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Lot 16

 

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Atul Dodiya’s engagement with the figure of Mahatma Gandhi and his place in the history of India has been a longstanding one, reaching as far back as his childhood drawings. The present lot, painted the year after Dodiya’s seminal exhibition ‘An Artist of Non-Violence’ in Mumbai, which focused on these themes, extends the artist’s engagement with the historical figure of Gandhi and India’s freedom struggle.

Based on a stock image from... Atul Dodiya’s engagement with the figure of Mahatma Gandhi and his place in the history of India has been a longstanding one, reaching as far back as his childhood drawings. The present lot, painted the year after Dodiya’s seminal exhibition ‘An Artist of Non-Violence’ in Mumbai, which focused on these themes, extends the artist’s engagement with the historical figure of Gandhi and India’s freedom struggle.

Based on a stock image from the 1938 session of the Indian National Congress party in Haripura, this watercolour commemorates the first time a resolution was passed asking the British rulers of India to hand the country back to Indians. Here, Dodiya portrays Gandhi deep in conversation with Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, elected President of the Haripura Session, with Jamnalal Bajaj partially visible behind them.

Apart from an important turning point in the history of the Indian nation, Dodiya’s also commemorates the Haripura Congress for its marking of a critical moment in the development of modern art in India. On Gandhi’s invitation, the artist Nandalal Bose, who Dodiya has always held in great esteem, created an 83-panel mural for the session pavilion. These large paintings of Indian rural scenes and popular life and culture in the country were made using indigenous materials, congruent with Gandhi’s vision of nation building at the time. According to the historian Tapati Guha-Thakurta, in these panels, “…we see a rich blending of a ‘classical’, ‘folk’ and ‘modern’ vocabulary in producing an art that could signify the nation. In both its choice of form and theme, these panels were concerned with the imaging of village India, with presenting a spectacle of Indian popular life and culture for a national public forum…In one sweeping gesture, a traditional folk idiom was transformed into the style of a modern master and into celebrated symbols of the nation’s modern art. The painting of these pictures for a national public forum serves as a critical ‘moment’ in India’s modern art history” (“Lineages of the Modern in Indian Art: The Making of a National History”, Culture and the Making of Identity in Contemporary India, Sage Publications, New Delhi, 2005, p. 93, 94).

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