Meet the curator of the new exhibition on modern art from South India

A new exhibition opens at the SOAS Gallery this month. A.P. Santhanaraj (1932 - 2009): Modern & Contemporary Art from South India looks at the artistic development in South India after Independence. We sat down with the curator Jana Manuelpillai to discuss the exhibition and his history of collecting. 

You have been a collector, curator, and director of The Noble Sage for several years. Can you tell us about how you established the collection? And why you began the collection?

Yes, I've been a curator, collector, and director of The Noble Sage Art Collection for over 15 years. We specialize in Indian, Sri Lanka and Pakistani modern and contemporary art. How I established it is really quite simple: I was working for a charity art gallery, and I was tired of working for someone else and the bureaucracy, so I set about establishing my own.

For a year, I was working on a project of my own called Gallery of Interpretation, which was a totally different educational project around museums. I started to think about the boom in contemporary art in India, the growing economic stability of that country, and the way the South was not as explored in terms of art as the North. That was how I started the gallery; there was something under-explored there. 

Balancing curating, maintaining, and preserving these amazing artworks displayed in the current exhibition must be a great privilege - and a lot of work! How do you balance everything? What does a typical day look like?

In a word, yes, it is a lot of hard work. I hold over 300 artworks in my collection, some of which are quite large, as you can see from the exhibition. I've moved my collection over the years. I used to have a physical gallery space in Muswell Hill or on the road to Muswell from East Finchley. That was a BIG space, almost too big, actually. Too big to manage. It was a lot easier to preserve, look after and maintain the collection there due to the scale of some of the artworks. 

However, since then, I've gone remote, so now I have pop-up exhibitions in different spaces like SOAS, which is currently on until 23 September. I also hire spaces, and I keep the work in storage when the work is not on show. I've created a space in my house where I can store the work safely, look at it, and photograph it.

I started to think about the boom in contemporary art in India, the growing economic stability of that country, and the way the South was not as explored in terms of art as the North.

It's really the mundanity of running an art gallery and all the jobs it must do that I think people underestimate. There's a lot of social media work and promotion. There's updating the mailing list, keeping the website up to date and intact for people to visit, updating Sachi and other gallery websites that help create traffic to my own, contacting clients, and writing invoices. Plus, keeping afoot of artists' work and replying to artists who get in touch about my collection daily.

It can be absolutely hectic and stressful, frankly. But I've gotten used to it, and I relax when I can, whether it's the weekend or during the week because I don't know what I'll be working on the next day, so it's very up and down, but that's normal. Entrepreneur life, really.

You have said before that you met A.P Santhanaraj (the main artistic focus of the exhibition) while travelling in India and met a lot of artists from the Madras school. How important is travelling to the way you go about collecting?

When I first read about the Madras Government College of Arts and Crafts, I thought it hadn't been looked at enough. The college was based in Tamil Nadu, and I'm Tamil myself. I have some heritage in South India, even though I'm from Sri Lanka. I thought I should do a journey there so I went. After doing a lot of kind of reading about the artists attending the college and how it was set up, there must have been close to 50 artists.

Travelling... is key to my art collecting and my vision of the world.

I went to galleries and museums to see what was happening there, and I got in touch with a group of artists, about 17 artists. I then did my first show with them in 2006 called Chennai Excite, and it gave everyone an insight into the Madras scene, but it also was to test the market to see if people were interested. That was what I did, and that's how I started the gallery. It began as a kind of academic research. Then travelling there meant some hard graft in the Indian heat. It was pretty hard work, but it was amazing.

Travelling and experiencing Asia, Africa, and non-Western countries is key to my viewpoint on art; it's almost a spiritual perspective. I ask: what is art, and why should we love art? I see art as close to a kind of divine experience. When it's good art, it comes close to a divine process. How we enjoy it and what makes it resonate with us is also an intangible experience.

Going to such places is very much around places of religious interest. I have been to Ethiopia, experienced shamanism in Mongolia, and The Camino Walk in Santiago de Compostela in Spain. I've deliberately pushed my understanding of spirituality, artistic practice, and religious culture and how they all intermingle. So, travelling to India is very important, but travelling full stop is key to my art collecting and my vision of the world.

The exhibition chronicles this incredible group of artists working at the Madras School in India, the first art school set up by the British in 1850 but also the most unrepresented of the art schools in India. Why do you think this lack of historical focus and research has happened?

The Madras School was set up in 1850 by Andrew Bell. It is the least known and the least collected, the least historically researched it. It's quite an odd thing because it is the first British art school in India. Admittedly, when it started, it focused on craft, like metalwork and ceramics, but it moved progressively into painting and fine art. Academic fine art is a British style. The Dravidian South, so Karnataka, may be in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, though that area is seen quite differently from North Delhi, Calcutta, and Bombay.

That area of India is just much more wealthy and it's more progressive. It has a more modern way of life (or Western kind of life), so I guess, in a sense, collecting and the art world boomed there first because of the money in that area. But, now, there is a lot of money in the South of India and many very talented artists working today.

My work is to draw attention to the roots or the foundations that make up the history that today the artists work in. I want to draw attention to people like A.P. Santhanaraj, who are key artists who are extraordinarily talented and impacted many other artists, not just in the South but in the North too. It deserves greater attention and a spotlight. The Madras School is significantly underrepresented, and this show is an important step in changing that.

Can you tell us why you were drawn to exhibit at the SOAS Gallery?

I came to the SOAS Gallery well before COVID struck, I've known this space for a very long time, and I started a PhD at SOAS many years ago. But because of that, I have a very soft spot for SOAS, and I think the work that they do is fantastic. To show at the SOAS Gallery was always a great ambition of mine. And that's why it was always on my radar. When COVID restrictions were over, and I was approached to see whether I wanted to do the show still, I snapped it up! Because it's a fantastic space and this, I think, is the biggest show I've ever had.