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Cover Story
Rekha@Fifty: Om Saanti Om
On 31st October 2008, Mumbai’s Sakshi Gallery celebrated the fiftieth birthday of the internationally acclaimed artist, Rekha Rodwittiya, with a solo show titled ‘Rekha@Fifty’. JohnyML visits the show and also the party that followed the opening, and traces the milestones that made Rekha Rodwittiya a ‘fiercely independent’ woman artist of India.
‘Dekho Dekho yeh syaam badi deewani
Dheere Dheere ban jaaye na koi kahani.”
(See..see.. this evening is so crazy
Slowly..slowly there must be a story shaping up)
Suddenly the dance floor at Joss, Kalaghoda, Mumbai is cleared up for a group of dancers to come in. The DJ works on his discs and the famous song from the Bollywood blockbuster ‘Om Santi Om’ fills in the room. In the movie, the scene is all about the birthday celebrations of Om Kapoor, a famous film star enacted by the Bollywood Badshah, Shah Rukh Khan. In the song sequence, we see all those ‘stars’ coming down to earth and singing ‘happy birthday’ to their beloved star- a perfect mixture of reality and fiction.
Here at Joss, the entire staff members of Sakshi Gallery come down on the dance floor to say happy birthday to…..(let there be suspense for a moment a la a Bollywood movie). Geetha Mehra, director of Sakshi Gallery does the ever green Rekha act. Usha Gawde, assistant director of the gallery, at least for a few minutes resembles Preity Zinta. And you see Salman Khan, Govinda, Saif Ali Khan, Aftab Shivdasani, Dino Morea, Kajol, Karishma Kapoor, Tabu, Vidya Balan, Juhi Chawla, Priyanka Chopra, Malaika Arora and so on in the gallery staff. It is quite a Baudrillard-ian scene. A simulacrum, perhaps, for a change, something with and without an original.
This is the celebration scene of Rekha Rodwittiya’s fiftieth birthday organized by Sakshi Gallery and the dance is a tribute to the artist. Before the celebrations at Joss, Rekha’s latest solo show, interestingly titled ‘Rekha@fifty’, opens at the Tanna House space of Sakshi Gallery. You find it is a daring act as many women artists prefer to erase their dates of birth from the curriculum vitae. Here is a woman artist who dares to bare…her age. And also you wonder why those women who have this name ‘Rekha’ remain eternally young. Rekha Rodwittiya looks fifty years young and from a monumental photograph mounted on the wall of the gallery, she looks intently at the viewers, exactly the way her eternally young protagonists do. With the Medusa like hairs (no serpents in there though) and kohl lined eyes, Rekha looks like a diva. The black top and blue jeans accentuate her youthful vigor. If it is all about a photograph, right in there Rekha stands in person, receiving guests who have come to wish her and catch up with the nineteen paintings that she has done specially for the show.
Rekha Rodwittiya rocks. She is India’s feminine/feminist icon maker. Her protagonists, in a way surrogate of her own self, look boldly at the viewer from a world created by the artist. This world is that of celebrations, full of worth emulating examples. They were aggressive and questioning during the 1980s. They had identifiable hagiographic details, which would help the viewer to locate the narrator within the existential world of self-doubts, aggressions, assertions and frustrations. The expressionist colors and strokes had underlined the internal turmoil of the artist then. Then in 1990s, they grew along with Rekha, resolving the issues that had made them violent and aggressive. By the end of 1990s, the artist seemed to be erasing the chaotic world around her protagonists and placing them in a unique world of luminous colors. One could see a clear move from ‘motherhood’ to ‘mother goddess status.’
I don’t know whether Rekha Rodwittiya aspires to play out the ‘mother goddess’ role attributed to her. However, in my view this mother goddess is different from the one we see generally in myths and fables. As I mentioned elsewhere, the surrogate self of the artist who constantly appears in her paintings as the woman protagonist is not a malevolent one who would like to drink the blood of demons. She is not benevolent either to bless everyone with the same kindness. The protagonist in Rekha’s latest works is rather impish, playful, bold and beautiful. They have a venerable defiance in their eyes and the glitter shows how boldly they counter the gaze sent out to them by the society. She has become a field of acceptance, which is a new feature in Rekha’s works. During the yester years, the protagonists of her works used to stare back in defiance of course, but there used to be a streak of violence in them. Now it has been replaced by a kind of gleeful calmness, the resolution only age and experience can provide.
While writing about Rekha’s life, works and personality, once I had mentioned how as an artist and also as a person she transforms the mundane into a field of dramatics. With an exuberant attitude she transforms her personal location into a location of myths and parables. And she lives out this new location just like a participating actress. She is a magician and the magic in herself. Her life has a performative element to it. She listens to a music which is not audible to others and she dances to the tune. What I see in her works as well as in her personality is the transformation of the materialistic into spiritual. What one witnesses in the new works of Rekha is this spiritual transformation of the body and self. The iconic women in Rekha’s works wear the materialistic history on their bodies as a drape, and connotative objects as sings and symbols, but the accent of the artist lies in the performative postures of these protagonists and this element of performance transport them into a spiritual realm.
The spirituality that I am referring to does not belong to any religion or sect or cult. I talk about the spirituality that only the creative people can achieve after a long period of work and experience. It is almost like the ‘gyan bhav’ (wisdom) and once gained this, the worldly woes would not affect the person that much. This is an eternal sense of equilibrium. It also does not mean that the person who has achieved wisdom remains aloof from all social deeds. But even in the thick of social deeds, one can just pass through, seeing the sunny side of everything, kind of levitating. Then one wears his/her nudity as dress; one becomes transparent. This is the transformation that you witness in the latest of works of Rekha Rodwittiya. The protagonists have become saintly humorous.
I would like to trace the trajectory that has helped the growth of Rekha’s protagonists from their materialistic engagements to the spiritual calmness and joy. Rekha Rodwittiya has always been a lone traveler ever since she decided to become and artist. The art scene of Baroda, where Rekha tested her mettle, during 1980s was quite democratic and inclusive in terms of gender. However, we understand the art history of Baroda as the male bastion, despite the presence of Nilima Sheikh, Nasreen Mohammedi, Nalini Malani, Geeta Kapur, Jyotsna Bhatt and so on. Rekha, a generation younger to these artists, however tried out a language, which could be called violently expressionistic along with a set of male artists. While her male contemporaries dealt with the existential and political pangs of the times in their works, she too did the same but from the point of view of a woman, a single mother and an individual fiercely in love with life. She protected her identity (both in personal life and creative life) as a singular one and while the next generation of the women artists started dabbling with materials, she chose to remain a painter.
It is interesting to see that Rekha’s decision to remain a painter, like her partner Surendran Nair, or friend Shibu Natesan, has a lot to do with the convictions she has about a woman’s life. She extracted her protagonists from a narrative structure and gave them a unique identity. I would say that it is a bold act as a woman’s singular identity is always counted either as an articulation from the social fringes or from the fringes of sanity. To put it in other terms, any woman underlines her unique identity is always called names. By extracting the woman from the dominant narrative structure that still remains to be a male bastion, Rekha achieved a special status in the art scene through her iconic women who created their worlds and ruled over there. It cannot be called a romantic escape to a non-problematic land of imagination. On the contrary, Rekha incorporated references from history and general life within the field of her icons. While analyzing the works of Rekha, seeing these icons vis-à-vis history becomes inevitable.
There have been attempts to locate Rekha’s artistic practice within the feminist discourse. I would call Rekha a reluctant feminist because she has never overtly voiced the issues pertaining to the feminist discourse. She approaches the issues of women from a personal point of view. One of the branches of feminism says personal is political. If so, Rekha is a feminist and a political artist on her own rights. Her reluctance to vocalize the feminist issues, I believe, stems from her deep understanding of the feminist politics articulated by bell hooks and Maya Angelou. Even in her autobiographical work, ‘Once Upon a Time’, Rekha acknowledges these writers giving a clue to find out her kind of feminist thoughts. Against this backdrop, it would be interesting to call Rekha an ‘empowered woman’ (artist and person). The question whether she is privileged to be an ‘empowered woman’ is a contentious one. I would prefer to say that Rekha empowered herself through her works and life. She did not wait for someone to come and empower her.
The latest works that we see in ‘Rekha@fifty’ are the declarations of this empowered-ness. Rekha deliberately uses art historical references (the dressing styles from miniature paintings, the toys and implements from crafts tradition, references from the works of her contemporaries etc) to emphasize the linkages that she and her protagonists have with the history of aesthetic discourse. While being grounded to the history, they can levitate to the realm of spirituality by being playful. She can hold a horse puppet and a sword in her hands and act a playful war (and also underline the uselessness of all wars). She uses a sword for hair ornamentation. She can step on a cornucopia as a playful defiance to her partner. These spiritual beings can achieve even the monumentality of Mahaveera, the Jain saint.
It is time to cut the cake. Rekha is ready with a knife and she looks like one of her paintings for a knife in a birthday party is as innocent and appealing as a bouquet of flowers. Rekha just cannot stand idle and wait for the rituals to unwind on its pace. She springs into a dance while cutting the cake. Mithun, her son announces his unconditional love for HIS mother. Someone drags a shy Surendran Nair to the podium. Rekha’s friends are all here, coming from Baroda and elsewhere. We all sing ‘Happy Birthday to you Rekha’.
‘Oh…the Bollywood Party. Art has become very Bollywood now,” someone tells me on the same morning. He/she is an intellectual artist and the cynicism is palpable in the voice.
What is wrong with Bollywood? I would like to ask because I have seen all our intellectual artists copying Govinda-Salman Khan steps on the very same dance floor of Joss on different occasions. How can they lip sync the Bollywood music so well if they only listen to Chopin and Mozart?
I am sure intellectual artists also watch more 9XM than History channel. Haq se.
