The democratic tradition of our national movement, which involved the vast mass of our peasantry in the overthrow of British colonial rule, was a powerful element in our contemporary art. That is why an accomplished artist like Jamini Roy abandoned his impressionist painting and took to a folk style, calling himself a patua, or traditional scroll painter. One of our leading artists, Ram Kinkar Baij, was the son of a village barber and masseuse who was noticed as a gifted poster-painter and was incorporated into Santiniketan.
It is not surprising, therefore, for us to see the development of Shakila, a naive artist, who belonged to a dispossessed peasant family that had taken to vegetable selling in the city. She belongs classically to the marginalised sections of society who are increasingly refusing to be written off. And she has succeeded.
From her first exhibition at Chitrakoot gallery in Kolkata in 1991 to her present show at Art Alive in Delhi, Shakila has received a number of awards from the West Bengal government (1991), a number of others from different organisations in Kolkata, Varanasi and Delhi, as well as a nomination for a UNESCO award. No small achievement, this.
It is interesting how the very structure of her work reflects her struggle against marginalisation. The centres of her collages are generally vacant spaces and we find elements entering them from the margins. They are everyday people, farmers, workers, vegetable sellers, ducks, chickens and cats and dogs. Everyday life takes centrestage in her works, reminding one that history is made by the people, while the celebrities and high-profile figures merely act at producing history.
It is this perception of the truth that underlies her art that has brought Shakila fame. Her technique is simple, but the way she assembles shreds of paper in spaces of light and darkness, areas of colour and grey, of smooth spaces the eye slides over and textures it dwells on, have made her the artist she is.
Shakila?s art is not kitsch.
It is naive, but very much fine art. It is perceptive and sensitive to relations between human beings and social
practices like dowry deaths, crimes of passion and wife beating.
And yet, it is not a poster. Each work of hers is assembled layer by layer with due regard for light and shade and texture, with painstaking figuration and an easy flow of narrative, and stands out as a work of art. Such art is worth looking out for. u