Of course, with a number of bright artists involved, the rehash has been tailor-made to suit our new urban environment and the mobile object is the hand-cut or the cycle-rickshaw. The themes too are more complex than Husain's Coals to Newcastle or Bamboo to Bareilly. They are those under attack in a world equally devoted to the policies of consumerism and regimentation in its various avatars, be it the battery chickens we produce in our schools or the communal taliban who try to classify people and blinker them.

The exhibition is really a mixed bag of the serious and the facile and could have been curated better. Works that stand out are Alex Matthew's Shelter, where a bareback evokes the shell of the tortoise, making the question of shelter an ironic one where thousands sleep on streets each day. Indeed, this is highlighted in the concept of the shelter as a prison in conventional terms, where women and children are trapped in a patriarchal society. Sonia Khurana's Zoetrope of a house-drudge sweeping the floor and Elena Banik's cage-like rickshaw like those that ply school-children everyday remind us that perhaps those who, like Eklavya, accept the terms of inclusion in our society, are worse off than those who challenge it.

Three artists-Subba Ghosh, Veer Munshi and M J Enas-highlight how even to challenge society one has to come to terms with its hard realities. Enas' image of Brecht's Mother Courage as played by Manohar Singh in the Hindi version Himmat Mai evokes images of aggressors and victims tied together in a visual symbiosis, which can only break with a final choice to walk on with the past on one's back but with an open future before us. If we take these assemblages as the core discourse of this exhibition, we humbly learn that we do not have to talk down to the people using bazaar art or kitsch as a language. They are quite capable of responding to any art positively. Husain found that out in the sixties. We find his conclusions reaffirmed today.

Suneet Chopra