VIJAY SINGH MOHITE: INEXORABLE PULSATIONS
Curatorial Text and Advisory Kamayani Sharma
For a brief period in the 1970s, a young Gwalior artist called Vijay Singh Mohite exhibited a series of dense, spirited abstract paintings in three cities. With their bold expanses of colour and kinetic lines that made the surface resonate, his works vibrated like songful gestalts. Contemplating them in 1972, artist J. Swaminathan described the effect as an “inexorable pulsation”. Gallery Prologue presents a series of Mohite’s works – paintings in watercolour, oil pastel and acrylic on paper, board and canvas, alongside photographs – offering a glimpse into the artist’s prolific yet private practice. The large-scale canvases from his exhibitionary years are complemented by postcard-sized watercolours on paper as well as pastels made in sketchbooks.
Born into an aristocratic family in 1940, Mohite took up the paintbrush at a remarkably young age, holding his first show at the age of seven. It is no surprise that he gravitated towards painting so early in his life. Growing up in the lee of the Maharaja of Gwalior’s patronage of and his own family’s passion for culture, he was steeped in classical music and modern art. Musicians frequented the Mohites’ haveli; on winter mornings, his grandfather would wrap the little boy in a blanket and carry him to stand beneath a window so he could listen to the riyaaz of maestros in residence. Visual artists such as Bombay School exponents M. R. Acharekar, V. B. Pathare, Govind Salegaonkar, A. A. Almelkar and D.D. Deolalikar were also regular visitors. Deolalikar introduced Mohite to his first art teacher – an instructor at a local art school – whom he would closely observe at practice and paint landscapes with, culminating in his first solo in 1947.
The other influence on Mohite’s sensory life was the natural environment he was surrounded by: jungle, cliffs and rivers. Indeed, the dauby, dreamy watercolour landscapes displayed in Mohite’s debut show already anticipated the brightness of colour and attenuation of form characteristic of his mature practice. Finger-like trees undulate against wavy horizontal swathes of colour suggesting sky and hill, revealing a precocious ability to transmute perceptible reality into line and shape. This tendency towards the non-figurative would develop into the abstract acrylics and pastels he produced as an adult.
Attuned to his hometown’s famed gharana and the visiting musicians’ sessions, Mohite’s vibrant and rhythmic compositions evoke the euphony of the Hindustani classical tradition. Yet, there is a darker, poignant undernote to this synaesthetic expression. In 1956, Mohite lost both his parents within a day. By coincidence, Ustad Alauddin Khan, the great sarodist of Maihar, had been invited by the Maharaja of Gwalior to perform. After the recital, he knocked on the grieving teenager’s door. Having known the family well, he proceeded to play Mohite’s father’s favourite ragas on that dismal dusk. Music gave form to the sorrow, a plangent diagram for expressing interiority that would later manifest in his paintings as tonal variations of hue and melodic arrangements of motifs.
Coming of age soon after, Mohite left Gwalior. Between the late 1950s and mid-1960s, he lived briefly in Bombay as a student at the JJ School of Art’s Commercial Art department – a traumatising experience for a youth brought up in the countryside – his only sanctuary being artist V. R. Amberkar's studio - before moving to Lucknow as a guest of the Maharaja of Samthar, a classmate of his late father. There, on a lark, he joined the local flying club, donning overalls and learning the mechanics of airplanes, indulging his love for working with his hands. While he never flew the machines, some of his paintings render the drama and dromos of motion almost as optical illusions, relying on both distance and persistence of vision for hints of topographies and figures to emerge.
Throughout his itinerant years, Mohite continued to paint. By the 1970s, resettled in Gwalior, he had arrived at an improvisational vocabulary of abstraction, aided by his adoption of acrylic – then a relatively new, quick-drying and dynamic medium that suited his spontaneous approach. This period was the heyday of the abstract idiom in Indian modernism, when painters like V. S. Gaitonde, Bal Chhabda and Ambadas Khobragade, as well as the Neo-Tantrics were active. Mohite’s expressive play of form and space imparted a distinct character to his practice, reflecting both his musical sensibility and mechanical curiosity. His large-scale acrylics embody this art historical moment, their rhythmic streaks and dapples of fluorescent colours lending the beat which Swaminathan had so perceptively picked up on.
Alongside a musical intuitiveness, Mohite’s paintings also reveal a cerebral engagement with space – configured through overlap, interlock and contour. It was the sculptors amongst his peers who noticed Mohite’s topological grammar. Fellow abstractionist Adi Davierwala discerned in his works a striking “sense of space”, while Pilloo Pochkhanawala declared, “You don’t paint, you sculpt.” Perhaps owing to the strong pigmentation of oil pastel, the dimensionality of Mohite’s formations is most apparent in the sketchbook paintings, where superimposed and imbricated shapes assume a faceted quality within a recessed pictorial field. Repetitive forms – horseshoes and hatches, circles and scribbles – and jewel-toned bursts of teal and purple, confer rhythm upon these planar constructions.
The 1970s were perhaps Mohite’s active years as an exhibiting artist. Between 1971 and 1976, encouraged and guided by senior figures such as M. F. Husain, he held shows in Bombay, Delhi and Bangalore to a favourable reception. Yet, just as his art was gaining recognition, he chose to withdraw it from public display. In doing so, he embodied a model of artistry rooted entirely in personal fulfilment rather than visibility. Mohite was far from reclusive – surrounded by his family and friends, he continued to paint profusely in his ancestral home, spreading large canvas works he made using brush, cloth and even fingers across the floor or the terrace for them to admire.
Ensconced in his Gwalior haveli, Mohite painted to a background score of classical ragas, in dialogue with the estate’s verdant environment. The large windows admitted the outside world in ways that left traces and imprints in his painted patterns — the subtle chiaroscuro along the tree barks, the speckled terrain of the plateau and the sight of birds in flight. Introduced to birdwatching in 1976, Mohite spent the next two decades photographing birds in the woods near Gwalior, their bright plumage and kinematics echoing his paintings.
Perhaps, ironically, the work that best elucidates Mohite’s abstract language is a singular figurative painting of a horse. Its elongated curvature and starkly delineated anatomy reveal the process of interpreting the specific object as a nonrepresentational assemblage of gestural marks. Looking and listening closely, one finds that there is indeed a relentless rhythm to Mohite’s kaleidoscopic abstractions as they — with their surges of colour, reverberatory forms and vagabond geometry — distil the phenomenal world into a vivid, musical throb.