An Interview

Jyotishka Bairagi

To Belong Everywhere & Nowhere: A Local Artist's Many Lives

Rishav Dutta

There are some conversations that slip and expand. My conversation with Rishav Dutta was one of those. It began with a simple question: “What do you want to be called: a mukha (traditional Assamese mask) making artist, a musician, or an artist?” Asking an artist to define himself is like asking water to choose a shape, to which Dutta replied, “An artist! Not a musician. Everything is art.” This was more than an answer, it felt like a refusal to be reduced and confined within a single form.

Dutta does not remember the first mukha he made as a child. But he remembers the feeling of learning: his early influences, interestingly, were not entirely rooted in Assamese tradition; rather, it was shaped by his exposure to Kolkata’s artistic practices, where he learned to carve expressive eyes and facial features, as well as a technique of molding in cement and layering with cloth or paper. It sounded almost like sculpting and painting at once: a three dimensional art work. Around the age of fifteen, Dutta learnt the deeper grammar of traditional Assamese mukha making at Majuli’s Satra (locally pronounced as Xotro). He said, “In Assam, mask is not made. It is assembled from what villages already hold close: bamboo frames, cow dung, riverside clay, and banana fibre.” One can simply sit on a sutal (courtyard) and carve out a mukha, using nothing more than what the land so generously provides. Hengul (red pigment, derived from cinnabar) and Haital (yellow pigment, derived from orpiment), the colours most commonly applied on mukhas are drawn from the earth, while other colours emerge from nature’s palette, ranging from golden stains of turmeric to soft hues of crushed flowers.

This process involves a slow labour of gathering, shaping and waiting. When I asked him about the shift to synthetic materials today, his response was practical: people no longer have time for slow labour, and preservation has become a priority. This made me wonder whether we are preserving the art or replacing its patience with convenience.

Who does art belong to?

Social media has turned mukha into a spectacle, amplifying Majuli as its sole authority. Dutta resists geographical ownership insisting, “Majuli carries the roots but art belongs to the artist.” What I gathered from this is that tradition is a practice in motion, craft flows wherever the artist carries it. But doesn’t this fluidity come with its own challenges? He spoke about how difficult it is to continue making mukha in a city like Guwahati, where he is currently freelancing, as the materials are no longer easily accessible. The art that once belonged to everyday life begins to feel distant, like it is a privilege of geography. Beyond traditional acknowledgement, the mask has long carried an association with duality and concealment, which led me to ask, “What does a mukha mean to you?” After a brief moment, he answered that masks do not hide; they transform. This claim of crafted consciousness echoed Eliot’s statement of impersonality.

Art for Art's Sake

Despite everything, Dutta admitted that music is what draws him the most, "It is all connected," he said; "music made me do graffiti." He wants to travel and music allows it in a way that mukha-making cannot. Yet he acknowledges the complexities of his relationship with music; there is an evident discomfort with rigidity, which developed during his formal training in classical music. "Art should flow," he told me, "people try to preserve art as if they are protecting God. God does not need protection." He firmly asserted that there should be no hierarchy in art: "I hate the patriarchal framework that art is often confined to. Art is human expression, so how can one expression be superior to another?" This question stayed with me long after the conversation ended.

His first significant break as a freelancer came through theatre. He designed music for a play called ASMR alongside his friend Lakhyajit, and for the first time, he said he was provided with a space to experiment freely. He blended Mising, Namghariya and Assamese notes along with country music for this project. “I felt I had really created something when the audience said they could feel the music acting within the play,” he told me. This work took him to the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa and to Mumbai’s Prithvi Theatre through Thespo ’24. Dutta began receiving more work after that, and though it felt new, he soon grew restless. I asked, “What was your first song about?”

‘Jikhon Nodir Parot’, his first song, written about his first love, felt deeply personal, almost too intimate to hold onto. “It bores me now,” he said, “my earlier songs were about being stuck while time kept moving. I have outgrown that phase; it used to dull my desire for life.” Music is like a ghost to Dutta: it appears abruptly and disappears just as quickly. He mentioned songs he has lost because he could not capture them in time. Now, as he works on a new album, he sees his music evolving. He believes that one has to let go of past versions of oneself, no matter how special they are. He no longer connects to his first song -he called it ‘fake’- yet he holds it as his own.

Modern Crisis

At the Serendipity Arts Festival, exposure to diverse forms of art made Dutta realize how limited art in Assam often felt. It was after this that he turned to graffiti, expanding his creative expression.Black and white are the two dominant colours of his graffiti, a choice he defends on philosophical grounds. “Colours are distractions,” he said. “I used to love colours when I was engaged with mukha-making.” He suggested that colours beautify reality into something it is not, like a poster vivid on the surface, yet blank and white behind. Monochrome, then, is his form of protest against superficiality, capitalism, and the constructive illusions of modern life. Graffiti, however, is often unwelcome. Dutta speaks of a quiet frustration about artists’ work being erased to make space for political posters. He recalled how a fellow artist laboured day and night painting a mural, only to see it whitewashed in less than twenty-four hours to make way for a political campaign. It revealed a stark, power-driven impulse: art that questions reality is meant to be erased. Graffiti, then, becomes both protest and casualty.

In a world obsessed with visibility, Dutta’s take on recognition is striking: “Things start and end with money. This has zombified people.” He believes that underground artists do not create art for recognition; they create to survive. It is, for them, an existential necessity. “To be specific about music,” he suggests, “if one creates for recognition, it is better that they stop. One should create music to truly find oneself, and to understand one’s flow.” Yet he does not romanticize struggle. Sustaining a life in art is brutally difficult: peopleoften over-romanticize music to earn, but Dutta believes that art demands a balance. Many passionate artists eventually abandon their practice for stability. “I often wonder,” he admits, “if my art is meant only to serve an intoxicated audience at pubs.” At its core, struggle is not just external; it is internal. He ends the conversation with a metaphor: “Our heart is like a parachute; it works only when it opens.” It is perhaps the closest he comes to a philosophy: to remain open to change and discomfort. And Rishav Dutta, in all his shifting forms as a mukha-maker, musician, graffiti artist, refuses confinement.

Interviewer

Jyotishka Bairagi

4th semester M.A. student in the Department of English

Tezpur University

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