Ancient forms, modern stories in NGV exhibition of Indian art

An exhibition of contemporary Indian art at the National Gallery of Victoria shows just how much the world has changed since Covid-19.

Detail from Kalyan Joshi’s Migration in the time of Covid-19, 2020

The diversity, complexity and mutability of India can seem overwhelming; its civilisation is not only one of the oldest but always seems to have been animated by a genius for proliferation. Simplification, rationalisation and clarity have never been the priority, even though so many Indian spiritual traditions have ultimately aimed at the liberation of the soul from the repeated sufferings of earthly life.

As a panel in this exhibition reminds us, India has 121 major languages and more than 19,500 dialects, though estimates vary according to the definition of languages and dialects. Broadly there are two main groups: a minority in the south who still speak Dravidian languages that predated the arrival of the Indo-Europeans, who brought the classical Sanskrit language, and the majority in the north who speak languages derived from Sanskrit – though even this is necessarily a simplification.

The most widely spoken of these languages is Hindi, which is a form or “register” of the broader category of Hindustani, which includes the main language of Pakistan, Urdu. These languages are mutually intelligible when spoken colloquially, but not in their written form, for Hindi uses the Devanagari script of Sanskrit and Urdu is written in the Persian or Perso-Arabic alphabet. When the two languages are used formally, they diverge towards Sanskrit and Persian respectively.

Venkat Raman Singh Shyam, Viral World II

The reason for this curious linguistic phenomenon is that much of India was ruled by the Mughal Empire from the 16th to the 18th centuries; during this time the courtly and administrative language of India was Persian, just as it was in Ottoman Turkey, so that formal Turkish was once largely Persian. Although Indian vernaculars such as Hindustani were spoken by the people, they would inevitably have been affected by the official court language to varying degrees, a process made easier by the common ancestry of Indo-Iranian languages as a subgroup of Indo-European.

The British had important trading activities in India during the latter part of the Mughal Empire, and when the empire collapsed after the reign of Aurangzeb (died 1707), who unwisely tried to impose Islamic law on his Indian subjects, the British East India Company effectively took over the running of the vast country until 1858, when rule of India was transferred to the Crown.

One of the most important legacies of British rule, together with the unification of the country and the building of modern infrastructure, was the introduction of English as a language of instruction in schools, now a common tongue among the countless different linguistic groups.

Aurangzeb’s failure in trying to impose Islam was inevitable not only because of the multiplicity of Indian religions but because, once again, the diverse and ever-proliferating spirit of Indian religion is antithetical to the extreme simplicity of Islam. We think of Hinduism as the main religion in India today, but Hinduism itself is a complex system of belief with deep roots extending back to the earlier Vedic religion.

Kalam Patua, Restaurant 2017

There are related but different traditions followed by the Sikhs and the Jains. Buddhism arose out of Hinduism, seeking to escape from the nightmare of karma and reincarnation; it spread widely across Asia and even had some influence in Europe, yet in India it almost disappeared about 800 years ago. Other religions have been imported, most importantly Zoroastrianism with Persian migrants (Parsis) and later Christianity.

But even these comments hardly do justice to the multiplicity of ethnic groups, traditions, beliefs and dialects found across the country. And this exhibition focuses particularly on smaller regional or tribal groups, most of which would be entirely unknown to non-specialists. These groups often preserve vestiges of animistic beliefs that predate the great religious traditions of the subcontinent, as well as their own minority lang­uages. Their art, in all the abundant variety on display here, is rooted in folk traditions but can also be considered as vernacular expressions of classic Indian styles. In the same way, their animistic beliefs have assimilated many influences from Hinduism in the course of the centuries. Everything in India seems to be complex, interrelated and hybridised.

What is perhaps most fascinating is the way that traditional and folk styles maintain their distinctive pictorial forms yet so readily adapt to dealing with contemporary social themes, particularly the Covid-19 pandemic. This no doubt reflects a longstanding tradition, within folk art and storytelling, of openness to topical and local anecdotes and digressions.

One of the most purely folk traditions is represented by the very large Warli painted cloth at the entrance of the exhibition. The style is the most unusual and distinctive of all, and came to wider notice only in the past few decades. It is rudimentary and highly stylised in its depiction of figures, like a kind of shorthand, and is far older than any of the styles represented here, possibly derived from Neolithic rock art. These almost ideographic figures are, however, used with endless inventiveness to compose a kind of encyclopaedia of all the daily tasks and labours of the villagers on their farms.

Sangita Jogi, Empowered Mother 2020

In contrast, a painting from Rajasthan is clearly a folk derivation of the sophisticated tradition of Mughal painting, of which two examples are included for comparison. In one, a young girl appears to be dressing her hair; in the second, another is performing a rite of adoration, Surya Puja, to the rising sun.

In the recent work, Apindra Swain’s Wash Hands (2020), a sumptuously dressed girl with a suggestively bared lower back stands washing her hands rather incongruously at a modern handbasin, and still more strikingly wearing a mask. It is interesting to ponder the intent of a work such as this: there is clearly a sense of humour in its juxtaposition of old and new, and in its use of motifs such as the girl’s reflection in the mirror, complete with mask, but it is not a cynical appropriation of the tradition. Members of Swain’s family have long been painters, and he is continuing and extending their traditional practice, not overturning it.

On the same wall is a set of three paintings from another unfamiliar tradition, the Vaghris of Gujarat. There is something quintessentially Indian about the story: three centuries ago, a certain part of the tribe was forbidden to enter the temples, so they began to paint their own holy images of the mother goddess. Three hundred years is only yesterday in the history of India, of course, and the resulting images betray the influence of Persian carpet design, with their borders, echoes of prayer-rug layout and tree of life motifs.

After this is a series of watercolours in the even more recent late-19th century Kalighat style from Calcutta. A kind of painting originally designed to produce religious scenes as souvenirs for pilgrims has been adapted by Kalam Patua to evoke surreal scenes and images of modern life. At first sight his Restaurant (2017) looks as though it belongs to the 1930s or ’40s, until we look more closely at details of costume or notice the mobile phone in one man’s hand.

Several works take the form of series of images or episodes on a panel or cloth divided into a grid of squares. The format was designed to recall the order and succession of anecdotes from the endless profusion of myth in Sanskrit classics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata. The images served as mnemonics and were used by travelling storytellers to prompt their own narration and no doubt to make the stories more vivid for their listeners, who retain an emblem-like visual impression of each episode.

Apindra Swain, Wash hands, 2020

Here we find traditional sequences of the avatars of Vishnu by Kalyan Joshi – Vishnu sustains creation by sleeping and so can manifest himself in the world only through emanations or avatars such as Krishna – but then, by the same artist and in a simplified, somewhat modernised style, Migration in the Time of Covid. This painting tells the story of the hundreds of thousands of labourers who had come to the big cities to find work but who were left without resources during the lockdown in 2020 and, with railway services suspended, walked hundreds of kilometres home to their villages.

Another work of this nature takes the form of a painted wooden box that opens out into long panels covered with stories. Storytellers would carry boxes such as this from village to village and unfold the panels like a kind of static theatre as they related the stories episode by episode. The scenes in this work, painted in 2017, do not refer to the Covid pandemic, but the artist has relished the opportunity to combine new and old means of transport: people ride horses, camels and elephants, but also motorbikes, cars and even rockets.

A particularly striking set of these narrative mnemonics, although in this case closer to the comic strip in the detail of the narration, is a series of Patua cloths from West Bengal. Subjects range from a surreal vision of the destruction of the World Trade Centre twin towers in New York by demon-planes, to the story of a bride who is tormented by her mother-in-law because she brought too small a dowry, and then hangs herself in despair.

Another is, yet again, about Covid: successive panels show people coughing, collapsing or in hospital, as well as foreigners flying in, bringing the virus. The skin colour of the three heads visible in the plane is contrasted to suggest different ethnicities, but the features are identical, just as there is little discernible variation between the expressions of those who are well and those who are sick or even in hospital in intensive care. At last the vaccine is being administered, and the artist herself is seen recounting the story while holding the scroll – a self-referential image of the function of the painting as mnemonic and prompt to storytelling.

There are many other interesting things in this exhibition, including Soni Jogi’s ink drawing Empowered Mother, in which she imagines herself doing something prohibited – driving her son to school on a quad motorbike – but Covid remains the most striking theme, and one of the most memorable images is of the whole world turned into the all-too-familiar image of the Covid virion.

Rajesh Chaitya Vangad, Natural world of Warlis 2017 (detail)

Venkat Raman Singh Shyam represents the globe, curiously focused on the Atlantic Ocean rather than on India, with green continents and a red sea, bristling with the sinister, almost floral spikes that are distinctive of coronaviruses. Above are birds trapped behind bars, below are masked and unmasked humans with the perennial motif of handwashing. In the centre squats a sinister blue figure, like the genius of the disease, surrounded by the bats that were thought to have been its source, flying across a globe in which there is nowhere to hide.

Transforming Worlds: Change and Tradition in Contemporary India, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, until August 28.