Interview - Saba Hasan

What vision do nails, words, fabric, leaves, plaster, memories and glue meshed together paint? Gopika Nath interviews abstract artist Saba Hasan, revealing the persona and politics enmeshed in her process.

GOPIKA NATH: A rapid change in India’s economic development has altered the physical and cultural landscape of our cities, but you choose not to dwell on these facets.

SABA HASAN: I am certainly aware of conflict. It doesn’t matter if it’s specific to any place. My interest is the mind, the heart - factors which are there irrespective of the location.

GN: The mind and the heart are located within physical and cultural dimensions, they always have a context.

SH: My material indicates cultural elements. I use everyday materials like jute, rope, plaster, nails or even the Urdu text. When I use a nail as opposed to a colour I am calling your attention to an alternate utterance, carrying the voice of the material itself. The experience of a nail could suggest pain, violence or construction. I love abstraction because I have the freedom to give the viewer the space to interpret my work in their own way.

GN: Who among the abstract painters have inspired you?

SH: Somnath Hore, Mark Rothko and perhaps J. Swaminathan. All three are restrained, they never over-state.

I love Rothko’s obsession with death. When I first saw his work I got goose-bumps. I felt that passage you make from our world into the other mysterious but magnetic world.

Somenath Hore, says so much with so little; reaches such depth with great simplicity and this is something I feel I have achieved.

Swaminathan brings in ordinary elements, using material that is not that different from what I use. It makes his work very powerful.

GN: Your canvasses have a heavy impasto quality using unusual materials. Can you elaborate on this and your choice of materials?

SH: I was painting monuments. The idea was not to paint walls but construct a space for reflection. I began with burning, then using plaster. The logistics of working with plaster led me to cement. I could create cracks. I wanted to bring tension onto the surface. I found some rusty nails – they seemed to have a voice. The different materials are like alphabets. It’s also about how I use them, whether I hammer the nail in or I put one beside the other as if it’s a path taking you somewhere – like when you die you go from one world to another

GN: Could you elaborate on the violence in your gestures as you work?

SH: Initially perhaps there was burning and then slashing of the canvas and then the hammering of nails. But every slash gets stitched - everything gets healed. There is an attempt to heal and find a certain resolution. This is important for me.

I really don’t believe in violence or destructive acts but in the universal Sufi thought sulh-i-kul [peace with all].

It begins with burning, then there is resolution – there is calm – may be its abstractionist– but that does not mean it is art for arts sake. I want to take a position.

GN: Is the process cathartic?

SH: Yes,

GN: Do the elements of violence and protest arise from your being a Muslim and the way the world views this today?

SH: As one of the elements, yes. I am not a believer of any formal religion and I have a split relationship with Islam.

You look at the painting and you think there is a protest, there is conflict, resistance. There are wrongs in this world, I do protest. There is also survival and a sense of calm.

People look at the work and confront deep tragedies or fears and yet they feel the work also lifts them out of that abyss.

GN: How do you deal with a process that is fragmented? [Working on multiple canvasses simultaneously]

SH: Its not as if you have one thought and another – art is my whole life and experience – not that today I am thinking that the wall is crumbling and on the next canvas I think how beautiful the flowers are; because I think about them simultaneously. One canvas has a thousand thoughts and feelings. I distil my entire life’s experiences in my work.

GN: How much time does each canvas take to complete?

SH: 6 months to 2 yrs and a life-time.

GN: Can you explain what you undergo in the process?

SH: I experience complete exhaustion – sometimes I can’t move for days after. I put my entire being into it and get drained. While I’m working my mind is not cluttered with any thoughts – certainly not about a socio-political, objective reality. I do not bother about all that; it’s my heart that’s at work. I only let emotions affect the way I work.

My expression is visceral. It could be a reaction to my mother not being well, a tragedy or some minor disturbance. It’s not that I think about these things, I just let my heart do the work. It’s more about the emotion than the cerebral

GN: The inclusion of Urdu text, you’ve said is “your personal resistance to the global wave which builds upon the cultural image of a backward, narrow minded Muslim jumping into action while wielding weapons of terror”. Are you speaking here as a Muslim?

SH: Urdu is my mother tongue; what I heard as a child and learnt the sound of. I use it for its visual beauty, rich linguistic fibre, nuanced and complex poetry and because it is an Indian language. I use words of contemporary writers, poets, family and friends as reflections of the world as we live it. I provide glimpses from our daily life, concerns of people in Kashmir, Delhi, Bangalore, tribes of Madhya Pradesh, extracts from real conversations, interviews and my letters; all collated to reflect the shared Indian experience, our basic philosophical oneness.

GN: You have said “that Art and life are for me simultaneously about the personal as well as about cultural contact, about experiencing the other.” You are married into a Hindu family, how has your art has been informed by this experience?

SH: My husband and I are not religious people. We don’t practice either of our faiths. We rebelled against tradition long before we got married. Socially however, it is interesting, because during partition, my parents chose to stay in India. They were active participants in the freedom movement. They did not believe in another nation based on religion.

Amit’s father and grandparents were from the North-west frontier. They had to forcibly leave and take refuge in Delhi; they witnessed the real trauma of partition.

When we got married, our families found healing way beyond political divides. This reaffirmed my faith in humanity and the power of love.

GN: In letters from Baton Rouge [2006] you said – “My generation has been long grappling with issues of ego, identity and heterogeneity of cultures” How do you express such issues visually?

SH: I am currently working on a project revolving around the burqa ban in Europe which just deals with the symbol of oppression, not the actual oppression; infringing upon a woman’s right to choose. I find it particularly offensive that for centuries women were coerced to hide behind the veil and today they are being coerced not to wear one. Neither the fundamentalist nor the democratic mind has learned to respect individual choice.

I have however, been most troubled by death, natural or as a result of wars. I am always confronting that point in my work. I wonder if suicide is the ultimate art performance and a grave the ultimate installation.

GN: At the end of your day, after many hours working through a rather intense and rigorous process, what do you feel?

SH: Physically I feel completely exhausted; mentally however, I am usually on a high. I am quite obsessive. The mind can’t stop ticking even after long hours in the studio.

GN: Do you have greater clarity about issues, you started out with?

SH: Clarity comes only when I immerse myself in the work. I don’t believe in thinking the entire project through, but leave room for discoveries while at work.

In addition to the studio hours, I read a lot, discuss ideas, jot my thoughts down, or just play with materials - be it plaster, paper, leaves or even sound.

Living next to the Notre Dame in Paris, I recorded the bells ringing every half hour. I’ve also recorded the ocean waves near my house in Goa and sounds in a grave yard.

GN: You have said that “Ultimately it is only we who can infuse our lives or art with new meaning”. What does art mean to you? What new meaning have you in particular tried to imbue your art with, and how and why?

SH: Art is my experience; a visceral, emotive response to the world in a somewhat dream-state with a sense of timelessness.

Each work is a complex thought construct residing in a universe beyond the palpable. This happens if I immerse myself so deeply, that my art is like meditation. At this point I feel I have successfully communicated the intended.

I depend a lot on accidents and keep an open mind to the outcome. Abstraction is best suited for this freedom and open mindedness. It allows me to deal with the complexity of my intention and frees me to develop my own signs of communication. My viewer too is a participant, in that he is free to interpret this vision with his own twist of experience.

Art is as powerful as the knowledge and instincts of the artist and the mind of the viewer.

An Exercise in Trust [Interview with Tejal Shah re performance at Vadehra Art Gallery, Delh]

As part of a group show at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, Tejal Shah invited participants to take her blind-folded on an hour long walk through the city, as an exercise in Trust. Narrowing the boundaries between art and life, she became the medium, colour and texture; her experience the canvas. ‘Feelings’ became the ‘colours’ of a life-like experience for both artist and participant.

                      

GN: It has been said that ‘Life’ is not something we discover but create in each moment. Is life the ultimate canvas for you?

TS: In some sense, life is the ultimate canvas, but for me nothing is the ultimate medium.

I engage with performance and its potentiality, exploring life-like art. Inspired by Allan Kaprow and John Cage - their thinking about life-like art and art-like art, I began exploring live performance in life-like art – what this means to the viewer and relevance of the viewer to the art, how not to de-contextualize it from life, but to engage in the process of life.

GN: Why do you work through live performance and not painting or installation?

TS: I am interested in it and living in India, the context in which one can make and produce art is limited, largely determined by commerce.

I come from a socially engaged and activist background engaging with issues of marginalization of class, religion, sexuality and gender and I wanted break down the false wall, the invisible curtain that exists between the artist and viewer - to bring myself to the viewer.

GN: Trust is intangible, yet fundamental for harmonious living. What did you hope to achieve by bringing the notion of trust as an ‘aesthetic’ into the gallery space?

TS: Trust is very loaded word. How can I explore some aspect of this through strangers? Contact was the key feature, leading to intimacy and touch, questioning the artists’ relationship with the audience.

I also wanted to work with the duality of trust and mistrust. It is relevant at this point of transition as a human society - of politics, war, colonization and technology.

GN: What does trust signify for you?

TS: There is a kind of fundamental handing over to someone else.

GN: What are the parameters by which you ascertain trust?

TS: I was sound recording the conversations which implied surveillance. Participants were not always aware of this.  I was surprised that people assumed I had completely surrendered.

Sometimes personal things were exchanged - life story experiences, where trust defined how one formed a relationship.

GN: If exploited, the exercise could have been traumatic. Was there any particular participant that tested the threshold of trust?

Tejal with Asim

TS: With Asim on the motor-bike and then also with Mary- with the kind of sharing - such openness, made me feel that there actually was great potentiality for trust between people. I also had sense of care which is related to trust.  

GN: Did anyone display a tendency to exploit the trust?

 TS: There was an artist in Beijing [where I have done this earlier]. San Juan gave me 3 choices and asked me to pick one. He wouldn’t disclose the choices. I really had to just trust, that this person is going to respect – not hurt me.

GN: What was the threshold of tolerance, beyond which you would call for help?

TS: So far I have not come across a situation where I needed to call for help. Dialogue helped as I was always in communication with the participant and could always say ‘yes’ to this and ‘no’ to that. The Gallery had the phone number of each participant and could hear us talk. The only control that I had was to choose to go along or not.

GN: You have done this exercise earlier in Beijing; what was the essential difference between that performance/interaction and this?

TS: In [Beijing] I chose no: 2. San Juan took me to an amusement part with crazy rides. Later, when we’d finished the exercise I asked what choice no: 1 would have been. He said that he would have taken me to the top of a sky skyscraper, made me stand on a parapet for 10 minutes, go down, take a photo and then come collect me.

He had decided that no: 1 would be a very dangerous thing, No: 2 – would feel very dangerous, but still safe [amusement park] and No: 3 –would be something that was not dangerous.

GN: Did this experience change your outlook in any way?

TS: I still think, ‘what if something happened’? Today if someone asks me to do something without telling me what’s happening, even in everyday things like  ‘are you free on this and this day’ my response is: ‘why are you asking, what do you want’?

GN: Your trust has become conditional?

TS: My worry is that someone is putting me in a precarious position where moving by a millimetre could be a question of life and death.

GN: Give some examples of what you and the participants in Delhi did?

TS: At the opening night someone kept asking me to guess what she looked like. She was interested in how people would perceive someone, without knowing what they looked like.

Tejal with Suruchi and Ankit

Suruchi took me to the work of Desire Machine Collective asking me to describe it. We then talked about my performance, whether it is art, not art.

A journalist took me onto the gallery terrace and asked round about questions. I am not sure whether they were meant to be metaphorical or poetic. She said: “there is an arch on a hill, like an old stone arch, its part of a ruin; [pointing me in that direction] what does it signify for me?’ I have been on that terrace many times but did not know if the arch was really there. I had no sense of what was reality and what was not. I just went with the flow.

I was also taken to Tughlaq’s tomb, Qutab minar, Greater Kailash II market [with Mary, where we went to a coffee shop and had coffee]

Tejal with Mary

GN: Were passers-by curious about your being blind-folded?

TS: I kept asking the participants ‘are people looking, how they are looking’? A foreign tourist interacted with us outside Tughlaq’s tomb. And when I was with Amber, some guy asked us in Hindi “What are you doing, what is the meaning of this?”

GN: Were your other senses heightened because you were blindfolded?

TS: Being cut off from the visual world created a dark space – a visual emptiness. It was amazing to lose the visual world and see how calm I felt - no anxiety about being blind-folded; it felt very natural. The sense of temperature was heightened. I could tell when we were going from shadow to sunlight, feel a change in temperature on my skin.

GN: In one recorded conversation you felt that the bike was titling to the left and said “I was scared, but obviously trusted him totally.” Could you elaborate?

TS: I have since re-questioned the idea. The bike felt it had titled, was almost touching the road. I felt desperate and needed to focus on one fixed point. I knew Asim a bit, but didn’t know if he was a safe rider. There was a lot of traffic, the sound was overwhelming. I lost my equilibrium. It was also getting dark and cold. It was not whether I trusted him or not, but a precarious situation.

GN: What specific nuances of trust did you discover through the interactions in Delhi?

Tejal with Mithu Sen

TS: I needed to keep talking. People are open and willing to engage and share, renewing my ability to trust. This is just the beginning.

Mithu was surprised her conversation was being recorded. She saw it as mistrust, making me question myself. The dialogue generated interest in the ethics of what is exchanged.

GN: The notion of trust is abstract, with no visual qualities. How does this come within the purview of the visual arts?

TS: There is something to hear and see and experience. I do not necessarily qualify this performance as visual art. Live art is more than even performance.

GN: We live in troubled times, trust is at a premium. Did the performance give insights that could help address this issue?

TS: Trust was built into the title of work. I am like an optimistic pessimist. I feel we can try and address these things. I have faith. People were willing to participate. It’s only when we engage that we can think about our limits.

GN: As a visual artist what do you experience when you become a performer?  

TS: I felt vulnerable. There was a sense of being exposed and of adventure too.

GN: What did the participants, your co-performers, experience?

TS: People lacked the experience of leading a non-sighted person. Some asked me to walk in front, to lead them and many walked really fast.

Some were vulnerable in the sharing they did.

GN: At the outset, who did you really trust - participants, the gallery, or some other element?

I started with a sense of complete trust in the participants. Ultimately, I do feel that it comes back to one’s self, as collaborative, sharing self.

Chronicles of Loss [Interview with Samar Jodha] Art India

The Bhopal Gas Disaster, disappearing North Eastern tribes, tiger conservation and the afflictions of the elderly are all explored by Samar Singh Jodha in his photographs. He talks to Gopika Nath about what drives him to work on marginalised communities.

Gopika Nath: From advertising and high fashion to the Bhopal Gas Tragedy – how did this shift take place? Was it a prick of the conscience?

Samar Singh Jodha: I could make things look amazing using different techniques of photography. But that wasn’t enough. My father was an economist. Talk around the dining table centred on development, marginalization, food security, drought, and water and wasteland management. We travelled with him to Africa, South America, the Far East and other South Asian countries and so I had early exposure to important social issues. As I watched our society changing, with its new material way of living, its lopsided development, the marginalization of certain communities and the lack of basic amenities, I wanted to talk about it.

In 1993, I worked on a book with Aman Nath called Jaipur: The Last Destination and then on Costumes and Textiles of Royal India with Ritu Kumar. Through these projects I saw another India. In 1994, I started working with Mobile Creches and HelpAge India. The latter led to the work I presented in 1999, namely, Ageless Mind and Spirit: Faces and Voices from the World of India’s Elderly.

G. N.: How does your approach vary from other photographers? Do you make a conscious effort to be different?

S. S. J.: Photography is only a tool. Skill is not the issue. I try to give the viewer an experience that is authentic and as close to what I have been through. In many ways, it is the antithesis of commercial photography where you have one meeting with a client, get your brief, shoot in the next few days, bill the client and your work’s done. There is no process going on in your head.

G. N.: The Ageless project involved a great deal of patient, time-consuming observation over eight years during which you documented the lives of 400 elderly people all over India. Did you get involved in the lives of the people you photographed? Did you investigate their histories?

S. S. J.: My brother and I would spend anything between one to five days explaining to them what I was doing. I took three flights to Calcutta for one portrait of a person living in a joint family because everybody had to be convinced. It had nothing to do with looking through the lens, but respecting the subject’s space.

 

G. N.: You have worked on issues like Save the Tiger, labour exploitation in the Commonwealth Games and the Bhopal Gas Tragedy – all of which are part of our history of national shame. Your installation Bhopal – A Silent Picture (2009) has been criticized for packaging ‘failed activism’ in an attractive way. What has it achieved in terms of addressing the issue?

S. S. J.: Well, in the space of three months this year, the installation has been shown at the India Art Summit in Delhi, at the Kala Ghoda Art Festival in Mumbai and at Art Chennai. No curator or gallery was interested in supporting it. I put my own money into it. An artist puts his work out there because he has something to say.

I first went to Bhopal in 2004 to work on a campaign for BBC that raised awareness about the Bhopal Gas Tragedy 20 years after the disaster. I made countless trips thereafter and kept thinking about how I could bring this issue into the public domain. In 2009, I invited Bittu Sahgal, an environment expert, and two others from an NGO in Bhopal and one survivor to speak at a public forum at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai. I did all this because I believed that people should know about these issues and respond to them.

Independent monitoring has recorded that over 95,000 people walked through the box-installation Bhopal – A Silent Picture. There was nothing to sell in there, it was purely about advocacy. It is not that the installation will make the Supreme Court change its judgement, but it will educate a whole generation of people in this country who have no idea what happened in Bhopal. As a photographer, I am using my medium to show what corporate irresponsibility can do.

 

G. N.: Your portrait of the Tai Phake tribe of Phaneng Village in Upper Assam was a subtle but dark commentary on their impending extinction. The people were the focus of this project. In Bhopal - A Silent Picture, however, you have shown the starkness of an abandoned factory. Were viewers moved by this? And did you manage to make a point about the human loss?

S. S. J.: Shockingly, dozens of people, especially students, had no idea that the Bhopal Gas Tragedy had happened in their own country. Many urban Indians now live like Americans do – a certain section of the young population has started living very insularly. They only know what is happening in their region and nothing beyond. Many said, “Thanks for bringing this here. Can you bring it to our university?” As a photographer, I have used my medium to increase awareness of crucial issues.

 

G. N.: You are not a dispassionate observer. Your documentation of the Burj Khalifa project in Dubai, like your work in Phaneng, involved months of interaction and observation. Do spaces and people interest you differently?

S. S. J.: Human suffering or celebration does come into play when you are capturing an issue or an event. One has to deal with the human condition. But art is not about going into other people’s living rooms. It is about issues that get sidelined. My work is about how a certain consumerist way of life dominates our so-called development or, for that matter, double-digit GDP growth.

My Through The Looking Glass series (1997) was one of the first environmental portraits project which ‘excluded’ humans. The project provided a counterpoint to the various visual depictions of living spaces in India found in glossy magazines and coffee table books that emphasized stylized order and harmony.  One of the things it did was document the now-pervasive presence of television in Indian life.

G. N.: Why did you choose not to show the people of Bhopal when the gas tragedy caused physical abnormalities, transforming them in terrible ways?

 

S. S. J.: I did photograph people. I went to hospitals and found deformed third generation babies. I also worked in communities that live around the plant. These images would have been easy to sell but to me it was important how human dignity was preserved in the portrayals. I wanted the general public to experience a space they would never have access to. The plant has been sealed for the past 27 years. There is still a chemical residue there and snakes too. Hardly anybody’s been there.

G. N.: Presenting the installation in a container used for the transportation of industrial goods is a smart way of accusing corporations of environmental neglect. To go back to a question I raised earlier, does it speak, however, of the enormity of the human tragedy? 

S. S. J.: The ‘Box’ is at an angle and inside, there is total darkness, recreating that midnight in Bhopal when the trains were pulling into the station. People were gasping and running, and they had no idea why they could not breathe. The five photographs inside the box are lenticular images of what they would have seen through the train windows – images of the factory that was the site of the disaster. As you walk through the box you lose your balance. I had thought of covering the box with a satellite image of the factory, but eventually, put only the information about the chemical composition of the gases, the dates of the disaster and the number of the people who died, on it.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum in New York has a room with just a pile of shoes. When you enter this space something intense happens to you. Instead of the pictures of the dead men and women you have only a heap of their sorry possessions. I believe in art that leaves room for the viewer to engage.

Review of Phaneng:  A Journey Into Personal Engagement
http://gopikanathartviews.blogspot.in/2009/03/journey-into-personal-engagement-samar.html

The Sorrows of the City of Joy - Leena Kejriwal [review]

Leena Kejriwal’s installation of photographs, Entropic Sites, curated by Shaheen Merali at Shrine Empire Gallery, New Delhi, from the 21st of January to the 21st February, 2011, presented an intriguing study of the city of Kolkata. Superimposed photographs were hung from the floor to the ceiling. Speaking voices from a documentary on human trafficking jarred with their American accents. Hung light bulbs in the centre of the room evoked an atmosphere rather than illuminate the works on the walls packed with images of Subhash Chandra Bose.

The coloured photographs were re-worked to create caricatures or ghostly ‘absent presences’ of people. An empty cubbyhole added to this, while the disembodied voices created a sense of displacement. Babu on the Terrace augmented this sense of dislocation, where a Babu was seen on a Victorian terrace overlooking a crowded, middle-class residential complex. Dressed in dhoti and kurta, wearing a supercilious expression, he seemed to look into the horizon. The sky above was covered with menacing predatory birds. Kejriwal probably intended to depict the arrogant Babu preying upon a disputable inheritance and through the solarized images she probably intended to comment on the carelessness of the upper class Bengali gentry.

However, the inclusion of a documentary on prostitution in the show confused both the intent and content. Its pertinence was lost thanks to the overloaded commentary. If Kejriwal intended to evoke guilt, she failed, revealing instead, that such complex situations require greater objectivity and sensitivity in selection and presentation.

Manjit Bawa - Readings, edited by Ina Puri [Book Review]

Book Title:      ‘Readings’ Manjit Bawa                  

Edited and
compiled by:       Ina Puri
Published by:      Lalit Kala Akademi,

                               New Delhi ,2010

Paperback 
220pages 
Size                           18 x23.75 cms
Full Colour
ISBN: 81-87507-42-X 
Price:                    Rupees 1,000/-

 

Manjit Bawa was an individualist; an artist and human being who lived life on his own terms. Through his art, he brought into play modern modes of expression in painting, while also referencing the Indian aesthetic. “Being a turbaned Sikh from an ordinary middle-class family was daunting enough but to strike out against the prevalent forces of Cubism and the iconic Klee was to really ask for big trouble”[i].But he did venture out; creating a new figure, a new landscape and spoke in a new voice.

Art in its essence is an experience; a silent communion between a viewer and an artist’s canvas. Its understanding matures as we do. The simplicity of this communion has become compounded in the crowding of urban life, where time is at a premium and such contemplation a luxury. Today, for most people, art is either a commodity to invest in or too challenging an intellectual activity to participate in. For some, art has been reduced to being just a piece of decoration.

Each artist however, spends a life-time devising an iconography that speaks most evocatively of their thoughts and feelings. This complex language that encompasses all dimensions of their being is not easy to decipher. In Manjit Bawa’s own words[ii] his work was “a continuous process that takes up almost all my waking hours. Even when I sleep, I have experienced visions in my dreams that are related to my painting activities….. I wanted to create my own style….to find a new idiom and a new language. In every sense, this was a stumbling block that needed to be tackled with immense patience and fortitude[iii]”.

Many books about artists become technical and theoretically complex, excluding rather than including the lay viewer. ‘Readings, Manjit Bawa’ compiled and edited by Ina Puri, published by Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, reaches out to us through essays, interviews, conversations and reminisces by Manjit Bawa himself and other artists, providing a unique insight into the artist and his oeuvre. It is not didactic, but eclectic; each reader is thus able to formulate their own ideas, to look at the artist’s canvas through these perceptions. The text is bi-lingual. There are writings in both Hindi and English. Ina Puri’s close association with Bawa’s art reveals itself through this selection, providing insight into the man, his persona and what made his art; the people that influenced him and how childhood memories led to the cow and goat becoming leitmotifs.  Prayag Shukla [in Hindi], sums up that the animals and birds and all the different emotions and feelings that Bawa brought to life on his canvasses that had not been seen before in Indian Art and “in par ab Manjit ki ek vishisht chaap hai” that the seasons and their colours have“apne he vishisht aakaron aur rangon mein kramash dhaal liya.”

Informative and refreshing to read, the book is illustrated with over forty full colour plates, photographs of the artist and some of his drawings. A full list of collectors is appended at the back of the book, but regrettably none of the works are dated. It would also have been useful to include a small biographical note on each of the authors published in this compilation. A comprehensive biography of Bawa tells us about his numerous exhibitions and art camps he attended. We also learn that Bawa curated shows of Indian Art in Syria, Egypt and Australia, was a founder member on the Committee for Communal Harmony, organized peace marches during the anti-Sikh riots and more.

Essays by Ranjit Hoskote, Ashok Vajpeyi, Gayatri Sinha, Richard Bartholomew, Ina Puri, Geeti Sen, S. Kalidas and Madan Gopal Singh bring some in-depth analysis and critical insights, while painter Krishen Khanna, a friend through the decades, reminisces of his early encounters with Bawa. J Swaminathan, friend and fellow painter, does a quick summary of the evolution of the modern Indian art movement from Amrita Sher-Gil to Tyeb Mehta, stating that “Manjit’s figure is at once an assertion of a tradition and its negation” owing hardly anything to the realism of the West, suggesting instead a linkage with the Pahari Miniature tradition.

 A year before the riots in Ayodhya, Bawa wrote an article for the Times of India which provides a glimpse of the artist’s unusual perception of things. He also brought attention to the fact that most people agitating in the name of Ram were quite ignorant about the Ramayana. They were mostly “sons of shopkeepers and petty merchants…. seething with frustration”. He arrived at this conclusion, not through some obscure intellectual analysis, but by engaging with people on the ground: one human being to another.          

The book has diverse material on Bawa’s evolution as an artist, his engagement with the world, involvement with communal issues, work as a curator and artist and also how he encouraged younger, aspiring artists.  His preoccupation with various dimensions of being, both physical and spiritual, all find place in these readings. In a talk given to art students at Shantiniketan he ends, with accrediting Ina Puri for motivating him to think anew and sums up with a Sufi saying: “simply trust…… do not the petals flutter just like that? Trust life….” He was well versed in the Hindu epics and could challenge the young protestors outside the Babri Masjid on the Ramayan just as easily as he could quote from the Gita, even though he “found it difficult to subscribe to many of these values.” An independent thinker, he questioned things. This is brought to life in this book, as in his art.

The interpretations of Manjit Bawa’s art are many and all equally illuminating.  Hoskote finds a “jagged edge of eroticism and risk in an intimate battle of beak and dagger, the swelling tongue of the bull, the tumescence of the goat” adding that “Bawa is more significantly preoccupied with the sheerness of pleasure at the edge of language.” While Kamala Kapoor sites that “Bawa’s images…. appear to reflect his desire to intervene in a world burdened with over-rationality, as he draws forms in the air that undulate and reform into pliable boneless shapes.”In a small note of personal appreciation, the author David Davidar makes an interesting observation about Bawa’s use of colour, where “artwork so vibrantly alive in hues of yellow, red, carmine, electric blue, green and gold was tamed, cooled and recombined through some strange alchemy such that a flaming red soothed the eyes, a glaring yellow could alleviate a migraine headache and the startling blues suggested a cool draught of water.”

The book may not represent an exhaustive research and analysis of the artist’s work, but it is the kind of book that makes Manjit Bawa and his art accessible to a large section of people. We become acquainted with the man behind the images on his canvas, from whom readers will draw hope, solace and inspiration at many levels.  The mix of analytical essays with reminisces, interviews, exhibition reviews and writings by the artist himself, give this book a unique place:  useful to the student of art, to artists, to the lay public and also the scholar. It is the first book in the series called ‘Readings’ of writings on artists and sculptors introduced by Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi.

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[i] Manjit Bawa Pg 65

[ii] Shantiniketan 1998

[iii] Manjit Bawa Pg 95