atul dodiya

SHRI KHAKHAR PRASANNA
A sculptural installation
2 Feb - 3 Mar, 2007

The Comic Mausoleum:

Atul Dodiya's 'Shri Khakhar Prasanna' demonstrates that there are as many varieties of homage as there are rasas in Sanskrit aesthetics. In this tender yet playful performance, Atul shows that a departed friend can be memorialised, not only through elegiac reverence, but also through a series of parodies and exaggerations, paradoxes and private jokes, fantasias and extravagances. This suite of works takes the form of a comic mausoleum, a Rousseau-like jungle of associations and symbolisms reflective of Bhupen's own aesthetic of ludic excess and abundant wackiness.

The title of the exhibition, 'Shri Khakhar Prasanna', is veined with the poker-faced wit cherished by Bhupen and Atul. Bhupen has been deified; he has, in Robert Graves' vivid phrase, undergone the 'pumpkinification' of immortality. For he is named in the place occupied in a Hindu invocation by the kuladevata, the revered and beloved family deity whose grace is sought on an auspicious occasion, whether wedding, birth or festivity. Thus, for instance, 'Shri Mangesha Prasanna' or 'Shri Ganesha Prasanna'.

Such phrasing is appropriate. Bhupen was without question the family deity of a lineage of artists who responded to his promptings, marched over the fallen barricades he had broken down, and gathered courage from his example when he spoke the demotic of experience, opening up the self and its ambiguities in sly and luminous ways. Among these artists are Atul himself, Anju Dodiya, Amit Ambalal, Vivan Sundaram and several others who were influenced either by Bhupen's art-making ventures or the risks of self-exposure that he took; by his apparent madness as well as his not-always-apparent method. I would like to see Bhupen as a Ganesha figure: at once joyful and mischievous, benign and irascible, both vighna-karta and vighna-harta, the creator as well as the remover of obstacles. And indeed, we could imagine this family deity as a mirthful liberator: Bhupen freed postcolonial Indian art from the burden of a high seriousness gone wrong.

Atul's relationship to Bhupen changed over the years of their friendship. At first, the older man was an icon to the younger, an exemplar for the expressive freedom that could be achieved in defiance of the Gujarati bourgeois milieu that they shared. The icon became a mentor; the mentor a confidante; the confidante a confrere. And eventually, the confrere became a rival in the field of revitalised painting, as Atul began to assert his own special claim to the territory that Bhupen had opened out: the territory of kitsch, coded allusion, autobiographical trace and visual/textual play. Bhupen's lasting gift to Atul was the liberty to loosen up, to transit from the grey constraint of everyday melancholia into a domain of high-spirited, even quixotic epiphany.

Ranjit Hoskote