An artist's life is said to be the mainspring of his/her art. But what is that life that goes into the making of those beautiful things the artists create? The artist lives on multiple planes of experience ranging from the most mundane to the most imaginative, from the most materially conditioned to a plane spiritually fine-tuned. His / her creative impulse is succoured and sustained by a unique mix of all these experiences of different planes, which admits of no prismatic analysis.
Rini Dhumal's prolific career in art, her masterly handling of diverse mediums and techniques, the depth and intensity of her vision, all demands a thorough in-depth study of her works in the light of her experience of a life spread over decades since the Partition of Bengal in 1947.
Early life: A dream and a trauma
Dhumal was born in Rangpur District of East Bengal (now in Bangladesh ) immediately after Partition. As her father was on a transferable job employed outside Bengal her childhood was spent, not always but mostly in the ancestral home in her native village with a lush green rural setting blessed by Nature's bounty. Her early life had been both a dream and a trauma. It was initially a childhood of pure joy, “carefree days of affluence and gaiety” in large prosperous land-owning and devoutly religious Hindu family in an ambience vibrant with cultural and nationalist idealism. Life was a round-the-year celebration through the seasonal changes marked by festivals and other religious and social events. This is evident in the general tenor of her numerous paintings and drawings and works in other mediums. It is there not only in the image content but spatial and structural build up of her imagery, in a certain celebratory and iconic outlook of the paintings.
But her dream childhood is not the whole truth of her early life. It was soon over, replaced by a sense of insecurity that haunted the minority community in the newborn state of East Pakistan . The cataclysmic disaster of Partition gradually began to traumatise the families such as that of Dhumal's parents, who stayed back clinging to their homeland defying deracination. People with whom they had lived for generations as neighbours in peace and harmony became hostile and posed a practical threat to their life, honour and property. No less painful was their becoming a foreigner in their own homeland, members of a conspicuous minority with cultural and religious alienation as well as the forced final choice of uprooting themselves from the age-old home and hearth hallowed by a long line of ancestors.
Indelible imprints on her psyche While she grew up away from Bengal in Mumbai and Baroda Rini made regular visits to her native village so long as her own folk continued to live there. These visits not only left indelible imprints on her psyche of the joys and horrors of her early life and implanted the ethos which her ancestral house steeped in religion and traditional culture exhaled but also gradually sharpened her critical perception of history and present-day realities. She had, therefore, also noticed the darker sides of the old feudal life-style and traditional social norms and values that adversely affected for the most part the fate of women in the family. The feudal institution of the joint family had no doubt ensured security, comfort and family solidarity for everybody living under a patriarchal roof with strong ties of blood, culture and religion. But domestic happiness thrived in such a family mainly on the self-effacing service of the women. Women of the feudal family, however, had only a paltry share of that happiness.
Daughters were married off even before they came of age and often they came back to the parents-in more fortunate instances- as young widows to live a life of self-denial and repressed desire, under a rigorous regime that made a virtue of shunning creature comforts. This was the lot also of the dependent unmarried aunts or cousins who for shelter and security slogged away at the domestic chores, probably not without a sort of satisfaction at being in some way useful and indispensable to the family.
A home-coming visitor
Rini's life shaped differently in Mumbai and later in Baroda, away from this outback of East Bengal, But she was nevertheless spiritually and emotionally close to the remote Rangpur village, the enchanted place of her Bengali nativity where she had been in her impressionable years a frequent home-coming visitor and later an outsider, and later a non-resident Bengali who felt nevertheless at home in her native place where deep down in the earth lay her roots and they are, she seems to feel, still intact.
At the same time she grew up imbibing values and spirit of a different time and age, her sensibility, both aesthetic and intellectual, acquiring a thorough modernist sophistication. Her world and outlook further widened with her frequent travels abroad, with repeated exposures to the art of contemporary thoughts, values and ideas. As a result, while distance lent an edge to her nostalgia for everything she missed away from home, she learnt to sift between what was to be cherished and what was to be trashed of that fast vanishing world of yesteryear. In a series of excellent graphics titled The Ancestral Tapestry (2002) Rini evokes vivid Expressionist images, drawing upon her reminiscences and impressions of life in her ancestral home before and after the Partition. She weaves into them in yarns, both dark and light, haunting memories--which both draw and scare her--of events, happy and distressful, and episodes that had happened at home and abroad, nostalgic portraits of dear and near ones and of those who suffered under a social regime oppressive to women. This unique blend of nostalgia and nightmarish experiences, her journey to a past which she cherishes as well as critiques, has given her art not merely its richly complex content but also an expression that acquires its eloquence from her powerful formal and technical handling ensuring a spontaneous lineal, tonal and spatial structuring of pictorial details.
Bengal connection
These memories have kept alive Rini's Bengal connection, her strong ties not only with her place of ancestral past but also with the most memorable phase of Bengal 's cultural achievements of recent past. Even though she spent the greater part of her life studying, teaching and working as an artist in Baroda , her art seems to have a close link with Bengal . Her figurative idiom, the mystic and mythic mould of her imagination, are no doubt of Bengal provenance though they acquired complexities, enriched by the multi-layered experiences of life while she has lived away from Bengal and toured abroad. Her art education in Baroda , has no doubt shaped her modernist values and her zest for work in diverse mediums, and a spell of training in Paris has added a fresh dimension to her formal and conceptual approach to art and helped her acquire further clarity in the contours of her personality as an artist. But the core part of her sensibility, her aesthetic, mode of image making, multi-dimensional richness of her iconography seem to have seminally come from what she acquired, not always consciously, quite early in life, from her spiritual and emotional roots in her native culture, sustained by and stored ever fresh in, her memories as well as in the unconscious. She has also gained access to the mystique of Bengal art that has survived till today since the days when Santiniketan had been India 's art capital occupying a unique space between, and beyond, tradition and modernism. It is important to note Rini was taught in Baroda by K.G. Subramanyan, a modern Indian master and a Santiniketan veteran trained by Nandalal. Moreover, she had a spell of schooling in Santiniketan under
Somenath Hore, from whom she learnt that it depends a lot on the creative mystique of technical and formal treatment to animate a picture even when the subject it sports has potential for a strong impact.
Remembered past
All this is evident in the current suite of her oils, mixed-medias, watercolours and other works on display in diverse mediums and on different surfaces. The works on canvas or paper may not strike one as all of a piece with her Ancestral Tapestry. They have no direct autobiographical references in their subject and in the formal treatment too they are much unlike the earlier graphics . Nevertheless, these images obliquely refer to her remembered past and are also steeped in the religious and cultural ethos that got ingrained in the artist's sensibility quite early on in life. Moreover, appropriate to the deeply subjective content, her visual idiom is charged with evocative elements of pictorial motifs, often of spirtual and religious symbolism.
Exclusive to India and the East
Here the world appears not the reality of immediate perception, set in time and space of present-day experience. The characters and motifs in her densely composed figurative imagery do not represent a world of mundane reality but comprise figures and forms which are neither strange nor exotic to those who, despite Said's critique of Orientalism, can instantly identify something non-western in our culture, religion, spirituality and also certain specificities in our art and aesthetic, that belong exclusively to India and the East. The pictorial content and their delineation contour and embody an ethos familiar to viewers unless they are rank outsider to Indian history and heritage.
Mortals, mythic and divine
The figures and forms, representing mortal or divine beings, birds, beasts and floral and mythic motifs are woven together into a pattern that recalls iconography of graven images in religious art, murals or temple sculptures from India's classical past- the past that enjoyed cultural domination over a large part of South East Asia and a fresh revival in the heyday of our nationalist aesthetic. The oils and mixed medias feature portraits of divinities, gods and goddesses, the Buddha, and Buddhist monks, Hindu devotees or devotional singers, mythological figures, legendary birds, fabled lions, all evoked with the abandon of an artist who is deep into the mystique of a reality, of a culture, of a solemn aesthetic experience that has survived from a remote past and has proved its relevance, howsoever obliquely, in the present day world of bad faith, violence and rank materialism. Each image is richly packed with pictorial wealth of colours in most expressive sombre shades of reds, oranges, browns greens and blues and lineally framed representational and decorative details of mystic and mythic symbolism and each is rounded off with an excellent painterly finesse.
Solemn and serene mood
Charged with varied tonal areas, dexterous textural density and lineal strokes that define the motifs or lend them a meaningful decorative support, Rini Dhumal's imagery have an inbuilt transparent core of solemn serene mood. This mood belongs as much to the subject as it is an inalienable quality of her mythic imagination, of her mystic perception and of her rich gift of a modernist mode of Expressionist image making. Her brushed-in or pen-and-ink lines free, fecund, fluid and plentiful, are not smooth, pliant, cool or delicate, exuding the cultivated refinement of a revivalist aesthetic, but have both strength and sophistication, vibrating with exuberant expressive energy that updates the formal outlook of her imagery. At the same time they have the simplicity and spontaneous overflow of calligraphic lines with fine unforced lyrical twirls and curls, recalling the delightful brush-strokes in the scroll paintings or pata chitras of rural Bengal 's master patuas or folk artists. She must have watched as a little girl many such folk painters while they painted patas and made clay images of Durga and other deities at her ancestral home during the puja seasons or met folk singers who sang songs about divinities or mythic tales while unfolding painted scrolls of their own making to carry the narratives, they sang, in pictures, frame after frame. The exhibits including tapestries and works on paper canvas or wood, even the enamels and oils or mixed medias have this folk painting attitude in subject, designal format and lineal plenty. Nevertheless, one cannot miss a contemporary sensibility quietly at work in all of them. This is obvious in their densely impacted expressional complexities; in the mixed tonal schemes of their colours; brisk and exuberant linear flurry and the bristly gestures of textural and tonal passages, all that add up to strong Expressionist formal values of Rini's imagery.
The recurrent motif
Not unexpectedly woman is the recurrent motif in Rini's images. Leave aside the female divinities, goddess Saraswati or Devi s of both the paintings and the graphics, women who appear in Rini's images are both mortal and mythic. There are Binodini , the woman In the Garden or one devi-like figure presiding over the Green Landscape , a Devotional Singe or a woman darkly looking on in Gaze .
Sad, sombre, solemn and lonely, they are no women to entertain the male gaze. Even Binodini , painted in a bright palette, is no exception- a lady married into a prosperous feudal family, who sits like a queen in a richly furnished interior, displaying her affluent life style. But the sad look in her large black eyes, her fair deadpan face, her stolid body language, all betrays that she is an unhappy creature in a golden cage- her cage is lavishly embellished with flowers and fitted out with furniture pieces of ornamental carvings- emblems of plenty and affluence.
More gloomy and grim is the woman in Gaze , who emerges from behind the ornamental door panel into an well-appointed chamber filled with a twilight chiaroscuro. Despite the tender contours, her face seems to have something awesome or psychic about it. What looks like a third eye on her forehead betokens her probing insight into the mystique of woman's hard lot. But what causes the glower in her gaze is definitely the raw deal she has received from life.
Serene and meditative
If the gazing woman looks quietly resentful, the others in the garden or landscape seem resigned to their fate, at peace with the world and with themselves and therefore, each wears a look serene and meditative. Still a pensive air clings to their faces and their supposedly outdoor setting- landscape or garden- looks a closed world without a sky overhead, as chiaroscuroed as the interior in Gaze . By contrast Binodini's room is much more bright, colourful and flooded with daylight. Nevertheless, each of these women is endowed with a power of spirit and personality, explicit in their dignified, sober, self-absorbed composure. One may not miss in some of them a certain token of the divine whether in the crown of flower, in the gesture of their hands or in the iconic frontality of the portrait format.
Icons of divinity in woman
In fact the line is very thin between Rini's icons of goddesses and portraits of women as ordinary mortals except when the former sport certain definitive signifiers such as multiple arms, a crown on the head or an emblematic animal or bird assigned in traditional iconography to each divinity as his or her familiar- Durga's lion, Laxmi's owl etc. Goddesses are, however, evoked not always strictly in the traditional iconic mould, in many instances they are not even the elite members of the Hindu Pantheon such as Devi of the tapestries, The Blue Goddess in oil and the divinities in the graphics of the Devi series. Her Saraswati is also a dark blue goddess, not a traditional white female divinity and lodged at her feet is not her signature swan, but a carapaced animal resembling a croc or armadillo.
Rini's godesses are neverthless icons of divinity in woman and the woman in the divine. Her God is female, unlike Michelengelo's bearded male God who creates only man after his own image.
Winged women Rini's women are not only mortal and divine but also mythic. The mix of the womanly and the divine in her portrait of women or in the icons of goddesses simply embodies the traditional and popular or primitive folk perception of a potential divinity in woman. But most intriguing are the women, who are half-human and half-avian. Whether they are painted on wood, paper or canvas or on metal plates and bear such titles as The Female Bird , The Strange Bird , The Woman , The Nymph or just simply The Bird , these mythic creatures flaunt a compulsive hybrid identity in which the human component is assertively feminine and the avian part is mythic and metaphorically oblique in epitomising a feminist dream- woman not deified but an empowered mortal. These winged women, if they are birds, they are not soft feathery domesticated doves, nor a talking parrot or a warbling canary, pets in the cage. They have mighty wings and strong feet sometimes with talons and they look big cats as they crouch and
eagles as they perch. Nevertheless they are neither predators nor birds of prey as is evident in their graceful looks, faces a glow with tenderness and curves charged with warmhearted femininity.
Desi and Margi
India 's native art traditions, which we may recall while viewing these works come under two major heads, deshi and margi - folk and classical respectively. Rini's recycling of native resources embraces both of our native traditions, although, as said above, her works have a general affinity in outlook with folk painting. Her works on canvas and paper whether in oil or mixed media, are done as freely as those she has painted on wood, or her enamels and watercolours. But surface or medium, or both, make all the difference in tone, tenor and temperament between these two sets of works. This difference may best be grasped, though not adequately, in terms of that between the margi and the deshi . In the oils on canvas and mixed medias on paper, brushstrokes, design and configuration of pictorial content no doubt display in a good measure the conceptual freedom and visionary spontaneity which synch well with certain features of folk painting's formal values. Still her oils and mixed-medias sport a formal sophisticaion, a sedate and settled structural gesture, an expressive depth often in textural density and tenebrous tones, all that associate more with margi than with deshi temper.
Turning from these works to the wartercolours or paintings on wood is a major shift in terms of mood and meaning. No need to point out that these images have a distinctive deshi stamp. In terms of ideas and execution they display, especially the watercolours, the artist in a creative mood, more free and spontaneous. There is a bouyancy, something of a gay abandon in the light breezy washes even though not in primary shades and in the racy yet playful lines and strokes which one misses in the oils and mixed medias. This is true of the tapestries too, though weaving has its own way of resisting free lineality but the colours have the same limpid lightness. The paintings on wood are more compact in design and dense and complex in palette range for which they look a little weighty, such as Binodini . In total impact however they are no less deshi with their delightfully simple and free linial handling of the figures and other objects including decorative details. Mythic motifs, nymphs, mermaids, winged women or Hindu deities – Laxsmi with her owl, Durga with her lion – or a strange Goddess with a croc for her mount are evoked with the brio and simplicity of a folk painter's imagination. Enamels often abound in explicit Expressionist energy, bristling with brisk scrawly sappy strokes in black over brushy passages of warm darker shades of red brown, yellow or green. But they have the same folk format of composition with a simple motif of mythic bird or female figure, mortal or divine. |
