Shri Khakhar Prasanna, Atul Dodiya’s exhibition at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, from February 3rd to March 3rd, 2007, was special for a variety of reasons. It was Gallery Chemould’s inaugural show in a spanking new 5000+ sq. ft. space; it was also Dodiya’s act of re-forging a long-standing relationship he had with the gallery as well as the relationship the gallery and he had with Khakhar.

As a show that tried to memorialize Khakhar, Shri Khakhar Prasanna successfully parodied the penchant most communities have for museumising heroes – by embalming them in neatly arranged history-bins that inevitably gather dust. This is a process by virtue of which spaces that the dead inhabit are effectively rendered sterile. Dodiya styled his response to Khakhar – as a close friend and confrere – by creating exhibits that summoned his living presence. He created an environment, in which Khakhar could not only dwell but in which he could also be imaginatively rehabilitated.

No other artist in recent times has excited as much admiration, attention, and criticism from fellow-artists as Khakhar – they have seen him as a figure casually challenging high-art protocols, have agreed and disagreed vehemently with his acts of harnessing Kitsch, and have, all things considered, been incontrovertibly enriched by their interactions with him and his art. You had Vivan Sundaram’s heart-felt bad drawings for dost at Gallery Chemould in 2006, which evocatively paid homage to the departed artist by creatively combining drawings and stencils of Khakhar’s iconic works – Sundaram’s works referred poetically to the delicately translucent nature of memories. Group shows like Bhupen Among Friends (2005) showcased the different ways in which younger and senior artists chose to remember Khakhar through their works.

Among other issues, Dodiya’s inquiry into the social lives of objects (chosen and stacked strategically in Wunderkammers – favoured items of furniture in middle-class homes) in the Broken Branches series (2003) also explored the composite structure of memories – where pain and pleasure, anger and affection inflect each other continuously. In Shri Khakhar Prasanna, Dodiya demonstrated an enabling way of making sense of contrary feelings – equal and opposite responses he had to Khakhar; in the process, he offered us a dynamic model of mapping the elasticity of recollections.

You entered the gallery to encounter a green-faced Shri Bhupen Khakhar Memorial Bust in fibreglass, grinning at you – there was an array of similarly disposed multi-coloured busts of Khakhar against the wall behind (mimicking Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe prints). In the room to your left, a stand holding 14 framed paintings of Khakhar on Peepul leaves stood in the shade of black clerical topis installed on a wall. There was a metallic cradle tied to a dumb-bell next to relic-boxes that held the Shri Khakhar teeth, the Shri Khakhar hair-strand, the Shri Khakhar sock, the Shri Khakhar pillow (with M. Merleau-Ponty’s weighty Phenomenology of Perception occupying pride of place), the Shri Khakhar Anniversary Notebook, the Donation Box, a Hot Water Bag, among other items. Dodiya’s attempt here was not to trivialize the man but to subvert the modes of canonization that run rampant in a god-obsessed culture like ours. Khakhar was not only a God of Small and Big Things but also a Saint of Critical Humour(s), Dodiya seemed to tell us, with his exceptional use of mischievous humour. Dodiya used an attitude to tropes, to orthodoxies of conceptualization and presentation, to sentimental pieties, to conjure up Khakhar in a manner that was as much his own as it was Khakhar’s (was that Khakhar’s silver-haired ghost you saw at the banquet?). The Gujarati middle-class and its endearing acts of faith, its delusions and self-assuring fictions, its psycho-pathologies of everyday life, were cocked a snook at by Dodiya through these scattered memorabilia. Dodiya’s cunning ploy of representing a community’s social rituals through Khakhar’s constructed after-life was an attempt at uncovering the sense of belonging Khakhar felt to this milieu; it was also an attempt at establishing a rationale for the need Khakhar felt to train his guns at this context. In this key, Dodiya also came up with works that referenced popular advertisements for sex clinics and marble plaques with edifying inscriptions.

 

As with some of our best Guru-Shishya exemplars, you found the ideal of Virodhi-Bhakti (contradictory devotion) in action – there were times when you thought Dodiya was being slyly sentimental (the five frames from Painting B Company, locating Khakhar’s close confidantes and intimate soul-mates as practitioners of trades that ranged from dealing in country liquor to supplying bricks and cement, for instance) and there were moments when you thought he was being vindictive (the SMS, which poked fun of an old man for his inability to get it up, in Pregnant Father – II).

 

At the far end of the main hall, were displayed naïve paintings done in the manner of the Georgian painter, Niko Pirosmani – was this Dodiya’s way of telling Bhupen, “Brother, I know where you are coming from!” as playwright Naushil Mehta maintains in his catalogue piece? There was, of course, the abiding feeling that Dodiya was settling scores – in a way, however, that Khakhar would probably have grudgingly appreciated. What was remarkable, however, was the manner in which Dodiya managed to squeeze aesthetic substance out of situations and events from the past – he managed to steer away from sloppy nostalgia and judiciously employed the agencies of control and excess to create a network of critical narratival associations between the works on display. One important aspect of the show, and one can’t really say this about many exhibitions, was that the festive registers did not strike you as being hollow – the celebratoriness did not leave you fatigued.

 

Dead men tell no tales. One wonders therefore how Khakhar would respond to the show, if we could get him to answer a lightning call (some of us had tried to ‘call him’ at a programme organized during the Bhupen Among Friends show).  Would he crinkle his nose, steady his spectacles, and say, “Saala, Marne Ke Baad Bhi Nahi Chhoda” or would he tilt his head, jerk it back, flash a Binaca smile, and say, “Mogambo Khush Hua”?