Edge Of The Precipice: The Art Of Rameshwar Broota

"Some soul is liberated even while in the womb,
another while being born;
 a third whether he be a boy or a youth or an old man.
A soul born as a lower species,
a soul undergoing torture in hell,
a soul achieving a heavenly region may be liberated on its way.
Some soul may return after the enjoyment of the heavens
and then be liberated on its way.
Hence there is no stipulated mode
or order in the attainment of liberation".

--- Shiva Purana, Vayari Samhita [Vol 41]

Most artists commit themselves to the enduring challenge ofdrawing from the imagination. Rameshwar Broota continually revises the way helooks at man himself. In a career spanning four decades Broota has moved fromimages of existential anxiety to sharp satire to a classic heroism, whichsettles tantalizingly close to the edge of hope and despair. In the process hecompels a revision of the notion of the heroic to embrace, rather than exclude,the ordinary.

However, even this claim may be contested. Broota's centralsubject is man, through whose tensions and aspirations, lusts and endeavours,the greater issues of life are meditated. God is indifferent or distant, thehuman 'other' is absent; the solitary male becomes the site for conflict andresolution. Through repeated acts of resistance, the male body, with itsskeletal frame or stolid musculature, plays out its postures of acceptance orconfrontation.

Broota speaks of his painting with undiluted simplicity even as he locateshimself firmly within the ordinariness of the vast Indian middle class. Hismythico-classic figures, in the words of Keshav Malik, have their genesisnot as legatees of a grand tradition but in the travails of the ordinary and theunknown, whom he invests with an unlikely heroism. Particularly in the lastdecade or so, the affirmative gesture of striving, of pushing the body intounpredictable spaces vests his figure with a determined stoicism.

Yet there is an extraordinary simplicity that guides Broota'sintentions. At no point in his career has he taken an ideological position otherthan a broadly humanistic view. The present series of four paintings mark adistinct change in the artist's ouvre. For two years now, Broota has used thecomputer as a means to sift through hundreds of images and their compositionalpossibilities. One of the consequences of this relentless pursuit is the extremeclose up, of the bodily frame that becomes the locus for Broota'sphilosophy of man. Perhaps for the first time, the figure is palpably at theedge of crisis. There is an imminence of tragedy in that the source of threat -architectural forms of man's own creating - are on view. The void of the past isnow dominated by massive concrete angularities and chains. Even here, the artistrefuses firmly to locate the sources of conflict. The use of the architecturalconstruct as suggestive rather than identified form heightens the nature of thethreat. Its externality, its source, its means of propulsion are not clear. Butits massive presence blocks all forward movement and can only be resisted ifjagged stone tears through onrushing flesh.

What is important here is that Broota's views of man existsoutside traditional morality or the possibilities of expiation. In the process,man's "will to powers, as Nietzche defined life itself, is in crisis.

"This is the most productive period of my life".

Broota's evolution follows an unerring pattern: at the end ofevery decade an unease with the existing work makes way for visible change.

These images have grown out of an emergent spiral. Rameshwar Broota's studentexercises, soon after his graduation from the Delhi College of Art, revealdepressed figures bled of all flesh tones. Overwhelmed by despair, they hold onto each other for cold comfort. In this period the only influence he admits tois the massive paintings of A. Ramachandran, which encouraged him to work on asubstantial scale.

By 1967 at the age of 26, Broota was leading the Triveni artdepartment. On the long drive each day from his father's home in Rajouri Gardento Triveni he traversed a city in rapid growth phase with eruptions of concretestructures and a marked cultural transition. The tentatively developing sphereof the artist with the venerable Delhi Shilpi Chakra, the National awards andtea sessions at Bengali market, created a cultural schism of sorts with Broota'sown family that had lived in his father's railways housing in Timarpur, ShaktiNagar and then Rajouri Garden. It was a world of a closely held 'sanskaras'of the discipline of close family ties and robust sustenance. Yet for Broota,over the years, the conflict of interest was not social but internal, betweenthe discipline of the family steeped in intellectual and spiritual enquiry andhis own needs. A practitioner of dhyana and yoga, he also felt thecontrary pull of the human world.

This existential conflict was to dominate the last twodecades of his work. In the early 70's, however, Broota was probably the firstIndian artist who turned outward with severely satirical paintings. Earlier, hehad made forays into geometric forms, followed by stark figures of emaciatedmen, suggestive of the labour in Delhi's growing streets. A decade later theemaciated anemic labourers of the 1960's paintings inflate into overfedgorillas, their humanness emphasized by bright striped sofas, their telephonesand drinks as they sit in serious consultation on the course of the nation. Thegenesis of the series of apes was fortuitous. Broota wiped out the face of alabouring figure in disgust and in the smear detected the heavy outline of anape. Broota's invective was turned against conspicuous public over-consumption. Anatomyof that Old Story [1970] is a direct take on this, probably fuelledby scenes of people gorging themselves in the sweet shops of Bengali market.Broota, bearded and thin [his rib cage is revealed] and his artist friend K.Khosa look up on an ape figure in the throes of avid gluttony.

In the early 70's, the butt of Broota's attack, the political establishmenthad enhanced its powers through abolition of privy purses, bank nationalizationand the successful liberation of Bangladesh. It was the height of the licenseRaj, of the empowered bureaucrat and lavish public consumption. Towards themiddle of the decade however, the realization that the apes with theirgargantuan appetites were essentially too close to the Indian political realityand that they lacked universality, presaged change. Gradually this mockery ofthe inversions of power began to play itself out, notably through paintings likeSpectators and Trial [both 1978]. Coming in the wake of theEmergency, such paintings define public response to political events as passiveor completely absent. The figures become miniaturized and stick-like, seeminglyadrift on the vast expanse of the canvas. Broota's view of Indian public life isdesolate.

It was the painted surface now, tentatively scraped by aknife that opened up a whole slew of possibilities. By 1978, the sharpgeometrically defined spaces and massive figures evaporated under the insistentscraping and nicking of the blade. On the brink of a definite phase in hiscareer, Broota realised that a figure need not be imposed on a canvas. It couldas well be coaxed, revealed or evacuated from its depths. This process unique toBroota, involves the over painting of the canvas with layers of paint, notablysilver, deep ochres, and modified tones of black. This process of change, as hedescribes it, came through months of work that are 'spoilt' or 'rejected',through 'erasure' and 'struggle', which ends as a new method finally suggestsitself.

The transition to a surface that resembles drawing, even asit rejects sharp deflations of line evokes two immediate comparisons. The firstis to the painted figures of Rabindranath Tagore which with intensetheatricality, seem to emerge from the darkened background of the stage or else,the unwilling recesses of the imagination. The other is of course the seductionsof photography and of the negative that develops an image of blurred features,but a definitive frame. Or even the x-ray which reveals the primitivist skulland the bone structure, even as it blurs individual features. The process inBroota's work, is intuitive, but it may draw heavily on his long nurturedpassion for photography and the intricacies of the photographic process.

The advent of the 1980's saw the mutation of the ape into theMan - essential, transitory, firmly athletic. Man wears a vest, even as hisgenitals are exposed, evoking the power of the athlete as if in a photographicfreeze frame. In different series, Broota typically uses degrees of sexualsuggestion in the male figure to denote power and erotic potential. In thelabouring class the entire pelvic area is evacuated and rendered null, in thefat apes the demasculinized male politician is made to awkwardly wear bikinis.In the Man series - and subsequently the geomorphic landscapes - thearticulation of a male sexual self is paramount. Yet it is visibly devoid ofpleasure, even as it retains an elemental power. To quote Michel Foucaulton Jean Martin Charcot's investigations on sexuality, "The essential pointis that sex was not only a matter of sensation and pleasure, of law and taboobut also of truth and falsehood, that the truth of sex became somethingfundamental, useful or dangerous, precious or formidable: in short that sex wasconstituted as a problem of truth".

The 'problem of truth' for Broota seeks articulation at leastat two levels. And it is difficult not to seek an interrelationship. Inthe series of paintings on Man that emerge through the1980's, the subject isessentially virile even as he engages in the act of aspiring, moving, suggestiveof a singular type of resistance. Interspersed with this series however, arepaintings of monumental penile forms that emerge from a geomorphic landscape. Inthis act of transference, from man to nature and then back again perhaps, theartist proffers the argument of the affirmation of the life force in itsuniversalism, far beyond the immediate trials and unrealised desires of theindividual self.

In the present series of four paintings there is achronological evolution. The figure of Man has grown flabby with the passage oftime. But his postures are perforce, defensive. In virtual and imminentcollision with architectural forms of his own making, there is both resistanceand a fatal inevitability. The torso in extreme close up, has a terriblevulnerability that appears to culminate in the recollections of old age. Toplay out the passage of destiny Broota used a photograph of the art critic and along standing friend, Keshav Malik. Malik was stooping to sign a canvas utterlyrapt in the act, when Broota photographed his face. The face appears like aninterlocutor of man's destiny, the neck stretched out to assume the rivulets andeddies of the earth itself. Yet even in these paintings there are pictures thatare alternatives of affirmation. If on the one hand there is decay anddecrepitude, on the other, the continued need for bodily intimacy isobjectified. Broota creates intimate possibilities that redeem man.

Readings of Rameshwar Broota must remain open-ended.

"Through many autumns have I toiled and laboured,
at night and morning through age-inducing dawnings.
Let husbands still come near their spouses.
Even as men did afore time,
law-fulfillers, who with the gods declared eternal statutes".

--- Hymn 394 in the Rig Veda

References:
1. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Vol 2 by Michel Foucault[Penguin 1992]
2. The Hymns of the Rig Veda vol 11 trans. By Ralph T.H. Griffith
3. The Shiva Purana [Trans and published by Motilal Banarsidass]