(an enduring image: Chintan and Hema Upadhyay)
Last year this time she was alive. She would meet with her
violent death a few hours later. Nobody can predict when death knocks on the
door. Some of us walk into it. Perhaps, each day and each moment we are walking
into it. Hema Upadhyay (1972-2015) was not expecting her death that day. She
was there at the villain’s den, a fabricating unit in Mumbai, with her
advocate, Harish Bhambani, a fatherly figure for her, and was planning to get
some documents from Vidyadhar Rajbhar, the killer who has been absconding since
then, to move against her estranged husband Chintan Upadhyay, who is currently
in jail for the alleged conspiracy that led to the artist’s and her advocate’s
tragic deaths. On 22nd of this month, Chintan Updhyay completes one
year in a jail in Thane, Maharashtra. As a friend of both Hema and Chintan, I
miss them. People say, Chintan would bounce back and I hope he could after
clearing all the doubts if not from the minds of the people, at least from his
own conscience. However, Hema wouldn’t come back. But who knows she has already
been reborn in another form, in another place, with another destiny completely oblivious
of what she had undergone in her previous birth.
I am no judge of people. None is a judge of none. Hence, it
is futile to think about the deeds that both Hema and Chintan had done during
their lives together. A cursory look at their lives together is fascinating for
many because any couple who have fallen in love with each other during their student
days and have decided to live together thinking that they are made for each
other must find their life and the apparent success that they reaped together
and separately in the material world as well as in the Indian art scene have to
do something with their own lives then and now. Hema was a Baroda girl, urbane,
suave, outgoing, intelligent, good looking, English speaking and caring.
Chintan was the quintessential village teenager (in their courting days in the
college), uncouth, stranger to urban ways, non-English speaking and a sort of
loner. The same old story, of all those young couples who fall in love when
they are students. We do not hear an urbane boy falling in love with an
unrefined girl in a college. If at all that happens, the setting should not be
a college, instead a village where the boy reaches there as a city bred and
English educated youngster in the role of a doctor or a saviour of some sort; a
reformer in denim clothes.
(Hema Upadhyay)
After their education, both Hema and Chintan moved to Mumbai
to find a foothold in the art scene. Hema was not that ‘pallu’ pulling and ‘roti’
making type of girl who would sit at home and let her man to toil all day to
bring food to the family table. For some time, in the beginning, Chintan worked
as a gallery assistant and Hema too might have done something to make their
life worthwhile together. Much before Chintan could make it in the art scene,
Hema, by becoming the ‘bahu’ of the Upadhyay family and changing her name from
Hema Hirani to Hema Upadhyay, found her success in the art scene in 2000 (just
within two years after they moved to Mumbai) as she was declared the Triennale
Award Winner. Allegations of favouritism were thick in the air but the work
that Hema had presented was impressive, perhaps for the Indian standards of art
practice, and could show the possibilities of her pursuing an international art
language and predictably she was picked up by the major galleries like Bodhi
(now defunct) and later by Chemould Prescott Gallery in Mumbai.
Though comparisons between the growth rates of couple
artists anywhere in the world would starkly reveal some sort of imbalance not only
because of familial gender disparities that operate within the domestic front
but also because of the patronage that one of the couple gets from the
galleries. Take any artist couple in India, the balance always tilted; when the
tilt is accepted or rather maintained for the perpetuation of the families that
they have created together they remain as a couple. The case of Hema and
Chintan was not different. While Hema’s break came through the Triennale and
then via reputed galleries, Chintan got his break in the Ashish Balram Nagpal
Gallery in Mumbai in 2003 with his exhibition, ‘Commemorative Stamps’. What we
see is a huge tussle between the artist-couple for social acceptance. Hema was
a natural swimmer in the safe waters of the art market ocean while Chintan
remained a ‘trouble kid’ constantly searching for not only aesthetic acceptance
but also intellectual acceptance by the elite academic section of the art
market.
(an image one does not want to remember)
Once again I draw a comparison between Hema and Chintan
though I do not like any kind of comparisons between people because I deem them
as unique and incomparable. Hema’s art had taken an international turn with the
Triennale and the after going through a series of art projects, she could
establish herself as a name to be reckoned with in the South East Asian art
scene, through her easy (and troubled at a later stage) flirtations with
environmental, feministic, hyper-real, existential issues. From her ‘Chandelier’
with match sticks to the site specific seed planting in Bangalore to the
assemblage paintings to the last solo exhibition with rice grains, Hema
maintained a steady pace almost guarding her personal troubles in the domestic
front without it getting reflected in her works of art. During the boom days,
like any other couple in the art scene both Hema and Chintan were living a life
in suitcases, hotel rooms, airport transit lounges, residencies, party hopping,
socializing and so on. Nature was being drained from their life together. It
became an arrangement of convenience with two people sharing a surname out of
wedlock and trying their best to keep it like that as is being done by several
couples in the art scene.
In the meanwhile, Chintan was looking for his honour. His
works changed from their initial arrogant and erotic expressionism to somewhat suave
market friendly populism; I could clearly see him moving from William De
Cooning to Andy Warhol. The ‘Commemorative Stamps’ had established the shift.
But Chintan was gunning for more. Hungry for fame and acceptance, Chintan subconsciously
competed with Hema, his wife, and went on experimenting with his art language
to find acceptance in the international art scene. In retrospect we could see
Chintan was desperately showcasing his talents not only in his paintings which
were lapped up by the market but also by portraying himself as a perpetual
rebel. His full page advertisement in the Times of India newspaper as a
pregnant man was one such effort to tell the ‘non-art’ world about his ‘pregnancy’,
a metaphor that would establish his counter-womanhood vis-a-vis Hema Upadhyay,
who was said to have refused a baby to Chintan. Also this advertisement said
loud and clear to the world that he was about to ‘deliver’ the best. The
initial success of the couple brought them together to do a collaborative work
titled ‘Made in China’ (2004) in the Viart in Delhi. An impressive show however
did not have the heat to fuse them together for future projects. They again separated
their ways. Chintan had already forayed into performance art with his ‘Bar Bar
Har Bar Kitni Bar’ in Baroda. He had created a rural art residency program,
Sandarbh in 2006 and also had addressed crucial issues of female foeticide in
his home state Rajasthan and legitimacy of piracy in the market of ideas.
(Hema Upadhyay)
Towards the end of the first decade of the new millennium the
separation between Hema and Chitan had become a public with their divorce case
and property feuds between them. The Mumbai tabloids always hungry for juicy
and spicy stories in regular intervals published the micro details of their
marital dispute as if the whole world was keen to know about it. In fact the
constituency that was interested in their dispute was so small and was confined
to Mumbai and scattered in small little gossip pockets elsewhere in the
country. I am sure that these news items might have given them a sort of
temporal high because only the rich and affluent got print space when they
fought each other in the bedroom as well as in the court. In that sense, this
couple too had reached that level of socio-economic affluence as their private
life was out there for others weave yarns of their own. However, this high was
not going to last. The ugly turn of events forced them to take drastic decisions
that led Hema’s health going haywire adding a lot of weight, almost making her
an unfamiliar person even within the art scene, and Chintan moving out of
Mumbai that had brought him fame, name, richness, success and friends and
settling down in Delhi.
What made this couple a wonderful one was their effort to
keep their necks out of the troubled waters even when they confronted the worst
things in life, obviously created all by themselves. Both Hema and Chintan worked
hard and created works of art and exhibited all over the world. Chintan took a sabbatical
and went abroad, doing itinerant projects in Mexico, Germany, Hungary and so
on. He took a lot of pleasure in ideating visually and verbally through his
facebook page as if nothing had gone wrong with his life. This was a
commendable step from both of them. But none knew that things were degenerating
from within. They were in fight even after living separately. He had to face another case for allegedly painting pornographic pictures
on the walls of their Juhu house in order to disturb Hema. Things were losing their
sanctified tragedy and were going to a sort of comedy. People, as always were
interested in taking sides and slamming the other. Personally I was out of all
these. I hardly visited Chintan in Delhi. He too had collected friends who
could give him temporal highs. I was a misfit there. I met Hema
in the Chemould in one of those days and I could not recognize her. She had put
on a lot of weight and the dimpled smile had gone and in its space there was
suspicious smirk that often women give to their estranged partners’ friends.
(Chintan Updhyay)
We are nobody to reverse the chain of events. The tragedy
could have been averted. But the tragedy happens. That’s how the world works. I look
at the pictures of both Hema and Chintan everyday as I have kept it right in
front of me; the catalogue of their one and only show together, ‘Made in China’.
Hema stands in the forefront. Chintan stands behind with his hands folded
across his chest. The pair of glasses that he wears is normal and the shirt
less flowery. He was yet to make a sartorial reinvention for himself. Hema too
stands looking intently at the camera, smiling. She has a U cut white top which
shows her collar bones and neck. Both of them look so simple and straight. They
are there to welcome the world into their lives. Their eyes are not cunning.
They have not yet learned the tricks of the world. Greed, avarice and ego have
not changed their facial contours. Like Keats I too wish they remained the same
forever , forever young and innocent. That’s only a wish. But the apparent
reality is that Hema is no more and Chintan is in jail. Shall we learn
something from this? Yes, we have a great lesson. Nothing matters for we do not
exist. We are just a part of the universe, the immense and the indestructible.
But we make ourselves so fragile.
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