In Search of Travancore’s Forgotten Craftsmen

In the 1970s, during our visits to Palkulangara in Trivandrum, where many of our relatives lived, I used to spend a lot of time in one of my maternal aunt's home, gazing at the wooden almirahs with glass doors that showcased many artistic wonders: gods, goddesses, elephants, and tigers fighting with snakes, exquisitely carved in ivory and wood. I craved them as toys, but only got some half-done miniature elephants in teak wood. My mother told me that my uncle had a business in carved ivory and wooden items.

When I was looking for a book titled The Forgotten Atelier by the Trivandrum-based young conservation architect Sharat Sunder Rajeev, I came across another book by him, about which I had never heard before. Titled The King's Craftsmen: History of the Ivory Carvers of Thiruvananthapuram, this book was published by the Kerala Council for Historical Research (KCHR) in 2016. I did not think for a moment before ordering it from Amazon because I thought I could get some leads into my childhood experiences, besides feeding my interest in art history.

I have to tell you this: a history book cannot be more of a page-turner than this one. Though the production quality is not as good as the other history tomes from established publishing houses, this 300-page book is laid out in the best way possible, making the complicated history of the ivory carvers of erstwhile Travancore eminently readable.

In Sharat, I found a great storyteller, like another young historian obsessed with the yesteryears of Travancore, Manu S. Pillai. As an aside, Manu has a love-hate relationship with the descendants of the former kingdom for his ruthless takes on the palace revolutions and conspiracies of the 19th century, while Sharat has been a darling of the palace and its current members. More interestingly, these two brilliant young historians collaborate whenever possible to walk into the nuances of the architecture, culture, and politics of Travancore. You may see their collaborations on YouTube.

The Viswakarmas functioned as guilds, and they were invited from the 18th century onwards from both the north and south of Travancore. Even before that, artisans from various guilds were making slow inroads into power centres where they could find patrons and material conditions that allowed their crafts to flourish and helped them eke out a sustainable livelihood. In Sharat's book, we find the northern influx into Attingal along with the adoption of princesses from Kolaswarupam, and the influx of southerners from various parts of present-day Tamil Nadu, such as Tanjore, Madurai, and Kanchipuram.

It is difficult to review the chronology of these craftspeople, mainly because there are several overlaps of patronage as well as guilds through locational shifts and marriages. There were also schisms between them based on their preferred language of communication. The northerners spoke Malayalam and the southerners Tamil. The latter felt they were better and the former felt they were superior, only to remain divided for a long time. But slowly, they started moving closer through work, guild participation, apprenticeship, patronage, business ventures, marriage, and even through legislation in the mid-20th century.

Through a thorough examination of palace documents, gazettes, and published as well as oral histories, Sharat narrates the social and material conditions that made the artisanal castes lose their early 'Brahmin-hood' and later regain it through patronage and proximity to the power centres. Material conditions determined the hierarchies from within, as the goldsmiths thought they were highly placed on the caste ladder compared to those who worked in wood, stone, and metal. But when ivory came onto the scene, we see the craftsmen crossing borders, employing their skills, reinvesting their talent, and altering and redeploying their tools for the new and expensive medium of ivory.

Sharat gives us a picture of ivory art in India and the origins of the ivory trade through various ports of India. By 1977, ivory works were banned and dealing in ivory became a punishable offence. Artisans migrated to various other mediums such as sandalwood and expensive and durable woods in general. They brought the same finesse of their ivory works into these alternative mediums and created wonderful works of art. When patronage weakened and the demand for oil paintings and portraiture increased with the advent of Raja Ravi Varma in Travancore, many erstwhile craftsmen became portrait painters, commercial artists, backdrop painters for film studios, cut-out artists for advertisements, and finally formal art directors.

What amused me was something that I read between the lines. Sharat studies the number of artisans working in ivory craft and their castes, and elaborates that there were craftspeople from other castes, both the high and lower castes, like the Ezhavas. But their numbers were very small. Sharat underlines how the Viswakarma and Ezhava were two castes that stood together, often lived in mutual proximity, and came together during times of distress. Ezhavas too entered ivory and craft practice and business as they apprenticed themselves under Viswakarma masters. But it is to be noted that the Viswakarma masters, who were the heads of guilds/kudis and had been reluctant to impart craft secrets and generational knowledge to other castes, started responding to the changing times and embraced artistically inclined youngsters from other communities to impart the craftsmanship.

Something interesting happened when Ravi Varma became prominent as an artist and the number of painters from other communities started increasing, especially in the Ravi Varma school/style of painting. The list that Sharat gives has mostly artists from the upper castes, especially from the Nair community. This happened mainly because they could get direct access to oil painting techniques, thanks to the proximity they had to the artists who constituted the inner circle of Ravi Varma's friends and disciples. With Ravi Varma leaving Travancore, as Visakham Tirunal showed scant respect for him, the upper-caste artists became prominent in Travancore. Definitely, they couldn't really outdo the Viswakarma painters in numbers or quality. Unfortunately, the former got documented and the latter got scattered beyond recovery. But I am sure Sharat has done his best to recover them from oblivion in his second book, which I am yet to read.

Trivandrum Fine Arts College is the last form of what started off as a Danta Appis (Dental Office or Office for Ivory Works). We see all the Viswakarma masters and craftsmen becoming the early gurus, guides, and teachers in this establishment, which grows into the Shri Moolam Shashtyabdi Memorial Institute, then a technical school, then the earlier form of an arts and crafts school, and finally the Fine Arts College. I find something that perhaps Sharat did not see in this evolution. In the mid-70s, ivory was banned in Kerala, and it was during the same time that the strike for upgrading the technical art and crafts school into a fine arts college started and eventually succeeded.

An eminently readable book for those who are interested in the general history of Travancore and the particular history of its art scene and the makers, movers, and shakers of it.

JohnyML

Contemporary Baroque and the Craft of Painting

A work of art makes a camera out of a human. It makes him move closer, farther away and around it to get a better grasp of the form, theme and technique that have been employed in creating it. Often, one moves through three different distances when there is a large painting on the wall. From far away, he gets an overall feel and narrative (if any) of the work. From the middle distance, he sees the volumes of the images and hints of textures. And from the close or closest ground, he can see the breadth, depth and variety of textures and techniques. This, in fact, changes a figurative/narrative painting into an absolute abstract.

Walking into the LTC Gallery of Bikaner House, where ‘Odyssey’, a solo exhibition of Poonam Bhatnagar, curated by Uma Nair, opened yesterday, in the first hall itself, from the above-mentioned third distance I saw the image of Lord Hanuman giving a head massage to a young girl/boy sitting on the ground. Frantically, I rambled through my knowledge of stories from the epics and found nothing to match the subject of the painting. I walked to the middle ground to take a better look and, lo, I saw that the monkey god, in his avuncular avatar, was not giving a head massage but blessing the young ascetic in the Indian way, by placing both hands on his/her head. I heaved a sigh of relief and apologized to my own self for making a humongous misinterpretation in the beginning.

Yes, art could deceive the viewer with its own craftiness, or the lack of it. Poonam Bhatnagar has a well-developed technique of using acrylic paints in various densities on the canvas in order to create the textural surface that, in turn, becomes the contributing unit of the intended narrative. Bhatnagar has been experimenting with this textured style for almost two decades, exhibiting less and working more, initially using the mehndi dispensing cone as her primary device to employ colour, later to be replaced with direct application from the tubes and other contraptions that she herself has developed for the purpose.

Together, these colours and textures make very visually ‘rich’ paintings, with an assortment of themes such as landscapes, imaginary scenes from the Mauryan period, the theme of enlightenment pivoting on Buddhist lore as symbolic representations, and Hindu mythological stories, besides having a set of sublime landscapes. As I said, they are visually rich and give away an impression of embroidery work done on silk, or perhaps that was my first impression, besides the misadventure with Hanuman ji. To put it in other words, it is a variety of paintings that shows craftswomanship more than painterly qualities. These paintings of Bhatnagar, in this sense, are well-crafted pictorial relief works made on well-primed and well-framed canvases.

Is it a negative judgement? Not at all, but it is a kind of painting where the textural build-up functions as pixels of a digital image. This laborious and time-taking working process needs patience and personal involvement from the artist, which, interestingly, hinders the practice of having studio assistants who could ‘fill in’ the gaps, take further the notations or develop the cues given by the artist. I do not think that Bhatnagar uses an assistant to make her works. Without making any effort to say whether having an assistant is a wrong practice and not having one is something commendable, I proceed to say that Bhatnagar’s works belong to a decorative category of painterly craft, which demands individual involvement, meditation and overall personal evolution.

Let me put this seemingly condescending view into perspective. Painting has, in a way, become a collective, contributory and collaborative process for many artists who use painting as a conceptual practice rather than an individual spiritual creative pursuit. But there are many other artists who are lone wolves of the genre and still hunt alone and howl alone in the moonlit nights of creativity. They do not allow any kind of collaboration or assistance from outside, though at times they use mechanical devices in executing the works. Such singular pursuits have now become a ‘craft’ or a protected practice whose secrets are never imparted through teaching or apprenticeship.

Bhatnagar belongs to this tribe of artists who pursue a lonely path. In the days of technological revolution such as ours, with the time given for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) to take over human endeavours, and also at a time when moderation and slow pacing are demanded by the industry leaders who work on the same technology, the art practice of Bhatnagar and her ilk would slowly turn into a ‘craft’ that needs protection and preservation. This will be a dying form of art soon, like ivory carving. When AGI is able to do anything that a human does, art done by an individual artist will become a ‘rare’ product, even negligible in the context of AGI.

I could see Bhatnagar’s works as crafted paintings not just because of the AGI doomers’ attitude but also because she fails, in a way, to choose the right ‘subject’ for her paintings. This may sound a bit confusing because she has chosen, to the best of her understanding, a range of topics that have been the flavour of the time for the last fifteen years or so. She de-historicizes history by making it look beautiful and without any conflict, like a straw painting, but preciously executed with a smattering of gold and silver colours and all the possible colours of precious stones.

Bhatnagar neutralizes the historical conflicts that have existed between Hindu mythologies and Buddhist ideas since ages and flattens them under the general aspect of personal spirituality. That clearly shows that the artist is like a craftsperson without any inclination towards the political or historical understanding of the times in which her art is produced. She repeats the craft of relief painting that she has successfully created for her purpose in subjects that have different historical and political quotients. When that is overlooked, these works become ‘beautiful’ and ‘interesting’ and ‘fabulous’ paintings, which we, the art historians, call contemporary baroque.

One word to the curator. A curator is never a compere or an anchor of an exhibition opening that she curates. She should stick to her brief, as in explaining her curatorial take on the works and a little bit about her personal affinities with the artist in question and her works of art. When a curator like Uma Nair goes into compere mode, the artists who commission curators will think that compering is a part of curating, which obviously is not. Curators should not become comperes and programme anchors. Even if they do, they should limit it to the generic, ‘Welcome to the dignitaries... and when I chose to curate this artist...’

JohnyML

‘Vision & Landscape: Aquatints of India’ by Thomas and William Daniell

 

Yesterday I visited ‘Vision & Landscape: Aquatints of India’ by Thomas and William Daniell, the uncle-and-nephew duo who travelled across India between 1786 and 1793. Presented by DAG at the Ballroom of Bikaner House, the exhibition brings together 144 aquatints developed from the paintings, drawings and watercolours they made during their travels.

The makeshift gallery space has been spruced up adequately with lights and panels, and the display is elegant and erudite. My only problem was with the chandeliers hanging from the ceiling—part of the heritage paraphernalia of Bikaner House—which shed more light than necessary and made photography rather difficult because of the reflections on the glass. Now, is it a problem of the glass frames or a problem of the chandeliers? Either way, it is a minor distraction from an otherwise excellent show.

Calcutta was the capital of British India at the time, and itinerant artists generally arrived there first before undertaking journeys into the rest of the country, often with a retinue of servants, elephants and soldiers.

Travel was slow and arduous. Emile Eden, who came to India almost half a century after the Daniells, noted in letters to her sister in London that their maximum mileage in a day was around twenty miles—and that too if they started before sunrise. Depending on the terrain, the journey could involve boats, palanquins, elephants, horses and walking, with the day divided into schedules to avoid the intense noon heat.

The Daniells followed a similarly demanding route: from Calcutta through the northern plains, Bihar, Delhi, present-day Uttar Pradesh and Himachal, and then west and south through the Maratha, Mysore and Madras presidencies.

What emerged from these journeys is an extraordinary visual record of late-18th-century India.

The 144 aquatints in this exhibition were laboriously and meticulously developed from the paintings, drawings and watercolours the Daniells produced on their travels. Their subjects range from monuments, temples—often described by them as ‘pagodas’—and forts to administrative buildings, Mughal landmarks and medieval architectural remains.

The Daniells had an eye for detail. They did not merely record what was architecturally or aesthetically impressive. Their works contain information that is topographical, historical, military and demographic. Soldiers who accompanied them for protection appear in some works, as do the labourers who carried their equipment.

There are also wonderfully self-reflexive moments. At Ellora and Elephanta, for instance, one can see one of the Daniells making an on-the-spot drawing while the other depicts the scene from another vantage point. The act of looking, recording and representing becomes part of the image itself.

But the detail that stayed with me most is from Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu.

The magnificent rock-cut panel depicting Bhagiratha’s penance to bring the Ganges down from the heavens contains, almost inconspicuously in one corner, a cat imitating the penance of the sage.

And the Daniells noticed it.

That tiny cat is perhaps a perfect reminder of what makes these works so fascinating. They were looking at monuments, landscapes and histories, but they were also attentive to the little things that made those places alive.

If you are interested in history, architecture, art, travel and India’s topography in the late 18th century, this is a show worth spending time with.

‘Vision & Landscape: Aquatints of India’ — Thomas and William Daniell

DAG, Ballroom, Bikaner House

JohnyML

The Grammar of a Life: Kanchan Chander’s Artistic Journey

 

“When you come, remind me to give you a copy of the book,” Kanchan Chander said while chatting on WhatsApp. She was inviting me to her solo exhibition, The Grammar of the Self, presented by Gallery Ragini and curated by Kishore Singh at the LTC Gallery, Bikaner House, New Delhi. As usual, the devil in me typed the answer: “When you see me in the gallery, please remember that you are supposed to give me a copy of your book.”

A pause. Then came the answer: “I am seventy. Sometimes I forget. I want you to have the book.”

Kanchan Chander, seventy years old—my God, I thought. I have seen artists whom I met in their prime turn grey, then white and fragile. Then I realise that I, too, am growing older. I couldn’t believe that she had turned seventy, or was about to, because when I met her for the first time, thirty-one years ago, she already had grey hair and a mature way of conducting herself in the art scene.

Kanchan has been around in the art scene for nearly half a century, it seems. She entered the art world from East Germany, where her diplomat father was posted. During the Emergency in 1975, as a young girl, she joined the Delhi College of Art. Soon after, her father was posted to Chile, which took her to Santiago University, where she pursued art studies for three years before returning to Delhi and graduating. A scholarship took her to Paris, where, at the École des Beaux-Arts, Kanchan studied printmaking and got married. The marriage did not last. She brought up her son, Palav Chander, himself an artist of some repute in the art scene.

Nobody leaves the gallery without asking, “Where were these works, Kanchan?” And she has a stock answer for all: “In the drawers, safely stashed away, only to be found now.”

For many, like me, Kanchan is an artist who makes “torsos” in various forms, formats and mediums. It has exasperated many, and when she switched to the sequined immortals, such as Madhubala and Marilyn Monroe, art lovers felt good. I think the reason was that nobody knew the trajectory of her artistic development. Many thought that she drew those torsos because she did not know how to draw.

Anyone who speaks conceptually, especially after the success of the Raqs Media Collective, is often met with the assumption that “yeh banda ko drawing nahi aata” (“This guy does not know how to draw”). When Kanchan explained her torsos with some inclination towards feminist theories, as she was keeping company with some firebrands in the genre, we all thought perhaps theories would help her eventually, the way Nalini Malani or Zarina Hashmi were “saved”, despite our lack of visual information regarding their formative years and exhaustive drawing experiences.

With The Grammar of the Self, we encounter a different Kanchan, whose open-ended torsos now fall into place as we see the archival material drawn from her stock of early drawings, prints, paintings and printmaking matrices. All of this is exhibited in one “look back in fondness” exhibition, given an appropriate curatorial shape by Kishore Singh.

Perhaps the exhibition should be called The Autobiography of the Self, but then anything said about the self is autobiography. So the alteration does not stand, but the meaning of the intent does. The show as a whole provides the topographies of aesthetics and craft that the artist has travelled through over the last fifty years.

From the earliest drawings of family members to the self-portraits of sudden self-awareness, one could understand how the young artist knew she was worthy of her chosen vocation. The more she drew, the more she archived. Tragedies, personal and familial, altered her images but never her focus. She found a special camaraderie with her mother, which she expressed through drawings and etchings. After her brother’s accidental death, her father became a loner, and she witnessed his weariness and pain through her works. She held on to these works for a long time for us to see, and they are now part of the exhibition.

Chance encounters with Bhuta Aradhana of the tribals at an exhibition held at the Delhi Crafts Museum brought a different thrust to her work, as she began experimenting with raw divinities in their frontal forms. Before that, her Parisian experiences had turned her into a caricaturist of sorts, transforming faces into noses growing out of faces and frames, giving them a comic, phallic presence. For her, these were symbols of nosey people and also of those who keep their noses up in the air to show their superiority. But autobiographically, it was also a take on the nose of her own spouse.

Kanchan painted and printed loneliness in the way Käthe Kollwitz had done. Her ideal in the beginning was Henry Moore, whose voluptuous sculptures found resonances in the bodies familiar to her. The motherliness of a round body and the genetic transference of the same to her may also have indirectly led her to portray her protagonists as well-endowed women, but drowned in sorrow and loneliness.

That does not mean that Kanchan has portrayed only sad women and men. After a certain stage, she moved from the representational aspects to the techniques of representation in various graphic mediums, which she has perfected, as the works in the exhibition demonstrate.

There is a conscious avoidance of the torso series, though an experimental row of works is presented, in which the female body turns into a horse-like torso, with suggestions of a spine—something that reminds one of the works of Atul Dodiya.

The exhibition is accompanied by a book, mentioned at the outset, which includes an interview with Kanchan by the curator himself, apart from his introductory curatorial essay, recognisably carved out of the interview. Senior artist Waswo has written about the lonely female figures, while Lina Vincent has detailed the techniques Kanchan has used in her works. There is also an article titled “Body as Archive” by Anita Jung.

The show closes on 18 September.

JohnyML

Chronicles of the Unseen: Labour, Rust and Vanishing Worlds

 

After an overdose of familiar modernism at the overground galleries of Triveni Complex, I always prefer to have an antidote at the Art Heritage Gallery in the basement, where good shows are often showcased with less glamour and glitter. The latest one, which opened yesterday (where I was an accidental visitor, as I generally avoid openings), is by Avijit Dutta, a young artist from Howrah, Kolkata, with a to-the-face title, Chronicles of (Un)seen Labour(er).

Avijit is a confident young artist whose style reminds the viewer of Mexican murals, a bit of Sudhir Patwardhan and, more so, Vikrant Bhise, the Jai-Bheem-themed-fame artist who prefers to wear upper-class linens and paints in Ambedkarite blues—very close to the sartorial philosophy of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, who retorted to the skeptics with the jibe, “Mr. Gandhi had clothes to shed, my community didn’t have anything.”

Hailing from Howrah, known as the Sheffield of the East during the colonial years, Avijit takes the din of this hub of small-scale industries, where working-class men and women are mired in dust, dirt and sweat. He paints them on paper using locally available materials such as iron dust, brick powder and local mitti (soil), all amply laid on a surface carefully created with acrylic colours. He creates grids with iron dust, showing a rusting landscape and the general dilapidation of hopes. But people still work on these sites, oblivious to the changes taking place all over the world, without even thinking once that they may be rendered redundant in the coming days of technological innovations that would replace them with skilful bots.

Generally, we do not see the milling workers who walk among us, as we are also busy in our own worlds of reels, news, untruths, half-truths, desperations, pains and ambitions. Draped in rag-like scrubs, their existence is so marginalised that even their body odour is no longer felt. In the shrinking locales of small-scale industries, these men and women toil day in and day out, only to eke out a meagre living and endure long-lasting ailments. But Avijit sees them, chronicles their unsung sagas and gives them the dignity of existence through his works.

The choice of paper as his pictorial surface should be much thought about, I should say. There are chances of these works getting oxidised because of the ferric pigment that he amply uses to build the images. It may be a subconscious decision to make the works performative in nature and with nature, through slow deterioration. But the curator assures us that they are well layered with chemical varnish treatment to preserve their initial quality and ensure long-term endurance.

The animals and humans are shown as animated characters, with their limbs in motion through multiple representations, as in a playful take on cubism and kinesthesis-ism, giving them “life” amidst hardships. Avijit must also be thinking about the multi-limbed goddess Durga, made in various parts of Kolkata (primarily in Kumartuli) and displayed, all decked up fabulously, during the Durga Puja days. He transmogrifies the lowly humans into divinities who could perform the impossible in the direst of times.

All these characters of Avijit are seen hoodwinked by a plastic bag called Thonga. It is a sort of autobiographical reference because his father mass-produces these plastic bags for local use and local import. When the heads are not covered with these plastic bags, Avijit deliberately obfuscates the eyes of the protagonists in order to protect their individuality, which otherwise seems insignificant in the eyes of the people around them.

Avijit creates his works amidst the din of these unseen and unsung small-scale industries, which would soon be replaced by sophisticated machinery and robotic workforces. In every industry, there is always a clarion call for upskilling of labourers, but we all forget the fact that there are several skills that have become second nature to many workers through prolonged years of working—skills that cannot simply be upskilled or downskilled.

Caught in the limbo of tumultuous technological changes, these workers would slowly become like floppy disks, handcarts and man-pulled rickshaws. If not in the near future, then in the distant one, perhaps these chronicles will remain only in Avijit’s works.

A show worthy of your weekend outings.

JohnyML

The Many Lives of Cubbon Park

 

“When someone has a few hours in hand before their flight, they call me to have a walkthrough at Lalbagh, and I oblige. It has become a routine now,” says Suresh Jayaram, a well-known art historian and the botanical historian and chronicler of Bengaluru. Suresh wears many hats; he is an art and culture columnist, a crusader for environmental protection and, above all, the founder-director of 1ShantiRoad, a famous address in the Indian art scene, which is at once an idea lab, residency and exhibition space.

Cubbon Park: Citizens’ Perspectives and Many Visions for the Future is Suresh’s second outing with Bengaluru’s botanical gardens as its central theme. He published a book on Lalbagh, Bangalore’s Lalbagh: A Chronicle of the Garden and the City, in 2021. If that book was about the botanical variety of Lalbagh and its history, the present book on Cubbon Park is built around conversations he had with twenty-six Bengaluru citizens, including a gardener, whose lives have been intertwined with Cubbon Park, hailed as one of the lungs of the Silicon Valley of the South.

Suresh comes from a family with a horticultural tradition. He imbibed stories about Bengaluru’s flora from the stories told by his grandmother, and when he established 1ShantiRoad after his art history studies in Baroda, he became a regular at Lalbagh, befriending other regular morning walkers, joggers, officials, gardeners, lovers and many others. He did not know when he had turned himself into a self-assigned tour guide of Lalbagh. “It happened when people from all over the world and India started coming to 1ShantiRoad. I took them to Lalbagh for morning walks and started telling them about the botanical life and history of the park. Sooner than later, I became an ‘unofficial’ storyteller of the park,” Suresh smiles.

Cubbon Park is a different story, rather more conscious, politically oriented and socially concerned. Established by the British in an undulating stretch full of bamboo groves and water bodies, the history of Cubbon Park goes back more than three centuries. Slowly and steadily, institutions of governance such as courts, assembly halls, hospitals, colleges and roads grew in and around it, each time the park adjusting to the demands of a growing city, in effect collapsing the ecological balance.

According to Suresh, as he reveals in this book, Cubbon Park has been a haven for those socially ostracised for their sexual orientations, as well as for sex workers, destitute people, beggars, tired people, loners, protesters, students, lovers, reel makers, joggers, morning walkers, yoga practitioners, amateur photographers, art students, theatre artists, poets, hawkers and dreamers. One could always see a cross-section of Bengaluru’s urban demography at Cubbon Park.

Things have been changing for many years now. Governments have been making demands on the park’s land, initially by restricting human activities and later through forced constructions. Suresh sketches out how this park has been abused through constant surveillance and restrictive measures. He highlights these issues through twenty-five interviews and shows how each interview has contributed towards the protection of the ‘rights of Cubbon Park’ as a people’s park.

While reading the views of Arvind Narrain, Madhu Bhushan & Shakun Doundiyakhed, Ekta Mital & Angarika G, Dilip Da Cunha, Sheela Gowda, Viswanath Srikanth, Akkai Padmashali, Leo Saldana, Pushpamala N, Vijay Thiruvady, Sneha Visakha, Suneetha Kumar, Nanjappa, Kavitha Krishnamoorthy, Rachel Lee, S Umesh Kumar, Oman Eappen, Surekha Sharada, Naresh Narasimhan, Jasmeen Patheja, Bimal Desai, Janaki Nair, Chiranjiv Singh, Indu & Gautham Krishnan, Priya Chetty and Ankit Bhargava, we come to know that a park is not just a park but a microcosm of the world, with varying issues that need urgent addressal with concern and care.

This book is a must-read for those who love their ‘parks and gardens’ and protected greenery. This book is also a must-read for the Chief Minister of Kerala, Mr. V. D. Satheesan, who has taken a decision to relocate the historic Trivandrum Zoo from its present location to a remote river shore.

JohnyML

Art Travels Before Time: Bhupen Khakhar and Salman Rushdie's Portrait

(The Moor by Bhupen Khakhar)

Recently, while watching Margaret Hoover’s Firing Line interview with Salman Rushdie, I was struck by something that had little to do, at first sight, with what Rushdie was saying. He spoke at length about Knife, the film and book dealing with the 2022 assassination attempt on his life, and also about the continuing tragedy of Israel and Palestine. But what held my attention was the camera angle.

Rushdie was shown in three-quarter profile. His damaged right eye was covered by a tinted lens, while his good left eye appeared behind an ordinary transparent lens. The effect was strangely theatrical. For a moment, he looked almost comically like a pirate. Yet that dark piece of glass was impossible to ignore. It became a constant visual reminder of the stabbing in 2022, of the eye he lost, and of the violence that had permanently altered his face.

And suddenly I thought of Bhupen Khakhar.

Khakhar, a close friend of Rushdie, painted the celebrated portrait Salman Rushdie (‘The Moor’) in 1995, around the time of the publication of Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. The painting is now part of the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London. What struck me, looking back at it after seeing Rushdie on television, was the extraordinary prominence—and disappearance—of the right eye.

Khakhar paints Rushdie in left profile, almost like a Mughal prince. His body is frontal enough to give the painting presence, but his face is turned decisively to the left. He holds an obscure object in his right hand, folded across his chest, while wearing a waistcoat. The profile is conventional, almost courtly. The right eye is completely invisible.

At the time Khakhar painted it, this was simply a formal decision. But after the events of 2022, the absence acquires an uncanny charge.

Khakhar was perfectly capable of painting frontal faces. His paintings often contain eccentric, theatrical and deliberately constructed characters. In this work too, there is a peculiar figure on the right, almost clerical in appearance, holding a cat on a leash. The image has the absurdity characteristic of Khakhar: an animal as famously headstrong as a cat being subjected to the indignity of a leash. One could read the scene as a comic meditation on authority, discipline and religious power. The absurdity of attempting to control a cat has its own strange resonance when placed against the extraordinary attempt to control Rushdie's life through a religious decree.

But Khakhar hides something more in the painting.

On the right side, there is an artist apparently working on a portrait of Rushdie. We see the sitter in right profile on the small canvas. And here, too, the eye becomes interesting. From the distance at which the little painting is represented, the eye appears almost like a dark slit.

This creates a curious doubling. The large Rushdie in the centre is apparently the sitter, while the small Rushdie on the canvas is the portrait being made by the artist within the painting. The painting therefore becomes a meditation on the act of portraiture itself—a portrait containing another portrait, and a sitter who is simultaneously present and represented.

Art history has given us many such games of representation. Vermeer, Velázquez and Rembrandt, among others, repeatedly complicated the relationship between the person being represented, the artist making the representation and the viewer looking at both. Khakhar's device belongs to this larger history, but his version is unmistakably his own: theatrical, ironic and slightly unsettling.

What fascinates me is what happens to that little eye after 2022.

Was Khakhar unknowingly prophetic?

Of course, he could not have known that Rushdie would one day be attacked and lose his right eye. To claim otherwise would be to turn coincidence into clairvoyance. But perhaps a work of art can become prophetic without its artist having predicted anything. Perhaps prophecy can occur retrospectively.

The painting has not changed. Our knowledge has.

Before the attack, the invisible right eye was simply a consequence of profile. After the attack, that same absence becomes loaded with an entirely different meaning. We look at the painting knowing something that Khakhar could never have known. The old image begins to absorb the future.

This is what fascinates me about art. It sometimes seems to travel before time. It leaves behind forms and signs whose significance may not become apparent until history catches up with them.

Rushdie's own Knife, his autobiographical account of the attack, makes this connection even more uncanny. The book's visual language of the slit and incision recalls the brutal physical wound inflicted on his body. One cannot look at a slit in a painted surface after such an event without thinking of the vulnerability of the body beneath the surface.

This brings to mind Lucio Fontana, whose famous Concetto Spaziale paintings were violently cut and slashed. Fontana's cuts are not merely representations of wounds; they are actual wounds inflicted upon the canvas. The surface is opened. The painting becomes a body that has been violated.

Rushdie's damaged eye and Fontana's slashed canvas belong, of course, to completely different histories. Yet the visual metaphor is difficult to resist: the slit as wound, the wound as image, the image as a record of violence.

And this is where Khakhar's portrait becomes unexpectedly disturbing.

In 1995, the invisible eye was merely an invisible eye. In 2022, it became something else. We can now look backward and see in that absence a strange prefiguration of the damaged face Rushdie would eventually carry into the world.

Perhaps that is one of the mysteries of portraiture. A portrait does not merely preserve a person at a particular moment. It also preserves possibilities of looking that may not yet have occurred. The future can enter an old image without ever having been placed there by the artist.

The camera on Firing Line did something similar. By placing Rushdie in three-quarter profile, with one eye behind a dark lens and the other visible, it unintentionally produced a living counterpart to Khakhar's painted figure. The television image seemed to complete something that had been left unresolved in the painting decades earlier.

For a moment, the two Rushdies—one painted in 1995, one sitting before a television camera in 2026—seemed to look at each other across time.

The painter could not have foreseen the knife.

But perhaps art does not have to foresee the future to travel into it.

Sometimes we are forced to think.

Art travels before time.

JohnyML