Atul Dodiya’s 'Radio Ceylon': Painting the Voices of a Golden Era
In his latest exhibition, the artist spotlights the known and unknown faces of those whose songs from the “Golden Era” of Indian cinema continue to be heard by millions across the world — and there’s more to why their art lives on.
The fact that Atul Dodiya is a cinephile is no secret. By his own admission, had he not picked up the paintbrush, he would’ve been a filmmaker. However, throughout his career and right up to this day, Dodiya hasn’t passed up an opportunity to celebrate his love for cinema, especially through his art.
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In his ongoing show Radio Ceylon Paintings: Vol. I at Mumbai’s Chemould Prescott Road gallery, Dodiya paints the faces of people whose songs would echo through his home on a scratchy transistor tuned into Radio Ceylon as a teenager. It’s a core memory. Therefore, one must imagine the way his face would’ve lit up when he learned that the channel is still alive.
Thereon, the process of putting this show together was a personal pilgrimage of sorts for the artist, who, once again, found himself tuning into Radio Ceylon while working in his studio during the COVID-19 pandemic. The intimate, almost melancholic portraits in oil — 125 of them — belong to some storied, some half-remembered, and many almost forgotten artistes of Indian film music who graced the airwaves in the “Golden Era” of Bollywood, from the 1940s to the ’60s.
Through these portraits, Dodiya looks for moments of stillness in the breathless dynamism of cinema, which, in the past, could be found on the fabled lobby cards that were akin to miniature film posters placed in prominent corners of movie theatres to lure audiences into buying tickets. Today, an equivalent of that for him is when he pauses a movie while watching it at home. It’s an observation that Dodiya accidentally stumbled upon while locked in during the pandemic. “It’s interesting to look at the expressions on the faces of the characters when you pause a movie. Those aren’t intentional pauses, but when you freeze that moment in time, those faces become so much more fascinating,” Dodiya says.
GENESIS OF THE IDEA
The artist started taking photos of those freeze-frames on his phone, intending to turn them into artworks that were eventually displayed in his 2023 show Dr. Banerjee in Dr. Kulkarni’s Nursing Home and Other Paintings 2020- 2022. Dodiya had made a series of 24 paintings — 24 being the standard frame rate per second for a film — simulating a storyboard with characters from his favourite yesteryear movies that collided to interact in a universe of his making. The exhibition — whose title is an obvious homage to Amitabh Bachchan and Ramesh Deo’s characters in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anand (1971) — was largely triggered by his rewatches of films like Padosan (1968), Kapurush (1965), Kaagaz ke Phool (1959), Awaara (1951), and Ittefaq (1969), and later a private commission in which Rajesh Khanna was the main character.
Much like how Khanna paved the way for Bachchan through Anand to take on the mantle of the next Indian superstar, this show led Dodiya to his current one that furthers his intrigue in faces caught off-guard in a momentary interlude. “[The movie] pauses were unusual abstractions and allowed me to engage with the characters differently from how I’d engage with them before or after that moment in the film,” he recalls. “When I paused, they’d often be half out of the frame, in a blur or haze. Sometimes, even their backs would be turned towards the screen. With Radio Ceylon, I wanted to bring to life the makers of the songs in those films that these characters were singing. Some of them were not granted as much recognition as they should’ve been during their time.”
THE JOY OF RECOGNITION
In many ways, Radio Ceylon is a veritable extension of Dr. Banerjee in Dr. Kulkarni’s Nursing Home. Dodiya’s rediscovery of the radio channel through the same pandemic years, and in the trusted company of its host, the late Ameen Sayani, urged him to paint these faces who have eluded public memory. “When I was studying at the J.J. School of Art (Mumbai), portraiture was a major subject, besides also being an area of personal interest as I’d keep making portraits of my family, friends and sisters. Through the years, I discovered the joy one feels when they can recognise someone in a painting, as opposed to when a face is abstracted and they can’t tell who it is,” Dodiya says.
He uses this sentiment and creative idiom to foreground artistes like playback singer Anil Biswas (1914- 2003), brothers and music director duo Husn Lal (1920-68) and Bhagatram (1914-73), singers and actors Kanan Devi (1916-22) and Shanta Apte (1916-64), among several others, who have receded into the background of modern-day conversations. By placing them next to the likes of music director Roshan, poet and lyricist Shakeel Badayuni, sarod virtuoso Akbar Ali Khan, and his favourite Mohammed Rafi — who continue to be a part of dinner-table conversations — Dodiya has attempted to grant them the recognition he believes they truly deserve. “They were all so fiercely passionate about their work and have created art that has moved me and thousands of others. If I could paint the better-known names, why shouldn’t I paint the ones less known as well?” he says.
A SECULAR UNIVERSE
The artist has a lot to thank Rafi for, but mostly, it’s for reminding him of simpler, better times, when the syncretic nature of the country was mirrored in its film music. Dodiya explains the expanse of the musical worlds traversed between the folk music-inspired songs of an O.P. Nayyar — who hailed from Pakistan’s Punjab — to Lucknow’s Naushad, who was among the pioneers of introducing Hindustani classical music into the “mainstream”. “Having said that, this diversity holds true for pretty much everyone from that time. Think of Hemant Kumar from Bengal or a C. Ramchandra from Maharashtra. Before the Partition, everyone was working across the film industries in Bombay and Lahore. But after it, some were forced to pick a side,” Dodiya says.
He believes these decades are now termed “golden” largely owing to the film music the industry produced during them. For him, it’s more than mere nostalgia; it’s a profound longing for a cultural spirit that fosters integrity. He says: “I remember an interview by (singer) Talat Mahmood where he talks about the competition in their field. He, however, mentions it fondly and calls it a healthy competition,” Dodiya says. He goes on to recall Lata Mangeshkar stating that Pakistani music composer Ghulam Haider was her real godfather, who even taught her how to manoeuvre the microphone correctly. This show, then, was never meant to be just a dialogue on the musical giants of a bygone era. “You see, we primarily continue to talk about that era and its music because of these values it came with. And it’s probably why we don’t remember a lot of the music that was made in the past few years,” Dodiya says, revealing why “golden” is more than just a colour for him.
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