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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

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