Jyoti Bhatt’s images constitute an important chapter in the history of photography, demonstrating great artistic sensibility, creativity and a unique understanding of traditional cultures, says Uma Nair
To look at a set of images by Jyoti Bhatt is like looking at a series of still lives. Spend some time and you could be looking at vintage panoramas that stand still in a time warp.
Images of rare iconicity, startling, engaging, encounters with Indian villages that contain an immense scope of Indianesque idioms. Jyoti Bhatt, the famed Indian painter, printmaker, and photographer once again unveiled a suite of his historic images at Rukshaan Art, Mumbai.
The many images in this exhibition chronicle the artists’ travels through rural environments in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, West Bengal and Bihar, from 1967 to 1995.
Bhatt has been actively engaged with photography since the mid 60s, and these images constitute an important chapter in the history of photography, demonstrating great artistic sensibility, creativity and a unique understanding of traditional cultures.
Each print can be seen as an artwork in its own right, as well as a historical document and visual aide to Bhatt’s paintings and prints.
Bhatt began documenting the folk and tribal culture of rural India in the summer of 1967. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan had organised a seminar in Mumbai on the folk arts of Gujarat and invited him to participate.
He traveled widely, visiting villages and tribal regions, photographing folk arts and craft traditions in their original environments, along with the people who inhabited these spaces.
Painted prayers
Children, women, cows weave in personality, experience, and drawings as painted prayers. Dediapada Gujarat 1987 — the cracked walls of a hut in the hamlet of Gujarat with a little girl sitting like an ethnic Madonna with a child-the tools and palm prints on the mud baked walls tell us about an age that was long past.
Indigenous Art and Cows
Govardhan Rajasthan 1987 — the murals on the wall have a graphic sensibility they echo the magic and foundation of traditional Indian folk design, the girl standing and painting the cow who complies with her intent in quiet supplication is a story in the livelihood and customs of India’s villages.
Bhatt the master lensman gives us vignettes of village life without disturbing his subjects.
Calf Madhya Pradesh 1983 is a charming chronicle of the beauty of a solitary journey of photography in modern India. Bhatt says that he doesn’t care for dramatic dialogues but each image is a moment to cherish in the preservation of Indian heritage. The expression of the calf with its dulcet eyes and its posture is one of limpid, the simplicity. On the temporary walls is the art form and here we glimpse the magnificent hand of the wanderer-the pilgrim who shoots in black and white and remains a silent observer.
Rural rhythms
“I was always drawn to folklore and the drawings and paintings I saw in the villages I covered. The cracks in the walls itself said so much about the predicament of the weather as well as the absolute status of the rural folk,” says Bhatt.
To study Bhatt’s work is to become conscious of various artistic forms and disciplines in photography. While objective truth is one of the key concerns in Bhatt’s photography, there is enough interplay between his archivist and imaginative instincts as well.
This exhibition reflects his formal art education, especially in painting and his eye for detail. Strong influences from other Indian art forms such as Rajput miniature paintings are apparent in his treatment and interpretation of spaces.
What do these black and white photographs tell usIJ A good deal of them, are more than mere ethnographic records. Women working on porches of mud huts, children playing in courtyards decorated with rustic rural patterns, cattle standing or just gazing-familiar scenes from small towns and villages across India. little everyday idioms come alive.
Bhatt captures the fact that the religious pithoro paintings, by certain tribes in Gujarat, used to be made with Indian red and chalk powder in those years. “Nowadays they use hardware paints,” says Bhatt. Rangoli, once used to decorate courtyards, is not as popular any longer. “Instead of labouring over these elaborate patterns, people prefer to buy stickers from temples nowadays,” Bhatt adds.
These images are about vanishing traditions. Bhatt’s framing and compositional skills strike the eye powerfully. Suddenly, in a series of images of walls, floors and living spaces adorned with patterns, we encounter a woman whose heavily tattooed body is a counterpoint to what we have just seen. Folk art, Bhatt tells us is not just an extraneous presence in the lives of its creators blindly imitating tradition, but rather, a vital part of their consciousness, worn as much on their skin, which covers their bodies, as on the walls, which protect their homes. “The concentration in my work is not just on the art forms, but also on capturing the integrated relationship between art and people-how the two are interwoven in the act of daily living,” he explains.
Evaluation and evolution
Here in these images we see Rajasthan, Haryana, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, West Bengal and Bihar. Whether we are looking at the images of the children or of folk and other indigenous art forms the documentation of traditional societies and their place in the lives of those people becomes the most important tool of evaluation and evolution. “The concentration on the art forms, also captures the integrated relationship between art and people — how the two are interwoven in the act of daily living,” he explains.
This show is a testimony to living traditions of rural tribes and their art made mostly by women. Archivist and historian Bhatt draws viewers into a densely pictured world where vegetal, figural, and animal imagery collide even as it is captured in crisp linear drawings as motifs that float on mud walls creating rich commentaries of India’s heritage. A memoir for the modern millennium.