Jyoti Bhatt: The Quiet Rebel

LOOKING BACK, MY art has really been the story of how I’ve made sense of the world,” says 91-year-old Jyotindra Manshankar Bhatt.

Jyoti Bhatt, as the artist is better known, can certainly lay claim to being an icon of contemporary Indian art, growing with India as it emerged from a young, independent nation to a global force. With a prolific and sweeping career spanning 70 years, Bhatt’s legacy stands apart.

His practice is “marked by a deep sensitivity to the socio-cultural environ­ment which he operated in,” says Bhavna Kakar, founder of LATITUDE 28, which is currently presenting a retro­spective of his prints and photographs. In Jyoti Bhatt: Through the Line & the Lens, cu­rated by artist Rekha Rodwittiya, Kakar attempts to highlight Bhatt’s “responsive relationship to his surroundings.”

Bhatt’s strong ties to his commu­nity allowed him to be attuned to the larger narrative. Through his practice and pedagogy, he became a key figure and important voice in the discourse on modern Indian art and its intersection with tradition, politics and community. This landmark retrospective offers an intimate look at Bhatt’s journey as one of India’s most distinguished printmakers, photographers and educators. It features etchings, lithographs, serigraphs, photo­graphs, and personal writings, to show his artistic philosophy and engagement with Indian visual traditions.

“I didn’t set out with a grand plan—I was just curious. I watched, I listened, and I felt the need to respond,” says the artist when asked to encapsulate his life-long art practice. “Whether I had a paintbrush in hand, a carving tool, or a camera, I was always trying to hold on to something—moments, memories, ways of life that felt important, even as they began to slip away.”

Born and raised in Bhavnagar, Gujarat, Bhatt was exposed to painting, music, theatre and literature at a young age. His initial foray into art can be ascribed to his fascination with the local birds of his hometown, many of which are rarely seen today. He would draw them while describ­ing their traits to friends. Noticing this, a teacher encouraged him to join a special art class, which sparked his journey into this world. Interestingly, later in his career, these symbols stemming from Indian culture, like the peacock, parrot, lotus and stylised gods and goddesses, would become motifs in his work.

He was further influenced by several renowned artists of the day, including Nandalal Bose and Jamini Roy, whom he discovered in the pages of Kumar, a Gujarati magazine that nourished his early artistic curiosity. As with most young people keen on pursuing an arts-based education in the 1950s, Bhatt was initially bound for Santiniketan. Yet fate decided otherwise.

“A friend returned from Baroda, hav­ing studied at an art department at Kala Bhavan and spoke of a bold new vision— an art faculty being born at the university level in Baroda. And thus, I switched my alma mater to MSU (The Maharaja Saya­jirao University of Baroda),” he recalls.

Rodwittiya, who has been his student, colleague and friend, as well as curator of several of his exhibitions, draws attention to the development of his artistic expres­sion from childhood. Born into a family that was deeply entrenched in the inde­pendence movement, and influenced by the Gandhian system and traditions, Bhatt made a most sensitive artwork as a schoolboy of 12. In this work, a Dalit man carries human waste on his head, while wearing a broom to erase all traces of himself lest it offend an upper-caste person crossing the same path. “It’s quite phenomenal to think that somebody that young could have this level of conscious­ness,” Rodwittiya reminds us.

His move to Baroda brought him in contact with artists like KG Subramanyan, NS Bendre and Sankho Chaudhuri, and through them he became aware of the academic divide between art and craft. A keenness to experiment and learn led him in the early 1960s to the Ac­cademia di Belle Arti in Naples, Italy, on a scholar­ship, followed by a stint at the Pratt Institute in New York.

Quite early on, he dabbled in cubism and pop-art imagery. Yet his signature oeuvre evolved only later—an intricate and layered style inspired by traditional Indian folk designs. He worked across mediums including watercolours and oils, but printmaking brought him the most renown.

Simultaneously, Bhatt began photographing traditional Indian craft and design, with a strong focus on the disappearing arts of Gujarat. As he explains, “Printmaking gave me a tactile, hands-on way of working—one that allowed for experimentation and layer­ing. The possibilities of this medium are immense, rather endless, at its technical levels. Photography, on the other hand, became an efficient tool to document life, especially fleeting expressions and traditions in rural India. With new tools came new ways of seeing. Sometimes I was drawn to the stillness of a print, other times to the immediacy of a photo­graph. The shifts weren’t conscious, but they built on each other, giving me new ways to express what I was feeling and witnessing. Through it all, I stayed close to the idea that art can preserve what time threatens to erase.”

In time, these two mediums began to inform one another within his practice, each offering distinct yet complemen­tary ways of exploring the interplay between image, memory and meaning. Photography, especially, allowed him to capture the visible reality of an object or scene, as well as to evoke something beyond it: “a resonance, a mood, an inner life”. He felt drawn to images that invited the viewer to look past the surface and engage with what lay beneath.

Printmaking and photography are more democratic mediums as they can be disseminated widely. Bhatt believed that the social responsibility of the artist was to ensure universal engagement with art and would deliberately price his pieces lower than those made by his colleagues in the art world.

Lauding this conviction, Kakar says it helped to create a visual archive that is both historical and dynamic, through meticulous recordings of rural artistic traditions, vernacular practices and the evolving academic milieu of Baroda.

BHATT WAS ALSO a founder member of the Baroda Group of artists, as well as a prominent member of the Group 1890. In his long career as a faculty member of MSU Baroda, he made the evolution of the university a subject of photo documen­tation, capturing students and teachers at work as well as the architectural significance of the buildings.

A leitmotif of Bhatt’s artistic practice is the self-portrait. He frequently places his own image within the ecosystem he feels he belongs to. According to Rodwittiya, this creates a unique per­sonal vocabulary, taken freely from the massive repertoire of everything already in existence, from folk traditions, callig­raphy, the ideas of the here and the now and other extant narratives. One sees it most clearly in prints dedicated to the bliss of marital life such as Me, Dreaming Young, Greetings From Me to Her and Pink Anniversary, as well as in his shape-shifting self-portraits.

Bhatt’s photographs are often centred on people but never seem voyeuristic, with the photographer and the subject meeting at a consensual space. They also provide a glimpse of his small-town origins, his love of craft, design and textiles and above all, his humanism and empathy.

Even while making strong political statements, Bhatt couches them in his own brand of humour. So, in a 1969 work titled Persona, which combines folk design with textual narratives, he boldly writes, “This is pseudo tantric modern Indian art”. “He makes fun of the context of art but also of himself without being disrespectful or losing sight of his humanism. This is why I feel he was an artist way before his time,” shares Rodwittiya. “He has always been slightly iconoclastic, slightly outside of following the trends of the day. I call him a quiet rebel.”

To prove her point, she shares the in­teresting example of T is for Tri-coloured, a print from 1977, made during the Emergency. In it, Bhatt critiques fellow artist and friend MF Husain for idolis­ing the leader of the country despite her questionable political decisions. “The art community sticks together as a rule but in this case, Bhatt did not feel that it was incorrect or inappropriate to use his art as a space to pronounce something that he felt strongly about. I believe this is quite marvellous,” says Rodwittiya.

It is indeed difficult to summarise Bhatt’s layered, thought-provoking and impressive practice. Yet, perhaps he does it best when he says: “I’ve lived through three very different Indias. My childhood held no concept of what we now call ‘modern’. After independence, I watched our world open up—Western influences arrived, some welcomed, some ques­tioned. And then, the digital age came, seemingly overnight, and the world changed again—faster, louder, more con­nected, yet somehow also more distant. All of this has found its way into my work, not deliberately, but naturally. It’s a reflection of the life I’ve lived—layered, evolving, rooted in the past but always looking ahead. Art has been my way of staying present, staying connected, and saying, this mattered.”

(Jyoti Bhatt: Through the Line & the Lens is on display at Gallery LATITUDE 28, Delhi till May 25)

artistcontemporary sensibilitiesDelhiGallery Latitude 28Jyoti Bhatttraditionsvisual vocabulary