 "How NGMA painted a picture of India's 4,500-year journey for G20 spouses")
For a Tuesday morning, the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) is unusually busy. Parking is hard to find and there is a queue by the security guard jotting down the credentials of visitors in his register. Opposite him, in a glassy, new security booth, freshly deployed personnel of the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) are scanning bags and frisking people.
The reason for this additional security and heightened interest is the cultural extravaganza that NGMA put together on September 9 for the spouses of world leaders who were in New Delhi for the G20 summit. Their day out at the gallery included a lunch (largely millet-based dishes and street food), shopping for textiles, engagements with artisans and craftspersons, and a tour of an elaborate exhibition of some 500 prized pieces — sculptures, paintings, coins, inscriptions and archaeological finds.
Three days on, their high-profile excursion is still creating a buzz. Designer Manish Malhotra, who had put on display his phulkari, chikankari and zardozi creations in the form of bright, embroidered jackets and lehengas, posted several pictures on Instagram of the visit that saw Türkiye’s first lady Emine Erdogan, UK’s Akshata Murty, Japan’s Yuko Kishida, Indonesia’s Iriana Joko and Mauritius’s Kobita Jugnauth, among others. There were also videos and pictures of the spouses engaging with craftspersons and entrepreneurs from Kashmir, Nagaland, Gujarat and Maharashtra, with Murty even trying her hand at block printing.
Meanwhile, the exhibition, titled “Roots and Routes” to illustrate India’s civilisational past and its interconnectedness with the world, is now open to the public.
Spread across two floors of the butterfly-shaped Jaipur House, which faces the India Gate Central Hexagon, it draws the visitor into the “roots and routes” theme from the very first room. On the left are three sculptures that demonstrate India’s ancient past. One of them, for instance, presents the country’s tradition of yoga, drawing attention to its divine origins through a 15th-16th century sculpture, “Yoga Narasimha”. And on the right side are three pieces that establish India’s interactions with the world through sea and land routes. There is, for example, “Malamni Pothi”, a logbook of sea navigation from the Samvat period, which carries details of the strategies of the mariner community of Kutch, Gujarat.
The antiquities traverse periods dating back some 4,500 years, with one room dedicated to a 2018 discovery from Uttar Pradesh: the remains of the Sinauli war chariot, which the curatorial note says are similar to those found in other cultures — Assyrian (1133 BCE), Chinese (1200 BCE), Mesopotamian (1800 BCE) and Egyptian (1274 BCE).
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The exhibits have been sourced from the National Museum in Delhi, Indian Museum Kolkata, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, NGMA, Government Museums of Chandigarh, Mathura and Chennai, National Library and Asiatic Society, Kolkata, and the site museums at Sarnath, Nalanda, Nagarjunakonda and Sanchi.
The curator, retired Culture Secretary Raghvendra Singh, says it took some nine months to put the exhibition together. The VIP guests, he says, ended up spending an hour here instead of the scheduled half hour. While there was no visitor book on which they could leave their impressions, they signed on a catalogue, he adds. “We also gifted them the catalogue of the exhibition, which is of a scale never attempted before.”
Through 11 themes, the exhibition attempts to check all the boxes.
Under “India’s outreach”, one is given a sense of how the civilisation realised, right from the Vedic times, the importance of forging trade and cultural relations with the world. This section has coins from the time of King Vikramaditya, Alexander the Great, Skandagupta, Jahangir and Indo-Greek king Menander, who later converted to Buddhism.
Environment, or prakriti, is another theme. A painting of Krishna lifting the Govardhan mountain and sheltering the inhabitants of Vrindavan from the deluge caused by Indra points to environmental concerns. Another one, of Krishna swallowing fire and rescuing the gopas, draws attention to the hazards of forest fires and the importance of clean air.
Yoga gets a section to its own. And the lotus appears through several works — sometimes to represent the chakras within the body; at other times to explain its significance in the Bhagavad Gita, where it is used as a metaphor for detachment, or in Buddhism, where the golden lotus represents enlightenment. Antiquities around Buddhism occupy a good part of the exhibition.
The question of gender is also addressed through a sculpture of Ardhanarishvara (half Shiva and half Parvati).
Connecting India to G20 countries is a theme that runs through 25 per cent of the exhibition. Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore are celebrated through paintings as among the most distinguished personalities from India. An attempt has also been made to represent works from each of the G20 countries. So, from antiques, you suddenly find yourself in the vibrant world of American pop artist Robert Rauschenberg or M F Husain’s “Dallas’ JFK”. The vivacious Amrita Sher-Gil shines through four of her works, which are focused not on India but the western world, like her painting “Notre Dame”. And Chinese President Xi Jinping might have skipped the summit, but at NGMA, six scrolls from China register the country’s presence at G20.
“Roots and Routes” tries to do a lot — presenting India the way it wants to be seen.