The title ‘Solitary
Companions’ tells it all; the mood of the retrospective of Naina Dalal, curated
by Girish Shahane and presented by Splash Art Gallery, Gurugram, at Travancore
House, New Delhi, is that of the solitary pursuits. Naina Dalal is that veteran
woman artist who stands representative to all those women artists who have been
under-represented, under-appreciated, under-rewarded and under-recognized in
the male dominated modern Indian art history. The reasons could be many; as the
title shows, she has been a solitary traveler and remained in the shadows for a
long time not because of her lack of inspiration or drive but because of choice.
That choice should be seen as natural and cultural at once. It is natural because
familial as well as professional duties take them off from the track of being
independent artists. It is cultural because art has been a male bastion for a
long time, despite the feminist interventions and related discourses.
This sets
the stage for the late recognition of many a woman artist in India and elsewhere.
With feminism completing its first, second and third waves, with many new waves
of it taking it to different inclusionary directions, women artists are now ‘re-cognized’
for their contributions. The late recognition gained by Saroj Gogi Pal, Arpita
Singh, Chameli Ramachandran, Madhvi Parekh and so on explain the trajectory of
such recognition, besides the market interest in their works. Men or women, the
vintage artists are the toast of the market because they have a ‘history’ of
existence as a ‘working artist’, their productions are well catalogued, often
due to their educated and forward-looking children than the galleries or
museums, they have been written about at various stages of their creativity,
and finally they have been a part of the male dominated scene as spouses,
participants and fellow travelers.
The Post-(Amrita)
Sher-Gil visual aesthetics was not easy for the new crop of women artists who
came in 1960s and entered their matured phase in 1970s. While Sher-Gil
relatively kept her freedom as an individual away from the political ongoings
of the time and was almost at loggerheads with those artists who were
nationalistic in the aesthetical approach, her visual production remained free
of the political overtones which the later generations of women couldn’t have
avoided. However, the public-private divide that functioned as a restrictive binary
for an artist like Dalal, even in her mature years goaded to address more of
her identity as a woman rather than a woman who has a say in the public domain.
Self-mythologizing
is a result of such interior addressal and could be seen in the works of the
post-Sher-Gil women artists like Saroj Gogi Pal, Dalal and Anupam Sud, which
changes considerably by the time of young generation of artists of the 1980s
like Nalini Malani, Rekha Rodwittiya, Pushpamala, Najot Altaf and artists of
their ilk. Dalal was a witness to the changes that happened in the art scene of
Baroda and could function as a silent precursor to the changing (feminist)
scenario, yet deviating fundamentally from the art of the men who led the scene
and the other two female artists who got early acknowledgement like Nilima
Sheikh and Nazreen Mohammadi. Dalal’s self-mythologizing is more poetic than overtly
political or sentimental. It is like a poetic soliloquy, a constant search for dialogue
with the self/interiority/inner-other. And that other should be seen as more
representational than an isolated one. The inner woman stands for all the other
women of the time who knew that they were created for a greater purpose but due
to socio-cultural and politico-economic reasons rendered bereft of such agency.
Solitary efforts come either from the awareness that one is all alone in a mission or from the philosophical fact that in life one cannot but be alone. In a time when collective movements were taking shape or in action for facilitating social changes not only in India but all over the world, someone feeling so isolated from all those should be seen carefully. Though the political scenario of the world was in turmoil and in India the making and breaking of the new nationhood was taking place at once, the predominant emotional and intellectual environment had veered towards the existential issues of the human beings. What was the meaning of life and what had made the humans so lonely in the world were the questions that haunted the artists and poets. Romanticism though had given way to stark Realism to take the central stage, for many creative people romantic search for the meaning of life and their loneliness provided solace and artistic trigger. Dalal’s works should be seen in this light.
Dalal
shares camaraderie with the poets of the time rather than the visual artists it
seems. In her works the female protagonist is always seen in relationship with an
‘other’, a nascent male figure or a strong female figure. While the male figure
is emblematic of the longing for sexual/emotional companionship, which should
function in an ideal plane rather than on a mundane one, the female figure is
the ‘true friend’, a confidante. The relationship happens in silence rather
than eloquence. Their gestures are fluid and there are no defined actions of an
embrace or holding hands. However, in many of her works one could see the image
of horse coming repeatedly. Horses, in those years stood as a major trope of
the male artist, exemplifying their virility, passion and unbridled hope for
progress. However, unlike the male artists’ horses, Dalal’s and Pal’s horses
stand for their anchor and vehicle, an implicit desire to self-deification with
a devoted mount as a constant companion.
Self-deification,
the Devi-idea of Indian women, however is not the case here. The Devi-Doormat
binary does not seem to be applicable while dealing with the works of Dalal.
The deification process is an internal desire to be beyond and transcendental
in physical and mental manifestations; the perennial desire to transmogrify and
experience a magnified and intense experiential reality, which women of the
early feminist phase knew, could only exist in an imaginary plane. Here my
attempt is not to posit Dalal as a proto-feminist, as there are no overt
feminist ‘waves’ in her works but are definitely open ended for feministic
interpretations, but to keep her at par with the poets like Kamala Das, Arun Kolarkar,
Nissim Ezekiel and so on, who had written about ‘empty afternoons with feverish
thoughts’. This afternoon alertness is diametrically opposite of the idea of Siesta
that one sees in the works of Sher-Gil and in the imaginary confinement that
frames her protagonists.
The feminine
alertness is not a natural attribute alone but a culturally acquired trait that
is the central mood of Dalal’s works, which have a tricky balminess about them.
They are not mean to sooth but to make one think about their existence. The
early works, especially the oil paintings done during the 1960s show this alertness
in a visible way as the gaze of the protagonists are directed towards the viewers.
They are unabashed in their nudity and their counter-gaze is not vacant or
submissive. Nor are their eyeballs blackened beyond recognition to suggest the hollow
darkness that they are in. The protagonists of Dalal’s paintings direct their
counter-gaze at the viewers in alertness. One cannot just fool them, cajole
them and coax them into doing what they don’t intend to do.
Dalal’s
works are informed of the Fauvist- Expressionist verve that the paintings of
Paul Gauguin have. If one avoids the exotic gaze of Gauguin and the inviting
gaze of the female protagonists that he preferred to paint while in Tahiti,
there is some kind of a dignity and strength that he attributes to those women.
They are not just partners of his sexual fantasy; instead, they show the freedom
of women in that society. They lie on their back, on their stomach, lean
against trees, wear colorful summer clothes, they display their ‘fruits’ and
they sport a deceptive smile on their lips. They obviously would have inspired
Naina Dalal, the way they had inspired Amrita Sher-Gil and T.K.Padmini, two
women artists who painted the interiority of women’s mind. While looking at the
works of Dalal, I could connect a lot with the works of T.K.Padmini though
Dalal might not have seen her works during her formative years as an artist. However,
I do not understand why the curator tried to tie Dalal’s works in the
traditional Rasas of Indian aesthetics, which I thought was a very poor
thought of an otherwise sensible curator.
JohnyML
