In the Presence of Another Sky traces the nearly seven-decade-long arc of Sakti Burman’s career, situating the artist in various contexts, including Indian modernism, the School of Paris, the sumptuous background of the Renaissance and the Baroque, the enchantments of commedia dell’arte,the turbulence of a Europe wrestling with questions of migration and an India vexed by rival claims on identity.Ranjit Hoskote, poet, cultural theorist and curator, adapts the literary and cinematic techniques of montage to tell this story, not in chronological order, but by reference to Burman’s lifeworld, distributed across France and India, and his varied emotional and intellectual investments, whether in the art of Ajanta and Pompeii, his childhood memories of festivity, or the talismanic power of the Kalighat gouaches and Dokhra objects he collects. This book maps, without simply replicating, the mise-en-scene of the eponymous retrospective of Burman’s work, held at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, in 2017.
