Tag: MF Husain

Justice S.K. Kaul Says ‘Obscenity’ in Art Brought on By Viewer Himself, Recounts Murugan Order

At a literary event organised by The Hindu, the Supreme Court judge known for his order in the case against M.F. Husain too, said that he often wondered what made artists and writers like Perumal Murugan, Husain and Khushwant Singh take on the status quo.

New Delhi: Talking of his 2016 judgment on author Perumal Murugan and his book Madhorubagan, Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul said on February 25 spoke glowingly on the constitutional safeguards for freedom of expression and said that any “perceived obscenity” in a book or artwork is brought upon by the reader or viewer himself,

Justice Kaul was participating virtually at a literary event, ‘Lit for Life’, organised by The Hindu news outlet in Chennai.

The Supreme Court judge said at the event that it was necessary to facilitate principled conversations on even the most contentious issues and ensure that freedom of speech and expression is maintained.

Justice Kaul, in his speech, recalled his famous order as part of the 2016 Madras high court bench also consisting of Justice Pushpa Sathyanarayana, bringing back to life Murugan’s book which had faced criticism for obscenities, particularly in its depiction of Gounder caste group. The order, which is often cited for its clarity and force, contained these famous lines:

“The choice to read is always with the reader. If you do not like a book, throw it away. There is no compulsion to read a book. Literary tastes may vary – what is right and acceptable to one may not be so to others. Yet, the right to write is unhindered”.

Speaking on this judgement on Saturday, he said that the order rejected allegations of obscenity.

“It (the judgement) held that the alleged obscenity which might or might not exist, was not the central theme of the novel. The perceived obscenity in a book or work of art is brought upon a viewer by the viewer himself. The constitutional principles of freedom of speech and expression weigh overwhelmingly in favour of the artist and cannot be disturbed,” Justice Kaul said, according to Bar and Bench.

Justice Kaul is also remembered for a landmark judgment in 2008 on a work of art by the late M.F. Husain which had been called ‘vulgar’ and ‘obscene’. Squashing the IPC Section 292 charge against Husain, Justice Kaul had illustrated in his judgment how “art is never chaste” and that its very nature is to be dangerous.

On Saturday Justice Kaul noted that he often wondered what made artists like Husain and writers like Khushwant Singh take on the status quo.

“What could be the benefit, especially if it comes at such a grave personal cost, as was the case with Professor Murugan, and very recently, with Salman Rushdie? Why did the makers of our Constitution, in line with democratic principles from across the world, chose to protect and grant privilege to such works, especially when the ramification of provocative art can be social disorder and at times even violence?” he asked, according to Bar and Bench.

He said such efforts could “mould a new humanity from the clay, to reshape society, chipping away at the existent social structure bit by bit.”

He also mentioned how A.K. Ramanujan’s famous essay Three Hundred Ramayanas faced opposition from some groups but indeed showed the diversity of perspectives.

He added that the Indian constitution heavily favours artistic freedom of expression and that this should not be disregarded.

“The act of literature emerges from an intellectual and cultural world that is full of contradiction and is always in a flux,” Justice Kaul said according to The Hindu, adding that resistant voices and activities always existed even within hegemonic ideological currents.

Gond Tribal Art by Jangarh Singh Shyam Sells for Record High at Pundole’s Auction

Meanwhile, work just painted by 97-year old Krishen Khanna was sold at the India Art Fair.

Sales of Indian modern art are hitting new highs in the wake of the pandemic. A $16.34 million auction at Mumbai-based Pundole on February 23 produced record prices for several artists. A couple of weeks earlier, the annual India Art Fair in New Delhi that yielded substantial sales with virtually all galleries reportin substantial results for the second year running.

The most surprising record at the Pundole auction was a Rs 65 lakh hammer price (just over $91,000 including buyer’s premium) for a Gond tribal canvas by Jangarh Singh Shyam, probably India’s leading Adivasi artist.

Jangarh Singh Shyam’s Krishna Lila. Photo courtesy: Pundole’s

Painted in 2001, a few months before he died, the 27 in x 40 in serigraphy and acrylic work depicts a traditional scene of Lord Krishna dancing with his gopi (follower), surrounded by a popular Gond rendering of brightly coloured animals, birds and trees. The artist’s previous record of $31,250 was at Sothebys in 2010.

There has been some interest in Shyam’s work in the intervening years and a renewal of interest in tribal art with acquisitions by International institutions such as the Guggenheim and the Chicago Cultural Institute, among others, says Rob Dean, a director of Pundole auctions. This has encouraged a new group of Indian collectors.

Raja Ravi Varma’s Yashoda Krishna. Photo courtesy: Pundole’s

Among other records set in the auction was for one for a very different style and age – a 28 in x 20 in oil on canvas by Raja Ravi Varma, which sold for Rs 38 crore ($5.3m including premium). A second work by the same artist went for Rs 16 crore. The previous Varma record of Rs 20 crore ($2.99m) was set in 2016, also at a Pundole auction.

Varma, who died in 1906, sought commissions from the rich and powerful in colonial India. He now has a steady flow of buyers who go for his colourful and grand mix of European artistic styles and Indian life.

The unsung hero of the India Art Fair was Krishen Khanna, a leading veteran Indian artist in the ‘modern’ style. Now in his 98th year, Khanna had a new work in his iconic Bandwalas series that he had painted over the previous month in his home outside Delhi, working on the 36 in x 24 in canvas for two hours a day.

Shown on London’s Grosvenor Gallery stand, “Bandwalas in a Truck” sold quickly on the preview day for Rs 45 lakh ($54,450), marking a triumph for the only surviving and active member of the famous Progressive Artists Group that began in Bombay in the mid-1900s and still dominates South Asian auctions.

Krishen Khanna’s son Karan with the ‘Bandwalas in a Truck’. Photo: By arrangement

The fair, with 71 galleries, was generally voted the best of the series of 14 annual events that began in 2009 when it was spun off from a public relations firm. Initially called an Art Summit, it was located at Delhi’s old Pragati Maidan exhibition grounds in a brutalist building with a leaky roof that had to be sealed, a far cry its current smart professional tents at south Delhi exhibition grounds.

There were fewer international galleries than before the pandemic – eight compared with a record of 16 – partly because of economies and cutbacks on regional fairs. Delhi is still building a reputation as a place for galleries from outside South Asia to sell both their own Indian artists as well as foreign names.

One that returned after missing a few years was Paris-based Galleria Continua. Maurizio Rigillo, one of the founders, told me “we are happy with coming back”. The gallery reported individual sales from $5,000 to nearly $900,000 by leading Indian artists including UK-based Anish Kapoor with one of his trademark red concave mirrors that was said to have been sold for $750,000.

Most galleries reported substantial sales on the preview day. Among those from India that did well was Delhi-based Vadehra, which sold a five-part artwork by Rameshwar Broota for $ 200,000 to a private UK collection and two works by Balkrishna Doshi for $100,000 to the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. “We are very happy” said Parul Vadehra. Another leading Delhi gallery, Nature Morte, sold a work by Tanya Goel for over $60,600 but failed to find a buyer for an aggressive looking glass and brass wall sculpture by Subodh Gupta.

A 30ft high acrylic on canvas by M.F.,Husain on the Crayon Art stand depicting the Ramayana epic, with a figure resembling Husain – rumoured to be priced at $3.5m but unsold. Photo: By arrangement

The fair organisers stopped revealing total sales figures and the number of footfalls a few years ago, but Jaya Asokan, the fair director, told me that there were 2,000 to 3,000 more visitors on the first two days than previously. There were not significant numbers of foreign buyers though there were curators and managers from the Venice Biennale, Sao Paulo, the London Tate, the Oxford Ashmolean and elsewhere.

There was little sign of much interest in crypto currencies’ non-fungible tokens, recently the rage, though the blockchain Tezos was giving away 3,200 NFTs as part of a “computational convergence” presentation showing where art and technology meet.

Asokan makes the point that India is “a self-sustaining market” with younger as well as established artists and buyers. She put the range of individual sales as Rs 50,000 ($605) to over Rs 7 core ($850,000).

This showed that, while auction houses specialising in Indian art are finding it difficult to maintain a strong flow of top lots ranging up to the current record auction price of $6.44m, there is considerable demand for works from new buyers at lower levels, as well as established collectors.

Explaining the lack of readily available top auction lots, one specialist told me, “Works at the top levels go into collections and don’t re-sell so go out of the market”.

The current $6.44m (including buyer’s premium) record was paid for a work by V.S. Gaitonde, one of the most sought after Progressives, in a Mumbai-based Pundole auction a year ago. Pundole is perhaps the most respected Indian auction house and yesterday’s results shows that it has pulling power.

Saffronart, the Mumbai-based market leader, has an auction on March 16 where the highest estimate is Rs 32 crore ($3.95m) for a Gaitonde oil on canvas, but the next highest is only Rs 7 crore ($850,000).

Sotheby’s and Christie’s appear to be lagging behind at their New York auctions later next month with top estimates of $1m-1.5m – Sotheby’s for an M.F.Husain work and Christie’s for one by Manjit Bawa.

But there can be surprises, and fresh trends as has been shown with the growing interest and visibility of tribal art, plus artists like Manjit Bawa and others attracting growing attention.

This article was originally published on the author’s blog.

John Elliott is a journalist.

Under BJP-RSS Rule, Madhya Pradesh’s Culture Department Stares at Moral, Artistic Decay 

In the last ten years, the state’s culture department has faced corruption allegations and charges of favouring a handful of bidders and artists, even as classical music suffers. The Wire investigates.

This is the first part of a two-part series on the curious ways in which Madhya Pradesh’s culture department functions. Part two will focus on what firms do once they bag a tender.

Bhopal: In April 2021, readers of local daily Swadesh found an astounding report in their newspaper.

Headined ‘Ustad Alauddin Khan Sangeet Evam Kala Academy ka Kaarnama (‘A Great Feat by the Ustad Alauddin Khan Music and Art Academy’)’, the newspaper reported that the Academy – set up by the Madhya Pradesh government in 1979 – had handed priceless recordings, dating back to 1962, including performances at the state’s famous cultural events like Tansen and Maihar Samarohs, for digitisation to a Bhopal-based firm without tendering or paperwork.

That was just the start. The firm, PP World (also known as Jhawak Bandhu, in Bhopal), had begun getting these recordings in 2012. By 2021, when Swadesh published its report, not one recording had been returned to the Academy.

Given the lack of paperwork, added Dainik Bhaskar, the Academy did not even have a list of all the recordings it had handed over. Both papers said PP World had not been paid. And so, pending payment, it was holding on to the recordings.

A newspaper clipping of Swadesh’s story on the academy. Photo: The Wire.

A newspaper clipping of Swadesh’s story on the academy. Photo: The Wire.

 

It was cavalier behaviour from the Academy. Capturing performances by exponents like Jasraj, Ravishankar, Shivkumar Sharma, Jitendra Abhisheki, Girija Devi and Kishori Amonkar, these recordings are a part of India’s cultural and civilisational history.

As outrage mounted, state culture minister Usha Thakur ordered an inquiry. When responsibility settled on Rahul Rastogi, a junior bureaucrat at the Academy who doubles up as its acting director, she punitively transferred him to a regional office at Chitrakoot.

He never went. As multiple sources in Madhya Pradesh’s culture department told The Wire, two senior RSS functionaries – Manish Pandey, who works as officer on special duty (OSD) to chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan and coordinates between his office and the RSS; and Hemant Muktibodh, the Sangh’s newly-appointed sah-kshetra karyavah in Madhya Pradesh (MP) and said to have special responsibility for culture – intervened on Rastogi’s behalf. The minister withdrew her order.

An official who had complained against Rastogi was transferred instead.

The Wire asked Thakur, Pandey and Muktibodh for their responses. None of them replied. And therein lies a tale.

A tale of favouritism?

Last November, The Wire got an email alleging corruption in MP’s culture department.

The sender, who wished to remain anonymous, alleged that while the state government is spending much more than before on cultural events like the Tansen Samaroh and Khajuraho Dance Festival, a large percentage of that amount is being siphoned by a clique of officials in the department.

Most tenders for organising these events go to a Bhopal-based proprietorship firm called Phoenix Networks, alleged the email. In tandem, it said, most performing slots at these functions go to a handful of artists, even as other musicians in the state struggle to survive.

The world of classical music is rife with factions and jealousy and claims of favouritism and patronage are not uncommon. Nevertheless, The Wire took a closer look at these allegations. A first round of interviews in November was followed by a reporting trip to Bhopal and further queries in Delhi in March; which in turn was supplemented with more phone interviews and secondary research, trying to test what the sender had written. 

Here is what we found. A small group of artists does indeed perform frequently at these events. In 2021, Phoenix Networks did bag many tenders floated by the state culture department. As local media has reported as well, a set of clauses in those tenders makes it easy for bureaucrats to dissuade some firms from participating, and to favour some firms during bidding. 

The images below show the names of firms which bagged its latest set of tenders. Six of 11 tenders went to Phoenix Networks. 

At one level, this is an odd tale. When a company bags government contracts with inordinate frequency, we expect to find a politician or bureaucrat misusing his or her position. Alternatively, we think the firm has suborned the department. What we have in Madhya Pradesh is different. 

Here, a clutch of junior bureaucrats are said to be slipping tenders to a firm they created. 

Private gains, public losses

This annexation of tendering has come with wider collateral damage. 

The missing recordings are just one instance. When it was created, MP’s culture department was meant to be a patron of the arts. Today, it’s a very different creature. 

On one hand, supported by a spike in the state’s allocation for art and culture preservation from Rs 10.5 crore in 2011-12 to Rs 191.47 crore in 2022-23, the department is spending much more than before on events. “The budget for Tansen Samaroh used to be Rs 25 lakh,” said a Bhopal-based employee of the culture department. “That has now climbed to Rs 3.5 crore.” 

Expenditure on salaries and scholarships, however, has barely budged. Take Chakradhar Dance Academy, set up in 1981 to revive Kathak. The salary of its guru (the academic head) is Rs 35,000 a month, said a person familiar with the academy on the condition of anonymity. “Students’ monthly scholarship is Rs 3,000. The musicians who play during practice get Rs 6,000 a month. How can anyone support a family on such a sum?”

Teaching aids are missing. “The library is gone,” he said. “If any researcher comes to us, we cannot point them towards any books. Saaz purey chale gaye. We had such a rich history – albums, photos – ab kuch nahin hain (now there is nothing). We had pictures and recordings of Mallikarjun Mansur, the Dagars, Birju Maharaj, Raja Chatrapati Singh. People like them used to come for our tests. Where are all those pictures and recordings?”

In other ways too, musical instruction is suffering. The Khayal Kendra is closed. So is the Sarangi Kendra. As is the Sangeet Vidyalaya. The Dhrupad Kendra is open but has no students. Chakradhar has students but even their meagre scholarships have not been paid for two years.

With a small number of artists bagging most slots at these festivals, even established musicians find it hard to make ends meet.“People close to them get lakhs,” said a Bhopal-based Dhrupad vocalist. “People like me eat chutney-roti.”

This decay started around 2011 when BJP leader Laxmikant Sharma became culture minister. It has, however, continued even after he left the department. 

BJP’s Laxmikant Sarma. Photo: PTI/File

In subsequent years, even when demands for remedial action were made, as in the case of the recordings, corrective action was scuttled by senior government and Sangh officials.

How it all began

At first glance, MP’s Sanskriti Parishad sits in the middle of a bewildering flowchart.

It reports to the state culture department and has, in turn, as many as 13 cultural bodies – like the Ustad Alauddin Khan Academy and Adivasi Lok Kala Academy – spanning music, dance and literature reporting to it. These academies, in turn, are home to centres (kendras). The Alauddin Khan Academy, for instance, is home to the Dhrupad Kendra, Khayal Kendra and Chakradhar Dance Academy.

For decades now, these academies have organised cultural events and festivals. The Ustad Alauddin Khan Academy organises the Tansen Samaroh and Khajuraho Dance Festival. Apart from overseeing Bhopal’s tribal museum, the Lok Kala Academy organises festivals like Lokrang and Nimad Samaroh.

One afternoon in Delhi, needing to understand the logic underpinning this matrix of institutions and festivals, The Wire met Ashok Vajpeyi at his office near IIT Delhi. In the 1970s and 1980s, the now-retired IAS officer, working under Congress leader Arjun Singh, had created this arrangement.

Madhya Pradesh was created from the remnants of the Central Provinces after Vidarbha was given to Maharashtra, said Vajpeyi that afternoon. “We had Mahakaushal, Chhattisgarh, Vindhya Pradesh, Bhopal and Madhya Bharat. Each had its own cultural traditions. We had two major gharanas – Gwalior and Maihar. We had famous painters – M.F. Husain, S.H. Raza, M.S. Bendre. And yet, with the exception of tribal art from Bastar, MP did not feature in the cultural map of India.”

In 1972, Singh and Vajpeyi decided to try and change that. To this day, opinion is split over their motivations. Was this Nehruvian idealism, with the state seeking to expand people’s cultural horizons? Or, given that this was a time of tumult with price-rise agitations, the national railway strike, the JP Movement and the declaration of Emergency, was this an attempt at diversion? Or was this about Singh’s own political career? “He wanted to be seen as a patron of culture,” a Dhrupad singer in Bhopal told The Wire. “He hoped this would help him in his prime ministerial ambitions.”

By 1972, Vajpeyi had finished his tenure as collector and moved to Bhopal. Knowing his interest in culture, Singh, MP’s education minister at the time, made him a deputy secretary in the department with special responsibility for culture. “(Singh) did not understand classical music but thought it needed to be nurtured,” said Vajpeyi.

Over the next 18 years, the two created the institutional design we see till today. 

Former Madhya Pradesh chief minister, the late Arjun Singh. Photo: PTI/File

The patron of arts

Academies and kendras were set up with specific mandates. 

India’s tradition of Sanskrit theatre was on the wane – and so, the MP government created the Kalidasa Academy for research and renewal of Sanskrit traditions of theatre. 

A similar impulse resulted in the Chakradhar Dance Academy. “Kathak was in danger of oblivion,” said Vajpeyi. “And so, this was a training institution.” Similarly, the Adivasi Kala Parishad was set up to focus on the state’s rich folk and tribal art traditions.

In each centre, the focus was on teaching. At the Dhrupad Kendra, the two great Dagar brothers – Zia Mohiuddin and Zia Fariduddin Dagar – were installed as gurus. Each year, five students would be inducted and trained in the tradition for four years. 

Festivals played a complementary role. In music, the department created Aarambh and Tansen. Apart from these, divisional and district-level utsavs were started. These helped the state identify talent, and offered artists a way to establish themselves.

Talented youngsters would be invited to Aarambh. The ones who shone there would be invited to Tansen. “Whenever a person wasn’t ready for Tansen,” said Vajpeyi, “They would be taken to the district and divisional utsavs where they would be paired with a senior. The youngster would sing for maybe 45 minutes or an hour. The senior would sing for 1.5 to 2 hours.”

Similar arrangements worked elsewhere. “Every year, we would do an annual Kathak festival and seminar. That was Ghungroo,” said Vajpeyi. “If someone was very good, they would be invited to Khajuraho.”

In tandem, Vajpeyi insulated academies from political and administrative interference. Directors were chosen not by the government but by eminent artists. They did not report to bureaucrats in the culture department but to Vajpeyi directly. 

Slowly, these institutions became extraordinary – drawing both talent and crowds. “They hosted cultural figures like Nirmal Verma, Agyeya, J. Swaminathan, B.V. Karanth, Habib Tanvir, the Dagars, Mallikarjun Mansur,“ said the Dhrupad singer in Bhopal. “The who’s who of Indian art and culture came to MP.”

The press and academic circles took note. In 1982, when the Charles Correa-designed Bharat Bhawan opened in Bhopal, said Vajpeyi, as many as 100,000 people flocked to see it. Bhopal, at that time, had a population below 9 lakh.

Riddled with coteries and corruption, most state-sponsored art festivals in India are underwhelming events. For close to 18 years, Madhya Pradesh was an exemplar of what the state could achieve. 

Then started the troubles

What is the useful life of an institution in India?

In the case of MP’s culture department, things ran more or less smoothly till 1990. Arjun Singh had become chief minister in 1980. He ceded space to Motilal Vora between 1985 and 1988 – and then reclaimed the chair till 1989. In 1990, Vajpeyi too left MP to join the Union government. With their exits, the department lost both autonomy and vision.

Less informed about culture, the bureaucrats who succeeded Vajpeyi tinkered with the original design. The Sanskriti Parishad was created, with a bureaucrat junior to the culture secretary heading it, and directors were told to report there. 

Centres continued to organise their events. In the absence of tight supervision, however, corruption reared its head. But given the low allocations, it stayed small in scale.

Larger changes were afoot in MP – and India. In 1990, the BJP came to power in the state till it was dismissed in the post-Babri crackdown in December 1992. Digvijaya Singh became chief minister in 1993 and held power for two terms.

He wanted the culture department to be revived but didn’t allocate enough resources, said Vajpeyi.

Then came Uma Bharti in 2003. Under her, D.P. Sinha, a former bureaucrat who was also a part of the RSS’s Sanskar Bharti, became the new head of Bharat Bhawan. He had hit the headlines in 2000 for halting the filming of Deepa Mehta’s Water. He was also amongst those who assailed M.F. Husain for his paintings of Hindu gods and goddesses.

Untitled (Arjuna and Krishna) by M.F. Husain.

During his watch, bhajans were sung in Bharat Bhawan for two Hindu brothers killed in the post-Babri firings; rainwater “gushed” into the building’s storeroom damaging as many as 3,000 paintings by M.F. Husain, J. Swaminathan, Manjeet Bawa and others; and the institution saw a turf battle in 2007, which saw Sinha refusing to step down.

By then, Uma Bharti had been replaced as chief minister by Babulal Gaur, who in turn had been supplanted by Shivraj Singh Chouhan in 2005. Budget allocations, however, stayed low. Just Rs 2.42 crore in 2006-07. In the years ahead, they would rise.

A pernicious evolution in government tendering

What happened next weakened the department in a different way.

Under Gaur, Laxmikant Sharma became culture minister. He held this post till 2008 when he was given the higher education portfolio. The state witnessed the Vyapam scam while he was education minister.

Also read: MP Marriage Assistance Scheme Scam: EOW Investigating 20 Banks, 93 Gram Panchayats

During Sharma’s stint in culture, a clutch of junior bureaucrats became powerful. In The Wire’s conversations with artists, local event managers, employees and ex-employees of the culture department, four names come up most often – Shriram Tiwari, Sunil Mishra, Rahul Rastogi and Ashok Mishra. 

Shriram Tiwari, said a litterateur in Bhopal, was an employee at the MP Film Development Corporation who was appointed trustee of the newly-formed Swaraj Bhawan by Sharma. Rahul Rastogi and Ashok Mishra were clerks in the Adivasi Lok Kala Parishad. As for Sunil Mishra, he worked in the culture department. 

A senior executive in a Bhopal-based event management firm attributed the rise of these bureaucrats to a larger evolution in the political economy of government tendering in MP. The executive requested that his name be withheld.  

When the BJP came to power, its ministers – like their predecessors in the Digvijaya Singh government – did not know much about their new assignments. This heightened their dependance on bureaucrats. “Every department has (mid-level) bureaucrats who know how to please their boss, the contractor and the political system,” said the executive. “With ministers – and senior bureaucrats – turning to them for trouble-shooting, such employees accumulated power.”

While awarding tenders, such bureaucrats had earned small commissions. This had slowly changed, said the executive. “These bureaucrats had begun thinking, ‘I get 3% from this businessman. What if I tell him to take my unemployed nephew as a partner?’.”

Businessmen went along – such arrangements bind officials to them. 

Then came the next iteration. “Bureaucrats began thinking ‘I know how the business is done. I know the costs and the percentages’,” said the executive. “They began poaching employees from contractors, and floating their own companies.”

In some cases, they poached employees from existing vendors. In others, they bought tools of the trade, and began renting them out to bidders. 

This happened, said the executive, in department after department. It happened in culture as well. Given its relatively esoteric nature, even senior bureaucrats were clueless about it. 

The mid-level bureaucrats emerged as trouble-shooters. 

The rise of Phoenix Networks

In the years that followed, the department saw some major changes. 

The responsibility of organising events was taken away from the academies and centralised with the department. “Academies could no longer organise their own events,” said a RSS member who used to work in the department.

This decision is puzzling. In MP, government tendering for events is handled by Madhyam, a part of the Department of Public Relations. The culture department, however, managed to keep tendering with itself. 

The Wire wrote to Usha Thakur, MP’s minister with responsibility for culture, state culture secretary Sheo Shekhar Shukla and Aditi Kumar Tripathi, who heads Sanskriti Parishad, asking them about the logic underpinning both these decisions – to centralise events with itself, and to resist further centralisation with Madhyam. This article will be updated when they answer. 

In tandem, from 2012 onwards, said a former employee of the culture department, a company called Phoenix Networks began bagging most tenders floated by the department. It was set up in 2011 by Animesh Mishra. 

In MP’s event management circles, there is much speculation about the origins of Phoenix Networks.

Multiple sources told The Wire that Animesh Mishra runs Phoenix in partnership with one Hemant Sharma. Certainly, the latter’s Facebook page has culture department bureaucrats congratulating him for events organised by Phoenix.

Hemant Dekate, a culture department official, compliments Hemant Sharma for an event being organised by Phoenix Networks.

Animesh Mishra, a former employee of the culture department told The Wire, used to earlier work with a company called Vision Force, an event management company in Bhopal. This is when he first came in touch with both Laxmikant Sharma and various bureaucrats in the department. Shortly thereafter, Phoenix Networks was started. 

The Wire contacted Animesh Mishra asking him about the rise of Phoenix – and if Hemant Sharma is his partner. He did not respond.

When the Vyapam scam broke in 2013, The Wire was told, the junior bureaucrat Shriram Tiwari came under a cloud – along with Laxmikant Sharma – and wasn’t given an extension after retirement.

With that, control over tendering moved to Sunil Mishra, Ashok Mishra and Rahul Rastogi.

The Wire asked Ashok Mishra, Rahul Rastogi and Shriram Tiwari, to comment on these statements – Sunil Mishra is no more, he passed away after testing positive for COVID-19. The first two didn’t respond. Tiwari replied to The Wire’s email calling these questions inconsistent, factless and false. “Asangat, tathyaheen tatha mithya.” Sent an email for further elaboration, he did not elaborate further. 

His response, however, militates against what a clutch of artists, current and former bureaucrats told The Wire.

The question of favouritism

Consider the department’s tenders in 2021.

It doesn’t float a single tender for an event. It floats 10-odd tenders, one for each aspect of an event – tents, stage, lights and photography. 

And so, in December 2021, it floated 11 tenders. As the document pasted at the top shows, Phoenix won six of these. A clutch of other firms won the rest. But take a closer look and you will find common ownership in some of these firms.

Film Nice Photo Labs and Films, Bhopal.
Lighting Bijli Bhawan, Bhopal
Manpower supply Ujjain Dreams, Ujjain
Photography and Videography 1. Phoenix Networks, Bhopal;
2. Unique Communication and Advertising;
3. Tiranga Photo Point
Sound 1. Phoenix Networks;
2. Bijli Bhawan.
Tents 1. Phoenix Networks;
2. Sajawat Tent House, Bhopal
Website design CRISP Society, Bhopal
Printing 1. Phoenix Networks;
2. Suvidha Enterprises, Bhopal
Flex printing 1. Phoenix Networks;
2. Suvidha Enterprises
Stage decoration Phoenix Networks
Taxi services
 No winner

 

Hemant Sharma also owns Suvidha Enterprises. 

Apart from Phoenix, Sharma also runs Suvidha Enterprises

When contacted on phone, Sharma refused to share his e-mail address. He confirmed, however, that the Suvidha Enterprises located at Soumya Heritage is his company.

Both Bijli Bhawan and Sajawat Tent House are run by Satya Prakash Agrawal, his son Rajiv Agrawal and their family members. On the Justdial page for Sajawat Tenthouse, the phone number ending with 41273 belongs to S.P. Agrawal.

 

“He is close to Ashok Mishra and Rahul Rastogi,” said an employee of the culture department. The Wire asked Rastogi to comment. There was no response. When contacted, Satya Prakash Agrawal asked this reporter to take the firm’s email address from Rajiv Agrawal. The Wire asked the latter – on phone and message – for the email address. It was not shared. 

In tandem, charged the event management executive, the culture department has resisted calls to float a single big tender. “Around 2018-19, there was a suggestion that the department club all these services into one tender,” he said. “But that would bring new competition into the fray. And so, they got that move scrapped.”

The Wire asked the department to respond. This article will be updated when it answers.

How to favour companies

This concentration of winners is a puzzle. MP doesn’t lack event management companies. And yet, a handful of firms like Phoenix win year after year.

To understand why, The Wire spoke to four individuals who have bid for culture department auctions. 

The first two run flex printing businesses. The third is a photographer. The fourth provides manpower. Speaking on condition of anonymity, all four said the department tries to dissuade participation in its tenders. 

“The Earnest Money Deposit is very high,” said one owner of the flex printing business. “It’s Rs 1 lakh for a Rs 10 lakh tender. The norm is about 2-5%.” The price of the tender document is high as well, he said. “It is not Rs 500 or Rs 1,000 but 5,000.”

In the document appended below, the tender value is Rs 75 lakh. The earnest money deposit? Rs 7.5 lakh. 

Flex Printing Tender by The Wire on Scribd

Apart from these, he said, the department delays payments. “I am due Rs 60,000 but have been paid only Rs 20,000,” he said. He also complained of opacity. “We qualified on all parameters but we were rejected in the technical bid. No explanation was given.”

Tenders also come with clauses which support favouritism.

The Wire inspected 10 of the 11 tenders floated last year by the department. Six of these came with a striking clause: “Keeping the work’s importance in mind, the culture department reserves the right to get the work done by other firms which fulfilled the conditions for the tender. No opposition or claims by rival firms will be entertained in this regard.”

“They wanted us to give an affidavit agreeing to this condition,” said the flex printer. “I objected. What is the point of being L1? If I cannot do the work then give the work to L2. At the very least, though, I should have the right of first refusal.”

The Wire asked the department to respond. The Wire also asked why this clause can be seen only in flex printing, stage design, lighting, sound, tenting and taxis but not in photography, printing, manpower supply and film-making. This article will be updated when it responds.

Or take the department letter announcing the winners. Saying firms from across the world can bid for these tenders – notwithstanding the fact that all the documents The Wire saw were in Hindi – the committee said these tenders should be seen as global tenders. 

For this reason, it says, if only one firm participates or qualifies in these bids, its bid should not be disqualified. 

The department wants its tenders to be considered global tenders. It didn’t, however, reply to questions asking if its tenders are floated in languages other than Hindi.

This assertion, which echoes the recent NDA decision that single bid tenders should not be summarily rejected, complements the first clause. A firm bagging a culture department tender might not get work. If they stop participating, the sole firm which participates can get the tender anyway. 

The Wire asked the department to explain these two conditions. It also asked if tenders are floated in languages other than Hindi.

That is not all. As reported by The Sootr, an online journalism portal in Bhopal, the department also defines other bid conditions like financial eligibility and qualifying documentation in a manner that benefits some firms.

Indian Art Moves Into the Multi-Billion Dollar Crypto Tokens Market

Two small South Asian art and collectibles auction houses, Prinseps and Artiana, launched NFTs last week. Big auction houses are becoming cautious about South Asia digitals.

Indian modern art is beginning to appear in the astonishing digital market as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that can suddenly fetch millions of dollars – even though they exist somewhere out in the crypto stratosphere of Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains and you can’t hang them on your wall as one-off creations.

Two relatively small South Asian art and collectibles auction houses, Prinseps of Mumbai and Dubai-based Artiana, launched NFTs last week. Others are planning launches and exploring the potential, trying to assess the appeal of the little-understood technology to existing art collectors and a wider range of speculative digital buyers.

Prinseps has auctioned small relatively low-priced figurative works (right) painted in the late 1940s by Gobardhan Ash, a little-known but significant Bengal artist. Artiana has a fixed price sale of larger more expensive works by better-known Sakti Burman, who lives between Paris and Delhi and is still actively painting.

A different sort of NFT sale is planned by Kent Charugundla, a New York-based leading collector of Indian art and a blockchain specialist, with a massive work by the revered M.F. Husain. (He talks about that with Prinseps curators and others on this YouTube session that also covers the Gobardhan Ash works.)

Many traditional collectors of Indian modern art are mystified and scathing about NFTs, which use the same technology as crypto currencies such as bitcoin to create a certificate of ownership over a specific digital file that cannot be copied or forged.

Pratap Bose, a long time Mumbai-based collector and dealer, who bought several of the tokens in the Prinseps auction, sees them as a good investment. “Like the stock market, it’s taking a punt,” he says, adding that much of Indian art is undervalued so there is strong potential.

For artists, the NFTs provide a way to benefit from the often substantial increases in prices that come after their works are initially painted and sold. In some countries, including the UK and EU, artists benefit from resale rights that give a percentage commission on their works in the secondary professional market. This lasts through their lifetime and for 70 years after their death. That does not apply in India, which will increase artists’ potential interest in having their works offered as tokens.

Estimates of NFT sales globally last year range from $18 billion to $25 billion, up from $94.9 million in 2020. They vary “from cartoon apes to video clips” (as Reuters put it) with images, videos and even lands in virtual worlds.

Also read: India Shouldn’t Throw Out the NFT Baby With the Crypto Bathwater

The tokens broke onto an unsuspecting art world in March 2021 when a jpeg file collage of tiny digital sketches done daily for over 13 years by South Carolina contemporary artist Beeple, sold for $69.3 million at Christie’s. It had been launched with a $100 bid just two weeks earlier. The FT reports that “the artist, whose given name is Mike Winkelmann, summarised his reaction to the sale with a tweet: ‘holy f..k’ ”.

Major auction houses and artists have cashed in on the craze, but they seem wary of bringing South Asian art to the virtual table. Christie’s, Bonham’s and Sotheby’s have not yet decided what to do. Saffronart, the Mumbai-based market leader, is focussing instead on reinventing auctions with a new platform that Dinesh Vazirani, the founder and ceo, says he plans to launch next month.

Deepanjana Klein, the head of Christie’s South Asian art business, gave me the best logic for what is happening: “NFTs are an additional art form, such as photography, installations and digital art or AI that entered the art world at different moments in time,” she said. They were “about democratisation of art and sharing of the digital art which goes with the NFT – anybody can download the art but the token belongs to only one person”.

The democratisation comes from everyone being able to access the token on the internet, while only the buyer has ownership of the token and can sell it – though arguably that can also be said of ordinary paintings whose images can be accessed and shared by anyone on the internet. The NFT owner can of course print out the image and put it on a wall, knowing he or she owns the digital token. The original painting could sometimes also be bought.

That is what Prinseps offered on January 14 in their auction of both the original painting and an NFT of 35 works by Gobardhan Ash (1907-1996). The paintings, oil on board and gouache on board or paper, varied in size, typically about 13in x 11in, and went for Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 lakh or approx $670 to $1,340. The tokens fetched Rs 12,500 to Rs 35,000 – $170 to $470. That is in line with some market calculations that the tokens will fetch 25-30% of the original art. (Catalogue and explanation here)

Prinseps decided to launch itself into NFTs with Ash’s works from the 1940s because it felt his small paintings were in tune with the cryptopunk images’ primitive style and vibrant colours that fuelled last year’s enormous NFT growth. The works “were very avant-garde for the time – and 70 years later cryptopunks become commonplace,” says Brijeshwar Gohil, a Prinseps curator.

Some of Prinseps buyers went on January 14 for both the original and the token, while others chose only one. A few collectors tried to win as many as possible, judging by the frequency that some “alias numbers” appeared on the auction website during the bidding.

Among them was Bose, a former top advertising executive. He says that Ash is an under-recognised Bengal artist “who never got his due”. That intrigued him, not for hanging works on the walls of his home but as an crypto investment.

Prinseps’ next NFTs auction is likely to be fashion sketches by Bhanu Athaiya (1929-2020), a film costume designer and Oscar winner, whose works it has sold earlier.

While Prinseps did a deal with Ash’s estate for the NFT rights and mounted the auction on its own website with purchases payable in Indian rupees, Artiana has worked out an arrangement with Sakti Burman and his family to sell 40 NFTs on the OpenSea crypto website. The works are priced in OpenSea’s Ethereum crypto currency, accompanied by the conventional currency equivalents – roughly $20,000 to $40,000.

The dollar rates were negotiated by Lavesh Jagasia, who runs Artiana, with Burman according to what the artist felt he should receive relative to current market values – and what the buyers might accept, given that this is the first such Indian sale.

Jagasia says Burman’s works are specially suited to NFTs because of the fresco-like images produced by artist’s marbling oil on paper and canvas technique, which the artist was using between the 1980s and 2015.

An early 1981 (154x114cm) work in the series achieved the artist’s record auction price of $330,000 [approximately Rs 2.4 crore (Rs 24 million)] in an Artiana sale last October. The paintings vary in size from 116x89cm to 162x130cm and sold, Artiana says, over the 35 years for between Rs 50 and 85 lakhs or $67,000 to $114,000 at current currency conversion rates.

The originals of the 40 works are now in private collections and Artiana is trying to find the owners so that it can offer them the NFT of their paintings. That process will end on February 8 (Burman’s 87th birthday), when the unsold tokens will be generally available on the OpenSea website.

The other current NFT investment offering, that lasts through 2022, is of tokens for a famous 60ft x 10ft mural, Lightning, by M.F. Husain, one of India’s leading modernists and a member of the mid-1900s Progressives. Charugundla bought the work, which was painted in 1975 and is Husain’s largest work, direct from the artist in 2002. It consists of 12 panels depicting galloping horses, a Husain favourite.

The NFT “drop” is on a special platform lightning.io with Prinseps helping on marketing. Later secondary sales will be on OpenSea. Investors can buy small random parts or “traits” of NFTs at prices that Charugundla says will be set relatively low. Buyers who manage to assemble what is called a “royal flush” of 62 “traits” will be given an NFT of the whole work that can later be traded.

Although the virtual currency world has hit headlines because of astronomic increases in values like Beeple’s $69.3 million sale, the craze for cryptopunks images was built on very low prices, which Prinseps has echoed with its Ash works. It remains to be seen whether there is a virtual market stretching up into the $20,000 to $40,000 that Artiana wants for its Burmans, and how much speculation there is on the Husain.

Scepticism remains. The total market value of NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain is held by just 9% of the accounts, according to one expert, rebutting the idea that they somehow democratically spread the assets widely.

The Washington Post reported last March that MetaKovan, who paid the $69.3 million, was in fact driving up the value of NFTs he had created earlier. He had bought 20 other works by Beeple for $2.2 million, divided them into 10m blockchain-based tokens, and sold 25% of them to the public.  As bids for the new work kept rising, so did the value of those tokens, which reached about $51 million by March 11, the day he won the Christie’s auction.

The Post’s conclusion? “The recent frenzy around digital art may be less a sign of an artistic revolution than a gold rush into highly speculative blockchain technology.”

This article was originally published on Riding the Elephant.

Dance Pioneer Astad Deboo Dead at 73

The dancer was renowned for marrying Kathak and Kathakali into a unique form.

Mumbai: Contemporary Indian dancer Astad Deboo, renowned for marrying Kathak and Kathakali into a unique form, died here on Thursday, his family said. He was 73.

“He left us in the early hours of December 10, at his home in Mumbai, after a brief illness, bravely borne,” the family announced on social media.

“He leaves behind a formidable legacy of unforgettable performances combined with an unswerving dedication to his art, matched only by his huge, loving heart that gained him thousands of friends and a vast, number of admirers,” it said.

The announcement said, “The loss to the family, friends, fraternity of dancers, both classical and modern, Indian and international, is inestimable. May he rest in peace. We will miss him.”

Astad Deboo and his troup of Pung Cholom drummers of Manipur perform ‘Rhythm Divine’ at the Annual Ananya dance festival at Old Fort in New Delhi. Photo: PTI/Vijay Verma

Deboo is noted for creating a modern dance vocabulary that was uniquely Indian.

He once said there was a time when most Indians saw his style as “too western” while westerners found that it was “not Indian enough”.

His innovative style of Indian dance may have raised some eyebrows in the 1970s and 80s, but the 1990s saw people embrace this new idiom.

Born on July 13, 1947 in Navsari town of Gujarat, the dancer, who studied Kathak with guru Prahlad Das from a young age, and later Kathakali with guru E.K. Pannicker, described his style as “contemporary in vocabulary and traditional in restraint”.

Also Read: India Still Lacks a Platform For Contemporary Dance: Astad Deboo

With a dance career spanning half a century, he had performed in over 70 countries, including solo, group and collaborative choreography with artistes, at home and abroad.

Known for his charitable endeavours, Deboo worked with deaf children, both in India and abroad for two decades.

In 2002, he founded the Astad Deboo Dance Foundation which provided creative training to marginalised sections, including the differently-abled.

Deboo also forayed into other art disciplines, like films, choreographing for directors such as Mani Ratnam, Vishal Bhardwaj and legendary painter M.F. Husain’s Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities.

“He has created a dance-theatre style which successfully assimilates Indian and Western techniques,” said the citation for the Sangeet Natak Akademi award he received in 1995 for his contribution to contemporary creative dance. He was also a recipient of the Padma Shri in 2007.

At Auction of Nirav Modi’s Assets, M.F. Husain’s Painting Fetches Rs 13 Crore, His Highest Ever

As many as 40 items that went under the hammer on Thursday fetched a total of Rs 51 crore in the auction of assets seized by the Enforcement Directorate.

Mumbai: A Rolls Royce car, paintings of famous artists M.F. Hussain and Amrita Shergil, designer handbags and other luxury items belonging to fugitive diamond jeweller Nirav Modi garnered over Rs 51 crore in the second auction conducted on Thursday.

As many as 40 items went under the hammer on Thursday, which marks the completion of auction of assets seized by the Enforcement Directorate.

The auction was conducted by Saffronart on behalf of the deputy director, Enforcement Directorate, and was expected to garner a minimum of Rs 40 crore in proceeds.

A collection of 112 prized assets of Modi were put up for live and online auctions from March 3 to 5, which included major artworks by contemporary and modern Indian artists, designer handbags, luxury watches and cars.

While the online auction on March 3-4 garnered Rs 2.04 crore against the expected proceeds of Rs 52 lakh, the live auction on Thursday garnered Rs 51.41 crore more.

These assets, seized by the ED, were put on auction in an attempt to recover a part of the dues Modi owes to various banks.

According to officials from Saffronart, the ED would get Rs 53.45 crore from the proceeds of these two auctions.

Watch: The Nirav Modi and PNB Scam Explained

The lots that went under the hammer included legendary painter M.F. Hussain’s painting of ‘Battle of Ganga and Jamuna- Mahabharata 12’ which went for a record Rs 12 crore, the highest price received so far for the painter’s work.

Amrita Shergil’s rare 1935 painting ‘Boys with Lemons’, which was auctioned for the first time, sold for Rs 15.7 crore (USD 2.24 million).

V.S. Gaitonde’s tranquil 1972 painting was sold for Rs 9.52 crore while Manjit Bawa’s Untitled 1992 sold for Rs 6.16 crore.

Modi’s Rolls Royce Ghost witnessed a high demand, selling for twice its estimate at Rs 1.68 crore (USD 240,000).

Three India Art Auctions Miss Targets But Mumbai’s Pundole Exceeds Its Estimate

Auction houses are hoping that these results have been caused more by over-ambitious pricing than by deeper economic worries.

India’s economic woes and civil unrest appear to have had a negative effect on Indian art auctions, with three sales organised by Sotheby’s, Saffronart and AstaGuru producing unexpectedly poor results and failing to meet targets. Works on the front covers of two of the auctions failed to sell.

This is a significant setback because the artists were leading names such as Tyeb Mehta, S.H. Raza and M.F. Husain from the Bombay-based Progressives Artists’ Group of the late 1940s and 1950s, who dominates the top end of the Indian art auctions.

Only Pundole, a long-established Mumbai gallery, has had a successful auction, which is achieved by restricting the number of lots and prices and by choosing works that have not been offered at auctions recently.

Such a slump has not been seen for some years. Part of the reason will have been India’s declining rate of economic growth, which now stands at 4.5% compared with 8% last year, and the failure of the Narendra Modi government to provide the necessary boost while at the same time driving divisive Hindu nationalist policies that are causing unrest across the country.

Also read: An Artist’s Impression of Dystopian India

Sotheby’s was the first to hit problems in Mumbai on November 15 with a live auction that failed to gain momentum as the evening proceeded.

Abstract oil on canvas by V.S. Gaitonde.

Bidding on the top lot, a 60in x 40in abstract oil on canvas by V.S. Gaitonde, stopped at Rs 14 crore ($2m), well below an estimate believed to be around Rs 21 crore. This seemed surprising, coming after a successful Rs 26.9 crore ($3.79) sale, including buyer’s premium, of a Gaitonde in a Saffronart live Delhi auction in September.

The best result came for a depiction by F.N. Souza of The Last Supper (a favourite subject for Indian artists) that was sold for Rs6.86 crore ($960,000), well above the top estimate of Rs5 crore.

The auction’s sales totalled only Rs23.8 crore ($3.36m) compared with estimates of around Rs37 crore, and twelve of the 61 lots failed to find a buyer. That was far below the result of Sotheby’s first Mumbai auction in November last year when it notched up a total of $7.9m.

The sharp drop illustrates the vagaries of showpiece auctions in Mumbai – Christie’s withdrew from its pre-Christmas sales after a poor showing two years earlier.

Pundole came next with a live Mumbai auction on December 5. It had sensed about three months earlier that the market was weakening, so it reduced the number of lots it was offering to 40 compared with 88 in its previous sale four months earlier. Only two of the 40 had been seen in recent auctions. The prices were also lower than usual with a top estimate of Rs3 cores ($420,000) compared with four times that amount in August.

That work, an 82in x 176in acrylic on canvas by M.F. Husain titled 3Ms (Mad Onna, Mother Theresa, Mad Huri), was being sold by a member of the artist’s family so was being offered for the first time. It beat its top estimate with a hammer price of Rs3.5core, while a 38in x 23in oil on board by F.N.Souza sold for Rs3 core, double its middle estimate.

M.F. Husain’s ‘3Ms (Mad Onna, Mother Theresa, Mad Huri)’.

The total for the auction, with all 40 lots sold, almost doubled the estimate of Rs21.01 (Rs 24.17 crores including a 15 % Buyers Premium).

Next came a more ambitious two-day online auction by Mumbai-based Saffronart, the current market leader in South Asian modern and contemporary art, that closed on December 10 with four of the top six lots failing to meet their reserve prices.

Also read: ‘An Instrument is a Personal Thing’: Shubhendra Rao Hits Out at Air India For ‘Damaging’ Sitar

The two that did sell were both by S.H.Raza, the best being $462,000 (Rs3.23 crore), but works by M.F.Husain and Bhupen Khakhar, a currently fashionable gay artist, failed. Saffronart’s auction total was $1.8m (Rs12.66 crore) with 76% of lots sold that contrasted with previous better results.

Finally, in this run of auctions, Mumbai-based AstaGuru’s two-day online sale ended on December 20, having failed to sell its catalogue cover work, a striking 59in x 35.5in acrylic on canvas from Tyeb Mehta’s Rickshaw Puller series with an estimate of Rs 20 to 25 crore ($2.88m-£3.6m).

From Tyeb Mehta’s ‘Rickshaw Puller’ series.

Successful bids included an unusual view of the Last Supper by M.F. Husain that fetched Rs 3.45 crore ($499,999). The top sale, Man in City by Akbar Padamsee, went for Rs 3.62 crore ($524,999), well above the Rs 2-3 crore estimate.

Last Supper by M.F. Husain.

The auction houses are hoping that these results have been caused more by over-ambitious pricing than by deeper economic or other worries, and that interest and sales will pick up at the annual India Art Fair at the end of January and then with sales in the spring.

The article was originally published on the blog Riding the Elephant. You can read it here. 

Indian Art Touches New Records in Prices and Sales in Auctions

Top Delhi collector pays 15 times the estimate for an oil on canvas painting of a sensual figure by Hemendranath Mazumdar at Christie’s.

Saffronart, India’s leading online auction house, today beat Christie’s, the traditional market leader, with a two-day auction of South Asia modern and contemporary art that yielded sales of $11.38 million (Rs 75.14 crore) – well over double the £4.53 million ($6.07m) achieved by Christie’s earlier this week at its London live auction on June 12. Saffronart’s total included a new world record auction price of $3.998 million for a work by Tyeb Mehta, one of India’s top selling artists.

Hemendranath Mazumdar’s Abhiman (Wounded Vanity) fetched a total price of $732,000.

But Christie’s produced the surprise result of the week with an astonishing hammer price of £450,000 – 15 times the £25,000-35,000 estimate – for Abhiman (Wounded Vanity), a sensual female figure by Hemendranath Mazumdar (1894-1948), whose works were often bought by India’s old maharajas in the last century.

Believed to have been bought by Kiran Nadar, India’s leading collector who has a large art museum in Delhi, the 32in x 16in oil on canvas fetched a total price of £548,750 ($732,000) including buyer’s premium. That was five to ten times the prices that have paid for similar works by the artist in other Christie’s auctions, and was inevitably a personal world record.

There is strong competition between the four or five main auction houses for South Asian art sales at a time when the top collectors are only interested in an artist’s best works and when it is becoming increasingly difficult to find lots of sufficient quality.

In sales three months ago, Mumbai-based Asta Guru, the most recent entry into the market, beat other Indian and international auction houses with a two-day on-line sale that yielded a total of Rs 89.16 crore ($13.93 million). Christie’s achieved $10.29 million in New York and Saffronart came third with a Rs 27.64 crore ($4.32 million) live Mumbai auction.

The Christie’s South Asian modern art sale started amazingly well but later showed signs of auction fatigue for some of the most famous mid-late 20th century “moderns” such as Syed Haider Raza, Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, and Maqbool Fida Husain, who failed to shine while older artists from the classical Bengal school did extremely well.

A 29.5in x 21.5in untitled oil on canvas by Ravi Ravi Varma (1848-1906) sold for $545,455
(Rs 3.60 crore).

Kiran Nadar (it is assumed) won the Mazumdar after just a few minutes of dramatic bidding that began at £24,000 and immediately jumped to £40,000. With just her and another bidder (possibly from the UAE) contesting by telephone, it then rose quickly through the hundred thousands and then in £30,000 jumps to the final figure that was made on the phone to Deepanjana Klein, Christie’s international department head.

Observers said that the purchaser had not expected such competition and tried to explain the price by pointing to the extremely fine detailed work, some in gold, on the woman’s bracelet and sari, and flowers in her hand and on the floor. Several people at the auction preview talked about how there were many similar portraits in Delhi and elsewhere by the highly productive artist.

Basically, it was a case of two determined bidders pushing up a price till one of them backed off. If only one of them had bid, the work would have probably gone for little more than £40,000.

That was the sixth lot in the Christie’s sale. The first three lots had also done well, albeit at lower levels. All by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), they went at several times the estimates. These works are regarded as non-exportable national art treasures in India (like the Ravi Ravi Varma above left) so realise a premium when sold abroad.

By contrast, the moderns by members of Mumbai’s Progressives group of artists that began in the 1950s did poorly. They usually dominate auction headlines but two by Raza and one by Husain failed to sell.

A 39in x 30in saffron coloured oil on canvas by Vasudeo S. Gaitonde (1924-2001).

The hammer price for a medium sized 39in x 30in saffron coloured oil on canvas (left) by Vasudeo S. Gaitonde (1924-2001), which was on the front cover of the auction catalogue, did not even reach the low estimate and sold after just a couple of desultory bids for £850,000 (£1.3 million including buyer’s premium).

Perhaps the most disappointing result was the £700,000 (£848,750 with the premium) achieved by a gigantic 10ft x 10ft red, black and white acrylic on canvas of a falling figure by Tyeb Mehta, one of the best selling Progressives (see image at the bottom of this article). That was far below the £1.2 million-£1.8 million estimate.

Too large for many private buyers to contemplate, the work has a memorable history. It was painted by Mehta in 1992 as the central backdrop for an Artists against Communalism sit-in at Mumbai’s Shivaji Park at a time when the city was being submerged by communal riots.

“Tyeb Mehta got up from a very sick-bed, against his doctor’s orders, and painted the outstanding blow-up of his traffic leitmotif ‘falling figure’ for the extensive back-drop of the stage,” the Economic Times reported at the time.

“The red that he uses is equally the colour of love, and of blood”, said Hugo Weihe in 2012 when he was Christie’s international director of Asian art, just before he auctioned the work in New York for $722,500. “This was the obsessive theme that moved him—human suffering—and it was a painting that was incredibly important to him. It represents what was at his core”.

Tyeb Mehta’s oil on canvas depicting Kali. Credit: Saffronart

Offsetting that low result for what most buyers would see as an iconic but difficult work, was the record price achieved by the Saffronart auction for Tyeb Mehta’s 67in x 54in oil on canvas. Depicting Kali, the often-violent goddess who represents the ultimate triumph of good over evil, it is one of only three works that Mehta did on this subject.

It was originally owned by Ebrahim Alkazi, one of India’s most famous and expert collectors, and was sold by Saffronart for Rs 5.72 crore, then a record price, in June 2007.

The bidding on this work – trackable because Saffronart’s website shows bids as they are made – was by two proxy potential buyers who, by 6pm (Delhi time) on the first day, had pushed the bids to Rs20.46 crore ($3.1 million). That was more in dollars than the hammer price of £2.3 million ($2.9 million) which produced Mehta’s existing record auction price of £2.74 million ($3.56 million, Rs 19 crore) including buyer’s premium in May last year at Christie’s in London.

So a record had already been made, but after that there was no more activity till a few minutes before the lot closed. Two bids then brought the price to a record of $3.998 million (Rs 26.38 crore) including buyers premium.

Its success helped 18-year old Saffronart celebrate its 200th auction with strong results, including good sales for the moderns that had been slow at Christie’s – the competition continues.

John Elliott is a Delhi-based journalist who writes a blog ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com

The Man Who Captured Shades of Bapu’s Dream

Touched by Gandhi’s genius, Toofan Rafai journeyed from poverty to worldwide acclaim as a painter and master of vegetable dyes. To mark a year of his passing, we bring you a rare, unpublished interview of the guru marked by his infectious cheer.

Touched by Gandhi’s genius, Toofan Rafai journeyed from poverty to worldwide acclaim as a painter and master of vegetable dyes. To mark a year of his passing, we bring you a rare, unpublished interview of the guru marked by his infectious cheer

gandhi dye

Credit: Carmen Artigas

Some days ago, while excavating my cassette collection as an artifact of an age that seems long gone, I found one tape that had been eluding me for the past eight years. It contained my interview of an extraordinary man in Ahmedabad whose name – Toofan Rafai – had captivated me the first time it was mentioned 22 years ago by the arts editor of The Economic Times, Sadanand Menon. Born in 1921 in Amreli (Gujarat) in a fakir’s family, Toofan went on to become an acclaimed artist and internationally renowned master of vegetable dyes and printing techniques that he was called upon to popularise through workshops in India and abroad. The 300 shades that he created, many out of waste like onion or pomegranate peel, were, in his own telling, the reflection of a great man’s influence on his life: Gandhi.

Toofan Rafai. Credit: Pinki Godiawala

Toofan Rafai. Credit: Pinki Godiawala

A memorable childhood meeting with ‘Bapu’ and the discovery, post-retirement, of a book Gandhi wrote on natural dyes, were significant turning points in Toofan bhai’s life. He said he had lived by the mantra Gandhi gave him: do not drive a vehicle, dress plainly, and wash your own clothes. It was his life’s mission to share his knowledge with as many institutions, people and students as possible.

Toofan bhai passed away in September last year. He was in his nineties. When I heard the news of his death, I remembered our meeting – how his eyes had smiled when he told me about the dirty topi (cap) on his head which drew ‘Bapu’s’ ire, the young nurse who helped him when he was injured at work, the ‘robots’ (commandoes) of Raisa Gorbachev who attended one of his vegetable dye workshops during the Festival of India in Moscow, and the Americans who were stunned by his lecture on feeding virgin cows mango leaves to get a deep yellow urine for dyeing. I also remembered the cassette that I had misplaced and felt miserable. (More so when I learnt that the reason why Toofan bhai had spent the last years of his life in the Muslim locality of Juhapura was because some Hindus in his old city neighbourhood, in the aftermath of the 2002 riots, disapproved of him giving drawing lessons to local girls and being a non-vegetarian.)

This year again, on October 2, my thoughts veered to Toofan bhai and his creativity that had been sparked by Gandhi’s genius in spinning threads for a new canvas – creativity anchored in a convergence of aesthetics, politics and solidarity that stands in stark contrast to the intolerance being witnessed in the country today. That I should find the recording of Toofan bhai’s interview around the time of Gandhi Jayanti seemed fitting, for his life did reflect the luminous hues that Gandhi had hoped to see in the Indians who would be born in freedom. Excerpts from the interview:

Q: In depth and breadth of experience you have had a most unusual life.
A: That is true. I come from a family of fakirs. No one in our family, in seven generations, had been associated with any work or labour. We lived on alms. My earliest memories are of asking for provisions like aata from Hindu families in the morning, from Muslim families in the afternoon, and for rotis in the evening.

Then at Bapu’s bidding a school for farmers – khedut shala– was set up in Amreli. I started going there. Studies also included helping farmers in the cotton fields, making the thread for baati (cotton wick), and dramas. I was a very good monitor and student. I remember the time when Bapu came to give away prizes. I was about nine years old and very excited that I would receive my prize from him.

Bapu came. A gaddi and takiya was ready for him. As my name was called out I started walking towards him. He was holding a big box. I looked at it and thought, that’s my prize. After bowing to him as I stretched out my hands for the prize, Bapu drew back. He said, you will not get this award. I was stunned. The conversation went like this:

Bapu: What are you wearing?

Toofan: khadi half-shirt, chaddi (shorts).

Bapu: No, what are you wearing on your head?

Toofan: Gandhi topi.

Bapu: That’s not a Gandhi topi.

Toofan: What you are wearing is a Gandhi topi, and what I am wearing is also a Gandhi topi.

Bapu: Your cap is frayed. It’s dirty around the edges, and there is dust and oil sticking on it. (It had not been washed for two years.) Where do you stay?

Toofan: Near the graveyard.

Bapu said, run to your mother this instant and tell her that I am angry that my topi has not been washed. So I raced to my mother and said, Ma, what have you done? Because you did not wash my topi I can’t get my prize. It is such a big dabba (box). My mother told me not to argue with Bapu if he did not give me the prize “because he is a great man”. Then she asked me to tell Bapu that while there was plenty of river water, poverty prevented her from buying soap to wash the topi. But she would use the local ‘khar’ to wash the topi regularly.

I ran all the way back and conveyed this to Bapu. He said theek hai (ok) and gave me the prize. I was tip-toeing back to my seat when he called me and said: ‘Mera jaan jalane ko yeh topi pahan ke kyon aaya’ (Why, by wearing this topi, are you trying to give me heartburn)? He asked me why I couldn’t wear another clean topi. So I said, kisi ke paas do topi hota hai kya? (Whoever heard of anyone having two caps?). Stunned, he asked the school to issue us new sets.

Bapu wanted to give us a lesson in hygiene. Because he was standing, everyone, including the collector, was standing respectfully. That was fun to watch. Then Bapu asked me if I went for the prabhat pheris (early morning rounds) with other children to spread the message that people should not drink tea. He was aghast to know that I had tea for breakfast even as I spread the message faithfully. We simply could not afford to buy milk. On Gandhi’s insistence, some rich farmers of the area agreed to give us milk daily for free. To this day I don’t drink tea or coffee, nor do I touch paan, supari or beedi.

What were your growing-up years like?

They were difficult. For instance, when I was about 15, a friend called me for his wedding saying he would be sitting on a horse, but I had togo for work in the evening. To support my parents, I sometimes worked for a wedding band, carrying a gaslight. As I walked with the gaslight that evening I realised that our band had been hired for my friend’s wedding. What a way to attend a friend’s marriage! The next day, seeing me doze in class, a student pointed me out to the teacher who slapped me and dismissed me from class. I told my mother that I would no longer beg for alms; I would work. I started doing odd jobs and later was employed in a seth’s household for which my family was promised Rs 40 after a period of two years! Happy with my work the sethani secretly gave me food to eat. But the seth was zalim (merciless); he would wear me out.

Later, when the family shifted to Mumbai, they took me along and gave me work as head mistri in their sawmill. That was the time when I met Husain (M.F. Husain) who painted cinema posters for a living. We both stayed near the red light area for that’s where the rooms were cheap.

On occasion when I travelled by local train I would see youngsters laughing, joking or playing cards and I would feel sad that my life was so hard. Once, seeing a boy cheating in a game of rummy I started helping the girl who was losing, and she started winning. The boy was so furious that he threw a banana peel on my face. I got off at the next station, crying and cursing God for the disparities he had created in society. I couldn’t concentrate on work that day and my hand came in the machine. I lost two fingers and was rushed to JJ Hospital.

When did things take a turn for the better?

In the hospital. I told the 19-year-old nurse who was looking after me that even though I was living by Gandhi’s mantra, boys my age could humiliate me so easily. It wasn’t fair. After telling me that in my profession people lose arms, not just two fingers, she brought me Sarat Chandra’s novels to read. When she got to know that painting was my passion she got me colours, paper and brushes. I should have been discharged after eight or ten days but she somehow kept me there for 40 days, giving me milk and fruits so that I could recuperate.

When I was discharged, she sent me to her brother, Prof. Fernandes at the JJ School of Arts. To cut a long story short, I finally became a student of fine arts and got my diploma in 1955 and also did a post-graduate course in mural decoration. After classes I worked at the factory.

Around that time the chief minister of undivided Maharashtra (Gujarat included), Jivraj Mehta, who was from my native place got to know that I was simultaneously studying and working. He offered to send me to France for two years. I refused for I could not leave my family in the lurch. Then the chief minister spoke to Pupul Jayakar who was largely responsible for handicraft revival post-independence and asked her to give me a government job in textile design so that I could get out of the factory job. In 1960, I started working at the Weaver Service Centre which was affiliated to the All India Handloom Board, doing research in dyeing and printing using natural dyes. After retiring in 1979, I was wondering what to do next when Bapu came to my aid once again.

How?

One day as I was walking in Ahmedabad I passed a pavement shop selling old books. Something made me stop. The book that had caught my eye was Gandhi’s rare text on natural dyes, Vanaspatiyon nu rang, which had originally been priced at six annas. I bought it there and then. For me the book is like the Koran and the Gita. I don’t allow anyone to make photostat copies of it also. Gandhi was far ahead of everybody in this respect. He felt that khadi and chemical dyes were a mismatch. (In fact he asked Prafulla Chandra Roy, who started Bengal Chemicals, to compile information on natural dyes.)

Pages from Gandhi's book on natural dyes and khadi. Credit: Carmen Artigas

Pages from Gandhi’s book on natural dyes and khadi. Credit: Carmen Artigas

I knew there and then that my mission was to develop a palette of vegetable dyes from flower, leaf, bark, root, and ‘waste’ like pomegranate seed and onion peel. I started developing shades and dyeing. Then I got wooden blocks and printed a sari. I showed it to Pupul Jayakar who gifted it to Indira Gandhi. Rukmini Arundale of Kalakshetra, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, and Mrinalini Sarabhai all asked for such saris printed in natural dyes. Ela behn (Ela Bhatt of SEWA) asked me to teach her girls. No one had worked like this on developing natural dyes. I developed 300 shades. In Bangladesh alone I found 80 shades. Because of the lush plant life made possible by Ganga ji, I found shades there that one cannot find in a sookha pradesh (arid place).

Developing 300 shades of vegetable dyes must be some sort of feat.

There haven’t been more than seven or eight colours in natural dyes, among them black, red, maroon, and yellow. Because of my training as a painter I knew how to blend, reduce, deepen and mix ingredients. Soon I was being called for workshops all over India; from the National Institute of Design to Santniketan to Banaras Hindu University to the Spastic Society of North India…you name it. I also started painting in natural dyes.

In 1987 Dashrath bhai [the renowned painter, photographer and designer] asked me to accompany him and the Indian contingent to the Festival of India at Moscow to conduct a workshop on vegetable dyes and printing techniques. Is tarah sansar main naam phailne laga hamara (My name started spreading in the world).

Something very interesting happened in Moscow. My stall was always crowded with people wanting to learn. One day – it was a Sunday – a group of Russian commandoes with guns and bayonets, who looked as if they ate a crane each for breakfast, burst into the stall and elbowed everyone out. I stood there quaking. Then four escort vehicles with flashing lights screeched to a halt at my stall. From the last car emerged Raisa Gorbachev, the First lady of the then USSR! I want to learn from you, she said. I told her to send the robots (commandoes) home but she said that was not possible. Seeing that she was holding the brush in the Chinese style I told her she did not know how to hold the brush. One of the robots told me I could not speak to her in that fashion. I told him she was my student and I could do so! Raisa was a very intelligent woman. Because of her I got to see the Czar’s treasure. I have never seen anything like it – what diamonds, dresses…

In which countries did you see a great curiosity for vegetable dyes?

An example of Rafai's work in natural colours, painted on the back of a greeting card and presented to the author. Credit: Chitra Padmanabhan

An example of Rafai’s work in natural colours, painted on the back of a greeting card and presented to the author. Credit: Chitra Padmanabhan

There was considerable enthusiasm in America, Japan and Germany. In fact during the 1990s I was being called to the US almost every year for workshops and lectures by various institutions, such as the Rhode Island School of Design, College of Art, Philadelphia and many other universities.

I still remember one lecture that I gave at Edison in the US in the early 1990s. I don’t think they had ever heard this kind of a talk!I told them that they needed to come to India to see the real laboratory in which natural dyes are made — that is, nature. I gave them an example: feed a virgin cow tender mango leaves in spring and the deep yellow of its urine would be a sight to see. Boil it, dip the cloth and you have it! That is my laboratory.

The colours that God has created in this world, our eyes have not even glimpsed them. There was a time when natural colours were used all over the world, and India led the way. It makes me sad to think that we can’t see the wealth we can create from what nature discards or what we discard. For instance, the amount of onion peel that is thrown away can be used by dyers to create a rich tint. Pomegranate peel, too, can be used to create a rich shade. Similarly, while the seed of the dholu flower in the Himalayan foothills is used for medicinal purposes, the flower itself, a very good colouring agent, is thrown away. Gandhi understood the link between colour, nature and culture.

As countries like Japan and Germany, having seen the cycle of chemical dyes, accelerate their efforts to build up a knowledge bank pertaining to natural dyes, it is possible someone from India may be influenced by them to start looking at the in-house wealth of knowledge. India has a bright future if someone looks at this aspect seriously. It is possible that I may not be alive to see this transformation. But I am confident that it will happen.

Husain at 100: Icon or Iconoclast, Maverick or Maestro?

MF Husain. Credit: Kiran Valipa Venkat/Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

MF Husain. Credit: Kiran Valipa Venkat/Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In 1947, a young unknown artist won a prestigious award at the Bombay Art Society’s annual exhibition. His name was Maqbool Fida Husain. Cut to 2015 and M.F. Husain is the poster boy for Google India’s homepage, reminding Netizens of the artists’ 100th birth anniversary. At the time of his death in 2011, no other artist would be as synonymous with contemporary Indian art as he was, no other would be as celebrated and subsequently as vilified.

Born in the pilgrimage town of Pandharpur, he studied briefly at the Indore College of Art before migrating to Bombay, where he eked out a living as a billboard painter. He was soon co-opted as one of the founder members of the Progressive Artists Group (PAG) by the rebellious Francis Newton Souza, who was itching to challenge the canons of academic and society painting prevalent at the time.

The ‘progressive’ in PAG was derived from the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA), a group of literary artists with communist leanings. Unlike the writers of the PWA who directly intervened in the socio-political debates and discussions of the time, the concerns of the artists in PAG were primarily painterly and revolved around reflecting the mood of a newly independent nation in a visual vocabulary that was both fresh and new.

The PAG metamorphosed into a multicultural organisation that cut across both social and religious lines, despite the horrors that Partition had unleashed only a few months earlier. Husain’s own family never toyed with the idea of migrating to Pakistan, so deeply invested were they in the idea of the newly independent India.

MF Husain, Varanasi III (1973). Credit: cea/Flickr CC BY 2.0

MF Husain, Varanasi III (1973). Credit: cea/Flickr CC BY 2.

Husain’s own commitment to this vision of a modern and syncretic culture found expression in the motifs that he used. He drew from both European Cubist and Expressionist movements as he did from Gupta sculptures and Chola bronzes. He was well versed in Indian mythology and in the late 1960s did a series of works on the Ramayana and Mahabharata. In an attempt to bring his art to the masses, he took the Ramayana paintings by bullock cart to a village near Hyderabad. Recounting the experience to art historian Yashodhara Dalmia he mentioned, “There were these six feet and ten feet high paintings of Hanuman and Ram strewn around and the villagers sat enthralled for about three hours while Borakatha singers sang the epic. No one asked where are Ram’s eyes or why a particular painting was done in a particular manner.” The artist also drew on popular culture and his love of Bollywood manifested itself in his pictures of Madhuri Dixit, who subsequently starred in the film Gaja Gamini, scripted and directed by him.

It was Husain’s uncanny ability to establish a connection with the masses that soon made him a household name. The boom in the Indian art market and the stratospheric prices his canvases commanded also did their bit in popularising his work. But as he garnered fame he also drew the ire of right wing forces ostensibly for his depiction of the Goddess Saraswati in the nude. The painting, which was done in 1976, went unremarked for several decades before suddenly becoming the cynosure of all attention in the 1990s. The Mumbai Police registered cases against him under IPC Sections 295(A) and 153(A) for outraging religious feelings and fostering enmity between religious groups while writ petitions were filed against the painter in several courts in Madhya Pradesh.

In Ahmedabad, Bajrang Dal workers barged into the art gallery of the Husain-Doshi Gufa and burnt several of Husain works’ reproduced in tapestry form. It is indeed ironic that it was not Partition but incidents such as these that forced the artist to flee the country, taking up residence in Qatar, where he finally renounced his Indian citizenship.