The Trial

The Trial was painted in 1978, towards the end of Rameshwar Broota’s decade-long preoccupation with sociopolitical satire, expressed using gorillas or apes as his protagonists. The artist was not only disturbed and deeply moved by the struggles of the laboring class, and the bureaucracy and corruption that was prevalent in society, but was also a victim of similar circumstances. It was during a period of immense personal and professional struggle that he was motivated to use his creative practice to comment on the unjust systems and the harsh economic disparities that existed in society.

In Broota’s own words, The Trial "depicts a poor person who is trained like an athlete performing tricks, but there is nobody to see him. He is isolated, and he just has to satisfy himself. That is how artists keep performing: they go on painting and painting throughout their lives and they don’t get any recognition. People come and go […] So it’s a personal trial not a legal one, connected to life. He is doing so much but nobody appreciates it.” (Artist statement, R. Dean & G. Tillotson eds, Modern Indian Painting: Jane & Kito de Boer Collection, Ahmedabad, 2019, p. 251)

This painting features a miniature ape-like stick figure in the middle of an acrobatic performance on one side of the composition, and a cluster of empty chairs on the other, presented as if they were in a courtroom or classroom. Broota has subtly painted these micro-images on an otherwise unpopulated canvas dominated by sweeping blue and silver brushstrokes. As a representational painter, Broota seems on the verge of abstraction in this painting, and the large figures of apes which had hitherto been the main subject of his oeuvre, dominating his frames, are almost lost in the vast scale of this canvas.

In this early period, Broota’s artistic practice focussed on external concerns and his paintings like the present lot voiced the artist's commentary on the social and political realities of the times, expressing various conflicting notions and dichotomies that exist in life.“Broota’s outward journey may appear to have taken many different paths. His inner journey, however, has been constant. The constant is his dialectic struggle between yin and yang, between light and dark, between the individual and the collective, between one man’s struggle to be good and a world that obstructs and bears down on us. It is the struggle of one man to find his identity in the infinity of mankind.” (R. Karode, Visions of Interiority: Interrogating the Male Body, Rameshwar Broota: A Retrospective 1963-2013, exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 2015, p. 17) Broota employed humor and satire as a weapon to deal with the sense of despair and angst he faced personally. Over time, the humor was replaced by a more philosophical approach as he was stirred to engage with larger, more universal issues.