Walking into an art gallery is almost always a rewarding experience because you discover so much through an exhibition that you would never have anticipated. But walking into the Dhoomimal Gallery, Connaught Place — the oldest gallery in the country that turns 80 this year — is like walking into a treasure chest of fascinating stories. Hearing the gallery matriarch Uma Ravi Jain, a lawyer who was converted into an art addict by marriage, is like listening to Indian art’s fairy tales. The good-natured Mrs Jain always has a new anecdote to share of the times when her father-in-law Ram Babu would let newbie artists walk away with imported colors from his shop, when he would deliberately look away, as he felt that the nascent art scene of a freshly-independent India needed that support; she also has a huge bagful of stories of how her husband Ravi Jain would have artists over to sit in his gallery, and paint and eat at his expense the whole day because he just loved being surrounded by art. And how the third generation, her son Uday who now helms the gallery along with his mother, would drive F.N. Souza nuts by pointing out the colors he should fill on his canvas as he knelt beside him as a toddler, parroting, ‘Uncle Blue,’ ‘Uncle Green,’ ‘Uncle Red.’This time, her namesake, curator and columnist Uma Nair has pulled out one sheaf of the book of art stories stashed away in the Jain household and created a show that will baffle any well-meaning devotee of the talent of Jamini Roy (1887-1972). Titled ‘Carved Contours,’ the show has 80 paintings and drawings by Roy, one of the most well-known Indian artists. It is accompanied by a 110-page book.The show is a surprise because it presents Roy’s oeuvre in an envelope that includes many phases of his career as an artist, revealing his influences that range beyond the most obvious Kalighat and Pat paintings. Nair, who allowed herself to drown in the sea of works that came out of the rarely seen Jain collection, says, “Umaji had been asking me to come over to her home and see the works all together and when I finally did go, I was stunned. I asked all of it to be spread on the floor and then I got see the whole body of work in a new light.”Nair has curated an exhibition that does equal justice to Roy’s ink pen drawings, to Western influences that belong to a period before he broke free of the convention of his time to draw essentially Indian inspiration, to his Christ paintings which are surprisingly enough to indicate that he was transfixed with the subject for a while, as much as to Kalight style paintings that are synonymous with his signature. “The mother and the child is a recurring theme in Roy’s works but he does wonder with this theme when he paints Madonna and baby Jesus,” says Nair, pointing to quintessentially Bengali-treatment to the work, complete with alpana figures in the background (Alpana, known by various names across India, is the art of decorating the house during festivals with geometric and floral patterns, with rice grain paste). Besides, there is also a crucifixion oil on canvas, a complete antithesis of the layman’s knowledge of Jamini Roy’s works. The mother and child figures appear in many avatars, both as drawings and paintings. And show the master’s total command of the medium as well as the subject — the fluent lines of the two figures are as tender as it can get, capturing the emotional space between the two with subtlety. Nair points out to the oil on canvas where the mother’s hug is a tight cinch, enveloping the infant in her bosom, with only a part of the tiny head visible from behind the fold of her saree. “Isn’t it amazing? The baby’s head is so slight. And look at the way the drape falls, it’s so straight. He was a master with the drapes,” says Nair.The richness of the quintessentially Indian canvases makes it easy to understand why this famous student of the Bengal School founder Abanindranath Tagore renounced Western inspiration to turn to totally Indian idiom. Even though his brilliance shines through in Impressionist-style paintings of a boy (tempera on cardboard) — quite akin to the early Paris works by Indian masters who studied at Ecole Des Beaux Arts, or the cowgirl with her distinct slant tackling her horse — the move towards Indian inspiration is very evident, it comes through even in decidedly western composition of a figurative work on a surface prepared by interlocking of strips of bamboo, as is done by women in rural India to this day to weave mattresses or fans. The dream part of the exhibition, however, is the left wall of the gallery adorned by nearly 40 drawings. “They were all in a folio and as they started coming out, I was amazed,” shares Nair, who got the selected ones framed identically, marking them out as a group in the exhibition. They offer a rich insight into the basic grammar of Roy’s work through sharp lines, firm contours, and the surety of strokes even though the size of the paper on which they are drawn is rather small. The exhibition is a must-visit for the total Jamini Roy experience that it offers, it will change the way this artist is perceived in popular imagination, and strengthen his position in your mind as the first modernist master of Indian art. — The exhibition “Carved Contours” is on view view at Dhoomimal Gallery, G-42, Connaught Place, through March 10. Visit www.dhoomimalgallery.comFollow@ARTINFOIndia
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