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Madhu and her makeovers
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She intended to be an engineer, but found her true mien in art conservation instead
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OLD IS GOLD Madhu Rani wielding the tools of her art Photo Murali Kumar K.
Madhu Rani has been hard to find. After much asking around for an art restorer, the Bangalore offices of INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage) were finally contacted and, some days later, located. Right at the back of the Chitrakala Parishath, all the way down at the basement level and then across a courtyard to the quietest corner of the spread-out campus.
Madhu is not just a restorer, she hastens to clarify, she's also a conservator which means she doesn't merely paint on the missing half of decayed paintings, she also works on protecting and conserving them.
It's certainly a rare field in India: low on funding and poorly paid, but with exchange programmes, the import of sophisticated equipment from the West and increasing awareness about the field of art conservation, things are looking up.
Presently, Madhu is working on old traditional Mysore paintings, holding them up gently to show how she has had to peel away layers of supporting newspaper and attach Japanese tissue before beginning the delicate work on the painting itself.
A fine arts graduate from the Chitrakala Parishath, Madhu got interested in the work that the INTACH Chitrakala Parishath Art Conservation Centre was doing even while in college. She would wander into their office and watch the work, soon joining as a trainee indulging her long-held fascination "for cultural and heritage things" and going on to work here for seven years.
The centre does work on a variety of art work — paintings, paper, sculptures, bronzes, wood, mural paintings, oleographs and so on, working extensively in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, but "since it's a relatively new field, in its infancy really, we all have to work on different projects although my specialisation is art work on paper," explains Madhu.
The longest time she's worked on a painting has been a cloth piece that took about four to five months, but often work is divided between different art pieces simultaneously. "We are just a few hands loaded with many projects," she explains. Lots of oleographs have come her way as have a fair number of original Ravi Varmas. Madhu recalls with some amusement the people who show up imagining they have an original Ravi Varma only to discover they have been treasuring an oleograph. And then there are the occasional elderly couples who have been praying to genuine masterpieces for years, believing them to be prints.
When people with a genuine masterpiece can't afford to pay for its conservation, the INTACH team sometimes waives the fee to work on it. The oldest painting Madhu has worked on was abroad, while on a Charles Wallace Fellowship: a 15th Century Mughal miniature at the Victoria and Albert Museum. "Yes," she nods, smiling, "it's sometimes terrifying to work on such old pieces; the paper can be so brittle that it crumbles even when you just touch it." Even in India, some of the Mysore paintings she works on are dated in the late 19th Century.
Working abroad on the scholarship exposed Madhu to the kinds of equipment and infrastructure available there. While she agrees that much of the know-how permeates to India, the emphasis on the importance of art conservation is still at abysmally low levels here.
Currently, the INTACH projects from Bangalore focus on preventive rather than curative art and Madhu travels into interior India taking workshops to train people into how to safeguard family heirlooms and keep them healthy. She's also part of the National Mission for Manuscripts, a nationwide project to preserve India's manuscript heritage; this work of course is in addition to all the art conservation she's involved with.
Need in India
Despite the flip side of working in a set-up which barely acknowledges its conservators, Madhu seems reluctant about wanting to seek lucrative jobs in the West where independent art restorers are paid huge packets. "I'd like to work in India because there's so much that has gone already and we need to save what's left," she says. "Each work is so different, every problem is so different — in fact this work is more difficult than the art I would have been doing!"
Her own art has, predictably, taken the backseat. "It's my fault; I should make time for it," she admits ruefully, but hectic travel schedules and a six-month waiting period for art works waiting to be restored mean that spare time is hard to come by.
Although her parents nursed ambitions of her becoming a doctor or an engineer and she worked towards that till the P.U. level, Madhu soon realised that these were not fields for her. Even while joining the CKP, she intended to specialise in graphic art and get into advertising, but was quickly drawn into the field of conservation. "As I tell my father," she says laughing, "I'm now a doctor for paintings!"
Watching her delicately handle a complex Mysore painting carefully wrapped in protective white tissue, it's hard to disagree.
Madhu Rani can be contacted on ickpac@vsnl.net.
HEMANGINI GUPTA
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