If you look at the India Art Fair grounds in Okhla from the elevated Govindpuri metro station, you will see people at ease—smoking, looking into their phones, finding their Ubers. It’s different from watching people step out of a cinema hall after an intense film and struggle to form coherent sentences. To paraphrase Kafka, shouldn’t art be the axe for the frozen sea within us? How is it that scores of people can pretend to be normal when they step out of the fairgrounds, particularly after the kind of art they have seen? I don’t expect them to be bawling their eyes out, but after consuming hundreds of artworks, surely, they should be ruminative?
I step into the India Art Fair grounds cautiously. Its scale is intimidating. A lot has changed since I last visited over seven years ago. “You can’t do an Art Fair without a map,” an artist friend warns me. “There is so much to see, so much.”
Indeed. There is much to see. When I bump into friends, the question is the same: “Which artwork did I like?” Regardless of my answer, everyone wants to convince me there is a better one around the corner. “Oh, you liked Atul Dodiya’s Rope? Wait till you see the photography booth. You will be shocked to see the pathos in Raghu Rai’s works.”
Pathos? That’s a heavy word to process on a Sunday afternoon. I’m all for art appreciation, but let’s be honest with each other. Why can’t we say Raghu Rai takes great pictures? How his images bring India alive? No, we must say pathos. It aligns with the billowing overlays we’ve picked to wear at India Art Fair, not to mention the Doc Martens.
It is this encounter that annoys the contrarian in me, making me trace my footsteps back to Dodiya’s Rope, courtesy of Vadehra Art Gallery. This time, I actually see it. On the surface, it’s an easy enough artwork to understand. There is a shutter painted with, you guessed it, rope. Lots of it. There is also a painting of The Girl in the White Dress by the American artist Milton Avery. After a few minutes, the shutter lifts on its own to reveal a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 crime thriller, Rope. According to the official description, Dodiya wanted to make sense of the closed shop shutters during the Bombay riots in the ’90s.
To me, the reference to Rope means something else. It was the first and only time that Hitchcock subverted the Hays Code—a set of self-imposed rules that governed Hollywood from 1934 to 1968. These rules prevented filmmakers from using profanity, excessive violence, interracial romance and sexual perversion. Back then, queer romance fell neatly under the sexual perversion category. Hitchcock’s gays in Rope aren’t madly in love with each other. At no point in the film do they kiss or even hug. They kill someone with a rope, put his body in a trunk and then decide to host a party, using the trunk itself as the main table. Does it get gayer than that?
I’m not sure if Dodiya wanted the viewer to interpret his Rope through a queer lens. But it makes for such reading because I stand there, watching the shutter go up and down for the better part of half an hour, with Janis Joplin screeching in my AirPods. Does it have pathos? I’m still looking for her.
My next destination is Inayat Malik’s untitled work: a collection of archival images overlaid with old letters and drawings of what looked like her grandparents or great-grandparents, presented by Gallerie Splash. The pictures glow, even from a distance. Later, I would find out that they are indeed Malik’s great-grandparents—both of them writers. In one of them, the great-grandmother, Prabhjot Kaur, wears a red sari. A thick horizontal stroke of blue paint runs across the image at eye level, cutting through multiple faces surrounding her. In another, the couple is sitting together on the floor, sharing a laugh. In another, Kaur, armed with a Padma Shri, stands with Indira Gandhi.
How do I go about reading their works? They seem like such a happy couple. The kind to sit on rocking chairs, the winter sun washing over them, with a dog-eared paperback in their laps. Their house must smell of pinnis and panjiris made in desi ghee. I go down a rabbit hole and contact Malik. Can I read her great-grandmother’s poems? Surely, there must be some in English? The evidence of their relationship of love is all there, littered across her poems. Consider this excerpt from her poem Once Is Enough:
Why should I turn my back
to the happiness and the joy of today for uncertain, unknown tomorrows?
Why should I crush the impulse to be gay now, and live on sorrows?
Isn’t each moment a wavelet of eternity?
Another half hour goes by as I pore through every image—using Google Translate, finding references, standing there, obsessing over their love. Their coolness, the way their shoulders are relaxed around each other.
Behind me, a different kind of love is unfolding. A woman is having a breakdown because her partner just won’t take the right pictures of her. In a tone of complete defeat, she scrolls through the pictures he has clicked and asks him, “Do you hate me? Is this how you look at me? Do you not know how to make me look beautiful?” The man’s response is a series of sighs and deep breaths. He blames the overhead lights, the crowd, the chaos. But she is convinced he hates her. “We’re better off having chole bhature in that shitty rathole you like in Paharganj,” she says. “Why are we even here?”
I walk ahead, lest I get wrapped up in the storm and get asked to correct her. On the wall, Kaur, unaffected, hasn’t stopped smiling. All around India Art Fair, people mill around, aim cameras at artworks, think of witty captions to slap onto their Instagram Stories and dispense their hot takes. The ones in chaste Hindi and Punjabi take the cake. The artist Madhvi Parekh is referred to by someone as “the Dior waali,” just that and nothing more. Subodh Gupta’s installation with his standard utensils elicits another response: “Did he buy these utensils from Star Bazaar?”
My last piece of the evening is a self-portrait by Deepak Dhiman, presented by Art and Charlie gallery. He is standing with a flower in his ear; his father, on a charpoy, also poses with a flower in his ear. The setting is just another house in India. In the corner is their dog, who passed away a few months ago. There are barely any viewers here. I think about my own father, also lounging in his lungi, telling me that I look like God’s own creation when I wear boots with heels or a skirt to an event. His only worry is whether I can walk comfortably. “Godspeed,” he usually says, “do not rush.”
So, I don’t rush today. Everything else can wait. The pathos too.
Also read:
10 new art shows in India we’re excited about this February
These Indian artists want you to stop and ask questions at an ongoing art festival in Dubai
The team behind LA’s biggest museum just visited Mumbai to learn more about Indian art
