INDIA EXPRESS / Sections

INDIAN POPULAR CULTURE

The heart and beginning of India Express is the exhibition Indian Popular Culture – Conquest of the World as Image curated by Professor Jyotindra Jain from Delhi. India Express illustrates the evolution of Indian popular imagery starting with the mythological prints of Ravi Varma, which became popular in the late 19th century. These mythological images were used all over India, often for economic and political purposes. They have also been used to sell all manner of products and goods and been appropriated by advocates of various ideologies. The exhibition also explains the important role popular imagery played in India's process of becoming independent. There includes prints, collages, labels, posters, photographs and miniature sculptures. Indian Popular Culture has been on display earlier at House of the World's Cultures in Berlin and at the museums of modern art of Delhi and Mumbai.

Printed images of gods – and other venerated heroes and heroines – are everywhere in India. Street vendors and bazaar stands sell an immense selection of pictures, and they are displayed everywhere where there is room on the wall. The exhibition also includes a selection of new calendar images from India.

BOLLYWOOD

The Bollywood section of the exhibition is also about popular culture. Most Bollywood films are musicals with dance and song numbers alternating with the action. There is a strong filmstar cult in India and the glittering heroes and heroines are worshipped like gods. In fact, mythological references are common not only films based on myths but also in films dealing with entirely worldly issues.

The exhibition displays a colourful selection of old and new film posters. In addition to Bollywood glamour, they include the visual world of the more serious art film. The exhibition also includes a short compilation of popular Indian films put together by the film critic Amrit Gangar.

Film posters, which are often several meters long, were traditionally painted by hand. Today this tradition has come under threat from computers and digital printing, which have taken the place of the hand-painted giant advertisements almost everywhere in India. But there are still a few traditional poster-making studios. They include the studio of S. Rehman in Mumbai, where it operates in conjunction with a cinema named Alfred Talkies. Posters by Rehman are included in the exhibition. The Balkrishna Arts studio, also from Mumbai, is one of the best known in the world. Its founder Balkrishna Vaidya travelled to Finland with his team to paint large film posters, which are shown in India Express.

COMICS

Many generations have read the stories of the Indian national epics Ramayana and Mahabharata in comic form. The publishing company Amar Chitra Katha started publishing mythological comics in the early 1960s and they are still very popular. The exhibition includes originals on stories from Ramayana. The hero of the epic is Prince Rama, one of the many incarnations of the god Vishnu. Originals are based on myths about his childhood and youth.

CONTEMPORARY ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Raghu Rai (1942), who lives in Delhi, is India's best-known photographer. He has documented especially his homeland and its people since the 1960s. India's many realities, different religions, traditions, daily life and ancient rituals are all present in his photographs. Raghu Rai's best-known works include his series on Indira Gandhi (1974), New Delhi (1983 and 1994), the Bhopal toxic gas accident (1984), the Sikhs (1984), Taj Mahal (1986), Kolkata (1989), Tibet in exile (1990) and Mother Teresa (1996). The exhibition includes colour and black and white photographs by Raghu Rai from several decades.

India Express includes several contemporary artists whose works deal with and comment the themes and imagery of the exhibition. The Mumbai painters Atul Dodiya (1959) and Reena Saini Kallat (1973) are interested in narrative expression. Their works fuse topical social themes with mythological and historical elements. On of the characteristics of Indian contemporary art is the strong awareness of the visual heritage of India and its appreciation of it. The Oedipal complexes typical of Western modernism are very rare in India.

Pushpamala N. (1956) from Bangalore (Chennai?) also deals with the visual heritage of India, especially the portrayal of women. Her collaborative installation with the photographer Clare Arn entitled Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs is on display in the exhibition in its entirety. Pushpamala herself performs in the installation, which consists of several photographic series and of stage sets. Pushpamala has been inspired by numerous different female images, including the women of traditional Indian paintings and the goddesses of calendars, criminals in police mug shots and the heroines of advertisement photos.

The Mumbai contemporary artist Archana Hande (1970) belongs to an artists' group named Open Circle, which organises exhibitions and public events and happenings. Open Circle artists are critical of consumer society and the by-products of the global economy. Archana Hande's work Tales of the Pata-Chitrakars is also fundamentally social. She deals with especially the social and political dimensions of the lives and art of the scroll painters of the villages in the Midnapur region, and the status of women and minorities in India, for example.

SCROLL PAINTERS OF MIDNAPUR

There are village communities in the Midnapur region of West Bengal, where most people are named Chitrakar. It means a maker of pictures. The people of these villages make pata paintings which are an ancient form of folk art. The scroll paintings consist of narratives based on Hindu mythology and social and topical issues. They are made with plant pigments on oblong paper or hardened cloth. The occupation and skills are passed from generation to generation. There are similar traditions in different areas of eastern India.

The Chitrakars are poets, painters and singers. The narratives associated with the pictures in a scroll are rhymed and sung to audiences as the scroll is opened picture by picture. Originally, the painters travelled from village to village carrying scrolls with them, passing on news and recounting myths and moral stories. The exhibition includes mythological and social scrolls by two Midnapur painters, Manu and Niranjan Chitrakar. A Ramayana scroll from the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum is proof of the long history of the tradition: it is some 200 years old.  

KALIGHAT PAINTINGS

An original and colourful style of painting emerged in Kolkata in the 19th century and became known as Kalighat painting after the place where it was invented: the paintings were first made and sold in the bazaars around the Kalighat temple built in honour of the goddess Kali. The paintings were cheap and sold to pilgrims as mementos. They became very popular among a very wide audience. Their production declined in the early 20th century when they were replaced by prints.

The themes of the Kalighat paintings were initially drawn from Hindu mythology. They included gods and goddesses and their incarnations. Later secular and topical subjects were included: The paintings began to comment on social issues and local news and sometimes made paintings that were like caricatures – just like the scroll paintings of the Midnapur painters. India Express includes a large selection of Kalighat paintings from the Victoria & Albert Museum.

SCULPTURES AND FESTIVAL CULTURE

The exhibition also introduces fantastic Indian sculpture and its long heritage. India Express includes a number of sculptures depicting gods, which are on loan from the Danish National Museum. The oldest are the stone temple figures of Sarasvati and Karthikeya. They are from the 12th century. The bronze 'master of dance' Shiva Nataraja from the 18th century represents celebrated classical subjects. There is also a richly decorated cart from southern India used to transport sculptures during religious festivals.

India has an enormous number of religious festivals. One of the most incredible festivals is the annual Durga Puja or the Festival of Nine Nights of West Bengal and especially its largest city Kolkata. The subject of the festival and the object of worshipping is the ten-armed goddess Durga, a gentle mother and fierce warrior. Tens of thousands of fantastical altars (pandal) are set up around Kolkata, which the millions of festival-goers visit day and night. Going from altar to altar is known as pandal hopping. The festival altars always depict a scene where Durga slays the demon Mahishasura who has threatened to destroy the world. Durga is shown with her daughters Sarasvati and Lakshmi and her sons Ganesha and Karthikeya.

One of the high points of the exhibition is a Durga altar like the one described above. It was made by Jitendra Nath Paul & Sons in Kumartuli, the old artisan district of Kolkata. The decorative altar figures are still made of the mud of the Ganges according to centuries-old traditions. In addition to the Durga altar, India Express includes altarpieces of Ganesha, Lakshmi, Sarasvati and Kali, placed in different locations in the exhibitions.

The Kolkata photographer Dev Nayak (1974) has for several years documented the work of the artisans of Kumartuli and the West Bengal festival culture in general. The Durga altar display includes his photographs. Nayak has photographed artisans making the figures, striking altar structures and rituals of worship. The photographs illustrate the story of the god-figures from beginning to end: from the dredging of mud from Ganges to the sinking of the figures back into the river after the festival to the sound of drums and chanting of mantras. The ecstasy of the festival is also conveyed in video compilations shown in the exhibitions, filmed by Erja Pusa during Durga Puja in autumn 2005.

 

Lasipalatsin Mediakeskus Oy ©2001 23.2.2006