Page 99 - Eye of the beholder

ABDUL RAHIM APPABHAI ALMELKAR [1920-1982] THE VERSATILE TRADITIONALIST
Almelkar belongs to a generation of artists in India who established an active engagement with her pictorial tradition particularly miniatures and folk and tribal arts. Belonging to the league of artists as Jamini Roy, K. Sreenivasulu and Narasimhamoorthy; his exclusive indigenous vision of regional art and art forms remained unique. It required intuitive strength to pursue a path of exclusiveness at a time when regional art and folk forms were dismissed as revivalist lacking persuasive originality, yet the artist remained untouched by modernism inspired from Western European artists in the art of his friends as Syed Haider Raza or Maqbool Fida Husain of the Bombay Progressives. He belonged to a tradition of stylized "Indian" painters with exquisite and intricate detailing, marking the character of his works as ornamental or decorative. This type of study had formed part of his pedagogy particularly derived from miniature art tradition.
Almelkar was an artist who developed his individual style in the mid 1950s after having gone through painting subjects as landscapes and life of the common people. In the mid 1940s he initiated themes that were mostly figurative based on kings and consorts, heroes and heroines and raga-raginis of Hindustani music. His development of visual language in 1950s was crucial at this juncture, as Indian artists were going through an identity crisis that became critical in the 1960s. By then it had become evident that authenticity in visual language and construction of Indian identity from the margins of the Third World in reacting creatively into Internationalism had become the need of the hour. Within this context Almelkar’s works marked an important departure, i.e. while the Bombay Progressives had aggressively contributed to developing Indian modernism through stylistic derivations from avant-garde European artists and now with this turn of events requiring authenticity of Indianness in visual arts, Almelkar’s derivation of inspiration from pictorial imagery of folk and tribal traditions as well as miniatures proved path breaking. He played an important role in the development of modernism within the Indian context particularly connecting to his roots, interpreting it according to his contemporary sensibility; thus establishing his distinct status within Modern Indian art, through a style of indigenous visual language.
Born in Ahmedabad in Gujarat, his family moved to Almelkar village in Bijapur, Karnataka. Almelkar believed that he must have learnt painting when he was still in his mother`s womb. "My mother was busy embroidering all through her pregnancy and I probably inherited art from her at that stage," he said. He began painting at the young age of seven. After a conventional education in a local school at Sholapur, he came to Bombay to pursue his education in art, initially at Nootan Kaa Mandir and later at J.J. School of Art. During his student years, he won several awards at shows organized by the Art Society of India and the Bombay Art Society.
In his journey towards the growth and development as an artist, Almelkar considered Khatri, a folk painter from Gujarat, as his true teacher, having instilled in him the seminality of perfecting drawing and perfect draftsmanship as a fundamental premise in releasing creativity and ideas from his mind. "In those days, there was `no inner eye and outer eye`. A single vision informed the work of most artists," says Almelkar.
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