Art transcends and art unites

IN November 2021, a senior lecturer and scholar of modern and contemporary art from Britain got in touch. She was researching the Simla Fine Arts Exhibition. We exchanged a few mails and had a couple of conversations over the Zoom platform. One came away from these meetings with the feeling that one knew very little about this institution that had come into being in 1865 and had thrived well into the 20th century. Scores of amateur and professional artists had exhibited and sold their works and created a remarkable record of people, landscapes, towns and cities and, of course, had their own artistic creations.

Shimla’s Bishop Cotton School hosted the first of these exhibitions, which was inaugurated by the Viceroy, Lord Mayo, on September 24, 1868. Apart from numerous British and European artists, these exhibitions also displayed paintings by Sobha Singh (1901-1986) and a few other Indians. In 1935, Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941) questioned the objectivity of its judges when five of the 10 paintings sent by her were rejected. She wrote to the organisers, “I shall, in future, be obliged to resign myself to exhibiting them merely at the Grand Salon, Paris, of which I happen to be an Associate, and the Salon de Tuileries, known all over the world as the representative exhibition of Modern Art.”

As the years went by, some of the more remarkable creations moved to museums — as did the creations of Amrita Sher-Gil and Sobha Singh. Others, as expected, have been passed on to family and friends. Still others have wound their way to art galleries and purveyors of fine art. Many have been lost.

Before and after Independence, across the country, a shift started taking place and artists looked for inspiration and to forms that lay deeper within their Indian roots. That is not to say that European or other influences had been discarded. Sometimes, a unique synthesis would emerge. One artist, Sanat Chatterjee, went deep into the art of India and returned greatly enriched from that inward journey. On Sunday mornings, the artist’s house would be packed with a couple of dozen children of ages varying between four and 15. In angles and contortions that only children, yoga masters and gymnasts seem to manage, some of these young ones would be crouching, some sitting cross-legged and some lying down. They would draw flowers and birds and the wonderful world around. Guruji, as they all called him, would come around and examine their work and guide them. Occasionally, his wife, Aarti, an accomplished singer and musician, would hold a small class or a soiree of her own. On those summer Sundays, I would drop and then pick up our young son. Sometimes, simply to avoid the walk up and down a steep slope, I would stay there.

To go back a little, it was in the early 1990s when I was working on my first assignment with the BBC that I first stood on Mr Chatterjee’s verandah. The documentary’s director, the cameraperson and I were looking for an angle to film the glade of Annandale that lay below. Put it down to serendipity or good old kismet, the artist stepped out. He was the last of the Bengal school and had trained under Asit Haldar, the grand-nephew of Rabindranath Tagore. That morning, Sanat Chatterjee was on his own and in an expansive mood. He began showing us his work, which included unfolding a section of the huge silk scroll that had taken him to the Guinness Book of Records.

From Lucknow, Sanat Chatterjee had come to Nahan and joined as a lecturer in the Arts College. Shortly after, he shifted to Shimla. Starting as a brilliant portrait artist (much to the dismay of his mentors), he found his own oeuvre when he added personal dimensions to the Bengal school of art that had originated with Abanindranath Tagore. Chatterjee found inspiration in mythology, the notes of classical music and in everyday life. As his art matured, he began looking beyond the physical and social persona of the mythological and sacred characters that he portrayed, and instead sought their spirit and soul.

After a visit to Ayodhya in 2003, Lord Ram appeared in a set of 30 paintings. Ram does not appear in human form but is present everywhere — on the musical instrument of a mendicant, or on the neck of a parakeet. He is there in the everyday lives of ordinary beings and is with people whom he would have related to.

In this brushwork lie some basic human values and truths that transcend moments that come to pass. There is, always, timelessness in time — and sometimes, forever, the artist pins the moment down.