Persona Non Grata

Come the '90s, he was confirmed persona non grata when he displayed Yayati at Jehangir Art Gallery. Scandalised eminence grises prevailed upon the gallery owners to not display the "obscenity". That painting of two priapic, supposedly mythic but shamelessly real men in unambiguous sexual embrace was not just ringing declaration of personal sexual identity but also his newfound artistic credo. The Accountant of Lost Reality had made his leap of faith, assumed the other mantle, that of the Accountant of Alternate Reality.

How Khakhar made his place in contemporary art history, how he bridged the painful chasm between Khetwadi slums and the Bombay swankside, between fearful sexual diffidence and fearless declaration, between knowing and articulating, tracing the trajectory of his troubled journey from the boondocks to the art world centrestage forms the burden of Hyman's story. En route he offers us a first authoritative insider outsider (he lectured at Baroda Art School where Khakhar studied) view of the fierce artistic debate that raged among the votaries of internationalism and indigenisation, abstraction and figuration, the literal and metaphorical in art in the Baroda Art School circuit of the '60s. Also a renewed perspective on the '70s art scene of the larger world (with dilemmas surprisingly similar to those the Barodawalas were wrestling with) of which Khakhar was soon to become honorary, respected citizen.

Much else figures in this elegantly written, compassionate, erudite book on one man's art, the internal landscape, the contextual artscape that shaped him. We meet Bhupen the Gujarati dramatist and short story writer, sneak a glimpse of the intellectual Pygmalion blooming under the tutelage of K.G. Subramanyam, encounter the endearingly insecure man who fought dark despair to falter, fall and finally find his artistic metier after travelling a long meandering road that led him to the pop worlds of Kitaj, the classical/fantastical worlds of Lorenzetti and Rousseau, the otherworld of Indian miniatures and finally, triumphantly to the teeming, ravaged, many times ugly, most times honest, underworld of his own subconscious.

My problem with this book dotted with rare archival pictures? None. Except the fact that I read the manuscript well in advance of the book's publication. That, the undoctored, inelegant version, had a lacerating edge, an intensity that made one weep. You heard Bhupen talk in his untutored syntax: the reality articles and prepositions were always missing, the honesty never. Ascribe it to my jaded second glance but did I discern a drawing room quality to the reworked prose? I begin to understand why the men-who-know-too-much are invariably bumped off by chapter two of any thriller by any self-respecting mystery novelist. They spoil things. The book is excellent. Too bad if one knows it could have been par excellence.