Lesser known artist
C. UDAY BHASKAR
JHUPU — A Life Drawing: Edited and pub. by Shona Adhikari; 11, Keyalata Lane, Kolkata-700029. Rs. 2750.
Jhupu Adhikari inhabited the two ends of Indian art — commercial and fine — with rare panache and perhaps this versatility and his reticence make him one of India's lesser-known artists. This book is an affectionate tribute to the gifted artist edited by his wife Shona who is well known in art circles. A series of essays authored by the artist, his immediate family, friends and eminent art critic Santo Dutta comprise the main body of the text which is complemented by sumptuous visuals.
In his rather brief but insightful introduction, Dutta traces the evolution of one of India's more acclaimed graphic designers and his brush with the world of fine art. An interesting historical aside is provided when we learn that Jhupu was the recipient of the Maharajah of Darbhanga's Gold Medal for his watercolour `Shallow Water' at the 1948-49 Annual Art Exhibition of the Academy of Fine Arts, Calcutta. The price of this painting was Rs. 50 and the silver medal at the time was awarded to an unknown M.F. Husain, while K.H. Ara received an honourable mention.
Transition
Perhaps if Jhupu had stuck with his fine arts pursuit, his trajectory might have been very different. But in August 1951 the artist chose to go to the U.K. for training in commercial art and soon became a very accomplished graphic designer and returned to India where he embellished the world of advertising for many decades. Jhupu came back to the art world as it were in the late 1980s and for some time exhibited his work in Delhi. His clown series at the time elicited favourable comment and as Dutta perceptively notes of Jhupu' s empathetic relationship with his protagonist: "Many artists in New Delhi use the clown image mostly as an interesting visual element in their paintings... few have so far established (such) a syntactical relationship between the image and other elements within the frame."
One of the more rewarding sections of the book is the addition of old reviews of Jhupu's exhibitions and I was personally very gratified to see the late Krishna Chaitanya — India's most rigorous art critic — again in print. Considering that serious art criticism in India is now a thing of the past — buried under the shallow and fickle compulsions of the market — these vignettes are special and one must commend Shona for her choice of such archival material.
Contribution to advertising
Painting apart, Jhupu made a very significant contribution to the Indian advertising lexicon in his time and it merits recall that the ubiquitous LIC image of two hands protecting a flame was the artist's visualisation in 1956 — and the flame continues to protect millions of lives even today. Jhupu's radical streak is perhaps best captured in his `Finlay' ad of the same period when he shocked Bombay with a woman in a blouse and a petticoat sans sari! This radical strand in the artist is evocatively captured by Gautam Adhikari — a younger cousin of the artist — in his brief essay on Jhupuda.
This is an affectionate compilation and provides an endearing picture of the "bhadralok" life in Calcutta in the mid-20th century and Jhupu is portrayed through many personal "drawings" as his family and close friends fondly recall the artist. But there is material here to more rigorously interrogate larger issues that are only hinted at in the course of the essays that would better contextualise the evolution of one personal voyage through contemporary Indian art and advertising. This is a project that Jhupu' s admirers could consider for their next festschrift.
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