From the farmlands to the gallery

In 1930, Nandalal Bose painted a mural of Rabindranath Tagore driving an ox and plough amidst a group of performers.

- Kamayani Sharma

Titled Halakarshana, it was created in Surul, a few kilometers from Santiniketan, at an experimental rural project called Sriniketan where Tagore brought together art and agriculture. It is nearly a century since Bose made the mural, and agrarian-themed art has finally come full circle in India.

From being done on modernist walls, it has moved back to the very fields it addresses, and is cultivated by artists from historically disenfranchised communities. This turn, perhaps, has to do with the current sociopolitical environment where scenes of farmers taking to the streets in protest have become part of the mainstream, and farmers' issues are visible to a wider public.

Since independence, agriculture has been the site of ecological and economic crisis, first due to its industrialisation by the Green Revolution and more recently, as the protests reveal, due to policies that benefit corporations at the expense of farmers.

Hailing from farming backgrounds, with varying levels of land and caste privilege, a new generation of Indian artists is countering exploitative models of agriculture through works that embody care and justice for farmlands. They work according to ideas of time connected to the tempo of fieldwork, acknowledge inter-species and non-human connections in acts of farming and preserve local knowledge and memories, whether through figuration on pulp drawn from the crops grown on the farm or abstraction of the field's landscape.

Some of them are associated with the platform, AgriForum, initiated in 2020 by the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) to reflect on agrarian creativities and criticalities. The AgriForum reading group led to a show called Turning: On Field and Work, curated by FICA director Vidya Sivadas at the Serendipity Arts Festival 2023. It featured prominent artistic voices engaged with agrarian issues.