Arpita Singh

revisit violence - Anandjit Ray

A journey to the local Post-Office

Shubhalaksmi Shukla visits the recent solo show of Yashpal Chandrakar held at the Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai and walk along the memory lanes with the artist and his works.

Visiting Yashpal’s exhibition at the Jehangir art gallery was intended meeting with a long-lost friend! I never intended to invoke nostalgia of the brooding gloomy days and dark nights of Santiniketan, where we decided to take our graduation degrees. And yet meeting him was once again an experience through those prints- his long passionate engagement with the medium of etching. Probably little to do with the history of print-making department at Santiniketan, and a lot to do with the passion for building up an artistic journey for oneself.. an engagement with the tools and inks and the books around one’s studio used to be in absolute silences. Perhaps my reason for associating with the darkness of his prints was above all this singular thread that plays a significant role in my urban experience of this city..!

In ‘Mimi my daughter II’ he draws a portrait of his own daughter, where the moon raises above her head as a halo and surrounded by some dark-fragrant-buds surrounds her profile. In “Ray of Hope’ he brings back the form of the kerosene lamp reminding of those long days and nights of load-shedding in the campus. Perhaps its significance lies in the fact about how different those experiences were from the way a feudal structure portrays this object in our Hindi films like ‘Saheb Bibi Aur Ghulam’ or ‘Sholey’. A ‘Ray of Hope’ is certainly not about the classical- romanticism that the films portrays throughout our history.

Yash pal’s daughter’s portrait takes me back to the series of portraits made in black-ink-wash by Rabindranth Tagore, wherein the self integrity and self- containment as much surface and yet dramatically remain buried in the silence that inherently shapes their character. Their faces appear to be ‘melancholic’ and yet they cherish an undeniable potency in a space for self-contentment which had remained subdued as a character for empowerment. The films mentioned above certainly are suggestive and yet defy such characters of women!  

I am yet to ask my friend about where does this silence emerge form in his mind in these chaotic urban surroundings, why does darkness still takes a prominent role to express a heart full of love..?

With this visit I am reminded of a rather significant group-show ‘PINK’ that took place some time back at the Gallery Mirchandani, Mumbai.

Amongst most of the large scale displayed works, the small ones which could hold attention for the similar reasons like the silence and the melancholy in the above works were those of Arpita Singh’s ‘Man in Pink Coat’ and Anandjit Ray’s ‘Envelop’.

These images along with the impression of ‘Letter’ by Yashpal create a narrative within my mind about this city where the long-distance communications yet turn out to be true only with the help of snail-mails for the immediate local migrants. An expectation of the short-message- communications made possible from one distant land to another on the basis of these long awaited choices create a value for ‘slowness ’and a desire for conversation which becomes possible through elaborate text materials (happens to be gibberish in the above work)!   

The narrative continues to keep unfolding in a journey of a middle aged man from home to the post-office, the thoughtfully framed content matter that a letter could envelop. All may carry an impression of gestures that might have eventually pasted the letter or a wallet that carries a family picture ‘missing’ or an absence pronounced out loud! Why does a man wear a ‘pink coat’ on such a journey? Is he the one going to arrive at the post-office next with a surprise to the rest present; and yet to each one’s surprise would be able to pull out a letter straight from the inner pocket of the coat and get it stamped in a rather clichéd manner to be sent across.

What a strangely continued familiarity with the colonial landscape in the age of speeded network for communications..! And then, there can be a painted envelop with a knife and some fragile slices of a flesh probably to suggest the emptiness of all that could be the content within or an inner soliloquy (see Anandjit Ray)!