Drawing out a southern identity

Most of the rooms in the Manikyavelu Mansion are empty, the walls on which paintings normally hang bare as it's time for a clean-up, but take a right, duck to avoid an installation from a past exhibition that's yet to be taken down, and you enter a gallery full of local Old Masters.

The National

Gallery of Modern Art is hosting `Regional Modernity: The

Madras Art Movement

', paying tribute to the art of the 1960s to the 1980s when artists in southern India took to modernism while drawing inspiration from local culture and heritage.

The walls are covered with canvases that capture a rooster fight in black and red, stylized figures inspired by Chola bronzes, men taming or working with bulls, line drawings of women who could be relaxing in a village square, stories and scenes from the epics, abstract art influenced by the tantric, Tamil and Malayalam words and alphabets pared down to their essence, and folk-inspired works in terracotta and bronze. The art is at once contemporary and very Indian, the themes and ideas rooted in the local, rural and provincial while the expression is modern and linearity abounds.

Curator Ashrafi Bhagat has brought together 128 works by 40 artists who best represent the movement, which grew largely around the Government College of Arts and Crafts in Chennai, Cholamandal Artists' Village and artist and former college principal KCS Paniker. “I did my PhD thesis on the

Madras Movement

, which was the moment in time when modernism came to the south,“ says Bhagat, who is based in Chennai.She describes the exhibition as “an academic crown on my head, a dream fulfilled,“ as doing her PhD was a fraught process with little information available on these artists who didn't just work with modern techniques but used them to raise questions about what it meant to be an Indian artist. “It was a postIndependence movement when artists were looking to break out of the western styles of art they had learnt,“ she says.

Bengaluru's well-known artist S G Vasudev, who is one of the pioneers of the Madras Movement, agrees saying he gave away his books on Picasso and Modigliani at that time. “We were studying in institutions that we inherited from the British but the questions we were asking was whether we wanted to continue in that style. Should we take our own route? Yet we could not just follow the traditional art forms for that would not be true to who we were, it wouldn't be original,“ says Vasudev, ambling through the hall at NGMA, stopping to point out works that he particularly likes.“Each of us tried to take from our roots without going backwards.“ For Vasudev, that meant immersing himself in Kannada poetry and theatre, having Tanjore and Mysore masters on his walls and listening to Carnatic and Hindustani music. “Poetry has inspired a lot of my work,“ he says.

Vasudev and many of the artists whose works are on show were students at the Government College of Arts and Crafts in Chennai, one of the oldest art institutes in the country, in the early 1960s when painter and writer KCS Paniker was the principal. The college was central to the birth of the movement, and Paniker along with his studentsturned-teachers A P Santhanaraj, Munusamy and S Dhanapal taught the students to question existing ideas and styles. The college drew students from all over the south as it was the only art institute in the region then. This group of artists also went on to found Cholamandal Artists' Village, 50 years ago, just outside Chennai, where artists still live and work together.

Bhagat says Paniker was the catalyst for the movement. “There was also the north-south divide with very few people recognising and being aware of this movement. Paniker used his position to give these artists the exposure they needed,“ Bhagat says, adding that she's happy the show will be travelling to Mumbai and Delhi.

Vasudev, describing Paniker as his teacher, father figure and friend, says, “He kept trying new things all his life and pushed us to do the same. He talked about everything, he influenced our ideas but never our style.“

Today, however, the influences on artists in Chennai and the south have changed, says Vasudev.

“Unfortunately, they are not able to take what we did further. In a sense, globalization has reversed what we created, changed what we were trying to break away from,“ he says. “Artists as well as curators want work that seems like what the west is doing; the work is no longer uniquely Indian in its sensibility yet global in its execution,“ he says.

On Saturday , Bhagat will conduct a walk through the gallery at 3pm. And at 5.30pm, Vasudev will be in conversation with Madras artists Achuthan Kudallur, Anila Jacob, Balan Nambiar and Parvathi Nayar to discuss their influences and the movement.