Sujata Bajaj assembles her mixed-media works as though they were palimpaesta: like palm-leaf manuscripts or scrolls retrieved from the hoard of some ancient monastery, they are placed before our eyes. Each frame has been crafted from disparate elements: paint, wax; monotype graphic, a collage of papers that range in density from the delicately translucent to the sturdily opaque. Each frame acts as a variation on the past, the ancestral inheritance: in the ocre yellow and red palette, we are recalled into the ritual circle of sacrifice; a hero-stone, a tribal totem, a lost goddess offertility is suggested by certain motifs; and in the elegant calligraphy of the sacred texts, the hymns repeated until the pitch of perfection has been achieved, we sense the poignant aphorisms of unknown grammarians, long-dead scribes who yearned for the joy of transcendence, the peace of eternity.

Look more closely; what inscriptions are these, developed like musical notations, rippling out in waves of mysterious script? What edicts are these, partly erased by war weather and vandalism? Tales told in broken sentences, scraps of castaway phrases in fossil dialects, keys to half-remembered legends: these are memoirs of a culture that has recited itself through long cycles of violence, upheaval serenity. Within the rubric of this treatment, the document is transmuted into a monument: it endures, it withstands. We observe as the yantra, the ritual diagram, drifts unanchored through a chalky topography of the mind; as expositions from the Sanskrit scriptures run parallel to the stabbing offensives of darkness. These are perennial mandates, endorsed by the decay of age.

When we encounter these signs, we acknowledge their oracular primacy; these almanacs remind us of our mortality and plunge us into danger, yet do they not also teach us the virtue of fortitude, offer us the hope of continuity? A great gestural freedom animates these works; the tail of a calligram, once the signature of a potent mantra, is now a free floating festoon, an index of pleasure,. the surface, which Sujata would formerly work out in lavered fields, is now articulated in an eroticism of creases and tears, roughened edges and bold slippages.

And we are not exhausted or exasperated by the recurrence of the sacred presence, through devices, allusions, direct raptures, an underlying universal energy makes itself manifest through the patterns of invocation that Sujata creates. Even as she performs her gestures of devotion to this source of power, Sujata Bajaj reinvents the forms of attention through which we communicate with the past and the unknown. She sings in praise of the fragment, in praise of the Word and the Image, those heirlooms of humankind that survive every attempt at effacement and bear across to us the freight of our origins.

Ranjit Hoskote
Art critic, Times of India, Mumbai