Rakhi Sarkar

A Woman of Substance

Romain Maitra tracks Rakhi Sarkar's journey as an ace collector, a curator and the moving force behind initiatives like CIMA and KMOMA.

THE ACT OF COLLECTING HAS HAD ITS SHARE OF CRITICS. IT HAS been considered an instance of obsessive-compulsive behaviour. Thinkers ranging from John Dewey to Jean Baudrillard have commented on its problematically acquisitive underpinnings. However, it is an undeniable truth that without collectors, artists would have to suffer privations; and without patronage, art forms would dry up.

For some collectors, art, its appreciation and the documentation of history become part of an important cultural mission. Rakhi Sarkar, one of India’s most significant art collectors, personifies this quest. A benign conversationalist, Sarkar is well-known for the many roles she plays in the art world of Kolkata. Rakhi Sarkar’s art collection is a joint effort with her husband Aveek Sarkar, who heads the leading media group ABP Private Limited. Distributed over the different residences she has in India, her collection has one important pattern. “Choosing art works of Bengal or those related to the theme of Bengal, from the last 250 years, determines the basic design behind my collection” she states. The collection is diverse and includes both traditional and contemporary art – it has mica paintings, ivory figurines of Durga, around 30 Early Bengal School oils from the 19th and early 20th centuries, Kalighat pats, Battala woodcuts from the late 19th century, Company paintings, academic studies by artists like Bamapada Bandyopadhyay and Hemen Mazumdar, a large collection of drawings and paintings of the Bengal School, among others. Besides, there are special collections of works by Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore and Jamini Roy. Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri’s Hindustani Upakatha is an important series. Further, there are large collections of works by K. G. Subramanyan, Somnath Hore, Bikash Bhattacharjee, Jogen Chowdhury and Ganesh Pyne (including his earliest works and cartoons).

In 2000, Sarkar curated a landmark exhibition, Art of Bengal: Past and Present (1850-2000), which dealt with the history of colonial and modern art in Bengal. “The collection also includes a huge variety of modern and contemporary Indian art specially related to the Bengal theme. There are Sailoz Mukerjea’s oils, M. F. Husain’s watercolours including his 30 portraits of important figures of Bengal, Tyeb Mehta’s widowed Durga after the demolition of the Babri mosque, S. H. Raza’s Shakti series, Ram Kumar’s two Durga paintings, Sakti Burman and Rameshwar Broota’s works featuring the goddess, Paramjit Singh’s landscapes of Bengal, Atul Dodiya’s mixed media work featuring the Titash river in Bangladesh, Ram KinkerBaij and Meera Mukherjee’s bronzes, among several others. “My search for art works is aimed at filling the lacunae in my collection,” she adds.

About the art collector’s role, Sarkar says, “There should be more collectors of art and there should be more museums and foundations. If the fostering of art is undertaken in a non-commercial context, it would definitely be for the better”. “Moreover, installation art, video art and new modes of artistic expression need special sponsorship as they have little saleability in India.” She points out the yawning gaps between private foundations and governmental organisations and this is where her concept of the ‘art centre’ comes in. “Art centres should undertake the responsibility for publications, seminars, workshops and artists’ residencies”, she avers.

Sarkar established the Centre of International Modern Art (CIMA) in 1993 to translate this vision into reality. In 1986, Sarkar curated an exhibition in Calcutta, titled, Visions, on behalf of the Ladies Study Group of which she was the President. It showed 200 art works of four noted painters from Bengal – Somnath Hore, Ganesh Pyne, Bikash Bhattacharjee and Jogen Chowdhury – gathered from various sources in India. It was a non-commercial exhibition, which also produced a catalogue that was perhaps one of the first of its kind on Indian art at that time. “CIMA was conceived purely because of the need of the hour. At that time, in the beginning of the 1990s, there were very few galleries doing seminal work on modern and contemporary Indian art. Besides, very little literature on Indian art and art events was coming out,” she explains.

CIMA has organised around hundred exhibitions in Kolkata and the rest of India. It has held curated shows abroad and has implemented several projects in association with national and international museums and educational institutions. Sarkar is very emphatic that CIMA operates as an art centre and not only as a gallery. She maintains, “All the earnings from the gallery’s commercial activities are ploughed back into non-commercial activities like academic research and publications on art.”

Ganesh Pyne. The Night of the Merchant. Tempera on paper. 50cms X 55 cms. 1985