If Impressionists set out to follow the dictum- one should be of one’s time (Il fait etre de son temps) as laid down by the artists, writers and art critics in mid nineteenth century France, the first decade of the 21st century has witnessed global trends that have defied this call for contemporaneity. Poushali Das’s paintings find their place among these counter trends in their systematic refusal to “reflect“ one’s time. Her works do not fit into any stable category of classification of contemporary art forms but rather straddle elusively and uneasily between the anti-modern and the high modern while at the same time, intersecting with the postmodern in unexpected ways.

At first glance, her paintings of medieval saints, levitating Buddhas and wandering minstrels seem deliberately set in a bygone age, dreamily floating in a hazy atmosphere, half hidden in curvy volutes of smoke, of simulated incense originating in the recesses of her imagination. It is as if the artist has put in place a painter’s vocabulary for denoting spiritual realm that can only have past for its reference. What is the artist driving at ? Perfecting the art of mystification in the world of born-again religiosity or regressing to a nostalgic mode ? Is she evoking some golden past which remains locked in an antiquated age of beatitude and transcendentalist fervor frozen in time and space ? What is the point of creating a world so bracketed from that of reality, of ugliness, of brutal exploitation, of tragic encounters between human aspirations and failures ? The repeated ornamental volutes so pervasively permeating her paintings resemble question marks punctuating my own text.

In her earlier works, the figures were often situated indoors surrounded by delicate furniture, archaic jugs, ornamental carpets interspersed with mysterious staircases leading to nowhere. However, in the works on display, the emphasis has shifted from indoors to spaces in the openness of nature- bountiful, pure. The only references to civilization come in form stray rustic huts and bamboo structures. Her construction of artificial paradise of exquisite beauty resonate with Gustave Klimt’s paintings or Ezra Pound’s evocation of the Far Eastern culture: the high modernist rummaging of sources belonging to an exotic tradition was itself a critique of modernist view of progress and modernization. With Poushali, who also seems to be turning her back to stories of progress, the very structure of narrativization from its traditional unfurling from right to left gets reconfigured as allegories along a vertical axis.

If most of the protagonists of her stories are mystic singers, musicians and dancers forever resisting the gravitational pull of the horizontal, the only way open for them to seek transcendence is along the vertical. While some figures in smaller dimension dance their way upwards in a group, others appears as elongated singular bodies stretched beyond normal proportions to literally embody their spiritual ascent. With their intense meditative gaze cast above, the yearning for the other realm, unfathomable and enticing, becomes a physical and spiritual levitation. It is these solitary figures towering above their setting that an ambiguity comes in to play about whether they are placed indoors or outdoors. Depending on our take either way, the intricate configuration of volutes can be either read as ornamental patterns on a curtain like background or evoking waves and leaves within cosmic wilderness.

This also explains her placement of her figures within a landscape setting to stage a constant communion between the eternal “man” and nature. If “man” is evoked as the vertical register and nature as the horizontal, the exchange between them is not that of conquest and domination. Humanism remains as a pervasive presence and lets her Santiniketan legacy inform her works. Drawing strongly from Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali in composing literary title of her works and staging encounter between man and nature, she sets up a conversation between herself and the Bengal School. In standard accounts of Indian modernism, “Revivalism” as initiated by Abanindranath Tagore has gathered a pejorative sense of being retrograde and anti-modernist.

However, taking cue from contemporary painters like Nilima Sheikh, Poushali recasts that heritage in a new light and offers a painterly revision of that past. If the Bombay Progressives found the Bengal School style as too cloying and effeminate, out of sync with masculinist strokes of modernist oil painting, how do women artists reposition their modernism and participate in the gendered discourse of the Indian modern ? It is by embracing the feminine style of not only the Bengal revivalists but also the pan Asian art traditions of ancient China and Japan, that she questions the modernist terms of transaction between “man” and “nature” as inevitably projected as masculine and feminine. What if the terms of this exchange are upturned ? Nature, rather than being a backdrop for manly heroism, begins to acquire a voice and comes alive. Gently heaving and breathing, the landscape expresses itself in all its glory with bejeweled rivers running through gently rolling hills. Nature becomes the site of plenitude, of reconciliation and ultimately transcendence.

This is where the gender dynamics come into play and bring within them the question of religion. The saints and the fakirs are uniformly feminized to conform to an equally delicate and aesthetized rendering of nature. As a consequence, points of overlap are made manifest in the delicate curvature of their hands, eyebrows and eyes with that of floating flowers, waves and fluttering clothes. What about the very few women protagonists who loom in the background either praying or acting as visual accompaniments to the larger drama of spiritual odyssey ? When the mode of representation is oriented towards the feminine, the question of their marginality does not arise. In the same manner, a similar accord is created between the Hindu saint and a Muslim fakir, who on the account of their religiosity, share more ground in common and hold an intense conversation, countering Samuel Huntington’s prophecy about the clash of civilizations.

What is avoided is the look of the everyday, the quotidian and the banal. Strictly banishing any ordinary object like a tin can or a Coke bottle from the class of “paintable” objects, as not only un-poetic and prosaic but ugly reminders of capitalist fetishism, Poushali opts for the most painterly alternative. Choosing to paint wash tempera on silk, she celebrates the artisanal aspect of painting which directly registers every gesture of her painterly labor. Perhaps by repudiating modernity thus, both in technique and thematic, she crosses into the postmodern. When confronted with a critic who finds her work not up to the latest in theme and technique, that it is regressive and behind the times, she would reject the normative and reductive naming of the contemporary.

Religion, not in some institutionalized sense but as human imagination set free to seek space beyond the urgencies of survival, enters her work as the return of the repressed. Her tripartite panels, where the central panel often takes the form of a band of flat color setting off the gently ascending figures, evoke the sacred space where the main icon is placed at the center; the vertical thrust of a shikhara, or a mosque or a church having the proclivity to draw the mind away from that centrality to a point above and beyond representation.

How does a painter who has recourse only to material means of paint represent the infinite and the phenomenology of the spiritual experience ? There are three ways in which she translates her pictorial language to simulate the effect of transcendentalism: a) via the volute that like the one on the Sanchi Stupa gateways, that keeps the narratives depicted in a compressed form and yet unfurls them from both ends. A volute is also aesthetically a distilled motif, at once protean and concrete, mobile and motionless. Protean because of its spiral shape, it can twist and turn in any direction and best simulate the meandering movement of smoke from incense. Yet, it emerges as a concrete shape and a finite motif with defined extension in space. In other words, the form of a volute becomes an ideal metaphor for depicting the transubstantiation from the physical to the spiritual. b). The other way of evoking cosmic spaces is learnt from the Chinese masters of scroll painting of the Sung dynasty. They had arrived at the method of reducing the size of the human figure set within the landscape to attain a spiritual scale. c). Poushali adopts from the Japanese painters as did the Impressionists, the art of fragmenting the whole figure - by letting the frame cut the figure into a part, its further journey into infinity is left to the imagination.

Poushali’s formative training in Santiniketan and subsequent exposure to contemporary trends in Baroda gave her clarity and confidence to move against the prevailing trends. Embarking on an art historical journey, both real and imaginary, and often rummaging through rare book stores for old books on Far Eastern art, Poushali has no apprehensions about pilfering images from these sources, not to subscribe to any easy notion of pan-Asianism. Rather, Poushali re-engages with aesthetic principles that had come to be constituted in Santiniketan by the leading figures of the Bengal School like Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose from her location in the present. Casting a backward glance at the rich pictorial heritage of Santiniketan, Poushali forges a visual language that perfects an aesthetic withdrawal from the real world. After Andreas Huysens’ reading of the crisis of modernism, one can diagnose a similar sense of engagement in her work- “When the social change seemed beyond grasp or took an undesired turn, art was still privileged as the only authentic voice of critique and protest, even when it seemed to withdraw into itself.”

In fact, Okakura, the Japanese cultural activist very succinctly illustrated the newly emergent aesthetics in form of his “magnetic triangle” with the help of three matchsticks standing for tradition, originality and nature. Any imbalance caused to any one element would lead to a loss of creativity: “A weak composition was like a reptile. It survived even if cut into pieces, whereas a strong composition was like the human body: the tiniest pin-prick alerted the whole nervous system.”

Dispensing with the organic mode of composition so vehemently endorsed by Okakura and the Bengal School, Poushali releases new meanings precisely by cutting open wholeness into fragments and yet they seem to work together as parts within parts ! These sources offer her tools and techniques, ideas and concepts about re-imagining the world afresh when they become part of her spatial and temporal imagination. When the known styles and motifs are recast and made to perform new functions in her paintings, the familiar is de-familiarized. It is this re-signification of the already coded that marks Poushali’s paintings as contemporary.

So contemporaneity does enter Poushali’s works but stealthily, almost crablike, in its unexpectedness...

References:
Rustom Bharucha, Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore & Okakura Tenshin, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006, p.44.
R. Radhakrishnan, Theory in an Uneven World, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.
Andreas Huysens, “Mapping the Postmodern” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology ed. Donald Preziosi, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp.329-337.

 -Parul Dave