The beating of the drums
Creates unified emotions and tears
As in when the queen is aloof on her bed
She describes the hell as heaven
And for every mere dew drop
There is a swan swimming
What a humble communication of two birds seated on a branch, building up slowly a transmission, of submission and the slow migration of the ‘self’ in understanding one another. The image of Sister Nivedita and Ma Sharada Devi appears in the mind, which is perhaps the right stepping stone, although strummed metaphorically, to harp on the strings of cultural discourses in the ever changing paintings of Poushali Das. Now it is here in the rooms of her artworks we can strike a dialogue about the east and the west. Sister Nivedita and Ma Sharada Devi, in their expressions the selfless ‘self’ in their etiquette and manners is never as beguiled as clouds are to the sky. The exchanges, or let’s say the exchange of these two seekers doesn’t veil themselves to speak about or to hide themselves. But now the question is who the seeker is and who’s the speaker? How could we raise a dialogue between these two entities, these two figures, the speaker and the listener, and the cloud and the sky when we strike a conversation about her works, never overlooking the fact that as when the ‘self’ as the solicitor is self-conscious of its own image the distance between the ‘subject’ and the ‘object’ subdues. Poushali had once shared with me that to get rid of fear in her juvenile years she even painted faces on the mirror to scare herself, to fight back and as someone she needed to counter her. What was she fighting with, was it with the ghost whom she always thought she’d encounter, or her own self that always contradicted her? She did get rid of her fear and pain slowly, and now she lives a fearless life. She now lives with three principles, her art, art, and her art, for the heart of her paintings is her own life, and it is here that I am interested in building and diversifying these two corners into a unified form and talk everything about her works.
In our unending discussions on fierce and light subjects on the intricacies of life and art, and in the politics of it what I could gather from her was a very selfless, yet a selfish representation of life. In her and my words she says,
“My interest as an art practitioner had always been to observe and experience the migration of the ‘nomadic self’ (the jajabor, the pathik in Bengali), to see how it is positioned in different locations in the present contemporary societies, and how ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’ is observed, preserved and molded in the present environment of rapid urbanization, multiculturalism, industrialization and Global capitalism. I am interested in knowing how a story travels and leave its traces in various cultural practices and how in the process, an identity or a collective is formed and how a language is build. Not just focusing on the mainstream cultural practices of India, I have from an early age, showed interest in understanding the ‘other’ cultures of India which is loosely tagged as ‘tribal and folk, ’ or the art of the marginals. This is undoubtedly a reflection of my academic art learning, firstly in Shantiniketan, Viswa Bharti and later in the Faculty of fine Arts, M.S University, Baroda. My later development as an art practitioner made me realize that my work and research is not just based on penetrating into the subject by looking at it through academic methodologies, it is greatly based on my empirical studies, oral history and my constant interactions, engagement and collaborations with different communities of the country. Moreover, I have an affinity in understanding and segregating the ‘natural’ from the ‘artificial’, the ‘organic’ from the ‘hybrid’, and to understand the common language that stitches culture into a singularity and how they are visible in rituals, customs and manners and their appropriation in the ever changing environment.”
“Imaginary landscapes imported from real life help make your environment of art and life”. How true is that?
As a child I never thought that I’ll do painting, I just used to scribble, and when I engage myself too much with it, I get a glimpse of something happening. I give my maximum to my art, and sometimes I even get little worried when I start a new work. I get a very faded imagery or imaginations of what I must do. Landscapes play a very dominant role in my art since my early years of my development as an artist; it is like the protagonist of a play. In nature I find meanings and sensibilities that greases my wheels of life. In nature I observe ‘Sadhna’, which in Bengali means the ‘way of becoming’, or transcending the self to the other existing realities, say for instance, a sapling develops into a tree slowly bearing flowers and fruits very much like the way a child grows into a man. The ‘self’ is nothing different from landscape, it is wide too and broad, one just must know how to spread out the wings. The idea of ‘Humanity’ itself is like a landscape as a super-conscious state of being and the one that has deep roots in Indian philosophy. The beauty and specialty of the human ‘self’ is that it can place itself in the ‘other self’ to relate with the ‘other’s way of being and ‘becoming’. Very often we want to see our things from the ‘others’ point of view so that the meaning and expression within us can have an expansion. The possibility of such a never-ending expansion in human ‘self,’ makes the ‘human way of becoming,’ a super-conscious one. The ‘Sahajiya Baul’ of Bengal or the ‘Sufi’ or the ‘Bhakti’ poets of the middle ages in someway or other sang about this way of ‘becoming.’ For them ‘the super conscious level’ is an achievable state which can be achieved through devotion and meditation. Devoting or meditating doesn’t mean pious or being religious; it is just like submitting yourself to what you are doing. This journey of becoming often been the main narrative of my paintings, where travelers in various guises travails that path of oneness and freedom in that vast landscape.
How do you define yourself as an artist or as someone talking about you own work?
Talking too much distracts concentration and therefore many a times I prefer to concentrate on the figuration of nature which is also existing and which we want to see it, realize it, and in order to do so we need to work upon it. Just by observing nature we can understand its laws and we can achieve the comfort.
In the beginning I had everything like any other person have. I’d villages, towns, cities and everything and slowly I’d to rethink what I should omit and what I should accept. I started believing that the physical reality or the reality that we are witnessing is not the only reality. Maybe we’ve lost track of the other realities. If we look into our past we come to know that everything comes from nature, the pot, the weapons and everything that helps in our day to day activities of life.
Do you not think that Shantiniketan played an important role in this realization of following this path.? How do you locate the element of ‘romanticism’ in your works?
I think lot of cultural theorist had misinterpreted Shanitniketan as a place celebrating rural life, and many of them have overlooked the philosophy behind it as a place of peace and harmony that the modern mind should aim for at this juncture of history. Shanitiniketan is taken only as a model by many cultural theorists.
What about Baroda? What made you to live here?
Baroda also has that peace and a culture of its own. One can achieve that life here also. For an individual independent life Baroda is suitable. Baroda has its own story of indigenous schooling.
How important is your medium for you?
I’ve tried experimenting with every possible medium, and since last fifteen years I’ve felt that medium is meditative, there’s a ritualistic way which comes from meditation. After the destruction of the Bamian Buddha I started making images of Buddha as a reaction to the action. During that time I felt that I am a Buddhist and started studying Thanka Painting, tantric art. The making of this medium needs lot of time and it’s not readymade, and one should have enough time to prepare it as a meditative ground, or as a ritual. It’s a long process and it’s ongoing.
Do you believe in God?
I believe in a supreme power, not God. When I came to Baroda I witnessed political turmoil and communalism, not just outside the university premise, but also outside, and I never tried to paint it, instead I chose to paint mystical figures, Sufi saints and others
Your works are sometimes too bounded by what we know as ‘feminine’, it very often refuses to mingle with the outside world. Are there any feminist implications, or let me first ask you what ‘Feminism’ means to you?
Feminism for me means being feminine, or let’s say a female has a mother inside. A child is a child at the first place, not thinking about if it is a boy or a girl. Feminism is a social issue. Sometimes I feel that I inflict myself too much pain for I feel that without that nothing can come. One cannot escape it, you are needed to accept it, one is birth and the other is death, one is Aanand and the other is Dukh, and in Dukh is happiness. Feminine is also being cultural.
Why do you build up an imaginary atmosphere in your pictorial surface? Is it the other reality, or the hyper reality that you want to personify? Why don’t you represent the harsh realities of life and the society around?
We are very much in the harsh realities at every moment, so it would be wrong to say that we are trying to escape it. Meditation is not easy because we are facing that harshness all the time. Working, arranging and balancing is another reality of life. My work is not just confined to my paintings; I spent more time to arrange my atmosphere to paint.
The imaginary world also exists because we imagine. In Thanga painting the color red, black and gold are colors of meditation. The red is symbolically used by artists as violent color or as color of protest, but it can also be taken in other ways. Just imagine when you stand in front of the sun and close your eyes you can see the limitless peaceful and infinite power of the color red, isn’t there a science associated with our body, the perception and the universe out there.
My imagery might look very hazy and gloomy which I want to because I don’t want it to be stitched and sharp, I want to make my space more meditative and imaginary. I do not want to make anything hideous, I just want my viewers to look for things and discover the layers with little effort in a contemplative way.
Documentation of the harshness is documentation of the harshness in the society. Every human civilization has two sides, one is abstract and unseen and the other is realistic or iconic.
Every great personality had their own reality, but even than many of them had to go further, for instance Buddha who renounced and seek the higher reality. Any great figures, when we look closely, they had to look deep into matter for understanding of life and their art.
What is the ‘narrative’ in the narrative, if there’s any? What is narrative building for you? Is it consciously been arranged, or they are just the flow of the story that you want to depict?
It is hard to find one ancient Indian art form that doesn’t have a narrative context, be it sculpture, mural or scroll. Supported by an enormous and marvelously inter-linked story-system of the puranas, the jatakas and other classics the tradition has showed its excellence in maintaining the continuity in the art in various ways. The traditional oriental artist first laid the technique of the art of story telling with the help of images that he drew on natural surfaces. ‘Pata’, for instance dates back into history. The Indian tradition of scroll attracted me most for its cinematic technique. The narrator dramatically unfurls a long scroll as a song is accompanied; it incorporates some kind of a speed into the images painted on the scroll. The images get the rhythm of a moving image like a zoetrope. One can also find the scroll maker using techniques like a ‘long shot’, ‘close up’ and the ‘cuts’. It is also been said that the idea of Montage came to the mind of Eisenstein from the Chinese and Japanese traditional scrolls. Moreover, scrolls are light and are easy to carry, they are nature extracts, and it so much caught my attention that I started collecting scrolls.
The historical link of scroll inspired me to narrate the story of my journey, but I had to invent my own style of maintaining the continuity of the journey of my ‘self’ as an artist.
Because I never know from which point the journey started and how it is going to end. Only a pleasure of discovering the self as a traveler in the way of becoming drives me into painting figures, which have clear reference to the figures of medieval saints in the murals of Binodbihary Mukhopadhya at Shantiniketan. In fact, I constantly tried to set up a conversation between the Bengal School and myself.
After I shifted to Baroda from Shantiketan, the change of environment opened my eyes. Of course, I missed the atmosphere of Shantiniketan surrounded by flora and fauna, but in the decorative architecture of old Baroda city I found my interest, which set me in a new journey of searching for natural motifs in traditional Indian designs and architecture.
Now, the human self itself is a design, a system working like a universe, and at the same time a tiny bubble in the eternal tidal currents of nature. The sense of interior and exterior grew in me out of these two different aspects of human self, embodying two different aspects of relationship between nature and culture. Slowly, the medium I found most suitable to my temperament is Tempera; a medium that plays an important role in our tradition and history, based on natural pigments that allows for an incredible range of sensitivity. Of course, I liked the cinematic way of story telling of a scroll, but with that, I loved the multi perspective vision of Indian miniature.
I started working on different size of panels (both horizontal and vertical) of silk, stretched on wooden stretcher not keeping in mind any thought of continuity between them. As in the work named ‘have you not heard his silent steps…’ three different vertical panels are assembled together in a specific order of blue-green-blue, of which the two blue panels may seem to have a continuity in color and design, but the middle panel will prove itself to have a completely different type of vision. If the blue panels were the interior space associated with my travelers’ self, the green one is the exterior. I just placed three panels like three shots in a movie, using the ‘close up –cut to- long shot’ technique, in order to narrate a journey through the interior and exterior nature of the’ Self’. However, despite achieving the ‘movie like’ effect of traditional scrolls, my technique of scroll invokes a completely different effect of meditative stillness because its narrative runs through not only horizontal or vertical axis, but relates in the every direction of the multi-perspective space arrangement used in my panels. In some panels, I adopted the Japanese technique of fragmenting the whole figure- by letting the frame cut the figure into a part, leaving its further journey to the infinity to the imagination.
What is the role of ‘textiles’ in your works of art?
The beating of the drums
Right from the days of Rabindranath Shantiniketan had its own tradition of ‘Batik’. This tradition became the first point of interest for me as art on textile. During my academic learning in Shantiniketan, I acquainted myself to the local artisans and learned their technique of brushing. Their dynamic designs and abstract representation of nature immediately caught my eyes. I too started using and learning their art for my paintings until I discovered or found out my own language in the form of sophisticated designs and patterns which I also imported from other cultures.
Another discovery of my days in Shanitniketan was the rich cultural tradition of scrolls. In Shantiniketan I’d befriended Dukhushyam Patua from Midnapur, a traditional scroll painter from Bengal. I was also fortunate enough to have few wandering ‘Baul’ singers of Bengal. This cultural awakening inside me and my realization of the native or local arts was further heightened when I at the same time encountered the works of Abanindanath Tagore, Binodbehari Mukherjee, Nandalal Bose and other masters who opened the chapters of modern Indian art in Bengal.
The ‘Kantha stitch’ (hand stitch), of Bengal and the costumes of the wandering ‘Baul’ singers gave me a new sensation of textile, which I even tried to introduce in some of my paintings through embroidering and even pasting real costumes. Like traditional scrolls which are made by pasting papers on cloth I mounted Nepalese paper and worked. Of the many diverse arts that flourished in early Islamic period, the art of textile designing also became an inspiration for me. The Islamic textiles made with costly materials such as silk, gold and silver, decorated with complex design opened a new horizon to me. In fact the study of Indian and Persian miniature paintings and its history enlightened my art practice with a newer understanding of image, method, material and color.
In 2002, I came to Vadodara for my postgraduate studies in M.S. University. The change of environment affected my work as I now penetrated into a city which was already glorious and a rich cultural history of its own. Changes happened in the use of materials as the weather changed. Pasting Nepalese handmade paper on cotton here was impossible for me as the weather here was too dry. Silk as a surface to paint was a very good option. And by then even though I knew about the rich silk tradition and history of the Oriental world I had to study it again and invent my own technique of stretching silk to best suit my artistic expression.
Meanwhile, the richness of Gujarati block print on cotton attracted my attention. I came in touch with Gujarati artisans and experienced their laborious process of making blocks to print on textile. I too tried the method of printing on my stretched silks. Using natural pigments on stretched silk I painted floral motifs of ornamental designs, and even at times I washed it immediately to leave an impression of what had been painted. The impression left spoke to me and gave certain feelings of ‘spirituality’, as something that has come from the past. While working on the dresses of my saintly figures of my paintings, the semi transparent textural quality of Buddha’s costume in the Ajanta cave paintings came to my mind, which even today reminds me of the rich technical achievement of the ancient Indian weavers.
Your art could be gifted but you can’t camouflage it. There’s difference between good making and good painting. Your innermost emotions and feelings can only be understood when you are deep rooted.
After finishing my studies in Baroda I contemplated on the famous rich tradition of ‘Kutch embroidery’ of Gujarat as the subject of my research for which I was even felicitated and was given assistance by the cultural ministry of the Indian Government.
Questions coming
How do you see yourself as a woman Indian artist?
Do you think that your works are political?
What does ‘sexuality’ mean to you? Very often we encounter in your works figures embracing each other, in love and in making love?
What is your favorite pastime?
Do you also consider yourself as someone great or unique, or let’s say gifted?
Poushali Das
(b.1974)
Poushali Das was born in 1974 in Calcutta. She completed her B.F.A. in painting from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan in 2002 and M.F.A Painting from M.S. University, Baroda in 2004. Her first solo show was held at Gallery Art Resource Trust at Mumbai in 2005 and second show ‘Re-tracings’ at Gallery Espace in 2006. She has also participated in several group shows including, Beyond Credos: Painting in Baroda Today, Birla Academy of Art and Culture at Kolkata; Celebrating Indian – III organized by TRYO… this show travelled to Kolkata, New Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai in 2007; Unfolding Grace at Baroda; Sense ‘N’ blend, New Delhi in 2006. She has received Junior Research Fellowship from Ministry of Culture, Government of India in 2004 and Nandalal Bose Scholarship from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan in 1998. The artist lives and works in Baroda, Gujarat.
Speakingcrow 
