaggerated therefore there was an increased activity in the economic side of art, which definitely was beneficial to the contemporary artists. But the increase in the number of galleries in those days was just an outcome of the increased demand not a natural growth in the organic state of the galleries (of such organic nature ever existed).

(Lado Sarai, Delhi's art district)

Catering to the demand cannot be a reason for assessing the durability of any market for two basic reasons; one, the demand could dwindle at some stage, two, the demand could exist but its focus could deflect. For example, there could be an added demand for pineapple due to various health reasons or some new scientific finding that makes pineapple a very covetable fruit. Automatically there will be an excessive production of pineapples all over the world. New products and new outlets will come up. But this is possible only till the allure of the health benefits lasts. Over a few months someone irked person would come out and say that he did not get anything out consuming pineapples. In the worst scenario, another scientific establishment that wants to create a market for apple could trash the benefits of pineapple consumption and could prove that apple is better than pineapple. The systems that have been created for selling and buying pineapple cannot be used for selling apple though some kind of adjustments are possible for a short term basis but the sustainability of it is always questionable. That’s what exactly happened to the STD booths; they stayed on for some time before saying it quit. If galleries are staying on in India now it is because some economic activities are happening around them still.

Ask a gallerist, she would say things are not bright. It is not her problem. It is the natural growth of the market. If understand the historical dynamics, then we would understand how the galleries have been getting out of use and purpose. Imagine a scenario with such outlets that could sell not only pineapple and apple but also all the kinds of fruits with proven scientific credentials. That means, to buy a bunch of strawberry, you perhaps would not go to an exclusive strawberry store. You would better go to a well-known supermarket with a lavish fruit section in it. In the worst case scenario or for convenience sake, you either buy from home deliverers or from the peddlers. Now, if you just jog your imagination a little, you could understand why people prefer to go to private museum to make choices and also to enjoy works of art. Or rather why they look at the auction results and instead of going to the single shop send a word around in the secondary market. What happens here is those galleries that could not upgrade themselves as little museums would eventually turn into peddlers and home deliverers, but with a difference. We have seen suited and booted peddlers who sell knick knacks from the pavements by making themselves distinct with their attire. It is almost like big shops set up their temporary stalls in the streets during the festival times in India.

(Kiran Nadar Museum in Delhi)

Private museums are fast replacing the galleries in India and elsewhere. These larger than galleries are not really commercial outlets but more prestigious art hubs where a single patrons whims and fancies works as the logical thread of the collection that one sees at a given point of time. Definitely the single patron employs experts and curators to choose, display and negotiate with other museums, always to push the level of quality and brand up. This is an international phenomenon now. There an inter-museum exchange and also intra-museum exchange of ideas and artifacts. This has created a new scenario in which what is outside of these exchanges could look like less authentic even. If an artist’s work is collected in a private museum, then that artist’s value goes up then the galleries could do some business but with no negotiating power on its price or ‘aesthetical value’ as they used to do before because the benchmark is set by the private museums. In the hierarchy, you like it or not, the galleries are the new underdogs. Though it is not completely so, the galleries with a devoted client list still scrape through in business but in the demand-supply logic, the psyche of a client works in tandem with the graph of the brand value of the product. You could buy a Louis Vutton bag from an Indian showroom but when you say it that you bought from Paris, that makes all the difference.

Private museums do not directly enter into the market. However, they invigorate both the auction circuit as well as the secondary market. If a private museum bulk buys an artist, you could imagine that this artist and his works coming back to the scene mostly via some international private museum and through the established auction houses. This process sets the ball rolling in the secondary market where the dealers like rag pickers scramble through all the available and known collections to eke out the said artist’s works. To sustain themselves, the gallerists also join the gang, literally shutting down the activities of the galleries and rendering most of their devoted artists jobless and less of income. It was against this scenario the international acclaimed artist Damien Hirst decided to give his work directly to museums and auction houses rather than sending it via galleries. When art is turned into a pure economic activity, its sanctity has to be maintained at some level; that’s why most of the private museums are opened to the public, mostly free of cost because the works have to be in the ‘public domain’ before they turn into a commercial product. So the art viewing now has become more of a ‘seasoning and validating’ act of/by the public which reminds one of the marriages all over the world. Marriage is a private act between two individuals and their families. But the whole community is called to witness it because the sanctioning the sexual relationship between the bride and groom should not be questioned and shamed by the public. So public viewing of art in the private museums is a public witnessing ritual that makes certain nexus socially permissible.

(Delhi Art Gallery)

If so what are these galleries going to do? To find an answer let me go to the opening example of the STD booths and mobile phones. As I said before, the people have not stopped communicating. They have started using new ways of communicating. Similarly, people have not stopped buying art or seeing art. Nor have the artists stopped making art. Things are happening as usual. But to make the economic activities stronger and faster, the galleries should find new strategies. The art scene itself has found new strategies and unfortunately the galleries have failed to catch up with these changes. People are looking at art as their desire to have something meaningful and beautiful will never cease to exist. But they are looking at different venues. They are looking at art in the virtual space; they are looking at the art in the social media. Via these new platforms, the buyers and collectors are coming into direct contact with the artists. The works are seen online and if need be, the buyers and collectors do not hesitate to travel to the studios of the artists or when they are showing in artists initiated exhibitions. They look at the auction results and buy from the secondary market. When they feel the need to collect art, they even get a few of the artists in camps. Industrial houses are still buying contemporary art via direct commissioning. Bulk buying is still done. More than before, the artists are at peace with themselves for there is no pressure on them from the greedy gallerists. In the meanwhile, galleries are getting closed.

Is there any future of galleries in India? I say there is but in an absolutely different way. A gallery in India would thrive only when it behaves absolutely like a sophisticated car show room. In a car show room, the owner would never come down to explain why this particular brand is good or important. The client relationship is handled by experts educated in client relations. An engineer is employed to tell what exactly the engine does. A wellness manager is employed to take care of the client needs. The brochures are written by the experts. The front desks are managed by smart young men and women. You get a complete experience when you come out of a car show room whether you buy one or not. Now you just imagine a contemporary art gallery. When was the last time someone greeted with you a smile when you visited an exhibition? I don’t say much, you make your own mental comparisons. I would say only this much, the collapse of Indian galleries are caused by gallery owners who instead of becoming good sellers became the ‘makers of aesthetic choices’. They killed the experts in the field; art historians, critics, art writers, business experts, trained front desk handlers, archivists and so on. India has moved on. Indian art collectors have moved on. But the galleries stand where they have been thinking that their little spaces are the cradles of a civilization. Delusion has never been so strong before.

(artist-film director Babu Eswar Prasad)

Road movie is a genre of films in which the roads play a very important role, either as a metaphor or as an active agent. The people who set out for the journey in their motorbikes or cars never reach their destination or come back home as the same people. People get transformed by the road where the strangers become gods and strangeness becomes natural. Road movies are also called coming of age movies for the touch of roads at times is visceral, sensual as well as intellectual. Chance meetings change the travellers; sexual encounters in cars, open lands or in seedy hotels, accidental meetings with revolutionaries, desperados and so on change the perspective of life itself. Roads change people and they change absolutely, and that’s why most of the people do not dare to travel. The growth of motor industry in the post-Second World War had facilitated the origin of road movies and road novels. The latest in the road novel genres was Orhan Pamuk’s ‘New Life’. And there would not be a single youth in this world who has not heard of Che’s ‘Motorcycle Diary’.

Babu Eswar Prasad, one of the Indian contemporary artists, has always wanted to make a movie and when he finally decided to make one he chose the genre of road movies. His debut film ‘Gaali Beeja’ (Wind Seed), however has turned out to be a quasi-road movie in which the characters meet by chance and leave without making any substantial transformations in their personalities. Thinking of this part of transformation, at times one could also see the ordinariness of lives lived by billions of people all over the world and millions of them on the road for one or the other reason. They go back home as they have come out. Road just does not affect them. Babu’s film oscillates between the wonderful alchemy that happens to personalities on the roads and the Beckettian absurdity of changelessness, where ‘nobody, nobody goes and nothing happens.’ This awfulness is often taken for granted till one is thrown out of his/her own devices and becomes a subject of external forces which lay out of his control.

(A still from Gaali Beeja)

The protagonist in Babu’s ‘Gaali Beeja’ is a road engineer. As a part of his work he drives between Bangalore and Mumbai, two economic hubs of India, helping the state to acquire new (agriculture) lands, rendering farmers helpless and paving way for the development to take out its grand procession. But this road engineer does not seem to be aware of the outcome of his road design strategies; even if he is aware certain kind of coldness has come into his being. The travels between the cities turn this young man into a machine driving another machine, almost unaffected by what he sees along the road. He has risked his comforts and even his romantic life to keep the absurdity and awfulness of his dreary job on. But it cannot be always so. A chance meeting with Jaffar, an erstwhile pirated DVD seller who hitches a ride, after knowing that he travels always between the cities, gives him a set of DVDs of the widely acclaimed road movies that include Alice in the Cities by the German filmmaker Wim Wenders.

The strange similarity between the life of the road engineer, mostly spent on road and motels, and that of Alice and the narrator in Wim Wenders movie, however does not change the protagonist in Babu’s movie fundamentally. He is a passive viewer but the films have touched him somewhere that’s why at some point when he takes the pictures of the roads, suddenly he becomes sensitive towards the termite dunes (which are a sort sand castles, firm, deep and full of activities) and happens to compare it with a high rise housing complex coming up in a nowhere land with the hope that the real estate cost would go up once the highway is laid in the near future to which our road engineer also contributes his bit. Also, he happens to see a picture card of Hieronymous Bosch painting and to this fantasy world of strange being, he cuts and paste a road during his leisure moments in a hotel, to his own amusement. This cruel joke or even a self-critique is quite poignant as we see a couple of other characters who cross the paths with the engineer, but for their own reasons.

(Amrish Bijjal in Gaali Beeja)

A farmer who waits for something to happen or someone to come from somewhere is a strong metaphor or rather a poignant symbol of the human beings all over the world waiting for their savior to manifest. In the apparent narrative of the film, as Babu puts, the road that leads from one city to the other gets ‘distracted’ by the side roads and the side story. The waiting farmer is such a side story but gets more focus than the main story because of the enigmatic presence who almost witnesses things changing around him. From his attire we understand he is a farmer who has lost a ‘life, family and land’ at the altar of development. But he does not join the protestors who try to stop the surveyors. He just goes to the bus stop and waits. This waiting symbol is at once the emblematic waiting of the human beings for their savior, and also of them who have lost the agency of change or resistance due to the ideological interventions of politics, culture and economics in their lives. As they have already forgotten what they are waiting for, the very waiting becomes an absurdity. Nobody comes, Nobody goes and Nothing happens. The road Engineer and the farmer become brothers in arms at least when we realize their plight.

The third character, the man who sticks bills/film posters on the village walls and bus stops, despite his age and agility is an ancient machine/a rusting cycle or a captive of it. Like the engineer he too moves from one end of the village to the other sticking posters. He is connected to the world of cinema because he sticks the posters. But he seems to be absolutely disinterested in films itself. His search is for a black dog which had bitten him a few days before and is more worried about the dog than his own fear for getting rabies. He too comes across the engineer and at a point he even gives a race to the engineer and leaving it in between without feeling depression or elation. He could eke out some laughter from the audience but his pathos that evokes a smile is what links him with the engineer; they too are doing the same absurd thing, going between places and pasting up dreams.

(Rizawan as the farmer in Gaali Beeja)

Gaali Beeja in Kannada means ‘Wind Seed’, a seed that flies around with/in the winds. The seeds that fly off take roots in far off places provided they find the right climes. At the same, the seeds that fly off connote the generations that break away from the roots and families; this is a sort of anchorless state of being. But what about those wind seeds that find no landing place at all? Babu is concerned about such people. This he expresses through a mad young man who wanders at the periphery of the village and along the highway. He is also in the move but reaches nowhere, perhaps comes back to the same place again and again. Babu shows him appearing in the film for the first time in a shot cleverly placed behind a burnt and rusting body of a bus abandoned. The degeneration of the purpose and the body that could have fulfilled the purpose (of journey) is now broken down. The rusting of life and also the life’s ultimate struggle to climb up even along the rusting bodies have been an interesting subject for Babu and he had expressed it in his major video work titled ‘Vortex’ (2008). The road engineer perhaps does not have a rusting body but rush seems to be getting into his mind as he has fallen victim to the routine. Road has not changed him perhaps road will never change him. But somewhere he is touched by the films, in which Babu believes as a director. Babu makes his engineer character to pass the DVDs on to a freedom loving woman traveller who gives him a lift on her Enfield Motorbike.

Though Babu would accept that Gaali Beeja started off as a road movie, it definitely did not end as one. In the course of making the movie, what changed was not only the story but also the very idea of making it as a road movie. But in the final analysis, it has to be a road movie because though the parameters that define a road movie are not met to the dot in this movie, finally the transformation of the film as well as the director itself is caused by the road and the experiences given by it. In that sense it is a complete road movie. What I liked at the outset itself was the irking length of the city views in Bangalore (mostly constructions) that Babu captures in due course of establishing the movie (which a Bollywood or Kannada director would have shown by two or three cuts of the Vidhan Soudh and the IT Hubs with glass facades) which slowly becomes a dreary trap from which the engineer tries to escape and ironically helps in making the same trap elsewhere through laying out of new roads. His journey between Bangalore and Mumbai becomes liberating only in the sense that while on road he is not in the two domain traps namely Bangalore and Mumbai.

(from Babu Eswar Prasad's video Vortex)

Babu Eswar Prasad’s movie is a tribute to many film makers. As an avid film watcher, Babu has almost 5000 film titles in his own archives and he has been adding to it by befriending those young school drop outs who sold pirated DVDs of international movies. Jaffar who hops into the engineer’s car is a living character and interestingly in every big city one would find one or two such Jaffers. With the arrival of speed downloading and special movie sites, the piracy sector is a dying one. Like Gaali Beeja, now what they could do is to spread the DVDs in the fertile minds. Babu’s film has got the problem of a man who knows too many things about films (including road movies) but does not have the technical know how of making one. The learning process seems to be good. And the confusion that he faced at the censor board that kept wondering whether it was a feature film or a documentary or none of the above, stems from the off-traditional narrative style. He does not tie the loose ends of the film; there is no solution by bringing the three characters together at some point (in the Anurag Kashyap format) and leave the viewers satisfied. The actors have to be appreciated for the commendable job that they have done as Mohammed Rizvan and Amrish Bijjal, two fellow artists who have also acted in the art house movies done by other friends in Bangalore. While watching the movie I kept wondering why Babu chose a conventionally handsome man (who could be mistaken for a film star in real life) to play the lead role of the road engineer.

These open spaces

Steps, shades

All what they want

To laugh, hold hands

Embrace and kiss

They need these

Open spaces

They laugh at the rulers

Who are afraid of life and

At those who sing praises

For the cowards in cars

They do not argue

Nor do they nurture

Vengeance and hatred

They fight weapons with

Guitars, flowers and flutes

They need these

Open spaces

You keep making

Fortresses and jails

They would come

There singing

Gallows and trees

They welcome alike

I am those two toes

Severed from myself

One is red with gratitude

The other, blue by a bite.

(The Kiss of Love by Emraan Hashmi- cover)

Survival stories educate and educate the surviving well. Enigma of death and the fear of it make survival stories thrilling than a thriller and chilling than poles. The meanderings of human minds throw the listeners/readers into utter disbelief. The flowering of human possibilities enabled by unexpected tragedies embolden the will to live of those who are about to surrender before impending hurdles. Death and pain change perspectives; this strange alchemy makes human beings divine and though it is not apotheosis, at least in the circles of their own kith and kin, the elevation of the ordinary to the level of divine is not seen improbable. Hang on, life says, because there still a leaf which is yet to fall, there is still a branch, a tree, a forest, an earth and a universe to hold you. Tragedies revolutionize human beings and they change absolutely. If they don’t, they must be people made of things that go into the making of nightmares.

I am fascinated by survival stories; that must be the reason why I drop an intellectual tome down and opt for the story of an ordinary being that tells me how obstacles changed him into something more than a human being. Emraan Hashmi is definitely is not Denzel Washington who has essayed the roles of Malcom X and Hurricane Porter. I wouldn’t have picked up a book penned by the young actor Emraan Hashmi had it been a recollection of his life as an actor; I would not have even chosen a book by him if it was about his image as a serial kisser, as he is popularly known. The book is titled ‘The Kiss of Life’. Hashmi who came to Bollywood in 2004, at the age of 24 in a movie titled ‘Footpath’ soon had become a North Indian sensation of the college going teenagers for his portrayal of characters a bit shadier and erotically charged than the usual fifty plus heroes who have taken vows regarding onscreen kissing and romancing. Many, including John Abraham, Arjun Rampal, Jimmi Sherghil and many other inconsequential guys followed the Hashmi though they had come much earlier in films than Hashmi. He was here to create a new audience. Emran Hashmi gave more misses than hits. Yet he had not learnt many lessons from those ups and downs. Then the tragedy hit him.

(Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, Emraan Hashmi and co-author Bilal Siddiqui during the Delhi release of the book)

The tragedy came in the form of cancer and it attacked his four year old son Ayaan Hashmi in 2014. It was Wilm’s Tumor, a cancerous growth around his kidney. The world came tumbling down around the actor Emraan Hashmi who was riding on the wings of success. The book tells the story of how Hashmi along with his wife, Parveen and other family members including his uncle and ace director-producer Mahesh Bhatt, whom he calls Bhatt Sahaab and the film fraternity fought the cancer of their child and learnt a few lessons along the way, which have changed his life forever. At the age of thirty four, Emraan was just like any other film star basking in the glory of glamour and money, hits and flops and living a life befitting to a popular film star. He had started off as a brat who was reluctant to be an assistant director with Vikram Bhatt until he was casted in a movie as a hero. His second film Murder worked for him and he became a star overnight.

Emraan Hashmi is a changed man today. Though I have not watched more than two movies of Hashmi, I could say for sure that in those two films (Dirty Picture and Once Upon a Time in Mumbai), he could pull the roles off very well. The serial kisser tag and the so called ‘intense’ look were for the younger crowds. Once Ayaan was diagnosed of cancer, Emraan Hashmi’s life changed. Though the tumor was removed in the Hinduja Hospital in Mumbai, they could not save the kidney. Emran decided to take the kid to Toronto for chemotherapy for six month. The book does not have much to offer in terms of literature; but it has a lot to offer in terms of emotional ups and downs of a young father and mother. Hashmi balanced his familial as well as professional commitments flying between Mumbai and Toronto and successfully brought his son back to India after treatment. The child is now six years old and leading a normal life.

(Emraan Hashmi with Shahrukh Khan with book)

The book is poignant for the simple reason that the super star in Hashmi takes the back seat and an ordinary human being takes his place. He does all what a normal parent would do. Had it not been for money which would help him pay the bills for the child’s treatment, he would have left acting altogether to be by the side of his sick child. But he held on. Ayaan went through the treatment and gained the wisdom of a matured person. Along with him, the parents also became wise people. Ayaan wanted to take part in a race on the sports day in his school. He ran and tripped. He ran and fell. But he got up each time and kept on running till he touched the finishing line. It was a moment for revelation for Hashmi. Just hang on in life. The book tells us how a parent would frantically change the pace of his or her life and become an expert in the child’s illness. Hashmi studied all what he could on cancer. He learnt a lot of from doctors in India and abroad. He ends the book with a list of things that we could avoid doing in life just to prevent cancer.

All the diseases kill. But the ‘C’ word frightens us to death. It not only changes the very core of the affected but it causes a complete change of course for the family members. Cancer hits not a person but a family. Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Melon Professor was a software engineer and pedagogue and was detected of cancer when he had just sired three kids. He knew from doctors that he was going to die in three months. Looking at the kids who were less than ten years old then, he thought of leaving the story of his life, which first became a lecture series and then a chartbuster book. When Steve Jobs succumbed to cancer, he too had written about the flimsiness of material possessions; some say it was the imagination of some well-meaning facebooker. Hashmi says that his son gave birth to him; a new Emraan Hashmi. ‘Child is the father of man’, said William Wordsworth. The context was different but when we read Hashmi’s book we understand that the bard was true in all sense.

(Shobha Deepak Singh)

There is something similar between Manisha Gera Baswani and Shobha Deepak Singh. Both of them are artists in their own genre of arts (Manisha, a painter and Shobha, a singer-dancer-theatre artist). They are learned and elegant socialites. Both of them dress elegantly (while Shobha sticks to range of whites, Manish prefers black). And, more than the pursuits of their respective genre of their chosen art forms, they wield still camera. The similarities are aplenty. Manisha hovers around the artists whom she photographs without registering her presence, slowly mingling with the surroundings and keeping her ego under check for the desired effect. Shobha also does the same. As the director of Delhi’s Sriram Bhartiya Kala Kendra, she too moves amongst the dancers, theatre personalities and singers like an apparition with her analog camera (a heavy one, as most of us have noticed, hanging from her frail neck) and clicks their various moods.

Similarities between these two women in Delhi’s cultural scene end there. While Manish has to heave her equipment all over and travel great distances to capture the many moods of her subjects, artists at work, Shobha Deepak Singh has this very special privilege to have her subjects either at her home or at the establishment that she heads. Nowhere in the world you would see another woman photographer whose subjects come to her (not really to be photographed by her) and let her register the golden moments during their performances. Hans Namuth used to hang around with Jackson Pollock and Nemai Ghosh with Satyajit Ray. Had it been their subjects’ importance, despite the great frames that these photographers would do otherwise, they would have gone unnoticed. Shobha Deepak Singh will remain as a photography artist, a very sensitive and privileged one and will walk into the history of photography in India by virtue of the virtuosity of her subjects; the great musicians, dancers and theatre personalities that the North of India has produced in the 20^thcentury.

(Manisha Gera Baswani)

Position of privilege cannot be held as a negative marker in anybody’s career. Access permitted is not justice denied (for many other photographers similarly inspired). Shobha Deepak Singh was born to a family that supported various forms of arts including music and dance. In childhood, she could see great masters coming and performing at her home. She was put to practice music. She learnt music under many masters and it was Mallikarjun Mansur who changed the musical course of her life. According to her it was a musical revelation as well as revolution. She not only practiced music but also learnt classical dance and also got trained in theatre forms under ace theatre director and art connoisseur, Ebrahim Alkazi. In the meanwhile she picked up a passion for photography and perhaps photography became her primary art practice and ground was fertile for nurturing her interest in photography. In Sriram Bhartiya Kala Kendra she could get any one she fancied to click.

The latest exhibition of Shobha Deepak Singh is currently on at the Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi. Titled ‘Musicscapes’, this exhibition is an extended event of her new book with the same title, published by Roli Books, Delhi. As the title shows, the exhibition as well as the book contain Shobha Deepak Singh’s selected clicks on the famous Hindustani musicians. Divided into different phases of a day and night (like Ushus, Madhyaahna, Aparaahna, Poorvaanha, Saayahna and so on), the selection of the black and white photographs explain not only the mood of the performing musicians but also that of the photographer herself. Transported into a different sphere of existence and ecstasy, the musicians at times even do not know whether hundreds of people are sitting before them or not. They even do not feel that someone is clicking their photographs. Being a privileged photographer (as the director of the Sriram Centre) Shobha could move behind the musicians in concert without being shouted at or hooted out (often the fate of the photographers who show too much of enthusiasm). As she herself has said in her writing, she likes to capture the play of the light on the faces of these musicians. And the photographs show that she is successful in doing so.

(Gangubai Hangal by Shobha Deepak Singh)

Strangely enough (or my lack of understanding?), Shobha Deepak Singh says that ‘she is a child of the digital photography’, a statement I see repeated in her other book titled ‘Theatrescapes’, in an article written by Amal Allana. The catch is that Shobha Singh could adapt to the changing parameters of photographic equipment and technology quite naturally despite her training in analog photography. But if that is a claim, then I should say that India’s top photographers (most of them) have undertaken that transition so gracefully that they never felt to make such claims. May be that Shobha Singh’s is a humble statement, which I am misreading, while I remember how Raghu Rai, late Prabuddha Dasgupta, Pablo Bartholomew, Dayanita Singh and so on have gone through this transition and have discussed the pluses and minuses in their own terms. Musicscapes brings out the old school photographs of Shobha Singh though her digital format works have been already published in two other books, Theatrescapes and Dancescapes.

Shobha Deepak Singh is supremely sensitive when she clicks the pictures of the female musicians. That statement need not necessarily be read as something that she is sensitive ‘only’ when she clicks the pictures of the female musicians. She is at her best when she trains her camera at a tremendously charismatic singer like Kishori Amonkar. The many moods of Amonkar make the viewer bend in awe and reverence. One feels the tenderness of Kaushiki Chakraborty as Shobha Singh makes this young singer an icon of boldness. We do not have many photographs presented here of Anushka Shankar but the one, which is partly hazy is a very powerful one. So are the daring postures of Gangubai Hangal, Girija Devi and Veena Sahasrabuddha.

(A montage of Shobha Deepak Singh's works)

There is a range of photographs of the male musicians; from Kumar Gandharva to Ayaan Ali Bangash. From Mallikarjun Mansoor to Bhuvanesh Komkali. From Bismilla Khan to Rahul Sharma. From Bhimsen Joshi to Mukul Shivaputra. We have Ravi Shankar and Zakir Husain. But in my view, they are great portraits but such great portraits could be taken by any other gifted photographer. There is some sensibility difference one could feel when we look at the female portraitures. Also the same sensitivity comes to fore when she focuses on those musicians who have gone beyond gender; the classic example is Mallikarjun Mansur.

The exhibition, unfortunately does not have any hand out or brochure. The irony is that a photographer who does not take the permission from the singers to take their photographer denies the viewers the same opportunity to have some clicks with her works displayed in the gallery. There is something absolutely undemocratic about the exhibition thought it is happening in an open for all gallery like the Visual Arts Gallery. My suggestion is this: if the artist and the organizers feel that the show is really important for them, and they really feel that the works should go beyond the coffee table books, the images taken by Shobha Deepak Singh should become the part of our cultural memory. To generate such memorial traces, the viewer should be treated with respect. He/she should be given a small brochure that he/she could carry home, read about the artist and if need be fall in love with the works. The attitude; here is the show, if you want to see, see it or get out, that attitude will keep the works behind the glass cases, eternally stuffed in museums; as good as dead objects.

(Photography artist Rahul S Ravi)

Twelve years ago, when the Tom Hanks starrer, ‘The Terminal’ hit the screens worldwide we all had come to know about the plight of a man who spent almost eighteen years in the Terminal One of the Charles De Gaulle Airport in France as a refugee. His name is Mehran Karimi Nasseri. He was an anti-Shah activist in Iran and was expelled from the country in 1986. After seeking asylum in many countries, he finally decided to settle down in the United Kingdom. However, on his way at the French airport, he found to have lost all his papers and since then, he has been living there as a ‘stateless’ man. He penned a book titled ‘The Terminal Man’ and it was the source material for the Tom Hanks movie.

(Mehran Karimi Nasseri, the airport man)

Airport terminals are no man’s lands. You lose your country when you are inside an airport terminal. Not only the conceptual status of a nowhere land but also the architectural finish of these structures make the airport terminals extreme cases of ‘no-identity’ lands. Even a domestic terminal in any country poses the same risk for a native passenger. The moment he is in, until he comes out he cannot really say that he belongs to a place. The authorities could do anything with you; they could make you a drug trafficker, a terrorist, a mad man or anything that they want you to become. You are the most helpless person in an airport terminal. What about Mr.Nasseri who spent almost two decades there? The experience might have grown into him and helped him to evolve the life in a terminal a constant performance, which is political, cultural and even spectacular. The naturalization of living as a man without a land would have given him a new identity, the identity of a stateless man. But what about those people who have passports, homes, familiar language and families to live with, and yet forced to live like ‘stateless’ ones?

(Picture by Rahul Ravi)

Rahul Ravi’s photographic series ‘Living in Limbo’ tells how such people lead their lives. Shot almost eight years back, when he was a student at the Photography Design Department of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad this series was shown in certain international art expositions. Looking at the photographs of the asylum seekers and refugees all over the world, a new and massive phenomenon caused by the militant and fundamentalist organizations like the Islamic State, and also at the photographs of the people who live under the perpetual threats of the militaries of the hostile countries as well as of the militaries of their own native countries, I tend to look at the people who live though not in conflict zones but in limbos created by political, religious and cultural prejudices as well as ridiculously complicated systems of governance and citizen management.

(Photograph by Rahul Ravi)

Photographers all over the world have taken interest in people who live in political and social limbos. While they focus on the eyes of their subjects that speak volumes about their present state of living and being, and also at the physical gestures and clothes in order to reveal the plight of their existence, Rahul Ravi’s photographs stand distinct mainly because that the abovementioned structural paraphernalia that define a photograph taken in a refugee situation are absolutely absent in his series. In these pictures, the subjects, a few elderly Muslim men in their bedrooms or drawings rooms (a very natural setting for a head of the family to be in in a photograph) are seen sitting tensed and looking at the camera with a sense of resignation. Rahul Ravi has taken special care to cut all the other human presences out of his pictorial frames so that these subjects get an iconic treatment in his photographs yet they resist becoming icons because of the pall of gloom shrouding their faces.

(Photograph by Rahul Ravi)

Who are these people? The story has the scope of a minor epic narrative but they remain short stories read less and hardly acknowledged, and even let the characters to fend off for themselves. However, they are not just left alone like that. Had it been so they would have been much better and happier. The state always asks after them. The state is always looking at them. They are under the state’s microscope. Living under a CCTV camera would make anyone either paranoid or a resigned one. The latter has happened to them. We have heard the stories of those Indian people languishing in the jails of Pakistan and vice versa. They are all treated as ‘suspects’; however they try to prove their innocence (as fishermen or shepherds) the authorities refuse to believe them. The lucky ones get freed through bilateral negotiations and the ill-fated ones rot in those jails and die, leaving no trace. In Rahul Ravi’s pictures we see those people who escaped jails but carry the jail in their consciousness and conscience or rather they are asked to live so.

(Photograph by Rahul Ravi)

These are the people, Muslim Men over sixty years old, who happened to have a Pakistan Passport in their hands. They are Keralites, natural Malayalis who had dreamt of making it big in foreign lands. In 1960s and early 70s the Middle East was beckoning many of the skilled and unskilled workers from the poorer sections of Kerala. People sold whatever they could and handed over the money to the agents who procured work permits or visas for these migrant laborers. Middle East being a conglomeration of Muslim countries, the first lot that responded to the labor market there was the Muslims in Kerala. Hindus waited and watched, initially with disparagement and then with awe. Money had started flowing into the state turning the Muslim families in Kerala richer by several notches than their Hindu counterparts. Sooner than later the Hindus also started chasing the gulf dreams.

(Photography by Rahul Ravi)

In the process many got duped by the agents. Some reached shores that were unheard of before. Some reached, as a comic relief, in the very same Indian shores. A few got job in places like Karachi, in Pakistan. For those who had gone to Pakistan without suspecting that one day the political differences would make their privates lives a living hell, Karachi was as good as Mumbai. The religious affinity and similarity might have helped them to feel confidence also. They started working there and sending money back home. Things were going on smoothly till they got the offer of becoming Pakistan citizens. Pakistan said that t they could not shuttle between India and Pakistan without a Pakistani passport. Many left the job and came back to Kerala and some of them stayed on only because they wanted to protect the economic gains that they had achieved. They did not find it a difficult proposition so long as they could travel to Kerala and live with their families during the vacations.

(Photograph by Rahul Ravi)

Over a period of time, things worsened at the both ends. Pakistan stopped Indian laborers migrating to its own cities. The ones living there already had got Pakistani passports. Once they came back in Kozhikode, Kerala, they did not want to go back. But unfortunately, they were no longer the Indian citizens. Technically, they were Pakistani citizens. So the present status is that they live in their own country as foreigners. Rahul Ravi captures their pathos; and all their jaws and lips are drawn down and their eyes show no spark of happiness. Their body posture shows that they are uncomfortable in their own bedrooms and drawing rooms. They have to go to the local police station every week to sign the register that they have not made any anti-national move. They cannot just leave their town without letting the authorities know. If anything untoward happens, the Police reach their doorstep to pull out all their Pakistani ‘antecedents’. They just don’t want to talk. They all have clammed up.

(Photograph by Rahul Ravi)

I have seen so many others photographing the lives of the people who are living in self-assessed limbos. For example, the Portuguese people still living in Goa who have been photographed by the late Prabuddha Dasgupta. None of them look like lost or sad. They are confident because they accept the fact that they have been ‘invaded’ by India but they have accepted their fate to be Indian citizens though they have their romantic memories about Portugal, though many of them have not even visited that country. In Rahul Ravi’s photographs we could witness the real limbo. They are not economically deprived nor are they deprived of human care. But they are deprived of the state’s protection and the dignity that they deserve as natural citizens- all because they carry the Pakistani passport.

(Photography by Rahul Ravi)

In the photographs of Mr.Mehran Nasseri, he looks like a writer. If we do not know much about him, the photographs could pass him off as an artist or philosopher. His eyes are sharp and no sense of resignation is seen on his face. He shows confidence verging to a little glimpse of craziness and the surroundings that he has created for himself within the airport terminal look more like a writer’s residence than that of a refuge. In Rahul Ravi’s photographs, however, we see the opposite. These people are in their homes but they are devoid of confidence. The human sap has been squeezed out of them by the state. In fact these photographs should be exhibited in all the airports’ terminals all over the world just to inform the people that you are what your papers are. Nothing more nothing less. If you lose your papers or you have a strange one in your hands, your existence will be in trouble. Having these photographs blown up on the terminals would be a better replacement for the current atrocities that are displayed works of art in the airports, especially in India. (Who can forget the mid finger welcome at the T-3 in Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Delhi?)

(Raja Ravi Varma)

Hundred and twelve years back, an Indian artist thought of making the then contemporary art democratically available to anyone who had liked to have one at his/her home. Raja Ravi Varma was his name. The story of Ravi Varma Press may sound so fresh and contemporary even today when we compare the circumstances within which Ravi Varma had initiated a new ‘popular’ art movement in India. Though several historians of Ravi Varma’s life say that it was his ability to give ‘human’ forms to Indian gods and goddesses in the classical and the neo-classical European style, with draperies added or altered in the Indian ways that had helped the proliferation of his works amongst the general public for these ‘works’ satisfied their demand for ‘gods’ and ‘goddesses’ in their personal altars, one should not overlook that fact that Ravi Varma had been led by a perennial urge to see his works in all the households in Indian subcontinent. True, (Hindu) religion was the binding factor in a culturally varied geographical formation like India in the late 19^th century. But Ravi Varma’s desire for making his works ‘popular’ was much above his need for giving ‘form’ to Indian pantheon. Religion was channel that he adopted insightfully so that he could remain in the good books of the (Hindu) patrons who had been relieved of their Mughal indebtedness in aesthetics and culture and was coming strongly under the democratic influences of British colonialism.

In our times when we lament the collapse of an organized art market and the irresponsible behavior of galleries in offloading their artists, once again Ravi Varma becomes a beacon and we have definitely got something to learn from his idea of making art democratic. This is a fascinating story. There are two Ravi Varmas; one, the Ravi Varma who worked based on the demands of the patrons and provincial governments. The second Ravi Varma was an artist in the modern individualistic sense who preferred his private studio to the atelier given to him by the royal court. Ravi Varma was as much as a civilian artist as he was a royal court painter. He was more like a travelling painter who moved from one kingdom to another not in search work but on invitation. Each time, he established his private studio where he and his brother Raja Raja Varma (who himself was an accomplished landscape and portrait painter) painted and chronicled their lives (mostly by the younger Varma) carefully giving a lot of attention to the business plans, proposals and funds. Had Ravi Varma found his satisfaction in remaining a court painter, he would not have even thought of establishing a printing press in 1894. Had he been painter of Hinduism alone, he would not have chosen a theme like ‘Birth of Shakuntala’ as the first print from his Pune press. Shakuntala was not a goddess. She belonged to the literary traditions of India therefore he was closer to the cultural memory of the populace.

(an Oleograph print from Ravi Varma Press)

The most important thing that Ravi Varma did was going against the normal logic of the market (that is, tightening the flow of commodities in the market and thereby increasing price); by making oleograph prints he decided to flood the market with his works (rather the works done by him and later multiplied by mechanical agencies). His logic interestingly, was much akin to the corporate logic of the present world; find the most populated market places in the world and introduce a new product for the cheapest and competitive prices. The best example is the mobile phone software and hardware markets all over the world. While the big corporates of Europe and America restrict their products in their own limited markets, through global economy flow, flood the most thickly populated markets like Mexico, India, China, Brazil and so on with hardware and software for cheaper prices. The more people consume, though the profit margin is less per consumer the aggregate consumption brings them mega profits. Consumers get competitive prices when the number of companies that provide same service in the same market. Ravi Varma, being the pioneer in making his print works cheaper, did not have to face much competition from other artists or companies. Varma made the works available and affordable. The culturally shared thematic in those works encouraged people to buy them and preserve them, if not worshipping them.

The competitive markets in the present world often use shared cultural values in order to sell their hardware as well as software. A product is not sold for its consume-ability but for its ability to satisfy a cultural need felt by a hollow population. The advertisements created by these product selling companies always play upon cultural festivals, religion, nationality, literature, celebrity icons and universally accepted values to pitch the products into the market. So when we buy a piece of chocolate, we are not buying a sweet confectionary but an idea of love and sharing. When we choose a telephone service provider over another one, we choose the idea promoted by the advertisement. Jewelry and gold are sold on the basis of human emotions. Insurance policies are sold through sentimental domestic values. A motor car could stand for nationalistic values for no reason provided the brain behind the advertisement has enough logic to connect with a four wheeler and an abstract concept called nationalism. Ravi Varma, as a keen seller of his works knew that a product is always sold and bought when a value is shared through that. Perhaps, he was the first businessman in India who did not have to advertise his wares for the products made cheaper and available were their own advertisement too.

(People in rural Maharashtra still cherish old oleographs from Ravi Varma Press- pic courtesy IE)

When art develops value in the market, because the movers and shakers of the economy know where what product should be idolized, it is natural that the common logic makes the sellers to make some products rare and unavailable in order to increase price, therefore we see the price of the contemporary art going high a few years back. When supply could not match demand, a lot of sub-standard look alikes started appearing in the market and those were also able eke out a price. Rawest of fruits could be sold as ripe ones with yellow packaging in a market blinded by profit making. In art too it happened. Instead of lowering the prices of the works of art, citing less availability of the quality works, the prices were hiked up to the skies. Raja Ravi Varma, in his time had done the opposite. In fact, there is no anthropological evidence to show that people were really waiting for Varma’s works to appear in the market. They were happy with crude idols, paintings done by artists from Kalighat, Batala prints of Kolkata, souvenirs of different kinds etc. Varma saw the market and he provided them with what they wanted but did not know it existed. This was a very clever marketing of one’s work through very democratic means. Varma moved vertically and horizontally in the market. The vertical movement helped him rise in stature and wealth amongst the patrons while the horizontal movement helped him to evolve the businessman in him and also gain appreciation from the larger audience, which he definitely had craved for.

Artists of any time need applause and public recognition. Indian art market and art market elsewhere made artists and art works rare and also facilitated their exclusion from the larger societies. Today with social networks, an artist could have a minimum five hundred followers from different parts of the world. But this scattered constituency of admirers never takes the form of real recognition in a tangible society within which the artist operates. Today’s artists are made through exclusion. But Varma became a celebrity by taking an inclusive approach. He, by making his works cheaper and available, worked in a corporate way, involving a lot of agencies and middlemen who too reaped wealth through commissions. In that sense Ravi Varma was not just an artist but a businessman at large. He was also functioning as a large museum operator whose approach was different than a conventional museum operator. While the latter asked the people to come towards the museums, the former took his wares among the people and made them buy, keep and look at them with reverence. If someone expects to meditate in the Rothko Museum, what does a person do when he looks at a Ravi Varma oleograph and goes into a deep prayer or meditation? Varma knew the answer.

(Ravi Varma press preserved)

That answer is still inaccessible or incomprehensible for many of the contemporary artists who still believe that they could sell their works for exorbitant prices either by select selling or by making their works rare. In whichever case, this situation gives birth to various cartels that handle works of art and its market, which would remain exclusive and undemocratic. After the collapse of the contemporary art market, we have several mid-career artists now selling their works from studios for finding funds to run their families, studios and other activities. They short sell their works compared to their prices in the boom market. Instead of balancing and correcting the market follies, this situation has further aggravated imbalanced situation though it is not seen in that light. Provided, if an art market boom happens again exactly the way it had happened a few years back, definitely the works that have been sold from the studios of the artists are going to coming back to the secondary market, collapsing the primary market. That means, we have to accept the fact that there will not be a primary market, which is a supreme market with right economic practices, in the future. Primary market will be replaced by art consultants, artists, curators and other middlemen. The secondary market will take the role of the primary market.

Though it would prove a difficult scenario for many, this future possibility would allow the artists much more autonomous than being the contracted slaves of the primary galleries, which has been the case till now. The same autonomy will come to the critical and historical authority of the critics, historians, consultants, connoisseurs and so on provided they could engage in the ethical practices in the newly evolving art market. The difference of such market from the existing market would be that this will not run on the profit making business model. While the artist and the consultant/curator could sell the work and divide their economic profits (not in the real profit of market logic), the dividend for the investor (if that concept remains in the evolving market) will be based on auction houses and other secondary market activities. In this scenario, artists will not be forced to do more works or less works. Internet could make them visible and the freelancing critics, curators and other operators could assess the works for the direct buyer. In the worst case scenario, the former gallerists could fall from grace and become ‘consultants’ without a gallery spaces to ‘show’ the works to the public and do community reach out programs! I do not know how many of them would come down to that! Intelligent galleries would control the price today and now.

(Sri Chithra Art Gallery Trivandrum, Kerala, where Ravi Varma's paintings are housed)

Raja Ravi Varma again shows the way. Varma was the first one to gain autonomy not only as an artist but also as a business man. He had to go through several trials and tribulations before he could really establish as a printing press owner who produced the prints of his works and pumped them into the market. The agents played smart and natural calamities forced him out of work. However, he could collaborate with visiting British artists to improve the quality of his prints. Varma was moving towards establishing his own gallery; rather a private museum of sorts so that the ordinary public could walk into the gallery and see his works. Despite the criticism that the succeeding generation of the Bengal school artists leveled against him that he was an artist who copied western naturalism, Ravi Varma was the first Indian artist who wanted his gallery/museum. The government of Travancore got into a contract with him in the late 19^th century that he would make two paintings each per year for the government and against which he would be rewarded by a museum in Thiruvananthapuram. The government did not honor its word and an angry Varma wrote a strong letter to the Diwan and severed his contract after six years. Though the Chitralayam (Art Gallery) in the name of Ravi Varma came much later, Varma was the first one to fight with the establishment for his autonomy.

Our contemporary artists could a lot from Ravi Varma. First of all they could develop a dual system of working; in the first one, they could work for their patrons or sell works to the patrons and get their wealth for sustenance and furthering their art activities. In the second system, they could produce works for the consumption of the masses in dirt cheap price. If we go by the Varma example, only a common philosophical or cultural thread would make every Indian citizen an art collector. And the work of art should come in cheap prices. We do not live in Ravi Varma’s times. Technology and outreach have changed, so are the modes of consumption. To find a common thread like Hinduism would be politically incorrect in these days. During the post globalization scenario with high level of economic disparities, it is extremely difficult to integrate people in terms of politics or religion. Even nationalism would not do though a majoritarian political scenario is possible through that. So what could be the common factor?

(A signed serigraph by MF Husain)

The most logical answer would be this: art and artist are the common factors that would integrate a country aesthetically. How is that possible? To make this possible, the artist and art works should become a part and parcel of our finer cultural senses. May be hundred per cent proliferation cannot be achieved in this sense. But a majority could be inclined to art and aesthetics. This is possible only when artists are given due space in the society. Also art works should be given in cheaper prices. Again the question is how. It is possible if the artists become much responsible than statesmen. They should grow to the level of visionaries within the world of visual aesthetics. They should be constantly finding avenues of expressing their individualities as well as integrating the craft and folk traditions within their scheme of their works. Larger concerns of ecology and humanism should activate them to do their works rather than the amassing of wealth. Once the artists become those special creatures of nature, a country as a whole would take heed of them. This needs a larger sense of vision, madness, individuality as well as inclusionary thinking. Artists should become sages of their own merit and right. Once that status is achieved everyone in the country would feel like keeping a work by any one of the artists or a few artists of their choices.

It is possible only when a work of art is sold in cheap prices and could be made available in places where one would buy finer things to embellish their lives. We have innumerable printing devices and technologies today. Artists could make limited or unlimited edition prints and with the artists’ signature agencies could sell them. To sell a print, the maker of the work of art needs a wonderful life to be wondered at by everyone and the aesthetic presented in the work should be exceptional. There cannot be monolithic parameters in setting the aesthetic tone of a country which has one and half billion population. Our galleries have tried selling signed prints by famous artists. But such attempts have always failed or have not taken up the way they should have been, mainly because the artists’ as well as art’s constituency is limited and none prefers to buy a signed print when he/she could afford an original. Art could be saved only by people. When people take up art as mediums of sublimation in/of their own lives, art would become a part of their lives and then they would need more art objects to see constantly. Now its place is taken by screen savers, wall papers, cheap calendars and other innumerable visual materials. We need them to be supplemented with a little bit of art (we cannot replace the wall papers and ever changing screen savers completely).

(Why dont you have a work of art at home?)

Again, I would say, it is possible. If literature of the world masters could be sold for hundred rupees in the traffic junctions and in Columbia (when Marquez was alive), his book releases were also celebrated in the streets by road side vendors of his books, then an artist work also could be lauded by the mass provided if they are made available cheap. Cheap does not mean cheapness. Affordable does not mean that replaceable. They mean works of art that could be bought at will by anyone without thinking twice about the monthly household budget. Wouldn’t it be possible? In my view, it is possible. The poor folk of Indian subcontinent in the late 19^th and early 20^th century parted with a few annas to buy their Ravi Varmas. If so, the people who would spend a couple of thousand rupees for a Sunday meal would definitely think of skipping it for buying an interesting piece of art. And we have printing technology and also we have print making artists who make original works of art in an affordable medium. If there is a will there is way. If Ravi Varma could dream of a country where every house having a print of his work, then definitely we could too….A home, a print, if not an original piece of art.

(The Artful Life of R.Vijay book)

Jiddu Krishnamurti, the world renowned philosopher, was once asked whether he would have remained the same had he not been ‘found out’ from his native Chittoor district in Andhra Pradesh (Madanappalli in the then Madras Presidency) by the Theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, he said that he would have been preaching the same philosophy along the shores of Andhra Pradesh if he was not ‘found out’. Some people are like that; chosen men and women. If they are meant to create an ocean, even if thrown in the middle of a desert they would conjure up a sea there. I cannot say it for sure about R.Vijay, the now well-known collaborator of the Indian-American artist Waswo X Waswo. Had it not been for Waswo, R.Vijay would have definitely remained an artist but an assembly line artist, like many whom Waswo had seen in Udaipur in Rajasthan, working as small cog wheels in a dwindling tourism souvenir industry, but definitely with a different name.

R.Vijay was Rakesh Vijayvargiya, says the author Annapurna Garimella in her convincingly written book on the artist and his creative collaborations with Waswo X Waswo. Titled ‘The Artful Life of R.Vijay’ this book is a first of its kind. Behind every successful artist in the world there should be a very patient, talented and self-effacing assistant whose story often largely remains untold. Waswo is a well-known name in the national and international art scene and he understands that his success as a visual artist is mainly depended on the stylistic finesse which is a combination of the various Rajput miniature traditions and a bit of kitsch-iness of the bazaar art imbibed and employed by R.Vijay under his direction. Waswo is a scientific western mind that looks for perspective while R.Vijay is a traditionalist Indian miniature painter whose sense of perspective depends on the importance of a character/image within the apparent or latent narrative of the painting. The direction and execution must be difficult and not devoid of conflicts. However, Waswo’s success cannot be assessed without the artistic presence of R.Vijay, therefore this book is a rich tribute to an artist who had been lying unrecognized in the inner streets of Udaipur till Waswo happened to his life in 2006. Indian art book market will be flooded with such books if all the artists would prove to be as lenient as Waswo.

(Waswo and R.Vijay)

Unlike many art history books or even monographs written by certain cultural theorists in our country, this book is lucidly written with a patient research gone well into revealing the life and times of R.Vijay. Born in 1970 in Udaypur, Rakesh comes from a family of traders and administrators in the erstwhile royalty and while growing up he did not have any particular lineage to lay his claim as a would be artist except for his uncle Ramgopal Vijayvargiya (1905-2002), an academically trained Rajasthani modern artist. Perhaps Rakesh was in awe of his uncle and wanted to be an artist. He apprenticed himself under a pitchwai painter namely Sukhdev Singh Sisodia and later studied Lakshminarayan Sikaligar. Rakesh excelled himself in painting flora and fauna. He was making money and his family too developed a confidence in him but he was not an artist who had a name nor was he intending to sign his paintings with the authority of a modern contemporary artist whose signature was the value of the painting that he made.

Rakesh reluctance to sign his works even after he started working with Waswo in 2006 (which he does after much persuasion later) in intricately entwined with the history of the artists who make souvenirs for the tourism industry. The art factories that produce works of art do not emphasis on individuality but style, which for them is the faithful repetition of the conventional, leaving no scope or chance for innovations and experimentations. This further has a history behind as the court painters and masters developed their kalams (styles) and those who belonged to those kalams followed the style faithfully that even a little change of it looked utter blasphemy. Artistic proficiency of a young apprentice was determined by his ability to reproduce the ‘style’ without wavering or pepping it up with a personal touch or change in color. Economic factor in a newly developed tourism market which was mostly driven by the interest of the western patron was one of the reasons why artists self-abdicated from personal expressions in the miniature market for the western patrons liked the ‘typical’ Indian style than the modern ‘touch’ of the contemporary artist. Rakesh was not different and he like many others worked for contractors and shop owners who in turn claimed the ‘authorship’ of most of the works that he sold.

(Dr.Annapurna Garimella, author)

Waswo met Rakesh via Rajesh Soni who has been hand painting Waswo’s photographs for a long time. Waswo had already established his working style in India by then. Being a gay artist, the ‘erotic masculinity’ of Udaipur was one of the reasons why Waswo chose to work from there. He published two collections of poem embellished by miniature paintings and a set of independent pictures were also commissioned by him which had in a way ‘established’ the Waswo style. While seeing the works in Waswo’s computer Rakesh realized that it was his works that became the hallmark style of Waswo. The meeting was destiny driven. The shop owner had not revealed the identity of the artist who worked for Waswo. But now he was there in his studio by chance. A proposal for collaboration was suggested and the rest is history. Slowly and steadily Rakesh Vijayvargiya became R.Vijay and today Waswo’s works cannot be called Waswo Works unless it is co-signed by R.Vijay.

The publication is a benevolent act that traces not only the history of miniatures that helps in understanding the style of R.Vijay but also the history of the collaboration between a homosexual Waswo and a heterosexual R.Vijay. Waswo’s Indian experience has always been ridden with conflicts. He is not a deliberate integrationist but his attempt to integrate has always been met with troubles. The ambivalent relationship that the adopted country maintains with a differently sexually oriented artist Waswo in turn has put Waswo also in an unpronounced predicament. Despite his wide acceptance as ‘Chaccha’ in Udaipur and great appreciation as Waswo X Waswo by the Indian art scene, his works are interpreted as the attempts of an Orientalist who still carries the colonial hangover which is expressed by his fedora cap, linen suit and box camera. This self-representation as the benevolent other and his efforts to conjoin his visions with the popular mythological and modern visual references however meet with critical firewalls, that keep Waswo always on the edge.

(Work by Waswo-R.Vijay)

R.Vijay is a meeting point of the ‘other’ Waswo and the ‘our’ Waswo. Their combination is like the city of Istanbul; half western and half eastern. R.Vijay is the Indian side of Waswo and Waswo is the Western side of R.Vijay. At present with a body of works to support their collaboration, they cannot be seen separately nor can we dispute the mutuality between these artists, which reflects even in the common sharing of the sales proceedings. The fact is that Waswo cannot be Waswo without establishing R.Vijay, in the long run. It is not just a director-actor combination either. Waswo knows what he wants to; he is photographer, serigraphy artist and poet. R.Vijay knows what he does. One could see how both Waswo and R.Vijay try their best to integrate themselves in the mainstream art of India via making a series of tribute works referring to the visual specificities of a series of successful Indian artists from A.Ramachandran to Aji VN. Atul Dodiya is one of the contemporary artists in India who has successfully made or still making a series of visual quotations from various artistic and literary sources and integrate himself within various cultural and aesthetical streams. This gives not only legitimacy but a sort of protection from cultural vandalism even.

One would wonder how a good number of works by Wawo and R.Vijay, which were shown in public exhibitions in India left unhurt without attracting the moral police forces in India. Waswo profusely selects Indian mythological themes and executes them via R.Vijay. He appears as Goddess Laxmi, Goddess Durga and so on. But somehow the playfulness with which this artistic duo executes their works has helped them to get away from the ire of the moral police here. However, Waswo’s relationship with India is still not at ease. In his comic book done in 2011 ‘The Evil Orientalist’ and his exhibition ‘It All May be Removed at Will’ (2012) he expresses the fear of getting attacked for being the ‘Other’ and also for being an accidental ‘Orientalist’. The latter terms Waswo uses to lampoon himself but not many critics have taken it in that spirit. But Waswo becomes Indian through R.Vijay, exactly the way R.Vijay becomes international through Waswo. The othering process ceases to be in play when they are together but when Waswo is alone he faces what an unsuspecting westerner faces in most of the Indian cities; callous looting by the locals. He faced it in March 2015 when he was removing his works from a show in the Kochi Muziris Biennale. The local trade unions charged him a fortune for moving his works and even stopped him from taking it away on his own. Waswo responded by breaking his works on record which went viral and became the headlines in the newspapers. The conflict goes on and we as Indian citizens should be ashamed of that. We forget that Waswo is one artist-collector who has an immense collection of Indian modern and contemporary graphic art and has shown in travelling exhibitions all over India. A thankless society as we are, it may take a more time to understand the human side of an artist beyond ideological coloring. The story of R.Vijay perhaps gives us a lens to understand that artistic collaborations, when placed in an even scale, do work on humanistic and environmental concerns than colonial master-slave relationships.

(work by Waswo-R.Vijay)

I would like to go back to the initial question that was put to Jiddu Krishnamurti by some skeptic. What would R.Vijay do now if Waswo moves away or he decide to break away from Waswo, the way Jiddu had done with Annie Besant? We cannot say that R.Vijay would go back to the tourist souvenir factories and become a faceless and signatureless artist once again. We cannot also say that he would do the same as he is doing with Waswo at present. But one is sure that R.Vijay has finally found his identity as an artist through Waswo. Finding one’s own identity is a sort of liberation. R.Vijay has a long way to go and I am sure and wish to have their collaboration flourish in the coming years.

A.Ramachandran

In 1989 Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote one of his grand novels, ‘The Major in his Labyrinth’ based on the life of the ageing conqueror Simon Boliviar who spends his time in a hammock, fighting torturous mosquitos in the hot and humid weather of Bogota. In 2004, the great Columbian novelist who had lived on this earth to ‘tell a tale’ came out with another masterpiece, this time in lesser length and was titled, ‘Memories of My Melancholic Whores’. It tells the story of a 90 year old retired journalist who seeks sex and finally falls in love with the young prostitute who comes to give him pleasure. The world Marquez is populated with ageing patriarchs, generals, autocrats in absolute solitude, sinners, prostitutes and saints; all of them invariably go through the Proust-ian moments of recollections, sometimes exquisitely poetic, at times staggeringly surrealist and at other times unnervingly raw. When I stand in front of the latest suite of twenty one watercolor drawings of the veteran artist, A.Ramachandran, I cannot help but thinking about Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Both these veterans perhaps did not go around the world (as many do to gain new experience and themes); they looked at the same place, exactly the way Orhan Pamuk does in his novels, with renewed and ever-renewing eyes and saw what was beautiful and evolving there. Marquez had his Columbia and Ramachandran has his Udaipur.

(Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

In his autobiography, ‘Living to Tell a Tale’, Marquez recounts how the mundane newspaper reports that he was handling on a daily basis as a political journalist, supplied him with the most bizarre and surreal to make his meanderings through the history of conquests and colonialism that made and broke and then again made the Latin American countries, their politics and the socio-cultural ethos. He could not have been anything but a story teller. Ramachandran, at the age of eighty one, still remains a story teller, the way Marquez was. Years ago, when Ramachandran was a young man looking for the verdant beauty of nature which was not there in Delhi, which he had chosen as a karma bhoomi, place of work in 1964 after his education in the sylvan Santiniketan. He lived in history and his story has been evolving through the rich narrative and symbolic visual traditions of India which were not away from the ‘gruha’ or ‘vastu’, architecture of the human habitat. He considers himself as the Vastupurusha, the god of the abode and the supreme creator. Like his understanding of art as something that is not separated from the living and lived realities of human beings, he makes his symbolic presence felt in every painting and drawing that he has been doing since late 1990s. Perhaps, Marquez was realizing the old Patriarch in him through the creation of several generals and retired journalists.

(From the Earthen Pot series by A.Ramachandran)

If such comparison between two patriarchs from two different geographical locations, using different mediums of expression is possible (I simply would like to overlook the fact that Marquez is dead and gone) obviously it calls for the reference of Magical Realism that Marquez’s works are generally connected to. Ramachandran is a naturalist and less a realist though his naturalism is really magical. Marquez deifies ordinary people through exemplary acts and exceptional narrative styles. The repetitive nature of Marquez’s novels, which is recognizable to the English reading public through the translations of Edith Grossman, his official translator, however does not diminish the effect of magical twists and turns that render each reader a child who despite knowing the fact that the magician would pull out a rabbit or a dove from his hat, willingly suspends disbelief in order to gleefully enjoy the narratives of Marquez. So is the case of Ramachandran. There is a repetitive nature to his works; from his magnum opus of the yester years ‘Yayati’ (1984-86) to the latest suite of watercolors one could see this, exactly the way a musician would elaborate his raga with slightly different inflexions here and there, for many number of years without putting the ‘rasikas’ into boredom. Repetition for both Marquez and Ramachandran is a way to assert their belief in life and life’s forces and its magical revelations. May be in the most mundane, suddenly one could see a divinity coming up.

(From the Earthen Pot series by A.Ramachandran)

Yes, it happens both in Marquez and Ramachandran. Look at the ‘The Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane’ included in the collection ‘Strange Pilgrims’. Marquez sees a beautiful woman who just passes by in an airport lobby. He is enamored by her beauty. His mind is preoccupied with the thoughts about her. To his surprise, she turns out to be his co-passenger in the next seat. She comes and orders the airhostess to wake her up before the landing and sleeps off. She gets up before landing, put a little make up on her face and once the plane lands she walks out as if nothing has happened. In fact nothing had happened. It was only the narrator’s feverish imagination that had made his travel miserable and exciting for him at once. In Ramachandran’s paintings and drawings, we encounter such women. Art historians have time and again said that these women are from the Lohar and Bhil community, a kind of nomadic community living in Udaipur whom Ramachandran has taken into his pictorial scheme as models. But they transform in the encounters in the exhibition halls where they appear as Draupadis, Gandharis and many other mythological women. This magical metamorphosis makes Ramachandran’s works as alluring as his brush-man-ship and Marquez’s pen-man-ship.

(From the Earthen Pot series by A.Ramachandran)

Sometimes when you read the stories of Marquez you shiver in an unknown and inexplicable feeling or fear. It is just like opening a coffin of a friend or a relative after twenty years or so after his death and seeing the body intact and luminous. Should you be afraid of that body? Shouldn’t you be happy that he/she still remains the same as you had left him/her years back? Is there some kind of saintly touch in that person that made his body intact? I feel the same shiver going through my spine when I stand before the latest suite of twenty one watercolors by A.Ramachandran. Titled ‘Earthen Pot: Image Poems-2016’ this body of the works shows how an eighty year old artist still carry the flame of creativity and above all the drive of Eros within him. But ironically, there is some sense of deception that Ramachandran has used in order to hoodwink the ‘inappropriate’ drive of desire in him. We have seen Ramachandran taking different forms of creatures (crickets, bugs, bees, turtles and so on) and witness or partaking in the action of his paintings. At times he even holds a mirror to the heroines of his paintings in the shape of a satyr. The male witnessing here is not voyeurism but active expression of desire or a sort of watchfulness; a patriarch’s perennial urge to keep his flock together. But, ironically, the Ramachandran incarnate is like foetus curled up in an earthen pot, absolutely oblivious of the things that going on around him.

(From the Earthen Pot series by A.Ramachandran)

Ella Dutta, art critic and a longtime friend of Ramachandran has done her best to write a catalogue as beautiful as possible and quite befitting to the works that she is writing about. But Dutta’s awkwardness is visible in each line as she tries to interpret Ramachandran’s foetus position as the eternal dream of the creator whose dream itself is the creation. In way, she is not too far from the perspective that I have developed through comparing Ramachadran with the literary giant, Marquez. In his story titled ‘I Sell My Dreams’ Marquez narrates a woman who dreams calamities, catastrophes and celebrations alike and still survives in the high society. Ramachandran as foetus takes that godly power of dreaming things around him. And what does he dream? In his eternal creative dreams, he conjures up fertility symbols like flowering trees, waiting woman for her beloved and various images of birds, bees, insects and so on as the agents of the changing ‘ritus’, seasons. She refers, invariably the Ragamala paintings and the Barah Maha paintings and poems which Ramachandran also uses as one his various inspirations. Dutta attributes the centralized flowering tree as a phallic symbol, which is not a bad allusion though. She also pitches her arguments on three pivotal imageries as said before, such as waiting women, trees in bloom and the sleeping Ramachandran as foetus. The recurring image of a chameleon climbing the tree is read as the presence of a dangerous predator.

(From the Earthen Pot series by A.Ramachandran)

Keeping all respect for a senior critic like Ella Dutta, I would like to make a different reading to this new suite of Ramachandran’s watercolor drawings. Dutta speaks of a pervading melancholy in these paintings; yes, it could be caused by the absence of the lover. But I would say it is also a wistful waiting all wet. It is not simply melancholy but a love prank, which amounts to irritation. While looking at the drawings on the walls of the Vaderah Art Gallery, I was continuously singing the song, ‘Ambva ki chayya mein, mangal gaaye, barkha ki rutu aaye, jhoola julaye’ (Under the canopy of the mango tree, let us sing some auspicious songs while swinging as here comes the Rainy season) in the voice of the vivacious Shubha Mudgal, singing the same in raag Khamaj and Deepchand taal. I had listened to this song more than a decade ago and it came to me as absolutely evoked by the drawings. The ‘ritu’, seasonal aspect is there; but it is not the season of rains. Outside I could see sunlight weaving fiery threads everywhere entangling the human beings like insects fallen to a spider’s web. Here, the women in the watercolors are also entangled in a desire and which is not realized corporeally but the artist has given enough suggestions that he intends a prolonged session of love making and the offer still lingers in each metaphor and symbol he uses in these pictures. The sleep that he is having inside the pot (a mortal mother’s womb) is deceptive. He sees it all.

(From the Earthen Pot series by A.Ramachandran)

A closer look reveals that the central image of the trees which are in full bloom is nothing but a displaced metaphor or a surrogate female body (unlike the phallic image that Ella Dutta contends). How do you make love to your beloved? You touch her/him with the tips of fingers, you touch her/him with the tip of your tongue, you peck at the lips, cheeks, chin, ear lobes, nape and the back, while your hands move all over his/her curves, the undulating landscape of corporeal passion, bodies in heat. Nothing is closed then; every pore of the body is opened. Everything is filled with the juices that are heard of otherwise. Every imaginations that you knew never existed in you comes out into full view and play. You torture each other eking out the best pain and pleasure in the world. You gag and bound, you turn into an animal, and fly like a bird. You move like a lightning without heeding to the aching joints and ligaments. And now look at the works of Ramachandran. A wood pecker is pecking the bark of the tree. And you know a wood pecker does not peck softly. And in all forms and all shapes it pecks. Look at the insects that crawl all over the petals and stamens exactly the fingers of the lovers move. Look at the buds, don’t they look like the throbbing tips of the male organs? Look at the flowers that are partly open, do I need to tell you how they look like? There is a chameleon in every painting. In the symbolism of Indian traditional art and astrology, chameleon is a creature that has the power to move slow, patiently and covertly, till it gets its prey or pleasure. And the phallic way that Ramachandran has painted them making their hold on to the bark of the tree as good as a slow but steady embrace of the lover.

(From the Earthen Pot series by A.Ramachandran)

Ramachandran sleeps because he has allowed the Eros of his mind to come out and play. The life force is all the more pronounced and here is a rasa leela in twenty one frames. He prefers to call it Earthen Pot- Image Poems. I would call it Earthen Pot: Erotic Poems. Also I would say, Ramachandran has come out with the best erotic drawings of the century, which without even once showing human genitals and other pleasure points have achieved the heightened sense of erotic impact. The women in the drawings remain pristine and longing; perhaps that’s what the patriarchs want. They find love in these women who have desire but do not have worldly ways to express them. Ramachandran gives them the chance to experience the best erotic pleasure ever without losing their modesty or dignity; and even not staking his six decades long artistic career. These most subtle and wonderfully aesthetical drawings give a new dimension to Indian erotic art. As a partriarch, Ramachandran sleeps on as if nothing affects him. Yes, it is his dream and in his dream he could conjure up everything that he wants. The satyr in his earlier works and the creatures are left to do what they are supposed to do. They no longer carry the head of Ramachandran, who is watchful and guarded. Now they have their head but their heart is controlled by the artist who sleeps the sleep of creation. Or perhaps, it is tiredness also. The age factor is realized when he paints the snails moving painfully slow near his pot/pod/shell/womb. He does not want to subject these women to any kind of fantasies. But fantasies are made up of the same materials used for making dreams and desire. They will wait and that eternal wait is like the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ by John Keats. They remain eternally beautiful and desiring and Ramachandran would remain in his eternal deception as a sleeper. Let’s wait for him to wake up again and recount the stories of his melancholic whores.

(JohnyML/Aksharananda)

This interview could have happened in any city in India. Here is an art historian, critic and curator, that is me, JohnyML who would like also to be known as ‘Aksharananda’ meeting a gallerist who could be a man, a woman or someone who belongs to the third gender. But one needs a name, so let’s call him/her, Mandeep. I choose a Punjabi name because if you add ‘Caur’ then it becomes a female name and if you add ‘Singh’ it appears as a male name. Like many other new gallerists, Mandeep too is confused about his/her choice of art. What to showcase, what to promote and what to sell; these questions keep pestering him. So s/he has questions for me. With more than two decades of work behind me, I have the confidence in tackling the questions of a gallerist. Excerpts from the interview:

Mandeep: You just now told me that you would like to be called ‘Aksharananda’. But we all know you as JohnyML. Why you opt for a name change?

JohnyML/Aksharananda: Recently, I was sitting in my study with my Guru and was flipping through a contemporary art journal with around thirty articles, features and snippets in it. Out of curiosity we started looking at the brief biographical details of the writers. Suddenly something struck us. We came to know that out of the thirty writers twenty eight have stated that they are art critics and ‘curators’. Sometimes, people qualify themselves as ‘cultural theorists’. But I wonder who actually gives them these titles? Is it possible to assume such titles without peer group validations? I am sure that these titles are not given by any universities or such authorizing establishments. Such claims make me very curious and amused.

Now coming to the intended change in my name, I would say, ‘JohnyML’ is the identity of Johny M.L as a person. JohnyML, which is written without space or dots is a pictogram of sorts from which people could understand the identity of the person as an art historian or art critic. ‘Aksharananda’ is a name that like because of its connotations. ‘Aksharananda’ literally means ‘Immortal Joy’. But there are various ways of interpreting the word. It could be ‘one who finds joy in immortality’ or one who revels in ‘letters’ (akshar). I am a person who finds joy in letters/writing. Hence, this name is the essence of my being and existence.

Mandeep: Let me address the first part of your answer. Why do you say that writers could not claim themselves as curators or cultural theorists?

JohnyML/Aksharananda: If you direct one film in your life, you are called a film director provided in the rest of your life you do not do anything worth reckoning. If you happened to sing a song for a movie track, you are eternally known as a playback singer even if you never sing another song for a movie and work as a bank officer. It is a boon and curse at the same time. Most of the people who claim themselves as curators have not done any curatorial practice in their lives. Arranging a show is not curatorial practice. Even this is true in the case of art historians and critics. You cannot claim to be an art historian or art critic unless and until your works have historical approach to your subject and a few critical points to forward. Today, review writers and feature writers call themselves art critics. In my view, they all should stick to the ‘art writers’ category. So is the case of ‘cultural theorists’. One could be called a cultural theorist only when his/her theories make substantial course change in the very thinking about a particular subject. We make ourselves fools by making such claims.

Mandeep: Coming to the second part of your answer, don’t you think it self-contradictory when you assume a new name? Isn’t it as good as some claiming like a cultural theorist?

JohnyML/Aksharananda: There is no self-contradiction here. The name ‘Aksharananda’ is not self-congratulatory in nature; it is more like a self-clarifying one. It is not a title and with this name I do not get more respect or fame than I am getting today.

Mandeep: But it sounds like a purely Hindu name and the qualification ‘Swamy’ invisibly precedes it. Do you have any Hindu ‘thing’ here?

JohnyML/Aksharananda: Malcolm X, the famous black power leader had assumed a new name el Hajj Mallik el-Shabbazz as he got converted to Islam. People change their names when they convert. As I said before, name is an identity and the new name is the essence of the self. There is something interesting about assuming a new name. When you get your first name, you cannot bargain for a better one as you are too small to understand the annunciation. But when you assume a new name, you have the freedom to choose the name that reflects your inner self. My existence cannot be separated from my relationship with the letters. So I choose a name ‘Aksharananda’ which reflects my joy in dealing with letters.

Obviously there is a Hindu ring to the name. I am born in a Hindu family and was brought up as a god fearing boy. Later when I could think for myself I started following other religions also. But there is nothing wrong with Hinduism (what has gone wrong is the ways in which it has been interpreted over ages) so choosing a Hindu name (ironically slightly displacing the Christian name that I carry) is quite natural to me. Our sannyasis, when they take ‘diksha’, they forfeit their ‘poorvashrama’ (the former life in the material world as a householder or whatever) and become a new entity by assuming a new name. This too is a sort of conversion. I am not converting myself into anything. I am just assuming a new name that expresses the essence of my being and existence.

Mandeep: So good to know about that. Aksharananda ji, as a new gallerist I am caught in a web of advisors. What I am supposed to do with all these advisors?

JohnyML/Aksharananda: Our art market is going through an interesting phase now. I would call it a ‘secret art market’. As popularly believed market for contemporary art is not dead and gone. It is still there but the gallerists and the artists have got into a different agreement mode. They all undersell their works without letting too many people know about it. It is a buyers’ market now. You can get good contemporary artists for the price that you want. But only the patient ones are buying. They are ready to wait for a number of years. But the real investors are only looking at the modern masters because there is quick money in there.

So the apparently feeling is that there is no market for the contemporary artists. It is true that the demand for the contemporary works have been considerably reduced. Hence, most of the contemporary artists and their supporters are waiting for some new money to come into the market. Perhaps, you are one of them. So everyone will hound you and they all want their pound of flesh from you. It is always better to seek expert opinion than to heed to unsolicited advice. You will never get good advice from a fellow gallerist as all of them keep their cards closer to their chests. This is where art historians and art critics come into play. They understand the intrinsic value of a work of art which would turn into money in the real market. Following their advice is very important. Failure of the Indian art market is also caused by the shoddy treatment it gave to its historians and critics.

Mandeep: I attend seminars and curator’s talks etc. Each time I come back with a shattered mind. First of all I feel that they do a lot of unproductive dialogues which for a business person like me is next to waste. But at the same time, I am challenged by the intellectual depth displayed by the speakers and discussants. I come back thinking that I should get into such kind of art. But my clients come and ask me the same old stuff, Raza, Souza, Gaitonde and so on.

JohnyML/Aksharananda: It is unfortunate that our seminars and critical talks have become the avenues for chewing dried cuds pushed into our mouths by the Western academic scholars. These jargon infested dialogues, to be very frank, have not helped our art market at all. Someone will come up and say that ‘we have been discussing the positional palimpsest of argumentative silences embedded in the diasporic experiences of the postcolonial subjects in the evolving material contingencies of the post-global economy and politics’. We are supposed to make out based on our brain power. If anyone believes that such kind of seminars and curators’ talks would help the general art scene, I would say they are just delusional.

A few years back, the ‘famous’ critic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist came to Delhi and interviewed around hundred artists in a Marathon program. He did it in several countries. In my view such things would help him to get into the Guinness Book of World Records; it will never help art, artists or art market. What we need is writing of history and good criticism because good criticism is the raw material for history and good history is the raw material for an active critical practice. These two only eventually help in validating the works of art when they come to the auction circuit. These seminars and curators’ talk would never help. If anybody has a different opinion, they could come out with it.

Mandeep: As I said before, I want to exhibit young contemporaries despite knowing the fact that there is no active market for them. Some of the clients are interested. But most of them are still asking for masters? How do I run my business if that is the case?

JohnyML/Aksharananda: If you want to exhibit young contemporaries, you should do it. When you trust your own act, your clients will trust in your decision. Most of the galleries in India are like seasonal showrooms. If Gond art is the trend of the year, they will not think once to push a Subodh Gupta into the store room. That is the curse of our gallery scene. You should believe in the art that you showcase and sell. You should have the patience to give at least five years to the artists who you choose to promote. Most of the people ask for masters because they are interested in money or status.

Mandeep: How do you assess the buyers of art?

JohnyML/Aksharananda: To tell you the truth we cannot categorize art buyers or collectors into watertight compartments. Still attempts have been done to categorize them. Accordingly, there are three types of art buyers; buyers, investors and collectors. Buyers buy art because they know it as a temporary possession and in the next opportune moment they will offload it. Their interest is neither in art nor in the artist but they trust in their ability to choose the best and sell it further. You do not call them dealers because they do not scavenge the secondary market for works. They buy from the primary market and move in the premium circuits of art and culture. Next is the investor category. Investors are interested in art exactly the way a developer is interested in a piece of land. There is no serious emotional attachment here. Their advisors tell them what will appreciate and depreciate. They make parallel calculations in various investment points and choose art for investing if that proves to be better point of investment in the given time. Investors know the pulse of the market and if any investor offloads his particular collection, then one could read a lot of market implications from that act.

The third category is the most reliable category; Collectors. They collect art because they are seriously interested in collecting a few things and one of which is art. They really do not think of making money out of them after certain time. Even if they do, they do it via auction houses and never through secondary market or through dealers. Collectors are not driven by the fanciful claims of the markets. Recently I came across an art collector who buys a work of art if there is an image of a woman sitting on any surface. She has already got more than thirty paintings of such a subject, done by different known and sparely known and absolutely unknown artists. A collector is driven by an internal aesthetical logic than the external monetary logic. People who walk into a gallery looking for a trendy artist are not seriously looking for art but the trendiness of that trendy artist. A real art collector would reach the artist first before he/she reaches the gallery and makes the purchase mostly through a devoted gallery. Collectors also make it a point, in case they are collecting from a gallery, at some stage that they meet the artist whose works they have been collecting for a long time.

Mandeep: Other than selling what is the role of a gallery?

JohnyML/Aksharananda: There is a difference between a gallery and a museum. Galleries are the places to showcase the work and sell. The public is always welcome but the pitch is on sales. A museum is a place where people get a three sixty degree idea about art, through audio-visual programs, guided tours and literature. If galleries could fulfill at least a part of it, it is a welcoming change. But galleries need not necessarily take the burden of social outreach and so on. The world does not need such charities. What a gallery should do is to cultivate its clients and receive the layman with a smiling face.

Mandeep: What do you think about Khoj, Experimenter Kolkata, Sunaparanta Goa and all?

JohnyML/Aksharananda: The war of Mahabharata had started with so many rules. For example after sunset there shouldn’t be any attack. If someone had lost his weapon, he should not be killed. If someone’s chariot was broken, he should not be attacked. Also it was imperative to spare the one who runs away fearing for his life. But slowly, as days went on, the rules started getting violated. Then it was free for all. Certain sections of our art scene is like Mahabharata; a lot of rules but they get violated as we go on.

In my view, the above mentioned institutions have a very clear role to play in the current art scene. But converting rest of the galleries into their line of thinking and paving way for creating a homogenized art practice is a wrong thing to do or promote. Organizations such as Khoj plan out their programs depending on the kind of funds that they are getting. If they are getting fund for promoting ‘art and science’ they cannot syphon it to ‘art and gaming’ or vice versa. If they are getting funds for public art, they cannot use it for setting up an art lab. Due to this tremendous amount of aesthetical ad hocism has crept into their programing. Khoj has moved from a community art lab to a corporate art management set up.

The other establishments, as they organize various seminars and talks, promote a different kind of aesthetics which is neither skill-based nor absolutely knowledge based. Many of such works come out of the misunderstanding of both (skill and knowledge). This urgency to be at par with the European left over is astonishingly strange. But I would like to see it as a part of the whole cultural scene where various streams of art making and discourse take place. They too are needed though they take place in controlled environments and in the milieu of mutual agreement.

Mandeep: Can one show young contemporaries despite zero market response and at the same time do secondary market dealings of modern masters in order to make money and run the show? Is there any kind of ethical conflict there?

JohnyML/Aksharananda: There is no need to feel ethical conflict there because this is what even the most established galleries practice. They show highly experimental contemporary art and get their money from working in the secondary market. It is better to make money from the same market than doing coal mining business and putting part of the profit to promote art and culture. This is why I always say that there should not be differences amongst the galleries; they all do the same, selling. Gallerists’ job is to sell well. Aesthetics, curatorial practice, criticism and art history should be left in to the hands of the qualified experts from the respective fields.

(Shantanu Lodh)

I just could not read what must be going on in his mind by the looks in his eyes. They stare at me like two shiny black silver beads. Those are the eyes of Shantanu Lodh who has been bedridden paralyzed since October 2015 after a road accident.

Last week, Indian Express newspaper told us that Shantanu was on the road to recovery. The photograph accompanying the news bit was an old one but it suddenly gave us a new hope. He would struggle back to normalcy; we would see the good old Shantanu Lodh who paused each sentence with a typical Bengali ‘eh’.

Rare are such friends like Roy Thomas, a contemporary artist, former colleague of Shantanu in the Mira Model School where this trio ‘Atul Bhalla-Roy Thomas-Shantanu Lodh’ taught in late 1990s, who would stick to a friend in any dire situation. Roy Thomas has been visiting Shantanu in the GB Pant Hospital in Delhi and also in Alwar, Rajasthan where Shantanu is currently being rehabilitated at the Sapna Foundation.

Who is Shantanu Lodh, many youngsters and senior generation artists may ask. Ten years is not that a long period, yet many must have already forgotten him because after a scandalous and curiosity evoking performance at Khoj in Delhi in 2005 Shantanu almost went in missing partly due to familial issues and partly by choice. In January 2012, Shantanu participated in an exhibition, after much coaxing and cajoling, curated by me at the Delhi’s Gallery Ragini and was titled ‘A4 Arple’. A suitable reminder of Shantanu’s daredevilry in art I exhibited his works next to the ceiling.

Shantanu did not come to the exhibition opening.

(Shantanu Lodh at the Sapna Foundation, Alwar)

Almost two decades back, much before the officially sanctioned, authorized and publicly celebrated ‘aesthetics of vandalism’ or street art pieces started appearing on the walls of Delhi, in the Kalkaji-Okhla-Alaknanda belt people spotted the presence of certain illegible symbolic presentations and started wondering who could have been the person behind. Those who knew art history understood they looked something like the works of AR Penck, the German artist. Banksy was unheard of then. Qualifications and nicknames like ‘space occupier’ were not even mentioned anywhere. But someone was stealthily occupying the walls of Delhi.

A senior artist, who was living in that area one day, asked me over for a drink and there she introduced the artist behind the mysterious paintings on the Delhi walls. A fat, large eyed and somewhat potbellied young person with thinning hair and fleshy lips was there at the drawing room who reminded me of the young Diego Riviera, the legendary Mexican muralist. He was Shantanu Lodh. We became friends. The senior artist was patronizing him.

After a couple of weeks, when I met her again in the absence of the young artist, she told me, “He could be the next Krishnakumar.” I smiled.

For the beginners I should say who Krishnakumar was. K.P.Krishnakumar was one of the students in the first batches came out of the Trivandrum Fine Arts College in mid 1970s. A young, sturdy and stout Krishnakumar had the charisma to be a natural leader and in his times he led a pack of artists. Then he went to Santiniketan, an unlikely place for him, studied there, worked there, got into a few scandals and came to Baroda in mid 1980s to officially found the then nascent ‘Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association’, which is known in its short form, the Radical Group.

Historians and the members of the erstwhile Radical group are still at each others’ necks when it comes to pinpointing the circumstances that led to the formation of the Group and also to the anointing of K.P.Krishnakumar as the leader of the Radical Group. This group, in their manifesto declared that the artists of the group stood against the ‘retrogressive aesthetics’ prevalent in the Indian art of that time. The retrogressive aesthetics that the group members referring to was that of M.F.Husain, Raza, Souza and of their ilk.

The poetic justice was finally done when Krishnakumar, KM Madhusoodhanan and NN Rimzon (though not strictly a Radical Group member but a sympathizer) who could fit together in ‘Pond Near the Field’, a five persons show in the Kiran Nadar Museum that collects a vast number of ‘retrogressive’ artists and their ‘retrogressive aesthetics’ which the Radicals stood against. Time is the great leveler, if not money would, don’t worry.

K.P.Krishnakumar committed suicide in 1989 in Kerala. That incident brought the curtains down for the Radical Group and the members took another decade to recover from the shock. Many went into hiding, some switched fields and some went into sheer cynicism and yet another lot still live like Radicals, fitting neither here nor there; living anachronisms.

The senior artist was finding another Krishnakumar in Shantanu Lodh.

What did she mean by that?

Was she saying that Shantanu could lead another ‘Radical’ movement in Indian art scene? Or Shantanu was as strong an artist as Krishnakumar? Or Shantanu will suicide at some point? Or simply he was a good boyfriend material?

(Indian Express report)

Shantanu’s Krishnakumar phase was short lived. The way a Bengali understood Marxism and the way a North Indian middle class woman interpreted it from books were two different things. I believe that was the reason why Shantanu walked out of his first patron in Delhi. Many years later I heard that one of the reasons why Manmeet, his estranged wife and artist, walked out on him was his obsession with what he understood. A liberal Communist, Shantanu took the liberty to wake his wife up at odd hours to discuss art and revolution.

When people assume themselves as Sartre and Beauvoir, they forget that the 20^th century intellectual giants too had their eating, shitting and sleeping times out of the Parisian cafes.

Whoever ejected or rejected you, you had somebody there at Mandi House in 1990s. Mandi House was the physical whatsapp group of the yesteryears, as far as the migrant artists in Delhi were concerned. You could go there, sit in the library or in the canteen and wait for your friends to come and they did. During the summer months, you could sneak into the Sahitya Academy library halls to catch a nap in the temperature controlled interiors.

I had come to Delhi in mid-90s with no acquaintances or friends. Someone had told me to go to Mandi House. I made my life in Delhi because I went to Mandi House. I met everyone there. Shantanu too went to Mandi House. And his life and art was shaped in that place.

Shantanu perhaps never wanted to become a school teacher. But to live and survive in Delhi one had to do something. Shantanu had to live here. And the best was to join a school where his friends taught. Atul Bhalla and Roy Thomas taught in the Mira Model School in Janak Puri. Shantanu got the job there as an art teacher.

These three young and emerging artists were moving in three different directions. A heavy bearded Atul Bhalla was struggling to find a language of his own through his paintings and watercolors. Roy Thomas was more like a traditionalist who painted with the severity and sincerity of a painter. He had already finished his experimental stage by making huge paintings on tarpolin. Now he was painting canvases and was sort of managing between school and studio. Shantanu was the unmarried one amongst the three and was considered to be ‘more radical than others’ and could easily move into the intellectual circles, ripples within the ripples created in Mandi House and then spread out to Max Mueller Bhavan, British Council and Santiniketan, a rich neighborhood in Delhi where some godfathers and godmothers of Indian art scene lived.

Working in the same school, drawing more or less the same salary and doing their art created a healthy competition between these three artists and I believe that it was Shantanu’s presence that created the present day Atul Bhalla and Roy Thomas. I do not intend to say that Shantanu taught them something or showed them the way. But Shantanu did show them the possibility of doing and hoping; and at times simply showing the mid-finger. Atul Bhalla grew into a conceptual artist and Roy Thomas, a fine painter.

(Poster of performance or Performance poster of Shantanu and Manmeet)

There is an artist who lives in Old Delhi and comes to Mandi House every evening. Even today he does it. I do not know for how many decades he has been doing it. His name is Susheel Kumar. Though many of the contemporary performance artists do not remember his name as he was not pushing himself so hard to be in the mainstream and was rather very critical of it, he has to be acknowledged for his contributions to Indian Performance art scene. Susheel was the one who inspired the conceptual and performance artists in Shantanu Lodh and Inder Salim Tiku.

Susheel grew cynical to the fledgling contemporary art scene and moved around as a living critical vehicle than a doer of art before withdrawing to his own shell of silence. His pivotal performance was carrying a Buddha head in his hands and walking from the National School of Drama campus to the Lalit Kala Akademi premises in Mandi House. It did not create such cry and hue because India was still tolerant even after Babri Masjid.

Shantanu took up the threads where Susheel had left it. He collaborated with large hoarding projects in and around Mandi House and mostly the hoarding featured the pictures of both Shantanu and Inder Salim. ‘Hum Tum Ek Kamre mein Band Ho’ said one of the hoardings. It was a criticism on the galleries in India (retrogressive art!). Art was held captive in galleries; that was what they wanted to say. Inder Salim shot up to fame when he cut the tip of his finger off in a ‘secret ritual’ performed in an undeclared location which was privy only to people like Susheel. The selective leak of the chopping off of his finger spread far and wide giving a new halo to Inder Salim as a ‘legitimized’ practitioner of performance art in India. Inder and Shantanu performance together against the gallery practices when they dressed themselves up as two waiters who served wine and cheese during the gala openings of art shows.

Manmeet was happening in Shantanu’s life.

(Shantanu and Maneet performing in Delhi)

Manmeet Devgun passed out from Jamia Millia Islamia in late 1990s. And she did not want to paint. What she carried around was a camera and photographing artists was her initial hobby. She too hung out in Mandi House.

A tough Punjabi girl falling in love with a soft Bengali boy should have come with an expiry date as it has been the case with a few other couples that I know personally.

Manmeet was a tough girl to chop off both Devgun and Lodh from her name. Shantanu helped her in liberating herself as an artist. The new millennium found them working together in a few projects that scandalized the ‘still conservative’ art community in India. The first one was the ‘Kissing in Public’ poster project done sometime in 2003. The idea was mooted and executed during a show curated by me in 2003 at the Arpana Art Gallery, Delhi. The show was titled ‘Dreams: Projects Unrealized’. Though the present crop of conceptual artists do not have a clue about the curatorial practices that prepared the ground for them was coming from me, the stalwarts of Indian art came to visit the show and went back dazed.

It was in this show Shantanu and Manmeet released their kissing poster which was later to be pasted all over Delhi. They did it and it was immediately removed or scraped by an uncaring public.

In 2004, I had grown disillusioned about Indian contemporary art and was thinking of quitting.

Money had become the deciding factor of Indian contemporary art in that year. It continued to be the same for another seven years. I had to survive so I went to work in a Newspaper in Delhi. One day in 2005, I got a call from Shantanu inviting me to Khoj. I was working as a political journalist.

Reluctant I went there. I saw among people, dust, smoke and the air thick with the smell of sweat and the beats of music, Shantanu and Manmeet in stark nakedness letting their bodies to be ‘vandalized’ by the viewers. You could write or painting on their bodies.

There was not an inch of space left in the bodies of Shantanu and Manmeet. I felt like crying and I was humbled. I stood there smiling at them. They came to me, looked into my eyes and we stood there saying nothing. I was just reminded of the famous performance of Marina Abromovic; she placed seventy two different torturing tools which had been used by the perpetrators of punishment all over the world. She stood naked before the crowd and asked them to torture her the way they wanted using those tools. Initially they were reluctant. But someone started; a pinching here or there. Within a few minutes Marina stood there like a ravaged land, her body bleeding all over. People rejoiced in torturing her. The context was art. And they were just participating in the ‘process’ of making a memorable piece of performance art. Though painful, Abromovic proved her point. Given a chance, any human being could be worse than the horrendous and hideous torturer in the world.

In the crowd in Khoj in 2005, I saw what Abromovic saw in Serbia in 1974. Shantanu and Maneet called their performance with this title: ‘Hamam mein Sab Nange hai, par Hamam Hai Kahan?’ (In the public bath everyone is naked but where are those public baths?) They were referring to a socio-cultural situation that decimated the beauty of openness and transparency in social life. More or less in the same time Chintan Upadhyay had also did one performance piece ‘Baar Baar Har bar Kitni Bar?” (Again and Again, Each Time and How many Time?) In this performance done in Baroda, Chintan sat nude and asked people to smear turmeric powder all over him.

***

(Shantanu Lodh performing in Delhi with a German artist)

Shantanu and Manmeet started living together. His father moved in with them after Shantanu’s mother’s death. Shantanu was attached his mother and he used to think that he looked exactly like her.

In the Mira Model School, he called us a few people (around seven of us) and did a performance for his mother. Shantanu did not want to make that performance a spectacle. It was a Sunday afternoon. He had made his preparations.

In a tank we saw a few dark fish with sharp thorns coming out their heads. Shantanu stood before the tank. Took out a pair of scissors and cut off a few curly locks from his hair. He placed it on the tank and put a few strands into the water. Then reverently he pushed his hands inside the water in an attempt to catch the fish. First, they slipped away. Then they began to attack. Shantanu began to bleed. He took out the bleeding hands and dropped the blood on the hair and stood in silence for a few moments.

It was a performance that he did for his mother. We did not ask for the meaning. But Shantanu told us that Bengalis ate the fish that they loved.

The erotic connotation was palpable. The Oedipus angle was too profane to discuss at that moment, which however I did when he did the next performance at his home where he lived with Manmeet and his father.

(Chanchal Banga, an Indian artist based in Jersalem, Israel also had performed a ritualistic act by tonsuring himself with a coarse razor in full public view)

(Shantanu in one of his performance pieces)

Shantanu called ‘I Slapped my traditional Father’.

It is a series of photographs in which we see him in a very special tea ceremony. Here Shantanu is the son/servant with no clothes on serving his full clad father/master. The real life son standing before the real life father nude becomes blasphemous only when the father is in the advanced stage and the son is still young. Here is a Yayati moment and a lot of Oedipal complications. I have written extensively about it and you may read it in http://artindia.net/johny/art6.html

Then Shantanu was not seen for a long time. We were looking for him. We heard that he was separated from his wife and child. As usual, wife takes all what the man has created, including children, and makes him flee. None of us was surprised as making and breaking were quite normal in the art scene.

Then I heard that Shantanu had gone in to some spiritual path. It was a very ironic course but very predictable one. A staunch materialist is the one who is prone to become a spiritualist in a given moment. The stronger materialism, the stronger is his fear to resist the spiritual calling. When the wall collapses, he just tumbles over. It happened to Shantanu. Peace is a birthright, hence I did not look at his spiritual course skeptically. As Sree Narayana Guru had once said to a Yoga practitioner, I too thought it was good for ‘fine bowel movements’. Yes, it was good for his bowel movements. Shantanu shed a few kilos and looked happy and trim. But with body mass he lost the zest for art making too. May be he was making a different art.

(Another performance by Shantanu Lodh)

Shantanu is paralyzed now and if we could believe a best friend like Roy Thomas, Shantanu is on his way back to his old self.

I believe, his very act of resisting death itself is a way of showing mid finger to the Indian contemporary art scene.

Once, I was instrumental in organizing a small camp for the ‘nange bhooke’ (naked and starving) artists of my generation in a big bureaucrat’s house in Delhi. Kaushal Sonkaria, Abhimanue VG, Mithu Sen, Shantanu Lodh, Shijo Jacob and a few others were in the camp. They were given canvases to paint.

Shantanu did his classical act. He, a la Kasimir Malevich, painted a hand showing the mid finger sign (we have it in whatsapp now) on a white surface using white paint. He went on working it for three days (we were given food packets as remuneration). From a distance it looked like a white canvas. Once you moved closer you could see the mid finger glaring back at you.

The bureaucrat came, looked at it and understood. Herself being a painter could not kick him out but kept her words for a later occasion. To my surprise, on the fourth day evening, when the dignitaries were supposed to come and see the paintings, Shantanu picked up his canvas, pressed it diagonally, creating waves across the canvas and making the wooden stretcher jut out of four corners like a badly broken human limb, kept it on the easel and walked off. The bureaucrat came and in fully fury she asked me to re-stretch it. I refused and slowly by the time the bureaucrats came Shantanu’s painting was removed from the lawn.

The irony was, after a few months, I saw the same work neatly stretched and exhibited in one of the exhibitions conducted by the ‘bureaucrat’. I think the organizer’s eye had missed the mid finger code hidden in it. I was happy to see it.

I would like to see Shantanu back. But at the same time I know that Shantanu will never be the same one.

(exhibition at Mandi House Metro)

At the busy Central Secretariat Metro station in Delhi, I see a girl child of seven years just accidently dropping her snack that her mother with a sleeping infant cradled across the hands, has bought for her from the refreshment counter over there.

The world seems to have frozen for that child. Astonished, shaken and deeply sad, the child stands in front of that snack, which she wants to pick up but she stops as if ordained by some invisible rules. The mother too freezes. Unlike the rich parents who would pick it up and throw it into the dust bin, this young woman just cannot do it. She wants the child to take it from the floor, wipe it off of dust particles and eat it.

Somehow, I just cannot stand looking at that scene. I walk off.

There are three moments. The moment when the mother’s love and the child’s demand for a snack meet at a common point and happiness swells in their minds. There is a second moment when the child receives it as if world’s best food has been given to her. The third moment is the moment of its accidental dropping.

Children are very special creatures from heaven. They come with a pair of wings. And as they grow up their feathers are clipped one by one, rendering them into people like us; the ordinary mortals.

(one of the exhibits at Mandi House)

I take a different line to reach Mandi House, which is a couple of stations away. Inside the coach, with embodied impatience stands hanging from the railings I stand like a silent scream wondering whether the child would have picked up her snack from the floor or not.

The huge distance that suddenly emerged between the child and the snack on the floor weighs me down. If she picks it up, then it must be seen as a willing suspension of both the mother’s and the daughter’s fear of contracting some illnesses due to bad hygiene. If she doesn’t it will be asu huge as the collapse of a gigantic structure of hope, all tumbling over her.

If she would pick it up and eat it, she would forget the incident sooner than later. If she wouldn’t, she would never forget that moment etched in her memory with the acid of desire and despair. In future, for her, the Central Secretariat Metro station would be nothing but the place where she had dropped her snack. Each time she would see that snack prettily sitting in the glass cases in any part of the world, in any given time or season, she would see only that moment of it dropping from her hand and she standing there with her head hanging for the utter loss.

I come out from the coach. Take the escalator to come to the concourse and look at the walls where a few frames are exhibited. I am familiar with the exhibition walls in the Metro stations in Delhi where thematic pictures are exhibited periodically. A project of the Delhi Metro in collaboration with the India Habitat Centre, and several other agencies depending on the subject of the exhibition, these public shows are meant to make people aesthetically aware of the ‘topics and issues’ that are pivotal to the society and are a ‘must know’ for an urban citizen.

(Exhibition @ Mandhi House Metro)

A couple of weeks back, on the same walls I had seen interesting book cover designs. Displayed in collaboration with the Oxford University Press, this exhibition had evoked a sense of pride in me for the simple reason that many of the book covers that I saw there were either read or referred by me previously. A sense of familiarity with any kind of exhibits imparts a feeling of elation to the viewer, which is one of the boons of seeing an art exhibition.

I do not know how many of us stand and stare at these walls and the exhibits on them. Time and again the spiritual gurus of India and the philosophers in general have been telling us to be inward looking people to lead a clear life. Of late we seem to have got the message clearly. We have become ‘inward’ looking people and our inward is nothing but our glowing smartphone screens. Hence, nobody sees what is going on in the world out there. Reality is now a reversed phenomenon experienced in terms of moving and static visuals and data in the phone screens. The world immediately outside of it is more or less non-existent or is deemed as a mere habitat. ‘I look at my phone, therefore I am ‘ is the new motto. If you do not, then you don’t exist.

One of the neon lit boards on display tells me poor sanitation and lack of potable water is the major causes of child death all over the world. Three thousand kids die a day globally because of consumption of unhygienic water and food.

(The girl who has just bent to pick up her snack is stopped in midway. Don’t, my child. I am coming. I could buy one for you, fresh).

(Exhibition @ Mandi House Metro)

A new exhibition has been propped up in the walls of the Mandi House Metro station. I walk up to them and watch. These are the photographs taken by the children-photographers who live in the slums or shanty towns in North and South East Delhi. These re-settlements are called JJ Clusters, which mean Juggi Jhopdi; the abode of the real Aam Aadmi. Literally speaking, the victory of the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi is assured by the innumerable votes from these shanty towns.

Non-Government Organizations or NGOs are very active in these zones. More than eradication, they aim at the maintenance of the JJ Clusters with better sanitation, awareness, health and education though they seem to be unachievable dreams. Save the Child is one such organization that has taken the responsibility of handing the cameras over to the children in these shanty towns. Hence, what we see here are the pictures taken by children about themselves.

What makes the photographs visually appealing is the absolute erasure of gaze. A lens man’s or lens woman’s gaze is so powerful that the subject turns into an object, almost helpless in all its authority and autonomy. There are no ‘innocent’ smiles or ‘curious’ eyes or ‘painful’ enthusiasm in these pictures. It is more like a Truffaut film dismantled into different frames.

These kids live in the JJ Clusters. When they are asked to train the cameras at their own life, their approach is completely different than those of the outsider photographers. They just look at the places that they haunt with a sense of celebration and right. They do not have playgrounds. They convert any available plot which doubles up as dump yards into their playgrounds. They do not have swimming pools so they cool off in the nullahs or drains that are filled with chemical effulgence from the factories and general dirt. They do gymnastics over the toxic pipelines.

In short they ‘play’ with their lives. They perhaps know it, or they do not know it. But whether they know it or not, they do not have any other way. They do not have any other place to go.

Twenty four per cent of the girl children from these shanties drop out from the schools. Where do they go? They do not go anywhere. They come to our homes, as maid servants. They come to us as vegetable sellers. They come to us as road sweepers. And a majority of them do not even get mentioned in our lives. They come and go, leaving no traces, but really wounded and scarred. But look at the photographs taken by their own friends. The co-existence of the animal and people, their love for each other is so touching in these frames.

(Exhibition at Mandi House Metro)

Children are citizen journalists not because they watch a lot of debate television. They are citizen journalists because they know camera is something that registers and take the images beyond the limits of their colonies. And also they know that if the images could travel beyond their colonies, they would communicate their views to others. It is an innate knowledge for survivals. Hence, in their pictures we see eateries at the shore of exposed drains and the heaps of filths. Children know that they are exposing the shortcomings of their surroundings but they do it with a purpose; they need response.

I keep looking at these pictures. Suddenly I feel like standing aside and watching other people, who are in thousands coming out and going into the trains, coming forward to look at these displayed works. For almost ten minutes I stand there to record the ‘viewers’. Apart from cursory glances there are no real viewers. Young people just sit down, right under these frames without knowing what is going on in these pictures.

May be, subconsciously the urban citizen, in his/her impatient and rushing life, imbibe the effects of these pictures, slowly but steadily, I hope.

I wish the children photographers were named.

I also wish the girl child would get her snack.

(artist Shashikant Dhotre giving a television interview)

This is the story of a mason who is not a freemason. Considering the boyhood experiences of this mason, he could have become a sculptor. But he was not that kind of a mason who had the inclinations of either an architect or of a sculptor. Between the stone that he cut and the sand he sieved he saw the lines running vertical and horizontal and whenever he got time he kept on drawing on the sand loaded on the trucks.

Sitting on the trucks that ran to the construction sites, this boy in his teens dreamt of a day that he would become an artist. Though he wanted to be an artist, he did not know the great names of the Indian art scene, let alone the names of the international artists. What he had seen in those days were the calendars and film posters. He liked the facial features of Amitabh Bacchan and Aishwarya Rai and even Rajni Kant. When he drew these images on paper, people gathered around him and exhorted him to draw more. Some even bought off his portraits done in ‘Natraj’ pencil on simple white paper.

On 1^st April 2016, the noted film actor and activist, Aamir Khan presented our ‘mason’ with the ‘Lokmat Maharashtrian of the Year 2016’ award in the presence of the Chief of Minister of Maharashtra, Devendra Phadnavis. This was one of the many awards that our mason turned artist has been receiving since 2009. The day he decided to leave his mason-work behind and become an artist, things changed for him.

You may all know his name and work. His name is Shashikant Dhotre and he is a super realist artist. Shashikant Dhotre had a little tryst with academic education in art but life had something else in store for him. The story of Shashikant’s life must be a fascinating one for many.

(Work by Shashikant Dhotre- Medium Color pencils on paper)

From Vashi in Navi Mumbai (New Bombay), Shashikant drives us to his studio located at the outskirts of the sprawling suburb with a highway running towards Pune. From the air-cooled interiors of his black BMW car the passing sceneries look like a muted travel program in television. Summer sun blazes and silver flames play at the tip of the palm trees carefully cultivated along the spacious road to give it a Dubai look.

Shashikant Dhotre is soft spoken. Three years back, when he had posted a picture of his new BMW car, many took it as a joke. And despite the skepticism about his new acquisition abound, the ‘likes’ were pouring in. Shashikant credits this overwhelming response to his ‘fans’ who are in thousands right from rural Maharashtra to strange shores of distant continents. Fan following, fame and fortune have not changed the man inside Shashikant, the successful artist, a bit. The jammed left backside door of his BMW stands evidence to this unchanged nature of Shashikant.

“A few friends in Solapur, where I was born and brought up, were having some fun time with my car when I took it to the village first,” Shashikant remembers. “I did not stop them. They were all happy for my success and fame. But they did not know that the BMW have a super sensitive magnetic lock system in its doors. They banged it close and it got permanently jammed. I got so busy that I could not send it to the showroom for a change,” smiles Shashikant at the wheels. His driver is on leave today.

(work by Shashikant Dhotre- Color Pencil on Paper)

Born to a mason’s home, Shashikant is the second eldest of the four sons and two daughters of his parents. Financial conditions were not so rosy at home and Shashikant was not so enthusiastic about pursuing an academic career. But he found himself drawing on whatever surface he could. Natraj pencil was his only tool then. By the time he reached high school he decided to drop out and join his father as a helper in construction sites. Years went by and his enthusiasm grew as he was toiling at quarries and rivers. It was then someone told he could study art formally. But he had to pass tenth and intermediate to get through in a fine arts college.

Hard work paid off. Fighting poverty and an alcoholic father, and above all the growing insecurities around, Shashikant, with the help of good Samaritans studied privately and sat for tenth and intermediate examinations and came out even if not with flying colors, some colors to his satisfaction. The illustrious J.J.School in Mumbai was waiting for him. He gave the entrance test and it was an easy walk over. The year was 2003. He could not finish more than three months in his first year, by then the condition back home grew from bad to worse. He had to extend a helping hand to his mother who had been working then as a domestic help. Without thinking much Shashikant dropped out once again and went back to his village.

However, this time Shashikant had something different in his mind. He had told himself that he was not going to become a mason like his father. And definitely he was not going to drink alcohol. He decided to draw the faces of the people in a nearby town. He had not yet tried color pencils. With black lead pencil, he could create the likeness of any sitter in startlingly original fashion. His prowess was not only in capturing the likeness of the sitter but also the folds and creases of the sitter’s clothes. He did not know, art historically it is called ‘drapery painting’.

(Work by Shashikant Dhotre- Color pencil on Paper)

Shashikant’s patrons were so happy to see a young boy sitting at the street corner, drawing the portraits of the interested passersby and selling them for paltry sums. They took him home and commissioned him to draw family portraits. Instead of his nominal remuneration, they showered him with praises and money. Shashikant now could experiment with color pencils. He kept his study going with color pencils and sooner than later, he became a master in using the color pencils too. The money that he gained from the benevolent patrons helped him to support his mother and ease her out of menial jobs. He saved enough to study an animation course in Pune and he decided to try his luck in the city of dreams, Mumbai again.

The year was 2007. Shashikant came to Mumbai and joined one of the animation studios. Sooner than later he understood that it was one of the most boring jobs though it was called a ‘creative’ job. They obviously were using his skills in drawing but he was not deriving any satisfaction from his work. He thought he was doing some assembly line work or patch work in a factory. He wanted to express himself and at the same time he wanted to earn more.

Prakash, a friend of Shashikant for year is still with him in his Navi Mumbai studio. The rise in Shashikant’s career graph has not changed the relationship between these two people for the simple reason that Prakash was his only comrade when Shashikant decided to quit the animation film industry and go solo in his career. But what solo? These two friends put their heads together to come up with a new idea.

They created a pamphlet and the pamphlet said that they were artists and they could create interesting bedrooms for the kids. They said that they could paint the walls of the children’s bedrooms with the superheroes the children liked and also could create the portraits of the kids along with their favorite heroes. Early in the morning, both Shashikant and Prakash walked to the newspaper boys and requested them to place the pamphlets in the newspapers before delivery. They complied and before ten o clock next morning, Shashikant and Prakash were getting non-stop calls.

(Work by Shashikant Dhotre- Color Pencil on Paper)

A new career started for Shashikant. He painted the bedrooms of rich kids. One painting led to more commissioning from the rich people because they all wanted to have the same glory for their kids. It brought the artists money and they could now afford to lead a proper life. Yet, renting out a place to stay was still difficult. Some political connections back home had helped Shashikant to temporarily put up in the Maharashtra Sadan in Mumbai. Now they were thinking to shift to their own rented apartment.

Shashikant, though he studied only for three months in the JJ School of Art, had developed strong friendship with students and maintained even after many years. One of the friends from the JJ times came to Shashikant’s lodge and was shocked to see a wonderful painting, a portrait of a girl, on the table. The friend was on his way to submit one of his paintings to the Bombay Art Society’s annual art competition. He requested Shashikant to send his painting to the professional category. But Shashikant denied saying that the painting on the table was already sold and he would make one if needed. That night Shashikant did not sleep. He made another painting on paper (with color pencils) and submitted it to the society next day in the professional category. The year was 2009.

When the results were announced Shashikant turned out to be the winner. It was the beginning point of a successful career. A couple of awards followed the Art Society award. In 2011, the India Art Festival in Mumbai adjudged Shashikant as the best painter of the year in the young artists’ category. It gives me a lot of pleasure to say that I was instrumental in adjudging Shashikant’s work as the best one in the given category.

(Work by Shashikant Dhotre- Color Pencil on Paper)

I still remember the award function. Shashikant was in a pair of jeans and T-shirt. When his name was called out, a minister from the Maharashtra cabinet was looking around for an imposing artist to walk up to him. Upon seeing a humble young boy, the minister was thrilled and in his speech he was in full praise for the artists from rural Maharashtra. Next day, the media took up the story of Shashikant and he became an overnight sensation in Mumbai and elsewhere.

In Shashikant’s studio in Navi Mumbai, one wouldn’t see too many works. Yet, there are three in different stages of completion. From the climate controlled studio, through a glass wall Shashikant could see the city out there, the highway where the vehicles plying to different destinations, thickets growing, a flocks of birds making different formations of surviving and winning.

The paintings feature rural Maharashtra scenes; to be precise Maharashtrian women involved in different homely activities. Time stands frozen in Shashikant’s works. He takes the photographs of his family members and friends in different dresses and engaged in different domestic activities. For him, these activities and these draperies give ample chances to display his skill in painting with color pencils and at times crayon pencils. Feminists cannot question Shashikant for making the women simple objects of male gaze for he absolutely leaves no chance for such gaze. These women are not voluptuous but they are beautiful and sensual. They are like cultural emblems captured by a very gifted painter.

(Work by Shashikant Dhotre- Color Pencil on Paper)

The lack of paintings or a stack of it in reserve is explained away by Shashikant with a smile. He says that each painting that he does is demanded by more than three collectors from all over India. That means all the time the buyers are waiting for his works. How could he be a fast deliverer when each of his works needs almost a month to finish? Shashikant knows his selling potential. But he is not a fast seller. He shows them in solo exhibitions before he sells them off. And where does he exhibit?

Shashikant exhibits in Jehangir. People have seen his works there. But this artist with a strong rural background before selling his works makes it a point to take his works to the rural Maharashtra. He has a very good team of rural friends who have now become adept in handling the sensitivities of a work of art in display. With their help he takes the paintings to rural areas in Maharashtra and shows them in community halls and temple halls. “Thousands of people come to see my paintings and most of them hug me and weep. Perhaps, they respond much better than the city art lovers. I am so blessed that I get people queue-ing up in front of my gallery wherever I exhibit, including the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai,” says Shashikant.

Is Shashikant happy about his journey? In a candid conversation, Shashikant confesses that he needs to do more to get what he wants in his works. “I have got what I wanted through my works. But I have not yet got what I want in my works. I am still striving to get it.” The fan following, the acceptance by the public and even by the government does not replace the need for taking his works to the next level of perfection. It is not just about getting the patterns, light and illusion right. But it is all about getting the artist himself inextricably within the work.

(Artist Shashikant Dhotre)

Shashikant looks out through the glass wall right in front of him. The sky has gone red in the horizon and the sky rise buildings have turned themselves into silhouettes blinking with neon lights.

“Disparities,” sighs Shashikant. “Disparities worry me. Rituals and spectacles- we want only that. None thinks about re-distribution of excess. My works, I hope, would one day reach to that level of speaking about such re-distributions.”

If you will, you can.

If silence could have wheels, then we wheel back to where we had started in the afternoon, as consolidate silences.

(Parthiv Shah- Photography artist and alternative visual communication designer)

Post-colonialism and the discourses engendered by it were very much in the air throughout the 1990s exactly the way a flower market carries the mixed heaviness of multiple fragrances, together slowly turning into an objectionable smell or an abattoir where blood and the severed body parts of animals send out an aroma of abjection. The Empire was talking back; for a long time without even thinking whether the former masters were really listening to the retort. Those who listened to the rhetoric of anyone who spoke out the experiences of a post-colonial life absorbed them into the academic structures that they had been creating to accommodate such hurt sentiments. Speaking the post colonial experience from within the academic structures however lost its edge, rendering the post colonial subject who spoke out into someone who could enjoy the advantageous status of being a ‘special other’.

(a work by Parthiv Shah)

The fad was very much in India during the 90s, especially among the producers of the visual cultures. The struggle of an Indian artist living in a decade that celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence from the colonial rule, to articulate the post colonial existence was a painful one for many had already forgotten the colonial past and its place had been taken over by the new imperialistic thoughts and styles without much critical resistance. The post partition literature had already taken the path of a different discourse, often overstepping the academic strictures of the post colonial studies and which has been successfully continuing till date. Films, both the mainstream Bollywood and the regional ones were churning out films narrating the stories of the heroes in our freedom struggle, without really addressing the post-colonial rhetoric. However, the articulations of the former colonial subjects and their descendents still living in the master countries were considerably different and those who imitated their articulations in the home made versions or even tried to make extensive historical researches to create visual art pieces looked painfully labored and clumsy; nobody know where they have gone these days. For a change, they all have started exploring the origins of imperialism and the trade routes that brought imperialism to our shores in order to make their art distinct.

(Swiss government installing a commemorative sculpture of Yash Chopra by Nilesh Powalkar)

Perhaps, it was Yash Chopra, one of the master film makers from the mainstream Bollywood genre was the only post colonial film maker who could articulate the anxieties and nostalgia of the present as well as the past time colonial subjects who got willingly trapped in the master countries. In these mega narratives generated in palatial feudal homes and verdant country houses in Britain or elsewhere, amply using the sylvan landscapes of the quintessential Switzerland, around the characters who are permanently caught up in the limbo created by a strong sense of Indian tradition and western modernism. It could be best expressed in suited and booted Khans dancing to the Indian tunes with their customized brides, around a patriarch, often played by Amitabh Bacchan, and characters breaking up and making out at candle lit dinners, or even travelling continents to snatch away an Indian traditional bride to western modernism.

(from Parthiv Shah's Figures, Facts, Feelings series)

Yash Chopra’s role in playing referee to the contesting post colonial discourse and the cultural discourse that repudiates the post colonial fixations completely is exceptional and his soft diplomacy through films is the only avenue where we see these kinds of post colonial tensions thrashed out amicably. The baton has been handed over to Karan Johar and his films address post colonial issues as a given, as the mother in law- daughter in law tensions are a given in the soap operas in Indian television. For the visual artists, dealing with post colonial issues was a passport to instant international recognition. Removed several years from the actual experiences of the colonial rule in India these artists’ affectations however became a thing of joke soon while a few artists who lived abroad and tuned themselves up to the current discourses could do justice to their visual articulations even if they were not really a part of post colonial subjection. Parthiv Shah is one visual communicator, designer and photography artist from India who could deal with the post-colonial subjectivity intelligently and seriously without claiming anything of post colonialism for himself.

(from Parthiv Shah's Figures, Facts, Feelings series)

Many people might have already forgotten a moderate exhibition of photographs and empirical data related to those photographs that came with a title ‘Figures, Facts, Feeling- A Direct Diasporic Dialogue’ in the year 2000 at the British Council Gallery in Delhi. The exhibition was by Parthiv Shah, the Delhi based photography artist and alternative visual communicator and it was a part of fulfilling his scholarship agreements with the Charles Wallace Trust which had given him a travel and study grant in Britain in 1998. As you have read the preamble of this essay, you should know what is special about the year 1998. The fag end of the 1990s, internet was already in and also mobile phones were started appearing in the hands of the rich and powerful. India’s roads were full of new model cars for the newly affluent middle class. India was in its global path through open economic policy which turned out to be irreversible (as we know today). Real estate was booming, new educational institutions were springing up, dot com boom was about to take place bringing online magazines and other platforms competitive interfaces in the new Indian market. A new subjectivity was getting formed around the young affluent class and they too were taking interest in acquiring art. Things were all looking rosy and cushy.

(from Parthiv Shah's Figures, Facts, Feelings series)

Parthiv, born to a Gandhian artist father, Haku Shah, and married to an Indian classical singer, and studied at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad must have seen the emerging reality of India and its changing cultural and visual landscape with a fair amount of curiosity and guardedness. Entrepreneurial as he was and still is, Parthiv might have seen these changes for furthering his creative career but not in the field of commercial advertisement that coaxed and enticed the consumer into a desire and aspiration. Parthiv, however did not like to see the emergent reality as an opportunity to create desire. Instead he decided to become a visual chronicler of the changing India with its contrasting realisms being played out in the public and private domains. It was when he got the scholarship to go and study in Britain. In fact, throughout the 1990s, Indian artists, both printmakers and painters got the opportunities go abroad and come back equipped to change the Indian visual culture. I should also add that scholarships were given based on coterie allegiance, group dynamics and dinner diplomacy in those years. Imagine, Indian Printmakers guild bagging all the scholarship for its members for many consecutive years! It happens only in India.

(from Parthiv Shah's Figures, Facts, Feelings)

Parthiv got his scholarship much later in his career and when he landed in Britain and decided to join the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), he did not really know which anthropological interest he would pursue. Soon he realized that the Indian diaspora had a strong presence in the British life and it could provide an interesting study material. Parthiv’s project ‘Figures, Facts, Feelings’ is not strictly a photography project. It has got the qualities and tendencies of a visual note book where a researcher notes down his findings and observations without fail. Interestingly, there is a method in these random visual notes. As Parthiv understood that this Indian diaspora in Britain, even if they had articulated themselves in different ways, needed some kind of an assertion and they could speak like post colonial subjects because they opted to be post colonial subjects unlike the people who lived in India or in any of the former colonies. The life in India was by choice; it was/is a given for all of us. But the diaspora Indians living in Britain was/is a choice. Their articulation could be beyond any revenge theories as expressed in the Empire talks back and so on and also need not necessarily be driven by hurt sentiments.

(from Parthiv Shah's Figures, Facts, Feelings series)

As a photography artist and visual communicator, Parthiv could notice this aspect of the diaspora Indians in Britain. The choice (of living there) had rendered them free and also they could cherish and nourish ideas about India, which at times were full of fondness and at times very poor. As the title shows, Parthiv embarked on a journey initially by befriending a series of Indian settlers there through various contacts and then asking them to be a part of his study project. Hence, there are figures and they are all given a form to fill in as Parthiv observed that the diaspora communities had gone through this filling of various forms as a part of migration and we get a lot of facts about the subjects in nutshell. Then definitely they have their feelings about themselves as well as for their parent country. Parthiv gives them the freedom to choose the location or backdrop against which they would like to be photographed. This freedom to choose the location reflects their freedom to choose the country for their living. Parthiv, as an artist couldn’t have been more liberal than this.

(from Parthiv Shah's Figures, Facts, Feelings series)

There are thirty four subjects in this project. Famous photographer Sunil Janah, famous political theoretician and author Sunil Khilnani, well known art dealer Behroz Gandhy and so on appear in this project along with twenty years old students and toddlers who love chocolates and think about India as a ‘poverty’ stricken place. Parthiv asks a few questions which are intrusive at times and generic mostly. However, none takes offence with his intrusive questions like ‘one’s age and education’. A Sikh middle aged man is just fifth standard pass and he leads a totally religious life while handling his business in Britain. Sunil Janah predictably would like to show himself in his darkroom where he processes his negatives, Sunil Khilnani (author of the highly acclaimed book ‘Incarnations’) is seen like an unsure young gentleman in a garden and a very confident political theorist in his study room strewn with hundreds of books. We see people preferring themselves to be seen in a very sober and intelligent set up as they willingly participate in a project like this. What surprises is a lady opting to be seen inside a toilet/bathroom as she finds it as the most ‘peaceful’ place in her home or rather in her life. Young people are seen in their bedrooms sitting casually or playfully. There is a grandfather giving musical lessons to the grand children. There is a medical engineer in his study and a doctor in her library.

(from Parthiv Shah's Figures, Facts, Feelings series)

Most of them do not shy away from speaking about their age, education and the choices in their lives. While the photographs tell a few things about the subjects, the questionnaire that accompanies these images tells everything about these subjects. Interestingly, most of them prefer old Hindi film songs as a vehicle that would transport them to their nostalgic past. Many of them have ‘Mother India’, ‘Pakeeza’, ‘Mughal e Azam’ as their favorite films. The grand narratives that built India during the independence and after still linger on in their minds as they like to see India as a part of the grand narrative of the world itself. A couple of them choose Satyajit Ray movies (like Apur Sansar) and one of them chooses Subarnarekha by Rwitik Ghatak. When a girl says that she likes the movie ‘Lahme’, we understand that the diaspora to has moved on to the recent times.

(Parthiv Shah with musician wife Vidya Shah)

Parthiv did this project when there was no special place for photography or experimental installations with photography as a main component in Indian art scene. Today a lot of young photography artists use anthropological documentations in order to get their aesthetical ideas across. Parthiv is one of the pioneers in Indian experimental photography using anthropological methods. But ironically he came much ahead of time. His exhibition in 2000 had an accompanying catalogue which contained a few interesting studies on photography and cinema written by authors including Christopher Pinney and Rachel Dyer who later became important voices in Indian photography and film studies. Though, a few other articles included in the catalogue now look like over embellishment, we could say that it was a time when such efforts to showcase exclusive photographic discourses were hardly done, hence it was the need of the time. It would be interesting if artists, curators and photography experts would make a revisit to this project of Parthiv Shah and push the discourse further.

(Pradeep Puthoor in his studio)

‘There was a boy, a very strange and enchanted boy.’ From Nat King Cole, we cut to Puthoor near Kottarakkara, Kollam District, Kerala. Seventh decade of the 20^th century was just about to begin. Suddenly, in this boy’s house furniture started catching fire. Dresses worn by guests were sniped to shreds. All the fingers were pointed at our enchanted boy, who was five years old then. His father was a District Medical Officer (doctor) and the impudence of his son infuriated him. For almost two years, till our boy turned seven, ghostly fires and invisible scissors were toppling the peace of the household. Each time it happened, our boy was caned thoroughly by his father. And one day, the family members chanced upon the real culprit; an elder cousin sister of the boy who lived with them and enjoyed her split personality was setting things on fire.

(Work by Pradeep Puthoor)

Remorse descended on the father. Each member of the family was guilt ridden. They looked at the boy who all those two years had been taking all thrashing without really understanding why they did it to him. Driven by repentance, his father set the boy free. Now onwards he could do anything he wanted under the sun; and over too, if he really wished. His father was like a pillar of strength for the boy to pursue what he wanted. He wanted nothing but to draw. Years later, when he graduated from the Trivandrum Fine Arts College with a second rank in Applied Arts, his father arranged a studio for him in their former stable of cows.

(Pradeep Puthoor in Studio)

Thus starts the story of Pradeep Puthoor, an acclaimed artist who lives and works in Trivandrum, whose paintings reveal the innards of non-existing organic beings and the fundamental structures of visible and invisible objects and edifices around him. The enchanted boy in him has not grown up yet. Pradeep sees the world through the eyes of that boy who had once wondered why he got periodically thrashed by his dad whenever fires appeared at the feet of chairs or holes appeared in the clothes. The boy in him now wonders why the world around him is so; why innocent people are being thrashed up and bullied around by people who hold patriarchal authority in the society. So the boy searches for the reasons and he goes into the fundamental structures that make up our society and the collective and individual imaginations. Pradeep, as his works show, believes that the very basis of understandings and misunderstandings is in the very act of ‘seeing’ things in the perspective that we choose to perceive anything and everything around us. Some are capable of seeing things beyond while most of us remain in the two dimensional world, occasionally using a pair of colored goggles to watch a three dimensional make believe world.

(A recent work by Pradeep Puthoor)

The X-Ray eyes of Pradeep are not scientifically intrusive but aesthetically intense. In a normal X-Ray picture whiter images are denser objects. In Pradeep’s visual world denser objects come to the fore, making the viewers believe that the artist sees only the denser objects lying hidden within the glittering skin of the external world. But trained eyes and intuitive minds could sense the lighter objects and lighter events that take place beyond the outer skin of the material world. What is that makes Pradeep see things beyond? Is it because of the presence of his father, a doctor in his life during the formative years? But as we enquire further we understand that Pradeep’s father Dr.Sukumaran was not an allopathic doctor who used invasive technologies to diagnose diseases. He was rather intuitive who practiced Ayurvedic Medicine. He lived in a world of herbs and medicinal plants. He looked and touched the patients and he could see their inner topography as we see a location in a google map these days. This intuitive mind and healing touch somehow has come to Pradeep absolutely in a different form; visual aesthetics.

(work by Pradeep Puthoor)

There is a side story here: Liberated from the parental clutches at the age of seven after suffering undeserving punishment for two years, Pradeep had grown wings to fly wherever he wanted. Too much of freedom at a tender age could be detrimental and while studying in the Trivandrum Fine Arts College, Pradeep was one of the richest students and brightest too, which got him into a sort of anarchy and sooner than later he started wondering why he took Applied Arts as his major and why he did not apply for painting. Even if he had ranked second in the examinations, Pradeep was not planning to join any advertising agency, which offered a lucrative job and life. He went back to his village and started painting from the stable studio which his father had set up for him.

(A work from 1990s by Pradeep Puthoor)

The story goes like this. Pradeep was not making any money from his art. In fact, in his own admission, he was just figuring out how to paint. In Applied Arts department he had learnt the techniques of visualizing and imaging rather than creating a painting using adequate and discreet application of paints on the surface of a canvas or a paper. In the stable studio in the village, he had told himself, ‘look, it is your job now to learn how to paint. If not you are doomed.’ But father was thinking differently for his somewhat crazy son. Making his son settled in life, which meant a good job, marriage and a household to keep up, was the prime concern of the father. So, he started a Medical Store for him. Also he appointed a young girl at the sales counter. Pradeep could be the owner cum manager and the presence of a young girl would have kept him inside the shop. Spirited he was and it took no time to convert the adjacent room into a makeshift bar for his local wayward friends. If at all Pradeep had any connection with the world of medical science and the anatomical structure of human beings or other creatures, it was his medical shop misadventure which came to an abrupt end once the father pulled the shutters of the shop down forever.

(a recently work by Pradeep Puthoor)

The painter in Pradeep was surging forth, learning through trial and error methods and in the meanwhile two major influences came to his life; Paul Klee and Anselm Kiefer. More than stylistic freedom these artists took, what attracted Pradeep were their unceasing efforts to externalize the internal world. When we talk about internal world, most of the art people mistake it as the spiritual world that the Indian philosophy qualifies as the embodiment of self realization and sublime expression. Many an artist has repeated this mistake and many have been repeating it even today. Pradeep, however was not trying to externalize that spiritual world; on the contrary he was trying to look at the strange and enchanted worlds and universes that lied hidden in him. Those attempts to get them out a la the Klee mode took him to the known and unknown archetypes that came in tiered fashion in his early works. Before he could really make out what he had been doing with his paintings, in 1992, he was awarded the best National Painter competition conducted by the Kerala Lalitha Kala Akademi. The title of the painting was ‘Air-Airy’, which thanks to the journalistic interventions of that time became a fad title and the artist who made that painting became equally famous. Pradeep was about to start his fulltime career as a painter.

(work by Pradeep Puthoor)

There was an interim period in his life, when Pradeep worked as an illustrator. While shuttling between the stable studio and the hangout places in Trivandrum city, Pradeep found that there was an opening in the Kalakaumudi weekly, which was one of the prominent weeklies of that time. Pradeep worked there as an illustrator for a few months and an offer came to him to go to Mumbai and work for the same organization. Pradeep grabbed the opportunity and went to Mumbai. According to him, going to Mumbai was all about visiting Jehangir Art Gallery. “I wanted to hang out there and see shows. I wanted to wander in the city of Mumbai and see what I could there,” Pradeep remembers. But in his remembrance, there are no faces or names. He does not even remember the place that he lived in Mumbai. “My office was at Nariman Point. And the accommodation was somewhere and I used to go by train.” Pradeep worked there for six months and came back to Trivandrum. “I had enough of Mumbai and enough of Jehangir Art Gallery,” Pradeep smiles. Interestingly, those were the days of the making of the ‘Mallu artists’ gang’ in Mumbai. “But I was not interested to know any Malayalee artists there for my interest was in art not in artists.”

(Pradeep Puthoor with his wife Raji in studio)

In 1993 Pradeep got the Junior Fellowship from the Human Resources Department, Government of India. It was in the same year that Pradeep got married to Raji, who now has taken up her responsibilities as Pradeep’s documenter, archivist, personal secretary and emotional and creative collaborator. The journey was not so smooth. Pradeep met Raji in front of the Public Library in Trivandrum in 1992 and he was asking for some direction to some place. They met again and finally they decided to marry. Soon Raji realized that she had chosen something ‘different’ and she found herself in the midst of utter confusion and anarchy. But she withstood all the pressures from family and society, mainly to desert a ‘non-profit artist’, and today she is Pradeep’s best friend and best assistant. Rare are such relationships especially they had the responsibility of bringing up two daughters who are now 22 years and 14 years respectively. “We had passed through the rough patches and now we have weathered enough to wade through any situations,” Pradeep says while Raji looks at him with full of admiration in her eyes.

(early work by Pradeep Puthoor)

British Royal Overseas League prize came to Pradeep in 1997. In 2003, Pollock-Krasner Fellowship was awarded to him. In 2006, he got an Indo-German residency program in Berlin. In 2005, Pradeep participated in the Florence Biennale. In 2004, one of his works was auctioned by Christies. Pradeep was in huge demand by the new millennium. There is a huge difference between the present works of Pradeep and the earlier ones that established him as a painter. Towards the end of the 1990s, Pradeep had already got a grip in the painterly language and all his hallmark expressions were developed by then. Still the refinement was escaping him. He was toiling between figurative and semi-figurative paintings which were sold off like hot cakes. However, the search for a refined language was still one; he did not hawk it for a profit. And by the time he started having his solo exhibitions in 2006 in Delhi and Hyderabad, Pradeep’s language was already established; it was semi-figurative and looking into a world that lied beyond the material comprehension.

(A drawing by Pradeep Puthoor)

Totem like structures repeats in Pradeep’s works. Though they are totemic, the organic fluidity shakes them out of the rigidity of vertical structures and shows the possible fluidity of the underwater weeds and creatures. There is a feeling of diving into the depths of the unknown while looking at the works of Pradeep, especially in the works that he did a decade back. Goaded by an urge to create more and more, similar images evolved but each time giving a different finality to the works. At times he painted the concrete totemic figures, shamanic appearances with beak heads and scythes and so on. There used to be a strange dance of ethereal figures in his works. Slowly we see them assuming clear patterns and becoming more and more definitive structures. While there are no bone structures and clear rib cages and skeletal views in those days, one could clearly say that he is inspired by the zoological and botanical anatomies. The most surprising thing about Pradeep paintings from this period is that despite their apparent leaning towards scientific microscopic views of animal and plant world of existence, he never had reference points to such imaginative take offs. (I scrutinize his book shelves in his studio for reference books and find no such scientific tomes).

(Drawing by Pradeep Puthoor)

Each time I look at the works of Pradeep, what comes to my mind is the world of ethereal beings, magical occurrences and a sort of constant witnessing of the same by the artist. As mentioned in the beginning, Pradeep is like a young boy, the nature child, Azaro in Ben Okri’s illustrious novel, ‘Famished Road’. Azaro sees a world different as others do. Each inch of his world is infested with invisible creatures which are visible to him only. The subtext of colonial critique in Okri’s novel could easily give way to the magical realism of the novel’s structure and prop the protagonist, Azaro into a witness of both the real and unreal world. Azaro’s father in the novel tries to finish off magically powerful boxer and each time he tries that he comes back hurt. In the blood that oozes out from his father’s body opens up a new world for Azaro. The father-son relationship could also be seen in the works of Pradeep, where the son is a constant witness to the father’s life, whose life he qualifies as a ‘colorful’ one, filled with herbs and dreams.

(work by Pradeep Puthoor)

The magical realism at times becomes clinically precise in Pradeep’s works. He extracts a singular image and repeats it many number of times as if he is changing a mantra or making a revisit to the same place that he has seen in his dream and later chanced upon in the real life. An effort to see the inner workings of not only the organic entities but also the inorganic edifices, Pradeep turns his X-ray eyes on anything and everything and the underlying bone structures are revealed. To the untrained eyes, the bone structures are simper representational efforts of the artist. But if one looks deep into these paintings he/she could come to understand two things; one, the artist has not really worked on bone structures autonomous images in previous works though they are shown in glimpses and glances. Two, the bone structures that we see in his paintings are not real bone structures as we cannot imagine creatures with such bone structures. This takes us to a different conclusion; the artist is not really paintings the familiar but the unfamiliar, besides, the bone structures do not really belong to any particular being.

(work by Pradeep Puthoor)

According to the artist, these bone structures represent decay of different kinds. However, I would like to see them as structuring of the self rather than decaying of the envelope that covers the ‘self’. This is not a spiritual self; but a transformation of previously known fluid structures into much concrete ones. The self intended here is the self that the artist confronts in his path of aesthetic creations. Most of the bone structures are like the remnants of a previous moment. The constant making and breaking of plans leave a lot of energy patterns in our surroundings and if we trace them through a device capable of doing it, we would be able to see a lot of ruins of our conjurations. Pradeep, with his sensitive creative ends is able understand these conjurations and reproduce them. I have witnessed him coming up with a skeletal image when he was painting the surface of a car in Jaipur recently. Pradeep starts at some point, may an axial bone and the rest of it develop in tandem with the other. His working style is such that symmetry becomes an inevitable choice as structurally only symmetry could hold the logic of a ‘building’ whether it is a real body or an imagined body. Yet, Pradeep gives autonomy to these structures never subjecting them to be a victim of the ensuing structures or images. Hence, Pradeep could leave a portion of the bone structure in the mid way and fill them with a color patch in order to bring the balance into the painting’s wholeness.

(Painting by Pradeep Puthoor)

Symmetry, especially the apparently clinical scientific nature of Pradeep’s works is concerned, seems to be a very conscious act of ‘painting’ rhythm and balance into a work of art. However, if we look closely, we come to know that Pradeep does not follow the scientific structural symmetry in a clinical fashion. The symmetries are automatically developed so that a visual balance is created vis-à-vis the rest of the images seen around it. One particular structure holding up the other in fact does not organically tally with the ensuing bone structure. That means, even if we conjure up a being based on the given bone structure created by Pradeep, we will not get a logically comprehensible being. Hence, decay or no decay becomes no longer important in deciphering the meaning of his works. On the contrary what I see in the latest paintings of Pradeep (that I see in his studio) is a sort of resolved (bone) structures which without adding imaginary flesh to it give away the feeling of witnessing a Gandhara Buddha who undergoes extreme fasting and turn skeletal. This reading could be made possible only by the subconscious rendering of such thoughts related to resolution and deliverance which are currently going through the mind of the artist.

(from Pradeep Puthoor's Nature Morte Solo in 2014)

If one asks the artist to define himself, Pradeep would say that he is an artist who likes ‘drawing’ than painting. In his studio one could see various sizes of expensive papers cut and kept in stacks so that any time he wants to draw, he could just get at it. Hundreds of drawings are made without the artist really caring much about its meaning or possible trajectory of travelling. Each stroke is important for Pradeep; it is like slow building, almost like imagining a castle, a world, a universe, a wood bit by bit. That’s how the nature boys like Azaro do while conjuring up ethereal worlds or extracting such worlds from the mundane ones within which they are forced to operate. Pradeep is a nature boy and one should not try to decipher what he is really making on the papers. They resemble many of his paintings; but they are not the blue print or studies for the paintings. They at times look automatic doodling; yet they are not subconscious drawing. Pradeep derives immense pleasure in ‘drawing’ his drawings bit by bit using pen and at times water colors.

(work by Pradeep Puthoor)

If Pradeep is given a chance, how is he going to define his artistic process? Pradeep does not think for long to answer this question because the answer has been given several times already. He likes to call his artistic journey as ‘wandering’ and in Malayalam he uses this typical word, ‘alacchil’. Wandering and alacchil mean the same. It is an aimless journey but with some glimmer of purpose occasionally showing up. Each time it is seen, the rest of the wandering is a pain, tinged with the pleasure of trying to know the unknown. One moves from sunlight to shade and wise versa. One walks out of an air-conditioned room into the blistering heat of a summer day. One sits under a heating tin sheet roof and sweat; all the while looking at his canvas. You sit in front of a computer and keep moving along the corridors of virtual museums and galleries. You could be travelling and wandering. You could be delivering your homely duties and yet wandering. You could be in one place and still enjoying the pleasure and pain of wandering. Pradeep enjoys wandering in his works. It is never ending, he believes. Even taking his white Swift car and driving with his wife Raji, around the city with a purpose and coming back without really carrying it out, is one of the forms of wanderings. Waiting at the coffee house where he meets his friends, while his younger daughter is at her class, for her to return is another kind of wandering. Shopping at Connemara Market in Palayam in the early mornings for fish and flowers could be another wandering. But Pradeep sees things differently and what he sees is what we see in his works.

(JohnyML is with Pradeep Puthoor in his Studio)

I close this essay with the song of Nat King Cole:

There was a boy

A very strange enchanted boy

They say he wandered very far, very far

Over land and sea

A little shy sad of eye

But very wise was he

And then one day

A magic day he pass by me

And while we spoke of many things

Fools and kings

This he said to me

The greatest thing you’ll ever learn

Is just to love and be loved in return

(Gopikrishna in his studio)

Through the large windows, the foliages and tree top freshly washed by the mid summer rains that shred the crystal blue sky into thousands of shining shards I see three medium sized owls, sleeping calmly. The artist smiles at me. “Look, what do they need?” I keep silence. I want the artist to speak. He continues, “They just need a place to sit and sleep. At night they fly away to hunt. They come back in the morning. At times they look at me turning their necks in impossible angles.” I strain my eyes at them. As if responding to a cue they open their eyes in unison and look at me. ‘It’s eerie,’ I think but do not say a thing. I know Gopikrishna, the artist and when he speaks of the owls, he is not just putting up an act. The trees out there, the greenery, the foliage, the creepers and vines that adorn the self designed studio-cum-residence of Gopikrishna are carefully cultivated by the artist himself, patiently and steadily. His works, often qualified randomly as ‘surreal’ or ‘Brueghel-esque’ have a lot of trees and foliages in them though most of them seem animated by their ‘unnatural’ extensions into creatures and species that are seen perhaps only in the imaginations of George Louis Borges.

(A recent painting by Gopikrishna)

Born in Sreekaryam, a suburban town near Trivandrum city in 1965, Gopikrishna has always been a devotee of the ‘remaining patches of nature’ in and around Trivandrum city. Ask any friend of Gopikrishna about his personal traits as an artist or an art student many years back, they would all say one thing: Gopikrishna was a loner and he remains the same. There is a reason for the loneliness of this artist. This loneliness was a choice when he was a student in the Trivandrum Fine Arts College in early 1980s. The students then were an agitated lot. Each student who joined the college then was fresh and normal like any other teenager. But within a month into the course they all started turning into some different beings, always talking about revolution through art and the social purposes of art. For Gopikrishna, seeing the metamorphosis of his fellow students perhaps was the initiation into the world of magical transformations of beings, which has been manifesting in his works for the last three decades incessantly.

(a painting in Gopikrishna's studio)

Gopikrishna’s works have a protagonist or a few protagonists in them, all in many ways, resonating with the characteristic traits of the artist himself, at least in the looks. They are all loners even when they are engaged in apparently absurd group activities. The early dissociation of his individual self from the collective ideological process(ing) of art during the student days comes to take many forms in this dissonant metabolism that we seen in Gopikrishna’s paintings. Loner as he was, instead of making art through collective discussions and for a common end, Gopikrishna looked for the fast fading green patches in and around the city. Pedaling through the asphalt laid paths under the blazing sun, with his drawing equipments in tow, Gopikrishna went to these places, sitting there alone, captured the varying moods of nature, hundreds of birds visiting the tree tops, bees humming around and the insects and frogs trotting here and there. Drawing them was a pleasure, which took him to the ultimate sense of ‘losing’ it (the ego) and the meditative experience that he experienced from these weekend sessions was much more alluring than the socially ‘responsible’ art that brewed within the crucibles of library, canteen and classrooms of the Trivandrum Fine Arts College. Gopikrishna did not discount his friends’ art but he was simply not interested.

(A painting by Gopikrishna)

A.Ramachandran, senior artist, who gushes praises for Gopikrishna does it for the right reasons. As a nature lover (as a rightful descendant of the doyens like Benode Behari Mukherjee, Ram Kinkar Baij and K.G.Subramnyan) Ramachandran has always painted directly from the nature. While Ramachandran devoted himself in developing a naturalism that is peculiar to the mural traditions of India, by adding a lot of realism to it, Gopikrishna chose a different path of developing his realism as perceived by his inner eyes. In his words, “I do not have any explanations for the incidents that take place in my works. But they are from there. They happen exactly the way they are seen in the paintings. I cannot force them to be different.” Hence, Gopikrishna’s early exercises in drawing directly from nature could be called the internalization process of the external world and the alchemy of aesthetics that occurred in him during those days must have created a different world of reality for him, which one of the early judges of his works commented upon as ‘painful paintings’.

(a painting by Gopikrishna)

This comment, ‘painful paintings’ came in the year 1995, when Gopikrisha was finishing his MFA in Painting at the illustrious Delhi College of Art. After passing out in 1988 from Trivandrum Gopikrishna had spent almost six years at home, painting from a fairly large attic studio created for him by his father. Then he thought of continuing his studies. During the annual display, one of the campus combers came from a reputed gallery in Delhi and looked at the works of both Gopikrisha and Aji VN, who too was a student there then. The gallerist looked at their works for a long time, which gave them goose pimples. They thought that they were going to be picked up and raised to the level of professional artists by offering shows or commissioning works. Nothing happened; he moved on and selected one of the students whose works both Gopikrishna and Aji thought ‘not up to the mark’. Later, they asked the chosen one about the secret behind his works. He did not say much but simply commented, “You have done painful paintings. They need happy paintings.”

(a recent painting by Gopikrishna)

Looking around, I understand that Gopikrishna has not learnt a lesson from that boy artist who was selected by the gallerist in 1995. Sometimes being adamant and learning no lessons pay better than making adjustments with one’s won soul. Both Gopikrishna and Aji held on what was closer to them tightly. We do not hear much about the other artist but we do hear about these two artists even if it took more than a decade for recognition to come. In Delhi too the image of Gopikrishna being a loner followed him. But the artist has a different take on that. “Most of them who knew me or tried to know me missed one point. There is not a single place in Delhi and its surroundings where I hadn’t cycled around. I used to go to all the green patches, parks and the ruins of Delhi. Sitting there I experienced the histories and stories that made Delhi. I was not alone because the spirits that made Delhi were with me. And I kept on drawing and painting them.”

(a painting by Sreedharan Nair, Gopikrishna's father)

Here we think of Gopikrishna as a child prodigy. “I have never been one,” Gopikrishna asserts. He started taking art seriously only when his father suggested that he could be an artist. The suggestion was not vague or casual for it came from an artist himself. Sreedharan Nair, Gopikrishna’s father was an artist himself. Born in 1920, Sreedharan Nair was closely related to the Travancore Royal family and also got trained under the Raja Ravi Varma ‘school’ of painting along with the then masters like Devaraja Aiyar, Govindan Asari and OV Velu Asari. They all painted in the Ravi Varma style, taking inspiration from the already established themes and also from the secular as well as mythological narratives. The palette more or less remained that of Ravi Varma. Sreedharan Nair was slightly different from these artists. Nair studied the Western Renaissance art closely and also was keen in copying several western masters including Michael Angelo, Da Vinci and Raphael. Besides, Nair collected a lot of Oleographs came out of the Ravi Varma Press, and took a special interest in developing a painterly style based on the oleograph representations than the Ravi Varma paintings themselves. When Nair told his son to study art, he knew that his son could even if Gopikrishna had not shown any interest in pursuing art as a career.

(a painting by Sreedharan Nair, Gopikrishna's father)

A strangeness came to Gopikrishna’s mind when he was too young to understand the ways of the world. One day he was told that his mother was dead. Orphaned at an early age, with a young sibling and a father trying to negotiate his financial problems, Gopikrishna found himself in a peculiar island of loneliness. Nair, who wanted to be a professional artist, finally had to take up a job in the Transport Department. Gopikrishna was trying to tell something to the world though he did not know which medium would help him to express himself. And when he started working on paper with pencils, the initial formations were just doodles. Then he found images and themes evolving out of those doodles. It was a Tagore moment for Gopikrishna and he was seventeen years old. When Nair told him that he could join the Trivandrum Fine Arts College, Gopikrishna knew that if he did, he could as he had already seen images coming out of his lines convincingly, exactly the way Tagore might have found the images while making doodles, smudges and erasures.

(work by Gopikrishna)

The evolution of an artist could be traced by the stylistic developments that his works show over a period of time. However, it is not necessary that one should see the same kind of style in the formative years of an artist and later. In the case of Gopikrishna, the ‘surreal’ feel of his works was always there from the very early drawings to now. He says that this persisted because the style or thematic was not forced. It happened in him and his job was to get it out on paper or canvas. That does not mean that the artist is a weirdo. If he should, then most of the artists in this world should be weird creatures giving birth to non-existing worlds and creatures. The normative ideologies do not have any place in the scheme of Gopikrishna. As I mentioned elsewhere, Gopikrishna did not like to involve in any of the group activities in the college and preferred to work from a dingy little room in the men’s hostel which was kindly given to him by a fellow student, as Gopikrishna was a day scholar. Painting from the dark hostel room did not fill darkness into his works. The predominant yellow in his works connotes not only the affinity for the ethereal but also for the sun; openness and freedom.

(a work by Gopikrishna)

The centrality of figures, the multiplicity of limbs and heads, and the liberal habitation of beasts and eerie birds speak a lot about the aesthetics of Gopikrishna. The careful cannibalism of the oleograph structures, images and aesthetics created by Raja Ravi Varma seems to be the basic foundation for the feverish imagination of Gopikrishna. The beautiful gods and goddesses with multiple limbs, heads and other attributes, consorted by female entities or beastly or avian entities, flanked by heavenly flying beings and the encryption of benevolence and good omen that populate the oleographs, transform into different male, female, beastly and avian imageries and create a new ensemble of actions and happenings at times, taking them to the lowly stations of life and at times to the royal existence of the feudal lords. There are the glimpses of divinity and monstrosity in the same frame. The embellishments of the conventional oleographs are cannibalized to create a new ornamentation that allures and repels the viewer at the same time. Along with the lowly and royal lives, one could see the emblems and symbols of colonial presence, and the struggles of the erstwhile royalty in the face of extinction.

(Gopikrishna in studio)

Remove your shoes just outside the steps that lead to the veranda from the granite paved courtyard. You get the feeling of entering into a museum. The drawing room is a high ceilinged spacious atrium which has antique furniture running along the walls. Each item there has a touch of history and suddenly you realize that you have seen all of them in one or the other fashion in the works of Gopikrishna. The cherry red tiled floors reflect the white washed walls on which the artist has displayed many number of original oleographs collected from various sources, including that of his father and the original works done by his father. This home does not look like a museum of innocence, but it is more like a museum of memories (which museums definitely are), more like a museum of pain or a museum of dreams. But the home itself does not carry the memories of pain though the energy flutters with the softness of a smile or a pair of butterfly wings. Gopikrishna’s wife, Indira welcomes you with a smile with the room lights up. Gopikrishna’s son is Anantha Padmanabhan, who is a Integrated Psychology MA student at the Hyderabad Univeristy and daughter Sumitra is a tenth standard student in Trivandrum.

(a corner in Gopikrishna's study)

Gopikrishna collects all what he could from the city of his life. He is full of Travancore history. And Travancore history is full of coups, conspiracies, abdication, love, revenge, chivalry, loyalty, magic, horror and war. C.V.Raman Pillai, the most eminent author of historical novels had caught the history of Travancore in all its moods in his famous works such as ‘Marthandavarma’, ‘Dharma Raja’ and ‘Rama Raja Bahadur’. The coups and conspiracies that made and broke the modern Travancore also tell us the history of its resistance as well as subjection to the colonial forces. Trivandrum developed a cultural character of pleasing and connivance by extending the royal activities into the lives of the common people. Gopikrishna intrigued by these conspiracies that still make and break the city, creates his paintings which seem to resonate with the stories from the history of Travancore. Raman Pillai was a creative genius who said he could imagine a sea of fire and still write about it. He made this statement almost in the same of Turner. Enamored by the narrative skills and the linguistic variations shown by Pillai in his works, Gopikrishna also seems to say that he can imagine a sea of not only fire but also life and the life beyond. As a true devotee to the master history teller, he got his children named after the characters in C.V.Raman Pillai’s novels.

(an early family portrait by Gopikrishna)

The old wall clock which is wound everyday by Gopikrishna himself strikes twelve times. The disinterested, detached, grave and matter of fact ringing brings in the memory of Travancore within the four walls. We climb the stairs to the first floor where his sprawling studio is set up. Along the hallway that leads to the studio and along the sides of the stairs framed oleographs and the ‘much maligned monsters’ of Indian gods and goddesses ogle at you. The studio has all what a studio needs. Through the large windows southern wind wafts in. The table tops and cupboards are filled with antiques that he has been collecting ever since. The chairs are woven with cane; a skill that is fast fading due to lack of demand. Gopikrishna believes that a good life means getting the nature back into life which include the old skills of making and using things from the surroundings. “I collect all these because I just want to live with their naturalness,” says Gopikrishna. From the walls, his protagonists turn around and look at me. To understand his paintings it is necessary to know a bit of local history; or at least the history that goes beyond a hundred good years. Who said history is dead? Let’s us forget him. But I know who has said, the regional is the new global. It was said by K.G.Subramanyan, a decade back. If so, Gopikrishna is a global artist without using sawed off cadavers, pickled fish or prosthetic largesse or shiny surfaces.

(a family moment, Gopikrishna with wife Indira)

From the comfort of a low chair, sipping the sugarless tea that Indira has brought along with a few pieces of ripe mango and a local delicacy called ‘Ilayappam’, I listen to the stories of Gopikrishna and the making of Gopikrishna. After his graduation in 1988, Gopikrishna went on painting at his attic studio, which his father had prepared for him. Nobody bought any work and nobody even cared to look at his works. As the young artists do even today, Gopikrishna also did send his portfolios to many galleries in Mumbai and Delhi, which came back with not even a note of thanks. Aubrey Menon, an Indo-Anglian writer and a decaled gay writer was living in Trivandrum in those days with his friend Graham Hall. Both Gopikrishna and Pradeep Puthoor were regular visitors to their home for ‘spirited’ discussions on art and literature. Aubrey Menon liked the works of these two artists and it was Menon who wrote about them first in the then famous Illustrated Weekly of India. Gopikrishna shows me the Olivetti portable typewriter of Aubrey Menon, who had gifted to the artist many years later. It sits pretty on an antique stool, like the tools that have created monuments in granite.

(Gopikrishna with Aubrey Menon's Olivetti portable typewriter)

In the year 2000, Gopikrishna did a solo exhibition titled ‘Gates to Decivilization’ at the Durbar Art Gallery, Kochi. Anoop Scaria of Kashi Art Gallery happened to see this show and was hugely impressed. Anoop was the first one to give a sponsored solo at his Kashi Café Art Gallery in 2002 and 2004. By that time Indian art market had boomed. Solos followed in Delhi’s Palette Art Gallery and in Mumbai’s Art Musings. Gopikrishna, the recluse artist, however remains the same after his market success. “Market has not changed the pace of my working. I do not do commission works. Whatever sales happened so far has happened either through solo or through group shows. I cannot do works based on demands. I do not make calls or pick up calls for selling my art. I am an ordinary householder, cleaning my house and studio everyday with my wife, purchasing vegetables, tending plants and trees, looking at nature and listening to any kind of music.” Gopikrishnan does not affect anything and I could see it. The energy in the studio is meditative and one could spend hours together looking at his works here or looking at the number of mangos hanging from the tree at a hand’s distance over his terrace.

(a work by Gopikrishna)

The more one looks at the works of Gopikrishna the more one gets to feel a sense of crime and punishment. Gopikrishna, though is not guilt ridden or remorseful like a Dostoevsky-ian character, his works seem to be an outcry for justice. At the same time, the bestial presence reverses the logic of the human world. There is a bit of madness in these works. The metaphor here is ‘vishamam’; the syncopation of two disparate images, narratives or incidents. The repetition of such disparities, Gopikrishna creates a world where justice is delivered even through the cruelest of the ways. The impossibility of transformations is presented as the easiest formations. Pain is tinged with an erotic pleasure as a release or cathartic effect. Fertility and eroticism together tries to overcome the difficulties of barrenness using the images of fish, snake and sprouts. In Gopikrishna’s works, if anything is mocked or lampooned, it is the human beings because according to the artist, human beings are the greatest errors in the earth. The errors are to be erased either through correctional methods or through pure allowance of the grotesque.

(portrait of young Gopikrishna by NL Balakrishnan, photographer and actor)

In the district of Trastevere in Rome in central Italy, sometime in November 2015 Gopikrishna stood in front of a Raphael’s mural depicting Psyche and the Triumph of Galatea. In Villa Farnesina, Raphael had created one of the most beautiful and intriguing paintings in the world. It was Gopikrishna’s first trip to Europe; a trip lasted four months, aided by the scholarship instituted by a friend, Gopikrishna traveled in Italy and France. He visited most of the iconic art works that have been celebrated in art history. “I had a book at home which my father had collected. In childhood I used to look at them every weekend. In this visit I was standing in front of them, in real. This was a moment…” This was a moment that brought the mental image of Gopikrishna as a person and artist together. That was a moment of apotheosis for him. The artist in him and the person in him became one and the same. “The conflicts, if at all there were any, all had gone in that one moment,” says Gopikrishna says. He walks me into the other two rooms of his studio; one has a high cot, from one of those royal houses. The other has got an easy chair. And on the cupboard there is a small portrait of Gopikrishna as a young child, taken by the ace photographer N.L.Balakrishnan, who was a friend of his father.

(JohnyML with Gopikrishna in his studio)

The owls are still there. They are three. “This three is something very important for me. Look at that drawing, a three headed man. There in the painting you see a three headed bird. I have not yet figured out what this three means to me,” Gopikrishna says. I tell him about the triads of religions; Brahma, Vishnu, Maheshwara, Father, son and Holy Ghost, the Three Times- past, present, future, the three heads, the three eyes, the three weapons. Gopikrishna looks at me and smiles. “Owls do not need language,” he says. Yes, they just need a place to sleep. Gopikrishna feels that as a human being it is his duty to provide home for nature and its creatures. That’s how an artist worth of his salt thinks.

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The Dream Collector: Gopikrishna, the Artist of Travancore