Sahmat used the inexpensive method of communication that was once endorsed by the father of the nation to celebrate his 150th birth anniversary. By Uma Nair
Sahmat celebrates 150 years of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth with an extraordinary set of postcards in a box, created by India’s contemporary artists which can be bought for Rs 500. The commemoration unravels as a “secular cultural festival,” to celebrate 150 years of Gandhi Jayanti.
Significance
The postcards carry different artistes’ images of Gandhiji on one side and his words on religious fundamentalism on the other. The postcards for the Gandhi Project 1994-95 are based on the Mahatma’s famous practice of using inexpensive postcards to communicate with a vast number of people. Artistes led by Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh organised a lino-print workshop at the M S University, Baroda.
“The significance of postcards for Gandhi lay in artists engaging with the concepts and symbols that the Mahatma used to marshal leadership of the National Movement — the charkha and swadeshi, for instance. The evocative works made strong artistic statements against the right-wing politics of the time,” says curator Ram Rahman who, along with Vivan Sundaram and Shamshad Husain, expanded on Sheikh’s idea and invited 100 artists across India to make six different postcard-sized works that reflected their understanding of Gandhi’s political leadership, philosophy and relevance to contemporary India.
Atul Dodiya
In the Sahmat series of postcards for Gandhi, Atul Dodiya’s has a poignant and reflective presence. He presents the fragmented figure of Gandhi with satchel slung on his hip and his right hand holding the historic staff that became a symbol for the civil movement.
The figure of Gandhi has been central to Atul’s work over the years who has used the Mahatma as a metaphoric symbol which questions the notions of modernity and universalism. Atul establishes dialogues between simultaneous moments in history and weaves into his imagery the leitmotif of artistic modernity in Indian contemporary art.
ARPANA Caur
The second image worthy of scrutiny is Arpana Caur’s Gandhi. She plays with the feminine to juxtapose Gandhi in a novel way. Caur says, “ I wanted to portray something different; so I painted a rotund image of Kasturba holding a pink heart with Gandhi in it. While there are many paintings of Gandhi, Kasturba rarely makes an appearance, I wrote her name and split up the alphabets to create an abstract tone,” says Caur whose works reference Indian miniatures.
Bhupen Khakhar and others
Equally enticing is an image by Bhupen Khakar — a linocut which is the stuff of history. Created in 1995 this is an impassioned Gandhi image with his glasses and an abstract rendition of the charkha. Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh’s Gandhi is another abstract mooring with a pair of slippers, spectacles and a book all done in a muted shade of greyish blue, which is firmly entrenched in the figurative narrative tradition within Indian art. Sheikh concerns himself with the search for an indigenous art practice that reflects the diversity of human life and art. “In art, painting came in the company of poetry, overlapping and yet independent of each other. Images came from many times, each flowing into the other,” said Sheikh of his work and this is what ensues.
Surendran Nair creates a thorny metaphor out of a single slipper with nails, a pair of spectacles and a clock. The red gives us a direct reference to the assassination and you think of the narrative that flows, of the life lived and a feeling of belonging to a world of nether times.
Nalini Malani’s image of Gandhi with the word “History” at the bottom is full of memories and elegiac elegance. The postcards from these great artists tell us that we can create visual memoirs from life and its incidents, emerging simultaneously through jottings, drawings and writings. The multiplicity and simultaneity of these worlds fill us with a sense of belonging. Gandhi belongs to everyone and we must live by his ideals — these postcards tell us this clearly. There is a fine line between the real and the imaginary in history. You cannot extricate one from the other, it is simultaneous, the process is continuous, in that way times collide, spaces collide and people stand out in memory.
Egalitarian ethos
Since 1989, the Delhi-based Sahmat has offered a platform for artists, writers, poets, musicians, actors, and activists to create and present works of art that promote artistic freedom and celebrate secular, egalitarian values. Postcards for Gandhi was one of Sahmat’s first projects to engage a large group of artists around a single theme. The artists’ works were shown in exhibitions in six cities, all opening on October 2,1993, on Gandhi’s birthday. Each presentation included one original work by each of the participating artists, making six different exhibitions. All the works were available for purchase at a uniform price of Rs 1,000 each. The works were also printed as postcards.
“These strategies of simultaneous exhibition and low cost for artists’ works, no matter the artist’s stature, reflected Gandhi’s egalitarian ethos. One work from each artist was also reproduced as a set of postcards and in a book, Addressing Gandhi, which included commissioned texts by historians, social scientists, art historians and artists that presented new scholarship on Gandhi’s life and work,” states curator Rahman. The present set of 100 postcards, previously unpublished, is being issued in 2018 in a box, to commemorate 150 years of Gandhi.
Animated by the urgent belief that art can propel change and that culture can reach across boundaries, Sahmat has offered a platform for an expansive group of artists and collaborators to present powerful works of art that defend freedom of expression and battle intolerance within India’s often divisive political landscape.
“Looking at the roots within our classical and folk traditions, Sahmat has traced the evolution of our modern consciousness through the national movement and cultural intervention by the Left, placing arts in the public sphere — giving a platform for artists to evolve work with a political and social edge,” adds Rahman.