The Caravan – August 2019

(coco) #1
12 THE CARAVAN

Shankarsaidthathisfamilyhasbeen
hand-paintingphotographsforsix
generations.Inthenineteenthcentury,
theywerebasedonthebanksofthe
river Sarayu—Shankar, a devout Hindu,
said their proximity to Ayodhya, Ram’s
mythical birthplace, lent his family’s
work a certain “godliness.” All of the
photographs of the religious organisa-
tion Radha Soami Satsang, he said, had
been hand-painted by his family.
Shankar learnt the art of
hand-painting from his parents, Indra
Prakash and Tara Devi. He told me
that his mother had developed her
own interpretation of the photographs
of the eighteenth-century ruler Tipu
Sultan, and hand-painted around forty
thousand photographs before she
stopped pursuing the craft. “My par-
ents also hand-painted pictures for the
king of Bhutan and Hyderabad’s Ni-
zam’s Palace. And then there was this
image, of the 1971 war, hand-painted
by my mother long back.” Their work
had earned them enough recognition
that the actor Amitabh Bachchan
and the former prime minister Rajiv
Gandhi met them, Shankar said with
evident pride.

Allanatoldmethatthepracticeof
hand-paintinghasbeenpigeonholed
asanoldertradition.“Thereisno
massproductionofthisparticularart
form, and the craft is considered very
niche. While this historical tradition
came in the nineteenth century, in the
twentieth century, digital technologies
replaced this traditional practice.” The
advent of colour photography killed the
demand for hand-painted photographs.
Many hand-painters were driven to
look for alternate sources of income,
since the profession could not sustain
them. When Shankar was growing up,
there were only eight to ten hand-paint-
ers left in Delhi. He felt he was restrict-
ed both because of geography and the
changing times.
Allana first came across Shan-
kar’s work while making a film on
hand-painting, in 2001, through
Mahatta, a studio in Delhi’s Connaught
Place that had many of Indra Prakash’s
photographs. After getting to know
Shankar, he put him in touch with
Yogananthan in 2015. Yogananthan’s A
Myth of Two Souls was a photograph-
ic project inspired by the Ramayana,
providing a modern retelling of the

story using hand-painted photographs.
“I was interested by the concept of
journey in time,” Yogananthan told me
over email. “Colours are fundamental
in the way we read photographs, they
influence how we read them. The idea
behind the series was to mix classic
color photographs with hand-painted
photographs in order to confuse the
viewer. Is he looking [at] photographs
of today’s India or from the past?”
As the scope of the art form contin-
ues to be restricted, Allana and Dewan
have made active attempts to chron-
icle this part of India’s visual history.
Shankar and Yogananthan have been
instrumental in reviving it over the past
few decades. Allana told me that, “as a
practice, hand-painting is at the cusp
of fading altogether.” Yogananthan was
more optimistic. “Hand-painting has
a great potential and many contempo-
rary artists are revisiting or using old
techniques,” he said. “The trickistodo
so not out of pure nostalgia, buttobring
something new to the tradition.” s

above: Jaykumar Shankar inherited the art
from his parents, Indra Prakash and Tara
Devi, who were prolific hand-painters.

courtesy philippe calia


camera obscura · the lede

Free download pdf