Without beginning or ending,
Your original wisdom has been
Shining forever, like the sun.
To know whether or not this is true,
Look inside your own mind.

Whenever we think of modernism in Indian art, two icons appear – first the Travancore Prince of Kerala, Raja Ravi Varma and the tempestuously beautiful the talented, Amrita Shergil. Between the two of them one male and one female, a perfect complementality in the arts become apparent. Raja Ravi Varma started portraiture durbar art and introduced the technique of oil on canvas and easel painting, in Indian art, Amrita Shergil with her move from France to India bought in the academic realism of the West to the India Art Palette.

Painting
For generations Indian women have been ‘artists’. Nowhere is it more evident than in the ‘little’ tradition. The women have been weaving and crafting their dreams in materials which are an inherent part of their culture. Women have always been creators in both private and public spaces. Medical research defines the creative aspect of the brain as the feminine side. Within the geography of artistic production, the creative feminine has a powerful and evocative canvas.

Starting from the 1970’s, the subcontinent has been witnessing extremely significant changes with regard to the emergence of women artists as a self-conscious group, differences that are inherently different from those of their male counterparts, specially when it comes to transcending the different obstacles - political and otherwise - that separate their respective countries, in this case India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Despite the fact that several of these women artists do not consider themselves to be feminists, there seems to be a general consensus that their experience in a patriarchally structured world is essentially distinct from that of men – which is to say that the ambitions, limitations and anxieties faced, as a group, by women artists of the subcontinent are linked by common discriminations that they face in socio-cultural contexts vis-à-vis men.

The 70s, in fact, were years that serve as a crucial landmark in the emergence of this sensibility that was honed by many factors, two of the most important of which were the impact of western education and the fervour of Indian nationalism. As women artists awakened to this new consciousness, they began expressing themselves in hitherto unexplored ways, subverting the existing images of the ‘Woman’ that saw her in the dichotomous mould of the nurturer or the destroyer; the virgin or the vamp, while rejecting all notions of her as acomplex synthesis of various qualities and emotions. Another brave beginning made during this time was that women artists now began examining their sexuality and expressing their perceptions in new and unique portrayals.

In the years following Independence, a number of female artists, such as Shanu Lahiri, Kamala Roy Chowdhury, Kamala Das Gupta and Amina Ahmad sought to experiment with new methodologies and create professional niches for themselves and had become a visible presence in art colleges by the 1950s. However, this was not without having to face severe resistance. When Kamala Roy Chowdhry held an exhibition of her nude drawings in Calcutta in the 1950s, for instance, a hostile press described her as a threat to public morals. Nevertheless, the women pioneers continued in their journeys and, with time, several important artists like Meera Mukherjee who trained in Calcutta and Germany, Nasreen Mohamedi who trained in St Martin’s, London, Veena Bhargava in Calcutta, Anjolie Ela Menon from J. J. School of Arts in Bombay and the Ecole des Beaux Arts Paris, and Arpita Singh in Delhi, to mention just a few, surged ahead creating new visual vocabularies as they moved forward.

Traditionally, however, artists in India belonged to the artisanal class. Practitioners of other trades, they were educated in traditional religious texts and then trained to inscribe manuscripts with illustrations drawn from or inspired by these texts. As per much research done in the area, the possibility that women were the carriers of this knowledge is quite strong and it is generally believed that it was through them that closely guarded secrets were passed down from generation to generation, persevering and perpetuating the traditional art forms and techniques.

Women like Bhaktian Jindan from Mewar are convincing pointers to the linkages and continuums that run between women artists now and those before them. According to Tryna Lyons, there is clear evidence of women painters of artist families painting ‘sceneries’ in the temple town of Nathdwara in Rajasthan, a tradition that they shared with men and which goes back to the early decades of the twentieth century, perhaps even earlier.

Unfortunately, the histories of women artists in artisanal practice remain frustratingly elusive. What is known is that with a decline in patronage, the increasing influence of the West and its mechanical processes of production, the popularity of photography and the importation of chemical inks and dyes, Indian artists in all traditional forms of creative expression such as painting, weaving, embroidery, printing, etc. were affected adversely. The old ways of story-telling and passing down myths in oral traditions and through other manifestations such as wall paintings, all started gradually declining until some of them were revived in the twentieth century.

The interdisciplinary aspects of a traditional Indian artist saw my grandmother making icons of worship with easily found material from earthy pigments to gold dust. Seema Kohli is very much at home in the domain of the creative feminine principle of artistic production. In the history of modern Indian art, there has been an unbroken tradition in painting in particular. Seema Kohli is a significant voice in the challenging dynamic space interrogating tradition and modernity.

Her fascination with colours in her paintings goes back a long way and has always been intrigued by the cosmic cycle of life and the powers that be. Her oeuvres are a manifestation of all that is around, from creation to procreation, and to the final liberation. Her creative expression is channelized through the emblematic figures, and therein unfolds the story of the Cosmos.

Seema’s visual language finds resonance in folk, tribal, Tantra, nature and environment, Sufi and European Art joining Philosophy. Seema takes the trajectory of myths, metaphors and autobiography. The philosophical concerns of creation, procreation and dissolution is the backbone of her conceptuality.