Dhvani se Shabd aur Chinh an exhibition dedicated to the innumerable unsung heroes of art and science.

Dhvani se Shabd aur Chinh an exhibition dedicated to the innumerable unsung heroes of art and science.

An interesting exhibition “Dhvani se Shabd aur Chinh”, which celebrates the relatively unknown artists who are connected with south India is now on display at the NGMA Mumbai. This exhibition curated by Mr AAdwaita Gadanayak DG NGMA, and his team, was inaugurated at the NGMA Mumbai on Saturday the 22nd April by three Director Generals of leading Museums, Dr BR Mani, DG, National Museum, New Delhi, Mr Sabyasachi Mukherjee, DG, CSMVS, Mumbai and Mr Adwaita Gadanayak, DG, NGMA. The exhibition includes paintings, sculptures and mixed media works of some of the unsung heroes of modern art who come from the Madras art movement including the cholamandala group. Their works are as inspiring and awe striking as those of their contemporaries from Bengal and Bombay. Yet, most of the artists whose works are on display at the exhibition are not very well known nor much has been written about them. The impact of these artists on the art scene in India at most gets a footnote mention unlike their other contemporaries from the Bengal school of art and Bombay progressives on whom scores of books and articles are written.

After presenting three canonical exhibitions from the collections of NGMA Delhi, namely, the Last Harvest exhibition of the paintings of Rabindranath Tagore, the Passionate Quest an exhibition of the paintings of Amrita SherGil, and the works of Jamini Roy, the NGMA Mumbai is now privileged to present the current exhibition -Dhvani se Sabd Aur Chinh- that exhibits works of 40 odd artists, from south India whose names, unfortunately, are not very well known even in the art circles. These works, which were confined to the art storage area and other inconspicuous areas of NGMA Delhi, have been very painstakingly culled out by Shri Adwaita Gadanayak the curator and his team to put together this great show, which weaves a memorable story that symbolically and metaphorically connects these works with shabd and chinh identities. While one looks in awe of the works of art, the 40 plus artists, whose works form the exhibition, are unfortunately not so very well known as those of their other contemporaries from the Bengal School and the Bombay progressives. This exhibition is therefore all the more creditable for it reintroduces us to the forgotten painters, such as K.C.S. Paniker, R.B. Bhaskaran, and others who were central to the 1960s Madras Art Movement.

The exhibition draws an uncanny parallel with the world of science which too is full of unsung heroes whose names too are as inconspicuous as those of the artists whose works are on display at the NGMA exhibition. Take for example the discovery of the structure of the DNA, which is central to all life. James Watson and Francis Crick are two instant names that most associate the discovery of the structure of DNA for which they were awarded the 1962 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine, which they shared with Maurice Wilkins. However there is one another name - a lady scientist Roslyn Franklin - whose X Ray crystallographic image was central to solving the structure of the DNA, which was shamelessly and clandestinely stolen and used by Watson Crick to decipher the double helix structure of the DNA and also to solve the central dogma riddle of the DNA. Like the artists from the Madras school of art, whose works are on display at the NGMA Mumbai exhibition, Roslyn Franklin too is not very well known. Similarly when we speak of antibiotics, whose serendipitous discovery earned Sir Alexander Fleming, Chain and Florey, the Nobel prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1945, people hardly ever have heard the unsung heroes works that made possible industrial scale production of antibiotics. The unsung hero (heroine in this case) whose painstaking engineering works made this possible was Margret Hutchinson Rousseau a Chemical engineer. She used the deep-tank fermentation process for mass producing Penicillin, and we finally had a method that could implement the benefits of the great discovery of the Penicillin. Her impact often gets a footnote, or at most a paragraph, in the history of Penicillin. But she arguably had as much of an impact as Fleming and the others when it comes to the penicillin antibiotics, which has saved tens of millions of lives.

I am therefore particularly happy that Mr Adwaita Gadanayaka the curator of the exhibition and DG NGMA has created this wonderful exhibition which must be dedicated to all those unsung heroes in the fields of arts and science who work ever so passionately and painstakingly without having to look at the results, name and fame.