Literary Review
Low kitsch, high price
THOUGH it looks like a coffee table book about Indian poster art, A Historical Mela the ABC of India, is in fact a catalogue for an auction of Modern and contemporary Indian art, rare books on Indian architectural heritage and fine arts, vintage movie posters, photographs, song-synopsis booklets and Lobby and show cards of Hindi cinema from the 1930s to the 1970s. Yes, definitely, this is quite a "mela", not very historical, but produced on expensive looking paper.
The author, Neville Tuli, is in fact the curator of the auction and producer of this catalogue. Though it is an interesting book to glance through, and the Hindi film posters and production stills will hold any Hindi film buff, the same buff will wonder what connection a pen and ink drawing by Nandalal Bose has with a poster of Raj Kapoor's "Bobby". But that confusion exists only because film buffs do not read fine print. If they did, they would notice that Bose's drawing is from his Ajanta studies and is reprinted in a section of the book entitled A Cultural Revival Amid the Mood of Swadeshi. Hence the extraordinarily extravagant, perhaps pretentious, connection between Bobby and Bose!
The great literary critic Samuel Johnson, when confronted by the work of the metaphysical poets John Donne, Andrew Marvel and others and struggling to describe the vast range of ideas and metaphors that these poets referred to, described their thoughts famously as "heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together". One can conservatively use that statement, with no alterations, to describe Tuli's book. One can say that he yokes by violence, high art and low kitsch in one volume.
I suppose the general idea of the book is to trace the history of commercial art in Modern India from calendars to early advertisements to movie posters. And to that effect one must describe a curious advertisement for "Maharaja cigarettes" manufactured by the city tobacco company of Bangalore. It uses Raja Ravi Varma's portrait of the Maharaja of Mysore to sell the product. This suggests that Ravi Varma was in fact not just a portrait painter but an early practitioner of industrial art. Is this true? If so, it is a novel idea and can be extended to the notion of M.F. Hussain's early profession as a painter of cinema hoardings. It is interesting and makes sense, especially when you see a few sketches and water colours on paper by Hussain in another section of the book entitled Another Aesthetic modern and contemporary art.
But the piece de resistance of the book, its sum and substance, are the movie stills and posters of Hindi cinema. Tuli has divided the sections according to generic categories whimsically created by himself. In the obviously titled chapter The Multi-starrers and the Stars, he has a poster of "Mother India" priced at, hold your breath, Rs. 25000 toRs.35000. Yes, "Mother India" was the first Indian film nominated for an Oscar, but you would have to be a very serious collector of film memorabilia to buy any of the stills and posters in the book.
However, A Historical Mela remains a great "glance-through" book, easy on the eye and lightweight on the mind. In the section entitled, The Parallel Wave Creates a Middle Ground there are a few wonderful pictures of Satyajit Ray at work and the photographs are well known ones taken by Ray's still photographer, Nemai Ghosh. The stills from "Shatranj Ke Khilari", Ray's first venture into Hindi cinema, are quite fascinating. They recall, with the clarity of daylight, Ray's fine art direction and the detailed attention he gave to creating a set design for a period piece.
Part of the legend of Amitabh Bachchan of the 1970s and 1980s was emphasised by the posters of the movies he acted in. People who never saw Hindi films would have been struck by the giant cut-outs of the extraordinarily striking image of this young man, pasted all over urban and rural India. Undoubtedly, the cult following of this superstar was underlined and blown up by poster art. Neville Tuli, appropriately, has a special section on what he calls Sholay and the Architects of the Bachchan Legend, as his homage to Amitabh. He takes you down memory lane with "Namak Haraam", "Muqaddar Ka Sikandar", "Kabhi Kabhie", "Don" and "Amar Akbar Anthony". But if you want to buy a poster of "Deewar", for example, it is likely to set you back by Rs. 15000 to 25000. Some might suggest, unkindly, that that is a lot of money for kitsch and that only a winner from "Kaun Banega Crorepati" would be fixated enough to purchase it. But then this book is meant for window shoppers, and we shall leave the buying to connoisseurs of poster art.
The essential problem with A Historical Mela rests not in what it contains but in the heights of eclecticism to which it aspires and the nonsensical categorisation with which it presents its subject. The job of a curator is to present art as an idea or as a theme with a cerebral continuity. This book represents an auction that appears more like a jumble sale than an art exhibition. It is almost as if the curator is saying: "here is what I got; now lets get the genres and sub-sections and give the exhibition credibility, authenticity and the official stamp of modern Indian art". Neville Tuli's book is a catalogue that is pretty to look at, but quite infuriating for a reader, or even for someone glancing through it.
A Historical Mela: The ABC of India, curated by Neville Tuli, Osians, 2002, price not stated.
AJIT DUARA
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