Excerpts of a presentation prepared by Ranjit Hoskote for the symposium, ‘Remembering Bhupen’, held at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi on January 27.
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Article 377 of Chapter XVI of the Indian Penal Code (1860) is unambiguous: “Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to [a] fine.” Although convictions under this colonial-era provision are admittedly rare, its continued existence as law condemns a large number of Indian citizens to the shadowlands, their life choices stigmatized as being – in a singularly sweeping and theological phrase, for a secular nation-state – “against the order of nature”.
Bhupen was adept at camouflaging the radical and transgressive nature of his art in the guise of ludic eccentricity or the stylised whimsicality of the everyday. Nonetheless, he very legibly asserted the liberty of the individual to fashion his or her own life in defiance of prevailing norms, and also actively challenged the stability and validity of such norms through his work.
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We on this panel have been invited to address the question of Bhupen’s legacy – a word that carries with it an aura of unbroken continuity, suggesting a productive relationship between a past that offers the gift of its achievements to a future that receives them appreciatively, as part of its memory and self-understanding. Unfortunately, the historical record is not uniformly encouraging on this subject. Amnesia, erasure and rupture have more often been the fate that great art has met.
There is no assurance whatever that the memory of great art will be preserved for posterity. The Old Stone Age caves of Lascaux would have remained buried forever, had a dog bearing the remarkable name of Robot not fallen down a hole made by the rain in 1940, obliging his owners to dig down into the earth. The Buddhist painted caves of Ajanta, executed between the 2nd century BC and the 5th century AD, had been reclaimed by the jungle and were lost to public consciousness for more than a millennium, until they were quite fortuitously discovered in 1819 by a British hunting party.
There is no guarantee whatever that the work of a great artist will turn into a benchmark for the future by itself, or by some fictional general consensus. Without the apparatus of museum retrospectives, mid-career surveys, monographic exhibitions and critical writing, many 20th-century artists would be destined to remain last among equals, or be consigned to the unexplored corners of the reserve collections of the world’s great institutions.
In brief, there is no such eternal and stable fact as collective memory, on which we may safely rely for the transmission of a legacy from the past to the future. The collective memory of a society is a fluid construct: the outcome of discussions and negotiations, the hybrid fruit of belief, ideological dogma and historical inquiry.
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For myself, I respond most strongly to what I have elsewhere described as Bhupen’s ‘religious imagination’. I have spoken of Bhupen as an “icon-maker in an age without religious certitudes” – as an artist who found himself in a world of anomie, a world alienated and disenchanted by instrumental reason, routinisation and the fetishisation of cultural objects, and sought to re-enchant the depleted experience of being by transforming it into an utsav, a ceaseless and unpredictable festivity. He returned constantly to the rich, splendid and playful iconography of Krishna-as-Shrinathji, central to the Pushti-marga, and offered us his translations and adaptations of it.
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