Simultaneously moving ahead and standing still, India is a country of immense complexities, inherent contradictions and deep spiritual and philosophical mores. These are reflected in the material culture and daily lives of the billion people who live in the country. Across India, there are more than 19,500 dialects and 121 major languages – in several languages, the word for yesterday and tomorrow is the same. Kal, for example, denotes the day that was and the day that is yet to come. Tradition and change make for good humsafar (fellow travellers) in India, where centuries-old buildings stand next to modern skyscrapers and ancient practices meld with modern technology.
With vast cultural diversity across India, numerous artistic traditions have evolved over time in different parts of the country. These include classical painting traditions, as well as folk and tribal art styles that reflect the cultural values of a society or community. Paintings are created for varied reasons and occasions, such as weddings, to appease gods and goddesses, to accompany certain rituals and rites of passage, as well as to create beauty in the home.
Today, artists who are steeped in the traditional arts of India, are vanguards of a particularly interesting conceptual juxtaposition – the ‘contemporary traditional art’. An oxymoron, this terminology best describes the art that artists create as they straddle two worlds – the world of their ancestors, their inherited art traditions, and the modern, technological world they live in. Custodians of their heritage, and aware of their duty to keep traditions alive, these artists are also responding to life around them in the art they make.
Over the past two decades, the pace of change in India has accelerated, and unprecedented events, such as the COVID pandemic, have stimulated artistic expression like never before. With a strong connection to their cultural heritage and the visual vocabulary of their lineage, many artists are exploring new frontiers and creating works that deliver powerful messages in response to change. Transforming Worlds: Change and Tradition in Contemporary India provides a timely and incisive look at the sweeping changes across the country through the lens of art, and allows a comprehensive view of how tradition, change and continuity are interwoven in today’s India.
The continuation of cultural traditions and the generational transferal of knowledge is a challenge anywhere in the world and more so in India, where the traditional arts are either private ritualistic art not for sale, or a hereditary profession – with knowledge about art-making processes typically tightly held within a family or community. In recent times, with greater access to education and technology, in many communities the next generation has often chosen not to follow an artistic career in their parents’ footsteps. The poor economic returns from painting sometimes prompt artists to guide their children to other professions. Ritualistic non-commercial art traditions, therefore, have either disappeared for lack of skills, time and effort to make them, urbanisation or have been transformed into art for sale. Thus, different scenarios exist within the spectrum of traditional arts in India: some traditions are flourishing, some are dying out, and for others, the children are taking forth their parents’ legacy, while in a few cases, the knowledge is being shared with strangers, in person and virtually through online classes. Transforming Worlds: Change and Tradition in Contemporary India presents artists who are striving hard to ensure cultural continuity by creating works they learnt from their elders.
While continuity of tradition is important for the artists, there has also been a great deal of innovation in the art created over the last decade. Drawing upon centuries of ancestral knowledge, traditional artists of the twenty-first century have been branching out into exciting new directions. New markets and audiences beyond the traditional community, including institutional and private collectors across the world, are fueling these innovations.
Madhubani artist Pushpa Kumari was initiated into the nuances of Madhubani art, which decorated the walls and floor of her home with auspicious murals by her grandmother, the esteemed artist Mahasundari Devi; Kumari was taught all the wall and floor drawings made in her tradition. However, it is in her feminist works, such as Coronavirus, 2020, and Female foeticide, 2017, a work that shows female foetuses huddling in a mother’s womb, where Kumari has made her mark, addressing themes that are topical and often provocative.
For other artists from traditional backgrounds, environmental issues and their changing relationship to the land are everyday experiences. Due to India’s rapidly growing population since the 1950s, which totals 1.39 billion today, increased urbanisation, deforestation, river dam projects and land use for agriculture has severely affected the country’s once-pristine landscapes of forests, fields, rivers and villages. Most traditional arts emphasise deep respect for Mother Earth and the interconnectedness of all life forms. In Gond paintings, humans are just one part of the circle of life and not the superior beast at the top of the pyramid – tiny insects are just as valuable. In Warli paintings, trees soar over humans because they are more important and live longer.
Contemporary Madhubani artist Pradyumna Kumar’s Global warming, 2017, in the Madhubani style, is a powerful warning about the state of the world, with global temperatures in 2021 reaching unprecedented high levels. Ahmedabad-based Prakash Jogi’s Cityscape, 2017, reflects his reality of living under the shadow of a massive power plant in a cramped urban settlement with a high density of human population. Both works speak of the immense degradation of nature that humans have wrought and the price that all life on earth has to pay for the mistakes and greed of one species. West Bengal artist Jaba Chitrakar’s scroll Tree Plantation patachitra, 2017, emphasises the importance of trees and the desertification that happens when trees are cut and not replanted.
Contemporary social and political issues are becoming a major theme for traditional artists as they move their art beyond the customary pictorial vocabulary. The information technology boom in India, one of the largest markets for mobile phones has made it impossible to live isolated, unaware lives.
Traditional artists nowadays translate real-time, real-life events into works not merely as an aesthetic response, but as conscious chroniclers of their lives and times. This is evident in pandemic-inspired works, such as Sonia Chitrakar’s COVID scroll, 2020, and phad artist Kalyan Joshi’s Migration in the Time of COVID, 2020. The pandemic-inspired art is as much about creating awareness about the virus as it is about artists asserting themselves and not being mute witnesses to contemporary history. Joshi’s phad painting is a poignant portrayal of one of the largest mass migrations in recent times, resulting from the imposition of a sudden lockdown in India. He depicts millions of urban poor migrant labour, with no source of income, who decided to return to their rural villages, literally walking thousands of miles home. Artist-led activism is also evident in Maduhbani artist Pradyumna Kumar’s Bonded labour, 2017, in the Madhubani style of painting, where he questions the presence of such economic exploitation and enslavement in the twenty-first century, and raises issues of freedom and choice in society. Though bonded labour, also known as debt slavery, is illegal in India, there are many who fall into this trap due to a debt to their employer and have to work for no or minimal pay until the debt is paid off.
It is heartening to note that many women artists (and some men) are increasingly using their art to speak volumes about the violence, oppression and social hypocrisy women face in India. Some works are searing, such as Pushpa Kumari’s Female foeticide, 2017, depicting the unborn foetuses of girl children refusing to leave the womb for fear of the violence that awaits them. Jaba Chitrakar’s Dowry pata, 2017, presents both the heinous practice of young brides being tortured for not offering enough dowry in a marriage and the legal repercussions of asking for dowry, such as imprisonment and fines. Second-generation Jogi artist Soni Jogi’s black-and-white drawing Empowered mother, 2020, and Archana Kumari’s Women Empowerment, a sujuni embroidery of 2020, share a common motif – a woman on a motorcycle, signifying the mobility that women seek and strive so hard to achieve. Many of the women artists featured here have never had the opportunity to attend school, nor did they have a voice in their family and society. But their compelling artworks speak much louder than any words could. Their art has become their ‘language’, reinforced by the fact that in many traditional art genres, such as Madhubani, the act of art-making is considered likhai or writing.
Transforming Worlds: Change and Tradition in Contemporary India shines a light on how artists are ensuring the continued relevance of age-old artistic traditions. It is remarkable to think that these traditions, several centuries old, have not been rendered obsolete in the technologically wired twenty-first century. They continue to be of significance, not just for their aesthetic beauty and artistic merit but more importantly, for their narrative that is topical. These artists continue to adorn their days, not rejecting the ways of their ancestors but reinvigorating them by infusing contemporaneity and a larger consciousness of what being alive in this day and age means. Today, after all, is yesterday’s tomorrow and time and art, metaphors and meaning, all move in mysterious ways.
Minhazz Majumdar is a curator, writer and designer who is deeply involved in preserving and promoting traditional Indian arts and crafts. Majumdar has worked on several significant exhibitions about India in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, and has built collections of Indian arts and crafts for museums and collectors across the world.