n News from The Nehru Centre

Art according to Tagore

[ ] 72nd issue of October 2011

P aintings fromthe BengalSchool of Art

were exhibited at theThe Nehru Centre onOctober 7. Among theartists whose workswere on display wereJamini Roy,Rabindranath Tagore,and other members ofhis family. The worksshowed Tagore’s influ-ence on art. He usedto urge artists of thattime to adopt modernity as a subject. The exhibition, titled ‘Rabindranath Tagore’sinfluence on Modern Indian Art’ was brought to London by Prof NirmalyaKumar. Art historian Prof Partha Mitter inaugurated the show.

Indian artists, frame by frame

I talian photographerCarola Syz Sarzi-Amadé opened

an exhibition of her worksat The Nehru Centre onOctober 11. The photo-graphs were of contempo-rary Indian artists AtulDodiya, Jitish Kallat, ReenaKallat, Shilpa Gupta, T.V.Santhosh, Mithu Sen,Iranna, Ved Gupta andAdittyia Pande. The stillshad captured intimate and personal moments from the daily life of the artists. Italian Ambassador to the UK Alain Giorgio Maria Economides and Directorof The Nehru Centre Sangeeta Bahadur inaugurated the exhibition titledArt/Space India: Contemporary Artists in their Art Studios. Prof Rossana Pittelli, artexpert from the Italian Cultural Institute, introduced the photographer. After the inauguration, a documentary, Art Talk, was screened. Produced byDino Prevete and James Fontanella Khan, the film had interviews with severalIndian artists including Subodh Gupta, Barthi Kher and Atul Dodiya.

Talk on ‘Pax Gandhiana’

P olitical scientist Anthony Parel delivered the Gandhi Foundation AnnualLecture at The Nehru Centre on October 13. He spoke on ‘PaxGandhiana: Is Gandhian Non-violence Compatible with the Coercive

State?’ He said Gandhian non-violence sought more than the personal virtue ofahimsa, resistance to the erring state and pacifism. Starting with a brief discussion of Gandhi’s abandoned attempt at writing a the-sis on non-violence, the lecture focused on the three conditions necessary for‘Pax Gandhiana’— a new philosophy of non-violence. Prof Anthony Copleychaired the lecture while Omar Hyat of the Gandhi Foundation introduced Parel.Parel is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Calgaryand has authored Gandhi's Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony (CUP, 2006), TheMachiavellian Cosmos (Yale, 1992), and other works. He is also the co-editor withJudith Brown of The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi (2011).

UK artist paints the Ganges

A rtist Tess Recordon exhibitedher paintings and prints atThe Nehru Centre on

October 18. Venki Ramakrishnan, theIndian-born biologist and Nobel laureate, inaugurated the show. Tess’s works are inspired by herjourneys to India’s north-east, Kolkata,and Gangetic plains. Her paintingstranslate her feelings for thesemoments and places. Before the exhibition, titled Along the Ganges, a talk on Tess’s art was given by SukPannu, writer of radio sitcom The Spiritual Centre, and the scripts of TV showsThe Kumars at No. 42 and Goodness Gracious Me!

Book launch, book readings

W riter Smita Singhreleased her first nov-el The Pariah Goddess at

The Nehru Centre on October13. She is the chairperson ofVAANI, a non-profit forum forAsian women authors and artists.J Publishing Company has pub-lished the novel. On the occasion, Sunita Pattani read from her upcoming book, My Secret Affair

with A Chocolate Cake— a guide to emotional eating. The chief guest at the function was Julie O’Yang, novelist and artist fromNetherlands. She too read some excerpts from her latest novel, Butterfly. Thereadings were followed by discussions with the audience.

Rabindranath’s world view

I ndra Nath Choudhuri, Academic Director of the Indira Gandhi NationalCentre for the Arts in Delhi, delivered a lecture on Rabindranath Tagore atThe Nehru Centre on October 17. Choudhuri is a former director of The

Nehru Centre and secretary of Sahitya Akademi. In his lecture, ‘Tagore : At Home in the World’, he said the writer's works werea blend of Western modernity and traditional India. The lecture took up the East-West relationship (conflictual as well as complementary), nationalism and Tagore’svision of life where the home (self) and the world (universe) were one and thesame. Choudhuri has written on comparative literature, poetics and aesthetics inHindi, English and Bengali. His works include The Genesis of Imagination: SelectedEssays on Literature; Theory, Religion and Culture and Sparks Fly Upward.

Ode to The Golden Temple

T he past of The Golden Temple, the Sikh shrine in Amritsar, Punjab, wasrelived through music, photographs and a discussion at The NehruCentre on October 14.

The evening began with kirtans by Bhai Ghulam Muhammad Chand, an exponent of the now vanishingrababi tradition which Guru Nanak,the first Sikh guru started. This wasfollowed by a demonstration of mar-tial arts by Nidar Singh Nihang, amaster of shastar vidiya, the Indianbattlefield art, and an expert on Sikhmartial traditions. Director of TheNehru Centre Sangeeta Bahadurintroduced the performers. A coffee table book with 500 rare photographs of the Golden Temple was alsoreleased on the occasion. In The Golden Temple of Amritsar: Reflections of the Past(1808–1959), edited by Amandeep Singh and Parmjit Singh, photographs col-lected from Europe, India and North America have been brought together to cel-ebrate the history and artistry of the shrine. Here, the shrine is seen through theeyes of artists and photographers. Parmjit Singh, Amandeep Singh Madra andJuga Singh, who put together the book, later participated in a panel discussion,chaired by writer Sathnam Sanghera, to talk about their experiences.

Saswati Sen presents kathak

S aswati Sen, a disciple of Pandit Birju Maharaj, presented kathak at TheNehru Centre on October 19. The event was held in association withSujata Banerjee Dance Company.

A recipient of the National SangeetNatak Academy Award, Sanskriti Award,Shringar Mani and CriticsRecommendation Award, Saswati standstall amongst her contemporaries in the wayshe has embellished kathak by integratingtradition with a contemporary approach.After training at Kathak Kendra under Reba Vidyarthi in Delhi, she received theNational Scholarship in Performing Arts and graduated to become the prime dis-ciple of Birju Maharaj. She has presented dance recitals all over the world. The guest of honour for the event was Pandit Birju Maharaj, an exponent ofthe Varanasi Kalka-Bindadin Gharana. Also an expert of Hindustani classicalmusic, he presented a few of his compositions, including Radha bani Krishna, towhich Saswati performed.