Bollywood Reveries- Rustic reveries of Bollywood : Essay by Nanak Ganguly

This body of work resulted from a piling up of images from a huge corpus of Indian Cinema bringing in an ambivalent language that facilitates the seizure of aesthetic and cultural meaning. Vinita Dasgupta has always been a pilgrim of intensity and one of our finest painters working at present in our contemporary art scene. She has dedicated himself to a quest for a surrealist imagery that can carry the freight of her early memories, cultural space, realism, of living in a city, a politico-social conditioning, a politics of identity, culture and language and above all an inner silence that pervades our existence. And yet, her works have never been nostalgic hymns to an existential epoch rather her aim has been to inhabit, and share with the viewer, a pictorial space that is ever-renewed
The works in this exhibition communicate the parable of a world where the close-ups of its members are mere overlapping of an individual’s close- up but an overview of a situation – a rare gesture. Vinita Dasgupta pays tribute to film noir. The visual parable is construed based on a huge corpus of mainstream Hindi cinema. The subjects of this body of work are the glamorous actresses of popular films made in Bombay that is crucially located in the terrain of culture that the nation, as an imagined community in these spaces, is most powerfully articulated into existence. The significance of Bombay’s cinematic idiom, from this perspective, lies in the fact that it represents the hegemonic vocabulary of cultural terrain in Indian. The local traditions and popular culture where social and political conflicts that are central concerns are virulent in her works. It proves to be a seismograph of a society locked into a transformation process, establishing its own positions to confront a discourse of modernity determined by the west. Though portraits of leading actresses of mainstream Hindi cinema and image from pin up actors of yesteryears and posters like Waheeda Rehman , Nutan, Madhubala, Suraiyya, Sharmila Tagore, Rakhi, Rekha, to Maduri Dixit, Kajol, Rani Mukherjee, Shahrukh Khan, salman Khan, Amitabh Bachchan or films like Shree 420, Aag, Awara,Mughal e Azam, Bees Saal Baad, Madhumati, Johny Mera Naam, Yaadon Ki Baraat, Bobby, Sholay, and others that helped in the construction of our cultural, social and national identities, these are not mere portrayals of a popular genre but of our cultural icons that cut across regional and national boundaries resulting in a new class of popular cultic, eclectic and visual imagery. At this point of career, she is deeply driven by a desire to search out the noble form: perhaps by a sort of need to aid ourselves and especially narcissistically and now its time for her to paint all the phenomena on the canvas before they are precipitated, assembled, crystallized that dwells in a space free from all bondage to the visible, definite and the finite-most spare and ascetic, referring to her inner world she made in consummate bursts of energy in defined periods of time. Her work is figurative and illuminated; it never gives itself away though as external sign- rich in privacy and inwardness. Some of the digital photographic images transferred on to the canvases here are replete with images of a world that substitutes the external one translating feeling and emotions into a visual language
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The visual images of actors of Hindi cinema and others that helped in the construction of our cultural, social and national identities, these films made in Bombay (now Mumbai) are not mere portrayals of a popular genre but of our cultural icons that cut across regional and national boundaries resulting in a new class of popular cultic, eclectic and visual imagery of an invented nation. Posters of popular films that is crucially located in the terrain of culture that the nation, as an imagined community in these spaces, is most powerfully articulated into existence. The significance of Bombay’s cinematic idiom, from this perspective, lies in the fact that it represents the hegemonic vocabulary of cultural terrain in Indian and Vinita Dasgupta’s present series ‘Mumbai Meri Jaan’s exactly seizes that enticing space. Today in social science practices, popular cinema is a particularly potent political and cultural document thus crystallizing a new area of discipline. The audiovisual cuts across barriers of language, class, culture, region in highly diverse societies. Cultural theorists interrogate the cinema while being in dialogue with India as illusion supplier- because India, in its own self- imaging, has given a prominent place to reflection as fantasy as the root of desire and agency which, in giving itself illusions and realities. These ultimately becoming the signifier of such sites in the public space. Cinema has always been a play of middle- class sensibilities and fantasy life and popular cinema (a genre which can publicly be ridiculed and secretly enjoyed at the same time) has become for this class both an ideological phalanx and a major vehicle self- expression and aspirations and often described as our ‘secret politics of desire’. Vinay Lal and Ashis Nandy points out-‘…..research of popular cinema often identified with post- modernist or post- structuralist schools of thought and theories of post-coloniality - the new discipline is also powered by the changing politics in South Asia. Politically, English speaking India has consistently lost ground in the culture of Indian politics during the last fifty years, though many observers in and outside India, have, in this respect, being misled by apparently contrary trends’. (Fingerprinting Popular Culture, OUP, 2006.)


Dasgupta’s present series reflect where the key emphasis remains the myriad relations between globalization, local traditions, fetishization of consumer objects and popular culture where social and political conflicts that are central concerns are virulent in its screenplay- bringing in an ambivalent language that facilitates the seizure of aesthetic, mythic and cultural meaning and thus becoming an important tool. They story telling act as sites of human characterizations of abstract concepts; the open ended, episodic and fragmented nature of the narrative minds conditioned by the notion of a linear meta- narrative of historical thinking , cemented together through devices such as family ‘history’, and ‘filial love’; and the reemergence of ‘Filmi’(read Hindustani) as secular film language (-All families invent their parents and children; give each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language.”-Edward Said.) It proves to be a seismograph of a society locked into a transformation process, establishing its own positions to confront a discourse of modernity determined by the west. .

If one crucially studies Vinita’ painted space that is zany and invigorating one would find the changing configuration of the “Indian woman” in popular cinema, with the laconic rural belle of the 50’s like Kashmir ki kali now being replaced by her ethnic-chic, cosmopolitan , upper-class/caste counterpart; the New Indian ‘Woman’ in ‘Race’ or Karan Thapar saga defined above all by the agency displayed by ‘falling’ in love the pressures generated by the new identity of Indian woman and explored the history of desire in Bombay film, mapped onto transitions in India’s state form that reconfigures the earlier opposition between “Indianness and “Westernization”. The identifying features of our cinemas portrayed by these posters have always been extensive use of music and dance, and the explicit stylization of roles and speech acts. It is almost like a rich study of popular culture whose important tools are these memorabilia can link the ancient India of the philosophies to the modern India of the film industry. In the present series a middle of the road return to narratives pervaded with a raw sexuality, dynamic equilibrium of forms and a measured progression for all in an essential priori. We know the visual text’s only role is to divide up the visible with an already given conceptual configuration. Dasgupta is never caught up with the old standards of skill which proves her resourcefulness as a painter some unequal to the artist ambition. This change has given rise to landscapes charting the mind’s subterranean terrain with a blood-rushed ecstasy; these oils/acrylics on canvas show a move back towards the landscape but with newer and stronger symbols filling the space; they seem to suggest an earlier preoccupation with his fundamentally elegiac temperament. Thus each visual plane assumes a significant value. Sometimes she plots the position of objects around the actors, marking the points where their forms reflect, intersect or overlap; the frame within the frame diverges instead of converging into a unitary whole. Seductive yet austere paintings float weightlessly unconstrained by necessity yet no less connected to material realm of natural. These remain chanced encounters for us; the dignity that once existed within the interface is now scattered across the silence of these forms-fascinated with isolation and depersonalization of the autographic gesture that maintain a certain austerity, these paintings celebrate their artifice, and sweeping brushstrokes seem genuinely felt, warm, invigorating and intimate. Vinita Dasgupta has ability to state, as she does assiduously the most enduring truths in a style that is measured and patiently gathers a luminous energy as we navigate her work inexorably forward. Her approach is much more visual in its address than being polemical. Her language shifts from spectacle to presence, a psychological space where there is absence in spite of presence; and that presence is the sole key to a state in which ratiocination of any kind is suspended- the inadequacy of the faculties is accepted and we the viewer advance humbly towards faith. Here concrete objects become tokens of a concealed desired principle.