A section of the page from The Hindu website. The caption reads: "The black-and-white line drawing eminent artist M.F. Husain shared with The Hindu. Though this exemplar of secular art did not apply for it, he was conferred citizenship by Qatar."
N. Ram in The Hindu:
M.F. Husain, India’s greatest and most celebrated artist, has been conferred Qatar nationality – something that is very rarely given. The artist gave me this news from Dubai early Wednesday morning by reading out the few lines he had written on a black-and-white line drawing that he released to The Hindu.
“Honoured by Qatar nationality” but deeply saddened by his enforced exile and the need now to give up the citizenship of the land of his birth, which he has lovingly and secularly celebrated in his art covering a period of over seven decades. India does not allow dual citizenship, even though it has instituted the category of the ‘Overseas Indian Citizen.’ Mr. Husain will no doubt seek to acquire OIC status after completing the due procedures.
It is important to note that Mr. Husain did not apply for Qatar nationality and that it was conferred upon him at the instance of the modernising emirate’s ruling family. More:
Also in The Hindu: Art under fire by Chitra Padmanabhan
In The Indian Express, Georgina Maddox reviews “Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters and Writings.”
Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters and Writings (Two Volumes); Edited by Vivan Sundaram (Tulika Books, Rs 5,750)
From the black-and-white Marg magazine that he brought out in 1972 to two superbly packaged mega volumes in 2010 — artist Vivan Sundaram has single-mindedly orchestrated the making of the Amrita Sher-Gil myth. Connoisseurs will argue that an artist as feisty and outspoken as Sher-Gil does not deserve less. While many publications on the half-Indian, half-Hungarian artist have been greeted with plaudits, one wonders if the bottomless interiors of the Sher-Gil archive have been finally plumbed with this exhaustive volume that reproduces her diary entries, letters, photographs, sketches and paintings.
This latest offering from Sundaram — who is also Sher-Gil’s nephew — surpasses anything that may have been printed till date on her. Priced at Rs 5,750, the collector’s item is glossy but lacks the frivolity of earlier coffee-table books on Sher-Gil. It also moves ahead of heavy-handed academic writing that some of the earlier books have displayed. The novelty of this avatar lies in its format: it spans her short life of 28 years (1913-1941) in refreshing epistolary style. It is a story told through the artist’s letters and diary entries that begin in 1920 when Amrita was barely seven years old. More:
New Delhi: Fifteen years ago, when artist Orijit Sen produced India’s first graphic novel — a story about the Narmada valley dam protest movement — he was only able to print the book with the help of government funding, and distribution meant carrying copies of the book to stores and trying to explain why it didn’t belong in the children’s section.
“No publisher would consider publishing something like a comic book,” Sen said. “We were only able to publish it with the help of a small grant from the government, and the government didn’t know what we were using it for, obviously.”
The scene is different now.
Amid a boom in publishing and contemporary art, India’s comic book scene is undergoing a renaissance of its own. Once known only for the beloved Amar Chitra Katha series, which focused on Hindu mythology, today India’s comic book industry includes homegrown superhero sagas, modernized versions of classic myths and even postmodern tales of urban angst. More:
From Raj Comics: Saviour of Mumbai, Doga tries to save the country from another 26/11. A note left by a dying terrorist.. A virus has been activated..All the SIM cards of a particular phone company would turn into an explosive if used between 8:36 to 9:36 p.m. on 26/11 this year.
From The National:
The inevitable outpouring of mainstream “26/11” cultural production has yet to occur (although the Bollywood director Ram Gopal Verma surveyed the Taj Hotel’s burnt shell for material for his next film), but the first signs are showing up – in comics. In November, Raj Comics published 26/11, a fantastical re-imagining of the three days during which 10 gunmen stormed two five-star hotels and the Chhatrapati Shivaji train station, killing 166 people in the process. Though Raj Comics does not publish circulation figures, the comics they publish are probably among the most widely read comic books in India. In an interview with Tehelka magazine, Sanjay Gupta, Raj’s founder and studio director, estimated their circulation at about 70,000 copies per standard issue.
Scripted in street Hindi, with the action laid out in busy, multi-frame pages, each Raj Comics instalment features one of a cast of a nine primary characters – including the half-man, half-snake Nagraj and the brawny, dog-mask wearing vigilante Doga – tackling challenges ripped from the headlines. Recent Raj plots recount the discovery of nine dead children in the house of an upper-middle class family in a Delhi suburb; a scandal involving the sale of contaminated blood to hospitals; and even the fate of an imaginary winner of Indian Idol.
In 26/11, the real-life Mumbai attacks are only a precursor to an international plot involving Russian arms dealers, Somali pirates, and a fictitious Pakistani terror group, the Lashkar e Aaka, that is determined to hijack the INS Viraat, India’s sole aircraft carrier. Nagraj and Doga clear the city’s besieged hotels with relative ease, only to discover an unholy international criminal nexus that threatens to destroy all of its residents. More:
Booker prize winner Salman Rushdie is in Mumbai with film-maker Deepa Mehta for the film adaptation of his book Midnight’s Children. Excerpts from the Times of India:
On meeting Amitabh Bachchan: I’ve met Mr. Bachchan before, in New York, and at both meetings, he was a charming, gracious presence.
On asking Deepa Mehta to film the novel: Her passion for my work and my admiration of hers.
Does Midnight’s Children have a ‘filmable’ quality? Now that we have a screenplay we like, I would say that, yes, Midnight’s Children is eminently filmable. I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.
Monk memorizing under mango trees. Photo copyright: Nicholas Vreeland
Twenty-five years ago, Nicholas Vreeland, grandson of legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland, left New York for the quaint Rato Dratsang monastery in Mundgod, Karnataka, to become a Buddhist monk. When he returned home, his brother gifted him a Nikon camera. Vreeland discovered a passion for photography at 15, when he assisted noted photographer Irving Penn and spent a summer working with another cameraman, Richard Avedon. At Rato Dratsang, Vreeland rarely used the camera, except to photograph his surroundings. “I did not want to be the monk who went around taking photographs,” says Vreeland, 55, as he chooses 20 pictures shot at Dratsang for an exhibition at Delhi’s India International Centre.
Photos for Rato are on exhibit (click here to see the photos) at the India International Centre Annex in New Delhi from 13-18 January.
In Karachi, the men might buy the art, but it’s women — many single and young — who control the market. H.M. Naqvi at GlobalPost:
Karachi: Defying the global downturn in art and perhaps common sense, another gallery opened in Karachi last month, the second in three weeks. Both are run by women.
More intriguing than the dynamics of the market is the fact that the entire Pakistani art scene is run by women, single women.
Sumbul Khan is a spritely thirtysomething of vaguely Pathan extraction. She returned to Karachi several years ago after completing a masters in art history in the United States. After teaching art history and theory, she pitched a program on art in Urdu to Indus TV, the first independent channel in Pakistan. After the program was aired, the head of Indus TV, the legendary Ghazanfar Ali, asked her if she was interested in setting up a gallery in a cove of vacant rooms within the premises of MTV Pakistan (owned, in part, by Indus TV). Khan readily agreed. She named it Poppy Seed. More:
Raghava KK is a contemporary artist living and working in Bangalore. His paintings and drawings use cartoonish shapes and colors to examine the body, society, our world. Painting from www.raghavakk.com
Coded, from the series All Things Yellow To The Jaundiced Eey
Dubai: The Indian painter Maqbool Fida Husain, who exiled himself to the UAE four years ago after he found himself facing criminal charges, said yesterday he was ready to return home at “any moment” following reports New Delhi was trying to help him do so.
Mr Husain, 94, described by critics as “the Picasso of India”, has repeatedly expressed a desire to return to India since charges were brought against him over a series of paintings, which included the depiction of a naked woman, in the shape of India, kneeling.
The Bharat Mata – Mother India – paintings sparked death threats and protests by right-wing Hindus. Mobs attacked Husain’s home in Mumbai.
The painter, whose work has sold for as much as US$1.6 million (Dh5.8m), said: “At last, they have taken this step after years of complete silence. More:
Watch Nina Paley’s animated film “Sita Sings the Blues” — “The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.”
Paley is an American cartoonist and animator and has set the story of the Ramayana to the 1920s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. In 2002, Paley moved to Trivandrum, India, where her husband had taken a job. While she was visiting New York City he terminated their marriage.
“Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina Paley is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by email. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Ramayana…”
Nina Paley released the film freely under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. She is Artist in Residence at the non-profit QuestionCopyright.org.
If the YouTube link above does not work, click here to watch the full movie.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is trying to raise interest in its extensive collection of ancient Indian paintings by showing how they connect to modern day Indian comics in a new exhibit starting Saturday.
The museum, known as Lacma, is billing “Heroes and Villains: The Battle for Good in India’s Comics” as the first major museum exhibit of Indian comics. The exhibit includes 18 paintings from its permanent collection. Some items dating back to the 16th century, along with current comic books and pages by Indian cartoonists.
While the comic books on display don’t have much in common visually with the ancient paintings, they borrow storylines and characters from the traditional paintings. More:
In The Telegraph, Calcutta, Anuradha Roy has this delightful story on Homai Vyarawalla, India’s first woman photo journalist. She was born in 1913:
In July this year, it was reported that India’s first professional woman photographer, Homai Vyarawalla, 96 years old, had decided to swap her 55-year-old Fiat for a Nano. She paid up, and was promised that the very first Nano out of the factory would be hers. However, the car company overshot its delivery date, upon which Mrs Vyarawalla cancelled her order. (To add insult to injury, she announced that a second-hand Maruti would do just fine instead.) In August, on Parsi New Year’s Day, Tata officials came personally to deliver her car and beg forgiveness.
After all that, by September she was considering selling the new car. She explained that she was tired of the media attention. Also, she didn’t like the car’s colour any more. She wanted to sell because she did not like driving a red car. More:
From the Wall Street Journal: This is a groundbreaking exhibition that displays a very high overall level of craft and intellectual depth. “Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art From Pakistan,” featuring 54 artworks by 15 artists, is the first museum survey in the Western Hemisphere of exclusively Pakistani contemporary artists. Considering the modest size of the show, one concludes that the curator, Salima Hashmi, did a lot of selecting out, but there can be no doubt of her qualifications for the task. Daughter of a famous poet, herself a prominent thinker and writer, for 30 years Ms. Hashmi taught at the National College of Art in Lahore, the leading such institution in Pakistan. Most of the show’s artists either taught or studied there.
A little museum in New York reveals his epic story. From the Washington Post:
By June 1935, Horch decided that his relationship with Roerich had been embarrassing and ludicrous, broke off contact, sued his former guru for $200,000 dollars in what he said were outstanding loans, took over the skyscraper and its art and evicted Roerich’s disciples. (Seven decades later, the details of the Roerich “scandal” are still in play. In an interview last year, art and dance historian Kenneth Archer, the author of a recent book about Roerich, said he believes that Roerich’s activities in Asia may have been on the up-and-up and that he could have been “swindled” by Horch. Archer says it would take a fully bilingual scholar, with access to archives in Russia and the United States, to get to the bottom of matters.)
By the time Roerich’s American reputation took its worst body blows, the painter was safely ensconced in a compound in the Kullu Valley in far northern India. When Roerich died there Jawaharlal Nehru gave the eulogy, speaking of how the artist had “touched and lighted up so many aspects of human endeavor.” The house is now a flourishing museum.
Roerich’s stock has also been rising elsewhere. “We get visitors from places where I wonder how they even know about Roerich — like from Africa,” Entin says. He explained that in the artist’s native Russia — source of many of his museum’s members — the fall of communism led to Roerich associations springing up in almost every city. More:
William Dalrymple on Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts, the new exhibition at V&A, in the Guardian:
Even at the height of the raj, the British directly controlled only three-fifths of India. Two-fifths of south Asia’s vast landmass always remained under the control of its indigenous princely rulers, split up between nearly 600 states. “God created the maharajas,” wrote Kipling, “so that mankind could have the spectacle of jewels and marble palaces.” Aldous Huxley came to more or less the same conclusion. Arriving in Delhi at the time of the Council of Princes in the early 1930s, he found the city “pullulating with despots . . . At the viceroy’s evening parties, the diamonds were so large they looked like stage gems. It was impossible to believe that the pearls in the million-pound necklaces were the genuine excrement of oysters.”
Not all observers, however, were so enamoured with India’s princes. Indian nationalist politicians such as Nehru and Gandhi regarded them as foolish and wasteful playboys, spineless Quislings of the British and enemies of India’s freedom movement. Lord Curzon took a similar view, and railed in his despatches home against “the category of half-Anglicised, half-denationalised, European-women-hunting, pseudo-sporting, and very often in the end spirit-drinking young native chiefs”. Writing to Queen Victoria, the viceroy detailed at surprising length the failings of the “frivolous and sometimes vicious spendthrifts and idlers” who, he believed, constituted such a large proportion of her princely subjects. The Rana of Dholpur was “fast sinking into an inebriate and a sot”; the Maharaja of Patiala was “little better than a jockey”; and Maharaja Holkar was “half mad and addicted to horrible vices”. More:
I later talked with Ravi Naidoo, South African design curator of the Design Indaba Festival in Cape Town, about the state of design in his country. While it was clear that design was changing how people around the world perceived South Africa, was design doing anything to change how people actually lived in Africa? What stories could he share with me of designers showing people a better way of living? Naidoo tells me that design is about enthusiasm, and that that is the reigning zeitgeist of South Africa today. From that enthusiasm will come change. Abreu’s pan-African imagery, Nkosi’s contemporary African chic, these had never been possible before, and together with Nathan Reddy’s on-going rebranding of the country design was going to transform the country as an inclusive, multicultural creative society. Images and surfaces are important, because they can transform perceptions and lead to a better way of living.
Naidoo described how the South African economy had grown once the political poison of apartheid was removed in the mid-nineties. He compared that with India’s own growth since liberalization in 1991, and suggested that growth in the design industries was directly linked with the growth in the market as a whole. I found his theory pretty sound, and offered him one better: South Africa and India both represented countries experiencing informationalization under conditions of limited or partial industrialization. And for that reason, the disciplines of design that have flourished in both countries up until now have had more to do with the shaping of images, ideas and perhaps retail experiences than with the design and manufacture of things, they way they might do in places like Italy and China. More:
Since September 11, 2001, the war against terror has invaded the global imagination, inspiring novels, films, and art. Pakistani artists were among the first to artistically engage with the controversial war, and their paintings from the past eight years help document this country’s emotional and political confrontation with terrorism and the personal tragedy and public policy that it engenders. Here, Dawn.com presents examples of works that touch on war, terrorism, extremism, and Pakistan’s post-9/11 foreign policy.
The V&A’s majestic exhibition – Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts – reveals the opulent lifestyle of the maharajas. From the Independent:
Earlier this year I accompanied curators from the Victoria and Albert Museum to India to see some of the treasures of the maharajas which will be leaving the country for the first time for an exhibition at the V&A next month. The maharajas of northern India have largely turned their palaces into hotels (Liz Hurley got married in a splendid one, Umaid Bhawan Palace in Jodhpur), but they remain powerful administrators, or at least powerful businessmen, in their regions.
Five members of royal families stood for parliament in the elections in the Spring. I met Maharaja Jyotiraditya Scindia of Gwalior who has restyled himself as Mr Scindia and was, when we spoke, a Congress politician and minister for communications and IT (latterly he became minister for commerce) in the Indian government. The issue of call centres in India for British companies is an interesting one in Britain, I mentioned to him. Does he intend to have more? “Certainly. Why shouldn’t we?” he replied. “The accent is a bit of a problem, but training will put that right.”
They are focused, determined people, the maharajas. Over drinks, they would discuss with us in somewhat maudlin fashion the days, still painful to them, when Mrs Gandhi – during her socialist premiership in the Seventies – curtailed their power and their wealth. More:
Emily Brontë’s only novel — the tale of the tempestuous love affair between Heathcliff and Catherine — has been turned into a Bollywood musical for stage by the British theatre company Tamasha.
A new biography of film-maker Mrinal Sen ['Mrinal Sen - Sixty Years in Search of Cinema,' Harper Collins, India] recounts the love-hate relationship between Sen and his contemporary Satyajit Ray. From Mint Lounge:
Film buffs of Calcutta often comment that there are only two common factors between Ray and Sen-their height and complexion. Their environments could not have been more different. Sen comes from an average middle-class family uprooted from Bangladesh, while Ray is a blue-blooded Calcuttan, representing one of the most cultured and aristocratic families of the metropolis. Sen studied science while Ray, after an initial grounding in economics, switched to fine arts. As a film-maker also, Ray belonged to the Hollywood school-a fact which he proudly proclaimed almost till his last breath-while Sen picked up his craft from European cinema.
Ray has always been a traditionalist while Sen is an eternal maverick, who refuses to conform to any norm. Ray is a master of literary narrative, while Sen’s strength lies in episodic structure. As sensitive artists, both have been influenced by contemporary events and trends, but the end-products have been totally different-like Punashca and Mahanagar. More:
Sourav Sarangi recently won eight international awards for his documentary film Bilal, which tells the story of a five-year-old boy who looks after his blind parents in a cramped hut in a poor district of Kolkata. The film-maker describes the journey he and the family have taken with the documentary (watch trailer below). From the Guardian:
I first met Bilal when he was only eight months old. His head was wrapped in bandages after an accident and he was lying on a cot next to my wife. His mother, who was blind, was clinging on to him. After attending to my wife, who had been hospitalised, I looked at the baby. He seemed to smile at me and seemed to nudge his mother as if, in a silent communion in a dark world, he was trying to tell her to talk to me. I was convinced about that. At that point in time, Bilal the film was born.
My friendship with the family grew. As I saw him grow up, what struck me about Bilal was his common sense. Even when he was three years old, the time when we launched the film, he was wise and that is the word I would like to use when describing this remarkable boy.
His Muslim father, Shamim, also blind, had married Jharna, a Hindu who changed her name to Humera Begum after the wedding. That in itself is quite unusual among the poorer communities in India – a Hindu woman marrying a Muslim man and then changing her religion.
Shamim himself is quite a man. He runs a portable phone call centre and, before this film was made, he used to carry a telephone to one of the busiest traffic intersections in Kolkata and sit on the pavement with a table. He has a photographic memory. Even now, he can rattle off 10-digit telephone numbers I told him six months back simply from memory. I am still amazed by this man. More:
Last heard of when Christie’s put up two strands of the famous seven-strand Baroda necklace for sale, fetching some $7.1 million, the Maharaja of Baroda, Ranjitsingh Gaekwad is now in London for an exhibition of his paintings, Of Goats and Kings and Some Such Things. In the Evening Standard, Godfrey Barker meets this man of many parts (thanks to Reshmi Dasgupta for the link).
The maharaja at Indar Pasricha Gallery/pic: Evening Standard
The Maharajah of Baroda has arrived in London, his name trailing 150 years of jewels, health and social eminence.
Nawabs and princes, most of them genuine, crowded to his art opening, Of Goats and Kings and Some Such Things, three weeks ago in W2, and you should not miss the Maharajah’s highly successful drawings and bronze sculptures at the Indar Pasricha gallery at 22 Connaught Street, hard by Fortress Blair.
A handful are still left after 12 sales and on offer until 31 July at prices that are much too low – between £2,000 and £5,000.
His Highness was last heard of in April 2007 when two strands of the Baroda pearl necklace, the greatest of his family heirlooms, went to Christie’s New York and yielded $7.1 million – far and away a record for any pearl sale in the world – for the Maharajah’s depleted co¬ffers. A record it should have been; for the Baroda seven-strand pearls, which have graced Indian princesses, maharanis and the maharajahs themselves, have no equal anywhere. more
In “Children of the Taliban,” documentary filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy interviews two 15-year-old boys, Abdurrahman and Wasifullah, who are living in Kachegori Camp, a refugee settlement in Pakistan.
The boys, best friends since childhood, fled their hometown in northern Pakistan in October 2008, when it became a target of both a Pakistani army bombing campaign and a U.S. missile attack intended for Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.
In the film, Abdurrahman, who blames the Taliban for the October raid, says he wants to be a Pakistan army soldier when he grows up. Wasifullah, whose cousin was killed by a U.S. missile, wants to join the Taliban.
Later, Ms. Obaid-Chinoy asks the two boys separately: Are they willing to fight each other on the battlefield?
“Definitely, I will kill him,” says Abdurrahman.
“Yes,” says Wasifullah, “I will retaliate fiercely.” More:
DC Comics’ superheroes join forces with characters inspired by Allah. Riazat Butt in the Guardian:
They are superheroes battling injustice and fighting evil the Islamic way, and they are teaming up with some of the west’s biggest comic book icons. Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are among those joining forces with The 99, who personify the 99 attributes of Allah, according to Islamic tradition.
What will unfold on the pages of the collaboration between DC Comics in the US and Teshkeel Comics in Kuwait is yet to be seen, but the appearance of The 99 – who already appear in comics in the Muslim world – alongside archetypal American heroes would have been unlikely during the Bush years. DC Comics’ president and publisher, Paul Levitz, believes the cross-cultural project is unprecedented.
He said: “It is a long-standing tradition for characters to meet others in the fictional world, and over the years a lot of the superheroes have been translated into Arabic, taking on ethnic elements. But this is a nice step forward. The most difficult creative test is when you are working with the least precedent and when you’re trying to reach an audience that has a different cultural bias and different interests.” More:
India’s Francis Bacon, 84-year-old Tyeb Mehta died following a heart attack at a Mumbai hospital. In one of his last interviews to Gayatri of The Times of India, the painter whose work fetched the highest ever price for an Indian canvas in an international auction said he never painted for money.
Tyeb Mehtas occupy pride of place in living rooms of the rich and famous from Malabar Hill to Defence Colony. But 82-year-old Mehta himself has managed from his life’s earnings a sparse middle-class apartment, one room converted into a studio, in Lokhandwala, Mumbai. The most highly-valued art works in India lean face-against-the-wall in his studio, as the dust and noise of Andheri rises from beneath. Has the recession affected art prices? Tyeb, who leads the market rate, should know. His last canvas Kali broke the Rs 1 crore barrier, and his Celebration went for Rs 1.5 crore ($317,500) on September 19, 2003. A Christies’s representative says of him, “Tyeb Mehta is undoubtedly amongst our most important Indian artist.” more
The Indian government has quietly blocked a comic-strip hard-core pornography site, savitabhabhi.com. The Telecom Department has asked all Indian Internet Service Providers to block access to the year-old site about the “sexual adventures of a hot Indian bhabhi.”
The creators of the site, that gets 60 million visitors each month, about 70 per cent from India, has started a ‘Save Savita’ online campaign, a Twitter stream and a Facebook group.
“Savita bhabhi” (or sister-in-law Savita) is a buxom, newly-wed housewife who seems to seduce just about anyone who knocks at her door — from neighbourhood teenagers playing cricket in the street to door-to-door salesmen.
Previously in AW:
Carnal comic : a chat with the makers of the comic strip.
![Painting by Ramzan Shad Buzkashi. [Dawn]](http://www.asianwindow.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/buzkashi_art.jpg "buzkashi_art")
