After a dry spell, let it rain artworks this monsoon

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Some of the works to be displayed at the United Art Fair 2012

The poignant smell of the earth as the first raindrops fall is something that has inspired the romantic in all of us. No surprise that the ittar-maker or perfumer created that incomparable aroma of the first monsoon showers on a parched earth and called it mitti or earth!

In the Baramasa miniature paintings from Rajasthan, the monsoon pictures have women on perched on swings, white cranes flying across a dark sky, peacocks with the plumes fanned out, parakeets and blooming lotuses with the musicians singing the Malhar or ragas of the rains. Everything speaks of rain without the painting actually depicting a shower! For it is said that rains had to be depicted with “ropes of pearls”! Some of the most evocative paintings from the Bundi, Bikaner and Jodhpur school of miniatures depict the moods of the monsoons with Krishna and Radha enjoying the dark clouds and women on swings on mango trees and more such romantic imagery all sans a speck of rain!
The present continuous tense of my brains is fried, as I am beginning to feel like the proverbial papiha waiting for the monsoons to arrive in Delhi. However, I am reminded of a similar situation a few years ago when the entire metrological department was going on and on about the lack of rainfall, and my mother had retorted in disdain that how could it rain till the Hindu month of saawan arrived? And the MET’s technology notwithstanding, it rained and rained after saawan arrived!
Hopefully, it will rain art in the monsoons, as this has been one of the quietest summers for visual arts in the last decade, with almost no exhibition or major art activity. But like our wait for the monsoons, the season will end our wait for art, as it promises to be a busy art scene. For one, there is the United Art Fair scheduled for September. And as artists are getting ready to participate, I can’t help echoing the sentiments of so many of them.
The general consensus is that this was a fair waiting to happen since the Art Summit has become a snake farm of a handful of galleries, who push their favourite artists and don’t even look at the works of others outside the self-created charmed circle. Their prohibitive participation fees also make it inaccessible, and as no individual artists can participate in the summit, it remains rarified. Such galleries and artists did a huge disservice to the art market by out pricing works from the market — a situation that has had a ripple effect and we are yet to recover.
The artists are hopeful that for once they will be in a position to be part of a fair that reaches out to individuals and not merely power centres. About 350 upcoming artists will exhibit their works of art along with 60 established artists in the United Art Fair. After travelling to 13 art hubs in India, the team led by founder director Annurag Sharma, decided to make it completely for the artists and will hopefully establish a new model in the international art fair circuit.
The one day that I am looking forward to in the fair is the Dissenters’ Day. Any person who has a different opinion about the workings of the mainstream art market and even against the United Art Fair could come and present their papers there. We are open to criticism, says curator Johny M.L. It is my sincere desire to see all shades of artists in this fair and not just a parade of favourites of another shade.
Talking of shades, the only hue that I want to see now is deep grays of the monsoon skies. By the way, few would know that Vritra, the cloud-dwelling demon of drought held back rains once and Indra had to use his arsenal of thunder and lightening to defeat him in battle and push him out of his cloud-built tower. The word monsoon comes from the Arabic word mausim, meaning weather. Paradoxically, the origin of the word for torrential rain begins in a desert that doesn’t even know the exquisite and sensual pleasure of a monsoon downpour!
Rajasthan is also home to two most interesting monsoon inspired pavilions — one in Deeg and the other in Udaipur. While in Deeg, an open pillared structure of marble has a concealed huge water tank, which was filled with water whenever the Maharaja was in a mood for the monsoons, in Udaipur, the Sahelion ki Badi pavilion had a plethora of fountains designed in a cluster to give the illusion of rain, when the queens so desired! But of course the most extravagant of such architecture comes from the Mughals in Delhi’s Red Fort.Two opulent marble pavilions at the end of the Hayat Baksh garden appropriately named Saawan and Bhadon were especially built only for the sole romantic purpose of watching the rain. The most dreamy and magical touch is in Bhadon, where behind a cascade of water, a row of
niches was carved in the
marble wall where oil lamps were lit.
Origin notwithstanding, the monsoons have had a literally cascading impact on Indian literature, art, dance, music and architecture, where the monsoon months are clubbed together as Chaturmasa — the four months of Asharh, Shravan, Bhadra and Ashvin. Of that when we get inundated!