Drawing the line

AKBAR PADAMSEE
A modernist, who was part of the Bombay Progressives group, Padamsee is loved for his haunting portraits of lovers, his spiritual Metascapes and nudes. When we asked him what he considered his most shocking work, he said, “I have done no subversive work. Others have found it subversive or obscene. I have simply painted and stood by what I believed in.” In 1954, however, his work Lovers, being shown at the Jehangir Art Gallery, got him into trouble. The artist was arrested on an obscenity charge, because the man in the painting had his hand on his lover’s breast.

“I had to fight for 8 to 9 months and though we won the case, it left a very bad taste in my mouth. I began painting landscapes and it is only 20 years later that I came back to the theme.  Now I have done a series of nudes, which is pure form.”

JOGEN CHOWDHURY
“My work does not start out to be subversive or sensationalist. I merely react to the situations around me, like any other human being would,” says Chowdhury, who is known for his classic cross-hatched works that are sensuous depictions of men, women and gods. “However my Wounded series is one of my more powerful works. Aftermath, Abu Ghraib and The Unborn Child take a stand against the kind of violence we have seen perpetrated in recent times,” the artist says. If the suture running through the back of a reclining figure in Abu Ghraib is the mark of a rupture in civilisation, in The Unborn Child, a woman’s stomach is split open with her infant spilling out. Chowdhury’s take on obscenity and art: “What is more obscene is the manner in which the freedom of expression is being attacked.”

TYEB MEHTA
Once grossly undervalued as an artist, Mehta now needs little introduction, with the prices of his works going through the roof up in the last three years. His works have so far steered clear of controversy though the artist notes “many of my works have very subversive Mahisasuras”. “I never work to shock. My aesthetics is a product of all that I see around me, all the art and life that I have assimilated in my lifetime. I create my work on the basis of these factors. I have my personal concerns that usually look at the formal aspects of art like colour, line and form,” says the reclusive Mehta, who made it a point to attend a public rally held outside Mumbai’s Jehangir Art Gallery to protest the attack on Baroda art student Chandramohan. The veteran artist is a voice of reason in a time of crisis. “I have seen a lot of paintings in the West and in temples in Bhubaneswar. You don’t need me to tell you that these are erotic works. I believe it’s more important to internalise the whole concept of the art and understand where the artists are coming from, at what time they created those works and who they built it for. One cannot see these works in isolation.”

ANJOLIE ELA MENON
A show by the artist had to be wrapped up because the Shiv Sena had protested her work, Raising the Kundalini. The work, which the artist says has been interpreted as subversive, depicted a sparsely dressed meditating sadhu, figures of various Hindu gods and goddesses rising up the ridges of his spine. “The principle was that it takes enormous effort to raise the life force or the Kundalini and each figure of a god was a mark of success. The painting was about the spiritual quest of an ascetic,” Menon explains.

On the protests that seem to erupt at shows across India, she says, “Fundamentalists are at the lowest end of understanding as far as Hindu philosophy is concerned. They are just a crowd of goons hired to beat, burn and destroy. They’re so ignorant they pulled Jatin Das’s beard thinking he was Hussain.” Simplistic criticism of art, says Menon, goes against the grain of Indian culture. “Classical Indian art is full of erotic or human love but it has always been a metaphor for divine love. Objecting to a nude goddess, like Husain’s Bharatmata, is absurd.”
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