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The series of mixed media paper-pulp and print works that Atul Dodiya created during his residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI) in 2005 offers insight into the artist’s ongoing, critical examination of personal narratives, communal violence and national politics. Engaging with the history of India through its epic mythology, Dodiya draws on the story of the tribal woman Sabari, one of the many narratives of the subaltern... The series of mixed media paper-pulp and print works that Atul Dodiya created during his residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI) in 2005 offers insight into the artist’s ongoing, critical examination of personal narratives, communal violence and national politics. Engaging with the history of India through its epic mythology, Dodiya draws on the story of the tribal woman Sabari, one of the many narratives of the subaltern contained within the epic Ramayana. Following in the footsteps of Nandalal Bose, who explored the story in a 1941 series of paintings, Dodiya elevates Sabari to the role of protagonist, and uses the chronicle of her lifelong devotion to Ram to explore the ways in which the epic is currently being misappropriated in the name of right-wing politics in India, and particularly in Gujarat.

“Dodiya has never allowed himself to be constricted by a particular stylistic choice or medium: his continuities have been staged through self-disruptions, an extension into new methods and spaces, an addressing of parallel arts and discourses…It is against this backdrop of restless inventiveness that Dodiya’s work at the STPI should be viewed” (Nancy Adajania, “Sabari in Singapore: The Testimony of a Pirate King”, The Wet Sleeves of My Paper Robe, Bodhi Art exhibition catalogue, Singapore, 2006, p. 8, 9).

In the present lot, the artist has used diverse material including a cotton shirt, carbon toner and synthetic hair, which have bearing on both technique and content. Part of the artist’s STPI suite of works, in this piece Sabari sits alone in a corner, literally bracketed in peaceful contemplation. Alongside her figure, Dodiya offers the viewer images of Athenian athletes. As wrestlers tussle in an open, blackened shirt, which bears silent witness to their battle, sprinters dash across the open braid of a wig, symbolic of Rama’s abducted wife, Sita.

“Dodiya draws elegant black figures from an Athenian vase – are they plumed satyrs or courteous drunks, centaurs in frontal view or actors romping about in a farce? – and conscripts them into the building of Rama’s bridge, which will take the armies of the god-prince to the island-kingdom of Lanka, where he will fight and kill Ravana, Lord of the Demons, who has abducted his wife Sita. Homeric resonances attend this tale, and doubtless it was from the same cluster of stories about runaway queens and stolen princesses, marauding demons and avenging heroes, loyal knights and far-seeing sages that these epics travelled east and west from the Inner Asian pasturelands, to the Aegean Sea and the Indian Ocean. Dodiya’s art permits, even encourages, such special intimacies of reading: his images dwell, not in the particularities of place and telling, but in the amplitudes of connection” (Ranjit Hoskote, “The Amplitudes of Connection”, The Wet Sleeves of My Paper Robe, Bodhi Art exhibition catalogue, Singapore, 2006, p. 23, 24).

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