On Gandhi's road

Atul Dodiya is redefining kitsch in streetside objects

Atul Dodiya comes from the Kathiawad area of Gujarat and was born in 1959, almost a century after the region's most famous son, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. By then the leader's symbolic acts of resistance such as the Dandi March and non-cooperation movements had gone into history books.

While artists before him ""such as S Khosa, Chittaprosad, Ratan Parimoo and Nandalal Bose""have all depicted the national leader in different moods of history, Dodiya embraced Gandhi as a symbolic interpretation later in his career than artists such as Jatin Das or K M Adimoolam. The turning point, says Dodiya, came during the 50th year of Independence, when he did a show called Artist of Non-Violence.

"Gandhi was always there. He was not to be discovered. To me, he is the first conceptual artist," explains Dodiya.

Growing up in Mumbai's low-middle class chawl of Ghatkopar, Dodiya says he re-lives images of Gandhi everyday. "I crossed the M G (Mahatma Gandhi) Road on way to school. Now, I cross it to reach my studio," he says.

His "studio" was once his home, where a game of gilli danda during childhood blurred the vision of his right eye. "My old neighbours there are still my first critics," he says.

Today, his works have travelled much beyond his neighbourhood and his shows are held in Europe, Japan and the US. He is, today, perhaps one of modern India's most subtle and sophisticated image-makers. His oeuvre of works challenges the boundaries of the abstract and realism.

In his series Antler Anthology (2003-2004), poems written in vernacular Gujarati become the central image. In Cracks in Mondrian (2004-2005), he takes potshots at the condition of our political state through the interplay of Piet Mondrian's colour geometry and seeping building walls, much as we see in our residential complexes. Personal stories also become his subject; Oh Nayna depicts his sister suffering from brain haemorrhage.

In short, Dodiya does not follow any singular style or technique. His experimentations oscillate between realism and abstraction in a two-dimensional landscape. He paints on rolling shutter (the metal shop doors) and uses curtains, water pipes, crutches as peripheries of his work as he searches for new contexts in calendar art, old letters, water stains and Bollywood kitsch.

He employs industrial material such as enamel paints, marble powder, charcoal dust and cement to convey the "emotion of his subject". For instance, for the series on Gandhi, he opted for paper ("as it is soft as a veil") and watercolour ("so that you work humbly").

Dodiya, who studied in a local Gujarati school and was a first class product from JJ School of Arts, heavily draws elements from Western art history and images of the east. But all these overlapping influences can get weary at times.

He remains an artist for the connoisseurs and his collectors avidly follow the progression of his work. He agrees he is influenced by Western art and makes self-portraits in Picasso's style "for fun". "I am just a part of a long chain of events," he comments.

As his distaste for communal violence grows, he feels there is a need for a Gandhian attitude of humanity but thinks aesthetics will always be his primary concern.

"I feel there is a total lack of leadership. Obvious poverty is what I see all the time. I may not be a seer of non-violence. But I can at least call myself an artist of non-violence," he says.