At the outset, let me just say that Roads Across the Earth: On the Life, Times and Art of Anil Karanjai – Juliet Reynolds’ long, brilliant essay and indeed, the essays by nine men who knew Anil – completes a circle for many others who knew the man in flesh and blood, who felt
his passion, and indeed, were stunned by his work. The senior writer
and historian, Sumanta Banerjee, Anil’s close friend who has a short but
poignant essay in the book, echoes many of us:
At one level – a very important level – Juliet establishes herself as a thoroughly rooted, extremely articulate – often fiery – but
consistently left-of-centre ‘art critic/historian’ who has earned the
right to sit at the welcoming table. Those alas, for whom writing about
art has now become a word-game, a sophisticated kind of scrabble with
the accompanying moolah that’s charged by an art gallery or dealer or
event manager or whatever – will take to their heels! This book will go
like an arrow to their hearts, just straight-ahead writing without
frills.
There are four historians of art (joining forces with Anil) who seriously messed with Reynold’s head – Ernst Fischer, Walter Benjamin, Max Raphael and John Berger: with Berger the youngest, the pivot around which Juliet unfurls the life and times of Anil Karanjai and then situates his larger oeuvre.
Given that music was rich in Benares, Juliet duly documents and explains Anil’s thirst for music. Hindustani classical music moved him. I do remember talking to him about his time in New York, and here too, he followed his heart, his sojourns taking him to the bars in Harlem, and jazz, people’s music.
Juliet divides her essay into seven parts, and probably Anil will smile in agreement and tell us that this is also the Rupak tal, the tal that is heard in every dive in North India – a people’s tal you could say. In these seven sections, she covers 50 years counterpointing a man she knew better than most to the unfolding histories around him.
Fine arts students at college and university will welcome an important book on art history they can understand, given the pervading obfuscation in this field. Juliet is matter of fact, pacey, yet unyielding and tough. The Indian art market is demystified, and neither is Juliet even the slightest bit overawed taking on the leftists. Typically, she spares no none!
From the 1960s, the book picks up pace, documenting the formation of the anti-establishment school of the ‘Hungry Generation’ better known as Hungryalists. They were men – artists, poets, musicians – who let it be said, would today have invited the khaki shirts.
Not that they didn’t. Juliet, somewhat sadly, mentions Anil’s drawings and paintings destroyed by the police. Not many people know that the beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, lived with the Hungryalists, probably learning from them far more than they learnt from him. The Hungryalists were important, and nothing has ever been written about this period in such depth.
With that period setting the tone, Juliet deftly weaves into her narrative the parallel art histories which did not, not have an impact on Anil – Benares, Calcutta, Bombay, Chennai, and Delhi. People whose names we have heard all make an appearance, all are situated, placed.
Of course, there are enough in the queue to say that people like Juliet and all that she represents have outlived their utility. They are just old school art historians trapped in an outdated ideological zoo. Sure, ideology may have been killed, but dialectics lives on and Juliet knows that.
Everything depends on whom you read when you want to learn about an artist living in a particular time, and what that history did to that artist – as much as what the artist did to that history he lived in.
Anil lived though, and was part of a very interesting period in Delhi for instance. There is never any doubt – anywhere in the book – where his heart lay.
If one was looking at ‘context’ – Anil’s favourite word perhaps – then given the way things are panning out to silence those speaking from the left even as I write this, you could very well see Anil as a ‘proto-Urban Naxal’. There is irony when you read:
In the final analysis, given Anil’s
love for music, the nine men who join in with very well chosen archival
contributions, are excellent backing musicians to a very competent
singer who sees the night out.
We are taken “back to the dissidence and colour of the 1960s, a decade unparalleled in politico-cultural history both international and Indian”. The Bengali poets, Malay Roychoudhury and Subimal Basak – and now an Egyptologist but then a full-fledged ‘hippie’, Edward Loring – give valuable insight to a time in Benares, when politics gave equal space to marijuana, and boundaries – all boundaries – were not just questioned but stretched till they frayed.
Mangalesh Dabral, Hindi poet and journalist, brings in the early 1970s, with Anil in Delhi – which gives us a different view of the city and indeed, the role played by radical Hindi-speaking intellectuals, poets and writers; and Ross Beatty Jr., a musician, musicologist and writer, who catches Anil in the two painful but revealing years he spent in the US.
Suneet Chopra, art critic, an activist with the mainstream left – and now often its spokesperson on TV – has a long essay moving from the influences on Anil of the Bengal famine of the 1940s, to the radical movements and protests in the 1960s and early 70s, and mainstream Indian politics up till the century ended. Suneet however, does not stop there. As Juliet notes, Chopra is “the sole critic to have noted the influence of Indian classical music on Karanjai”, one who saw “the emotional resonance in his landscapes”; one who recognised Anil in the role of ‘the artist as healer’, as one whose work offered hope to those who struggle, to people “worn down and torn to shreds by exploitation”.
You cannot stop a smile when you read Juliet writing: “Given the general disinclination of leftists to acknowledge value in such art, Chopra’s is a highly significant analysis”. Now one hopes that the rest of the Left reads it.
We see Anil out of the 1990s with a short piece by art critic, curator and painter Santo Dutta that appeared in the catalogue of Anil’s retrospective exhibition at the Vadhera Gallery, New Delhi, September 1990. The historian and writer Sumanta Banerjee’s essay, A Friend In Remembrance, is one only he could write. Although you wish it was a little longer, if only because Banerjee is yet another Leftist unafraid of critically calling out his own.
There is also an excellent piece, a Sunday morning read over coffee, by Pramod Ganapatye, painter and museologist, well worth reading twice:
“What is art in your eyes?” Ganapatye asks Anil when they meet in 1988, and Anil answers:
These were the paintings he started in his studio in Jor Bagh, inspired by images he captured in Lodhi Gardens on his morning walks; that he changed, as only he could, in his head and then on a frame. I saw two of those paintings take their first shape, emerge out of nothing. Much later I saw the exhibition – Images of Silence – when it opened in Delhi, the last time I met Anil and Juliet.
In 2005, I was sitting on the side of a hill in Goa, in a monsoon drizzle, lit by rays of sunlight breaking through clouds slowly shredding in the breeze and contemplating the majesty of the Western Ghats breaking on my small state’s south-eastern borders.
Because, behind my back, not even 20 km as a bird flies, were the foothills of these same Western Ghats, acres and acres of hill and forests being destroyed and laid bare by Goa’s rogue mining companies excavating for ore, licking their lips like they were looking for bloodied flesh.
In front of me, myriad shades and
textures of green and blue, as if the colour of earth and mud had
disappeared from life. It brought tears. When I was writing my book on
the mining greed, Anil’s paintings came back again, forcing me to contemplation, to see again.
I willingly credit Anil with one paragraph from the book, written thinking of him. As if to tell him I did manage to understood the images of silence that were to haunt him till his death – and even though I could be actually describing one of his paintings, not sitting on a hill contemplating the reality of ecocide:
Yes, I grieve that he is not here.
Imagine that he changed his gaze from the Western Ghats I was watching from the side of a hill, looked behind me at the lacerated iron ore mines – a bleeding, burning, reddish-orange expanse of waste, surrounded by dust-stained forest just beginning to lose their greenness as they wait their turn to die – and began to paint.
In her short but pithy archival essay on Anil’s painting, The Door of Kusma – perhaps his only angry painting of his Lodi Garden phase – Juliet puts it very aptly:
It is time this book on Anil came out. In November 2009, The New York Times‘ art critic, Benjamin Genocchio reviewed a small exhibition titled Indian Art After Independence: Selected Works from the Collections of Virginia and Ravi Akhoury and Shelley and Donald Rubin. The small exhibition was curated into four interrelated themes.
The first section, Genocchio writes, was titled “Rethinking the Past,” and looked at the “way in which artists amalgamated the old and new, either turning to established painting traditions, like Mughal miniatures, or traditional media, including gouache, to comment on contemporary life. In the better cases, artists did not merely copy past styles, media or subjects, but transformed them into something new”.
A solitary painting by Anil opens that section, and Genocchio writes: “In Untitled (1969), Anil Karanjai (1940-2001) drew on a tradition in central Indian painting and Bengali temple decoration of depicting closely entwined bodies with erotic or religious overtones. In this case, though, he transformed the figures into grasping, fighting monsters to symbolize the challenges the new nation faced in the post-independence era, especially the constant threat of sectarian violence”.
True, but what would he write were he to see Anil’s earth-centred paintings?
Hartman de Souza cooks for his family and occasionally writes. He is the author of Eat Dust: Mining and Greed in India.
Anil Karanjai was not a celebrity among India‘s elite art circles and their patrons. He hated to woo them, and continued to paint in his own style till the end of his life, defying market demands. But he occupies a special niche in the hearts of many people whose voices remain unheard in the babble of the cocktail parties.
Roads Across The Earth : On The Life, Times And Art Of Anil Karanjai
Edited by Juliet Reynolds
Three Essays Collective, 2018
Edited by Juliet Reynolds
Three Essays Collective, 2018
There are four historians of art (joining forces with Anil) who seriously messed with Reynold’s head – Ernst Fischer, Walter Benjamin, Max Raphael and John Berger: with Berger the youngest, the pivot around which Juliet unfurls the life and times of Anil Karanjai and then situates his larger oeuvre.
Given that music was rich in Benares, Juliet duly documents and explains Anil’s thirst for music. Hindustani classical music moved him. I do remember talking to him about his time in New York, and here too, he followed his heart, his sojourns taking him to the bars in Harlem, and jazz, people’s music.
Juliet divides her essay into seven parts, and probably Anil will smile in agreement and tell us that this is also the Rupak tal, the tal that is heard in every dive in North India – a people’s tal you could say. In these seven sections, she covers 50 years counterpointing a man she knew better than most to the unfolding histories around him.
Fine arts students at college and university will welcome an important book on art history they can understand, given the pervading obfuscation in this field. Juliet is matter of fact, pacey, yet unyielding and tough. The Indian art market is demystified, and neither is Juliet even the slightest bit overawed taking on the leftists. Typically, she spares no none!
From the 1960s, the book picks up pace, documenting the formation of the anti-establishment school of the ‘Hungry Generation’ better known as Hungryalists. They were men – artists, poets, musicians – who let it be said, would today have invited the khaki shirts.
Not that they didn’t. Juliet, somewhat sadly, mentions Anil’s drawings and paintings destroyed by the police. Not many people know that the beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, lived with the Hungryalists, probably learning from them far more than they learnt from him. The Hungryalists were important, and nothing has ever been written about this period in such depth.
With that period setting the tone, Juliet deftly weaves into her narrative the parallel art histories which did not, not have an impact on Anil – Benares, Calcutta, Bombay, Chennai, and Delhi. People whose names we have heard all make an appearance, all are situated, placed.
Of course, there are enough in the queue to say that people like Juliet and all that she represents have outlived their utility. They are just old school art historians trapped in an outdated ideological zoo. Sure, ideology may have been killed, but dialectics lives on and Juliet knows that.
Everything depends on whom you read when you want to learn about an artist living in a particular time, and what that history did to that artist – as much as what the artist did to that history he lived in.
Anil lived though, and was part of a very interesting period in Delhi for instance. There is never any doubt – anywhere in the book – where his heart lay.
Much to the annoyance of the art world’s panjandrums, the Saturday Art Fair enjoyed considerable success, not commercially, but in its popular appeal. Frequented by a wide public from all walks of life, it was well covered by the press; poets and writers would also participate, occasionally organising readings. In addition to weekly exhibitions and on-the-spot sketching and painting, there were frequent performances by street theatre groups, generally of the Left; one of the most regular of these was Jana Natya Manch, the group lead by the talented Marxist activist, Safdar Hashmi, later murdered by mobsters of the Congress Party while performing a play on the outskirts of Delhi.There are descriptions of Anil’s paintings that will catch your throat, but there are also barbed comments about artists and art critics that should duly be read – if only to see a point of view they may not have engaged with enough.
If one was looking at ‘context’ – Anil’s favourite word perhaps – then given the way things are panning out to silence those speaking from the left even as I write this, you could very well see Anil as a ‘proto-Urban Naxal’. There is irony when you read:
At the time when Anil Karanjai was making his mark in the Indian capital, the Naxalite movement was still in progress. Its brutal suppression by the government of West Bengal and that of Indira Gandhi at the centre had not yet succeeded in extinguishing its fires. The artist was one of many who continued to support the movement, not just as a sympathiser but as cultural activist. He offered shelter to comrades on the run and helped the party propagate its slogans in such a way that they could evade being caught. Living in a fashionable part of the city and being married to an American provided good cover to him and the cadres. Moreover, as a rising star in art circles he was afforded protection even while he openly professed his ideology. Yet, he declined to sacrifice art on the altar of politics. He was passionate about his chosen profession and he relished being part of the scene onto which it had carried him.
Awakening of Offensive Conscience, 1970. Courtesy: Lalit Kala Akademi
We are taken “back to the dissidence and colour of the 1960s, a decade unparalleled in politico-cultural history both international and Indian”. The Bengali poets, Malay Roychoudhury and Subimal Basak – and now an Egyptologist but then a full-fledged ‘hippie’, Edward Loring – give valuable insight to a time in Benares, when politics gave equal space to marijuana, and boundaries – all boundaries – were not just questioned but stretched till they frayed.
Mangalesh Dabral, Hindi poet and journalist, brings in the early 1970s, with Anil in Delhi – which gives us a different view of the city and indeed, the role played by radical Hindi-speaking intellectuals, poets and writers; and Ross Beatty Jr., a musician, musicologist and writer, who catches Anil in the two painful but revealing years he spent in the US.
Suneet Chopra, art critic, an activist with the mainstream left – and now often its spokesperson on TV – has a long essay moving from the influences on Anil of the Bengal famine of the 1940s, to the radical movements and protests in the 1960s and early 70s, and mainstream Indian politics up till the century ended. Suneet however, does not stop there. As Juliet notes, Chopra is “the sole critic to have noted the influence of Indian classical music on Karanjai”, one who saw “the emotional resonance in his landscapes”; one who recognised Anil in the role of ‘the artist as healer’, as one whose work offered hope to those who struggle, to people “worn down and torn to shreds by exploitation”.
You cannot stop a smile when you read Juliet writing: “Given the general disinclination of leftists to acknowledge value in such art, Chopra’s is a highly significant analysis”. Now one hopes that the rest of the Left reads it.
We see Anil out of the 1990s with a short piece by art critic, curator and painter Santo Dutta that appeared in the catalogue of Anil’s retrospective exhibition at the Vadhera Gallery, New Delhi, September 1990. The historian and writer Sumanta Banerjee’s essay, A Friend In Remembrance, is one only he could write. Although you wish it was a little longer, if only because Banerjee is yet another Leftist unafraid of critically calling out his own.
There is also an excellent piece, a Sunday morning read over coffee, by Pramod Ganapatye, painter and museologist, well worth reading twice:
“What is art in your eyes?” Ganapatye asks Anil when they meet in 1988, and Anil answers:
“Art is something that makes a person more sensitive, makes him dream, liberates him from the terror and tension of reality. The role of art is to liberate. In my view, art has two faces. One face looks towards society while the other looks inward. The artist’s own art makes him traverse the distance between the unconscious and the conscious, it forces him to think.”
Steps in the garden, 1986.
§
I only found out in 2015, after
Juliet got in touch with me over Facebook, that Anil had died in March
2001. That was sad. Even worse though, in 20o5, when the frenzy of
illegally mining ore in Goa was just shifting gears to move into greater
greed, Anil’s paintings visited me.These were the paintings he started in his studio in Jor Bagh, inspired by images he captured in Lodhi Gardens on his morning walks; that he changed, as only he could, in his head and then on a frame. I saw two of those paintings take their first shape, emerge out of nothing. Much later I saw the exhibition – Images of Silence – when it opened in Delhi, the last time I met Anil and Juliet.
In 2005, I was sitting on the side of a hill in Goa, in a monsoon drizzle, lit by rays of sunlight breaking through clouds slowly shredding in the breeze and contemplating the majesty of the Western Ghats breaking on my small state’s south-eastern borders.
Because, behind my back, not even 20 km as a bird flies, were the foothills of these same Western Ghats, acres and acres of hill and forests being destroyed and laid bare by Goa’s rogue mining companies excavating for ore, licking their lips like they were looking for bloodied flesh.
Fiery landscape, 1999.
I willingly credit Anil with one paragraph from the book, written thinking of him. As if to tell him I did manage to understood the images of silence that were to haunt him till his death – and even though I could be actually describing one of his paintings, not sitting on a hill contemplating the reality of ecocide:
Some 20 kilometres south-east of Maina and Cawrem by road, the dark cloud-framed the dark cloud-framed ghats beyond Sulcorna are the mothers of the pre-historic hills one of which I sat on. It is a chastening sight. All the more so if you sit alone, a chill in the air, and like the hills around you, feel under threat. They are bathed in a luminescence that looks and sometime feels like water. Let your imagination run a little more and the hills begin like pre-historic animals sleeping on their bellies. In the misted silence, you sense how the lives of the forests and hills and wildlife and indigenous peoples are intertwined with the almost divine presence of water. In that Age of Greed, one would have thought it was the beginning of a surrealistic film if only it wasn’t so real.Anil’s paintings gave me hope that the earth would speak back through people who saw her as reverentially as he did. What would he say if he knew that in 2012, the Shah Commission put the amount looted in Goa by way of illegal mining at some Rs 35,000 crore?
Yes, I grieve that he is not here.
Imagine that he changed his gaze from the Western Ghats I was watching from the side of a hill, looked behind me at the lacerated iron ore mines – a bleeding, burning, reddish-orange expanse of waste, surrounded by dust-stained forest just beginning to lose their greenness as they wait their turn to die – and began to paint.
In her short but pithy archival essay on Anil’s painting, The Door of Kusma – perhaps his only angry painting of his Lodi Garden phase – Juliet puts it very aptly:
A large part of our knowledge about the world comes from seeing. The visual arts are intended to clarify our vision, to help us see the world with greater sensitivity, directness and immediacy. An artwork should reveal to the spectator that which is neglected, elusive or obscure, even as it retains its sense of magic and mystery.
An image like The Door of Kusma achieves this end. Within the limits of a single, silent frame, an entire human story is told with all its social, economic and psychological implications.
The Door of Kusma, 1984. Courtesy: National Gallery of Modern Art
The first section, Genocchio writes, was titled “Rethinking the Past,” and looked at the “way in which artists amalgamated the old and new, either turning to established painting traditions, like Mughal miniatures, or traditional media, including gouache, to comment on contemporary life. In the better cases, artists did not merely copy past styles, media or subjects, but transformed them into something new”.
A solitary painting by Anil opens that section, and Genocchio writes: “In Untitled (1969), Anil Karanjai (1940-2001) drew on a tradition in central Indian painting and Bengali temple decoration of depicting closely entwined bodies with erotic or religious overtones. In this case, though, he transformed the figures into grasping, fighting monsters to symbolize the challenges the new nation faced in the post-independence era, especially the constant threat of sectarian violence”.
Boar Rock-1, 1999.
Hartman de Souza cooks for his family and occasionally writes. He is the author of Eat Dust: Mining and Greed in India.
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