Radio Ceylon Paintings

Atul Dodiya lost his eyesight in his right eye ‘at the age of 10 while playing gilli danda,’ as he confirmed to me in a message. ‘Same year I realised that I love drawing and painting and want to be painter.’ He first told me this when I was walking around with him at the Radio Ceylon exhibition. This connects him to those who – outside of the humanist paradigms for how intellectual and creative processes originate: the heart for emotion, the head for thought, say – paint without seeing, like Binodebehari Mukherjee, or, in the case of the man who worked at the Bhowanipore Sangeet Sammelan, listen without hearing. This decentred attention must account for Atul’s fascination with Krishna Chandra Dey, the blind singer, of whom he has painted three portraits in Radio Ceylon: experiments, like the exhibition itself, in a portraiture that moves subtly away from how we believe subjectivity perceives the world. Atul is following the arc of listening: not a portrait, but an intimation, of existence.