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Journalism of Courage
When Jatin Das visited South India two years ago, two things struck him most forcefully: the liquid grace of the female form and the cudappa, the wooden, turmeric-coated doorstep spotted with vermilion dots that greets vistors as they step into any traditional home. The first produced a series of ink paintings, the second a series of poems to be published soon, titled Cudappa, after the doorstep that Jatin Das felt, not as a welcome to the outsider, but standing guard as a sentinel, 8220;an enemy of the inside.8221;
It could be end-of-the-millennium angst or the weariness of an artist who feels time 8220;escaping, melting out of my hands,8221; but there seems a new yearning in his painting, especially in his female figure, beckoning and yet warding off the painter from her inner space.
In contrast to the male figures, almost almost contorted in their search for repose, Jatin8217;s female figures exude an almost enviable self-containment, whether seated in regal nakedness in meditation, or backs turned, communing with space or dancing with abandoned shakti. Or merely standing, in stateque poses, self-contained. As Jocelyn Saeed ,a poet, put it: 8220;Your language encloses and discloses dimensions I hardly know at all.8221; For Jatin, comprehending the inner space of a woman 8220;that she hardly knows at all8221; comes easily from his own awareness of his space: his studio. 8220;Admit One,8221;says the black and white sticker on the on the door of his studio.
Stepping over the wooden doorstep into his sanctum sanctorum, one can see why: there is standing room for only one person. It8217;s not that the room is too small 8212; in fact, it is perhaps the largest room in the luxury apartment in Asiad village; but all the space seems to be taken up by the legitimate residents of the studio-room: his paintings. 8220;The studio is the private naked space of the artist where no external forces are at work,8221;he said a few years ago: 8220;It is an area of contemplation:a state of oneness.8221;
All four walls of the room are stacked from floor to ceiling with paintings, neat sheaves of paper and canvas, faces turned, bearing cryptic labels, like 8220;Energised 8212; 1995.8221; Brushes, paints, canvases mingling their shapes and odours in the surprisingly ill-lit room, in which Jatin Das flits from kitchen to telephone to the music system playing an Oriya music tape. 8220;There is no more room for paintings,8221; he says in his disconcertingly abstract way, his thoughts exploding briefly and erratically into a few spoken words, submerging almost before they are fully articulated.
And hence the exhibition, 8220;that vulgarity I have to undergo in order to make room and money for fresh painting.8221; Das can propound on vulgarity with the intimate hate of many years, whether it is the vulgarity of reporters who request interviews on the phone or of artists who pound the corridors of newspaper offices in order to attract attention or the more common vulgarity of scantily-clad female models who decorate magazine covers with their grotesque nakedness.
For Jatin, who rarely deigns to drape his human figures in anything more than the colour of their energy, real nakedness is as distant from vulgarity as prurience from truth. I once saw him suddenly stop mid-stride outside a well-known cultural centre with a howl of anguished horror. 8220;Look at this! So vulgar!8221; and with rare courage, he stripped the marble plaque of the crepe coyly concealing it, and walked away, hardly mollified by his own gesture of defiance.
