An uncommon commoner

Celebrating Jyoti Bhatt's work.

The gallery supplies a sheaf of paper and some coloured pens and swiftly, skillfully, Jyoti Bhatt scribbles a drawing that would frustrate most people "" those who cry foul about modern art in the first place, that it follows no known paradigm, that it is promiscuous, that yes, even a child could draw it.

You imagine telling Bhatt all this and you know he will smile that most guileless of smiles. He is essentially the man in the background, R K Laxman's "common man" "" only, he is uncommon, of course: the Bhavnagar-born, Baroda-educated artist who made folk forms trendy, turning them into pop mythology.

That was long ago, a time already fading into history, when he found he would have to end up with an education in art because he had neglected the study of Sanskrit, English and algebra. "I thought I would go to Santiniketan," he beams, even though he had no idea where Santiniketan was, either geographically, or as an idea.

Fortunately, a friend from Baroda happened by and so the boy whose interest in drawing had been limited to sketching birds so he could explain the joys of birdwatching, found himself at Kala Bhavan in the company of Professor N S Bendre, Sankho Chowdhury and K G Subramanyam. "I was more lucky than smart," he says.

The three teachers took him under their wing, helping him "like their child", working on murals "like an assistant". Bhatt found rich nourishment "" and freedom. "I have few wants," he explains, yet when he chose to literally step off the map, to abandon painting and, later, printmaking, for a life devoted to documenting folk and tribal cultures, it must have created hardships.

"My wife," explains Bhatt simply, "had a job." When he drifted into photography, he insists he lost "the painterly eye". It's another matter that many of those photographs could stand on their own at any exhibition for their ability to combine the vanishing human note in the still life of folk forms.

There is much that Bhatt can talk about, such as the impermanence of folk art, something that would horrify the urban artist, or his lack of politics, which he denies "" using the idiom of the screw to explain that it is at once a symbol of disarray as well as order and it could also be a symbol of "a politician screwing you".

He points to a work on display at the Delhi Art Gallery where an acrylic, pen and ink "A-B-Zee of My India" has been mounted, to explain that it was six years in the making. "It was on the wall in my home, incomplete..." but gallerist Ashish Anand wanted it for this, the largest show of Bhatt's life (though it isn't a retrospective, he insists). So, "I finished the work", he says, but had it remained with him it would have been, like most folk forms, a work in progress.

Not that Bhatt is willfully slow. Just that there are problems "" "blood pressure," he shrugs, "prostrate, and that is really inconvenient, and macular vision", this last causing loss of sight. "There was a time I could work for 18 hours on the go," he reminisces, "now I cannot work for more than 18 minutes at a time."

In the decade since he got back to painting, he says he has been able to get back his "confidence again", seamlessly bridging the decades with the same line and flow. "Certain things," he explains, "become a mannerism."

But ask him about the illustrative quality of his work, and he is upset: "It can be taken negatively," he suggests, the teacher in him coming to the fore. Illustrations may be a pejorative term "" but aren't they too a work of art? His answer to that, alas, remains unanswered for now, when he is celebrating his life in a book to be released by Vivan Sundaram tonight.