Pop goes the Easel

Tea time
Red wine in cutting chai glasses, at the beautifully restored Ruia Mansion.

Post-dinner
Atul Kumar’s version of Anton Chekov’s Lady with the Lap Dog or Chokher Bali, a Rabindranath Tagore classic, directed by Rituparno Ghosh.

WELCOME to High Pop. The latest path that merges middlebrow aspirations with elite lifestyles. Not to be confused with the sequinned and loud 1990s (read, kitsch), this sugar-coated capsule has a dash of snobbery and a smidgen of intellect—without all the existential angst the classics are famous for. Coined by scholar Jim Collins, this late 1990s American trend, in its desi avatar, has gained steam only now.

The aforementioned diary of a socialite gives a fair idea of how art has moved out of white cube ‘culture’. While Ruia and Nosh’s art house party included a bit of roadside cuisine, Rituparno Ghosh’s version of Chokher Bali repackages the classic. So what if Aishwarya Rai, who plays the dark-edged protagonist Binodini, has not read Tagore’s novel and simply let Ghosh ‘‘lead her’’ through the role. Rai didn’t feel the need to read it; that she was doing a Tagore classic was enough. Ditto for the audience which hailed an otherwise average film as a modern classic.

The yuppie brigade might not have the brawn to stomach the stark reality of a Satyajit Ray, but they are all game for Ghosh’s modern rendition of Chokher Bali. After all, it’s a status symbol for the multiplex-driven audience.

Even Gurinder Chadha, a diasporic film-maker from Britain, thinks so. The lady, known for ‘‘bending’’ the global box office with her football shootball cocktail—Bend It Like Beckham—is scripting new fare. And purists be damned. For Chadha is adding Punjabi flavour to Jane Austen’s propah classic Pride and Prejudice where the Bennets are the Bakshis from Amritsar and Elizabeth is Lalita. There’s even a hip hop track by pop sensation Ashanti called Goa Groove in Bride and Prejudice.

Similarly, Vishal Bharadwaj brings Macbeth and his vaulting ambition to Bollywood via Maqbool, while Mumbai-based Atul Kumar’s Company Theatre makes Shakespeare and Anton Chekov’s plays more accessible by weaving an Indian perspective in each case.

One-time illustrator Sunil Padwal also taps into global imagery. ‘‘I am not just an artist. As part of the urban clique, it would be untrue if I said I wasn’t influenced by what I see,’’ says the artist whose latest body of large paintings on wood are clearly inspired by the glossies, a shift from his earlier works where his protagonists had a universal look about them.

Highbrow opera just got a little more popular, too. Thanks to Pavarotti jamming with the bodacious but extinct Spice Girls. Back home, it’s Shubha Mudgal selling Sufi. However, Mudgal, a trained classical musician, doesn’t believe in hierarchies. ‘‘It’s okay to categorise music in a shop for convenience, but there shouldn’t be a distinction between high and low music; there can’t be a caste system like this,’’ defends Mudgal, who easily flits between ragas and Indipop.

With a resumé featuring thumri to a ballet score, Mudgal wants to continue experimenting—anything but Indipop. Even santoor maestro Pandit Shivkumar Sharma has never gone as far as bringing out his own Indipop album, but he’s definitely a favourite when it comes to elevator music. Combine that with a ‘best of’ album and you have the masses lending a ear.

Rahul Sharma, a second generation musician (he’s Pandit Shivkumar Sharma’s son), is getting an earful by not being fussy about adding a wave drum to his music. Hence Zen, his last album. ‘‘Eight steps to meditation, it’s meant for the younger generation,” says Sharma, who’s toured with classical American pianist Richard Clayderman. And then there are films like Mujhse Dosti Karoge for which he’s composed music.

Even Shankar Mahadevan hasn’t faced breathlessness juggling jingles, film music, fusion and kacheris (classical music concerts). “I have always believed that classical music is the greatest form of music, but it’s not the only form. I think that embracing popular culture has been a way of life for me,” says the singer who released two albums last year—Nine, a collaboration with lyricist Javed Akhtar and Shaiyarana with Alka Yagnik and Akhtar.

Pandit Shivkumar Sharma was one of the first to compose for Hindi films and had to struggle for more than a decade ‘‘to convince the purists that the santoor was an acceptable instrument’’. No wonder he doesn’t want to fall into the ‘‘trap of a closed mind’’. He says he’s driven by the ‘‘challenge of each style”. ‘‘Curiosity drives me,’’ says Mudgal.

We say it’s High Pop, what with its practitioners embracing the influence of the popular with open arms. Like Andy Warhol, they don’t go out looking for Campbell cans. The soup comes to them, through fashion glossies, pop icons and, of course, MTV.

Artists like Sunil Padwal and Delhi-based Manisha Gera Baswani have always drawn from such influences.

The latter loves James Bond films, while her sister-in-law Tara Baswani has a pink room dedicated to Elvis. (Manisha watches MTV, looking out for Mrygya, the band Tara croons with.) No wonder then, that Manisha’s paintings are dedicated to pop icons. ‘‘Elvis, Travolta and Bond appeal to the Indian upper middle-class, thanks to globalisation,’’ explains the artist, whose earlier works drew largely from kitsch. Manisha gravitated from using the ‘street-side Romeo’—the man with a comb in his back pocket—as her subject to the more sophisticated images of the King and Bond. Travolta is her latest pin-up boy for a series that she’s working on in her Hauz Khas studio.

Even maestros like SH Raza and MF Husain—in a bid to make their works accessible to a large audience—have turned to either Bollywood (Husain’s Madhuri-Tabu-Urmila syndrome) or couture houses like Satya Paul. Eighty-three-year-old SH Raza ‘‘feels a sense of pride if some of India’s beauties wrap a Satya Paul scarf’’ bearing his painting.

The line between kitsch and high pop is a thin one. Making a statement by painting an old cupboard (a la Anjolie Ela Menon and the late Bhupen Khakhar) is not what Mumbai-based artist Sunil Padwal intends with his popular images—be it the androgens of fashion glossies for his latest show or images from the telly.

His patrons (former Israeli Consul General Dov Steinberg and corporate collector Harsh Goenka) don’t, by any yardstick, refer to his works as kitschy. Though they agree that it’s High Pop.

Inputs by Harneet Singh, Che Kurrien and Lalitha Suhasini