House Talk: Santhosh Sakhinala in conversation with Tanmay Santra

House Talk

Santhosh Sakhinala in conversation with Tanmay Santra

Hyderabad,      April - September, 2011

(In course of the time we encountered Tanmay Santra's paintings and drawings which extensively uses the 'imagery of House' in his works. Santhosh K Sakhinala generates a conversation with the artist particularly for our ongoing project-Blog "Disposable House".)

Santhosh: 
Tanmayda, I got the opportunity to see your work transforming through time. I feel there is a shift from the intimate, domestic nature of pictorial space to an open and arid type; may be a kind of move from home to outside. How do you see it?

Tanmay:  
Yes, my painterly practice over the past few years has changed after I moved to Hyderabad from Santiniketan.

During student days at Kala Bhavan, through my works I attempted to articulate certain sensibilities with the help of objects and events that surrounded me. Gradually some other elements, related to my life, started coming into my work. Around that time ‘home’ and ‘journey’ became two major concerns in my work.

In 2007 I moved from Santiniketan (West Bengal) to Hyderabad and joined Sarojini Naidu School of Arts & Communication as a Lecturer. I encountered a different kind of environment, culture and life style. I would look at countless vistas of wide barren land and rocks around my new home whenever I stepped out. I started roaming around to discover new places. Sometimes I got lost on the way, sometimes I also got lost between my past and my present. I saw lands get fragmented and compound walls being made. Experiences of seeing ‘This plot is not for sale’ or ‘This land belongs to...’ on the walls or boards became very familiar to me.

Initially I did some sketches and photographed several sites. Gradually these overwhelming construction projects which dominate the pulse of the new city arrested my attention. I began showing them in my paintings. Instead of showing physical activities like labourers engaged in construction works, I showed them in extreme solitude. I think it helped me unfold some other stories about how I look at my surroundings and life.

SS: 
How do you understand the concept and experience of home?

TS: 
Home is a small word, but it is a strong one; stronger than the walls or the beams of a house, for me. Of course, primarily home means a physical space to stay in but conceptually it crosses that boundary. It actually may be a mental or psychic space where an individual lives. It should be a space where you really can grow and people understand you.

I have numerous experiences of my relocation and displacement. This reminds me of a real incident which I heard from my mother and sisters. I still try to imagine the moment when my parents and the family had to leave my father’s ancestral house just before my birth. I heard from my sisters, who witnessed the moment, that after some arguments and agitation regarding the house and common property, they faced difficulties to stay there and decided to leave the house. The incident took a shape in my imagination which still haunts me. It seems to be a metaphor of displacement! Isn’t it?

I grew up in two-three places in Midnapore district, West Bengal. After my school days I moved to Kolkata where I stayed with my elder brother. There I encountered the reality of a cosmopolitan city which has a high percentage of migrant population and cultural diversity. After some time one of our sisters joined us. Next year my father passed away and my mother came to live with us. This became a home then. I lived there in south Kolkata for a decade. This place and its adjacent localities are the ‘colonies’ of displaced Bengalis who moved here from the East Bengal (now Bangladesh) after partition. I could sense how they feel about their homeland where there is no possibility of return. Though I am not a migrant in that sense, yet my mind, more or less, began being permeated by a very personal sense of loss or dispossession regarding home. It is still very difficult to talk about this situation.

I visited my old home for two times in last ten years. There are reasons and logic behind it, among which few things are not even clear to me. I sense that the bittersweet memories regarding my home may have transformed into a feeling of loss in my mind. And I imagine, if I go there, I would see those things from a distance as if that is not my home.

I am not sure whether I am able to convey all these layers of experiences and facts through my works. But you may see this as backdrop to read them.

SS: 
You stayed in Santiniketan for some time, studying and then working. Can you share your experience and association with the place?

TS: 
Life in Santiniketan is different from any other place in the world. It is a place designed and created by a poet-artist-thinker. I do not know whether there is any other example like that across the world. I was privileged to be associated with this place in many ways. This provided me many things.

I grew up in parts of rural Bengal, and lived for a decade in Kolkata, then came to Santiniketan. Being in Santiniketan was totally a different experience for me since it is a place which is neither urban and nor totally rural. I liked the place for many reasons. May be one of them was its semi-urban-semi-rural nature. Next thing would be of course its homely environment. Homely in the sense that it is a small town and everybody knows each other. If you walk away from the centre you see the village life there. Despite all its homely characteristics, it is ironical that when I wanted to rent a house, it was like any other place. I had both very bad and good experiences while staying in several rented houses there. Sometimes I joke that there are people of only two kinds in the world--- house-owners and tenants!

Anyway, when I was studying at the Art College in Kolkata, my idea of home began to change, and it took a more clear shape during my stay in Santiniketan. I have also been influenced by Salil-da’s concept of ‘home’, as he innovates constantly the possibilities of intimate and rich ways of living space. His ‘home’ has been far from a typical home or a typical artist’s studio; rather it is a unique mixture of theatricality, museum-like and artist’s studio-like space with a bed and a refrigerator. This is about artist Salil Sahani who lives and works in Santiniketan. And I think it can be a critique of how most of us generally ignore this aspect in our life. You know, I do not mean here that a well designed house makes a good home; but for me these experiences have opened up my perception about living space.            

                                                                                                       

SS: 
Let us make the Home public. You know, home is also related with the issues of class, region, geography, nation and other socio-political factors. Can you reflect on these issues, and are you trying also to address these issues through your work because, in the present historical condition house/Home is increasingly associated with the economics, money and status to a considerable extent. It is also becoming a mode of exploitation of various things like labour, land, resources etc. 

TS:
Initially I started working with the idea of home and some survival memories which are depicted through my personal and experiential perspectives. Again it may touch upon other wider contexts too. I think while I am talking about my personal understanding and experiences of ‘home’, I am also talking about power, money and politics indirectly. My experiences lead me to look outside, and I sensed how experiences of an individual become public. The present narrative is more or less autobiographical. But my intention is also to address many other related issues like inequalities in the distribution of property or land, social and personal aggressions etc. But I am not a social reformer or social activist in the general sense of the term. What I like is to transform some of these experiences into visual imagery, sometimes in a documentary mode, to evoke certain meanings and sensibilities.

SS: 
Very true. The experiences that we believe personal and particular, definitely involve certain level of universality. Is there any artist that you share a commonality in terms of your ideas and work, both in India and outside? Many artists have been engaged with the ideas of displacement, migration, alienation and urbanity which are inevitable in our condition of modernity.

TS:
Yes, many artists had dealt and have been dealing with these issues in our country and   outside. I share a kind of commonality in terms of their ideas and works. For me life and works of Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Dorothea Lange and Frida Kahlo are very significant. In contemporary India, Zarina Hashmi, Subodh Gupta, Nataraj Sharma, Veer Munshi, Dilip Mitra, Alok Bal, Paula Sengupta, Archana Hande, Jagannath Panda, Sovan Kumar, Gigi Scaria among many others have been dealing with these issues in their work. Moreover, when I see or read some of the films or books which reflect these issues, I see a similarity with my engagement.  In many of his films Ritwik Ghatak addressed the condition of refugee-hood and ‘home’ so poignantly that it moves me.

SS: 
Another aspect intriguing about your work is the language of representation. It works with a particular kind of realism, which is selective and a collage of synoptic events or moments that are captured and put together. Again, your paintings also appear to have not involved expressionistic or emotional tendencies. They appear as austere pictorial calculations of certain sensibilities. Could you please tell us about these aspects?

TS: 
Yes, you see a kind of realism as a language of representation where my approach to painting is very minimal and simplistic. And you may find my fascination towards abstraction in the language of visual representation.

A kind of silence dominates the picture plane and you see almost nobody in the represented space.  Yet it may evoke a mood in the viewer to imagine its past and future (of land, of site). I find various aspects of drama behind it, the human drama! When I look at a construction site, grandiose, or even a simple walled plot, I imagine its past and the people who once will come to live there. And it refers to the basic needs and desire of common man. All these related perspectives and sensibilities are there while I am observing, nurturing or transforming these experiences into my visual imagery.

These images of urban spaces are related to human beings, yet human presence is less emphasized. Perhaps I wanted to show this void, through which a kind of melancholic aspect can be conveyed. They also encode a sense of alienation and distance.

SS:
After your Kolkata and Santiniketan-phase, you have been staying and working in Hyderabad for some time now. How do you see this place, which provides a home for you now?

TS: 
Though there are lots of differences between cultural environment and political scenario of these two places, I find similarities in many things. To certain extent, people here are not very different from the place where I am from. The city and the people seemed to me very lively and interesting. I like to see people; I like their courage, struggle --- the overall drama! I am interested in seeing people, their day-to-day life. Of course negotiating with certain things as a tenant, I live in an extended part of the city which is growing very fast. I am here amidst the small, as well as the vast overwhelming mega-projects of construction-works. Gradually I am getting known to people around me and overcoming my anxiety of being an outsider.

SS: 
It seems evident that your experiences of displacement and concept of home are reflected in your art practice. How does this affect your life style or day-to-day life now?

TS: 
Yes, it affects my life style. For example, I am still very hesitant to buy a wardrobe or any other heavy furniture for my house. We are four in the family; yet, we live with only two metal trunks and three travel bags! I want very simple living and try avoiding any kind of luxury. I dislike being dominated by the household goods in the living space. And that reduces the anxiety of relocation too. I have been living in this colony called Gulmohar Park for nearly four years, and more than half a year in this house, the present one. I don’t know exactly how long we will stay here. You may have heard this popular saying, ‘Dhane-dhane-pe likha hai khane-valon ka naam’(It is written over every rice grain that who will eat it); I say, ‘Ghar-ghar-pe likha hai rahene-valon ka naam’ (It is written over every house that who will stay there)!