The Kangra butter art
By D.C. Sharma
KANGRA, famous for its paintings, stone carving, temple architecture, bamboo and butter arts, is still a nursery of artisans, masons, sculptors and butter artists.

Bizarre Hitler film
RUSSIAN director Aleksandr Sokurov’s bizarre portrayal of Hitler left the recent Cannes Festival critics perplexed, while Michael Winterbottom put aside his dark dramas for a poignant story of real London lives.

Art from the inner recesses of the heart
By Atma Ram

O.P. TAAK, a veteran artist of Kangra Kalam, has been given the coveted Tulsi Award, 1998-99, comprising a sum of Rs 1 lakh and a citation. The award was instituted by the Madhya Pradesh Government in 1983-84 for outstanding services/contributions in various fields at the national level.

Taak has won several distinctions in his field and received awards from various/states and organisations in India. However, the national Tulsi Award is the most precious feather in his cap.

Taak is an awardee teacher in Himachal. He retired from government service as a craft teacher in March 1996, and is currently living at Depot Bazar, Dharamsala, in the lap of the snow-clad Dhauladhar ranges. He is leading a quiet, yet busy life of a painter completely and wholly devoted to his art.

Taak as a child had very difficult times. Born on April 1, 1936, in Gujaranwala district (now in Pakistan), he was studying in school when Partition took place. His father was an SV teacher in a middle school. The family had to flee to India. However, the child was separated from his parents. Being all alone with none to look after him, he was forced to do all types of menial jobs to make both ends meet. However, two months later, the lost child joined his parents in Jalandhar. Even now Taak shudders and tears well up in his eyes when he recalls those horrible days.

Taak had a genuine spark of creativity in him as also an indomitable will to do something good and great in life. He strove hard to make a mark in life. He got immense inspiration from his guru. Gulabu Ram and a few principals and education directors under whom he worked with exemplary zest and zeal.

The enchanting nature and landscapes of many valleys in Himachal impressed him and entered his mind to fire his imagination. He has been a great traveller (like Chandra Cant of Kulu), a regular and tireless walker who repeatedly visits and meditates on forts, tombs, temples and observes keenly tribals and their life-patterns. Mural paintings hold him spell-bound. All this provides him considerable food for future moments, the food which is finally reflected in his paintings.

He is ever a creative artist looking for something beautiful. Consequently, Taak’s contribution is two-fold: he paints with immense deftness the hitherto-ignored positive aspects of our kings, princes and village folk — patriotism in Raja Sansar Chandra Katoch, for example. “Kunju and Chanchalo” was his first painting. Two, the artist is always specific, clear, precise and innovative. He thus infuses new light and life in miniature paintings and effectively recreates the past. In several pieces, he captures scenes from the Indian epics and classics — the virgin fields which not many have ventured into.

He is happy with the efforts made by the Himachal Pradesh Government to promote art in the states. However, he strongly feels that the government should open schools for the Kangra miniature painting at places where this art flourished — Guler, Kangra, Nadaun and Sujanpur Tira.

In his interview with this writer he made many meaningful observations. Excerpts:

Q: Why did you go in for the Kangra miniature painting?

A: In Kangra shaily paintings, the composition, finesse and delicacy of lines and use of self-made colours are far superior to their counterparts in other schools of India. The Kangra style has its own specialities. We can locate a side-pose, fingers and hands, the features depicted emotionally, the fineness of the brush, delicacy of lines, the shine of the colours.

Q: What are the major influences on your art?

A: These relate to tribal people’s way of life, their living modes; nature, freedom fighters of India, folk lores, historical themes, Indian culture, festivals such as Tian, Karwachauth, Tulsi Pujan, earth worship, Divali decoration, tree worship, peepal pooja, dera puja and so on.

Q: What are the main traits of your paintings?

A: I have done more than 4,000 paintings and arranged around 30 solo-exhibitions. My paintings are the best. Their characteristics: The heroine’s eyes are straight and long like a stag or the lotus; her tresses fall in heavy plaits; her breasts are firm and raised; her thighs are full and smooth; her hands like rosy flowers; her gait is dignified as that of an elephant and her nose is sharp. All Kangra paintings have the background of land scapes.

Q: Was teaching a help or hinderance in your work as an artist?

A: It was, indeed, very helpful. Most of my principals and students encouraged me through their appreciation and suggestions. My students would explain ideas and collect information at times, since many of them belonged to remote corners and far-flung areas of the state.

Q: How do you spend your time these days?

A: I spend my time in making drawings and paintings, according to my moods. I lose the sense of time, day or night, when I start with a brush. My hobby is to study nature. I go on walking around Dharamsala every now and then, and observe changes — I see the nature change, people change, change in change and so on.

Q: What are your future plans?

A: I would like to draw and paint more and more — to create some new themes. But mainly I want to work on rural/tribal life — folk lores, folk tales etc. I am keen to work on tribal culture, ballads and also wish to establish my own art gallary at Dharamsala.

Q: What is your philosophy/view of life?

A: My philosophy of life is: do-do-do; paint-paint-paint; research-research and research. Life is labour. Don’t see what others are, but see what you are.

Q: Anything else you would like to say as a seasoned painter?

A: If an artist performs his work keeping in view monetary benefits, he/she is not an artist but a trader. Real and genuine art is the voice of the heart. It is the creation of the inner recesses of the heart — an outcome of prayer, devotion and meditation.

by B.N. Goswamy

A prodigious talent

NOT everyone may know his name today, but there is little doubt that Abu’l Hasan was possessed of extraordinary, uncommon gifts. Before I go on to speak of this great Mughal painter and his work, however, it is appropriate that I let his royal patron, Jahangir, speak, for in his “Memoirs”, the emperor devotes more space to him than he does to almost any of the other master-painters, including Mansur, who worked for him. Writing in the year 1618, he noted:

“On this day, Abu’l Hasan, the painter, who has been honoured with the title Nadiru’l Zaman, drew the picture of my accession as the frontispiece to the Jahangir-Nama, and brought it to me. As it was worthy of all praise, he received endless favours. His work was perfect, and his picture was one of the chefs d’oeuvre of the age. At the present time he has no rival or equal ....His father, Aqa Riza, of Herat, at the time when I was a prince, joined my service. There is, however, no comparison between his work and that of his father.... My connection is based on my having reared him, till his art arrived at this rank. Today he has become Nadiru’l Zaman, “the wonder of the age.”

The emperor does not describe the painting that he praises so highly, and there is of course the grandiose royal statement that it was as a result of his rearing in the imperial household that Abu’l Hasan rose to the level of perfection that he did in his art. But, fortunately, some of the painter’s work has survived in the form of signed examples, and there are other works that have with good reason been attributed to him. One can see them and allow oneself to be dazzled by their sheer brilliance.

I had occasion recently to hold in my hand a work of Abu’l Hasan’s: a painting of Neptune, god of the seas in European mythology. He must evidently have seen a European work of the same subject, and set out to copy it or take from it what he could, something that many painters did at the Mughal court. But the manner in which he captures the spiritedness of the god, his majestic fury as he rides the waves, takes one’s breath away.

The god is shown by him as a figure of wild grandeur, naked and muscular, wielding aloft his dread trident, seated astride a mythical mount: horse-bodied, fish-tailed, lobster-legged. The elements are all astir in the painting: as threatening clouds gather in the sky, the mane of the bearded god and his horse are swept by the wind, and all creatures gaze at the sight in awe and astonishment. One can almost hear the roar of the waves and, above it, the defiant yell of the god himself. Nothing seems to have escaped Abu’l Hasan’s eye, not even the tiny little pelican that sweeps close to Neptune’s head.

It is an affecting, disturbing work that comes across as all the more impressive for the reason that nothing in his own background could have prepared Abu’l Hasan for it: neither the subject, nor the style or the technique in which the original must have been painted. He seems simply to have set about his task, armed with his own talent. And, after copying a Latin label at the bottom of the painting, he has gone on quietly, humbly to put his name down in the bottom right hand corner, “Aml-i Abu’l Hasan, ibn-i Riza, murid-i Padshah Salim”, the inscription reads, meaning: “The work of Abu’l Hasan, son of Riza, devoted follower of Padshah Salim”, i.e. Jahangir.

This work is dated in the Hijra year which equals AD 1602-03. We are able to work out from another dated work which he painted in his “thirteenth year” that Abu’l Hasan was born in 1588-89, this painting of Neptune he must have painted therefore when he was only 15 years of age. Or a littleless.

There are some other biographical details of interest as far as Abu’l Hasan is concerned. His father, Aqa Riza, who seems to have come to India from Herat, apparently entered Jahangir’s service when the latter was still a prince with the name Salim, but had set up a court and atelier at Allahabad in defiance of his father’s authority, assuming the title “Padshah”. Since Akbar died only in the year 1605, clearing the way for Jahangir’s ascent to the throne, works painted for the future Jahangir between 1600 and 1605 refer to him almost always — like the present work does — as “Shah Salim” or “Padshah Salim”, not as Jahangir. But already, during these years, the second generation in the talented Aga Riza’s family, was growing up, leading to Abu’l Hasan often taking on, with obvious pride, the designation “khana-zad”, or one ‘born in the imperial household’. In the same household was born Abid, Abu’l Hasan’s brother, another painter touched by greatness, whose best work was done for Shahjahan.

There are many works by Abu’l Hasan to which one could draw attention, each one of them enticing, each remarkably delicate, not spirited like his “European” study of Neptune. This, because delicacy, refinement, seem to have come to him naturally: he had, after all, grown up in a tradition that placed these qualities almost above everything else. There is that work of his at Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore in which an old man, perhaps a poet, advances towards an unseen prince, holding in his hands a book, while others, including princely and powerful figures, stand around him.

Each figure is a remarkable study in itself: sharply observed, reticently rendered, crisply coloured. But the eye returns again and again to the person of the old man, for in him there is a dignity and a sense of engagement which is truly moving. Abu’l Hasan must have known the soul of this man, and the trials that his sensitive mind must have gone through.

A different hand

A small portrait of Abu’l Hasan has survived among the margin figures on an album leaf. In it he is seen seated in a garden setting, an intense figure, sketching something on a paper placed on a wooden tablet resting on a raised knee. A detail that one notices at once is that he is seen drawing with his left hand. Suddenly, in the light of this, a puzzle gets solved. On the Neptune painting, the date he has written in the Hijra year reads “1101”. Almost certainly he intended to write the figure “1011’ but confused the order of the digits, as many left-handed persons are prone to do. One knows of course that stylistically only the date 1011, which comes to AD 1602-03, can make possible sense in the context of the work. If one were to read the date as written, i.e. 1101, the painting would have to be placed nearly a hundred years later; a clear impossibility.

The Kangra butter art
By D.C. Sharma

KANGRA, famous for its paintings, stone carving, temple architecture, bamboo and butter arts, is still a nursery of artisans, masons, sculptors and butter artists.

The butter art of the most ancient Bajreshwari temple at Kangra had won numerous prizes and words of praise even from the Mughals and the English who themselves never worshipped the Hindu deities.

Mughal Emperor Akbar, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Sir Richard Temple, and Max Muller were dumb-founded to see the butter art of Kangra.

One hundred and one seer of pure butter made from cow’s milk is washed a hundred and one times with water and then pasted in a tomb-like shape on the eight metalled image of Mother Bajreshwari.

A triangle-shaped cap is made by studding the costliest possible dry fruit. This cap protects the head of the deity thereby blessing the devotees with an aura of protection.

Around the deity’s belly are layers of dry fruit making nine artistic circles each representing a different aspect of goddess Durga.

There is Mahakali for emancipation, Annapurna for plenty, Chandi for killing enemies, Hinglaj for the removal of evil, Vindyavasini for ending worries, Laxami for acquiring wealth, Saraswati for education, Ambika for happiness and Anjana for a long, prosperous life.

This butter is removed after seven days’ application. It is then used for eye cures, eruptions and grave wounds on the body.

The Kangra butter art is an old and unique way of worship in this region. Having its roots in the ancient Kangra culture, it represents the intense religious psyche of the masses.

Bizarre Hitler film

RUSSIAN director Aleksandr Sokurov’s bizarre portrayal of Hitler left the recent Cannes Festival critics perplexed, while Michael Winterbottom put aside his dark dramas for a poignant story of real London lives.

As competition grew for the prestigious Palme D’or Award, a pleasant surprise came early on in the star-studded festival with Winterbottom’s “Wonderland”, an ensemble drama on the quest for happiness of three sisters living separately.

Nadia (Gina McKee) takes out lonely hearts ads in search of true love; Debbie (Shirley Henderson) lives alone with her nine-year-old son but prefers one-night stands; and Molly (Molly Parker) is pregnant and in crisis with her boyfriend.

Winterbottom shot his film with a hand-held camera, no extra lighting and real people instead of extras.

“One of the first scenes in the film is in a bar in Soho. We had to wait until 10 at night until everyone was drunk, and then we had to shoot the scene without characters very quickly,” the 38-year-old British director told Reuters.

The only added effect was Michael Nyman’s beautiful, uplifting score.

“The surface of the characters lives is very confrontational and matter of fact, So I wanted (the music) to show that even if people are like that they also have desires and hopes and dreams,” Winterbottom said. — Reuter