The Bengal Biennale makes its debut in Santiniketan

Santiniketan isn’t quite Oz but it’s close enough—just with brick-red dust instead of the yellow brick road. Its presiding deity Rabindranath Tagore, with his flowing robes and long beard, could pass for a venerable wizard. And the main mode of transportation is vehicles one rarely sees in metropolitan Kolkata—totos, three-wheeler electric rickshaws, the larger country cousin to Kolkata’s “autos".

Toto-hopping through high art might sound a little odd but it makes perfect sense on Santiniketan’s bumpy roads and narrow lanes. These toto drivers also double as guides. “I’ve hired a toto for the day," says a wise friend. I tag along happily.

The biennale kicked off on 29 November with a few speeches, a bit of tree planting but no Rabindra Sangeet at all. Whatever the reason, to me the omission of this hallowed staple felt like a quiet signal that a biennale in Santiniketan can salute the great masters without being petrified by reverence for them.

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Old hallowed Santiniketan is very much a part of the biennale. There are exhibits at Vishwa Bharati’s famous Kala Bhavana with its exquisite murals by K.G. Subramanyan. But the newest murals in town come from artists Mithu Sen and Sanyasi Lohar and their team of young Santhal women. Like Kala Bhavana, these are also in black and white but on the mud walls of huts in a Santhal village. The subjects are not the Ramayan or Devi Durga, just the letters and numbers of the Santhal alphabet. This is ‘I am Ol Chiki’.

Ol Chiki is the script of the ancient spoken Santhali language, developed in 1925 by the scholar Raghunath Murmu. Even now few can read it. People often write it in Bengali or Hindi script instead. These letters on the mud walls are both an act of reclamation and defiance. As two young women shyly and haltingly read the letters, Sen says, “Next time I want to see a whole sentence on the wall."

But even here there’s a bit of tongue-in-cheek irreverence. Snuck amidst the letters are emojis like a yellow smiley face. It’s again a signal, a wink to a changing world.

“We were determined to use only organic colours," says Sen. “But the black was too ashen. Sanyasi (her co-artist) said can we mix some of the ash from burned tyres? I said okay, we can cheat a bit. It’s artistic licence."

Artistic licence is a word that sits uneasily in a place where one is more used to hushed reverence. This is a town of art giants—Ramkinkar Baij, Nandalal Bose, Somnath Hore. But Sen says the test of art has to be the work not the name. “When I go to a museum and see a work of art, I don’t want to see who the artist is. I want to see the impact on me first. Then I look at the name."

In fact, some of the artists in the biennale spread over Santiniketan and Kolkata are not known as artists at all. “We wanted it to be not only about the Tagores and the Grand Renaissance or only serious contemporary art which is a searing critique of the times," says Malavika Banerjee, who along with her husband Jeet are the trustees. “So we also have Louiz Banks." The paintings of the godfather of Indian jazz will be shown in no gallery or museum but at Trincas, the legendary hot spot for Kolkata’s nightlife from the days of Usha Uthup and Pam Crain.

Even in Santiniketan there are a few names which might lead to raised eyebrows among purists—mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik and economics Nobel laureate Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee. At Mitali Homestay, Banerjee provides the wry monologues while the caustic and irreverent graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee comes up with the images for Water-Wars. I check out the artwork right after dinner there with friends—hilsa being the star of the meal, delicately prepared with fat green chillies. If there is some irony in eating an overfished delicacy from Bengal’s rivers and then exploring an exhibition on our water crisis, I choose to ignore it in the name of artistic licence.

Pattanaik too is taking licence here, appearing as an artist rather than a mythologist who draws. For MYtruTH, the art takes centre-stage while the text offers context. As he leads a walkthrough in sculptor K. S. Radhakrishnan’s elegant Tokaroun art space, Pattanaik points to a rather South Asian looking Last Supper and says if westerners could imagine Christ with blond hair and blue eyes, he could turn him desi as well. Then with a chuckle he says it doesn’t bother him. He thinks of himself as a doodler rather than an artist.

That’s perfectly appropriate in Santiniketan where Tagore himself was a doodler par excellence, scribbling his art into and all around the lines of his poetry. Thus it makes perfect sense that a fan extends his notebook to Pattanaik and asks not for an autograph but a doodle.

“What’s your favourite animal?" Pattanaik asks. “Monkey," replies the man. Pattanaik obliges.

Of course, the biennale comes with more familiar artistic names too. A brightly painted Bankura horse leads to Sudhir Patwardhan’s portraits of ordinary people. Nikhil Chopra, dressed in crumpled white, does a live performance blurring art and ecology, writhing on sheets while mesmerised viewers watch from above. T. V. Santhosh blends truth, fiction and subversion in Dreams of Doom.

The biennale’s theme is “Anka Banka—Through Crosscurrents". Anka-banka, a play on words, suggests a meandering road straying from the straight and narrow. “And crosscurrents stuck with me because even in the Bengal school simultaneous influences are present, at times within the same household," says festival curator Siddharth Sivakumar. “Within Tagore’s Jorasanko household you will see Abanindranath doing his Arabian Nights while his brother does Cubist experimentations." And their self-taught sister Sunayani Devi finds her inspiration in pata folk paintings.

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“I think we have a lot of contrasting ideas here, not always in harmony," says Sivakumar. That tension makes sense in Santiniketan, he says, the town that was meant to be an ashram but now wants to be a city.

The yellow Wow! Momo outlets make it feel just like any aspirational modern town in these parts until a man in a cycle rickshaw goes past announcing over and over again that doctor so-and-so will have his chamber on Saturday from 11-3, like a village crier of yore. Yet, there’s also an impeccably designed Amoli café, which just made the Conde Nast 50 best restaurants list, whose upside-down orange cake has the perfect bitter-sweet note to go with an Americano.

As my toto bumps down the road to Somnath Hore’s studio, I notice a golden statue of Rabindranath Tagore standing at the entrance to a little temple. I don’t know what deity actually resides inside, but this is a town (and a state) where Tagore is God. He is part of this biennale too but not its gatekeeper.

Instead, he shows up in an unexpected cameo in a painting by artist Mahesh Baliga. It’s a lovely idyllic rural scene of a river bank. The eye is drawn to the figures in the foreground, ankle-deep in limpid green water. But if you look carefully, in the back, a woman in a sari is walking along the bank with a child. And if you look even more closely, the little child is dressed as Rabindranath, complete with Santa Claus beard, as if for some costume party at school.

Like Mithu Sen’s smiley emoji, it’s a wink and a nod.

In Tagore’s own town it’s artistic licence at its most charming.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against. Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr

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