“I belonged to a country which also had a great tradition of its own. It was the heritage which had in a thousand ways folded me. And, so though I was at the moment living, learning and growing in the West, I should still find my own way to myself, rooted in the great Indian tradition.” - Meera Mukherjee
One of the most well-known artists associated with bringing modernity to Indian sculpture is Meera Mukherjee. She was able to combine Dhokra metal casting with contemporary sculpting to offer metal casting a new direction as a result of the growth of her technical metal-casting talents. 2023 is the birth anniversary year of Meera Mukherjee. At a time when there were very few women painters in Indian modern art, Meera demonstrated that women may be just as skilled as men by working in a trade that was thought to be exclusively for men. She has featured musicians, the general public, and women in particular in her many sculptures. She was the primary creator of the sculpture to uses human figures and abstraction. From April 27, Akar Prakar Gallery Delhi will host an exhibition of him in honor of the 100th anniversary of her birth. The exhibition includes her bronze sculptures as well as works in terracotta, wood, marble and ceramics, as well as many of her drawings on paper. Meera Mukherjee is identified as a sculptor but she also did paintings, especially she did a lot of work on paper. In sculpture too, she worked in many mediums.
Meera Mukherjee not only carved a niche for herself in metal sculpture but also worked with tribal artists as an activist at that time. She broke the notion that painting was the only art form for women. At that time peoples think that sculpture is a masculine art that is not possible for women to do. This is a major reason why crafting involves the need for greater physical strength as well as skill in operating various tools and assistants which is not possible for women. Meera Mukherjee changed it completely. In Delhi, when she took craft as a subject while studying arts at Delhi Polytechnic, students and teachers also said that she would not be able to do crafts. Painting can be done alone but in crafts, especially in metal, the artist takes the help of other assistants, who are mainly men, from taking the modeling to finishing. Getting them to work will be a difficult task for the women.
Mira Mukherjee joined the Indian Society of Oriental Art School, founded by Abnichandranath Tagore, at the age of 14. She wanted to move forward in the field of art but the family got him married. The responsibilities of the family after marriage put the artist in him on the back burner for some time. The life of monotony did not suit her and she was soon divorced. After that, she came to Delhi and joined the art department of Delhi Polytechnic for further study. In those days Art College was a department of the Polytechnic. There she started with painting but in the second semester, she start sculpture study. In 1947 she received a diploma in drawing, graphics, and sculpture.
She then received an Indo-German Fellowship at the Akademie der Billenden Kunst (Academy of Fine Arts) in Munich, which contributed significantly to the furthering of his art practice. Contacting other sculptors abroad, as well as seeing the world's great sculptures, and learning the Western methodology of metal sculpture, she get a lot of knowledge in sculpting. careers came in handy, although her destination was something else. The company of tribal artists of Bastar gave dimension to her craft, which became her identity. Not only this, but she also worked to establish a new relationship between the treble artists and modern artists. It is a different matter that Meera Mukherjee's work of bridging the gap between the two arts did not get the support of other artists. The modern artists who used the work of the tribal in their crafts never helped the tribal artists to establish themselves independently. This is the reason that even today the Dhokra sculptures have not been freed from the realm of folk and tribal art, for which Meera Mukherjee had tried.
What is interesting about Meera Mukherjee's artistic expression is that she did not limit herself to just one art form, she adopted painting and graphics as well as writing and education to explore her artistic quest. In the beginning, she did work in the field of child education, and later she worked in Bastar with tribe artists as well as an activist in Bihar, Rajasthan, etc. States to empower tribe artists. she regularly wrote diaries that reflected her art process and education, as well as her curiosity about art.
Her immense love for craftsmanship inspired him to study this art in particular and Western art also gave him a new vision but she soon caught that she should give priority to self-styled strategies. From the director, she started the search for Indianness in her art, which reaches the social and cultural consciousness of diverse art through the creation of Dhokra sculptures. Its main inspiration was Tony Stadler, her mentor in Munich, who told Meera to search their artistic roots in Indian traditional art rather than Europe art. However, it was not easy because at that time most of the Indian artists, who were associated with European countries on scholarship or the other, were too much influenced by Western art.
She returned to India from Munich in 1957 and started working as an art teacher at Schools. She also started studying traditional Indian sculpture art. She went to the Bastar region of Madhya Pradesh where she was introduced to the Gharuan and Maran tribesmen and their Dhokra metal casting technique. Dhokra is also called Lost Wax Technique. Meera Mukherjee incorporated it into her metal sculpture, and try to teach modern sculptures to tribes. Later she created such centers in designated areas which were helpful in the development of tribal art. Meera Mukherjee is credited with having changed the technique of metal craft supervision in Bengal, as well as at the same time using inscriptions in the main crafts. Along with this, she also gave birth to the idea of establishing a group of crafts as an artist, breaking the concept of a single figure. There are also a large number of single figures among her sculptures, but in many sculptures, she has used more than one figure as complementary to each other. Its inspiration will be the realization of a collective socialite in tribal life.
Meera Mukherjee's sculptures are based on the common man engaged in everyday activities and chores. Her subjects include fishermen, weavers, women engaged in sewing, and laborers. Nature, music, and dance have been some of her other themes. She created a lot of sculptures to depict women's life and their strength. Due to the Dhokra rapture, her crafts acquire a monumental quality even though they are not very large.
Meera Mukherjee had her first show in 1960. She received positive recognition for her works and was awarded the President's Award for Master Craftsmen in Metalwork. She initially began her search tour in Madhya Pradesh, soon receiving a two-year fellowship from the Anthropological Survey of India to aid her search. She is also credited with directing the craft traditions of metal workers in central India. From 1961 to 1964, she worked as a Senior Research Fellowship at ASI and continued the survey on metal workers throughout India and Nepal. She made a special study of the craft of various communities in the states of Madhya Pradesh along with some Eastern and Southern states. During that period she came in contact with promoters of 'living traditions' such as Prabha Sen and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, who helped him understand folk and classical arts. Her countrywide research was published in 1978 as part of the Anthropological Survey of Metal Craftsmen of India.
She received the Padma Shri award in 1992. Apart from this, she received many honors including the Abnindra Award of West Bengal. Her major books are Folk metal craft in India (1978), Metal Craft in India (1978), and Metal Craftsmen in India (1979).
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