From the Depth of the Mould: Meera Mukherjee (1923-1998), a centenary tribute, is a rich compilation edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, with Adip Dutta and Sujaan Mukherjee as Assistant Editors. It brings a diverse array of material on the artist to give the most comprehensive survey of her practice and insight into the individual that she was. Five components cohere to give this holistic overview: a comprehensive introduction; essays on her craft, process and new directions in her practice; personal essays; translations of her diaries and unpublished reminiscences; and a stupendous collection of photographs covering a wide range of her sculptures – from small and mid-sized to monumental. All of it is welded together by the remarkable design of Sukanya Ghosh.
Five components of the book
Tapati Guha-Thakurta’s exhaustive introduction, in the form of a biographical essay, ‘Meera Mukherjee: A Life Apart’ – which could be a catalogue volume by itself – traces her long, difficult and unique trajectory as an artist, in seven detailed sections.
Adip Dutta’s essay, ‘Thoughts Cast in Metal: A Creative Pathway’, is a fine balance between a personal memoir of a mentor and a meticulous critique of a sculptor – especially in terms of the process of her work. It starts with an anecdote of how he had taken his first clay creation to her, it got partially damaged on the way, and she corrected it and made it better, but then crumpled it back into a lump without realizing his heartbreak. As compensation, she promised to make him another like it and that is how Sahodar [Brothers, 1992] was created.
Anecdotes – liberally sprinkled – in fact, build up the character of Meera Mukherjee throughout the volume. They surface in the conversation between Adip Dutta and Tapati Guha-Thakurta at the end of the book and the interview with Bandana Loharby Sampurna Chakraborty. But they are strongest in the three personal essays: by Samik Bandyopadhyay, her friend and associate; Sandipan Bhattacharya, her publisher; and Arun Ganguly, her Boswell. They give us an intimate glimpse of the person Meera was, with her idiosyncrasies, and the laborious process of her sculptural work.
Arun Gangily’s photographs constitute the bulk of the images in the book. Many of them have been drawn from the 2022 Exhibition of his photographs – “Meera Mukherjee by Arun Ganguly” – curated by Adip Dutta and Tapati Guha-Thakurta at Gallery 88, Kolkata and Project 88, Mumbai.
Translations
The most memorable part of the book is, however, the translations of Meera Mukherjee’s Diaries (1970, 1974, 1976, ‘The Bastar Journal’ 1960-61), and Unpublished Reminiscences – ‘A Visit to Japan’, 1983 and ‘Casting Season’, 1985-86.
While all these have immense archival value and are interesting in their ways, ‘The Bastar Journal’ stands out in the way it expresses her fascination for the place, the people, their lives and their art. It bears the impression of a new world opening up in front of her eyes. She is there to learn their traditional techniques of sculpting and she gives that her most devoted attention, as this passage from the Journal testifies:
The first step was to make the kuton or the inner core made of clay. Then, Manik [Gharua] introduced the next step saying, there is a chance you will find what I’ll ask you to do now disagreeable, but this is an important part of the process.
Pointing to pellets of goat dung, he said, Go and fetch those. Once you gather them together, we will have to soak them in water. He handed me a clay bowl and said, this is a very important step. I did as I was told. Next, he pointed to a shil-nora and said, now you have to grind them up with the pestle. At that moment, my mother’s face fleetingly flashed before my eyes, but I did not allow it to weaken my resolve. After I finished grinding it, he ordered – A few different types of clay are kept over there. Sift them well. You need to mix a third of what you just ground with the clay carefully and then make a torso and a leg on the shil. I followed his instructions. [180]
But it is not just metal crafting processes and metal casting techniques that she writes about in this journal. Nothing escapes her keen observation: the relationships between men and women, both in the domestic and social sphere; their alcohol addiction; their games (some violent, others playful); the myths and deities that rule their life – especially Shitala and Danteshwari; and the famed Dussehra Durbar (at Jagdalpur) of Maharaja Pravir Singh Bhanj Deo of Bastar.
Finding herself
The most striking features of Meera Mukherjee’s life – as revealed in this book – are the lengths she went to, to find herself, and the perennial precarities she struggled with. No artist’s journey is ever easy. But hers was a particularly steep ascent to the peak of self-realization.
She was an ardent student who kept pushing herself into new frontiers of learning and practice, initially propelled by the exigencies of her personal life (an early marriage and divorce that took her a long to overcome), but later motivated by an inner compulsion of her own. Her initial training at the Indian Society of Oriental Art in the late 1930s was followed by five years at the Delhi Polytechnic (1947-51) and a brief apprenticeship under the Indonesian artist Affandi Koesoema in Santiniketan. Her major break however came when she secured a scholarship to study at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts (from 1952-56) and had the opportunity to train under Tony Stadler, a renowned German sculptor. After her return home, she would travel extensively to research the living traditions of metal craftsmanship – first at Bastar (1960), then at Bangalore (1961) with a stipend from the All India Handicrafts Board, followed by an apprenticeship under Prabhas Sen at the Regional Design Centre in Calcutta.
According to Guha-Thakurta, “It was her continuing impulse to keep travelling and learning from artisanal communities that made her pursue a new career trajectory of the artist-as-anthropologist”. The apotheosis of that was attained with an ASI Senior Fellowship (1962-1964), where she undertook “a comprehensive survey of practising [artisanal] communities” – which resulted in a seminal publication, Metalcraftsmen of India.
Mukherjee would channel all that learning into her practice as a sculptor. It would develop into an oeuvre with a signature style that, by the 1980s, found a steady clientele and was being periodically exhibited in galleries. But the process of her work entailed uncertainties at every phase and, most of it being un-commissioned, always remained financially strenuous. Settling into a seasonal cycle of sculpting helped combat the uncertainties somewhat; the major portion of the preparatory work of her sculpting - clay cores, wax models and outer casting – was done at her Calcutta residence in Paddapukur, from spring to monsoon, while casting and breaking of crucibles were carried out in winter in her studio at Elachigram. Learning music sustained her spiritually; but her life and work were fundamentally grounded in her companionship with and the unstinting support she received from Nirmal Sengupta – a profound bond that deified labels.
Building community
Mukherjee’s fierce commitment to self-actualization as an artist was accompanied by an equally robust belief in building/supporting artistic communities. It is best exemplified in the ‘Kantha Project’ hers with the children and women of Nalgorhat village (on the outskirts of Calcutta) that led to an Exhibition at Seagull Art Gallery in 1982, “The Stitchpainters of Dhankhet Vidyalaya”. But its most sustained manifestation was the group of artisans and assistants who helped shape her creations at the two venues of her work – Paddapukur and Elachigram. It was these trusted lieutenants who completed her last masterpiece, the Buddha, after her sudden death in 1998 – from raising funds to bringing together the 66 parts of the giant sculpture and then transporting it to its remote hilltop destination of the Badamtam Tea Estate in Darjeeling, owned by the Goodricke group.
This book can be taken as an example of the same ethic of collective labour, which will grant access to Meera Mukherjee’s life and work to a wide audience.
AUTHOR PROFILE
Rituparna Roy is a writer based in Kolkata. She can be reached at royrituparna.com.