Geetanjali Krishna: Art to set you free

I saw a quotation the other day that made me wonder a bit. I don’t remember the exact words, but the gist of it was thus: We all commit transgressions, only some of us get caught. Given that I saw it at an exhibition of artworks by the inmates of Tihar Jail, the thought was particularly piquant. For many of us tend to think that inmates of jail are ‘people like them’, quite distinct from people like us. “This is the thought I had when I passed the Tihar Jail in early 2007,” said Anubhav Nath of Ramchander Nath Foundation, one of the two curators of the exhibition. “I asked myself,” said he, “why is it that most of us just choose to ignore the Jail?” So unlike the multitudes who probably go past the jail everyday without pausing to wonder what happens behind its walls, Nath decided to enter its portals and see for himself.

“I found that most of the people in Jail number five (which I visited) were victims of bad circumstances. I also realised that enabling some of the inmates to learn a skill set that could help them earn an honest living outside jail, was the best way to help them,” said Nath. So he, under the aegis of Ramchander Nath Foundation (an organisation in the memory of Nath’s grandfather which works for the development and restoration of the arts) started art workshops for jail inmates. “Initially, we conceptualised the workshops as art therapy — as an outlet for their suppressed emotions and feelings,” said Nath. Gradually, the body of work that emerged began to look very promising. So Nath and other associates persuaded well known contemporary artists to visit the jail, spend time with the inmates and record their experiences as well. Thus the seeds of an exhibition of collected works by inmates and established artists were sown.

As I walked through the circular galleries of Mati Ghar at the Indira Gandhi Centre for Arts and Culture, gazing at the artworks, I was riveted. My eyes fell on what was a fairly unoriginal painting of a young Krishna caught with stolen butter in his mouth, painted by a prisoner named Mehtab. What set it apart was that the baby Krishna had a very adult expression in his eyes, not of guilt, it seemed to me, but of regret at being caught….Some of works of the contemporary artists were also interesting — TW Donovan’s painting of a young prisoner gazing wistfully at the wall that confined him, was quite arresting. Another thought-provoking work was Chintan Upadhyay’s ‘Tapori Bhai’, a naked infant staring with a slightly lewd innocence at the viewer.

I found myself smiling at the surprising humour that many artists displayed, some of it quite wicked. Like the empty glass jar that was supposed to contain air from jail (inspired by an immortal Bollywood phrase, “jail ki hawa…) Another exhibit that inspired laughter as well as thought was a wooden box with a hole beneath through which people could push their heads in and experience what jail was really like. Trying to see in the suffocating blackness inside the box, a strange thought came to me. So many people I knew were actually living in self-inscribed prisons even though they were supposedly free…

Nath said proudly that one of the inmates who’d participated in the workshop had landed a job as a studio assistant. The artworks exhibited had also received several sales enquiries, quite an achievement given the exhibition was not even a week old. But for me, the biggest achievement of the exhibition was to show people like myself that perhaps there were not that many differences between people on either side of the high walls of Tihar Jail.