A retrospective and accompanying exhibition in New Delhi, Reina Sofia and New York have done much to consolidate Nasreen Mohamedi's position in Indian art, but her brother Altaf (he dropped his surname) has stayed under the radar - although, hopefully, that might change with a career-retrospective that is being planned in Mumbai in September, 11 years after his death in 2005. Born to a wealthy business family with a number of siblings who fell foul of a debilitating disease, Altaf was given to thoughts around death and mortality which seeped into his art. For most of his life, he was haunted by despair, about which he wrote in his diaries, currently being edited by his daughter Sasha.
But darkness aside, there is another facet to Altaf's life that has remained forgotten, a discourse on the importance of art as a political device, something he became part of when, in the early 1970s, he joined Proyom (short for Progressive Youth Movement), a students initiative begun by Dev Nathan and Kiran Kasbekar, which he joined along with his wife and fellow artist, Navjot. Among other things, Proyom wanted to move the matrix of art out of white cube galleries and museums to the streets with its discussions around peasant uprisings in Naxalbari and student movements in Gujarat and Bihar. Its particular resonance for Altaf went so deep that he chose the open-air art gallery of the pavement outside the city's Jehangir Art Gallery for his first exhibition; later, he would visit mills and labour camps where he would use art to inform and educate the proletariat on their rights and a life of dignity.
If protest formed part of his oeuvre, so did thoughts of mortality; but working on the exhibition with those who knew him closest, I have to admit to vicariously enjoying his addiction to lists of books (read and unread) and films about which he wrote at great length. Almost nothing recreates an era as much as the popular literature and music of its time, and Altaf's heroes were the usual intellectuals of his time, Karl Marx and Mao Tse Tung, and he enjoyed the relationship between art and politics that he discovered in books by John Berger and Herbert Read. But he also read Dostoevsky and Maxim Gorky, Rainer Maria Rilke and Marquez, Sylvia Plath and Pablo Neruda, Noam Chomsky and Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and Octavio Paz, a passion for understanding the world that he carried from his London years to Mumbai where he surrounded himself with the writings, over the years, of everyone from the recently deceased Mahashweta Devi to the activist Arundhati Roy. If he liked films - and his daughter says he would have made a great filmmaker - he also surrounded himself with music all the way from Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and their protest lyrics to Stevie Wonder and Pink Floyd. He could argue about the merits of Western artists but at home he admired most Tyeb Mehta and Prabhakar Barwe.
All this forms part of the material being collated for the upcoming retrospective and offers insights into his practice and thinking, but for many the takeaway might be about how art should engage more with the public. It is something we could do well to ask when its commodification has taken even tribal art away from its roots and into the formal gallery - an idea first realised by J. Swaminathan at Bhopal's Bharat Bhavan. Come to think of it, a conversation between Altaf and Swaminathan would have been a great pointer to how two radicals united by a love of learning shared a common goal but came to it via different routes.
But darkness aside, there is another facet to Altaf's life that has remained forgotten, a discourse on the importance of art as a political device, something he became part of when, in the early 1970s, he joined Proyom (short for Progressive Youth Movement), a students initiative begun by Dev Nathan and Kiran Kasbekar, which he joined along with his wife and fellow artist, Navjot. Among other things, Proyom wanted to move the matrix of art out of white cube galleries and museums to the streets with its discussions around peasant uprisings in Naxalbari and student movements in Gujarat and Bihar. Its particular resonance for Altaf went so deep that he chose the open-air art gallery of the pavement outside the city's Jehangir Art Gallery for his first exhibition; later, he would visit mills and labour camps where he would use art to inform and educate the proletariat on their rights and a life of dignity.
If protest formed part of his oeuvre, so did thoughts of mortality; but working on the exhibition with those who knew him closest, I have to admit to vicariously enjoying his addiction to lists of books (read and unread) and films about which he wrote at great length. Almost nothing recreates an era as much as the popular literature and music of its time, and Altaf's heroes were the usual intellectuals of his time, Karl Marx and Mao Tse Tung, and he enjoyed the relationship between art and politics that he discovered in books by John Berger and Herbert Read. But he also read Dostoevsky and Maxim Gorky, Rainer Maria Rilke and Marquez, Sylvia Plath and Pablo Neruda, Noam Chomsky and Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and Octavio Paz, a passion for understanding the world that he carried from his London years to Mumbai where he surrounded himself with the writings, over the years, of everyone from the recently deceased Mahashweta Devi to the activist Arundhati Roy. If he liked films - and his daughter says he would have made a great filmmaker - he also surrounded himself with music all the way from Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and their protest lyrics to Stevie Wonder and Pink Floyd. He could argue about the merits of Western artists but at home he admired most Tyeb Mehta and Prabhakar Barwe.
All this forms part of the material being collated for the upcoming retrospective and offers insights into his practice and thinking, but for many the takeaway might be about how art should engage more with the public. It is something we could do well to ask when its commodification has taken even tribal art away from its roots and into the formal gallery - an idea first realised by J. Swaminathan at Bhopal's Bharat Bhavan. Come to think of it, a conversation between Altaf and Swaminathan would have been a great pointer to how two radicals united by a love of learning shared a common goal but came to it via different routes.
Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated