Fantasy has always played an important role in India's ancient mytho-poeic tradition. The artists imagination wandered freely, crossing the barriers of naturalism or the real world into a phantasm- agoric world of nature spirits like the yakshas, kinnaras, nagas, hybrid mythical beasts, fantastic fauna and flora of the Indian forest, all of which the artist used either to decorate the empty non religious areas of the temples, the walls of their houses or illustrate Indian fables like the Panchatantra or the Buddhist Jataka stories. This element of fantastic imagination continues and is reflected not only amongst the folk and tribal cultures of India, but is also seen in the art of some of the leading contemporary artists, some of whose works are being represented in this exhibition "Realms of Fantasy".

K.G. Subramanyan was born in a small town in Kerala in 1927. It was as a child that he was exposed to the world of fantasy. In his book "Reminiscence and Reflections," he expresses that "...even as a child I was irresistibly drawn to art objects and events...I saw the paintings and sculptures in temples, temple chariots or houses with great relish. I marvelled at the spectacular rigs of ritual dancers and paintings and paraphernalia of ritual worship. The visual magic of...Kathakali and the gripping phantasm of the travelling theatre kept me enthralled.... side by side I had a great desire to make things, assemble things and devise dioramas." For the young boy the world seemed magical and exciting.

It was KG's move to Santiniketan as a student in Kala Bhavan that really fired up his imagination. Although Rabindranath Tagore was no longer alive, his ideals regarding education where art, music, theatre, dance, literature were taught in proximity with nature, was still being followed. For this new student at Kala Bhavan, the opportunity to learn from and to work with great artists like Nandalal Bose, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Ram Kinkar Baij was like a dream come true. This, coupled with a world of beauty and fantasy reflected in the folk and tribal culture around him in Santiniketan, played a major role on KG's evolution as an artist - and its influence can still be seen reflected in his art.

A multifaceted artist, K.G. Subramanyan is equally at ease in diverse mediums such as painting, murals, working in ceramics or sculpture. However, what sets him apart as an artist is his virtuosity, where with a few gestural strokes and spontaneous application of brightly-hued earth colours, he can create a narrative of joyous abandon - with gesticulating and voluptuous young women, multi-limbed goddesses, animated monkeys, flowering creepers - even inanimate objects like chairs in his works come alive, creating and expressing a world of pantheistic 'joie de vivre'.

It was K.G. Subramanyan's experience at the Slade School of Art in London and his many trips to the west since then, that he came to the understand that only path for art in India lay "in modernism enriched by exposure with past" just as the modern art movement in the west was enriched by it's contact with African, Oceanic as well as Oriental art.

The source of inspiration for Jogen Chowdhury, like his senior K.G.Subramanyan, lies in the rural art tradition of Bengal especially East Bengal (now in Bangladesh), where he was born in1939 and spent his early childhood years. He was greatly influenced by the rich indigenous art and craft tradition, mostly carried out by the women of the family, like drawing lyrical patterns or alpona on the floor with rice paste, kantha embroidery depicting simple objects and elements taken from a woman's own familiar environment - like flowers, creepers, animals like horses, elephants, fish and colourful clay images of the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon. All these imageries stayed with him and would later re-emerge when he began his search for an indigenous vocabulary as an artist.

Forced to migrate to Calcutta after partition in 1947, Jogen joined the Government College of Art and Design after which he went to Paris on a French scholarship. During his stay in Paris, the exposure to modern western art made him decide that though the art was good, it was an expression of Europe's own history, culture and intellectual tradition and was therefore irrelevant to India. He thought that for India to develop its own new visual language it must look within, towards its own social and cultural reality, instead of blindly aping the west.

Returning to India and going back to his roots and his early experiments with black ink, charcoal and pastels, Jogen began to draw simple objects with which he was familiar and which were to be seen around him - objects like flowers, creepers, fish, apples, woman's breast, snake. He then moved to Delhi where he was appointed Curator of the Rashtrapati Bhavan. This change in his environment brought about a change in his iconography. Being close to the political scene at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the sycophancy and corruption of India's politicians and leaders that he saw from close quarters disgusted him. So the artist now began to create satirical art, depicting corrupt distorted and bloated imageries of our leaders and their nude voluptuous women in compromising postures. Even simple still life objects like a pillow and bedcover took on sexual overtones. Jogen's art of this period could well be described as being in the 19th century Kalighat Bazaar genre, depicting the lives of the decadent and nouveau riche Bengali babus of Calcutta shown in dalliance with their favourite courtesan at the time. The most well known art of this period are his 'Tiger in the Moonlight' and 'Binodini', based on the character of a well-known theatre actress of the late 19th century.

Moving back to Santiniketan brought about yet another change, not in style or technique but in subject matter. The biting satire of his earlier works in Delhi now gave way to works expressing romance and poetic fantasy. Like a Haiku poet, Jogen began to paint his lyrical black and white drawings, expressing with a few strokes of his brush, the "inner rhythm or pulse of life," he so wanted to capture in his works as a young student in Calcutta. Jogen Chowdury's fame as an artist rests for his hauntingly surreal imageries. He builds up the images with fine black lines and crosshatchings, using black ink and pastel colour, which he then sets up against a densely flat black background, creating in the viewer's eye a world of disturbing beauty.

Lalu Prasad Shaw, a contemporary and a colleague of Jogen Chowdhury at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, was born in a small town called Seuri in the Birbhum district of West Bengal. Like every one of his generation, Lalu too grew up with and was familiar with the indigenous art and cultural traditions of Bengal.

Though Lalu's field of specialisation was printmaking, his move to Santiniketan and the then current demands of the art scene in India brought about a change in his style and medium as an artist. The return to his roots in Birbhum as well as the romantic and the idyllic environment inspired Lalu to take up painting seriously. While in his Graphics he continued to work in the modernist abstract expressionist style, reminiscent of American artists like Franze Kline and Robert Motherwell, in his paintings however, the artist looked to the 19th century Company School paintings for inspiration. Like them, he began to paint genre scenes taken from the every day life of a Bengali middle class society, using gouache and tempera as his medium. For his iconography, he began to depict images of a typical dhoti clad Bengali babu holding an umbrella in his hand or holding on to the loose end of his dhoti in front. The other popular themes are portrait-like images of Bengali women or young girls with plaits holding a flower in their hand and looking absentmindedly out at the viewers. Then there are his still life of flowers placed in a vase, or a plateful of Bengali sweets prettily arranged on a plate, images of street dogs fighting, delicate dragonflies and butterflies hovering over creepers and flowers. The genius of this artist lies not in his choice subject matter, but his brilliance in the handling of his chosen medium, gouache and tempera, and for his delicate brush strokes, which makes the 'ordinary' 'extraordinary' - giving Lalu's paintings a delicate luminescent quality, which could be described as being an expression of this great artist's own poetic fantasy.

Suhas Roy, yet another friend and colleague of both Jogen Chowdhury and Lalu Prasad Shaw at Kala Bhavan, has had from very early a close affinity with nature. Born in 1936 in East Bengal, Suhas too had to migrate to Calcutta after Partition in 1947. However he was fortunate to study art under a well-known painter Atul Bose at the Indian College of Art in Calcutta. Later he went on a scholarship to Paris to study art at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts and like other young artists, was exposed to the works of European modern masters which seems to have affected him.

While Suhas Roy was a member of the faculty at Kala Bhavan, the natural beauty of Santiniketan appeared to have affected his sensibilities as a painter. Apart from nature, the artist was also exposed not only to the romanticism expressed in the works of masters like Nandalal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee, but was also influenced by the works of Chinese and Japanese masters whose works he saw in the books and journals at the library.

His early works seem to reflect all these influences in his black and white drawings of crows done in the calligraphic style of oriental art and the series on landscapes expressing in a semi abstract style, the natural beauty around him. However, it is Suhas's famous series on 'Radha' which has brought this artist considerable fame. This idealised concept of 'Radha' can be easily traced to the medieval poetic concept of the 'Nayika' or the heroine, as expressed in poet Kesava Das's 'Rasikpriya' where the poet classified women in various moods - that of joy, sorrow and union with the beloved .The concept of 'nayika' as a heroine, as is well known, became a popular theme in the Rajput and the Pahari miniature painting tradition.

Regarding his own personal vision of the series on 'Radha', the artist has expressed, "…I have tried to depict and express Indian women's inner thoughts, their beauty, joy, despair, love, union. For Radha, according to our tradition, is closely linked with creepers, bowers and trees. Women and plants are therefore, closely and naturally intertwined. One without the other is incomplete. It is through beauty that I have tried to depict the eternal charm of Indian women, using 'Radha' as a symbol or a metaphor."

Suhas's 'Radhas' are not of the real world but are creations of the artist's own poetic imagination and fantasy. Stylistically speaking, both in pastels or gouache medium, one notices a sensitive blend of the French Post- mpressionists, the idealised and poetic imagination of the Bengal School style and the romanticism of the Pre-Raphaelite painters of the early 20th. Century England.

While Santiniketan seems to have played such an important role in the expressions of artists like K.G. Subramanyan, Jogen Chowdury, Lalu Prasad Shaw and Suhas Roy, one can observe and savour the flavour and fantasies of rural Andhra and Punjab in the works of two well known artists, Laxma Goud and Manjit Bawa.

Laxma Goud, a Hyderabad based artist was born in 1940. He received his early art training at the Government College of Art & Architecture and later went to the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, in Baroda and specialised in Graphics.

Laxma is not only a skilled graphic artist but is equally adept at drawing and painting as well. However, what sets Laxma apart from the other artists represented in this exhibition, is his expression of raw and earthy eroticism commonly found amongst rural people in India. For as the artist says, "there is eroticism in nature itself," so why not express it joyfully without any inhibition.

Like a village story teller, Laxma sits on the ground and weaves his visual stories about men, women, hybrid creatures of his imagination - part goat part man- all 'protagonists in a world of uninhibited erotic fantasy…where crude is rendered touching, the wildly erotic natural and each one of his figures swollen with lust, reaching out or embracing is wholly human.' Even the vegetation depicted in his art evokes a spirit of fecundity and sensuality -all the elements evoking a mood of rare humour, fantasy and vitality, rooted in the soil of rural Andhra.

While Laxma sits in Hyderabad busy weaving his earthy fantasy, in faraway Delhi, Manjit Bawa has successfully created his own magical world based on the stories and myths of pastoral Punjab.

Manjit Bawa is an artist of rare talent, who has successfully created his own individualistic imagery, based on the concept of fantasy. He was born in a farm in rural Punjab. Once I remember him saying, regarding his obsession with the farm animals, "I was born in a farm in a village in Punjab and I grew up like Krishna, playing with them and drinking milk straight from their udder…therefore farm animals like cows and goats keep appearing in my paintings." Many of Manjit's works reflect this affinity with nature where humans and animals co-exist in harmony.

The rich cultural traditions of Punjab which left a deep influence on Manjit, both as an artist and as a man, are the mystic Sufi traditions of Punjab, their philosophy, poetry and music as expressed in the works of sufi mystics like Bule Shah. The rich storehouse of oral folklore tradition expressed in touchingly beautiful love stories like Heer Ranjha, Sohni Mahiwal, Salsi Punnu along with the ever- popular Krishna legends, became for him as an artist, a rich storehouse to delve into for inspiration.

Manjit received his early art training under the well known painter, Abani Sen, based in Delhi and later graduated from the Delhi School of Art. He then went on to study at the London School of Painting in U.K. Manjit Bawa's source of inspiration as a painter was the Pahari Miniature tradition of the Punjab hills. It was the pastoral beauty of the paintings and the indigenous tales visually expressed which inspired him. While their beauty moved him, Manjit did not want to emulate their style - he wanted to create his own personal style and visual language to express the culture and the soul of Punjab.

In this, the artist has succeeded brilliantly. Using bold and brilliant pigments like red, green, purple, yellow, blue, which the artist uses as a flat backdrop, he places against them his luminescently painted pale hued, boneless, inflated forms of the Goddess Durga riding her puffy lion, Krishna playing the flute surrounded by "enthralled cows", moustachioed young men, acrobats, sufi mystics, episodes taken from Punjab's folklore and of course his beloved cows and goats - all of these imageries seem to float and dance against their dazzlingly bright background, creating a drama of incandescent fantasy where time seems to stand still.

In conclusion, after all that has been said about the works of these six great painters of India's contemporary art movement, each one of them working in his own diverse and individualistic style and medium - the thread that holds them together as artists is their ability to dream and to create art, expressing and preserving India's ancient mytho-poeic tradition.... of creating 'fantasy'.

Baruna Bhattacharjee
Art Historian