Exhibition catalogues have lately become the mainstay of art writing in India. Which is, in a way, natural in an art economy (I use economy in the broad sense of an organised system) that is only in recent years growing into a consciousness of itself as an “economy”. After all, art galleries that organise exhibitions are the most “invested” in creating informed opinion about art and artists, a process that must precede the creation of greater appreciation, both aesthetic and commercial, for Indian art within the country and abroad. By helping to interpret and contextualise the art-work and artist in a format that’s not just attractive but also enduring – most are prestige publications in large coffee-table format, printed on thick art paper, with pages after pages of full-colour images – catalogues become the first line of scholarship.
This is one way of considering this book whose publication marks the ongoing “retrospective” show at Delhi Art Gallery of Gogi Saroj Pal, the 66-year-old woman painter who is described in the foreword by the gallery’s director Ashish Anand, as “India’s first major feminist painter”. That’s a big claim, and one that historians of Indian art, who have unanimously reserved that distinction for Amrita Sher-Gil, will contest. A more accurate assessment would be to place Pal among a set of women painters such as Arpita Singh, Nalini Malani, Madhvi Parekh and Nilima Sheikh whose art-works, from around the eighties, began to foreground female figures, experiences — their own and that of their sorority.
What marks out Pal is the way she, more than the other painters in this set, “looked for a creative visual expression from within her cultural identity”, as art historian Seema Bawa points out in her introductory essay, “The artist explored”. Even here Pal is distinctive because she does not, Bawa elaborates, pick familiar “mainstream” figures such as Ganesha, Durga and Mahisasuramardini, but “excavates” marginalised figures from ancient Indian art and scriptures, such as the kinnari and kamdhenu, and then “inscribes her own meanings into these forms beyond the religious; transcending ritual and reinterpreting myths”. The reference here is to the kinnaris, nayikas and half-woman-half-animal figures that Pal has been painting for nearly two decades now. Celestial yet domestic; unabashedly naked, sensuous yet not seductive, these Kamdhenus and Dancing Horses are what Pal is now best known for.
This is a book of pictures — a “catalogue” — of Pal’s paintings, giving an overview of her career, tracing the development of her style and imagery over more than 40 years — starting from the early (dated 1963, 1964) still-lifes rendered in the academic style, to her dark, evocative oils of the lonely boy monks of Macleodganj (early 1980s), the first appearance of the characteristic female figure in “Being a Woman” (soon thereafter), the expansion and exploration of her feminist concerns and their culmination in the mythical nayika and kinnari in the 1990s and 2000s.
The text thus plays a supplementary role in this book, serving merely to provide cues to the visual narrative. The essays, unsurprisingly, are very short. The dominant mode here – barring Elinor Gadon’s “Sexuality, Transgression, Play”, which seeks to place Pal in the Western feminist framework – is biographical, that is, the essayists all try and explain how the artist’s aesthetic choices are dictated by her life experiences and her reactions to them. So Bawa draws a correspondence between the childhood memory of Pal’s grandmother being hounded with shouts of “nangi, nangi” in a bazaar because she had taken off her chadar on the hot afternoon, to her preoccupation with nakedness and shame. Similarly, Roobina Karode traces the Kinnari and Kinnari mantra series which Pal began working on in 2008, while prone on a hospital bed after breaking her hip, to her struggles with pain and the fear of being immobilised. “Gogi was playing out the contradictions of her immobility vis-a-vis the freely moving body, airborne and on top of the world. Her perceptions and experiences of her everyday helplessness led her to explore the imaginative and transformative possibilities of her body…”
Biography, especially in the case of a living artist, is an important entry into her output. An artist’s physical circumstances throw light on her choice of subject, style, medium and size. Gadon, in fact, posits that a “fuller understanding of meaning in feminist art can be best gleaned from the relationship between a woman’s life, creativity and activism”.
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But surely there’s a limit to how far life story can be used to throw light on the subliminal processes of image-creation? Can even a generic image be traced to a particular event as is implied in the essay, “Being Woman: A Biography”, where the profusion of flowers in the “These Flowers Are For You” (2001) paintings are traced to the baby born to Pal’s brother, and her consequent concern for environmental degradation. To be fair, the artist herself makes the connection: “My brother had just had a baby and it made me think — what are we giving to our children? After summer, rains are welcome. But even they can be so ugly.” Which brings me to the question: how far can you trust an artist to theorise about her own work?
THE FEMININE UNBOUND
Gogi Saroj Pal
Delhi Art Gallery
229 pages; Rs 4,900
