The thinking line...

Abhijeet Tamhane

Dilip Ranade's drawings from last 30 years were exhibited at Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai in the second half of October. The show will travel to Delhi and Kolkata, with different selections from his treasures that lay in the heaps of his sketchbooks. The three exhibitions would show 150 drawings. A companion volume to the exhibition, 'Shifting the Logic', has an essay by Ranjit Hoskote that explores the 'laboratory, observatory and scriptorium' in Ranade's works.

The opening evening at Pundole saw no page-three celebrities. People important to the Mumbai art scene were present, though. And they knew Ranade's importance as an artist whose perennial quest  for space and form, line and colour has always provided a learning opportunity for others. The ways in which Ranade articulated his positions are now charted in three parts. While one could classify the drawings according to their representational garbs (erotic, philosophical, life and so on), his thinking line remains elusive to such branding. Ranade was not entangled in the 'great debate' of representational versus non-representational that once ruled the Mumbai scene. He was interested, instead, to make the non-marked areas speak at par with the marks he made on his surface- and so the drawings affirm this interest. The drawings are not rehearsals for a painting. Some of them have a sculptural appeal, and many retain their splendid isolation from a possibility of getting translated to the canvas. The show kept these flavours intact. If K.K. Hebbar, some forty years ago in Mumbai, had shown the prowess of his Singing, Dancing line; Ranade's drawings keep us busy at looking along with his thinking line.

Does it happen only in Mumbai?

It happened on August 1 this year. Sir J. J. School of Arts, the premier institution which reels in bad administrative shape (and worse, when the administrators decide to show their presence at once), was  a site that delighted the TV news channel cameras when a Professor in the Metal crafts Department, Kiran Gimhonkar was beaten up by the Shiv Sena student wing. This students’ organization that has hardly done any good to the institute in question suddenly cleansed it from 'immoral elements'. Their act entailed a blackening of Kiran's face, an irresistible bite for the channels!

The self-proclaimed perpetrators of morality accused Kiran of 'harassing girl students and passing lewd remarks', a charge that seemed out-of-place for everybody who knew Kiran in the campus. The Committee of Departmental Enquiry ‘against’ Kiran, however, had a different set of findings. To stop the politics, Kiran resigned on October 3. The last email from him, to people he had spoke to after the attack, was a pleasant one, though. Kiran's works had been selected at the 11th biennial International Juried Exhibition, 2007 sponsored by The Enamelist Society, New York. As Kiran continues to work, one wonders what was done to and done-up against him happened only in Mumbai. What happened here fits any mofussil town, perhaps!