The government at the Centre has always been generous when it comes to recognising artists with Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri titles. The 2014 honours alone included Gulammohammed Sheikh, Sunil Das and Paresh Maity in a list that featured writers, actors and fashion designers - itself a recognition that "soft" fields have their day at the Rashtrapati Bhawan. Yet, it is ironical that it continues to exercise its control on the art market in a way that it has failed to recognise.
As a mandate for change sweeps through the country over issues such as corruption and economic growth, perhaps it is time to out what was perhaps intended as a grandiose gesture but has ended up strangling the environment and market for art, and question the logic that places nine artists among hundreds as first among equals - not because the art fraternity deems it so but because the government sees fit to pronounce them "to be art treasures, having regard to their artistic and aesthetic value".
A young country may need its nationalistic symbols, but what can explain the Ministry of Culture's chauvinistic attempt to name nine artists as "national treasures" - this in the 1960s - the navratnas being Raja Ravi Varma, Amrita Sher-Gil, Russian artist Nicholas Roerich, the Tagores Rabindranath, Abanindranath and Gagendranath, Nandalal Bose, Jamini Roy and Sailoz Mookherjea. Were these artists greater than those who painted before them in the miniature style, which reached its zenith under the Mughals? What of Nainsukh, the Kangra artist, an icon of his time and considered seminal today? How were the names selected - on a whim, or did a committee approve them? What was its bureaucratic basis? More to the point - have we had no artists since who can qualify as masters on a par with the favoured nine?
The fallout of this honour is actually a blindside to this distinction. Because these nine artists are now national treasures, their works cannot be freely sold in the market (while works by the greatest artists in the West can be bought and sold at will, whether Matisse or Monet, Cezanne or Chagall, Gauguin or Turner or Constable, who, each one of them, is surely a "treasure" too). Or, at least, they cannot be taken outside the country even for purposes of exhibiting their work unless decreed and routed through the Ministry of Culture. So, you can own, or buy, say, a Jamini Roy painting in Mumbai but you cannot take it to your own home in, say, London. This discourages sales, and keeps prices for these artists artificially low. Similarly, works owned by those outside the country - and there are many - don't create a level platform for art-lovers because, even after paying high taxes to bring them back to India, you cannot, again, take them out. A mandate such as this by the state is restrictive and discriminatory. It is also a reason why the Bengal School, to which six of the artists in this list owe their allegiance, find their prices unnaturally deflated - a strange paradox that the "treasures" should have a value less than that of their later peers.
The government is, of course, free to choose its "treasures" and any other categories it wishes to recognise to uphold talent, and perhaps it can even provide a platform for more artists through these means, but should it be allowed to interfere in their commerce? The fear of outsiders laying their hands on our "treasures" has had its day. And by now, surely we know that it is the diaspora that is at the forefront of claiming allegiance to its cultural roots. The Chinese have proved it, and its time Indians were allowed a similar chance.
Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated
