India Abroad

Indian art exhibitions are popular, says Desai, second only to Chinese art. ‘‘They need to be looked at as part of Asian art. There is also an added interest among the NRI community in contemporary Indian art and they have begun to buy a lot of it,’’ she points out.

These days, apart from giving lectures on topics ranging from the ‘destruction of Bamiyan Buddhas’ to ‘Contemporary Art in the Age of Globalisation’ at Charleston, South Carolina, Desai is involved in developing Vis-a-Vis India, a major exhibition on the contemporary visual culture of India which accounts for not only the urban contemporary art, but also other areas of visual creativity which do not get included in exhibitions. The show will open in Australia in the 2004 and travel to New York in 2005.

MAHRUKH TARAPOR was in India for a brief week recently, juggling her time between an Agra visit as part of the Taj Mahal Conservation Committee and narrowing down craftsmen to make adaptations for the Met shop. Now she is roaming the world — Munich, Athens, St Petersburg, London and 25 other cities — to finalise a show on Byzantine Art, scheduled for 2004.

Tarapor is the most visible face of the Met, because of her role as the principal negotiator for the Museum with governments and galleries worldwide.

‘‘Sometimes, I think I get too much of the good thing,’’ laughs Tarapor, who lives alone in Manhattan. She is referring to being on the road for nine months of the year, organising anywhere between 30 to 50 shows for the Met, of which 15 are major exhibitions.

For someone who came from a middle class business family and studied English literature in Mumbai because ‘‘there was no such thing as art history in India in the late ’60s,’’ Tarapor went ahead to get a PhD at Harvard, ‘‘scraping together scholarships because my family could not afford it,’’ she reminisces.

Studying under scholars like Stuart Cary Welch, Tarapor realised the only thing that interested her was museums. She joined Met during the Festival of India of 1985. She has been there ever since.

From curating shows, Tarapor has moved on to organising them. Her canvas is large — Origin of Impressionism, Splendours of Imperial China and Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids.

She is also finalising work for the May 2003 archaeological exhibition, Art of First Cities: The Third Millennium, From Mediterranean to Indus. ‘‘We cannot work with Iraq, so the core of our exhibits are coming from Syria, Greece and Turkey. Saudi Arabia, Sharjah and Bahrain are desperately anxious to send us their best material. Even Pakistan is giving us 30-35 pieces from its museums,’’ she says excitedly.

Ask her about the response from the Indian government and her voice drops a notch with disappointment. ‘‘Despite repeated petitions, there has been no response from them. Our art just languishes in museums,’’ she says, wondering why India takes no initiative to be part of the ‘‘international art circuit.’’

AMIN JAFFER, 33, was born in a Kutchi family in Rwanda. He says he was drawn to British India furniture — his two comprehensive books on the subject have made him an undisputed expert in the area — mainly because it was ‘‘hybrid’’ like him. ‘‘I was always obsessed with history, and through it, material culture. Maybe I was struggling for my roots. I did not travel to India till my early 20s,’’ he points out.

After switching from practical law to art history (without telling his businessman father!) in college, Jaffer found himself doing a Masters on French and Spanish material at the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum. ‘‘Soon, I began to scrutinise the Indian gallery. When I saw this late 18th century ivory chair, it raised many questions in me. How did Indian craftsmen perfect the English design technique? When did Indians start sitting upright on western style chairs?’’ he says. His doctoral thesis on the subject threw up a lot of interesting information about European life in India and the Indian response to it. ‘‘Indians adopted western lifestyles as early as the 17th century,’’ he reveals.

Today, Jaffer lives alone in London, and spends his time trawling colonial architecture and ruins, whether in Peru or Goa, when he is not looking after his collection of 600-odd furniture pieces at the V&A. He has finally come to terms with his ‘‘spiritual home’’ India and is happy that there is no dearth of craftsmen here continuing with the 18th-19th century woodwork traditions. ‘‘In the villages of south India, the technique is very much alive, only the patronage is missing. Now the ivory work of Vishakapatnam is being replicated in acrylic,’’ he says.

Ask him how curating Indian art has changed over the years and he takes a moment to answer. ‘‘The most obvious change is the appreciation of the ‘Company School’ today from classical Indian art. There is also greater emphasis on context.’’

Jaffer firmly believes only scholarship and achievement count when it comes to getting a break in a museum like the V&A. ‘‘Race and background make no difference. Being an Indian today is an advantage,’’ he adds.

GAURI PARIMOO KRISHNAN, 39, says, “I think I was at the right place at the right time.’’ She works with the Asia Civilisations Museum, one of the few museums in the world (apart from the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, and Musee Guimet, Paris) entirely devoted to Asian art.

‘‘In the early ’90s, the Singapore National Museum was beginning to organise exhibitions. They asked me if I would curate an exhibition of Indian artefacts on loan from the National Museum, New Delhi. The show was to kickstart cultural cooperation between the two countries,’’ she explains. There has been no looking back since.

‘‘I enjoy being in a specialised Asian museum rather than in one where it is in a minority or neglected,’’ she adds. These days, Krishnan is fitting out 10 permanent galleries of Asian, South Asian, South-east Asian collections, put together over the last decade, which will open to the public next year.

Born in Vadodara to artist Naina Dalal and art historian Ratan Parimoo, Krishnan studied both art history and classical dance. ‘‘At home, we just glided from dance, to theatre, music and literature and that left a deep imprint on my mind,’’ she remembers. After a PhD on Devangana sculptures, she moved to Singapore with her software engineer husband Krishnan Jagannathan.

Having been involved in huge shows like the 1994 Alamkara: 5000 Years of India and Eternal Egypt: Treasures from the British Museum in 1999, Krishnan has got to used to working with large frames. ‘‘Curating is basically about unlearning a lot of jargon and simplifying ideas,’’ she points out. She gives the example of Hindu philosophical concepts like darshana or srishti and how hard it is to explain them to an uninitiated audience.

‘‘We have done away with linear chronology and have more thematic shows to explain these concepts. We also make it a point to foreground the scientific acumen of Indians through astrology, architecture and metallurgy,’’ she explains.

PRATAPADITYA PAL could be called the grand old man of Indian art. As Keeper of the Indian Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in the 60s (originally donated and curated by art historian Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy), he was one of the first Indians (after Coomaraswamy) to break into museums in Europe and America.

Ask him about that era and you can rest assured that he did not make it there because of his talent for small talk. ‘‘What difference does it make if I was the only Indian then? I went abroad only because I could not get a job in India,’’ he replies wryly.

Armed with a Bachelors degree in History from St Stephens, Pal did his PhD at Cambridge University. From then on it was a steady museum career — two years in Boston, 14 years at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as senior curator of Indian and Islamic collections, and then, acting director of the museum. ‘‘At that time, the Indian community was relatively less interested in Indian art. The westerners were much better. Even today, Indians would rather go to temples than visit museums,’’ he grumbles.

These days he is Visiting Curator of Indian, Himalayan and South-East Asian Art Institute of Chicago and busy with his latest project — a huge show on the Art of Himalayas. ‘‘The show has 186 art objects from ancient Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Nepal and Tibet, borrowed from all over the world. It will travel to Washington next year,’’ he reveals.

But he is furious with the Indian government for not lending him 10 pieces from the Srinagar Museum and three from the National Museum. ‘‘They do not understand the political importance of participating in a show like this, in getting across the Kashmir issue,’’ he says exasperatedly. ‘‘Look at China, it sends across one big show every year on new discoveries made in their country. But India does not understand the importance of publicity. Don’t they know that in today’s world, you have to hype everything up,’’ he adds.

VIDYA DEHEJIA has just left Smithsonian Institution, comprising of the Freer and Sackler Galleries, after eight years to teach Indian art at Columbia University. But her long engagement with curating Indian art exhibitions continues. Her show The Sensuous & The Sacred: Chola Bronzes from South India opens this month at the Sackler Gallery and will travel to the Dallas and Cleveland museums of art.

‘‘We are aiming at South-Asian visitors, who’d rather go to any of the 25 temples in greater Washington than come to a museum,’’ says Dehejia, a Tamilian who lives with her Gujarati husband Jay and two sons, Nikhil and Aditya, in Washington.

Dehejia remembers her first assignment at the Smithsonian (later, as acting director she oversaw an annual budget of $ 8.8 million and a staff of 118), to curate a show on Indian threshold designs (rangolis). ‘‘Since this was women’s art, I used the occasion to make some points about the paradoxical position of women in India where a figure like Indira Gandhi and bride burning coexisted. The reaction to this was unexpected — ‘Isn’t this a rather strong curatorial voice,’ people worried. To which I responded, ‘Isn’t that why I am here?’,’’ narrates Dehejia, who is well-versed in classical Sanskrit and Tamil, apart from a range of subjects like Buddhist art, north Indian temples and the art of British India.

The Smithsonian collection, according to her, is clearly partial to the refined Mughal miniatures and to a lesser degree, Rajput paintings. And what does she think of the imminent danger of exoticising Indian culture in Western museums? ‘‘To me, it is not a troubling phenomenon that most south Asian sculpture, which is sacred imagery, is now being seen as art,’’ she says. ‘‘I offer no apologies for using lighting to make an image of the Devi glow and sparkle. To my mind, it is a totally appropriate way to suggest to viewers that they might view the multiplicity of divine images as multiple sparkling facets of a single diamond, as Hindus themselves do,’’ she adds.