The Hindu Business Line : Ordinary events, ordinary humans… nothing abstract

S.H. Raza and Francis Newton Souza, the painters, were talking seriously a point of craft with the photographer, Henri Cartier Bresson. Around them stood the characters who had unfreezed themselves from their canvasses and camera frames. Those on the outer fringe were chatting and not particularly keen on what was happening in the centre of the circle; except for Laxman Shreshta, who was using a modern digital camera to preserve an interesting, if not an important, moment.

“Can painting or photography, in the sense you know it, have a chance in a technology and consumerist world,” Raza asked Bresson who while not thinking much of the modern world replied, “the camera does not create like the painter or musician. The photographer shoots the moment and if that slips away, he packs his bag. You can still live by working the moment on the canvas but a photographer cannot.

“In that sense, a camera man can hope to be always around. Our profession is close to God who created the world in a split moment and did not bother whether he had a TV channel or a newspaperman around. He did it on a whim, and hence, the many imperfections and the regrets.

“When God saw his own shots he realised most of them were poor on light while a few tickled him by their brilliance. God was always thoughtless and you can’t blame him as none can think much in a moment.”

Smoking a bidi, Souza walked away to chat with his female models. One heard from the security guard at the Sir Jamshetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art, that the men and women who stay on frames during the day come out for a stroll every night.

By 12, the streets do get a bit dark and empty reminding them of the Bombay they knew of the late 19th and 20th centuries.

As they would be quartering in the wooden, high-ceilinged halls of Sir J.J. School of Art, for quite some time, they walked down D.N. Road to have a vada-pav or a chai and get to know the Mumbaikar.

The security guard was unhappy over their romps as he was not sure whether they would all come back; if not, some frames would hang empty and the security guard would face police queries and a job loss.

The fellow nearly lost it a week ago, when a couple went for a drink at the Press Club and did not turn up till 9 in the morning when the exhibition was to open at 10. Somehow they made it back to their frames in time, though a bit haggard. Most of them were curious about the blank TV screens at the shop windows and decided to have a look at them on the off-day of the exhibition.

Henri liked the long night walks from Regal Theatre to the Art school down the vaulted colonnades framing the pavements looking like elegant, burqua-clad women. This writer sat up in his bed and switched on the lights. It was about two midnight and a moon, like a half-chewed sandwich, was crawling the skies. One had just got out of a dream.

The previous day, one went to an exhibition of some 300 paintings belonging to an old era at the Sir J.J. School of Art and also made it to the photographs on display of Henri Cartier Bresson and Sardar Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, the father of Amrita Sher-Gil, at the National Gallery of Modern Art. It was Amrita who said (as quoted in the book Amrita Sher-Gil, a Life by Yashodhara Dalmia): “Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse and many others, India belongs only to me.”

A simple matter about the twin shows is that an ordinary human being can relate to them. Ordinary events, ordinary humans. That is less weary than staring cluelessly at abstracts.

An untitled frame, 1947, oil on paper, of S.H. Raza has a woman in a green saree, red blouse and a brown face with a tika on her forehead. She looks past the visitors trying to guess at her fate, which in 1947 needed no guessing.

An untitled water colour on paper by K.S. Nerulkar (1907), has a widow seemingly sitting on hard ground with her legs stretched out, one upon the other. Her eyes are stuck somewhere between a hard life ahead and an immense disappointment with the present.

Quietly, in one corner of a wall, like a spider, hangs a faceless nude of Souza and one spent a few minutes studying the outline. The stone and wood make of the Art school with a staircase sticking to the side walls continues to remain as it was built in 1878.

The modern National Gallery of Modern Art, mainly of stone, has a staircase stylishly curving up from the centre of the base floor to the top with Bresson taking all the wall space on the ground floor. The Master says: “To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the head. It’s a way of life.”

Of the many one liked is a 1933 shot in Valencia in Spain showing a blind child, head up, feeling the wall with his left hand while walking down the pavement; a second pix in Andelucia, Seville, clicks a small crowd of children playing under a broken wall with a lame kid in the forefront. One looked and looked and looked at the camera work and lost one’s self.

Bresson picks you up and makes you a part of his camera work and you do not want to come away. Umrao Singh Sher-Gil was born in 1870 in Majithia in Amritsar and was a Sanskrit scholar and philosopher.

There is one click (the last click) of his daughter Amrita sitting in the corner of a sofa which held one. Then there is a full portrait shot of Umrao with only a langoti on. One wished the dream had run on.

P. Devarajan

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Ordinary events, ordinary humans… nothing abstract

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