Book Review (Think India Quarterly, Jan-Feb 2006)
Text Box: By Ashok Vajpeyi Modernism in Indian art has had a long history of ambivalence in terms of response and acceptance. At one end, it has been seen as imitation of the Western modernism which emerged under entirely different historical and socio-cultural contexts and implanted in India by colonialism. At another, it is viewed as a world-wide movement which India could not have possibly escaped or avoided. It has also been argued that in India there have been two concurrent modernisms: one provoked and propelled by the Western influence and second born out of the restlessness and anxieties of our own tradition. At yet another level, it could be noticed that while visual arts, literature and theatre have firmly and in many ways radically modernised themselves, classical music and dance have preferred to remain more stubbornly rooted in tradition. Altogether modernism in arts and aesthetics presents a very multilayered and complex area to understand and explore. Its multiple forms and connections while embodying its robust plurality could also create a lot of confusion. Indeed it already has. In this context the present book by Shakti Maira, an eminent thinking painter, offers a fresh perspective and some provocative insights about the contemporary visual culture of India. It is very much a painter’s book based not only on his own long journey across continents as a painter but also on his experiences as a sensitive traveller to many parts of India and the world. He is the one who reads deeply, observes carefully, remembers and is able to connect and does not shy away from some of the dominant questions relating to globalisation, market economy, middle class ethos, malaise of education, active forces of communalisation, cheap spirituality, value-vacuum of most politics etc. He does not offer solutions but raises relevant questions and also enhances our awareness about the dark implications of the glitter that surround modern art in India these days. One of the major points Shakti Maira makes is that since the manifold traditions of aesthetics and art-practice in India have generated great and enduring art-works across millennia, contemporary Indian art, or for that matter its aesthetics, cannot possibly ignore or bypass them without creatively and critically rediscovering and reinventing them for our times. While analysing the various theories that have been thrown up in the West during its modern movement and the current post-modern phase, he emphasises the place of communicativeness in art particularly in the context of India and questions the over-bloated notions of individualism and self-sufficient autonomy of art. He rightly underline the communicativeness and self-expression are not necessarily mutually exclusive. He asserts, “Art has the ability to joyfully move our minds from dullness to curiosity, from unknowing to knowing, from darkness to luminosity. Something that can only happen when we don’t merely look at art, but when we look into it.” Shakti laments the undermining of ‘the intelligence of the hands of the artists’ by art pundits, the Brahmins of art. And he does not fail to notice that “one of the great excitements of Modernism as a social movement is the flattening out of oppressive hierarchies”. Making an important distinction between style and vision, he lays stress on the point that a young artist must aspire to attain a vision of his own and his style would follow. One of the most interesting parts of the book relates to Shakti Maira’s experience of and insights into Buddhist art and aesthetics. He identifies four defining characteristics namely ‘a focus on the beauty of inner reality’, ‘the attempt to create an art experience that includes and integrates sense perceptions, feelings and emotions, thoughts, cognition and understanding’, ‘the motivation of the artist’, and ‘the quality of attention and mindfulness the artist brings to art making’. Interspersed with personal encounters with art-works, events and experiences, Shakti Maira comes out with some very interesting ideas. While acknowledging the enduring fascination with the notion of perfection in human history, he remarks, “A critical problem with perfection is its unitariness, which flies in the face of the diversity in nature. We imagine perfection and then try and conform to that imagined form. But in nature everything is different. So to presume that only one form of a leaf, or a face, or a way of being is perfect is to deny life’s truth. Perfection is a multiplicity and not a singularity. If art is a way of truth, perfection is a false premise.” Shakti Maira looks critically at the dominant aesthetics of the bizarre, the abhorrent, and the ugly in the contemporary Western art and makes a fervent plea for making art in India “that is profound, beautiful and joyful.” He feels it is time “to revive and revitalise the Art of Joy”. Taking his cue from the Indian philosophical and aesthetic traditions, he pitches in for art in which “there has been inclusion of the temporal and the spiritual, an integration of the sensual and the spiritual, a celebration of the pleasure of the senses, of sexuality, happiness and laughter.” Dealing with beauty, he observes, “Both art and people are much more than their physical form and it is their wholeness that we often fail to respond to in our preoccupation with the surface. With people, our deepest experience of beauty comes not from their looks but from their love and wisdom. With art it comes not from its material surface but from its deeper transformative qualities.” The book also reads like a notebook of an artist. It allows Shakti to put down his chanced observations without losing the overarching concerns of exploring the philosophical and aesthetic underpinnings of art in our time and culture and looking for an alternative vision. For instance, he find the age-old practice in the South India of painting and plastering beautiful stone carvings unaesthetic and remarks, “There is real beauty in natural materials and good artists and designers do not allow their intrinsic beauty to get lost in pretence and artifice. Nakedness if beautiful. We could allow more of it, with the exception of naked walls.” Prudishness and decline of visual literacy and artistic intelligence in contemporary India are dealt with at some length. Shakti examines various aspects including the sociological factors. He starts by noting that “the moment our people step out of the beauty that remains in our traditional crafts, they seem to show no sign of visual intelligence or literacy. They go straight for the loud, vulgar and ugly.” He moves on to the stipulation that “the feudal elite and their temples and palaces probably hijacked art and aesthetics from everyday living and made it their privileged reserve.” One of the pleasures of reading this book is that every once in a while you come across a problem or a situation which might have bothered you. Shakti offers interesting analysis of many such things; for instance, he thinks that most people’s inability to relate to sculpture has less to do with attitudinal issues and more to do with the changes that are occurring in the way we see. He adds that “modern life is making people see two-dimensionally. We can’t appreciate three-dimensionality as we once used to. Our faculty of sight is being so extensively used for reading words and viewing pictures on the printed page, cinema, computer screens and television, the flatter the better, that is causing changes in how we see and relate to the dimension of depth. Depth has become de-emphasised in modern seeing and even when we look at the three-dimensional, we scan the surface-plane rather than see depth. We are carrying our habit of reading page or screens into the real world and are thus seeing most things only two-dimensionally. As a result sculpture has lost its ability to stir us through its magic of dimensionality and depth.” There are two chapters namely ‘City Cultures and Shoptalk’ and ‘Expectations and Education’ in which there are several useful suggestions for action by both private and public institutions and agencies in terms of improving community aesthetics, reinventing education of arts etc. Both policymakers and persons in charge could greatly benefit from the rich experience and robust wisdom they so intensely and yet practically embody. Shakti Maira is acutely aware that “In India, historians and scholars seem to mistake the past for the eternal” and refers to the prevalence of “a fantasy about return to some glorious past, an idealisation of Vedic culture and a sanatan dharma.” He is of the opinion that “our art cannot be pulled back to the past, yet it should also not lose its search for the eternal.” He squarely criticises the Hindutva mentality which divides us between ‘us’ and ‘others’ and tends to eradicate from our living heritage the tremendous contribution made to Indian arts, indeed tradition and culture, by tribal, folk, Islamic, and modern art languages. Shakti Maira, in the last analysis, makes a powerful case for the Indian art to offer a new alternative in an increasingly globalised world. While many aspects of Western modernity can and should be incorporated within an alternative vision from India, which in the words of Makarand Paranjape, would allow “rationality and plurality, a non-violent integrative wisdom, which allows for both material and spiritual elevation, for opportunity and equity.” Such a vision seems to be slowly taking shape. Whether it should be christened as Advaita Modern or Integrative Modern, as suggested by Shakti, is a matter for artists themselves to decide. *