Medicine on Canvas
In the process of healing, lies the art of life: Raines
The Medical Dreamtime held in the Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre featured Acrylic on canvas paintings, Video Art and an installation: the secret Cabinets that never were. Also featured were medically relevant Tangkhas by Sunrita Lama, a trained artist. Why do I paint medicine in Art only?
Replies Shubhadarshini, that this is the question that confronts her all the time. She usually tells them a story: when Jivaka, a great physician-surgeon of Rajgir, who became the beloved doctor of Buddha, was asked by his Medical Guru to go round the campus and bring him things that were not relevant medically, Jivaka returned days later, dusty and apologetic and replied that he could not find a single thing that wasn't somehow a cure for some malady!
But the underlying and most motivating factor for the artist was when she realised that despite India’s glorious medical history from the Vedic period to the 21st century there were hardly any visuals- in sculpture, murals, frescos, temple art, or modern art and thereafter. Even the medical artifacts and equipment were not preserved.
"Whereas, in most other countries there are medical museums with special collections, and interesting events, we have no such museum!" She says.
Every artist, whether it is the 15,000 year rock art in Lascaux, France or Egon Schiele, there is a medical topic. In the cave there is a shaman in the room of the dead man and Schiele the artist has drawn a portrait of his doctor. So have Rembrandt, to van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera you just think of any artist in any age and there are so many portraits, so many amazing anatomy lessons, wax anatomical figures. 
Even Christie's realized the beauty of old anatomical art and had a successful sale recently.
So, in her own way she is trying to keep alive the History of medicine in India, with paintings that range from Ayurvedic healers like Susruta, Charak, and Jivaka, Patanjali and Dhanvantari to the unsung Hakims of the unique Islamic medicine o India: the Unani system.
She even painted a portrait of the Persian Doctor-scholar, Avicenna or Ibn Sina who was rated the Prince among Doctors. Ibn Sina was the equal of the two other greats, Hippocrates and Galen.
The seven day exhibition Medical Dreamtime at the Visual Arts gallery, India Habitat Centre, ended with a wonderful symposium on medicine and art.
The topics covered were Outsider art, medicine in art-its paucity in India, and the need for a Medical museum with popular appeal.
The artist Shubhadarshini Singh presented her views followed by distinguished scholars and doctors like Dr Sayeeda Hamid, Member, Planning Commission of India and Dr P.K. Dave, the former Director of AIIMs now Chairman, Rockland Hospital. They felt it was time the History of Medicine again became a part of the curriculum in Medical studies, and that a medical museum run on modern scientific and professional ways was the need of the hour.
The Psychiatrists, Dr Sumant Khanna a former Additional Professor of NIMHANS, Bangalore and Dr. Veena Kapoor, Chief of Psychiatry, Batra Hospital, also talked of creativity and Insanity, after Shubhadarshini presented her audio visual on Art Brut or Outsider Art. The history of Outsider Art traces its discovery of talented patients who spent their day making something that was in its own way a work of art. The amazing examples were Adolf Wolflii and Rizzoli both schizophrenics who spent most of their adult life in mental asylums in the 20th century, among many others.
As an Art Historian, Nanak Ganguly wrote: If one were to look at Shubhadarshini Singh's paintings of the last few years one would find the strategy of subversion worked carefully into almost all their manifest attributes. It follows fastidiously posited 'inspite of' codes. The viewer strays into them as if in half remembrance, unanchored, almost without a narrative, works that seem particularly legitimate and self assured.
One pieces together stories of mutation and the dramatic transformation of medical knowledge that had been interred long ago and could no longer be told unless you open up new signs.
