Rooted Landscapes

ROOTED LANDSCAPES The Art of Rini Dhumal

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ROOTED LANDSCAPES The Art of Rini Dhumal

Edited by Ina Puri

Mapin Publishing •

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First published in India in 2010 by Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd 502 Paritosh, Near Darpana Academy, Usmanpura Riverside, Ahmedabad 380013 T: 91 79 40 228 228 • F: 91 79 40 228 201 • E: mapin@mapinpub.com • www.mapinpub.com Simultaneously published in the United States of America in 2010 by Grantha Corporation 77 Daniele Drive, Hidden Meadows, Ocean Township, NJ 07712 E: mapin@mapinpub.com Distributors: North America Antique Collectors’ Club, USA T: 1 800 252 5231 • F: 1 413 529 0862 • E: info@antiquecc.com • www.antiquecollectorsclub.com United Kingdom and Europe Marston Book Services Ltd, UK T: 44 1235 465521 • F: 44 1235 465555 • E: direct.order@marston.co.uk • www.marston.co.uk Australia & New Zealand Peribo Pty Ltd., Australia T: 61 2 9457 0011 F: 61 2 9457 00228 • E: michael.coffey@peribo.com.au The Middle East Avicenna Partnership Ltd, UK F: 44 1387 247375 • E: claire_degruchy@yahoo.co.uk Southeast Asia Paragon Asia Co. Ltd, Thailand T: 66 2877 7755 • F: 66 2468 9636 • E: info@paragonasia.com Rest of the world Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd Text © authors Images © Rini Dhumal All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-81-89995-45-4 (Mapin) ISBN: 978-1-935677-06-2 (Grantha) LCCN: 2010930896 Copyediting: Vinutha Mallya / Mapin Editorial Design: Paulomi Shah / Mapin Design Studio Processed and Printed in India at Thomson Press

Captions: Cover (front): Goddess Durga, see page 85 Cover (back): Rini Dhumal, photograph by Jyoti Bhatt Page 2: Rini Dhumal, photograph by Mahesh Padia Page 4: Kali (detail), oil on canvas, 122 x 122 cm, 2010 Page 5: Woman with a Champa Flower (detail), oil on canvas, 91 x 122 cm, 2010 Page 6: Ganesh, sketch & watercolour, 19 x 20 cm, 2008 Page 7: Hanuman, watercolour on paper, 19 x 20 cm, 2008 Page 8: Vairagini (detail), oil on canvas, 91 x 122cm, 2010 Page 9: Monk in Burma (detail), oil on canvas, 76 x 122 cm, 2008

This publication has been made possible with generous support from: • Transpek-Silox Industry Ltd • Tao Art Gallery • Rajen Kilachand / Dodsal • Ineos ABS (India) Ltd • Shiva Pharmachem Pvt. Ltd • Limited Edition

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CONTENTS

Foreword: K.G. Subramanyan

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The Empress of Solitude: Ina Puri

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From Kali to Durga: Anil Dharker

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Rini Dhumal’s Woman: Mahesh Elkunchwar

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Reiterations—Self in the Making: Roobina Karode

Catalogue

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Paintings 66 Prints 100 Watercolour and mixed media 128 Other media 158 Sketches 182

Travelogues Excerpts from limited edition books by Rini Dhumal A Woman with Wings: Karan Grover Illustrated Biography The Contributors

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Foreword

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e live today in a multicultural world. We can now go from one part of the world to another in a few hours; and the new information highway familiarises the people of one part of the world with the culture and customs of another. This has led to many gainful interactions and these, in turn, have persuaded each cultural group to reinterpret its heritage and enlarge its dimensions. The resultant fluidity is the hallmark of modernity. It is also true that, while spinning in this global vortex, many individuals and groups want to preserve a sense of identity.

Rini Dhumal is a product of this new world. Having started her artistic career in the 1960s, she was not affected deeply by certain features of the Indian art scene that preceded this—the early attraction for Western art forms and manners of the nineteenth century, then a subsequent effort to replace these with so-called indigenous alternatives, and a little later, a desire to keep abreast with the changing trends in the modern art scene in the West. Besides, she studied in a fine-art institution, the M.S. University in Baroda, that tried, in its limited way, to understand, analyse and rationalise the details of this passage, pointing out its successes and failures and giving the emerging Indian artists a total perspective that could help them make intelligent choices.

Rini went to Paris soon after she finished her studies in art and made her debut in the Indian art scene. She worked in the printmaking studio of Sir S.W. Hayter and his close associate, Krishna Reddy. She admits that she was not taken up with Hayter’s technical approach, but responded more readily to Reddy’s poetic one.

She was also not too enamoured by pure abstraction; the human image remained for her a continuing obsession. Her days in Paris gave her an opportunity to survey the spectrum of world art from the earliest phases to the present; and it had enough examples that convinced her about the durability of the human image.

Rini returned home after her first exposure to the world art scene, as an accomplished printmaker and painter. She also made short forays into other art media like ceramics and bronze, and techniques like vitreous enamel and reverse painting. And, on the side, she chose to teach in her alma mater and did so for long years. Although she withdrew from this commitment some time ago, she is still sought after for advice and counsel by art educational agencies.

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A compulsive artist, Rini continues to be versatile and prolific.

And like many creative persons she is also bitten by the diaspora bug—she sees herself as a wanderer in a wide open world. Many present-day artists and writers do likewise, considering themselves “wandering jews” or “outsiders”, even moving far from their original moorings and functioning in strange locations. But they all grope around at the same time for an innate identity. Rini has travelled to various parts of the world in the last two decades, be it for short lengths of time. And this included a trip to Bangladesh in search of her ancestral roots.

After returning from these sorties, Rini has put together attractive graphic records of some of the journeys. But all these sorties seem to have brought her back to herself. The large body of works that she has produced in the last few years seem to be diverse iconic representations, or avatars, of a personal identity she is giving chase to. This is not an unusual phenomenon with artists. It is often said that artists read, or represent, outside reality through an act of identification and in the process undergo a transformation of sorts. Over half a century ago I had occasion to hear Professor E.H. Gombrich explain how this happens, and had happened even in the case of an artist like Rembrandt. To the amusement of the audience he showed through relevant visuals how Rembrandt play-acted in his various self-portraits—now as a Jewish notable, now as an Italian nobleman; how even in his remarkable drawings of old men and beggars in his sketch book he was obviously playing their roles himself.

In her recent works, Rini is not concerned as much with an outside reality as with an inner persona; although, she admits she spends a lot of time during her travels abroad recording in her drawings what she sees, and interacting with the people she meets. Did this also involve a cross-projection of identities?

Or, in other words, measuring the “other” with the yardstick of “self” or vice versa?

Whether it does or not, artists do have a tendency to enter into the skin of what they see, and re-emerge transformed.

K.G. Subramanyan Vadodara May 2010

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The Empress of Solitude Ina Puri

“What must always be remembered is that myth is a double system: there occurs in it a sort of ubiquity: its point of departure is constituted by the arrival of a meaning. To keep a spatial metaphor, the approximative character of which I have already stressed, I shall say that the signification of the myth is constituted by a sort of constantly moving turnstile which presents alternately the meaning of the signifier and its form, a language-object and a meta-language, a purely signifying and a purely imagining consciousness.

This alternation is, so to speak, gathered up in the concept, which uses it like an ambiguous signifier, at once intellective and imaginary, arbitrary and natural.”

— Mythologies, Roland Barthes

Devi fired glass 46 cm (d), 1998

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omewhere between the drawing board and the final image on her canvas, a conjuring trick has taken place; the artist has forsaken historicity and transformed her dramatis personae into a deity, magnificent and awe-inspiring, a devi. How did this representation come about? Was there a Sita-like trial of fire that lent the domesticated, diminutive woman her mantle of divinity? Or were other rituals performed, an invocation of mantras chanted, unbeknownst to the rest? Steeped in anonymous ideology and myth, Rini Dhumal’s abandoned heroines, cast aside from society gravitate into an arena where they rule the universe, as goddesses of all she surveys. A virtual Mahishasur Mardini, slayer of evil… Around her, meanwhile, her vahana-vahini (mounts) collect: the impatient bull stamping its hooves in fury and the lion, raging and ferocious, readying for battle of the gods and demons.

In her diaries from her girlhood, Rini’s flowery script spoke of her initial association with the family puja (prayer) room when she was asked to offer prayers and prasad (offerings) to the family deity, Lakshmi, on the days that her mother was indisposed.

One wonders what went on in her mind, as a little girl, a kumari, she knelt before the vedi and said her prayers? We learn from her jottings that it did not end with puja; she

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Family Durga Puja photoetching 20 x 18 cm, 2010

also very meticulously patterned the floor with floral motifs, making elaborate alponas (floor art) to propitiate the family deity. In her artistic but chaotic household where pichhavais share the wall space with Bhupen Khakkar and K. G. Subramanyan, Diwali brings back memories of those years as Rini, following that tradition from her childhood, continues to adorn the floors of her spacious home with alponas, today even more elaborate and complex in their whorls and motifs, more assuredly an artistic exercise given her long years in the interim decades as a successful painter.

In reconstructing her life as an artist, what indeed strikes the memoirist is this leitmotif of consistencies, these running threads that bind and hold together a life lived in her own right, lived on terms and conditions she has never compromised upon on—no matter how dire the consequences, no matter how difficult the times; and times have been difficult for Rini, both personally and professionally, in her capacities as a painter and as a professor at Faculty of Fine Arts in M.S. University, Baroda. Yet the fact that she chose to strike out bravely, undaunted, uncowered, speaks of a conviction deep and true, that is deeply impressive.

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Sketch

Sketch

charcoal and watercolour 13 x 18 cm, 2008

charcoal and watercolour 13 x 18 cm, 2008

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< The Modelâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Kanku charcoal and watercolour on paper 76 x 123 cm, 2000

The Empress of Solitude (detail) > oil on canvas 183 x 183 cm, 2010

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Play (detail) linocut 91 x 91 cm, 1992

No matter what her detractors opined, Rini was going to pursue her art. She had known many moons ago, as she, then a lass of ten, had painstakingly decorated the puja room’s dark maroon floors, cool and shining after regular scrubbings, with myriad patterns dipping the ball of cotton wool moistened with the rice paste tinged with turmeric that, as soon as she grew up, she would join art school and formally undergo training to learn the techniques she then knew so little of.

In her grandfather’s rambling mansion, she was the adored granddaughter with special privileges while the other women worked tirelessly in the kitchen and elsewhere. Hence for Rini to dream and hope that life would ultimately be elsewhere was natural. It is quite another matter that her dreams were fulfilled and she was offered in later years, as a meritorious student an opportunity to study in Paris, on a scholarship. Until then, it was another world in Itakumari in Rangpur district of Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, where she spent months at a time with her maternal grandparents, in their ancestral home with labyrinthine passages that led to a bewildering number of rooms. Her mother, often unable to cope with her children and domestic burdens, had sent Rini off to her maternal home and thus it transpired that her childhood was divided between cosmopolitan cities where her father was posted (as a senior director with Burmah-Shell) and Itakumari, with it’s lush green fields and ponds. Often alone, the little girl would tag along with the women of the house, observing their domestic routines closely. She soon learnt that there was a hierarchy the household followed when it came to the division of chores, which meant the dependant family members had many more responsibilities to perform. As is usual, her Zamindar Thakurda, the family patriarch, provided shelter to many abandoned daughters of the joint family who had been widowed. Rini recalls how terrified she was when she saw the emaciated group of women, heads tonsured, in their stark white sarees, bent to their tasks in the corner of the large kitchen. Silent and submissive, they were victims of a vicious social system that threw them out as pariahs when they lost husbands, often years older than them, men they had barely known. In years to come, she remembered their blazing eyes, haunting dark eyes, filled with such anguish, with scorn, such desire…

In later times, as she made her way through college at M. S. University, herself an independent young woman, the image of the widowed women remained, long after the Itakumari household had been abandoned as the family dispersed, fleeing to India to escape the wrath of the marauders who came to pillage and root the home, post the liberation of Bangladesh. Who knows where the women went? Or if they ever found escape from their bleak destinies in the arms of a lover or husband? Rini often thought of their plight.

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The Woman from Istanbul pastel and charcoal on paper 19 x 28 cm, 2009

The Face pastel and charcoal on paper 19 x 28 cm, 2009

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And in the following years, she went about completing her school, enrolling herself for Art and Literature, thereafter, in St Xaviers (Mumbai), before joining and finishing her Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Art degrees, from M.S. University in Baroda [now Vadodara]. In 1975, Rini set off to Paris, to pursue her art studies and acquaint herself with the masters of contemporary and classical European art. Earlier, in another time, she had followed Indian masters, in Bombay [Mumbai], Calcutta [Kolkata], Baroda and Santiniketan, as a student and budding artist, learnt graphics from Somenath Hore and guidance on art from the savant guru, K.G. Subramanyan, but nothing in the past had quite prepared her for the romance of Paris. In her letters to Dhumal, in those years of courtship, Rini had filled page after page describing the seductions of the city as she strolled by the Seine on misty mornings on her way to S.W. Hayter’s Atelier 17. In the distance she would see the grand façade of Notre-Dame and the mecca of all art-lovers, Musee du Louvre on the Right Bank. In the smoky cafes in the Latin Quarter and St-Germain-desPres, she would strike up conversations with other young students and the evening would blur into moments of laughter, music and easy camaraderie. Even today, Rini recalls that fleeting interlude in Paris, 1975 to 1977, with nostalgia and wistfulness.

Amongst the associations she formed, the strongest bond was with Krishna Reddy from whom she learnt much. In a letter to Dhumal in 1975, she writes, “It’s nice to be away from Hayter’s workshop for sometime. While Hayter is a fantastic teacher, he is too rigid about his theory of counter-points and not very encouraging if you do things differently… as a result, in the atelier, almost everyone works like Hayter, the sole exception being Krishna Reddy. His work is very different—really subtle.

He uses three colours and a lot of transparencies. That is how he brings about that effect in his plates. He takes about 50–60 different proofs before making a final selection. I hope to learn a lot from him…”

Rini (nee Dasgupta) returned to Baroda to marry Dhumal and work full-time as a print-maker, even managing to organise studios from where groups of printmakers could work in unison. Her mission she explained thus: “It was crucial to bring about an awareness; collectors had to learn the value of a print and not dismiss it altogether. It was imperative that patrons realised that it was as relevant and original as any other work of art. Though print-making is techniquebound, it does allow the imagination to soar into the realm of pure creativity…”

Alongside, she dabbled in ceramics, experimented with glass surfaces and metal before losing herself to the magic of her first love—painting and drawing.

While ceramics offered an opportunity of working with tiles, experimenting in the process with textures and pliable clay that yielded to

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Family Tree From The Ancestral Tapestry etching 24 x 11 cm, 2002

myriad possibilities, with painting, she returned to the solitary women, women whom we encountered on streets, workplaces, at home, but never really knew. It was the story of their solitude that the artist now wanted to narrate pictorially on her canvas. Beneath whose common, humdrum existences, lived, unbeknownst even to themselves, poets, prophets, painters who never wrote a line, composed lyrics or uttered prophesies, but lived and died, in solitude. In her personal capacity, after training in Santiniketan and Paris, she joined the Faculty of Fine Arts of M.S. University in 1977, as a print-maker, serigraphing, wood/lino cutting and lithographing to create a body of substantive work in the graphic medium. As Head of Painting Department, she shared her work experience and technique with a vast number of students who joined her class down the years.

In the melding of realism and myth, Rini’s art seeks not to appropriate/ represent reality, but to signify it. “This certainly does not mean that there is no responsibility of form towards reality. But this responsibility can be measured only in semiological terms... as signification, not as expression.” In drawing her protagonists, mostly women, from anecdotal references, from memory, from recollections of a past lived amongst characters who donned a mask to keep their desires, fantasies, dreams hidden away from the prying eyes, is the artist distilling the essence of her psyche and spirit into her own notional style. A reiteration that the feminine psyche more often than not had shared sensitivities lent her work a deep conviction, giving her the courage to reach out to strangers in strange lands, who desisted at times, used to years of silent subjugation, but on other occasions opened their hearts, sharing intimacies one can sometimes share only with a stranger.

As we journeyed down the Silk Route in 2005, I observed how easily Rini could melt into a crowd, win their trust, as they collected around her, allowing her to

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Visitor from the Sky linocut 91 x 91 cm, 1993

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sketch them in her drawing book, and within minutes, her hand moving fluidly in graceful movements, she would bring alive the commotion around us…silhouettes of the wizened elders, grey-bearded and gold-toothed, laughing children would appear as if magic. In flowing jallebas (robes), eyes kohl-rimmed, women passed by, on mysterious errands as if and these moments too would remain engraved in her memory, to sketch when she sat alone in the hustle-bustle, absorbed, sketching. In her imagination, the ordinary women she had encountered became larger than life, Amazon women, who were bold and imperious of bearing, and so the conjuring trick happened and on the canvas a pagan goddess appeared—tall and voluptuous, clad in diaphanous draperies, gauzy and gold-spangled, offering glimpses of bare skin beneath. In the curve of her hips or the thrust of her shoulder, there is raw sexuality and provocation. Yet amidst all the bravura, the eyes reveal fleetingly, a tremulous fragility as if the wounds have pierced too deep.

“Are these in the end allegories of art or of a search for personal selfhood? Undoubtedly something of both, of a synthesis of diverse traditions with more modernist ones through a process of involution in paintings that are imbued with something like a devotion to a gentler, more innocent past,” as Kamala Kapoor writes in Rini Dhumal’s catalogue, circa 2000.

Framed in architectural ruins, the jharokha, ancient wooden lattice windows, Rini’s women remain in their deliberately deified avatars, beyond reach, beyond renunciation. The mood remains sombre and contemplative, establishing a premise that she is never too far away from, in that feminine experience is too often subjected to suppression and violent abuse. Her paint overlays build on this mood and there is a preference for dark, deep crimsons, indigos, mustard that is only occasionally leavened with patterning in gold. Increasingly, with her skill of a print-maker, Rini textures her surfaces to achieve a rhythm and resonance her very own, creating an imaginary chalchittro, the backdrop, for her protagonist upon which are intertwined flora, fauna and fishes… Amidst all of this stands the empress, glorious in her solitude.

Ancestral Aunt From The Ancestral Tapestry photoetching 19 x 23 cm, 2002

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From Kali to Durga Anil Dharker

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rtists’ lives get mirrored in their work: a novelist mines his unwritten autobiography for episodes he can flesh out and embellish on his pages; a poet lives off the trauma and displacement and rejections of his life (which is why there are no happy poets).

So it is with painters: some take incidents that have affected them and transmute them into line and colour; while others are affected by an early influence to such an extent that you see its effect right through their careers. One spent his childhood in the mountains, and though the canvases may be abstract, the undulations of mountain ranges are unmistakably there. Another will always feature water, however ambitious the colour palette, it will always have hint of waves crashing against rocks, or a limitless sea, or a flowing river.

These thoughts come to you when you look at the work of Rini Dhumal. In a long and astonishingly productive career in which she has experimented with every conceivable medium with a courage that’s remarkable, she returns always to a theme that’s come from her childhood. The medium is not the message; the message is in the theme and the medium is merely a different way to express it.

Even when you speak to her, she inevitably goes back to a childhood spent in a village in what was then East Bengal and is now Bangladesh. She talks of carefree and happy days with no material wants (she comes from a zamindar, land-owning, family). Her family was devoutly Hindu and quintessentially Bengali, so pujas and festivals were celebrated with gusto and without fail. Durga Puja was obviously the grandest of them, but other festivals too were an excuse for music and food and the decorations that can come together so exuberantly when you have a joyous family.

This ancestral home and the life around it is the subject of what is probably the defining work of Rini Dhumal: The Ancestral Tapestry. Completed in 2002, it brings together Expressionist images of Rini’s family home but it does so not as one happy continuum, but as a vivid depiction of an idyll gone terribly wrong.

Girl with Hibiscus oil on canvas 76 x 122 cm, 2006

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The Young Woman oil on canvas 106 x 122 cm, 2001

The Lady of the House oil on canvas 91 x 122 cm, 2006

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Durga oil on canvas 122 x 122 cm, 2006

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Durga drawing and watercolour on paper 25 x 28 cm, 2004

Page from Sketchbook watercolour on paper 20 x 19 cm, 2001

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Mythical Goddess mixed media on paper 76 x 56 cm, 2006

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Bengali Woman mixed media on canvas 56 x 65 cm, 2006

Behind the upheaval was the turmoil of Partition. Though Rini is from the generation immediately after that cataclysmic event in our history, its repercussions began to assert themselves gradually even in their cloistered environment. Suddenly their neighbours looked at them differently; where earlier there was carefree intermingling, there was now obvious suspicion. The family which had been so boisterous in the assertion of its Hinduism suddenly became aware of its minority status and thus began to feel like foreigners in their own land. The sense of insecurity, of alienation, shows itself in The Ancestral Tapestry through highly contrasting light and dark yarns and through depictions and portraits which suggest nostalgia while others hint at sadness veering towards distress. There is, in Rini Dhumal’s words, “Yin and Yang there”.

What is predominantly present in the body of her work is the allpervasive presence of Shakti. A powerful face, huge eyes, a strong nose devoid of any fragility… There are variations of this face whenever you see a Rini Dhumal work. The lines are strong, the textural density intense and the colours are almost somber, even though she uses red, orange, green and blues quite often, they have been deliberately subdued as if the painter doesn’t want her paint to overpower her subject.

When this face looks straight out of the canvas, though not necessarily at you even if you are in her range, what mood is she in? You can call it solemn if you wish. The look could possibly be interpreted as defiant; though I sense that it goes beyond defiance. This is a face that has seen it all, that has gone past anger and defiance and come into a blissful state of acceptance that isn’t passive at all.

The woman so depicted may be Rini Dhumal. She may be Everywoman. She may be Durga. She may be Saraswati or Laxmi or any other devi. She may, ultimately, be Shakti, female energy, the feminine life force. She is always surrounded by enigmatic emblems, symbols and animals. There are lions and large birds and virtual gardens of flowers…some of the symbolism is Hindu, some Egyptian, some elements even drawn from Greek mythology. Overall, the effect is mysterious and even mythic in its impact.

Many of the women have wings. These aren’t made of delicate feathers. They are as strong as the face and in paintings where you see legs or feet, those are almost trunk-like and planted firmly on the ground. Perhaps these grounded winged-women want to fly; perhaps they can fly but are just biding their time. Maybe these are the women she knew as a child in her ancestral home, the mothers and aunts and cousins, some prematurely widowed, some perennially

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on the shelf, all taking refuge in the extended family home, and within that home taking refuge in a domesticity which was at once comfortable and also a way of paying for the shelter they received. Did the young Rini see them as shackled and wanting to break free? They would feel shackled if they had an option. They would have an option if they had wings. What reinforces this feeling is that some of the symbols in Rini’s paintings suggest sexuality, like in the voluptuous flowers that are a common motif, or fish, which has always been a sexual symbol.

Rini Dhumal’s travels have taken her all over the world resulting in work specific to the subject such as the limited edition book on Bali, the Silk Route Travelogue from China or the Burma Travelogue. A less direct result is of imbibing various mythological symbols from all these cultures and using them as unexpected elements in her canvases. But these seemingly alien motifs are skillfully integrated into the work so that they add to the mystery without seeming forced or out of place.

Rini Dhumal remembers a Kali temple near her ancestral home in Bengal, and how as a child she would run past it as fast as she could, frightened of the fiery idol and all the vicious demons surrounding her. The childhood fears didn’t last; what stayed with her was that presence, which over the years transformed itself from Kali to Durga, powerful yet benevolent, the Life Force of Rini Dhumal’s work.

Saraswati oil on canvas 91 x 152 cm, 2009

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“The large body of work that she [Rini Dhumal] has produced in the last few years seems to be diverse iconic representations, or avatars, of a personal identity she is giving chase to. ” —Prof. K. G. Subramanyan in his Foreword

MODERN & CONTEMPORARY ART

Rooted Landscapes The Art of Rini Dhumal Edited by Ina Puri

248 pages 256 colour illustrations 10 x 11.5” (254 x 292 mm), hc ISBN: 978-81-89995-45-4 (Mapin) ISBN: 978-1-935677-06-2 (Grantha) ₹2,500 | $65 | £40 2010 • World rights