DIGITAL COPY ON MAGZTERFamilies limber through, children in tow, the
circus of art, like any other – the machine tool
fair a week earlier, the design fair a week later.
India is too large and unmanageable an idea
to ever reveal the subjective purity of every
content; its art has struggled much like its own
recent history. The tiresome bigoted century in
upheaval and transition, lurching and unstable,
like an Ambassador car. While upheavals
and repression and the political instability
of places – Iran, Pakistan, China – produces
innovative responses, Indian art often struggles
to find reasons for existence, oscillating as it
does between the petty promotion of figures
from politics and history to current topics of
intolerance and censorship, to altogether private
uninhibited expression. For that reason, art’s
moorings are now more than ever, uncertain.
In such a setting, it is hard to be entirelyunsentimental about the city. I have lived
in Delhi too long to be detached from its
upheavals. I grew up in a place that changed
from garden city to middle class suburb to
metropolitan sprawl, all in the course of my
lifetime. In the process I have learnt to tread
warily; like the city’s other confused citizens, I
make my way through fake neighbourhoods,
past imitation Renaissance mansions, wade
through the unfinished gashes of modern
commercial blight and hopelessness, drive past
Mughal landmarks hedged and manicured into
an artificial silence The mechanics of the city’s
physical growth are now the defensive scales and
scars of my own life. I look to them in moments
of retreat, and seeking the quieter promise of the
drawing board. To undo the architecture outside,
and remake it in drawing.Country House, Gautam Bhatia, 2011, 8" x 11", Watercolour on Paper(^104) / arts illustrated / feb 2016 - mar 2016 /IAF - Delhi Connecting Art