This is a video about painting in India.
By Suneet Chopra, in People’s Democracy weekly in India:
Artistes Observe Bolshevik Revolution AnniversarySir Richard Eyre, the distinguished director who led the [UK] National Theatre for 10 years, has warned that ‘apartheid’ in the arts is denying millions of people access to high culture: here.THE 90th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was observed at the Visual Art Gallery in Delhi, with an exhibition of the works by some 26 artistes, including Arpana Caur, Neeraj Goswami, Komala Vardan, Shamshad Husain, Subroto and Nupur Kundu, Nand Kishore, Avijit Roy, Dattatraya Apte, Anoop and Ritu Kamath, Asurvedh, Biplabi Samaddar, Dharmendra Rathore, Laxman Aelay, Laxma Goud, Jayant Gajera, T. Vaikundam, L.N. Rana, N S Rana, Prabir Bepari, Prokash Karmakar, Rohit Sharma, Santosh Verma, Vinod Sharma and Vinodvrat.
The reason I had in mind when curating the exhibition was that the impact of the Russian Revolution and the setting up of the Soviet state was something without which the independence of India and other colonies was unthinkable. For, empires that came into being before the Soviet state simply replaced one oppressor state with another. The Arabs fought the Turks for their independence, but Lebanon and Syria were parcelled out to France and Iraq and Jordan to Britain. Palestine, put under British ‘protection’, suffered a fate worse than death. Even after the World War II, the USA demanded Korea as a “mandated territory” while the Korean people had defeated Japanese colonialism on their own!
