MUMBAI: The vermilion on the foreheads of 64 ‘devis’ lining the dome of Colaba's NGMA gallery seem still warm from the fingerprint of their bindi-sporting creator.
Vadodara-based painter-printmaker Rini Dhumal was supposed to be here at this exhibition titled 'Shakti', clad in her trademark handwoven sari and embodying the raw power that leaks from the signature solitary women of her canvases, home walls and washroom tiles.
But her sudden demise in September 2021 has turned her Covid-delayed meditation on womanhood--which had been planned for December 2020-- into a ‘retrospective’ in which her womanhood reassembles in careful, mixed-media fragments: a few sketchbooks, a voice sample, imported paint-brushes, a recreated temple-like studio.
“We never realised that she'd be so loved,” says Dhumal's daughter, Radhika, touched by the stream of visitors to the show, which opened on May 20, who told her that the hall felt as “meditative” as her mother.
Curated by the gallery's earthy Bengali director general, Adwait Gharanayak, who had visited the artist's “Parliament-dome-resembling” studio on the first floor of her residence soon after her death and come away amazed enough by its spiritual orderliness to replicate it. The retrospective coincides with the 25th anniversary of the NGMA, which opened in the former auditorium of CJP Hall on December 23, 1996.
“You'll find that every step will lead you on its own,” says Gharanayak, about the stairs at the NGMA which--starting from wooden hand-painted boxes to Durga-Puja-inspired sculptures, terracottas to ceramics, ‘Lady with a bird’ to ‘Peace on Earth’, ascendingly uncover not only the well-travelled Bengali artist's fondness for the Egyptian Pharaoh but also her firmly-rooted Rabindranath-Tagore-soaking self. “From Benares to the Silk Route, she had been everywhere,” says Gharanayak about Dhumal, who had studied multi-color printing and textured patterns in Paris-based Atelier 17, influential printmaker Stanley Hayter's experimental studio where legendary sculptor Krishna Reddy taught in the 1970s.
The austere faces of her canvases drew from a deep well. “The story of my family emerged as part of a much-larger saga of dislocation,” Dhumal, who was born into a zamindar family in Bangladesh in freshly-sliced India of 1948--had once said, referring to the ravages of Partition.
“Most of us who live in big cities have ceased to think that we have been cut off from our roots,” Dhumal had added in the same still-painfully-relevant breath. While her non-abstract muse may have been solitary, “with such a work on the wall,” her mentor, K G Subramanyam, had once said, “one can never be alone.”
Dhumal, who died at age 73, too wasn't alone for most of her life. “They had been married for over 50 years,” says Radhika, about her Bengali mother and her Maharashtrian father, Purushottam Dhumal, both of whom taught at Vadodara's MS University. “He would tell us how she liked to work with only the finest art materials,” says Radhika about the artist who liked to finish her paintings within two days. “She'd work on each piece as if it were her last,” says Gharanayak, adding that Dhumal's last painting, an untitled woman, remains unfinished.
