Important Notice

In his creative practice, N.S. Harsha draws from several Indian artistic traditions, ranging from Mughal and Pahari miniature painting and ancient frescoes to popular murals and wall paintings, to create detailed works on paper, large-format paintings and site-specific installations. "Like other stalwarts of the Baroda School…Harsha embraces the modern Indian narrative enriched with popular art forms as a platform for a powerful social and... In his creative practice, N.S. Harsha draws from several Indian artistic traditions, ranging from Mughal and Pahari miniature painting and ancient frescoes to popular murals and wall paintings, to create detailed works on paper, large-format paintings and site-specific installations. "Like other stalwarts of the Baroda School…Harsha embraces the modern Indian narrative enriched with popular art forms as a platform for a powerful social and political commentary. As the miniature painting format has regularly been used to highlight social and political inequities, Harsha's reference to them represents an embrace of the tradition updated by his personal idiom to embody contemporary conditions" (Savita Apte and Rebecca Morrill, Indian Highway, Serpentine Gallery exhibition catalogue, London, 2008, p. 98).

The present lot is part of a series of twelve canvases titled 'Charming Nation', exhibited in the artist's first solo exhibition at Gallery Chemould, Mumbai. In this series, painted during a period of frequent international travel for the artist, Harsha contemplates some of the unique features of life in India, communicating each with humour and a touch of irony. As Grant Watson notes, these works present "…aspects of Indian national life, its peculiarities, its intractable problems, its strange conjunctions, its enchantment and its comedy like a series of instructive scenarios, lessons that must be learnt, situations that must be understood and dealt with by the next generation of Indians" (Charming Nation, Gallery Chemould exhibition catalogue, 2006, p. 19).

Like the other works in the series, this canvas presents viewers with a spare brown room or cube, populated by a limited number of elements and characters, each minutely detailed in the artist's hallmark style. Resembling a theatrical stage or diorama, complete with a painted backdrop, props and actors, the present lot offers the artist's meditation on the commodification of culture and traditions in India, using an example from the artist's hometown, Mysore.

As Watson explains, "Heritage as a commodity appears at its most flagrant in Come have a meal with my king, which depicts a banquet during the festival of Dasara in the presence of the monarch (with all the accompanying splendour of the throne room), an attraction that was at one point made available to any tourist who could stump up a few hundred dollars" (Ibid., p. 13, 14). Underlining the farcical nature of this practice, Harsha paints a jester clutching a globe and pulling a pennant inscribed with the title of the work across its foreground. "In pictorial terms the clown's inclusion is marked by an act of transgression, prompting comparison with that of the cultural interloper, an identity sometimes ascribed to that of the contemporary artist" (Sharmini Pereira, "N.S. Harsha: The Making of Good Things", Voices of Change: 20 Indian Artists, Marg Foundation, Mumbai, 2010, p. 219).

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