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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essays on her craft, process and new directions in her practice; personal essays; translations of her diaries and unpublished reminiscences; and a stupendous collection of photographs covering a wide range of her sculptures – from small and mid-sized to monumental.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 arduous 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.

After completing his graduation course from Presidency College, Satyajit Ray joined Kala Bhavan when he was only twenty years old. His mother, Suprabha Ray, wife of late Sukumar Ray, did not allow him to enter a job at this early age.  Moreover, the poet Rabindranath Tagore wanted the son of Sukumar Ray as a student of his Visva-Bharati Santiniketan school. When Sukumar Ray died of Kala-azar, Satyajit was barely two years old, and it was not possible to send him to a boarding school.  Suprabha Debi would not part with her son when he was just a school-going boy. She brought him up single-handedly.

Suprabha Debi thought that they should respect the poet’s wish to get Sukumar’s son as one of the students of his school. Satyajit himself was also convinced to take up a course on fine arts in Kala Bhavan under the tutelage of Nandalal Bose.  He was deeply interested in book illustration, just like his father. His grandfather Upendra Kishore Ray Chowdhury was also a great book illustrator and an accomplished artist. So painting and book illustration was in Satyajit’s gene.

In the Mahabharata, the prince Arjuna holds ten names. Of those, one is Partha. Sarathi is a Sanskrit word meaning charioteer. In the battle of Kurukshetra, Sri Krishna, the king of Dwarka, decides not to take part as a warrior but as the charioteer of Arjuna. Therefore Parthasarathi means Sri Krishna, the charioteer of Arjuna.

At the outset of the Kurukshetra battle, Arjuna requests Sri Krishna to drive his chariot at the middle of the battleground to see both the Kaurava and Pandava armies from an equal distance. As his chariot reaches the centre, Arjuna sees all the warriors from both sides are his relatives and gets disheartened thinking of the devastating consequence of the war. He gets perplexed and decides to quit. At this moment, Sri Krishna motivates and persuades him to fight using his words and panentheistic divine image. Sri Krishna and Arjuna had a long conversation, compiled in the sacred book called Srimadbhagabad Gita. Executed in 1912, this watercolour painting, the subject matter of this essay, is an imaginative still taken from that conversation.

Somnath Hore is known as an artist with a singular focus on human suffering. He saw suffering not as an ontological fact of existence, but as the outcome of an unjust social system we have built and continue to perpetuate. This meant that it could be changed, and to him, the solution lay in socialist political action. Early in his life, he joined the Communist Party to be a part of this process. But while trying to do this he soon realized two things. One, art guided by the Party can degenerate into propaganda and the production of art can be reduced into an unthinking mechanical process. Two, that to keep emotions alive and intense, and the message fresh, one had to innovate. In art, he realized, one had to change even to remain the same. So he adopted, mastered and extended available mediums, and developed new ones. The white on white prints made by pouring paper pulp into matrixes prepared from moulds made from clay or wax surfaces, and the singular sculptures made by cutting, joining, and hand modelling of thin wax sheets, and then made permanent by casting using the lost wax process were two of his last and more personal innovations.

Why contemporary art carpets you ask?

Carpets and Rugs! The use of these words brings forth the imagery of a beautiful tradition. I was pursuing my studies as a textile designer, I always wanted to transcend my painting into something more than the frame of my canvas. That is when I came across carpets being used by artists not only in India but globally as a gateway for the free flow of ideas and visualization.

Her confidently draped saree, motia (jasmine) adorned scanty bun, kind eyes behind the glasses and a warm and welcoming smile on her thin lips -- people who met her in her ripe old age has this humble image of her etched in their minds. Suraiya Hasan Bose (1928 –2021), a legendary textile revivalist, pioneering entrepreneur and advocate of women’s empowerment, fondly called ‘Suraiya apa’ by the community of weavers, textile connoisseurs, researchers, students and those who loved her and admired her for her enormous contribution to the field of textile. Her weaving unit and outlet, House of Kalamkari Durries in Hyderabad, was like the second home for many of us. With her demise in September and the untimely closure of the weaving unit in November 2019, a significant chapter of the textile revivalist movement in post-independent India has ended. It has remained treasured only in memories of the unnumbered people who had a chance to get associated with her. My essay attempts to revisit a brief history of the weaving unit, focusing on its final years that decayed in a parallel manner to Suraiya apa’s frail body and fading memories.

The exhibition books accompanying the carefully curated, retrospective-scale exhibitions of Dashrath Patel, Jogen Chowdhury and Kartick Chandra Pyne at Emami Art between 2018 and 2020 delve deep into the life and work of the three modern masters. Lavishly illustrated, the books, based on foundational research on the artists, offer a glimpse of the exhibitions, presenting the side of their practice, rarely seen and scarcely explored.

Paper may be precious, printing technologies transform, and production methods expand—but the potential of the book as a creative form will remain available for exploration

-Johana Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Book