Mattancherry Mix, 2018
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moment of lived experience is what came to the fore in the work of some painters in the wake
of Kitaj’s call for “an art in the image of people”. That call found an answering echo in India in
the early 1980s and its conduit was the painter and critic Timothy Hyman during his stay at
the art school in Baroda as artist-in-residence. He found a climate that was far from hostile to
figurative art, although there were exponents of painterly abstraction, too (ranging from
neo-tantric to trans-national idioms) in other parts of the country. The preeminent abstract
artist living and working in Baroda was, of course, Nasreen Mohamedi, but the pristine and
rarefied geometry of lines through which her drawings envision the coordinates of another
realm on a radically different plane was light years away from the hubbub of the here and
now on which representational art came to stake its ground on the heels of Hyman’s
ambassadorial role in claiming the primacy of the human figure for painting and the
narratives in which it was inscribed. (Mohamedi’s apartness on the Indian art scene, not to
mention the solitude that accompanied the absolutism of her striving, marked her work as
something of an anomaly and the recognition of the magnitude of her achievement as an
abstract artist of the first rank only came much later, more than two decades after her
untimely death in 1990). The painter in Baroda for whom representation was not a polemical
issue (as it came to seem at the time in the light of the zealousness of some of the newly
minted partisans of the narrative impulse) was Bhupen Khakhar, since his painting from
its very inception (in the early 1970s) had made common cause with the human figure and
the social microcosm in which it was embedded. His playful, sometimes mischievous
sponsorship of kitsch, the happy promiscuity of “high” and “low” — the interfusion of what
he had gleaned from high art pictorial conventions and the vernacular idioms of popular
culture to which he was gleefully drawn — gave his representational language its particular
flavour and queerness. His pictorial audacity was identical with his formal awkwardness; his
manner could appear to be gauche but not his sincerity. Indeed, the “gaucheness” would
become a signature of his style of empathy and affect. It was he who set the precedent for
an exploration of forms of pictorial narration that were iconographically and thematically
anchored in a lived social reality. (The “magical realism” of Gulammohammed Sheikh’s
paintings, steeped as they were in art historical lore and erudition, notably of Islamic
miniature painting, offered another model of narrativizing the quotidian in small town
India.). More than any other artist at the time, it was Khakhar who made the life-world of
social outcasts and marginals – “men without qualities” – the motivating device of a poetics
of fellow-feeling and companionship. His inclusive approach and eclectic means made for
an openness to earlier legacies of figurative art, an expansive view that enabled him to shape
the particular complexion of eros that the representation of the (male) human body had for
him. And representation was, before anything else, a question of language – as it was for
Mohamedi, an artist whose work and sensibility were at the antipodes of Khakhar’s practice.
Both emerged at roughly the same time, and the attitudes that their radically opposed
bodies of work are emblematic of constitute an art historical conjuncture (as it appears in
hindsight) that is also a vantage point for viewing the subsequent orientation of art practice
in the wake of the “eccentric” positions they once occupied on the Indian scene.
The intransigent abstraction that is Mohamedi’s bequest set the bar very high and not many
artists have had the spiritual ambition or formal discipline to follow in her tracks. (The
notable exception is the work of Prabhavathi Meppayil.) Khakhar’s “descendance” is rather
more multifarious and multigenerational: Atul Dodiya (b.1959), N.S.Harsha (b.1969), Jitish