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Sabari revisited
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Atul Dodiya renders Sabari in a contemporary framework
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AFTER THE MASTER Atul Dodiya's works are inspired by Nandalal Bose's three-part sequence on Sabari
One of the most acclaimed contemporary artists of the country, Atul Dodiya brings alive Sabari, an interesting character from the Ramayana, in the series The Wet Sleeves of My Paper Robe (Sabari in Her Youth): After Nandalal Bose. This recent body of work by the 47-year-old artist, interestingly, was inspired by the celebrated Indian painter and teacher Nandalal Bose's 1941 tempera sequence.
On display at Sumukha Gallery till June 28, the series was created during a residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI). Initiated and sponsored by Bodhi Art, the collaborative effort with the STPI team — especially American paper-maker Richard Hungerford and Japanese printmaker, Eitaro Ogawa — yielded this stimulating basket of 31 works. In this series, the artist who has many awards (including the Sotheby Prize) and shows to his credit provides his own interpretation of the secondary but carefully chiselled character of Sabari, the woman hermit who waits patiently to receive the darshana and blessing of the Rama. It is a well-known a story of touching faith and unconditional love.
Nandalal Bose, in his paintings, portrays Sabari as a Santhal woman. His three-part sequence in tempera titled Sabari in Her Youth, Sabari in Her Middle Age and Sabari in Her Old Age not only depicts the protagonist in differing time intervals, but also captures the mood of loneliness and waiting. Dodiya's reading and rendering of the episode is more contemporary in outlook and non-linear in structure. He adopts modernist symbols and techniques to provide a subtle social commentary.
"Dodiya's Sabari narratives are elliptical, syncopated, allusive and elusive," writes Ranjit Hoskote. "In this suite of works, Dodiya steps out of his gender identity, symbolically, to embrace what it might feel like to be a woman. This gesture is both traditional and contemporary. Sabari is given her freedom in this imaginative rendering. The archetype of a life premised on anticipation, a figure lost at the edges of the triumphal march of the Lord, she becomes epicentre of Dodiya's seismic recasting of the epic... Dodiya's Sabari sequence is a critical engagement with the history of India, a claim to the shaping of India's future as a space of inclusiveness."
(The Wet Sleeves of My Paper Robe (Sabari in Her Youth): After Nandalal Bose series is on display at Sumukha Gallery, Wilson Garden. The exhibition concludes on June 28. Phone: 22292230 /410207215.)
ATHREYA
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