Art is where the heart is

Nonika Singh talks to a few artists who have traded off a secure existence for a tenuous, new beginning.

VENUE — New York City opera. Year — 1991. India born US settled dancer Navtej Johar performs solo to enthralled full capacity crowd. An enviable feat. His compatriots would perhaps have given their right arm to exchange his dancing feet with theirs. But midway during the mesmerising performance, a small voice inside him whispers — Navtej, do you want to be here? Like a thud the unequivocal response is a resounding — "No".

A year later in the sweltering heat of New Delhi, sitting pillion behind his friend’s motor bike revelling in the scorching sun, he repeats ad nauseam — this is it.

Coming home to.... The hullabaloo over Dilip Kumar’s Nishan-e-Pakistan (no judgements please) would have us believe that artists are not bound by man-made boundaries. Indeed, artists are beyond narrow sectarian interests. Since art can not be contained by facile demarcations, an artist like a free bird spans the entire universe. So what is an artist? A global citizen! Sure. Hold on. May be not. An artist too belongs. The yearning to reach out to his roots is as strong (even stronger) in an artist as the rest of us too is connected by a rare connectivity that defies hard-nosed logic.

So Hurbux Singh Latta, now a film-maker who had immigrated to the land of the Big Apple to master the intricacies of dried laws of engineering felt a lump in his throat when he saw the play Rani Jindan at New York, incidentally written by his own father noted playwright Dr Harcharan Singh and directed by Mohan Maharishi. Latta recalls "Till then I was totally cut off from my roots, oblivious of my vast heritage. Why I had no inkling whatsoever of the great literature my own father had penned. But in an instant I was a convert".

Hitherto uninitiated in the realm of art, he knew he had found his muse. Back home he made a film Sardara Kartara. The film bombed but not his aspirations. Realising film-making was not child’s play, he enrolled for a two-year course in film direction and language at New York University where the earthy ambience, the faculty members and the exposure to world’s best cinema honed his aesthetic sensibilities. In his second avtar as a maker, he won critical acclaim for his teleserial Ekus ke hum barik, based on Guru Nanak’s travels. He pioneered the trend of video film-making in Punjab for the city-bred could empathise well with his urban sophisticate viewer. With videos like Gidda pao kuriyo, Gurdas Mann wanted dead or alive he struck a responsive chord amongst his Punjabi brethren. But then it had to be. Fait accompli. As Navtej rues that all the while in U.S. no matter what he did the vital organic palpable contact was always missing.

Gick Grewal a consummate theatre actress agrees! "The nasha, the sheer exhilaration of performing in the presence of your people who can relate to the subtlest of nuances is unparalleled". Gick who landed in the land of Big Ben, courtesy her marriage, did not really come back to realise her artistic potential. At that point she did not want her children to grow up in an ethos totally divorced from their Indianness. So a decade ago she flew down to Mother India and settled down in City Beautiful. Though during her university days she represented her college in various activities like dance, music and drama she wasn’t expecting great things to happen to her. But viola! Comedy king Jaspal Bhatti picked her up for a role in his laugh-a-minute series Ulta Pulta. Thereafter celebrated theatre personality Neelam Man Singh Chaudhry noticed her. Essaying the part of grief-stricken blind woman in Neelam’s much acclaimed Nag Mandala Gick, the actress, emerged. Since then the talented actress hasn’t looked back. Recognition, locally and at international platforms, has come out of its own volition. She now owns a flourishing costume company. Though her children continue to enjoy British citizenship and she has the option of moving close to river Thames whenever she desires she gushes with unconcealed passion, "I wouldn’t even want my ashes to go back to England".

However, not all share her sentimental euphoria for the arduous trek back home has diluted their effusiveness. So much so that Zoya Raikhy city’s famous woman potter trained at Marshmallow Centre for Arts at Philadelphia who otherwise calls herself a dyed-in-wool Punjaban was thoroughly disenchanted when she had to move back to Chandigarh after a decade long stint in the U.S.A. Having established herself in a nation where pottery is considered an independent evocative stream of art and then moving to India where this particular form of art is in a nascent stage was, predictably, a tough task. She contends," Here I was totally at sea for while being a painter was suitably fashionable the not so discerning Indians had little clue about pottery. In fact pottery was (is) considered synonymous with spray painting and embellishing a Kumhar’s earthenware". Whereas on the one hand there were several roadblocks in the way of setting up her studio, on the other hand there were practical difficulties like availability of the right kind of clay, ceramic and glaze etc.

For years she kept going back to US selling her work there, ploughing the dollars thus earned into her studio in Punjab. Today with her work accepted by stalwarts like Ebrahim Alkazi and an exhibition at Art Heritage Delhi where her exotic creations were a complete sellout, she can rest easy. Nevertheless she had grave misgivings about her return. Life was on a rewind..Back to square one the learning process began all over again. Down the memory lane she reminisces, "Often I would come back from the studio with tears in my eyes and seriously contemplated packing my bags and catching the first flight to the US". Latta who retains his green card status too thinks that leaving America after all wasn’t such a bright idea. The man who has devoted over 15 years to Punjabi world of make-believe, states that the real faux pas was his decision to settle down in Chandigarh, a city with limited opportunities. But for a Shriomani Nirmata Award, there is little else to commend his achievements. His recent multimedia extravaganza Bole So Nihal produced to commemorate the tercentenary celebrations of the Khalsa too found few takers. While the government backtracked on its promise, the private sponsors were equally apathetic.

Ironically, the light and sound show which juxtaposes different mediums that is light, drama, video and sound has found a market across the seven seas. He asserts that qualities like honesty, integrity and straight forwardness which he imbibed from the alien culture have proved to be an Achilles’ heel in a system that thrives on underhand manipulations.

Are artists on a sticky wicket in India? Is Indian artistic milieu inimical to the blossoming of their creativity? Mangal Singh, a playback singer who spent prime time in England and came to Bombay in 1990 muses,’’ In India whom you know matters more than what you know". Yet he had a dream debut in Bollywood. Like Aladdin’s fabled khul ja sim sim he got his first break in Sunny Deol starrer Vishnudeva yet another number kaali teri gut te paranda tera laal ni became a chartbuster thus catapulting him to the crest of success. Small wonder Navtej whose arrival on the Indian cultural scene coincided with an openness in the air, is enraged and demands furiously. "It’s time we stopped asking these lopsided inane questions. The argument that in India you can’t succeed albeit with the blessings of a fairy godmother/godfather has been stretched to a ludicrous limit".

Sure it’s no cakewalk. But then the world of art is a cut-throat competitive world, which has no place for mediocrity. Be it India, America or Europe, only the best can survive. Diwan Manna, the city’s well-known photographer who has often exhibited his work in England, reminds us that making a mark at international levels is easier said than done. Apart from fighting racial prejudices, however much we might delude ourselves, one can’t ignore the harsh grim reality that in the international circuit we Indians just do not matter. In the domain of ideas and mind, Europeans have an inherently superior attitude. The world of contemporary art is a near sanitised zone where the entry is strictly prohibited. Of course if Indian artists stick to traditional format i.e. if you are a classical dancer or singer, acceptance comes with relative ease.

But Navtej, a Bharatnatyam dancer, refused to replicate the Indian number. He says,"I abhorred the very thought of being viewed as an oddity, an exotic oriental species with add-on curiosity value. Instead he chose to work with the modern-day dance gurus and came to be regarded as an American Indian dancer, a local phenomenon. If in the U.S., he did not seek recourse to the easy way out in India too he did not care to flaunt his American antecedents. Instead, he found his feet as a Bharatnatyam dancer first. It isn’t as if he is denying the American experience. Though he went to America with a heavy heart, on hindsight he feels that it was a good move. For one, it freed him from the ghettoised agendas which cultural czars impose upon their proteges. Coming back as a mature adult prepared him to resist attempts to be drawn into any kind of dragnet.

Though we Indians have a strange fascination for goods and beings with foreign labels and often international recognition precedes national applause, most artists insist that the NRI tag has been of little consequence. However the lessons learnt outside in foreign lands have been more than helpful. For instance Latta realised that Kipling’s "Never the twain..." is all humbug and the union between diametrically opposed cultures is always possible. A horde of singers who have invaded the Punjabi musical galaxy to encase upon the booming

craze for Punjabi pop have brought with them the technical wizardry mastered abroad. The net result are some slick videos accompanying their not so great vocal chords, assisting them in their ascent upwards.

Whatever the reasons for the homecoming — purely personal, sheer avarice, emotional or strong bonds — a common thread that binds these artists is how they have traded off a secure cocooned existence for a tenuous new beginning. In the process they have both lost and won. Of course an artiste’s life is never a straight lined curve but an oscillating graph. Since an artiste’s goals are never predetermined and are constantly revised, Mangal had no

qualms in winding up his fairly successful musical group in UK Navtej too had no compunctions in bidding adieu to a country where he enjoyed major visibility and had a fan following which trailed him. He justifies, "The high of making it big in distant nations is soon offset by an aching realisation that you can’t touch the inner recess of the viewers’ hearts. After a while things stop resonating. When that happens what should be a sublime journey translates into a harrowing experience".

So what happens in Bharat maa? Smiling exuberantly he utters, "We, me and my audiences, share a heart".