EXCERPTS: Biscuit tins, playing cards...
mystic_rajan
By Jyotindra Jain
Jyotindra Jain captures the impulsive approach of the folk artists
who used traditional embroidery to create new images.
Kantha, a form of traditional embroidery done over layered rags with
threads drawn from old sari borders, served as quilts and coverlets in
rural Bengal for centuries. Unlike the embroideries of other regions
of India, which remained repetitive and utility-based, Kantha, in
adopting new images of the age of mechanical reproduction, rose to the
level of a "fine art".
The Bengal folk artist's fascination for new, mechanically reproduced
imagery finds culmination in Kantha embroidery. The women
embroiderers, as nowhere else in India, lustily savoured the joy of
consuming the popular, printed imagery of the time - whether from the
colourful chromolithographs, oleographs, playing cards, postcards,
textbook illustrations, photographs, biscuit tins, or even product
labels. They saw no inconsistency in juxtaposing the old images of
fish, umbrellas, lotus flowers, horse and elephant riders, women
engaged in daily chores, with those of forks and knives, aircraft and
railway trains, fashionable dandies and courtesans - all part of a
continuously growing, changing, transforming reality called tradition.
This openness to contemporary media-based imagery and the capacity to
appropriate it in art practice lent it a certain vigour and dynamism.
The most distinguishing feature of this genre of Bengali folk art is
that it served as a mirror of its own time - it did not repeat the
past in one more hackneyed reproduction but forged a fresh new
expression.
The Kanthas rarely adopted a narrative mode. They concerned themselves
with images, each having its own reality, each equal to the other in
terms of pictorial value. Since each image was an independent and
complete entity in itself, and not an element of a narrative, it did
not demand a context and therefore one image could exist next to the
other, not necessarily sharing a common genealogy. Shorn of narrative
function, each image stood for itself and by itself. It is this nature
of the pictorial form of Kantha which allowed the simultaneous
representation of modern images with conventional ones.
In this context, I would like to describe a few new images from
Kanthas which reflect the contemporary face of this traditional art
form and once again demonstrate how Bengali folk artists remained open
to change and thereby saved themselves from the position of cultural
isolation and stagnation. If creative interpretation of the images of
one's own time has anything to do with being "contemporary" and being
"artists", this is evident in the work of the rural Kantha
embroiderers of the second half of the 19th century.
Of Ravi Varma, biscuit tins, and playing cards
The new bazaar imagery reproduced on product labels, sold as
oleographic and chromolithographic prints, and published in school
textbooks was widely collected, framed, and even worshipped in homes
at the turn of the century. The practice continues, replaced with
calendars today. A huge number of religious pictures once used as
labels on cloth bales exported to India from the textile mills of
Manchester, Glasgow, and Birmingham, framed and stained with vermilion
used in worship, have recently come onto the market.
Popular imagery had charged the vision of the rural and bazaar artists
of Bengal and had even entered the sacred space of Hindu worship,
while both the art establishments - the British art schools and the
indigenous resurgent art movements (one of the leading expressions of
the latter being the Bengal school) - had kept away from it as it
stood, in their minds, for a degeneration of the much coveted
traditional aesthetic values, originality, authenticity (these
enhanced the market value of Indian goods abroad), and corrosion of
national identity (this in the sphere of art stood for rediscovery and
revival of the "glorious" ancient tradition).
It was only in the last quarter of the 20th century that modern art
establishment artists of India began to respond to the bazaar
aesthetics under the shadow of influences from the West - Robert
Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and more recently Francisco Clemente.
The Kantha embroiderers, the storyteller's scroll painters, as well as
the bazaar artists were not only enchanted by the new visual
experience provided by the glitzy images of the popular street culture
of the time, full of transcultural quotes, but were open enough to
bring them within the sphere of their art practice so as to widen
their repertory of images and therefore the language of expression.
As they juxtaposed their familiar motifs of lotus and fish medallion,
peacock on a tree, woman milking a cow, an elephant or a horse rider,
with new images of European playing cards, woman seated on a Victorian
chair posing as if playing a sitar (sourced from photographic
pictures), Ravi Varma's heroines (sourced from oleographs and
postcards), Jesus and his lamb (sourced from "Happy Easter" cards), a
European milkmaid holding freshly cut flowers and ears of wheat
(sourced from British biscuit tins), Shiva cast in the image of a
Madonna (sourced from Christian missionaries' house altar pictures),
and a European boy with his pet dog, holding a whistle (sourced from
British school textbooks), the Kantha embroiderers reschematized
tradition and modernity without fussing over a hierarchical order.
As the principles of Western art history began to set aesthetic
criteria for indigenous cultural objects, irrespective of their
inherent utilitarian objectives, through the new art establishments of
the late 19th and early 20th centuries, comprising art schools,
galleries, art criticism, and the market, the ethnographic object
began to be aestheticized as "art". The makers of the cultural objects
of everyday life - the artisans were completely oblivious of the
phenomenon of transfiguration of their smoking pipes, cultic images,
and pots and pans into "art objects" brought about by the universal
art establishment of the period.
The artisans had no voice in the discourse that defined their
creations; their space could always be invaded by establishment
artists at will but they had no access to the formal art world which
had assumed authority over setting aesthetic criteria for their
expressions. The late Khatri Mammad Siddiq, a master handblock printer
from Kutch, Gujarat, once narrated to me how an American called
"Roshandaan" had come to his workshop and made patterns on pieces of
cloth with bicycle tyres dipped in a dye solution and how his rich
hosts from Ahmadabad had asked him to put his signature on each of
these pieces.
Siddiq took pride in the fact that his own unique designs, colours,
and neat printing served as his signature and his village clients all
over Kutch recognized his fine work and appreciated it, and therefore
could never understand why there was a need for "Roshandaan Sahib" to
actually write his name on his "cycle-tyre prints". Siddiq's
"Roshandaan Sahib" was the celebrated American artist Robert
Rauschenberg who had done some experimental cloth printing in the
early 1970s at the Kutch craftsman's workshop.
Yashodhara Dalmia is an art critic. She curated the inaugural show of
the National Gallery of Modern Art Mumbai in 1996-7. She is also the
author of The painted world of the Warlis (1988) and The making of
modern Indian art: the progressives (2001).
Jyotindra Jain was till recently senior director, Crafts Museum, New
Delhi. He has written extensively on issues relating to folk and
popular art.
This volume provides a perspective on contemporary Indian art. It does
more than chronicle modes and styles. The 11 essays in the book raise
questions such as modernism in Indian art in its Eurocentric, Asian,
or multicultural form, expressiveness of one's own reality, the plight
of the common man, the feminist and the marginalized.