Discussion and Screenings
presented by Sher Gil-Sundaram Arts Foundation & School of Arts & Aesthetics, JNU

School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Seminar Room SAA II

29–30 August 2025

“In 2010, Amit Dutta redefined Indian cinema’s relationship with its art history. Nainsukh, Dutta’s fictional biography of the renowned 18^th century Pahadi painter, was a direct collaboration with renowned art historians Eberhardt Fischer (who produced the film) and B.N. Goswamy (who participated actively in its making). Its many cinematic innovations with film language, notably with how moving-image live action worked with painting – which would slowly expand into animation – all took place, astonishingly, within a defined art-historical armature.

Since then, Dutta has made a slew of films that have deepened and complicated that engagement. Three specific concerns in this entire body of work define the current programme. One, the Pahadi region, which features centrally, and is a region with which he is autobiographically and linguistically identified. In his cinema, the approximately forty principalities that were once known as the Punjab Hill States come together with complex and intertwined political histories, a geographical ecosystem, a condition of consciousness (and even in some cases of dreaming) alongside the practice of an art that, although made in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, throws uncanny light on life in the region today. Practicing artists, poets, vagrants and stablemen, descendants from courtly histories, live and struggle even as Dutta repeatedly cuts between the present and the art that emerged from history.

The second is his enduring interest in the persona of the artist – as embodying a kalam, an individual, a member of a community and a figure socially defined by structures of patronage. The death of Jangarh Singh Shyam, which Dutta learned about when still a student at the Film & Television Institute of India, was so personal to him that he ‘could not be objective about Jangarh’, Dutta writes in an unusual book-length ‘art-historical inquiry’ into Jangarh’s life and death. Even as he needed to go beyond Jangarh to the root of his tragedy, he also ‘needed Jangarh to locate myself which we both shared in many areas, and also areas where it was impossible for us to overlap’. As he moves into the present, the concern diverse contemporary artists, poets and authors.

The third is the art museum: as a space of wonder. The well-known metaphor of the ajab ghar or House of Wonder here turns into a zone of fantasy, of free association and dream, of making impossible connections happen. Dutta first attempted this with the Amar Mahal Palace and Museum in Jammu, and has since moved through museums as diverse as the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai, contemporary  art museums like the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, and most expansively, the Museum of Art and Photography, Bangalore, where he works with several of MAP’s collections from matchboxes to photographs to mica paintings through animation and storytelling.”

–Ashish Rajadhyaksha