Fresh from Tulia: The crafting of a new tale

  Details from -from gods own garden_ pen & ink on paper, cloth mounted & wooden framed_ set of 25 pcs- each 24cm X 31cm

by Rahul Bhattacharya on Thursday, 1 December 2011 at 23:38

Putting up a slightly old write- written this September for Muktinath Mondal's solo show at Exhibit 320.

CHENNAI: An urge to uphold Indian traditions mixed with environmental concern has urged a bunch of students of P S Senior secondary school to start a medicinal garden there. They also plan to plant such floral varieties in neglected alleys of the neighbourhood. Over 160 students of the school's eco-club started the herbal garden a week ago. Most of the members from classes 6, 7 and 8 plant the saplings and maintain the garden. As of now plants like Karpooravalli, Tulsi, Nandyavatta, Thiruneerpachai, Vasambu, Vallarai and alternanda, which comprise the garden, are bought from private nurseries at Rs 10 to Rs 15. "We plan to get more medicinal plants, mostly rare ones. The gardens will be in unused stretches behind classrooms. The breeze that comes in after caressing the herbs will rejuvenate the students. Initially the saplings have been planted near and behind the principal's office," said C Sharan and R Mohan of class X and senior members of the eco-club.”[i]

This news clip gives us a trope though which one can engage with and historicize Muktinath Mondol’s artistic practice and his passions. This is the domain of contemporary revisiting of pre-modernism; the need to archive its ‘scientific’ knowledge and its value systems is what gives fuel to his practice. However unlike the school kids of Chennai, Muktinath does not visit tradition as an outsider, rather he captures it and paints it as an insider’s tale, and yet it is a tale of changing memories. Thus it is tempting to begin this story placing the artist’s life, its journey and how it has shaped a body of work which is a sublime and deeply affecting portrait of the struggle between tradition and progress. Yes, we will have to come to that narrative too; nonetheless it is tempting to begin in a slightly different note.

One of the fabled haunting scenes form  Pather Panchali is the long single take which climaxes with the protagonists Apu and Durga running though fields of Kash flowers, rushing to see the galloping train which appears to them as a mysterious monster billowing smoke, momentarily dwarfing the pristine agrarian landscape. In the third part of this fabled trilogy, Aparajito (1957), Apu returns. He has grownup now, settling down into a career, and has come back on an occasion of deep loss and suffering. Apu enters the house of an aged relative of the family, and on hearing the sound of the train in the distance, runs to the doorway. He calls excitedly to his mother, in anticipation of the sight he is about to see. But at the trains comes and rushes by, his face drains of animation. Of course, Apu has just been on the train, it is no longer a mysterious and wondrous object of fantacy and new experiences.  This graceful balance between nostalgic idealism and poignant realism has played a very important role in shaping up Munktinath’s aesthetic premise.

Though Pather Panchali is located in the misery of the rural poor, the lack of basic amenities such as adequate medical and other facilities, the condition of women and the position of the man in the family, the trend of rural-urban migration in search of employment.. The experimental neo realism of Ray and his artistic layering transform it in to universal narrative about family relations – the loving bond between a brother and a sister, about values and the tensions between tradition and modernity.[ii] This transformation is very crucial to understand the dialogue of ideology and aesthetic delight that is intergal to the formation of Muktinath’s artistic sensibilities and aspirations.

lakshman rekha_ oil on canvas, thorn, jute_ 6ft diameter

With Fresh from Tulia Muktinath weaves rich neo-mythological narratives, seeking to find his own language to tell stories of social reality through personal experience.  Tulia is Mutinath’s home. Located somewhere between the bursting metropolis of Kolkata (still Calcutta to many) and Kharagpur (a township centered on a prestigious engineering college, railways and an Air Force base), electricity is yet to reach Tulia. He rembers growing up in a land of local folklore, religious beliefs and popular rituals, yet deeply tired to the cultural history of Bengal, laced with the beautiful hand-work of local craft traditions. One can sense an artist being haunted by the instability of his own past, striving to preserve what is fast being lost, grappling between memory and fantasy.  Though Muktinath is one of the few artists who do not mask the Local as Global (or pretend that the Global can easily stand for the Local), what is refreshing is the manner in which he takes recourse to re-presentation, with a rare maturity that transforms deeply local narratives into an effective critique of contemporary progress, yet not shutting its doors on utopia.  This hedonistic notion of progress is made possible by a careless (violent?) forgetting, where desire defeats nostalgia. Muktinath intervenes with his shades of greys, medallion compositions, using slippages and conjectures between myths and realities. Almost like a skilled homeopath, the artist seeks to use longing to counter desire.

PAWANPUTRA_ OIL ON CANVAS_ 72''X120''

Motivated to find a style which enables him to explore dissolution of the distinction between classical, folk and popular art, the artist takes refuge in art history, digging deep, Muktinath still strives to arrive at a narrative mode, and yet working withing his attraction to the icon.  At this historical juncture in contemporary Indian art, narration is a bit of an anti trend. The obsession with single, poignant imagery that strove to be universal through a stubborn denial of context is still strong; with it we are beginning to see greater formal experimentation, but weaving narratives and storytelling is still rare to see. It is the artists over arching need to build connections with the mystifications of his own reality (childhood) that prompts him towards the artistic strategies of neo realism, revisiting it to be able to destabilize the (now) sterile mediatic realism, at the same time bringing forth a new folkloric imagination[iii]. This enables him to undertake an archiving of the transformation of an symbolic economy, charting changes in the forms and cultural attachments, evolving a new understanding of the temporal. Though on the surface, the near photographic realism is the dominant stylistic approach of his works, but a closer look shows a deep affiliation with social realism being influeced by the deep observation skills artists like  Ritwik Ghatak and Sudhir  Patwardan, unlike many of his contemporaries, Muktinath likes to subtely flaunt his context, the broken cycle pedal, the mud lacing the tyres of the cycle, bring us close to the reprensentative style of Sudhir Pathwardan...the use of spot sound by Satyajit Ray,  and the harsh character detailing of  Ritwik  Ghatak.

divine arms_ acrylic on wood, jute, iron_ set of 52 pieces- each 13'' diameter_ 2011

 Increasingly Muktinath has been playing within the zones between myths and realities, in an attempt to find a narrative context for his works. This helps him to invade the sensibilities of his largely urban audience. This invasion of sensibility is crucial for the artist to initiate the dialogue that he so longs. Far evolved from the understanding of an artist as an avant-garde hero, crusading against and reforming bourgeoisie sensibilities through a voracious monologue, Muktinath understands too well that his archiving project can only succeed if it gets embedded in the dialogues his works generate. It is this kind of artistic strategizing that prompts him to use well known myths as metaphors for lesser known realities. Not afraid to fall into the trap of vernacular clichés, Muktinath  uses this play between myths and realities to uphold certain ethics which he holds very dear. Haunted my the deep crisis craft and manual labour is facing in this post industrial times, grieved my their shrinking spaces, loss of livelihood and respect, the artist chooses to respond with Divine Arms. He uses the traditional hemp cord covered ring on which the earthen water-pots are placed in village and sub-urban homes, and subverted them into frames for artworks by fitting a circle of plywood in these rings. On each of these fifty two medallions are painted the tool-of-trade of  (primarily) lower caste workers and crafts persons. Divine Arms. thrives on a semantic play, each of these tools are placed in front of the god during the Vishwakarma Puja, and this ritual is firmly rooted in the local practice of Bengal, yet the name also conjures visions of gods and goddesses with swords spears and tridents in their hand, allowing the artist to engage with craft and its crisis though the historical prism of caste and untouchability.

THE GREAT INDIAN FOLK LORE, OIL ON CANVAS, EMBROIDERED QUILT,CLOTH, PAPER & PLY BOARD, GLASS, WOODEN FRAME, 2ft X 20ft(approx, together), 2011

The Great Indian Folklore,  a series of ten oil-on-canvas portraits of street children, who have been named after famous freedom fighters. Carrying the burden of names like Khudiram, and Subhas  is not easy. The representation of that burden is highlighted by the by decorating the mounting with beautiful kantha embroidery and then framing the whole thing in an antique style wooden frames. This work signals a new flame of maturity in the artist’s practice, content, style, meaning and language come together in multiple layers. There is reference to a old Bengali parable which roughly translates to ‘the one who will be called lotus eyed, will inevitably go blind’. Somehow this folk saying is transformed to stand for the  careless marginalisation which results in children being reduced to live on the streets. Mostly they have roots in villages and carry narratives of immigration and dislocation. The strategy of representation is one of the most nuanced the artist has come up yet, kantha for us may symbolise delicate decorative craft, and reduced to the superficiality of a stitching style, but for the children sleeping on the streets its the only hope of keeping warm, and possibly the only touch of softness. At the same-time the the combination of kantha and anitique like hand crafted wooden frames do invoke rural and the culture of craft, both threatened with the kind of displacement and marginality.

the saviors_ clay, terracota object _ 70''X130''X 70'', 2011

We see that what really gives the edge to Muktinath’s practice, is not really how his Tulia  has influenced the manner in which he looks at the world, but  how his increasing exposure has made him look at Tulia.  Though rural and not materially developed, Tulia exposed him to literature, and cinema of the great masters from Bengal, and that was his first exposure to the kind of socialist humanism that characterizes some of the most powerful strands of cultural and political thought in post independence India. Travelling to Hyderabad for his higher education exposed him to stands of neo left political thought, destabilizing the Bhadrakol humanism of Ray, making transparent to him the various castes, class dynamics and politics that are constantly evolving in his idyllic Tulia. Maybe in an attempt to understand Tulia better, Muktinath has begun travelling and learning about various other tribal/rural communities and places. His exposure to how modernization has pushed tribal/agrarian communities, (some considered to be amongst the oldest on the land and extremely important storehouses ritualistic believe systems and traditional knowledge), to the brink of extinction. The Saviours/The Spirit of Anticipation first came up as a painting and was shown at the Hong Kong Art Fair, not satisfied with how the semiotics of object and commodity lapsed into each other, the artist has  decided to revisit the work again, this time as ephemeral installation project. His choice to to not make/fabricate/buy, but instead to travel and collect, laces this work with a spirit of performativity...heralding new directions in his practice.  Working with the traditional votive terracotta offerings to the dead by the Pithoro tribe of Gujarat, he weaves a metaphor, leading us to the assault on tribal culture, at the same time highlighting the roles of tribes as the protectors of the forests. The artist chooses to evoke the Ind festival, a festival named after the agrarian gods, where peole offer votive figures (of pada-padi/ cow-calf, kutta/dog, billi/ cat, ghoda/ horse, man on horse, ghar/ house etc), they pray for their cattle being more productive, the harvest better and such pastoral  concerns. Muktinath clearly relishes the prospect of playing with agrarian myths and at the same time invoking the god Ind as a  possible saviour of a world threatened by environmental disaster.The work is also a quite celebration of the way in which ordinary people establish communion with the unknown, in simple, ritualistic and confident ways that have survived and evolved though layers of myth-making.Betraying his love for the simplicity of their complex knowledge systems, he remains aware of the politics of such nostalgia.
“Every one comes and join in this festival, they do pujas, dance with drums and dhols, cook food and have together. in other festivals people join in partly”.
This celebration of the Dionysian rescues his art from the dangers of revisionism, allowing for revisit to the memories of earth which are hidden..vanishing..endangered..yet   precious.

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In the early 80’s Tulia was even smaller and cut off, Muktinath was very young and unexposed and automobiles were rare to sight. One can imagine a young Muktinath running to see a rare glimpse of a white Ambassador car, fascinated my this myth provoking, gleaming mysterious machine. Last year his father left for the heavenly abode, almost like Apu in Aparajito Muktinath returned - a grownup into a man, settling down into a career, and coming  back on an occasion of deep loss and suffering. There was big white car to receive him, but he had just touched base at the airport, and cars no longer held any awe nor mystery, but they do not stop triggering of memories of times when they inspired awes and myths. The consciousness of this co existence sets Muktinath free...letting him explore and play...within the fields of grey.

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[i] http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-08-12/chennai/28290654_1_medicinal-plants-plant-saplings-herbal-garden
[ii]
Nationhood, Authenticity and Realism in Indian cinema: the double take of modernism in the work of Satyajit Ray, Ravi Vasudevan, Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi
[iii]
Both ‘mediatic realism’ and ‘new folkloric imagination’ are frameworks brought into Indian art though the art historic practice of Nancy Adajania.