Fruits

Abalal Rahiman (1860-1931), 'Fruits', 1912. This is a small, cramped still life: an oil painting on oil paper-that is to say, intended for sketches, not for oil on canvas, and in itself a humble statement about what this painting tells us. Nothing in this composition has been arranged to impress. A whole, heavy melon, with a rind crisscrossed by faint rust-brown scars, lies to the left; just next to it a segment cut clean through, its pink flesh packed with jet-black seeds, and further over a segment disembodied, peeled off, and lay bare against the background, its white pith catching the light; the leathery shells of two pomegranates torn apart, not cut, so that some of the berries burst out. A metal bowl, no finer than you would find in a working kitchen (rendered in a few stark strokes of grey and ochre), contains a tumbler of water with the stems of a vividly red hibiscus and a star-shaped paler flower: the petals of both still damp, still glossy, against the glass; and in the foreground a collection of fruit, all unfinished, half-done. Oranges tumble; one is peeled, its pith unspiraling in a single strip; a segment is laid bare and flat. Apples, some green with blushes of red, are either half-eaten or cut in half to reveal their pale flesh; a pale bunch of grapes crowds an equally pale, split fig. Everything is half-something. There is no relief: the background is a nondescript dark wash, with here and there vague suggestions of greenery or drapery bleeding away into shadow. At lower right, signed 'Abalal' and dated 1912, in the same humble, worn tabletop that carries the weight of the fruit, Rahiman is at his plainest and most direct. Rahiman was born Abdul Aziz in Kolhapur into a family that had for generations spent its time rendering Quranic scriptures by hand. As a boy he was given the task of colour-washing the intricate borders his father outlined. His inherent discipline for detailed, patient mark-making was first adapted, and then redirected in the unlikeliest place when the wife of the local English Resident noticed his drawings and secured him a scholarship to Bombay's Sir J. J. School of Art. There he trained under John Griffiths in every aspect of European academic naturalist painting-life painting, anatomy, tonal modulations-and won the Viceroy's Gold Medal before he had even finished the course. When he was finally brought back to Kolhapur to be court painter to Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj, he travelled with him on hunts and durbars, painting landscapes at various times of day to capture fleeting light, and produced likenesses of royalty and commoners, male and female alike. These works, all commissioned in watercolour to meet market demand, were for somebody else's consumption, and perhaps that is why oil painting and still life, for which there seemed to be no equivalent in Indian painting, only came into their own after that career ended with the death in 1922 of the Maharaj. Grief stricken, Rahiman himself subsequently destroyed a great proportion of his œuvre. Still life, a self-sufficient genre (where fruit and flowers are painted for their own sake and have no narrative purpose beyond themselves), was not indigenous to India until it arrived via the route of just this kind of colonial school of art education where the painting of objects on a table is used as an exercise in light, volume and texture before students are judged capable enough to render figures. DAG, the present owners of the work and which has published it three times in its catalogue of Indian modern art, presents it precisely as 'a seemingly random still-life composition...fruits cluttered on the table without any neat or pretty arrangement,' its success stemming from the "deliberate ordinariness" that comes so close to what really happens with everyday objects that were once painted according to convention. This is where the strength of the image lies. No vanitas apparatus (skull, candle-stub, moralizing trinket) is used here, merely the sheer fact of things when they are in use. The orange, half-eaten; the melon someone has begun to carve. The flowers, already in their glass, not newly cut. The same highly disciplined eye with which Rahiman painted maharajas and durbars with utter fidelity, rendering like for like with painstaking precision, is used here with unblinking impartiality at whatever else presented itself, that is, a messy pile of fruit on a kitchen table. Nothing here asks to be admired; every element, from the least shred of orange pith to the largest seeded watermelon, simply is. And in a career spent almost exclusively painting images for others (either a patron or a committee, or in exhibition), this unlovely private clutter of eating fruit seems something more like a personal exercise in why you might paint if there was no-one to look.