The Currency of Manufactured Melancholy: Deconstructing the NGMA Roster

I recently found myself sitting through a panel discussion at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai. The event, titled "Being an Artist, Being a Woman: Many Selves, Many Worlds," featured a lineup of prominent women artists discussing their creative journeys, struggles, and inspirations.

The stage, captured in image.png and image_2.png, was set for what promised to be a profound dive into contemporary Indian womanhood.

Instead, what unfolded was a stark reminder of how deeply disconnected our elite art ecosystem remains from reality.

Listening to these artists speak, it became impossible to ignore an overarching sense of self-importance. They took themselves—and their suffering—far too seriously. The visual narrative presented on stage, documented from various angles in image_3.png and image_4.png, felt less like a celebration of creative evolution and more like a carefully curated exercise in anachronistic grievance. The official event poster in image_7.png provides the perfect framework to ground this critique.

When you look closely at the names on that billboard—*Saviya Lopes, Shakuntala Kulkarni, Yardena Kurulkar, and Prajakta Potnis—a distinct pattern emerges. These creators represent the absolute pinnacle of institutional backing. Yet, their respective portfolios reveal a collective obsession with outdated trauma, claustrophobia, and victimhood. It is a highly profitable aesthetic that directly caters to a Eurocentric gaze while completely failing to represent the **Vikasit Bharatiya Nari* of today.

Here is how the discourse on display correlates with an updated social contract:

Saviya Lopes: The East Indian Paradox & The Domestic Disconnect

Lopes’ entire artistic practice constructs narratives of historical dissent and systemic marginalization. But this narrative presents a massive socio-economic disconnect when juxtaposed with contemporary reality:

The Reality of Assets: The East Indian community across the Vasai-to-Bandra belt is sitting on some of the most premium, high-value real estate in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.

The Archaic Label: Clinging to historical grievances or navigating contemporary spaces under the banner of "backwardness" or "OBC classification" is completely disingenuous given the community's immense multi-generational wealth and premium land ownership.

Because this brand of art completely lacks concurrent demographic representation—failing to mirror the actual prosperity, autonomy, and advancement of the community it claims to depict—it suffers from a total lack of domestic takers. Local audiences see right through the farce and refuse to buy into a manufactured illusion of their own backwardness. Consequently, out of pure economic necessity, the work needs to be packaged and exported directly to the misery mongers of the western hemisphere, who are only too eager to finance and consume an outdated aesthetic of Indian struggle.

Shakuntala Kulkarni: Perpetual Cages for the Abla Naari

Shakuntala Kulkarni is internationally celebrated for her landmark series, Of Body, Armour and Cages. Her work consists of elaborate, wearable cane sculptures that trap the female form in literal cages under the guise of "protective armor." Her performances explore the alienation, claustrophobia, and fear that urban women supposedly feel within patriarchal structures.

This is the definitive embodiment of the Bharatiya abla naari (the helpless Indian woman) archetype. By continuously staging the Indian woman as a trapped entity who requires heavy, primitive basketry just to navigate public spaces, Kulkarni feeds a Western art market that demands third-world women remain perpetually subjugated to be deemed "marketable."

Yardena Kurulkar & Prajakta Potnis: The Monetization of Internal Anxiety

The theme of an over-romanticized, dark melancholia finds its absolute anchors in the portfolios of Yardena Kurulkar and Prajakta Potnis:

Kurulkar’s Obsession with Decay: Kurulkar’s conceptual works—with telling titles like An All Consuming Grief and Breath of Sorrow—frequently use clay bodies and terracotta hearts that disintegrate in water. It is a masterclass in performative, existential mourning designed to evoke an archaic, tragic mystique.

Potnis’ Domestic Claustrophobia: Potnis focuses on the "overburdened female body" exposed to societal toxicity, using the architectural motif of "the wall" to map out internal anxieties, confinement, and domestic isolation.

Victor Hugo Syndrome: Peddling Misery Voyeurism

Ultimately, what we are witnessing on these prestigious stages is a blatant peddling of *misery voyeurism* tailored precisely for a Eurocentric market. This is a Western audience that historically and culturally idolizes Victor Hugo for a narrative quite literally titled "Les Misérables."

They are deeply conditioned to consume, romanticize, and award the aesthetic of the downtrodden—provided it comes from the Global South and arrives neatly packaged as high art. By serving up a highly digestible palette of simulated Indian despair, these panels give international collectors exactly what they crave: an exotic, tragic spectacle to patronize from a safe distance, completely insulated from the actual, thriving economic realities of the very women staging the suffering.

Step Out of the Echo Chamber

As seen across the auditorium in image_5.png and image_6.png, the panel operated within a bubble of immense institutional security. When these highly privileged, generational-wealth-backed artists congregate at the NGMA to dissect their "suffering," the cognitive dissonance is blinding. By their own self-admittance, these are all women of extraordinary means—be it through currency, caste, or elite familial credentials. They are weaponizing elite vocabulary to market an outdated, trauma-centric version of India to international collectors who buy into the romanticized aesthetic of the struggling Eastern woman.

The modern, self-assured Indian woman has outgrown these cages, quilts, and walls. It’s time our elite art ecosystem acknowledged that reality and updated the memo.