Beyond the masters, the India Art Fair offered the freshest of young Indian voices

I have a bone to pick with myself. For over ten years of studying art history (albeit, for my art entrances), writing and reporting intermittently on art, I have not been able to move beyond the Modern masters. To date, I find everything I know about the Progressives well within reach in my mind—we’re also talking details the friends wrote in letters to one another when they were busy being globe trotters and hustlers. And the ghost of the one cover story I wrote, where I interviewed the then four living Progressives about painting in their 90s, has not left me in over seven years.

Perhaps it was not me but the enigma of the masters I closely interviewed as a fresh magazine reporter. I still recall the small, busy painting studio of SH Raza, filled with colour, him in the centre (there is a bindu imagery there that is hard to ignore) of it, painting with shaky hands that stopped only for the 15-minute break he took to share tea and biscuits with me before going back to letting his back do the talking. The fresh cream basement of Krishen Khanna filled with many a bandwala and crow that felt smaller than the man himself. The theatrics of the dark hall that Ram Kumar was painting in, and the anger that reverberated through it when we kept him away from his canvas too long. Or the home I still find when I think of the humble home of KG Subramanyan in Baroda (Vadodra), shaded with trees that perhaps fell on his canvas in varied colours, and the kindness with which he took out the box of cards he draws out for his friends and family every year and handed all of us a small drawing. How does one forget the masters when you’ve witnessed them at work and every time you see their paintings you can imagine them standing behind the canvas with their brush?

But the problem then lies in allowing that knowledge to limit you. Sure, I know enough about the celebrated contemporaries, but every year as I enter the labyrinthine India Art Fair and find myself lost, only to yet again find solace in the known. This year I vowed for it to be different.

So, with concerted effort I stopped at places where I would have earlier only browsed. I did the signature stop-move forward-squint-move back-and nod; and I found new inspiration in names I had never before heard of.

Avinash Veeraraghavan’a Colour by Number was an intricate exploration of the crafts of India. On silk organza, the embroidery with glass beads is at once a reminder of brocade as of the Naga weave and Kalamkari. Rajyashi Goody’s ceramic rendition of the colours of the river was as visceral as it was layered, and Reyaz Badaruddin’s Private and Public Spaces—a ceramic collage dedicated to his time house hunting—reminded me to let go of the excuse of waiting for some catastrophic inspiration.

But, most importantly, whether it was Debasish Mukherjee’s old family photographs led mixed media or Shanti Panchal’s watercolour on paper, Nandini Bagla Chirimar’s intricate pencil sketches or Rashmee Pal Chouteau’s mixed media floral bouquet, taking a step back from the masters reminded me that whether it was what was moving the artists to paint or the mediums they were employing, there was a lot that I had blinded myself, which reflected the current cultural zeitgeists. Now if only I can find something that juxtaposes fantasy with Instagram memes, I might be a lifelong fan. 

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