Jayaram Poduval: When you have a retrospective of an artist, say from a school like Santiniketan, an artist or art historian from that school will usually be asked to coordinate. I would like to know how did you get involved in this project.
Gulammohammed Sheikh: I was invited by the National Gallery of Modern Art to curate the show. And I decided that such a job requires the expertise of a certain kind. I knew Siva Kumar had worked on Benodebehari Mukherjee. Not only on Benodebehari but also on Santiniketan as a whole. When I accepted to curate the show I asked the NGMA to invite him as a co-curator and we formed a curatorial committee with Prof. KG Subramanyan as the consultant advisor and Mrinalini Mukherjee, the artist’s daughter and Nilima Sheikh as members. We also had a research associate in Sanjoy Kumar Mallik. That is how we proceeded.
If you are asking me why I got involved, I frankly admit that I am no expert on either Benodebehari Mukherjee or Santiniketan, but I happened to be interested in both. With my questionable credentials in art history, I thought perhaps Siva Kumar would put it right. But you can blame me for all the mistakes that we have made and I will squarely accept it. Well, my purpose was basically to know more about Benodebehari. I have seen his work over the years..
JP: Have you met him personally?
GS: I was, in fact, interested in his work right from the time I was a student. And I think I went to Santiniketan in early 1960s to attend a Lalit Kala seminar in Calcutta, I made it a point to go and see his murals. I have a vivid memory of seeing these murals. Then over the years I have been visiting Santiniketan, and every time I made it a point to see them and if I am not mistaken, it was in 1969 that I photographed the Hindi Bhavan mural and I still have those slides and photographs. I was quite keen to work on Benodebehari but unfortunately, except for a show, which was organized in 1971 by K.G. Subramanyan and others, there was very little material (except the little Lalit Kala monograph by Prithwish Neogy and the catalogue essay written by K.G. Subramanyan). That show was also not taken much notice of. I wrote an article in Lalit Kala Contemporary (no. 14) in 1972, which I was surprised to find quite recently; I had almost forgotten that. I wrote it because I had felt that here was an artist of great distinction whose work has not been sufficiently studied or noticed. Such a wonderful artist ! I was very happy when my friend Timothy Hyman wrote about him in ‘London Magazine’. I think that was the point of departure when contemporary art circuit began to take notice of Benodebehari. You realise that it was not the day, contemporary Indian art was (being) talked about so much. So here was somebody quite unknown to us, writing about his work and writing with great affection. More than affection, he held him in high esteem and assessed him as a very significant Indian artist. This is just to give you the background.
JP: In Arts & Ideas, long back, there was an article on Benodebehari.
GS: I don’t know whether you are talking about my article. That is called ‘Viewer’s View’. It was an article where I chose three works – one was Velazquez’s ‘Las Meninas’, that is an easel painting and I was talking about single point perspective. Then I had ‘House of Sheikh Phool’ by Bishan Das, the Mughal painter of the Jehangir period; that is a small, hand-held folio (which required) different kind of perception of looking: holding it in your hand and entering the picture. Then the third was Hindi Bhavan Mural, the ‘Llife of the Medieval Saints’ where you actually walk through the picture. You have these three options. That was published in the ‘Journal of Arts & Ideas’
JP: I remember seeing the reproduction of Medieval Saints for the first time in that journal.
GS: That, in fact, we tried to put together for the first time because until then, Medieval Saints, being such a vast mural, was printed only in fragments. You could not photograph the entire thing. What we did here, actually, was, with the help of a student Suryaprakash Gowda to join the fragments. We used the photographs Jyoti Bhatt had taken and spliced them in a manner where we could connect the whole sequence.
JP: Much before the “Photoshop’ days…!
GS: (laughs) I still have that photograph hanging outside my studio, which I used to have in my room in the Art History Department.
Coming back to the writings on Benodebehari, after Timothy, Geeta (Kapur) wrote on him and many others followed. He became much more talked about after the 1980s. Because of my interest in his work, and Dillu (Mrinalini Mukherjee) being our student who lived in Nizamuddin, and Benodebabu and Leela di had also moved to Delhi, I used to visit him quite often. In fact, I took photographs (of his work)..
In those days I was expected to do a PhD, which I never did (finished). Anyway, I photographed many of his paintings I (thought I) ‘discovered’ !. To my great delight I could handle them and then used to have even discussions with him. Quite interesting discussions but at this point it may not be relevant. I will write about it when occasion comes. All these things were at the back of my mind when the invitation came from the NGMA. But I said I am not an expert on Benodebehari and I will put down my conditions if I have to put up the show. I said I will have such and such people with me and I wrote to Rajeev (Rajeev Lochan, Director of NGMA) and it seems the Advisory Committee agreed to my conditions and they invited me. Anyway, that is how we started.
JP: Your first task was to find out where the works are, wasn’t it? What impressed me in the show is that you have taken care to bring even a small doodle done on cards, which, in fact opens up a refreshing perspective of understanding Benodebehari.
GS: It was a kind of discovery for us too. The first task was to find out how many works and where are they. Then we had to collect all the old catalogues to see whether the works are in the same collections or that they have changed hands. Then we had to approach the people to find out whether they were willing to lend these to us. Luckily we found out that there were not many people, may be six or seven major collections. We also discovered some old collections like that of Manju Bharatram who had a very fine landscape which I was not aware of. Then we also discovered a painting with Harinarayan Ghiya in Jaipur. So that way we were making a list from whom we could borrow the works.
JP: Baroda Art History Department had a work.
GS: I know. It was bought in my time. But I decided not to borrow it because we have (several) works like that. There is no point in having everything. That way there were many people who had the works and we knew who had what. In fact, we have documentation of all those works (including the small catalogues where these are was published etc). For example there was a screen that we would have liked to display but we could not; the one, which Abhishek Poddar has. (When he was approached he was going to be away, so) at the last moment he was not able to lend it to us. Like there are some collections in Bombay of people who were in Santiniketan during those days. Like the Khatau family has something. We had addresses and phone numbers and I even tried to get in touch with some of them because we wanted to know who has what. But then, we had to make a selection: there is no point in collecting each and everything.
JP: Surely...in that process you may find some rare works.
GS: Yes, like Manju Bharatram collection was a discovery. Even in the family collection everything was not visible. For example, the Japan drawings. Dillu at one stage told us she has a few of them, and then we were surprised to see so many of them. We knew about one Japan painting that is in the Kala Bhavan collection, so we were quite delighted to have so many of the Japan drawings and we could make a selection out of it. My greatest delight was to have the old photographs of the dormitory mural. It is, as you know, in a bad shape. It is almost lost. Finished. One student called Muthuswamy had taken black and white photographs (when it was in excellent condition) and these photographs have been used (in earlier publications) but they all are (printed) in fragments. Now digital technology is available to us. We are lucky to use this technology to put these photographs together and reconstruct the (entire) ceiling mural.
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