Ranjit Hoskote
Sujata
Bajaj assembles her mixed-media works as though they were palimpaesta:
like palm-leaf manuscripts or scrolls retrieved from the hoard of some
ancient monastery, they are placed before our eyes. Each frame
has
been crafted from disparate elements: paint, wax; monotype graphic, a
collage
of papers that range in density from the delicately translucent to the
sturdily opaque. Each frame acts as a variation on the past, the
ancestral
inheritance: in the ocre yellow and red palette, we are recalled into
the
ritual circle of sacrifice; a hero-stone, a tribal totem, a lost
goddess
offertility is suggested by certain motifs; and in the elegant
calligraphy
of the sacred texts, the hymns repeated until the pitch of perfection
has
been achieved, we sense the poignant aphorisms of unknown grammarians,
long-dead scribes who yearned for the joy of transcendence, the peace
of
eternity.
Look more
closely; what inscriptions
are these, developed like musical notations, rippling out in waves of
mysterious
script? What edicts are these, partly erased by war weather and
vandalism?
Tales told in broken sentences, scraps of castaway phrases in fossil
dialects,
keys to half-remembered legends: these are memoirs of a culture that
has
recited itself through long cycles of violence, upheaval serenity.
Within
the rubric of this treatment, the document is transmuted into a
monument:
it endures, it withstands. We observe as the yantra, the ritual
diagram,
drifts unanchored through a chalky topography of the mind; as
expositions
from the Sanskrit scriptures run parallel to the stabbing offensives of
darkness. These are perennial mandates, endorsed by the decay of
age.
When we
encounter these signs,
we acknowledge their oracular primacy; these almanacs remind us of our
mortality and plunge us into danger, yet do they not also teach us the
virtue of fortitude, offer us the hope of continuity? A great gestural
freedom animates these works; the tail of a calligram, once the
signature
of a potent mantra, is now a free floating festoon, an index of
pleasure,.
the surface, which Sujata would formerly work out in lavered fields, is
now articulated in an eroticism of creases and tears, roughened edges
and
bold slippages.
And we are not
exhausted
or exasperated by the recurrence of the sacred presence, through
devices,
allusions, direct raptures, an underlying universal energy makes itself
manifest through the patterns of invocation that Sujata creates. Even
as
she performs her gestures of devotion to this source of power, Sujata
Bajaj
reinvents the forms of attention through which we communicate with the
past and the unknown. She sings in praise of the fragment, in praise of
the Word and the Image, those heirlooms of humankind that survive every
attempt at effacement and bear across to us the freight of our
origins.
Ranjit
Hoskote
Art critic, Times
of India,
Mumbai
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