A historian and a painter chronicle the subcontinent
Om Ma Ni Pad Me Hum | Oh, the Jewel in the Lotus! — a Buddhist prayer chant. A Journey Within by artist Olivia Fraser (HarperCollins, pp.200, `2,999) is her first monograph, a result of a substantial aggregation of the best of her past exhibition catalogues, plus much more. This beautifully-produced, bold, wide-format book has some illuminating essays and prose pieces by B.N. Goswamy, Virginia Whiles, Navina Haider, Robert Macfarlane and Conor Macklin. It also contains a moving and poetically personal opening essay, eponymously titled, by the artist herself.
But the most important part of the book is the stunning and lavishly produced art-plates of her works, including at the end of the book, thumbnail-sized softtoned early watercolours — scenes from everyday Indian life, people, and Indian monuments — acting as an important prelude to her later work. Some of these have also graced the pages and covers of her husband, author and historian William Dalrymple’s books, such as City of Djinns and others.
There is something intensely magnetic, yet gentle — an aura that is simultaneously piercing, penetrative, probing and prophetic — about Olivia Fraser’s art. In every frame, the human eye deeply is drawn towards an aesthetic centre or focus - whether it is the bindi, third eye, jewelled pupil or adorned iris (‘Darshan IIV’, ‘Kama Diptych’) — or lotus (‘Lotus Eyes’), bee (‘Brahmri’), golden hour (‘Godhuli Bela’) — each of them bearing a distinct personal signature, anchored within the whorls of a private fountainhead.
Yet, her gaze is universal, both inward and outward — a view that is both centripetal (‘Churning’) and centrifugal (‘Creation’) — all following a cosmic pattern and precise geometric axes. Mixing Hindu (‘Krishna’), Buddhist and Mughal motifs, as well as miniature styles — she incorporates in these paintings, aspects of computergenerated modern graphic art. Except, nothing is machine or software generated — everything is painstakingly drawn and painted with utmost care and minuteness.
“I feel there is a natural affinity between a traditional Indian artistic aesthetic, whether it be Tantric art or miniature painting, and the Western ideas of Minimalism, Op art and Geometric Abstraction. All explore essence, sensation and perception,” writes Fraser in her introduction. “I have sought to combine these perspectives by focusing in on the iterative, pairing it down to the minimal and ultimately striving to reach for an essence while also pursuing the idea of movement, which is innate in the texts and practices of yoga.”
For her new show Amrit at Nature Morte gallery in New Delhi, she says, “I moved on from the lotus to the bee, a motif in ancient and modern poetry that is also vitally present in the iconography of Buddhist and Hindu art. Beautiful women in Sanskrit poetry are often trailed by a cloud of bees because they are irresistibly desirous. The insect is invoked in another context in the Gheranda Samhita, an early 18th century treatise on yoga, composed in Sanskrit.”
Olivia’s work is profoundly meditative and possesses immense power in its quietness. Her lines are precise, her curves elegant, her focus yogic, and her overall canvas is akin to a mandala where large multifarious narratives are embedded in the specific art of précisstorytelling. A Journey Within is a collector’s item from an immensely gifted and exceptional contemporary artist.
William Dalrymple is widely known as a historian, travel writer and literary journalist. He is the co-director of the world's biggest literary festival, the Jaipur Literature Festival; has been a broadcaster of several historical television series — but what is not as well known about him is that he is also a very fine photographer. In 2016, he had published his first book of photography, The Writer’s Eye (HarperCollins, pp.71, `999), with a foreword by Siddharth
Dhanvant Shangvi. More recently, his second book of photographs, The Historian’s Eye (HarperCollins, pp.112, `1,299), with a foreword by Raghu Rai, has been published.
William’s signature tone is his high-contrast, controlled depth-of-focus, noirish black-and-white photographs that cast sharp shadows with their extreme 'black point levels — characteristics that lend a moody quality to his frames. One of the lovely textual aspects of this new book is his short pithy side-notes that accompany the photographs, setting them in context.
Some of my favourite images include the one with a hollowed-out skeletal chassis of two cars and a bus in an abandoned patch of woodland. In the note opposite the image, Dalrymple writes, “In Murshidabad, I stumbled across a graveyard of old Ambassadors and buses. Like so much else there, it was essentially overgrown. For today, Murshidabad is a fraction of itself — all the families that used to live there, including the service families of the nawabs, moved bag and baggage to Calcutta.” Another image includes a nude statue derriere in the foreground with the view of Calcutta’s Marble Palace. The ‘butt’ressing arches match the curves of the human forms. He writes, ‘The Marble Palace’s uniquely over-thetop and flamboyant character is amplified as you stroll around. All about the mansion, you will find these wonderfully magnificent out-of-place, classical nudes that the Mullicks brought back with them from their foreign travels.”
Dalrymple’s landscapes with their panoramic breadth, brooding skyscapes, and grainy terrains — remind me of the legendary Ansel Adams. The photographs in this book could be “on the Pakistan border, above the Shyok Gorges”, or in Chamba where “after a cloudburst, [he] saw two children crossing a kutcha bridge to their village, over the water rushing out to the ravines”.
Then there is William’s fascination for the Mughals, amply borne out by his various books on the subject. “What probably first drew me to the Mughals, as with so many people, was their architecture.” One of my favourite photographs in this series is that of a cyclist and the way his body and bicycle cast an elongated shadow on the stone paving, under the entrance arch of Delhi’s Safdarjung Tomb. The sun’s rays flare out, cutting out a crescent shape on main tomb's inverted lotus dome. The light here is dynamic, pungent and assertive — yet, there is a calmness to this mise-en-scene.
In his architectural images, there is precision in framing, balance in composition, subtle and clever use of natural light — but for all the technical finesse, his images are never without humanity or humanism. Even as he portrays religion, it is always through the lens of secularism. But beyond the traditional boundary of the vertical and horizontal frames, there is always depth and gravitas — William Dalrymple’s photography is of a very high order.
Sudeep Sen [www.sudeepsen.org] is a writer, translator, literary editor and photographer. His newest book is Kaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms: New & Selected Translations (Bloomsbury).