This will naturally produce an uprooted and superficial art. And such art is not worth the material it is made out of.

Mercifully, India is too big a country to be bought over completely. Also, the strong thrust of our national movement and the manner in which it has affected our regional cultures-often as a kind of shock treatment that has overturned traditional concepts of art, artists and the quality of art works-are very resilient and live in out of the way places.

One such centre of art that is now attracting serious young students is Gulbarga. This traditional centre of Deccani culture is also a creative source of contemporary Indian art that is being produced at the Ideal Fine Art Institute, founded by J S Khanderao in 1965 and run by his student, Veeranna Gurappa Andani, from 1972 to 1990 and still functioning under his guidance.

Born in 1947, in the village of Honna Kiranji, 21 km from Gulbarga, with a powerful architectural tradition, Andani has not only been able to ensure that the institute survives, but also to train a number of young artists who have come into prominence recently, such as Vijay Bagodi, Vijay Hagargundgi, Iranna, Baba Harwal and Kishore Kumar Kurchagi. One of Andani's students recently sold a work for Rs 1 lakh. Andani still prices his canvases at between Rs 20,000 and Rs 30,000, and his drawings at a very affordable Rs 3,000-5,000.

Andani's works are considerably lower priced than their actual value as the work of the founder of a definite creative art centre and whose students have achieved national and international acclaim. This has been facilitated by the area's evolution in agrarian and industrial relations on the basis of the deep-rooted cultural and artistic tradition of the Bahmani kingdom, the folk culture of the tribal people and Kannadiga peasantry and of eminent contemporary artists such as K K Hebbar, G R Santosh, Sunil Das, Jyoti Bhatt, Palsikar and N S Bendre. This has allowed him to assimilate the trends of mainstream Indian art that have given this centre-and the artist who has spent a lifetime on it-a presence on an all India level too, with Andani being elected state president of the Lalit Kala Akademi after having served as Karnataka's representative on this body for a number of years.

It is remarkable how, despite the awards he has received, Andani's art still manages to keep its close links with the life of the rural people who often appear in his work as a powerful, but silent, bull, watching events, being gestured to by a deity on a pedestal, but ignoring it and going along its own path.

It is not impervious to change. It is changing with the times. It sometimes assimilates with a female form exuding an uncanny softness or with an elephant, highlighting the fact that it is conscious of its own power. In one of his latest drawings, we see the ball with an elephant head. The peasantry is shown to have a new momentum in its motion, a vision and a direction to its motion. That the artist should have seen a new consciousness appearing in the inert peasant masses with the opening up of our agrarian market to global and corporate forces.

Few artists are able to express the momentum of this change as subtly as Andani does in a painterly manner. His expert handling of line is reminiscent of both Hebbar and Bendre and rooted in the folk-tradition of Gulbarga and southern Maharashtra, while his painterly treatment of colour reminds one of the layer by layer treatment of our coloured cloth hangings of the Deccan.

But it is to his credit that he has been able to use the rich tradition of Deccani art and express the most immediate crises and changes in the life of the people and give a visual form to them without reducing it to poster art.

This quality is rare in contemporary art. Also, his many projects in the field of art ensure that Andani does not overproduce or allow his works to become superficial or market oriented. This shows in his prolific production of drawings, many of which go into the making of a single canvas. Andani is an artist whose art will survive and be sought widely. It is a pity his art is not known more widely than it is today. In the future it will be.