From the fringes to the frame: Why you haven’t heard of the Modernist Prafulla Dahanukar
‘If we look at how the narrative of Indian modern art is written, it seems as though only men were artists,’ says art historian Savita Apte.
Gauri and Gopika, Prafulla Dahanukar’s daughters, vividly remember a retrospective of her work, held at the Jehangir Art Gallery, in 2014. Organised by their now deceased father, the industrialist Dilip Dahanukar, three months after her death in March, it offered an expansive overview of her work across six decades.
A few things stood out for the daughter at the time. “So many artists came up to us and told us that their supporter has gone,” says Gopika Dahanukar, 51, an expressive-arts educationist.
“I heard it so many times that day, ‘Your mom is my best friend’. She had a million best friends,” adds Gauri Mehta, 56, a cultural philanthropist in the US.
Dahanukar showed her art around the world in her lifetime. Besides being a prolific painter and muralist, she was president of the Art Society of India, and of the Bombay Art Society. She was on the boards of the Lalit Kala Akademi, Kala Academy Goa, and Jehangir Art Gallery.
She worked to promote up-and-coming artists from non-metropolitan centres. She had a remarkable ability to pull in funds from industrialists and high-net-worth individuals.
Yet, in the pantheon of Modern Indian art, Dahanukar’s name remains obscured.
A retrospective set to open on December 11 in Mumbai — where the artist grew up and spent most of her life — seeks to rectify this.
***
The Dahanukar retrospective marks the 10-year death anniversary of an artist who was a contemporary of VS Gaitonde and SH Raza.
But “if we look at how the narrative of Indian modern art is written, it seems as though only men were artists,” says Savita Apte, an art historian, former consultant with the auction house Sotheby’s, and founder-director of the art fair Art Dubai. “So when we come across a woman modernist, it almost always seems like a discovery. We often come across them after they have passed away. So it is not unusual that this is the case with Prafulla too.”
Apte is currently editing a book on Dahanukar’s life and body of work.
“She was not only a painter, ceramicist and printmaker, but also a mural maker. She was very invested in public art and believed that it uplifted the soul. She supported younger artists by raising funds, and giving them space to exhibit. She was one of the most democratic joiners of dots, which is why I’m fascinated both by her journey and by how women under-represent themselves,” Apte says.
The retrospective has been curated by Beth Citron, curator of Modern and Contemporary Asian Art at the Asia Society Museum in New York. It will feature Dahanukar’s paintings, personal sketches, early prints and celebrated murals.
“Prafulla was impactful in the development of abstraction and mixed-media public art in India through her murals. This has not been studied as rigorously as it merits,” Citron says.
***
This year, incidentally, also marks the 10-year anniversary of the Prafulla Dahanukar Art Foundation, set up by her husband, with support from the art community. Its mission has been to take art to the public, and support young struggling artists.
The daughter of a Hindustani classical singer and a businessman, Dahanukar (nee Joshi) grew up surrounded by the arts herself. She was born in Goa, in 1934, and moved with her family to Mumbai when she was five.
“She used to tell us how, when she was nine, she met someone who didn’t know how to sing the Ramkali raga. Surprised, she asked her mother how this was possible. Did everyone not sing? That’s when she realised not every does,” says Gopika, laughing.
Dahanukar did sing. Classical music formed an intrinsic part of how she resolved abstraction. “She would wake up in the morning singing a particular raga, and she would sing while painting, for hours on end in her studio. She would often describe her painting to me as a vibration of the raga,” Gopika says.
She even brought the two together in a memorable fundraising effort.
For the centenary celebrations of the Bombay Art Society, in 1988, Dahanukar brought Pandit Bhimsen Joshi and MF Husain together for an onstage jugalbandi at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA). The artist Suhas Bahulkar would later describe in detail how the celebrated Modernist painted in acrylic, with large brushes, while the Hindustani classical maestro sang.
The funds raised that day formed the basis of an annual grant for emerging artists that is still given out by BAS, called the Bendre-Husain Scholarship.
***
Dahanukar’s journey as a painter began at the Sir JJ School of Art, where many members of the Progressive Artists Group (Gaitonde, Husain, Raza, KH Ara), studied too.
She completed her diploma there, winning a gold medal, in 1955. By this time, a vibrant arts centre had opened nearby called the Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute (BDMI). Dahanukar rented a studio here and often lent the space to other artists, including Husain and Gaitonde. (The latter, incidentally, had taught her mural-making at the JJ School of Art.)
The opening of the institute was an epochal moment for Modern art in India. The large bungalow housed artists from across disciplines, including Uday Shankar’s dance troupe, Ravi Shankar’s sitar studio, the thespians Ebrahim Alkazi and Satyadev Dubey, danseuse Meenakshi Raja, and artists such as B Prabha, Krishen Khanna and, later, Nasreen Mohamedi and Nalini Malani.
In 1960, Dahanukar received a scholarship from the French government and left to study printmaking at Stanley William Hayter’s famous Atelier 17 in Paris. She returned to BDMI, and began to venture into other forms of practice.
“In the late 1960s, Dahanukar began a practice of creating large murals for residential and commercial buildings, including many modern apartment blocks built for the wealthy, in place of old bungalows, in South Bombay. It was an unquestionably radical gesture for a woman artist to be appointed to this role. At the same time, that Dahanukar was commissioned to create these works speaks to her centrality and high regard within the Bombay art world,” Citron says.
“For many of these projects, Dahanukar chose to work in ceramic, occasionally using glass, scrap iron, canvas, or other materials in response to a specific moment or site. Some of these remain in place, including a mural created at the Neelambar building in Bombay in 1972.”
The exhibition in Mumbai will trace the periods of Dahanukar’s career, from early experiments in abstraction to landscapes, murals, and her late-career series, termed Mindscape and Eternal Space.
“She was exceptional for the reach of her work over a long career,” Citron says. “In looking at Prafulla’s work, especially from the early 1960s on, it becomes clear that she was critical to dialogues about the development of modernist abstraction in and for India. But, in India as elsewhere, many women artists did not have the renown they deserved due to prejudices, some of which still remain.”
Recommended Topics 
