Art | Walls don’t lie

In K.G. Subramanyan’s spectacular new mural, War of the Relics, the invader faces the invaded and the victorious face the defeated in a deadpan dialectic. The 9ft-high, 36ft-wide work spread across the gallery’s walls, consisting of 16 panels divided into eight diptychs, is the master’s meditation on the futility of violence. Despite its panoptic arc—at one end is a scene of rhapsodic horsemen from the Crusades, and at the extreme other end are battle tanks that could well be from 2002’s Afghanistan—Subramanyan’s figures, painted in black acrylic and oil on a white background, are undramatic. They represent war in a quiet, non-fussy way.

Subramanyan, 89, who lives and works in Vadodara after having spent many years at Santiniketan teaching, mentoring and making art, says this could well be his last work on such a scale.

Subramanyan is a theorist, painter and muralist who played a proactive role in the freedom struggle. Seen in its entirety, his art, which includes weaving, toymaking, children’s book illustrations, terracotta murals and glass painting, narrows the gap between the artist and the artisan. His murals testify how the form can be a bridge between street art and galleries, street art and art academia.

Subramanyan’s tone can be ironical, subversive and unequivocally celebratory. War of the Relics is one of his most political works—another reason this work is important in the history of murals, because most murals in India are decorative or celebratory.

Take the murals at the Delhi airport, the Union culture ministry’s chosen site for murals these days. The walls of the international arrivals section have murals by Paresh Maity, M.F. Husain’s murals adorn the area between the domestic and international sections. The international departure pier has a long mural by Seema Kohli. Who can miss the mural-installation of dance mudras by Jaipur-based designer Ayush Kasliwal? By the end of May, Anjolie Ela Menon’s 21x8.2ft mural, Walled City, will be unveiled at the domestic departure of Terminal 3—a paean to overpopulated Delhi streets.

Thegreat age for murals has passed. Santiniketan’s greatest artists, Nandalal Bose, Benode BehariMukherjee, Somnath Hore and Subramanyan himself, painted many murals on site. In scale and vision, the murals on the walls and ceilings of Santiniketan are still the most important murals in the country.

Over the years, the value of art has increased according to the diktats of the fickle art market, but if an artwork can’t be lifted and moved, it has little value. Parallel to the fluidity of artworks in the private realm is a stagnant public art scene. Murals which work best in a public space are few in India.

The life of a mural is intimately related to the life of a building and its architecture. The conservation of murals therefore begins with the conservation of the buildings that house them. Santiniketan has not always had the vision, the technical resources or the money to take constant care of the works. But of late, there has been some effort at conserving some, including the works of Bose and Mukherjee. “Much needs to be done, especially with the sculptures of Ramkinkar Baij,” says Raman Siva Kumar, historian and professor at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. “It requires constant monitoring by a team of experts and periodic conservation. But this should be true of other murals and sculptures in public places. The work by Subramanyan at the Gandhi Darshan in New Delhi has not received the care it deserves though the Capital has no shortage of conservation experts,”says Siva Kumar.

Among world cities, the mural thrives as public art in Los Angeles and Philadelphia in the US. In 1987, the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles (MCLA) was set up to preserve the city’s numerous mural walls—all commissioned and painted between the 1950s and 1970s. Many were lost to real estate development. The MCLA’s role now is just to preserve what exists.

In Philadelphia, in 1984, then mayor Jane Golden initiated what came to be known as the “anti-graffiti” initiative. She invited the city’s graffiti artists, who were working without any patronage, for commissioned works in the city’s public sphere. It led to around 2,000 murals.

The difference between graffiti and a mural is in its sanction and ownership. Graffiti, the more democratic art, is not commissioned and its purpose is not spelled out. Murals, in that sense, belong to the owner of the space in which it is created, and to the commissioning authority or person.

Twenty-eight-year-old Unnis M. Mani Achary is one of Kerala’s most prolific muralists. His canvases keep him footloose and away from home most of the time. He studied murals and wood carving in Kerala and started painting in small temples at Kadayiruppu, Ernakulam, his hometown. In the past decade, he has created around 2,000 murals in Kerala and outside—at the altar of the Mariya Goretti church, Idukki, at a church in Thrissur, in temples and private homes, and famously repainted the murals at the famous Guruvayur temple. “For me this is a lucrative way to earn,” Achary says. He has painted religious deities, scenes from nature and a series called Kala, devoted to the arts—his motifs not radically different from what you see in ancient caves and in temples.

Ajanta and Ellora, the Alchi and Hemis monasteries in Ladakh, the palaces and temples of Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura, the wall paintings in Ajmer, Jaipur and Jodhpur in Rajasthan, the Veerabhadreshwaratemple in Lepakshi, Andhra Pradesh, the wall graphics inside Old Delhi’s Jama Masjid, the mosque at the Bara Imambara complex in Lucknow, and the temples of Kerala—the motifs in traditional Indian murals are of animals, deities, clustered figures, details of costumes, depicted in languages that borrow Persian and European influences.

In 2011, a mosque mural provided a eureka moment to Indian scientists. In a mural at the Mosque of Madani in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, researchers found the “first firm record” of a supernova event in the subcontinent centuries ago. The Indian Express reported, “Researchers from the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE), Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and the University of Kashmir said the mural, depicted on a door-arch in the mosque, shows the supernova as a ‘dragon-head’ on the tail of the Sagittarius constellation.”

Contemporary artists have used the mural as a device for experiments. In 2010, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke hosted Mumbai-based Manish Nai’s Extramural, which featured a mural along the gallery’s walls made up of grey paint and gouache, combined for a dense texture and shifting perspectives with light. Nai wanted to use the scale of a mural to present his gaze on a city in flux.

Recently, Bangalore-based artist Amitabh Kumar showed murals that he imagined as public art in various locations of Mumbai at Mumbai’s Guild Art Gallery. His choice of the mural form, he says, was for a wider reach and to “bridge the gap between art and culture”.

The mural needs a rebirth. When a mural and its site are not irrevocably tied, like Subramanyan’s War of the Relics, it steps out of history, and stops being a relic.

War of the Relics is on display at Sakshi Gallery, Grants Building, Arthur Bunder Road, Colaba, Mumbai, till 3 June.