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AN AUTUMN OF ARTS AND FESTIVALS
BY T.R.K
A collection of water colours by a group of 19th century artists from Calcutta was on show this week until January at the prestigious Victoria and Albert Museum in London. This group of anonymous Kalighat painters, sold their work mostly to the pilgrims visiting the temple of Kali. Traditionally they had painted stories from the Hindu Puranas on hand-made paper joined together into scrolls to be used as a visual aid to public story-telling. As far back as the early 19th century the Kalighat artists, Bengali Hindus of the Patua community abandoned this tradition and begun painting on factory made paper in watercolours.
At the preview some 500 aficionados from the world of Art and media gathered with glasses of wine in their hands and seemed stunned by the vitality and vibrancy of what to most of them was a discovery of an entire oeuvre. It did not surprise me to hear that multi-talented painter and novelist Balraj Khanna whom I wrote about recently had "curated" the show and painstakingly put together the exhibition.
I consider myself to be art-blind, in the sense people are colour-blind or tone-deaf; I am unable to tell great from good, and bad from mediocre. It has always seemed to me that unlike in writing, it is always hard to make quality and value judgements when you look at paintings. I envy critics on the other hand who can pronounce fluently on what they see in full flow of metaphors. But this collection spoke to me louder than words. Initially there is an awful moment of deja vu and even a double take when you see the solid shapes of Leger and even contours of a Matisse in these sure-handed lines and uncontrived fluency of drawing. Then you see the origins of calendar Art, much influenced as it was by Victorian tastes for decorative art. You see Modigliani's ellipses in the apple of a courtesan's face. You see humorous caricatures, one where a pack of Rats are holding a court to judge a Cat's conduct as its enemy. You see drawings anticipating Gemini Roy's lines and forms some fifty years earlier. We all collectively wondered why we had not heard of this astonishingly modernist collection with its idiomatic consistency before this? And yet these Kalighat artists pre-date our twentieth century Modernists. In fact Rudyard Kipling was the first to donate a collection to the Victoria and Albert in 1917.
I enjoyed being a fly-on-the wall at this preview, listening to bursts of unselfconscious, animated cries of the London's demi-monde. "Hullo, Sabine darling", piped a modish cut-glass voice, " How are you! Kiss kiss!" " Hullo Mohan! Fancy seeing you here. Kiss, Kiss, must meet soon"
There seems to be a renaissance of Indian Arts and Drama in England this autumn. The BBC Radio Drama are broadcasting ten episodes of Ramayana, our mega Hindu epic with ever-present Saeed Jaffrey and Shashi Kapoor, the latter making his debut as a radio artiste.The music composed by Wilfredo Acosta, I understand is hauntingly splendid. This is a synergetic accomplishment of a group of Asian actors on a Radio Drama Equal Opportunities Training programme and a well known gifted director Alby James. This serialisation starts on Radio 4 on Monday the 31 October. Anyone who is familiar with the Hindu mythology knows the vastness and the cosmic dimensions of the stage on which these stories are enacted.
A decade ago, Peter Brook produced a 6 hour mega stage production of Mahabharata, which he later filmed creating a spell-binding magic lantern version. Elephant-headed Ganesa as a child playing scribe to a wise narrator of the epic Vyasa inhabiting a timeless zone retailing the unfolding story of Mahabharata, as a device is unparalleled. Channel 4 showed the whole uncut work bravely. My regret is that these visionary interpretations are generally not shown in India, where the filmic tradition merely permits a parading of card-board cut-outs of our calendar gods, acting out a ghastly parody of our Bombay films.
I understand that octogenarian Indian novelist Shankar Menon Marath is currently on a visit to India. It is unlikely that he would be feted in India's literary salons, who I am told write only about writers with pent-houses and swimming pools. I first met Menon Marath in the mid sixties when he was coming to the end of a life-long career as a civil servant. Kind, aloof and amused, he was pleased that someone somewhere had heard of him. He has not had the literary critical recognition of his literary peers of Indians writing in English: like R.K.Narayan, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, Nirad Chaudhuri, nor the benefit of a redemptive blurb from Graham Greene which elevated Narayan.
He has only three published novels to his credit. Menon Marath is a slow writer. At 89 he lives in the riverside suburb of Teddington in London. His first novel Wound of Spring was published in 1960 when he was 54. The novel is set in pre-independent India, in Kerala in a feudal matrilineal society. His other two published novels are more sparely written. The Sale of an Island is about the feudal imperatives of a society of landlords, tenant farmers and migrant workers locked in a fatal struggle. Janu his last published novel is about an orphaned girl seeking the freedoms of recognition as an equal, in friendship and in love. Janu could prove to be a commendable addition to a list of classic feminist resurrections that India's publishing house like KALI could look at with benefit. Menon Marath has held an elite group of Indian feminists in his spell. They cannot come to terms with a male novelists sympathetic portrayal of Janu, an inarticulate, uneducated Indian woman, who is abandoned, enslaved, raped and expelled, but discovers the secret of living forever in the present at the very heart of human moral quandaries in empathy with her aggressors and friends. Menon Marath certainly deserves new attention and a careful critical re-appraisal.
The festival of Divali is here again, and the Indian community in England celebrate it in some pomp and style. In a sense it has become all things all men: a Hindu New Year, an Indian Christmas, a time of reconciliation and renewal of friendships, of acts of charity, public and private celebrations. A group of Asian businessmen led by our own Swaraj Paul, who has been much in the news with his generous donation to the London Zoo, live it up with a magnificent dinner at the London Hilton. The Goddess of prosperity is not far from their minds, and Lakshmi is rightfully invited to cross the threshold, whilst our scribes open new book-keeping ledgers and inscribe an OM on page one. It coincides uniquely with the very British Guy Fawkes day, celebrating another story, another folk villain - from another time.
19961163 Words