Jayasri Burman is puzzled every time she exhibits overseas—whether in Singapore, Switzerland’s St Moritz or Hong Kong, for instance—and visitors react to her works as “Indian”, the very tag that she bears like a cross in India. Contemporary artists are expected to be radical and intellectual, eliminating, strangely, the largest selling body of artists whose aesthetics dominate the current markets. That the country’s tradition of mythology should be held captive to such thinking shows a vacuum on the part of critics, one that the recently launched book Antaryatra: A Journey Within, on the artist’s career to date, should eliminate.
Collector Rajiv Chandran refers to Burman as “guardedly a private seeker” with a privileged “princess-like fairytale childhood”, and whatever its rude awakenings, she comes across as someone rooted in her beliefs of ritual and puja. For her detractors, he makes a point they miss too easily in their attempt to slot her: “But as one peruses the hallmark art of Jayasri Burman, what strikes you is its universality. Figures and human forms are central to her art. Yet, they are not micro-static. They acquire a luminous universality. Did one encounter them on Indian palm leaf art, or in Egyptian scrolls, or in Mayan frescoes? For even in the intrinsic Indian quality of her figures, there resonates global universality.”
It is certainly true that Burman is drawn to, and practices an aesthetic that is uplifting rather than sorrowful—in her women protagonists, whether goddesses or mothers, you can feel the pulse of humanity emanating from them. “When I stand by a pond or a lake watching a little bird swim joyfully in the water, at that moment even I want to be like the bird. I feel—let me be with her, swim like her in total abandon. Perhaps the pure happiness of such moments of empathy finds expression in my paintings. This is perhaps my true expression, my desire, my finding. That is why they appear sometimes as mermaids, sometimes [as a] swan or pen, as parrot or pigeon, creating the language of my images,” Burman tells author Ina Puri.
Two distinct factors make the book interesting. The first is a collection of images of artworks from the mid-1990s onwards that tracks the artist’s journey—and the early works are a surprise for an artist with such a distinctive, established style. The second is the manner in which Puri draws out Burman on her art and life over an extended interview, allowing the artist’s personal voice and beliefs to come through like an intimate conversation. Burman’s collapsing marriage and her flight to Delhi must have troubled her family, yet Burman stays true to her course and art “free of societal pressure or censure”. That Burman’s art is escapist has some logic, but she does not shy away from commenting on issues that concern her, such as a large 85-inch painting titled Swarg Mela, where a large gathering of gods is turned into a mall of dreamsellers—a sly comment on the commercialisation of religion itself. Senior art writer Partha Mitter sees a contemporary validation in her work: “With her muted but engaged feminism, Jayasri Burman refashions the universe of Hindu mythology, which acquires in her watercolour paintings an entirely contemporary meaning and nuance. This is in the best sense tradition reinterpreted, reinvented, revised and reimagined for India of today.”
There is much of that universe in this beautifully produced book, an ode to her career thus far, with Pritish Nandy writing poems to accompany some of her works, and Amitabh Bachchan roped in to pen a Foreword in which he describes them as “ethereal and yet worldly, divine and yet human”.
But what remains is a brilliant recapitulation of a hard life’s journey captured magically in a book that is a tribute to an artist who creates her own fantasies.