Baiju Paarthan, who entered the contemporary Indian art scene as a self-declared ‘outsider’, is today an acclaimed painter. He is also one of the pioneers of intermedia art in India. Written by the noted art critic, poet and independent curator Ranjit Hoskote, Baiju Parthan: A User’s Manual takes the reader on a tour through the artist’s diversely populated imagination. It maps Parthan’s journey from his childhood in Kerala, through his student years in Goa, to his gradual improvisation of a niche for himself in the contemporary Indian art scenario. This book records Parthan’s participation in the countercultural hippie scene, his encounters with spiritual teachings and shamanic lore, his formal experiments and his engagement with media flows and alternative reality environments. Baiju Parthan: A User’s Manual includes a monographic essay on the artist by Hoskote, as well as a freewheeling conversation between artist and author, extracts from Parthan’s journal, a section on his intermedia works, a selection of the artist’s occasional writings, and a brief biography.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ranjit Hoskote
Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, cultural theorist and independent curator of contemporary art. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Zones of Assault (1991), The Cartographer's Apprentice (2000) and The Sleepwalker's Archive (2001). He has also co-translated Vasant Dahake's Marathi poems under the title A Terrorist of the Spirit (1992) and edited the anthology, Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (Viking, 2002). He has also written a critical biography of the artist Jehangir Sabavala (Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer, 1998) and a monograph on the painter Sudhir Patwardhan (The Complicit Observer, 2004). As a literary organizer, Hoskote has been associated with the Poetry Circle, Bombay, since its inception in 1986, and was its President from 1992 to 1997. Hoskote was Visiting Writer and Fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa (1995) and has held a writing residency at the Villa Waldberta, Munich (2003). He received the Sanskriti Award for Literature in 1996 and the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award in 2004. Hoskote lives and works in Bombay.
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