Print perfect

This morning I went to a sort of pre-preview of an art show that opens soon in Mumbai. Since the newspaper I work for wanted to give it some coverage, and I sounded vaguely knowledgeable on the subject, I was dispatched, and got there before 10:30, my heels throwing up tiny sprays of water as I got out of my car and dashed into the gallery through a wonderfully grey drizzle. I found the lady I was there to see and was summarily dispatched to take a look at the work on show. And, if I didn’t have a conscience, I would have walked off with at least one smuggled out under my kurta, never mind the rather unsightly and sharp-edged bump it would have created.

The exhibition was part of a collection of oleographs and lithographs belonging to a gentleman from Kolkata. In my family, while the concept was not unfamiliar, works of this genre were always looked at with a certain degree of contempt, as ‘calendar art’, with stout women who looked singularly unintelligent and fairly unrealistic albeit fervent portrayals of mythological, historical and nationalistic themes. They seemed somehow too brightly coloured, too detailed, even too cheesy, for lack of a better word. But today, I was charmed.

Especially by two pieces. One, I have not yet stopped talking about. It shows the Draupadi vastraharan, the stripping of the Pandava queen by a Kaurava villain. She is obviously horrified, but stylisedly so, her feet planted just so, her face grimacing in a very ye olde filme way. Sort of like Theda Bara or Fearless Nadia would have done if she was being so publicly stripped for celluloid posterity. Her sari flows in a vivid mithai pink wave, in real fabric, perhaps georgette or chiffon, dotted with neat rounds of zardosi work – which also finds place on other costumes in the same print. The whole looks like film still, movement captured in a frame, with the villain looking amazingly like the hero of a South Indian potboiler. Shamelessly, blatantly, I asked the gallery lady, a sweet person with a mercifully good sense of humour, to convince the owner that I would give it a good home, and she laughed. The owner, when I asked him, was even more amused.

The other piece I would have taken home if I could was as charming, though more subtle. It was a delicately tinted work of an adolescent Krishna, lounging gracefully, a tiny smile edging its way out of his eyes and on to his lips. It could have been a young girl semi-lying there at an al-fresco picnic, soft colours and a sense of playful peace emanating from the picture. I have not said anything about that one to anyone; perhaps I want it too much!

I looked at the whole show carefully, doing two rounds. But only these made my acquisitive instincts bristle. Now I need to work on the owner to sell them to me. Do you think he would? Or does he feel as connected to the prints as I do?