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Prologue 7
one
Prologue
the picasso manqu syndrome
Gaganendranath Tagore,
A Cubist Scene, c. 1923,
watercolour on postcard.
Gaganendranath and his
circle often sent postcards
they painted themselves
to students and friends.
The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once stated that Surrealism was
stolen from the Europeans by a Black [the poet Aim Csaire] who used
it brilliantly as a tool of Universal Revolution.1 Sartres admiring and yet
enigmatic comment encapsulates the problematic relationship between
non-Western artists and the international avant-garde, which is enmeshed
in a complex discourse of authority, hierarchy and power. Even cultural
subversion, as suggested above, prompts the common perception of nonWestern modernism as a derivative one, a phenomenon that I would like
to christen the Picasso manqu syndrome. Let me elaborate with an
example. The English art historian W. G. Archer wrote an influential
account of Indian modernism. His analysis of the painting of
Gaganendranath Tagore, one of the first Indian modernists, consisted almost
entirely of tracing Picassos putative influence on him. Unsurprisingly,
Archer drew the conclusion that Gaganendranath was un cubiste manqu;
in other words, his derivative works, based on a cultural misunderstanding,
were simply bad imitations of Picasso (see p. 18). Behind this seemingly
innocent conclusion rests the whole weight of Western art history. We need
to unpack its ramifications here.2
Stylistic influence, as we are all aware, has been the cornerstone of art
historical discourse since the Renaissance. Nineteenth-century art history,
in the age of Western domination, extended it to world art, ranking it
according to the notion of progress, with Western art at its apex. Influence
acquired an added resonance in colonial art history. For Archer, the use
of the syntax of Cubism, a product of the West, by an Indian artist, immediately locked him into a dependent relationship, the colonized mimicking the superior art of the colonizer. Indeed influence has been the key
epistemic tool in studying the reception of Western art in the nonWestern world: if the product is too close to its original source, it reflects
slavish mentality; if on the other hand, the imitation is imperfect, it represents a failure. In terms of power relations, borrowing by artists from
the peripheries becomes a badge of inferiority. In contrast, the borrowings
7
only race and gender but also regions. We notice the operation of this paradigm even in the field of Renaissance art. The Vasarian master narrative
of artistic progress defines cities, such as Florence, Rome and Venice, as
centres of innovation, presenting peripheries as sites of delayed growth
and derivation. This has affected the reputation of an artist such as
Correggio. Hailing from Parma, considered to be peripheral compared
with Rome, Venice and Florence, Correggios innovative work has until
now been assessed in the light of Raphael or Michelangelos achievement,
rather than as an independent achievement.8
In our post-colonial environment, scholars have proposed ways of
empowering non-Western modernism that seek to restore the artists
choice and to view them as active rather than passive agents of transmission.9 Let me offer a flavour of their arguments: Keith Moxey suggests the
flexible and inclusive concept of visual culture that goes beyond the
Renaissance hierarchy of art, which has been responsible for reinforcing
global inequality in power relations. Nstor Garca Canclinis multitemporal heterogeneities, Geeta Kapurs restructuring the international
avant-garde and Bourdieus reminder that modes of representations are
expressions of political conflicts, are some of the emerging possibilities.
Gerardo Mosquera argues that the periphery is ceasing to be a reservoir of
traditions, creating at once multiple sites of international culture as well
as strengthening local developments in constant hybridization of cultures.10
Hybridity, originally a concept in biology, has been vigorously theorized
with a view to empowering the colonized which has given rise to intense
debates.11
Such a plethora of persuasive arguments indicates the positive direction
art history is taking in the twenty-first century, leading to some loosening of the canon.12 It is however possible to examine these issues from a
different perspective in order to formulate concepts that will address
complex interactions between global modernity and regional art productions and practices. This book engages precisely this issue of artistic production and the construction of national identity in late colonial India.
First of all, instead of using influence as a convenient tool to describe
the introduction of modernism in the non-Western societies, we may turn
to the concept of paradigm change postulated by Thomas Kuhn in the
history of science. The adoption of the new language of modernism by
Indian artists was necessitated by the changes in artistic imperatives in a
rapidly globalizing world, which prompted them to discard the previous
artistic paradigm centring on representational art.13 Second, influence as
an art historical category misses out more significant aspects of cultural
encounters, as for instance, the enriching value of cultural mixtures that
have nourished societies since time immemorial. The claimed purity of
cultures is simply a nationalist myth fabricated in the nineteenth century.
Arguably, the strongest cultures have often developed through constant
cross-fertilizations and crossing of cultural frontiers, though the original
9
forms and ideas necessarily acquire a new meaning in the new environment. But what one must remember is that these exchanges of ideas and
forms need not necessarily be a question of domination and dependence
nor do they represent a loss of self.14
Colonial mentality asserts cultural transmissions to be a one-way
process flowing from the Occident. Yet one could offer one documented
instance of cross-fertilization in which the West has been an enthusiastic
recipient. This is the persistent fascination with Eastern thought that has
periodically surfaced in the West in different guises. Raymond Schwab,
who named the impact of Indian thought on nineteenth-century
Romanticism the Oriental Renaissance, considered this challenge to the
West to be as radical as the first Renaissance.15 This critical tradition
continued in the Transcendental Idealism of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
down to Heidegger and the twentieth-century Existentialists.16 In the
field of modernist art we find three influential figures, the philosopher
Henri Bergson, the art historian Wilhelm Worringer and the novelist Leo
Tolstoy, all of them intellectually engaging with the alternative tradition
represented by Indian philosophy.17
surrogate for their own predicament as women within the wider nationalist struggle. In parallel with the primitivists, artists belonging to a
naturalist counter-stream, engaged with quotidian life, some of them
expressing deep sympathies for the underclass. Where both these streams
that emerged in the 1920s and 30s were in tacit agreement was in their
common distaste for history painting and the master narrative of nationalism that had obsessed the previous generation.21 Yet strange to say, historicism continued to flourish, partly because of Raj espousal of Indian
cultural nationalism as a safe alternative to active and violent resistance.
Its final flowering took place in the decoration of the new imperial capital in Delhi and the India House in London. Finally, as a coda, I touch
upon the changing nature of modernism in the closing decade of the
empire which anticipated developments in post-colonial India. War, famine,
peasant rebellions and widespread political unrest radicalized artists
who looked beyond personal validation towards active participation in
communist and other popular movements as they swore allegiance to the
formalist vanguard of Paris.
In this pioneering phase of Indian modernism, the interactions
between the global and the local were played out in the urban space of
colonial culture, hosted by the intelligentsia who acted as a surrogate for
the nation. Western expansion gave rise to a series of hybrid cosmopolises
around the globe: Calcutta, Bombay, Shanghai, Singapore, So Paulo,
Mexico City, Hanoi, Cairo and Beirut, to name the best known.22 The
two cosmopolitan cities in India, Bombay and Calcutta, which acted as the
locus of colonial encounters, were beneficiaries as well as interlocutors of
colonial culture. I have chosen to explore Calcutta as a hybrid cosmopolis
here because of its pioneering role in Indian modernism. In the city, the
nineteenth-century intellectual movement known as the Bengal Renaissance
represented a hybrid intellectual enterprise underpinned by a dialogic
relationship between the colonial language, English, and the modernized
vernacular, Bengali.23 The Bengali elite, the Bhadralok, who took to the
new colonial learning with alacrity, had less commitment to traditional
Hindu culture on account of its ambiguous status in the caste hierarchy.
Its role as a marginal group in traditional Hindu society had telling parallels with the post-emancipation Jewish intellectuals of Vienna, who
became major players in twentieth-century modernism.24
The Bengali intelligentsia negotiated cosmopolitan modernity largely
through the printed medium, since few of them had any direct physical
contact with Europeans.25 Yet they were deeply imbued with Western
literature and Enlightenment values. Modernity created a globally imagined community based upon print culture, whose members may never
have known one another personally, and yet shared a corpus of ideas on
modernity.26 To explain this communitys critical engagement with
modern ideas, I propose here the concept of the virtual cosmopolis. The
hybrid city of the imagination engendered elective affinities between the
11
elites of the centre and the periphery on the level of intellect and creativity.27 Their shared outlook was possible not only through the printed
media but also through hegemonic languages such as English and
Spanish spread by colonial rule. In sum, the encounters of the colonial
intelligentsia with modernity were inflected through virtual cosmopolitanism. One of the products of such encounters was global primitivism
and the common front made against urban industrial capitalism and the
ideology of progress. As I argue later, primitivism was not anti-modern;
it was a critical form of modernity that affected the peripheries no less
than the West. Primitivists did not deny the importance of technology in
contemporary life; they simply refused to accept the teleological certainty
of modernity.28
The Western primitivists were chiefly concerned with the predicament of urban existence, whereas Indian artists used primitivism as an
effective weapon against colonial culture.29 The interest of the Cubists in
African art as an aspect of primitivism has been thoroughly explored.
Though radical in its formal innovations, early Cubism was less radical
politically than, let us say, certain expressions of non-objective art. In their
development of flat non-figurative art, Kandinsky and others sought
affinities with the decorative art of the primitive and non-Western peoples untouched by Renaissance naturalism. However, to my mind even
more important was their radical quest for an alternative to materialism.
That is when they turned to Eastern, particularly Indian Buddhist and
Hindu philosophy, which is described by David Pan as the intellectual
context of the abstract method.30 Their quest, they felt, was met less by
institutional Christianity than by a form of syncretism that offered fresh
existential and epistemological possibilities. It would of course be an oversimplification to consider these painters as merely reproducing Eastern
spiritual concepts in their works. They engaged with Eastern philosophy
critically, their interpretations of Eastern thought were in the light of
their own sense of crisis in the West and deeply felt creative needs that
went beyond mere fashion.31 I intend to show how in very many diverse
and interesting ways such primitivism had its counterpart in the colonial
world of India where artists saw parallels between their own resistance to
Western rationality and urban modernity, and that of the Western modernists. Global critical modernity has multilateral and multi-axial origins
and reasons; its global impact forces us to revise a simple notion of cultural
influence as a one-way flow of ideas from the West to other cultures.
Finally, a personal note: why did I decide to write this book? One
urgent reason was to understand what modernism has meant in the culture of my origins. The other reason, as someone who has lived most of
his life in the West, is to make a wider transnational audience aware of
this little-known story of Indian modernism. Contrary to colonial representations of the non-West as the recipient in a long one-way civilizing
process, global modernity has been a two-way dialogic transaction in which
12
13
one
Gaganendranath Tagore,
Poet on the Island of the Birds,
c. 1925, watercolour on paper.
To many of us Cubisms revolutionary mode of representation is synonymous with modernism. It was the first Western movement to attract
Indian artists, although it failed to leave any lasting mark until its resurgence in the 1940s. We may take December 1922 as a convenient entry
point for modernism in India. An exhibition of works of the Bauhaus
artists in Calcutta in that year symbolized the graduation of Indian taste
from Victorian naturalism to non-representational art. We first hear of
the Western avant-garde in 1914 in the Bengali journal Prabasi, which
described Brancusis Mlle Pogany as unacceptably bizarre. Its author
Sukumar Roy, a fervent believer in naturalism, had previously been a critic of orientalist distortions of reality. (I use orientalism, orientalist artists
and oriental art in lower case to refer to the first nationalist art movement
in India known as the Bengal School and use capitals for European
Orientalists in the Saidian sense.) In his essay, Exaggerations [distortions]
in Art, Roy acknowledged Cubisms revolutionary objective of challenging academic naturalism, but he rejected its extreme distortions of reality,
while he condemned outright Futurist glorifications of war, the machine
age and other odious trappings of progress.1
Others were more welcoming of modernism. In 1917, the widely read
Modern Review carried an anonymous piece on automatic drawing, which
dealt with Freuds impact on avant-garde art.2 The poet Rabindranath
Tagore, who had increasing misgivings about the nationalist Bengal
School of art, was intent on broadening the artistic horizon of his university at Santiniketan. In 1919, during a visit to Oxford, he hired Stella
Kramrisch (18981993) to teach art history at the fledgling art department
(Kala Bhavan). Of Austrian-Jewish descent, Kramrisch had received a
thorough grounding in art history at the University of Vienna, becoming
a renowned authority on Indian art in later life. She became one of the
foremost figures in the dissemination of Indian modernist art. At
Santiniketan her personal knowledge of the avant-garde made it a living
reality for the students.3
15
India but also for orientalism, and its engagement with the past. Even
Abanindranath, the archpriest of orientalism, quoted Kandinsky a few
years later to repudiate his own historicism as an anachronism because,
he confessed, it was impossible to live and feel like the ancients.16 This was
in the 1920s when the here and now would seriously challenge historicism, which was administered the final coup de grce by Abanindranaths
own brother Gaganendranath. Once sympathetic to oriental art, Gaganendranath had gone down the path of modernism even before the Bauhaus
show, and indeed made his Cubist dbut at the very same show.17
18
Gaganendranath Tagore,
The Fake Brahmin Dispensing
Blessing for Lucre, c. 1918,
hand-coloured lithograph.
crows, a familiar sight in Calcutta, prepared him for his later monochrome
Cubist interiors. In 1908 he joined the oriental art movement, acquiring a
major collection of Mughal and Rajput miniatures in the process.
Until the 1920s, Gagenendranath was best known for his brilliantly
savage lithographs caricaturing the social mores of colonial Bengal.20 In
early 1922, he seized the modernist moment to realize his artistic vision
through Cubism. Evaluating Gaganendranaths Cubism in an essay
19
Gaganendranath Tagore,
A Cubist Scene, c. 1922,
watercolour on paper.
Gaganendranath Tagore,
A Cubist City, c. 1922,
watercolour on paper.
his own brand of Cubism, as also his ability to soften Cubisms formal
geometry with a seductive profile, shadow or outline of human form.23
The paintings were well received in the daily papers, though the
reviews dwelled more on his poetic qualities than on the new language of
Cubism. The Englishman, which had been following his artistic career
closely, described his Cubism as a new phase of oriental art, complimenting the artist on his beautiful colours.24 While the Statesman admitted the
difficulty of appreciating Cubisms revolutionary language, it praised the
painting Symphony for successfully blending rigid telling cubist lines with
mysterious lighting effects reminiscent of Rembrandt.25 Forward found
21
Gaganendranath Tagore,
Cubist Subject, c. 1922,
watercolour on paper.
him to be one of the finest painters of light, confessing that the appeal of
his works lay in their beautiful colours, not to mention their intelligibility.26
By 1925, the Englishman acknowledged the power of Gaganendranaths
personal treatment of Cubism though it was less certain about Cubism as
such.27 Benoy Sarkar, the avowed modernist, gave Gaganendranaths
exhibition at the Indian Society of Oriental Art his unqualified endorsement as object lessons in pure art. In such compositions, he wrote, we
begin to appreciate without the scaffolding of legends, stories, messages
and moralizings, the foundations of a genuine artistic sense.28
In 1928 Gaganendranath held his last major retrospective at the
Indian Society of Oriental Art. The Englishman, once again reviewing the
show, crowned him the master of modern art in Bengal.29 The Welfare
gave an indication of its awareness of Roger Fry in describing the artists
synthesis of the Bengal School and Cubism as a quest for significant form.
22
Gaganendranath Tagore,
Interior, c. 1922, watercolour
on paper.
Interestingly, the reviewer seemed uncertain about the worth of avant-garde formalism, suggesting that despite his eclectic
sources, the Bengali artist had shown
himself a great painter in the originality
and the intenseness of his vision.30 In 1930,
at 63, a cerebral stroke left the painter
paralysed and speechless. He died eight
years later.31
Around 1915, as Gaganendranath
began quietly to withdraw from his brothers nationalist preoccupations, he moved
into a poetic fairytale world drawing upon
the Bengali stage and literature. While literature nourished his imagination, unlike
the orientalists, he was not interested in
painterly historicism. It was at this juncture that he discovered Cubisms possibilities. As he later confessed to the journalist
Kanhaiyalal Vakil, the new technique is
really wonderful as a stimulant.32 The
multiple viewpoints and jagged edges of
Cubism offered him the means to create
compositions with many-faceted shapes
evoking a remote mysterious world, for
instance in his imaginary cities, such as
the mythical Dwarka, the god Krishnas legendary abode, or Swarnapuri
(The Golden City). Mountain ranges also gave him scope for the interplay
of diamond-shaped planes and prismatic colours, resulting in fragmented
luminosity. What held these zigzagging planes together was a tight formal structure. His other preoccupation was what he called the House of
Mystery, inspired by his involvement with his uncle Tagores plays staged
in their home, for which he designed the sets. His growing preoccupation
with imaginary interiors mysteriously illuminated by artificial lights hidden
from view shows this involvement with the theatre. The painter conjures
up a magic world of dazzling patterns, crisscrossing lights and shadows
and light-refracting many-faceted forms. His paintings from the 1920s
make constant references to stage props, partition screens, overlapping
planes and artificial stage lighting. Their endless corridors, pillars,
halls, half-open doors, screens, illuminated windows, staircases and vaults
remind us a little of Piranesis Carceri prints or Alain Resnais film Lanne
dernier Marienbad.
The obsession with prismatic luminosity led Gaganendranath to look
for mechanical devices for intensifying colour patterns. He is known to
have often held up a crystal against the light to capture the rainbow colours
23
Gaganendranath Tagore,
Sat Bhai Champa, 1920s,
watercolour on paper, inspired
by a popular Bengali tale for
children.
word power also suggests obvious gender connotations. Archers primitivist longing found the power, absent in Gaganendranaths painting, in
abundance in Indias tribal sculptures. In The Vertical Man, he expressed
admiration for the masculine vigour and abstract geometry of Indian
tribal art, as he did for the peasant art of medieval Britain. Primitivism
had bestowed on modernist art criticism the notion of virility as standing
for bold simplicity, as opposed to the weakness of complicated feminine
anecdotal painting.40
Archers modernism found both the high sculptures of English cathedrals and Indian temples to be less authentic than their respective examples of primitive art. Yet the English art historians preference for Indian
tribal art in comparison with Indian modernist art did not rest solely on his
allegiance to the avant-garde. Notions of virility have been a compelling
metaphor of power relations in colonial history, a metaphor derived from
anthropology and its myth of the timeless primitive tribes nestling in
British protection.41 Archers idealization of tribal sculptures as the authentic art of India highlights his ambivalence about Indian nationalism, which
he had to confront as a colonial civil servant. One of the persistent assertions of the Raj was that the nationalist movement was unrepresentative.
Hostile to the Bengal School, Archer dismissed Gaganendranaths paintings as dracin efforts that lacked the national mandate.42 There are of
course parallels between the new nationalist discourse of primitivism
and Archers idealization of tribal India. However, in contrast to the anticolonial primitivism of Mahatma Gandhi, for instance, Archers primitivism was grist to his colonialist mill. Archers final objection to
Gaganendranaths work was its failed modernism. Let us read on: His
picture, Light and Shadow . . . is made up of blacks, whites and greys and
is a simple illustration of geometric architecture. . . There is no attempt to
break the shapes into their fundamental structure or to link them into a
single cohering rhythmThe artist merely selected a scene that looked
Cubistic and set it down with academic care.43 I have already discussed
Archers conclusion that Gaganendranaths works were simply bad imitations of Picasso, and need not repeat the arguments here.
By what criteria can we judge Gaganendranath today? The artist
named his paintings Cubist, even though he was perfectly aware that he
was not seeking to reproduce Picasso. His Cubism makes sense in a global
context and against the reception of Cubism in countries other than
France. Analytical Cubism or the Braque/Picasso revolution of 190910,
the great achievement of modernism, finally laid to rest the 500-year-old
history of illusionism. Painters since Giotto had related different objects
within a picture by means of consistent, directional lighting. Cubists set
out to destroy illusionism by arranging objects within a picture formally,
and by creating conflicting relationships of light and shadow. Thereby
they restored the internal cohesion of a picture so that it was no longer a
window to the external world. The implications of its revolutionary form
26
did not affect other artists, Western and non-Western, so much as its flexible non-figurative syntax which could be put to different uses. The driving force behind the Expressionists, Franz Marc, Lyonel Feininger and
Georg Grosz, behind the visual poetry of Marc Chagall and behind the
orientalist Gaganendranath was the same: objects could be distorted and
fragmented at will to create dazzling patterns. But their specific cultural
contexts were as different as their artistic aims, not to mention their different artistic agendas. We now know that Eastern European artists created
their own versions of Cubism that did not reproduce the Braque-Picasso
experiment.44
The flexible language of Cubism, with its broken surfaces, released a
new energy in Gaganendranath, enabling him to conjure up a painterly
fairytale world. The German avant-garde critic Max Osborn, reviewing
the exhibition of modern Indian art in Berlin in 1923, singled out
Gaganendranaths Poet on the Island of the Birds as having affinities with
Feininger in its indifference to Analytical Cubisms formal implications.45
The Indian artist represents the decontextualizing tendency of our age
a tendency shared as much by artists in the centre as in the peripheries, a
tendency we come across again and again: styles past and present can be
taken out of their original contexts for entirely new modernist projects.
In short, Cubism served as a point of departure for Gaganendranath,
the particular Western device yielding a rich new crop in the Indian
context. Although its revolutionary language released a new energy in
the Bengali artist, Cubism was merely a passing phase in India. It was
primitivism that would dominate the decades of the 1920s and 30s, a story
I take up next.
27
two
Kshitindranath Majumdar,
Jamuna, c. 1915, watercolour
on paper.
In the late nineteenth century, Lal Behari Deys classic treatise on the
condition of rural Bengal had offered its readers an unvarnished tale of
a plain peasant.1 Two of the greatest Indian novelists, Sarat Chandra
Chattopadhyay (18761938) and Prem Chand (18801936), made it their
lifes mission to champion the weak, the deprived and the oppressed, who
gave all to the world but received nothing in return.2 If sympathy for the
poor was nothing new, the elite discovery of the peasant in the 1920s as the
authentic voice of the nation was altogether novel. Part of the reason for
the rise of a form of political primitivism in India was the transformation
of elite nationalism into a popular movement led by Mahatma Gandhi. It
added a new urgency to the age-old debate: was nationalism to revolve
around the city or the countryside?
As early as 1895, the leading nationalist environmentalist,
Rabindranath Tagore, had rejected the trappings of colonial urban civilization in favour of the primitive simplicity of the proverbial hermitage
set at the edge of the forest.3 In 1909 he expanded this idea in his seminal
essay, The Hermitage, describing a rural site where man and nature
joined in a mystical communion in renunciation of Western materialism.4
By 1915, the locus of the nation was clearly shifting from the historic past
to the countryside as anti-colonial environmentalism joined forces with a
new commitment to the wretched of India. Under its impact, the
Bengali historian Dinesh Chandra Sen started painstakingly documenting the oral literature of rural Bengal. This is also the era when the
nationalists came to admire the hunting and gathering communities of
India for their robust innocence uncorrupted by colonial culture. To the
Bengali elite the sexualized image of the Santal women became inextricably linked with the myth of their innocent vitality, serving as a foil to
the trope that blamed the loss of the Bengali vigour on colonial domination.5 Bengali literature celebrated the natural, healthy Santal way of living, the black lissome Santal women providing a counterpoint to the pale
cloistered ladies of urban Calcutta. An erotic undercurrent of romantic
29
31
Abanindranath Tagore,
Krishna Kills Kamsa, 1938,
tempera on paper, from the
Krishnamangal series.
sentiment, he lamented that the urban elite had lost all the aesthetic sense
that survived only in rural Bengal, though he was slightly encouraged that
the intelligentsia had at last begun to take pride in the humble peasant.13
Dutt too sought affinities between Bengali village painting and Western
modernist art.14
In the West, the very flexibility of primitivism offered endless possibilities, ranging from going native, to a radical questioning of Western positivism.21 For the avant-garde, the artistic discourse of primitivism opened
up the possibility of aesthetic globalization as part of art historical consciousness.22 For instance, the simplicity of African art was pitted against
academic naturalism by a series of artists. Even though the simplicity of
African art is a myth, since it is governed by strict aesthetic conventions, it
proved to be an effective weapon against the nineteenth-century salon.
The excitement generated by primitive art in Picasso, Matisse, Amedeo
Modigliani, Constantin Brancusi, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Karl
Schmidt-Rotluff and E. L. Kirchner, to name some of the most important,
is common knowledge. But however important, I am not concerned with
the formal or stylistic aspects of primitivism here. It is the vision of primitivism as an alternative to Western rationality promised by non-Western
thought that formed the crucial bridge between Western and Indian primitivists. Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich and other abstract painters invested in the primitive a spiritual dimension of human culture they found
absent in urban modernity. They viewed the distinction between the primitive and the modern as the difference between spiritual and material
dimensions of human existence. The Expressionists, who saw primitivism
as a universal phenomenon, sought to bring out the primitive dimension of
European culture, in their critique of rationality. One finds interesting
parallels here with Rabindranath Tagores own quest for spirituality as an
alternative to colonial materialism.23
The issue of the abstract artists precise debt to Eastern thought
remains contentious. It has not been helped by the fact that Eastern doctrines were often filtered through the often questionable tenets and practices of Theosophy. Sixten Ringbom and others have systematically documented Kandinsky and several other abstract painters debt to Eastern
thought, foregrounding the importance of Indian Upanishadic philosophy
in abstract art.24 Most recently, the distinguished art historian John
Golding has questioned this view, reiterating what he considers the essentially Western foundations of abstract art.25 Yet there is considerable evidence that Kandinskys spiritual progress from the mystical Russian faith
to Eastern philosophy, including yogic meditation, paralleled the dissolution of corporeal form in his art. Indeed, the evolution of spirituality in his
art as an integral part of his artistic makeup has recently been convincingly demonstrated.26 Fearing positivist ridicule, Kandinsky tended to be reticent about his debt to Eastern thought, unless he was assured of a sympathetic audience. However, Michael Sadler, a champion of modernist art in
Britain, who visited Kandinsky in Germany in 1912 with his son, was so
fascinated by [his] mystical outlook that they missed the last train27
Malevich was deeply moved by Swami Vivekanandas Chicago lectures.
His definition of Suprematism as objectlessness rather than abstraction is
strongly reminiscent of Vedantic notions of consciousness and the self.28
34
Mondrian admired the Bhagvad Gita and the Upanishads and treasured
the Indian mystic Krishnamurtis little book until his death.29 Theo van
Doesburg justified his non-representational art by quoting a purported
statement by the Buddha.30 These are only a few examples among many.
What the abstract artists represented here was the anxiety about the crisis
of Western materialism, from which the world, they felt, could be rescued
by the spirituality of non-representational art, a spirituality owed to nonChristian Eastern thought, mediated partly, though not entirely, through
Theosophy. The abstract painters were not unaware of the dubious aspects
of Theosophy, but for them it served as a useful entry point for Indian
thought. Their response to these non-Western ideas was not a simple one
of influence but rather a complex dialectical process that reconfigured
these new ideas in the light of their creative needs and cultural experience.
It was precisely the questioning of the teleological certainty of modernity articulated by primitivism that gave Indian artists the leverage to fashion their own identity. This was less easy with academic naturalism, the art
most unequivocally identified with the triumphalist Western empires.31
Because of the radical alternative to Western materialist rationalism proposed by Western artists such as Kandinsky, colonial artists felt an instinctive kinship with them. This questioning of Western rationality across
the world for diverse reasons prompts us to probe more deeply the global
issues of cultural crossovers in our time. The particular formal aspects of
the art of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Doesburg or Malevich had little impact
on the Indian primitivists. Their artistic priorities were very different. Yet,
as Kramrisch pointed out in the Bauhaus exhibition catalogue, the Bengali
artists saw themselves making a common cause with them as anti-naturalists against academic art, as much as they shared their questioning of
Western industrial capitalism. Kandinskys treatise, On the Spiritual in Art,
is quite telling in this respect. He speaks of the inner, spiritual-moral strivings that unite modernists and primitives, those pure artists who want to
capture the inner essence of things. The wisdom of those primitives, who
are held in condescension by the West, he explains, are now being studied
by the Theosophists. Strikingly, he declares that the crudely carved column from an Indian temple is animated by the same soul as any living,
modern work.32
Because of its protean nature, with shifting meanings and significance,
primitivism as a form of critical modernity offered rich and different possibilities to Indian artists. Rabindranaths primitivism was a playful exploration of the Unconscious. Amrita Sher-Gil projected a tragic vision of
rural India that acted as a surrogate for her divided identity. In some
respects the most complex artistic responses were the environmental primitivism at Tagores university in Santiniketan and Jamini Roys synthesis of
art and politics in an alternative vision of Indian identity. Profoundly influential in the works of early Indian modernists, primitivism assigned a new
status to marginal culture hitherto ignored in Indian national life, produc35
i
Two Pioneering Women Artists
The first two women painters in India to gain public recognition were
Sunayani Devi (18751962) and Amrita Sher-Gil (19131941), who also
happened to represent two different facets of the primitivism spectrum.
Sunayani was essentially a housewife in an affluent household whose
enlightened husband was partly responsible for her brief fame; after his
death, she lost her inspiration, entering a period of decline and lassitude.
Trained in Paris, Amrita competed with men as a professional painter,
gaining fame and notoriety in equal measure, though her early promise
was cut short by her sudden death. The two of them one a housewife
and the other a professional exemplify womens changing social position
in India as well as the predicaments of women artists of the time. Before
Sunayani, we know only of the leading painter Ravi Varmas sister,
Mangalabai Tampuratti, who reached professional standards and helped
her brother with his ambitious history paintings. Mangalabai remains
unknown apart from her one portrait of her brother.1 Women amateurs
participated in art exhibitions in Calcutta from as early as the 1880s.
The best-known early woman painter at the Bombay Art Society was an
Englishwoman, Lucy Sultan Ahmed, married to an Indian. From the late
1930s women began exhibiting at the Society in growing numbers.2 Girls
generally did not attend art schools, except those who were from Eurasian
or Parsi communities in Bombay. On the other hand, elite families hired
private tutors to teach painting to girls at home as part of their accomplishments.3 Not until the 1920s do we find girls going to art schools, the
earliest possibly at Tagores Visva Bharati university at Santiniketan.
being brought up in the womens quarters, which remained more traditional and secluded in these families, she shared these intellectual excitements
only indirectly. Her uncle, Rabindranath mentions in his autobiography
that men lived in the outer quarters while women occupied the inner ones.6
Amina Kar, a woman sculptor from the post-independence period, explains
that it was unknown and unheard of for women to do anything, even
Art, on a professional basis, and they remained very much in the background.7 The men embodied a dual consciousness, using English as a language of modern discourse for professional purposes, while keeping
Bengali as an intimate language for domesticity. Most women on the other
hand, educated at home in the vernacular, were expected to look after the
household and uphold Hindu values. Kramrisch contended that the
strength of Sunayanis nave art lay in her cultural integrity for, unlike men
who had succumbed to colonial culture, Indian women continued to perform the domestic rituals that had once played a central role in Indian life.8
Sunayani mentioned that as a child she was fascinated by the devotional pictures that hung in her aunts room, the Ravi Varma prints making the strongest impression on her.9 As a young woman, Sunayani took
art and music lessons as part of her feminine accomplishments. Spying on
her two older brothers experiments in Japanese wash techniques, she
secretly longed to pick up the brush and paint.10 However, it was not until
in her thirties that she actually summoned up the courage to take up
painting, and then only with her husbands encouragement. From 1915
onwards, she and Pratima Devi, Rabindranaths daughter-in-law, took
part in exhibitions at the Indian Society of Oriental Art run by the
Tagores.11 During her fifteen active years (between the ages of 30 to 45)
she maintained a strict painting regimen, working every day from eight
in the morning until midday, and from three until four-thirty in the afternoon. Her grandson offers us a vivid account of her work method.
Matriarch in a large well-to-do household, she was expected to oversee
its daily routine: she would sit on a taktaposh (divan), propped up with
bolsters, painting and occasionally dipping her painting in the water bowl
that had been used for washing vegetables, all the while supervising her
daughters-in-law who made preparations for the cooking.12 Her routine
suggests a remarkable degree of tolerance from her husband not often
granted to women in this period. The idyllic arrangement came to an end
with his death in 1934, when Sunayani lost all impetus to paint.13 Yet as
early as 1927 the young critic Govindaraj Venkatachalam noticed that she
no longer painted in the enthusiastic manner of her earlier years, attributing it to the pressures of family life. Sunayani ultimately failed to serve
two mistresses, art and family, especially in a society that discouraged selfexpression.14 In 1935 her loyal admirers arranged a showing of her works
at her home, which was to be her last public exposure. In the 1940s, her
family suffered a series of misfortunes, causing her deep despondency and
her departure from the world of art.15
38
42
Salon des Tuileries known all over the world as the representative exhibition of Modern Art . . . where I can, at least, be sure of receiving some
measure of impartiality, she added with considerable pique.44
The Society, the most venerable in colonial India, exacted its revenge
by excluding her work from a show several years later. In 1939 she became
convinced of the general hostility of the Indian art world: the Bombay Art
Society rejected some of the works submitted; the Fine Arts Exhibition
held in Delhi failed to make any special commendation of her work. For
her part, lacking all diplomacy, she lost a lucrative sale of her works in
Hyderabad because she ridiculed the art collectors taste for Victorian
painting. By the end of 1939, she felt demoralized by what she interpreted
as indifference to her work. Amrita wrote ruefully, Funny that I, who
can accept a present without the least pang of conscience, should not be
able to say that a bad picture is good even if it is in my interest to do so.45
Her behaviour reflects the romantic topos of artists placing themselves
above philistine criticism, even at the cost of their livelihood. It is of
course true that society was prepared to tolerate such behaviour in men,
forcing us to admire her courage when she wrote that the artist has every
right to reject or accept public estimates of her work. When the public
makes a mistake regarding a picture, it is the business of the artist by some
gesture to show that the public is un-informed and dull.46
Nonetheless she craved for recognition. Let us also not forget that
despite her pessimism, her energy and originality had begun to have an
impact in India quite early on. In fact in 1937, the Bombay Art Society,
with her champion Khandalavala on the jury, had awarded her a gold
medal for her painting Three Women. She was deeply moved because she
felt she did not have to compromise her artistic integrity to receive this
recognition. Sher-Gil held her first solo exhibition at the fashionable
Falettis Hotel in Lahore in November 1937. Charles Fabri, the
Hungarian art critic of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore,
expressed his admiration for the kind of modernism he could relate to,
modern but not ugly or incomprehensible. Another critic, Rabindranath
Deb, spoke of the masculine strength [of her work], which shows the
immense intellectual quality of the artist . . . a rare quality in [a] woman.47 The English artist and son of the composer John Foulds, Patrick
Foulds, remarked that she had been acclaimed all over India as an artist
of exceptional talents, the author of a new Indian art form more vital
more closely connected with the soil.48 R. C. Tandon, a professor at the
Allahabad University, organized an exhibition on the campus in
February 1937. He was smitten by her beauty and fascinated by her
unconventional personality, but was unsure about her cultural credentials for interpreting India. Other critics felt that her brutally realistic
works were more typical of modern French art than Indian. The public
however flocked to her show, drawn by stories of her unconventional life
and immoral subjects. Response to Sher-Gil ranged from bewilderment
49
and grudging respect for her Paris training to the deeper appreciation of
a discerning minority.49
In the action-filled seven years 193441, Sher-Gil pursued a vigorous
painting career, crossed swords with the art establishment, met prominent
Indians, including Jawaharlal Nehru, and made trips to ancient monuments to learn her heritage.50 In 1938 she paid a brief visit to Hungary to
marry her doctor cousin Victor Egan, returning to India with him to settle on the family estate in Saraya. She died on 5 December 1941 at the age
of 28, when the brief illness treated by her husband turned fatal. By the
time she died, her fame had spread all over India. Condolences poured in
from political leaders, including Gandhi and Nehru. The latter found her
50
work to show strength and perception . . . different . . . from the pastyfaced lifeless efforts that one sees so frequently in India.51 Her former
teacher at the Grande Chaumire, Pierre Vaillant, sent a photograph of a
portrait he had done of her as hommage dadmiration pour sa talent,
pour sa beaut. She died as she was preparing for her second solo exhibition at the Punjab Literary League in Lahore, which was held posthumously. The coda to Amritas story is the suicide of her grieving mother,
Marie Antoinette, a few years following her death.
suous pleasure in her own body as she did of her sister Indira in a nude
study of her.62 Sher-Gil was conscious of the effect she had on people,
especially men, not simply for her physical beauty but for her unbridled
nature. Typically, her French art teacher Pierre Vaillant, who did a portrait
of her, wrote: You must give me a chance to keep your sweet memory
alive and to be able to look on the familiar, noble features and those beautiful eyes that seem to see beyond.63
She shared with many gifted people a voracious sexual appetite as an
outlet for her abundant energy, and an amoral outlook on life, a hedonist
who believed in the healing power of pleasure. She once confessed, I am
always in love, but fortunately for me and unfortunately for the party concerned, I fall out of love or rather fall in love with someone else before any
52
damage can be done! You know the type of alcoholic who stops drinking
at the merry stage?64 This was eroticism free of commitment or procreation. She married her cousin because she needed someone to take care of
her. He knew of her affairs, but promised her freedom after marriage.
Her behaviour seems to have been an inversion of the accepted male attitude. One of the heroic myths of male artists, such as Modigliani or
Picasso, was their highly charged sex life, considered unacceptable in
women. Sher-Gil refused to suppress her instincts, though admittedly her
privileged background helped her to ignore opprobrium in India.
Strikingly, Sher-Gil accepted the subjective nature of gender identity,
disavowing the idea of socially constructed sexual desire as exclusively
masculine or feminine. Having won professional kudos, she felt no need
to identify with women, claiming that they could not paint because they
were sentimentalists who lacked passion.65 Today we may understand
Sher-Gils bisexuality as a feminist trope and an integral aspect of gender
identity. Hlne Cixous views female bisexuality as a feminist response to
phallic monosexuality, suggesting the possibility of the humankind to
expand in energy, creativity, and jouissance a word often used by her to
denote total sexual and aesthetic pleasure.66 Sher-Gil pursued women
with transparent honesty. She was attracted to the daughter of the poet
Sarojini Naidu and had an affair with Edith Lang, a Hungarian prizewinning pianist. With the Frenchwoman, Marie-Louise Chassany, she
had a more complicated relationship. Though it had strong homoerotic
overtones it was not consummated. Explaining to her mother the risks of
casual relationships with men, Amrita stated with candour: I need someone to physically meet my sexual needs because I believe that it is impossible to fully transform ones sexual desires into art . . . I thought I would
have something with a female when the opportunity arises.67
Sher-Gil successfully asserted her independence in a male world, carving out a central position in Indian modernism. She refused to let her emotional life compromise her art, a separation between life and art generally
admired in a male artist, whose profession always took precedence. Her
friend Rashid Ahmad noted that while she was not overburdened with
social taboos, the strong balancing factor was her self-discipline, indulging
in sensuality but not a slave to it.68 Sher-Gil admired Dostoyevsky precisely because she considered him a free soul who remained an artist to the
very end.69 Muggeridge often watched with fascination the animal intensity of her concentration, making her short of breath, with beads of sweat
appearing on the faint moustache on her upper lip.70 Art was a question
of life and death to her, an intense period of work usually followed by considerable exhaustion. Feminist art historians have rightly cautioned us
against using culturally charged terms such as genius, since these in effect
excluded women artists from mainstream art histories.71 And yet SherGils self-presentation successfully inverted the dominant power relations.
She never faltered in her faith in her own genius a free agent who
53
placed herself beyond the norms of ordinary behaviour. This was indeed a
modern professional woman much ahead of her time.
for instance, she now added austere shades such as red ochre to
her plain backgrounds, to pick out brightly coloured figures and
objects. From Ajanta she went down to South India, finding the
dark-skinned Tamils ideal for her vision of rural India, as in The
Brides Toilet, Market Scene and, possibly the finest of the genre,
The Brahmachari. In this group of Brahmin acolytes, she brilliantly combines Ajanta with her South Indian figures. On the
other hand, one also notices her Indian experience applied to the
Hungarian folk style of Istvn Sznyi in a Market Scene, painted
on her visit to Hungary in 1938.92
Aged twenty, on the eve of her return to India, Amrita had
a remarkable premonition that defined her entire painting
career. Her epiphany is worth quoting here:
Amrita Sher-Gil,
Young Man with Apples,
1932, oil on canvas.
Amrita Sher-Gil,
The Brahmachari, 1937,
oil on canvas.
57
what matters is how she imagined it. With her abstract idiom she creates
a distancing effect in her elegiac paintings of austere villagers. Absorbed
in their daily activities, these impassive figures give the impression of a
state of equilibrium and immobility, which is not disturbed by the gaze of
the outsider, a condition of stasis achieved by her formalist language. The
artist is the outsider here who is transfixed by this world that she knows
only vicariously. And yet her stylized, melancholy peasants haunt us precisely because they become a metaphor for her alienated self. Her nephew
Vivan Sundaram, for instance, considers her peasant faces with sad eyes
and pouting lips to be her own visage.94
On the surface, her mixed ancestry caused no undue anxiety, her
social position enabling her to move with ease in a culturally plural
India, quickly winning admirers and a dominant position in the art
world. The prescient Muggeridge however diagnosed her as a victim of
the tensions and displacements of the modern world, half European and
half Indian.95 She was the classic Kafkaesque outsider, the modern
alienated intellectual, expressing a lack of centre, her anguish not the
result of any specific unhappiness, but of an existential malaise. Her vulnerability often surfaced when faced with a hostile critic like the orientalist Asit Haldar. In private she was assailed by doubts about her
Indian-ness and her un-Indian work. But she was outraged that those
Indian artists whose escapist works helped conceal the tragic face of
India had the gall to tell her what the true interpretation of Indian
society was.96 Her modernist technique did not stem from traditional
art, she readily conceded, but it was fundamentally Indian in spirit. She
was confident that her universal language of modernism enabled her to
portray the life of the Indian poor on the plane that transcends . . . mere
sentimental interest.97
In Sher-Gils images of the melancholy countryside personal and cultural identities coalesced, her insecurities going back to her troubled
childhood, a sensitive child of an unhappy union. She was a rebel and yet
she longed for her fathers approval, and mourned the loss of his love. She
was deeply hurt when her father tried to discourage her from settling in
India, stating that she was not interested in India or its art. But he was
really worried about the family reputation.98 Umrao Singh was not
unloving but increasingly out of step with Amritas life. During her
absence, he destroyed her intimate letters partly out of distaste and partly
for fear of scandal. Amritas letter to him makes sad reading: I must
admit it was a bit if a shock to hear all my letters are being perused and
destined to the flames . . . These letters . . . were dear to me, amused me,
or were important from the artistic point of view . . . I had left them
behind not because I thought them dangerous witnesses of my evil past
but because I didnt wish to increase my already heavy luggage.99
Her jouissance and bid for freedom had a price tag attached to it.
Muggeridge accused Amrita of being emotionally frigid; she had many
58
Amrita Sher-Gil,
Young Girls, 1932,
oil on canvas.
lovers but they left no scar.100 He failed to see the deep scars left in the
painful aftermath of sexual encounters. Amrita experienced her first trauma in Paris when her fiance left her pregnant and infected. She reflected sadly after an abortion, I am like an apple, all red from outside, but
rotten inside. Amrita spoke candidly about her ambivalence towards
men: At the commencement of a love affair I usually conceive a passionate antagonism akin almost to hatred for my lovers, which serves as a
stimulant in a way, and also enables me to bring my love affairs to a rapid
and painless termination.101 Amritas most moving subjects were
women. I would take two works here, an early and a late work, both nonIndian, which show her deep understanding of women.102 At 21, she
painted Young Girls, a study of relaxed intimacy between two women, one
of them sitting with one breast bared, a masterly study in objectivity. A
more sexually charged late painting seems to be in the nature of a statement. Painted in Hungary in 1938 in a flat stylized manner, Two Girls was
one of Amritas largest works. A nude young white woman, with piercing blue eyes, stands in a provocative pose next to a demure black woman
lightly touching her, who modestly covers parts of her naked body. We
are tempted to read in this an allegory of the fragmented self, Hungarian
and Indian. There is a strikingly similar painting by Frida Kahlo dated
1939, The Two Fridas, one European and the other Indian, as her two
selves.103
At the age of twelve, Amrita had a premonition about womens tragic destiny. The poor little Indian bride, she wrote in her diary, sat forlorn
in a corner surrounded by ladies in gorgeous
finery, with an expression of weariness in her
liquid dark eyes as if she guessed the cruel fate
awaiting her.104 Years later, she painted the
poignant Child Wife, as if remembering this
episode. The Professional Model is a study of an
aging life model with sagging breasts and
sunken eyes, a picture of misery. It was exhibited at the Salon du Cercle International
Feminin in 1933. On seeing it, the Parisian
critic Denise Proutaux asked in astonishment:
where did this young girl learn to see life with
such pitiless eyes and without any illusions?105
The Bengali journalist, Ela Sen, mentioned
that many in India found her subjects ugly, but
that her conception of beauty was different to
that of the ordinary person.106 When Sher-Gil
was berated for her obsession with the ugly, she
replied that she found sad and ugly models
beautiful, confessing that an inner trait in her
nature drew her to things that were sad rather
59
Amrita Sher-Gil,
Two Girls, 1939,
oil on canvas.
Amrita Sher-Gil,
The Professional Model,
1933, oil on canvas.
hours in bored silence as she sank deeper and deeper into depression,
being unable to break down the barrier. A few months before her death,
on the verge of a breakdown, she uttered a forlorn cri de coeur: I passed
through a nervous crisis and am still far from being over it . . . Feeling
impotent, dissatisfied, irritable, and not even able to weep.110 Sher-Gils
romanticism could easily have descended into mawkish sentimentality
without the discipline of her formalist idiom. What ultimately conferred
a redemptive value to her work was her ability to transmute this sense of
alienation and loss into something permanent and universal, creating
grandeur out of unhappiness.
One detects a third and final style that marked a striking new departure left undeveloped at her death.111 The tensions in her art between
avant-garde formalism and the value of emotions, the essential modernist polarities, have exercised critics ranging from G. Venkatachalam
and the novelist Mulk Raj Anand to W. G. Archer, who were also deeply
influenced by the Bloomsbury group.112 Archer went so far as to claim
that the obsession with abstract colour and the abandonment of human
sympathy in her last paintings caused her art to dry up.113 Today we may
dismiss this artificial dichotomy between formal clarity and emotional
value, the preoccupation of the heroic age of modernism. Nonetheless,
her modernist sensibilities were dismayed by the emotional intensity of
her paintings. She feared that the pathos evoked in her Mother India
compromised her artistic integrity.114 If this was the exuberance of a gifted young artist, in her final years, she gradually shed this anatomy of
melancholy for a detached primitivism, observing village India from an
Archimedean vantage point, but no less moving for that. In her penultimate year, she informed Khandalavala that she had outgrown her sentimental period, developing an ironic detachment worthy of Mughal
artists.115 This observation gives us a clue as to her new colourism, seen
as early as 1938 in Ganesh Puja, the bright red clay elephant in the foreground dominating the flat landscape. Copying the motifs, figures and
manners of Mughal and Pahari miniatures helped her eliminate
chiaroscuro. Her discovery of the hot deep colours acid green, lemon
yellow, vermilion red and cobalt blue of Basohli painters enabled her
to build up masses and planes simply with pigments.116 Gradually, she
eliminated outlines to concentrate on pure colour values and simple
masses. In her final rural idylls, she slowly reintroduced depth and the
natural environment, abandoning her shallow neutral background.
Among these, the Haldi Grinder (1940) is a singular study of pure bright
pigments that literally jump out of the dull grey-green landscape.
Strikingly, these works also brought out her affinities with the visionary
Hungarian primitivist K. T. Csontvry, whose spiky geometrical tree
trunks and acid colours remind us strongly of Sher-Gil.117
For Archer these late formalist works were devoid of human emotions
and social commitment. Amrita or, for that matter, other Indian primi63
tivists were not social realists but visionaries of an authentic India filtered
through their particular experience. These last works had not compromised her empathy for the rural poor, nor reneged on her monumental
vision of authentic India. But by now she could stand apart and observe
the distant village through a colourist lens. She applied her new discovery
to elegiac images of rural women closeted together in states of intimacy
and ennui that she had encountered in Rajput and Pahari painting.118
This was no longer the bleak Indian winter of her first encounter, but an
autumnal India seen through the detached eye of radical modernism.
ii
Photograph of Rabindranath
Tagore, c. 1913.
Rabindranath Tagore (18611941) was Indias greatest poet and the first
non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. Probably the
best-known world figure in the inter-bellum years, he counted Albert
Einstein, Wilfred Owen, Andr Gide and Charlie Chaplin among his
numerous admirers. He was among the luminaries that graced the
Sapphic painter and hedonist Natalie Barneys legendary salon. His
poems inspired Leos Jancek, Alexander von Zemlinsky and a host of
other European composers.1 An avowed cosmopolitan, he undertook
twelve world tours, challenging in the process colonial representations
of India as an inferior subject nation. The enthusiastic reception in the
West not only of his writings but also of his painting underscores yet
again the emerging transnational discourse of global modernity. Tagore,
who took up painting late in life, had a powerful impact on Indian modernism, but he was also an influential educationist and founder of a
holistic experimental university in Bengal. Tagores primitivism took
two forms, private and public: in his painting, Tagore used primitive art
to explore his unconscious, but in the public sphere, much like Gandhi,
Tagore laid claim to a primitivist anti-colonial resistance located in the
countryside.
Rabindranath Tagore,
Architecture, Berlin, 1930,
coloured ink and wash on
paper.
After the judgement of Paris, Tagores works were exhibited in various British cities, but they were cold-shouldered by English critics offended at the poets denunciation of the infamous Amritsar massacre. An
exception was the artist Joseph Southall in Birmingham, a Socialist Pacifist
and a leading figure in the English Tempera Revival. In his introduction
to the exhibition, he described Tagores lack of conventional art training as
67
that his views carried weight in world opinion.17 In North America, the
works were shown in Toronto, New York and Philadelphia. For the New
York show, Ananda Coomaraswamy, art historian and curator of the
Asian Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, wrote admiringly
of his paintings as examples of modern primitive art, untouched by his
self-conscious literary output.18 A few dissenting voices in the West
included his erstwhile friend, Romain Rolland. The novelist was shocked
that Tagore could indulge his private passion and be carried away by
Western adulation. One wonders about his egoism when all the Indian
leaders are in prison and India suffers its heroic passion, he confided in
his diary.19
Tagores succs destime in 1930 certainly owed much to the mystery,
vitality and nervous energy displayed in his paintings. The most obvious
reaction among reviewers was to find the mystic Orient in them.20 The
more discerning, however, appreciated the imagination and originality of
the watercolours and their experimental quality that drew upon the
Unconscious. They underlined their affinities with global primitivism, commenting on their difference with the pantheistic naturalism of his poems.
The Vossiche Zeitung drew parallels between Tagores manner of piercing
through outer reality and that of modern European artists, particularly
Munch and Nolde, as well as his free play in the manner of Klee, finding
affinities between Indian abstractions and modern European ones.21
Rabindranath Tagore,
Page from Purabi ms., 1920s,
pen and ink.
passage suggests. We can think of parallels with artists such as Klee, who
sought to learn from their own childhood drawings. The late nineteenth
century had discovered the autonomous world of children and the value
of their creativity unhampered by traditional pedagogy. Tagore introduced this free creative atmosphere at Santiniketan and visited the pioneering educationist Franz Cizeks free drawing class for children in
Vienna in 1921.41
74
lences and its fractured consciousness. In India ambiguity and suggestiveness as artistic devices were absent in academic art or the nationalist
allegories of the Bengal School. More to the point, modernist issues of
alienation and displacement had not formed part of Tagores mimetic
literary corpus. His mystical lyricism, expressed in a mellifluous language,
was governed by a strict decorum originating in Victorian evangelism.
From the late 1920s, with age, failing health, disappointments and a sense
of loss, he began to question these very same aesthetic standards. By the
1930s, Tagore, like Marcel Proust in France, had been turned into a
national monument in India. Bishnu Dey and Sudhindranath Datta, the
younger generation of modernist poets in Bengal, who preferred the fragmentation and discontinuities of modern life to his Olympian prose and
emotionally charged poetry, quietly ignored him. A letter dated 1928
already hints at his loss of poetic inspiration, when lines began to cast a
spell on him.54 Tagore felt liberated from the high canon of good taste,
over which he had presided for many years in Bengal, producing some two
thousand paintings (c.192841).
For a poet known for his exaltation of beauty, truth and goodness,
Tagores pictorial nightmares unequivocally repudiated the conventionally beautiful; the images that plumbed the dark depths were primal and
transgressive. In 1927 he felt the need for reassurance from the European
modernists, as he did from Roy, that they too deliberately expunged the
Good and the Beautiful from their art.55 Wendy Steiner has spoken of the
troubled relationship between modernism and beauty.56 One of the most
tantalizingly ambiguous motifs in Tagore is the primitive mask. Masks,
after all, are meant to conceal ones identity we are thus left with some
76
language. He came to the conclusion that painting transcended the limitations of language, a reflection of his growing pessimism about the survival
of his poetry. The conventions that governed language, he argued, inhibited
their cross-cultural understanding.66 On 24 June 1926, Tagore and Romain
Rolland met in Villeneuve to exchange ideas about the universality of art
and music. Ironically, the discussion, conducted through interpreters, posed
the very difficulties of translating from one culture to another that Tagore
had raised; they failed to appreciate each others musical taste at all.67
For us today, it is perhaps difficult to share Rabindranath Tagores
optimism about the universality of art, an optimism common to his generation. It is true that a foreign language can be totally incomprehensible,
whilst the subject of foreign art can at least be recognized in most cases.
But recognition is not the same as appreciation. The optimism of Tagores
generation sprang from their faith in the objectivity of knowledge. An
instance of this is nineteenth-century art criticism, which failed to recognize that artistic language differed because art was concerned not so much
with the objective world as with its representations.
After the wide exposure of his paintings in the West in the year 1930,
there were a few more local shows during his lifetime. Under the shadow
of war and depression, global enthusiasm for Tagore imploded as abruptly as it had exploded in the interwar years. With his European triumphs
fading, Tagore increasingly turned inward in his last years, for the first
time enjoying painting for its own sake.68 In the aftermath of World War
II and the Holocaust, Tagores paeans to universal brotherhood became
discredited. But today as the clash of civilizations and identity politics
dominate our global society, Tagores universalism and his scepticism
about nationalism do not seem out of place. His artistic language and
skills were limited, but within those limitations he created a very personal
form of modernism with the power to disturb and astonish.69
student a personal instructor, aiming to revive the pre-colonial apprenticeship under a master.79
While respecting spontaneity, Nandalal nonetheless expected the student to harness his creativity to discipline. Although he had been part of
the nationalist rebellion against academic art, Nandalal retained a respect
for basic colonial art school training, especially geometry as a foundation of
drawing. Conscious of the need for an underlying formal structure in a
painting, he was never comfortable with the hazy wash technique of
Abanindranath. His departure from Calcutta completed the ideological
rift with his teacher, although he continued to profess respect for him in
public.80 At Santiniketan, he helped wean students away from the morotai
wash technique of oriental art towards the impasto effect of tempera.81
Nandalals curriculum was quite eclectic; he was prepared to accept
even colonial art teaching, including scientific anatomy, which had been
anathema to the orientalists, if it helped artistic progress. However, as a concession to them, he devised schematic stick figures to work out naturalist
poses rather than using nude models, at the same time introducing vigorous life studies of animals.82 By the 1930s, however, Nandalal was forced to
introduce a more conventional curriculum, including Renaissance art, after
his failure to ensure competent levels of art training. Students were also
encouraged to draw the scantily clad Santal women at work in order to
understand the body in movement. Yet Nandalals criticism of Western
arts lurches from trompe loeil to abstraction, and his preference for the
more balanced object-centred approach of oriental art, suggests his
attempts at a synthesis of East and West.83 For instance, his view of representation, not a mimetic reproduction of nature but a communion with its
myriad forms, encouraging creativity and a respect for the environment,
clearly recalls East Asian art.84 This is evident in his numerous sketchbooks
filled with quick brush drawings of local flora, fauna and the seasons that
served as mental notes for teaching.85 Indeed, we notice the central importance of Okakura Kakuzos art theories, which he had imbibed as a student,
in Nandalals curriculum. The Japanese ideologue had developed his PanAsian artistic principles in collaboration with the Tagores around 1905,
evolving three cardinal principles, nature, tradition and creativity, as a
selective response to Westernization.86 In the final analysis, however, strong
decorative lines and a unified formal structure in art remained the core of
Nandalals teaching.87
Nandalals growing openness to Western art, shunned by the orientalists, can be partly explained by his symbiotic relationship with Tagore
and his friendship with the small international contingent at the university, the political activist Charles Freer Andrews, the Orientalist Sylvain
Lvi, the art historian Stella Kramrisch, the artist Andre Karpels and
the urban theorist Patrick Geddes. Among these, Kramrischs presence
was decisive in introducing Western art history at Santiniketan. These
various influences laid the foundations of modernism at Santiniketan,
80
Nandalal considered himself a spiritual disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, taking up the spinning wheel as a tribute to the Non-Cooperation movement.
His linotype of Gandhis celebrated salt march to Dandi in 1930, depicting
the father of the nation in his heroic determination, remains a classic in its
austere blend of economy and expressiveness.89 Gandhis vision of a higher
moral purpose of art was to bring him and Nandalal together in the 1930s.
Initially Gandhi held the hallowed view of the spirituality of Indian art,
which had been part of the nationalist discourse since the late nineteenth
century.90 His ideas about art began to change in response to his own evolving doctrine of moral force as an instrument of change. In 1924, he told an
interviewer that he had no sympathy for what was currently regarded as
art.91 In 1927 Gandhi made clear in Young India his Tolstoyan view of art:
Who can deny that much that passes for science and art today . . . panders
to our basest passion?92 His insistence from 1928 onwards that real art
was concerned with the beauty of moral acts reflected his objective of utilizing art to build the nations
moral character.93
Nandalal was particularly moved by Gandhis
respect for the common man, not to mention his
efforts to confer human dignity on the Untouchables.
His interventionist form of artistic nationalism shows
uneasy attempts to bridge the gap between the two
opposing poles of nationalism represented by Tagore
and Gandhi respectively: while agreeing with
Gandhis critique of Western materialism, Tagore
did not share the Mahatmas brand of active politics.
Gandhi for his part was unhappy with Tagores laissez faire attitude to caste inequities at Santiniketan.94
Nandalal urged students to be aware of both the
wider community and the environment, an idea that
owed as much to Gandhis respect for the common
people as to Tagores environmentalism.95 His concern for the disadvantaged led him to give simple art
lessons to housewives and to incorporate womens
domestic art, such as alpona, in the Kala Bhavan
curriculum.96 Nandalal also took a personal interest
in training women students in decorative art. This
would, he convinced himself, arouse an aesthetic
sense in women who in their turn would influence
their families.97 Under the graphic artist Andre
81
Karpels and the fresco painter Pratima Devi, students learned not only the
fine arts of oils, frescoes and woodcut, but also decorative arts, such as book
binding, lithography, lacquerwork, leatherwork and batik, as well as
womens art, namely, alpona, embroidery and stitchwork.98 Nandalal introduced rustic costumes for plays staged at the university to raise awareness
about the culture of the rural poor.99 Likewise, his interest in folk art
stemmed from his Gandhian respect for the humble artisan, rather than
any intrinsic interest in its formal qualities. Although he had dabbled
briefly in Kalighat pat during its vogue in Calcutta about 1915, he did not
seek inspiration from it in his own work. Believing originality and progress
to be the driving force of art both colonial legacies he did not wish to
return to folk art, nor did he admire its alleged modernist simplicity.
Indeed, in 1932, he dismissed Gurasaday Dutts romanticization of folk art
as entirely artificial. He described the patuas as backward, saying their
conventional work could only improve with scientific art education.100
On his visit to Santiniketan in 1922, Gandhi came to know of
Nandalals role in the rural reconstruction programme at the university.
Nandalal was in the crowd that greeted Gandhi but was too shy to
approach him. A convergence of interests eventually brought them
together. The power base of Gandhis political revolution, we know, was
rural India. The Mahatma constantly reminded his compatriots that true
India resided in Indias countless villages. Yet Gandhi was acutely conscious that many of the Congress leaders were from the cities, and hence
had only vague notions about indigenous art. In 1935, he set to redress this
by helping to form the Village Industries Association in order to revive
the indigenous arts and crafts. In 1936, an ambitious Exhibition of Khadi
and Village Industries was held during the annual Congress conference in
Lucknow.101 In 1938, in his speech to the Khadi and Village Industries
Exhibition held during the Congress conference at Haripura, he
expressed the hope that these exhibitions would be a training school . . .
and not a place of entertainment.102
In view of Gandhis ambitious plans for art, it is not at all surprising
that in 1936 he turned to Nandalal, asking him to organize the exhibition
of Indian art for the Lucknow Congress.103 In his speech at the exhibition,
Gandhi paid a handsome tribute to Nandalals efforts in bringing to life the
local villagers crafts through simple artistic symbols.104 Nandalal felt overwhelmed that the Mahatma spent time at the exhibition taking a personal
interest in the works of the artists. In 1937, for the Congress session at rural
Faizpur, Gandhi entrusted him with the ambitious task of designing a
whole township with cheap local materials such as mud, bamboo and straw,
to house the numerous delegates attending from all over India. For the
Mahatma the township became an object lesson in rural self-reliance
through art.105 From this time, Nandalal enjoyed Gandhis affection and
became his confidant in artistic matters.106 In 1937 Gandhi intervened with
the industrialist G. D. Birla to provide a subvention for the Kala Bhavan,
82
which he affectionately called Nanda Babus art school.107 (Babu is an honorific address, like Mr, used to address the Bengali Bhadralok or elite.)
Nandalals posters (wall panels) for the Haripura Congress, produced
at Gandhis behest, gave him the greatest personal satisfaction and
brought him nationwide attention. This time Gandhi set him the task of
organizing the exhibition displays in such a way that the local villagers
could gaze at them as they went about their daily business.108 Gandhis
encouragement to artists to reach the ordinary villagers became a
Congress ideal from now on. As a preparation for the Haripura Congress,
Nandalal made pen-and-ink and brush studies of the local villagers to
lend the posters a touch of authenticity. The same idea of creating a village ambience was behind the treatment of these posters, done in thick
tempera in a bold cursory style and broad brushwork reminiscent of the
patuas or scroll painters. If he considered folk art to be unworthy of
emulation, why had he changed his mind? In this case, he clearly wished
to make a political statement. The folk style of these panels was seen as
appropriate for representing rural life and labour cobblers, carpenters,
drummers, barbers and nursing mothers. Indo-Islamic scalloped arches
framing the figures underlined the shared Hindu-Muslim heritage to
counter communal tensions.109 Preparing the 400 posters was an ambitious undertaking, involving the whole Kala Bhavan; Nandalal produced
81 of them.110 The strong sense of formal design in these panels suggests
his apprenticeship at Ajanta rather than the amorphous wash technique
of oriental art.111 His student and close associate Benodebehari compared
these posters with murals because of their bold colour scheme and their
blend of nature and convention.112 Gandhi exhorted the delegates at
Haripura to study the exhibition carefully to learn about the moral purpose of art with a warm acknowledgement of Nandalals contribution.113
The Mahatma profoundly affected Nandalals thinking about the
moral purpose of art. Nandalal began to use simple affordable material
for buildings, frescoes and sculptures at Santiniketan, a building practice
that Gandhi wanted to introduce at his ashram commune at Wardah.114
However, after Haripura, Nandalal withdrew from participating in
Congress sessions as he was a little disappointed with Gandhis treatment
of Subhas Bose, his other hero, though he never wavered in his devotion
to the Mahatma.115 As the next incident demonstrates, nor did Gandhi
ever lose respect for the artist. When Puri in the province of Orissa was
chosen as the venue for a Congress session, the delegates persuaded
Gandhi that the erotic temple sculptures in the vicinity should be plastered over before the conference. In line with his practical morality, he
had little sympathy for these ancient sculptures and accordingly consented to the plan. In fairness to Gandhi, he changed his mind after Nandalals
intervention. He trusted the artists integrity sufficiently to accept the
aesthetic defence of the sculptures.116
83
Barman, who won the competition to paint the murals at India House in
London. He was one of the four that decorated India House but he was
not the most influential artist at Santiniketan.) As with his other endeavours, Nandalal saw the need to make a truly independent cultural assertion that owed little to the colonial regime. The rise of an alternative
mural movement at the Kala Bhavan with the aim of creating a convincing indigenous expression was also in accord with Tagores environmental nationalism. Engrossed in developing a new artistic expression
through murals, trying out wet and dry processes from East and West,
and seeking to make the murals blend with the surroundings as an integral part of the environment, Nandalal and his pupils seem to have quietly ignored the battle of styles in distant Bombay and Calcutta.117 The
Santiniketan murals have been documented in considerable detail by
scholars.118 Hence I shall not be concerned so much with their stylistic
and iconographic analysis as with the political and cultural implications
of this movement and its impact on national self-imagining. One of the
major contributions of Nandalals pupils was to create an open air mural
tradition, as an integral part of architecture, to be accessible to the whole
community even at the risk of their rapid deterioration. Santiniketan also
led in concentrating on everyday subjects and landscapes for murals in
preference to national allegories.
The murals were collaborative experiments between teachers and
students with Nandalal at the helm, which was in keeping with his pedagogic vision. There were important learning stages in Nandalals mural
experiments, each new experience enhancing his own skills at the same
time as they fed into his art teaching. Nandalals first encounter with
mural painting went back to his student days with E. B. Havell, who had
initiated mural experiments at the Calcutta art school. However, for the
aspiring nationalist, there was no greater model than the ancient Buddhist
murals at Ajanta. Sister Nivedita, Vivekanandas Irish disciple and mentor of the nationalist Bengal School of painting, had urged them to decorate modern temples to the nation with inspiring murals. In 1909, she
arranged for them to help the muralist Christiana Herringham with her
work at Ajanta. Lady Herringham, who along with Joseph Southall was
the leader of the Tempera Revival in England, had come to study these
ancient murals in India. Nandalal was the only one among
Abanindranaths students to have been profoundly affected by the experience, helping him to break out of the hazy brushwork of oriental art
towards clearly modelled hard-edged figures and complex compositions
reminiscent of these ancient paintings.119
Nandalals initial aim of undertaking monumental painting met with
institutional indifference.120 An exception was Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose
(18591937), who commissioned him to decorate his home and the Bose
Institute (Basu Vijnan Mandir) in 1917. The great scientist had done much
to help overcome Western stereotypes about the mystical Indian mind
85
mistakes. In 1922 Patrick Geddes, the British urban planner and biographer of Jagadish Bose, visited Santiniketan. He advised them to use charcoal as a durable medium for the foundational drawing and suggested
that they decorate the exteriors of buildings with paintings in order to
make them an integral part of the environment. Decoration as an essential part of architecture had a distant resonance with William Morris, but
it also appealed to Nandalals own ideal of making painting matter in
everyday life.129
Having gained experience in egg tempera, Nandalal turned in 1927
to indigenous fresco techniques. At his request, Sailendranath Dey,
Principal of Jaipur School of Art and one of his old friends from the art
school days, despatched a traditional Rajasthani painter, Narsinglal
Mistri, to Santiniketan. As a Gandhian, Nandalal admonished his students not to treat the humble artisan with condescension.130 The
Rajasthani stayed in Santiniketan until 1933, completing a 24 m2 mural
on the front wall of the library with the collaboration of Nandalal and his
students. This marked the next stage in Nandalals development. He correctly surmised that the bright flat colours and bold lines of Jaipur painting were better at achieving the two-dimensional effect he was aiming for
than the chiaroscuro and three-dimensionality of Ajanta or Bagh.131
87
Nandalal also explored Nepalese wall painting and village wall decorations, consulted ancient treatises such as the Shilparatnam, and followed
the practices of local craftsmen.132 The artist summed up the heterogeneous sources of the mural tradition in Santiniketan: Patas of Jagannath,
illuminated manuscripts, Tibetan thang-ka, Rajasthani miniatures, chao
technique, chikan (embroidery) work, Chinese and Japanese paintings on
silk, Sinhalese frescoes, Jaipur arayaesh, our Bengali ponkha work and
Italian frescoes.133
Nandalals achievement was to assimilate the diverse techniques he
had experimented with in a unified expression, in 1930 completing his first
ambitious mural in Sriniketan, the agricultural science building, based on
the Italian wet fresco technique. In this multiple-figure composition, a
lively observation of nature was firmly controlled by a fine sense of
design.134 The subject was Halakarshan (ploughing), a ceremony with
which Tagore inaugurated seasonal cultivation every year by ritually turning up the earth with a plough. Vriksha Ropan (tree planting) and
Halakarshan were the two fertility rituals introduced in 1928 as part of the
poets concern for the environment. In these two works Nandalal replaced
historic murals with everyday activities, such as cultivation and other
forms of seasonal work, making the Santals the central figures in his compositions. The originality of Nandalals mural experiments lay in their
non-illusionist monumental style, which depended for their effect on the
88
formal arrangement of lines and colours. The mundane genre scenes and
the landscape backgrounds greatly contributed to their effectiveness.
Nandalals more impressive murals were produced between 1938 and
1945 quite independently of the nationalist debates that had raged for
decades over murals in the New Delhi Secretariat and India House in
London. In 1938, in keeping with Maharaja Sayaji Raos tradition of supporting national culture, the Gaekwad family invited him to decorate the
ancestral memorial, Kirti Mandir (Temple of Glory), in their capital,
Baroda.135 For these murals Nandalal went back to historicism as he felt
the commission demanded subjects more majestic than genre scenes. He
made a preliminary visit to Baroda on his way back from the Congress
session at Faizpur in 1938, revisiting the state in October 1939, and eventually undertaking seven visits to Baroda to complete the project.136 His
foremost pupil and colleague Benodebehari has left us an account of his
work method. Nandalal had originally planned the whole work as an
interplay of black and white to complement the predominantly white
walls, relieving the monotony with brightly coloured wall insets. This
however proved to be unattainable. The actual production was shared
with his students, the master producing the outline drawing, to be filled
in with colours by student assistants. However, in order to impose an
overall structural unity, Nandalal made the finishing touches himself.137
The overall inspiration for the four large egg tempera panels was the
Buddhist Stupa.138 However Nandalals narrative sources ranged from
the epics and mythology to historic figures. In 1939, he completed the
89
91
Benodebehari
Mukhopadhyaya, Travellers,
1947, watercolour.
Benodebehari
Mukhopadhyaya, Saints, 1947,
fresco buono, Hindi Bhavan,
south central portion.
93
forms and blank spaces (pictorial objects and the field in a painting) that
he tried to set up were not easily achieved with proportions based on
three-dimensional volumes or masses.147 Tragically, Benodebehari lost his
sight after a botched operation but continued to paint, his bravery and his
experiments providing inspiration to future generations.148
One of Nandalals major contributions to the Kala Bhavan was to
translate Tagores anti-colonial environmentalism into art practice.
Brought up in the city of Calcutta, his move to the rural university opened
his eyes to the beauties of nature, a love he sought to inculcate in his
pupils.149 However nothing epitomized the nationalist commitment to
the environment more strikingly at Santiniketan than the romantic image
of the Santals as the innocent children of nature. Nandalals attachment to
the Santals, living in close proximity to the campus, was part of nationalist mythologizing.150 These simple people, he was convinced, had
retained the humanity that had been lost with colonial rule. Castigating
the use of cheap foreign prints with which the elite decorated their homes,
he argued that despite their material poverty the Santals had retained an
innate aesthetic sense.151 He constantly sketched them, painting their festivals, dances and other activities in which they were presented as living
in harmony with nature. Among these, we may take the series representing the three stages in a Santal womans life: the youthful maiden with her
supple graceful strength; the woman with her lost youth working in the
field; finally the lonely hag gathering fruits in the forest.152 With his students, Benodebehari completed sixteen ambitious panels on Santal life in
the Santoshalaya Building in 1925.153
In the final analysis, the artist most closely associated with the image
of the Santals was the modernist sculptor Ramkinkar Baij. Of humble
origins, Ramkinkar (19061980) began under Nandalal in the 1920s,
initially as a painter; on discovering his unusual modelling talents
Nandalal transferred him to the sculpture class. From the outset,
Ramkinkar showed a keen interest in the European avant-garde, an
interest actively fostered by Nandalal, despite his own suspicions about
modernist painting.154 Ramkinkar took lessons from visiting sculptors,
while Kramrisch opened up the world of Western modernism to him.155
The leading sculptor, Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury, who taught for a
while in Santiniketan, recommended Edouard Lanteris Modelling: A
94
Ramkinkar Baij,
Bust of Rabindranath,
1938, cast cement.
Guide for Teachers and Students to him. The French sculptor was known
for his vigorous sculptures of labouring people.156 Ramkinkar had further
instructions from the Austrian Lisa von Pott and the Englishwoman
Margaret Milward. Tagore, who had sat for Milward for his bust, offered
her a teaching assignment at Santiniketan. A pupil of Emile-Antoine
Bourdelle, she presented a sculptural piece by him to the university during her brief sojourn there.157
Lanteris peasants and Bourdelles dramatic lyricism and, above all,
their rough broken surfaces appealed to Ramkinkar. However, it was
95
came from a humble family, used to seeing labouring people. Their simple
easy life, mode of working, their movement these were my subjects.
Santals in Santiniketan especially influenced me. Both Santal men and
women work cheerfully and break into a song and dance at any pretext.
Their needs are few but they have an infinite capacity for happiness and
for giving pleasure to others. I have tried to capture moments from their
dynamic life in my painting and sculpture.165 The Santal Family is static
in its monumental grandeur, whereas his other well-known sculpture, The
Mill Call, is an ebullient portrayal of two Santal women running against a
gale force wind. One with a pot on her head looks ahead, while the other
looks back, the rough texture echoing the dynamism and elemental lifeforce of the subject. Ramkinkar admired the rhythm and light gait of the
Santals, their healthy labouring bodies, their happy temperament, their
simplicity, strength and vitality.166 With Ramkinkar the myth of the
happy, innocent Santals attained its apotheosis.
98
iii
Jamini Roy and Art for the Community
the fashioning of a folk artist
Jamini Roy was most impressive in personality and looks; his head had
some of the massive beauty of Picassos though his deep eyes were gentler
and more withdrawn, wrote Maie Casey admiringly about the artist.1
Roys long artistic life spanned almost the entire era of Indian anti-colonial struggle, spilling over into independent India (18871972). He displayed a restless desire to explore dazzling pastiches of styles, Eastern and
Western. As a critic once commented on one of his exhibitions, it showed
his characteristic catholicity, a copy of Van Goghs self-portrait, another
la manire Czanne, a lady in a Chinese manner, and a free rendering of
Ajanta. However, it is not this virtuosity but his compelling modernist
vision of folk art that made him a memorable artist of the late colonial era.
Maie Casey correctly sensed Roys influence on the primitivist Amrita
Sher-Gil, if not directly by his art then by his philosophy, which drew its
strength from life and not from the past.2 Jamini Roy has been called the
father of the folk renaissance in India who created an alternative vision of
modern Indian identity.3 While Roy acknowledged his debt to the nave
painter Sunayani Devi, he achieved his radical simplifications through a
slow, deliberate and systematic process.4 With him we return to competing ideas of nationhood in modern societies, to the debate among the
intelligentsia should the nation centre on the urban metropolis or the
countryside? We know that from the 1920s the definition of nationhood
had started shifting from the Pan-Indian to the local, which inspired a
whole generation of artists and writers. It is in Jamini Roys art however
that we find the most radical expression of local identity in opposition to
the Pan-Indian historicism of the Bengal School.
Through the folk idiom, Roy sought to restore the collective function of
art and thereby disavow artistic individualism and what Walter Benjamin
calls the aura of a work of art, the hallmarks of colonial art. In the process,
he radically recast indigenism, the nationalist paradigm.5 Roys primitivism
however went beyond indigenism in an increasingly global era. Roy displayed what I call structural affinities with the avant-garde in the West who
engaged in challenging the teleological certainty of modernity though they
arrived at their respective critiques of modernity through different routes.
Western primitivists sought to restore the values of the pre-industrial community in the life of the alienated modern individual, while Roy used the
notion of the village community as a weapon of resistance to colonial rule.
Their response to the forces of global modernity was part of the transnational dialogue in the virtual cosmopolis that I described in my introduction.6
100
104
panels. Roys juxtaposition of his own paintings with pats became one of the
key tenets of his primitivist ideology.12
In 1931, Roy was ready to share his artistic ideology with the public.
The exhibition, inaugurated by Stella Kramrisch at his modest residence
in North Calcutta, was no less than a political manifesto. Shanta Devi,
daughter of the nationalist journalist Ramananda Chatterjee, remarks on
Roys transformation of the exhibition space into a traditional Bengali
105
106
107
of Reverend and Mrs Milford, Harold Acton, Maie Casey and Anthony
Penny. In the catalogue Irwin expressed confidence that Roy had solved
the problem of authenticity in his work, achieving a synthesis of modernism and Indian art.46 The reviews in London were ambivalent about
Roys achievements. Iris Conlay spoke of the fascinating Christian paintings by a Hindu painter from Calcutta. She added, Do not be put off by
his slit-eyed faces and his stiff figures . . . there were not only an intellect
and technical skill behind these apparently expressionless formalities, but
also a deep sympathy with, and understanding of humanity.47 Pierre
Jeannerat in his article, Indias Greatest Painter, in the Daily Mail made
a more condescending assessment: I will not say that Roy takes rank
among the great artists of our era; he seems too responsive to mere manual dexterity and repeats ad nauseam facile formulae [but] nationalism in
art normally bears fine fruit, whatever the effects in politics.48 In 1953, in
the US, the Herald Tribune, while acknowledging his considerable repu111
tation, found his work lacking Matisses spontaneity and Gauguins emotional depth, though it did have a charming ingenuousness.49 In 1956, the
catalogue to the major exhibition of Steuben glass, Asian Artists in
Crystal, held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, dc, described
Roy as an internationally renowned master who was a modest, rather
retiring medieval craftsman in private life.50 The year after, the
Smithsonian Institution Travelling Exhibition Service showed Roy at various places, including the Columbus Museum of Arts and Crafts in
Columbus, Ohio. Roy was one of the artists chosen to design unicef
Christmas cards. One of Roys admirers was the celebrated French
Mauritian painter, Herv Masson, who considered him to be among the
great contemporary masters. In 1971, his paintings curated by Roy Craven
were exhibited at the University of Florida Art Gallery to popular acclaim
as part of the cult for things Oriental. In 1954, when Peggy Guggenheim
visited India, she met Roy. She was impressed with his simplicity despite
the fact that he had been shown in London and New York. She noted his
disapproval of three-dimensional painting, finding his primitive painting similar to the work of the Romanian Surrealist painter Victor
Brauner. Considering him to be the only worthwhile modernist in India,
she bought his painting of a scene from the Ramayana for the nominal
sum of Rs 75.51
religious mythology remained.72 Roy seems to imply here that the crisis of
Western modernism was not only a crisis of industrial capitalism but also
a crisis of conscience. Losing its myth-enriched folk-tradition, the West
was forced to resort to primitive art for inspiration.
Perhaps Roy was unduly severe on Picasso for taking recourse to
African art. Nor was he aware that an artist such as Kandinsky drew
upon the richness of Russian folk painting and indeed that spirituality
played a crucial role in his art.73 Once we leave aside the formal aspects of
their art, we notice striking parallels between Roys primitivism and that
of Kandinsky and other abstract artists. Unaware of their primitivism,
Roy felt himself to be at an advantage in comparison with the Western
modernists, being confident that primitive culture had continued to
flourish in rural Bengal.74 It is not certain whether Roy was particularly
religious. He told Mary Milford, I am not a Christian. I meditate on what
I hear. Religious art is abstract and symbolical.75 Indeed, Mrs Milford saw
similarities between Roy and Jacob Epstein, both unbelievers but making
an objective statement about the profound character of Christ. What is
important here is not his religious faith but his belief in the connection
between a vital artistic tradition and its mythological richness that sprang
from the cohesion of its community. This became a central plank in his
theory of the communal function of art.76
Parallel debates on the function of art, whether it should be for individual pleasure or for the community, were raging in Germany in the
1930s. Roys use of the Bengali pat in an effort to restore art as a collective
activity nourished by a deeply symbolic religious mythology has very
interesting parallels with Oskar Schlemmers murals at the Folkwang
Museum in Essen in Germany. The German Expressionist, who like
Roy wished to create an art of collective identity, offered the following
justification for his widely criticized doll-like figures: non-naturalist
treatment of the human form was superior because of its symbolic nature,
as seen in ancient cultures, Egyptian, Greek and Indian, nourished by
religious faith. The modern man, living in a period of decadence, had lost
these ancient symbols. Schlemmers use of simple modes of representation
sprang from his feeling that the earlier social function of art was about to
117
most advanced Marxist thought. This reaction apparently left the artist
somewhat perplexed.83 As the Expressionists believed in multiple local
aesthetic possibilities, Roy contended that the mythology that nourished a
community art had of necessity to be local and timeless. His view allowed
for the plural aesthetic possibilities of the folk art of different regions.84
I have spoken of the parallels between Roys and German primitivists questioning of Western modernity. The critic, Wilhelm Hausenstein,
for instance, explained the modernist movement in terms of restoring the
collective function of art.85 Carl Einstein, who also defined primitive art
in terms of its communal function, saw the modern primitives and primitive peoples as having similar objectives of integrating individual experience to communal life by means of myths and rituals.86 Roy himself insisted on the importance of mythology as expressed in art as a bonding agent
for a community. I do not mean to suggest here that the artistic sources
and priorities of Roy and the Western primitivists were the same, nor can
one deny the ambivalence of the German Expressionists with regard to
mystical Volkish nationalism. Yet Roys challenge to colonialism as an
expression of urban, industrial capitalism had clear structural affinities
with the Western critiques of modernity. Einstein sought to restore the
values of the pre-industrial community in the life of the alienated urban
individual. Roy used folk art to restore the collective function of art in
India. In both cases we find a clear recognition of the importance of myth
in human society, which had declined with the rise of modern rationality.
There was however one crucial difference between the Indian artist
and the German Expressionists. While Western primitivists aimed at
merging art with life in a disavowal of the aesthetics of autonomy, they
never ceased to believe in the unique quality of aesthetic experience.87 Roy
sought to erase it, deliberately seeking to subvert the distinction between
individual and collaborative contribution in a work of art.88 Tradition was
a collective experience for Roy, the village art for the community, as
opposed to the individualist aesthetics of urban colonial art. Roy often
asked his sons to collaborate with him, his oldest son Patal, particularly,
and putting his own signature on the finished work, sometimes not signing it or sometimes signing Patals pictures. Roys objective of making the
signature meaningless was his playful way of subverting what Walter
Benjamin calls the aura of a masterpiece. In addition, he turned his studio
into a workshop to reproduce his works cheaply. This was art for the
community, cheaply produced and anonymous, inexpensive enough to be
afforded by even the humblest. His concern with making useful objects was
extended to making elegant decorated pots that benefited from his innate
sense of abstract design.89 Of course, Roy did not cease to sell his works to
the cognoscenti, but he was determined from the outset to sell them also to
the ordinary people who could not afford artworks. This prompted the
Communist Party of India to urge him to declare himself a peoples artist,
but the artist refused to be involved in doctrinaire politics.90
119
sophisticated man who lost that simple feeling may, though highly educated, be immune to art. Interestingly, though not in sympathy with
modernism, the Russian thinker stressed simplicity in art, imagining that
all the members of the community would be involved in all future art and
the artist would earn his livelihood by the sweat of his brow. Tolstoy
pointed out that it is impossible for us, with our culture, to return to a
primitive state say artists of our time . . . but not for the future artist who
will be free from all the perversion of technical improvements . . . .99
Jamini Roys primitivism sought confirmation not only in Tolstoy but
also in Tagore. His communitarian painting turned its back on colonial
culture, seeking to restore the simple goodness of art, lost to the elite of the
colonial metropolis. Roys heroic search for authentic Indian art and his
utopian formulation of the village as the site of the nation were of considerable importance to the creation of Indian identity. Roy lived his ideology
in his art but that did not necessarily make him the most remarkable
painter of pre-Independence India. It was his ability to create a perfect synthesis of political and artistic ideas that made him such a charismatic
painter. His art of austere uncompromising simplicity reminds us of
Mondrians intellectual journey in search of an idea. Jamini Roys intense
concentration and his ruthless ability to pair down the inessential details to
attain a remarkable modernist brevity, boldness and simplicity of expression, became a vehicle for his deep but understated social commitment.
122
three
124
i
The Regional Expressions of Academic
Naturalism
academic artists regroup in calcutta
In the period under review, a naturalism of considerable variety and richness, anchored on the immediate environment, replaced the earlier
engagement with history painting. But let us first remind ourselves of the
genesis of Indian nationalist art. In the late nineteenth century, the
ground for the reception of naturalism had been prepared by, among
others, Ramananda Chatterjee, who furnished the intellectual justification for admiring Victorian naturalism. This encouraged academic artists
to serve the motherland through this universal language of art. In
Calcutta, private institutions that took pride in offering courses in academic naturalism mushroomed. The best known among them were the
Albert Temple of Science and School of Art, the Indian Art School and
the Jubilee Art Academy.1
During the nationalist Unrest of 1905, with the ascendancy of the
nationalist Bengal School of Art under Abanindranath Tagore, the fortunes of academic art sank. E. B. Havell, the English Principal of the government art school in Calcutta, appointed Abanindranath his deputy,
ruthlessly cleansing the institution of Western art teaching.2 The triumph
of the orientalists within the art school was short-lived. Percy Brown was
appointed Principal after Havells retirement in 1909. Being passed over,
Abanindranath resigned in disappointment, his post going to his cousin,
the landscape painter Jamini Gangooly. Though an academic artist,
Gangooly had hitherto been close to the orientalists who now viewed his
action as a betrayal.3
Brown was open-minded and a competent scholar of Mughal art, but
he allowed Gangooly to reinstate academic naturalism at the school. The
1920s generation of academic artists of Bengal must be studied against these
vicissitudes of artistic fortune. Between 1905 and 1915, as oriental art went
from strength to strength, academic artists of Calcutta lost prestige and
patronage, some being forced to emigrate.4 Though seen by the nationalists
as dracins, Bombay artists continued to enjoy professional success. In
the 1920s, naturalism re-emerged in Calcutta partly under Percy Browns
encouragement and partly because of the rise of two gifted and ideologically active artists: Hemendranath Mazumdar, a specialist in female nudes,
and the portrait painter Atul Bose. Interestingly, Jamini Roy, who started
as an academic painter, belonged to the Mazumdar and Bose circle in his
initial career though he also maintained his links with Abanindranath.
To their circle belonged the talented but reticent B. C. Law (Bimala Charan
Laha), an artist of independent means, and the figure painter Jogesh Seal.
125
127
The art school under Percy Brown offered the three following artists
basic academic training. Jamini Roy lingered over a decade at the art school
where his precocious talent and wayward ways assumed legendary proportions.6 The childhood friends Hemendranath Mazumdar (18981948)
and Atul Bose (18981977), who were from rural Maimansingh, had
dreams of becoming artists. Knowing that his zamindar (landowning class)
father would not let him take up the vocation of an artist, Mazumdar ran
away from home to enrol at the art school in Calcutta. This proved to be a
mistake for the headstrong Mazumdar who hated routine work, his disappointment reaching its nadir in 1911. Refusing to join other students in
producing artwork to welcome the visiting monarch George v, he left
the school to join Guptas Jubilee Academy.7 However both these institutions disappointed him in his ambitions of mastering figure painting.
Eventually, he taught himself anatomy and figure drawing by means of
books that he had sent from England. Atul Bose was from a more modest
background and did not face similar family opposition. After spending
some years at the Jubilee Academy, Bose moved on to the government art
school. His hard work and precocious drawing ability won him the schools highest accolade in his final year.
128
Hemendranath Mazumdar,
Cast Out, c. 1921, oil on canvas.
Atul Bose, Hemendranath Mazumdar and Jamini Roy began as penniless artists, doing sundry artistic odd jobs, such as painting scenery for the
theatre, or producing paintings of the deceased for the family based on photographs, a popular Victorian custom in Bengal. Bose tried to set up portrait
practice with little success. One evening the three friends gathered at
Mazumdars dingy studio in north Calcutta to form a circle of academic
artists. The Indian Academy was more of a convivial club, the highly temperamental and ambitious artists thriving on endless discussions on art. As
Bose reminisced later, the burning issue of the day was whether the pursuit
of naturalism was tantamount to a betrayal of national ideals, and whether
the historicism of the Bengal School was the sole path to Indias artistic
revival. Though admired for his intellect, Roy was often teased for his weakness for orientalism. Yet, as Bose was to admit later, Roy rejected both the
historicism of the Bengal School and the crude representational methods of
the academic hack. As early as 1920, Roys originality was confirmed, if confirmation were needed, by the mounting number of prizes he won. Roy
astonished his friends with his remarkable gift. To prove his point about the
economy of form, he would, for instance, bring out a drawing in a drastically shorthand style; yet no academic drawing could be more lively.8
129
131
Opposite: Hemendranath
Mazumdar, Palli Pran, 1921,
oil on canvas.
angles. These more conventional poses never attained the easy grace and
eroticism of Palli Pran.
His one other successful attempt to capture translucent flesh tones was
a large ambitious watercolour nude suggestively titled Dilli ka Laddu,
loosely translated as the obscure object of desire. Mazumdar was obsessed
with capturing the sexual appeal of the lighter-skinned elite women of
Bengal, and even wrote verses on his paintings.23 Most probably the model
or inspiration for all these different women was his wife, but the subjects
cannot be definitively identified. His draped studies capture the dreamy
sensuousness of his sitters absorbed in their own reveries. The subject of
Rose or Thorn?, a young woman in a silk sari, wearing elegant earrings and
armlets, stands engrossed in her own dream world. The rose in the back-
Opposite: Hemendranath
Mazumdar, Rose or Thorn?,
1936, watercolour on paper.
Hemendranath Mazumdar,
Dilli ka Laddu, c. 1930s,
watercolour on paper.
136
ground has been suggested as symbolizing the pain and pleasure of love. It
was shown at the annual exhibition of the Academy of Fine Arts in Calcutta
in 1936 and was later to draw accolades at an exhibition of Portraits of
Great Beauties of the World, held in California in 1952.24
In socially conservative Bengal in the 1920s, it is hard to gauge peoples
true feelings about Mazumdar. As his images were diffused in Bengali
journals, his readership could not but have taken a guilty pleasure in looking at them. Classical nudes, occurring on the pages of the same journals
since the early twentieth century, did not hold the same shocked fascination because of their cultural distance. Then there were the Bengal Schools
mannered, voluptuous semi-nudes.25 The disturbing power of Mazumdars
women lay in their palpability and immediacy: his subject a young Bengali
woman enacting an everyday village scene of returning home after her
daily bath. A critic put it well: at a time when women were behind purdah,
it was daring to represent someone from the respectable middle-class,
someone unapproachable in real life.26 In short, the beholder experienced
the frisson of spying on a respectable housewife, the proverbial girl next
door. The artists tantalizing silence about the identity of the model heightened the mystery surrounding her.27
The voyeuristic aspect of his paintings called forth questions about his
motives as well as the quality of his work. The Empire had given rise
to extreme ambivalences with regard to the body, as its representations
became central to the construction and maintenance of British authority
in India.28 The rulers were responsible for a new concept of modesty,
which provoked serious differences between them and the colonized as to
how much body could be exposed without outraging decency. In the past,
and at least from the fourteenth century, under the impact of Muslim
empires, respectable women no longer appeared unveiled in public.
Peasant women had no such constraints, nor did respectable Nair women
of Kerala hesitate to go bare-breasted as late as the twentieth century.
Victorian evangelism discouraged Indian erotic art, and yet turned a
blind eye to the Classical nude, which stood for moral purity and the
height of art. And yet, in no culture was artistic nudity more ubiquitous
than the Victorian.29
Such contradictory pressures created tensions with regard to issues of
taste and morality. Tagore led in cleansing the Bengali language of its
vulgarisms. But even he reacted against the prevalent Victorian prudery. The new concept of shame among the educated was so exaggerated,
he wrote in his essay on education (1906), that we start blushing if we see
bare table legs.30 Academic nudes found their way into the mansions of
the rich. However, since the Classical nude was not part of the Indian tradition, it became hard to distinguish it from pornography. The situation
was made worse by the influx of Victorian and Edwardian pornography,
especially art photographs from Paris, from the end of the nineteenth
century.31 Tagores nephew Balendranath Tagore, a discriminating critic,
138
took the Classical nude as his model, admiring the Platonic idealization of
the unadorned state of nature.32 Yet Balendranath was repelled by the
erotic sculptures of Hindu temples.
Morality entered the nationalist agenda early on. Swadeshi ideology
imagined the modestly draped mother figure or the self-effacing sati or
chaste woman as the highest Indian ideal. Interestingly, taste and morality
became the subject of a heated debate in 1917. Several nationalist leaders,
who normally showed little interest in art, expressed strong opinions on the
function of art in shaping the national character. The debate took place in
Narayan, a journal edited by the leading nationalist politician Chittaranjan
Das, and drew contributions from other prominent figures such as Bepin
Pal and Barindranath Ghosh. The writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri, a struggling
intellectual in the 1920s, describes Narayan as a diehard conservative paper,
in contrast to the liberal Sabuj Patra, endorsed by the Tagores.33 However,
the difference between the two groups was more a matter of degree than of
kind. Although the Extremist politician Bepin Pal often employed Hindu
nationalist rhetoric in his stand against the empire, his response to modernity was not so different from that of the Moderates.
In Religion, Morality and Art, published in Narayan in 1917, Pal
ventured that the sole purpose of art and literature was aesthetic pleasure
(rasa). Arguing that morality was historically contingent, he reminded
his readers of Emile Zolas works morally questionable, yet great art.34
The following year an essay, purportedly written by the charismatic
Aurobindo Ghosh (actually written by his acolyte, Nalinikanta Gupta),
contended that an artists aims were different from those of a saint. Unlike
a man of religion, the artist treated all aspects of life, even morally questionable ones. Thus the nude must be judged by its treatment, for, unlike
photography, a successful painting was able to transmute its subject matter.35 The nationalist historian Radhakamal Mukherjee objected to such
irresponsible hedonism: an ugly subject could never be a vehicle for
beautiful art. The nude, he insisted, was lowest on the artistic scale; it
could not encourage exalted thoughts, only lascivious ones. The editor felt
obliged to intervene: the aims of the artist and the saint were incompatible; art attained its higher goal only through the profane path.36
The cultural climate demanded that Mazumdar justify his erotic
paintings against charges of prurience.37 The editor of the Indian Masters,
his ardent admirer, offered a rather disingenuous explanation of Palli
Pran. According to him, the village belles dshabill betrayed unselfconscious innocence: although we caught a glimpse of her naked flesh
through her wet cloth, her half-turned face and timid gaze represented
her modesty. He piously admonished the reader against imputing any
base motive to her: the healthy growth of a nations life is possible only
when its women lead the purest of lives.38 Mazumdar had claimed a high
moral ground for his art in competition with the Bengal school. He was
thus forced to make strenuous efforts to prove his integrity. In Shilpi he
139
offered lessons in figure drawing for the interested amateur, stressing the
discipline and hard work that he claimed were absent in photography.39
Not only did the artists dedication elevate figure painting to a higher
plane, he contended, but the beholder also had the duty to approach it
with a pure heart, accepting nakedness as natural and beautiful. The
implication was that the onus rested on the beholder. Despite such protestations, the public perception of the dubiousness of his voyeuristic works
remained. As a famous Bengali wit once quipped, after Mazumdar, [our]
mothers and daughters hardly dared to go down to the local pond for fear
of artists lurking behind trees and bushes.40
opinion of Indian artists, was impressed with Bose, asking him to draw his
likeness.45 Mukul Dey himself became the next victim of the internecine
struggle at the school, being forced to take early retirement, the feud
claiming Bose as its final victim. In 1945, two years before Independence,
Bose became Principal of the art school, only to hand in his resignation
within two years, as he found his every move at the school blocked.46
One of Boses lasting achievements was to help found an art society
that would not be dominated by any one faction. The Fine Arts Society,
we have seen, lost its space at the art school with Deys appointment, but
Bose soon found a more permanent site.47 In the early 1930s, he enlisted
the support of a wealthy benefactor, Maharaja Pradyot Kumar Tagore.
Under his aegis, a meeting of Calcutta notables was held on 15 August
141
Datta singled out the striking portrait of Boses future wife, Devjani,
as one of his finest achievements, as the sensitive painting, and the
remarkable sketch on which it is based, testify. He recognized the delicate quality of Boses drawing, having few rivals in this country, and
also noting the treatment of his academic nudes, faultless yet full of life.
Mindful of the orientalist charge that Indian naturalism smacked of colonial hybridity, Datta argued that the outstanding quality of his work
rested on his complete mastery over the medium that he had so deliberately chosen. Pointing out that the impact of European civilization on
other cultures was not uniformly disastrous, he argued that Boses pictures, despite their European technique, were expressions of the Indian
vision of reality.56 Interestingly, Datta noted that the prevailing political
turmoil had made Bose aware of social injustices as evident in some of
the works.
An admirer of Jamini Roy, Sudhindranath Dattas appreciation of Bose
was necessarily muted. The limitations of Boses work, he pointed out, lay
in its over-elaboration, an absence of boldness and an over-dependence on
the subject matter to the detriment of its formal structure, and in his least
successful moments [Bose] is a trifle too academic to be wholly satisfactory.57 Dattas modernist critique of Bose is like comparing chalk with
cheese, because Bose and Roys objectives were entirely incompatible. Bose
143
himself, and his well-wishers, regarded his career as a teacher and a painter
as a failure, a career of frustrations and the missed opportunities of an
undoubtedly gifted man. Part of his failure may be ascribed to his misplaced faith in the essential objectivity of representational art. To counter
the subjective vision of the visual world proposed by both orientalism and
the avant-garde, he prepared a sophisticated teaching manual to teach correct drawing with his invented device, the Perspectograph. Regretting the
global excesses of modern art, he dreamed of returning to an art of greater
reticence, discipline and self-control, based on solid empiricism.58
144
145
folk tales and grand landscapes. His style ranged from a soft-focus treatment of genre scenes or mythological subjects and misty Corotesque
landscapes to hard-edged outdoor scenes. Winnowing with Buffaloes, for
instance, is a masterly evocation of the midday Indian sun, mimicking
photography by painting the farmers and the buffaloes in deep shadows to
emphasize the blinding light. Allah Bukhshs final works express his deep
anguish at the mindless carnage of 1947 in two remarkable semi-abstract,
almost surrealist landscapes, Anthropomorphic Landscapes 1 and 11.60
Sobha Singh (19011986) came to art late in life after having spent some
years in the Middle East as a soldier in the First World War. While there, he
became fascinated with the land and its inhabitants.61 Singh is best known
for his portrait series of Sikh religious leaders and paintings based on Punjabi
folk tales in an accomplished but somewhat sugary style that reminds us of
Edmund Dulac. The most enterprising among Punjabi academic painters
was S. G. Thakur Singh (18941970), who left the province to make his fortune in Bombay, where he assisted a professional scene painter for a brief
period. He then moved to Calcutta, spending the next 30 years in the city.
From making a living as a scene painter for the popular Madans Theatre, he
joined the Pioneer Film Studio as art director.62 The Tagores became Singhs
patrons, while reproductions of his works in vernacular journals, especially
seductive paintings of women, endeared him to the Bengali public.
Immensely energetic, he set up the Punjab Academy of Fine Arts singlehandedly to promote his own works, steadily publishing his paintings from
the 1920s. Among these, the most ambitious were the four-volumed The Art
of Mr S. G. Thakur Singh and Glimpses of India, with introductions by the poet
Tagore and Abanindranath. His painting After the Bath, which pays homage
146
S. G. Thakur Singh,
A River Landscape at Sunrise,
1939, oil on canvas.
S. G. Thakur Singh,
A River Landscape at Sunset,
1937, oil on canvas.
opposite: G. M. Solegaonkar,
Mahiari, 1935, oil on canvas.
This prize-winning painting
shown at the Bombay Art
Society exhibition in 1935
encapsulated the mottled effect
and heightened post-impressionist colours typical of British
posters of the 1920s and 30s.
M. K. Parandekar, Landscape,
1930s, oil on canvas.
Of this new generation, I have chosen two who had long and successful
careers in Bombay to suggest a flavour of these developments, particularly the new impressionistic treatment of landscape and figures. S. L.
Haldankar (18821968) was a prize-winning student at the J. J. School of
Art from 1903 to 1908. He emerged as the most prolific portrait and landscape painter of the region, winning commendation at an exhibition held
at the Royal Society of Arts in London in 1915. The enterprising
Haldankar set up a highly successful private art school, Haldankars Fine
Art Institute, soon after graduation, and founded with his friends the
nationalist Art Society of India in 1918 to rival the official Bombay Art
Society. As he explained, he felt dissatisfied with the society for being a
mouthpiece of the colonial rulers. Yet the Society was not slow to honour
the artist in 1925 for his oil painting A Mohammadan Pilgrim. The work
was in the late nineteenth-century genre of picturesque ethnography popular at the art school. An artist who used a variety of expressions and
media, one of his favourite devices was to illuminate the figure from an
artificial light source, such as a lamp placed below the figure, to create a
dramatic effect. Among these, the most popular is The Glow of Hope.
However, it is the large number of sketchbooks as well as watercolour and
oil sketches left by Haldankar that give us an opportunity to study his systematic observation, in the plein air tradition, of the surrounding regions,
including the ancient ruins in Bombay and its environs. These painting
151
M. S. Satwalekar, Himalayan
Scene, 1920s, oil on canvas.
S. L. Haldankar, Glow of Hope,
c. 1920s, oil on canvas.
er on the grounds that it betrayed crass materialism. Acharekar attempted to reconcile colonial art teaching with nationalist anxieties by distilling his years of experience as a teacher. In the book, he juxtaposed
ancient Indian temple sculptures with drawings of nude models posed
after these sculptures. His aim was to invite students of a modernist bent
to examine how ancient Indian artists used their knowledge of anatomy
to produce brilliantly simplified forms.70 In contrast to Haldankars
luminous watercolours, Acharekar specialized in a loose impressionist
style with heavy impasto colours, quick brushstrokes and loose applications of paint, to build up a sketch-like rough surface with speckled light
distributed over the whole painted surface.
S. L. Haldankar, Landscape,
1930s, watercolour on paper.
153
the Victorian mode. The Indian Academy of Art illustrated his sculpture
In Tune with the Almighty, an Indian ascetic playing a musical instrument
in praise of god. The journal wrote approvingly that the anatomical
accuracy of sinews, bones and muscles and the expression of pure bliss
. . . convincingly attest how the ideal can touch and blend with the real
. . . The sculpture is a silent and direct refutation of the theory that the
ideal and the real are [the] opposites which can never meet.71
V. P. Karmarkar (18911966), who was attracted to the formalist
simplifications of modernism, including Art Deco sculptures, was perhaps the most original among the Bombay sculptors of the 1920s. Born
in a family of traditional image-makers, Karmarkar was discovered by
a colonial civil servant, Otto Rothfeld, who arranged for his admission
to the art school in Bombay. In 1916, on the advice of Rabindranath
Tagores elder brother Satyendranath, then posted in Bombay,
Karmarkar moved to Calcutta. The Maharastran set up practice in the
city, producing busts of leading nationalists and graceful draped female
figures inspired by Mhatre.72 In 1920 he went for further training at the
Royal Academy, returning to Calcutta after three years. In his absence
his earlier patronage had dried up, forcing him to return to his home
province in 1925. However, now he was taken up by the Maharastran
156
B. V. Talim, In Tune
with the Almighty, c. 1920,
plaster of Paris.
B. V. Talim, Takali
(Threadmaking), 1932,
plaster of Paris. The work
won the gold medal of the
Bombay Art Society that year.
V. P. Karmarkar, Graceful
Worry, c. 1930, plaster. A regular
contributor, he won the Societys
gold medal for his work Koli
Girl, shown at the same exhibition, c. 1930.
V. P. Karmarkar, Fishergirl,
c. 1930s, plaster.
160
11
From Orientalism to a New Naturalism:
K. Venkatappa and Deviprosad Roy
Chowdhury
Not only the naturalists but also Abanindranaths disciples were gradually
turning their backs on orientalism, notably K. Venkatappa and
Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury, both of whom, in very different ways, projected a heroic image of the artist as a genius. No fewer than forty odd
volumes of Venkatappas densely packed diary, the most extensive ever
maintained by an Indian artist, offer us an insight into the mentality and
artistic process of a colonial artist poised on the cusp of modernity and tradition.1 Fiercely jealous of his artistic mission, Venkatappas evolution from
a painter of the Bengal School to magic realism makes fascinating reading. A muscular hero, the urbane uomo universale, Deviprosad was a larger-than-life figure who projected his own physical prowess on to his
Michelangelesque sculptures. A versatile artist, his work ranged from
delicate orientalist miniatures, romantic watercolours and commissioned
portraits to colossal public sculptures celebrating national allegories in the
late colonial era and two and half decades of Independence. We are
allowed an insight into his quirks and idiosyncrasies as well as his powerful mind in the candid memoirs of his wife and lifelong companion.2 In
these two supreme individualists, naturalism became inflected in the light
of their own specific objectives.
K. Venkatappa, Ramas
Marriage, c. 1918, watercolour
on paper.
K. Venkatappa, Monsoon
Clouds Breaking, 1926,
watercolour on paper.
166
tal groups 69 m high that celebrated the trials and triumphs of the
labouring man. Beverley Nichols, who was unimpressed with Indian
artists with the sole exception of Jamini Roy, described his work; It is
not calculated to set the Ganges on fire, but at least it is alive. Choudhuri
has something to say on canvas and is technically competent to say it.21
In his breathless stride across the subcontinent, Nichols missed
Deviprosads large-scale sculptures, his particular strength. Critic G.
Venkatachalam, who wrote essays defending Indian artists against
Nicholss judgement, wrote admiringly of the sculptor: For originality,
individuality, strength and expressiveness his sculptural works are easily the best in the country. Even the Rodinesque touch which characterized his earlier studies . . . was only superficial. Roychoudhurys art is
definitely his own.22 The East German visitor to India, Heinz Langer,
169
was impressed with his profound feeling for plasticity, as well as his
artistic genius and human charm.23
Deviprosad had his first painting lessons with Abanindranath, giving
evidence of a precocious talent in the two paintings submitted to Wembley,
a self-portrait and a primitivist Lotus Pond (see p. 30). Treated in an orientalist style, the penetrating self-portrait and the primitivist figures anticipate his characteristic sense of design and firm drawing. However, his
mtier was modelling, kindled by his first sculpture teacher, a European
named Boeiss. His next teacher, Hironmoy Roychaudhury, trained at the
Royal College of Art, taught him to build in rather than carve in his figures.24 As in the case of Hemendranath Mazumdar, Deviprosads choice of
art as a vocation caused a permanent rift between him and the head of his
family, his zamindar grandfather, who disinherited him. He was forced to
take up work as a scene painter for a theatre in north Calcutta, followed by
teaching art at a boys school in the city. However, recognition was not long
in coming. Stella Kramrisch was one of the first to recognize his talent,
writing of his bronzes as the first serious contribution modern India has
made to the portrait sculpture of modern man.25 He taught briefly at
Santiniketan where he had Ramkinkar among his students. In 1929 he
became head of the government art school in Madras, one of the first
Indians to run a government educational institution. In the 30 years he was
at the school, he inspired generations of art students in South India, helping to end its reputation as an industrial arts centre. The Hindu voiced
public recognition of the importance of his appointment. In 1936, reviewing the annual art exhibition of the school, it commented on how
Deviprosad had sparked a new creativity among the students who had
hitherto produced only conventional work.26 A pupil of Abanindranath,
Deviprosad finally cut the orientalist apron strings at a public lecture in
Madras in 1936, criticizing the unquestioning adherence to tradition and
recommending that one learn even from Western art if it was of value.27
Deviprosad delighted in pater les bourgeois with his outrageous views
on sexuality, in part an outcome of his discovery of Freud.28 I have mentioned his physical strength. English soldiers stationed in Calcutta were
generally feared by the slender-limbed Bengalis for their often violent and
unpredictable behaviour. Deviprosad enjoyed picking a fight with them.
Bristling with energy, he worked from early morning till evening every
single day without fail, often on large-scale sculptural pieces. Despite
being in charge of a major government institution for 30 years, he was
remarkably productive. We read about the artists fiery personality from
his wifes memoirs, published in the 1950s, where she describes him with
a mixture of admiration and exasperation as over-frank, oversensitive and
overbearing.29
170
Deviprosad commanded a wide range of artistic media from the most delicate jewel-like watercolours, such as Sumatra Birds, Expressionist landscapes and commissioned portraits, to massive bronze sculptural groups.
His high professional standards brought him a steady stream of private
and public commissions, notably portrait busts of British dignitaries,
which left him unsatisfied. Deviprosad sought inspiration from the heroic forbearance of the salt of the earth the fisherman making his weary
way home, weighed down by his dripping net, or the peasant resigned to
his humble lot, going about his daily toil. He produced some moving
images of the great famine in Bengal in 1943, notably of a mother with her
starving infant. Of course, this harrowing subject inspired not only
Deviprosad but a number of artists in Bengal.
The question is: if his work expressed sympathy for the salt of the
earth, what then was his difference from Ramkinkar and the primitivists? Indeed, Deviprosads heroic vision of the toiling masses had
many similarities with that of the primitivists but the differences were
significant. The primitivist idealization of the innocent Santals as the
denizens of an unchanging community was essentially a critique of global capitalism, urban modernity and Enlightenment notions of progress.
On the other hand, Deviprosads sources were an uneasy mix: he drew
nourishment more from nineteenth-century Romantic notions of struggling humanity than from a primitivist avant-garde critique of modernity. His sculptures of the industrial proletariat were rooted in a progressivist Marxian mode that saw history as inexorably moving forward
towards a socialist utopia rather than backward to the village. Deviprosad did not show
an overt interest in Marxism, but as a well-read
man he shared the elite interest in socialist
thought and the trade union movement in
India within the larger nationalist struggle of
the 1920s.30 Revealingly, his most ambitious
compositions glorified urban labourers, such as
road builders, rather than peasants or fishermen. Deviprosads oppressed humanity was
fired by the idea of social justice and had a definite goal. One of his first multiple-figure reliefs
completed in the 1930s was on the theme of
social justice, the Travancore Temple Entry
Proclamation, which celebrated the admission
of the Untouchables into the Hindu caste temples in South India. In the 1940s, a critic
summed up the artists optimistic vision of
nationhood in his painting Road-Makers, but
171
his comments could equally well apply to his ambitious sculptural group
Triumph of Labour:
Choudhury, strangely for all his aristocratic antecedents, is a socialist
on canvas. His striking pictures of labouring proletariat are at once
a challenge and an appeal. They are monuments of dignity and
strength. [Choudhurys sculptural group] are of the like who forge
mighty highways for the conquest of nations. The Road-makers
are the forgers of Mans empire, his extending dominion over
elemental forces.31
Deviprosads Road-Makers were not simply labourers struggling to dislodge a massive boulder; they were indomitable men [and women]
wrestling with nature, doggedly, determinedly, powerfully, a vision that
pitted man against the elements, a well-known romantic topos of the
nineteenth century. The Michelangelesque body became his romantic
metaphor for man struggling as much against the elements as against
injustice. His equation of emotional power with physical strength was
closely connected with his obsession with his own body and physical culture. He took an almost sexual pleasure in forcing obstinate metal or clay
into shape.32 Deviprosad loved to dwell on the wiry musculature of his
172
workers, revealing their bones, veins and sinews through their flesh, often
creating an corch effect. With female figures, he chose to bring out the
fleshy, earthy voluptuousness of peasant women in contrast to the emaciated waifs of the Bengal School. An admiring critic waxed eloquent about
his virility:
Roy Choudhury, like Rodin, is rugged, original and virile; his
sculpture has the same elemental fury and strength . . . His
genius, for all his great achievements on the canvas, is essentially
and pre-eminently three-dimensional . . . The sculpture . . .
stands out massive, compelling and alive.33
Perhaps no modern master had explored the body more intensely in its
myriad forms and convoluted expressions than Rodin, who created a
new form of expressionist bronzes with broken, rugged surfaces and
fragmented non finito works. Deviprosad seems to have reached Rodin
indirectly through Edouard Lanteri, the French sculptor settled in
Britain, whose vigorous naturalism celebrating labourers and peasants
influenced the new sculpture movement in Britain. Deviprosad recommended his standard treatise, Modelling: A Guide for Teachers and
Students, to his students in Santiniketan. Indeed, a whole generation of
English and French sculptors were influenced by Rodins rough-surfaced bronze, including the previously mentioned
Pramatha Mallik and Fanindranath Bose, who had
settled in Scotland in the early twentieth century.34
Deviprosads rough-hewn style and unpolished bronze were appropriate to his heroic story of
the downtrodden. Yet in his most powerful bronzes
he moved beyond Rodin in his exaggerated forms,
which suggests an ambivalent relationship between
him and the discourse of modernism. He often used
strong anti-modernist rhetoric, identifying artistic
truth with mimetic art containing a strong social
content, and refusing to ally himself with the modernists because of his ideological commitment to
naturalism. He welcomed the new language of art.
However, for him the objective of art was to express
emotions in a controlled manner, which was only
possible with the skill that he found lacking in many
of the modernists.35 Yet not only did his gnarled
corch figures go beyond representation towards
expressionist distortions, but he himself showed a
fascination with the physically ugly, the grotesque
and the macabre in his paintings and short stories
as well.36
173
Opposite: Deviprosad
Roy Chowdhury, Road-Makers
(later renamed Triumph of
Labour), c. 1940, bronze.
Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury,
Dignity of Labour, 1950s,
bronze.
version of the Martyrs Memorial, which was to be the largest group composition in the world, when he died in 1975.37 The memorial would have
decorated the great open space in front of the Red Fort in Delhi, symbolizing the unity in diversity that was modern India. The artists radio
broadcast of 1951 constituted a testament to his lifes achievement: imposing statues on a gigantic scale were an essential quality of sculpture, rather
than dainty figures for embellishing drawing rooms.38
176
four
Contested Nationalism:
The New Delhi and India
House Murals
In spite of the dominance of the local and the quotidian in the art of the
1920s and 30s, historicism continued to display an amazing resilience. Its
final efflorescence gave rise to two competing definitions of nationalism,
as advocated by the artistic rivals, Bombay and Bengal, between the years
1912 and 1931. In these crucial years, the two provinces fought tooth and
nail to win lucrative Raj commissions for the grand historical murals in
the New Delhi Secretariat and in India House in London. This section
unfolds the story of these murals, bringing out the ambivalent relationship between the British overlords and their Indian subjects, throwing
into bold relief the complex interface of colonialism and nationalism. This
is also a story of rivalry and ambition, intrigue and character assassination;
it is above all the story of one mans determination to win the primacy of
his institution by any means. The man was Gladstone Solomon, the
Principal of Sir Jamsethji Jijibhai School of Art in Bombay in the crucial
years 191836.
forward the Prix de Delhi scheme for decorating the capital. The prize
students would be offered government commissions, helping this Indian
school in the capital to spread its influence and labours over the whole
subcontinent.11
There were compelling precedents for the choice of mural decorations for New Delhi. To nineteenth-century nationalists, nothing less than
historic murals on an epic scale adorning public spaces could truly serve
the nation. The political potential of murals was fully realized with the
spread of Gesamtkunstwerk ideas in architecture, an example of which was
the Palace of Westminster, completed in the 1840s. (Gesamtkunstwerk or
the marriage of the different arts was a Wagnerian idea that affected
William Morriss notion of architecture as the mother of all the arts, for
instance.) Ruskin had described the architect as a mere large-scale
frame-maker unless he was also a painter and a sculptor.12 By the 1860s
even the Royal Academy, the bastion of easel painting, judged artists by
their ability to produce decorative murals.13 The patron saint of murals
was the Frenchman, Puvis de Chavannes, whose murals for the nation in
the Panthon in Paris had become justly celebrated. Take also the case of
Alphons Mucha. The Czech poster artist had made his fame and fortune
in fin-de-sicle Paris; in 1899, in a fit of conscience, he pledged that the
remainder of my life would be filled exclusively with work for the nation.
His impressive murals on the Slav nationalist struggle adorn the Municipal
Building of Prague.14 The Mexican murals of Diego Rivera, Alfaro
Siqueiros and Jos Clemente Orozco in the 1920s were surely the apotheosis of the public mural project and yet unknown to India until as late as
the 1940s.15
In 19024 E. B. Havell, head of the art school in Calcutta, who put
forward the idea of decorating Indian homes with murals in the manner
of Gothic Revivalists, first planted the idea of nationalist murals. In order
to equip his students with indigenous fresco techniques, Havell brought
in traditional muralists from Rajasthan. His efforts were unfortunately
confined to a few experimental fresco buono slabs in the Jaipur method
produced by his young collaborator, Abanindranath. A master of delicate miniatures, Abanindranath did not have much luck with large-scale
works.16 During the Swadeshi unrest of 1905, Nivedita, the Irish disciple of
Vivekananda and a mentor of the nationalist artists of Bengal, proposed
that public buildings be decorated with epic murals to serve as modern temples to the nation. The ancient Buddhist frescoes at Ajanta, rediscovered in
the nineteenth century, were promptly adopted by the nationalists as a
model for emulation. In 190911, Christiana Herringham, a moving force
in the English mural movement and a translator of Cenninis Il libro dell
arte o trattato della pittura (c. 1390), visited India in order to copy the Ajanta
frescoes. Nivedita arranged for Abanindranaths pupils to assist her so that
they might gain first-hand experience of these ancient achievements.17
180
naturalization of the Royal Academy practice finally consecrated the school as a fine arts institution, a
process that had started in the late nineteenth century. Solomons task was made easier by the fact that
his Indian deputy Dhurandhar was a devotee of the
nude.28
The year was barely out when Solomon set in
motion his pivotal scheme of starting mural painting
as an advanced specialist course. The first generation of students, notably S. Fernandes, A. R.
Bhonsale, G. H. Nagarkar and N. L. Joshi, undertook the decoration of the school walls in earnest,
the crowning achievement being an experimental
lunette, Kala Deva Pratistha (Installation of the God
of Art), measuring 308 m2. Executed in the central
hall, it marked the ritual inauguration of the schools
new calling. The Governor duly unveiled the
murals at a prize-giving ceremony in 1920, offering
a generous sum to the school as an encouragement.
The public viewing of the murals soon followed.29
The murals aimed at combining European naturalism with Indian decorative sensibility. Solomon,
who had a weakness for allegories in the manner of Alphons Mucha,
encouraged students to paint personifications of the four quarters of the
day and the four [European] seasons.30 Two prizes were instituted, one
for mural design and another for enlarging figures to scale from small
sketches to life-size, a prerequisite for any large figure composition.
Drawing and painting from the nude now occupied the pride of place in
the school. As Solomon was to argue later, every students colour is his
own. But he may be taught to draw correctly . . . [When] a student can
draw the human head and the human figure accurately [he] has mastered
the grammar of the language of Art.31 The visiting English portrait
painter Oswald Birley wrote approvingly in 1935 that the work of the
Life classes in the Bombay School of Art is well up to the level of the
standards of European Schools of Art.32 In 1923 a commission to decorate the Government House in Bombay followed. A medallion and three
panels on the theme of personification were executed in its Durbar Hall,
the four of them measuring 396 x 213 cm each, with life-size figures,
demonstrating the success of the new department.
However strongly Solomon may have stressed the importance of naturalistic drawing for large-scale murals, he must have known that even in
Bombay winds of orientalism had been blowing for some time. The journalist Vasudev Metta, otherwise sympathetic to the murals, commented
on their un-Indian character.33 Back in 1904, the Times of India, the
184
between 1872 and 1881, but it was only in 1909, under the impact of the
Bengal School, that pilgrimages to this nationalist shrine became de
rigueur. Solomon took his students to the caves in 1921 in order to study
the paintings, claiming that these paintings vindicated his own approach to
art. Rejecting orientalist pretensions that such art could spring from religious dedication alone, he argued that they demonstrated a scientific
approach and the constant use of living models:
[in] every phase of these decorations pulses a throbbing, vigorous,
energetic life . . . They were a band of tremendously practical hard
workers. This is a point that cannot be too strongly insisted upon today
when there exists a tendency to approach Indian art from the mystical
or antiquarian rather than the genuinely artistic point of view.36
187
M. V. Dhurandhar, Welcome
address to the Prince of Wales by
the Parsi Panchayat Fund and
Charities, 1921, watercolour on
paper pasted on glass and
framed. The text reads : We
pray, may you live long, / May
you live happy, to help / The
righteous and punish / The
unrighteous, Amen.
Dhurandhar was also
commissioned to design this
loyal address.
Government and find some other means of livelihood.43 The visit of the
Prince of Wales in November, which was a gesture to mollify Indian public opinion, was seen for what it was, and boycotted by the Congress.
Bombay, being close to Gandhis power base in Gujarat, was chosen as the
likely site for the demonstration of loyalty to the crown. The provincial
government embarked on a lavish welcome with the help of the art
school, a state institution. Dhurandhar, entrusted by Solomon with realizing the ambitious project, describes it in his memoir. What a difference
it was from Dhurandhars earlier work in 1905 for the Principal Cecil
Burns. For that royal visit, Dhurandhar had prepared a sizeable
birds-eye view perspective drawing of the Alexandra Docks of Bombay.
For his efforts he received a small fee and an impersonal letter of thanks
from Burns.44
Because of the political stakes involved, the Bombay reception committee of 1921 conceived the idea of massive pylons (rather than arches) to be
placed at prominent street corners in Bombay to give scope for ambitious
decoration. A modest sum of 8,000 rupees was initially allowed for the
entire work. On Dhurandhars advice, however, Solomon approached the
committee for the much larger sum of 20,000 rupees in order to carry out
the job properly. This was sanctioned on condition that the work be completed in eight days. Dhurandhar was the right choice for such a large-scale
work, as seen earlier in 1905 and later in New Delhi. Because of the short
time within which he had to deliver, Dhurandhar farmed out the work
among local artists in addition to his senior students so that each one of
them had to execute only two to four paintings within the deadline.45
The decoration of the pylons was finished within a record six days.
The 54 m high figures, inspired by the Hindu pantheon, stood on 1.5 m
high plinths, displaying multifarious emblems. When they were complete, Solomon took the Indian Headmaster in his automobile to admire
them, declaring that the emblems . . . of the Gods, far from being a com189
plex burden seemed in this instance a pure joy and solace to their delineators.46 That joy was short-lived. Of course, as the main author of the
venture, Dhurandhar received the encomia of the pro-government press.
Solomon seized the opportunity to publicize the pylons in the Times of
India. However, furious letters from the Hindu nationalists to the Bombay
Chronicle excoriated Dhurandhar for the depiction of Hindu gods on the
pylons, demeaning them by making them wait upon the mleccha (polluting foreigner) rulers. (In the late nineteenth-century the Maharastran revolutionary terrorist Chapekar had publicly branded the British as mlechhas.) As the main identifiable perpetrator, Dhurandhar was forced to
seek police protection after receiving anonymous death threats. On 31
October 1921, Solomon asked Dhurandhar anxiously whether the headdresses and the familiar symbols should be removed from the figures so
that they could no longer be identified as Hindu gods. They could then
represent abstract qualities like justice, love or art. On the day of the
Princes visit, the streets of Bombay were deserted except for pitched battles between the loyalists who came out to welcome the Prince and their
nationalist enemies.47
In spite of the debacle, the art school collected rich dividends from
this display of loyalty. Solomon proclaimed himself a facilitator of Indian
nationalism, viewing the project as a triumphal union of naturalism with
Indian decoration. The presence of nationalist politicians at the school
prize-giving ceremony the following year further vindicated the nationalist character of his efforts: the Schools compound is neutral ground
where rival factions fraternally mix, where Cosmopolitan hearts beat in
unison to the gentle but irresistible music of Saraswatis Vina which can
still the pulsations of Politics . . ..48 Grateful for this demonstration of loyalty, Sir George Lloyd proclaimed that the lines upon which the Principal
and the School then chose to work were emphatically the right lines the
lines of assimilating to the national Indian genius the best in modern
art . . . I have always held that successful art in India must be . . . backed
by national enthusiasm.49 Since Bombay had made European drawing
the foundation of Indian art, Indianization had not taken the form of a
return to a hide-bound convention, but is acquiring a real sense of form
and colour, and at the same time developing the decorative instinct, which
so strongly national in character. It is well to recall here the 1935 Act,
offering autonomy to Indians, which was delayed for at least two years by
the determined resistance of the die-hard group led by . . . Churchill
and Lord Lloyd.50 A romantic imperialist, Lloyd had his own ideas about
promoting cultural nationalism in the empire, art being one of his pet
projects. In appreciation of Solomons efforts during the royal visit, Lloyd
declared eight scholarships for the fledgling mural class.51
Solomon was acutely aware of the economic implications of the
schools success, firmly setting his sights on public commissions for the
mural class. In a public lecture in September 1923, he appealed to the
190
Studio, the oldest ally of the orientalists, invited their chief ideologue,
O. C. Gangoly, to review the show. Refusing to acknowledge the presence
of any other style, Gangoly repeated what had become a well-worn clich:
the coining of types from the inner vision, untrammelled by the limitations of a living model, is a distinguishing feature of orientalism.66
Gangoly then proceeds to play courtier to his imperial patrons:
It is said that the supreme significance of the British connection in
India is to help modern India to recover the glories of her ancient
culture. In the sphere of art, the sleeping princess is opening her
eyes to the golden touch of British sympathy. She appears to have
sent precious jewels to add to the lustre of the Imperial crown.67
The Bengal Government under Lord Ronaldshay (now the Marquess of
Zetland) had been the champion of the Bengal School whose achievements seemed to be self-evident in Wembley. In Rothensteins letter of 6
April we learn of plans to acquire the works of the Bengal School at
Wembley for a national museum in London.68 A letter from the members of the India Society was published in Indian Art and Letters, backing
the purchase of these works for a nominal sum of 200 to be the nucleus
of a permanent gallery of modern Indian art in London. It was signed by
powerful figures, including its President, Sir Francis Younghusband,
intrepid explorer, ruthless imperialist and a devotee of Eastern spirituality, as well as E. B. Havell and Lord Carmichael, former LieutenantGovernor of Bengal.69 Wembley was the first grand display of imperial
patronage in which Bombay received considerable recognition but it still
had an uphill task against the orientalist hold on Western imagination.
For their part, the orientalists had not remained silent during the rise
of Bombay as an alternative nationalist style which threatened their very
existence. As early as 1921, Gangoly had dismissed Solomons efforts.
Reviewing Solomons book The Charm of Indian Art in 1926, he took him to
task for daring to use the frivolous word charm with regard to Indian art.
Questioning the claims of Bombay as the new Ajanta, Gangoly queried, if
the Indian artist was as imaginative as claimed by Solomon, why impose life
classes on him?110 In that year, Vakil paid a visit to Calcutta to gain
first-hand knowledge of his adversaries. He described the atmosphere in
the Tagore residence with a touch of irony as the realm of fancy and beauty where logic and routine purposely fear to tread.111 He particularly
resented the reverential attitude the Tagores seemed to generate in people,
though reporting favourably on their endorsement of the newly founded
Benaras Hindu University as the best antidote against public indifference to
art.112 Rabindranaths open-mindedness about art made a strong impression on Vakil, whilst Gaganendranaths Cubist experiments fascinated him.
O. C. Gangoly he could not stand, but then they held irreconcilable views.
In 1929, at the height of the BengalBombay rivalry, Vakil described
Gangolys lecture at the Bharat Kala Bhavan in Benaras as full of vague
generalizations and lacking any concrete plans.113 However, by the 1930s,
the animus had died down considerably and Vakil wrote sympathetically
on Gangolys lecture at the newly formed Rasa-Mandal, yet another society to rival the established Bombay Art Society.114
M. V. Dhurandhar, The
cartoon for Stridhanam, Law
Members Chamber, left, 1929,
watercolour on paper.
M. V. Dhurandhar, The
cartoon for the Stridhanam,
Law Members Chamber, right,
1929, watercolour on paper.
M. V. Dhurandhar, Stridhanam,
Law Members Chamber, left,
1929, oil on canvas.
M. V. Dhurandhar, Stridhanam,
Law Members Chamber, right,
1929, oil on canvas.
203
(100,000) was to be divided among the artists in proportion to their importance. Dhurandhar was entrusted with the important murals in the
Law Members Chamber, for which he received the handsome fee of
17,000 rupees.116
The government expected Dhurandhar to complete the paintings
by September 1929, leaving him approximately a year. Although
Dhurandhar was able to keep to the deadline, he suffered ill health and
even despaired of completing the work on time. However, after taking
several months off from work, he was able to regain his confidence.
Dhurandhar was assigned two generous wall spaces in the chamber, each
7.3 m long and 1.5 m wide, divided into three parts, each to accommodate
a 2.4 m long canvas. Dhurandhars theme was the dispensation of colonial
justice: two laws from the Hindu Civil Code, Bride Wealth (stridhanam)
and Adoption (datta vidhana), and an example of the Muslim Shariah
law, Last Will and Testament. Framing these scenes of civil law was an
East India Company court scene, celebrating the empire as an impartial
upholder of law and justice.
These marouflage panels for the Law Members Chamber, consisting
of over 300 figures, were completed in the third week of July 1929 in his
studio, well ahead of schedule. An informal exhibition, on the eve of their
transportation to Delhi, was attended by his close allies, including the
politician M. R. Jayakar and Vakil. Explaining his success, Dhurandhar
made a public statement that his student experience at Ajanta had left a
lasting impression, a somewhat unconvincing statement in view of his
lifelong love affair with Western art. Dhurandhars friezes in the Law
Members Chamber were praised by Percy Brown for their draughtsmanship, colours and symbolism.117 Dhurandhar personally accompanied the
works to Delhi in order to supervise their attachment to the walls with the
help of his students. Solomon, who was directing his own mural students
in Delhi, congratulated him with the wish that 50 years hence the
Maharastran would be known as the Titian of India.118 Solomons senior
students were awarded the decoration of the North Block of the
Secretariat. As a preparation for the murals, special drawing courses,
using Dhurandhars large drawing of an undraped figure as exemplar,
were conducted at the school. Students also studied details from living
models and learned to enlarge sketches to scale in order to produce lifesize watercolour cartoons for the murals.119
The upshot of the LutyensBaker clash was that only one of the 340
rooms in Lutyenss vast palace for the Viceroy was adorned with a visual
image: an ambitious map in oil colours of the largest empire in the world,
designed by Percy Brown, head of the Calcutta art school, and executed
by Munshi Gulam Husain of Lucknow with his assistants. The rest of the
murals found a home in the North Block of Herbert Bakers Secretariat,
which was conceived as two massive blocks, with myriad chambers,
flanking the ceremonial Kings Way. The uppermost impression created
204
by the motley subjects was one of conscious Raj attempts to put Hindu,
Muslim and Western elements through a paternalist sieve to produce a
cultural pure. Miran Baksh, Assistant Principal of the Mayo School of
Art in Lahore, and his students decorated the domes of the loggia of the
North Conference Room with Quranic inscriptions, sinuous arabesques
and Buddhist geese (hamsa). The narrative murals were executed entirely
by artists from Bombay. The veteran Rustam Seodia, the first Indian
painter to be trained at the Royal Academy, depicted the four seasons (a
European version of four, unlike the Indian six). Four additional lunettes
sported a cultural mishmash such as an oriental slave market, Bluebeard,
Cinderella and stories from Harun al-Rashid.120
Bombay art schools contribution, including Dhurandhars, was
mainly in the marouflage (oils) method, introduced by Solomon, though
tempera murals were not entirely absent. The South Loggia was in the
care of G. P. Fernandes, one of the first students to be trained by
Solomon. He used marouflage on the dome but had the versatility to
paint the rest in tempera. The lantern of the dome was brightened by the
use of colourful costumes for the artisan figures. G. H. Nagarkar, another senior student of Solomons, covered the dome, arches and spandrel
with an elaborate series on Hindu Aryan life, represented by welldrawn figures in low-key colours. The lofty dome crowning the North
Block was decorated by Solomons students under his supervision, with
figures representing different periods of Indian history (see The Gupta
Period, p. 185). Eight further lunettes were filled mostly with female
figures personifying themes of painting, architecture, music, dancing,
poetry and drama. A typical lunette, for instance, on the theme of music
represented the classical Indian Todi ragini in the manner of miniatures.
J. M. Ahivasi from traditional Nathdwara, who painted the lunette
Drama, was versatile enough to range from a Rajasthani miniature style
to deeply modelled figures.121
205
the New Delhi murals. His formula, as we have seen, was to meld Indian
decorative talents with Western figure drawing, dismissing the
theory that an Indian Art student should be able to evolve a lifesize figure entirely out of his inner consciousness, because he is an
Indian, means that his art must degenerate into the repetition of
conventions, as did the art of Egypt. There may be a good philosophy in it, but it is not a working proposition.123
The story of the New Delhi murals would not be complete without a consideration of the work of a heavyweight from Bombay among the chosen. Trained at the art school earlier in the century, Samuel FyzeeRahamin did not belong to the Solomon coterie and indeed became his
implacable enemy. As a wit once quipped, Bombay was not big enough to
hold these two supreme egotists. Solomons first public clash with FyzeeRahamin took place in 1924, when he approached Solomon with a view
to being the acting head during his absence at Wembley. On
Dhurandhars advice Solomon decided not to recommend him. Feeling
slighted, Fyzee-Rahamin started a vendetta against the school in the
Times of India. The feud lasted two years, until the weary editor refused
to publish any further letters on the subject.124
The Solomon/Fyzee-Rahamin conflict also had a deeper ideological
reason. Trained at the Royal Academy under the fashionable portrait
painter John Singer Sargent, Fyzee-Rahamin began his career as a successful portrait painter.125 He was among those who sacrificed their lucrative Western career under Mahatma Gandhis inspiration. However, he
did not simply turn out historicist subjects in the manner of Ravi Varma
or Herman Muller. Fyzee-Rahamin renounced naturalism in order to
revive the two-dimensional character of Rajput painting, somewhat in the
207
manner of Bengal. It is difficult to establish the precise date of his conversion. His romantic liaison with the classical singer Atiya Begum in 1913
may have been a catalyst. The artist from the ancient Bene Israel community of Maharastra converted to Islam and added his wifes surname
Fyzee to his own. One of the fruits of their joint explorations of the
delights of Indian classical music was Music of India, written by the diva
and illustrated by the artist in 1925.126
Fyzee-Rahamin enjoyed a high reputation in London in the inter-war
years. Having held a successful one-man show at the Goupil Galleries in
1914, he showed his watercolours of Rajput inspiration in 1925 at Arthur
Tooths Gallery under the rubric Indian Vedic, Mythological and
Contemporary Watercolours. A leading English critic, Herbert Furst,
praised his portrait of Gandhi as a masterpiece of characterization in
Apollo, in one of his several essays on the artist.127 A Ragamala painting
from the album Amal i- Faizi-Rahamin was gifted by the industrialist
Victor Sassoon to the Tate Gallery. Another, The Rajput Sardar, was
acquired by the Tate at the same time.128 Queen Mary lent FyzeeRahamins portrait of Veena Sheshanna, the famous musician of Karnataka
admired by Venkatappa, to the exhibition of modern Indian art held in
London in 1934. The following year, he showed 45 pictures at a one-man
show at the Arlington Galleries.129 These works expounded FyzeeRahamins vision of artistic nationalism, claiming to
offer a viable alternative to both the archaistic Bengal
School and the Western approach of Bombay. However, in a penetrating though favourable review, Furst
diagnosed the predicament of the erstwhile pupil of
Sargent. The uneven mixture of Western realism and
flat decorative elements appeared to him to indicate a
clash of Western and Indian approaches, the artist
revealing an acute hesitation in seeking to turn his view
into vision. Sargents realist training was incompatible
with Eastern decorative sensibility, concluded Furst, a
problem not faced by traditional Mughal artists.130
Fyzee-Rahamin was among those from Bombay
selected to decorate the Imperial Secretariat but he carefully distanced himself from Solomons entourage. On
17 June 1926, after winning the commission, he published an article, On Indian Art and Burne-Jones, in
the Times of India, questioning the Bombay art schools
nationalist credentials for the murals, holding naturalism to be incompatible with Indian idealism. In passing,
he took a dig at J. A. Lalkaka, an academic portraitist
belonging to his own generation. In a sarcastic response,
Lalkaka demanded to know the message emanating
from Indian art. His friend Rustam Seodia, one of the
208
Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin,
Rajput Sardar, c. 1925,
watercolour on paper.
Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin,
Knowledge, Secretariat, North
Block, 1929, fresco buono.
tained the images of the Hindu trinity, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva,
while the spandrels were adorned with ashtanayikas (eight conventional
heroines of ancient Sanskrit literature).132
Furst, this time reviewing Fyzee-Rahamin enthusiastically, observed
that the strength of oriental art was its flatness, whereas modern
European artists were caught in a dilemma over whether to eliminate
depth altogether. However, tradition had collapsed in both East and West
and all artists of today come to their task primarily with the intellect, and
consequently, with a self-consciousness that prevents them from doing
what their forebears were able to do; that is to say, to ply their art as trade
naturally, without doubtings and questionings. Convinced that no genuine Indian style could survive in the cultural tide of colonialism, he welcomed Fyzee-Rahamins attempts to create a unified expression in New
Delhi that avoided the drawbacks of both Calcutta and Bombay, which
was in his view, the only sound alternative.133 Percy Brown, who also
made a careful analysis of the murals in Delhi, complimented the artist on
his delicate drawing and painting. Solomons cantankerous ally Vakil
however rubbished them: they were distinctly Western . . . his figures of
women are uniformly wooden [with] apparently no mural feeling in the
work . . . .134
The murals, on view from 1931 following the inauguration of New
Delhi, did not win universal approbation. Baker initially felt that the
murals would inspire Indians for generations. He even urged the government to print a small explanatory pamphlet. Arthur Gordon Shoosmith,
builder of public edifices in India, criticized the faulty draughtsmanship
and cloying romanticism of some of the works.135 And Baker soon had
private misgivings. In 1931, the Secretary to the Department of Industry
and Labour confided to the President of the Bombay Art Society that
Baker had found the work in New Delhi to be very unsatisfactory and
the outcome of the first impatient efforts.136 Baker later reflected:
In the buildings of New Delhi, where I felt that encouragement
should have been given to Indias great traditional art of mural
painting, my advice as to the training and selection of artists was not
taken, and painters with no thorough training in the difficult technique were for political reasons turned loose and uncontrolled upon
my walls, and the architect was ignored.137
As we shall see, this may have been one of the reasons for leaving out both
the Bombay art school and the marouflage method for the murals of
India House, London.
210
to the English artists good sense, he suggested that the best alternative
would be to entrust the work to those who were already experienced in
the indigenous tradition. Although a senior artist, Fyzee-Rahamin was
even prepared to be retrained by Rothenstein in order to obtain the commission. Rothenstein poured cold water on this unwarranted solicitation,
disagreeing that a little training in European mural decoration would
blight the Indian spirit. I seem to remember that you yourself claimed
that you have been a student of Sargent, yet this has not prevented you
from adopting Indian conventions, he wrote.142
The India House Scheme was publicly announced by the
Department of Industries and Labour on 9 November 1928. At an open
competition held on 12 March 1929 the selection committee chose, on
Rothensteins advice, four artists out of some 74 contestants. FyzeeRahamin was shortlisted, along with Seodia, because of their previous
work at the Secretariat. However, in the end the committee turned them
down because of their seniority and experience. The scholarships were
meant to encourage artists in their early or mid-career who would benefit from further training.143
The chosen four were Bengalis: Sudhansu Sekhar Chaudhury, Ranada
Ukil, Lalit Mohan Sen and Dhirendra Krishna Deb Barman. Sen, who was
a teacher at the government art school in Lucknow, had already completed
a mural course at the Royal College in London in 1926. His works had been
acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum and Laurence Binyon,
Keeper of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum, had engaged him to
copy the ancient frescoes of the Bagh Caves in central India. The other
three were all trained in oriental art. A prize-winner at exhibitions, Ukil
had learned Indian painting at the government art school in Calcutta in
19224, followed by tutelage under Abanindranath. Deb Barman had been
a student of Nandalals mural class at Santiniketan and had accompanied
the poet Tagore to Java. Chaudhury had been in prison as a revolutionary
terrorist. After his release, as part of rehabilitation, he took up painting
under Abanindranath. One may speculate that his selection was meant to
be a magnanimous gesture on the part of the Raj. Although it was denied
at the time, the choice of the Bengali artists was swayed by the government
policy of balancing different interest groups in India. Because Bombay had
swept the board in New Delhi, Bengal was to be placated with India
House. In any case, Solomons students were preoccupied with the New
Delhi murals at this time. As they admitted later, they could not prepare for
the competition in the short time at their disposal.144
The four arrived at the Royal College on 23 September 1929. In welcoming them, Rothenstein exhorted them to bring out the Indian quality
in their work, for all they lacked was a knowledge of modern techniques.
They quickly settled down and gained much from the practical advice of
Professor Ernest W. Tristram and E. Michael Dinkel in the mural department. Hitherto they had little experience of working together; yet the
212
design made jointly by them for the decoration of the dome of India House
was perhaps the most successful of their works.145 One of the artists, Deb
Barman, has left us a lively account of his experience in London. At
Santiniketan, his teacher Nandalal used to urge students to work in natural surroundings and approach art in a spirit of contemplation. The Royal
College was the very opposite, resembling a factory, full of bustle and hubbub, with some 500 extremely keen students jostling for the cramped
space. The Bengalis gradually became adept at producing large designs at
the college.146 The Times of 30 March 1930 reported Queen Marys visit to
the college. She was gratified that the Bengalis had kept to the Indian tradition, purchasing Sens work Girl Working in a Potters Yard. At a garden
party held at Buckingham Palace the artists turned up in white Bengali
dhoti and panjabi which was much admired.147
After spending a year at the college, the students visited Florence,
Arezzo and Padua in Michael Dinkels company to perfect the egg tempera method. Deb Barman was charmed by Florentine maidens, who literally stepped out of the canvases of Raphael and Botticelli. Later they
visited Vienna while Dinkel returned to London. The Bengali artists
commenced work at India House on 9 April 1931, coincidentally a few
months after the murals of New Delhi were thrown open to the public. A
studio was allocated to them in India House where they prepared their
preliminary cartoons, measuring between 2.8 m2 and 12/15 m2, with largerthan-life figures. Ten months were spent on designing. The dome posed
special problems because of the curvature, a problem that was known to
have beset Solomons students in New Delhi. Initially, the artists expected to use oils but egg tempera was found to be more suitable as it was
supposed to bring out the flat linear quality of oriental art. Twenty-four
carat gold paint was lavished on the background.148
213
The iconographic programme for India House decoration was as follows: the lunettes in the exhibition Hall on the ground floor by Ranada
Ukil and Sudhansu Sekhar Chaudhury represented Hindu and Muslim
subjects. Lalit Mohan Sen was assigned a large space in the library, while
Deb Barman was in charge of the pendentives of the Octagonal hall on the
first floor, where he depicted the four great classes of Hindu society and the
four great stages of Hindu life (varnasramadharma). Then followed the
decoration of the quadrants. However, the dome was by far the most ambitious as it represented great moments in Indian history, notably the reigns
of the Buddhist emperor Ashoka and the Mughal emperor Akbar.
According to The Studio, All four artists are united in the design and execution of the decoration of the dome, which is admirable in its effect of
colour and as a complete scheme . . . [The] work carried out is a successful
example of traditional Indian painting applied to modern use.149
The art magazine expressed the hope that the whole scheme would
see a successful completion. However, before its completion Sir Atul
Chatterjee was replaced by Sir Bhupendranath Mitra, the cautious official
at the centre of the construction of New Delhi, whom we have encountered before. Rothenstein complained that the new High Commissioner,
a financial expert, with no sense of the arts . . . sent for me constantly,
fearful always that the painters were idling, and again doubtful of the reasonableness of their claims to payment.150 For the head of the Royal
College, it was a trying situation. Not only were excessive demands made
on his time, but he was also expected to act as a policeman. The political
climate in India was changing rapidly as well, prompting the government
directive that the artists return to India immediately after completing the
painting in the dome, and without further work on the project.
Rothenstein tried to interest the Indian leaders attending the Round
214
Table Conference in the future of the artists Deb Barman and L. M. Sen,
but they had the future of India on their mind. Rothenstein wrote to the
Viceroy on behalf of Ranada Ukil and Sudhansu Chaudhury. However,
acutely aware of the ugly controversy raging in Bombay, he added that he
did not wish to press the claims of the Bengali artists. Lord Willingdon
assured him that something would be done for them on their return.151
This never happened. It is quite significant that Deb Barman is silent on
the India House work in his later memoirs.152
Baker predictably felt disappointed with the murals, as he had done
with the New Delhi ones, expressing this in a letter to Rothenstein, What
I did see of their colour I did not think very good. It seems to me that all
Indian painters make the vital mistake of following the colour scheme of
Ajanta, where, accidentally, I think, and due to decay, browns prevail.153
Baker had correctly noticed that the general predominance of browns in
Ajanta had something to do with the fact that the blues and whites had
perished. He was convinced that the close imitation of Ajanta had led to
the prevalence of red-earth colour at India House. However, the architect
did concede that a good start had been made in restoring Indias great
tradition.
In 1930 an exhibition of paintings of the Bombay art school at India
House, arranged through the good offices of Chatterjee and the India
Society, did nothing to assuage the resentment of Solomons allies.154 In
1931 the Times of India unleashed a virulent campaign on the choice of the
Bengalis for India House. This led to an acrimonious and protracted
exchange between the Times of India, the Bombay Art Society, the India
Society of London and the Government of India over claims and counterclaims regarding favouritism towards Bengal that lasted a good part of
the year.
215
The Times of India alleged a conspiracy between the India Society and
the Indian government to deprive Bombay of its legitimate prize. On 6
April 1931, three days before the Bengali artists were to commence their
work at India House, the Times of India, mouthpiece of the Bombay artschool faction, issued a warning under the heading, India Society:
Bombay should realize that very intelligent forces are mobilizing in Delhi
and London to scoop the big stakes in art revival.155 When constructive
efforts in art education were in their infancy and confined to Bombay, the
India Society supported the Prize of Delhi, alleged the paper, but now
Baker was playing fairy godmother to Rothensteins Indian mural painting class, while Bombay watched helplessly as its scheme was hijacked for
the benefit of another province. In an allusion to the celebrated passage in
Shakespeares Julius Caesar, the paper addressed the Marquess of Zetland
and Lord Lytton (a former Governor of Bengal and a former Viceroy),
Laurence Binyon, the Keeper of Oriental Art at the British Museum, and
Rothenstein ironically as honourable men.
The next day, Lalkaka, who was chosen to copy royal portraits at
Windsor, felt obliged to register his own protest.156 On 10 April, under
the heading India Society Again, the Times of India accused the Bengali
High Commissioner, Chatterjee, of securing this regrettable family
arrangement. Nor were the four artists spared. Bombay must insist on
her rights, concluded the paper sanctimoniously.157 The paper fired the
next salvo on 12 April 1931, claiming a sort of copyright for Bombay
over the invention of Indian murals: It is a fact that Bengal did not compete in the first and then most difficult competition, though criticisms
have emanated from that province which now wants to join the competition . . . [as] the initial problems of mural painting on a really comprehensive and unusually difficult scale have actually now been solved.158
On 24 April, the pugnacious Vakil joined the fray, describing the India
Society as a reactionary setup and claiming that its pet henchmen, both in
London and in India, have prevented many ideas and resisted many reconstructive endeavours for the advancement of art in India. Forestalling any
rebuttal that Bombay had already won the New Delhi commission, he
described the hard earned commission as a mere earnest of good intentions of the government of India. Vakil joined in the personal vilification
of Chatterjee, Rothenstein and Sir John Marshall, Director-General of the
Archaeological Survey of India and member of the selection committee.159
The India Society, learning that its members had been libelled in the Times
of India, issued a formal protest on 6 May, pointing out that it never backed
any specific school but only gave general encouragement to Indian art. Nor
did it take responsibility for opinions expressed by individual members,
reminding the paper that it was through the Societys efforts that the exhibition of Bombay art students at India House in the Aldwych had been
possible.160 There were activities behind the scenes as well. On 7 May, Alan
Green, Deputy High Commissioner for India, had sent a confidential let216
ter to Wiles, regretting that the whole affair was based on a misunderstanding, but then it would be too much to expect a journalist to acquire
correct information from public records. Green was especially peeved that
the accusation followed closely on the heels of Chatterjees generosity to
the Bombay art school. He went so far as to suggest that the very limitations of Solomons marouflage murals in Delhi had led to the decision to
train Indians in proper frescoes at the Royal College. I think you will
agree, Green offered, that marouflage is a somewhat unworthy form of
mural decor. However, as a comforting gesture, he assured Bombay that
there was still plenty of room in India House to cover.161
Wiles, who also happened to be a member of the India Society in
London, was seen by the art-school faction as an ally of the Society, and
complicit in helping the Bengalis. Feeling obliged to clear his name, Wiles
sought public clarification about the India House commission from the
President of the Society.162 Younghusband wrote to the Times of India on 20
May denying any favouritism shown by the Society. The paper however
refused to accept this, assuming a tone of outraged reasonableness: we
never asked for more than that Bombay should be allowed to participate
with other provinces in the work in London and New Delhi. Complaining
further that the committee for the forthcoming Burlington House exhibition of modern Indian art consisted almost entirely of orientalists, it refused
to accept that Bombay had received any special favours in merely being
invited to exhibit at India House. Two days later, the combative Jayakar
joined the fray, firing at random at a number of favourite targets. He felt it
an affront that Indian artists were never shown with contemporary British
artists, demanding that the planned museum of ancient Indian art in
London must expand to include modern Indian art. The recent publication
on Ajanta by Laurence Binyon, a friend of the orientalists, was dismissed as
lacking first-hand experience. The Maharastran finally accused Chatterjee
of rigging the India House project in favour of Bengalis, the art litterateurs,
dilettantes and connoisseurs, who have unfortunately made of Indian art
elsewhere a symbol of preciosity and practical ineffectiveness.163
The next day T. S. Shilton, Secretary to the Department of Industries
and Labour responsible for the Delhi and London projects, wrote to
Wiles, ostensibly to correct certain misunderstandings, but in fact to
answer Solomons faction. In the first of the two government schemes, he
pointed out, Bombay had swept the board. In the second, the four
Bengalis were chosen at an open competition. Shilton made no bones
about the underlying political reason, the balancing of different interest
groups in India:
You will thus see that equal opportunities were afforded to all artists
and schools of art in India in both the above schemes and there is no
justification at all for any heart burning in Bombay over the award
of scholarships to Bengali artists. In fact so far as the Government
217
of India are concerned there has been much greater work given to
Bombay School of Art than to Bengal.164
Shilton then gleefully informed Wiles: You may be pleased to hear that
we have had a protest from Sir Herbert Baker against the decoration of
the ceilings and walls of a building designed by him with paintings which
he describes as very unsatisfactory and to which he refers as first impatient efforts. This is of course not for publication.165
On 29 May 1931, Sir Francis Younghusband, President of the India
Society, wrote to George Wiles, President of the Bombay Art Society,
insisting that no council member of the India Society was on the selection
committee. Wiles decided to go public in the Times of India the very same
day. Objecting to the character assassination of individuals, especially of
high officials, Wiles sought to cut the ground from under Solomons feet.
He pointed out that many artists both in India and abroad had doubted
whether the methods of training followed by the Bombay School were
consistent with the ideals of Indian painting.166 He also revealed that the
vociferous Sethna and Jayakar were both on the Finance Committee of the
Assembly when the measure was passed, but not a squeak was heard from
them. Sethnas later claim that the presence of the majority of Bombay
artists in the New Delhi project was a mere accident was plain poppycock.
The issue was not allowed to die a natural death, for it had opened old
sores. Though disappointed at failing to obtain the India House commission, in the Times of India of 4 June 1931, Fyzee-Rahamin aired his own
grudge against Solomon, which he had harboured since 1924. His own orientalism, which sought, like the Bengal School and the Gujarati artists, to
revive the indigenous tradition of flat decorative painting, had little
patience with Bombays naturalist revival. While Rahamin accepted that
the Government communiqu had misled the artists and the public in not
making clear that the project was meant for young artists, he deplored the
lack of public interest in obtaining the commission for Bombay. He also
criticized Jayakars conduct as unbecoming in favouring the art school
rather than Bombay artists in general, adding:
Mr Jayakars assumption that I tried and failed in the competition is
amusing . . . I need no certificate from the dilettante and school masters who at their best only entertain the novice. My attempt to compete, as Sir William Rothenstein himself put it, could not be in order
to learn from him, but to protect the reputation of Indian art in
Europe by representing the best.167
This provoked Sir Phiroze Sethna, Member of the Council of State, to
retort:
[Fyzee-Rahamin] as your readers must know, avails every opportuni218
in Rajasthan, and Fyzee-Rahamin, who was not part of the faction and
appears to have consulted an ancient Sanskrit text, had success in this area.
What about Solomons claim that he had created a new national
style? Here too we are on a slippery ground. He persistently broadcast that
a sound understanding of nature, in other words, Western illusionist
drawing, enhanced the decorative instincts of Indian students by improving their representational skills. The difference, as perceived by Solomon,
lay in the use of naturalistic figures based on a knowledge of anatomy, as
opposed to the flat mental images of the Bengal School. Yet, when we
examine the works of Bombay we cannot escape the fact that they were not
that very different from oriental art. Indeed if one were to describe paintings from Solomons mural class in a few words, it would be personifications la Mucha overlaid with traces of Ajanta and the Bengal School.
who were not averse to joining the provincial governments from the 1920s
onwards. The peak of power-sharing was reached in 1935 when the
Congress formed ministries in the majority of the provinces in India. Even
in 1939, when the Congress withdrew its co-operation with the government
after it was snubbed by the Viceroy over the declaration of war, other political groups rushed in to co-operate with the regime. For instance, Vasantrao
Dabholkar, who had Dhurandhars vote, was one such non-Congress
politician who stood at the Council of State elections at this time.190
In the 1940s, this accommodation between the Raj and the nationalist politicians became increasingly difficult. Political conditions worsened,
polarizing opinions and putting intolerable burdens on Indian loyalties.
Few students at the art school in Bombay remained untouched by the
tales of the heroism of the Indian National Army in Southeast Asia or the
mutiny of the Indian naval ratings and their subsequent repression. A
moving testament to this period is a series of paintings produced by the
students of the art school inspired by these events.191
Ukil (one of the Indian House four) were given charge of organizing the
event.196 There were elaborate preparations, a lot of diplomatic flurries
and much advance publicity in the press, journalists closely following the
brothers every move. Notices appeared even in the distant American Art
News on 20 June 1932, not to mention the English papers. Both Vakil and
Solomon visited London before the exhibition to safeguard Bombays
interests, but they were now in a more conciliatory mood.197 The opening
of the exhibition on Monday 10 December was carefully orchestrated to
squeeze in as much publicity as possible. To underscore noblesse oblige, the
Duchess of York, who formally opened the exhibition, and the
Maharajkumari (princess) of Burdwan posed for press photographs. The
President of the Royal Academy was in attendance as the chief guest. The
Marquess of Zetland, the loyal friend of the Bengal School, introduced the
exhibition. In 1930, he had urged the members of the Round Table
Conference, who had met in London to decide the political fate of India,
not to neglect art.198 The secretary of the India Society expressed his own
satisfaction with the flowering of two vigorous renaissances under imperial patronage though once more reaffirming Bengals pre-eminence.199
Notices appeared in a variety of papers, notably the Illustrated London
News, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and Manchester
Guardian, the last admonishing Indians to revive the glories of ancient art
by resisting the lures of Western art.200 The 500 works at Burlington
House included a number of large format paintings. Augmented by works
from the collections of the Queen, the Marquess of Zetland and quite a few
Maharajas, the show represented virtually all the reputed Indian artists of
older and younger generations that spanned three decades of the twentieth
century. The only surprising omission was the controversial Amrita SherGil.201 The Times, which reviewed the show in extenso,
failed to discover any masterpieces, though it
recognized the abundance of talent, not to mention
Bengals primacy. Although hesitating to speak with
authority on the orientalists symbolic colours, since
that subject was not to be touched by anybody
unversed in Indian philosophy, it felt dismayed by
their misty gradations borrowed from Japan.
Gaganendranath excited the greatest interest, while
admiration for Rabindranath had by now been
reduced to mere curiosity.202 Ramananda Chatterjee,
the veteran journalist from India, who had done
much to shape Indian taste, covered the show for his
Modern Review.203
In the wake of this grand spectacle of empire,
which had opened with so much fanfare, the memory
of Indian artists in Britain gradually faded away. The
political situation in India was deteriorating even as
224
the war clouds started gathering on the distant European horizon. This
particular swansong of imperial patronage had all the panoply of a state
occasion before Raj politics entered its final meltdown. The government
expected the grand exhibition to demonstrate the limited popularity of
the Congress and highlight its cordial relations with the hereditary
princes who trusted the Raj more than the nationalists. For the artists this
was the last demonstration of ambitious government patronage. From
this moment artists would rely on private patronage and their own
resources rather than on the endorsement of the colonial regime.
225
Epilogue
The year 1947 marked the end of the British Empire and the creation of
modern India and Pakistan in the midst of anarchy and communal violence. It also brought an end to the debates on art as a vehicle for nationalist resistance. The heroic age of primitivism, the most compelling voice
of modernism in India, had in effect ended in 1941. Two of its chief protagonists died in that year, Rabindranath Tagore at the age of 79, and
Amrita Sher-Gil at 28. The surviving member of the trio, Jamini Roy,
only added refinements to the striking artistic language that he had perfected in the 1930s. However, younger artists such as Ramkinkar and
Benodebehari continued well into the 1940s, as did some of the figurative
artists, notably sculptor Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury.
How can we sum up this defining period, which threw up larger than
life figures that changed the face of Indian art through their compelling
visions of Indian modernity? Their modernity was, as we know, viewed
through a wide range of artistic lenses in resistance to colonial rule. By
1905 the nationalist Bengal School had rejected the Victorian history
painting of the previous era as the handmaiden of imperialism, constructing their own historicism by an amalgam of flat non-illusionist styles. In
contrast, most of the artists of the 1920s and 30s disavowed the historicist
master narrative, which had obsessed the previous generation. They sited
their nation, not in the historic past, but in the local and the present,
which allowed for multiple aesthetic possibilities. The debate between the
modernists and the naturalists in this period was essentially within the
broader spectrum of global modernity, as they drew their inspiration
from international figures such as Tagore, Gandhi, Marx and Freud.
When the discourse of modernism came to India in the 1920s, its flexible
radical language provided the artists with a new tool to construct their
images of anti-colonial resistance. Modernisms most fervent advocates,
the Indian primitivists, proposed a far-reaching critique of colonial
modernity, drawing upon peasant culture in an affirmation of the local
and the present. Yet their anti-urban, anti-capitalist counter-modernity
had global implications. Interestingly, even the naturalists, who were
226
References
Prologue
1 J.-P. Sartre, Black Orpheus, trans. S. W. Allen (Paris, 1951),
p. 39, quoted in R. Linley, Wifredo Lam: Painter of
Negritude, Art History, ii/4 (December 1988), p. 533. See
L. S. Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde,
19231982 (Austin, tx, 2002). Csaire was an iconic West
Indian poet of Negritude.
2 W. G. Archer, India and Modern Art (London, 1959), may
be taken as a classic example of the study of non-Western
art essentially as a derivative enterprise. In an essay on
decentring modernism, to be published in Art Bulletin
(Intervention series), I develop the relationship of power
and authority between the West and its others as expressed
in histories of non-Western avant-garde art and possible
ways of thinking beyond current practices.
3 W. Rubin, Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the
Tribal and the Modern (New York, 1984). I do not need to
rehearse here the arguments and rebuttals in this controversy
except to add that Hal Foster, The Primitive Unconscious
of Modern Art, October, xxxiv (Fall 1985), pp. 4570, and
James Clifford, Histories of the Tribal and the Modern,
Art in America (April 1985), pp. 164215, offer trenchant
critiques of the Western art historical canon. For my own
work on Western representations of Indian art, see Much
Maligned Monsters: History of Western Reactions to Indian
Art (Oxford 1977), especially chap. vi. See also critique of
Eurocentric discourses of modernism by Latin American
critics, R. A. Greeley, Modernism: What El Norte Can
Learn from Latin America, Art Journal (Winter 2005),
pp. 8293.
4 M. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (Berkeley, ca, 1985),
pp. 85ff., on the passage: influence is a curse of art criticism primarily because of wrong-headed grammatical
prejudice about who is the agent and who the patient: it
seems to reverse the active-passive relation which the historical actor [the artist] experiences and the inferential
228
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63
64
65
66
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68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
Santiniketan, 1919.
78 See supra, p. 74.
79 N. Bose, Art, Patronage and Institution, Visvabharati
Quarterly, Nandalal Number, xxxiv/14 (January 1971),
pp. 7076. B. B. Mukhopadhyaya, Chitrakatha (Kolkata,
1984), p. 159.
80 Mukhopadhyaya, Chitrakatha, p. 185.
81 Ibid., pp. 512.
82 N. Basu, Drawing Humans and Animals, Drishti o Shristi
(Kolkata, 1985), p. 161.
83 Basu, Artistic Perception, in ibid., pp. 3850.
84 Mukhopadhyaya, Adhunik, pp. 1723.
85 Ibid., pp. 2713.
86 Interestingly, he retained the use of geometrical shapes
and the blackboard, Mandal, Bharat Shilpi Nandalal, i,
pp. 56176. Mukhopadhyaya, Chitrakatha, pp. 512. On
Okakura, Abnindranath Tagore and Pan-Asian art, see
Mittel, Art and Nationalism, pp. 2626.
87 Mukhopadhyaya, Chitrakatha, p. 159. N. Basu, Application of
Anatomy in Art, Drishti o Shristi, pp. 2130; Rhythm, Drishti
o Shristi, pp. 314 (mention of Okakura triadic principle).
88 Mukhopadhyaya, Adhunik shilpashikhsha, pp. 535. See his
student manuals using a wide range of Eastern and
Western art techniques and artists materials in Basu, Drishti
o Shristi, pp. 61143.
89 The title is Dandi March (Bapuji), 12 April 1930. Linocut,
ngma, Acc. No. 4893, the catalogue: Nandalal Bose,
18821966: Centenary Exhibition, National Gallery of Modern
Art (New Delhi, 1982), p. 184.
90 Letter of 25 January 1932, M. K. Gandhi, Collected Works,
xlix (Delhi, 195884), p. 37.
91 Interview with the musicologist Dilip Roy on 2 February
1924, Gandhi, Collected Works, xxiii, p. 193.
92 Gandhi, Young India, in Collected Works, xxxiv, p. 319. This
was in response to Anton Chekhovs stories. Tolstoy was
one of Gandhis inspirations and his favourable response to
Gandhi is too well known to bear repeating here. L. Fisher,
Tolstoy and Gandhi, in The Life of Mahatma Gandhi
(London, 1982), pp. 12330.
93 Interview in The Island (14 October 1931) in London,
Gandhi, Collected Works, xlvii, pp. 14950. Letter dated 11
May 1928, Gandhi, Collected Works, xxxvi, p. 305. In 1929
he again rejects the art for arts sake argument, Collected
Works, xl, p. 342.
94 S. Bhattacharya, The Mahatma and the Poet (Delhi, 1997), on
the debate between Gandhi and Tagore.
95 N. Basu, The Place of Art in Education, in Drishti o
Shristi, pp. 918, originally read at Calcutta University. On
his use of crafts as a Gandhian nationalist, see his close associate Prabhatmohan Bandopadhaya, Nandalal: Karusangha
o Jatiya Andolan, Desh Binodan (Nandalal birth centenary
number) (1389), pp. 3447.
96 Mukhopadhyaya, Adhunik Shilpashiksha, pp. 4353.
97 C. Deb, Shiksha Kshetre Nandalal Basur Chhatrider
Bhumika, Desh Binodan (Nandalal birth centenary number)
(1389), p. 152.
98 Mukhopadhyaya, Adhunik Shilpashiksha, p. 56. Interestingly,
on his visit to Santiniketan in 1924, Abanindranath, deeply
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
241
242
2
3
4
5
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
243
244
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
tions, pp. 8542), see www.aaa.si.edu. I was unable to consult the archives as they were closed indefinitely for re-siting in 2006. For alerting me about Peggy Guggenheims
interest in Roy, I am grateful to Sundaram Tagore of
Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York. See her autobiography, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict
(London, 1979), pp. 3513, as well as Holland Cotters Art
in Review; The Promise of Modernism: Art in India,
18901947, New York Times (17 December 1999; published
online 27 August 2006), in which he mentions that
Guggenheim acquired Rays painting Woman with a Parrot.
B. Dey, Jamini Raier Chitrasadhana (conversation with the
artist), Jamini Rai, p. 57 and also pp. 22, 101, 115. Letter to
Dey of 18 September 1942, on his plans to show folk, child
art and his works together.
Letter of 6 June 1946. Dey and Irwin, The Art of Jamini Roy,
p. 32. S. Nandy, Shilpi Jamini Raier Chitra Sadhana,
Kshanika (1378), ii/4, p. 29. The Amrita Bazar, 1 February
1937, mentions that he had turned to child art. On Klee
using his childhood drawings as well as his daughters,
supra, chapter Two note 41.
Von Leyden, Jamini Roy, in, The March of India (1947),
p. 16.
Suhrawardy, Prefaces, pp. 126 and 134, originally delivered
as Bageswari Lectures.
Dey and Irwin, The Art of Jamini Roy, p. 32. He also painted on wood panels.
Von Leyden, Jamini Roy, p. 16.
Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters, p. 86.
Jamini Roy, Indian Society of Oriental Art Catalogue (1944),
p. 28.
Nichols, Verdict on India, pp. 13031.
H. Gangopadhyaya, Jamini Rai, Amrita, iv/4 (3 Vaisakh
1372), p. 811; Kshanika, ii/4 (1378), pp. 2021.
Letters to Bishnu Dey, 22 July 1942, 9 September 1942, 22
September 1942 and 30 October 1942.
F. J. Korom, Inventing Traditions: Folklore and Nationalism
as Historical Process in Bengal, in D. Rightman-Augustin
and M. Pourzahovic, Folklore and Historical Process (Zagreb,
1989), pp. 5783. Dinesh Chandra Sen, History of Bengali
Language and Literature (Calcutta, 1911) and Folk Literature
of Bengal (Calcutta, 1920).
G. S. Dutt, Folk Arts and Crafts of Bengal: The Collected
Papers (Calcutta, 1990), introduction by S. Bandyopadhyay,
p. xiv.
R. Italiaander, Meetings with a Great Master, in The Art of
Jamini Roy (Calcutta, 1987), p. 43. He met the artist around
the early 1960s.
Coates, The Peasant Painter, in The Art of Jamini Roy,
p. 50, a tribute published after his death in 1972.
Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, xi, p. 589, see supra, chapter
Two, note 4. Roy had underlined the bits that he found stirring.
Dey, Jamini Rai, p. 48. In Bengali it was 18 Jyestha 1330. See
Kshanika, ii/4 (1378), p. 21.
Casey, Tides and Eddies, p. 183. See Einsteins discussion of
the nature of myth in African sculpture, C. W. Haxthausen,
Negro Sculpture (Neger Plastik), October, cvii (Winter
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
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246
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
247
248
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
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12
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18
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28
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250
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203
255
Bibliography
Sources and Documents
Acharekar, M. R., Rupadarsini (Bombay, 1958)
Agastya (Canopus), Aesthetics of Young India: A Rejoinder,
Rupam, ix (January 1922), pp. 247
Annual Exhibition, Academy of Fine Arts, 1st year, exh. cat.
(Calcutta, December 1933January 1934)
Annual Exhibition, Academy of Fine Arts, 2nd year, exh. cat.
(Calcutta, December 1934January 1935)
Anon., Indian Mural Painting, The Work of Four Indian Artists
at the New India House, Studio (March 1932), p. 148
Archer, W. G., The Vertical Man: a Study in Primitive Indian
Sculpture (London, 1947)
, India and Modern Art (London, 1959)
Attiya Begam (and) Fyzee Fyzee-Rahamin, Music of India
(London, 1925)
Baker, H., Architecture and Personalities (London, 1944)
Bandopadhaya, S., Gogonendranath Thakur (Kolkata, 1972)
, Shilpi Ramkinkar: Alapchari (Kolkata, 1994)
Belnos, Mrs S. C., Twenty-Four Plates Illustrative of Hindu and
European Manners in Bengal (London, 1832)
Bose (Basu), A., Banglar Chitrakala o Rajnitir Eksha Bachhar
(Kolkata, 1993)
Bose, A., Verified Perspective (Calcutta, 1944)
Bose (Basu), N., Drishti o Shristi (Kolkata, 1985)
British Empire Exhibition Descriptive Catalogue of Modern Indian
Paintings and Sculptures, Calcutta, Bombay, Lahore (Bombay,
1924)
Brown, P., The Mural Paintings at New Delhi, The Indian
State Railways Magazine, iv/5 (February 1931), pp. 3959
Casey, M., Tides and Eddies (Harmondsworth, 1966; Melbourne,
1969)
Catalogue of the 14th Annual Exhibition of the Indian Society of
Oriental Art, (Calcutta, December 1922), International
Section: Modern Phases of Western Art, Introduction by St.
K. (Stella Kramrisch)
Catalogues of Bombay Art Society Annual Exhibitions 19381947
(47th to 57th year)
Chatterjee, D., Gaganendranath Tagore (New Delhi, 1964)
Chatterjee, R. ed., Exhibitions of Indian Art in London and
New Delhi, December Last Year, Modern Review (July
1935), p. 60ff
, The Golden Book of Tagore (Calcutta, 1931)
256
257
Other Literature
An Exhibition of His (Karmarkar) Sculptures at the Nehru Centre,
Worli, exh. cat., (Mumbai, December 1996January 1997)
Arte figurative in Ungheria tra 1870 e il 1950, exh. cat., Milan
(1987)
Artists Directory, Lalit Kala Akademi (New Delhi, 1962)
Aryan, K. C., 100 Years Survey of Punjab Painting, 18411941
(Patiala, 1977)
Asian Artists in Crystal; Designs by Contemporary Asian Artists
Engraved on Steuben Crystal, exh. cat. (New York, 1956)
Bagal, J. C., History of the Government College of Art and
Craft, Centenary Government College of Art & Craft Calcutta
(Calcutta, 1964)
Baij, R. K., Mastermashay and An Interview with Ramkinkar,
Visvabharati Quarterly, Nandalal Number, xxxiv/14 (May
1968April 1969), pp. 7784
Bandyopadhyaya, S., Rabindra Chitrakala Rabindra Sahityer
Patabhumika (Bolpur, 1388)
Baxandall, M., Patterns of Intention (Berkeley, ca, 1985)
Benjamin, W., The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, in Illuminations (London, 1982), pp. 2267
Bhattacharya, S., The Mahatma and the Poet (Delhi, 1997)
Bhaumik, G., Vijnyanacharya Jagadishchandrer Shilpanurag,
Sundaram, year 3, no. 2, (1365), pp. 16672
Bisanz-Prakken, M., Heiliger Frhling (Munich, 1999)
Blotkamp, C., Mondrian: The Art of Destruction (London, 1994)
Boas, G., Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages
258
259
260
Acknowledgements
261
262
Photo Acknowledgements
263
Index
264
Barney, Natalie 65
Baroda 89, 90, 92
Basohli painters 63
Basu Vijnan Mandir (Bose Institute) 85
batik 82
Bauhaus, Weimar 10, 1518, 25, 37, 68,
70, 72, 73, 79
Baxandall, Michael 8
Begum, Atiya
Music of India 208
Beirut 11
Bell, Clive 16, 25
Benaras Hindu University 202
Bene Israel community of Maharastra 208
Bengal 29, 323, 65, 76, 107, 109, 114, 124,
125, 127, 129, 130, 136, 138, 149, 171,
177, 180, 182, 186, 1935, 199,
21920, 223, 224
Bengal Renaissance 11, 37
Bengal School of Art 1517, 22, 26, 42, 54,
68, 76, 77, 93, 100, 103, 110, 125, 129,
130, 133, 138, 160, 161, 163, 173, 181,
187, 188, 193, 194, 195, 208, 221, 226
Benjamin, Walter 8, 100, 119
Benodebehari, see Mukhopadhyaya,
Benodebehari
Bergson, Henri 10
Berlin 16, 27, 68
Berlingske Tidende 75, 77
Besant, Annie 179
Bhadralok, the 11
Bhagvad Gita 35
Bhagwat, Nalini 149
Bharat Barsha 13031
Bharati 130
Bharat Kala Bhavan, Benaras 202
Bhonsale, A. R. 184
Bidou, Henri 66, 73
Bikaner 132
Binyon, Laurence 191, 212, 216, 217
Birkenhead, Lord 198
Birla, G. D. 82
Birley, Oswald 184
Birmingham Mail 68
Blaue Reiter Almanac 71
Bloom, Harold 8
Bloomsbury group 55, 63
Boeiss 170
Bomanji, Pestonji 1923
Glory of Pestonji 193
The Last Touch 1923
Bombay 11, 54, 85, 125, 140, 142, 146,
14957, 165, 177, 181, 182, 186,
189210, 215, 21820, 227
Bombay Architectural Association 198
Bombay Art Society 36, 37, 49, 132, 149,
151, 182, 199, 202, 210, 215, 21819,
222
Bombay Chronicle 132,183, 190, 198200,
219
book binding 82
Bose, Atul, 12433, 14044, 193, 197
Bengal Tiger 131, 131, 132
Comrades 130
preparatory sketch for a portrait of
his wife Devjani 143
preparatory sketch for a portrait of
Rani Goggi Devi Birla 144
sketch of his wife 127
The Artists Wife Devjani 143
Bose, Fanindranath 96, 158, 173
Bose, Sir Jagadish Chandra 85, 87
Bose, Nandalal 32, 54, 7994, 106, 107,
124, 161, 193, 212, 213, 219
The Triumph of Science and
Imagination 86
Abimanyu Vadha 90, 90
Dandi March 81
Dhaki 84
Gangavatarana 90, 90
Halakarshan 87, 88
Natir Puja 89, 90
Santals in Birbhum Landscape 91
Bose, Subhas 83
Boston 69
Bourdelle, Emile-Antoine 956
Bourdieu, Pierre 9
Brahma (Brahmin) 19, 57, 118, 210
Brancusi, Constantin 34
Braque, Georges 257
Mlle Pogany 15
Brangwyn, Frank 150
Bratachari organization 118
Brauner, Victor 112
Brelvi, S. A. 200
Breton, Andr
First Manifesto of Surrealism 66
British Empire 10, 138, 226
Exhibition 161,1914
265
266
formalism 1528
Forster, E. M. 107, 110
Forward 21
Foster, Hal 33
Foulds, John 49
Foulds, Patrick 49
Frampton, George 164
France (French) 7, 47, 52, 53, 96
art 49
painters 66, 112
sculptor 95
Free School of Painting, Nagybnya 55
frescoes 83, 86, 88, 180, 192, 217
Freud, Sigmund 15, 66, 68, 73, 75, 124,
164, 170, 226
Fry, Roger 22, 25, 55
Furst, Herbert
Apollo 208
Futurists, 15, 24
Fyzee-Rahamin, Samuel 193, 197, 20712,
21820
On Indian Art and BurneJones 208
Amal i-Faizi-Rahamin 208
detail figure Secretariat 209
Knowledge, Secretariat 209
Music of India 208
The Rajput Sardar 208, 208
Gaekwad family 89
Gaganendranath, see Tagore,
Gaganendranath
Galerie du Thtre Pigalle, Paris 54, 66
Gandhi, Mahatma, 26, 29, 50, 65, 79,
813, 108, 109, 110, 124, 158, 175,
182, 188, 189, 2078, 222, 226
Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule 33
Young India 81
Ganga 31
Gangoly, O. C. 16, 188, 191, 194, 196, 202
Gangooly, Jamini Prokash 125, 140, 149,
186
Gauguin, Paul 55, 112
Geddes, Patrick 80, 87
Geneva 68
George v 152, 177
German National Theatre 17
Gesamtkunstwerk 180, 191, 196
Ghosh, Ajit 32
Ghosh, Aurobindo 139
Ghosh, Barindranath 16
Ghosh, Nibaran 32, 139
Gide, Andr 65
Giotto 26, 93
Golding, John 34
Gombrich, E. H. 24, 75
Gontcharova, Natalia 51
Gothic Revivalists 180
Gottesman, Marie Antoinette 47, 51
Kuhn, Thomas 9
lacquerwork 82
Lahore 49, 145, 182
Lalkaka, J. A. 140, 208, 216, 219
Lang, Edith 53
Langer, Heinz 169
Langhammer, Walter 227
Lanteri, Edouard
Modelling: A Guide for Teachers and
Students 946, 173
Law, B. C. (Bimala Charan Laha) 125,
193
A Bengali Lady 126
leatherwork 82
Leighton, Lord 17
The Arts of Peace 201
Lerch, Franz 55
Lvi, Sylvain 80
Lewis, Wyndham 17
Ley, A. H. 199
lithography 82
von Leyden, Rudi 107, 110, 112, 113, 120,
227
Lloyd, Sir George 183, 190, 195, 196, 198
London 70, 84, 110, 111, 112, 182, 188,
192, 208, 213
Lorry, P. 221
Lucknow 182, 204
Congress 82, 107, 110
Lutyens, Sir Edwin Landseer 140, 160,
1779, 196200, 204
Joint Memorandum for the
Encouragement of Indian Art 179,
196, 199
Lutyens, Emily 179, 197
Lytton, Lord 179, 216
Macke, August 71
Madans Theatre, Calcutta 146
Madras 145, 170, 182
Mahabharata 90
Maharajkumari of Burdwan 224
Maharastra 127, 149
Maimansingh 128
Majumdar, Kshitindranath 193
Jamuna 28, 31
Malevich, Kasimir 34, 35
Mallik, Pramatha, 127, 173
The Soul of the Soil 158, 159
Manchester Guardian 224
Mann, Thomas 68
Marc, Franz 27
Marcks, Gerhardt 17
marouflage 182, 192, 205, 210, 217, 22021
Marshall, Sir John 202, 216
masks 16, 69, 71, 756
Marx, Karl (Marxism) 119, 124, 171, 226
267
268
Pahari
miniatures 63
painting 65
Pal, Bepin
Religion, Morality and Art 139
Palace of Westminster, London 180
Pan, David 12
Pansare, S. 153
Panthon, Paris 180
Panwalkar, R. D. 192
Parandekar, M. K. 150, 192
Landscape 151
Parichay 107
Paris 8, 11, 16, 36, 46, 47, 50, 55, 59, 667,
71, 138, 180
Parma 9
Parsi Rajakeya Sabha 200
pat (scroll painting) 31, 42, 44, 82, 106,
107, 11213, 11618
patas 88
patua (scroll painter) 44, 82, 83, 113
Pathare Prabhu caste 200
Patiala 132
Pechstein, Max 34
Penny, Anthony 111
Philadelphia 69
photography 139, 140, 146
Picasso, Pablo 78, 257, 34, 53, 100, 117
Demoiselles dAvignon 8, 71
Pioneer Film Studio 146
Piranesi, 23
Pithawala, M. F. 186
Poetry 205
ponkha work 88
Popova, Liubov Sergeevna 51
Portraits of Great Beauties of the World,
California 138
von Pott, Lisa 95
Prabasi 15, 55, 130
Pratinidhi, Panth of Aundh 193
Prieto, Laura 51
primitivism 8, 12, 26, 29122
Prix de Delhi 180, 196, 198200
Prix de Rome 196
Progressive Artists of Bombay 227
Proust, Marcel 76
Proutaux, Denise 59
Public Library, Mysore 168
Pudovkin, Vsevolod 107
Punjab 127, 135, 145, 194
Punjab Academy of Fine Arts 146
Punjab Literary League, Lahore 51
Puri, Orissa 83
Rabindranath, see Tagore, Rabindranath
Ragamala 165, 208
Rahiman, Abalal 149
Raj, the 11, 16, 26, 84, 114, 161, 177, 178,
269
270
Vossiche Zeitung 69
Vriksha Ropan (tree planting) 88
Wadiyar, Krishnaraja, Maharaja of
Mysore 163, 165, 168
Wagner 180
Wales, Prince of 189
Wardah 83
Watson, Alfred Henry 104
Websters Dictionary 168
Welfare 22
Wembley 140, 170
wet-sari painting 133, 149
Wilenski, R. H.
The Modern Movement in Art 133
Wiles, George 21719
Willingdon, Lord 152, 215
Wilson, Leslie 223
271