IT IS perilous to become an artist in Haryana because it becomes difficult to make both ends meets by art alone. To think only about paintings as an art form would be erroneous because it includes great deal of activity in other forms too such as sculpting, embroidery such as famous Bagh work of Malwa region in the Punjab, clay work and pottery, terracotta, shaping the drift wood, mosaic, imaging and of course designing work (artistic manuscripts and book-binding of yore).

Recently an assortment of opinions expressed by leading artists of Punjab published in a section of the press was about bad managements and politics in a couple of art galleries and made no mention about other work of art. Leave the Punjab affair aside, the scenario in Haryana is even worst that does not have more than a handful of artists worth mentioning. With a few exceptions namely Bhim Malhotra, Bhim Singh Berwal, Baljit Singh, Shakti Ahlawat and Sravan Kushwaha other’s work in Haryana is either mediocre or less than that, which fails to attract attention.

Except Malhotra and Ahlawat other perform occasionally and a lot others just in name are defunct. Secondly, there have been few appraisals of work of fine art from Haryana and for lack of independent critics/reviewers one seldom comes to know about the antecedents of artists and value of their work from the State of Haryana. Many of the so called artists from the state were never appreciably productive in their life times and could even touch the peaks of acumen. From the above named stars only Malhotra’s work consistently fetched him substantial monetary rewards so far.

On the talking front, politics of art was once a live subject among the 50 or so small time artists in Haryana. A group from such artistically defunct people once tried their level best towards establishing Lalit Kala Academy in Haryana but in vain. The political masters of the day that had little understanding of the role of fine art shooed them away. A few of them have again become dynamic nowadays to bargain positions in the Multi-arts Center, Rohtak that will soon start functioning.

Perhaps, neither the politicians nor the bureaucrats have grown to become mentally prepared to promote art in Haryana because everyone believes - even those that live away from the shores of India that there is nothing in Haryana except agriculture. Punjab could avoid this tag only due to the rich traditions carried for long since the times of the great Mughals and Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

In early decades of the British regime in erstwhile Punjab, Percy Brown and George Watt of the Mayo School of Art at Lahore contributed to arts - particularly commercial and industrial, of the region but the modern distress is about fine arts of which there is little activity in the schools of art in modern Haryana. The difficulty is not with the art or the number of artists but of lack of patrons and neglect of non-traditional subjects. George Watt was a botanist but took to art and illustrations and produced Dictionary of Economic Products of India, and on the other hand, Percy Brown, E.B.Havell and Lockwood Kipling (father of Rudyard Kipling) began publishing Journal of Indian Industrial Art – a forerunner of Marg (Tata Press, Mumbai). In Haryana there is neither a future for fine art nor of industrial or commercial art because regrettably all business in art is located at Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangaluru, Chennai, Kolkata or Jaipur but not at Chandigarh, Simla, Amritsar, Patiala and Rohtak.

‘Even small time art has become difficult to survive in a small town such as Rohtak,’ says Baljit Singh who efforts in organizing in the past several painting and photographic exhibitions of local artists have been internally recognized but ignored by the State. ‘The potential energy of creative activity in this field in Haryana is further drained due to incompetency at the level of management, rampant corruption and unscrupulous treatment towards artists accompanied by financial malpractices at higher level’ observed Ranbir Phaugat, an art critic and historian of repute and continued that ‘Haryana could not count on even one national or international level exhibition of art supported by renowned artists and painters but to rely on local talent in the past’.

‘And where are the publications on art in Haryana that could regularly publish on a wide range of all the subjects within the ambit of fine/commercial/industrial arts’ lamented Singh? Only occasionally published feature articles by reputed author-columnists like B.N. Goswami cannot be considered enough to capture the happenings in the region, he said. If per chance one takes to a career in one of the above three branches of art, starvation will make him a pauper. Therefore, the boom in the classes of art schools or departments of fine art in universities and other institutions run by govt. departments or private trusts is only illusionary and serves only those that wish to seek a job on recommendations alone.

‘In spite of lot of regional space available to artists, we have failed to see growth of new trends in art activity in Haryana and adjoining Punjab’, says Singh. Baljit Singh, Senior lecturer, in local Government College for Women observes that ‘for the promotion of art, assured scholarship is indispensable for the real artist but identifying an honest and diligent person is really a challenge as fakes and incapable abound who pursue art only as past time’.

The pseudo-artists in Haryana is galore and lives either on ad-hoc exhibitions depicting third rate work that receives paltry grants from district officers or merely a salaried teacher. ‘The impoverished mind cannot think of art’ is a well known idiom, which is true for the state of Haryana: not in terms of money but ideas. ‘Budding artists, which seriously wish to take up art as life time mission must think out of the box to succeed and create new kind of strokes in the line of Maqbool Fida Hussain’, says Sunil Phaugat whose not only surprised the oldies from his new kind of strokes in water color but also got acclaim.