NEW DELHI // When the artist Yuvraj Jha was asked to imagine and depict one year in the life of independent India, he picked 1956. That year, B R Ambedkar, the architect of India’s constitution and the champion of Hinduism’s lowest castes, led 385,000 followers in a conversion to Buddhism.
“This was a watershed moment for neo-liberalism in India,” said Jha, who lives in New Delhi and describes himself as a mixed-media concept designer. In portraying this mass sloughing off of the trappings of caste, he wanted “to create a scene with a certain density of people”.
Jha is one of 69 young artists across the country whose work makes up Indianama, an exhibition in New Delhi that commemorates India's 69th independence day on Monday.
The exhibition was curated by Kunel Gaur, an artist and co-founder of Animal, a creative agency in the capital. Animal conceptualised Indianama, which will run at the Kona Art Gallery until August 18.
Gaur said the project came together with remarkable speed.
“Last year, as an agency, we had done a project called Taxi Fabric,” he said. “We got a bunch of artists to design new interiors for the iconic black-and-yellow taxis of Mumbai.”
This year the agency wanted to assemble a project around India’s Independence Day. “A month ago, we were sitting around at [the] office, brainstorming, and someone suggested that we get 69 artists to each pick one year in the history of free India and show that year through their art.”
Animal already worked with a roster of about 15 artists, whom Gaur commissioned. He then put out a call for submissions and ideas on social media, and assigned the remaining years.
“It was up to the artists to do their research, to choose some event that symbolised that year, and that they thought was important to India’s identity as a nation,” he said.
Every work in Indianama takes the map of India as its template but then riffs on its own particular theme.
One work, by the Manali-based artist Dhruv Chakkamadam, shows the first units of India’s iconic Ambassador car leaving the factory in 1958. Another, by the Bengaluru-based artist Ishaan Bharat, depicts 1973 when the government launched Project Tiger to conserve India’s national animal.
The Mumbai-based artist Ameya Narvankar, meanwhile, sketched herds of cows interspersed with the apparatus of the dairy industry – milk tanks, pasteurisation plants, factories – in a clean, simple illustration to depict 1970. That was the year the government launched Operation Flood, an initiative that revitalised India’s dairy industry.
“It was the largest dairy development programme in the world, which involved creating a national milk grid across the country,” Narvankar said. “By linking rural supply to urban demand through co-operatives, it cut down the middlemen and ensured that the dairy farmers benefited. It is an important economic achievement in independent India’s history.”
Often, the submissions surprised and enlightened Gaur and his colleagues. With Jha’s work, for example, although Gaur was aware of Ambedkar’s reputation as a jurist, he had not heard the details of his conversion to Buddhism.
“It struck me that so much has happened in the history of modern India that we just haven’t heard about,” he said.
An artist himself, Gaur chose 1980, the year of his birth, for his contribution. That was the year Sanjay Gandhi, the son of then-prime minister Indira Gandhi, died in an air crash. Growing up in Delhi, Gaur had often heard about Gandhi’s political tendencies – his wielding of great power, despite holding no office, and his divisive visions for a modern India.
“Since childhood, people around me would sometimes be saying that he would have made a great prime minister, or that he was an awful figure,” Gaur said. “My work reflects that – these two facets of Sanjay Gandhi.”
Taken together, the paintings and illustrations that make up Indianama convey a sense of optimism about the national project, Gaur said.
“A lot of the themes are positive. They show the artists being happy about something happening, about some progress within India.
“With this, they’ve been able to look upon independent India itself as a canvas, and they’ve seen a sense of hope.”
ssubramanian@thenational.ae