Staging innate grandeur
Art review
Maharajas at Tasveer (January 18 to February 9) brings a charming as well as perceptive array of royal portraits in photography.
Selected consistently for compositional and preservation quality, the images first surround the viewer in the period atmosphere of a rather grave, if assuredly relaxed, majesty that remains set immobile amid ancient opulence. Since the formal, fairly similar takes hold a varied richness, one becomes instinctively drawn to savour them at a leisurely pace. It is only after a while that the display which repeats comparatively alike poses and picture sizes gathering shots from the later 19th and early 20th century by British and Indian photographers, a time when the indigenous still prevailed while Western paradigms permeated it, lets one intuit a fascinating phenomenon of not just the two cultures superimposing and partly blending but also of the layered, aesthetic and practical, trajectories in the staging of majesty and power where spectacular artificiality too mediates specific kinds of naturalness.
At first glance, one absorbs the familiar and expected regal beauty of ornate robes and ample jewellery. The brocade tunics, densely covered by classical gold embroidery patterns have enough metallic stiffness to impart a sense of archaic, motionless and smoothly, sharply contoured statues to the bodies. In certain instances they give the sitters an acute, severe elegance, hinting that the men were aware of its impact, whereas in other cases the folds and creases enter into a relationship with the bodies often revealing an inherent appropriation of the real costume, somewhat ill-fitting in a few portraits of child royals alluding to the discomfort of premature role-playing or, as in the shot of the Nawab of Junagad, with elaborate grace draped along linear meanders, they speak of personal fantasy.
The profusion of precious stones in swords, sceptres and rows of necklaces, rings and turban decorations may parallel the fabric designs, the regularity of its intricate motifs linking with and enhancing the dresses whose static splendour is replete with subdued inner pulsations. As such, it heightens the self-aware, archaic grandeur of the live persons inclusive of the stout ones, sporadically overtakes the individual and at times adds lyrical enchantment when the camera can capture the misty radiance around the white, feathery eruptions in headgear decorations. The photographs not being very remote of age, let the onlooker intuit a little about the personalities, most presenting the innate, locked-in face of rightfully superior might that together with its immobile heaviness and waxed moustache acquires properties of the costume.
Some other prints, though, especially the close-ups, offer an aura of individual wisdom, of reflection, pride, indulgency, severity, belligerence, vanity, contempt, craftiness or wildness, otherwise a child’s discomfort and redolent innocence. With equal proprietary acceptance and intimate pleasure, the maharajas exhibit and internalise symbols and paraphernalia of colonially accepted status and formal representation.
They embrace British medals, official robes and exquisitely tailored suits mostly either overwhelmed by traditional glamour or explored with free dignity. Although much more evident, the style of the Western props and backgrounds undergoes a similar assimilation. The royals sit on carved chairs of sumptuous, gilded chair-thrones with lion figurines, half-Indian and half-Western, in poses required by the conventions of the photographic studio, still their indigenous spirit, assertion and stances overtake the impositions.
The black and white shots are composed in tune with the language of century European painting, centred round draped tables with heavy tomes, curtains and columns, the surface behind given to a soft play of tonalities or showing sceneries amid swirls of muted luminosity and graded shadow. The intricate, weighty figures, however, either dominate the new or appropriate it for its own through the common ornate element. Occasionally, the brightness of the hand-brushed colour flattening the hieratic whole almost returns it to the indigenous canon.
In playful warmth
The paintings of S Nataraj at Apparao Galleries (January 7 to 24) are an unassumingly poetic fantasy about the spirit of the everyday people in the city. Graceful and warm, they depict a variety of traditional and fashionable characters enjoying themselves on cycles and animals, in hybrids configurations with trees, blossoms, clouds, planes and various beings.
The not too bright water colours accept the past as comfortably permeating the present, while his keenly but softly observed characters of now mix with transposed quotations from miniatures, inclusive of their regular design-like arrangement. If some figures are rendered with a light perceptiveness, some other dilute a little over generalities and vagueness, which becomes enhanced by the decorative leaning, otherwise by the indulgence in fluffy background brushing.
One prefers the sharper, wittily delineated but not over-stated images against the whiteness of the paper, like in the picture of a zebra on a chair sipping tender coconut water which barely marks the mood around human-animal connectedness letting the viewer complete it.
