Atul Dodiya

Photo courtesy Bodhi Arts

Atul Dodiya, "Sabari shaking Mondrian"

Photo courtesy Bodhi Arts

Atul Dodiya, "The Wet Sleeves of My Paper Robe" at Bodhi Arts

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In terms of how I was treating Sabari: Yes, obviously she is young and naked, but at the same time, you see that all the postures and gestures are not in any way titillating or provoking. She is often shown holding a grinding mill; this is basically a person who has had lots of pain and struggle in life. So I think in the context in which I put herlike for example, the bones showing through her fleshthe sensual feeling gets diverted into the reality of life: the death, decay and the agony, all those things.

Speaking of the sensitivity around dealing with figures of myth and religion, only a few months ago the Indian artist Maqbool Hussain was burned in effigy and threatened with death when his painting of a nude Mother India was put up for auction. The painting was eventually withdrawn from the auction, and Hussain issued an apology. What was your response to this incident?

It is really unfortunate that, at the age of 91, Hussain had to go into exile. He lives in London at the moment. And it is really sad that there was this reaction made with so little understanding of the work. If you ask anyone, is it good to depict Mother India naked? Obviously theyll say no. But how the image is rendered is whats important. And Hussain has never had a sensual quality to his work. Its just really sad, particularly in the context of Hussain. The response is definitely politically motivatedprobably because hes Muslim.

If we can shift gears a bit and talk about the materials in your current series, which are delightfully varied: Every work contains some combination of pulp paper, gold leaf, carbon toner, synthetic hair, watercolor, charcoal and screenprinting ink. But most intriguing are the presence of these cotton shirts. What were the formalist and thematic concerns that drove the decision to use these as a material?

I had been working on this Sabari series in watercolors in my studio in India. But for the first two weeks of my residency at the Singapore Print Institute, I was not sure I would depict this theme. It started when I was told it was possible to have shirts embedded into the paper. The shirts gradually got transformed metaphorically to depict the Lord Ram, around which the female body of Sabari is located. Theres no body, but the presence of Ram is still there.

And finding a way to include Ram was quite an important concern because over the last 15 years, a lot of drama has happened in India in his name. In 1992, a mosque was demolished by Hindu militants because they said it was Rams birthplace. And tension still continues in India over thistheres been violence and bomb blastsand I wanted to address that theres so much fighting and violence in the name of a man of such compassion.

The shirts that represent Ram were bought on the streets of Bombay as export rejects. They are very cheap, so that the lower class people can buy them. And in this violence, it is the poor man, the absolutely poor people, who get killed and murdered more than anyone else. The shirts and some of the works talk about that violence. And Sabari, by the way, is a woman who has a backbone and will not succumb to this kind of violence.

This Sabari series is just one good example of what appears to me as an advantage you have on many artists. You are well-versed in the history of Western art and have a deep understanding of the language of the contemporary scene, but you can also draw on a remarkably rich cultural history that has been largely untapped by visual artists. Do you also see this omni-cultural background as an advantage?

Definitely. India is such a vast country; it has such vast and diverse cultures coexisting and great sources [from which] to draw inspiration: from mythology to epics to folklore to cinema. I was born and brought up in Bombay, and the citys incredible diversity has been a major influence on me.

And always as a student, I was interested in Western art. We were taught mostly in Western art, so the great paintings of Europe and the United States have influenced me immensely. In my early works, I was really influenced by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. And Ive been equally moved by Picasso and Matisse.