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Courtesy – Ahmedabad Mirror

Link : http://bit.ly/1TnLhed

Esther David recounts how a young boy from a different faith came to live in their home and became an integral part of their family.

He came to live in our family home when he was six years old. His father, our plumber, left him with my grandmother, as he could not feed a large family. He suggested that the child could do odd jobs in our house and all my grandmother had to do, was feed him and give him a place to sleep.We could see the anguish in his eyes. Besides the household chores, soon the child learnt to wash bird cages and groom the dogs. I was closer to his age, so we grew up together. This was in the mid- 50s and it never bothered anybody that he was a Muslim living with a Jewish family. Once a year, he was sent home for Eid. In his growing up years, he learnt to cook from the women of the house by assisting them and became our cook, which gave him a respectable position in the house. Eventually, my father got him a job at the zoo; later he was married and returned back to his family.

Then, he rented a room and lived a comfortable life with his own family, but as a rule, on Sunday afternoon and every evening after work, he came to our house, helped in the kitchen and set the table before returning back to his own home. Even after he retired and was employed as a peon in a school, he continued this pattern and was always there for us, often helping me with the children. It was an unspoken understanding that on Eid, lunch came from his house. This continued, till recently, when he suddenly decided to go on Haj to Mecca and wanted to be known as Haji Faiz Mohmed. Before leaving for Mecca, he came to meet me and sat reminiscing about our happy childhood in the family house. Then, last week, I received a late night call from his grieving son that his father had suffered a heart attack in Mecca, had left for his heavenly abode and was buried there. I mourn his death, but I do feel, his story has an incredible ending.

Courtesy : Speaking Tree

Arun Joshi’s novel “The strange case of Billy Biswas is one of my old favorites. I had bought it in the seventies from a bookshop at the railway station. Often I turn to this book as it is all about freedom of the human spirit. Billy Biswas is now in tatters, because the silverfish also love him. With all my interest in the book, I do not know anything about the author. But, I was impressed that he had dedicated the novel to his father in memory of thirty years of love and friendship. Recently, I was rather touched to see that it has been republished with a new cover. I do not think the book did very well, but the mere fact that it has been republished makes one realize that a good work of literature survives time. 

The entire gist of the book is narrated in the first page “As I grow old, I realize that the most futile cry of man is his wish to be understood. The effort to understand is even more futile. If in spite of this I propose to relate Billy’s story, it is not because I claim to have understood him, as it is on account of a deep and unrelieved sense of wonder that in the middle of the twentieth century, in the heart of Delhi’s smart society, there should have lived a man of such extraordinary obsessions.” 

The story revolves around Billy Biswas educated in the USA and a professor of anthropology. He disappears unto a tribal community, much to the chagrin of his family. They start a statewide hunt for him, which eventually ends in tragedy. Because, it was hard for the civilized world to understand that Billy was a free soul and nothing on earth could tie him down, not even death, “After lunch I lay in my camp bed and read through a couple of magazines that I picked up in New Delhi, and an old copy of the New Yorker. As I leafed through them the whole thing, hallucination or whatever it was, that has been haunting me since the time of my meeting Bilasia, miraculously cleared up. You are some kind of a nut, aren’t you, Billy Biswas, I said with unutterable relief. What do you think is going to happen to you? Are you going to run away with that Bilasia. Maybe all you want is to get her into bed. Who do you think was going to happen to your wife and child?”

While reading these chapters one almost assumes that Billy is an irresponsible human being. That is when the craft of the writer comes to the fore. Arun Joshi delves into the complexities of human desires and dreams, “All we could hear was the sound of her anklets above our heads, sometime here, sometime there, winding along the narrow footpath that a million feet had beaten into the side of the hill at the bottom of which stood Dhunia’s hut. I remember how we stopped talking and how we waited in silence for her to emerge from the darkness.”

Few years before this experience Billy had told his friend Tuula in New York, “A strange woman keeps crossing my dreams. I have seen her on the streets of Delhi, nursing a child in the shade of a tree or hauling stone for a rich man’s house. I have seen her buying bangles at the fair, I have seen her shadow at a tribal dance and I have seen her pensive and inviolable, her clothes clinging to her wet body, beside a tank in Benares.”  This dream has supernatural intonations when Billy is worshipped by the tribals because of his knowledge of medicine and  astronomy. They believe he is the incarnation of the king who built the temple at Chandtola. “The temple stood in the middle of nowhere. All of a sudden it loomed in the glare of the headlights like an apparition.” According to legend the temple was commissioned by the king, who was carved the main idol. “The king left the palace and lived in a little hut by the temple. He ate what little the townspeople left by the hut. The king went mad. But the chiseling went on day and night. Then one night the chiseling ceased. In the morning the townsmen came and found the young king with the white hair, dead. The last piece, the one at whose feet he lay, was exquisite. No artist had ever infused such life in a stone figure or hewn such limbs out of common granite. But the figure had no face. That had always been the trouble. The king could never make the face of his god.”

The narration ends like this,“The strange case of Billy Biswas had at last been disposed off in the only manner that a humdrum society knows of disposing its rebels, its seers, its true lovers.”

(A dialogue between Amit Ambalal and Khanjan Dalal written for an exhibition of Amit Ambalal’s installation organized by Lemongrasshopper Gallery, Ahmedabad)

Khanjan – “kagdana makanma installation kariye to kevu ? ”

(Why don’t we make an installation of your crows in the crow’s building?”

Amitbhai  – ?

K – For the simple reason that Le Corbusier was known as Corbu-the-crow-like-builder and ATMA is his nest. Corbeau in French means crow and Le Corbusier was affectionately known as Corbu.

A – It is the perfect nest for my crows, because, it is all about Corbu and his ATMA

K ­– I see a work of art as an object, and this particular installation is site-specific, in context to your crows.

A –   My crows?

K – Yes, they are fun.  

A – For me a crow is like a metaphor….

K – I suppose there are many reasons why you use crows in your work.

A – Because crows talk to each other and also to us, they have great communication skills; are exhibitionists by nature, have a certain amount of physicality and a fine geometry of form.

K – Crows create many questions, like I often wonder; do crows think and if they do, what do they think about?

A – I like crows because they are very smart; shy, sweet, intelligent, cunning, big bullies; notorious and often ruthless. They are full of contradictions.

K – Actually, we as humans also have a crow within us, but do not like it…

A – Through crows, I try to express my inner experiences, which are often non-specific and difficult to define, but, create feelings of history, religion, personal life, society and politics.

K – A crow has multiple layers and inspires innumerable themes.

A – Interestingly, crows are also symbols of our ancestors.

K – They are full of contradictions.

A – Crows become symbolic of our ancestors when they are offered food during the Shradhpaksha.

K – I was telling you about this crow within, which we prefer to ignore. Instead, we like to pick and choose our identities and insist on saying; I am not a crow, but a koel. All our conflicts and contradictions stems from here, in the same way that we are both good and bad.

A – Sometimes, I wonder whether I am following these crows in their journey towards spirituality, because, they allow me to create so many metaphors of life.

K – For this work, Corbu’s architecture is perfect, almost like his ATMA. They say; he was a crow-like builder, who looked at the world from a bird’s eye view.

A – Actually, it is a tiny bird in context to the vastness of the universe, but has the capacity to control our environment.

K – Because, like us, it is also searching for bigger gains and always waiting for something big to happen in terms of achievement.

Although in this particular work, it is merely an atom, from where all thought germinates.

A – True, it is mere atom; observe how it transforms from micro-crow to tiny bindu…. 

Page 7

A letter from Paris

His sculptures grow like trees from the roots of their feet, erupting with great force from the pedestal, with their rough textured limbs that have simple anatomical details, made ever so more sensitive with the artists touch.

Giacometti (1901-1966) started painting when he was five years old with his post-Impressionist painter father. At twelve he had painted his first oil and soon he was copying Michelangelo’s frescoes of the Sistine Chapel and was deeply influenced by Rembrandt’s paintings with their world within of light and shadows.

But, slowly, he left these masters behind in his own search of a personal idiom and created a brave new world of sculpture in the twentieth century with his haunting figures; which never seem to leave your memory once you had seen them striding, slightly bent with a sense of doom. Although, he followed his own path of expression, a certain feeling of Rembrandt and Michelangelo’s isolated human beings can be experienced in his work. It is said, he copied to understand better.

In the same way, his drawings and paintings emerge on the surface of the paper with emotion, while his rendering shows the master’s complete involvement in depicting the human condition with its fragility, difficulties, lack of communication and deep solitude. In portraying this, the artist journeyed beyond conventional art forms and reinvented world, all his own, which became known with the heads with haunting eyes, described by Sartre as ‘empty,’ which emerged from the portraits like three dimensional forms. In a similar manner, he was also successful in lending a third dimension in painting, where the human figures appear to be rounded. Later, while working in the studios of Boudelle and Alexander Archipenko, he tested the possibilities of simultaneous relations between forms, which helped him break the limitations of conventional sculptural forms and, in 1922, alongwith Archipenko he discovered the inner and outer realties of sculpture.

For a while, he worked in marble and this led him into the realm of inner and outer world of dreams and Surrealism along with the theories of Andre Breton, which helped him create the shrouded figure with the extended hand and suspended ball in space, titled, ‘Boule Suspendue,’ or ‘L’object invisible,’ which was a human figure with a mask-like head disappearing into the pedestal, creating an illusion of slender hands holding an unseen object.

It was in these elongated human figures, that he saw hope for his own artistic expression and the people around him became a powerful source of inspiration, like his mother, brother Diego, wife Anette, friend Yanaihara and sister Otilla, who died young in 1937, which left on him a deep scar for life. Soon after, in 1938, when he was hit by a car, he was disturbed him and felt, as if was thrown off-balance. Slowly, he collected himself and while walking, he was always looking ahead, never looking backwards. This experience resulted in his well known sculpture known as ‘L’homme qui marche,’ a subject which kept recurring in his sculptures, paintings and drawings. In this form, he came to understand the inner structure of the human body. With these thin, tall, slightly bent, striding human figures, he left his imprint in time, as an incomparable artist.

Soon after, he involved himself with matters of form in space and tried to see the monumentality of sculptural forms, as his work became frontal  and vertical and took the shape of an entity diminishing into space, like the standing man or bust of a woman, which appear to grow vertically into monumental proportions and have a powerful presence. It shows the total involvement of Giacometti in sculpture as something metaphysical, which goes beyond the confines of mere volume, form and technique. In this way, he contributed to the re-awakening of figurative art in the post-war years.

Giacometti also created definite spaces between sculptures of men and women. If the man was a figure marching ahead in space, the women appear to be immobile heretic figures, rising from the earth like goddesses. This was because he was always bothered about the incompatibility between human beings. But, for him, the head was to become an indestructible force – the ‘pith of life.’

Interestingly, for someone, who was successful in creating his own metaphor; yet he was constantly haunted by failure.

He died in 1966, two years after his mother’s death.

Page 8

(written for a catalogue of Amit Ambalal’s work)

Life is Leela.

Leela is Ananda.

And Anand is Art.

Where life floats in an endless story of day-to-day incidents, transferred from the ordinary to the pictorial, sometimes satirical.

Like Krishna carrying mount Goverdhan on his little finger, in the painting “You carry the burden, I will play the flute” the mountain transforms into a cosmic Frisbee, which Krishna throws at Amit, expecting him to hold it for him while he plays the flute. The sequence of narration finds continuity as mount Goverdhanshifts from artist to crow, to langur and so on, backward forward and upside down.

For us humans, with feet of clay, Hercules-like it is not possible to carry mountains just to please the blue god.

But, Amit never swims against the flow. He allows it to take it’s own course, often turning it into pleasure. The same applies to his paintings, “If and when I feel my paintings are getting too serious,

I make an U-turn and transform the heaviness into Ananda through humour. Just like a child, I try to make everything around me light and weightless,” he says, fingers moving like the Krishna in his painting, playing the flute, “because I am always in search of my lost childhood.

I found the child within me through my paintings.

You must have noticed children do exactly the same when they face a serious situation. The forms in my paintings emerge from this feeling of Ananda.

Yes, if you want, you could call them caricatures of the people I paint. Like the scheming dhoti clad god-men or the bureaucrat types, neck-less suited-booted creatures, which were always around me during my earlier avatar of a rather reluctant businessman.

I would secretly sketch them and give their characters my own interpretation.

I discovered one could express the most complex thoughts through humour.

To take life as a caricature is easier than the real thing.

I could survive those bleak days through simple pleasures like sketching situations which amused me and leaving behind those which jarred the magic of Leela.”

In his home, Krishna is everywhere, on the walls, in his heart, in the family temple, weaving the web of Raas-Lila in Amit’s life and paintings.

Why Krishna?

There are many answers. He was born after five sisters. There must have been festivity at his birth, almost like Krishna-Janmashtami.

As a child in class two he remembers he made a beautiful drawing of Radha-Krishna and soon after he was sent to another school where art was not important. He suffocated in the role of the only male heir to the family business. Training in these matters started early.

But, his father understood, secretly he would have liked to be a musician, so he allowed Amit to take lessons in art from painter Chagnalal Jadav, himself an eccentric maverick of sorts.

Guru like in appearance with long white hair, dressed in dhoti-kurta.

At war with the Bengal school style then prevalent in Ahmedabad, he painted in the impressionistic style, sometimes veering into automation. He had heralded the modern art movement in Gujarat.

A liberal teacher, he taught only techniques allowing Amit the total freedom to discover him-self.

During one such session, late in the evening, Amit was painting and the bare chested cook Raghuram stood in the doorway discussing dinner matters, when Amit made a quick sketch and Jadav remarked, ”You are an artist!”

Later he wrote to Amit, “I taught you nothing but one thing, and that was to paint. I was always vigilant and asked you not to rub the brush, but a put a patch on the canvas.

I realize you have mastered the technique and succeeded.”

In Amit’s painting one can see layer upon layer of colours, transforming, forming, revealing, reinventing an unimagined story.

He starts painting with a certain colour scheme in mind, but ends up with a totally different composition. He does not analyse as to what happens at that moment, but it definitely leads him to the colours, which satisfy him.

Jadav also had fixed ideas of good and bad and made sure that Amit’s characters were humane, if he saw anything evil in the faces he painted, he would fume and fret, saying an evil face was non-art.

In a roundabout way, Amit still adheres to this ideology.

Even if tinged with pointed sarcasm or a spicy black humour, his forms are never wicked as seen in “Aarti.”

As a young man, in his plush office, prisoner in the inner confines of a three-piece suit, the painter within was looking for a release.

The child within was also bursting to break free.

Then one day Amit saw a Vaishnav temple hanging, the Pichwai of the family deity Shrinathji at the Calico museum. As he speaks about Krishna, the pained look disappears from his face, suddenly he smiles, “When I saw this Pichwai, Krishnalooked like a seven year old. I started wondering, if Krishna could paint, how would he paint?

The answer came to me in Nathdwara. As I stood watching the paintings, I told myself, Krishna would have painted exactly like this.”

From that point there was no looking backwards. He convinced his father to sell their textile mill and started the inward journey towards his own painting and the study of Nathdwara.

Sitting against his favourite Pichwai of Krishna, he says, “This is an ethereal world, my sort of world. The cows appear to be flying. Krishna is a blue cloud. The Gopis seem to swim around him with the pink lotus buds. Clouds look like faces and the trees resemble clouds. Everything seems to be floating. Nothing seems to be rooted, yet strangely everything is rooted to me,” he says in a matter of fact way.

It is easier to understand how the book, Krishna as Shrinathji happened.

Often his love for Nathdwara becomes visible in his paintings.

The painted walls appear as a background with lions, tigers, cows, deer and the peafowl, adding that special element of humour in his rather topsy-turvy world like “Holi in Haveli.” And if for some reason he does not use these familiar forms, they creep into his paintings stealthily through the pelt of a tiger or the Nathdwara colours, ultramarine blue, crimson pink and emerald greens.

As for the cows, they are not from Vrindavan, but Ahmedabad.

How can the artist in Amit live in the city of cows and remain untouched. Amit’s cows are shot at the viewer through a double-barrelled gun named Nathdwara via Ahmedabad.

Unlike the Krishna cows, these are not washed in milk, nor decorated with marigold and palm prints, they live in slush, eating garbage and stand at the traffic lights ruling the road and doing their own thing, like their daily ablutions. With a certain element of mischief the artist makes the cow pass holy water, gleefully showing off the private parts in “Do that alone that gives you joy.”

In this play of human life and the intricacies of the cosmic Leela, the tongue suddenly appears in Amit’s paintings with an identity of it’s own. Almost becoming a connecting-point between the creatures frolicking in Amit’s circus. He seems to say, everybody likes a good lick. This tactile feeling is at it’s best in “Tiger and Tulips,” “Crossing the Vaitarani” and “Prayer heard.”

In Amit’s house, you can see Krishna toys arranged everywhere, peacocks, cows, langurs, tigers and crows.

These are allowed to romp on Amit’s canvas with subtle humour and a touch of sour sweet sarcasm, like his toothache “God of small pains” or his pet dog Dusty’s“ Underworld” stomach ailments. It was actually the medical reports of his own frozen arm, which attracted Amit to anatomical charts. What followed was a series of X-ray paintings like “Birth of a lotus,” “Jai Gange” and “Flowers in the mind.”

You can recognize an Amit painting anywhere. Through the years, his faces have become more refined yet they retain a characteristic sameness. Although his human figures have changed from atypical stylised forms with ant-hands into detailed anatomical studies as seen in “The holy dip.” He keeps going back and forth between detail and simplification, and if you ask him why his human figures look the way they do, he has a simple answer, “because I cannot draw in any other way.”

It appears that Amit likes to discuss small day-to-day events or humorous stories with intimate friends and family. As the painting progresses, everything changes from story, colour, form, technique to humour, perhaps leading towards satire, like “The fate of the mask, man and the goat.” The entire series reads like a story as the mask plays games with man and animal. Amit tries to expose the complexity and duality of urban life with humour, which is often as fatal as a mosquito bite.

Flowers are very much part of Amit’s household.

Religiously, every morning the mali collects the flowers of his choice and makes a floral installation around the antique coffee table – creating the experience of Ananda at its most colourful!

Flowers, pattern, design and layers of colours add to the strangely poetic satire in Amit’s work. Sometimes form and pattern contradict each other like his crisp appearance and his work.

Flowers play an important part in his workmanship; it could be the bright red hibiscus or the profuse use of the flute like yellow karan, which abound both in his painting and garden.

Having just returned from Italy, he shows you the work done there, gardens and interiors of the Civitella castle at Umbria, the butcher shop, the swallows, the hounds and the caricatures of the paintings of Dukes and Duchesses, haughtily looking down with a sarcastic sideways glance.

Amit smiles, “people in power always look down upon us in this manner, be it a from a gilded frame or chair.”

Amit paints in his open-air studio in the garden, a little away from the house, built with his collection of old woodcarvings. It is here that the artist escapes and follows a strict work discipline taking a short break at mid-day.

And, if once in a while he suffers the painter’s block, he could be sketching crows, langurs, a peacock flying towards the roof or reading, writing, and pasting paper clippings for reference. If not, he could be just arranging his large collection of old photographs an even larger collection of books, letters, Pichwais, miniatures, contemporary art, artefacts or he may be just having a hilarious time with family and friends.

The Ambalal house is hospitable and often has artists staying there.

If not, he is always in his studio known as The Cottage or Haveli, dressed in a spotless white kurta pyjama, sitting cross-legged on his gaadi, the canvas resting on a short-legged easel, specs resting on nose, totally engrossed in his work.

It has been a long journey to Vrindavan via Nathdwara?