An ode to Jyoti Bhatt’s enduring legacy
This rare, wide-ranging retrospective called “Jyoti Bhatt: Through the Line and the Lens” is currently split across two venues in Delhi—CCA, Bikaner House and LATITUDE 28, Lado Sarai. Curated by the noted artist and educator Rekha Rodwittiya with great personal knowledge, the exhibition provides a rich and nuanced perspective on the life and legacy of one of India’s most seminal artists.
In over six decades of practice, this exhibition is not merely a chronological display, but an intimate mapping of Bhatt’s multifarious body of work: printmaking and photography, writing, pedagogy, and documentation. It’s a stark archive, a personal diary and a cultural mirror, all in one. Between Two Worlds: The Visual Language of Jyoti Bhatt. What distinguishes the work of Jyoti Bhatt is his effortless dual inhabitation of the spaces of aesthetic refinement and cultural memory.
His photography especially combines ethnographic documentation with the eye of a trained artist. This takes its most persuasive form in the way his compositions bear the accents of a painter — balance, rhythm, texture — while also most tenderly and urgently preserving fading traditions, artisans and village life.
Bhatt’s photographs from rural India are not romanticised anthropological studies. They are bridges—linking the ground-level creativity of India with the ongoing discourse of contemporary Indian art. For through his lens he documented not just living traditions but also the texture of a transitional India.
The Graphic Language: Printmaking as Politics and Play At the core of the exhibition are the marks of Bhatt’s groundbreaking artistry — etchings, lithographs and serigraphs that celebrate his expert technique and biting wit. He still seems radical in his exploration of print as a democratic medium. In the first decades after independence, when printmaking was yet a nascent form in India, Bhatt recognized its capabilities to engage with popular culture and subversive narratives.
Returning to India in the 1960s with a technical knowledge of intaglio processes due to both his academic training in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda as well as at the Accademia di Belle Arti (Naples) and Pratt Institute (New York), Bhatt was influenced by the same tradition of academic schooling that had trained him. Like friends from the Baroda School, he set the groundwork for a new modernism steeped in tradition but tolerant of experimentation.
As Rodwittiya observes, Bhatt “frequently used ‘subversive inflections’ to confront backward- looking institutions and principles, utilizing written language, irony and symbols as early indicators of a postmodernist way of speaking.”
Not Just a Practitioner, a Pedagogue Bhatt’s influence extends beyond the studio. A founding member of the Baroda Group and a major figure at MSU Baroda, his legacy is one of education and institution-building. His diaries, letters and writings featured in this exhibition show a reflective thinker invested in supporting future generations. His pedagogy was inseparable from his politics and practice: he viewed the classroom as a space of dialogue, experimentation and cultural critique.
That curatorial choice to place his writings alongside artworks gives fuller view of the man behind the medium. This was Sonya’s ultimate role: in addition to being an artist, we see here a tireless recorder, observer and educator. The Crossroads: Intersections of Photography: and Print and the Personal Politics One special strength of the exhibition is how it investigates the interrelatedness of Bhatt’s work across media.
His photographic documentation of folk motifs directly influenced his printmaking; many of his prints were a response to socio-political climates with sly humour or symbolic forms of resistance. There is a kind of looping, self-referential quality to his work that repays close, repeated viewing. His collaboration with the late Jyotsna Bhatt, a Ceramicist of repute in her own right, gets a brief nod too — a cue of personal relationships creating sustainable creative ecosystems.
A Living Legacy Bhatt has been widely exhibited globally and has received numerous national, international awards including the Padma Shri, Kalidasa Award and multiple lifetime achievement awards. But instead of coming across as a display of accolades, this retrospective feels more like a heartfelt tribute. It’s a map of an artist’s mind—how curiosity becomes documentation, memory becomes form, tradition becomes something else entirely.
“Through the Line and the Lens” is more than an exhibition — it’s an invitation to think with Jyoti Bhatt, to see the world through his poetic eye. It tells the story of an artist whose work is rooted in the tactile, the lived, the local, yet speaks to with the timelessness of interest. Be it an artist, student, researcher or just someone who’s curious, this is one show in Delhi you must not miss.
Featuring Image Courtesy: Latitude 28
Contributor
