Excerpt from Nilima Sheikh, ‘Caprice of Memory and Mime: Painted Drawings of Leela Mukherjee’, in Leela Mukherjee: A Guileless Modernist, edited by R. Siva Kumar, New Delhi: Tulika Books in association with the Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation, 2024. Published with permission from the publisher.Leela Mukherjee: A Guileless ModernistEdited by R. Siva KumarTulika Books, 2024It was while she was in Delhi in the eighties and nineties that I got to know the range of Leela Mukherjee’s creativity better. The few of her mixed media paintings I had come across excited my curiosity, and I asked to see some more, knowing that for the past few years she had spent most of her time drawing and painting. A little daunted by the mountains of paper spilling over the tables in her home, I nevertheless set to the task of unrolling endless rolls of paper. As image after image pranced out, I was led first by their exuberance and ingenuous spontaneity into a place in the world they made for Leela Mukherjee. As I went along traversing these known/unknown lands, the pictorial configuration grew denser; layers of language impacted meaning into the images – not unlike the cliffs of stacked-up figure and foliage within the paintings. Which land was this where these ebullient characters enacted drama and played games, I wondered? There is East Asia certainly, through the language of art, in calligraphic verve, forming figure in space claimed from the void by gesture and action of the body. Style ordains physiognomy too, perhaps; otherwise how do so many Chinese people inhabit her work, I laughingly ask. But are they Chinese, or the Manipuri dancers rehearsing at Triveni Kala Sangam, the multi-arts centre in New Delhi whom Leela Mukherjee would often sit and draw? Samurai warriors thunder down hill-slopes with martial agility; now, the Manipuri dancer takes on the bravura of a Jatra artiste brandishing sword and shield. Friends filling her room with voice and music over an evening get-together assume the guise of the Sufi mendicants whose songs they sing. The Doordarshan Mahabharat which she sketched while watching television dissolves as her eye and mind, nurtured on the cultural inspirations of her Santiniketan days, invoked Southeast Asian depictions of the epics. To which floating world did these parasol-sporting ladies belong? Or did the pleasures of the monsoon observed from the front veranda of her home convert the neighbourhood into a stage for prancing performers? Then there is Central Asia too, in the papers strewn in her room: the stocky swagger of heroes of romance and lore in configurations that play with scale to define narrative space, flying figures cavorting with the assurance of acrobats sure of their leap into fantasy. Monkeys play peek-a-boo from a relief rockface teased out of Mahabalipuram, while princesses of a quixotic court embellish grove and niche with the compositional craft of Nepali wood-carving. What is quite easily apparent is the drawbridge that the language of calligraphic intent makes between day-to-day contemporary experience and traditional Asian cultures.Leela Mukherjee, Mother and Child II, wood, 50 x 12 x 9 cm. Courtesy Mrinalini Mukherjee FoundationLeela Mukherjee, Untitled, 1986, water colour, pastel and sketch pen on paper, 51.7 x 38 cm. Courtesy Mrinalini Mukherjee FoundationLeela Mukherjee, Untitled, 1988, water colour, sketch pen and pastel on paper, 55.9 x 76.2 cm. Courtesy Mrinalini Mukherjee FoundationLeela Mukherjee had no anxieties about being original first and foremost. Her steadfast conviction in the language acquired at Santiniketan left no room for prevarication; as an artist of a ‘gharana’ she had no introspective decisions to make on her means and mode. Sets of paintings in ink, water colour and pastel, usually on translucent natural fibre paper, used a vocabulary compiled four decades ago. With that she removed a barricade, and helter-skelter words, idioms, swirled into buoyant articulation, robust in a way only she could will them. They validate the position that inventiveness can well be rooted within a gharana. Idioms deemed stereotypical can be energized by an input of conviction.
