The Baggage...

Abhijeet Tamhane

The aoking wheeler backpack I carried to Delhi had been a hard-disk of my everyday. It was at once a diary, a resource with retrieve/save functions. The hard disk is almost full now.

To begin with, the cheapish, dhandha-oriented (omit these words if you want to avoid a long rejoinder from the PR-wallahs), ‘India Art Summit’ drew hoards of ‘aap ka koi broshar hai?’ people (collectors?1), but I had a couple of CDs. Then, there were catalogues from friends that met at the evening, or the Espace opening. Also bought theatre CDs from NSD, and lastly, collected copies of the two catalogue texts I wrote. It added a good 3 kilos to my backpack.

 I parked it at the Lalit Kala Academy guest house in Mandi House. And the inmates did their bit of value-addition to this hard-disk. While it was an eventful week for art scene in Delhi AFTER the summit, the guest house inmates were unfettered, intact and did not bother about the events that be.

In Mumbai's cultural geographic parlance, it was as if the guest house was at Boisar or Khadavli, unmindful of the art happenings at the downtown districts of South Mumbai. South Delhi is not a downtown, as the city guidebooks had told me, but suddenly the LKA guest house was at a loss: this site, that was so near and dear to the Dhoomimal/ Kumar Galleries and ‘Art Today’, has suddenly been reduced to a sidey place.

I have been a regular visitor here. I visited it for the last two LKA Triennials, and whenever my stay in the capital was more than three days. I knew the profile of the inmates, ‘some are from Bengal, others from Khairagarh or Bhopal in the central region, some from Jammu, from UP. The Malayalam or Marathi speaking lots have mostly disappeared over last seven years, and the LKA has increasingly been looked at as the last resort to stay. The place has its own army of people who live in what was conceived some 60 years ago as ‘Indian Modernity’.

Nevertheless, I heard some questions from the inmates:

“Accha bhaiyya, aaj kal jo kaam chal raha hai wo kaam hai kya?”
(is there any substance in the contemporary work that is in its heyday today?)

“ Kya cutting-age hone ke liye khud paint karna chhod dena chhahiye?”
(Is it necessary to stop painting yourself if you like to be called a cutting-edge artist?)

“jinka bhi kaam chal gaya, wo bada hota hai kya?”
(does the market make you a great artist?)

“ Yeh sab kitni der chlega? Galleriyan acchhe kaam ko kab dekhegee?”
(Does the situation that we are in have no end? When will Galleries accept our work as good work?)

I am not abusing the ignorance. The LKA Guest house inmates seemed to know what they were upto, and whatever respect they had for the so called ‘pure mind’; they were all adults, not juveniles.

The questions are also not unique to LKA Guest House. They could be asked at the middle-class suburb of Dombivli where I was brought up and still live. However, I am happy to carry them with my Delhi baggage. It is the LKA Guest House walls who re-sound these questions the most, as the place measures its distance from various sites of art.