Missing a <i>biennale</i>

India should have showcased its soft power at Venice

The noughties were prime time for contemporary art in India, when in spite of government abstinence, its artists could do no wrong. Their works were on view in London, Shanghai and San Francisco. Curators sought them out for commissions for museums. Their art was meant to represent one of the most startlingly transformed nations in the world, and they were the toast of the decade, names that were introduced via the West. And the prices overtook in that brief ascendancy even those of the masters, causing heartburn and prophesies of imminent collapse. The soothsayers had it right, but for reasons they could hardly have fathomed - the collapse of a bank in America that plunged the art world into financial chaos. And with it, the story of contemporary Indian art went into rigor mortis. Comparisons with the Chinese art market, in whose footsteps Indian art was supposed to follow, now offered a liminal hope, especially since the Chinese used the financial crisis to capitalise and dominate their hold of the global art market, becoming its largest buyers and sellers. At the same time, the Indian market shrank further. Far from comparisons with China, it became ostracised, in a manner of speaking, a pariah of the art world for the loss in value it created for its collectors.

More than the fiscal hammering though was the loss of face before an international community of art viewers who had come to expect a certain urbaneness from Indian art. Can anyone forget the image of Subodh Gupta's Very Hungry God tethered to a platform in Venice, a gigantic skull made up of steel utensils floating ominously against the city's Medici architecture? Gupta's Hungry God recounted India's irony that simultaneously celebrates containers of plenty alongside paucity, not unlike the presence of Indian artists at the Venice Biennale in spite of their government's apathy. The world's oldest and most prestigious art event was established in 1895, the 55th edition of which opened recently - and as is usual - without even mandatory government presence, though a few Indian artists were represented, as has been the case, individually. At the previous edition, in 2011, for the first and only time, India had a national pavilion at the Biennale, with an exhibition that had been curated by Ranjit Hoskote. That had raised hopes of a permanent presence at Venice, but this year's nonattendance has belied it as just chimera.

Art fairs attract collectors who come to buy art; biennales draw curators, museum directors and other officials who constitute the art literati, and who select works for inclusion in other curated shows and for institutional collections. The Venice Biennale, among them all, remains the most significant. In opting away from this global platform, the Lalit Kala Akademi and the ministry of culture have robbed the country of a powerful platform on which to roll out its soft power. When bureaucrats have been packing their bags to represent the country at even the most insignificant trade and consumer fairs, or to go to Cannes where the 100th anniversary of the Indian film industry was celebrated with a sequinned Amitabh Bachchan declaring the annual outing open in chaste Hindi, it is unfortunate that an older tradition of art - the Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai is 156 years old - has got short shrift. It is worth remembering that for millions of people around the world, the Indus Valley Civilisation is represented by one iconic image - that of a dancer, cast in bronze by an artist four thousand years back. A similar image of India, circa 2013, would - alas - be difficult to find.