Unframed
The daily meanderings of Ira Chaudhuri
Ira Chaudhuri, who has said that she pots “because it bothers her not to”, wound up her pottery studio in her nineties, following the 2020 pandemic. She began creating works on paper, a natural transition, as her work had for some decades been dominated by drawing on pots, using a technique called sgrafitto (roughly, scratching). Drawing on doubly curved surfaces like spheres obeys a different geometry from the flatland she has occupied; it maps differently. The adjustment, if there was one, must have been eased by the strength of the impulse.
It’s an impulse developed over decades, starting from her education at Kala Bhawan at Santiniketan, seen by some as an influence on her work. In truth, there are many, barely discernible threads in a very mixed braid. You will see a channelling of tradition, laid out in unpredictable, promiscuous ways. In an alive mind, tradition is a live thing.
Indian classical music is a useful parallel. Her substantial familiarity with its Hindustani variant may be incidental, but her practice corresponds with the musician’s in important ways. In both, years of reflection become live moments—improvised and prepared. These works are built from fluent, intricately varied, visual phrases arising from a common impulse in a daily rhythm that starts at eight in the morning and pauses at sunset. The lines are final, and any mistakes are absorbed into the flow. Her work addresses herself as much as it does an audience. It is at once riyaz and performance.
JUST PUBLISHED
The Idea of Belonging
The journal contains a compilation of talks delivered at the History for Peace annual conference held in Calcutta, August 2024.
The Idea of Justice
The journal contains a compilation of talks delivered at the History for Peace regional conferences held in Delhi NCR and Patna in 2023 and 2024
DOWNLOAD HERE:
https://www.historyforpeace.pw/journals
Celebrating 100 years of K. G. Subramanyan
Glimpse from 2024
The celebrated artist, teacher and public intellectual Kalpathi Ganpathi Subramanyan (KGS) was born in Kerala a hundred years ago. At a deeper level, his journey from Palghat to Vadodara, via Chennai, Santiniketan, Baroda and again, Santiniketan, exemplifies the best of the idea of India. From the 1997 book by academic Sunil Khilnani to the erudite dialogue between historian Romila Thapar and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, we have a framework to understand the contours of the idea of India. While these scholars articulate it in words, the visual language of KGS provides a graphic and pictorial reading of a nation that went through the excesses of both colonial and post-colonial regimes.