A rustic clock crafted from reclaimed wood.Photo/Instagram

A passion beyond money

From a young age, Aziz was deeply fascinated by animals, plants, and the natural world. While others chased financial security, for him, money was never the priority — expressing himself through art was. In 2021, he took a bold step to reconnect with his inner self and envision a future rooted in creativity. That’s when he founded Stick and Bones, his official brand dedicated to transforming waste into meaningful art.

While juggling a corporate job, he spent five months in the profession before making a life-changing decision in 2024 — he quit. “Something didn’t feel right,” he recalls about his career choice.

“I committed to my passion full-time last year, turning it into a larger project. Now, I don’t just create décor from waste for the love of my craft — I also inspire countless young people who aspire to build careers in arts and crafts,” Aziz said.

The viral turning point

Despite his talent, Aziz’s work initially reached only a limited audience. He started sharing his art on Instagram, but his content was scarce, and his followers remained at 8,000.

The rustic table lamp that became Aziz’s first big hit started with a simple discarded piece of wood he found in his backyard. He chiselled it down, shaped it, and manually carved a plank of wood to serve as the base. Once the structure was ready, he carefully added lights, transforming what was once waste into a unique, functional piece of art.

“It was a surprise for everyone because no one knew that lamps could be made out of waste wood and something as basic as a wicker-wood hat, that too at home,” he recalled. This creation marked his breakthrough moment, proving that discarded materials could hold new life and purpose.

“I posted the making of it on Instagram. The reel went viral globally and brought me 40,000 followers overnight,” he added

This sudden surge in recognition changed everything. His work began inspiring young artists, encouraging them to explore sustainable art.

Defying criticism and carving his own path

As a master’s student of ichthyology, Aziz faced harsh criticism for his passion. Many warned him that he was straying off the right path and insisted that a stable nine-to-five job was the only way to secure his future.

“I still remember my parents doubting me and others laughing at what I did, telling me it was a useless dream. But I picked up the discarded animal bones and wood anyway and kept carving them with dedication, turning waste into intricate art,” he said.

But while the world questioned him, there was one person who never doubted his talent — his brother, Khaleel.

“I always believed in my brother and knew he would take things to a different level. Even though he’s my younger brother, I look up to him because he sees the world differently. He never follows trends or conventions — he simply does what he loves. Every piece of his art tells a story of its own, revealing what’s happening behind the curtain. What he is best known for is his ‘behind-the-scenes’ process, capturing the journey of creation as much as the final masterpiece,” Khaleel said.

Khaleel further added, “I’m proud that my brother earns his bread and butter through his passion. What makes it even more special is that he has kept his prices affordable, ensuring that everyone can access his art. More than just an artist — he is a storyteller, weaving narratives into every piece he creates.”

Recognition and government support

That one viral Instagram reel was just the beginning. Today, Aziz’s work has gained global recognition, inspiring many young people to turn waste into art. His unique approach has even caught the attention of the government, which has praised his innovative take on animal bone art.

Beyond simply working with waste, Aziz fuses his creations with Kashmir’s rich heritage, adding vibrant papier-mâché art to his bone carvings.

Exhibiting at Kashmir Arts Emporium

The former Director of Handicrafts and Handlooms, Mahmood Ahmad Shah, applauded Aziz’s creativity, stating:

“His art is truly amazing and unique in a way that sets it apart. While many have been reinventing art from waste materials, what makes his work different is how he seamlessly fuses heritage into each piece. We had the honour of exhibiting his work at Kashmir Arts Emporium in 2023. I believe that all art forms hold value, but when art is sustainable, it becomes even more significant, carrying both meaning and responsibility.”

A legacy in the making

From discarded bones and fallen trees to intricate wall decor and heritage-infused masterpieces, Aziz-ur-Rehman is not just creating art, he is redefining it. With passion, resilience, and an unshaken belief in his craft, he has transformed waste into wonder.

He started on his own, without tools or a proper workspace. He built a small shed in his backyard and began buying hand tools and power tools with his pocket money. Whatever he earned, he used to buy more tools and manage his expenses.

“I have sold more than 2,000 articles, both small and large,” he says, looking back at his journey. His workshop at his home in Srinagar, is where he puts in all his effort. Every piece he makes is not just art—it’s the result of hard work and dedication. And he’s just getting started!

(Edited by Megha Chowdhury and Leila Badyari for The Better India)

(This feature has already appeared in The Better India)

Courtesy: Kashmir Times

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In Aldous Huxley’s “Grey Eminence,” the enigmatic character of Father Joseph, advisor to Cardinal de Richelieu, embodies a perplexing interplay between beauty and perversity. Despite composing the spiritually uplifting Les Cantiques Spirituels, Father Joseph resorted to ruthless tactics, including deception and murder. He is said to be responsible for the deaths of thousands of Huguenots, or French Protestants, during the Thirty Years’ War. 

This paradox prompts a profound question: Can art transcend its creator’s actions, allowing us to appreciate its beauty separate from its moral compass? As we grapple with the haunting reality of Father Joseph’s atrocities, his hymns resonate, inviting us to contemplate whether beauty can exist independently of ethical considerations or is intrinsically linked to truth and goodness.

The phrase “Satyam Shivam Sundaram” suggests that truth, Godliness, and beauty are interconnected. Is beauty separate from ethical considerations, or is it linked to the fundamental nature of reality and goodness?

This week, I saw two productions where ethics was not just a theme but the soul of art; they, in a distinctly brave way, search for social justice amid contractions of society. Art is just an extension of the artist; the story they told us is an extension of their life; they steal moments of their life and decorate them into art.

Indeed, if archiving is making ‘the personal public’, then Mari Selvaraj’s Mamaanan and Nish Abdulla’s  ‘We push the sky’ merge the personal and public, private and political, and the audience is not a passive observer but is invited to participate.

Mari Selvaraj achieves this immersive effect through the astute portrayal of his characters, the dynamic cinematography, recurring motifs, and the deliberate use of visible violence. On the other hand, Nisha employs a more subtle approach, gently drawing viewers into her personal world. From the shared moments over tea to the thought-provoking discussions on Uniappam, the boundaries of the stage are extended to envelop the last member of the audience.

In his latest film, “Maamannan,” director Mari Selvaraj skillfully subverts the entrenched caste hierarchy portrayed in the iconic film “Thevar Magan.” In “Thevar Magan,” the character Isakki, played by Vadivel, represents a submissive individual who faces severe consequences for deviating from the established caste structure by entering a temple. His punishment comes in the form of having his hand amputated. However, in “Maamannan,” Mari Selvaraj orchestrates a powerful narrative shift.

The film places Vadivel, who hails from a marginalised community, at the centre of the story as the protagonist. Vadivel’s character embarks on a transformative journey, arming himself with a sword to protect his family and assert his agency. Have we transitioned? No, but the film’s narrative reflects the need to change the caste hierarchies and the storyteller’s gaze.

In the movie “Maamannan,” Vadivelu plays the role of Maamannan, a Dalit MLA from Kasipuram in Salem. Udhayanidhi Stalin portrays Adhiveeran, Maamannan’s son, and Fahadh Faasil delivers an impressive performance as the caste-Hindu antagonist.

While “Thevar Magan” (drew inspiration from “The Godfather”) explores a strained relationship between a father and his son. In the film, the reluctant son ( played by Kamal Hasan) takes the mantle of leadership from his father. Thevar-Magan ( Son of Thevar, a Kshatriya caste ) is benevolent.

Unlike “Thevar Magan,” Mari Selvaraj’s film places the reluctant father (Maamannan) at the forefront as the protagonist, challenging the existing caste equations. Adhiveeran’s silence and his simmering anger inspire his father’s introspection. In this narrative, Maamannan evolves from a hesitant figure into one who confronts and reevaluates the prevailing caste dynamics.

The characters in the film, along with powerful acting and Vadivel’s transformation and body language, make it engaging. Udhayanidhi Stalin’s restrained performance and Fahadh Faasil’s versatility as Supermist also add to its appeal. Mari Selvaraj’s use of motifs, especially animals, and his dialogue and cinematography, particularly his aerial and long shots, have become his signature.

The second half needs a more cohesive narrative thread, and the ending needs conviction. It is as if the director bravely opens Pandora’s box; but struggles to control the beast he has unleased. The female characters could be better developed, and the music is not rooted in the plot.

The film Maamannan is pivotal because it turns the narrative around a community and creates a powerful arc that transforms personal struggle into public dissent. The director portrays the pain of this transformation; it is a story that needs to be told. The film engages the audience and prompts, “Are you listening?”

Nisha Abdulla presents her solo act, “‘We push the sky”, with a banner as a backdrop that reads “Are you listening?” As the audience arrives, Nisha invites them to a conversation over a cup of tea and Uniappam, making them feel comfortable. She promises them that the ‘wait will end’ and encourages them to engage with her. As she draws them into her plot, there are no spectators here- everyone is an actor (or a prop).

The story gently catalogues a series of childhood stories, a glimpse into a child’s life, friends, family and neighbours; personal stories, incidents, and inspirations weave an identity. A woman, Malayali, Mappila, Muslim, Indian Migrants in the Middle East, cricket lover, and non-Urdu speaking Muslim is transformed into a Muslim when Junaid goes missing.

The plot turns the personal into political when the nation turns the narrative into them versus us. The catalogues of complex identity turn into an archive of personal and community pain. Nisha quickly confronts her fears while questioning our cowardice in our prolonged silence; the extraordinary exchange with the audience where she asks if potatoes can be considered desi, then why Muslims who came earlier are not citizens, she lists them one by one, the laugh induced is dark as the protagonist uses the absurdist idea of the home minister coming (like waiting for Godot).

In the climax, which retells the night of solidarity, the women hold their hands at the protest site; as police stare at them, the hands rise to the sky, creating a new space of solidarity, harmony and hope. ‘We push the sky’.

The production was terrific, with exceptional scriptwriting and acting by Nisha Abdulla and lights by the team of Madhusudan and Arun. The set design was by Gowtham and Pardafash designed the sound. Shradha Raj flawlessly managed the production. Ujwala Rao as a director kept the play tight, intense and engaging. The play is a triumph of storytelling and is exceptionally brave.

The Play ‘ We push the sky’ on 9 July was dedicated to Teesta Setalvad.

Truly, in Mari Selvaraj’s Maamannan and Nisha Abdulla’s ‘We push the sky’, we see how artists take a personal moment to create a trajectory in art; art is an extension of the artist, and their dissent becomes archiving in our times. We must, as the audience must, not be mere spectators. Are you listening?

Reach out to ‘We push the sky’ at ​​​​qabilacollective@gmail.com 

(The author is a financial professional with a master’s degree in economics. I am intensely interested in the arts, academia, and social issues related to development and human rights.)

Related:

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The complex design of propaganda & narrative manipulation: India

The post Is anyone listening? Two creative works that transform personal tragedies into powerful political statements appeared first on SabrangIndia.

‘In India, you become an engineer first and then decide what to do with your life.’

For those of us who grew up during the last decade of the 20^th century and the first decade of the 21^st century, one knows exactly what this means. The reason this adage holds true for millions of engineer-turned-whoevers in this country is because of the sheer incapacity of our systems to offer any freedom in choosing the purpose of our lives. We were made to find a purpose only within the economic realities of our class and the social realities of our caste.

Being a lower middle-class Savarna boy meant that we were to complete our engineering and find a job with a multi-national corporation (MNC) that would potentially offer us the opportunity to work in a first-world country. Once this dream was realised, we were to find a community to belong to and make that country our home. After that we were to re-produce, contribute in rearing an entire generation away from their roots and when they developed an identity in the new culture, guilt-trip them into accepting our roots as their own – basically exercise our patriarchal privilege on our off-spring, thus snatching away from them any agency over their own identity.

Nothing new, as far as middle class Indian parenting is concerned.

As somebody trying to break out of this cycle of hopelessness, I was successful in resisting this ‘Neo-liberal Indian Dream’ on two counts – one was a discovery, the other was a challenge.  The discovery was of finding a purpose in the performing arts. And the challenge was to break the cycle of guilt inherent to the Indian parenting set-up.

Resources were scant but hope was high. And of course, there were the good-old modern values. Those that taught you to look art as a mirror of society. And a society whose fault-lines were witnessed through lived experiences was the perfect candidate to be shown a mirror to.

Conflict

A mirror reflects, after all. Technically this meant that art is supposed to show society the way it is – the naked reality. It meant showing this naked reality with the intention of creating a shift in how one perceived it. It meant evaluating this reality against a human standard – a standard that a society set for itself.

At least, this was what we were taught by our earlier generations.

Questioning the standards that one is conditioned into needs a certain disengagement. Let us refrain from calling it objectivism. Because the first step towards being objective is to disengage. This disengagement is a long-ish process. And there are layers to it – emotional, psychological, physical. Moving from the personal to the social (and eventually political) needs, and takes, time.

That is why the initial expression of an artist is always localised. It comes from their immediate reality. And most of the times, it discounts privilege.

My earlier stories were thus about my immediate surroundings. Starting with a short film about the spirit of Bombay and then slowly moving on to cutting sarcasm about a certain police officer who would not allow the young to drink or romance peacefully were subjects that I thought were of prime importance. The Religious Divide bothered me but did not force me to question the reason behind it. Through one more short film, I had tried to connect it with the idea of God and its futility. But it did not address the consequent bigotry within humans.

And caste? That was completely out of the question – I was inert to it.

It took an incident like the death of Rohith Vemula for any understanding of caste privilege within me and the need to question the Savarna system that I was a product of.

What transpired in India after that had woken an entire generation up to a reality they were completely unaware of. The sheer apathy showed by the Indian media was followed by a counter-attack by powerful and regressive forces. This vicious counter-attack involved demonisation of the entire student community right after the JNU incident. These series of incidents were to have a lasting impact. This put into question the very meaning of art being a mirror of society.

The behaviour of the Hyderabad Central University Vice-Chancellor, Appa Rao Podille and the consequent response from the then HRD Minister, Smriti Irani, had led to the institutional killing of a bright student like Rohit Vemula. This shocker, for me, brought out the real meaning of what it meant to be ‘disadvantaged’ by birth in our country. Immediately after came the JNU incident. Student leaders were targeted by the State, misinformation was used as a major tool in manufacturing an ‘enemy of the people’ and very conveniently, this enemy was picked on the basis of their religion. This is more evident from the fact that of all the students who were targeted by the State at that time, Umar Khalid today happens to be the only one still behind bars after 1000 days of incarceration.

In such a scenario, it became immensely important as an artist (and more as a filmmaker since films have such a deep impact on the psyche of the Indian society) to respond to this new reality of the society around us. One could not just be satisfied expressing one’s immediate issues.

The idea of being ‘disadvantaged’ was gaining massive proportions – it was not just limited to a one-off incident that one could talk about, express concern and walk away. With new ways and waves of oppression came a greater understanding of the machinations functioning behind them.

Meanwhile social media started emerging as a powerful tool. And with its new ways of expression came a greater responsibility of cutting through the flak and standing out as a storyteller. Because story-telling had not remained the monopoly of those who had dedicated their lives to it. Now it was a house-hold item for consumption and the shorter the form, the better its reach. A story’s impact was evaluated through the number of hits on it and not by how deeply it affected one’s senses.

As a filmmaker, there was a double-edged challenge now – to understand my society at a wider level if I had to have any deeper understanding of it and to express that understanding in the quickest possible manner.

Epilogue

It is at this time when Annie Zaidi’s story ‘Two Way Street’ came to me. A ten pager that Annie had carved out while waiting for a meeting in an obscure office in Bombay spoke of all the changes I was seeing around me in a way that only Annie could. The depth of her understanding combined with the brevity of her thought was a breath of fresh air for a mind like mine that was still trying to find its own language of expression.

I started working on the script almost immediately. Through innumerable pitches to prospective producers, the drafts kept changing shape as the nature of tolerance around kept shifting. Every few days a new incident of intolerance towards minorities would come to the fore and a new attempt needed to be made to make the script relevant to this new low of hate that we were witnessing. After a few drafts, I actually gave up.

The more one tried to incorporate the intensity of the prevalent violence against minorities in the script, the more it started getting rejected by investors. Nobody wanted to touch it. Well, it was not a good business proposition to talk about prevailing hate, you see. A non-existent romance one can talk about. But not seething, burning hate. It just did not fall in line with market standards. Hate could be expressed on the streets but not spoken about in our stories. Unless one found a market for it. The script itself became an ‘untouchable’.

The next challenge was to then make the story palatable to the market. One good thing about capitalism is that its loyalty is only towards opportunity. While socialists fought for values, capitalists resisted for the sake of opportunity. And opportunity is a two way street (pun intended).

If the market was not conducive to one story, we decided to make it into four stories. Four stories of hate and prejudice. Then it becomes a package, you see? A similar package of lust was already famous in the OTT markets. A lot of people were working on such packages. It had just become the flavour of the season to deal with stories in packages. It was then that it dawned upon us that it was not that our stories did not find place in the market. It was how we were packaging them.

Consequently, it was not that our politics did not have a place in society. It was about how we were expressing this politics.

This intervention formed the backbone of the treatment for Two Way Street. We were living in an opportunistic time. Hate had become an industry that had a large market. If we spoke about it in exactly the same way as it was expressed on the streets, then we were to be of the same category as those who were benefitting from it. Hence, it was imperative for us to find a way of expression that was unique to our politics. If our politics stood for inclusion, it was because we believed that that was the inherent value on which our society was built. And so, our expression needed to derive itself from something that is inherent to the hate we were seeing around. And it’s projection needed to have an inherence that resonated with the market.

With this learning, we went back into the market. This time armed with an expression which was unique to our politics and a package that seemed familiar to those backing us. The trick worked and magically, we had a producer. Although they were funding only 50% of the costs, we were confident of building a team of artists who would work with us for the sake of our politics. The rest of the 50% would come from their labour. This calculation worked for the market and for us too. A win-win situation as they call it and today, we find ourselves on course to make an anthology of four short films around the subject of ‘Inherent Prejudice’.

The first film Escort dealt with the subject of ‘able-ism’. After winning Best Screenplay at the Venice Shorts, it is well on its way in the festival circuit.

Our second film, Two Way Street has had five selections and an award for Best Director. It is gathering the response that we expected.

It is a film that has taught us the importance of having a malleable stance in our expression while staying true to our values in these ever-changing and ever-shifting times. It is a film that evaluates the hate spread within our society and offers tools for resistance – tools that might seem miniscule when thought about but become larger when implemented, tools emanating from the values the founding fathers of our country set for us, tools that have helped us make this film in these crazy times.

The plan is to now carry this learning ahead and apply it to the forthcoming stories. After all, since Art is a mirror to society and the society of today is in more of a flux than ever before, it is imperative that our expression from now on keeps evolving itself and as artists we are ever ready to shape-shift based on what the universe around us becomes.

Art thus can also mirror a universal need. And I am glad that for now, in this moment, the work I am engaged in with and after Two Way Street, meets that need. 

(Asmit Pathare straddles the world of theatre and films. He is a screenwriter, filmmaker, stage lighting designer and a theatre-maker.)

The post Art must mirror an urgent need, the personal and the political: Asmit Pathare appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Image courtesy Indian Express

JV Pawar, eminent historian and co-founder of the Dalit Panthers, says: “If Dhale had not been at the forefront when dalit literature emerged, if he had not stood there with a naked sword in his hand, dalit literature would have been killed in its infancy. Even ‘experts’ on dalit literature agree on this.” Dhale’s collected works were compiled for the first time by JV Pawar; and in 1990, on Dhale’s 50th birthday, the collection was published in a book entitled Astitwachya Resha (The Lines of Existence).This significant book provides insights into Dhale’s meticulous understanding of various subjects, and introduces us to the many unexplored aspects of his personality—the writer, the artist, the literary theorist and the political visionary.

Literary renaissance has one crucial requirement. Old literary values need to be refuted; and new values—that connect to contemporary society and advocate justice in social life, have to be vehemently propagated. For this to happen, an understanding of the relationship between society and literature is essential. Raja Dhale not only had this understanding; he also had the vision to develop it.

Just as “literature is a part of our personality,” says Dhale, “it is part of our existence. This means (that) as literature shapes our existence, our existence shapes our literature.” Dhale captured the objective of literature at the theoretical level. But he did more. He developed the objective into a literary framework to resolve the tussle between Marxism and Ambedkarism. He spoke of this as early as 1976 in a speech delivered at a convention of dalit literature. This speech also marked the arrival of revivalist understanding of dalit literatures, inspired by the thoughts, teachings and literary vision of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar. Dhale’s speech shed light on literary aspects which had, till then, been matters of confusion and conflict in Indian literary spheres:

The concept of ‘Marxist literature’ originated from a theoretical understanding of society. But the concept of dalit literature originated directly from lived experience.

Today there are writings which can be said to be inspired by Marxian thought. But there is nothing that can be described as Marxist literature. Because of this, literature inspired by Marxian thought attempts to seize the field of ‘dalit literature’. Therefore, dalit literature should be called the literature of Ambedkar Pranalee (Ambedkarite ideology).

Till now, our literature has been that of Ambedkari (Ambedkarite) ideology. Because dalit literature emerges from life itself, it acquires social significance – which manifests as dalit social consciousness. This social consciousness of dalit life is shaped by Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar and his battles. Hence the social significance of dalit literature, is Ambedkari.

The vision of dalit literature is infused with its social consciousness – this is why dalit literature acquires social significance. But ‘Marxist literature’ has neither social consciousness nor significance; it has a theoretical significance. Just as its origin is theory, its eventual form too is theoretical, not social. The names Marxist literature goes by underline this. ‘Progressive literature’, for example: which social group does this literature refer to? Where exactly does it lead? Towards the social or the theoretical? Another example is ‘parallel literature’. The term does not clarify which social group and which social consciousness it is ‘parallel to’.

When we call ourselves litterateurs of Ambedkari ideology, and when we describe our literature as the literature of Ambedkari ideology, our objective of social revolution becomes clear. Likewise, our ‘place of work’ is also clear; it is the dalit community…

A skillful artisan gives shape to his artefacts, stroke after stroke, with persistence and patience. Like that artisan, Dhale’s meticulous study of literature and his understanding of theories of art and aesthetics shaped the discourse of dalit literature — which he preferred to call the literature of Ambedkar ideology — and the dimensions of its theory. Logic was never absent from his words– be whether he was writing his literary essays, articles, stories or his few but significant poems. For example, in his poem “Eka Panther Che Manogat”, he says:

Each man is the last one. If he sees that clearly,
why should he not fight each battle
as if it is the last one
I don’t understand it — because the end is decided.
Either the battle will come to an end
Or we will die. 

If death is certain, why shouldn’t
the battle for equality be certain?

As part of social movements, Dhale’s words and actions were directed by his commitment to truth; justice; and the creation of a casteless society, whether in the realm of the imagination or in the real world. His life showed that he never bowed down before power. His literary and artistic talents gained strength from his unique imagination, which, in turn, was fed by Ambedkar’s thoughts and vision. This is why he found his reference in social history, the history of his community, and in the vision of Ambedkar, rather than foreign theories on art, literature and movements. His contributions to literature and art are unparalleled in the legacy of dalit literature. He wrote short stories, literary essays, critical reviews, songs for adults and children, and introductions to books. What he chose to translate is also telling: he translated Zen short stories, Egyptian poems, and poems by African American poets such as Langston Hughes, Samuel Allen and Robert Hayden into Marathi. As for his art, its idea of beauty is not sensual, but charged with sense; with sensibility. His illustrations reveal an artistic sensibility that suggests future directions for the anti-caste struggle. They also indicate why the appreciation of beauty requires the creation of a just and equal world.

Notes:

¹ All translations are by Yogesh Maitreya.
² Pranali Prakashan, Mumbai, 1990.

Read more:
Remembering Raja Dhale: How the Dalit Panthers Planned to Burn Holy Books
दलित पैंथर: दलित अत्याचार के ख़िलाफ़ साझा संघर्ष
Sharankumar Limbale: “Literature that was restricted to a class or a group is now expanding”
Strike a Blow to Change the World

Yogesh Maitreya is a poet, translator and founder of Panther’s Paw Publication, an anti-caste publishing house. He is pursuing a PhD at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

All illustrations are by Raja Dhale. They first appeared in Raja Dhale: Samagra Lekhan Vol 1, published by Lokvangmay Gruh.
 

The post Raja Dhale: A Renaissance Figure in Dalit Literature and Art appeared first on SabrangIndia.

On 15 November, the Polish Institute organised the second edition of “Readings in the Shed”, an evening of poetry readings in New Delhi, the first edition of which was held in Mumbai. The reading was performed by acclaimed playwright, Ramakrishnan (Ramu) Ramanathan at the snug hall at Studio Safdar, and was composed of poetry from some of his favourite Krakow Poets.  

One familiar with Ramanathan’s work will find that his art is situated in a dialogue – an extended conversation with artists who came before him, as well as his contemporaries. Be it through adaptations of Becketts’s plays or recreations of King Lear, or even collaborations with professionals and students from non-theatre backgrounds, Ramanathan’s work always engages with the life and imagination of artists, cultural narratives, and political discussions both Indian and global.

In his poetry reading session, he etched out intimate portraits of “some of his friends”, the Polish Poets, namely, Wislawa Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, Anna Swir, Czeslaw Milosz and Adam Zagajewski. He read verses they wrote, drawing with them, a kinship that was artistic but also historical and philosophical, throwing light on vital issues that have continued to play out in the domain of art and aesthetics.

Ramanathan has also produced a book of poetry. Published in 2016, My Encounters With a Peacock is a series of exchanges with a talking peacock. First published by the author in 2016, My Encounters With A Peacock is a series of enchanting exchanges with a talking peacock articulated in the form of short poems. These exchanges take place over the course of six months, from January to June, and constitute a total of sixty-five poems. Each poem is a conversation between the poet and the peacock, who are sometimes sharing a rickshaw, rarely eating akkhar masoor wali khichdi, often grieving about lost lovers, and always discussing bank interest rates like old pals. Adorned with just the right amount of delightful illustrations by Mansi Ghuwalewala and an intricate book design by Dibyajyoti Sarma, the 2017 edition of My Encounters With A Peacock makes for an enjoyable read. It also educates the human reader about living, breathing, talking unconventional peacocks, who challenge stereotypes by refusing to dance in the rain. Here’s a verse from the book

“Half a kilo of pure happiness
Can you home deliver that to me?
After all, I am the national bird of this unhappy country.
Since 1963.
You don’t want me flying
Across the border,
To Burma or Ceylon
As a mark of protest.”
– Ramu Ramanathan, My Encounters With A Peacock

Kanika Katyal of the Indian Cultural Forum had the pleasure of speaking to the playwright post the reading. Following is an excerpt from the interview.  

Kanika Katyal: Why did you dedicate your “Readings in the Shed” session to Kedarnath Singh and Vishnu Khare?
Ramu Ramanathan: Both poets passed away this year. Kedarnath Singh is a true master. Three of his favourite Krakow poets were present that evening at Studio Safdar. Vishnu Khare was unwell when I last saw him for the Balshastri Jhambekar award program at Sane Guruji School in Dadar. I had to meet him in Mumbai a few days later. Unfortunately, that meeting did not happen. Again, one of the brightest minds I met. Their absence is a huge loss.
Today both of them will be with five of the poets: Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska and Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rozewicz and Slavomir Mrozek. Only Adam Zagajewski and I are alive.

KK: You told us that you had never been to Krakow or read the original works of the Krakow Poets in Polish, and yet you engaged with them intimately. I want to ask you,
a) How does a young reader in India in 2018 locate kinship with them?
b) Does this say something about translation as an enabler? Especially because you have prolific work on artists across languages, space and time, both as a theatre practitioner, as well as an editor of a print weekly.
RR: a). As I mentioned Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself “I don’t know” … If she had, she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying I don’t know, and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize. Poets, if they’re genuine, must also keep repeating, I don’t know.
b). The beauty is, as I mentioned during my reading session, the masters have translated each other’s poems. The same thing happened with playwriting in India in the sixties and seventies, when the masters (Tendulkar / Karnad / Mohan Rakesh) translated each other’s work. Likewise, the modernists who translated each other Ashok Shahane, Vasant Dahake, Dilip Chitre, Arun Kolatkar and Dhasal, etc.

KK: Let’s talk about this Marie Curie reference in a poetry reading. I found it a very interesting dialogue on the scientific temper in arts. Was it that?
RR: Yes, because immediately after that I quoted from M Holub, the immunologist. Also, most of the important theatrewallahs (from Kashinath Ghanekar to Dr Lagoo, from Mohan Agashe to Jabbar Patel, etc) in Pune / Mumbai are doctors. Likewise, some of the best theatre people I know in Mumbai were from BARC / TIFR!

KK: Then what makes a poetry reading different from a play from the audience’ point of view?
RR: Theatre needs an audience. That is the primacy of the spoken word. Sometimes, it is true with poetry. The two most popular poets in Hindi heartland are Kabir and Tulsi. People know their work through the spoken word.

KK: I’m reminded of what Belgian writer and critic, Luc Sante, said in an interview on discovering Rimbaud. He said, “That riff in “A Season in Hell” about liking idiotic paintings and reading outmoded literature and dreaming of unrecorded voyages of discovery and seeing carriages on the roads in the sky—that was virtually the template for my entire life! I could almost say that everything I’ve done has come from that poem.”
In your presentation, you showed us maps and talked about real and mythical cartographies. Could you reflect on living vicariously as a creative compulsion/commonality?
RR: I referred to Alberto Manguel’s The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. In it, Manguel takes us to … 1200 imaginary cities, islands, countries, and continents, from Homer to the late 1990s. … I tried to do the same with Krakow. Try to see the city through the poems. I don’t think I need to visit Krakow.

KK: You are seen as one of the voices of dissent in the theatre circuit. What is the importance of art in tough times?
RR: I recall what Ibsen said centuries ago in An Enemy of the People — The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That’s one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against.

KK: What are the complexities behind the identity of an Indian writer writing in English about a diverse India? How do you negotiate the local, ‘Marathi tradition’ with the national, and the global? Can you tell us a little about your creative process as a writer?
RR: Language is a strange beast.
When Alberuni came to India, he accompanied Ghazni
He sought to learn Sanskrit
But the Brahmins said no
So he sat outside the temple
Among slippers and chappals
And mastered the language
Became the father of Indology.
Doing research has become a habit now. I’m not a historian or a scholar so to speak; I suppose I’m compensating for some deficiency from my student days. One of the plays that have just been completed is set around the time of World War I in India. While doing the primary phase of research that involves collating neutral information available about what transpired in Mumbai at the time, a few other aspects emerged. One was the question of Indian nationalism set in the time between 1850 and 1925, coming down all the way to the sort of ultra-nationalism one sees around the world today.
Around this time, there were about 7-8 political affiliations being formed in the city, interestingly in its southern tip. The RSS, the Hindu Mahasabha, Communist Party of India, the arrival of Gandhiji and Dr Ambedkar into the city — creating a sort of tussle for affiliation. This happened while unknown peasants and farmers were put on ships and sent off to Flanders to fight a war for the British that nobody understood. He says, “If you study that time, look through the speeches of some of these guys (some of whom were booked for sedition or were under the gaze of the British police), what emerged is that theatre was an adhesive to seemingly unrelated events in Mumbai. A lot of these plays were staged in South Mumbai, in the red-light areas… some of them were official, some other unofficial… I’ve spoken to two important scholars who have studied this time. These stories are so fascinating. All this is present in this longish and laborious play about the WW I in Mumbai.

KK: Please tell us about your future projects.
RR: [An] Idea for a play about Gandhiji. So, Barrister VV Oak attended the Nathuram Godse case in 1948. When the court was in session, Oak made sketches of the people in the courtroom. Also, he was a photographer who devised a way of enlarging a negative based on the principle of Camera Obscura. [An] Idea for a play about Dilip Ranade, ex-taxidermist at the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai. He stuffed animals during the day. At night, he read Kafka’s Trial and Castle. One day, Ranade created fibreglass sculptures of frogs, Edison’s electric bulb, Marilyn Monroe’s bra as a fossilised icon show.

Ramakrishnan (Ramu) Ramanathan is an Indian playwright-director with acclaimed plays to his credit. His list of plays include Cotton 56, Polyester 84, Comrade Kumbhakarna and more recently, Postcards From Bardoli.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum
 

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Srinagar:- At the age of 19, Nazar Nasir decided to share the idea of him knitting and crocheting with his family members. Their reaction was exactly as he had expected. He was told in blunt words that this line of work didn’t suit males. But Nazar had made up his mind and decide to live his dreams despite the resistance.

Crocheting has been a well-known art amongst Kashmiris but it has been mostly pursued by the women for decades. It is for the very first time that a male while breaking some rigid stereotypes has made a business out of it. Nazar, who wet up Knotty Crafts, is gaining a huge following not only in the Valley but outside the state too.

A resident of downtown, Srinagar, Nazar is a student of literature. Apart from being a student, he keeps himself busy with crochet. He is the first and the only male who crochets from Kashmir.

Crocheting is a process of creating fabric by interlocking loops of yarn, thread, or strands of other materials using a crochet hook.

It all started two years ago when his sister brought a crochet hook and some yarn from her aunt and while she was wiggling the hook with the yarn strand, Nazar was so fascinated that he brought himself a hook and some yarn and started experimenting and has never stopped since then.

From being just a mere experimental hobby, his passion for crocheting kept increasing and he turned it into a part-time business.

“For me, crocheting is not just a small business, but an escape from the world as I almost forget my being while crocheting. It’s so healing and so peaceful to me that I can work non-stop without worrying about anything else,” Nazar says during a conversation with TwoCircles.net.

“In a society where knitting and crocheting are considered too feminine a profession to be taken up by men, it was very difficult for me to do something that women usually do here,” he adds.

But paying no need for criticism, Nazar made-up his mind and started crocheting. It has been almost two years now and his business is flourishing day by day.

“People always talk and they say what they have to say, but today those who criticized me are always there for appreciation,” he says.

Nazar says he has been attracted to different forms of art for as long as he remembers.“I first learnt how to crochet and then I got deeper into the world of craft and taught myself to knit, to do macramé and to weave and I’m always learning new things,” Nazar says.

Nazar made his work public through social media apps like Facebook and Instagram and is getting a tremendous response.

“I earned a huge customer base within two years with the help of social media,” Nazar says.

He says he is blessed to be a part of such a big maker community in this age “I can’t describe how perfect I feel being a part of it. I will always try to explore and create more interesting things,” he says.

For people, it’s unusual to see a boy in this field of craft but Nazar says he is proud to call himself, ‘The only male crocheter of Kashmir’.

knotty crafts by Nazar

This article was first published on twocircles.net

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Theodore Adorno’s famous statement “Poetry is impossible after Auschwitz” beautifully sums up the inevitable impact of politics on art. The statement was certainly not literal. He must have meant that poetry – and art in general – can no more remain what it was; it cannot pretend ignorance about what is happening in the world and continue to celebrate roses and wine. It was an invitation to the artists, in Neruda’s words, to “come and see the blood in the streets.” Bertolt Brecht once asked in a poem, “Will there be poetry in bad times?” and answered, “Yes, poetry about bad times.” The poetry of the Holocaust proves this point. It was a new kind of poetry – “a poetry for the horror-stricken, for those abandoned to butchery, for survivors, created out of a remnant of words, salvaged words, out of uninteresting words from the great rubbish dump”, in the words of the post-war Polish poet, Tadeusz Rozewicz. I remember Picasso’s statement that art is not meant to decorate drawing rooms and the artist is not one who reduces the sun into a yellow spot but one who transforms a yellow spot into the sun.

The art of witness has acquired special relevance in our times of violence. Baudrillard said that globalization is the greatest form of violence as it destroys local cultures and languages, is a monologue of power, sentences the people of the third world countries to cultural amnesia and historical mutilation, and destroys indigenous modes of knowledge, native cosmologies and regional forms of art. It also appropriates people’s intangible heritage as raw material for the culture industry, destroys cultural diversity leading to an unhealthy standardization and creates crises of identities.

The source of violence in our times are nation-states that promote jingoism; Western concepts that hierarchise knowledge and pursue the Orientalist agenda where the East is looked upon as West’s past and the West as East’s future; patriarchy that oppresses and marginalizes women, transgenders, homosexuals and bisexuals, and promotes violence in the name of machismo, racism and casteism; religious fundamentalisms that empty religions of all their spirituality turning them into instruments of exploitation and sources of power; techno-fascism that ruins the environment; scientism that thinks science is the only way to truth much as religions claim, and multinational capitalism that impoverishes the majority materially as well as culturally, forms of what Umberto Eco calls “Ur-Fascism”, characterised by anti-intellectualism, fear of difference, intolerance towards dissent, hatred of pluralism and scorn for the weak.

Art is inevitably pitched against violence of every kind and cannot survive without fighting status quo-ist ideas and norms including aesthetic concepts and canons. So it is not merely a political question, but also one of its own survival, as proved by many incidents in the last few years like the attack on M F Hussain leading to his death in exile and attacks on film-makers, playwrights and dancers such as Deepa Mehta, Anand Patwardhan, Habib Tanvir, H.S. Shivaprakash, Hiren Gandhi, Mallika Sarabhai and many others. Bans on writers such as Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasreen, the murder of Safdar Hashmi and the attack on an art exhibition in Baroda are a few more examples of the fascist hatred of freedom and democracy.

Artists have always tried to resist oppression; by radicalising representation (Sudhir Patwardhan, Laxma Goud, Ganesh Pyne, Bikash Bhattacharjee), representing the transformative powers of men and women (K.S. Radhakrishnan), interrogating the conservative sexual ideal (Bhupen Khakkar), using the existing repertoire in new and different ways (Jamini Roy, Ghulam Sheikh, Sreenivasulu, Binode Behari Mukherjee, K.G. Subramanian), relocating and re-visioning history (Nilima Sheikh, Riyas Komu, Alex Mathew), bringing in class through the representation of labouring bodies (Somnath Hore, Ramkinkar Baij), problematising the real and its relation to art and society (F.N. Souza), turning art confrontational (T.V. Santosh, N.N. Rimson, Jyoti Basu, Kobita Mukherjee, Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malanai, Gogi Saroj Pal), questioning the sacred (M.F. Hussain), and inventing new forms that resist the market such as installation and video-art.

The artists today need to reject all prescriptive and normative approaches and develop a non-atavistic art of concern, opposition and awareness that is methodologically various and polyphonic. Art critics and historians are invited to re-examine our art history organically: its dialectical relationship of form and content; the diverse ideological configurations behind movements and concepts in art; the impact of market forces on the shape of art; and the ways in which art confronts the State and other forces that try to use it for their own ends. The latter engagement would develop a critique of hegemonic ideas and institutions. It examines the representation of difference (class, caste, gender and race) to establish connections among societal and artistic movements. At the same time it would mean re-examining the canons to reformulate the idea of art – with due acknowledgement of the art practices of the people – and end the divide between the “high” and the “low”, and the “elite” and the “popular” in art .

In short, we need a heterogeneous, inclusive and dynamic concept of art which rises above sectarian considerations, and recognises our multiple identities through a flexibility of techniques and strategies in order to fight the culture of silence and consent that is enveloping us and to confront the challenges and temptations of a greedy consumer industry and a blood-thirsty revivalism.

K. Satchidanandan is perhaps the most widely translated and anthologized of contemporary Indian poets. His books in English translation are While I Write: New and Selected Poems (2011), Misplaced Objects and Other Poems (2014) and The Missing Rib(2016). Read his essays on Indian Cultural Forum here, and his poems and translations on Guftugu here.

Courtesy: indianculturalforum.in
 

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My grandmother told me years ago that "Ismat apa", as she always called the illustrious writer,  wrote lying flat on her stomach, in the middle of a room buzzing with people. My grandparents were part of the great current of people who contributed to and were carried along by the Progressive Writers' Movement in the 1940's. While my grandfather was directly involved in literary production, my grandmother's contributions were more tangential, and her observations rather pithy. She told me that she loved visiting Ismat apa's home near Shivaji Park in Mumbai, a far trek from where she lived in Andheri. The windows of this house were always wide open, she recalled, and its curtains billowed all day in the sea breeze. From these observations I formed my own image of Ismat Chughtai, a woman of formidable achievement who wrote in an accessible voice. In my mind, she is the writer who wrote no matter what, belly down on a chatai (mat) on the floor, thriving on the bustle of the household around her.  The prolific writer was in the news recently, when the Rajasthan government decided to drop her stories from school textbooks. It also removed poems and short stories by the late theatre activist and writer Safdar Hashmi.
 
In her life, Chughtai was adept at offending people. Her work dealt with taboo themes and took readers into places that had never before been described. She wrote in the 'ghareloo zabaan': the turns of phrases and idioms of her busy household, the gossip of inner courtyards and women's quarters. I read her memoir Kaghazi Hai Pairahan (translated in English as A Life in Letters) as a college student. It was as transformative a text as other feminist tracts I encountered during those years, if not more so for the immediacy of its setting. Chughtai wrote in a style that was fearless, irreverent and often very funny. She began writing in the 1930s, but the story that defined her was Lihaaf (The Quilt), published in January 1942 in Adab-i-Latif, a literary magazine published from Lahore. The story earned her a court summons for obscenity, along with her friend Saadat Hasan Manto. They both chose to stand trial rather than apologize for their work, and eventually the cases were dropped.
 
Chughtai's canon includes works like her novel Terhi Lakeer (The Crooked Line) and stories like Masooma, Chauthi ka Joda (The Wedding Dress)  and Ziddi (The Stubborn Girl). The latter was adapted into a film script directed by her husband Shahid Latif. The duo collaborated on a host of other films including Arzoo (1950). Chughtai also wrote the dialogues for the 1978 film Junoon in which she played the role of a grandmother. And Chauthi ka Joda formed part of the story for the Partition classic Garam Hawa (1973), directed by MS Sathyu.

The years of student life are made special by exploration, by tuning into the abundance and diversity of nations, voices and realities. All this would be denied to the young minds who read the purged textbooks.
 
In every way, Chughtai stood for progressive values for most of her life.  She had to fight for an education, first from the iconic Isabella Thoburn College in Lucknow and then to gain a Teachers Training degree from Aligarh. She went on to write books that challenged parochialism and patrirachy and championed the cause of social justice. She wrote for all of India, and almost 25 years after her death, she stands as a proud symbol of India's syncretic values and her own compassionate humanity. So to weed her out of textbooks for schoolchildren is a self defeating move.
 
According to media reports, the reason for the removal of Chughtai and Hashmi's writings is that "they were were loaded with Urdu words…" and were "highlighting practices of a particular community." They are sought to be replaced by readings that promote "local cultural practices and beliefs". This runs counter to the idea of Indian plural culture, that takes pride in its diversity. It also fails to understand the entire culture of reading, and of exploring different worlds through words, ideas and books. As a young woman in Aligarh, where Chughtai set many of her stories, I devoured translations of Chekhov and Maupassant, besides the writings of PG Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. It is limiting to think that reading should be about your own life or what is familiar. The years of student life are made special by exploration, by tuning into the abundance and diversity of nations, voices and realities. All this would be denied to the young minds who read the purged textbooks.
 
It is both sad and ironic that Chughtai's works continue to fall foul of government diktats, decades after her trial by the British Crown, in the India of 2015.  Perhaps the only sane response to this is what I imagine Ismat would have done: continue writing, in a room with the windows flung wide open, open to the breeze from all directions.  
 
(The writer is a journalist based in Mumbai )
 

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Unlike the bombs that devastated the planet as the second world war blurred the lines between East and West, civilian and combatant, honour and terror, the bombs that exploded in the salons of colonial Bombay’s art scene in the late 1940s were crisp and bright, smelling of fresh paint and fresh ideas.

Many of Bombay’s art lovers, brought up on the genteel aridities of academic realism, found themselves grappling with shock. What did they find on these canvases bearing unknown signatures? Statuesque women modelled in planes jagged enough to draw blood, strangers to the sedate portraits favoured by the patrons of the age. Landscapes laid in impasto thick enough to chew, startling when mounted beside the delicate vistas and faux Mughal-Rajput miniatures approved by prevailing taste. Voluptuous nudes that had cast aside the coyness of their demure life class counterparts, to delight in the immediacy of skin and breath.

A new group of painters had made up their minds to seize centre stage, convinced that they alone could pick up the storyline of the Contemporary in India from where it had been dropped in 1941, after the deaths of the brilliantly idiosyncratic Rabindranath Tagore and the flamboyant but demon-haunted Amrita Sher-Gil.

Souza and Ara, Raza and Husain, Gade and Bakre: these young men were "strange and powerful animals", as one of them recalled fondly, in the course of a conversation with this writer some years ago. They were intense; and intensely frustrated with the canons that guided the practice of painting and the conventions that conditioned its reception in society. They were eager to record unfamiliar sensations, to grasp new and vibrant ways of putting brush and knife to canvas.

Even as India attained independence, they banded themselves into the short-lived but legendary Progressive Artists’ Group. Husain, the oldest, was slow to come on board; Souza, the youngest, was the febrile leader and ideologist. Amazingly, and this is a tribute to early post-colonial India’s – and specifically to early post-colonial Bombay’s – inclusive spirit, most of them belonged to religious minorities that had been shaken and dislocated during the partition that had been the dark twin to independence, their sense of self challenged and their reasons for belonging questioned.

Between the 1940s and the 1980s, the Progressives established themselves as the standard-bearers of India’s first post-colonial generation of artists and dominated the art scene in this country. They decided to explore a path distinct from the indigenously achieved modernism of Santiniketan, the utopian forest-university that Tagore had established in Bolpur, in the tribal heartland of eastern India. For the brilliantly eclectic Santiniketan artists, the toy-making and bell-casting techniques of tribal shamans went into the same crucible as Brancusi’s sculptures and Picasso’s epiphanies.

But the Progressives were Bombay artists. Although they were later to change their minds, the hinterland of India represented all that was to be left behind; the future lay elsewhere, in the metropolitan centres of the West. They were intense in their engagement with Art (they always speak of pictorial practice in the upper case), certain that it should be autonomous (even if they were not always certain of what it should be autonomous of), and quick to dismiss many who did not belong to their circle as social decorations, charlatans, or simply, as ‘non-artists’. They were convinced, also, that they should aim for standards of excellence that were international rather than merely local. And yet, these firebrands may never have been transformed into the sophisticated and magisterial figures that they later became without a crucial encounter that stimulated their energies, catalysing their enthusiasm into achievement.

The volatile Souza may well have wasted his life in prolonged tirades against god, the state and society, like many other Goan cranks. Husain may have hesitated, despite his resourcefulness and pragmatism, to break free of his anchorage in the Muslim artisanate and upper working class and redefine himself as an international nomad. The cautious Raza may not have received the impetus, so early, to book a passage to France and devote himself to a switching between the parentheses of Indic metaphysics and European urbanity.

These young men may not have transformed themselves so radically without the gifts of three eastward bound magi of Central European provenance answering to the names of Rudolf von Leyden, Walter Langhammer and Emmanuel Schlesinger. Without this troika of expatriate patrons who introduced them to the powerful languages of European modernism, the Progressives may well have remained raw, troubled rebels with the vaguest glimmering of a cause. And how intriguing that these magi should themselves have been affiliated to a minority group that had been stigmatised in Europe, herded into annihilation or driven into exile.

***

This meeting between the Central European magi and the future masters of post-colonial Indian art is a classic example of the enabling fortuity of the great city, the serendipity with which a global metropolis can nourish intercultural encounter. Von Leyden, Langhammer and Schlesinger were refugees from a Europe overshadowed by the Third Reich, who had made Bombay their home. Situated safely midway between the embattled harbours of the second world war’s eastern and western theatres – with Marseilles and Suez at one end, and Shanghai and Singapore at the other – Bombay played host to a varied cast of characters transiting from one uncertainty to another.

In this exodus were men and women who had narrowly escaped the SS, leaving behind sumptuous apartments or villas in Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Vienna, Salzburg, Budapest, Prague and many other glittering cities that had fallen under the jackboots of Hitler’s armies. Like their diasporic forefathers, who had been forced from their homes first in the Levant and later in Reconquista Spain, these representatives of the refined German-speaking Jewish elite had carried into exile what was most precious to them: their culture. Theirs was a connoisseurial heritage, its amplitude measured in musical scores and instruments, paintings and books.

Von Leyden, Schlesinger and Langhammer had arrived in Bombay at various points after the Nazis had seized power in Germany in 1933 and re-established their interrupted lives. Each had prospered reasonably by the mid-1940s and found a place in their host society: Langhammer was art director of The Times of India; von Leyden was a senior executive with the Swiss-Jewish firm of Volkarts and also art critic for The Times of India; Emmanuel Schlesinger owned a pharmaceuticals firm. Together, they had formed a circle into which they gradually invited some of the most gifted young artists who had appeared on a scene benumbed by British colonial taste. The Progressives were invited to the Sunday morning meetings that Langhammer held at his home, which von Leyden and Schlesinger also attended. Here, these transplanted Europeans would open before their protégés the sophistications of the Eden they had known and from which they had been expelled.

For the Progressives, whose knowledge of modern Euro-American art came mainly from art books printed on war quality paper and confined to black and white reproductions, the full-colour amazements of Schiele, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Rouault, Modigliani, Klee and Picasso, these were invaluable lessons. In retrospect, it also seems clear that the troika also infected their acolytes with a nagging sense of discontent and dislocation, the belief that the horrors of experience could only be healed by the affirmations of art, which could only be found in the lost Europe of their nostalgia.

To the Progressives – both the nucleus of founder members and their associates, Akbar Padamsee, VS Gaitonde, Tyeb Mehta, Krishen Khanna and Mohan Samant, life could no longer go on as before. They were seized by a yearning to travel, to unchain themselves from the familiar. Despite Nehru’s stirring evocation of the "soul of a nation, long suppressed, [finding] utterance" at the threshold of independence, the new India had begun to devote itself obsessively to the practical rather than the imaginative aspect of collective life: while culture was celebrated and even institutionalised as a monopoly of the dirigiste, developmentalist state, cultural practitioners did not necessarily receive support unless their activities could be brought into the ambit of an official national art. If they could paint murals and produce public sculpture, this was acceptable; more conceptual, experimental or private departures were not regarded as pertinent.

The Progressives, like many other young artists elsewhere in India at this time, wanted to remake themselves in societies that were hospitable to the imagination and where they did not have to assert their preference to be artists rather than engineers, social workers or medical practitioners dedicated to the task of building a new nation. Most of them went westward: some to Paris, others to London, one or two brave souls to New York. Some settled in their new homes; others returned after varying periods of residence abroad; and yet others among them have shuttled back and forth for decades.

***

The trouble with latter-day magi, as O. Henry’s Christmas parable suggests, is that their gifts can go tragically awry. While the Central European troika gave the unruly talent of the Bombay artists a sense of direction and purpose, their patronage also had a certain negative and even limiting effect. The acolytes, flying on their guides’ instructions to Europe, missed the transatlantic flight of talent, capital and knowledge that had already taken off during the war. Painters and critics, collectors and dealers, museum specialists and historians had all escaped the Nazi onslaught to settle in the USA, mainly in enclaves on the east coast. Apprenticing themselves to the School of Paris, which was already fading before the School of New York, some of the Progressives condemned themselves to years of epigonic work justified by an exhausted rhetoric of originality and heroic quest; a fate from which they were not released until changed historical or personal circumstances allowed them to grow beyond the context of their apprenticeship.

Fortunately, some of the Progressives and their associates took up the challenge of formulating an artistic language that addressed its immediate location and yet could communicate across borders without restricting itself to the auto-Orientalism of ethnic or nativist choices. As the impact of personal encounter and the charisma of their European mentors faded, the Progressives could discard the biases and preferences they had imbibed, and distil the lesson of transcultural receptivity from their encounter with the magi.

Over the decades they have opened themselves to diverse artistic lineages, becoming attentive, variously, to impulses that came from T’ang painting and the Japanese ukiyo-e prints, from Gupta sculpture and the Rajput raga-malika paintings, from cinema and mathematics, Sanskrit grammar and Santhal mythology. The leading spirits of the Progressive Artists’ Group emerged strengthened from this confluence of lineages and have remained committed to a lifelong quest for the crucial rather than the alluring image, seeking it through the icon of the heroic survivor, the allegorical tableau, the visionary landscape and the symbol that mediates between time’s decay and the luminosity of the eternal.

Archived from Communalism Combat, August-September 2007, Anniversary Issue (14th), Year 14    No.125, India at 60 Free Spaces, Art

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