Tiranga... hues of honour
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While the Jindal Foundation's book Tiranga rolls varying shades of nationalistic fervour into one, Palette Art Gallery's group show Structuring the World Anew tends to use elements of structure and construction, comments GAYATRI SINHA.
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IMAGES OF INDIA: Photographics works from the book Tiranga.
TIRANGA, THE book project, has brought the Indian tricolour into a space that is emotive and expressive. Funded by the Jindal Foundation for the Arts, it marks Naveen Jindal's initiative through the courts that allowed ordinary Indians to fly the flag - here supported in the book with a selection of some spectacular photographs that places the flag in a contemporary context. This is not a history of the Indian flag, although we get a sense of the evolution of its design from Sister Nivedita's first square flag of 1906 to Pinglay Venkayya's flag of 1921 which lent an iconic authority to the Congress charkha, and to the three essential colours of the flag for the first time. Vijay and Samar Singh Jodha, who have edited Tiranga, have interspersed the photographs with rhetoric around the nation and nationhood with the varying shades of nationalistic fervour. The range of quotations both defines and challenges the notion of patriotism. Mahatma Gandhi's evocation states "It will be necessary for us Indians - Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Parsis and all others to whom India is their home - to recognise a common flag to live and die for." The range of responses to the flag vary from the symbol of sacrifice (P.T. Usha), the flag as a brand (Azim Premji), the flag as God with iconic power (Birju Maharaj).
Right wing slant
At the same time, the ultra nationalistic fervour that drives right wing appropriation of national symbols is questioned (Praful Bidwai, Alyqyue Padamsee, Geeta Kapur), where a national vanity in symbols and grand gestures is no substitute for a well performing state.
The photographs selected for the books move from the layered and evocative to the amateur. Vijay and Samar Jodha have chosen emotive moments which locate the flag in the continually unfolding mise en scene of the nation as living entity. A flag waving magician, national ceremonies, children sticking flags into sandcastles, or saluting in gangly earnestness. And always the street, the mohalla, the adda, where the flag is the shutter on the shop, the cloth strung out to dry, the child's moment of sudden exhilaration, the petty trader's stock in trade. Tiranga makes a vital and interesting document appearing even as it does in this pivotal moment in our own tentative reconciliation as a people with the idea of nationalism.
Group Show
It reads a little like the school of Rameshwar Broota. Palette Art Gallery presents together a group of artists in the exhibition somewhat intriguingly titled `Structuring the World Anew'. A recognisable imprint weaves through parts of the show, as indeed the artists on view have worked over a period of time at the Triveni studios. Several artists in the group tend to use elements of structure and construction. The single foray into the third dimension is by Hemi Bawa who works with cast glass modernist blocks in square compositions that create a sense of the architectural forms and vertical movement. One can imagine that if the artist were to create a cluster of such structures, the embedded comment would be much more powerfully conveyed. Vijaya Bagai's architectonic forms, Surinder's loose spatial divisions that have the happy informality of a patch work quilt and Shruti Gupta Chandra's disappearing grids like forms all conform to this ideal. The dominant image, however, is the male nude form in vigorous athletic form - Meena Deora, Sanjay Roy , Shruti share these forms.
Vasundhara Tewari and Jagdish Chander strike a different note. Chander works with expressionist heads creating a sense of deep torment through his thick impasto strokes in the works Gaze and Visage. Through working in such large format, he creates a sense of an encounter with an organic seething form. Vasundhara has tended more and more towards abstraction, placing diminutive female forms in imaginary spaces that appear to generate both volcanic heat and a metallic chill. Broota's own work is a dominating phallic image that metamorphoses into a metallic form. The work is daring and strongly conceptualised.
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