A country and nation in flux — ever expanding, redefining its ethos and finding its feet through a journey which is both ever continuing and yet stationary in its meaning. The underlying theme of the exhibition is to marry and bring together the post-independence decades and display across disciplines — be it architecture, painting, film and the written word in many forms — about how the creative process is the bedrock of making the country one whole.
The juxtaposition of works by the three artists from the Progressive Artists Group, founded in Bombay in the late 40s, is what sets the pace for a voyage, which is nomadic in its execution and still brings us together as a people, rooted in their habitat and adobe.
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An idyllic time, when the foundation of much of the Indian terrain was being changed by the leaders of a young nation, is juxtaposed and reflected in the photos of Delhi. In collaboration with Ram Rehman, we witness the transformation that architects like Kuldip Singh, Raj Rewal, Habib Rehman, JK Chowdhury, Joseph Allen Stein and AP Kanvinde were bringing to their modern temples of both administration and learning. None as poignantly at display, as the exhibition shows us, like the pictures of the Hall of Nations, which as a remnant, outlived its purpose. As the curator Roobina Karode notes in her foreword and it strikes you almost immediately in the choice of paintings and photographs, some will not be able to withstand change and with ebbing relevance, will be gone. A milieu, once used and popular, will one day be only a memory and a picture, which needs to be captured and kept.
Interesting to note, that only one, the Gandhi Memorial Hall, finds place in the legendary Madan Mahatta’s pictures, as all others are well post the Nehruvian era, i.e. late 1960s to almost the 90s. This was soon to give way to a more modern sensibility supposedly. Then there’s the Punjabi Baroque, which came to be the mainstay of a Delhi in a hurry to be recognised as a “world city.” It has come to lose its aesthetic sensibility, albeit slowly with time.
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