The art of Bihar, too, especially that of the Mauryan and Gupta period has influenced our contemporary art. Even today contemporary artists like Lalu Prasad Shaw, Subodh Gupta, Sambhavi, Sanjeev Sinha and Narendra Pal Singh, who have made their mark both in India and abroad, remind us that Bihar may well be very different from the motivated denigration of it in Delhi. Arun Pandit and Dinesh Kumar Ram are among the youngest of Bihar artists, showing at the Nehru Centre in Mumbai from September 7-13.

Pandit is a sculptor whose aluminum figures remind one of the Gupta art, but their distortions are distinctly modern. Also, unlike the Gupta art, his concern iswith the common man. For him, the gods of Bihar are its farmers, its workers and the urban man who sees the world literally through his newspaper!

Mohan Kumar Ram, on the other hand, is a colour-based abstractionist, mapping out areas of joy and warning, and light and darkness, constructing an architectural space of moods that reflect a complex tradition going back to the roots. These young artists of Bihar remind one that we may be globalising and not being globalised by borrowing plumes from outside.

--Suneet Chopra