Do something new this Independence Day. Check out the Indianama Project, a curated collection of 69 events, one for each year of independence, put together by 69 artists. Indianama promises random yet interesting insights that will resonate with the Indian in each of us.
The series has been conceived by the 35-year-old Delhi-based artist Kunel Gaur. Over phone and email, Gaur, who is also the founder of the creative agency Animal, spoke about his expectations. “I see Indianama as an artistic documentation of the years after independence. It will be a visual journey seen through the eyes of many artists.” Apart from picking an event for each year from 1947 to 2016, the only other condition is that the artists should work within a set template of a 36-inch-tall India map. When completed, the project will have 69 India-shaped paintings, illustrations, graphic artworks and calligraphic pieces.
The artists have chosen everything from historical events to trivia. From 1956, there is B.R. Ambedkar converting to Buddhism along with 3,85,000 Dalit followers to start the Neo-Buddhist movement. From 1968, we have the iconic Beatles’ visit to Rishikesh to attend Transcendental Meditation training at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram. From 1977, there is mathematician Shakuntala Devi’s The World of Homosexuals , probably the first Indian study on the subject. From 1997, we have the India-born astronaut Kalpana Chawla flying into space with six other astronauts on Columbia flight STS-87. Then there are Bollywood representations as well — the death of actor Guru Dutt (1964), Sharmila Tagore in a bikini on the cover of Filmfare (1966), and even the year India’s disco craze was at its zenith (1982).
Gaur has picked 1980, which is not only his birth year but also the year Sanjay Gandhi — “a leader who could have changed India’s fate forever, for good or bad” — died in an air crash. The piece will be inspired by American contemporary street artist Shephard Fairey. Gaur has used Independence Day as his muse earlier too. Last year, he did a fresco-style depiction of freedom fighters using the inside of a Mumbai taxi’s roof as his canvas.
The artists consist of writers, graphic designers, painters, calligraphers, street artists and illustrators. They each have unique reasons for selecting a particular year. Mumbai-based visual artist and illustrator Shreya Gulati, who picked 1977, the year Emergency ended, did so to highlight the paradox of Indians getting back their civil liberties even as Shakuntala Devi was fighting for the right to love freely. “ The World of Homosexuals needed to be brought to the forefront,” Gulati says. “After she found out her husband was gay, Shakuntala Devi went on this unique journey of coming to terms with it.”
Mumbai-based Sanket Avlani chose 1987, the year Goa was granted statehood, a topic he knew very little about before embarking on the project.
Other artists have delved into subjects they have always found intriguing. New Delhi-based concept artist and illustrator Yuvraj Jha, who chose Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism, was aware of the Neo-Buddhist movement and its role in history. “Given Ambedkar’s writing on the subject of Buddhism and aspects of Hinduism, I wanted to showcase this major milestone in our journey as a nation,” he says.
Bengaluru-based Prateek Vatash, who is giving final touches to his digital illustration work, speaks about the excitement that the first television broadcast must have generated in 1959. “I can imagine the awe,” he says. “People getting blown away by the technology and the idea of experiencing events happening at a distant location, live or recorded, from their homes.” His work will be a visual interpretation of the start of the television boom.
Chennai-based graphic artist Vijay Krish, an alumnus of the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art, confesses to having no choice at all in selecting 2003. “All the others were taken.” He looked up magazine archives and stumbled on the story of elephant rejuvenation camps. “In July 2003, a temple elephant broke loose and created havoc in a temple in Tamil Nadu, following which the then Chief Minister Jayalalithaa commissioned the creation of camps that were basically month-long holidays for temple elephants across the state.” Krish adds that his childhood consisted of many temple visits where the most exciting bit was the elephant. “For one rupee, it would bless me with a gentle tap on my head with its trunk.”
Gaur says, “Art allows us to go frivolous or vague, have a different point of view, or show a different context to a moment in history that we have all heard or read about.” Indianama promises to do just that.
On View:Indianama, 10 a.m. - 6 p.m., Aug. 13 - 18, Kona, Jor Bagh, New Delhi.
Jayanthi Madhukar is a freelance writer who believes that everything has a story waiting to be told.
