In Conversation with Anish Gawande, Writer, Speaker, Curator, The Art Edit
Q1. What made you choose A Living Tradition as the theme for the Art Edit special exhibition?
It comes from a book. K.G. Subramanyan wrote A Living Tradition in Santiniketan, where he taught briefly before returning to Baroda, where he spent most of his life. It’s not a long book, but it takes on a question that has plagued generations of artists: what do you actually do with tradition? You can ossify it, venerate it, idolize it, and replicate it. Or you can discard it entirely and say it’s irrelevant to you. Subramanyan, being the wise man he was, refuses both. He says something closer to this: every generation builds on the one before it, and every movement in art is a new movement and an old movement all at once.
That felt like exactly the right frame for this show, because that is precisely what you see happening in Indian art right now. There’s a generational shift underway, and the artists in the middle of it are working out what to keep and what to break. I should be honest that a lot of them are unsure themselves. That uncertainty is the interesting part.
Q2. Sakshi Gallery has spanned the shift from post-independence modernism through 1990s liberalization to the present. How does this selection of works reflect that broader transformation of Indian society and its visual appetites?
Sakshi turns forty this year, and the moment Geetha Mehra opened the gallery in Chennai in 1986 is worth dwelling on, because it was a peculiar time in Indian art. The Progressives had done their work, and their reputations were secure, but the generation coming after them was still finding its feet. Baroda had become a genuine intellectual centre where artists were arguing that Indian art could be figurative and political and local rather than chasing an international abstraction, and there was serious work happening in Bengal, in Kerala, and across the South. What did not exist was any infrastructure to hold it together. There were very few galleries, fewer collectors, almost no market, and barely any conversation running between one regional centre and the next, so an artist in Chennai and an artist in Baroda could spend years on the same problem without ever knowing it.
Geetha opened into that gap with the idea of bringing art from other regional centres to the South and building connections across the country, and within a decade she was running spaces in Chennai, Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Pune simultaneously, which is to say she decided a national conversation ought to exist and then went and built the rooms for it. She gave significant solos to KK Hebbar, Manjit Bawa, K.G. Subramanyan, Vivan Sundaram, Krishen Khanna, Himmat Shah, and Jehangir Sabavala, and those became relationships that lasted decades rather than single exhibitions. She has gone on doing the same for younger artists ever since. She took Indian work to London, Hong Kong, and Singapore, ran a space in Taipei showing artists from very different geographies, and brought the traffic back in the other direction as well, introducing Indian audiences to Julian Opie, El Anatsui, and Gregory Crewdson at a time when hardly anybody here was attempting that kind of two-way movement.
So the transformation you’re describing is not something the gallery observed from a distance. Geetha was one of the people making it happen. And while the appetites changed enormously across those forty years, the question sitting underneath them did not, because every generation in that collection is asking the same thing in a different accent, which is what it means to make Indian art and how you take from the world without becoming a copy of it.
Q3. You’ve mentioned that tradition isn’t fixed. How are the artists in this show taking traditional art styles and making them their own?
I keep coming back to an idea I’ve always found fascinating: bounded imagination. Agha Shahid Ali wrote that the ghazal form must be retained, but within that constraint, the couplet can be placed anywhere. Originality emerges precisely because there’s something to push against. You see the same thing in art.
Take Ravinder Reddy. He’s building on the Yakshis of Mathura, on Gupta and Chola sculpture, on the Benin bronzes, and yet what he makes is unmistakably his and unmistakably of now. There’s a wonderful story about the fiberglass. When he first tried to work with it in Baroda, the only people using it were in the chemical industry, and they refused to give him access, assuming he was after trade secrets. He had to explain that he was an artist and that he simply wanted a material that could hold a form the way stone, wood, and even bronze couldn’t. Out of a completely new material, he made a sculpture that still carries the essence of something very old.
Or Roshan Chhabria, who takes Bhupen Khakhar’s visual language and reinvents it for his own life, for the Sindhi middle-class household he grew up in, with enormous care and a real innocence and joy. Or Shine Shivan, who is medium agnostic and draws from queer theory and from feminist practice at once. Or Rekha Rodwittiya, whose work is about the gaze, a feminist gaze long suppressed and ignored in Indian art, which she retrieved and brought back to life. Her figures are monumental. They refuse to be muses. And she teaches and mentors young artists in Baroda to this day, which means she inherited a tradition from people like Subramanyan and has passed it on in a modified form. A whole living tradition inside one career.
Q4. Sakshi Gallery has been open for four decades. How has the Indian art world changed over this time, and how does this show tell that story?
As I mentioned earlier, the biggest change is that we now have a contemporary distinct from the modern, which was not always the case, because for a very long time, Indian art was understood almost entirely through its modern masters. What has happened over these forty years is that a generation inherited that legacy, discovered it could be honoured but not simply repeated, and set about building a new grammar of contemporary Indian art, one that remains very much under construction and is nowhere close to settled.
The show tells that story by putting the generations together and letting the references travel between them. Ravinder Reddy reaches back a thousand years to Mathura and to Chola bronze, Roshan Chhabria works directly out of Bhupen Khakhar, and Rekha Rodwittiya, who learned her vocabulary in Subramanyan’s Baroda before turning it against one of its oldest assumptions, now teaches the generation coming after her. Surendran Nair draws on an iconographic memory that his figures then refuse to obey, Schon Mendes builds interiors of hyperreal precision and dissolves his figures inside them, and Sujith SN paints landscape at a scale that reduces the human trace to a rumour. Alongside them are Teja Gavankar working in brick and cement, Lakshman Rao Kotturu in fencing wire and steel, Arunkumar HG assembling mythic animals out of salvaged timber and discarded plastic, and Chetnaa in pure geometry, several of which would not have been recognised as sculpture at all thirty years ago. Standing among all of it, someone who knows the older work will find it living inside the newer, and someone encountering everything for the first time will still understand that none of it arrived out of nowhere.
Q5. What do you hope a first-time visitor feels or learns after walking through the gallery?
I hope they come away having discovered that Indian art has a long and rich history which runs directly into the present, because the modern and the contemporary are not two separate stories but one continuous one that is still being written. If somebody leaves with a sense of that depth, of how much has been made in this country over how long, that would be more than enough.
I also hope they feel free, because art asks very little of you at the door, and one of its great pleasures is that you are allowed to go on your own adventure with it, and nobody can tell you that you have done it wrong. If they leave confused, that strikes me as an honest response rather than a failure, since everybody is confused, and the artists making this work are unsure themselves.
Mostly, I would encourage people to be curious and to ask questions. I will be there, Geetha will be there, many of the artists will be there, and so will any number of people encountering this work for the very first time, and a conversation with any of them will teach you more than a wall text can. Curiosity is the only qualification anybody needs.
Q6. What are your thoughts on art coming to a design festival like Design Democracy and the convergence of the two disciplines?
Honestly, I was skeptical at first. I’d never curated at a design fair. I know the art world far better than I know the design world. But I looked at what Design Democracy has done over the past few years and realized it has been at the forefront of conversations about art, about design, and about the future of aesthetics, not just here but internationally.
These were never separate worlds to begin with. When Pupul Jayakar was advising Indira Gandhi on handloom policy, she was as embedded in the art world as in the craft and design world. NID was conceived as an interdisciplinary institution, and there were meaningful conversations between NID and MSU Baroda. The Rajeev Sethis of this world were at every art opening. Somewhere along the way, that got lost, and Design Democracy may be the right place to get it back.
There’s a lot each side could learn. Designers in India are transforming how we understand material, bending it into forms sculptors couldn’t have imagined, using techniques that ought to make their way into the art world. Reddy and his fiberglass are exactly that story, forty years early. Perhaps galleries should also be learning from designers about lighting, because nobody lights work as precisely, and after all, it’s interior designers and architects who ultimately decide where art lives once it leaves the gallery.
The other direction matters too. Artists have known for generations how to build a visual language that is unmistakably theirs. You can recognise a Souza across a room. You know a Manjit Bawa when you see one. That’s what design is reaching for, and increasingly arriving at. You know a Chandigarh chair when you see one. You know a Nakashima.
And last, the city. There’s no more exciting time to be in Hyderabad. The conversation around Indian art is finally moving beyond Mumbai and Delhi, and Hyderabad has centuries of artistic patronage behind it, universities full of young people willing to look, and people like Hoshang Merchant and Varunika Saraf who’ve built real communities of culture lovers there. Bringing Sakshi, a gallery that grew up in Chennai, then Mumbai, and then traveled the world, into that conversation is the part I’m most looking forward to.
