How Latika Katt chiselled a bold, modernist language for Indian sculpture

Katt created Sati in response to the widely reported case of Sati that took place on September 4, 1987, when Roop Kanwar, an 18-year-old woman in Deorala village in Rajasthan’s Sikar district, immolated herself on the pyre of her husband, who had died the previous day. It would be a euphemism to call that nerve-wracking incident as merely horrifying; it led to the enactment of the seminal legislation, The Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987.

A feisty artist

To use a cliché, Katt was bestowed with an indomitable spirit, which seems to have been the chosen path for her much before she would become aware of how different she was from her peers. Born in February 1948 as Latika Sharma, she was the only girl student at The Doon School, the all boys’ school in Dehradun; her father, Bhagwan Swarup Sharma, worked in the city as a botanist. When she enrolled at the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) for a bachelor’s degree in fine arts (1966-71) to study sculpture, she was one of the few Indian women formally training in this genre of art.

Mannu Dosaj of Gallerie Alternatives — the first art gallery of Gurgaon — who shared a long association with Katt, recalls, “She was a feisty woman and nothing in life could put her down. I met her when she knocked at my door as she was visiting her brother and his family — who were my neighbours in Gurgaon — and who had locked the house and gone for some time. She came over to my house and asked if she could wait at my place for her brother’s family to return. That started an association that became a lifelong friendship and I was privileged to have exhibited her works, along with those of her husband, sculptor Balbir Singh Katt, when I opened my gallery in January 1999.”

Dosaj adds that she came to know the artist as a highly sensitive individual, who responded to social situations through her art powerfully. “The most recent example was her response to the COVID pandemic when bodies washed up on the banks of Ganga in Varanasi; those are disturbing sculptures but also a potent comment,” says Dosaj.

‘…Death in Varanasi’

To borrow a part of the title of Geoff Dyer’s book, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, death in Varanasi is ubiquitous. Katt lived in Varanasi for most of her career. In her book, Metaphors of the Inner Realm, she notes: “My father brought me to Varanasi for the first time in 1961, after my sister’s death in 1960. I think Varanasi helped him overcome the great sorrow that fell upon him.” She returned to the city in 1966 to study at BHU, which was also her father’s alma mater. “My father used to say that even if anyone spends a short time at Varanasi, it has a strong impact on the person,” she records in the book. She met her future husband, Balbir Singh Katt, too in Varanasi, where she eventually settled.

“Recently, after the mass deaths during Corona time, I was very much affected and transferred my emotions and made many bronze figural sculptures on Death,’ she writes in the book. “People come to Varanasi to die, to attain moksha, therefore, too many dead bodies were visible near the ghats, as they were on their way to Manikarnika ghat. At first, it used to be scary and something unique but gradually, I got immune to the dead bodies… After many years of Varanasi Ghat experience and in the memory of my first visit to the ghat with my father in 1961, I decided to capture all my feelings into one sculpture, that of, Dashashwamedh Ghat on a festive day! I chose Makar Sankranti as that is the most auspicious day and a fascinating experience on the ghats.”

The result, a bronze sculpture titled Makar Sankranti snan on Dashashwamedh Ghat, won her the 4th Beijing Biennale Award in 2010. “Morbidity was a theme that she seemed to have a lifelong commitment to,” says Deepak Kannal, her classmate from MS University, Baroda, who went on to serve as professor, head of department and dean of the faculty of fine arts of his alma mater. “Death, decay, degeneration… these were themes that Latika worked on extensively, not just as subjects but even in materiality. She would carve a stone from inside, as if it had been hollowed out by termites,” says Kannal who was in the same class as Katt for their master’s degree in 1973-75.

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Kannal says that Katt was one of the first female artists who explored so many linguistic and technical possibilities of modernism in her sculptures. “I think she always remained a modernist even though there are some postmodern elements in her later works,” he adds. He also recalls how during their student days, whenever a girl student would come in the sculpture department, “we always knew that we would have to do the casting for her. But not with Latika. She did not expect us to do her casting, and in fact, she did not allow us to do it for her; she would get into the furnace herself.” He goes on to add that despite Katt’s petite frame, she was not a bit lesser than any male artist. “Given the size of some of her sculptures, I would say that very few male sculptors would have dared the same,” he remarks.

Beyond labels

It is well-known that Katt did not like being addressed as a "woman sculptor’. Pune-based National Award-winning filmmaker Nandan Kudhyadi, who was Katt’s junior at MSU, says that she didn’t need any crutches such as ‘woman artist’ to succeed as a sculptor. “When she came to Baroda from BHU, she knew well that she was one of the earliest women sculptors of the country but that didn’t affect her, neither did she claim anything on account of that,” he elaborates.

Kudhyadi, who spent time in Varanasi more than a decade ago, documenting the making of a 15-ft bronze sculpture of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi that Katt had been commissioned by Andhra Pradesh Congress leader YS Rajasekhara Reddy (who passed away in a helicopter crash in 2009), recalls her as a highly committed artist for whom work was the only thing in life. “One great thing about her was that she could work in any medium, from bronze and stone on one hand to papier-mâché and terracotta, bamboo, resin, etc. on the other. She could see art in the most mundane things,” says Kudhyadi.

The filmmaker adds that though it’s her abstract sculptures and works imbued with socio-political meanings that are well-known and have won accolades globally, her portraits need to be celebrated as well. He recalls seeing the sculpture of N. S. Bendre, the well-known artist who was the first head of the department of painting at MSU’s Faculty of Fine Arts, during his visit to Katt’s studio in Varanasi. Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were among the statesmen whose busts or sculptures Katt made, and which she remains well-known for.

Kudhyadi remembers her as a “great person, lively, spontaneous, always smiling with her eyes bright… she was full of joie de vivre.” That’s a monumental thing to say for a person who faced colossal tragedies in her life. She lost her father, “my biggest support” in her own words, before she became big as an artist. Or the manner in which she lost her husband, Balbir Singh Katt, a Professor of Sculpture at BHU, who went for a walk one day in the year 2000 and never returned. “It weighed heavily on her which she perhaps channelised in her work,” says Dosaj, “but she never let it show.”

Katt, despite the despair and anguish of her personal life that she may have grappled with at some internal level, chiselled a bold modernist language for Indian sculpture — imbued with a sense of empathy for the issues concerning humanity at micro and macro level — for which she will be remembered for a long time.