Arunima Choudhury: Natural Flair

AS THE DIVERSE audience gathered at the ground floor of the five-storeyed Emami Art gallery, surveying Arunima

Choudhury’s new exhibition titled The Dark Edge of Green, the Bombay wallah in me couldn’t help but wonder if all art openings in Kolkata are this leisurely. I am told they are. Clad in a yellow sari, a relaxed Choudhury mingles with friends, visitors, students and connoisseurs alike. She makes small talk with all before quickly floating back into the crowd to play the genial host.

The next day, we find the artist waiting for us at the gate of her Picnic Garden home in the southern part of Kolkata. Pointing out her favourite plants and shrubs in her modest garden on the way to her studio on the first floor, she says, “My mother was a gardener and my entire childhood revolved around nature. Being inhabitants of North Bengal, we used to move around forests, tea gardens, mountains, streams and rivers and the majestic snow peaks of Kanchenjunga. Thus, nature became an inseparable part of my life.”

This morning, Choudhury is a picture of restless energy. Last evening’s composure is all gone and the artist is on tenter­hooks, possessed by the demons of creation. She fishes out an acid-free paper and begins an unannounced artistic onslaught on it. “Whenever you want something you can never find it,” she mumbles in thick Bengali-accented English. Finally, digging into a side cabinet she locates the container she’s look­ing for. She opens the lid and offers me to smell it. “Is it grape juice?” I venture, tentatively. “It’s red hibiscus,” she corrects me. There’s a palpable sense of delight in her voice. She goes on to apply it on paper, then dabs it with alum and lime juice. The colour changes continuously, from red to chestnut coral to faded pink. She smears the paper with more homemade vegetable dye. Has she made a figure? Or an abstract totem? It doesn’t matter. For Choudhury, the process is often more important than the end result. “For me, creating is a medita­tive act,” she muses, as the unfinished artwork is tossed aside into the corner where it seems it is fated to spend the rest of its life until the artist returns to complete it.

At 72, Arunima Choudhury is not only among her generation’s most significant artists but also one of its “most formally innovative,” asserts Richa Agarwal, CEO, Emami Art. Throughout her career, she has experimented relent­lessly with several mediums, very much in the spirit of an al­chemist. Apart from making her own vegetable dyes, she has dabbled in techniques as varied as enamel, ceramics, gouache, acrylic, eco-prints on cotton and rice paper and fabric paint­ings over the last four decades. During a walkthrough with the show’s curator Nancy Adajania, your eyes are instantly drawn to the artist’s naturalistic colours—the earthy browns, moss greens, ochres and lilacs. The Dark Edge of Green sums up a large body of her work, starting from 1995 to the present. From afar, the exhibition evokes pure botanic bliss but closer inspection yields a more complex and nuanced version of the artist and her career. Two motifs recur throughout — her singular devotion to nature which is manifested in the paint­ings of trees and what looks like branches, leaves and roots and a psychological interrogation of the ‘self’. The paintings of nature show more abstract tendencies. By contrast, the female figures, often alone and lost in a wonderland, recall the sim­plicity of folk art. There’s more to her art than meets the eye, suggests Adaja­nia who has used the trope of the ‘dark edge’ to rebuff the notion that her work is limited to just two subjects — women and nature. These categories “should not be seen as uncomplicated synonyms,” Adajania insists. While admitting that there’s a “nurturing, fecund female principle” at play in her art, equally there’s a “dark edge that disrupts this greenness,” she argues. “I am alluding here to the impulses from the artist’s subconscious that propel her vision, freeing it of social and sexual inhibitions. I am inspired by the way she has crafted an ecopoetics for herself, channelising her profound connection with the natural world through the female gaze and through a series of experimental, improvisa­tional techniques that speak of na­ture’s resilience as much as they assert female agency,” Adajania says.

Indeed, the evocative renderings of the female figures in Choudhury’s body of work belie the sinister forces that constantly threaten female agency. Much of the darkness arises out of childhood trauma. One of Choudhury’s school friends Bina Das had died by suicide by grinding and eating the paste of the green seeds of a poisonous fruit in Siliguri. Even to this day, the artist cannot forget the horrifying sight of her friend’s cut-up dead body lying at the local Mora-Kata-Ghor (the Autopsy Cell). “She killed herself to avoid the pain of being slut-shamed,” the wall text at the exhibition reminds us. A cell-like installation has been specially created at the exhibition as a way to start a conversation about patriarchal violence and the female gaze. Elsewhere in the show, too, other childhood trau­mas and fearful memories convey the emotional state of the artist. There is, for example, a moving homage to Jyoti Singh, the 2012 Delhi gang-rape victim.

Choudhury, who is a mother of two grown-up daughters, recalls that she herself was a victim of domestic abuse at home as a child. Her father, who worked as an insurance agent, was a tyrant to Choudhury and her sister. “But mainly, to our mother, who suffered gracefully for the sake of her marriage and chil­dren,” Choudhury reveals. Adajania describes Choudhury’s female protagonists as “agile shape shifters”. The artist agrees: “Of course, my own self is very much present in the body language of the women I paint. There’s reflection of ourselves in whatever we do. Did you see the painting of a naughty girl in a saree sticking out her tongue? I like to be playful and whimsi­cal. I want to point out that women are not only victims. They know how to play tricks, too,” she says, adding, “I have always wanted to give my female figures enough space to think, to act and live their own life as they feel like, without prejudice or fear. One has to be humane from beginning to end.”

INITIALLY TRAINED AS A lawyer to fulfil the dreams of her father, Choudhury fought against all odds to pursue her passion for art. Ultimately, she gave up law and returned to her first love. She enrolled at the Indian College of Arts and Draftsmanship, Kolkata in early 1970s. Today, she vividly remembers her teacher Bikash Bhattacharjee as a guiding light. “Bikash was very popular,” she notes. “Every student wanted to show him his/her sketchbook. He was a master of drawing and oil painting and very carefully taught us to acquire those skills. I learnt drawing and painting under his tutelage but coming out of art college I felt that’s not my way. It was one of my vital realisations and I began searching for my own idiom of expres­sion.” Choudhury, who calls herself a “lifelong explorer,” found her calling in Santiniketan. Kala Bha­vana was a cultural laboratory where Rabindranath Tagore’s anti-colonial art practices and environmental-friendly ideas had influenced successive generations of artists like Nandalal Bose, Ramkinkar Baij and others. “I visited Santiniketan for the first time in 1978. It had a great impact on me,” she admits. “I saw Ramkinkar Baij’s huge and robust sculptures done with concrete cement, Benode Behari Mukherjee’s mural The Life of Medieval Saints and Nandalal Bose’s murals. There were hundreds of paintings by Rabindranath Tagore. It was incredible to see so many masters experimenting and impart­ing their knowledge to students.” Besides being steeped in a na­tionalistic commitment and with a reformist outlook towards education, “Santiniketan was a perfect place where nature and art became one and where the boundary between art and craft was continuously being challenged. I felt secure being rooted in my own soil,” she adds.

Meeting KG Subramanyan at Santiniketan in the mid-1980s was a turning point for her. If she learnt eco-consciousness from Tagore and Nandalal Bose then it was Subramanyan, or Mani-da as he was fondly known, who set her free and encour­aged her to find her own voice. “I used to take my work to Mani-da for advice. One day, he saw the collage on printed paper I had done and said, ‘You should do enamel.’ So, I learnt enamel from my elder daughter Boul who was studying the technique at the time. Mani-da told me to explore different mediums and mate­rials. He specifically taught his disciples that art has no barrier and that form and content are the same. He remained true to his words right until his last breath [he died in 2016],” she says.

Today, Choudhury is one of the few artists who is proudly carrying forward the path-breaking Santiniketan legacy of art and craft as an extension of the natural world. Adajania explains, “Let us remember that Santiniketan encouraged the practice of eco-art before its time and rejected the colonial hierarchy that set art above craft. I consider Arunima-di a true legatee of the Santiniketan philosophy because she embodies this spirit. She is committed to an ethic of eco-sensitivity and self- sufficiency—making her own vegetable colours, bridging her practice and her natural environment, and believing in the possibility of healing and mending the planet.”

Admittedly, Choudhury’s eco-prints on paper are as organic as it can get. Created during the recent pandemic, they are an intrinsic part of the show. Even as the lockdown shuttered enamel factories and her ceramic-making studio, the artist decided to resume working with eco-prints once again.

On her way to the grocer’s, she would collect leaves from the kadam tree, the rose plant and roadside ferns and crotons to make her own paper. Conscious of the effects of climate change, especially water pollution around her neighbourhood, Choudhury believes it is the duty of every artist to leverage the use of sustainable pigments, handmade paper and fabrics. She also enjoys making clothes from leftover fabrics for her two daughters. “Stitching, embroidery, fabric paintings I do with joy because at the end my motivation is to create and present it to one of my dear ones as a gift.”

A few years ago, she recalls being invited by the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre to take art classes for a peace project. The children were given drawing books and colours as part of the course but she soon realised that they preferred embroidery instead of painting. “Most of the girls used to forget to bring their art materials. So I decided to change their medium. Muslim girls love stitching embroidery. I gave them pieces of coloured cloth and embroidery threads to do applique work. It was a new type of work for them, so I had to teach them an easy way to cut shapes and stitch them on cloth. It was such an interesting activity for them that they never missed bring­ing their materials ever,” she says with a laugh, happy to hand down the lessons that she learnt from her own masters to the future generation. n

(The Dark Edge of Green by Arunima Chowdhury runs at Emami Art, Kolkata, till August 20)

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