There are a number of elements in this process. One can see this from the recent works of one of Uttar Pradesh's better artists, Mr Satish Chandra, who exhibited his paintings last month at Delhi's Gallery Ganesha. His work is known to art lovers all over the country. It is based on definite locations, like the stream behind the Raj Bhawan in Lucknow, the mountains near Badrinath and other locations typical of Northern India. But he stresses the natural processes at work around us rather than the upheavals caused by human intervention. This should not surprise anyone who knows Uttar Pradesh, where any form of intelligence other than the brute force of nature is hardly visible today.

It is to the credit of the artist that he does not concentrate on the waste and ruin that is present day Uttar Pradesh, but rather on the latent energy each landscape radiates in terms of a profusion of colours that warn off predators who would loosen the determined grasp its farmers have had over the Northern plain for thousands of years. Its mounds and grooves all reflect the stamp of ongoing human activity. He stresses the inexorable march of time, and of people conducting relentless activity in the face of the savage conditions imposed on them by history with a certain subtlety. We see the fields not the farmers. His landscapes are repositories of radiant hope arising from the mustard fields, grooves of bristling thorn-trees and the flame of the forest or the vast expanse of a sky constantly changing colour over the earth that bears the marks of man's intervention without that agency being visible. This makes the human factor even more important, for one misses it. Mr Chandra is a civilised artist from anarea where the art scene is dominated by savages of all sorts. His is definitely an exhibition to visit and see what an artist can achieve under what are, perhaps, the most adverse conditions that artists face anywhere in the country.

Suneet Chopra