On May 31, "Transfigurations", sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee's stunning retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, will close after celebrating her 50-year career. Tragically, she did not live to see its success. Mrinalini passed away on February 2 of lung failure at the age of 65, just a few days after the show opened for public viewing. She has left behind a body of monumental work in natural fibre, ceramic and bronze, and memories of an artist who's lust for life has few parallels in the Indian art scene.
Mrinalini "Dilruba/ Dilu" Mukherjee was addicted to making sculptures, travel, good food, Old Monk and horoscope columns. Often on a Sunday morning, she would call to tell me that "bad things" were going to happen to her, according to The Hindustan Times, but if The Times of India forecast a "wonderful week ahead", she kept quiet about it. There was nothing Dilu enjoyed more than a good grumble.
No one predicted that her retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, once a youthful fantasy, would open without her on January 27. For months Mrinalini had worked towards it, uncaring about the number of chocolates she consumed, cigarettes she smoked and the coughing bouts which made it impossible for her to talk. She forgot to wear her dentures and take her medicines and simply carried on. Dilu quarrelled with everyone during this time, her curator and friends, driver Santosh and Man Friday Toofani, and everyone was fed up of her as well.
Till her lungs collapsed, the night before the biggest day of her life. At the hospital, in the intensive care unit, breathing with the help of an oxygen mask, she pleaded and fought with the doctors to let her go for a few hours to the NGMA for the inauguration of her show. They thought she had lost her mind. And then suddenly all the fight went out of her, and she asked me to read out her carefully prepared speech. I felt both humbled and important. Because although I never told her this in the 27 years that I knew Dilu, I admired her greatly as an artist, a connoisseur of all things beautiful, and a brutally honest human being.
Mrinalini Mukherjee was the only child of Benode Bihari Mukherjee, one of India's preeminent painters and muralists who worked and taught in Shantiniketan, and Leela Mukherjee a renowned sculptor. At the age of 16, she was sent by her father to study drawing under his former student K G Subramanyan at the Baroda School of Fine Arts. But took up sculpture in the early 70s, when she "accidentally discovered the feel and texture of hemp".
Showing exceptional courage, Dilu began making, according to her oldest friend and fellow artist Nilima Sheikh, "one larger than the other site-specific and later free-standing natural fibre sculptures." Her only assistant was an old village woman called Budhiya. By knotting and twisting, patting and caressing Hemp, Sisal and Jute she created fluid organic figures - "Pushp" "Aranyani", "Van Raja" and more. Many of these works were made in her one-room Humayun tomb-facing barsati in the Nizamuddin East colony of New Delhi. It had a single narrow door, which was broken down and replastered every time one of Dill's sculptures had to exit the house.
By the mid-1990s, she had changed medium, moving to ceramics and then bronze. This exploration of different material was not a planned journey, Mrinalini once told me in an interview. "I am not trained in any of them. I think that is the strength of my work. I don't have any fixed notion of what is possible and what should not be done. Simply, because I don't know. I am constantly discovering."
But whatever substance Dilu chose, her forms always reflected a deep bond with nature, inherited from her father who taught her to recognise and fall in love with all flora, its lush sensuality and smell. She had grown up between between Shantiniketan and Dehradun. Both places where, Nilima Sheikh says, "flowers were planted and grown in gardens, worn, sung in praise of, painted, worked into shorthand in textile and rangolis." They occupied centrestage in Dilu's private space, fragrant lilies placed in the bedroom and in her work. "Everything I have ever sculpted is my resonse to plant life," she told me. "The process of growth and decay is a part of my work. But it has never been naturistic. For instance, my Palms are not a particular plant, they are an expression of my feelings and ideas towards Palms."
Mrinalini continued to make her sculptures as large and complicated as possible, sitting for hours in the hot sun with a caster in the village of Burari on the outskirts of Delhi. "She pushed and pushed," says Nilima Sheikh, "till the work acquired the kind of stature that she wanted it to." These were monumental struggles which not many artists engage with today, "I am not saying there's anything wrong with it, but they are using sources outside their own skill potential. So when all these ways of making art are available, the reason for using one's own hands becomes less important. And here Mrinalini once again went against the grain and made the sculptures herself."
In the end, it is this deep engagement which made her art so different and so fearless.
Today, Dilu's work is part of the public collections at the NGMA, Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal and the Lalit Kala Akademi, as well as the Tate Modern in London, and the interest is only growing and getting stronger. But for most of her 50-year career, she was ignored by her contemporaries who dismissed her art as craft. In the speech she wrote for the opening of her show, Mrinalini said that although her creativity was supported by her peers - MF Husain , Krishen Khanna, Jagdish Swaminathan and many more - "it did not find any acceptance with the sculptors of my generation and nor has it till today."
The hurt stayed with her, but no one could tell. Specially in the last few years, when Dilu finally began to earn well. By this time her health had begun to deteriorate. She became increasingly lonely. After her last solo show, Palmscape in 2013, Dilu told me she had made a lot of money, but there were very people with whom she could share her good news and celebrate. But Mrinalini was never sad for too long, nor did she attract sympathy. Many found her self-centred. Because not only did she live life on her own terms, but also as far as possible, in the words of her friend and Art critic, S. Kalidas, "willed, manipulated, cajoled and seduced the world to fall in line with her wishes." She had an immense lust for living yet she did not care for her body or her illness. She was all spirit."
And perhaps in an artist's life in the end, that is what really matters.
(Shikha Trivedy is Features Editor, NDTV 24x7)Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.