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Snapshots of ancient India

Sushma K Bahl’s coffee table book, 5000 Years Of Indian Art isn’t something you would like to finish over a cuppa. It’s a detailed, thought-provoking account of our artistic sensibilities over five millennia. By Sumati Mehrish

Some Indian artists are timeless and others, time-bound. Artists Subodh Gupta, Ravinder Reddy, Bharti Kher and a few like them could, well, be both. With his favourite pack of cigarettes in his neat blazer, Subodh Gupta would happily return to the Indus Valley Civilisation and use utensils, washed and unwashed, maniacally in his work like he is using now. Ravinder Reddy would be Gupta’s happy neighbour, finding solace in sculpting women busts and voluptuous pouts in terracotta. Bharti Kher would ignore them both and shut herself up in the corner of a regimented cluster of houses, sculpting iconic animal figures and discovering textures. Indian artists, well-known and not, are baffling for the way they can connect themselves to different time frames of the ancient civilisation India is meant to be

Try depicting 5,000 years of Indian art to a child of five through a mere dozen pictures of works from the contemporary times and the previous eras. You will break into a tearful laughter seeing the set of images roll out of your digital print out. Uncanny, but they are connected in the subject, elements and thought, if not the form, material and structure of expression

Take the human figures in terracotta and bronze from the Civilisation and Ravinder Reddy’s busts; reflect over the utensils unearthed from the ancient sites and Subodh Gupta’s clutter of utensils he uses as the recurrent material in his work with alacrity or his piece of jaalidaar marble work that connects you to the Mughal era; or the animal figures from Mohenjo-daro and samples from Indian tribal art and Bharti Kher’s repertoire. In 5,000 years, Indian art has moved a full circle, taking and living elements from various eras it has seen. Art history sounds boring to many people. Well, it definitely is not, especially when you flip through 5,000 years of Indian Art a coffee table book that has the millennia chronicled and crunched in 240 pages — a colourful, captivating picture-text depiction in a delectable and debatable avatar of contents. Authored by well-known city-based art adviser curator and writer Sushma K Bahl and published by Roli, the book is an attempt to make Indian art “accessible”

She says, “I wanted to tell a story about how and where we started to where we have reached today. I had attended a conference on global art in Europe sometime back. Art from across the world was discussed and there was just no mention of our works. I got up and asked them what they knew of Indian art and they said, well, not much. This is the sad part. The world doesn’t really know much about the philosophical element, the beautiful co-existence of rasa in our art. Our museums don’t take things seriously. Works at museums are not sufficiently described and are displayed with scanty details. I wanted to tell the story in continuity.

Indian art is like a preserved cross section of an ancient tree you would find at a science museum — its intrinsic circles and loops depict the years it has lived and the different eras it has seen. Therefore, it was necessary someone looked at it with a historical perspective. Bahl has tried to do the same in the book. From works going back to the pre-historic times to the noteworthy “richest” and divine Gupta period to the modern eccentric expressions of Mithu Sen, Gigi Scaria and Thukral and Tagra, Bahl has rope-walked all the eras dangerously leaving out on a number of revolutionary concepts, traditions, works and artistes owing to the lack of space

She says, “I believe the Gupta period was the best. The works created and carved were sensuous, beautiful, there was a marvellous co-existence of the rasas, there was adherence to shilp shastra. There were the Buddhist sculptures that influence this period in a great way. Today the notion of beauty has undergone a change. It is very different from what it was in the Gupta period.

Bahl’s task was definitely not easy, yet she has laboriously tried to include works that represent the churning of Indian artistic expression during the Gupta period, the flourishing aesthetic fulfilling temple art, the influence of Buddhism and Buddhist art, the Mughal period and its illustrious artistes, the British era and its patchy, bright, convenient interpretation of India and the rise of artists like Raja Ravi Varma and Abanindra Nath Tagore. What about art done during the British era? “There was a lot of reproduction of photographs. The British artistes in India weren’t the best in their country but were invited here to work. They added their sense of perspective to their Indian way of thinking. There was a market. A lot of attention was paid to colours,” adds she

The book, however, disappoints on a few fronts. There is, as guest and speaker Pavan Varma had pointed out at the inaugural discussion, a dangerous royal miss given to the tribal and “folk” arts. She adds, “I have sourced images of works from museums in Pakistan. But it was tough to get the images from Indian museums. I have left out on tribal art deliberately. In that sense, 5,000 years have seen a lot happening in performing arts as well. But I couldn’t have ventured there. Separating art and craft is a Western concept, and we look at art in totality. Yet, there isn’t more I could have included in the book.

Then, the choice of works (and artists) used in the book to depict the maniac and methodical contemporary art are open to debate. Coffee table books are meant to sell. Yet, this one misses out on artists the Western world or the erudite Indian would have loved to know about. It straddles between things that have found narration and things that should have been told. It dabbles between artists who find mention and artists who deserved mention. Between works of FN Souza, SH Raza, MF Husain, and the revolutionary Jogen Chowdhury; between Zarina Hashmi, Rameshwar Broota, Ravi Kumar Kashi, Subodh Gupta and the very experimental NS Harsha, the book excludes facets — some out of expert “art” driven decisions and some out of inescapable logistical constraints. Bahl adds, “There has been a sustained chaos in Indian art. It exists in real terms today. It’s a huge canvas. I wanted to make the book accessible to a wide audience.

Yet, you come across moments and monumental changes in Indian art in Bahl’s chronicle, you may have missed, forgotten or simply skipped at art fairs and museums. There is an image of the aged mullah by Farrukh Beg, the artist in Jahangir’s court, the Kalachakra and its maddening metaphysical tones painted in natural pigments, then, the image of Vishnu sleeping on the sarpa sheersha, the fertility Goddess, Satish Gujral’s fibre sculpture showing men climb a lamp posts with damrus in the hand. There is Foreplay, by Mithu Sen on one end and serendipity in the gender role reversal you see in works from the ancient times. There is a parallel subtle account of the shift in media and material used. In the works included, you discover the oceans of change in technique and grammar, especially in the way Indians have used mythology, figures and symbols

Not everyone has knack of making art history so visually engaging to viewers bombarded with the pleasantly chaotic and surging contemporary Indian arts scene. Bahl does