Shakuntala looking for Dushyanta is an epic painting by celebrated Indian painter, Raja Ravi Varma. Ravi Varma, depicts an important character of Mahabharata, pretending to remove a thorn from her foot, while actually looking for her lover, Dushyantha, while her friends call her bluff. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, an art historian, wrote; "This very gesture – the twist and turn of head and body – draws the viewer into the narrative, inviting one to place this scene within an imagined sequence of images and events. On its own, the painting stands like a frozen tableau (like a still from a moving film), plucked out of an on-running spectacle of episodes. These paintings also reflect the centrality of the "male gaze" in defining the feminine image. Though absent from the pictorial frame, the male lover forms a pivotal point of reference, his gaze transfixes Shakuntala, as also Damayanti, into "desired" images, casting them as lyrical and sensual ideals." However, to describe Buddhadev Mukherjee's modest-sized lone man (or single creature) compositions in words is an interesting and telling exercise. The translations share the curious qualities of translated Haikus or transliterated proverbs from a foreign language. They walk the line between hilarity and profundity and the cultural contexts they are created under seem both vaguely familiar and faintly exotic. Buddhadev Mukherjee's lines are almost imperceptibly weighted. While his earlier schooling in Santiniketan and continuing interest has been in Painting, his official studenthood of Graphic Arts at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, did leave a permanent impression on his visual vocabulary. It first fragmented and then slowly condensed and streamlined the materality of his paintings. Later, the time spent at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou on government scholarship, gave him the freedom to encounter the traditional Chinese arts on his own terms which has led to the great fluidity of his line, and the penchant for minute variations on a single theme. It would be interesting to note here that spirits of Chinese and Japanese visual arts had historically been imbibed into the ideals of his previous alma mater, Kala Bhavan in Santiniketan, which had already been imparted to him. (Contemporary art c.1900 CE-Present) To Jana Samudra is a vast space obsessively filled with tiny human figures, henna-coloured, the drawings of isolated men are a striking contrast. But the identity crisis the tiny men suffer is also shared by the meticulously drawn and appendaged men in Buddhadev Mukherjee's suite of drawings. The recurring figure with side-parted hair and apple-blushed cheeks seems to be performing very many functions with deadpan seriousness. Here bathing with slithering snakes falling off along with the waste water, there napping with a train of ducks on his chest, yet everywhere looking sombre and resigned to his fate. Even figures which look clearly older and different, come across as disguises of this lone performer. It's cavalier to identify this performer as either the artist or the viewer but it definitely reminds us of the everyday bizarreness we willingly have to submit ourselves to, without any recourse of escape. In 1947, India became independent of British rule. A group of six artists - K. H. Ara, S. K. Bakre, H. A. Gade, M.F. Husain, S.H. Raza and Francis Newton Souza - founded the Bombay Progressive Artists' Group in the year 1952, to establish new ways of expressing India in the post-colonial era. Though the group was dissolved in 1956, it was profoundly influential in changing the idiom of Indian art. Almost all India's major artists in the 1950s were associated with the group. Some of those who are well-known today are Bal Chabda, Manishi Dey, V. S. Gaitonde, Krishen Khanna, Ram Kumar, Tyeb Mehta, K. G. Subramanyan, A. Ramachandran, Devender Singh, Akbar Padamsee, John Wilkins, Himmat Shah and Manjit Bawa. Present-day Indian art is varied as it had been never before. Among the best-known artists of the newer generation include Bose Krishnamachari and Bikash Bhattacharjee. Another prominent Pakistani modernist was Ismail Gulgee, who after about 1960 adopted an abstract idiom that combines aspects of Islamic calligraphy with an abstract expressionist (or gestural abstractionist) sensibility. Painting and sculpture remained important in the later half of the twentieth century, though in the work of leading artists they often found new directions. Bharti Dayal has chosen to handle the traditional Mithila painting in most contemporary way and created her own style through the exercises of her own imagination, they appear fresh and unusual. The increase in discourse about Indian art, in English as well as vernacular Indian languages, changed the way art was perceived in the art schools. Critical approach became rigorous; critics contributed to re-thinking contemporary art practice in India.
