Art & heart of Tyeb Mehta

A 16-minute film written and directed by the late Tyeb Mehta in 1970, ‘Koodal’ — the only film made by the celebrated artist — offers a sense of identity to his work. ‘Koodal’ means joining, union, or meeting point in Tamil. The short film is considered by the legendary Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein as “a masterpiece that belongs to a rare genre of cinema that was invented by that now historic early 20th century collaboration between Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali”.

With no narration or dialogue and just a series of montages, ‘Koodal’ is both the story of humans and animals. It opens with a dilated animal eye, shows a bull mounting a cow and geminating life — an image of virile sexuality juxtaposed with the helpless and meek cattle being led to the abattoir, and ends with a statue of Nandi being worshipped in a temple.

It also moves between the streets of Bombay, the procession after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, to a eunuch putting on makeup, preparations for the wedding of Shiva and Parvati in a temple (‘Koodal’ also points to Madurai) and Nandi.

The bull has significance as an emblem of a community. In Mehta’s work, the images signify sexual union and procreation as well as sacrificial death, bringing together life and death in a double-faced metaphor, achieving a traumatic release.

The trussed bull is one of the earliest and most enduring images from Mehta’s work. But there are other images that Mehta uses again and again in his work: the human being falling headlong into the abyss; the rickshaw-puller dragging but also melting into his rickshaw; the slashed-mouthed Kali; Durga and Mahishasur locked in struggle; the chorus of swaying Santhal drum-dancers; the man and the bull grappling; the bovine skull; and, more recently, a transitional figure that is part-man, part-bird.

However, the most familiar image through all of Mehta’s oeuvre is the diagonal slash dividing the canvas, vivid and insistent as a sword. Mehta’s images spring out at the viewer with a life force that triggers an emotion, even if we barely understand the form. We just know that they cannot be mistaken for any other Indian artist, although comparisons to Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ and Francis Bacon’s raw unsettling but religious imagery abound.

Philosopher Ramchandra Gandhi had perhaps the most intense reaction to Mehta’s work. He wrote a 232-page book titled ‘Svaraj: A Journey with Tyeb Mehta’s Shantiniketan Triptych’ in 2002, where he recorded a double journey into the symbolism of the untitled painting popularly called the ‘Shantiniketan Triptych’, painted in 1985, and the deeper meaning of ‘svaraj’.

Ten years later, Mehta painted ‘Celebrations’ for Nandita Jain nee Judge of the Times Group. The room-size triptych shows women dancing with the goat. It raised Rs 2.19 crore in 2002, creating a record for the highest price an Indian painting had ever sold for at an auction.

‘Mahishasura’ (1994) fetched Rs 10.9 crore at a Christie’s auction in New York in 2005, making it the first contemporary Indian artwork to surpass the $1 million mark at an auction.

A 1998 work called ‘Untitled (Kali)’ went for Rs 5.72 crore at a Saffronart auction in 2011, setting a record in online bidding. Then came ‘Woman on Rickshaw’, which fetched Rs 22.99 crore at a Christie’s auction in 2017, and ‘Kali’, which went under the hammer for Rs 26.4 crore at Saffronart’s auction in 2018.

In a 2017 Sotheby’s auction, ‘Gesture’ sold for Rs 10.4 crore, making it the highest price ever paid by an Indian for a work of Indian contemporary art at an auction in India.

‘Durga Mahisasura Mardini’ sold in 2018 for Rs 20.48 crore. The ‘Trussed Bull’ has recently commanded a staggering Rs 61.8 crore, making it the second most expensive work of Indian art to be sold at an auction, sharing the position with Amrita Sher-Gil’s ‘The Storyteller’, that sold for the same price in 2023.

But none of this was of exceptional importance to Tyeb Mehta, who many, including Eisenstein, called an unfragmentable artist of exceptional integrity. One was because the money went to the gallery owners and collectors who had purchased his works. For a long time, Mehta and his family lived in a one-bedroom apartment. At night, they would sleep on the floor and during the day, the mattresses would be rolled up and the space turned into his studio.

The other was because, as Ebrahim Alkazi said when he inaugurated an exhibition of Mehta’s in New Delhi in 1966, “his insistence on being true to himself and to his personal vision. In face of the great temptations of reputation and money accompanying such conformity, Tyeb’s fundamental honesty is a token of remarkable strength of character”.

Mehta himself said in an interview with Nikki Ty-Tomkins Seth, “There is always a tendency in discussing an artist’s work to concentrate on his use of the medium and its technicalities. Or on subject matter... which can be a very trivial experience. When you begin to understand the language of painting, subject matter becomes secondary, and content assumes priority. Subject is something you can talk about, but content is emotive. It is you... like putting yourself bare in words. It is my life... my reaction to something I see or experience and is very private.”

Born on July 26, 1925, in Kapadvanj, Gujarat, Tyeb grew up and was educated in Bombay, although his summer holidays were spent with his maternal grandmother in Calcutta — which gave rise to his iconic images of the rickshaw-puller. He joined St Xavier’s College to study cinematography, but the prospect of theory lessons without practical experience bored Mehta, who joined the Famous Cine Laboratories instead from 1945 to 1947 as an assistant to a film editor.

Tyeb joined the JJ School of Art in 1947, graduating in 1952.

As a Muslim, and as a member of the Dawoodi Bohra micro-minority within the Gujarati Shi’a community, Mehta would have felt the dreadful violence of Partition, but equally, the sight of a man being stoned to death by a mob not only became a motif in his work but also had a lasting impact on his work.

While still a student, Mehta became associated with the vibrant Progressive Artists Group of Bombay. He left for London in 1959, where he worked and lived till 1964. In 1968, he received the Rockefeller fellowship which allowed him to study artists. He became Artist-in-Residence at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, between 1984-85 after a heart attack that almost prevented him from going. It changed his work, and he made the ‘Shantiniketan Triptych’ at this time. He also explored bronze casting at Santiniketan. Mehta may have started selling well, but his single-minded pursuit of art didn’t change.

He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2007 and passed away in 2009. His wife, Sakina, who had often kept the home fires firing while Mehta painted, and his children, launched the Tyeb Mehta Foundation in 2013 to foster thoughts, visuals and dialogues that originate from shared and connected histories of South Asia, broadening the ongoing discourse about Indian modern and contemporary art. In Mehta’s birth centenary year, they have tied up with Saffronart to hold a year-long collaboration to honour his many contributions to art and society with a series of special events and initiatives.

Tyeb Mehta’s ability to create emotion was uncanny — like he laid all our sadness and emotions bare.

— The writer is a Delhi-based contributor