Dreamy tales

Jayasri Burman's canvases are stories from everyday life.

At a time when most contemporary Indian art challenges singular representation, Jayasri Burman's work stands out refreshingly for its Indianness. Burman, however, resents that her work is labelled.

"What is so Indian about my work?" she asks.

"The fact that my women adorn themselves with bindis and alta?" But it is not just the imagery, it is the idiom that takes cues from Indian folklore.

Disqualifying any perception of herself as provincial, she tells me of her extensive travels and the influence they have had on her. Like the blues that she points out in her latest series, is not the most common shade she tints her drawing with.

"That comes from my recent trip to Alaska," she says. "The blues of the Pacific and the glaciers are quite different from the cobalt blue of the Shekhawati region that I used earlier."

But Indian in visage or not, there is one very definite quality in Burman's work that straddles different worlds "" its narrative.

Birds, beasts and humans inhabit a tableau that springs to life briefly before settling into dreaminess. They are stories from everyday life, as she suggests, men and women who have inhabited her life "" and many transiently.

She gets carried away with the stories, sometimes wide-eyed, at other times her eyes are brimming with tears at the mention of an unfortunate turn. As the story goes, when S H Raza first took a look at Burman's work, his words were: "This one has soul."

Burman's art derives succour from her upbringing "" "My parents exposed me to aesthetic experiences early on." Her uncle, the reputed artist Sakti Burman, was a strong influence through the period when she studied at Kala Bhavan in Santiniketan, and Visual College of Art in Kolkata.

Her husband, incidentally, is Paresh Maity, whom she recurrently refers to as her travelling companion. Their styles are distinct: him celebrated for his mastery over watercolour, she for her painstakingly fine linearity. The couple, according to Burman, are fascinated by the people and colours of Rajasthan.

"Wherever we go we pull out pencil and paper and make sketches of people, places and things."

But Burman cannot escape the social and cultural climate of her Bengali upbringing. "There are images I cannot escape," she says, "like waking up to my father's prayer chanting or the vision of my mother playing the sitar on our terrace after she would put the family to bed."

Women are her primary muse "" mythical heroines depicted as consort, mother and child. However, as she vehemently asserts, she is not a feminist choosing to adopt a more equitable regard for both sexes.