Till Mid Sem All

Introduction
T h e M o d e r n I n d ia n P a r a d o x
 this book arises from a paradox located at the heart of artistic

production in postindependence India: how to be modern and Indian? On the
one hand, an unmarked, presumptively Western modern embraces the univer-
sal, has faith in pure form, and understands history as a story of progress. This
conception of the modern exerts pressure on those producing art after 1947
in India, a time when modernization programs for industry overlapped with
a drive to define the new independent nation. On the other hand, this move
toward a universal modern is countered by a desire to recover the supposed
“truth” of Indian culture. Indian nation-building efforts have often sought out a
lost, imagined, and pure precolonial past, holding it up as a locus for a national
identity. Colonialism, of course, cannot simply be expunged from India’s his-
tory, a reality that those who seek this past purity acknowledge. Furthermore,
no narrative of India’s history before colonialism can be told without recogniz-
ing the role colonialism had in constructing that very history. But these are not
the only elements of this mid-twentieth-century paradox. In addition to the
drive toward universalism and the desire for a pure, precolonial India, the new
nation had to work through a palpable sense of “being behind” on the path to
modernity in comparison with Euro-America. Art of the first generation after
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independence thus faced a mandate to establish an Indian national identity
and to participate in a universal modern while attempting to “catch up” in a
large asymmetrical game of development. How to be simultaneously modern
and Indian, if the former demands an articulation of the universal and the latter
requires an attention to the local? How to catch up while still maintaining and
building a national identity?
In the chapters that follow, I examine carefully chosen examples that range
from oil painting on canvas to Hindi cinema out of Mumbai’s Bollywood to
demonstrate the ways visual culture, and by extension India itself, negotiates
this paradox. How might a milk factory built for a cooperative in Gujarat par-
ticipate in the construction of a modern India without merely aping Le Corbus-
ier? How does one paint what is arguably the holiest city in India, Varanasi, and
simultaneously assert a modern Indian idiom? When do parallel lines drawn
in pencil on a piece of paper start to participate in the construction of India’s
modernity? The examples discussed in this book, from the red velvet floor of
Meena’s house in Waqt (dir. Yash Chopra, 1965; figure 7) to the monumental
chandrashala entryway on the Vigyan Bhavan in New Delhi (1955; figure 4),
trace the outlines of modern Indian art and politics, addressing the question of
what it means to be both Indian and modern.
I examine these works because they refuse to be impaled on either horn of
the dilemma, choosing neither a naive universalism nor an unthinking indi-
genism. Instead, all of them take on the question of modernity in a postinde-
pendence context, and each work explores the possibilities of that question to
different ends. These works address the modern/India paradox at a time when
India’s national identity is only nascent. The two terms of the paradox are in flux
and unclear during these decades. What often arises from the struggle with the
dilemma in the Indian context is a deeper understanding of the postcolonial
condition in all of its complex relations to colonialism, modernity, and national
identity. This book thus demonstrates how visual culture in India during the
period 1947–80 negotiates the paradox of Indian modernity and argues that this
negotiation produces several interconnected understandings of the postcolo-
nial condition.
The theorization of this postcoloniality has shifted over the past few decades.
An outgrowth of colonial studies that attempted to understand the particu-
lar positionality of formerly colonized cultures, early postcolonial theory ad-
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dressed the struggle to articulate subjectivity in the face of a history of Othering
by European powers. The publication of Orientalism by Edward Said in 1979
deepened the critical analysis both of Eurocentrism and of the construction of
the formerly colonized Other. In the 1990s postcolonial theory—following the
1980s work of Gayatri Spivak and the subaltern studies group (Spivak 1988, 1990;
Guha 1982; see also Chakrabarty 2002)—turned to an articulation of the post-
colonial as understood from the space of the postcolony, rather than through
the lens of the Euro-American academy. Homi Bhabha’s work has developed
the idea of a “third space,” articulating postcoloniality as the space “otherwise
than modernity” (1990, 118–19; 1994, 6). Many of these authors are also con-
cerned to articulate the ways in which postcoloniality is not simply a problem
of the postcolony but an integral part of an understanding of multicultural-
ism and hybridity in both the former colony and the former metropole (Brah
and Coombes 2001). More recently, the literature of postcolonial theory has
begun to make inroads into the question of modernity itself, long the province
of those focusing on Euro-American culture. Perry Anderson (1998), Timothy
Mitchell (2000), Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000, 2002), and others have uncovered
the centrality of colonialism to the production of modernity, not simply as a
tangential motivating factor but as a constitutive, core element.1 This move
in the theorization of postcoloniality contradicts discourses within art history
that propose a series of “alternative modernities” for regions outside of Euro-
America.2 Instead, the literature investigates modernity’s roots in the so-called
periphery, acknowledging the integral role of formerly colonized spaces to the
constitution of the modern.
It is at this juncture that this book addresses the broad field of postcolonial
studies. In large part the discussion of twentieth-century Indian art has been
mired in the early constructions of modernity as a European preserve, depen-
dent on its colonial possessions only for referents. Among other things, this
has led to the dismissal of the visual culture from 1947 to 1980 as “derivative” of
particular Euro-American styles or movements, with little acknowledgment of
the colonial roots of modernity. With the new turn in postcolonial theory, this
book forges a fresh approach to modernity in India’s visual culture, one that
takes seriously the paradox of constructing a modernity in the face of both the
universalizing modern and the particularity of India.
While the focus of this book is India, the paradox discussed is not only
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an Indian one. It appears clearly on the subcontinent, but it is fundamental
to the operation of modern visual culture more broadly. The contradiction
of universal-versus-national also exists within art from Europe and North
America, with the crucial difference that the national or the local often goes
unmarked in the West, whereas it is heavily marked in the Indian context. The
exceptions to the unmarked European contradiction tend to occur at the mar-
gins of the mainstream: in struggles for national identity in the former Soviet
states or in calls to articulate minority identity within and across existing state
boundaries. But these issues also anchor mainstream European art: a presence
less marked makes it no less pressing. By exploring this paradox on the subcon-
tinent, this book invites a similar consideration of the same types of dilemmas
at the root of modern European art. The paradoxes inherent in modernism
grow in importance as we begin to acknowledge the dependence of modernity
on colonialism.
Throughout the book, the term modern does not indicate a periodization;
I eschew the usage sometimes employed in art history and literary studies in
which modern indicates either a specific period or a specific genre of art. In-
stead, the modern or modern indicates a particular approach to the world em-
bodied in an epistemology of progress, a faith in universals, the primacy of the
subject, and a turning away from religion toward reason. The term modernity is
used here for the condition that embodies this epistemology. While the art his-
torical uses of these terms for a period, period style, genre, or type sometimes
overlap with these concerns, I wish to make clear here at the start that while
I analyze art as it struggles with modernity, this book does not investigate the
art historical Modern Art. Instead I call for a broader understanding of how
modernity and the visual inform one another.
Of course, the term modern has a rich history, and thus I pay attention to
its use by artists, critics, and writers on Indian art during the decades after in-
dependence, to mark the difference between that usage and the current one.
Only rarely do these individuals use modern in an art historical, disciplinary
context, and I attend to this fact by taking seriously the intersection of moder-
nity and visual culture during the decades after independence. This approach
to the modern enables a historical discussion of this period that articulates art’s
participation in and production of modernity.
Similarly, my use of the term postcolonial is purposive. It does not designate
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a temporal period after colonialism. Postcolonial offers no more of a periodiza-
tion than does modern, although sometimes both terms are taken as such. Post-
coloniality arises out of debates and dilemmas produced by colonial relations
of power. Postcolonial thus describes the historical, political, cultural, and epis-
temological conditions produced by and through the historical experience of
colonialism.3 These conditions present themselves after independence, but they
also exist prior to that moment in nationalist debates, anticolonial battles, and
movements to express a new national identity. More important, postcolonial
does not reference a time period, but rather an understanding of the implica-
tions of colonialism for those living in a formerly colonized region. It describes
a condition.
In negotiating the paradox of how to be simultaneously modern and Indian,
the works examined in this book help articulate postcoloniality. They show
us that the postcolonial is rooted in the modern/India paradox, which itself
depends on colonial power relations. If modernity arises from decolonization
and independence, it also demands emulation of the Euro-American model
of the modern. On its surface, the postindependence articulation of a mod-
ern Indian nation is impossible: on the one hand, extricating the nation from
earlier colonial relations requires erasing several hundred years of history; on
the other, the need to relate to “modern Euro-America” reifies, at least in part,
the historical colonial relation. Colonial history cannot be erased, and therefore
contemporary India continually negotiates its relationship to its past through
the constructions inherited from colonialism. That past, then, is interrupted by
the colonial era itself—and more importantly, during the colonial era India’s
history was written in the service of the colonizer. Substituting a nebulous
opposing narrative for this colonial history only serves to reify the colonial
one, revealing the interdependency of colonial and nationalist visions of India.
Several works discussed in this book attempt to understand this fragmented
relation to the past through visual expression; the struggle is where one finds the
postcolonial. The most successful works take on the paradox directly and use as
their subject the fragmentation of India’s past and its contemporary identity.
If India is fragmented then it seems that one cannot take for granted either
of the terms within the paradox of modern/India. Defining what India might
mean was one of the central elements of postindependence politics: this process
of definition shaped decisions about architectural commissions, the creation

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of museums, and the support of the arts across the subcontinent. Striving for
unity within diversity only added to the struggle that defines the postcolonial
condition. In the end, these terms are attempts to stabilize inherently unstable
objects: India, the modern, and the postcolonial.
C o l o n ia l , P o s t c o l o n ia l , a n d M o d e r n
The Indian need to be modern exists in the context of two assumptions: that
the subcontinent is not modern, and that modernity is desirable. The former
assumption springs from the very definition of modernity. Modernity depends
on a differential relation between those that are modern and those that are
not yet modern, and colonialism often defends itself as dedicated to bringing
those regions of the “not yet” toward modernity. Colonialism and modernity
are therefore intimately interlinked. As a result, articulating a modernity after
colonialism means unpacking the relations of power that support colonialism,
produce modernity, and continue to operate in a postindependence context.
Historians and literary scholars have long been aware of the ways in which
modernity relies directly on colonial relations of power, relations that them-
selves supported European and American economic growth in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Dipesh Chakrabarty has focused on the ideology of
progress and development embedded within modernity and has pointed to this
historicism as a necessary move in the justification of colonialism in the nine-
teenth century:4 “Historicism is what made modernity or capitalism look not
simply global but rather as something that became global over time, by origi-
nating in one place (Europe) and then spreading outside it” (2000, 7; see also
Lowe and Lloyd 1997, 1–32; and Prakash 1995, 3–20). Modernity understood
from this perspective becomes inseparable from colonialism: the colonial space
articulates the difference between civilized and not civilized by placing the
“nots” further “back” on the timeline of modern progress. Chakrabarty frames
this as the “not yet” of modernity’s historicist outlook: colonial regions are not
yet ready—for democracy, for industrialization, for, as I argue in this book, the
concepts related to abstract art (2000, 49–50, 65–66).
Others have also argued from within Western modern visual culture that pro-
gressivism is the problem of modernity. That is, the assumption of the always-
new and the value of the avant-garde (in other words, the Hegelian articulation
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of negation to move forward) fix a definition of modernism into a pattern of
reaction against a set norm and then resolution into another base tradition
(Foster 1983; Osborne 1995). These theorists of the avant-garde identify this
element of modernity as a problem, and some locate within it the fundamental
colonial and sexual relations of power modernity is founded on (Pollock 1992).
This work heralds a critique of the avant-garde and of modernism founded on
an understanding of the interdependence of colonialism and modernity.
Nonetheless, in the context of the centrality of an avant-garde for moder-
nity, other modernities—and for the world ostensibly outside Euro-America,
the plural here is crucial—struggle to articulate themselves in the absence of a
canonical norm to work against. Geeta Kapur, for example, argues that India
may not have had a modern art if we define the development of such a move-
ment as an avant-garde reaction to an a priori or institutionally defined canon
(2000, 288).5 Hegelian, progressivist models cannot be easily translated for use
in postcolonial contexts. India, like other formerly colonized spaces, helped
constitute the conception of historical progress (by serving as a foil), and thus
we cannot expect simply to replicate such models here.
The difference that the historicist reading of modernity sets up between the
normative Euro-American modern and any other culture attempting to estab-
lish the modern leads to a valorization of the primitive as authentic, timeless,
and nonmodern. One can see this impulse toward the primitive encompassed
by the symbolist movement of the late nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts
movement of the early twentieth century, the cubist interest in the formal and
spiritual qualities of African sculpture, and the abstract expressionists’ inter-
est in Jungian, primordial conceptions of universality and spirituality. This im-
pulse extends outside a strict Euro-American context as well, as seen in Soetsu
Yanagi’s aesthetic writings of the 1930s and Ananda Coomaraswamy’s philo-
sophical arguments of the 1930s and 1940s (Yanagi 1972; Coomaraswamy [1943]
1956). Reading the literature on these movements for their engagement with
the primitive and their search for a universal spirituality, one finds artists and
philosophers turning to tribal, “indigenous” cultures of lands far away made
accessible through colonialism. For Paul Gauguin, the landscape and people
of the southern Pacific French colonies served a similar purpose as did India
and Japan for William Morris and Charles Robert Ashbee, respectively. Pablo
Picasso’s use of Malian and other western African sculptural forms in his work

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presages the interests of mid-twentieth-century artists such as Mark Rothko
and Adolph Gottlieb who investigated the Jungian unconscious through, in
part, an interest in tribal cultures.
Thus non-Western art has never strayed far from the consciousness of most
major players in the story of modern art history in the West. As the object re-
moved from “the West” that serves to define the latter’s boundaries, this consti-
tutive outside demands articulation within the context of a modernity defined
as progress over and against either the, at best, static or often simply “behind”
state of colonized regions of the world. The concept of the “not yet” allows us
to acknowledge how dependent progressive modernity remains on a group of
cultures ostensibly behind. In the case of visual culture, the gap between the
modern and the “not yet” is reinforced by the romanticization and valorization
of the native, primitive, and indigenous Other as a source for artistic inspira-
tion. Stated differently, that Other needs to be not (yet) modern for the mod-
ern to utilize the aesthetic and spiritual authenticity of the native to shore up a
space of Western modernity.
This dependency—the need to freeze the “native” in a particular way to sup-
port a vision of modernism—leaves no space for modernity in a contemporane-
ous non-Western context. That is, the historicity of the modern means that the
colonized and formerly colonized nations perpetually remain in a state of not
yet, differentiated from the modern by historicist developmental time. Indian
modernity, if related at all to European modernity, therefore runs up against
several dilemmas. How do those artists in the “native” context vis-à-vis Western
modernism find a space for themselves? How do art historians engaged with art
produced outside of the flowchart of modern art history place Indian artists?
And how can these artists be modern when a major part of the definition of
modernity depends on the use of an authentic, native Other?
In India, the discussion of these questions has occurred in a variety of con-
texts, from the writings of artists and critics in the mid-twentieth century to
contemporary debates about the development of an Indian modernism (or the
lack thereof ). Many of the tensions expressed in the writings of Rothko and
Gottlieb, for example, find a space in the writings of their contemporaries in
India such as K. C. S. Paniker and Nasreen Mohamedi, who also struggle with
issues of materiality versus spirituality. However, as Anshuman Das Gupta and
Shivaji K. Panikkar aptly point out (and Paniker and Mohamedi would likely
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agree), the Indian context further complicates these issues. When discussing
the modern in India, the specter of modernization (as Westernization) also
raises its head: “One of the aspects of what one calls modern, i.e., moderniza-
tion, is invariably an offshoot of . . . industrialization,” and industrialization
draws on “concepts like scientific rationality, progress, etc.” Panikkar and Das
Gupta go on to argue that “the modern” proves even more problematic in the
case of India since, through industrialization, “India entered into the sphere of
the technological modern under [the] dismal circumstances of . . . colonial do-
minion” (1995, 18). The authors claim that any discussion of Indian modernity
must be grasped through this context of colonial domination and industrial-
ization from without. This idea, together with Chakrabarty’s contention that
Western modernity depended on that same colonialism, provides us with a
clearer perspective on the place of an Indian modern: it balances precariously
in between a modern defined only through the Other and a modernization
insisting that India is not yet modern.6
One can surmise that to write postindependence Indian modernity, neither
the perspective of Western modernity, nor that of progressivist Indian art-
historical development is sufficient. The former leaves no space for a non-
Western modernism (or at least no space for a modernism that is anything
more than derivative), and the latter pretends that a modern India can be iso-
lated from its colonial history, or that a merely different or alternative Indian
modern can be found by following India’s artificially isolated history.7 This is
where Chakrabarty’s argument takes us. He insists that to understand moder-
nity (in India and elsewhere) one must pursue neither of these options. Ignor-
ing or erasing the elements of modernity that arise from the European En-
lightenment means changing the object of study from modernity to something
else altogether (2000). Thus one must find a different path that acknowledges
modernity’s roots both in the Enlightenment and in colonialism.
Like Chakrabarty, Timothy Mitchell rejects the idea that modernities out-
side Europe or North America might merely be “alternative” ones. Mitchell’s
approach proves helpful for understanding the modernity produced in the
visual culture of postindependence India. He cites examples that range from
the sugar plantations of the Caribbean to the disciplinary monitoring of Ben-
gali school children and argues that the constitutive elements of modernity
are first constructed in the so-called periphery and only then brought to the

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metropole (2000, 2–3). Following Perry Anderson, Mitchell remarks that terms
such as international, nationalism, modernism, and postmodernism were first
articulated on the edges of European power. Sometimes, as in the case of Irish
nationalism, they were created in the context of anticolonial struggles; in other
cases they arose in response to particular intersections of culture, history, and
time in the so-called periphery (Anderson 1998). These histories of the modern
complicate the uniform location and production of modernity in Europe, sug-
gesting that the origins of the modern might reside elsewhere.
To note that crucial elements of modernity were created outside of moder-
nity’s traditionally assumed space undermines the very fabric of the modern,
as it suggests a certain internal inconsistency. From this perspective, we are no
longer able to tell the story of the modern in a single temporal line about an
(artificially) unified space. Rather than speaking of a plurality of modernities
or alternative modernities, each dependent on an a priori, singular modernity
from which they differ, Mitchell instead suggests that modernity must be con-
tinually restaged to preserve an internally unified, unique, and singular pres-
ence (2000, 23). That is, the modern only appears to be monolithic. It is held
together as monolithic through a continual performance and re-presentation
of this uniformity. As such, the nonmodern and the non-West often participate
in and constitute the staging of the modern.
In this book I trace the staging of modernity as it coincides with the produc-
tion of India after its independence. During this period, one finds continued
references to a European, unified, universalized modern both in art and in
critical writing. One also finds a need to participate in that universal ideal while
simultaneously constructing a vision of India. The visual and verbal texts I ana-
lyze in the following chapters reveal the struggle with what Mitchell’s exegesis
identifies as a fundamental instability in the modern. The modernity figured in
this book is not an alternative modernity to some central, foundational modern
residing in Europe. Nor is it marked merely by some overarching difference or
otherness; it does not reject outright the foundational definitions of modern-
ism. Rather, each theme discussed as I traverse the terrain of visual culture in
this period allows for the interruption of the overarching, unified modern—
even as the work attempts to re-stage the latter. India’s modern reveals moder-
nity’s cracks even as it attempts to participate in a full (uniform, clean, univer-
sal) modernity.
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Between 1947 and 1980, the conceptualization of the “modern” enjoyed a
broad range of interpretations among artists, architects, film directors, audi-
ences, and patrons, much as it does today. My project here is to demonstrate
the various facets of the paradox of the Indian modern both to elaborate our
current hermeneutic framework vis-à-vis modernity and to provide insight into
the historical struggle with the definition of the modern for those involved in
producing these works.
Bac k g r o u n d ; o r , T h e O s t e n s i b l e C a n o n
This book is not a survey of Indian art from 1947 to 1980. However, as the
period is not well known outside a relatively small circle of art historians, crit-
ics, collectors, architects, and artists, I offer here a chronological narrative of
this period—in terms of art history and history—to set the stage for the body
of the text. The narrative stems from what has begun to emerge as a canonical
art history of the period after independence. In part my project is to intervene
into this canon making as we are constructing it, and so I also present ways in
which the present text attempts to refigure the canon.
The book begins with 1947 because at midnight on August 15 of that year
Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, declared the
country free from its colonial masters. The celebration of independence was
marred by the concurrent partition of what had been British India into two
separate nations: India and Pakistan. Pakistan was to be the nation for South
Asian Muslims and was divided into two geographic regions: one to the west
(present-day Pakistan) and one to the east (present-day Bangladesh, East Paki-
stan until 1971). The movement of people across these arbitrarily drawn borders
and according to the constructed division of religion caused widespread blood-
shed and devastation.8
For artists born prior to independence who produced art during and follow-
ing this period of upheaval, 1947 meant different things. Some, like P. T. Reddy
(1915–96), lost much of their preindependence work; Reddy was forced to aban-
don his paintings in Lahore as he traveled back to Hyderabad in the newly-
created India (Brown 2005). Others continued their art as they had prior to
decolonization, even while they were aware of the widespread upheaval in the
country. Institutionally, 1947 cannot be considered a full break: art schools in
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major cities continued to produce artists and architects as they had in decades
prior; several museums founded before 1947 continued to exist; and change,
when it came, was gradual. The story of postindependence art therefore finds
its roots in pre-1947 movements and institutions.
Shantiniketan, an artist colony and school in Bengal founded in 1901 by Ra-
bindranath Tagore, had as its core project the development of literary and artis-
tic aesthetics connecting to India’s past and folk heritage (Dalmia 2002; Hyman
1998, 11). The institution’s leaders also pursued a connection to a pan-Asian
aesthetic through collaborations with Chinese and Japanese artists as part of
a larger nationalist, anticolonial movement. Abanindranath Tagore, Rabindra-
nath’s nephew, anchored a separate movement in Calcutta that turned to India’s
past tradition of courtly arts. Reacting against artists such as Raja Ravi Varma
(1848–1906), whose Western academic oil paintings of Hindu subject matter
were seen as emulating colonial models too closely, Abanindranath turned
to tempera and watercolor and looked compositionally to Mughal miniature
paintings (Dalmia 2002, 2).9 Shantiniketan benefited from the Tagores’ elite
status in Bengal, which allowed the school to operate as a regional magnet for
rising artists. The model of intellectual retreat the school expounded was not
repeated elsewhere and thus exists as a distinct type of art schooling. The fol-
lowing generation of artists in Bengal, including Nandalal Bose (and his student
K. G. Subramanyan), took the ideas of both Shantiniketan and Abanindranath
further, abandoning the nationalist focus on the restoration of Mughal glory in
favor of a focus on folk and local traditions. In the case of Bengal, this meant
that they looked to the paintings of traveling minstrels or patuas, the popular
temple paintings of Kalighat in Calcutta, and various three-dimensional craft
traditions such as terracotta sculpture and wood toy making. The atmosphere
at Shantiniketan supported the development of artists under the leadership of
Bose, Ramkinkar Baij, and Benode Behari Mukherjee.10
The bridge from preindependence nationalism to independent India for the
art world in Bengal was therefore somewhat smoother than the one in Bom-
bay,11 where the Progressive Artists’ Group established in 1947 pushed Indian
painting in new directions. Many of the artists involved directly or indirectly
with the Progressive Artists were trained at the Sir J. J. School of Art, established
under the British and focusing, by the 1930s and 1940s, on teaching students
contemporary movements in European painting.12 The art schools, of course,
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have their own histories of engagement with colonialism and its aftermath,
maneuvering back and forth between the two poles of universalizing a Western
aesthetic and valorizing an indigenous ancient or folk idiom (Dewan 2001).
During the 1930s and 1940s, students of the Sir J. J. School produced paintings
in varying styles, exploring the colors of Henri Matisse, the cubism of Picasso,
and the symbolism of Paul Klee or Joan Miró. The Progressive Artists moved
well beyond student-level emulation of these Western painters to appropriate
Euro-American techniques and theories into works of art that illustrate the
extent to which these artists came into their own. In many ways, while the
art schools themselves struggled with the two horns of the modern Indian di-
lemma, much of the art produced by those trained there successfully negotiated
the paradox.
M. F. Husain, who has become one of the more famous personalities and
artists arising from the group, pursued iconic figural forms through strong
brushstrokes and baroque, dramatic, centrally focused compositions. F. N.
Souza worked with the figure as well, looking to the head and face, organically
breaking its boundaries and rules with circular gestures that communicated
a frenetic energy. S. H. Raza began from an abstracted landscape focus and
shifted to an idiom appropriated from tantric art, incorporating a geometric
symbolism that connects the broader universe to the microlevel of the body
and the local. Unlike stylistically driven movements, however, the Progressives
did not produce a unified visual aesthetic; rather, they joined together to direct
Indian modern art away from imitation and to create an independent space for
it within modernism.
Several members of the core group including Raza and Souza traveled to
Europe—the former settling in France and the latter taking London by storm
in the 1950s before permanently relocating to New York. The group was, like
most at this time in India, short-lived: once these artists went overseas in the
early 1950s the group dissolved. Yet the length of its existence does not reflect
the weight of its influence on the shape of Indian art during this period. Other
artists, related to but not officially a part of the Progressives, also became cen-
tral to the movement’s effects.
The painter Krishen Khanna, for example, exhibited in the same spaces as
did the Progressives, and he was close friends with many in the group. Critics,
too—such as Geeta Kapur, whose writing continues to exert a formative influ-

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ence on our understanding of modern Indian art—traveled in these circles. In
some ways, the Progressives offered not a single new direction for Indian art,
but rather a pivot around which various artists, critics, galleries, and collectors
could redefine what it meant to be Indian and modern in the postindepen-
dence context. While not a complete break from former practices (for rarely
do complete breaks actually occur), the Bombay movement of the 1940s and
1950s created a space from which artists could comfortably work with Euro-
pean visual modes without being dismissed as derivative, and they could do so
while maintaining a strong connection to Indian subjects and visual culture.13
Other cities had movements that similarly shaped their regions. While the
Bombay Progressives have in recent years transmogrified in art-history think-
ing into a type of “all-India” marker for the 1940s and 1950s, important regional
groups in Madras and Calcutta in fact changed the landscape in those areas and
beyond. In Bengal, the weight of nationalist artists including the Tagores and
the leadership of Shantiniketan’s art school meant that making a statement in
postindependent India involved distinguishing oneself from the Tagores and
the so-called Bengal school (Kapur 1969, 4; 1978a, 191; Dalmia 2002, 3). The
Calcutta Group formed in 1943, and its members continued to work together
until the late 1940s. Exhibiting in both Calcutta and Bombay, they earned some
of the earliest positive reviews for a new Indian modern art and helped spur
the opening of gallery space in Calcutta. Artists such as the sculptor Pradosh
Dasgupta and the painter Nirode Mazumdar emerged from this movement,
looking to the school of Paris (including Picasso, Matisse, and others) and to
various forms of abstraction rather than Shantiniketan for inspiration.
The scene in Madras saw its roots in the local colonially established art
school, the Madras Government College of Arts and Crafts, with which many
of the postindependence artists were associated. K. C. S. Paniker established
the Progressive Painters’ Association (PPA) in 1944, which then served as a cen-
tral organization for the promotion of modern Indian art in the decades after
independence. Paniker’s leadership shaped much of the direction of the PPA.
Early on the group pursued experimentation with various European painting
styles influenced by Vincent Van Gogh, Gauguin, and similar painters. Later the
PPA established a variety of approaches to the problem of modernism in India,
much like the group in Bombay. Paniker’s work explored the exoticization of
script, using unreadable text to probe the barriers to understanding across cul-
14 Introduction

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tures. He also experimented with local folk idioms, helping promote indige-
nous forms while simultaneously acknowledging their capacity to dialogue with
modern artists. Paniker also founded Cholamandal, an artist cooperative meant
to support these ideals through the promotion of folklore, craftsmanship, and
collaboration between artisans and urban artists (James 2004).
In New Delhi, the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society (AIFACS) had al-
ready been founded in 1930 as a means of promoting contemporary art in the
colonial capital. The AIFACS was not the only group centered in New Delhi; the
Delhi Shilpi Chakra was founded around 1950, in part due to the influx of refu-
gee artists after Partition. As the capital city, Delhi drew many artists from other
regions into its fold. This concentration of artists, the existence of an interna-
tional community, and the city’s vibrant political climate created the momen-
tum for the foundation of the National Gallery of Modern Art in 1954. Delhi’s
political position thus helped support its artists in ways unavailable to other
cities. The national Lalit Kala Akademi, founded by an act of parliament in 1954,
supported publications and exhibitions of contemporary art from all over India
and produced regional academies along similar lines.14 Artists such as Jagdish
Swaminathan, who founded Group 1890 in New Delhi in 1962, brought artists
from Baroda, Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay together in the capital (Dalmia
2002). Delhi thus became a locus for various artists and art movements and
developed into a center for galleries dealing in contemporary art.
The story of the smaller provincial city of Baroda (now Vadodara) generally
remains a separately told narrative, one centered on the establishment of a
contemporary school of fine arts there at the M. S. University in 1950. De-
signed to be distinct from colonial predecessors, the faculty of fine arts sought
to push the postindependence movements in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras in
new directions. Baroda has often been treated as its own phenomenon because
while it had its roots in the earlier movements, it remained separated from the
bigger, colonial cities due to its location in Gujarat. Artists from major metro-
politan areas such as N. S. Bendre, a member of the Progressive Artists’ Group,
taught at Baroda from the beginning; other faculty members came from Cal-
cutta (K. G. Subramanyan), and still others were trained at Baroda or elsewhere
(sometimes Europe) then to return, including Gulammohammed Sheikh.15
As a school with teachers and students of diverse backgrounds, Baroda
produced artists who moved away from both the nationalist Bengal school’s

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valorization of the Indian past and the post-1947 amalgamation of modern
abstraction and an Indian aesthetic. Looking to indigenous roots, different
media, and international styles of painting from other non-European regions
(e.g., Central America, South America, and Africa), these artists took a variety
of paths and then went out into India to teach and work in many locations
ranging from large metropolises to smaller regional capitals such as Bhopal.
Artists like Jyoti Bhatt, who explored photography, and Jeram Patel, who took a
blowtorch to wood to produce the base for his paintings, began their careers at
Baroda. Interactions with local indigenous crafts encouraged by Subramanyan
produced new directions for artists like Raghav Kaneria and Sheikh; Bhupen
Khakhar’s sometimes playful, sometimes serious manipulation of collage and
paint produced a new idiom for the depiction of space and exemplified the
use of mythologies relevant to contemporary India’s political and social situa-
tions. As many directions as Indian art took in the second half of the twentieth
century, Baroda seems to be a part of all of them. Transcending other regional
movements it often becomes a topic of its own.
The stories of the many art schools and groups discussed above illustrate
the difficulty of encapsulating the post-1947 period in any singular manner.
The painter Raza gave voice to the confusing nature of the period: “This was
a time when there was no modern art in our country and a period of artistic
confusion. We were particularly torn between western academic ideas and tra-
ditional Indian art springing from the Renaissance in Bengal” (quoted in Baha-
durji 1984, 35; and Dalmia et al. 1997, 12). It thus becomes difficult to create a
smooth narrative describing these decades. Dividing the story into regional,
group-based studies as I have done above makes the telling slightly easier, but
it also elides the overlaps and erases the physical movement of artists around
the country. The canonical narrative above also entirely leaves out the story of
architecture, primarily because the existing important texts on contemporary
art movements in India focus almost completely on painting, with a few ges-
tures toward sculpture and even fewer toward photography (Sokolowski et al.
1985; Dalmia et al. 1997; Sheikh 1997; Dalmia 2002). This bias toward the two-
dimensional reflects the gallery focus—indeed, sculpture is difficult to sell on
the art market and remains in second seat to painting—and also indicates the
focus of important collectors during this period (Modi et al. 2000). Develop-
ments such as installation art, larger sculptural forms, video art, and perfor-
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mance only emerge after the temporal focus of this book, in the 1980s and
1990s, arising from many of the activities of artists and architects discussed
in these pages. In the face of these aporias in the history of twentieth-century
Indian visual culture, this book seeks to bridge some of the gaps and draw new
connections among movements, artists, architects, art schools, and patrons.
In this approach the book also moves away from the artist-centered one
common in contemporary publications, particularly as individual artists have
become commodities on the international art market. Husain, Raza, and Souza
may not yet be household names everywhere in the world, but their work is
marketed and sold through books, gallery and museum shows, and essays orga-
nized around recognizable names rather than around more nebulous histori-
cal groups or regional schools. As a result, a relatively large body of literature
details the lives of these artists and the narratives of their work. Geeta Kapur’s
excellent first book is the standard in this regard: it was published in 1978 at
a time when biography-based art history was still widely in use and at a time
when the artists she discusses were so little known that her contribution largely
founded the study of India’s twentieth-century art (Kapur 1978a). My project
here enters the conversation at a different historical point, when the biographi-
cal approach no longer answers our questions, and the lives of the artists have
in large part been published.16 Rather than grounding my analysis in it, I there-
fore use biography only sparingly within this volume. The bibliography includes
monographs on the individual artists I discuss, and many of the major group
publications include short biographies of each artist.17
T h e ma t ic O r g a n i z a t i o n
To carry out the tasks set out above, I have organized the chapters themati-
cally. Chapters 1 and 2 address two aspects of a stable presence felt beyond the
temporal boundary of 1947. “Authenticity” explores a general continuity from
preindependence nationalist art to the decades after independence, focusing
on the central theme of the authentic. In this chapter, that theme is found
in the subject matter of the guru under the tree, encapsulating the idea of an
“authentic India” in a rural, traditional vision of village life. Examining three
instances of this trope—in architecture, painting, and film—the chapter articu-
lates the distinction between this “authentic” and that sought after by earlier

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nationalist artists. The chapter illustrates a critical break between the vision of
an India-to-be in the eyes of the nationalists and that of a newly established
Indian nation.
Chapter 2 addresses the theme of the icon and the development of an icono-
graphic pattern for post-independence, modern Indian art. Whereas pre-1947
artists utilized various Hindu, Christian, and historic figures to anchor their
works in an Indian sensibility—reinterpreting either Hindu icons in a Western
mode (as in Ravi Varma’s painting) or painting Christian icons in a local Indian
idiom (as in Jamini Roy’s work)—postindependence artists examined the cen-
trality of the icon for Indian national identity. The chapter therefore analyzes
the reworking of the iconography of Hindu gods and the composition of popu-
lar calendar prints, and it also looks at the concept of the icon as it is found in
the architectural emblems of public buildings. Iconicity proves to be a central
motivator for the articulation of postindependence Indian art and architec-
ture, one springing from an earlier concern with the icon but rearticulating and
sometimes self-reflexively challenging the iconic mode.
Chapter 3 takes on another underlying theme in the staging of modern
Indian art, namely, the oft-repeated view that Indian culture has, from ancient
times, had a particular affinity for storytelling and visual narratives. “Narrative
and Time” expands outward from narrative and storytelling to encompass the
concepts of time and temporality, not only by examining the role narrative
plays in modern Indian art and architecture but also by investigating the almost
stereotypical understanding of contemporary India as existing simultaneously
in the medieval or ancient era and the modern world. The film Waqt (1965) an-
chors this chapter, and from that foundation I develop analyses of architecture,
interior design, photography, and painting that bring into question understand-
ings of time, history, and narrative.
Chapter 4 seeks to comprehend the location of technology and science in
India’s search for a modern artistic identity. While clearly central to the rhetoric
of Jawaharlal Nehru and his government, modernization through technology
was not obviously a central part of modern art, particularly of the fine arts like
painting. However, science and modernization proved crucial for the develop-
ment of many different areas of the fine arts, from technological advances in
architecture and photography to mathematical and geometric elements used in
drawing and painting. This chapter traces a line from Nehruvian rhetoric to Le
18 Introduction

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Corbusier’s architectural technologies and mathematical, geometric imagery
that articulates the ways in which modernization, science, and mathematics
shaped an idea of the modern for Indian art and architecture.
This discussion continues in the fifth chapter on the urban. As the book
begins with the rural, it ends here with the question of the city, the megalopo-
lis, and the vision of an imagined modern space in India. But space for a mod-
ern India must be negotiated against the backdrop of the desperate search for
healthy, safe, affordable places to live, and so this chapter tips between fanciful
constructions of urban space in film and the extremely (and literally) concrete,
examining architects’ efforts to build suitable housing for India’s population
and to plan reasonable cityscapes within which this housing can take shape.
The chapter tackles the ways in which the city figures as a space of both hope
and despair, thus serving as a metaphor for the larger struggle to find a modern
Indian art.
The epilogue addresses the question of the next generation: where do these
elements of modernity lead in the decades before and after the turn of the mil-
lennium? While some artists continue along the path of the first postindepen-
dence decades, many others move into an entirely new mode of questioning.
Criticism of the dominant understanding of India’s relation to the West had
begun in the 1970s, but it truly started to take shape in the 1980s as questions
of identity politics rose, third-world feminism challenged assumptions about
the universal nature of “woman,” and analysts began questioning the unity and
inevitability of the so-called developing world. The art world in India changed
with the emergence of a new gallery scene, several periodical publications with
excellent reproduction quality, and easier, cheaper access to the technologies
of video and film.
This book offers an intervention into the canon even as that canon is form-
ing, and it also assumes a readership that may not be familiar with India’s par-
ticular art scene during the period under discussion. It was thus tempting to
include as many images as possible to provide a survey of these decades, that is,
to deliver a holistic package of India’s struggle with modernity in visual culture.
This approach, however, is one best served by a book other than the one I have
chosen to write. My goal in this volume is not to survey the artistic production
of modern India as a whole, but rather to focus on the problem outlined in
this introduction, namely, the paradox of India’s modernity. My targeted ap-

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proach, achieved by delving deeply into a few select objects, demonstrates how
close visual and historical analyses provide us with a great amount of data from
which to work. It also allows readers an accessible entry point for the period,
its visual culture, and the conceptual problems therein.
The images included here lend themselves to analyzing the paradox of the
Indian modern, but they should not be taken as the only valid choices. I have
chosen representative examples: each one might be substituted by a different
piece of the same artists’ oeuvre or by an entirely different object that speaks to
similar issues. The book should therefore be used as a starting point for discus-
sions of larger bodies of work rather than as a prescriptive list of the only works
fitting this analysis. I have chosen images because they speak to the problem
at hand in a particular chapter. Each chapter includes a variety of media, and
the book as a whole includes both canonical and noncanonical objects. I have
selected them as a group because together they open up new ways of thinking
about India’s modernity, to which each work offers something slightly different
from the others. Many central artists are thus not represented here—not be-
cause their works do not speak to the discussed themes, but because I privilege
a depth of analysis for each work over a quicker surveylike approach.
I have tried to balance various media across the book, including sculpture,
photography, architecture, drawing, and film alongside the more traditional
painting. Yet a complete balance is not always achievable, and in many ways
certain imbalances reflect the extent to which scholarship and criticism have
addressed particular media. In each chapter I explore the way in which the-
matic elements operate across traditional boundaries in painting and archi-
tecture, photography and sculpture. I do not include every medium in each
chapter; I do choose combinations that may appear counterintuitive at first and
come together because of the chapter’s thematic focus. In this manner the book
produces a new view of the canonical artists and objects outlined above. This
allows the intersections and overlaps among the works to rise to the surface.
Overlapping takes place among the themes as well, as the book folds back on
itself several times. I return to the same images in multiple chapters, rereading
the works in new pairings and through different lenses. Paniker’s Words and
Symbols series and the film Waqt are therefore examined multiple times, pro-
ducing differing but related readings and demonstrating the ways in which the
themes of the book cannot be isolated from one another. Nasreen Mohamedi’s
20 Introduction

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drawings, Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh buildings, and Charles Correa’s projects
echo across several chapters. I encourage further interconnections with ob-
jects not discussed here, although I have resisted the temptation to list artists’
names, works, or movements as expansions, a type of exegesis often more alien-
ating than helpful. My hope is that the focused discussion of a few works will
spur further investigation along these lines.
Each chapter takes a different approach to our still nascent understanding
of a complex period in Indian art history. I offer these analyses as an addition
to the existing literature to raise new questions and promote new research into
the visual culture of post-1947 India. Taken together, the chapters of the present
book trace the shape of art and architecture during the period after indepen-
dence, providing a context for an in-depth engagement with these objects and
the visual culture of these decades as art staged the modern in the face of the
paradox of being both Indian and modern.

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Chapter 7
Santiniketan, the Making of a Community
R. Siva Kumar
In February 1940 during Mahatma Gandhi’s last visit to Santiniketan at the time of
leave-taking, Rabindranath Tagore placed a letter in Gandhi’s hands. The letter
read:
Dear Mahatmaji,
You have just had a bird’s-eye view this morning of our Visva-Bharati centre of activities.
I do not know what estimate you have formed of its merit. You know that though this
institution is national in its immediate aspect it is international in its spirit, offering
according to the best of its means India’s hospitality of culture to the rest of the world.
At one of its critical moments you saved it from an utter breakdown and helped it to its legs.
We are ever thankful to you for this act of friendliness.
And, now, before you take your leave from Santiniketan I make my fervent appeal to you.
Accept this institution under your protection giving it an assurance of permanence if you
consider it to be a national asset. Visva-Bharati is like a vessel which is carrying the cargo
of my life’s best treasure and I hope it may claim special care from my countrymen for its
preservation.
With Love
Rabindranath Tagore (Dutta and Robinson 1997, p. 517)
The letter states in a nutshell the idea of Visva-Bharati as Rabindranath con-

ceived it and wished to be seen, that is as national in its immediate aspect and
international in its spirit. By Visva-Bharati, he appears to be referring prima facie to
the institution we know by that name, but when he refers in the final line to
Visva-Bharati as a vessel carrying his life’s best treasure he is certainly not referring
merely to the material or institutional aspects of Visva-Bharati or even to its edu-
cational programmes but to a more valuable expression of his life’s endeavour.
Visva-Bharati being a culmination of all his work at Santiniketan, and of his life’s
work at large, we may conclude that ‘Visva-Bharati’ here refers to the many strands
R. Siva Kumar (&)

Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India
e-mail: ramansivakumar@yahoo.co.in
© Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla 2017 95

K.L. Tuteja and K. Chakraborty (eds.), Tagore and Nationalism,
DOI 10.1007/978-81-322-3696-2_7
96 R. Siva Kumar
of his work at Santiniketan. We cannot explore all those strands within the scope of
a single paper; some of them have been studied and commented upon at length,
especially those dealing with his education and rural reconstruction work at
Santiniketan and Sriniketan. A third and equally important aspect of his work at
Santiniketan was his effort to build a new community through artistic creativity. It is
to this work that we shall turn our focus in this chapter.
The unity of these three aspects of his work at Visva-Bharati is underscored in a
lecture he delivered in 1924. Referring to Visva-Bharati in this lecture, he said: ‘Our
endeavour has been to include this ideal of unity in all the activities in our insti-
tution, some educational, some that comprise different kinds of artistic expression,
some in the shape of service to our neighbours by helping the reconstruction of
village life’ (Tagore 1925, p. 102). The seeds for this were sown during his stay in
rural Bengal in the 1890s, and their germination in his mind can be traced through
his letters from these years. Their main burden is his discovery of rural Bengal, its
life and beauty. But the letters also show that his stay there also lead him to notice
other issues and to see them in a connected way.
Of these, his discovery of the beauty of the world was almost instantaneous. In
what is perhaps his first letter from Shilaidaha dated 29 November 1889, he wrote:
‘When one is living in Calcutta one forgets how astonishingly beautiful this world
is. It is only when you live here that you comprehend that this sun that sets
everyday among the peaceful trees by the side of this little river, and the hundred
thousand stars that silently rise every night above this endless, ashen, lonely, silent
sandbank—what a surprisingly noble event this is. The sun, as it rises slowly in the
east at dawn, opens the page in some tremendous book, and the evening gradually
turns another enormous page in the sky from the west—what an amazing script that
too is—and this barely flowing river and this sandbank spread across the horizon
and the other shore like a picture—this neglected bit at the edge of the world—what
sort of a large, silent, deserted school is this!’1 This inaugural report has all the
power of an epiphany. However, in letter after letter written during the next four
years, we not only get to know rural Bengal in all its beauty, but also about India’s
problems that he learns from the ‘school of life’ rural Bengal opens before him.
He now becomes intimately familiar with the peasants’ life, its joys and sorrows,
and begins to empathize with them. In a letter written not soon after the one quoted
above, he wrote: ‘When the peasants present their case so respectfully and sorrow-
fully, and the clerks stand humbly with folded hands, looking at them I wonder how
am I greater than any of them, such that at my slightest hint their lives may be saved or
at my slightest aversion, destroyed. What would be stranger than I sit on this chair and
pretend that I am different from all these people, that I am their lord and master!
Within myself I too am just like them, a poor man, affected by joy and sorrow; I too
have many small demands from the world, so many heartfelt tears for the smallest
reasons, so dependent in my life upon the grace of so many people! How mistaken
1
Letter written from Shialidaha dated 29 November 1889, Choudhuri, p. 51.
7 Santiniketan, the Making of a Community 97
they are in me, these simple-hearted peasants, with their children–cows–ploughs–

households! They don’t realize that I am one of their kind. And to keep this mis-
recognition alive, we deploy so much ceremony and use so much paraphernalia’.2
This feeling of oneness with the poor peasants made him critically reconsider the
attitude of the educated members of his own class to the larger issues and think
about what they ought to do if they wished to serve their country well. In a letter
written a few days later, he writes: ‘Sometimes I feel so unbearably angry with the
people of our country! Not because they aren’t getting rid of the Englishman here,
but because they don’t do a thing about anything at all—they can’t demonstrate
their superiority in any field. They don’t even have that aim in mind…. They don’t
want to teach our countrymen anything, they look down on our country’s language,
they’re indifferent to anything that the Englishman doesn’t pay attention to—they
think they are going to become important people if they form the Congress and
raise their folded hands in supplication to the government. My personal opinion is
that until we can do something for ourselves it is better for us to remain in exile….
Only when we establish ourselves in the world, when we can contribute to the work
of the world, shall we be able to smile and talk to them. Until then it is better to hide
away and shut up and keep doing our own work. The people of our country think
just the opposite—whatever work is done out of site, whatever has to be done
privately, they dismiss as unimportant, and that which is completely short-lived and
impertinent, mere gesture and ornament, that is what they lean towards. Ours is the
most wretched country. It is difficult here to keep one’s strength of mind so one can
work. There is no one to help you. You cannot find a single person within ten or
twenty miles with whom you can exchange a few words and feel alive—nobody
thinks, nobody feels, nobody works; nobody has any experience of a great
undertaking or a life worth living; you will not be able to find an instance of mature
humanity anywhere’.3
He realizes that, without waiting for the foreign rulers to solve our problems,
Indians have to do something for the country by themselves, and it has to be
something that is broad in scope—reflecting mature humanity—and done alone if
necessary. Thinking, feeling and working would be the guiding concepts of this
work, which would include not only working for the village but also learning from
village people and incorporating it into our idea of civilization. Referring to a
wronged and suffering peasant who still behaved with a sense of natural righ-
teousness towards him, he wrote: ‘But the people here have something that is not to
be looked down on. Until this clear simplicity is established at the centre of civi-
lization it will never be complete or beautiful. It is the absence of these qualities that
seems to be making European civilization morbid’.4
2
Letter dated Shahjadpur 1 February 1891, ibid, p. 72.
3
Letter from Cuttack, dated February 1893, ibid, pp. 157–158. The issue is taken up again in
another letter written from Cuttack dated 10 Feb 1893, ibid, pp. 160–162.
4
Letter from Calcutta, dated 21 August 1893, ibid, pp. 213.
98 R. Siva Kumar
And finally, he is convinced that the arts have a role to play in this work for the
country he envisages. He writes in yet another letter: ‘I can… see that literature has
a huge contribution to make to the history of man…. Unfortunately, even among
the educated people of our country, the winds of thought do not blow freely, the
connection between life and thought is really very little, and it is impossible to feel,
when you’re in the company of our country men, that literature is an important
force for humankind—one feels eternally hungry to find one’s own ideals reflected
in other people’.5
These letters from the early 1890s flag all the elements that would become
integral to his life’s work. Some of them are based on his experience in rural Bengal
and others are an expression of his sensibilities, a sort of self-discovery made in
contact with nature. But here, they map an emergent perspective and the germi-
nation of ideas happening within him. Their consolidation into a firm plan of action
happens during the Swadeshi years, and it is structured as answers to the questions:
What is India’s problem? And how can it be solved? The problems, in
Rabindranath’s view, were primarily two—the divide between the city and the
village and the race problem. Of the two, the disconnect between urban and rural
India, between the educated urban elite and the peasantry, was the one he tried to
address first. He saw this not merely as a disengagement between the two segments
of the society but as an alienation from the very foundations of the country’s life.
Marking this out in a letter from 1893, he writes: ‘The soil in which we are born is
the soil of our village, the mother earth in whose lap we receive our nourishment
from day to day. Our educated elite, abstracted from this primal basis, wander about
in the high heaven of ideas like aimless clouds far removed from this our home. If
this cloud does not dissolve into a shower of loving service, man’s relation with
mother earth will never become truly meaningful. If all our ethereal ideas float
about in vaporous inanity, the seed time of the new age will have come in vain’
(Das Gupta 2004, pp. 11–12).
This is further fleshed out and presented as a programme for the nationalist to
undertake in Rabindranath’s address to the Bengal Provincial Congress held at
Pabna (not far away from the villages where he first became aware of these issues)
in 1908. He begins by asking, since the British have become the leading power
among nations by exploiting our resources, ‘How can we expect that they will
forego easily what they hold?’ And his answer to this is national reconstruction
work undertaken by Indians. ‘We must,’ he argues, ‘free our industries, reshape our
education, and make the community strong and fit for service. It will need all our
strength to do so and we shall strain every nerve in this stupendous endeavour…. If
we desire to build an edifice that will reflect our national aspirations, we must work
up from each and every district… The Provincial Conference should establish
branch organisations in every village and begin with the collection of all possible
information about every part of the province. This is necessary as precise knowl-
edge must precede all efficient work…. Self-government will become real only if
5
Letter from Calcutta, dated 2 August 1894, ibid, p. 253.
the leaders of these units can make them self-reliant and capable of coping with the
needs of their component villages. They must have their own schools, workshops
and granaries, their own co-operative stores and banks which they should be
assisted to found and taught to maintain. Each community unit should have its
common meeting place for work and play where its appointed headmen may hear
and settle local disputes and differences…. Unless we unite to build an embankment
by our joint effort, the results of our labour will, like trickles of water, slide down
hill-slopes to fill alien reservoirs. We shall then produce food for others and our-
selves starve and not even know why this is so. We must therefore first bring
together those whom we wish to serve.’6 And concludes by asking, ‘How can the
Congress have the authority and the strength to demand a share in the adminis-
tration of the country if it is not moved by the urge of national work and remains
merely a platform for raising weak complaints and offering irresponsible advice?’7
The position Rabindranath takes here on what he considered the most important
national issue was not based on his personal experience or his inclinations alone, it
was based on what he considered the choice India has historically preferred. He
outlines what he considered her preferred choice in his essay ‘Swadeshi Samaj’
published four years before his presidential address at the Provincial Congress from
which we have quoted above. In this essay, he asserts that the idea of nation is an
alien import. In ancient India, he argues, ‘the Government took the shape of the
royal power, but there was an immense difference between the state in England and
the royal power in India. England has entrusted to the State all the possible func-
tions of public utility,—India did only partially.’ Though providing for the people
was not outside the King’s duty, he argued, ‘it was his duty in part only, it was
normally the duty of every citizen. If the king stopped his aid, if anarchy replaced
the royal power, even then… the nation did not come to a sudden stop’. Unlike in
England where ‘all the great tasks of society’ were assigned to the royal power, ‘In
India the royal power was comparatively free, because the community at large was
saddled with the social duties’.8 His argument for self-reliance or atmashakti,
therefore, was based on what he considered India’s historical foundation.
This did not, however, persuade his countrymen to take upon themselves the
responsibility of rebuilding India. His argument that India’s problem was primarily
not political, but social, and reconstruction of its society should take precedence
over pursuit of political freedom did not appeal to the nationalists. It led to his being
seen as an impractical poet who lives in a dreamworld (Collins 2008, p. 2). This led
Rabindranath to conclude what India needed most was an education that will make
the urban elite more sympathetic to the problems of the village, and the villagers
were more self-reliant in terms of both knowledge and openness to the larger world.
Although he considered himself a poet primarily, and believed he was unfit for
6
Presidential address to the Bengal Provincial Congress, Pabna, quoted from Das Gupta (2009,
p. 263).
7
Presidential address to the Bengal Provincial Congress, Pabna, quoted from ibid, p. 265.
8
‘Swadeshi Samaj’, translated as Communal Life in India, The Modern Review, June 1913, p. 655.
100 R. Siva Kumar
political or practical work by temperament, when he found that his compatriots were
not responsive to his idea of self-reliance, he decided to go alone and put into practice
all that he preached to the Provincial Congress. His effort was two-pronged—on the
one hand he tried to ameliorate the condition of the peasants in the villages around his
estates by setting up a Benevolent Society in one of his estates, administered by
elected representatives from the villages which helped the peasants in setting up
schools and dispensaries, in digging tanks and building roads and so on, and later an
Agricultural Bank to give small and easy credit to the villagers.9 On the other hand,
he endeavoured to bring about a meeting between the educated elite and the village
by starting the school at Santiniketan. The school, founded in 1901 when he was in
complete allegiance with the Swadeshi Movement, was part of his larger and
long-term vision for India and was shaped by the direction in which he wanted to see
India move. In other words, it represented the India of his dreams.
In a letter written to Dinesh Chandra Sen in 1905 placing the Santiniketan school
in the context of Swadeshi efforts at large, he wrote: ‘In the new series of
Bangadarshan, suggestions were put forward for the cultivation of self-reliance and
Swadeshi sentiment: and the foundation of the Bolpur school has been an effort to
take education into our hands. Here Pandit Vidyasagar was the pioneer. He initiated
the process of education with an English-style school run by Bengali teachers—my
ideal is to make my entire educational effort as indigenous as possible’ (Dutta and
Robinson 1997, p. 64). With reference to Rabindranath’s claim about the school
being ‘as indigenous as possible’, Krishna Dutta and Robinson points out that of the
five teachers with whom the school began three were Christians, and one of them
was an Englishman (Dutta and Robinson 1997, p. 65). Clearly for Rabindranath the
school, even in its early years, was Swadeshi more in its inner intent than in its
outward manifestation. About ten years later, in his essay ‘My School’, he writes
that the idea underlying his institution ‘is not like a fixed foundation upon which a
building is erected. It is more like a seed which… begins to grow into a plant.’ And
that his school owes its origin, not to ‘any new theory of education, but the memory
of my school days’ (Tagore 1917, pp. 137–138).
Clearly the beginnings of his school were rooted in personal experience, but its
growth was the outcome of his reflexive engagement with India’s history and the
changing world around him. Thus, as an evolving programme, the relationship of
the Santiniketan school with its beginnings was constantly changing. For instance,
let us consider the importance he placed on the role of nature in education. His own
experience of schooling told him that conventional education by imprisoning
children within classrooms and the pages of books kills the innate curiosity and
love for nature children have. At his school, he decided to use these natural pro-
clivities of the child as the first tools of learning. Nature’s help, he argued, ‘is
indispensable when we are still growing up, and still learning, and before we are
drawn neck and crop into the whirlpool of affairs. Trees and rivers, and blue skies
and beautiful views are just as necessary as benches and blackboards, books and
9
For a discussion of this part of his Swadeshi work, see Dutta and Robinson (1995, pp. 146–147).
examinations’ (Das Gupta 2009, p. 117). Further, by encouraging the children to

interact with the surrounding villages, he hoped to make them sensitive to their life
and problems. Thus, by setting up the school far away from the city, in the lap of
nature surrounded and by villages, Rabindranath wished to make education
self-education rather than regimented tutoring, and to create young men who would
be naturally sympathetic to the welfare of the villages.
In addition to this, there was from the outset a great variety of literary and artistic
activity at his school. Referring to this in a lecture to teachers in China, he said: ‘I
have always had in mind to create an atmosphere. This I felt was more important
than the teaching of the classroom….
‘We have there the open beauty of the sky, the seasons in all their magnificent
colour. Through this perfect touch with nature we took the opportunity of instituting
festivals of the seasons. I wrote songs to celebrate the coming of spring and of the
wonderful season of the rains which followed upon long months of drought. We
had our dramatic performances with decorations in keeping with the seasons.
‘I invited renowned artists from the city to live at the school, leaving them free to
produce their own work, which I allowed the boys and girls to watch if they so felt
inclined. It was the same with my own work. All the time I was composing songs
and poems, and would often invite the teachers round, to sing and read with them.
This helped to create an atmosphere from which they could imbibe something
impalpable, but life-giving’ (Tagore 1925, pp. 100–101).
The role of the arts at Santiniketan grew with time, especially as the school gave
way to Visva-Bharati, the international university, during the interwar years. The
introduction of painting, music and crafts into the institutional framework of
Visva-Bharati was partly responsible for it, but their introduction as a taught pro-
gramme—a little before Visva-Bharati was formally established and before any of its
other academic wings were inaugurated—was itself an expression of his desire to
expand their role in the life of the campus. But why did Rabindranath wish to give the
arts such importance in his educational programme? Why did he think that creating
an atmosphere through the practice of arts more important than classroom teaching?
As we have already noted, as early as 1894, he had written that ‘literature has a
huge contribution to make to the history of man’. However, for a fuller under-
standing of why the arts become all the more important for Rabindranath during the
interwar years, we have to turn to his engagement with the second of India’s
problem he marks out for special attention, namely the race problem or race con-
flict. He recognizes this as a problem ever present in the history of mankind, but to
which different people have brought different solutions. He first writes about it in a
letter to Myron Phelps written soon after his address to the Provincial Congress of
1908 as follows: ‘One need not dive deep, it seems to me, to discover the problem
of India; it is so plainly evident on the surface. Our country is divided by num-
berless differences—physical, social, linguistic religious; and this obvious fact must
be taken into account in any course which is destined to lead us to our place among
the nations who are building up the history of man’ (Dutta and Robinson 1997,
102 R. Siva Kumar
p. 74).10 Rabindranath argues that the caste problem in India is a vestige of India’s
historical solution to the race problem. While the race problem is not exclusive to
India, in many other parts of the world the friction was eliminated through anni-
hilation; in India, the friction was resolved through a modification of the social
system that allowed the accommodation of differences but prevented amalgamation
and social cohesion.
He revisits the problem in his 1916 essays on nationalism. In these essays, he
connects the different approaches to the race question in India and the West with the
ideals of the ‘samaj’ and the ‘nation’, two alternate modes of social organization. In
them, he reiterates the differences between ‘samaj’ and ‘nation’ which he had drawn
in ‘Swadeshi Samaj’ even more strongly. He argues that nation, as ‘the political and
economic union of a people, is that aspect which a whole population assumes when
organized for a mechanical purpose. Society as such has no ulterior purpose. It is an
end in itself. It is a spontaneous self-expression of man as a social being. It is a natural
regulation of human relationships, so that men can develop ideals of life in coop-
eration with one another’ (Tagore 1918, p. 9). He argues that, while goodness is the
end and purpose of man, ‘success is the object and justification of a machine’; and
‘when this engine of organization begins to attain a vast size, and those who are
mechanics are made into parts of the machine, then the personal man is eliminated to
a phantom, everything becomes a revolution of policy carried out by the human parts
of the machine, with no twinge of pity or moral responsibility’ (Tagore 1918, p. 12).
The conjoining of science, which ‘pursues success with skill and thoroughness, and
takes no account of the higher nature of man’ (Tagore 1918, p. 76), with nationalism
in the modern period, he argued, has made European nations more powerful and more
ruthless than ever before. Although Europe, through her literature and art, has fer-
tilized all countries, ‘The political civilization which has sprung up from the soil of
Europe and is overrunning the whole world, like some prolific weed, is based upon
exclusiveness. It is always watchful to keep the aliens at bay or to exterminate them.
It is carnivorous and cannibalistic in its tendencies, it feeds upon the resources of
other peoples and tries to swallow their whole future’ (Tagore 1918, pp. 59–60).
This was, in his opinion, not only morally wrong but also against the historical need
of our times. And his renewed engagement with the idea of nation and samaj was based
on his sense of this need. ‘The most important fact of the present age’, he wrote, ‘is that
all the different races of men have come close together. And again we are confronted
with two alternatives. The problem is whether the different groups of peoples shall go
on fighting with one another or find out some true basis of reconciliation and mutual
help; or whether it will be interminable competition or cooperation.
‘I have no hesitation in saying that those who are gifted with the moral power of
love and vision of spiritual unity, who have the least feeling of enmity against
aliens, and the sympathetic insight to place themselves in the position of others, will
be the fittest to take their permanent place in the age that is lying before us, and
those who are constantly developing their instinct of fight and intolerance of aliens
10
Rabindranath Tagore, letter to Myron H Phelps, dated 4 January 1909.
will be eliminated. For this is the problem before us, we have to prove our humanity
by solving it through the help of our higher nature. The gigantic organizations for
hurting others and warding off their blows, for making money by dragging others
back, will not help us’ (Tagore 1918, pp. 100–101).
While he felt that a society founded on the ethics of coexistence and cooperation,
as the Indian samaj was, rather than on the principles of the nation, as embraced by
Europe, was more appropriate to the full realization of the possibilities of our age,
this did not automatically privilege India. For although India has practiced racial
tolerance all through her history, he also recognized that her solution to the race
conflict has been partial and remains imperfect. In accepting diversity over its
suppression, as many other countries have done, he argued that India was right in
her efforts, but she failed to realize that in human beings differences are not like
mountains, fixed forever, but fluid with life’s flow. He wrote, ‘in her caste regu-
lations India recognized differences, but not the mutability which is the law of life.
In trying to avoid collisions, she set up boundaries of immovable walls, thus giving
to her numerous races the negative benefit of peace and order but not the positive
opportunity of expansion and movement. She accepted nature where it produces
diversity, but ignored it where it uses that diversity for its world-game of infinite
permutations and combinations. She treated life in all truth where it is manifold, but
insulted it where it is ever moving. Therefore, life departed from her social system,
and in its place she is worshipping with all ceremony the magnificent cage of
countless compartments that she has manufactured’ (Tagore 1918, pp. 115–116).
India’s imperfect solution to the race problem had an impact on all aspects of her
life. Overcoming this innate weakness was important even for those fighting for the
political freedom of India if they wished to establish a just nation. In his essay
‘Nationalism in India’, he warned them: ‘We must remember whatever weakness we
cherish in our society will become the source of danger in politics. The same inertia
which leads us to our idolatry of dead forms in social institutions will create in our
politics prison-houses with immovable walls. The narrowness of sympathy which
makes it possible for us to impose upon a considerable portion of humanity the
galling yoke of inferiority will assert itself in our politics in creating the tyranny of
injustice’ (Tagore 1918, p. 123). He concluded his caveat to the Indian nationalists
with the question, ‘And can we ever hope that these moral barriers against our race
amalgamation will not stand in the way of our political unity?’ (Tagore 1918, p. 124).
The samaj Rabindranath talks about in the interwar years was much more open
and inclusive than the one he talked about in ‘Swadeshi Samaj’. It is no more India’s
solution alone, but that of the whole world. ‘In finding the solution of our problem we
shall have helped to solve the world problem as well. What India has been, the whole
world is now. The whole world is becoming one country through scientific facility.
And the moment is arriving when you also must find a basis of unity which is not
political. If India can offer to the world her solution, it will be a contribution to
humanity’ (Tagore 1918, p. 99). And finally, the idea of samaj he expounds in the
interwar years is completely congruous with the ideals of Visva-Bharati. And this
makes Visva-Bharati an experiment in education, an experiment in rural recon-
struction, and an experiment in samaj building rolled into one.
104 R. Siva Kumar
The samaj might be India’s answer to the race problem, but the samaj of our
times he realized cannot be a new extension added to our old home. If we do so, the
changes we bring about is bound to be superficial, and the old structural mistakes
will persist. But it cannot be an imposition from outside either, for right from the
Swadeshi days he knew that only which is built by one’s own effort, by atmashakti,
can truly become one’s own. The samaj of our times should be a fresh reinvention
based on the civilizational values of the Indian people, not a mere continuation of
the past. We may preserve the deeper values of our civilization but will have to
discard its debilitating trappings. Civilization, he wrote, ‘cannot merely be a
growing totality of happenings that by chance have assumed a particular shape and
tendency which we consider to be excellent. It must be the expression of some
guiding moral force which we have evolved in our society for the object of attaining
perfection. The word ‘perfection’ has a simple and definite meaning when applied
to an inanimate thing, or even to a creature whose life has principally a biological
significance. But man being complex and always on the path of transcending
himself, the meaning of the word ‘perfection’ as applied to him cannot be crys-
tallized into an inflexible idea. This has made it possible for different races to have
different shades of definition for this term. The Sanskrit word dharma is the nearest
synonym in our own language, that occurs to me, for the word civilization…. The
specific meaning of dharma is that principle which holds us firm together and leads
us to our best welfare… Dharma for man is the best expression of what he is in
truth’ (Tagore 1925, pp. 122–123).
The two primary resources Rabindranath employed to build the new samaj he
envisioned were nature and the arts. Nature was for him the springhead on Indian
civilization, which was born not in the cities but in the forests. Thus, its earliest
‘development took place where there was no jostling of closely packed humanity.
There trees and creepers, rivers and ponds had plenty of opportunities to associate
with man’ (Tagore 1912, p. 563). It allowed its poets to penetrate into the pro-
fundity of the universe by its meditation and establish a deep harmony between
nature and the human soul. He called this ideal of life the religion of the forest.
‘This ideal of perfection preached by the forest dwellers of ancient India,’ he wrote,
‘runs through the heart of our classical literature and still dominates our mind’
(Tagore 1922, p. 46). Realizing oneness with nature was to him India’s civiliza-
tional dharma, it was also what his own sensibilities urged him to do. In My
Reminiscences, he tells us how as a child he felt impelled to rush out of his bed
every morning so that he does not miss the first rays of the sun lighting up the
trembling coconut fronds at the end of the garden and inhale the scent of the dewy
grass. These were daily visitations in the life of a child growing in the city. Later at
Shilidah and Santiniketan, he realized that nature is the setting for our leisurely
one-to-one conversations with the universe and the infinite. In a letter from 1892, he
wrote: ‘The universe has many paradoxes, one among which is that where there’s
an extensive landscape, endless sky, dense clouds, a deep feeling, in other words
where the eternal is manifest there its appropriate companion can be only one
person—too many people make it too petty and messy. Infinity and one person are
both evenly balanced in relation to one another—both deserve to sit on their

individual thrones face-to-face’ (Choudhuri 2014, p. 113).11
If science was the instrument for harnessing the powers of nature for man, for
Rabindranath the arts were the instrument for realizing his bonds with nature. ‘The
world of science’, he wrote, ‘is not a world of reality, it is an abstract world of force.
We can use it by the help of our intellect but cannot realize it by the help of our
personality…. But there is another world which is real to us…. This is the world
from which Science turns away, and in which Art takes its place. And if we can
answer the question as to what art is, we shall know what this world is with which
art has such intimate relationship’ (Tagore 1917, pp. 12–13). Art springs from our
being in this world, and from the need to give expression to our feelings. These we
share with the animals. However, in animals, ‘this has gone little beyond the bounds
of usefulness,’ but ‘Man has a fund of emotional energy which is not all occupied in
his self-preservation. This surplus seeks its outlet in the creation of Art, for man’s
civilization is built upon his surplus’ (Tagore 1917, p. 13). This is the reason why,
of all creatures, only man knows himself,… He feels more intensely his personality
than other creatures, because his power of feeling is more than can be exhausted by
his objects. This efflux of the consciousness of his personality requires an outpour
of expression. Therefore, in Art, man reveals himself and not his objects’ (Tagore
1917, p. 21). In short, art is the expression of the man’s personality. But man’s
personality is not independent of his relationship with the world.
For Rabindranath, the world we grasp with our senses or mind is a partial world.
‘It becomes completely own when it comes within the range of our emotions. With
our love and hatred, pleasure and pain, fear and wonder, continually working upon it,
this world is becoming a part of our personality. It grows with our growth, it changes
with our changes. We are great or small, according to the magnitude and littleness of
this assimilation, according to the quality of its sum total. If this world were taken
away, our personality would lose all its content’ (Tagore 1917, pp. 23–24). It is this
personal world we grasp that we share with others through art.
The most important tool Rabindranath had at his disposal for grasping the world
with the full range of his emotions and sharing it with others was his songs, his
music. The over 2200 songs he wrote was divided into various categories by him,
three of the largest being prakriti or nature, prem or love, and puja or devotion;
other smaller groups categorized as bicitra or miscellaneous included patriotic and
ceremonial songs and those written for his plays. Judging by the lyrics, these
categories are not mutually exclusive, and many songs placed under one category
can be easily placed under a different category. And the overriding motif connecting
them is nature. For instance, one of the songs placed under the category prem reads
in translation as follows: ‘Stars fill the sky, the world teems with life,/And amidst it
all I find my place!/I wonder, and so I sing’ (Alam and Chakravarty 2011, p. 332).12
Another song categorized as a song of devotion runs as follows: ‘If you did not give
11
Letter written from Bolpur, dated 14 May 1892.
12
Translated by Ratna Prakash.
106 R. Siva Kumar
me love/Why paint the dawn sky with such song/Why thread garlands of stars/Why
make a field of flowers my bed/Why does the south wind whisper secrets in my
ear?/If you did not give poetry to my soul/Why does the sky stare like that on my
face/And why do sudden fits of madness grip my heart?/I set sail upon seas whose
shores I know not’ (Alam and Chakravarty 2011, p. 312).13 Referring to a similar
overlap in his poetry, he has written: ‘I have not divided up my devotion, keeping
my soul, the world of nature and the lord of the world as it were in separate
compartments. Whether through the soul or through the world I find no end to
amazement’ (Tagore 2006, p. 11).
This sense of wonder and oneness with nature runs through many of his songs
cutting across categories. Many of them, especially those about seasons make the
everyday world, come alive with magical vividness. Take, for instance, two songs
popular with the school children in Santiniketan which hold up two very different
but equally rich sensory experiences of nature: ‘Sunshine and shadows play
hide-and-seek today / in the paddy field / these cloud-drafts soft-floating in the sky’s
blue— / who has set them adrift?’ (Tagore 2010, p. 252) and so on goes one. And
the second captures the riotous spirit of spring: ‘A fire of flowers has hit the blue
horizon. / A flame of fragrance in springtime has arisen. / The sky is cozened, / thinks
the sun’s there imprisoned. / Perhaps in the earth it seeks its consummation / and so
as flowers in a mustard-filed has risen’ (Tagore 2010, p. 264).
His songs awakened the senses and refined the emotions and quickened the
sensibilities of the students, the teachers and the Santiniketan community at large
and taught them to experience, love and share the earth as they experienced it, and
through this shared experience empathize with each other. In the creation of this
empathy, he was joined by the artists of Santiniketan. Just as Rabindranath made
the everyday world sensuous and real by connecting them with the inner world and
animating them with the tangible rhythms of the Bengali language, Nandalal Bose
and his associates too made the everyday world of Santiniketan come alive in their
works. Unlike the nationalist-minded Bengal School artists of their time, they
moved away from paying homage to the past and from attempts to revive it, and
committed themselves to representing the land and the people around them. They
did so not by choosing to paint corners of it that might be considered beautiful
according to some cannon of art, but by embracing it in its entirety, and trans-
forming it into their object of love. They painted it on long scrolls, stretched out
from horizon to horizon, and spread it out like a visual encyclopaedia of rural life in
a mural painted across the ceiling of a hostel. They showed her in her summer
barrenness, bursting into green succulence during the rains, and decked in flaming
red and yellow in the spring. They taught their viewers to look at trees and plants,
love the gnarled hardness of their trunks and the tenderness of the flowers, notice
their shapes and patterns, respond to the small and the big in nature with equal
curiosity, feel the rhythm of plants and animals and of their own bodies, and
experience space not as a mere receptacle for objects but as yet another means for
13
Translated by Senetra Gupta.
the articulation of emotional response. What Rabindranath did with words they did
with forms and colours, like Rabindranath they too made the world seep in through
the senses and touch the minds and heart of the community.
What he did through his songs was extended through the seasonal festivals he
planned and brought into existence. Two of these festivals—Vriksharopan and
Halkarshan—connected the community with the earth and its tillers, the world of
trees and agriculture. Others taught them to see and celebrate ‘the six act musical
show nature puts on through the six seasons of the year’ (Das Gupta 2009, p. 118).
Many of the songs he composed were themselves occasioned by these festivals.
Here too he was joined by the artists, as his chief collaborators. Besides giving birth
to a modernism based on the sense of an experienced and shared world, they also
breathed life into the real world and transformed the familiar surroundings. On
special occasions, they transformed familiar parts of the campus into embodiments
of beauty and distinction with simple hand-painted floor graphics or alponas, they
created distinctive ornaments for the pageants and festivals; and did these with
leaves and flowers and employing simple skills so that it became possible for the
community to participate in all these creative activities. Even the alpona decorations
they devised were usually based on the natural world and thus helped to connect the
community with the environment even as they lifted it from its everyday ordinar-
iness and made it distinctive. By placing nature at the centre of their creative work,
Rabindranath and his associates helped the members of the Santiniketan community
to transcend the traditional identities of caste, religion and language which divided
them into different social groups and to unite anew as a community. It was
important for those who wished to create a new samaj to free themselves from
acquired habits and the ensuing tyranny of history and see the world afresh,
because, as Rabindranath believed, only when we experience and create as free
individuals, we gain the opportunity to expand our sympathies and create a new
samaj.
However, creating a sense of our oneness with nature was not the end but the
beginning of the creation of a new samaj. ‘It is easy to feel this communion of one’s
own nature with Nature’, he wrote, ‘because there is no interference of other souls
with one’s own. Yet in this very communion we do not ever find complete satis-
faction. Because we have a soul and that seeks a greater communion. It is possible
to have this wider union not with Nature, but only with humanity’ (Tagore 2006,
p. 28). In what is perhaps his final assessment of his work at Santiniketan,
Rabindranath wrote: ‘On the one hand in this place I have called upon the joyous
communion with Nature, and on the other I have wished to make the bond between
man and man a bond of hearts’ (Tagore 2006, p. 71). To open up this dialogue with
humanity was the second function of art and literature. ‘We have to enter the world
of literature,’ he had argued years earlier, ‘to learn… how far human kinship has
been rendered true in the world—that is how far truth has become human pos-
session…. not any individual’s private possession’ (Das and Chaudhuri 2001,
pp. 148–149).
An attitude to nature implies an attitude to society and humanity but it does not
make it explicit. In his novels and plays, Rabindranath addressed the questions of
108 R. Siva Kumar
wider social and political importance more directly. In them, he is not primarily
engaged in awakening the finer and universal aspect of humanity but in awakening
new social values through a contesting dialogue with both tradition and the
nationalists. Commenting on what he considers the most political of Rabindranath’s
novels—Gora, Ghare-Baire and Char Adhyay—Ashis Nandy states, ‘What gives
the three novels their complexity—and their politics of self its depth—is the
author’s plural concepts of authority and dissent. Political authority for Tagore has
three distinct strands. There are the standardized, routine structures of authority, a
new set of claimants to authority trying to usurp the moral space created by the
rebellious victims of the first set, and a third category, cutting across these two,
consisting of those committed to their traditions and to the victims as living, suf-
fering, real human beings rather than as categories in an abstract ideology of
dissent. The third set carries the seeds of a genuine rebellion in the future, against
the oppressive aspects of the past and an intolerable present. For it includes those in
deeper touch with traditions, who are for that very reason, more open to the new
and exogenous’ (Nandy 1998, p. 47).
An exploration of the tensions between the dissenting humanist on the one hand
and the authoritarian structures of tradition, utilitarian science and aggressive
nationalism on the other are also the main concerns of his plays. And his plays
played a greater role than his novels in taking the message to the immedi-
ate community. Several of them were written not only in response to prevalent
social issues but also to be performed by the students and teachers of Santiniketan.
The first play to be performed in Santiniketan was Saradotsav in 1908, and fol-
lowing this 15 more of his later plays were first performed in Santiniketan.14 Apart
from this, every year there was one or more repeat performances of his plays at
Santiniketan. This is how W.W. Pearson describes these occasions: ‘At the end of
each term arrangements are made for staging one of the poet’s plays. The teachers
and boys take the different parts, and the play is staged in Shantiniketan [sic],
visitors coming from Calcutta to see it, especially if the poet is himself taking
part. The poet coaches the actors himself, first reading the play aloud, and then
reading it over with those who are to take part. During the days when the play is
being rehearsed there are not many classes held, for the boys of the whole school
are always present at the rehearsals…. In this way the ideas of the poet are
assimilated by the boys, without their having to make any conscious effort’
(Pearson 1916, pp. 61–62). The same point is also made by Rathindranath, he
writes: ‘In those days he preferred to hold the rehearsals in an open place and did
not mind the whole Asram looking on and listening. As a result, the rehearsals of
plays and music were of great educative value to the whole community and not to
the participants only’ (Lal 2001, p. 31). Thus, with his songs if he sang a samaj into
existence and shaped the sensibilities of its members, with the plays he presented
the problems of the world to them from an ideological perspective different from
that of the nationalists and morally neutral scientists.
Based on the list of first performances provided by Lal, in ‘Appendix B’, 2001, pp. 375–377.
14
Here again the artists worked alongside Rabindranath. Besides devising simple
yet effective stage settings for his plays, they embellished the campus with murals
and sculptures, took their art out of their studios and put them into the public space
of the community where they could function as markers of social value. And these
include Nandalal’s murals documenting the landscape and the festivals of
Santiniketan; his narrative representation of Rabindranath’s play Natir Puja,
underscoring the readiness of an individual—in this case, a dancer/artist—to place
her art and life at the service of truth; Benodebehari’s comprehensive representation
of village life in the ceiling mural at Kala Bhavana, and more importantly his
meditation on the history and destiny of India in the Hindi Bhavan mural with its
emphasis on the contribution of the heterodox and humanistic vision of the Bakhti
poets to India’s civilizational stream; and Ramkinkar’s tree-like image of Sujata
who merges into the surrounding landscape, his large outdoor sculpture’s valorizing
the doubly subaltern Santal tribal peasants and his later works where they are
transformed into proletarian mill workers. All these works taken together map a
community with values which are very different from those of the traditional Indian
society and one closer to Rabindranath’s idea of samaj.
Was this experiment in samaj building at Santiniketan successful? Rabindranath
anticipated the question and answered it as follows: ‘But the question will be asked
whether I have attained my ideal in this institution. My answer is that the attainment
of all our deepest ideals is difficult to measure by outward standards. Its working is
not immediately perceptible by results. We have fully admitted the inequalities and
varieties of human life in our ashram. We never try to gain some kind of outward
uniformity by weeding out the differences of nature and training of our members.
Some of us belong to the Brahma Samaj sect and some to other sects of Hinduism;
and some of us are Christians. Because we do not deal with creeds and dogmas of
sectarianism, therefore this heterogeneity of our religious beliefs does not present us
with any difficulty whatever. This also I know that the feeling of respect for the
ideal of this place and the life lived here greatly varies in depth and earnestness
among those who have gathered in this ashram. I know that our aspiration for a
higher life has not risen far above our greed for worldly goods and reputation. Yet I
am perfectly certain, and proofs of it are numerous, that the ideal of the ashram is
sinking deeper and deeper into our nature every day. The tuning of our life’s strings
into purer spiritual notes is going on without our being aware of it. Whatever might
be our original motive in coming here, the call sounds without ceasing through all
our clamour of discords’ (Tagore 1917, pp. 165–166).
The samaj as Rabindranath conceived is perhaps not a total answer to India’s
problems, but it is an essential part of a larger answer. Many view it as a purely
utopian endeavour, which does not have the apparatus to respond to human
problems on a large scale, and therefore incapable of offering a practical alternative
to the nation state (Chatterjee 2013, pp. 116–126). There is some merit in this
observation, but it misses the moot point; underlying Rabindranath’s efforts at
samaj building was another mission, the making of men—and men matter. Even if
110 R. Siva Kumar
we are convinced that the samaj can neither be an absolute alternative to the nation
state nor a corrective to it, we cannot deny the fact that the nature of the men who
build and administer the nation—not merely its constitution and its institutions—
will determine what kind of a nation we have.
References
Alam, Fakrul, and Radha Chakravarty (eds.). 2011. The Essential Tagore. Kolkata: Visva Bharati.
Chatterjee, Partha. 2013. Lineages of Political Society. Raniket: Permanent Black.
Choudhuri, Rosinka. Translation. 2014. Letters from a Young Poet. New Delhi: Penguin Books.
Collins, Michael. 2008. Rabindranath Tagore and Nationalism: An Interpretation. Working Paper
No. 42, South Asian Institute, University of Heidelberg, Oct 2008.
Das, Sisir Kumar, and Sukanta Chaudhuri (eds.). 2001. Selected Writings on Literature and
Language. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Das Gupta, Uma (ed.). 2009. Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Writings on Education and
Nationalism. New Delhi, India Oxford University Press.
Das Gupta, Uma (ed.). 2004. Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
Dutta, Krishna, and Andrew Robinson (eds.). 1997. Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dutta, Krishna, and Andrew Robinson (eds.). 1995. Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad Minded
Man. London: Bloomsbury.
Lal, Ananda (ed.). 2001. Rabindranath Tagore, Three Plays. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Nandy, Ashish. 1998. The Illegitimacy of Nationalism, Collected in Return of the Exile. New
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Pearson, W.W. 1916. Santiniketan: The Bolpur School of Rabindranath Tagore. New York:
Macmillan.
Tagore, Rabindranath. 2010. I Won’t Let You Go: Selected Poems, Translated by Ketaki Kushari
Dyson. New Delhi: Penguin.
Tagore, Rabindranath. 2006. On Myself (Atmaparichay), Translated by Devadatta Joardar and Joe
Winter. Kolkata: Visva Bharati.
Tagore, Rabindranath. 1925. Talks in China. Calcutta: Visva-Bharati Book Shop.
Tagore, Rabindranath. 1922. Creative Unity. London: Macmillan.
Tagore, Rabindranath. 1918. Nationalism. London: Macmillan and Company.
Tagore, Rabindranath. 1917. Personality. New York: Macmillan.
Tagore, Rabindranath. 1912. The Springhead of Indian Civilisation. The Modern Review, Dec
1912.
Cosmopolitan Cartographies: Art in a Divided World
Ranu Samantrai, Zarina
Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, Volume 4, Number 2, 2004,

pp. 168-198 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mer.2004.0034
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/168470
[ Access provided at 22 Jul 2022 08:58 GMT from The University of British Columbia Library ]
ranu samantrai
Cosmopolitan Cartographies
Art in a Divided World
I went on a journey, the first piece I saw by Zarina, is a bronze sculpture of a

house on wheels. The work at once suggests mobility and the futility of
motion. At first glance it indicates the easy mobility of a home on the road,
but if the wheels on this house were to turn they would pull against each
other. The motion suggested at best is interrupted and circular, never
straying far from its point of origin, as though tethered. I could not decide
if the piece holds mobility and stasis together in tension or in collabora-
tion, whether its rootedness is a lifeline or a constraint. Its surface is
roughened by hundreds of marks, ranging from light scratches to deep
gouges. It is a heavy, solid piece. Lifting it requires a surprising degree of
effort. When I put it down a residue of gray patina (powder graphite)
remained on my fingers and transferred to everything I touched.
It is not difficult to read in these characteristics a visual and tactile
allegory of migration. Indeed, I was to discover that the invitation to create
interpretive narratives is a persistent characteristic of Zarina’s work. Her
gestures are always spare, generally abstract, and yet richly allegorical. She
uses elements that can be explained biographically: the wheels, for
instance, are a reference to the aikkas [horse-drawn cart] ubiquitous in the
Aligarh of her childhood. Yet her work is not restricted to autobiography,
nor does its interpretation require that knowledge from the viewer. On the
contrary, it is readily available for appropriation, for it engages the viewer
through his/her own biography. Zarina often combines opposing impulses
[Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 2004, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 168–194]

©2004 by Smith College. All rights reserved.
168 ranu samantrai

I went on a journey
cosmopolitan cartographies 169

such as motion and stillness, with the result that her works suggest repose
over underlying tension, as though order must repeatedly be sought and
achieved. The residue of discomfort they leave is a reminder that her pieces
raise questions. Indeed, they are embodiments of ambiguity and paradox.
Any answers or resolutions viewers may provide are our own; they are not
acknowledged or affirmed by the work. The reticence of the work itself
both enables and cautions against our interpretive activity.
I interviewed Zarina first in May 2001, and again a year later in May
2002. I requested the second interview because of the events of the
intervening year: the tragedies of September 11; America’s subsequent war
in Afghanistan and persecution of Muslims within and outside its borders;
the renewal of the Palestinian intifada and the Israeli invasion and occupa-
tion of Palestinian territories; and in February 2002 the attacks by Hindu
fundamentalists on Muslims in Gujarat that resulted in the murder of
some 2000 Muslims, the displacement of a further 100,000 people, and the
destruction of 20,000 homes and businesses and 360 Muslim places of
worship.1 It seemed to me that the horrors of those few months must have
compounded the difficulties of being a Muslim in the world, and particu-
larly in a country led by a crusader.2 Subsequent displays and reinforce-
ments of deep geographic, economic, racial, religious divisions have tested
cosmopolitan, secular people accustomed to embracing a wonderfully
large, uncontainably heterogeneous world. I wanted to know what effect
they might have on the aesthetic practice of one very cosmopolitan and
determinedly secular Muslim artist. Our wide-ranging conversations are
distilled in the following excerpts.
Born in Aligarh, India, in 1937, Zarina was educated at the University of
Aligarh, where her father was a historian of medieval India. Although she
had been exposed to the history of European art and to the great Moghul
monuments of northern India, she traces her passion for printmaking to
her first encounter with Japanese woodcut prints in Bangkok. She began to
study woodcut techniques while in Bangkok and made her first print in
1961. Her formal art training began soon thereafter in Paris at Atelier 17,
the school established by the great British printmaker, Stanley William
Hayter. Zarina credits the Hayter for reviving the art of print in the twenti-
eth century, and for directing her away from the representational art that
had dominated her practice. “Representational art was the only reference I
had,” she says of her early work. “I had no idea what abstract art was. But I
170 ranu samantrai

was always attracted to order and space. The Mughal monuments in Agra,
Fatehpur Sikri, and Delhi showed me that order in the world of my
childhood.
“When I met Hayter I did not tell him I had never done etching in my
life. I showed him the woodcuts I had done, and he accepted me in the
Atelier. So I had my first formal art training in Paris. I was 26 years old,
very shy, painfully shy, clad in a sari. I started working there a few hours
every day. I thought I was in heaven.
“Everything I know I learned at Atelier 17. I had been doing representa-
tional work—women sitting in front of a building, stone breakers, village
scenes—the kind of work I had seen done in India. I thought that was art.
Hayter was involved with the surrealists. He encouraged me to use my
imagination, to let my hand move freely. And then one day I dipped my
brush into ground for etching and let myself go wherever my hand took
me. That gesture gave me such a sense of freedom, as if I could fly. That
experience took me away from representation for good.”
In Paris Zarina encountered the work of Mondrian, Brancusi, Kandinsky,
and Malevich—artists whose language of visual abstraction reinforced her
turn away from representational art. Yet eventually she developed a style
and a motif that is at once gestural and abstract.
May 2001
Samantrai: When did you start working with the house motif ?
Zarina: In 1980, in Spaces to Hide.
Samantrai: But the house is gestural, is it not?
Zarina: It is not a house, it is an abstract form. I came to it by accident. I

was making forms for paper casting, playing with a square and a triangle,
and the two became a house. And then I added two circles, and the shape
became a house on wheels. These are the three basic geometric forms—
square, triangle, and circle. One cannot go any further. The forms are not
gestural; this is Euclidean geometry.
Samantrai: Why do you prefer the pure form to gestural work?

Father’s House
172 ranu samantrai

Zarina: I like order and symmetry. For me order is a spiritual value. Think
of the harmony of the Taj Mahal: there is the Taj in the center and a mosque
on either side. The mosque on the left side faces west [toward Mecca], but
the one on the right has no apparent purpose. It is there as the jawab
[answer].
Samantrai: For symmetry?
Zarina: Yes. Some people find symmetry boring, but I need that order.
Samantrai: Is order necessary to shape, or to comment on a life that has

moved in many directions? Are you trying to create order in a world so
complicated that it borders on chaos?
Zarina: I need to keep a center. I understood that in 1975 when I was on a

cross-country drive. In Arizona I started to wonder where I was, where I
had come from, how I came to be standing by myself in that desert,
encircled by horizons. I started to cry, and then I realized that I am the
center and the horizon is a daira [circle]. The daira exists in every tradition.
It is very Islamic, and it is Hindu also, as in the Lakshman rekha. It is found
in Christianity, and the Buddhist mandalas are composed of circles and
squares. If I am the center, as I move the protective horizon moves with
me. If you understand that, you know that you are the center of a world
enclosed by the horizon. That is what I try to translate, as the concept of
the dome in Islamic architecture translates the sheltering sky.
Samantrai: The dome, the circle, the square—these are the basic shapes of
the Moghul monuments. Are your geometrical shapes derived from
Moghul architecture?
Zarina: They are from Mondrian, Malevich, and Brancusi. The geometry of
their work validated my ideas.
Samantrai: Modern European art validated older Indian and Muslim

forms?
Zarina: Yes, my point of entry into visual art was through the Western
canon.

Samantrai: Geometric shapes are strong in Islamic art too.
Zarina: I may have known that instinctively when I began to experiment

with these forms, but I did not understand the artistic significance of that
legacy. I was attracted to symmetry and space, and I liked the sehens. When
one enters a mosque there is a large, empty square, and the only reference
for its size is the wall. That is my greatest experience of space, walking into
a mosque like Badshahi Masjid in Lahore, which has an enormous sehen.
But I was able to see those spaces and to understand their significance only
after I had been to other places. I would be dishonest if I said that I never
looked at other art practices. When I saw the Malevich and Mondrian
retrospectives in New York, my heart started to beat faster.3 In fact, there
are genres of Islamic and Indian art that do not appeal to me, for example
miniature paintings and Indian sculpture.
Samantrai: What about Islamic calligraphy?
Zarina: Calligraphy is another story. I love the Kufi style of calligraphy for
its simplicity.
Samantrai: Does it share the particular experience of space and openness

that you find compelling?
Zarina: Yes, that’s exactly right.
Samantrai: Do you consider what you do Islamic art?
Zarina: No, I do not. It is not in the Islamic tradition of calligraphy or

religious art. But nor do I object if people want to see that influence in my
work. Western artists have certainly been inspired by Islamic art. That is
the nature of twentieth-century art, it has absorbed influences from
everywhere. You could say that my printmaking is influenced by Japanese
woodcuts too. Literature, art, movies—these are hybrid forms. I am not of
the world that does not look at other things.
Samantrai: That would be suffocating, to be enclosed in a monolithic

world, to live in only one language, one country, and one set of beliefs.
174 ranu samantrai

Zarina: Yes, once you have lived with different people and studied other
cultures, I think you become whole. And in that way India is wonderful.
You know, after independence at least we had a beautiful experiment,
secularism. It did not work, but the intermingling of India’s cultures is
visible in our art forms. That is the difference between India and Pakistan.
And that is why, despite all its problems—Babri Masjid and other such
incidents—I would rather be in India than in Pakistan.4
The trajectory of influences Zarina traces is far more intricate than the
notion of separate cultural and aesthetic traditions that mix into new
syncretic forms. She suggests that by engaging critically with one tradition
and proceeding through it, we can reach another. Each tradition is already
hybridized, and each one opens into others. By inhabiting one tradition
deeply we discover an avenue of entry into others. Zarina’s model suggests
something other than the interaction of particularisms or their blending
into universalism. It is possible to follow the shape of the circle around the
world, and in encountering its repeated iterations also discover that in
each instance its meaning is embedded in a local context. Zarina grew up
responding to a certain organization of space, the open courtyard of the
home and the mosque, and recognized that experience when she looked at
another shaping of space in another medium. Perhaps aesthetic traditions
and experiences are not incommensurable to each other, despite our habit
of separating them into distinct geographic and cultural zones. This is a
level of interconnectedness and multiplicity that our conceptual models
struggle to explain.
Such complexity is evident as well in the process of printmaking, the
medium Zarina favors. Each print appears to be no more than simple lines
on plain paper. Behind it is a process that begins with sketches and
proceeds through scale drawings, woodcuts, and photographic metal
plates etched with acid, all before ink can be put to paper. If the final image
calls for Urdu calligraphy, the text is sent to Pakistan, where a master
calligrapher contributes his skill to the process. Zarina carries paper from
India, France, Nepal, and Japan, to her loft in New York, and selects a
particular texture and subtlety of shade for each print. Although at times
she regrets not having made more sculptures, the necessity of wood
carving and metal etching mean that the printmaker’s art encompasses

House with four walls
sculpture. The hybridity of Zarina’s chosen medium matches the hybridity

of her aesthetic sensibility. Likewise, the process of printmaking, which
involves harnessing a range of intricate, heterogeneous crafts and media to
the stark simplicity and stillness of a single image, echoes a life devoted to
creating order out of potential chaos and to finding briefly harmonious
resolutions in a richly cacophonous world. Zarina’s prints are often paired,
176 ranu samantrai

in the manner of the question and answer that frame the Taj Mahal. Or they
are part of an interconnected series of prints in a portfolio, a whole made
out of individual pieces that each retains its distinctiveness.
Samantrai: Why are you fascinated by the house motif ?
Zarina: I came to it when I needed to put my life in order. I suppose it

functioned for me like writing an autobiography might function for a
writer. It allowed me to situate myself after I had left the known path laid
out for my life and struck out on my own. It was not that I wanted to go
back, but I wanted to know who I was and what I had become.
Samantrai: Is that why you use Urdu when you want text on the prints?
Zarina: I use it because few people can read it now.
Samantrai: When did you decide to move from English to Urdu?
Zarina: That was in Father’s House. For many years I remembered the house
of my childhood, how we came in this door, and then turned through this
Door, crossed the Threshold and into the Courtyard (titles of prints from Home
is a Foreign Place). When my father died I decided to draw the house and
dedicate the print to him. As I was drawing the floor plan of the house I
was thinking of old maps, so I started to write the names of the rooms. I
could not have written those words in English. Then too, Urdu is my
language. It is now a dying language in India; using it in my prints is a way
of preserving it. Last year I took a class in Arabic and the teacher was
surprised that I already knew the alphabet. He thought that Urdu is not
known in India, that it is not an Indian language. Perhaps he will be right
soon, but I do not want to accept that erasure of Urdu from India. I am
determined to fight it. In Father’s House I wanted to show that Urdu existed,
and that its cultural and historical legacy has marked me for life. People
cautioned me against using it for fear that I might identify myself.
Samantrai: As a Muslim?
Zarina: Yes, out of concern for my physical safety.

Summer afternoon
Samantrai: It took you a long time to start using words visually.
Zarina: I was a little shy about it. When I make images that are culturally
symbolic and cannot be translated, they become a secret code. When I use
language, people can read it. That’s another reason why I chose Urdu,
because I knew most people would not be able to read it.
178 ranu samantrai

Threshold

Samantrai: What about the visual effect of words on the prints? Do
alphabets have their own specific aesthetic qualities?
Zarina: Interesting question. As a child learning to write, I wrote on a

takhti, a wooden board that you coat with multani matti [clay].5 You prepare
the black ink yourself, dip a reed pen in the ink, and then write aleph, be .
. . . It looks exactly like this [referring to Threshold]. I had forgotten the
takhti, but somehow it reappeared in my work. It took me sixty years to
realize the source of my love of the simple black line, and that I love the
color of this paper because it is like multani matti.
Samantrai: In House with four walls four lines completely enclose an empty
space. These walls allow the house no entrance or exit. It is an oddly
unsettling image, simultaneously comforting and tense, protective and
constraining. Obviously this is not supposed to be a representation of the
real. But it is a representation—of what? an idea? a memory?
Zarina: Of the idea of char diwari [four walls], which is a complicated idea
because it is used in so many contexts. In Pakistan, for example, it was
used in a slogan that instructed women to stay in chador [veil] and char
diwari. A warning from some maulvi [teacher of the Koran]. It is very easy
to produce such slogans, but they have little to do with the reality of
people’s lives. How many women have the choice to live in chador and char
diwari?
Samantrai: Because women have to work to support their families?
Zarina: And many people suffer from violence, they lose their homes to
riots and war, their char diwari are taken from them.
Samantrai: But as you think back to your childhood home, do you mean
that those char diwari were that same kind of containment?
Zarina: No, I also like the ring of it, char diwari. It was my home, my shelter,
my four walls. That is what I am getting at, the different meanings of the
idea. A shelter can be turned into a prison, or it can be made immensely
valuable when it is threatened. These are structures of memory, not
blueprints. I long to walk into this courtyard of memory.
180 ranu samantrai

To draw blueprints would be to portray the past as fully available to the
present. But Zarina’s prints are not about retrieval, preservation or return.
Still less are they about stripping away flux and change to create artifacts
for the heritage industry. The home she recalls is irretrievably foreign and
distant, but nonetheless exerts its influence in the here and now. Her work
is a commentary on memory and tenacity, and is often prompted by loss.
Zarina first left India in 1958, shortly before her parents moved the
remainder of the family to Pakistan. When she returned, it was to the loss
of home. That loss has become the recurrent theme of her work, and has
reverberated out to stand for the loss of country, language, and way of life.
Her chosen themes take us further into the paradoxes that lie at the
heart of Zarina’s art. As is the case with all memory work, her abstract
shapes and gestures are fragments that derive their meaning idiosyncrati-
cally from intensely personal memories. The seven etchings that comprise
the portfolio of House with four walls, for instance, include depictions of a
family servant (The one-eyed maid said we would have to move far away), a ghost
sighting (On rainy nights the ghost stopped by the pillar), and the feel of hot
bricks against bare, child’s feet (I run outside to play and burn my feet). The
visual expression of these memory fragments is equally idiosyncratic: the
chik [window blind]; the khas ki tatti [vetiver grass] used to cool rooms in
the hot afternoons (Summer afternoon); the penchant of animals to pass for
ordinary household objects (The black snake came in the house). The text that
accompanies these images is at once descriptive and highly enigmatic, its
mystery adding to the dream-like quality of these glimpses into a past. The
similarity to dreams is made explicit in the title of her first portfolio, At
night I go to the house at Aligarh (1990), in which each etching memorializes a
member of Zarina’s family, again in highly idiosyncratic manifestations.
Her brother, for instance, is remembered for his endless weave of stories,
expressed as the figure eight (Aslam tells a story).
Their dreamy, evocative quality prevents these prints from being
solipsistic references to a private history inaccessible to the viewer. Images
and texts hint at but never quite articulate a coherent narrative in which
meaning is readily apparent. Despite her fears about giving away too
much, Zarina retains a secret code of lines, shapes, and words. Her
reticence means that her work cannot be interpreted as easily referential,
with meaning limited to the specific content of one person’s memories.
Instead it becomes about the act of remembering, and it highlights the
invention and interpretation necessary to all memory work. The text that

Dividing Line
182 ranu samantrai

Atlas of my world
accompanies her images reaches for the allegorical, referring at once to a

specific past and to the past in general.
Here, then, is another paradox of Zarina’s work: it is highly idiosyn-
cratic, and yet it invites appropriation and interpretation. It is difficult not
to spin one’s own narratives from her minimal, bare gestures, as indeed I
did with I went on a journey. Their refusal to fill in all the gaps, to explain

and clarify, invites the participation of the viewer, whose own interpretive
activity must begin where the enigmatic suggestions of lines and shapes
end. Zarina’s incomplete remembering prompts the viewer to begin his/
her own process of remembering, to excavate his/her own dreams. The
lines she draws are precise and plotted with infinite care, and yet so spare
that they cannot be pinned down to referentiality. House with four walls is
simultaneously about her childhood home and char diwari, the idea of
shelter and confinement. Its minimal four lines are not limited to the
autobiographical, for the viewer must understand them by referring to the
walls of his/her own experience. And from there the next step is inevitable:
everyone has, or wants, a shelter, a place in the world, and everyone must
grapple with the limitations and loss of that place. The longing for and
discomfort with home cannot be restricted to individual psyches or
anthropologically drawn cultural boundaries. We proceed from the
particular to the potentially universal, but without losing the specificity of
the houses, both the artist’s and the viewer’s, that are far away.
This interpretive process parallels the influences that Zarina traces in the
formation of her aesthetic sensibility. She recounts finding that immersion
in one aesthetic tradition provided an avenue into others. Similarly, she
creates work that asks us to go through her memories to reach our own,
which in turn enables us to reach out beyond ourselves. If this practice
invokes a certain universality, it does not do so by assimilating or denying
the particular and the different. Nor does it make one set of experiences
stand for others. Instead it proceeds through a chain of local specificities
that may connect or overlap, but that cannot be substituted for each other.
By never making generalizable claims, by limiting herself to her own
idiosyncratic memories, Zarina invites the viewer to do the same. If a sense
of commonality emerges, it does so because of recognition of parallel and
intersecting particularities.
In this way Zarina avoids as well the habit of turning culture or experi-
ence into an object for the viewer’s gaze, an exotic curio that confirms the
necessity of division. She is unambiguous in her critique of work that
exoticizes South Asian cultural or religious practices for the North Ameri-
can viewer’s titillation. She describes the type of image, generally created
by female artists, that is popular now in New York’s galleries: “The artist
depicts a woman in chains, adds veils and some Koranic text in Arabic.
That kind of work encourages people to believe that if a Muslim female
artist uses the Koran, she must be criticizing the book for justifying the
184 ranu samantrai

mistreatment of women.” Such work is created to feed the market and
panders to popular prejudices. In its rush to generalization it evacuates the
specifity of the local, blending all variation into a generic, easily commodi-
fiable icon, in this case the icon of the suffering woman under the evils of
Islam. It also reaffirms the notion that the world is divided by unbreach-
able, albeit aesthetically pleasurable and consumable, differences.
In contrast, Zarina’s practice exemplifies the best potential of
cosmoplitanism. Attentive to the forces that shape individual lives, it
connects the individual to the global and back again to other individuals.
Each of the six prints that comprise Atlas of My World depicts a national
border she has crossed. The portfolio is an explication of how an indi-
vidual life and the map of the world interact with each other. It is at once
autobiographical, a map of the routes of her life, and about the shaping of
nations. In Dividing Line the India-Pakistan border is depicted as multiple
and wavering, in acknowledgement of the tenuous position of Kashmir
and of the two nations’ disagreements over their limits. The lack of a
geographic imperative for division, a ready marker to distinguish one
nation from the other, signals the arbitrary imposition of difference.
Connections between the two nations run so deep that fifty years after
partition neither land nor people can be differentiated clearly. Although on
the national scale the ties that bind are made up of hostility and political
ambition, on the local scale matters are far more complicated. Zarina notes
that many families, including her own, have been divided by the border. “I
know lots of people who feel that the dividing line goes through the heart,”
she says. “People who came to Pakistan long for India for the rest of their
lives. But those who stayed in India long for their blood relatives in Pakistan.
We are constantly pulled in two directions.” Oddly, the print does not
name the two nations, or even explain that the divide in question is geo-
political. Absent that explanation, the image is freed from strict referentiality
and open to multiple appropriation. The print then becomes an occasion
to reflect upon the many lines, literal and metaphorical, that divide.
Atlas of My World, an intimate geography of a life lived in a fragmented
world, demonstrates the impossibility of separating the personal from the
political. It also demonstrates determination to intervene in the public
world by defying, crossing, and re-presenting borders, and thereby
resisting the imperative of fragmentation. These commitments of the
cosmopolitan sensibility have been challenged by the events of the past
year. Antipathy toward Muslims has reached frightening levels in the

United States, Europe, Israel, and India. But there is no viable alternative to
the embrace of a large world and delight in its multiplicity. As Zarina says,
those of us who live in that world have been changed by it. We have no
option but to continue to assert that it exists.
May 2002
Samantrai: You were in New York on September 11?
Zarina: Yes, I was here. I started to go out in the morning, I had to mail a
print. But then I thought a woman wearing salwar-kamiz, walking around
with a huge tube in her hand—it did not make a very good picture on that
day. In the afternoon I walked on 8th Avenue, which was filled with people
trying to find Chelsea pier to get a ferry to New Jersey, because the bridges
were closed. They were dazed, wandering around, asking directions to the
pier. It was hard for a few days to understand what had happened. I could
smell the smoke, my eyes watered from it. I had a persistent image of all
the people buried under rubble. Then the telephone started to ring with my
family and friends calling from all over the world asking, “Are you all
right? Is it safe?” And then the suspicion and negative comments about
Muslims began. I found that very offensive and very hurtful. I have made
New York my home, I have lived here for 25 years, and now I am labeled an
enemy within. I am thought to be illiterate, lacking any culture, back-
ground, and history.
Samantrai: That is the representation of Muslims in the media?
Zarina: Yes. Journalists and commentators on television keep waving the

Koran around and saying it is the only book Muslims read. I found televi-
sion very offensive, very insulting. But I had more problems with Indians
than with Americans.
Samantrai: Hindus?
Zarina: Yes, and also Muslims. I found it very hurtful that when the Osama
bin Laden connection emerged there were demonstrations in Delhi. The
saffron warriors wanted Afghanistan to be bombed and Muslims to be
186 ranu samantrai

Mapping the dislocations

killed.6 So where is my country? James Baldwin wrote about being asked
where he came from, and he replied that he came from a country that did
not like him. I was born in a country that does not like me. I have adopted a
country that does not trust me. It is a painful situation to be between these
two homes.
Samantrai: Did those events make you feel more a Muslim?
Zarina: They did not make me more Muslim, but if we are to be singled
out, then I will say yes, here I am. Not that I was ever going to hide it. But I
grew up in secular India. My generation, we never identified ourselves by
religion.
Samantrai: And you come from a secular family?
Zarina: Yes. I never saw my father go to a mosque to pray. And women of

course never went to pray in mosques. I believe in secular India, I am a
product of secular India. It was a beautiful dream. But the destruction of
Babri Masjid shattered that dream. All the while the controversy was going
on and the saffron warriors wanted to destroy the mosque, I said until the
night before that it would never happen. I did not think such a thing could
happen in India. And it happened. That broke my heart. Babri Masjid was
not a big monument, it had little artistic or archeological significance. But
it was a symbol because it existed side by side with a temple. People in
Ayodhya had never fought each other, had never killed each other.
Samantrai: The trouble was caused by the agitators from the BJP and the
VHP?7
Zarina: Yes. So I felt very hurt, very, very hurt. And then I thought, yes, I am
a Muslim, if that is what India wants to know about me.
Samantrai: Was September 11 a similar defining moment?
Zarina: Yes, it was.
Samantrai: What do you feel now about living in America?
188 ranu samantrai

Zarina: I have no place to go. I have lived here more than twenty-five years,
much of my adult life. I work here. I have wonderful friends from all
communities, all countries. New York is my country.
Samantrai: We have the media response to September 11, which was

contemptible, and the government response, which was frightening, but
what do you think about ordinary Americans that you encountered?
Zarina: I think ordinary Americans in New York have been wonderful. You
know how Indians, when we see each other we never acknowledged each
other?
Samantrai: Yes, why is that?
Zarina: Because you do not know where other people come from, what
class, what place. But after September 11 people started acknowledging
each other.
Samantrai: Has the violence in Gujarat affected that goodwill?
Zarina: Yes. A few local groups organized a fundraiser, very last minute, for
the refugees in Gujarat. And I know some friends who called the organiz-
ers and advised them not to go and not to donate money.
Samantrai: Why? Because its purpose was to aid Muslims?
Zarina: Yes, what else? But you see the thing is that we are all one. We be-
long to each other. We have the same culture, the same language and cus-
toms. The ties that link us together are so strong. How can you separate us?
Samantrai: I do not think it is possible. Have these events effected your

work?
Zarina: I did not work for a long time after September 11. I never thought
that it would effect my work so much. I am not frightened, but I am very
hurt. It is a deep down hurt. At the time I had been working with maps. A
couple of years ago I saw an aerial image of Grozny in the New York Times.

The city was had been turned into rubble by the bombing. I cut out the
image but didn’t do anything with it. And then the war in Bosnia—I didn’t
even know there were so many Muslims in the former Yugoslavia. The first
time I realized it was after a massacre when people were burying their
dead, and they were saying the Sura Al Fatiha [the first chapter of the Koran,
customarily recited for the dead]. We see the Chechens reciting it too, over
their dead. When something has been destroyed, I think the only way we
can remember that it existed is by acknowledging it. So I started by making
a map of Chechnya, and then one of Bosnia. They are not detailed maps.
Instead, I use the outline of the country and render its interior in black, as
though it is a piece of burnt charcoal. And then I moved on to Kosovo, and
now Iraq—how many people, how many children, are still dying there?
Samantrai: Five thousand every month, due to the sanctions.
Zarina: And we must not forget what is done to Palestinians, and to

Afghanistan.
Samantrai: These are all places where Muslims have been targeted?
Zarina: Yes. And do you think it is coincidence? No, it is not coincidence. I

remember when Dick Cheney was the defense minister in the first Bush
government, he bragged that they would turn Baghdad into a parking lot. I
will never forget it. Do you know what Baghdad means to Muslims? It is
one of the holy sites of Islam. It was a center of Islamic civilization and
learning. Scholars like Abu Hanifah, Sheikh Abdul Qadir Gilani, and Imam
Jafar As-Sadiq are buried there. Hazat Ali’s burial place is in Najaf, and the
battle of Karbala was fought nearby.8 Today we are in the midst of a war
against Muslims. I am sorry to say it, but I think this war is part of a very
long hatred that has gone on for centuries.
Samantrai: What is this series of maps called?
Zarina: I might use a misra [line] from Mirza Ghalib, the second line of the
couplet, “Yunhi gar rota raha Ghalib to ahle jahan/ Dekhna in bastion ko jo kay
veran ho gayn.”9
190 ranu samantrai

Samantrai: Am I right that this is your first deliberately public piece, about
public politics? Is this series a departure from earlier work, or is it a
continuation?
Zarina: It is a continuation because I was already working with maps. But

those maps were mine, the borders I have crossed. Nevertheless, in my
work there is always a link between the personal and the political. After all,
the first border I made was the India-Pakistan border.
Samantrai: Are you finished with the house motif ?
Zarina: No, but it is not my house any more. Now I am working on a print
titled “ . . . and surely the frailest of houses is the spider’s house.” The title is taken
from the Koran, Sura 29:41. The house is something that you can carry
with you and rebuild. I commemorate the desire to rebuild homes that
have been destroyed, and I love people’s refusal to give up. In refugee
camps you see them putting up a little tent, and they put their things here,
a jug of water there, and a quilt there, and they make the tent into a home.
The other day in the New York Times there was a picture of a house on the
West Bank. A whole family was sitting in their drawing room, the woman
was on the sofa and the man in the easy chair. But the front wall of the
house had been blown away. Yet they continued to sit comfortably in their
own house. One could laugh and cry at the absurdity.
Samantrai: People are amazingly tenacious. They are determined to hang

on no matter what happens around them. And I suppose to rebuild one’s
home is an act of faith in the future.
Zarina: It was hard for me to regain that faith. For some time I wondered
why I should bother to work. But I have to work for my sanity.
Samantrai: Do you see any reason for optimism at all?
Zarina: No, I do not. But I do believe that superpowers cannot win. I do not
think you can win wars against people. Did America win in Vietnam? Did
France win in Algeria? No. There will be a lot of bloodshed. Governments

are pushing people, and when people are pushed against a wall they
protest. And that is what worries me about India also, that people there
will become militant.
Samantrai: This BJP government and all that has happened under it make
me not want to go to India. This is the first time in my life that I have ever
not wanted to go home.
Zarina: You know, I do not want to go there either. Isn’t it amazing? I never
thought a day would come when I would not want to go to India, or to
Pakistan.
Samantrai: But then we are stuck in this country, which has its own
difficulties.
Zarina: This is the awful thing, because we do not have a home to go to.
Where shall we go? I left home, my father’s house, when I was 21 years old.
Now I am 65 years old. For 44 years I have lived in a world with people
from diverse communities. That is my family, my house of four walls.
list of artwork
1. I Went on a Journey, 1991
Bronze with patina
11 x 51/4 × 51/4 inches
2. Father’s House, 1994

Etching printed with Chine Colle
Plate size: 221/2 × 151/2 inches
Sheet size: 30 × 22 inches
3. House with Four Walls, 1991

Etching with Chine Colle
Plate size: 9 × 8 inches
Image on recto page
Text on verso page (Far away was a house with four walls)
4. Summer Afternoon, 1991

Etching with Chine Colle
Plate size: 9 × 8 inches
192 ranu samantrai

Image on recto page
Text on verso page (On summer afternoons everybody slept)
5. Threshold, 1999
From the portfolio, Home Is a Foreign Place
Woodcuts with Urdu text
Block size: 8 × 6 inches
6. Dividing Line, 2001

Woodcut
Block size: 17 × 12 inches
Sheet size: 251/2 × 191/2 inches
7. Atlas of My World, 2001

Woodcut
Block size: 141/2 × 131/2 inches
Sheet size: 251/2 × 191/2 inches
8. Mapping the Dislocations, 2001

Woodcut
Block size: 111/2 × 411/2 inches
Sheet size: 20 × 471/2 inches
notes
1. For an account of these events see “Report of the Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal”
and the documents gathered in Varadajan 2002. For a thoughtful commentary
see Nussbaum 2003.
2. Recall that George W. Bush initially promised an American crusade against Al
Qaida and its supporters.
3. Piet Mondrian retrospective, Museum of Modern Art, October 1995-January
1996. Kazimir Malevich retrospective Metropolitan Museum of Art, February–
March 1991.
4. The Babri Masjid, a mosque in the Indian city of Ayodha, was destroyed by
Hindu fundamentalists in 1992.
5. Multani mutti is soft clay from riverbeds in Multan, an ancient city on the border
of Sindh and Punjab, now in Pakistan.
6. The “saffron warriors” are members of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh
(RSS, Association of National Volunteers), a khaki-clad nationalist paramilitary
sect formed in the 1920s, and its political wing, the Vishwa Hindu Prashad
(VHP, World Hindu Council).

7. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rose to power in 1998 and has pursued an
aggressive pro-Hindu agenda. The BJP backed the construction of a temple in
Ayodhya at the site of the Babri Masjid, a mosque. Several members of the
present cabinet, including the Deputy Prime Minister, L.K.Advani, were present
at the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992. The BJP also controls Gujarat, a
state that some consider a laboratory for Hindu fascism. Its Chief Minister,
Narendra Modi, is a long time party organizer and pracharak [preacher] from
the source of contemporary Hindu nationalism, the RSS.
8. Abu Hanifah (699–767) founded the Hanif school of jurisprudence. Sheikh
Abdul Qadir Gilani died in 1166. Imam Jafar As-Sadiq (d. 765) was the sixth
Shia imam. The battle of Karbala was fought in 680.
9. The couplet is interpreted by Adrienne Rich as, “If Ghalib must go on
sheddding these tears, you who inhabit the world will see these cities blotted
into the wilderness” (“Late Ghazal,” in Ahmed [1971]: 78).
works cited
Ahmed, Aijaz, ed. 1971. Ghazals of Ghalib: Collection from the Urdu. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 2003. Genocide in Gujarat: The International Community
Looks Away. Dissent: 15–23.
“Report of the Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal—Gujarat 2002.” www.sabrang.com.
(accessed June 15, 2003).
Varadajan, Siddarth, ed. 2002. Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy. New York: Penguin
Books.
194 ranu samantrai

—
THE 19. {tis in this context that
one must consider Ram-
ee y identifying regions that
kinkar's hand-thrown
cem ent sculpture, known
GROUP A g RAMKIN
KA!
JLT
ULPTUI
N TE x 1
{ and ‘very severely affected’
most as Harvester or Thresher
, from the year the famine
shing
x HARVES
TER it mgr city in Bengal, was the
began: a dynamic figu
re of a woman, thre
NTIN!!
of
» for the largest number d firmly in her hands.
[For
© OF SATH E 194 Light subsistence and survi
val a bunc h
on
of
Ramk
grai ns
inka
gra
r’s
spe
scul pture, including Harveste
r,
AND Santini- more
head has been var-
aS peated within Bengal, 31 ,]. The abse nce ofa
In the 1940s, social and political crises st to one see pp. 130- r:
of 19¢ heen identified as belonging the effect is certainly clea
The famine ' artists Chit- jously interpreted, but
Partition during independence would affect a gener ndat exories of severity: While d to conv ey the very act of
graphical bou n in Calcutta the anatomy is rede fine
in t! n Midnapur, zainul Abedi h grains were critical to
Bengal. The period saw the emergence of artist-activists best indicated were all directly threshing at a time in whic
of Industri Ash in Begu mpur ed into.a gesture cap-
Department sengal ~vard han
Baij i Santini- life. The result is a body turn
and the formation of the Calcutta Group. iot ns
subdivistha
const!
sffected by the famine, Rarnkinkar ofaction. In the context
by it- Like the rest turing a suspended moment
kotan was less direct ly impac ted ance ts the fact that the
SANJOY MALLIK also have of famine, what is of signific
harvest, which becomes
Santiniketan must
of Bengal, however,
artis t cons truc ted an icon of
especially of food-grains; — Nabanna — signifies
experienced rising prices, an allegory: the new crop
due to starvation on the
and likely witnessed death hope in the tryi ng time s of the disaster.
It has been customary to consider the history of art in periodic 7 Ge FADE, year, for instance, in 1941. The root causes ofthe account of the cost of rice. This sculptural image was Ramk
inkar's entry sent
a contemporary
units of decades and centuries. When one speaks of the ‘forties’ man-made’ famine have been traced to the efforts of the British One must keep in mind that (in all probability, in the form of
a maquette) to the
due to starva tion or other wise, may not nec- rnational Sculp-
it may be possible neither to begin exactly with the year 1940, colonial government to freeze supplies for the war front; the death,
theme of death Bombay committee for the 1952 Inte
essarily be the result of famine- The theme of the
nor to stop exactly at the end of the decade, because it is not stock hoarders’ ever increasing greed, which led to an aberrant
nkar' s paint ing known by ture competition in London on the
ssed in Ramki query by
“Unknown political prisoner’. Replying toa
was addre
possible to fit historical events into such neat periodizations rice market; and the failure of systematic and organized relief subjec t of a tea-shop
the title Death of Jogin, on the tion: when
This chapter on the state of the visual arts in Bengal during the supply from an imperfect administration.* painting was Sankho Chaudhury, he explained his posi
owner who was executed in 1943. The oners
decade of the 1940s therefore takes the year 1943 as its starting
Over and above the horror and stench of death, the famine ically wars rage and famines ravage, political pris
not primarily about famine, nor was It specif ving multi-
point: the year that saw an infamous *man-made’ food shortage.
revealed itself as an agent of social disruption, culminating in cer- may be held in prison, but it is the stri
adocumentation ofa real event. The artist was fight, and hence
the disintegration of the family and abandonment of dependents. tude on the fields who suffer, who
culminating in horrendous conditions of mass-scale human suf- tainly affected by the death of the subject, whom
he
n."
is Children were sold, women took to sex work, the number of for him are the actual prisoners of the situ
atio
fering and death, conventionally identified as a ‘famine’. It knew: his tea shop was an artist haunt frequ
ented by
people begging on the street rapidly increased. This benumbing Sanjoy Mallik
this inhuman social disaster that led to two distinct formations Ramkinkar and his friends Benodebehari Mukherjee
— on the social trauma found voice in a body of work by various artists,
within contemporary visual-arts practice in the region and Nandalal Bose. In this expressionistic painting,
that called a distinct set of images collectively identified as the artistic
one hand, the commencement of an artists collective death is rendered as a bluish-black hue in emphatic
political-hu- response to the Bengal Famine [Box 8.1]. brushstrokes that outline the lifeless body.
itself the ‘Calcutta Group, and on the other, the and
of the famine itself Individuals like Chittaprosad Bhattacharya (1915-1978)
manist motivations that led toa chronicling their personal
outside the Somnath Hore (1921-2006) were motivated by
in the hands ofa loose confederation of individuals of the Com- | See endnote |! in Prakash Das, ed., Ramkinkarer
conviction in Marxist ideology. As direct members
Ramkinkar Baij, Harvester.
themselves from
Calcutta Group. Both entities sought to distance with the anti-fascist 1943. Larerite pebbles and Drawing [Drawings by Ramkinkar], (Kolkata:A.
through differ- munist party, they were ideologically aligned cement mortar Mukherjee
& Co. Pvt. Ltd.. 1400 Bangabda/Bengali era).
dominant modes of visual expression, though within that political ambi-
significance protest-movements that emerged from
ing strategies, and this constitutes their common the dictum ofa ‘peoples
Indian art. ence, and responded enthusiastically to
within the spectrum of the modern in famine through sketches and
war’, But the chronicling of the
these artists in a more open, humanist ter
Visual posters situated departure in the domain of the visual arts. In terms of pictorial FAR LEFT
The Panchasher Manwantar and rain than that of pure political dogma.
It was this distinction
Fig. 8.1 Chittaprosad.
st style, these images are formed through abbreviated notation.
Expressions of Chronicle or Prote that eventually culminated in
a schism between personal ideo-
Hungry Bengal, 1943. Ink
panchasher manwantar ( ‘fam- With limited time to spare when drawing from life, Chittaprosad
During the Bengal ‘Famine’, or the direction of the party, with
regional calendar-year logical perspective and the collective transcribed the urgency of the situation into the essentials of
on paper
ine of fifty’, referring in Bengali to the Chittaprosad, and at a Jater date
Somnath Hore, dissociating
emaciated form through swift strokes, brisk turns and sharp
in the Midnapur dis- In the end, they sought 9
1350 Bangabda’), the Tamluk subdivision themselves from party membership.
subdivision, a location rather than jabs of the line. Such an evolved pictorial code belonged to real-
trict of the state suffered the most. The follow their hearts and their individual
convictions.
pis butpadi
nationalist period, was a ie issue of stylistic specificity, the relevance
of firm political resistance during the party dictates in the domain
of cultural expression.
* ee
devastated: initially by a terrible
1942,
cyclone on 16 October the famine was 49 ' oe Bes in the fact that they heralded a concep-
For the self-trained Chittaprosad, oe
by the artifici ally generated shortage of food- of political convictions: i ew pictures as objects belonging to the domain
and subseq uently
, dealing a final blow.* theme and a locus for articulation nd reall
— aA tic contemplation, to documents or records that
grain that followe d the cyclone the on-the-grou
1943, he had personally experienced pee — sa he distinction, therefore, was two-fold:
had been artificially manu- (a military ee
The fact that the food shortage ies of the British ‘scorched earth’ policy
al in the daily Statesman the nese) * a oe aie om ce of visual expression, coupled with
factured was recognized in an editori destroying any resources
that might be useful to
the implication of this admis- volunteers to Chattagram,penne
as early as 23 September 1943; a team of porary practice. The sestees cn
ntion could have averted the accompanying
bya possibility of Japanese
# = Lael
sion is the fact that human interve threatened derived out
but ofof art- school academism; serial
disaste r alone was not the reason
then supposedly
work for the Com oe neitherSeay
did
ha
This experience was his initiation into posters and draw)
sufferi ng, and that natural i
term famine should be taken bigs ee een a visual language ha ae
for the famine (and as such, the he prepared propaganda
While : hiss/n
t monologue reveals C hittaprosad to be
was a surplus district, meaning Party, for whom the ray 8ieee
politic, rtiviet erriv: a distant past. It was a lan,
with a pinch of salt). Midnapur to Midnapur to document VISC Striving to convey his party's perspective.
it Subsequently assigned ted ina PY” eee . caries present. Its ‘topical’
of crops, and it is true that records culmina' Pierce lya Pict orial-reporter of the scene, the carts
it ordinarily produced a surplus followe d, that the 1943 famine, Chittaprosad’s ss accountpee
accn descriptions of roa cc. x : was certainly an
crop disease that eyewitne a attempt to formulate
was the cyclone, coupled witha lication titled Hungry Bengal
(1943), aD § reveal an acutely sensitive artist. One can
ben
n. There have, however, been sina
early com oe
the political threat ofa chronicle ee be potentially capable of address-
converted it into a deficit locatio of the district. Strung together as a written text and ieee ly like Hun:
neler ae . ne contemporary.
cing econom ic analyse s arguing for the untenability and white, Hungry Bengal was prom
*Hence its destruction, Butas
an example of pictorial
convin decline. Stat- sketches in stark black Tende Ting, the doc bone uae ,
‘food availability and all but on of “ 7 aprosad did align with a very specifi
an explanation relying purely on
ocument simultaneously constituted
confiscated by the British authorities a point of :
been put forth as proof that despite the cyclone, soon as It was published [Fig:
Pictorial realism, and his strong
partisan Seti fod
istical data has
actuall y been more than in copies were destroyed as
in Bengal had
the 1943 crop yield CHAPTERS .
THE 9405-7 HE CALCUTTA
(1900-1947)
GROUP AND TH E BENGAL FAMI NE
NATIONAL IDENTITY 113
COLONIAL MODERNITY. AR T AND
Fig.8.2 Zainul Abedin.
Famine Drawings, 1943. ink promine he propaganda posters he designed In Such
work } the satir mode of caricature effective presumed to be those of its founder members
ly and
led anatomic natur ‘alism
for the jupta, Kamala Das Gupta (née T. C. Kamala),
g linguistic contrast ‘orcef Paritosh Sen, Nirode Majumder, Subho Tagore,
ully
TESS Ra ra and Prankrishna Pal. Subsequently, however,
It is fascinating to contrast
¢ hittaprosad's Pictorial Prag vership was certainly not consistent,
and the Calcutta
tice with the famine drawings of Zainul Abedin (191 Group experienced more than one instance of reconfiguration
4~1976),
a chronicler of t ¢ urban scenario of Calcutta, as 5 Well as the and reconstitution of its participants.*
water s by Govardhan A 1 (19907~1996), who
recorded The members of the Calcutta Group hailed from diverse back
the bleakness of exodus as villagers deserted the Village grounds of artistic training, and some of them were self-taught
of
Begumpur, relocating ~ in pursuit of survival, in the face Giver this diversity, how did they seek to formulate their pic
of
immense odds — to the metropolis. Zainul Abedin wy ‘aS & Com. torial language? Although the immediate factors triggering the
petent student from the art school in Calcutta, trained in group's qi were contemporary sociopolitical transformations,
the
conventional academic mode. Jolted out of academic realism notably the war and the ‘famine’, as mentioned in their collec
tive statements the Calcutta Group was not primarily concerned
by the experience of the famine, he evolved a personal language
using the rudimentary starkness of the harsh black brush-drawy with assuming a sociopolitical mission through art. Whereas
line. Executed in the dry-brush technique, the images excluded Chittaprosad, Ash and Abedin had tasked themselves with the
tonal modulation, and therefore the softness and romanticism formulation of an “iconography of the famine’, the Calcutta
of chiaroscuro [Fig. 8.2]. The setting is drastically reduced to Group merely prioritized the location of a linguistic paradigm
the bare minimum, while the figures occupy a place ofpromin. that would be suitably ‘modern’, so as to facilitate articulating
the shifting times, (Here and henceforth, ‘linguistic’ exclusively
ence within the held of vision. Developed from recall and brief
refers to art and visual language.) Their primary mission was
visual notes, these carefully composed drawings dwell on the
one of evolving individual and personal artistic styles, Rather
dynamics of contradiction, with a simultaneous feeling of eleg.
than proposing an agenda of political commitment, or even
ant spontaneity against an extreme precision ot arrangement.
one of humanist concern that would thematically introduce
But there is no pronounced protest; none of the drawn figures the immediate present as the substance of art, the members
ever address the viewer directly, It is only as silent witness to
of the Calcutta Group preferred to define their search through
their negotiation of their destinies that one feels the empathetic relatively formal aspects of the visual language. It is from such
resonance of the suffering. a vantage point that they went on to declare the effete insuf-
In a Contrasting approach to Chittaprosad’s urgency of mission ficiency of traditional art forms from their own cultural past, to
and the elegant perfection of Zainul Abedin, Govardhan Ashs the extent that they summarily dismissed the possibility of any
watercolours effectively translated the rupture of social cohe- form of progress having occurred since the 17th century. But,
sion into its pictorial equivalent. As he reduced his human in contrast, their conviction in developments outside India was
forms to dark, thin silhouettes of ochre and brown, almost like supreme and all-encompassing; it was not limited to admiration
apparitions, Ash's protagonists literally pera anonymous, for modern European movements (they mention impression.
representing the unidentifiable multitude dislocated by the ism, cubism and surrealism in their 1953 note) but
extended
famine [Fig. 8.3]. As his work develops, all identifiable dest back as far as the ancient achievements of the
Egyptians and the European modern, a few of which the members
of physiognomy disappear from the silhouettes, and anonymity the Assyrians. They wrote: ‘we have to study so specif Fig. 8.4 Prodosh Das
all of them deeply, ically mention in their 1953 note). Rather, the Calcutta
becomes pronounced even in the isolation that envelops them. develop our appreciation of them and take Group Gupta, Seated Woman,
from them all that was a loosely bound collective aspiring to shrug
we could profitably synthesise with our requirements off the shack-
and trad- les of ‘tradition’ at all costs. To them, there was
The Caicutta Group (1943-1953) itions’ They also declared: "The guiding clearly a polar
motto of our Group is dichotomy between tradition and modernity
While Chittaprosad, Abedin and Ash directly referenced ne best expressed in the slogan “Art
should be international and
. What would be
their specific relevance within the modern in
immediate trauma of the famine, there was another, quite dis- inter-dependent" In other words,
our art cannot progress or the Indian context?
develop if we always look back to Before we can come to a conclusive assessme
tinct response among a group of young artists, forwhom the our past glories and cling to nt that answers
our old traditions at all cost The this question, it is first necessary to identify
calamitous moment within changing times signalled their cue vast new world of art, rich briefly the individ-
and infinitely varied, created by Masters ual tendencies that collectively constitut
the world over in all e the Calcutta Group.
to form a collective of the like-minded, Prodosh Das Gupta's ( '912-1991) search
ages, beckons us! for a preferred sculp-
The moment at which the Calcutta Group was formed was tural form was constantly evolving;
crucial: between the enormous loss of life that occurred pee
One of the most scathing eritiques
of the Calcu while some of his works
tta Group are loaded down by literalness,
has bee: n directed at its mar © successful articulations
World War II, and the way in which the ‘famine’ glaringly ie formalist Position. Critics
the citi ing of social argue that like Food Queue (1944) and Clamou
situations as a backdrop for their r (or Jai Hind: 1948) aspire
lighted a severe degradation of humanity, it is sel together is no more coming towards represe: nting a closely knit group
a than an avowal, and that far too of human forms as
the group chose to voice their conviction in humanism: Stirring disquiet little of the a unified and coherent sculptural
of the times is actually reflect integrity, and bear a simple
is supreme, there is none above him" — this was the goes Produced during ed in the works Correspondence between theme
the years of the group's existen and expression. He displayed
gan when the Calcutta Group was formed in 1943. bine Collective,* They ce as a unified on the one hand a Rodinesque tenden
h adan apolitical standpoint, cy in exploring the partial
dark days for Bengal. Famine and pestilence were heer . affil; ation to political rejecting any human figure as a valid and comple
ideology as a motivating te sculptural form, and on
the land. The barbarity and heartlessness all around ™\ va the m. This, force behind the other a tendency towards
togethe, t with
the diversity of linguistic accentuation of solidity, with
a few young artists, deeply, We began to think, to seare attons distinguishing configur- emphasis on mass and yolume the
each membe r from one culminating in ponderous mon-
hearts and ask ourselves; ",..which way?” a admietediyi , since Underscores the another, effectively umental bulk [ Fig, 8.4]. He
fj act that beyond a general displays a range of deviation
this isa part of their collective statement made in 1953+ fi ‘88 what they agreement regard- the norms of academic realism from
wished to reject, there did not and a movement towards formal
4 possibility that this was declared with retrospective hi ae ditection, al Consen exist any defined qualities that evolved in the
sus guiding the collective Course of the modern in the
Unpui Stic frat
an towards a common equally West,
Setting aside conflicting claims and differences of op! ernity, Itisi therefor F e clearly evident visible both in his figures and
even among the members themselves as to who found that the Cal- in the varied rendering of
atta GGroup was
Hota ' ‘movement’ CG(in the his portraits [Fig, 8.5]. The
extilb” sense that the term less thoroughly
documented artist
group, if one assumes the Calcutta Group's first collective GeSignates the
StcCessive artistic revolution Kamala Das Gupta (1913
s that characterize -2001) was.an equally sensit
ition in 1945 as an index to its initial configuration, the foll though she is not know ive sculptor;
n for radically innovative
explorations,
COLONIAL MODERNITY, ART AND NATIONAL IDENTITY (1900 -1947) CHAPTER ® + THE 1940S: THE CALCUTTA GROUP AND THE BENGAL FAMINE
=
reflected in her portrait-essays that effeey
mality of the sitters, while simulta a
| a part of her own, apparently withdraw,
1] Ghose (1913-1980) is best known a apace
chromatic landscapes, in which intensity of
rtkks together with the flourish of calligraphic lag
ta lyrical expression, but this popular identity prog
nly a partial view of the artist. His complex artistic
cluded not only images of 1946 riot-torn Calcutta, but afer
paintings that are executed ina liberated language of
»me of these bear a peculiar thematic ambivalence that b
easy translation into direct or singular meaning. Paritosh Sep
(1918-2008) went to Paris in search of a first-hand e -|
with modern art [Fig, 87]. French modernist pictorial pig.
ciples fuse with his personal understanding of the traditionaljg
his own cultural context to produce images that are
simplified to geometric essentials of form (following an ey
ent admiration for cubism) and yet imbued with the lyricism:
of idyllic settings. By the mid-1950s, however, be had been abl
to successfully merge post-cubist planar structure with ani
sive social satire (for example in Politician on Promenade, x
Nirode Majumder (1916-1982) visited Paris too, working is
the studio of cubist painter André Lhote. Majumder's works
ABONE his time in the Calcutta Group display the adaptation of
Fig. 85 Prodosh Das Fig.8.6 Kamala Das characteristics to a greater extent than they do a synthesis
Sapte tere, ‘ French styles [Fig. 8.8]. Rathin Maitra’s (1913-1997) as
apes, aca See Eee
Gupta, 1950. Bronze $947. Uncast with the Anti-Fascist Writers’ and Artists’ Association
in which the simplification and mellifluous elongation of the ABOVE :

human forms are played against the steady staccato rhythm of Fig. 8.9 eee
brush marks indicating the crop [Fig. 8.9]. Through the themes ‘i :
in his work, like collective labour at the rail-yard, workers on
their way to the factory, card players and the nude, he represents
the modern as an urban experience, while his stylistic affin- hon
ities reveal a distinct tendency to align directly with the West Fig. 8.10 Abani Sen, Deer,
in attitude and expression. He also exhibited an admiration 1950. Pastel on paper
of Jamini Roy (1887-1972) and tried to explore the possibility
of extending Roy's distinctive stylization of human forms into
a wider panorama of human figures grouped in a landscape set-
ting, Prankrishna Pal (1915-1988) also admired the pictorial
achievements of Jamini Roy, with whom he shared an interest
in folk art, but like Roy, he must be viewed as an urban modern
painter operating in.an artistic circuit completely different from
that of the folk-artist’s norms, concerns and context [Box 8.2}.
; Green Cow (n.d.) by Abani Sen (1905-1972) attempted a super-
ficial Pictorial transformation of a conventional gesture of
affection through heightened colour contrasts of red and dark
Breen, His later works utilized a more fluid and flexible han-
dling of paint to arrive at expressionistic statements [Fig, 8.10).
Being self-taught, Sunil Madhay Sen (1910-1979) freely explored
“number of diverse stylistic affinities, but the human figure
remained his prime concern. The more convincing pictures
depart from strict realism; through these statements of spon-
‘aneous vitality in swift lines and rich impasto of pigment, Sen
‘Mparts an energetic gestural quality to his pictorial forms.
fore Hemanta Misra (1917-2009), who was also self-trained, chose
Fig. 8.7 Paritosh Sen,
Refugee, 1946. Gouache
CHAPTERS = THE 1940S: THE CALCUTTA GROUP AND THE BENGAL FAMINE ue
a mane 1 « COLONIAL ART AND

MODERNITY, NATIONAL IDENTITY (1900-1947)
oe
SE:
ve xog
BISHNU DEY AND JOH
N not as an outsider but as one
JAMINI ROY IRWIN'S 1944 MONOGR
ON JAMINI ROY
APH knowledge and understand
wi
ho had an fn
ing of the living NA AND THEATRICAL Bijon Bhattacharya wrote the dialogues for balancing a high production standard (the revolving
iences of the people's Nabanna in a mixed quasi-rural Bengali, disregard- stage, for instance) with simplicity of set design.
ORMANCE IN BENGAL
Ces xou
a The greater significanc ing regional specificity. The realism in language and Malini Bhattacharya associated Nabanna with the
BISHNU
In 1944, the Indian Society of
Oriental Art published lies in their iil of ney i jn) THE 1940S L.PT.A. (Indian People’s Theatre Association estab-
DEY 3 monographic study on Jamini Roy ee : dialogue and the simple expressions of the villagers
sa in the form of politics of Bengal in the 19408, This pee lished in.1943).! The I.PT.A, performed two roles:
a long essay, co-authored by Bishnu : os saw a transformation in all forms of cul- who feature in the play contrast with the sophis-
Dey and John tl
rise of anti-fascism and the Left's ticated urban language of the character Yudhistira, (a) encouraging new experimentation of dramatic
JOHN IRWIN Irwin. Dey, a poet of considerable repute, was an Stress on tural expression. In theatre, Bijon Bhattacharya’s
solidarity with the masses, Consequently ; the political leader in the village. forms not allowed by the naturalistic conventions of
ardent champion of the Calcutta Group's
modern- 1944 play Nabanna (New Harvest) holds a significant 1gth-century European stage performance norms;
through the exploration of popular art Nabanna's realism operated on a wider scale, and
ism and had decidedly leftist ideolog for, 3 position In the history of Bengali stage performance.
ical leanings.
Irwin, a former keeper of the Indian section
this bond could be forged. Dey and Irwin ache fwo aspects were key to its importance: the theme
revealed a covert and subversive politics. As a char- and (b) presenting in dramatic performance the
of the sentiment in their writing: Neverthele in acter, Pradhan Samaddar represented an analytical contemporary reality emerging out of a world-wide,
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, ss, in 2 of the famine of 1943, and the innovative shifts
lived in Cal- of the contradiction, Jamini Roy is doing outlook on the contemporary crisis in peasant life. democratic people's struggle against imperialism
cutta during World War Ul asa British th the form and structure of the performance. Con-
officer and thing possible, for whatever Patter Toan urban audience, his personal tragedy and mis- and fascism.
the private secretary to the Governor of Bengal. n of com z temporary opinion was divided regarding the play's Sanjoy Mallik
The life India is going to have, this folk-culture i ery offered a point of entry to the lives of others. The
text carried a foreword by the art histori merit. For some, it was hailed as revolutionary. For
an Stella almost certainly provide the Connecting initis others, it meant a deviation from established norms, production of Nabanna took full advantage of the
Kramrisch, which defined modernism against the revolving stage of the proscenium theatre in which
Moreover, art and propaganda aremore Theatre critics suggest that Nabanna cannot be
earlier revivalism of the Bengal School of Paintin grasped by acts alone but through a combination of it was performed, which enabled quick scene shifts,
g onciled in those countries where the folk
during the 1940s and 19505. scenes. In the play, the central character, Pradhan breaking from a single narrative to several social
is still living; and in India it isdoubtful wh
Characterizing this trend as a ‘conflict between propaganda can ever have power without Samaddar, though not a hero, is a seminal figure. His contexts. This multi-layered approach was one tool
outworn Western art forms and a formlessness to avoid sensationalism in the individual climac- 1 Malini Bhattacharya.’The LP.TA. in Bengal’, Creative Arts
upon this formal heritage of the community experience of personal tragedy ~ he was a respectable in Modern India; Essays in Comparative Criticism, vols | and
arising from a futile desire to revive the great past This point of view proposed that Jamini village elder before the cyclone and famine brought tic scenes, which unfolded against a bare-canvas Ul, eds Ratan Parimoo and |. Sharma (New Delhi: Books
of Indian art’, Kramrisch believed that it was an him to the streets of the city and wiped away his fam- backdrop and simple props. Therefore, the play & Books. 1995); originally published in the Journal of Arts
tesponse to folk and popular art was not simp
artist like Jamini Roy who could ‘cut through the ily and livelihood — reflects broader social disruption. attempted to negotiate and reconcile its concerns, and Ideas, No. 2. New Dethi (January-March | 983).
appropriation of its subject but also an eng
confusion of contemporary thought". In his paint- with its language and production-systeThis
Bishnu Dey & John Irwin, m.
ings the essentials of form and content allowed hailed as having ushered ina revolutionary,
Jamini Roy (indian Society of
Oriental Art, 1944) ‘no vagueness in his wide curves, no emptiness in in the context of modern art in Bengal. Over
his spacious surfaces’* She maintained that Roy's however, this radical gesture on the paroftthe GANASANGEET: MUSIC IN changing political beliefs over time rendered the agency. In his defense, Salil Chowdhury claimed
re xoa
work was “based on universals of form which are ist became reduced to a signature style: a demur BENGAL IN THE 1940S songs irrelevant and resulted in them no longer to be faithful to his experiences, and rather than
understood by all who know art, whether from the girl with an oval face and elongated eyes. resonating with the people. using the songs as a rousing call to collective pro-
East or the West’!
Sanjoy The new sociopolitical consciousness of the 1940s The angst of the famine inspired more songs in test, they were a statement of creative expression.
Dey and Irwin began by tracing the significance impacted Bengali songs as well as theatre {see this genre. It brought poets and song composers to Hemanga Biswas criticized the party's attempt
of Jamini Roy’s birthplace, Beliatore, in the Bankura Box 8.3, above]. The new genre of the ganasangeet the people on the streets and face-to-face with the to control songs’ compositions, since they were
dis oftri
Bengal, ct
and the role of local cultures
in the | Stella Kramrisch, foreword in Bishnu Dey
& John (mass song or people's song) arose out of left-wing harsh realities of the disaster. Jyotirindra Moitra indirectly encouraging formalism of a dangerous
formation of his practice. They traced the history of Irwin, Jomini Roy (Kolkata: Indian Society of Onenral politics and was socially responsive in content. composed a series of songs that came to be known as kind by avoiding the political nature of the content.
the subcontinent from ‘Aryan times’ to the present Art, 1944), np. Ganasangeet grew out of igth-century nation- the Nabajibaner Gaan (Songs of New Life) — the title The debate over content and form became a major
2 Ibid. alist songs of patriotism, swadeshi gaan. This
in order to reinstate the notion of an unchanging itself suggests life and hope as well as mobilizing the point of contention, and would contribute to the
3 Ibid.
village society that does not transform over time. 4 Bishnu Dey & John Irwin, Jamini Roy. p. 13. genre of patriotic song tradition sprang from the people to protest, The compositions were infused decline of the ganasangeet in Bengal.
5 Ibid,p. 19, English-educated liberated elites. Although the with harmonic aspects suited to group choral sing-
They claimed that Jamini Roy ‘approached folk art Sanjoy Mallik
songs from within this circle were Brahmanical odes ing and had a distinctly non-indigenous flavour to it
to the country as ‘divine-mother’, they soon spread Ganasangeet
gave rise to crisis and debates. In
beyond the urban areas thanks to the bards, like fact, songwriter Salil Chowdhury wrote that when
too, this concept of modernity-as-metropolis with a fra re Mukunda Das, who d their wider popularity the ist Party bi d his Gnayer Bodhu
to draw on his native Assam for thematic inspiration [see Chap- Patriotic songs were fashionable chiefly because
ter 18], while traversing a wide range of styles, from the pointillist sense of time and space must have been a major decisive (The Village Bride) or the Palki Choley (The Palan-
they addressed a broad range of nationalistic sen-
to the expressionistic, before shifting in the late 1950s towards especially in a city torn into disorientation by war,‘famine’ quin Moves), it had accused him of perpetuating
‘iments rather than specific realities of colonial the ypes of bling huts, desolation and
an intuitive surreal imagery. Subho Tagore (1912-1985), though the ensuing communal violence between Hindus and Mus! repression. The singer Hemanga Biswas was
‘A discourse of the modern was already strong in other forms'
destruction, which did not quite reflect the ground
a bohemian by spirit, had an acute sensitivity for controlled later apologetic about his early ganasangeet, since
Ce reality, where village women had shown more
pattern; his layouts — preparatory exercises on paper — had cultural expression [Boxes 8.3, 8.4]; the artists of the
later adapted well when translated into textiles, and in fact his Group shared in the excitement and vitality of this debate
paintings are rather like preliminary designs for textiles, with their contemporaries. Since the notion of ‘progress’ was
an imposed geometric order that restrains evocative expres- with a specific political agenda (taking its cue from Soviet distinction alone, they longed to proceed toward
s the promise Ash was simultaneously inclined towards a formal modernist
siveness. Govardhan Ash [whose near-monochrome famine sia), and because the artists of the group were determt cto of a new Indian ‘modern! attitudinal disposition that enabled him to align with the Cal-
watercolours are discussed on p. 114] was also a participating keep themselves out of the domain of social realism inp! cutta Group collective as a participating member. Similarly,
member of the Calcutta Group. Other than his paintings that practice, their concept ofa modernist breakthrough inart a Between the Two Trajectories, and beyond one could consider the transformation in Chittaprosad’s prac-
centrated on formal achievements. Yet it is significant that Bs We have already seen how a strict classification of artists into
took the famine as their subject, his works emerge as examples tice from 1946 onwards, a period when he had settled relatively
did not merely submit to fulfilling the criteria andchronologie
the two trajectories envisaged for the 19405
of-a formal-modernist quest: his pictorial style of the period in Bengal might
occasionally bedisrupted by individual modes of operation. Goy-
permanently in Bombay with occasional visits to Calcutta. His
shows a leaning towards a post-impressionistic palette com- logic of the trajectories of western modernism: the growing awareness of an increasingly differing perspective to
ardhan Ash is one such example: despite a genuine humanist
bined with an expressionistic urgency of vigorous brushwork. of the group came up with visual correlates that were P aie that which was adopted by the Communist Party led him to
Z eg “oncern for the dispossessed that led him to formulate a socially
Pertinent here is Charles Baudelaire’s formulation of moder- ily contextual to their immediate experience. Their dissociate himself from active political engagement [Box 8.5],
for responsive imagery in his famine drawings [as seen
nity as a ‘new, fragmented and distracted sense of time as it had the appearance of a catapulting out ~ at all pea on p. 114}, His sympathy and commitment for the working class remained
was experienced in the city.” For the Calcutta Group artists, the dominant discourses of Indian art practice; throug!
CHAPTER B + THE 1940S: THE CALCUTTA GROUP AND THE BENGAL FAMINE 119
ART AND
PART | COLONIAL
spegroe———
{
fainul Abedin: followin
g the 19
mave to Dhaka (in B; anglad vy Partition
esh th personal signature style. Like Chittaprosad, his pic- Hailing originally from Chattagram, Somnath Hore had in
d not continue the linguist
ic char, a gsos and subsequent years explored a varied range 1940 joined City College, Calcutta, when he came into contact
tures
ires.. 1 It is 1likely that this was:
} won
pe
es bec: DOCAUSE he dig tylistic and thematic concerns that evince a desire with the Communist Party, The war and a resulting personal
evolvingg stylistic
stylis manner
a iTism of the ternational modern in visual language. Just as Chitta- financial crisis forced him to return to Chattagram, where he
Same ty
as driven by the optimism of the peace movement, was confronted with the sight of devastation from the 1942 Jap-
practice was perhaps determined by the optimism and anese bombardment, When introduced to Chittaprosad, Hore
n¢ of a newly born nation-state, and its desire to estab- began to follow him, picking up the notion of sketches as a direct
record of observed reality. The younger artist acknowledged
THE PRAGUE CONNECTION istinctive identity.
OF work in Czechos vakia: cormmissioning the art connection to the Danish writer Erik Stinus that it was Chittaprosad who virtually took him by the hand
$8 xo
CHITTAPROSAD (191 5- 1978) ypal Ghose is another painter who did not necessarily per-
ist over many years to contribute to the cultural his family, and his links with a number ive social awareness and formal achievements as mutually and guided him onto the course of documenting the hungry,
of indi i
and political monthly journal Now) Orient and its uals from the Soviet Union, including the sive categories. Though better known for highly chromatic the sick and the dying. While Chittaprosad toured Midnapur,
Chittaprosad’s dissociation from the CPI (Com Rug :
English-language version, New Orient Bimonthly: artist Victor Klimashin, + lan scap) es executed in pure hues of saturated intensity, he ts
Hore continued in Chattagram, and their sketches appeared
munist Party of India) in 1948 led him to build and, perhaps most importantly, their continued Chittaprosad, as a former party artist, can ilso known to have sketched in the lanes of the city during the together in the party journals People’s War and Janayuddha, As
4 network beyond the national frame. His work with Chittaprosad, Hore’s flair for hand-drawn posters was soon
discussion and appreciation of Chittaprosad’s aes- be understood against the prism of the Cold famine. Two such drawings, bearing the stamp of his identif-
increasingly circulated within a transnational net Way discovered by the Communist Party. But the difference lies in
thetics and approval of him as an artist. and the transnational network between Czechn. iable cursive calligraphy, appear in the 1944 album of pictures
work that was marked by solidarity with a socialist which was named the Bengal Painters’ Testimony [Box 8.6]. the fact that the party, recognizing Hore's potential in visual art,
Chittaprosad’s first exhibition, which included slovakia and India. The artist's career and work
outlook. The personal connections and fr iendships encouraged him to train at an art institution in order to learn
linocuts, drawings and photographs, was held at unfolded in a dynamic informed by the "processes Apart from these, two other famine paintings are also known,
that he came to form with such individuals from the first executed in the ‘wash’ technique (signed and dated 1350 the necessary technical proficiency, When he returned to Cal
Prague's Hollar Gallery in May 1963; it then trav- of translation and transnational migrations’ a fac
Prague as the Indologist Miloslav Krasa and Fran- of the Bengali era) and the other a recall image from a sketch cutta in 1945, Somnath Hore joined the Government School of
elled to Bratislava. His subsequent exhibitions took that reveals the circulatory practices ina global mag,
tigek Salaba, who worked as an assistant to the book of 1946; The former is marked by romantic affectations Art, where his contact with Zainul Abedin, then a teacher in the
place in October 1979 at Miad4 Fronta Gallery in ernist discourse, as articulated by Andreas Huyssen
trade commissioner of Czechoslovakia in Bombay, typically associated with ‘wash’, a favoured medium of the institution, proved crucial to his artistic development. Zainul
Prague and in Litoméfice in March 1980, In 1981 in his ‘Geographies of Modernism ina Globalizing
helped to support his post-independence career so-called Bengal School of Painting. But the latter is a testim- Abedin encouraged the young artist to develop methodically
a retrospective took place in Brno, featuring works World’ (2007).
ony of how recall can result in powerful pictorial possibilities. a skilled hand for powerful drawing.
in several ways. These individuals’ contributions acquired by the National Gallery Prague,
Simone Wille A yellow-green field is cut across by a dark road, with bare ver- Art historians generally agree that around 1946, cultural activ-
included staging performances with Khelaghar, In order to assess Chittaprosad’s transnational
ticals that stand in for tree trunks, while black vultures descend ists of the Communist Party received an album of contemporary
a puppet-theatre group formed by Chittaprosad, in aesthetics fully, one must consider not only his ties
from a red sky above a high horizon onto white skeletons that Chinese woodcut prints, which caused considerable excitement
Bombay; acquisitions and exhibitions of the artist's and relationships with Czechoslovakia but also his
dot the ground. Gopal Ghose's characteristic energetic sweep and aroused admiration.” Somnath Hore evidently shared the
of the brush and his preference for brilliant colour tones com- enthusiasm, for it is said that he made a point of learning the
bine here with notational shorthand brush marks for the birds medium at the art school from the printmaker Safiuddin Ahmed.
and abbreviated strokes for the skeletons, resulting in a fleeting, Ina later text, Somnath Hore recorded: ‘Chinese wood engray-
haunting vision of the famine — a vision that not only recurred ing of this period, after the German artist Kathe Kollwitz were
THE BENGAL PAINTERS’ he identified as the origin of Indian modernism, in his memory three years after the disaster, but also merged influences that drew me to this craft; but I:did not have the req-
v8 xoU
TESTIMONY OF 1944 or ‘the splendid beginning of a varied movement into and became identical with the immediate experience of uisite knowhow or skill’ This statement, especially the mention
in our art world’. the 1946 riots. of Kollwitz, sheds light on the specific character of the linguis-
The Bengal Painters’ Testimony was an album of pic- The diverse images in the album (none of which Calcutta was ripped apart by a major communal riot in 1946, tic mode of the prints, and thereby points to the possibilities
tures published on the occasion of the 8th Annual were dated) addressed contemporary social themes, yet visual art recording this conflict and its impact is seemingly inherent in both the Chinese wood engravings and the works Fig. 8.11 Gopal Ghose,
Conference of the All India Students’ Federation in ranging from Indra Dugar’s monochrome brush rare, unlike the artistic response to the 1943 to 1944 famine. by Kollwitz, which were potent with possibilities for artists to Untitled, 1946. Gouache
December 1944. It included reproductions of paint- drawing Madonna, with its artificiality of posture, to Gopal Ghose, the painter who celebrated the calm and majes
ings, sculptures and prints by twenty-eight artists, Asit Halder’s painting ofa stormy disaster (recalling tic expanse of rural landscapes, turned to his tormented city,
arecent cyclone). Similarly, Debiprasad Roy Chowd- the flourish of his brushstrokes now painfully responding to
of whom at least fourteen had addressed the 1943
the violent flames and burning vehicles in a city disrupted by
to 1944 famine. hury’s expressionist When Calcutta Sleeps represents
extreme violence [Fig. 8.11]. Here, violence does not manifest
Edited by Arun Das Gupta, Kamrul Hasan, Adi- lived experience, despite the stress on frail figures
itself directly in visible human action; one sees its aftermath,
nath Mukherjee and Safiuddin Ahmed, the album and spatial depth, Muralidhar Tali’s print Begging by Cover of Bengal Painters Testimony,
eds Arun Das Gupta, Kamrul Hasan,
transcribed through the expressive potential of the formal ele-
had a foreword by leading intellectual Sarojini Naidu a Crowded Tram Car captures the reality of daily life, ments of painting ~ the colour palette and brush marks, With
Adinath Mukherjee and Safiuddin
and an introductory note by the poet Bishnu Dey. as does Adinath Mukherjee's The Destitutes, In the Ahmed (1944), np. these images, Gopal Ghose once again compels us to rethink the
[All quotations are from this unpaginated album. } same vein, Kamrul Hasan’s After the Cyclone success- category of social responsiveness, which can stretch beyond the
Dey began with the rise of the Tagore house fully presents destruction by showing a blown-away It is apparent that the intention of the album wit ; obviously declamatory guideline of party dictates, and can instead
and their part in the cultural renaissance of the thatched roof and fallen trees, While Sudhir Khasta- not to claim stylistic conformity or thematiccon® tefer purely to an individual's intimately personal response
region. He went on to emphasize the ‘st rength of gir’s figures from In Search of Food are exaggerated in tency. In fact, it was created to generate funds,5 Statements,
folk-culture in Bengal’, referencing Abanindranath form, the two sketches by Gopal Ghose in the album spelled out in its editorial note: [the] story DES, In the hands of Somnath Hore, one observes the extension
Tagore's turn to folk art in his Homely Rituals of Ben- appear cryptic (unlike his other pictures) and ephem- the collecting and printing of these pictures 50°" Of political commitment beyond the period of the famine in his
gal (even if he gave more credit to Jamini Roy in eral. In comparison, Nirode Majumder’s Orphan is of deep patriotism.... The painters of all val 1946 Tebhaga drawings, subsequently converted into a series
affective through its stark portrayal ofa naked child. the Indian and European Publishers, the Hindi of woodcuts in 1953. These drawings are perhaps a conscious
this respect). He also included Rabindranath Tagore
in Santiniketan, followed by Ramkinkar Baij and Ramkinkar’s painting The Storm transcends the doc- Muslim pressworkers all have stood as one a response to his admiration for Hungry Bengal, albeit in a differ-
umentary and becomes an allegory of devastation our object.’ Despite the seemingly unified ee £nt context and possessing different content. Somnath Hore
Benodebehari Mukherjee, ‘who had left the dilet-
through its powerful and controlled abstraction. identity shared by the publishing body, the 265 ‘as six years junior to Chittaprosad, and the younger artist's
tante world of pretty decoration’, Dey mentioned
Painters’ Testimony is not so much an rcio6 a Work was an instance of continuity of engagement in which
the innovations of Gaganendranath Tagore — ‘the Likewise, Prodosh Das Gupta’s formalist sculp-
the famine ceased to be merely a topical theme relevant to the
painter of slashing cartoons and poetical book illus- ture of figures standing in a queue, reminiscent ofa political agenda as it is a wide cross
Period of the disaster. For him, the scars were permanent, and
tration who also experimented fluidly with cubist of the queues during the famine, rises above mere Bengali artists coming together to be represe
they transformed into a lifelong metaphor through a series of
topicality, in a modestly priced album.
forms’ - but ultimately it was Jamini Roy whom
sonjoy
MOM works centred around the generic theme of ‘wounds.
CHAPTER & « THE 1940S: THE CALCUTTA GROUP AND THE BENGAL FAMINE iat
120 PART I COLONIAL MODERNITY.

ART AND NATIONAL IDENTITY (1900-1947)
Fig- 8.12 Somnath
Sen joined FURTHER READING

second exhibition in Bombay, 1945. Abani Chittaprosad, Hungry Bengal (New Delhi:
Delhi Art
n in 1947,
the group just before the fourth exhibitio
1946 drawing
a rare
350 Bongabdo corresponds to the period
ed a member in Gallery, 201 1), [Facsimile reproduction from
while Rathin Mitra was nominat surviving copy of the original 1943 book]
i-Aprl 1943 to mid-April 1944, 1949. immediately before the joint exhibitio
n with
Aims and
» wat 4 spontaneous national outburst following (held in Das Gupta. Prodosh, The Calcutta Group ~ Its
as the Progressive Artists’ Group of Bornbay Lalit Kala Contemporary no. 31 (1981)
est of the Congress leaders (9 August 1942) ‘Achievements’,
Calcutta, 1950), Rathin Maitra and Gopal Ghose
ste of the Quit India call the day before.
This had an Ash -. Smritikatha Shilpokatha/Calcutto Group [in Bangla —
fictinedive regional dimension in Midnapur. Beginning had withdrawn membership, and Govardh Memoirs, Reactions on Art/Calcutta Group] (Kolkata
sole
of mill wat invited to replace them: This was also the Pr han Publi 1986),
with protests, such as blocking the efforts exhibition in which Rar k a r Baij particip ated
owne to export rice from the region, it escalated Klaus, Fischer, The Calcutta Group’. Marg, vol VI, no. 4
Sunil Madhav Sen and Hemanta Misra joined
sto planned simultaneous ateacks by massive crowds as the (Mumbai: Marg, Deepavali, | 953).
the group in 1952 and 1953 respectively
on organs of communication and on pofice stations. final recruits.
Sarkar, Nikhil, The Great Fomine of 1943: the Artists’
Peasants’ resistance in Tamluk subdivision
eventually
The Calcutta Group Handbook. Commitment, ed. Kankabati Dutra (Kolkata: Kankabati
t’
rook the shape of a rebel ‘national governmen For the most incisive critique of the Caicutta Group
Dutta, 1995),
aon
that survived undl Sepeember 1944, which had ary Som, Sovon, Calcutta Group: Uddeshya Karmopantha O
(in Bengali). read Sovon Som, Coletta Group: Uddestya,
armed wing and arbitration courts, offering sustained Porinam [In Bangla — Calcutta Group: Aims, Plan of
karmapentha © parinorn’ (Caleutra Group: Alms, Pian Action and Outcome] (Kolkata: Sharadiya Anushtup
resistance to British administrative policies
of Action and Outcorne) (Kolkare Sharadiya Anushtup,
for a more detailed account and analysis of the Year XVII, 1390 Bangabda/!983)
Year XVII, 1390 Bangabde [1983]). Also refer to
farnine’, see Amartya Sen, Poverty and Fomines, an essay
on entivement ond deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon
the rejoinder in Prodosh Das Gupta, Smirinkatha
Shilpakatha!Calautta Group (In Bangla — Memoirs.
Press, 1981), and Paul R. Greenough, Prosperity ond
Reflections on Arv/Caicutta Group) (Kolkare
Misery in Modern Bengat the Fomine of 1943-44 (New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, | 982) Pratikshan Publications, | 986).
9 Nigel Wheale, ed., The Postmodern Arts: An Introductory
For an explanation of the strategic relevance of
Reader (London and New Yori: Routledge. 1995). p.7.
>
the position of che town Chattagram, the threat of
Japanese bombing during World War Il and the British 10 Cl. Pranabranjan Ray."Hunger and dhe Painter:
colonial poticies of ‘boat denial’ and ‘scorched earth’, Somnath Hore and the Wounds’, Cressida Tronsections,
see Sumit Sarkar, Modern lndia/ 1885-1947 (Chenrail vol. I, no. 2.
Dethi/Mumbai/Patna: Macmillan India Led, 1985 11 Somnath Hore, Wounds, exh. cat. (Kolicata, 1992).
reprint). (This exhibition of bronzes, drawings and prints was
The Caicutta Group Handbook, 1953. Unpaginated. organized by Seagull at Sukh Sagar. Kolkata.)
w
A scanned copy of this document is available in the 12. OLN. Dhanagare, Peasant Movements In India, 1920-50
Maharaja Sayajirao University archives. (New Delhi Oxford University Press, 1983),p. 155.
There is no clear consensus regarding Banshi 2% quoted in Samik Bandopadhyay’s introduction to
a
Chandragupta’s membership, while Subho Tagore Tebhaga:An Artist’s Diary ond Sketchbook, uans. Somnath
never participated with the collective beyond the Zutshi (Kolkata: Seagull, 1990), p. vii.
translate elements from that pictorial language into their own and 1950s are a testimony to the fact that this was still emoment
context, productively. when the modern in the visual art of India was caught betwee!
Somnath Hore was still a second year student at the art school the binary of aesthetics and politics and was predicated on
when he accompanied party members to north Bengal, in a bid a dichotomy between form and content. The slant towandé
to document the peasant movement Tebhaga, which backed form produced the phenomenon of the Calcutta Group; tht
sharecroppers’ claims to two-thirds of produce, in place of the stress on the message potential of the image gave rise to the
existing rule of half-share. One can comprehend how different social-responsive documentary. Taken as they are, and viewed
the year 1946 was from the grey days of the famine from the fact in the context of objects of visual art produced elsewhere ora
that the Tebhaga is conventionally identified as the ‘outgrowth other times, both earlier and later, the images under consider
of the left-wing mobilization of the rural masses-..the first con- ation may be judged by some to be too limited, insipid or even
sciously attempted revolt by a politicised peasantry in Indian docile to resolve the form-content polarity. The significance
history." This difference in tone marks the distinction between those decades and the efforts during that period, howeves be
Chittaprosad''s famine sketches of Hungry Bengal and Somnath as much in the objects produced as in the common denominait®
Hore's pictorial record of the peasant movement, Tebhagar Diary of a rejection of academism, The latter served as a much-n
[Fig. 8.12], It is also reflected in the content and in the tone of springboard that propelled more radical departures from tht
the text. Tebhagar Diary is markedly optimistic and its images traditional at later dates.
are mostly affirmative: they exude a faith in political endeav-
our; they bear the mark of enthusiasm and expectation, The
portraits are faces lifted up in determination, and the images of
group activity — harvesting, gathering at a meeting and march-
ing in processions of protest — are convictions in the collective
effort. While the drawings in Chittaprosad's Hungry Bengal were
essentially an individual's self-effort, Hore’s Tebhaga drawings
are evidence of technical maturity achieved through training
at an art school that had obviously equipped him with a con-
fident ability to portray likeness, as well as to arrange pictorial
elements in an effective composition. They represent two dif-
ferent modes of bringing together the political and the aesthetic
and yet defy any easy resolution between the two.
The varied approaches adopted by the artists in Bengal in
their journey towards a valid visual language during the 19408
CHAPTER & + THE 1940S: THE CALCUTTA GROUP AND THE BENGAL FAMINE 123
122 PART COLONIAL ART AND NATIONAL IDENTITY (1900-1947)

MODERNITY,
MAN AND MAHABHARATA
Maqbool Fida Husain (1915-2011)
May I use the word "I" as an artist of

present century who lives simultane
in Kyoto, Mahabalipuram, Samarkand ously
, Palermo, Provence, Liverpool and
Having established the word "I" let Alaska.
me now stretch my canvas, spread
chisel wood and marble, hammer and rice paper,
bore metal , pour plastic lava into moul
and wrap them with glass fibre. There ds
the Chola Nataraja and the Venu s d'Avi FIGUR E 4o.
are born. Their birth pain has stirred gnon
Richard Barth o1ome W, "M · F· Husai n (Profile) New Delhi ," ea. 1958, photo graph.
an unending dialogue between the
seven Artwork and imag
'
e
points; from Kyoto to Alaska . © Richard Bartholomew/ Estate of
Richard Barth olomew.
MAQ B00L F. HUSA IN, JULY
11, 1969 FIGUR E 41 .h 1
Richard Bart o omew, "M· F· Husa in (holding Ericsson Cobra phon e)," New Delhi , ea. 1962,
photo graph.
. age © Richard Bartholomew/ Estat
Artwork and 1m e of Richard Barth olomew.
These words, from Maqbool Fida

Husain's poetic prologue to the 1971 thro u h a serious and sustained
volume Husain,
es a~~ forms
published by Harry N. Abrams in enga gement with nonmodernist mod
New York , announced the cosmopol . gd f om South Asian public cultu
and world-historical ambition of the itan orientations denve r re.I This critique was overlooked by
artist's work and indeed of the proj cntICs who
tended to see the artist as an unrecons . . h
ism in India. They signaled Husain's
particular commitments to translati
ect of modern- tructed moderm ~t m t _e ~oId. of .Picasso or Klee,
on, that is, an Indi an inheritor of a tradition e That
to working across med ia-p aint ing, of visual representation ong mat i:g
sculpture, performance , and film was the view of Richard Bartholo m ;:~op A~r ams
ing boundaries of cultural practice -an d to bridg- mew an~ Shiv S. Kapur, the a~e ;i\:s
associated with East and West, or volume. Two mid-twentieth-centur edecritic and
Husain at once acknowledges the craf ts and art. y portraits by Bartholomew, a
artist's role as individual creator l
of tradition, as the "I" who births and as the vessel friend of the artist who contributed h 1 d to the Abrams vo ume , 1·11u minate
and is birthed by the beautiful , male t _e ea . essahy H . cherishe d and cultivated
(Dancing Shiva) and the grotesqu Cho la Nata raja myths of mod ern man an d pos t lomal artist t at usam
e, female Venus d'Avignon. This co . . . a e and
generative, produced by and the prod "I" is fictive and (figs. 40 and 41) . The artist is strug shre wd operator in
ucer of art. The artist inhabits the gling dreamer m ontee1rmom:ntic and
time and space · t' 1'd ntity as consumma canny business-
of many continents and cultures, the othe r, poin ting to t h e artis s e
and his art- for Husain, the idea . . t ·v·ing and hopeful as he gaze
imagined as other than mal e-is l artis t cannot be man . In the earlier portrait, . h b hested Husam 1s sn s
an amalgam of national and glob t e are-c d .
citations from Hindu temple scul al imperatives, of out from a dark inteno . d the light seate m a s tu d'10 space as suggested by the
pture and modernist masterworks r towar '
Les Demoisel!es d'Avignon (1907). such as Picasso's wooden edges of the canvas m . th b kgro' und th at frames h 1' s body. In the later portrait,
The artist comes into being by work e ac . C b telephone seated in a well -lit
ing thro ugh these . d h
references and the materials of his
craft: stretching canvas, spreading he seems to have arnv e , as e h OIds an Encsson o • ra
ing wood and marble, ham mer ing rice paper, chisel- office, twirling his hair. . his legs on the chair an d des k·
and boring metal, pouring plastic lava, and restmg . . h of the artist taken almost sixty
and wrapping
glass fiber. The se images by Barth o1ome,v antICipate photograp s
This passage reveals-key features ofH years later by Tamara Abdu l Had'1for the New or imes ,
y, k r· of Hus ain living in exile from
usai n's art: an emphasis on doing . . . h the artist looks pensive seated
as opposed to expression or introspec and mak ing .. of Had i's photograp s,
tion , translation between media, and India m Dubai m 200 8. In one
.
artistic creation as magic. These featu the notion of
on a low divan, covered m . b ine fabnc an d decorated with colorful pillows (fig. 4 21·
res were neither incidental nor insig au erg . h
the 1950s and r96o s, Husain offer nificant. In d .n a gallery of pictures on the
ed a postcolonial critique of originali In the othe r, he appears to be per fi0rmm g as e stan s 1
ty and mastery . . . b bearing visual citations from his .
.
occasion of Id-ul-F1tr, wea nng a stnk mg green ro e
90
MAQ BOO L FIDA HUS
AIN . 91
Scanned by CamScanner
scious of being part of a whole strea m a strcan1 .
- · 1\ , .. ,. , -, I ;r\_ . ' wit 11 goal and di re t' .. 7 I
~
'
. - '-11 - • ,- ' [-{usai n's education took place in tenements _1 l ·t c ion. n Bombay,
• nc s reels as lw made .1 l' · d . .
:;,: .-· ,.L1 ~ q,ilj • I _.
toys, m aking furniture, and painting billboa rd s TI • , _ -
·1 , d I I . .
_- ' ivm g es1gn1ng
. iesc early l'xpene nces have b,•come
r
the stuf- o f egen , myt 10 og1zed by the arti st ,ind I ·. b' . .
·, -: lr' ' ' , . . . Hs mgr,i phcrs ahke, and ,ire widd
understood as the basis of l11 s epic artistic vision." Y
Yet the paintin gs that e merged fro m thi s quintes ·• t' -11 .
1
3
· se n Y llr1>a n comm g-of-age had
titles such as Potters (1947) , J>cnsn11t Couple (19 5c) 1im"u (i ) M • .
• . . • b 9 53 , ot 111- rn11d Cl11ld (1955)
lndi1111 V1/111gc (1955). Zn111m 1 (Land) (1 955), Wo11 ,c111 ut \Vork ( S) _ d • , • _'
. . . . . . 195 , an 1·urmer s /·0111111,
(, 9 60), ec ho111g nallonah
.
st pro1ects of the 193os and th . I ·
..
f
• ' <' Sll JJccts o ar t by Sher-Gil,
FIGURE 42 . Roy, Bose, Mukheq ee, a nd Ba11. Indeed the fi gure of woman tl
. . . . · -. d d
• , 1c pnv11cgc mo · e of
Tama ra Abdul Hadi. " M . F. Husain . Ind ia's most famous painl,•r, in one of his homes iu Dubai, Un ilctl Ar:ib representmg India for anll-colomal natio11alists and the sit , of tl ·11 .
Emirates, whe re ht• n ow lives· (original caption) , puhli slwd in Smnini Se nHupla , "Au Artist Tests India's
. . . . ' c 1e v1 age, va1on ze d by
Gandhi as a microcosm of the nation , remained the prce 1111·11 c-iit . b' t· f d .
Dt•mocratic Idea ls." Ne w l'ork Tim es, November 8, 2008. hnag,• rnnrtesy of 'flt e Nr111 l'ork Tim es and Rc<lux su Jee s o mo ern1st
art in the 1950s and beyond. In Co11t c111porarl' /11diclll Artists (i<' 8) G t K
Pictures. - :, 7 , ee a apm noted·
continuities between Sher-Gil's and Husain's careers: "In hi s tendency to romanticize,
FIGURE 43 .
Husain is in line with Annit a Sher-Gil, )amin i Roy and George Key t: for that matter
Tamara Abdul Had i, " M. F. Husain" (orig inal caption), published in Somini Se ngu pta, "An Artist Tests lmlia's
with the Ben galis Rab indranath Ta gore and Sailoz Mookhcrjea."'1 Thus Kapur situated
De m ocra tic ldt•als," New l'ork Tim r.s, Nov,• mbe r 8 , 2008 . Image courtesy of Tlt e Neu, l'ork Tim es and Rcdu x
Pictures.
[-{usain in a dis tinctive tra jectory of modern art and a lineage of modern artists in India.
In subject and style, Husain inherited a practice of modernis m that engaged womt>n,
the village, a nd other signs of the primitive as the repository of nation.ii tradition, ,1
modern, anti-colonial natiomlist, and eve n (to use Kapur 's phrase) "romant ic," inven-
paintings (fig. 43). Somini Sengupta reported for the Tim es: "Mr. Husain, a master of
tion and intervention. 10 Kap ur explained: "Husain took Amrita's legacy towards a more
flamboyance, stood beaming in a green silk jacket embroidered with motifs from his
authentic stage. H is villagers are not particularly beautiful: but m rro1111dcd b)' th eir 1001s,
paintings, including several voluptuous, scantily clad wome n." 2 This comment on the
tlzeir a11it11als, th eir mngic sig11s n11cl symbols. they appea r more truly alive , secu re and
artist's dress was loaded with significance as Husain was forced to flee India in 2006 rooted in their environment."11 Husain's art privileged women and villagers in the 1950s
because of persecution from the Hindu right, which began in 1996, for his depiction and 1960s as Sher-Gil did in the 1930s and 1940s, even if. as Kapur obscrw d. "hi s
of nude Hindu goddesses and especially a controversial painting, Bl1arat Mata (Mother primary concern is not with the historical state of man" and "his peasant s, therefore,
India) (2004) .3 This painter of India-of its villages, peasants, and women-was its are not strictly a class with specific social attributes or historical role." 11 In other words.
modern man and modernist master par excellence for most of the twentieth century, Husain transformed man and peasant into myth . m aking them over into national-
ye t he died in 2ou a Qatari citizen, splitting his time between homes in London, Doha, cultural ideal and civilizational idea. His project was not realist in the way that Sher- Gil's
and Dubai.4 In 2008, Husain was at work on two series of paintings, "one on Indian had been; instead it heralded a new aesthetics of abstract signs, unh·ersal symbols. and
civilization, to be mounted in London, the second on Arab civilization, which will be international codes.
exhibited in Qatar." 5 This pairing-and the straddling of nationalist and international- Take Husain's remarkable experimental black-:md-white film Through the Ey.-s ,f
ist priorities it represented-was apposite to a life lived at the center of world culture, a Painter (1967), shot on location in Bundi. Chitod (Chittam) . and )aisalmer in the
imaginative!)• if not always materially, as suggested by the prologue to H11sai11 (1971). western state of Rajasthan (fig. 44). Commissioni?d by the Films Division of lnd b . a
Born in the temple town of Pandharpur, Maharashtra, in 1915 and raised in the pro- government agency, Through th e Eres of o Pnintcr won the Golden Bea r award at the
1,;ncial capital oflndore, Husain arrived in Bombay in 1937 after brief stints in Siddhpur Berlin Film Festival and India's National Film Award for best experimental fi lm in 1967.
and Baroda in Gujarat with little by way of formal art training. He had tal..--en evening The nonlinear narrative follows the painter in his e.-xplorations of the Ind ian ,·illage and
classes at the British-administered College of Art in Indore for a year and gained expo- villagers, keenly tracing what Kapur called ·thdr tools, th eir crni11rnls. t);eir m,igi, ~ign.<
sure to basic draftsmanship and academic oil painting. At various libraries in the city. he and symbols.~ The dominant visu al principle of the film is mont age. and it, recn rring
read books on Western art moYements and encow1tered his #first history of a.rt, written motifs are ajooti (handmade leather shoe). an umbrella, a bull. paintrd image · of 3 man
by John Ruskin.~ Through this self-directed education in modern art, he became ·con-
6
and woman, and a storm lantern.
') 2 • MAN AND MAHABH Al! ATA MAQS00L f <D A HU Sl l N 93
FIGURE 44.
M. F. Husain , Through the Eyes of a Painter, 1967, film still (17:00). Films Division, Ministry of
Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. Film© Estate ofM. F. Husain; image courtesy
of the Films Division, Government oflndia.
In Through the Eyes of a Painter, the lantern seems to have migrated directly from
Husain's painting Between the Spider and the Lamp (1956; fig. 45) onto the screen. The
spindly legs of the spider in the painting have metamorphosed into the dark ribs of the
umbrella in the film. The solitary jooti hangs on a wooden door and stands on a plaster
wall in the film, indexing the artist's eye, hand, mind, and body. In a few memorable
scenes, a single hand or pair of hands belonging to an unseen person move-as if doing
a jig-next to the shoe on the wall, suggesting the artist's role as a kind of puppeteer or
projectionist, a manipulator rather than an originator of the image.
The film highlights the human hand: hands at work, hands at play, and the artist's
_hand. The hand is a central motif in Husain's painting Man (1951; fig, 46), inspired
by Rodin's The Thinker (1902) and Picasso's Guernica (1937), and in Husain's film it
becomes a metaphor for making. Hands make art, crafts, the village, and the nation,
Through the Eyes ofa Painter seems to say. Graphic matches of found objects, shapes, and
patterns-the finial of an umbrella and the horns of a bull, a circular grinding stone FIGURE 45 .
and women's bangles, the intricate coils of a turban and the twisted forms of a jalebi M. F. Husain, Between the Spider and the Lamp. 1956, oil on board . Estate of
(a syrupy, fried dessert), a sculpture of an elephant and a drawing of an elephant-are the artist. Artwork© Estate ofM. F. Husain; image courtesy of Vadehra Art
Gallery, New Delhi.
94 · MAN AND MAHABHARATA
Husain's film had argued that just as the craft
Year' sman worked on his c ft t d. d
the artist create t~rough ~oing rather than expressing. ra • so 00 1
This was a radJCally different notion from that 0 f th . .
. . h. . e artiS t as a gifted individual or
genius commumcatm g 1s mnermost thoughts pr
. ' ocesses, and feelings spontaneous!
onto external surfaces, a notion that Husain actively par ficipate . d. . Y
. . m disseminating dur-
B b II
ing the 1950s and 1960s. In a 1965 mterview with om ay co ector Ayaz Peerbhoy
., .
Husain stated: When I pamt I experience an expression 0 f my bemg. . . . '
. . The pamtmg
represents m a way the totality of my experience Bein . . . .
. . ···· g a pamter 1t 1s very difficult
to put mto words the feelmg that I feel about my paintings · All 1 can say 1s . h
t at each of
my paintings represents the totalness which is of that minute "1• Th h h
. . . · roug e Eyes of a
t
Painter disrupted .the logJC of the .artist as an individual maker, s·t - h. . d
1 ua 1mg 1m mstea
within a commumty of makers, Six Days of Making disrupted the logic of the artwork as
a freestanding vision, situating it instead within a community of viewers.
Both the film and the performance emphasized the role of chance and construction
FIGURE 46.
rather than idea or inspiration. Yet neither film nor performance has been analyzed
M. F. Husain, Man , 1951; oil, wood, metal, and Masonite; 47.75 x 96.75 in. The Chester and Davida
Herwitz Collection, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts (E301146). Artwork © Estate of as an exercise in visual thinking, much less as a challenge to or critique of dominant
M . F. Husain; image courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum. notions of art, the artist, and art-making in India during the 196os. The film and per-
formance are usually upheld as testaments to the artist's virtuosity, talent for showman-
ship, and knowledge of international artistic developments such as performance art and
avant-garde cinema. It is shortsighted to view Husain's artistic projects of the 19 6os
punctuated by the sounds of schoolchildren and rural singers and the original music of as merely confirming his skills and talents in marketing, sales, and public relations,
Elchuri Vijaya Raghava Rao. though these were no doubt considerable. I propose instead that we see the film and
The play between light and darkness in Between the Spider and the Lamp carries performance in a continuum with Husain's easel paintings and epic murals, produced
over into the film, with the umbrella and lantern functioning as universal symbols of for Air India International, the national airline, in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Prague, and
heat and rain, generation and extinction, life and death. Through such formal exten- Zurich; the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research, a scientific research institute in
sions and transmutations , Husain draws analogies between handmade painting and Bombay; and the Dhoomimal Gallery, a private art gallery in Delhi. In opposition to
mechanical film, between artist and craftsman, and between city and village. Through dominant paradigms of the period whereby the modern artist was considered irrelevant
the Eyes of a Painter reimagines the painter's art as akin to the potter's craft. It shows or ineffectual, Husain's projects claimed modernist art as national-cultural work and
India's rural and urban citizens as participants in a shared project of nation-building . the artist as public person and world-citizen.
It loans cultural authenticity to the "foreign," "imported," or "Western" practices of A critical art history ofHusain's oeuvre, spanning his monumental painting Man to
modernist art and avant-garde film. It makes over the elite figure of the painter into that his Mahabharata series of paintings for the Bienal de Sao Paulo in 1971 (fig. 47) , would
of the popular picture showman. shift scholarly focus from his late career and right-wing attacks on the artist, or what
Consider Bartholomew's description ofHusain's 1968-1969 performance, Six Days Susan S. Bean has called "contemporary culture wars." 15 It would examine the condi-
of Making, which followed Through the Eyes of a Painter, at the Shridharani Gallery in tions that enabled him to become India's national artist without equal for most of the
New Delhi: "What he [Husain] created was an interest in painting, in painting as an twentieth century, and analyze the formal and social properties of his art in the period
activity the result of which can be art. "13 At the critic's suggestion, between December 27, from the 1950s until the early 1970s. This period merits special examination not least
because, as Husain asserted, "I reached my peak as an artist in the late 1950s. All my
1968, and January 1, 1969, Husain worked on six canvases at once for an exhibition and
other work is a manifestation of that." 16 Kapur, one of his champions, lamented that
invited the public to watch him working. Bartholomew's account of this performance
"Husain resorted so early in his career-already by the 197os-to a pastiche of his vivid
direc_ted attention to the materiality of artistic practice, to the notion of art as process
corpus," abandoning "the great typology/iconography he had created in the first phase
rather than product, and to the identity of the artist as practitioner rather than master.
ofhis career."17
The contingency entailed in the "activity" of painting could yield art or not. The previous
MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN 97

96 .· MAIJ AND MAHA8HARATA
rupees (US$3-1 million), far exceedino the presale estimate of8 8
. . "' - - crore rupees (USS1. 46
million). He VJewed Husam as a commercial or popular art 15 · t
and h.IS artwork as com-
modity and kitsch: "A look through the catalogue reveals the arc of the painter's humble
beginning and growth through the 1950s and thereafter, ending with works executed
in the 1980s, by which time he had become an established brand and was seeing his
drawings being block-printed on ladies' scarves and sold in high street boutiques."'9 For
Murthy, the artist was neither original nor particularly Indian: "A cursory look through
his works reveals them to be a pastiche of various western styles, including collage and
surrealism." 20 His skeptical view of the artist was by no means unique.
In an obituary published in the Guardian, Tapati Guha-Thakurta v.-,ote: "Husain had
become to many a jaded star on the contemporary Indian art scene, w'ith what they saw
as his outdated, overdone, repetitive brand of national modernism. There were strong
criticisms, in particular, of his sycophantic paintings of Indira Gandhi as the goddess
Durga during the state of emergency of 1975-76, of his courting of rich patrons and of
his penchant for gimmickry and showmanship." With the artist's death, she concluded,
"stock can now be taken of the art that he did so much to shape, while refusing to accept
limitations on his freedom of expression." 21
This chapter takes up Guha-Thakurta's imitation to reexamine Husain's art and his
position within a history of modernism in India. I trace the beginnings of the artist's
career and visual imagination in his paintings of the 1950s, specifically Man , Zameen,
and Between the Spider and the Lamp, which laid out the representational task of the
postcolonial artist in India. Then I analyze how that imagination was translated into
f fC.Ui:£ 47.
cinema in Through the Eyes of a Painter, a film that shifted the boundaries between
M. F. H= in. 1'.,j:.r.a ;;,i:h Char.a: "modernist" art and "traditional" crafts and staged a dynamic exchange between the
(YA}.abi-..arcr~ Jj)~ 1971. oil cm earn-as, city and \'illage. Finally, I address how Husain reemisioned the role of art and the artist
Tr_e Ches-= and D;r.,tl.;a Herv.i tz in modem India through an inventive play between painting and performance in the
Crll~on. Pe.!Y.Jdy [s;;,>_z Museum. late 1960s and early 1970s. He adopted the persona of picture showman, an artistic
S2Jem, Mass:sd rus..<-tts (E301 :.8z).
figure common to India's rural and urban cultures, and changed the terms on which
Artv.-orl: © L<t!!e c.{ !;I. F. Husain;
imag~ COOrt.."S}· of the Peabody Essex audiences received modernist painters and painting. The performative strategies of
Mll9.1lm.. Husain's art were crucial to its conception and e..xecution, yet they have been neglected
in critical discourse on the artist.
By focusing on unifying themes across Husain's works and identif}ing the artist
as maker and performer, I propose that the artist's main achievement was translation
between media (performance, painting) and sites (village, city) that were perceived as
~~eev_aluation ~f Husain's art is especially necessary in the wake of the artist's death
separate and opposed. For much of Husain's career, these media and sites were asso -
w. ra1Sed _questior15 about his legacy and the past and future of modernism . I di '
Witness Surul Murthy writing in the Hindu, a major English-langu d ·1 ~ n a. ciated with the categories of East and West and practices of crafts and art. The artist
"H . I age a1 y m 2013· critiqued boundaries between these categories and practices through work in diverse
usam casts a ong shadow across the Indian art scene and w1·11 co t· ' .
dee3 d ' n mue to do so fc media including painting, performance, and film. Husain's engagement with indig-
many es to come. Like it or not, he is the best known of all te or
- - con mporary I d ·
pamters, and also the most overrated of them all •18 Murth . n ian enous, marginal. and nonmodernist worlds of experience-socially and politically
value of H · · k· · Yque 5 honed the aesthetic marked as folk, popular, rural. and vernacular-linked him to Sher-Gil, and to Subra-
usam s wor m response to a Bombay auction, where it fetched 8
1 -5 crore manyan and Khakhar, whose careers I explore in subsequent chapters.
98 . LIAN AIIO MAHABHAAATA
MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN • 99
ART-MAKING AS MYTH-MAKING: THE PAINTINGS OF THE 1950S . .
Progressive Writers' Association (AIPWA) and the Ind'ian people,s Theatre Assoc1alion
.
In 1984. Francis Newton Souza. the original enfant terrible of the art world in India, (!PTA) and for a hme to the Communist Party of Ind.1a.29 Eac h of these groups-the
AJPWA. !PTA, and PAG-had a distinct agenda , yet they were umte · d . h . opposi-.
reflected on his motives for establishing the Progressive Artists Group (PAG) in 1947: _ . . m t e1r
tion to colomahsm, fascism, capitalism • and cultural cons erva1ism.
- io Th e PAG was the
r had begun to notice that the J.J. School of Art turned out an awful number of bad artists shortest-lived of the three groups and has functioned as a powerful myth in cultural and
year after year and the Bombay Art Society showed awful crap in its Annual Exhibitions ·
institutional memory. As Karin Zitzewitz has noted , "it di'sbanded aImos t as soon as 1t
which comprised the amateur efforts of some memsahibs in India who were pampered formed" with the dep~rtures of Raza and Souza. 31Her interview with Kekoo Gandhy, an
by British colonialism. Hence their pretty-pretty paintings together with the work of sev- associate of these artists and the influential founder of Gallery Chemould in Bombay,
eral artists coming out of the art school exhibited once a year in the Art Society had no encapsulated the myth of "the Progressives as a set of poor migrants to the city who,
directions, no goal. no inspiration, no energy-regardless of the style _or method they through their own creativity, contributed to the secular culture of the city while demon-
choose to work in. It then occurred to me to form a group to give ourselves an incentive. 32
strating its capacity for equity." Of these artists, none embodied this myth more than
Ganging up in a collective ego is stronger than single ego. 22 Husain. This bohemian and often barefoot artist had "a long apprenticeship to poverty,"
as Kapur described it, and achieved the celebrity status of "a film star in India" well
Husain was invited to join this group of artists, which included Souza, Syed Haider before this was a likely possibility or imaginable condition for artists in that society. n
Raza, Krishnaji Howlaji Ara, Sadanand Krishnaji Bakre, and Hari Ambadas Gade, and Jn the 1960s, the artist Tyeb Mehta, one of Husain's contemporaries, reputedly said
showed work at their exhibitions held in Baroda and Bombay in 1949. As Souza's with- to the artist, poet, and critic Gieve Patel: "To pick up a brush, to make a stroke on the
ering words suggest, the PAG challenged the orthodoxies of the J.J . School of Art, the canvas-I consider these acts of courage in this country." 34 This remark gestured to
colonial art school in Bombay, and the Bombay Art Society, an association of artists and the status of modernist painting in mid-century India, where it was regarded as an
patrons that enjoyed state patronage. It refused their "pretty-pretty" amateurism and elite preoccupation and self.indulgent activity by comparison to necessary tasks of post-
lifeless academicism and proposed an art that was revolutionary and dynamic. A review colonial nation-building such as economic or political development. 35 Writing in the
of their Bombay exhibition by Rudolf von Leyden, published in the Times of India in July 1980s, Patel understood Mehta's remark to mean "We do not have a free and easy right
to paint." 36 Patel articulated the predicament of modernist art and the artist in India
1949, suggests that they were successful in this task: "Those who go to the exhibition to
during the 1950s and 1960s thus:
look for pretty pictures will be, on the whole, disappointed. Those, who want painting to
be the expression of the deeper emotions and the strivings of a generation, will be well
23 Post-Independence India had no role for the urban, contemporary artist, the man who
satisfied with the progressive offerings of these artists."
would fabricate and comment on the present, and who would not necessarily continue
The PAG drew on the formal vocabularies of Cubism and Expressionism, in part
with folk and classical forms. The world would have certainly been chill for him, with the
because of the encouragement and support of central European emigre critics and col- unexpressed, ubiquitous question: "What is your work for? Who is it for?" It has taken
24
lectors Walter Langhammer, Emmanuel Schlesinger, and von Leyden. Finding them- the artist two or three decades to reply simply: "It is for you. And me." And specific third-
selves in Bombay as refugees from the Second World War, these displaced aesthetes world tragedies gave a special edge to the chill. In universal deprivation, may one allow
collaborated with Indian artists, critics, and gallerists to establish the modernist art oneself the luxury "to pick up a brush?" 37
world in India. 25 Members of the PAG sought belonging to an international fraternity
of artists, secular citizens, and modern men. 26 All were migrants to Bombay, and most
By Patel's account, "the modern Indian artist" was "the favorite whipping boy for art
came from marginal groups or minority communities by virtue of their religion, caste,
professors, newspaper reviewers and editorial columnists" in the newly independent
and class. For some, migratio~ to that city was not the only one they would undertake. nation, condemned for being "Western, rootless, alienated, confused, self-seeking, imi-
Souza and Raza left Bombay for London and Paris, respectively, in search of interna- tative and sterile." 38 Husain's career flew in the face of such skepticism and hostility
27
tional recognition, while others, such as Husain, built careers in India. toward modern art. His biography attests to overcoming the embattled status of mod-
These artists' commitments to the city, technological progress, professional asso- ernist art within related, if distinct, personal, social. political. and historical contexts,
ciations, and universal freedoms marked them as different from their predecessors and to making over modernist art into a national activity.
and peers in India, and aligned them with artists in "Paris, Munich, New York. and Husain's father worked as a clerk in a textile mill-his father had been a tinsmith-
.London." 28 They forged links to other modernist movements such as the All-India
MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN . 101
100 • MA"f · AN D MAHABHARATA
and wished for hi g son to learn a trade and become a tailor. 1'; Defying theHe familial
expectations, Husain went to Bombay with an aim to pursue an arti stic career and
rented "a cheap room ju8t off Grant Road, a hovel in a bylane inhabited by pimps and
pro8tituleH."''' He found rncntorK and friend s in Raza and Souza, and exhibited hi~
early paintings, few of which s urvive, with them. In 1947, he won the gold medal of the
Bombay Art Socie ty for Putten; Sher-Gil had won the same prize for Three Girls (1935)
in 1936. In 1950, he held hi s first one-man show at the Artists' Centre on Rampart Row,
a s pace rented by Schlesinger for the occasion. This European patron bought many of
Husain's early works for "fifty or a hundred rupees" (approximately US$1-2), a far cry
from the $1,609,000 that Battle of Ganga and Jamuna, from his Mahabharata series,
commanded at a New York auction in 2008,•1 In 1951, Husain visited China, where he
met the artists Qi Baishi and Xu Beihong.' 2 In 1953, he traveled to Europe for the first
time and showed his work there regularly through the 1950s, including at the 1954
Venice Biennale. Such trips set him apart from his peers and established his reputation
as a jet-setting, itinerant artist well before it was the norm in India or indeed very many
other parts of the world.' 1 Jn 1955, Husain won the Padma Shri, India's fourth-highest
civilian hcmor. (He went on to win the greater honors of the Pad ma Bhushan in 1973
and the Pad ma Vibhushan in 1991.)
Such awards and accolades, conferred just five years after his first solo exhibition,
secured Husain's position as a national artist despite his somewhat belated introduction
to the nation's artistic and cultural past.44 After an intensive immersion in academic flCURE 48.
and modernist Western art during the 1930s and 1940s, Husain had a transforma- "The Progressive Artists Group surrounded by their supporters at the Bombay Art Society Salon."
1951, photograph. Image courtesy of Gallery Chemou ld Archive, Mumbai.
tive encounter with Indian art in the Great Exhibition of 1947-1948, organized by the
Royal Academy and shown at Burlington House in London in 1947 and at the Viceregal
Lodge in New Delhi in 1948. This exhibition, officially titled Masterpieces of Indian Art, period) and folk practices, recalls Sher-Gil's appropriation of the wall paintings of Ajanta
marked the transfer of power from imperial Britain to independent India. It surveyed and Mattancheri and miniature painting from the Rajput and Mughal courts alongside
five thousand years of art and culture from material artifacts of the Indus Valley Civi- village crafts in her oil paintings of the 1930s. These references to classical art and
lization to painting from the Rajput and Mughal courts. Many of the works on display, folk practices did not signify continuity with the Indian past, but rather allegiance to a
sourced from public and private collections across the country, became the nucleus modern notion of national tradition. 48 This allegiance was evident in Husain's paint-
of the National Museum , established in 1949 on the premises of Government House ing Man, exhibited at the Artists' Centre in his first solo show, where it functioned as
(now the Presidential Mansion) in New Delhi.45 Guha-Thakurta has proposed that this a backdrop to an eclectic gathering of the art world in Bombay. Husain, seated cross-
exhibition reified a national art historical canon.46 It is ironic that postcolonial India's legged in the foreground of a photograph of the group (fig. 48), sports a black hat and an
preeminent modern artist and premier art museum trace their origins to a colonial intense, earnest expression. Elsewhere in the scene a distracted Mulk Raj Anand (critic)
exhibition that made significant cultural claims on behalf of the new nation-state. reads a pamphlet; Khorshed Gandhy (dealer) looks serious standing next to a bemused
Husain remembered the exhibition: "I came out with a set of five paintings in 1948 Krishen Khanna (artist); an ebullient Walter Langhammer (art teacher), dressed in a
after visiting Delhi with Souza where I saw all the Indian works and then I felt I should light-colored jacket and dark tie, beams at the camera as an unassuming Shiavax Chavda
paint something else. Till then I was influenced by the Expressionists. After visiting (artist), arms crossed over his body, looks away from it.
the exhibition I combined three periods, the form of the Gupta period, the strong colors Man is a vision of the future saturated with traces of the past; magic and myth oper-
of the Basohli period and the innocence of folk art and worked on it and came out with ate as the central principles of a postcolonial modernity. In terms of color. line, and
five paintings which were shown at the Bombay Art Society in 1949." 47 This turn to composition, it is darker, rougher, and less exuberant than the celebrations of village
indigen~us motifs and modes of representation, drawing on India's classical (Gupta life, modern nation, and ancient civilization in panoramic pictures such as Zameen
102 • MAN AND MAHABHARATA MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN · 103
(1 955) that Man foreshadowed and for which Husain became famous . As Kapur rightly Su rrounded by the action of other figures·· a bull , an ups"ide -down man, a woman, an
observes, the painting is "wholly unexplained, and in some senses, unsurpassed."49 Its upright man, and two couples (whose paired forms flank the central figure on sur-
achievements can be described in terms of formal innovation, iconography, address, and faces that could be canvas or tablet). Critics and scholars have understood the upside-
affect, though the effect of Man exceeds the sum total of these. Kapur writes: down male and female figure as deities, with the male figure and bull representing
the Hindu god Shiva and his mount Nandi, and the female figure holding her hand in
The surface seems at first to mimic a wall painting in the way the line, a white incision, abhaya mudra (gesture of reassurance) as a village devi (goddess). The central figure in
contours the tumbling forms across the surface of the wall/canvas, and even the way the the composition is nude, pensive, powerful, and primal, embodying oppositions that
rich-hued pigment is applied, as though smeared, dabbed, and squelched with fingers Kapur described as "savage and superhuman, demonic and wise." 54 Yashodhara Dalmia
and palms. But there is also a strange fragility about the surface and, on second take, one viewed him as "a man from a dark autochthonous tribe, a representative of both the
might read the painting as a giant-sized collage fabricated from colored kite-paper (used archetypal and the ordinary," who "sits contemplating the vortex of events that designate
for tazias [replicas of the tomb of Husain ibn Ali, the martyred grandson of the prophet contemporary India." 55 She interpreted the intriguing representations of couples in the
Muhammad] and the Duldul horse carried processionally at Muharram, the love of which image as "votive tablets that echo artefacts from the Indus Valley show[ing] torsos of
initiated Husain as a boy into art-making)." 50
men and women ripped apart." 56 Alkazi noted the juxtaposition of "primitive art in the
static, monolithic hewn forms of the women, and of classical Indian sculpture in their
Thus the critic understands this painting as wall and canvas, collage and procession, rounded fullness," attesting to the artist's engagement with the past, tradition, nation,
allegory and autobiography. It narrates the artist's self and the nation's history through and civilization as they had been articulated by Masterpieces of Indian Art.57
a modernist appropriation of primitive marks, signs, and gestures. Kapur's brilliant Man functions as a portrait of the citizen and artist in a violent and creative conflict,
reading captures the ambiguity of the painting, which could be "'fresco' or collage," in the throes of what Husain called the "birth pain" that generates the Shiva Nataraja
"archaic or ephemeral," "chanced upon a cave" or "carried like a banner in a pageant." 51 and Venus d'Avignon. This figure, like the nation, was new and old. He.was a subject
Indeed Man evoked a history of anti-colonial nationalist visual representation, from formed by world war and mass destruction, not least the Partition of 1947, and governed
copies of the cave paintings or "frescoes" at Ajanta-as they were commonly known by ancient codes and rituals. Husain's Man was an emblem of enchantment in the
after the publication of Ajanta Frescoes (1915)-and Abanindranath Tagore's Bharat face of disenchantment. It is replete with cryptic signs and icons that represent village,
Mata (Mother India) (1905), initially executed on a banner during the Swadeshi (of tradition, nation, and civilization, and it prefigured elements in Husain's paintings and
one's own country) movement in Bengal, to Sher-Gil's paintings of village women and films to come.
Bose's posters of Santhal drummers for the Haripura Congress in 1938. Through this Take Zameen (Land), Husain's oil painting, which won the national award of the Lalit
painting, Husain asserted lineage and belonging as well as rupture and future. The Kala Akademi in 1955 amid some controversy (fig. 49).58 This work extends and elaborates
paradox of Man lies in its being burdened by history and becoming free of it, material- the large scale and horizontal format of Man . Zameen, now in the collection of the National
ized in the painting's figural oppositions of standing up and falling down. It revises the Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, measures 9r.5 centimeters high and 548.5 centimeters
format of the nationalist tableau, as it had been deployed by Ravi Varma and Sher-Gil, by wide. A vivid depiction oflndia, this painting reproduces the notion of the nation as village
reducing-formally and socially-the subject of the nation to a single, male individual with a gendered economy in which woman is mother and man her child. Kapur described
·and citizen-subject rather than a community of women as in Galaxy of Women (c. 1889) its elements thus: "Zameen shows a pack-mule; a woman with a sieve; a vignette of village
or the masses of Gandhian nationalism as in South Indian Villagers Going to Market wall inscribed with letters from the alphabet; and a snake which is the symbol of fertility;
(1937). The abstraction and desolation of Man was unprecedented. For Ebrahim Alkazi, a man with a pair of bulls; a hand with a lion-the Panja [hand] denoting holy persons,
Husain's·painting presented an image of"organized chaos" and "cataclysmic upheaval," the lion a metaphor of courage; a woman delivering a child; a multi-armed man; a woman
· a simulacrum of urban disorder and disorientation," and "an elaborate jig-saw puz- churning milk; a man beating a drum; a bunch of faces; a wheel; a kite; and a cock in a
z]e_"5Z It did not enact the nation as vibrant, splendid pageant, as Bose, Mukherjee, strutting pose." 59 And this list is not complete. The painting also depicts footprints, a tree,
and Baij did in the 193Os and 194Os, but depicted the solitary, heroic quest of artist and a fish, an elephant, a horse, horses and human hands fused together, homes and build-
citizen. It did not perform a movement toward freedom but announced the imperfect, ings, a pile of hay or grass, a group of pots, and a female dancer, all of which are presented
uneasy arrival ofliberal democracy_ in square or rectangular frames across the surface of the picture.
The male figure at the center of the painting, and ostensibly the man of its title, This painting not only represents "a pictorial inventory of images from rural life"
is brooding. seated on a red chair-interpreted by critics as stool and throne 53-and but also draws on visual forms and techniques associated with the village, such as wall
MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN · 105
FIGURE 49 .
M. F. Husain. Zameen (Land), 1955, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.
Artwork courtesy of the estate of the artist; image courtesy of the National Gallery of Modern Art.
painting and scroll painting, performed by untrained or itinerant artists and celebrated Jn "Nirvana of a Maggot," Souza conceives artistic expression as a fierce contest
in Husain's film Through the Eyes of a Painter. 60 His fragmented image, however, does between nature and culture, of wrestling inner and outer forces in an effort "to make
not develop a linear narrative, nor do its parts relate to identifiable, known narratives. one of creation within Creation."67 Coming to language is a struggle, for "how can one
Indeed it invents a set of new mythologies about the village, nation, woman, and man. articulate in Anglo-Saxon with a jeweled mandible that was fashioned by the ancient
Identifying particular citations from East and West, Shiv Kapur understood the paint- Konkan goldsmiths of Goa?" 68 The act of painting brings relief as the artist becomes a
ing in universalist terms as "a characteristic product ofHusain's imagination in which "master" with images in a way he cannot be with words.69 He is "happy as a barbarian"
light and darkness shadow each other and life is spawned in anguish and primeval amid the oral, aural, tactile, and visual pleasures of the village, where he ambitiously
strength." 61 He focused on the image of the woman giving birth to "a distorted child" and imaginatively engages questions of colonialism, capitalism, Christianity, and cre-
under a black sun on the right side of the painting, viewing this figure as "an anthropo- ativity.70 For Husain's one-time comrade in PAG, meals with the vicar enable reflections
morphic representation of the earth. "62 For this critic, the child born of this woman is on creation and creators; memories of a childhood in Bombay produce denouncements
man_ This child is a metaphor for the artist, and woman is the subject of his art. This of urban corruptions and "a mechanical, Macaulian educational system"; and writing
reading of Zameen reveals gendered myths of creation and creator, and suggests it is a and painting engender profound insights on colonialism: "my inarticulation was due to
companion to the allegory of artistic production in Man. England having possessed a lot of boats which had netted India into its vast empire." 71
These paintings tell us as much about art and the artist as about village and the If Souza's way out of this postcolonial predicament was an embrace of disenchantment,
nation. Husain's inquiries into the role of art and the artist in a postcolonial society then Husain's strategy was to reenchant the world. Whereas Souza's savage. sacrilegious
found a parallel in Souza's "Nirvana of a Maggot," even though the relative civility, even pictures critiqued old myths (secular and religious), Husain's symbolic, epic pictures
festivity, of Zameen may at first glance appear the antithesis of the primordial village invented new ones.
imagiped by Souza.63 Souza's autobiographical essay, published in 1955 (and therefore Consider the dramatic enchantment visible in Between the Spider and the Lamp
contemporary with Zameen) in the British literary magazine Encounter, narrates the (r956). In this famous painting (fig. 45). Husain places a group of female figures against
return of the modem artist to an "almost deserted" village in "his native" Goa, to an a textured, gray background enlivened by a field of rich, blood-red paint. These flat.
"old h~.l f dilapidated house· infested with "toads, white ants, silverfish, cockroaches, cutoutlike figures appear like puppets on an improvised rural stage with the painter
spiders, lizards and snakes." 64 These "creeping inhabitants," the embodiments of "an assuming the role of puppeteer. This painting stages an encounter between a veiled
uncivilized Goan countryside," are "swatted ruthlessly, brutally," by his servant Salu, "a figure clad in a white-gray sari holding a storm lantern on her head and an enigmatic
good cook, a primitive sort," so the artist could carry on "painting peasants and rural brown-skinned figure dangling a . spider from one hand. These figures , depicted in
landscapes." 65 Souza's language is laden with violent imagery and dark humor; the profile, have usually been understood to represent an elderly peasant woman and a
artist describes himself as "a blooming maggot on a dung heap" with the "nose of a middle-aged adivasi woman. The third female figure in the group-nude, alert, youth-
fetus." 66 Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915) is a clear point of reference. ful. and yellow-skinned-stands with arms folded across her waist gazing at the viewer,
106 • MAN AND MAHABHARATA MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN · 107
a witness to the compelling encounter on the left. Behind-indeed attached to-two of rimitive others who are alter egos for or counterpart ("fi 11 ..
P s e ow-citizens") to the artist's
the figures are ghostly half-figures, not quite persons that seem to denote masks and self. but it is also a parable of the psychic and social impulses 'th' h lf
' • . • . . . WI m t e se that yield
costumes. Inscribed above the figural group are Devanagari letters, geometric symbols, rt Husam reclaims pnm1tiv1sm as a postcolonial im pu Ise, much as Octavio . .
a · . , Paz did
and graphic marks that mimic writing on a village wall. This script is as undecipherable ·n
l The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) when he claimed Mexican ·d . .
" . . 1 en11ty was essentially
as the scene playing out below it. .....,asked:
,.. We hide our true selves, and sometimes deny the m.«7s Th e use of masks and
Kapur views this image as turning Western modernism on its head, as Husain's .....,asking
,.. . wh ereby the
in Husain's paintings of the 1950s participates 1·n a s·1m1-1ar 1og1c
nod "to the Picassianf'primitivist' component of modern art.'' 72 By her account, before postcolonial artist is master and "Nobody," in Paz's term, "the eternal absentee" from
"a red half-curtain, the yavanika of Indian classical theater." the artist stages a play history and society and a stranger to himself.76 The task of the postcolonial artist was to
that "convert[s] early modern artists' ethnographic indulgence into a progressive nativ- bring that figure out of what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called "the waiting room of his-
ism, and thence into a representational project." For this critic, Husain's primitivism is tory" and into representation, to render ambivalence as identity, and to claim originality
aligned with that of"modernists from Mexico, Brazil and Cuba with access to living folk through mimicry.77 Citing European masters Picasso, Rodin, Klee, and Kafka, Husain
and tribal traditions." rather than with that of Picasso and other European masters. The and Souza came to language and established speaking positions as postcolonial artists.
primitive does not function as a figure of distance, exoticism, mystery, and savagery for
the postcolonial artist. Instead Between the Spider and the Lamp renders "the proximate
SCRATCHES IN TIME: THROUGH THE EYES OF A PAINTER (1967)
figure of tribal/peasant/proletarian subjects: the artists' fellow-citizen's [sic] in inde-
pendent India whom he embraces with warm alacrity and ideological astuteness." For "Will the scratches be there?" Husain inquired of Santosh Sivan, the cinematographer
Kapur, this painting represents "a nationalist aspiration to render iconographically (and for his feature film Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities (2004). Sivan recalled Husain's
situate within the modern) the living archetype of the ' Indic' body while articulating, worry as he reflected on the "magic of theater" in the documentary film Celluloid Man
73
at the same time, the impossibility of arriving at the 'truth' of this representation." It (2012).78 For Husain, the painter who long wished to be a director, cinema possessed
epitomizes Husain's talent for "treating the archaic/archetypal and the modern as mutu- a magical materiality, legible in scratches on the screen. 79 Digital technologies of the
ally constitutive categories." 74 late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first centuries were unable to reproduce the magic that
Kapur's deconstructive reading of Between the Spider and the Lamp highlights the marked his first film, Through the Eyes ofa Painter (1967). This film was propelled by the
work of representation in the face of nationalist and modernist imperatives. However, magic of modern technology, the magic of rural culture, and the magic of artistic cre-
she does not address art at the level of making as Man, Zameen, and indeed "Nirvana ation. Through the Eyes of a Painter was one of the earliest art films in modern India and
of a MaggoC seem to do quite directly. What is artistic creation? Who is an artist or cre- perhaps the first artist's film . It was a landmark attempt to unite two disparate genres of
ator? For artists like Husain and Souza in newly independent India, art was a struggle. filmmaking: the documentary on art and artists and the experimental art film.
It was a project of borrowed forms and identities, of learning to speak again or anew In the opening frames of Through the Eyes of a Painter, which function as a prologue
in the wake of colonialism, of rerouting the language of such Euro-American masters to the film, the painter is seated on the ground at work on a canvas. He explains the proj-
as Rodin, Klee, Picasso, and Kafka. These Indian artists' claims to modernist original- ect as an experiment with new sources and materials for an artist who had previously
ity were tempered by the awareness that they were postcolonial subjects, coming after worked with "color pigments, brushes and canvas." His stated goal is to "tackle the film
and critiquing the modernism and modernity they had inherited from Europe. Hence medium" with "the feeling of a painter." Husain describes the formal logics of the film
Souza's play with colonialist and modernist tropes of savagery and civility in "Nirvana thus: "They are unrelated moving visuals juxtaposed to create a total poetic form , very
of a Maggl)t~ and H.usain's reworking of nature and culture (and by extension, female integrated. No spoken word but the very sound of music makes a dialogue between shot
and male) in Mar. and Zameen. sequences in the film which you'll see now." This short speech is reinforced by written
Bawun the Spider and the Lamp, like Man and Zameen, provides an account of this text, which appears just before the title and credits: "No Story. Impressions of Painter
artistk proc.t:Ss. The postc.olonial artist stages theater, plays roles, wears masks, and Husain as He Passes through Bundi, Chitod and Jaisalmer." As at other moments in
reveals truths. He conjures a world of magic and myth, creates a Jiminal zone of ritual, the film, the repetition here is humorous, not pedantic or didactic. A set of diagrams
and rommmdi the p<r....-er$ of light and darkness, sex and death, illusion and reality. announces the film's key conceptual and visual formula: the image of a bull with an
He ii n ot expre;sionist genius but masked performer. Husain's formal vocabulary of umbrella plus a lantern minus a shoe equals a man and woman (fig. so). These motifs
ci.rtouu, e<>llag.-:s, and cartoons, which he de-.·eloped and perfected in later work, articu· recur in painted and photographed forms throughout the film, setting up a play, or
fated th1» kk-ntity in Bt4wun the Spider and The Lamp. Not only is the painting a fable of "dialogue," as Husain termed it, between reality and representation.
MAQBOOL FI D A H U ~AIN 109
FIGURE 50. FIGURE 51.
M. F. Husain, Through the Eyes ofa Painter, 1967, film still (01:12). Films Division, Ministry of M. F. Husain, Through the Eyes of a Painter, 1967, film still (14:54). Films Division, Ministry of
Information and Broadcasting, Government oflndia. Film© Estate of M. F. Husain ; image courtesy Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. Film © Estate of M. F. Husain; image courtesy
of the Films Division, Government of India. of the Films Division, Government oflndia.
The opening and closing shots of the film (as well as one in the middle that suggests analogizes the painter and the filmmaker, urban art and rural life, the handmade draw-
the painter's journey between sites in Rajasthan) convey the speed of a train or car that ing and the mechanical shot.
transports the painter to the countryside where he will shoot in the film. The relative Early in the film, we see a village home painted with riders astride a pair of ele-
speed and smoothness of the other shots in the film reflect the rural landscape Husain phants on the upper level, and two tigers embracing-their tongues touching-on
surveys. They are slow and rough, corresponding to the gait of women carrying pots of the lower level (a lone horse and rider stand to the left of the tigers, and several small
water and men leading cattle through a village street. As Husain's camera pans across parrots embellish the action of the larger animals) . A live boar strolls by the verandah
the built environment and arid earth, he invites the viewer to partake in the pleasures of this house and finds himself between the tigers, as does a goat later in the film (fig.
of the cinema: to focus in and out, to scan left and right, to look up and down. Natural SI). These amusing shots exemplify how Husain repeatedly invites us to consider the
textures-rocks, water, trees, shrub, sand-and creatures big and small-children, boundary between animate and inanimate, real and represented, and two- and three-
camels, a horse, goats, a wild boar, birds, a squirrel, cattle-come under close scrutiny. dimensional forms. There are other sequences in which we see-and are asked to
The painter highlights marvels of everyday life in rural India: bathing at a tank, turn- compare-elephants that have been sculpted and painted; the wooden wheel of an ordi-
ing a grindstone, washing clothes, cleaning pots, making art, polishing leather, work- nary cart and an elaborately carved balcony also made of wood; and painting on wall,
ing with animals. In one sequence, Husain juxtaposes shots of diverse activities like cloth, or paper, and the body of a cow (fig. 52). Through the use of montage, Husain
twisting rope, grinding spices, and lathering hair, linking them through the sound of makes inventive connections between mixing paint and rolling dough, between tying
musical instruments, which hum, spin, buzz, whirr, ring, vibrate, drone, and drum in a turban and frying a jalebi, between the moving lips of an old man and the rotating
response to the work and workers visible on screen. In this sequence and others, Husain record of a gramophone. Such connections probe the boundaries of high and low cul-

110 • MAN AND MAHABHARATA
say, he was possessed of a highly cinematic imagination before he began work"mg m
. the
medium of film.
Consider Sergei Eisenstein writing in 1939 on montage: "This property reveals that
any two pieces of a film stuck together inevitably combine to create a new concept, a new
quality born of that juxtaposition." 83 He elaborated: "The result of the juxtaposition of
two montage pieces is something more like the product than the sum . It is so because
the result of juxtaposition is always qualitatively (that is, in dimension, or power, if
you like) different from each of the components taken separately."84 Widely understood
and debated as an essential property of cinema in the 1920s and 1930s, montage is the
central principle of the Through the Eyes of a Painter. Husain exploits what Eisenstein
called the "the potentialities of juxtaposition" to generate "a new notion, a new concept, a
new image." 85This new image, materialized in Through the Eyes of a Painter, pushed the
limits of visual representation at many levels. It renewed Husain's practice as an artist.
It produced original ways of making and seeing cinema in the 1960s. It generated novel
forms of depicting the village and nation.
Through the Eyes of a Painter refused what Srirupa Roy has called the "disenchanted
imaginary" of the Films Division oflndia and the "boredom effects" that its films culti-
vated.86 Established in 1948 as a branch of the Ministry of Information and Broadcast-
ing of the Government of India, the Films Division was tasked with producing news-
FIGURE 52. reels, short films, and documentaries in service of the new nation.87 These films were
~t Husain , r;rough the ~yes ofa Painter, 1967, film still (09:50). Films Division, Ministry of
n ormat1on an Broadcasting, Government of India. Film © Estate of M F H . ..
viewed in commercial movie theaters, a requirement of the state until 1994, and in free
screenings in rural and urban locations, made possible through mobile cinema vans or
of the Films Division, Government of India. . . usam, image courtesy
as and when electricity was available. Positioning itself against the entertainment values
and visual pleasures of commercial Bombay cinema, the Films Division sought to make
ture, artistic and everyday activity, and handmad d h . films for "instruction, information and motivation." 88
· , e an mec amcal technologies as the From 1949 to 1972, the majority of Films Division films were dedicated to the sub-
artists camdera a_nd curious gaze magnify and minimize distinctions between things
persons, an actions. , ject of "development and planning" (696 films of 1,742 total) , with "citizenship and
reform" (314) and "defense and international" (289) occupying the next most popular
In the 1960s, Kapur described the effects of the film thus· "Ah I d
empath ·1 h .
there i//:e:;0;:~:: :~ ::!::, · umorous y etached
::t~ :e::tatnoetohus logkicdor deli~erate illogic. In this,
,
Through the Eyes of a Painter represented "a perfect carr
e wor - ay routme •so F h " ..
.. or t IS cntic,
categories.89 Films on "art and culture" were a minority (139 , or 8 percent) , and very few
films were produced under the category "experimental" (18, or 0.01 percent) . The Films
Division organized the films on "art and culture" into subcategories: "Archeology and
process, from painting into film-making."81 She describ:do~~r of_h1~ [Husain's] visual Monuments," "Arts," "Crafts," "Festivals," and "People of India." Within this frame -
as "studded with symbolic images that are introd d is pamt_mgs of the period work, Through the Eyes ofa Painter, an "experimental" film, engaged and dismantled the
position with the more explicit images Th ucbe I naturally and m continual juxta- subcategories of the "art and culture" film.
. ese sym o s are not t b d.
sense. They are to be comprehended th . . . . o e rea m any literal In Roy's view, the "art and culture" films of the Films Division rendered "culture as
as ey are pamted mtmtiv 1 . h h .
logic. Their untold element reveals itself i·n I t· ' h e y, wit t eir own fluid a tangible artifact, object, or visible practice that could be located in a specific time and
re a 10n to ot er hap · .
context and seldom needs outside refi • 82 I . penmgs within the place; for example, Madhubani paintings from Bihar in eastern India, temple carvings
erence. n Husam's fil th h
umbrella are symbols, in Kapur's th . m, e s oe, lantern, and from the Ajanta caves in western India, or Kathakali dancers from the southern state of
. sense, at acqmre meaning th h .
Like the symbols in his paintings they m tat d roug Juxtaposition. Kerala."90 By her account, the Films Division presented culture as the exclusive property
' u e an metamorphose I d d
a 5 kil led practitioner of an art ofi·uxtapo ·r . h . · n ee Husain was of rural or premodern societies, and performed salvage anthropology of the folk. In this
s1 ion m t e medmm of painting wh· h .
' IC IS to context, Through the Eyes of a Painter, despite its rural setting and preoccupation with
ll2 . M A N A N D M A H A 8 HAR AT A
MAQBOOL · FIDA HUSAIN · 113
. 1m
folk culture. was ra d1ca
,
· 1·1-, aesthetics and politics.
. It showed mobility across
. . time and
. , .bed rura I and urban Iabor. It claimed art and culture as hVJng practice
-
space. It remscr1
rather than rarefied thing.
Husam . presen1ed a live!}' and d,,1amic
, exchange between India's art and crafts '
. . an d v1·nagers, 1·ts modern men and rural folk. The painter produced himself
1. ts c1t1es
as a worker amon g \\·orkers

· in the village and therefore in the nation. This notion of
the artist as worker had an intriguing precedent in Eisenstein's Notes of a Film Direc-
tor. in whidi the filmmaker referred to himself and his colleagues as "We Soviet film
workers:n The Soviet worker imagined by Eisenstein, whose films were well known
in India, was the citizen-artist of Russian Constructivism. The idea of artist as worker
has other modernist genealogies that were also influential in India, such as those of
the Bauhaus, a model for the National Institute of Design, established in 1961 with the
technical assistance of Charles and Ray Eames. In the context ofNehruvian India, when
the nation embarked on a modernization process emphasizing heavy industry and five-
year plans, Constructivism and Bauhaus, with their emphasis on modern technology
and the machine, provided models for reimagining artistic labor and national work.
Husain cultivated an identity analogous to Eisenstein's worker in his film, which
supported and was supported by the nation, yet was not statist or nationalist. Through
the Ei•es ofa Painter linked the labors of painter and film maker in a milieu where cinema
was understood by the state to be corrupt, crass, and commercial, providing entertain-
ment for the ·masses," not culture for the "classes" as did visual art, music, dance, FIGURE 53,
theater. and literature.92 The film linked "foreign" (Western) practices of modernist M. F. Husain, Througli tlie Eyes of a Painter, 1967, film still (06:08) . Films Division, Ministry of
film and painting with "indigenous" (Eastern) cultural practices of the village, sug- Jnformalion and Broadcasting, Government of India. Film © Estate of M. F. Husain; image courtesy
oflhe Films Division, Government oflndia.
gesting a continuum between them. In so doing, Husain made the work of the artist as
much a national priority as that of the craftsman, the embodiment of rural labor and
moral virtue in Gandhi's schema. Husain proposed the painter-filmmaker as a worker
ity. It displayed a fascination with children as sources of creativity and surrogates for the
among other workers and claimed modernist practice as necessary national-cultural
artist. Children are shown writing on slates-training their hands and refining their
work, not art for art's sake. Recall Patel's comment on the place of the modern artist
skills-and being released from schoolwork under a shady tree. As their bodies scatter
during the 1950s and 1960s: "Post-Independence India had no role for the urban, con-
and spread across the frame, Husain juxtaposes sounds of delighted shrieks with the
temporary artist. the man who would fabricate and comment on the present, and who
image of a silent gramophone and solitary record in the foreground , leaving the viewer
would not necessarily continue with folk and classical forms." Husain's art was by no
to contemplate the difference between original and mechanically reproduced sound (fig,
means reducible or equivalent to the folk forms-visual, material, aural, and oral-that
53). This scene, like others in the film , was characterized by a sense of discovery. Its
he engaged in Through tl,c Ercs of Cl Painter. Nevertheless he suggested solidarity and
aesthetic effects owed to Husain's belief, contrary to the public consensus of the 1950s
proximity between modernist and nonmodernist cultural practices. He was an artist-
both painter and filnunaker-who was also a maker like the village schoolchild and and 1960s, that films were material. handmade, and improvised artifacts.
pastoralist, probing and playing with his environment. Take his childhood memory of a bioscopewC1l!C1h (literally, "man with a bioscope") ,
Attesting to this identity of the artist as maker, Tl1rough tl1e Eyes of a PC1inter lacked who projected moving images from rudimentary, often recycled and refurbished, pro-
the slick polish and technical finesse of Husain's paintings from the s · d jectors in towns and villages across India:
ame peno , as
the artist tried and h~sted his cinematic skills and style before the audi TI k
. ence. 1e sI1a y, A man installed a box in the town or village square and loudly invited the people to take
unpn.'<l1ctable mo,,ement of the camera; the use of found objects and r d . .
. __ . . · an om 1uxtapos1- a peek inside. He had an amusing patter. "Dilli kC1 darbar dek/10, Viceroy Curzon ko dekho"
hons. and the 1mprov1sed rhythm of sequences gave the film a naive e . ·
• xpernuental qua!- (See the court in Delhi. Look at Viceroy Curzon). The box had a peep-hole, Through it
1l,4 · LIAN ANO I.IAHA8HARATA
l.lAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN • 115
you could see action pictures. The box was cranked to make a picture-strip move across
the frame very swiftly. This created the illusion of motion. I was so intrigued by it that I
constructed m~· o,vn "Peep box' -hand crank and all. l drew a strip of eight to ten draw.
ings. rather like animation pictures, or those you see in flip books. My invention was a
91
tremendous success and after this I got hooked on photography.
From an early age, then. Husain imagined himself as a collector. curator, editor, and
bricolc..r oF Jroa::es. as a playful improviser, professional performer, and amateur film-
rn.ak,,,._r_As a child. he gathered pamphlets, magazines, and ephemera relating to the c.in-
= ·a.vicil~-
li.,-.~n:;-,,~ to the man ma torr.ga (horse-<lri..-en ,ehide) who would advertise its
·marvels and mi.ra.des~ about town.'!4Toe young co!lagist cut and pasted mechanically
reproduced ITTP:?=5 of the cinema to make a collection; such skills would also be mobi-
Iiz..=d for his prize-winning art =d crafts prniects.9~
The J?eepholes: and picture-strips of the cinema had a physical. tactile. and animate
q=lity fur this arti._q_ They Were capable of prnducing wonder. Consequently. Through
t:l----<! Eyes of c; Pcri:r.ur w-..s not the vision of a master, but of a worker, and that too of a
p.rrticirLrr k:i::!d of nz:ional-cn.l~ worker. It was not the wo":"ker of the steel plants and
r:.76-a-:ilic b-n-s -=.e:gen: m and iconic of Nehnman India. but a worker that continued
tf::e vfiI.age- ~ -~ r-=tio!! of Gandhlan mtional:h---m_ To reimagine the village as a site
cfcr=s,d.l'l ~~2 ;wd. p,:rhctrri::y-w-as 2 crucia1 cfu=,,i,e and material prefect for Gandhi.
tee rr;c=;;;~ v-~--=., a=r.fj- 5 b Gandhi =
bot-..b 'dung-hezp~ and dream.% Gan- flCURE S-4.
e:.?, •ce-' .;r-;.?"'" e:ri:,d ir:: a: rcJpi'.= fi.....~e where the,· would function like "tiny M.F. Husain. Througf: t/<.e Ey,es cf a Pi.ir.:a. 196-. film s till (02:28). Films Di,isio:i, Mini..~· o:
Information and Broadcasting. Gc,,;·emment o: India. Film© Es-..a:e of M. F. Husai..'1: i.m.a.ge court.."S'f
g;;.=:"=s--cf&.:=...rr [:w-..s: r:oc rndia';; ron~-npc.r..ry villzges that earned his admiration..
of the Films Drnsion, Go,;ernment of India.
F..e .ir::.tc:: *Yrn = t mn ~ cm: I am =~g]ng o-m- village life ;;;sit is to-<lay.
TI-..e -,~~ c£=i a-,:;.= is ~z rn m: mrru:i. .. _.. },~y ideal lillag-e wm cmrtain intelligent
-:.=-,~ E.e:::-zi: 1'Ee:- W-C rmt E;e rn ort «n.a & i = h"k.e am=k.~ Fm- Gandhi, vil- handmade, nonmechanica.l, nonindustrial, and nationalb""t l.abor. It vr,as a modality of
=
fage-~fr rr.:i± a:i-~ .. ::: a=d w-ea-.ing w~ e:iwa.ry- .labor, tlr..e repetitr-.e if medita- construction and creation comparable to that of art.
6 e ~ c : fazite::~~ =ta. ::ccial ~=-=-ci.t,. •m& mti=al tran...-fonnztion.5'' The maker of Through the Eyes of a Painter was a ....-orker, to use Kapu:r's lan,,=ge.
r::: ac::;;:Ji: re a:e- C'df...ra--..z.:,. &e ~~ .,,c.--rn:r was a h-u~. a tedmkal specialist ,;,.1Jo rediscovered ·v,-onder" in "work-day routine." He was a v.-orker ,;,;ho recalled the
a::-.i! d-n"J e::.:..." =. w~..o "'-~~..a.~ CI::1:$ a::.:d tw,-m~, ~ and unin:rsities, bioscopewallah of Husain's childhood and youth. a magician possessed of the pov;-ers
6.-:::ir ;.'?'.:'C l:.r.'i.e?'L TI--.es;8:,-G' ~,..-~~£ ~..,-.r,;n in Tr..re-~ tf,..,:; fy~~ ofa Pair.ta did not rorre- of cinema_This worker produced wonder by means of the everyday and ordinary, not
:1p--m ro #i::-~r.:. a£:.c, ~!li ~ teru1es, l":".e"i.2ro-£;i',t;., a.rli!l '1,0001"1,0-rk. thzt hzrl beffi through grand monuments or high culture. Thraugh the Eyes ofa Painter quenioned the
,:.&~ i\.,;!· 8~a c...,}~; ,,....-h-,ri-;~ ari-..& ~,e pw~>Yhnia1 mtioo~.a!e.. The figure of d n,ision of India's culture into discrete classical and folk elements, as suggested by the
~ b~...-J O.?f~l-'..\,',!J ;,,t: ~~l';' ;,1,<"..ffJ:.t:r, Tf":etab;-,;;--r""-...,.,-, (ff '1,0"Jlhit-"tt-er did nal: appear in Films Division subcategories of"Archeology and Monuments," "Arts," · c rafts." "Festi-
~::-.:::.. ~!=r.r); .,.-~3~.eik r.::-.-em!"'~ -,,ere in ifAinaTj' and L-.-ery·&j•acti,ities vaJst and "People oflndia_~iw Forts and pa.races in Rajasthan are the scene of pleasure
~re ,,...,_~~-ml,, !E-Z.,-i7f·.; w::d ar.)}~ -,;.~ ..,,f::'Ie mn uPA.t.1:$'.r.-od as ereatr,e practice or and desire and the mise-en-sct:ne for an artfully arranged, if humble, lantern. umbrell.a,
e~ 2i; 1r-£e3 ~:Y.-'l'.. uz_~i; (~:.':1tl 1n Th-c-"-lfa tk Eje1 ofa Painur as a category of and shoe (fig. 54). People and animals make their homes and lives around these artifacts
16.l'Jg 4'I.l'..J dQ5!'~ :aw~~ , ,'ltl! fut ·;ifutW:, Th<:: ~-iJ!zg,; ar...d craft<S were often cnllap.s-ed of princ.ely India, bringing "archeology and m onuments" into contact ,;,,ith "crafts· and
~ 7.;;b:.k d°1W"..r...1~ ~If 6Je f-e1"Y4 ~nd Hlw.<lrt:E film m.aie ws.e of this a,;wciatfon. Jn "festivals." Moreover, this environment is strewn with Husain's art and that of his rural
Thrf.Y;,;Jfo ~~ 'fy!i! efA Pa~ aafrs functi.'r.W.d b:-$ ai; diu:r<.1e 15kJJb than as a sign of peers, or the "people of Jndia." Many sequences juxtapose paintings by the artist with
MJ..QBOOL F IO I- H U SJ.. l f~ . 1 17
•
. of the village or "crafts." In others, the artist whimsically situ-
the cultura 1pro duc t10n cleaned steel dinner-plates with coal ash. The washing of the utensils struck up a tune,
ates his paintings on desert dunes and sites them on cattle. . . . . shin-shin-kreech-kreech. A Iota [round vessel] gurgled, ghutargooed [cooed] pigeon-like,
Husain's film was distinguished by its divergences from Films D1V1s1on documen-
rising and then drowning in a bucket of water. The sound of the water, the utensils and
taries, and from contemporary commercial and art cinema.101 Through the Eyes of a
the bucket blended into a symphony, as memorable as the compositions of John Cage,
Painter was shot in black-and-white in a period when color films, often shot in Europe,
the master of avant-garde fusion."107 The ordinary could produce the extraordinary if
such as Sangam (Confluence; 1964) and An Evening in Paris (1967), proliferated on com-
one looked through the eyes of a painter (read: artist). The simple could be sophisticated
mercial screens in India.102 The landscapes surveyed in Husain's film were quite unlike
depending on one's point of view.
the fantasyscapes of Paris, Tokyo, Rome, or even Kashmir in these Bombay films that,
Bundi, Chitod, and Jaisalmer, where Husain sited Through the Eyes of a Painter, are
as film historian Ranjani Mazumdar argues, produced a "'postcard imagination' that
and were towns and cities, not villages. He shot the film in a way that played with village
brought . .. jet age aviation, tourism, consumerism, color film stock, fashion , and music
and city as representation. Husain's gaze was focused on activity, action, and artifice
into a distinct cultural configuration." 103 According to Mazumdar, the advent of color in
rather than on a realist, beautiful, and moving depiction of rural life as in Ray's films.
cinema bespoke a complex economy of desire, consumption, and excess, and the 196os
His film made no claims to ethnographic truths or historical authenticity, for its subject
were a decade marked by "the longing for colorful images." 104 In Through the Eyes of a
was art and the artist. 108 The village was the site of art: of making, crafting, building,
Painter, however, pleasure was located neither in the middle-class consumption oflux-
and working. It was a place of pleasure and productivity. It bustled with energy and
ury goods nor in the traversal of international airspace or national highways. Husain's
ulsated with vitality. Art was essential to the village-and by extension, the nation-as
film celebrated ordinary pleasures oflooking, listening, and making; of traditional and
~videnced by the sequence in which Husain likens rolling dough to mixing paint, and
natural spaces; and of slowing down, rather than speeding up, time.
therefore, making roti (bread) to making art.
A romance of the Indian village was key to the film's accomplishment, yet this was
not the village ofSatyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy (1955-1959), which included Father Panchali
(Song of the Little Road) (1955), Aparajito (The Unvanquished) (1956), and Apur Sansar PAINTER AS PICTURE SHOWMAN: THE PAINTINGS
(The World of Apu) (1959).105 Based on a novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, Father AND PERFORMANCES OF 1968-1971
Panchali, the first film in the trilogy, was set in 1920s Bengal and portrayed the travails
Like those who depict Infernos, loud singers paint unrealities on the
of a Brahmin family struggling with debt, disaster, poverty, and privation. The premise
canvas of the air (canvas, air= ambara). 109
of the film was an essential distance between the city and the village as exemplified in
ANANDA K. COOMARASWAMY.
the famous scene in whicli the young Apu and his sister Durga race through rice fields "" PICTURE SHOWMEN " (1929)
to catcli a glimpse of the fast train billowing smoke, which functions as a metaphor for
modernity, the city, and the cinema. Apu and his parents' tragic departure on an oxcart And Ramlila! It was not street theater at all but an unforgettable
from their ancestral home for the city of Banaras at the end of the film highlights the experience. The characters of the old myth took fantastic shapes. It was
distance between the village and city. A storm lantern dangles below their cart and rocks more than real. It was magical.110
to the movement of its wheels, symbolizing hopes dashed and dreams destroyed. The HU SAIN, IN CONVERSATION
WITH GOWRI RAMNARAYAN (1997)
village Apu leaves behind is the site of death, highlighted by the ominous snake that
slithers into the abandoned family home.
Through the Eyes of a Painter anticipated the way in which Husain took his art to the
By contrast, Husain's film suggests, through its camerawork and sound, greater inti- people in 19 68 at the suggestion of socialist politician Ram Manohar Lohia, who advi~ed
macy between the city and village. The pace of Through the Eyes of a Painter is rapid, set him to create art for new, non-elite publics.111 According to K. Bikram Singh, Husam's
to folk rather than classical rh th d· .
. Y ms, an its 1ens moves qmckly, even randomly, through biographer, Lohia said to the artist: "Stop painting for Tatas and Birlas [two of India's
vanous forms of village work. 106 It moves to -the beat of musical instruments native to most prominent family-owned conglomerates]. Start painting for the _c ~mmon_~an.
Rajasthan such as the Sindh"1 · b ..
sarangi ( owed fiddle), man11ra (cymbals), matka (clay Paint Ramayana."112 Commissioned by Hyderabad-based patron Badnv1shal P1tt1e, a
pot), and bhapang (plucked dru ) d .
. m , an transmutes the polyphony of ordmary sounds- Lohia supporter, Husain staged paintings based on the Hindu epic poem the Ramay~na
people walking, water pouring b 11 h " . . .
, e s c 1mmg-as they were heard and experienced m in the annual Ramlila performances (reenacting the Ramayana) of a village outside
everyday life. A passage from H · , b"
. . . usams auto JOgraphy, Where Art Thou (2002), reveals the city of Hyderabad in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.m The artist studi_ed
his interest m the capacity of th d
e every ay to generate art: "The sister-in-law, the bhabhi, the poem with a Hindu priest and took approximately twenty paintings from the senes
118 • MAN "AND MAHABHARATA

MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN ' 119
to rural India by bullock cart, thus playing out "a self.elected role as a modern-day great crowd of inquisitive
.. .
children," holding out a " · t d
pam e canvas stretched out on the
sutradhar (narrator, storyteller, performer, stage manager] for the nation.'' 114 In the support of rods m one hand and "wielding a reed w d · h"
. . . an m 1s other hand."119 This fi .
197Os, Kapur described Husain's paintings as "stage props in a nautanki [folk theater] ure of the painter as mag1c1an and salesman operatin · th bi" g
. . . .. gm e pu JC space of the bazaar
performance of the Ramalila near a village in Hyderabad_"m This signaled a reversal of corresponds with the hvmg trad1t10ns of many commu ·r f .
. . . . m ies o artists and artisans in
conventional hierarchies between art and crafts-designated here by the rural, folk per- India, mcludmg the bhopas m RaJasthan, patuas in Bengal gar0 d . G .
• • as m u1arat, and gollas
formance of the Ramalila-whereby the modernist master's paintings were consigned in Telangana, whose . practices
. . are often termed "folk performa nces. •120 F"l1 mmakers m
.
to th~ status of prop and the nautanki players took center stage. India from DhundiraJ Govmd Phalke (1870-1944) and Prithvi·ra·J Kapoor (1901-1972)
Whereas Through the Eyes of a Painter marked the transport of rural art to the city, to Raj Kapoor (1924-1988) and Yash Raj Chopra (1932- 2012 ), often referred to in the
Husain's Ramayana paintings marked the transport of urban art to the village. This per- country's English-language press as "dream merchants," have also functioned as pic-
formative exchange between village and city-iflargely symbolic and limited in impact- ture showmen, at once performers, producers, directors, and writersm Contemporary
was Husain's unique contribution to modernist practice. In the 193Os, painters such as artist Nikhil Chopra performed the identity of picture showman in his Memory Drawing
Sher-Gil, Baij. Bose, and Roy located themselves in the village to produce an authentic series (2007-2009). However, in the art world of the 1960s, artists and critics held the
national art, often repudiating the city and modern technology. Following Gandhi, they picture showman of the rural theater and urban cinema at a distance from the practice
viewed the village and the city in opposition to and competition with each other. There of modernist painting. In claiming the identity of picture showman, Husain offered a
could be little traffic between spaces that were defined and differentiated by their associa- critique of dominant notions of art, the artist, and art-making.
tions with East and West, nationalism and colonialism, handmade products and mechani- Consider how the artist remembered the intention and reception of his Ramayana
cal technologies. Moreover, these spaces represented separate spheres of art and crafts, paintings in a 1992 interview with Yashodhara Dalmia:
which Ruskin--:-whose writing initiated Husain into art history-had memorably called
"The Two Paths" in his inaugural lecture at the South Kensington Museum in 1858.116 I painted the epic not from the religious angle, but for the people. After Lohiaji [Ram
The public event Six Days of Making at Shridharani Gallery in New Delhi in 1968- Manohar Lohia] died, these paintings were taken on bullock cart to a village about eighty
1969 was the logical conclusion to Husain's experiments in film and performance of kilometers from Hyderabad and were spread out there. There were these six feet and ten
1967-1968, through which he raised consciousness about art. Bartholomew recalled feet high paintings of[the gods] Hanuman and Ram strewn around and the villagers sat
Husain's response to his suggestion that he invite people to watch him at work: "That's enthralled for about three hours while Borakatha [Burrakatha, a folk storytelling style
a brilliant idea, come to think of it. Why not? Let's call it something; let us show every- native to Andhra Pradesh] singers sang the epic. No one asked where are [sic] Ram's eyes
or why a particular painting was done in a particular manner. 122
one how a painting is made. Everyone. Some will consider this a stunt-but there will
be people who will look more closely at their paintings after this."117 Note the artist's
emphasis-at least in the critic's mind and memory-between making and viewing. Husain's goal of painting for the "people" resonated with the "everyone" that was his
Husain wished to take art to the people, to have an audience examine its process and intended audience in Delhi. The way his large paintings were "spread out" and "strewn"
craftsmanship, to look upon painting as practice. Although many in the art world, then in a rural environment recalled their staging in Through the Eyes of a Painter, where
and now, would view Husain's painting and performance as "a stunt," the two modes Husain's work found a home on mud walls and sandy soil. The artist's recollection of
went hand in hand for this artist. He cultivated the identity of puppeteer, performer, the villagers' embrace of his art-no questions asked-pointed to his belief in their
projectionist, and picture showman in order to reach "everyone." This "everyone" intuitive understanding of creative work.
referred to an expanded public for art, and it continued Sher-Gil's efforts to generate an The village and its people were the repository of national culture, as they had been
"art of the soil" that was organic and authentic. In his quest for such a public, Husain for Husain's predecessors, but his village did not function in isolation from and contra-
troubled and transformed boundaries of elite and popular practice. distinction to the city. Nor did its cultural production figure as pure motif and symbol
The category of picture showmen, proposed by Ananda K. C:oomaraswamy in 1929 to embodied in vessels such as the Santhal woman or terra-cotta pot. Instead the village
describe yamapattaka (painters ofYama, god of death), traditional exhibitors of Hindu was a place of live action and Jiving audiences for art. Through the Eyes of a Painter,
and Jain narratives in South and Southeast Asia, can encompass the humble bioscopewal- and the paintings and performances that followed it, seemed to realize the stage set of
lah and the big Bombay filmmaker in modern India.U 8 Citing an example from Bana's Between the Spider and the Lamp and theatricalize an encounter between the village and
Harsha-carita ' a Sanskr"t
1 b"10graph Y of t h e Hmdu
· · Harsha dating to the sevent h the city, and between radically divergent notions of cultural production emblematized
kmg
c::entury, Coomaraswamy conjured a picture showman active in a "bazaar street amid a by Borakatha performance and easel painting.

120 . MAN AND MAHAB "HARATA
cessional trickster, amateur magician, and itinerant singer-st t II
1' ory e er common to ma
oflndia's urban and rural cultures. ny
At a twenty-year retrospective exhibition held in Bomb ,5 J h .
. . . . . ay e ang1r Art Gallery in
19 9 ' Husam installed
6
.
his pamtmgs alongside "a painted Fi.at [ ] . h l'fi .
. . car wit I e-s1zed fig-
ures, a smal~ r~om with wooden puppets ms1de as in villages and Salle de Bal, a black
tent with a dmmg room. The tent could be looked into like a peep-show."128 This traffic
between performance and painting, between the ballroom and peep show, between the
Fiat car and wooden puppets, bespoke a visual imagination that thrived on the modali-
ties of props, panoramas, procession, and pilgrimage. This imagination can be related
to what Sandria B. Freitag has called a distinct "visual vocabulary of the nation" that
emerged in the public cultures of modern India through the intersection of various
media (painting, print, photography, and cinema) and their circulation and reception,
specifically, "South Asian courtly culture, religious practices including the centrality of
darshan [seeing and being seen] and the special reshaping effected under bhakti [popu-
lar devotion], and live performance traditions." 129 Husain located his art firmly within
this vocabulary. Take this marvelous passage on art-making from his autobiography:
"He [Husain] made a grand paper palace complete with a royal durbar [court assembly]
FIGURE SS- and a king's chamber, out of the empty packets of Passing Show cigarettes discarded
Richard Bartholomew, Krishen Khanna (left), Ram Kumar (centre), and Virender Kumar (right) at by his Uncle Murad. Scissors snipped to create latticed jharoka windows, the robes of
a gathering at Krishen's home, New Delhi, ea. 1967, photograph. Artwork and image© Richard
the raja [king] and his queen, mini-elephants and horses and parrots perched on baby
Bartholomew/Estate of Richard Bartholomew.
trees. Like the devout carrying taaziyas on their head during Muharram, he carried this
wonder exhibit to the school's annual fete. He was awarded the first prize in arts and
Such gestures toward rethinking the role of art and remaking what it meant to be an crafts.'' 130 In this world of Husain's creation, art and crafts were bound together as were
artist in India have received little critical attention. They have been reduced to crowd- elite and popular cultures, represented by royal costumes and Passing Show cigarette
pleasing stunts and advertising gimmicks or attributed to the artist's innate folksy, packs, and secular and religious practices, represented by school fetes and Muharram
naive, itinerant, or childlike personality. 123 However, what Sumathi Ramaswamy has processions. Art was a "wonder exhibit," extraordinary but crafted from the everyday,
called Husain's "Judie nomadism" charted a distinct path between domains of practice snipped and conjoined by hand.rn
and worlds of experience that were kept apart in mid-twentieth-century India. 124 His A similar method can be observed in the artist's mature works. Kapur describes
determined crisscrossing and crosscutting of these domains and worlds had aesthetic Husain's technique in Man: "The joinery at the seams of the cut-out figures resembles
and political aims and effects. the rough stitching of a tailor's white thread so that the composite image becomes a
In the 1960s and afterward, Husain occupied the paradoxical position of being paste-and-stitch collage. Man is the first 'sample' of the virtuoso in Husain but the
bohemian and populist, _nonconformist and commercial, elite and entertaining. He virtuosity carries the poignancy of an explorative, craftsmanly, language-seeking hand
presented a model of the artist rather different from the cerebral Ram Kumar or elegant that will acquire, and later squander, the gift of great draughting talent." 132 She com-
Krishen Khanna, gathered together with other male comrades from the art world, seri- pares Husain's collagist technique to the craftsmanship of a tailor, punning on the
ous suits smoking and talking intensely in a book-lined living room with oil paintings words joinery, sample, seam, and stitch and mixing metaphors of modernist and non-
hanging on the wall, as depicted in a 1967 portrait by Bartholomew (fig. 55). 125 Bar- modernist modes of production.m Nevertheless, for Kapur, the resulting painting-a
tholomew recalled that Husain organized, often impulsively, informal salons where masterpiece-is "emphatically modernist" and "cubist" and Husain is a craftsman-
"house painters and carpenters ... sat with artists." 126 According to Bartholomew, the turned-draftsman.134 In her account, craftsmanship is a sign of virtuosity, an individ-
artist's generosity left no room for snobbery in what might have otherwise been "awk- ual trait-perhaps even a badge of male artistic genius-but not a social or political
ward occasions." 127 By contrast to the contemplative male figures in Bartholomew's commitment.
pho_tograph, Husain adopted an artistic persona akin to a picture showman-the pro- What if, in our assessment of Husain's career, crafts were to operate as more th an
MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN 123

122 • MAN ANO MA·HABHARATA
metaphor and residual trace? His practice of painting-as-performance proposed a syn. 146 ,
in Rajasthan. In. these .early studies, craft was a capacious and sh'fi 1 tmg category that
chronic ' not diachronic relationship between art and crafts, and a commitm ~~
. .
and I d
135 encompassed textile traditions and wall paintings sound scu pture, an the work
translation across media and sites constituted as separate. It was a critique ofb ound- •
of men and women, amateurs and professiona ls.
· .
aries established by canons, schools, textbooks, and institutions of British colon 1a1sm
1 .
Husain's uncle and man Through their collective efforts, a notion of crafts-broa dly defined as nonmo dermst
and Indian nationalism. Art was not a "useless activity," as activity emerged in
and nonclassical forms, genres, practices, and media-as creative
Indians in the 1960s believed, but a livelihood and a technique of enchantme nt aki; through exhibitions such as
the late 1960s and was consolidate d in the 197Os and 1980s
to crafts.13 6 as the Crafts Museum
Aditi: The Living Arts of India (1985-1986 ) and institutions such
Such notions distinguished him from many of his peers for whom art was anmtel- ·
in New Delhi. The pioneering artists and activists of the crafts revival movement
147
lectual and highly interiorized pursuit. Bartholomew, one of Husain's most ..
sensitive
of the mind Thi· · . rejected the idea of crafts as unskilled repetition, unimaginative labor, unchanging
and sympathetic critics, understood art as "a theatre ·
"137
s cntic read
essence, and the antithesis of art. Husain was early and progressive in his insistence
the artist's work through a formalist and subjectivist lens ' describing th e process of
. . " . 138 on the modernity of crafts and, by extension, the tradition of art. Crafts could be tech-
pam~mg_ from genesis t~ revelation." For Bartholomew, transcend ence-not com-
nological, art could be national, Husain's modernist paintings, performances, and
mumca!Jon or commumon. with people-wa s the purpose of art ·139 H e un d erstood
. , . . · I mastery of film proposed.
Husam s pamtmg as essentially an art of "poetic expressionism"·, te ch mca
.
compressio n of me . . By painting Hindu epics, Husain extended these insights to the relationship between
lme, color, and form;. and "the work of aesthetic mory commg mto
. . . . 140
,
"viv'd d • the classical and the folk, state-sanctioned and widely recognized divisions of Indian
bemg mall its plastic eqmvalents." This art had the character of a
fleeting mood.141 I ream or culture. The Ramayana and Mahabharata span great and little traditions, though there
are key differences between Sanskritic and regional or vernacular versions. These
148
.Yet Husain aspire~ to a m~re ordinary and everyday practice of art even as he engaged epics can be rendered in classical and folk forms ; Husain rendered them national and
epic themes and sub1ects. His projects of the late 1960s and early 197Os were comm1t- . for
· modernist. His Mahabharata paintings, a series of twenty-nine canvases executed
d exchange
te to m~g over the classical into the folk and vice versa, to enacting an characters and events from the
the Bienal de Sao Paulo in 1971, referred to specific
between India's "great" and "littl e• tra d itions. ·· 142
The notion of great and little traditions epic with titles such as Bhima, Bhishma, Kauravas, A,juna with Chariot (fig. 47) , and
149
:~s; f~om an account of the division of social and cultural life in India into Sanskritic Duryodhana Arjuna Split (fig. 56) , yet they represented a modern and secular mythos.
flu:tsm (the cl~~sical) and its others (the folk) . Although scholars have emphasize d Husain was invited to show his work in an exclusive exhibition space at the biennial;
. ty and mob1hty across these categories, they were often polarized in popular Picasso was the only other artist to receive such an invitation that year. His decision to
d1scourse and practice In mid tw - h
. .. · · entiet -century India the theory of Sanskritization ' paint the Mahabharata was in response to the perceived honor of exhibiting alongside
wherebY I1tt1e traditions and th . .
b ul . e groups associated with them achieved upward mobility an artist he had long admired. In Husain's view, the Mahabharata was a subject worthy
y ~tmch_atibng great ones, was influential. Since the 1980s, scholars have discussed code- of the occasion and of Picasso.1so Husain sketched extensively and studied C. Rajago-
SW! mg etween the great a d J'ttl d. ·
India' cla . 1 d n I e tra itions, and proposed a continuum between palachari's English translation of the Mahabharata, originally published in 1951, with a
s ssica an folk practices.143
tenth edition published in 1970. The artist researched the paintings over eight months
Such insights into cultural exchan . . 1 1
ho · · h ge, mediation, and translation were not on the and eventually produced them in a temporary, makeshift studio in Paris. s
nzon m t e 1960s when H . d
painting as a kind 0 f fc usam ma e Through the Eyes of a Painter and presented The premise of the Rajagopalachari translation was that the epic was living tradi-
per ormance. In 19 65 th . . .
awards for "M te C fts ' e government oflnd1a mstJtuted national tion for many Indians, though contemporary audiences received the Ramayana and
as r ra men • reco · · fi
Stella Kramrisch . d ' gruzmg era ts as special and skilled labor. In 1968, the Mahabharata "embroidered with garish fancies of the Kalakshepam [also known as
organize the exhibition U known Ina·ia: Ritual . Art m . Tribe and Village Kathakalashepa, a performance involving song and storytelling native to Tamil Nadu]
at the Philadel h · M n
h . .
p ia useum of Art In pa II I . h t ese mstJtutional initiatives, vari-
· ra e wit and the cinema as to retain but little of the dignity and approach to the truth of Vyasa
ous individuals unde t k 12
r oo surveys ofcr ft
Surv fl d" a s
d I
an rura folkways in the r96os. Working for and Valmiki [scribes of the Sanskrit Mahabharata and Ramayana, respectively]." s Raja-
the Anthropolo gical popular
ey o n ia between 1962 an d 1 9 64, scuIptor Meera Mukherjee gopalachari's translation was intended to serve as a corrective to such folk and
researched The Metalc •Ii .
raJ'smen of India (1978) I« ArtJst . H k h corruptions, yet he imagined himself as a modern storyteller "for dear Tamil children"
Swiss ethnographer Eh h d . · a u S ah collaborated with
er ar Fischer on a stud Yo erafit tra d'Jt1ons
h
f . .
m rural Gujarat.145 and "hoped the reading of these stories might enliven village evenings, when rustics
Artist Jyoti Bhatt ph t . . 1 3
o ograp ed and docum t d h 11
e t e wa pamtmgs and terra-cotta art of gather socially in the chavadi [meeting place] or temple after their day's work is done." s
Gujarat while folkl . t Komal Koth · en h
' ons
an gat ered and recorded the music of the Langas He understood himself as part of a lineage of "gifted reciters," who interpreted and
124 . IAAN ANO IAAHABHAR ATA MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN • 125
. f them to the lives of ordina ry Indian s. 154 This
added to the ep!CS, connec mg under.
·. d . . .
standmg was s11are Y t b H isain whose Mahabharata pamtm gs recited , restag ed,
• and
re-created the epic.
. , . ,
Take Duryo d,iana A']·una Split · in which the artists palette refers to P1Casso s Guer-
.,ca d H ·n·s early work The nude female figure
11 an to usa1 · , facing the viewer on the left
0 f the canvas , w1
'tll finoers held up to her face, recalls the yellow
" -skinned damsel in
Between the Spider and the Lamp. Husain struct ures
the canvas aroun d two semic ircula r
forms resembling the split halves of a black sun, a
central motif in Zameen. Two female
fioures stand on the left, while a grotesque three-
headed male figure is seated on the
ri;ht, gesturing toward the center of the composition
with a raised arm. These figures
are not easily identifiable as the hero Arjuna and
his villainous cousin Duryo dhana ,
named in the painting's title. Bean's identification
of the figures as the blind king Dhri-
trashtra and his blindfolded queen , Gandhari, witnes
s-observers to the epic rather than
its main protagonists, is compelling. The flat, partiti
oned space of the compo sition and
sketchy, spare figures evoke popular and vernacular
formats such as the tableau, pan-
orama, film still, and comic strip. The splits and cuts
of Duryodhana Arjuna Split, like
those of Ganga Jamuna (fig. 57), can be related to contem
porary political events, specifi-
cally India's war with Pakistan in 1971, a "fratricidal
conflict" that resona tes with the
subject of tl1e Mahabharata. 155 Yet they also extend
the struct ural play betwe en darkn ess
and light, ernblematized by the spider and the lamp,
in painti ngs like Man and Zameen,
and reiterate Husain's interest in painting as a time-b
ased art that unfold s like cinem a
or performance (precisely the media lamented by
Rajagopalachari).
The Mahabharata paintings refer to Husai n's pictur
es and those of others . Altho ugh
Bean noted a citation ofMichelangelo's Adam from
the Sistine Chapel in Duryodhana
Arjuna Split, outstretched arms and spread-out hands
were a long-s tandin g feature of
Husain's oeuvre.156 In Zameen, the hand combined
reference to Le Corbu sier's open
hand, a symbol of modernist Chandigarh and Nehru
vian India, and the panja (palm)
associated with saintly or gifted individuals, a symbo
l of traditional knowledge and folk
religious belief. In Through the Eyes of a Painter,
hands repres ented the makin g and
magic of artists and craftsmen. In Arjuna with Chario
t, a pair of abstract and abbreviated
hands , painted in white, mimicked the elongated
forms of horses ' heads and an ele- FIGURE 56.
phant's trunk. Positioned above a wooden cart, presum M F H ain Duryodhana Arjuna Splil (Mahab1rnrata ·
ably the chario t of the painti ng's 9), 1971. acrylic on canvas . T he Cl1ester an d
title, these dynamic figures are animals, toys, and D~v;da :en;it z Collection, Peabody Essex Museum
icons like the symbols that anima ted . Salem, Massachusetts, E300243. Artwork ©
Husain's 1967 film. The fingers at the center of the Estate ofM .F. Husain ; image courtesy of the Peabod
y Essex Museu m .
composition spin a golden chakra
(wheel), which represents artistic creation as much
as cosmic strugg les and dharmic FIGURE 57.
(ethical) obligation, the subjects of Krishna's discou .
M.F. Husam , Ganga Jamuna (Mahab harata 12), 197 1, oil on canvas . T h e Chester an d D ·'da Henvitz
rse to Arjun a in the face of battle. ' a-.
Husain's Mahabharata series pointed to the existe . p b d)' Essex Museum Salem, Massachusetts, f
E30024 4 . Artwork © Estate o M. F·
ntial and everyday throug h a well- o
C llect1on, ea o · ·
developed vocabulary that encompassed Husain's Husain : image courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museu
projects in various media . m.
In this series, Husain's technique can be likene
d to storyboarding a film. Daniel
Herwitz noted: "Some [ofMahabharata paintings)
seem to layer filmic images telescopi_-
cally. Together these paintings can be read as if the
precis of a film." 157 Unlike Raja go-
126 · t.liHl ANO MAHA BH,.RA TA
_ . L->, _~ dnfi!lZ a.:id perfcrma= to be authentic national-cultural
~ 1 , Husam v=!!e°i"r:u ~ were not separate, as evidenced by Man , Zameen, Through the Eyes of a Painter, and the
fzms ~ equip;,ea tD ccr.n·e:,- the ..onder of the epic -~ ~o modern audiences.
Mahabharata series. Unbounded imagination and skilled repetition were operative in
_- I:".--'-'''-
The ar-~-t --'•'-.....-effects
,,,.,,.,=..: ui,c:~
ofimme<liacy and pmxirmty m his Mahabharata paint-
art and crafts, the city and the village, and West and East.
oz. "6idi zt o:-= es-oked bi1lboards and Picasso's Guernk a. The scale and seriality of This view of the artist's career and achievements requires reading the artist's words
th:..-~ pair::ings suggest an engagement v;ith narram-e traditions such as those of the
and those of his critics against the grain. Husain's showmanship has often been under-
R=li!z zrirl Eorakatha performances that Husain admired. In link ing painting and
stood in opposition to his artistry rather than as an essential component ofit. For many
an= with fofk theater and epic poetry, the artist presents modernist media as capable
critics and art historians, the artist's flair for commerce-sales, marketing, and exhibi-
of ger.emi.ng oztional forms. tion-detracted from his art instead of contributing to it. Noting Husain's talents as "a
Gi>en the stat us of modernist art and the artist in public discourses of the period,
kind of performance artist," whereby "his work becomes almost incidental to the actual
this w-a.s an original. ew:n radical, proposition_ In 1963, critic S.A_ Krishnan deplored life process and the way he puts it on stage," Kapur wrote: "The artist's performance has
tls.e hypocrisy of haw on one hand · we talk of one world and internationalism" and, on come within the process of commodification." 160 This commodification, for the critic,
the other hand, ·demand total traditional purity and national fidelity of the modem art- was acquiescence to capitalist and cultural nationalist logics. However, by the standards
ist_•m He condemned "tradition-mongering" in the art world: "U1timately it is not what of the picture showman, making wonder was doing work. The picture showman was
is painted or sculpted that lends a worlc its 'Indian' character, but it is that indescribable artist as well as technician, advertiser, and dealer.
unobtrusfre apprehension of and affinity with the past.. .. It does not matter if his [the Husain's translation of practices across media and sites was a critique of dominant
axtist's] worlc shows influences of an extraneous character. So do many other activities paradigms of art, the artist, and art-making in India (though this critique was perhal'.s
in our life. When we think of the Nangal dam, the steel works ofBhilai or Durgapur, we more intuitive for Husain than for Subramanyan, whose critique took more academic
do not confuse their identity with the countries that helped us to build them." Modem and systematic forms). His translation cannot be reduced to eclecticism or virtuo_s-
art 1.vas no-less Indian than steel plants and gravity dams for, as Krishnan wrote, "we ity; it represented a commitment to probing the boundaries of East a~d West. Husam
have changed inevitably and organically and we must face this fact .. .. Why single out understood himself as a postcolonial master who would emulate the pICture showman
the artist for 'infection' from the West when it is occurring all around us and for very of India's great and little traditions to invent a distinctive modernist language. :h~s
good reason too?" In Krishnan's opinion, "the jet aircraft and the bullock cart do go picture showman was not the antithesis of modernity, but instead its emblematic, if
159
together for the time being." In his practice of the 1960s and early 1970s, Husain shape-shifting, figure.
aimed to transform the modem artist into a national worker, to unite the logics of the
jet aircraft and the bullock cart, and to synthesize the handmade and the mechanical.
Husain played with folk, rural, popular, and vernacular forms long before it was
fashionable or commonplace. This playfulness was different from crafts documentation
projects under way in the 1960s or efforts at crafts revival by the state and its agencies,
which are addressed in the following chapter on Subramanyan. It was also different
from the work of those artists that used crafts as a static symbol of the Gandhian village
or of a rural past that Jnd 1·a· d ·· ha . . .
. .. . s mo em c11Jzens d left behmd. Husam's play mtroduced
mstabil1ty m the relationship bet • d . • .. .
ween mo ermst art and "trad1t10nal" crafts, creatmg
the possibility for permeabTty 1 1 d
. an porousness between them. It challenged patroniz-
ing and primitivizing views ofth -11 d . .
. . e VI age an crafts, whICh were often collapsed m pub-
he discourses of the 1950 a d 1 6 d. .
. s n 9 os, an 11 resisted evolutionary and developmentalist
paradigms for conceiving the .
. se categories. In Through the Eyes of a Painter, Husain did
not valonze crafts as the pa t Of b . ..
· s art, ut rendered 1t contemporary, cnt1cal, and avant-
garde; hence the sounds of ever d
Y ay movements and activities in an ordinary household
were the material of a Cagean ..
. compos11Jon. Through this play, Husain proposed not
an eqwvalence between art and fi b
. . era ts, ut analogies between these modes of making
an d th mkmg, of constructing d .
an creatmg, of being and doing. The hand and mind
128 .• \.IAN ANO MAHABHARATA

MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN • 129
AFFILIATION, WORLDLINESS,
AND MODERNISM IN INDIA
THE MODERN IN THE CONTEMPORARY
Everybody Agrees: It's About to Explode was the intriguing title oflndia's national pavilion
at the Fifty-Fourth Venice Biennale in 2011. The ambiguous pronoun "it" could refer
to the nation-state, contemporary art, the art market, or a variety of myths about any
of these entities. 1 Sponsored by the Lalit Kala Akademi (National Academy of Art) and
curated by Ranjit Hoskote, the pavilion marked India's first official representation at
the international art event, though Indian artists had shown work there as early as
1954. 2 This pavilion took its place among others in Venice in a year when the Bien-
nale theme was IllumiNATIONS. That title was a reference to the writings of Walter
Benjamin, witness-observer and critic of capitalist modernity par excellence, and an
index of how several nations were represented at the Biennale as ruins. 3 The Chinese
pavilion, Pervasion, curated by Peng Feng, occupied a warehouselike structure and dis-
played fragments from a national-cultural past: ceramic pots, ink painting, industrial
containers, and rubber tubing. The artworks in this pavilion functioned as artifacts and
omens, sprinkling water and spraying incense at viewers to awaken their sensorium.
For Benjamin, the ruin was the material of history, a site of destruction that was also a
place of production.4 The ruin was a tool to separate myths from matter, to see the old
in the new, to reconstruct the past and reimagine the present.
At the Indian pavilion, the nation came into view as dream and detritus, or dream-
world and catastrophe, to use Susan Buck-Morss's phrase, in the work of the five artists
on display: Zarina Hashmi, Praneet Soi, Gigi Scaria, and the Desire Machine Collective
(Sona! Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya).5 Zarina's portfolio (the artist prefers to be
known by her first name) of thirty-six woodblock prints, Home Js a Foreign Place (
1999 ;
fig . 1), evokes a sense of no-place and every-place. Spare grids, globes, and lines signify
entities such as "country," "sky," "stars," and "distance," testaments to a diasporic life
and displaced belonging. Born in Aligarh in 1937, the artist has lived and worked in
New York City since 1975. Her Homes I Made/A Life in Nine Lines (1997), a portfolio
of nine etchings and one cover plate, features floor plans of houses in Bangkok, Santa
Cruz, Paris, and Aligarh, while Cities I Called Home (2010) , a portfolio of five woodcut
prints, renders maps of cities from Delhi to Tokyo, precisely and poetically delineated in
black and white with Urdu inscriptions. Such homes yield a fugitive image of "Country"
as the sum of repeated squares, alternating positive and negative space on a rectan-
gular grid.
In Residue (fig. 2), a 35 mm film with sound by the Desire Machine Collective, the
camera lingers over giant metal drums, rusted pipes, peeling paint, and proliferating
moss at an abandoned thermal power plant near Guwahati in northeastern India. In an
age of live feed , split screens, jump cuts, and short takes, the haunting blues, greens,
grays, and rusts of the collective's film slow down time as it loops every thirty-nine
minutes. It constitutes the nation as a ruin, made up of ruins like the power plant that
were once monuments to industrial modernity and socialist planning. This ruin bears
accretions that demand analysis, leaking smoky gases and viscous liquids into the atmo-
sphere, spilling substances to be examined by the viewer. It holds together event and
thing, carrying the marks of time and traces of process.
This image of the nation at the Venice Biennale was the antithesis of the spectacle
of Antilia, industrialist Mukesh Ambani's towering home in Mumbai, which stands in
the center of the city at twenty-seven stories high , employs a staff of six hundred, and
has three helicopter pads. Antilia is a glittering sign of the new India, like the shopping
malls and office parks that have arisen in recent times. Such signs of the nation are the
ones often on view in the West, noted by business investors and news media alike. These
signs, along with images of persistent poverty, disease, disorder, and disaster, have come
to represent a dichotomy between new and old India in the twenty-first century.
Siddhartha Deb's The Beautiful and th e Damned: A Portrait of the New India (2012)
borrows its title from F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel of 1920s America and begin s with a
chapter entitled "Gatsby in New Delhi."6 Chronicling the lives of capitalists and workers,
it presents a nation divided by extremes of prosperity and privation. Between 2008 and
2010, the New York Times featured articles on the poor modeling Fendi bibs and Burberry
umbrellas as part of an advertising campaign for the Indian edition of Vog11e magazine;
FIC.URE 1,
the care of pampered dogs by their doting owners in New Delhi; and of course, th e rise
Zarina, Country, from the portfolio Home Is a Foreign Place, 1999, portfolio of thirty-six woodcuts 7
of Antilia, so named after a mythical island sought by early modern explorers. Each of
with Urdu text, printed in black on Kozo paper, mounted on Somerset paper, edition of twenty-five
and five Roman numeral sets. Image size: 8 x 6 in. (20.32 x 15.24 cm). Sheet size: 16 x 13 in. (40.64 x these reports sensationally enacted a contrast between new and old India. Yet contem-
33.02 an). Artwork and image courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
MODE R NI SM •· 3
AFF I LIATION , WORLDLINESS . A N D
porary art from India at the Venice Biennale in 20n offered a more complex picture of
a society in transition.
A sense of the modem as passing was conveyed in the official exhibition by Dayanita
Singh's elegiac File Room (2011; fig. 3). Black-and-white photographs of rooms over-
flowing with bastas (cloth portfolios} conjure the work of the state and its institutions:
courts, hospitals, municipal authorities, and district offices. Singh focuses her lens on
the materiality of archives, at once weighty and transitory, showing histories embodied
in paper and lives escaping the grasp of records. Time stands still on metal shelves and
stone floors , silent witnesses to the footsteps of clerks and keepers and the machinery of
requisitions and petitions. Ghostly presences mark the empty spaces of Singh's photo-
graphs of factories, laboratories, cinemas, shops, homes, and monuments in contempo-
rary India. With her Hasselblad camera, Singh has established herself as flaneur of the
late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century. Collectively, the artworks by Zarina, the
Desire Machine Collective, and Singh at the Venice Biennale summoned the viewer as
a critical archaeologist of national remains and offered no visions of future glory. This
stance was ironic for the work of national representation at an international art exhibi-
tion committed to mid-century notions of progress, culture, and diplomacy evident in
permanent pavilions, patronage systems, and public relations for the event. Foreign
ministries and departments of culture commission artwork; the exhibition is visited
and legitimated by dignitaries and delegations. An official internationalism reigns at
the Venice Biennale even as individual artists and artworks are often critical of the
nation-state and of market logics that prevail at the exhibition and in the art world more
generally.
By choosing artists working in and from distinct locations (New York, Mumbai, Kol-
kata, Amsterdam, and Guwahati}, Hoskote wished to highlight different perspectives
on and ways of being Indian. 8 This was not the Nehruvian project of unity in diversity
whereby difference-of caste, class, gender, ethnicity, region, and religion-was placed
in service of a centralized nation-state. Nor was this a postnational forecast of free-
flowing artifacts and freely floating agents under globalization. Instead Hoskote sought
to decenter notions of nation and world that inform our perceptions of artistic prac-
tice. Contrary to popular and scholarly discourses on contemporary art that stress the
commoditizing and homogenizing effects of the international art world, he insisted on
the importance of specific location and individual belonging. This insistence stemmed
from a particular understanding of the relationship between past and present and
between modern and contemporary art. Despite variation in the affect and address of
the artworks representing India at the Venice Biennale, they shared a mode of memo-
rializing, even mourning, the modem, a mode at odds with dominant discourses on
contemporary art and the new world order it marked.9
FIGURE 2. Contemporary Indian art is "booming and shaking." pronounced the New York Times
The Desire Machine Collective {Mriganka Madhukaillya and Sona! Jain), Residue, 2ou, in 2007, employing a metaphor of the "new India" that had come into being since the
35 mm film with sound, thirty-nine minutes looped. Artwork and image courtesy of the economic reforms of the r99os. 10 "A Whole New World" was how the Economist charac-
artists.
FIGURE 3.
Dayanita Singh, File Room, 20n, pigment print. Artwork and image courtesy of the
artist. AFFILIATION . WORLDLINESS . AND MODE R NISM · 5
tcrizcJ tht' international art market with the emergence of:irtists, collectors, and dealers
in China , India, Iran, and Turkey. 11 By so me estimates, the Indian art market grew in
12
value from $2 million in 2001 to $400 million in 2008. An explosion of interest in
contemporary art has been evident in cla ssrooms and museums worldwide and in the
rise of biennales and triennales in non-Western locations from Sharjah to Singapore.
For many observers, these developments signal a changed landscape for the production
and co nsumption of art in the twenty-first century. As Holland Cotter noted in 2ou,
"Not long ago the contemporary market meant Europe and America. Now it also means
New Delhi, Beijing and Dubai." 13 Amid this frenzied commercial and cultural activity,
there has been relatively little inquiry into the longer histories of these developments,
which is to say, of the modern art movements, artworks, and artists that rendered this FIGURE 4,
contemporary art possible. Nikhil Chopra , What Will I Do with
This forgetfulness is neither innocent nor inconsequentia l. Art historian Kobena This Land?, 2005, digital photograph
on archival paper. Costume designer,
Mercer has asked : "Why does 'the contemporary' so often take precedence over the
Tabesheer Zutshi; photography by
'historical' as the privileged focus for examining matters of difference and identity?
Shivani Gupta . Artwork and image
Does the heightened 'visibility' of black and minority artists in private galleries and courtesy of the artist and Chatterjee
public museums really mean that the historical problem of 'invisibility' is now a prob- and Lal, Mumbai.
lem solved and dealt with? To what extent has the curating of non-western materials in FIGURE 5.
blockbuster exhibitions led to visual culture displays that may actually obscure the fine Nikhil Chopra, Yog Raj Chitrakar:
14
art traditions of countries that experienced colonialism and imperialism?" Through Memory Drawing VI (1 8.0 0), 2009.
these rhetorical questions, Mercer points to costs of a new-found visibility for minority digital photograph on archival paper.
Costume designer. Tabesheer Zutshi;
and non-Western artists in the art world since the 1980s. The hypervisibility of the con-
photography by Shivani Gupta.
temporary has led to the relative invisibility not only of the modern but also of historical Kusten Festival des Arts, Brussels.
links between the modern and the contemporary. Belgium . Artwork and image
Yet, as the art on display at the 2orr Venice Biennale suggested , these links have courtesy of the artist and Chatterjee
inspired some of the most compelling contemporary art in India from the performances and Lal , Mumbai.
ofNikhil Chopra (b. 1974) and site-specific installations of Atul Dodiya (b. 1959) to the
photo-performa nces of Pushpamala N. (b. 1956) and digital photomontages of Vivan
Sundaram (b. 1943). Looking to the modern is a compulsion, one could say, for these
artists. It bespeaks an ethical impulse. Contemporary artists in India have adopted a
stance that may be likened to Benjamin's in the Arcades Project as the examiner of
traces and excavator of truths.
Inhabiting the persona of Sir Raja or Yog Raj Chitrakar, Chopra performs the role of
patron or painter, respectively, in nineteenth- and twentieth-cent ury India (fig. 4). By
turns Sunday painter and urban patua (scroll painter), Chopra enacts rituals of art-mak-
ing from getting dressed and setting up to working en plein air and packing up in venues
all over the world, including Lal Chowk in Kashmir, the Khoj studios in New Delhi,
the Serpentine Gallery in London, and the Mori Museum in Tokyo (fig. 5). His work
straddles the space of drawing, painting, photography, and performance, acknowledg-
ing its debt to the habits and habitus of princely rulers, native gentlemen, indigenous
artisans, Western painters, dandies, and dreamers.
6 • /\FFILIATION , WORLDLINESS , AND MODERNISM
FIGURE].
FIGURE 6.
Raja Ravi Varma, Lady in Moonligh t, ea. 1889, oil on canvas. Sri Jaya-
Pusbpamala N. and Clare Ami. "Lady in Moonlight (after 1889 oil
chamarajendra Art Gallery, Mysore. Artwork in the public domain; im age
painting by Raja Ravi Varma)." from Native T)'pes series.from The
courtesy of the Sri )ayachamarajendra Art Gallery.
Na tive \Vomtn of South India, Manners and Customs, Type C print on
metallic paper, 2000-2004 . Artwork and image courtesy of the artist
and Nature Morie, New Delhi.
an artist in India and the world? How do art and artists engage and change the relation-
ship between past and present?
In the series Native Women of South India , Manners and Customs (2000-2004), Push-
The character Yog Raj Chitrakar is loosely based on the artist's grandfather Yog
pamala, working with British photographer Clare Ami, restages famous paintings and
Raj Chopra, an amateur landscape painter in Kashmir in the early twentieth century.
photographs from the South Asian past, making herself into the subject of Raja Ravi
Chitrcikar literally means image-maker or painter and denotes active communities of
Varma's Lady in Moonlight (c. 1889), a demure maiden waiting anxiously for her beloved
folk and commercial artists in India. The name Yog Raj Chitrakar also recalls Yash Raj
by a body of water (figs. 6 and 7), and a Toda woman from the Nilgiri Hills, the latter
Chopra (1932-2012), one of the most successful commercial filmmakers in modern
measured in the manner of Maurice Vidal Portman's anthropometric photographs of
India, who had a reputation for shooting on location in Kashmir, one of the settings for
the Andamanese (figs. 8 and 9). The title Native Women of South India, Manners and
his last film, Jab Tak Hai Jaan (As Long As I Live; 2012). In the Memory Drawing series
Customs is a play on ethnographic albums produced by the British during the colonial
(2007-2009), Chopra as Yog Raj Chitrakar asks: What does it mean to make art and be
AFFILIATION , W ORLDLINE S S , AND MODERNI S M 9

8 · AFFILIATION , WORLDLINESS , AND MODERNISM
FIGURE 8.
Pushpamala N. and Clare Arni. ·Toda (based on
I.ate 19th century anthropometric study): from FIGURE 9-
Tht Nat iv< Types s,ries , from Native Women of S01,th Maurice Vidal Portman. Anthropometric
Study of Andamanese Wo man , ea. 1893.
Ir.dia, Mar.ners and Customs, Type C print on
metallic paper, 2000-2004. Artwork and image The British Library. photo 188/ 22 (22),
recto. Artwork in the public domain;
courtesy of the artist and Chatterjee and Lal,
image © The British Libraq• Board.
MumbaL
period, including The Oriental Races and Tribes, Residents and Visitors of Bombay (1863), situates her practice alongside that of nationalist painter Ravi Varma and colonialist
and The People of India, A Series of Photographic lllustrations, with Descriptive Letterpress, photographer Portman, asserting a visual-cultural genealogy of her selfbood and sub-
ofthe Races and Tribes ofHindustan (1868-1875). Pushpamala's series mimics the visual jectivity and admitting her role as agent and effect of history. Her appropriations sug-
and conceptual logic of these albums as she presents female types from a contempo- gest the debt of contemporary artists in India to a colonial and postcolonial modernity
rary South India, mobilizing a complex visual culture of films, calendars, photographs, that produced distinct notions of art, the artist, and aesthetics.
and art. Both "native woman" and "South India" are discursively and materially pro-
duced by the census and survey and by elite and popular culture, Pushpamala proposes, MODERNISM AS AFFILIATION
and are therefore subject to reimagining and remaking. The artist gazes at us, boldly
and directly, from these photographs and invites comparisons with the originals. How This book charts a history of modernity through the persons, practices, protocols, and
do Ravi Varma's women-passive, pale-skinned, plump, and pleasing-inform contem- publics that constituted modernism in India. As the art ofZarina, the Desire Machine
porary notions of femininity in India through their circulation in popular visual cul- Collective, Singh, Chopra, and Pushpamala suggests, that past is foundational to the
ture? How do Portman's depictions of adivasi (indigenous) peoples and native bodies- representational practices of the present. Through four careers, I trace continuities and
savage, primitive, naked, and natural-persist in the management of populations by change in artistic production from the late colonial through the postcolonial periods
the state and in the everyday perceptions of its citizens? As Pushpamala inserts herself that have been treated as discrete, if not disconnected, in art historical scholarship. In
both these periods, ideas of national identity were bound up in shifting relationships to
into these frames, she places the artist at the center of social and political inquiry. She
AFFILIATION, WOR LDLI NESS . AND MODERN I SM · 11

10 • AFFILIATI_Otl. WORLDLINESS. AND •MOOERNISM
the West because of the legacy of colonialism in the subcontinent. Such cross-cultural and her successors as they sought to generate a national culture synthesizing East and
negotiations were by no means exclusive to the artists of my study, but were, in fact, the West in the wake of colonialism.
structural conditions for modernism in India. In twentieth-century India, as elsewhere, the terms East and West operated as mythical
Despite the rhetorical claims of artists, critics, and movements, modernism in India figures and rhetorical devices that artists and intellectuals engaged and disputed. They
was not characterized by a period ofWesternization followed by one of Easternization. did not denote historically or geographically precise entities, but represented categories
Modernism was an art of calibration between East and West. I focus on four artists, of thought, experience, and analysis. Thus, I follow Dipesh Chakrabarty's description of
Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941), Maqbool Fida Husain (1915-2on), K. G. Subramanyan Europe as "an imaginary figure that remains deeply embedded in cliched and shorthand
(1924-), and Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003), canonical figures in India, iflittle known forms in some everyday habits of thought." 17 The project of "provincializing Europe," as
in the West, who are taken to represent distinct poles ofWesternized (Sher-Gil, Husain) Chakrabarty articulates it, would examine the intellectual genealogies and social effects
and Easternized(Subramanyan, Khakhar) practice. Yet, as I show, Sher-Gil and Husain's of these forms as they come to organize modernity. In the context of the visual arts,
art was influenced by the painting traditions of precolonial India and the everyday prac- a dichotomy between East and West was produced and reinforced by British colonial
tices of rural India as much as it was by the School of Paris, and Subramanyan and art policies and practices in India, and continued to inform artistic production after
Khakhar's art was inspired by Pop and Conceptual art in London and New York as much 1947, the year of India's independence from Great Britain. As Tapati Guha-Thakurta has
as it was by the crafts practices, folk arts, performance traditions, and vernacular culture argued, this dichotomy between East and West was maintained, even if the hierarchy
industries of India. In other words, a national art was not a nativist art. of terms was reversed, by anti-colonial nationalists in Bengal who sought to establish
Western painting served as foundation and foil for Sher-Gil, Husain, Subramanyan, Eastern spirituality as superior to Western materialism.18 For the period l discuss in this
and Khakhar. Painting was the preeminent medium in the visual arts in India from book, the East was associated with the village, crafts, tradition, and nationalism, while
the 1930s through the 1980s. Even when these artists worked in other media, notably the West was associated with the city, art, modernity, and colonialism. Artists interro-
Husain in film and Subramanyan in terra-cotta, it was with an eye to their practice of gated distinctions between East and West, but the terms remained active in forms such
painting. Husain's first film, titled Through the Eyes ofa Painter (1967), sought to remake as easel and earth or indigenism and internationalism, as l explain in individual chap-
the painter into a national worker and continue the village reconstruction imagined by ters. A shifting balance between East and West was the hallmark of modernism in India.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in the 1930s. The four artists of my study are not identified with a single region or community
Each of the careers discussed in this book entailed deft negotiations between East in India, making them useful for comprehending the relationships between groups,
and West, which were highly unstable and generative categories in the modern world. movements, and schools, and for considering the emergence of a national art. Sher-
From John Ruskin's The Two Paths (1859) to Ananda K. Coomaraswamy's Medieval Gil, Husain, Subramanyan, and Khakhar sought to exceed past attachments to place
Sinhalese Art (1908), East and West were marshaled as formal and social attributes and parochial forms of expression. They forged an artistic identity that expanded their
in art history's most crucial debates on naturalism and abstraction, line and color, art self-understanding as Hindu and Muslim, Tamil and Punjabi, Brahmin and brahmak-
and crafts, masculinity and femininity, nature and culture. 15 They signified a relation; shatriya, and emphasized instead a sense of being national subjects and world-citizens.
one did not stand without the other. Ruskin viewed fine art (read naturalism) as the National belonging was essential to envisioning worldly belonging and vice versa; nei-
prerogative of civilized European nations, races, and cultures, and the Indian taste and ther identity subverted or superseded the other.
talent for decorative crafts (read ornament) as a sign of their barbarism and cruelty. By These artists pursued an identity without identitarianism, rejecting the chauvin-
contrast, Coomaraswamy upheld the crafts of the East as spiritual, collective, idealizing, ism they associated with the Bengal School. an anti-colonial nationalist art movement
dominant in the first decades of the twentieth century that came to equate otherworld-
and superior to the materialistic, individualistic, and imitative art of the West. While my
liness-spirituality, mysticism, transcendence, and idealism-with lndianness. The
study focuses on such mobilizations of East and West in the context of modern India,
artists of the Bengal School rejected oil painting and naturalistic conventions as signs
we would do well to recall Charles Fabri, a Hungarian-born art critic and naturalized
of colonialism, and looked east to evolve a Pan-Asian aesthetic. Their nationalism was
Indian citizen, writing in 1951: "Others before Amrita Sher-Gil had attempted to bring
invested in a return to the (precolonial) past rather than in visions of the (postcolonial)
the East and West together by means of painting; there was Bellini, there was Dela-
16 future. 19 By contrast, the modernism that is tl1e subject of this book was worldly in the
croix and there was Gauguin [sic) that most successful bridge-builder of all.'' As Fabri
sense of marking a turn to the present, materiality, and a cultural world that included
reminds us, bridge-building between East and West was a function of art far beyond the
the West. This modernism was not the predicament of rootless. exilic, or nomadic souls
boundaries of modern India, but it achieved new dimensions in the work of Sher-Gil
. 13
AFFILIATION. WORLDLINESS , AND MODERNISM
12 • AFFILIATION . WORLDLINESS, AND MODERNISM
but rather the product of situated practices, cultivated identities, and chosen commit- tions on modernism's trajectories in East and West 2i A . . .
. . . . · 2013 symposmm, "Rethmkmg
ments in the wake of displacements wrought by colonialism. Those displacements were Cosmopohtamsm: Afnca m Europe, Europe in Africa " · d b .
, organize y Salah Hassan m
the ground for modernism in India. Berlin, directly addressed modernism and postcoloniaJ ·sm ·n th · al R
1 1 e v1su arts. ev1s1omst · · ·
The identity sought by the artists I examine is congruent with what Edward Said historiographies ofNeo-Concretism and Constructivi·sm 1·n lati. n Amenca · h ave made a
described as "affiliation," a critical act by which naturalized bonds, or "filiation," strong impact in the art world and academy.24
between the state and culture (or between empire and culture) are dissolved and the While this growing interest in modernism as a global practice is welcome, not all of
worldly conditions, or social and political horizons, of cultural production are revived.20 these projects unsettle a teleology whereby Gutai and Neo-Concretism are significant
This book provides an account of modernism as a practice of affiliation between artists for anticipating performance art and Minimalism in Euro-American centers, for being
in East and West, a system of transnationa l exchange and critique, and a movement what Cotter described as "parallel with, or sometimes in advance of, what was happen-
25
generating artworks with shared visual and material forms. It refutes the idea that art- ing in Europe." Such accounts of modernism do not interrupt received notions of time
ists in India produced either modern art without modernism- disidentifica tion with and space, nor do they destabilize a narrative of modernism in which artistic develop-
artistic practices in the West-or modernism marginally modified-W estern forms ments in Paris and New York (or Vienna and Berlin) are the standard by which all others
repurposed for non-Western contexts. Affiliation denotes a historical process by which a will be judged. Instead the idea of modernism as affiliation holds matters of identity
national art world came together and became conjoined with an international art world. and difference in tension and allows for spatial, temporal, conceptual, and material
The careers analyzed in this book serve as resources for rethinking our histories of mod- divergences between artistic practices and movements across the globe. It enables us to
ernism in India and the world. They challenge the notion of modernism as a universal consider modernist art that cannot be easily mapped onto schools and styles elsewhere.
movement emanating from a European center with peripheral variations, generating It allows us to engage forms and ideas that do not intersect with or converge on the West,
vernacular or alternative modernisms in colonial and postcolonial contexts, which were rather than treating them as anachronism and anomaly.
either derivative of or distinct from their European counterparts . My study reveals modernism as a practice of affiliation emerging from a global phe-
In a 2012 review of an exhibition of modernist art from South Asia, Radical Terrain, nomenon of modernity rather than a set of disparate modernisms situated within dif.
at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, Cotter summarizes a popular consensus ferential modernities. Instead of the dominant narrative of a modernism birthed with
on modernism and the state of scholarly interventions in the field: "The West tends Jacques-Louis David's Death of Marat (1793) in Revolutionary France and ending with
to be proprietorial about Modernism, treating it as a Euro-American invention copied, Jackson Pollock and the crisis of the easel picture in 194Os New York, the model I pro-
in inferior versions, by the rest of the world. But more and more this view has come to pose acknowledges modernism as a global movement with plural forms. This worldly
look parochial and wrong. In recent years historians have been studying the reality of modernism- with centers in Shanghai, Hanoi, Mexico City, and Dakar as well as Paris
multiple (sometimes referred to as alternative) modernisms that developed in Africa, and New York-accoun ts for asymmetrical relations of power and histories of colonial-
ism that enabled particular dialogues between artists and artworks. It asks us to consider
Asia and South America parallel with, or sometimes in advance of, what was happening
in Europe." 21 Cotter concludes that the series of exhibitions on South Asian modernist Diego Rivera (1886-1957) and Lin Fengrnian (1900-1991) as exemplars of modernism
rather than postcolonial or non-Western outliers. Their education in the West and admi-
art at the Rubin "can only hint at the full history of global modernism, or modernisms ,
ration of Western artists, their commitments to nationalism, their critique of imperial-
that everyone now knows is the true story of modern art. It's a story that has yet to make
22 ism, and their self-understanding as world-citizens were shared by many artists across
its way into our big museums, but surely that day must come."
the globe, not least in India. Their aims were akin to each other and to their Western con-
In 2013, major exhibitions of modernism in Japan, including the art of the Gutai
temporaries even if previous generations of critics and art historians did not recognize
group, were held in the United States including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
their achievements, much less grant them common ground with those contemporaries.
Museum, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art New
Recent scholarly efforts to decenter modernism have drawn attention to the criti-
York (MoMA). In 2013-14, the Asia Society in New York held an exhibition of modern-
cal pathways to modernity forged by artists and intellectuals in non-Western and post-
ism in Iran from the 194Os through the 197Os, Iran Modern, curated by Fereshteh Daft-
colonial societies. 26 Exposing the limits of Eurocentric histories of modernism and
ari and Layla S. Diba. In 2014, the Tate Modern (London) and Haus Der Kunst (Munich)
modernity, they emphasize the need to examine cultural flows on terms more precise
organized a conference, "Postwar-A rt between the Pacific and Atlantic, 1945-1965," as
and ethical than what Ming Tiampo has called "cultural mercantilism," or the ten-
part of an eight-year research and exhibition project to rewrite histories of modernism. 27
dency to see influence as unidirectional and universally flowing from West to East.
On a smaller scale, a 1922 exhibition of works by Indian and European artists held in
By this logic, non-Western cultures come to supply raw materials for the production of
Calcutta was restaged at the Bauhaus Dessau in 2013, an occasion for scholarly reflec-
AFFILIATION . WORLDLINES S. AND MODERNIS M . 15

}4 · A FF I L"I AT ION , WORLD LI N .ES S, AN D MODERN I SM
Euro-American modernisms; they can serve as "export markets" for those modernism s
28
but cannot be sites of creative expression or innovation. Tiampo's critique is closely
related to what Partha Mitter has termed "the Picasso manque syndrome," whereby the
citation of non-Western art by European modernists, exemplified by Picasso's turn to
African and Oc~anic cultures, is viewed as original and radical, while the citation of
Western art by an Indian artist such as Gagendranath Tagore is regarded as derivative
and inauthentic. 29 Over the past decade, art historians have enriched and expanded
what we understand as modernism , analyzing discourses and practices in Great Brit-
ain and the Soviet Union as well as Mexico, Brazil, Senegal. Nigeria, Vietnam, China,
Japan, Iran, and Pakistan.30 They have excavated unknown or little-known artists and
artworks, casting new light on modernism 's varied forms and multiple lives.
Consider the career of Lionel Wendt (1900-1944),_a Sri Lankan artist with interests
in music, theater, literature, and photography. Born in Colombo and educated in England
at Cambridge University and the Royal Academy of Music, Wendt organized the Group
43, a collective of modernist arti_sts and intellectuals active in Sri Lanka during the
1940s and afterward. His Untitled (Still Life with Mask and Statue) (fig. 10), is a dramatic
and controlled composition. It stages a contrast between the shiny black head of the
bodhisattva, cradled in a dark, printed textile in the foreground, and the smooth body of
the Neoclassical male nude, standing beside a white marble pillar in the background . It FIGURE 10.
allegorizes a relationship between East and West with the mask and the statue embody- Lionel Wendt, Untitled (Still Life with Mask and Statue), 1942, gelatin silver photograph ,
25 .1 x 30.
4
ing the classical ideals and representational idioms of each civilization. It materializes a an. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2006.
worldly modernism for which we do not as yet possess a critical vocabulary.
The terms regional, alternative, vernacular, and non-Western do not adequately describe
Wendt's modernist style and sensibility, which are as much a product of Aestheticism, modernism stands in a complex relation to discourses and practices in the West, and
Neoclassicism, Surrealism, and the ideology of the Bloomsbury group as of the society that relation is crucial to understand ing their art.
and politics of his native Sri Lanka. Such terms provincialize the cosmopolitanism of How then do we write Wendt's imagination into history? Our existing narratives
his endeavor, failing to recognize its claims to global citizenship and international com- of modernism, committed as they are to discrete national-cultural frameworks , can-
munity. They overstate his difference from Western art and understate his identification not accommodate a figure like Wendt (on whom there is little scholarship despite a
with world culture. They obscure his participation in a network of cultural practitioners. remarkable body of work) . In fact, Wendt is not as unusual as he might seem. Sher-Gil,
They reinscribe a hierarchical relationship between the central and regional, normative Husain, Subramanyan, Khakhar, and many of their peers in India would have affirmed
and alternative, dominant and vernacular, and western and non-Western. allegiance to his worldly affiliations. Their commitment to this artistic identity was
Analyzing the career oflndian playwright Mohan Rakesh (1925-1972), Aparna Bhar- a direct response to colonialism and not an aberrant development in spite of it. Take
gava Dharwadker has criticized the related assumptions, common in literary studies, Simon Gikandi's assertion that "modernism represents perhaps the most intense and
"that in the hands of Indian writers, both English ·and the modern Indian languages unprecedented site of encounter between the institutions of European cultural produc-
embody 'vernacular' culture and experience, and that the postcolony must always and tion and the cultural practices of colonized peoples. It is rare to find a central text in
only represent a 'periphery' in relation to the imperial 'center."' Dharwadker insists
31 modern literature, art, or ethnography that does not deploy the other as a significant
that Rakesh was a "cosmopolitan modernist fully cognizant of Western movements, source, influence, or informing analogy. And the relationship between the institution of
but also fully committed to an indigenized aesthetic, his cosmopoli tanism inhering modernism and these other cultural spaces is not, as was the case in earlier periods of
precisely in the cultural ambidexterity of his vision." The artists of this study have
32 European art, decorative: it is dynamic, dialectical, and constitutive of the field of Euro-
a status similar to the one Dharwadker sketches for Rakesh whereby they are major pean and American culture." 33 Gikandi explains that postcolonial critics have tended to
figures in India, if margina~ to histories of modernism in the West. Nevertheless their regard modernism with skepticism , viewing it as "the art form of an alienated cultural
17
AFFILIATIO N, WORLDLINE SS, AND MODERNISM
· 16 • AFF.ILIATIO N , WORLDLINE SS, ANO MODERNIS M
elite. eager to master European form at the expense of local traditions of writing and which emerged in 1947·42 For Brown, Indian . .
34 Progressive Artists Group, artists forged
t:hus placed at odds with the political project of decolonizatio n." Yet he insists that . .
b k · h . past
a new national (Indian modern) culture. that significantly ro e wit t11e co1omal
"\\ithout modernism, postcolonial literah1re as we know it would perhaps not exist."lS Euro-Amenc an conceptions of d · H h .
and successfully challenged
.. mo ermty. W ereas Mit-
He notes the parado.x whereby · the archive of early postcolonial writing in Africa, the in Europe and I t I · d'
ter stresses affimhes between modernism a e co 0111a1 1n 1a , Brown
Caribbean, and India is dominated and defined by writers whose political or cultural
highlights the distinctivene ss of art produced in postcolonial India. Although these
projects were enabled by modernism even when the ideologies of the latter, as was the
16 scholars ac~n-owledge _the foun~ations of postcolonial modernity in a colonial past.
case \,ith Eliot, were at odds with the project of decolonizati on."· neither explicitly exammes legacies of that past-namely, the problem of art education,
Substitute Gauguin, Matisse, or Picasso for Eliot, and Gikandi's arguments about lit- the formation of a public for art, the relationship to the West, the role of tradition, the
erature apply to the history of the visual arts in India, though there are crucial qualifica- figure of woman, and the place of the village-in the cultural production of the post-
tions to be made for the case of the visual arts. The politics oflanguage and, specifically, colonial period. A theory of rupture in the visual arts around 19 47 neglects the ways
the debate over the use of the colonizer's language and vernaculars do not directly map in which problems of visual representatio n from the colonial period persisted through
onto the ,isual arts. This debate finds an analogy in the relative status of fine art and the postcolonial period.
decorative crafts in India. and in the rejection of oil painting by a generation of artists in This persistence is the subject of art critic Geeta Kapur's When Was Modernism:
Bengal. ?-.fatters of circulation (the role of the market and public) and periodizatio n (the Essays 011 Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (2000), a collection of essays written
relationship between the modem and the contemporar y) differ for literature and the over a period of fifteen years. Her account of modernism in India borrows its title from
44
45
\irual arts.37 Nonetheless many lessons from literary modernisms hold true for artistic Raymond Williams's famous lecture at the University of Bristol in 1987. Marking her
modernisms in a postcolonial society. Modernism represented a creative and critical allegiance to Williams, Kapur takes modernism as the object of historical-materialist
e.~ange between Western and non-Western cultures, albeit one freighted with risks inquiry and not as the denouement of a universal narrative of modernity; note her insis-
and constrained by asymmetries . tence on modernism as contemporar y cultural practice. Rejecting the production of a
The emphasis on e.,-change in emerging histories of artistic and literary modernism disjunctive and depoliticized temporality for modernism, Williams concluded his lec-
points to a two-way traffic between the West and non-West, opposes predetermin ed ture "If we are to break out of the non-historical fixity of post-moderni sm , then we must
models of domination or resistance, and ultimately reconfigures the notion of metropole search out and counterpose an alternative tradition taken from the neglected works
and periphery. Scholars ha\-e shown how non-Western peoples \Yere generators of mod- left in the \vide margin of the century, a century which may address itself not to this
by now exploitable because quite inhuman rewriting of the past, but for all our sakes,
ernism and not merely its consumers, dissenters, outsiders, or primitive source mate-
to a modern future in which community may be imagined again:«, In response to
rial. New accounts of a dialogic or transnationa l modernism have reoriented discussions
Williams, Kapur writes modernism into the present. She strategically transforms the
of modernity and modernism toward translation between cultures rather than focusing
rhetorical question ofWilliams's title-observ e her omission oftl1e question mark from
on innovation and reproduction or on,,,oinal and copy. They have revised the conven-
his version-into a statement of postcolonial praxis.
t-on.al time and space of modernism as a culru.ral movement located in Europe and the
Scholarship in history, anthropology, literary studies, and film studies has empha-
United States that reached its limits by the mid-twentie th century. In India, modernism 7
sized continuity amidst change in the cultural production of modern South Asia : lt has
emerged during the late colonial period in the 193Os and 194Os and continued well into
shown that colonialism has an enduring legacy and that decolonization is an ongoing
the 197Os and 1980s.JS In the context of theater, Dhr-adker argues that modernism is
39 process in South Asia as in much of the world. Consider Partha Chatterjee's critique of
an ongoing project. a · postcolonial (and still unfoldfug) phenomenon ."
nationalism, which "produced a discourse in which, even as it challenged the colonial
Studies of modernism in the visual arts in India have tended to explore individual
claim to political domination, it also accepted the very intellectual premises of modernity
arti:,--ts, mo•.-ements. and groups in Santiniketan . Bombay, or Baroda."° Recent scholar-
on which colonial domination was based." 48 Contrary to popular beliefs and nationalist
ship has focused.on social and political conta.ts of art, yet it implies that 1947 marked a
desires, freedom did not arrive at midnight.49 Artists in twentieth-century India under-
w.ite.rshed for artistic production. Partha Mitter's The Triumph ofModemism. 1922-1947
stood the indebtedness , indeed the embeddedne ss, of their practice in a colonial past.
(2007) concludes its narrative in 1947, while Rebecca M. Brown's Art for a Modem
41
Representati onal freedoms would have to be sought from within existing struch1res.
India, 1947-1980 (2009) commences its narrative in that year. For Mitter, Sher-Gil. Multiple forms of continuity with the colonial period were manifest in the vi ual
5
Jamini Roy, and Rabindranat h Tagore exemplify a "heroic age of primitivism " during arts of postcolonial India. The figure of woman, the privileged mode of representing
the 1920s and 1930s that represented "the most compelling voice of modernism in the nation-form for anti-colonial nationalists, and the site of the village, valorize<l by
India: bu t ·their influence was limited and their model of art largely ignored by the
AFFILIATION , WORLDLINES S , AND MODER NISM • l9
18 · 4FFlllATIOH . WORLDLINE SS, ANO· 1.tODERNISU
Gandhi as a microcosm of the nation, remained the preeminent subjects of modernist envisioned by artists and intellectuals cannot be reduced to the developmentalist enter-
art in the 1950s and beyond. The nature of art education, and the relative positions of prise of the nation-state. The nation of modernism was an inchoate form and utopian
·fine art" and "decorative crafts" as they had been institutionalized during the colonial horizon. Modernists were critical of colonialist and nationalist positions, often seeking
period, were debated in the art schools, studios, and journals of postcolonial India. The alliances and allegiances apart from those of the dominant culture. Like its counterparts
roles of the artist, critic, and viewing public were constituted and calibrated in response elsewhere, modernism in India was oppositional and experimental, positioning itself
to cultural developments in India and the West, which remained a crucial node in against conservative and codified practices.
the circulation and consumption of Indian art. Many Indian artists studied, lived, or Rethinking the boundaries of art around 1947 would enable us to see links between
worked in London, Paris, or New York, and even when they did not travel there until movements in the visual arts, literature, and theater. The All-India Progressive Writ-
late in their careers, as in the case of Husain and Khakhar, those centers offered models ers' Association and the Indian People's Theatre Association were formed in the 1930s
through which they conceived their practice. The reception of exhibitions of Western art and 1940s and had close links to anti-colonial nationalist politics and the Commu-
in India and Indian art in the West, such as Two Decades of American Painting, 1946-66 nist Party of India. The short-lived Progressive Artists Group, of which Husain was a
(organized by MoMA in New Delhi, 1967) and Six Indian Painters (organized for the founding member, shared with these associations commitments to internationalism
Festival of India at the Tate Gallery in London, 1982), catalyzed the art world in India, and socialism, yet its agenda and trajectory were distinct. Relating these movements
confirming its difference from and identification with an international community. to one another would clarify the stakes of modernism in India and render visible its
By making the case for revised periodization, this book proposes conceptual gains negotiations with colonialism, anti-colonial nationalism, and postcolonial state prac-
from an approach to modernism in India as a project that extends from the 1930s tices. The purpose of art, Sher-Gil wrote in 1936, was to "create the forms of the future";
through the 1980s. It allows us to see how problems of visual representation raised by she concurred with Clive Bell that great art did not seek to revive "old material" but to
colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism were not resolved in 1947. These problems bring into being a "new world of aesthetic experience" that did not yet exist "in the world
persisted into the 195os-as exemplified by Husain's existential paintings Man (1951) of human interests."54 That new world was not limited to or bound by existing social
and Zameen (Land) (1955), which cited European masters Picasso and Klee to imagine a and political conditions; indeed, art aspired to change those conditions. An account of
postcolonial artistic identity-and they animated art well into the 1960s and 1970s, as modernism's affiliations-of artificial bonds constructed and cultivated apart from or
against empire and the nation-state-w ould approximate art's promise as Sher-Gil and
demonstrated by Khakhar's critical engagement with the visual culture of the colonial
her successors understood it.
period in Tiger on the Bridge (1969) and Janata Watch Repairing (1972). Subramanyan's
and artist in a postcolonial society
19 61 essay, "The Artist on Art," probed the role of art
in the spirit ofSher-Gil's 1941 radio talk, "Indian Art Today."50 These artists referred to POSTCOLONIA L WORLDLINESS
each other, directly and indirectly, in their work and understood themselves as partici-
The history of modernism in India not only challenges conventional boundaries of
pating in a collective project (even if they are often written into art history as isolated
the colonial and postcolonial but also complicates the distinction between national and
geniuses and iconoclasts). In a 1971 lecture, Subramanyan counted Sher-Gil among the
cosmopolitan identities. It illuminates what Iftikhar Dadi, in his study of modernist art
"creative men" of the "Indian art tradition" who had established a true connection with
in Muslim South Asia, has called the "transnational" character of modernism. Dadi
55
the "great art" of the past. 51 discusses artists whose careers unfolded in or were linked to the nation-state of Paki-
A significant thread that runs through the work of all four artists discussed in this stan, but who were deeply skeptical and critical of the nation. According to Dadi, these
book is a preoccupation with marginal or precolonial visual-cultural forms that came to 52 artists adopted a different attitude toward the project of nationalism than their peers in
represent a national tradition and were associated with authenticity and indigeneity. India.56 He traces this attitude to a long history of Muslim cosmopolitanism in South
These forms were as diverse as the "primitive" seals of the Indus Valley civilization (c. Asia and the world and to the more recent history of British colonialism and Partition in
2500-1500 B.C.E.), "classical" painting of the Ajanta caves (c. 475 c.E.), crafts practices of South Asia. These histories redefined the categories modern art and Islamic art during
the village, and calendar art of the bazaar (market). Modernism in India was a project of the twentieth century. For Dadi, the work of Sadequain Naqqash (1930-1987), whose
imagining and critiquing-the nation-form, as Sher-Gil and others, notably Ramkinkar "calligraphic modernism" had significant West Asian and North African counterparts,
Baij and Benodebehari Mukherjee, did in the 1930s. Nevertheless art did not follow exemplifies this phenomenon.57 Sadequain's practice, and that of M. Abdur Rahman
politics in any simple or straightforward way, though it is commonplace to date the Chughtai, J. Iqbal Geoffrey, and Anwar Jalal Shemza, suggests a complex relationship
beginnings of modernism .in the visual arts in India to 1947, to locate them in the of nationalism to cosmopolitanism and a longue durie for.the globalized art world.
53
activities of the Progressive Artists Group, established in Bombay that year. The nation
SAA ARCHI
AFFILIATION , W ORLDLINESS , AND MODERNISM · 21 Ji\!tJ , NEW DE!
-2 0 : • AFFILIATION , WORLDLINESS , AND MODERNISM
· Ace No.M .~C\
These ideas were not limited to Pakistan or to Muslim artists in South Asia. Modern- holding the texts to society, author and culture." 60 This materiality is not apart from
ist art, even one committed to the nation, always exceeded nationalist ideals and goals. discourse, as Said emphasized "the bonds between text and world , bonds that special-
> Indeed transnationalism was essential to the formulation and dissemination of anti- ization and the institutions of literature have all but completely effaced." The worldly
61
colonial and postcolonial cultural movements like Mexican muralism and Negritude. criticism proposed by Said can be linked to Gayatri C. Spivak's notion of the "worlding
Heidegger's
The global diffusion of these movements inspired the artist Satish Gujral (b. 1925) to of a world," which she described as a purposeful "vulgarizati on" of Martin
of Art." 62 As Spi-
of the Work
study with Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros in Mexico City from 1952 to 1954 with the dialectic of world and earth as adumbrated in his "Origin
the colonial context by which an
support of Octavio Paz, who had a diplomatic assignmen t in New Delhi in 1951. They vak called attention to worlding as an act of power in
World" and its subjects, she pointed to
inspired the critic Gieve Patel (b. 1946) to denounce the international art system and "axiomatics ofimperialism" produced "the Third
63 She illuminated a process of clearing
American hegemony represented by Clement Greenberg during his visit to India in its possible "reinscription" and "deconstruc tion."
1967. One has only to glance at newspaper coverage of the visual arts or art criticism and concealment under colonialism, showing how the colonized were earthed in the
published in such magazines and journals as The Modern Review, Marg, The Illustrated worlding of the colonial self, how the expression of Jane Eyre hinged on the repression
Weekly of India, Lalit Kala Contemporary, Thought, Link, or Design in twentieth-century of Bertha Mason. The occlusion of"the native female" in this instance was emblematic,
India to get a sense of the extent to which artists and critics there acted as part of the for Spivak, of the processes by which a global capitalist modernity and its institutions
international world. The relative merits of contemporary American prints and modern- came into being.64 Spivak developed Heideggerian notions of worlding and earthing
ist Korean painting were discussed and debated alongside theories of art from Aristotle into a mode of critical inquiry in her writing on postcolonial literatures, identities, and
to Claude Levi-Strauss and the art historical legacies of El Greco and Piet Mondrian. The politics. 65 Her exercises in reworlding showed how constellations of the global and the
local come into being and generate reifications like "Third World" and "First World" or
art world included emigre and expatriate critics such as Rudolf von Leyden and Walter
"native female" and "male norm."
Langhamm er, art historians such as William G. Archer and Charles Fabri, collectors
Whereas Said's notion of the world privileges social relations and material conditions,
such as Emmanuel Schlesinge r and Davida and Chester Herwitz, and museologists
Spivak's emphasis on reworlding shows how the world is produced by and through the
such as Grace McCann Morley and Hermann Goetz. Together with Indian counterpar ts
imagination. Art is constituted by the world, and art constitutes the world . Said's affilia-
such as Mulk Raj Anand, Richard Bartholomew, J. Swaminath an, and Ebrahim Alkazi,
tion and Spivak's reworlding present critical tools for writing an art history of relations
they were integral to the making of modernist art in India.
between image and world. Such an art history would elucidate the process of translation
/r Their individual and collective identities _evoke Said's notio~ o~ "affiliation," which
by which the world is made visible in the image and the image becomes a world, invok-
he defined as "the implicit network of peculiarly cultural assoc1ahons between forms,
ing a world of other images. This book seeks to understand the image in the world-its
statements, and other aesthetic elaborations on one hand and, on the other, institutions,
social efficacy-a nd the image as a world-its aesthetic economy- within the context
agencies, classes, and amorphou s social forces." Affiliation, according to Said, func-
58
1 . 1£"59 of modern India. The worldliness discussed here is national and cosmopolitan, mate-
tions "as a principle of critical research and as an aspect of the cultura process 1tse · rial and imaginative, and is committed to artists and artworks as agents of history. As
It challenges reifications that have produced East and West as opposed and culture
and
several scholars have noted, modernism in the visual arts has been resistant to this kind
the state as unified. Affiliation operates in contrast to filiation, a process whereby rela-
of worlding because of geopolitical, institutional, and epistemological factors . Yet this
66
tions between text and world are naturalized and depoliticized, and culture is managed obduracy of modernism makes it all the more necessary to scrutinize it, in order not
Land mobilized in service of the state. Said specifically critiqued the process wh~r~by only to locate its biases and omissions but also to provide new narratives of its forms
civilizational values were mapped onto nation-states in the nineteenth century, citmg and ideologies. These new narratives might include Anne M. Wagner's study of British
Matthew Arnold's conflation of culture with the state. One can extend Said's critique sculptors in the early decades of the twentieth century and Elizabeth Harney's study of
of national literatures in the nineteenth century to art histories from the same period. Senegalese painters in mid- to late-twentie th-century Dakar, works that evoke Barbara
0 th
Owen Jones's Grammar of Ornament (1856) and Alois Riegl's Historical Grammar f e Hepworth and Henry Moore exploring the world of the British Museum in the 1930s
to 67
Visual Arts (1898) mobilized theories of racial-cultu ral difference and development and Leopold Sedar Senghor addressing the First World Festival of Black Arts in 1966.
1 · ere predicated on the rela-
· · f
propose ontologies and ep1stemolog1es o art. elf
Th · c aims w The worlds conjured by these modernist practices correspond neither to a multicultur-
tive place of various civilizations within a world-historical order. . .. . alist unity-in-diversity proposition nor to a universalist sameness-in-difference model. ;
The work of culture, Said insisted, was not bounded by nation-stat es or c1vihzation s They highlight the contingency, if also the constraints , of affiliation, which is to say, of ,
"To recreate the I
and the work of the critic was to revive the conditions of its worldlines s: cultivated relation and constructed community.
affiliative network is therefore to make visible, to give. materiality back to, the strands
AFFILIATIO N . WORLDLINE S S, AND MODERNI SM · 23
22 • A f FIL I AT ION., WORLDLIN ESS, AND MODERNIS M
;·- p
, An affiliative network cannot be limited to an analysis of center-periphery relations, world that track and account for contemporary globalization as well as older historical
with a deterministic view of flows and directions, nor can it be reduced to a critique of narratives of worldhood." 74
origin and derivation. The terms center and periphery, or origin and derivation, and their Such narratives would surely include the careers of artists and intellectuals who
corollaries domination and resistance, or inclusion and exclusion, would be necessary but were denied world-belonging by colonialism and who asserted citizenship in national
0 not sufficient for a history of affiliative networks, which would attend to other worlds and international community as a response to an unjust world system. In India, Rabin-
imagined by artworks and their makers and preservers. As this study shows, artists and dranath Tagore's and Jawaharlal Nehru's embrace of cosmopolitanism as "a strategy of
intellectuals in India sought a national identity that was also international-often criti- anti-colonial nationalism," to quote Antoinette Burton, represents but two well-known
cal of, yet constantly engaged with, ideas in the West and elsewhere. Anti-colonial and examples of a widespread phenomenon. 75 This cosmopolitan stance, an anti-colonial
postcolonial intellectuals from Gandhi and Frantz Fanon to Said and Spivak have made nationalist and postcolonial gesture, was shared by a majority of the artists and critics
'/. worldliness-in various historical articulations such as universalism, internationalism, surveyed in this book. Rather than embracing a timeless or ideal notion of national
and cosmopolitanism-their ethical demand. culture, they crafted a worldly identity through which the relation between East and <-
This worldliness is not equivalent to belonging in the current order of globalization, West was remade.
nor can it be equated with the world imagined by world systems theory. It follows the The case of Octavio Paz in India exemplifies postcolonial worldliness as lived experi-
notion of the world articulated by Pheng Cheah: ence and utopian horizon. In 1951 , the Mexican poet and diplomat traveled from Port
Said to Bombay on the Batory, "a German ship given to Poland as part of the war repa-
The world is a form of relating or being-with. The globe, on the other hand, the totality rations."76 His shipmates included a monastic maharaja and his entourage; a group
produced by processes of globalization, is a bounded object or entity in Mercatorian space. of nuns and pair of priests from Poland; Constantin Brancusi's widow; W. H. Auden's
When we say "map of the world," we really mean "map of the globe." It is assumed that brother; Indian writer Santha Rama Rau; and Rau's American husband, Faubion Bow-
the spatial diffusion and extensiveness achieved through global media and markets give ers, a former aide-de-camp to Douglas MacArthur and expert on Japanese theater. 77
rise to a sense of belonging to a shared world, when one might argue that such develop- John Bicknell Auden, a geologist, gave Paz explanations for the "strange appearance"
ments lead instead to greater polarization and division of nations and regions. The globe of the Taj Mahal Hotel, built in 1903 and based on plans imported from Paris, with "its
is not the world.68 front facing the city, its back turned to the sea." 78 Paz in turn observed: "The mistake
seemed to be a deliberate one that revealed an unconscious negation of Europe and
the desire to confine the building forever in India. A symbolic gesture, much like that
Cheah emphasizes the world-making function of wor!!!_iterature, which is "a funda-
of Cortes burning the boats so that his men could not leave." 79 Paz's poetry and prose
mental force in the ongoing cartography and creation of the world instead of a body of
abound in comparisons between India and Mexico and their experiences of European
timeless aesthetic objects."69 He encourages us "to see the world as a dynamic process
colonialism. The train journey from Bombay to New Delhi in 1951 reminds Paz of one
with a practical-actional dimension instead of a spatio-geographical category or only in
he took "near the end of the Mexican Revolution" between Mexico City and San Antonio,
terms of global flows, even if the latter constitutes an important material condition of
Texas, and of "massacres along the railroad track, the same in India as in Mexico."80
a world."7° The nation is not irrelevant to this world, for worldliness "takes place and
The Taj Mahal Hotel, which greeted Paz on his arrival in Bombay harbor, embodied
is to be found in the intervals, mediations, passages, and crossings between national
paradoxes of colonial history and postcolonial identity. Like India, it was "real and clli- _. ,
borders."71 The world is open to reworlding. The cartographies we inherit are subject to merical, ostentatious and comfortable, vulgar and sublime."81
revision, and this revision is the work of culture. . In The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) , drafted in Paris, where Paz was active in Sur-
1
· 'i, ") The world is produced by the imagi~tion, and as such it is contingent, in~ete:m - realist circles, he wrote: "The Mexican is always remote, from the world and from other
th e
nate, and permeable. For Cheah, literature, and one can infer art as well, p~ovides people. And also from himself." 82This alienation was a legacy of colonialism and a form
· strudure of opening through which one receives a world and through which ~nother of belonging for the colonized. The Mexican, as Paz put it, was "Nobody," a fi gure who
world can appear."72 Moreover, worldliness is a special prerogative for postcolomal p~o- practiced the art of dissimulation and whose existence was "transparent" and "phan-
J pie.s: "The devastating ii:npact of globalization for the lower strata of these [postcolomal] tasmal."81 The task of the artist was to make meaning of that unbelonging and remake
. th .. 73 In
societies makes opening onto another world especially urgent m ese spaces. belonging to the world.
0
his reading of Nuruddin Farah's Gifts (1992) , set in 1980s Somalia, as exempla?' ,~ Such ideas of masking, mimicry, savagery (what Paz called "barbarism"), and sly
world-making literature, Cheah privileges contemporary forms of "world-belonging, civility as postcolonial identity were evident in Indian artist Francis Newton Souza's
_: but acknowledges the need for "imaginings and stories of what it means to be part of a
AFFILIATION, WORLDLINESS . ANO MODERNIS M • 25
· zt· ~ F ~ t.:LJATION ; WORLDLINESS , AND MODERNISM
autobiographical essay "Nirvana of A Maggot," published in 1955 in the British literary untouchability, and rural life, including The Untouchable (1935 ), The Coolie ( 6). Two
magazine Encounter. In that essay, Souza writes of coming to language-verbal and 193
Leaves and a Bud (1937), Lament for the Death ofa Master ofArts (193 8), The Village ( ),
1939
visual-as a struggle: "How can one articulate in Anglo-Saxon with a jeweled mandible and Across the Black Waters (194°)-91 Gandhi and Marx were political and intellectual
that was fashioned by the ancient Konkan goldsmiths of Goa?" 84 For Souza, writing touchstones for Anand. In 1946, Anand founded a journal for the arts in India, Marg.
and painting engender profound insights on colonialism: "My inarticulation was due to which became a vehicle of the postcoloniaI worldliness he embodied. Jn a 194 3 editorial.
England having possessed a lot of boats which had netted India into its vast empire." 8 5 Anand wrote: "For, firmly convinced as I am that Asia cannot do without Europe and
A founding member of the Progressive Artists Group, Souza was a comrade of Husain. Europe without Asia, we in India have positive things to achieve: the integration of a
Husain's painting Zameen (Land), also of 1955, presented the artist as masked per- synthesis between the values which we have inherited from our past and those which
former in a manner akin to Paz's Mexican, the archetype of postcolonial man. For Paz, Europe has evolved."93 Anand's career was marked by acts of reworlding such as his
Souza, and Husain, the ideal artist and citizen was gendered male. In chapter 3 of this account of a greater Asian cultural world as exemplified by the book Persian Painting
book, I situate Husain's and Souza's painterly and performative strategies in the context (1930), his advocacy of Sri Lankan artists and intellectuals in support of the idea of
of their self.understanding as postcolonial artists speaking to and through modernist South Asia (as opposed to India) in the 194Os, and his participation in the Afro-Asian
masters Picasso, Rodin, Klee, and Kafka. Writers' Association at their first meeting in Tashkent in 1958.94 These cosmopolitan
Paz's notion of indigenismo inspired Kapur's thinking and writing during the 1960s. modernist projects of South-South solidarity rejected the world as it had been ordered
Her 1969 master's thesis at the Royal College of Art in London was entitled "In Quest by capitalism and colonialism . It reimagined the world through art and ideas.
of Identity: Art and Indigenism in Post-colonial Culture with Special Reference to / _ Yet most histories of modern and contemporary art rely on predetermined or inher-
Contemporary Indian Painting." For Kapur, indigenism was a means of articulating ited notions of the world, and the exchanges between its areas. Consider Terry Smith
national and cosmopolitan identity and achieving political and intellectual emancipa- writing on the "postcolonial turn" in the international art world since 1970:
tion. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India (and Afghanistan and
Sri Lanka), a position he relinquished in 1968 in protest of the Mexican government's Think of a toy globe, a metal or plastic sphere with a world map on its surface. Think of
actions against student protesters. During his time in South Asia, Paz befriended artists it as a double cup, cut at the equator-two halves to be fitted together. So it might serve
and intellectuals. including J. Swaminathan, a journalist, critic, and painter. 86 Swami- as a container. Think of it, circa 1750-1970, as having the Mercator world map on it with
nathan, who had studied printmaking in Poland in 1958, was a key member of the the top and bottom halves connected by the two-way trafficking of global circuitry, butthe
radical Group 1890, established in 1962 in Bhavnagar. Paz wrote a catalogue essay, whole being turned by the greater force of northern metropolitan cultural centers. This
kind oficonogeographic twisting persists until sometime in the 197Os, when the cultural
"Surrounded by Infinity." for the group's first and only exhibition in 1963 in New Delhi,
centers in the bottom part of the world, and in all the souths present in the northern
inaugurated by Nehru. 87 In chapter 5, I discuss Swaminathan's model of art and the
hemisphere, themselves start to generate enough energy to do some turning. 95
artist and Khakhar's "indigenist" critique of that model in the 1960s.
Swaminathan and Khakhar's activities in India relate to what Joan Kee has called, in
her account ofTansaekhwa (Korean monochrome painting). "the world as practice.''
88 Here Smith rehearses the equation of world with map and globe that Cheah cautions
During the 1960s and 197Os, practitioners and proponents ofTansaekhwa understood against, and erases longer histories of and aesthetic possibilities for "iconogeographic
the world as "a process necessarily in formation, rather than as a circumstance over twisting" prior to 1970. In fact, the modernist practices discussed in this book achieved,
which artists, critics, and artworks had no control." 89 Like the Gutai artists in Japan, with varying degrees of success, precisely the "turning" Smith attributes to our present.
they imagined their practice as critique of a system that reproduced logics of colonialism From the first decades of the twentieth century, artists in India reworlded commonsense
90 notions of East and West or North and South. Such reworlding is by no means the exclu-
and capitalism, creating dominant centers and marginal peripheries in the art world.
sive prerogative of contemporary art; it has crucial antecedents and analogs in modernis.!!!.:.- .~.
·They embraced an internationalism that opposed Orientalism.91
The controversial reception of Clement Greenberg and his views on modernism in
S1.1~h critiques of the art world resonate with the efforts of Mulk Raj Anand, a novel-
India in 1967 pointed to a postcolonial critique of world and globe or, perhaps more pre-
ist, critic, and editor, who organized the Triennale of Contemporary World Art exhibi-
cisely, of the conflation of world and globe. On assignment from the U.S. State Depart-
tion in New -Delhi in 1968, an inspiration to the artists Kee discusses and a model for
ment, Greenberg accompanied a MoMA-sponsored exhibition, Two Decades of American
·· _, · .vostcolonial art exhibitions in the 197Os. Anand received his doctorate in philosophy at
Painting, 1946-1966, on its travels to Japan and India. Noting "the spirit of unrest"
·.. the u ·niversity of London in 1929, worked for T. S. Eliot's Criterion and Leonard Woolf
0.•. ·· :·<,and· Virginia Woolfs Hogarth Press, and authored social-realist novels on poverty, among Indian artists, Greenberg compared their predicament in the 1960s to American
~?<(>:,.. . .
!l~iiJ~t;,'"'"""" ....,....... "' ..,,...... AFFILIATION, WORLDLINESS . AND MODERN I SM '
2
7
-artists in the 194os.96 He exhorted them to follow the School of New York in devising a modernity. Paz, a critical figure in that history, described 11·1s experience
· ofth ese .fl ows
unique, modern, and "exportable" expression of their national identity. 97 Indian artists
as "circumambulations, circumnavigations, and aerial circumvolutions in Asia, Europe,
and critics rejected this possibility even as they were compelled by the art on display. and America," rather than a path of linear progress.1m
They challenged Greenberg's view of modern and contemporary art, claiming that it The view of modernism as a practice of worldly affiliations promises to transform our
imposed capitalist logics and reimposed colonial norms whereby Indian artists were notions of the modern and the contemporary. Instead of contemporary art marking the
expected to conform to European models. They considered American art as neither end of modernism (and the "death of modernity," as Kapur puts it), it comes to represent
providing a model for their practice nor establishing a universal norm. continuity with many projects of the modern: translation, democracy, secularity, and
Writing in a little magazine edited by Swaminathan, artist and critic Gieve Patel cosmopolitanism. In chapter 6, I explore these continuities through the 2012 Kochi-
recalled the experience of British colonialism in India whereby it was "not Constable or Muziris Biennale, an art exhibition held in Kochi (Cochin), Kerala, and a self-conscious
Turner, but the schools of Landseer and Lord Leighton" that were exported.98 He asked: response to the Venice Biennale. A reevaluation of modernism and modernity, as Kapur
"ls the officially exported contemporary art of a country ever representative of the most proposes, might yield an image of the contemporary as radical potential, not a commod-
vital things then going on in that country?" 99 In the 1970s, Patel joined hands with ified currency of the global art market but the possibility for world-making. Contrary
other artists, including Khakhar, to produce a critical realism, upholding figurative and to the stereotype of contemporary art representing a homogenous practice across ever-
narrative imagery as a rejoinder to the perceived dominance of Abstract Expressionism expanding art fairs and international exhibitions and performing infinite repetition
and Pop Art, the American "exports" Greenberg touted while in India. Their efforts across differential geographies, we might arrive at a vision of its rootedness in history
culminated in a group exhibition, Place for People (1981), that Kapur participated in as and politics. Against widespread (neoliberal, ethnic nationalist, or religious fundamen-
a critic-member of the group. Her catalogue essay for the exhibition charted a geneal- talist) injunctions to forget or erase what came before (Gandhi and Nehru, Bandung and
ogy of modernism different from the Greenbergian model, citing Bertolt Brecht, Jose Budapest, decolonization and socialism), we would see modernism's persistence and =-
Clemente Orozco, Max Beckmann, Francis Bacon, Andrei Tarkovsky, R. B. Kitaj, and understand its identity with and difference from contemporary art.
Frederico Garda Lorca as exemplary artists and world-citizens. This genealogy enacted
a postcolonial worldliness that neither opposed the West as idea or influence nor cor-
THE ALMIRAH AS ARCHIVE
responded to nationalist ideals of purity and authenticity.
In chapter 5, I present a full discussion of Place for People and the role of these figures Gazing at Singh's File Room in Venice in 20II, I was reminded of visiting the Archaeo-
) (Swaminathan, Patel, Khakhar, and Kapur) in r~~orlding modernism. That exhibition logical Survey of India (AS!) offices in New Delhi in 2007 and requesting permission
embodied a history of modernism that remains significant for contemporary art. Its to enter its archive. Days and weeks passed until a frustrated employee asked what
legacy was the subject of a 2012 exhibition curated by Chaitanya Sambrani, To Let the exactly I was looking for. I described a room full of paper, documenting individuals and
World In: Narrative and Beyond in Contemporary Indian Art, at the Lalit Kala Akademi, institutions in the 1920s and 1930s. "Oh," he said, finally registering the nature of my
Chennai. In an essay commemorating Anand's career, Kapur outlines the stakes of the request with clarity and understanding, "you are looking for the 'old file room.' " The old
modern for the contemporary: file room of the AS! houses records of the colonial period; the (new) file room houses
records from 1947 onward. This was neither the first nor the only time I would have
. While the youngest generation of artist-intellectuals in India, situating themselves pretty such an exchange in the course of researching this book and searching for an elusive
firmly within a postmodern era, may have little patience with modernity and mo~ern- archive. What was the file room of modernism in India, 1wondered. and how might one
ism, there is reason to believe that the issue, in discourse as in practice, is not so quickly write an art history attentive to its peculiar character?
disposed of. Not if one rescues it from the nostalgic mode and re-evaluates the l~gic_ (or At Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, the site of postcolonial India's premier
lack of it) in arguments relating to "the death of modernity," revises canonical p_enodiza- art school, I was directed, after days of waiting for permissions, to a Godrej a/mirah
I ..
tion of the cqmplex category of the "modern," calibrates it from the vantage pomt of t~e (cabinet) in the library and informed that this was "the archive." Treasures-loose-leaf
contemporary, and sees it as a web of counter-currents resurfacing on a global scale m papers, tattered catalogues, faded brochures, and fiery manifestos-spilled out of the
· Hows that ar~ far from frozen. 100 freestanding steel cabinet, technically the lnterio-Storwel, designed by Indian entre-
preneur Pirojsha Godrej (his brother, a lawyer turned inventor and engineer, Ardeshir,
.· ·, / Here Kapur s_u ggests that contemporary art has a recursive relationship to modernism. Was a master locksmith) and manufactured by the Godrej Group of Companies since
·-:J ·•· Its gl9bal flows can and should be understood within a longer history of modernism and 1923. 102 Established in Bombay in 1897 by Pirojsha and Ardeshir, Parsi (ZoroaS trian)
AFFILIATION, WORLDLINESS , AND MODERNI S M

29
-~-8 .-' - A-fFIUAT"ION , WO .R LOUNESS , AND MODERNl"SM
brothers committed to swadeshi (of one's own country) goods, the Godrej Group is a the intellectual legacy of area studies and persist f . . .
family-owned conglomerate that manufactures locks, safes, typewriters, refrigerators, . . ence O a social scientific model in the
humamsttc study of non-Western societies The h"
vegetable oil, animal feed, consumer soap, and the Interio-Storwel. The Godrej almirah . · answer I t mk they expected was a
village or rum such as Molela in Rajasthan or H ·· K
is a common feature of middle-class homes, offices, factories, laboratories, libraries, and . ampi m arnataka. Given the subject
of my study, my village was Santiniketan, the location of the an t·1-co1oma . . .
public institutions across India where there is little built-in storage. This indigenous . . 1 nat10na1ist
Visva Bharat! (literally, World-Indian) University and · .
. . , my rum was the nation. I found
armoire, frequently referred to as a Godrej in much the way Colgate signifies toothpaste, the archive m museums and galleries, buildings and garde ns, a1m1ra · - h- d d
s an go owns
keeps moisture, mold, termites, and burglars out. In Baroda and other sites I visited, it calendar art and contemporary art, films and photographs , m . '
· d"1v1·dua I an d coII echve
holds objects of value and accumulations of knowledge, carefully guarded by custodians memory. Indeed the archive of modernism in India was eve rywh ere an d nowh ere m ·
and curators. particular.
The Anglo-Indian word almirah, derived from the Hindi-Urdu almari, Portuguese Much of the original artwork I studied was housed in structures with intimate links
almario, and Latin armario, points to the mixed-up origins of Bombay (now Mumbai), to the history of modernism and modernity that I relate in this book. My base was
the Godrej Group, and colonial modernity.103 The almirah I encountered in Baroda was Jaipur House, the former residence of the Prince of Jaipur, completed in 193 6 as part
less magical cache than Kafkaesque nightmare for a scholar on the track of facts and of British architect Edwin Lutyens's plan for the colonial city of New Delhi, and now
truths, in pursuit of a paper trail of the art world in India. Much information in that art the home of the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), established as a museum of
world, in the 193Os and in the 2OOOs, circulates through social networks and oral tradi- modern and contemporary art in 1954. I would read in the library there and step into
tions. In my quest for the archive, I was often redirected to the anecdote, to individuals the galleries, finding myself face-to-face with Sher-Gil's self.portraits or village scenes
who held unofficial stores of documents and potential answers to my questions. from the 1930s and with the work of her contemporaries: Jamini Roy's bold icons and
Fashioning an archive from disaggregated almirahs and anecdotes was not what I Santhal figures, Rabindranath Tagore's vivid birds and wild beasts, and Nandalal Bose's
had in mind as I began this project as a doctoral student at Berkeley. My training had patchitra (narrative scroll painting)-inspired posters for the Haripura meeting of the
been with books, papers, electronic resources, inanimate artwork, and above all, dead Indian National Congress in 1938. Not far from the NGMA, films and lectures at the
people. It afforded little preparation for the work I would do in India: cold-calling, visit- India International Center and the India Habitat Center provided escape from poring
ing, waiting, and wandering. The research for this book was conducted in art schools, over dusty papers. Both of these cultural centers were designed by American architect
museums, galleries, universities, libraries, auditoriums, theaters, homes, garages, pri- Joseph Allen Stein (1912-2001), whose buildings abound in central Delhi near Lodi
vate collections, and storage facilities in Santiniketan, Baroda, New Delhi, Mumbai, Gardens and have given rise to the name Steinabad, a riff on the seventeenth-century
Kolkata, Chennai. Chandigarh, Lucknow, Bhopal. Ahmedabad, Jaipur, and Durgapur in Mughal city of Shahajahenabad, built on the river Yamuna.
2006-2007 with follow-up visits in 2009 and 2010. It entailed the study of original art- I made regular excursions to other sites, such as the Rabindra Bhavan galleries of the
work and art criticism, as well as interviews with artists, critics, collectors, curators, and Lalit Kala Akademi, designed by MIT-trained architect Habib Rahman (1915-1995) and
academics. It was supplemented by consulting books and journals in U.S. libraries; the built in 196!, and the Triveni Kala Sangarn, an art space and cultural center founded
archi.-es of the :Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Manuscripts and Archives by philanthropist Sundari K. Shridharani (1925-2or2) in 1949, designed by Stein and
Division ofthe New York Public Liorary. Research trips to Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, completed in 1963. The tea terrace at Triveni is a legendary meeting place for artists and
and Munich m 200,-2006 enabled me to see a major exluoition of Sher-Gil's work at intellectuals. Both Rabindra Bhavan and Triveni Kala Sangam, situated in the Mandi
the Haus der Kunst as well as art she admired as a student in Europe during the 192Os House chowk (intersection) of New Delhi, were central nodes in a network of cultural
aind.1930,g_ Vrsits to the Venice Bienna:.le in 2ou and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2012 institutions that emerged in newly postcolonial India: national academies of art, litera-
iflu."Ilinated new and oki constellations of nation and world and reshaped my under- ture, and the performing arts, as well as art schools, technical universities, design insti-
mmiing of modemb7D's foundations and futures. These exluoitions enacted complex tutes, auditoriums, theaters, galleries, and museums. They aie icons of a mid-century
re!atiomhips: between rr..ooem and contemporary art and confirmed long histories of a modernism that felt very distant-conceptually and geographically-from the spaces
g!'oc;.Hz.ed an ~-CJrkt in which contemporary art was being displayed and viewed in early-twenty-first century
The multi-sited and tnn..~ional nature of my archive reflected the art world in India, including the sleek, futurist Apeejay Media Gallery on Mathura Road. where I
which Sb..e:--Gil,. Hllldm, Subramanyan, and Khakhar operated. The almirah was an apt saw a solo exhibition of Shilpa Gupta's projected dra\vings and interactive videos; the
aar-,e:. mixed-up. impmvised, and dispersed quality. In the U.S., schol-
r:l'.:cta?fur."C" fur iu
white cube interiors ofVadehra Gallery in the Okhla Industrial Estate, where I viewed
many a show of India's modernist masters and contemporary classics; and the brick
a.-u ofi...--n .t!ked about my ·fie!aw-orit'" in India: what is your site? That question bespoke
AFFILIATION. WORLDLINESS . AND MODER NIS M • Jl
, D . ..... Foundation in Gurcraon . a private collection turned museum o f
"'
fortress of the e"1 =,
where I attended the opening of The One Year Drawing Project • a coI-
contemporary. art.
laboration between four Sri Lankan artists curated by London-based Sharmini Pereira.
These galleries. located in the suburbs or on the outskirts of an expanding megalopolis
(pop~tion 22 million and grov.ing), represented a different configuration of the art
world than the one that is the subject of this book, centered in the art schools of San-
tiniketan and Baroda ,,ith the cities of Delhi and Bombay serving as hubs of display,
criticism. and co=erce.104
Writing the history of modernism was a strange project to pursue at the height of the
.., art market boom in India. At art openings and academic seminars alike, where the con-
temporary-the very new, the just now, the up-to-date, the au courant-was the rage, my
interest in the modern, and its outmoded artists, artworks, institutions, and exhibitions
provoked curiosity and confusion.. w; Why was I interested in modernism? Wasn't it pas;
in the sense of having passed, of being passe? When was modernism, indeed, I thought
to myself. restating the title of Kapur's postcolonial response to Williams. Despite the
apparent disinterest in modernism, its ruins and traces could be glimpsed on the streets
and sidewalks ofmany Indian cities even as they were in the throes of radical restructur-
ing, not least in Nev.• Delhi, the site of the 2010 Commonwealth Games.
To some extent, this book is an artifact of an art world quite different from the one
in which artists and audiences find themselves in 2015. Major players in the art world
such as the Bodhi Art Gallery and Osian's Auction House have all but disappeared, and
FIGURE 11.
new institutions such as the India Art Summit (now renamed the India Art Fair) and Maqbool Fida Husain, detail
the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art have appeared. In 2006-2007; there was a heightened of Ramayana mural. ea. 1967,
sense of flux and a sensation of vanishing in the air. The nation was under construction Dhoomimal Gallery, Connaught
Place, New Delhi. Artwork © Estate
and in need of renovation; the old was giving way to the new. "Everything [the nation-
of the artist; image © Sona! Khullar.
state._ nati~nalist projects of education and culture] is slowly being taken away,n said an
art hi st~nan at Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan in 2006. "It's [modernism,
moderru~] all over nowt declared a curator and archivist in 2007 at Gandhi Darshan,
a memorial andmuseum to Gandhi in New Delhi where many artists, including Sub- present even as its aesthetic vocabularies appear past. The disinterested pedestrians
ramanyan, installed their work in 1968-1969. The bust has transformed some of these and interested scholar testify to modernism's history and future, its immediacy and
conditions but the boom · fj d . obscurity, its ephemerality and monumentality. My photograph recalls how a dialectic
' m orme my perceptions of modern and contemporary art.
Take_for example fragments of Husain's Ramayana mural (fig. n) produced for the of forgetting and remembering, appearance and disappearance, and interestedness and
Dhoom1mal Art Gallery m · th 6 h . disinterestedness has been central to the history of modernism and modernity in India
e 19 os; t ey stand m Connaught Place, the center of
Lutyens's New Delh'1 I · . and the world. For Baudelaire in the nineteenth century as for Benjamin in the twenti-
• recent Y remvented m the name of restoration. This mural was
·
an attempt to retool notions of art an d era fits mherited from the colonial period and to eth century, a vanishing past was the necessary ground from which to imagine futures.
create a new public fj t· 1 • • ' By contrast to the frenetic pace of change in Delhi and other "metros," as India's
. . . or ar m postco omal India. In the late 1960s, Husain exhibited his
011 pamungs in villa fj metropolitan centers are known in the English-language news media, time stood still in
ge per ormances and staged folk theater in city galleries. The three
male figures wallcino pa t h. I. Santiniketan, or so it seemed to me during my visit there in 2006. At Kala Bhavan, the
,. e s is mura m New Delhi in 2010 without a second glance and
t he,emalearthisto · d art school of the anti-colonial nationalist university established by Rabindranath Tagore
the . d · nan recor ing this work with her camera, visible in the reflection on
· wm ow, suggest how tht-s t' . . . in 1919 , students worked on the ground mixing paints and weaving textiles, literalizing
Th t·la ear 1st1c practices are at once forgotten and remembered
.eco gedsurfaceofHu ·rr · . · the Santiniketan spirit of staying close to the earth and learning from nature, as Sub-
· · sai s ct'Tam1c mosaic serves as the foundation for art in the
A F F I LI AT I O 14 • WO R L D L I N E S S • A P< D M O O E R P< I S IA • 33
e on the camplls
ramauya n did when he was a student there in the 194os.wc, Elsewher
Nandalal Bose, sculptur e b)' Ramkink ar Baij, and mosaics by flenode.
stood murals by
ee, testamen ts to national commun ity and internati onal collabora tion.
behari Mukherj
the first Sllldents
Bose, Baij. and Mukherjee were Subramanyan·s teachers and among
and influences
at Santiniketan in the 1910s and 1920s. Their art had diverse sources
tlia11gkns (devotion al scrol;
including the ancient wall paintings at Ajanta and Tibetan
masters (and nineteen th.
painting); Egyptian and Mesopotamian "frescoes "; trecento
; Edo-peri od scrolls and contem.
and twentieth-century British copies of that painting)
a Taikan,
porary nihonga (Japanese-style painting) practices of artists such as Yokoyam
to live and work in India between 1 0
Hishida Shunso, and Arai Kampo, who came
of Design, Subrama nyan's exuber:n ~
and 1915. On the exterior of the Departm ent
107
complete d in 1990, continue d the earlier:

if fading, black-and-white murals (fig. 12),
108
twentieth-century practice of his mentors.
from Santinik-
Durgapur, the Nehruvian-era steel town some thirty-five miles away
r, one committ ed to heavy industry and tech-
etan, represented another utopia altogethe
and his America n compatr iot Benjami n Kauff.
nological progress. Designed by Stein
steel plant were organize d along grids, creating
man Polk in the 1950s, the town and its
factory spaces for workers and their manager s in a
rationalized, moderni st housing and
etan and Durgap ur-were monume nts to
moderni zing India. Both utopias- Santinik
moderni ty in India, correspo nding to the Gandhia n
particula r visions of moderni sm and FIGURE 12.
which the artists of my study came of age.
and Nehruvi an periods, respectively, during K. G. Subraman yan, detail of untitled mural. 1990. Departmen t of
Design, Kala Bhavan, Visva
ered Chopra
They seemed a world apart from the Khoj workshop where I first encount Bharati University, Santiniket an. Artwork © the artist; image© Sona!
Khullar.
studios of Perform ance Art 2007, the
as he perform ed Memory Drawing for the open
the nonprofi t artists' associati on and
culmina tion of artists' residencies supporte d by A reference
109 while Motti Brecher from Tel Aviv jumped off a roof in a monkey costume.
arts incubator Khoj (literally, "quest" in Hindi-Urdu). menace? we
the experimen- to the Ramayana, a Hindu epic poem, or to Delhi's infamous monkey
Along with an internati onal group of young artists, Chopra activated and artists,
the fourteen th-centu ry speculated.110 The audience was a mix of expatriates and Indians, students
tal space of the Khoj studios, located in a modern building near critics and dealers- not unusual from my experience in the art world.
ristically if anach-
Khirkee mosque in South Delhi. As Yog Raj Chitraka r, clad characte My first encounter with Pushpamala was at Gallery Espace in New Delhi in
2009 , at
reveal a landscap e
ronistically in natty tweeds, Chopra opened a brown paper package to the finale of"Video Wednesday," an annual forum for video and new-med ia work initi-
ed to transpose
painting of snow-capped mountai ns and green meadows that he proceed
111 In a
ated by curator Johnny M. L. in 2008 as part of the gallery's outreach activities.
he paused to shave,
with sticks of charcoal on to the white walls of the studio. In between panel discussion with artists, critics, and collectors about copyright, property,
authentic-
put on makeup and a wig, and gaze at himself in the she looked famil-
undress, don women's clothes, ity, and piracy in India, I saw Pushpamala in the audience and thought
drawing . During his four-hou r performance, that of others, from
mirror. Then he returned to work on the iar. I recognized the ace archivist and clever copyist from her art and
the time, a few watched intently from knowing and
some of us grew bored and left, others chatted to pass published images in books and original works in exhibitions, and
Moonligh t come to
and took photogra phs. studying a history of images. It was like seeing Ravi Varma's Lady i,i
ian artist, heav· y damsel and
Among the other perform ances that day, S.S. Listyowati, an Indones life in the twenty-first century. She was both that coy nineteenth-centur
a golden chariot d in an
ily made up and dressed as a Javanese bride in jewels and silk, rode the fierce twentieth-century hunterwali (one with a whip), a figure she performe
and career of
through Khirkee village, a mixed-in come neighbo rhood, and we followed her in a pro- earlier series, Phantom Lady or Kismet (1996-1998). Inspired by the life
star and stunt-
cession. She returned to the Khoj studios, perform ing wedding rituals under candle- Australian-born Fearless Nadia (nee Mary Ann Evans), a Bombay film
cooked seven eggs and ate them. 1930s, Pushpam ala wore a cape, mask, and feathered fedora , roamed city
light to the sounds oflive gamelan music. Then she Woman in the
a slim paperba ck volume,
Later that evening Ni Jun from Shangha i read out loud from
AFFILIAT ION, WORLDLI NESS , AND MODERN

I SM . 35
.,.,., , ,,.T,n-.i ,,1001 n, INF<:<; . AND MODERN ISM
streets at night, and leapt from balconies as she was photographed by Meenal Agarwal.
That evening in Delhi, in response to an exchange between a gallerist and a collector, Subramanyan, and Khakhar cannot be accommodated by either a history of styles or a
Pushpamala questioned the entanglements of art and commerce and expressed a desire sociology of art. Each chapter entails formal analysis of artworks alongside a social his-
for art to be accessible to a public. Art was an argument about society and a form of tory of their production and reception. The chapters are sequenced in roughly chrono-
social action; it was made to engage and be engaged, she said. logical order so as to chart the history of individuals, institutions, and image practices
These encounters with Chopra and Pushpamala in art and life made me rethink the that constituted the art world in India. This organization is not intended to suggest
connection of modern and contemporary art in India. They confounded my assump- organic or inexorable progression, but to show how artists build upon and depart from
tions of their proximity to and distance from each other. In their search for new publics, earlier practices, to analyze the changing role of the critic and criticism, and to dis-
in their citation of historical practices, in their commitment to location, were Chopra cuss the impact of major exhibitions. Each chapter portrays an artist, artworks, and
and Pushpamala as disjunct from their predecessors as I had imagined? Or were they art exhibitions that would not have been possible without specific predecessors and
extending a project inaugurated by modernist art? Williams, in conversation with Said, precedents. Cumulatively these chapters track the emergence and consolidation of mod-
provided a partial answer: "The analysis of representation is not a subject separate from ernism in India.
The visual artists who are the focus of this study represent a distinctive and influ-
history, but ... the representations are part of history, contribute to history, are active
ential trajectory of modernism in India. I discuss their contributions alongside those
elements in the way that history continues; in the way forces are distributed; in the
of their contemporaries and artistic interlocutors: Jamini Roy and Ramkinkar Baij with
way people perceive situations, both from inside their own pressing realities and from
Sher-Gil, Francis Newton Souza and Ram Kumar with Husain, Satish Gujral and Riten
outside them." 112 It became useful to think of contemporary art as "active elements" in
Mazumdar with Subramanyan, and Jeram Patel and Sudhir Patwardhan with Khakhar.
the continuation of a history of modernism. What is the role of artists, artworks, and
There are other significant trajectories of modernism in India, notably those of artists
aesthetics in a postcolonial society? How does a national art perform its distinctiveness in Bengal who have been studied by Mitter, Guha-Thakurta, R. Siva Kumar, Debashish
from discourses and practices elsewhere? How do artists signal their allegiance to place? Banerji, and Ratan Parimoo. 113 This book is indebted to their scholarship, but departs
These questions remain as crucial to the contemporary art world in India as they were from it by locating the beginnings of a national modernism in the figure of Sher-~!_
to the modernist art world that Sher-Gil, Husain, Subramanyan, and Khakhar built. in the 1930s. Her art, unlike that of Rabindranath Tagore, Gaganendranath Tagore,
In the r99os, many artists in India turned to conceptual photography, site-specific Nandalal Bose, and Jamini Roy, was a self.conscious and systematic modernist coun-
installation, video art, and performance as a response to conditions of globalization. terproposal to the art of the Bengal School and .was recognized as such by contemporary
This period witnessed the rise of new patronage for the visual arts, especially in urban critics and a subsequent generation of artists including Husain and Souza. 114
India, and the articulation of new relationships between art and politics. Hence the art A considerable literature on and by Sher-Gil, Husain, Subramanyan, and Khakhar
of Chopra and Pushpamala and the institutional spaces of Khoj and Gallery Espace in enables larger arguments about the relationship between modernism and contempo-
· which I found it displayed and discussed. In a rapidly changing environment for art, rary art and their national and global histories. This book is a response to art histories
the attachments to specific positions, practices, and places-to the artist's studio and and criticism that have analyzed these artists' work through an autobiographical or
art world, to early film and landscape painting, to Kashmir and South India-in Chopra minoritarian lens, often reducing their achievement to a personal struggle with gender
and Pushpamala's work argued against the fetishization of the new and homogeniza- and sexuality and rehearsing logics of a dichotomy betv,een private and public spheres.
tion of-'~ulture. Contemporary Indian art was not a commodity form representing a Those methods have yielded overdetermined readings of Sher-Gil as "woman artist" or
Khakhar as "gay artist" despite each artist's vexed relationship to these identities and
total break with the old and a seamless link with the global, a view promoted by its
to identity politics generally. They have overlooked the masculinity of Husain's "mas-
detractors and admirers alike. This was an art keenly attuned to its past, to its society
terly" and Subramayan's "craftsmanly" artistic identities. By contrast, I concentrate on
and community.
arguments made by the artists' work, visual and verbal, and less on developments in
their lives. Thus, I aim to reorient discourses on these artists beyond categories such as __,
TRACKS OF _T HE ART WORLD "woman," "Muslim," "Brahmin," and "queer," even as I acknowledge that thes~ catego-
ries have been significant for the reception of their work. The artistic identity practiced
This book traces the coming together of a·national art world and a project of modern· by modernists in India was opposed to an identitarianism based on gender. sexuality,
: ism from the 1930s through the r98os. Modernism in India was a critical response to region, religion, class, and caste. Contrary to contemporary understandings of the term,
· -colonialism ·that produced complex forms of national and cosmopolitan belonging!!!.--- identity in the context of the cultural politics of twentieth-century India was a shifting
worldly ·affili~ti~ns. The worldliness of the modernism imagined by Sher-Gil, Husain,
AFFILIATION . WORLDLINESS, ANO MODERNISM • 37

. ":'Otl.Dll(i£SS, AND MODERNISM
relationship between self and other (nation and world), and it was the unstable ground
from which to articulate aesthetic goals and political aspirations as in Kapur's essay "In for Weavers Service Centers of the All-India Handloom Board in Bombay (1959-1962)
Quest of [dentity" (1969), which I discuss in chapter 5. and dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda (1968-
Chapter 2, "An Art of the Soil," examines Sher-Gil's efforts at synthesizing East and 1974). These institutional positions in the world of crafts and art, respectively, were crucial
West, which by the 1930s had come to represent distinct modes of visual representation. to the development of his theory of art language, first articulated in his 1961 essay, "The
The Paris-trained artist embraced oil painting and inaugurated a tradition of modern- Artist on Art," in which he likened postcolonial artists to "the primitives of a new age."
ism to which generations of artists in hventieth-century [ndia professed allegiance. rn This art language was worked out in Subramanyan's toys, paintings, murals, and reliefs
her paintings of the 1930s and 1940s, she engaged two precolonial artistic traditions of the 1960s and early 1970s that linked distinct domains of cultural practice and modes
that she took to represent an authentic India and could therefore serve as the basis for of artistic production to make a postcolonial modernism in the image of Indian tradition.
a new national art. Her engagement with the wall paintings of Ajanta and Mattancheri Chapter 5, "Paan Shop for People," analyzes how Khakhar came to appropriate visual
in the South India trilogy of 1937 recast the relationship between national tradition forms and modalities associated with the bazaar in his art of the 1960s and 1970s. His
and modernist art, giving visual form to the masses. Her engagement with the minia- turn to the city and material-cultural legacies of colonial modernity was unprecedented
ture painting of the Rajput and Mughal courts in her paintings of 1938-1940 offered in mid-twentieth-century India. In the 1950s and 1960s, Husain and Subramanyan,
a feminist critique of dominant representations of women and the village, which were despite their differences in method and materials, privileged the space of the village
or the figure of the craftsman to mark commitments to national tradition. By locating
the object of male nationalist reform and remaking. Although Sher-Gil is usually con-
national tradition in popular culture and urban lifeworlds, Khakhar's art participated
sidered an iconoclastic or isolated figure, her work was in critical dialogue with artists
in contemporary debates on "indigenism" and "internationalism," which stood for
and intellectuals in late colonial India on questions of the nation-form, citizenship, and
a fraught relationship between East and West. In the 1960s and 1970s, these terms
aesthetics.
defined distinct and competing aesthetic and political agendas. Along with other Indian
Chapter 3, "Man and Mahabharata," traces the development of Husain's artistic
artists and critics in the 1970s, Khakhar engaged in a critique of internationalism, or
career and visual imagination from his existential portrait Man (c. 1950) to civilizational
the perceived dominance of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, through indigenism.
tableaux based on the Mahabharata, a Hindu epic, for the Bienal de Sao Paulo (1971). This critique culminated in the group exhibition Place for People (1981), which called for
A founding member of the Progressive Artists Group, Husain offered a postcolonial a critical realism in art and political engagement with the space of the city. Khalchar's
critique of modernist notions of originality and mastery in his paintings of the 1950s. painting Paan Shop (1965) and installation Paan Beedi Shop (1992) referred to the ordi-
His first film, Through the Eyes of A Painter (1967), shifted the boundaries between nary and ubiquitous paan shop-at once the vendor of paan (areca nut wrapped in
"modernist" art and "traditional" crafts and enacted a dynamic exchange between the betel leaf), tobacconist, corner shop, and social meeting ground in Indian towns and
city and the village. Its achievement hinged on translation between media (cinema, cities-and proposed that art should be like a paan shop for people.
painting) and sites (village, city) that were perceived as separate and opposed. In paint- Chapter 6, "Globalization, the New-Media Nineties, and the Persistence of Modern-
ings and performances of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Husain reenvisioned the role ism," discusses the ongoing relevance of modernism in light of violence against artists
of art and the artist by adopting the persona of picture showman, a creative figure com- and artworks by right-wing Hindu groups in India and a series of international exhibi-
mon to India's rural and urban cultures. Through a committed practice of translation, tions of contemporary Indian art including Kapital and Karma (Vienna, 2002), Edge of
he recast modernist art as nationalist work and transformed the relationship between Desire (Perth, New York City, Berkeley, Mexico City, Monterrey, New Delhi, and Mum-
artist and audience. bai, 2004-2007), Indian Summer (Paris, 2005), Indian Highway (London, 2008, with
Chapter 4 , "The New Primitives," relates Subramanyan's visual thinking on art and restagings in Oslo, Lyons, Rome, and Beijing), Horn Please: Narratives in Contemporary
crafts, and their corollaries easel and earth, to his ideas on art language in the 1960s and Indian Art (Bern, 2007) , New Narratives: Contemporary Art from India (Chicago, 2008),
Chalo! (Let's Go!) India (Tokyo and Seoul, 2008-2009) , and Paris-Delhi-Bombay (Paris,
1970s. These ideas were a response to particular histories of colonial and anti-colonial
2011). These developments represented a simultaneous contraction and expansion of
nationalist art education iµ India, which the artist engaged as a teacher, theorist, and
aesthetic and political possibility under globalization. Even as interest in contemporary
. practitioner of art. His involvement in.emergent crafts revival, textile art, and mural move-
Indian art has grown exponentially worldwide, artists and artworks representing mod-
. ments in mid-twentieth-century_Jndia was visually and materially manifest in his Ravin-
ernism, most prominently Husain, have been under threat in India. Persecuted for his
dralaya terra-cotta relief in Lucknow in 1962-1963, textile paintings and rope sculptures
depiction of nude Hindu goddesses from the mid-199os, Husain left India in 2006 and
(or the 1964-1965 World's Fair in New York, and sand-cast cement sculpture at Gandhi lived in exile in homes in Dubai, Doha, and London until his death in 201!.
Darshan in New Delhi in 1968-1969. During this period, the artist was director of design
AFFI LI ATIO N. W ORLDLINESS, .. ND MODER N ISM · 39

/ .A_fflLIA t lON, WORLDLINESS, AND MODERN I.SM
What fur..i..~. then. fu:- mode:nli:c:m and its cosmopolitan secularity in lndia? I tum to
=~=:i-:lra.')· art- Vl\-a.n Sun ';;...-.im·s digit:tl ph· tomontages Rc-takt: < ifAmrita (2001),
XJ. :ma. ·s.he:..'l:.h"s serin cf p:;..intings Ec.-i. Sig}:1 P.it Kashmir in }-Our Drra ms (2.004-
:;. ;:::1:;;:i, 5".he.da Gowda ;m<l Chr'.sroph Storz's sculptural installation Stopo:-e.r (201 2), and
AM -~ ya's p:. ~.aphic ir...s!allation Cdttm..-:ian in the Laromtcry (201~)-for prmi-
:il~ ans=. Thoe artists take up a lllirory of modernism in India in order to reveal
ti:.,;, p;h"'t and renun :- the presec.t. They propose th at modernism is a
AN ART OF THE SOIL
ruin in Benjamin's
~= N:ct c.e..d <K dcne uith. but afa-e \\ith potential. puL-;ating with energy, and stir-
Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941)
"But don't you think that on the whole I have learned something from Indian painting
and sculpture?" wrote Amrita Sher-Gil to Karl Khandalavala, a Bombay-based art critic
and collector. in the summer of 1937. 1 She was referring to Brahmacl1aris (fig. 13), a
large oil painting of five male figures seated on the ground. It was inspired by a tour of
artistic and archaeological sites in South India, including the temples at Madurai and
Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu and the palaces at Padmanabhapuram and Mattancheri
in Kerala. The rhetorical question Sher-Gil posed to Khandalavala echoed a confes-
sion made to her parents in a letter written the previous winter. The artist, who was
twenty-three years old at the time, declared: "Ajanta is wonderful. I have for the first
time since my return to India learnt something from somebody else's work! "2 Thus the
Paris-trained Sher-Gil understood Brahmacltaris to translate into the idiom of modernist
art the aesthetics of Ajanta (fig. 14). an ancient Buddhist cave site, richly decorated with
painting and sculpture, that by the 1930s had come to represent the pinnacle oflndia's
cultural achievement for colonial authorities and nationalist critics alike.
Like many artists and intellectuals in late colonial India, Sher-Gil viewed the paint·
ings at Ajanta as representative of the past and future glory of the nation, but her paint·
ings based on the site were novel in their engagement with modernism in Europe. They
portrayed the secular world, addressed concerns of the present, and placed Indian art
in dialogue with Western art. Sher-Gil's practice of art was characterized by synthetic
gestures between motifs and techniques that had come to stand for distinct traditions of
East and West in late colonial India. Through its medium and subject, use of color and
,t. ff H,-.. TIO II , \VORL0LJNESS, ANO MODERNISM
Fig. 9.3 Meera
Mukherjee, Ashoka ot
Katingo, 1972. Bronze
WER!
SCULPT URAI IAGINATION

IN 20TH-CENTU NI INDIA
DV
2oth-century Indian sculpture captured dialogues between the genre's classical

inheritances and creative labour rooted in colonial and postcolonial negotiations.
Artists strove for national visibility while experimenting with new forms of material
and monumentality to redefine modernity through the medium.
SANJUKTA SUNDERASON
An overview of Indian sculpture across the early and middle

decades of the 20th century reveals a dispersed domain of prac
tices, initiatives and directions. With a view to extracting from
this mélange a script for sculptural modernity in India, this
chapter is restricted to a representative selection of sc ulptors
and issues around sculptural practice, To identify an internal
logic for the field, we must foreground questions of form and
space, figure and material, publics and sites — both as structural
factors in the production and public lives of sculptures, and as
signatures of the materiality of sculptural modernity in com
parison, for instance, to that of paintings and prints.
Three landmark sculptures were installed across the cen
tral quarters of the Indian capital, New Delhi, through the
post-independence decades of the 1950s to the 1970s. The first
ABOVE PAR RIGHT
Figs 9.2a,9.2b
is a life-size bronze tableau of labouring men in the academic
Ramkinkar Baij, Yoksha realist tradition: Debiprasad Roy Chowdhury’s Thumph of Labour
and Yakshi (commissioned (1956), mounted in the frontal courtyard of India's premier pub-
in 1955 and completed lic art collection, the National Gallery of Modern Art [Fig. 9.1]
in 1964), Stone. Entrance
of Reserve Bank of India,
The second comprises a duet of iconic sentries from the classical
Indian pantheon, guarding the entrance of the stately Reserve Indian canon, The third sculpture, Meera Mukherjee’s Ashok
New Delhi
at Kalinga (1972), is an eleven-feet-high bronze figure
of the:
Bank of India building: Ramkinkar Baij’s Yaksha and Yakshi
se.OWw (commissioned in 1955; completed in 1964) [Figs 9.2a, 9.2b] legendary Mauryan king Ashoka at the moment of his realms
Fig. 9.1 Debiprasad Roy ciation of violence upon seeing the scale of destruction 1 oie
These monumental stone compositions stand at twenty-four feet
Chowdhury, Triumph of
ae
Labour, 1956. Bronze high and are caryed in a modernist refraction of the classical _ Kalinga war [Fig. 9.3]. Created in Mukherjee’s signature
ilation of folk metal-casting techniques from central India: INF
figure adorns the grounds of the capital's luxury hote
1, the ITE
Maurya Sheraton (purchased and installed in 1977)» presenti
. isto
an almost totemic fusion of the epic and the folk, the hist
and the iconic. the
All three sculptors work with the commemorative 9F
celebratory idiom in some sense, deploy ying andcont
Bite 5 ev t
tropes of the heroic, the classical or the epic. TH
stylistic difference, however, suggests more than an om
e. Ie s™
eclectic spectrum of 2oth-century Indian sculptur
hate
a coincidence that all three began as painte’ rs, ort
worked with the academic realist tradition 10 their early
and in their mature works continued to adhere to the gu
while consciously disrupting and reworking surf races,
peit (rave
and forms to invoke the modern. This alliance, al
oder?
of the figurative and the modern, of realism and m
CHAPTER 9 STRUCTURES IN PLACE: MODERNITY AND SCULPTURAL IMAGINATION IN 20TH-CENTURY INDIA 125
124 PART | °* COLONIAL MODERNITY. ART AND NATIONAL IDENTITY (1900-1947)

* a
can be identifieas
d 4 critical feature of s¢ ulptural m tates. Patronage was thus
tied to the w, AY ae.
India as it developed through the early and 1 mic n thrived in certain quarters over others.
tn
the th century. While
this does not overshadow new iw a steady line of academic Sculptors nto carve a select fusion of a traditional Indian sub
yy ay fy
ities of pure abstraction that have emerged since the mid-2otl 1ark on the early formations of the
held. p his case, a demure Hindu female devotee poised with
century, it does suggest an alternative rapport with the modet Caleutta, academic artists in general and sculpture "PY Cone t de jamp, with the posture and figuration of the rigid Euro-
in of
that distinguishes trajectories of zoth-century Indian sculpture were marginalized by the aesthetic
revivalism of h, cademic tradition, This spawned an Indian variant
trom those of modern painting institutionalized as ‘Indian-st
2 yle’
yle’ painti
pa
. What ssical style that was, in effect, an extension into sculp
ng or the Be.
7 ngal f what Raja Ravi Varma had concretized in oi! painting
This chapter charts some of the configurations of this ray of Painting. This was championed by artist S, Criticsa:
friend and
seurs led by Abanindranath Tagore (1871 -195i)and et sce the late 19th century, or what Mhatre'’s close
port by splitting the lineages of the three sculptors introduced
(1861-1934), the principal of the Government Sche
B, Hay ciate M. V. Dhurandhar, the academic painter, was devel-
here into three broad sections: the first focuses on realism as
0 of 4, ping with similar subjects
a dynamic stylistic problem that both bound and baffled sculp Calcutta at the turn of the century. Havell is f amously kom this neo-
he 1920s witnessed a gradual reorientation of
tors between the early 1g00s and the 1940s; the second dwells have begun a process of ‘cleansing’ the art schoo} by aucti
classical idiom in naturalistic sculpture. In response to critiques
on dialogues between realism and modernism that split sculp its vast reserve of European plaster casts in order to Re
of being ‘denationalized’ for following a degenerate colonial
tural imperatives from the early 1950s onwards and introduced a resurgence of the pre-colonial artistic traditions, wing 4 aesthetic, academic artists and sculptors were increasingly
questions of mass, yolume, ‘truth to material’ and spatial recon celebrated in the orientalist artistic revivalism of th striving to establish new forums for national visibility, to bid
‘ ie "Today
struction of form; and the third elaborates on the rhetorics of style. By the early 19008, a host of promising young for their places in contemporary discourses on artistic moder-
assimilating the national, the folk and the popular that devel from Calcutta who wanted concrete training in the a nity! A conscious rethinking of the potential of naturalistic
oped in the 1960s through modernist reconfigurations of the traditions, such as Rohini Kanta Nag (1868-1895), Fanindrana sculpture can also be identified during this period, with a new
ideal of an artist—artisan continuum. Bose (1888-1926) and Aswini Kumar Barman ( 1862-unknoa), turn towards deploying realism to showcase labouring bodies,
had to leave for Europe, never to return.’ humble subjects and the margins of society. This reoriented the
classical idiom of portrait busts to allow new spaces for studies
Realism and its Discontents This difficult terrain for naturalist sculptors Persisted even
of alternative subjects, and new routes into the national-modern
To understand the modernity of Indian sculpture in the early in an otherwise conducive atmosphere like Bombay, where:
aesthetic, dominated so far by the Indian-style painters of the
decades of the zoth century, one must chart the complex career patronage for naturalist sculpture was substantial, Even:
Bengal School. In the 1920s, for instance, this was highlighted
of realism in the colony: its straight-jacketed introduction as such a successful academic sculptor as Ganpatrao Mbatre
and noted in the exhibition reviews of naturalist artists in new
academic naturalism in the new colonial art schools since the (3876-1947) — whose celebrated compositions in plaster and
journals like the Indian Academy of Art, established in Calcutta
mid-igth century; its subsequent mutations into social realistic marble like To the Temple (1896) [Fig. 1.8, p. 26] and Sabarr (ugg) in 1920 by academic painters Hemendranath Majumdar and
fetched awards at the Bombay Art Society (1896), the Deli
figuration since the 19208; and its increasing stylistic refrac- Atul Bose, to showcase the hitherto marginalized academic
tions into expressionistic and modernist iconography through Durbar exhibition (1903) and the Wembley Empire exhibition naturalist artists. Works by academic sculptors from Bombay,
(1924) — had to struggle ceaselessly to gain official patronage!
the mid-century. A realist aesthetic, it can be argued, medi- like B. V. Talim’s In Tune with the Almighty (c. 1920) [Fig- 9-4]
Despite failed attempts to reach the Royal College of Art, London, or Pramatha Mallik’s Soul of the Soil (c. 1928) (Fig. 9.5], mark
ated the structural imaginations of modern Indian sculpture,
Mhatre’s impeccable realistic finesse was acknowledged tobeth not only a new ethos of realism in sculpture but also an active
The arrival of the modern was itself a result of the institution
of academic naturalism as a quasi-official aesthetic in the col hallmark of an Indian naturalist tradition honed in the colon exploration of the formalistic criteria of realist figuration. This
art schools. In his intricate plaster cast To the Temple, Mbattl is supported by the sculptors’ shared preference for working
onial art schools in the provincial capitals of Calcutta, Bombay, with smaller dimensions, with closer attention to expression
Madras and Lahore. The first generation of modern sculptors, and posture, moulding the subject and narrative in compact
who emerged from these schools, sustained themselves through works. Yet, while painting continued to escape the confines of
official and aristocratic commissions and worked with a heavy naturalistic figuration through the 1920s and 1930s, sculpture
naturalist accent in their eagerness to gain expertise, visibility remained tied to naturalism — but with conscious integration
and patronage for their new-found identities as professional art- of expressionistic layers within the frame of the naturalistic.
ists. At the same time, this academic naturalism was a stylistic Debiprasad Roy Chowdhury (1899-1975), a painter trained
of
blindfold that displaced possibilities of alternative treatments in the Indian style under Abanindranath Tagore, and a sculp-
tor trained in the academic tradition of the Royal College of
form, spawning a dichotomy in which Indian sculptors struggled
it. Art under Hiranmoy Roy Chowdhury, ideally exemplifies these
with the realist idiom, anxious both to master and to overcome
new deflections of academic naturalism in sculpting. In the late
Art-school pedagogy, the material costs of sculpting w ith mar-
19208, he was the only one of his peers from the Bengal School
ble or bronze, and an already-limited domain of patronage are coterie to be part of the first generation of Indian principals of
important factors in understanding the sway of academic sculp- the government art schools. At the Madras School of Art, where
ture during the early decades of the 2oth century, particularly heserved 45 principal from 1928 to 1958, he not only became an
when read in comparison with the alternative visualizations of iconic teacher of the naturalist method, but also initiated modes
artistic modernity by painters during the same period. More of reorienting the visual language of academic naturalism into
importantly, this naturalism in the colony was also equated new styles of social realism. In his own works, this was reflected
with the formulation of a ‘western-style’ art, and carried an aura in dedicated experiments with the expressionistic and the gro-
of modernity that was sanctioned by colonial bureaucracy, as ‘esque, using Rodin’s signature rupture of surfaces and tense
well as the new clientele of mercantile aristocracy and landed musculature. Debiprasad used gritty realism in charcoal sketches
gentry in India. Within art schools, curriculum and pedagogy 18 oils through the 1930s, and he reinvented this
language in
were structured in a rigid European academic style, supported au ths Temple Entry Proclamation. (1936)
by a steady inflow of plaster casts of classical Greco-Roman Ned eo er corres (1957) [Fig. 9.6]. PU Somme aes
models and copies of the neoclassical sculpture that was cur- at © 19408 and 19508 repeated this restructured
rent in Britain. Outside art schools, patronage was dominated , Combining it in particular with a monumental and
he a
by memorial busts of colonial officials and portrait studies in pee ‘rope. Triumph of Labour, with its energetic bodywork and
aristocratic and government commissions, Students keen to ieeicbr ‘story staging of struggle and dynamism, tries to capture Fig. 9.5 Pramatha Mallik,
purers at the moment of displacing an obstacle [Fig. 9.1]. In Soul of the Soil,c. 1928.
FAR WIGHT establish themselves as professional sculptors required steady Bronze
Fig. 9.4 B. V, Talim, IoTune financial and infrastructural support that was limited to the
with the Almighty, « 11720.
mercantile bases of cities like Bombay or commissions from CHAPTER 9 + STRUCTURES IN PLACE: MODERNITY AND SCULPTURAL
Piaster of Paris IMAGINATION IN 20TH-CENTURY INDIA 27
PART | COLONIAL MODERNITY, ART AND NATIONAL IDENTITY (1900-1947)

126
——EEE————
niscent of the context of its5 tn, aking Burp

& But Dy
further in this work. In invo! king a Sense ofi
ires also the internal pressure
ams, which I he achieves( by minimisofnizingmasscon,thruse 0
ing the tense volume of enchaine. d mass. In BondyAtty
testimony to a further transition of realistic § ‘se
SUN on
mein the post-famine years, with a more
defined Tote
social realism. It also became part of a communist Cultura)
tion that assimilated art with revolutionary
itionary potential
tty, ,
The sculpture was published, for inst ance, in the Communi
eople’s War in May 1945."
calcutta Group was a collective formed in Calcuty
during i the catastrophic Bengal
8 Famine of 943,1943
Set 2eainst thy
fa host of artistic interventions that depict ed hunger
and displacement. As such, the group and its moder nity could
never be ¢ ociated from their roots in social crisis, as 4 thete.
ric of social realism was tied intrinsically to the way their work
were framed and received. In the mid-1950s, Prodosh Das Gupta
i back on his works from the Calcutta Group perigd;
seemingly more distanced from this repertoire, he is critical
of what he saw as the naive narrative bias of his famine works:
which he felt were guided by ‘emotional excesses bordering
on sentimentalism’ rather than by sculptural qualities? Hig
quasi-autobiographical book My Sculpture (1955) revealed hig
personal journey from the social realism of the 19405 to ‘a more
restrained order of basic forms’ of the 1950s, one that celebrated
‘truth to materia!’ while still responding to the themes from
everyday life.’ His observations reveal the values and anxieties
that marked the ‘transitional’ years of decolonization, a perioll
that was characterized by the shifting compositional ethicsat
modern art. Prodosh Das Gupta offers an ideal marker from
its monumentality, it reveals a confluence of the sculptor’s per- which the transitional moment in sculpture can be mapped!
sonal faith in romantic socialism with an allegorical testimonial as a student of the reoriented academic naturalist tradition
to the arrival of the post-independence Nehruvian nation-state.* under Debiprasad; as the only sculptor in the modernist col
Under Debiprasad’s mentorship at the Madras School of lective of the Calcutta Group; as a teacher at the Caleutta‘Att
Art, a new generation of sculptors emerged through the 1930s School; as an artist-administrator following his directorship
and 19405. During this period, the school also became a verit- at the National Gallery of Modern Art in the late 195085 oF #
able refuge for disgruntled academic artists from Calcutta who a steady commentator on modern sculpture through the 1939%
missed realist training at the Calcutta Art School, where the to 1960s, Alongside his academic naturalist predecessors (tke
noted Indian-style painter Mukul Dey was at the helm as prin Mhatre, Talim, V, P. Karmarkar in Bombay, and his mastery Deli
cipal. One of Debiprasad’s students to gain prominence through prasad, in Madras) and his modernist peers (like Ramkinkar Bal
these years was Prodosh Das Gupta (1912-1991), who trained in Santiniketan, Chintamoni Kar in Calcutta, Dhanra) Bhagat
9 be
in the academic realist tradition at the Madras school before in Delhi and Sankho Chaudhuri in Baroda), Das Gupta
leaving for the Royal College of Art, London. He returned in the treated as a connecting link between the figurative and abstrachy
early 1940s and formed, along with some fellow painters, the or between the understandings of realism-and modernist? a
of transition
Calcutta Group in 1943 [see Chapter 8]. In the late 1930s, Das Indian sculpture that characterized the aesthetics
Gupta had displayed his student works at the annual exhibitions in the immediate post-independence decades.
of the Academy of Fine Art in Calcutta, in which his naturalist
works Burden of Age and Opium Eater brought him awards in Restrained Order of Basic Forms wal of
1936 and 19372 In the 19405, he produced some smaller-scale In his writings, Prodosh Das Gupta identified the anv"
6 perio d, cal ;
| -194
s from the post minatlts,
concrete figures of hunger and resistance as a response to the modernity in his work
traumatic experience of famine and genocide that marked this in the mid-1950s. Compositions like Poundir ng Corn (1949)
miss
closing decade of anti-colonial struggle. Here, too, his accent Condolence (1950) reveal a new formalistic cone ern around
tl®
remained naturalistic, tilting towards a defined social-realistic and volume, with visible efforts from the scul ptor to re struc
form
response to the crisis of the times; however, even in his iconic contours in order to arrive at minimalistic, simplified i
t
works from this period like In Bondage (1943), Das Gupta can ‘mostly rounded, cylindrical or ovoid’, and to accentuate
nd voids ang
be seen to depart from the enforced contours of naturalistic relative values of concaves and convexes, mass 4 ie
ito focus th
figuration, reframing the body to contain the social — in this lar planes and their juxtaposed lines’ that brought in
ion re of fort
case, the vehement struggle of enchained humanity against abstract, formal aspect of sculpture.” This language ~ jon Fig. 9.7 Prodosh Das
sensibility dominated the works of sculptors in th
ne transit!
‘
oppression [Fig. 9.7]. The neorealistic figure is rendered with rt Gupta, in Bondage, 1943,
»neration
ati ‘ait
a strong expressionistic language that speaks of the artist's decades of the 1950s and 1960s, with the new gene , Bronze
. sncush
training under Debiprasad, charging it with a revolutionary towards the European modernist works of Brancuy
CHAPTER 9 STRUCTURES IN PLACE: MODERNITY AND SCULPTURAL IMAGINATION IN 20TH-CENTURY INDIA 125
128 PART | COLONIAL MODERNITY,

ART AND NATIONAL IDENTITY (1900-1947)
aaa
in whom, Das Gupta argue
d in al ater.pi
nee sculptors were igurative and the abstract that became actively ‘place-making" He developed a genre of environmental sculpture
recognizing ‘the
ulpture manifested in their fluid rh “SSCntiale »508 and 19605. in cement, a material almost defined by its cheap availability, a5
nse of swelling from within? This
ythin, glidiy r’y penchant for realism in his early years of train- the artist recalled." This was a mode of making the rural land-
; Sense of. Ahavan did not deter him from repeatedly disrupting scape and habitation ‘visible’ within the space of the ashram,
the expression of the internal energy ofmattor :
listic integration of the human figure, Which style to and at the same time, visualizing the everyday of the ashram
ct Jements in the reorientation of his work throw, al
recalls in his memoirs, was the key question of his in art. This conscious fusion of form and space, material and
nd he attributed this aesthetic to his ‘return’ 1g ce Hew. t
though his faith in realism was at odds with the more motion, introduces a rhetoric of ‘vitality’ in Ramkinkar's sculp-
Indian sculptural values. day tures; Henry Moore had identified this in his own open-air
Writing in the early 1970s, Das Gupta saw himself as ommitted
comr } rhetoric of his master, Nandala! Bose,
Indian-style
one training sculpture as ‘a pent-up energy of its own, an intense life of its
the earliest protagonists of modernity in
Indian sculpture, ee the characteristic eclecticism of the Kala Bhavan art
own independent of the object it may represent,’ The concrete
with Ramkinkar Baij (1906-1980)
of Santiniketan, whom A allowed and encouraged this creative freedom,'* Ramkinkar’s
in the material is physically inscribed with the sculptor’s compos-
had invited to join the Calcutta Group in 1949," He noted ti more defined absorption in modernist form-making
itional fluidity, placing Ramkinkar between the frames of the
they were connected by commitment to the materia} dimen, 19308 is attributed to his training under visiting sculptors like
lyrical and the concrete, the narrative and the abstract. Yaksha
the British artist Marguerite Milward (a pupil of Bourdelle) and
sions of sculpture alongside steady engagement with thehan of mat- and Yakshi stand testimony to his monumental treatment of the
dimension. Ramkinkar, who was one of the celebrated trinity of the Viennese artist Lisa von Pott. His own reworking
classical and the modern; the mythological narrative status of
erial and subject in his concrete open-air compositions within
Santiniketan along with his master, Nandalal Bose (2882-1966) the figures seems to be reinvented and staged via the sculptor's
the university campus, however, reveals a euphoric assimilation
and fellow student and colleague Benodebehari Mulherjeg of the vitality of human bodies with that of matter itself. His active flattening or accentuation of contours, surfaces and angles
(1904-1980), could have featured in the preceding section of [Figs 9.2a, 9.2b]. Iconicity is produced not only via the myth-
cement-fondue works from the 1940s and 19505, like Harvester
this chapter, as an example in the discussion of social realism (1943) [Fig- 9.8] [see Box 8.1, p, 113], Famine
(a series from 1943) ological but also by a restructuring of the classical through the
and radical reorientation of realistic figuration. His 1938 sculp: and Mill Call (1956), reveal this organic transformation of real juxtaposition of rhythm and rigidity of stone, internal pressure
ture Santhal Family | Fig. 7.19, p. 108], an open-air composition ism to abstraction, in which motion is transfigured in concrete. from within and the enforced restraint of contours,
in cement fondue depicting a migrating family from the San- ‘Lhave gone to the abstract to capture the dynamic pose of the Both Prodosh Das Gupta and Ramkinkar Baij are connecting
thal tribe, is an essay in the social-realistic ethos, as indeed are human body while husking’, Ramkinkar commented regarding links between the concerns and sensibilities of the 1940s and the
many of his works from the next two decades [Box 9.1], Yet the abstract framing of a peasant threshing rice-harvest in Har- 1950, when a new generation of sculptors came to the fore, with
Fig. 9.8 Ramkinkar Baij, Ramkinkar, in his signature eclecticism, can also be placed at the vester; in this monumental insertion of form into space, he fused more active consciousness of the potential of sculptural abstrac-
Harvester, 1943, Laterite fluid margins of yarious styles. An internal logic and dynamism the abstract figuration of motion, labour and force"? tion. This was a trend broadly shared with painting, yet sharper
pebbles and cement mortar of material transition places him at the centre of the dialectic Ramkinkar worked with a conscious sensibility of using sculp- in sculpture, in which a late arrival of international modernism
ture to enrich architecture and space. Rabindranath Tagore prompted a drastic transition from the defined naturalistic ten-
is known to have given him a ‘blanket license’ to make open- dencies to a full-hearted embrace of abstraction. This trend was
air sculptures. Both material and location are active tropes in initiated by the new generation who graduated from art schools
Ramkinkar's works, reflecting the participatory aesthetic that in the 1940s and became teachers in the post-colonial decades:
RE-CONFIGURING SANTHAL notes in the introduction of the exhibition catalogue, Nandalal Bose devised in his broader pedagogical model of Sankho Chaudhuri (1916-2006), trained under Ramkinkar in
6 xoe
FAMILY: POSITIONS AROUND to ‘break with the regional model (the generic fam- aestheticizing the campus everyday. Alongside genres of land- Santiniketan; Dhanraj Bhagat (1917-1988) and Amarnath Sehgal
A MODERN SCULPTURE ily), the sequential one (the family tree) and opt scape studies, nature studies and murals on campus walls, (1922-2007), trained under Bhabesh Sanyal at the Mayo School
instead the idea of a grouping based on affinities SANTHA Ramkinkar's open-air sculptures-were integral in this act of of Art in Lahore; and Chintamoni Kar (1915-2005), a sculptor
How must one read a seminal piece like Ram-
kinkar Baij’s Santhal Family [Fig. 7,19, p. 108]? The
that cut across generational and geographic divisions
(the unconditional family)’ [p. 3]. Inviting inter-
| FAMILY
work was made in 1938, at a confluence of multi- national artists, critics and scholars to engage with
ple currents: it was a time of nationalist as well as and respond to Ramkinkar's sculpture, the exhibition
left-wing celebrations of the ‘folk’ as representing sought a ‘rhetorical’ intervention into approaching,
living tradition, labour, the national and the pop- assembling and annotating modern Indian art. For
ular, and a period of artistic yentures into imaging curators, artists and commentators involved in the
the rural, the tribal and the everyday. As such, Ram- exhibition, issues like locality, mobility, translation,
kinkar's cement-fondue portrait of a migrant family lization, medi de-familiarization
of Santhals draws in and lends itself to multiple cita- and ‘unbelonging’ (as raised by Geeta Kapur and Irit
tions, meanings and questions. As elaborated in the
ambitious international exhibition ‘Santhal Fam-
Rogoff) were critical tools, and in the series of arti-
cles and photo-essays accompanying the catalogue,
| SCU
ily; Positions around an Indian Sculpture’ (2007), one finds the beginnings of a new art-historical exer-
multiple methodologies — curatorial, theoretical, his-
!
cise in India and South Asia, in which history and
toriographical - can be applied to understand both the present are juxtaposed and fused, both displacing
its formal roots and its more diffused resonances the historicizing gaze and tethering contemporary
across space and time. Curated by Grant Watson in imagination. The radical curatorial turn posed by
the exhibition cut open some of the theoretical and Cover of Santhal Family: Positions
cooperation with Anshuman Dasgupta and Suman
‘Around an Indian Sculpture, eds Grant
Gopinath, and held at the M HKA Museum of Con- methodological conundrums inhabiting the contem- Watson, et al. (Antwerp ; Museum yan
temporary Art in Antwerp, this landmark exhibition porary pedagogical concerns of ‘world art history’. Hedendaagse Kunst Anewerp, 2008),
sought to reposition or re-stage the masterpiece, Viewers and readers are pushed to consider and
aft
albeit theoretically, outside its location — referring think through key questions and positions from the dis-located, de-familiarized, re-invented?
both to its fixed physical station at Santiniketan and vantage point of Ramkinkar’s monumental image: the afterlives of this mid-century modernist
to its historical position within mid-2oth-century what happens to the locations of meanings that San- How can the ‘periphery’ be de-territo! rialized - fro
artistic modernity in India. The idea was, as Watson thal Family spawns, once the iconicity of the workis and within disciplinary and political Fig.9.9 Chintamoni Kar.
S1 snd Reclined Figure, 1967 Vitrified
terracotta
CHAPTER 9 + STRUCTURES IN PLACE: MODERNITY AND SCULPTURAL IMAGINATION IN 20TH-CENTURY INDIA 131
130 PART | * COLONIAL MODERNITY,
ART AND NATIONAL |DENTITY (1900-1947)
of the Delhi Polytechnic and
pal of the Calcutta Art Schoo] Chita Fig.9.11 Dhanraj
ow q ly demonstrate movement and poise. In his works Cosmic Dance, 1967. Welded
the Government College Ps
of Arts and rracotta from the early 1960s, like Les Ondines iron
od rking during the transitional period
eof modernist sensi jolus and Tearus (1963) and Reclined Figure (1967)
bility was revealed
in the use of Kar both invokes and transcends the figurative and
- ¢ reinventing of trad
ne itional ones Seu Critics observed in him the final ‘arrival’ of ‘Indian
were keen to extract the ‘int ;
ernal energy’ of matter m insculpture:‘a synthesis between Indian sensibility
and
H yew Western techniques’ whereby the artist was seen
taught in Ba or twenty years: und compact Compositions the organic interiority of form, In an
;
}
of sculptors were trained . ir r th-a fun hi ¢ of Chintamont Kar, who returned to India in the ; to » ont towards the organization of form in an intellectual
damental appreciation of f 19508 after a long sojourn in Europe, terracotta became ong order of relations, with the ebb and flow of energies as freed
experiments in wood, metal 2 e, Dhar the artist’s favoured materials for sculpting dynamic pi a fram the restrains of the 19th century Europeanism’, which was
seer) to have imposed on and impaired the vitalism of classical
Indian sculptural tradition.”
The defined intellectualism that was observed in Chintamont
Kar's works found parallels in the metal and wood compositions
of Sankho Chaudhuri and Dhanraj Bhagat, which represented
an active exploration of the architectonic qualities of form and
an eclectic use of material. Their experimentations in rhyth-
mic forms and spatial arrangement of mass provided sculpture
with an active non-realistic modernity that had been missing
in previous decades. Sankho Chaudhuri was trained in a mod-
ernist ethos under Ramkinkar in Santiniketan in the 1940s, and
in his works he dismissed realist or narrative content entirely
with his thorough focus on formalistic treatment of material.
His trips to Europe in the late 1940s only added to his attrac-
tion to abstract sculpting and new media, and when he returned
to join the art faculty of the Maharaja Sayajirao University in
Baroda, Chaudhuri was working with a range of material, from
the plaster and cement of his early years to wood, stone and.
increasingly, cast metal and metal sheets. Works are typically
small in dimension, with a defined linear, sinuous quality that
reveals Chaudhuri’s interest in working with the concave and
the convex as modes of both sectioning and activating space;
these concems are evident in Music, a brass-on-cast-iron sculp-
ture displayed at the First Triennale-india (1968) [Fig. 9-10].
The constructivist aesthetic of Chaudhuri’s abstract metallic
compositions can be read in comparison with the wooden sculp-
tures of Dhanraj Bhagat, in which the artist tried to address the
architectonic and the totemic at the same time. Wood carving
became one of the modes in which sculptors made the transition
from lyrical narrative sculpting to fully abstract compositions.
Bhagat began in this tradition, limiting his initial works to
narrative reliefs in wood, and thereafter, his experimentations
\n accentuating the solid, vertical character of wood allowed
for spatial segregations and layering,” From the late 1950s, he
graduated to a wider range of materials, including cement, iron
filings, stone and metal sheets. The wooden sculptures retained
acurvilinear, lyrical flow within a close formal bind, examples of Bhagat also offers a point of entry into the realm of the totemic
which can be found in his works from the 1950s, such as Three and ‘organic’, with a parallel play of simplified contours and
Women (1953). The rhythmic compositional unity that is evident inscribed surfaces. The organic operates here either as. a mode
in these pieces was revised and restructured in Bhagat’s works of allowing matter to determine form, or to introduce formal
from the early 1960s onwards, when he consciously reworked citations from ‘living traditions, or to invoke totemic signs from
‘conic or totemic forms, using surface details like perf ‘folk’ tradi ‘These brought to the sculptural imagination of
relief decorations, fissures or marks to layer a composition visu- mid-2oth century India what had been initiated in painting in
ally, alongside architectural construction of multiple levels and the 19305 by Jamini Roy: a radical restructuring of the binaries of
: Mensions emanating from the core of the material itself. The ‘folk/modern’ or ‘artist/craftsperson’. Our third sculptor from this
: Snarch (1964), a composition in wood, metal and nails, and chapter's introduction, Meera Mukherjee (1923-1998), offers
he welded-steel composition Cosmic Dance (1967) [Fig- gut}, a ease in point. Her works from the 1960s activated questions
of tradition, modernity, social signification and formal values.
ethic, which strives towards a visual
oethis ofconstruction
a: al assemblageal and a detailed cohesion of inscribed At this critical juncture, a rapid consolidation of sculptural
hari dimensions. It is a turn towards a conceptual sculp- abstraction (in keeping with modernist internationalism of the
lat defines both Chaudhuri and Bhagat’s works from Cold War decades) came together with a defined legacy of the
Fig.9.10 Sankho this period, ‘national-popular’ aesthetic of the Nehruvian nation-state, which
Chaudhuri, Music, exhibited
in 1968. Brass on cast iron
AND SCULPTURAL IMAGINATION IN 20TH-CENTURY INDIA
CHAPTER? = STRUCTURES IN PLACE: MODERNITY
132 PART | COLONIAL MODERNITY, ART AND NATIONAL IDENTITY (1990-1947)

iption of anatomy in Mukherjee's
in which she lets matter and PLOCESS take On
guage merely a conscious staging 11 to more ‘personal styles’; from traditional medialike _ transfigured forms, the 1970s begin with a belated resolution
of the ton a
the modernist and the rhetoric of from the epic and the classical, and bot a plaster and stone to a wider range like wood, metal _ of stylistic tensions and aesthetic identities of the sculptural
sculptural field at the rurn of the 14¢ estion and transfiguration of folk techniques. in
mn nd terracotta; from narrative through abstract idioms —_ imagination. The 1950s and 1960s can be seen as a period of
ealist guration is intertwined with abstract Com to complete freedom from subject or theme altogether’; and ‘Becoming’ rather than ‘Being’, as observed by Mulk Raj Anand
Recasting Tradition values, casting the folk into a modern in the arrival of internationalism with the commitment to in Margin 1962.” The next decade brought a more resolute and
ist Montage oft ‘purely structural aims and values’ beyond ‘limited national- eclectic modernity, as displayed at the First Triennale-India in
For Meera Mukherjee, inherited tradition became an ‘ideal’ that and manner, Her idiom ofa modern mediated by the
she pursued and explored in her work, as well as the subject of ism" While the figurative and the indigenous can be seen to 1968 [see Box 13.3. p. 190].
the humanist and the totemic introduced fresh
intense experimentation and reinterpretation. Her training as persist in the post-independence sculptural modern, albeit in
devices to discourse on the nation and the everyday,
an artist was eclectic: she followed a defined ‘Indian’ style at and the folk; it achieved this bydeveloping formal
the Indian Society of Oriental Art in Calcutta but focused on that would accommodate both social sensibility and ry, 2
the entirely opposite western academic tradition at the Delhi consciousness. Geeta Kapur called this a ‘radically
Polytechnic, where she spent five years gaining a diploma in nography as well as from within the imaginative un;
painting, sculpture and graphics, before moving to the Akad- using the sympathetic sensors of art language itself
emie der Bildenen Kiinste in Munich in 1953. This mélange jee’s attempts to discover a national tradition, or tof NOTES FURTHER READING
determined the internal tensions in her works, as well as the | Kamal Sarkar, Bharoter Bhoskar 0 Chitrashilpi (Kolkata: Appasamy, Jaya. Introducton to Modem Indian Sculpture
‘organic’, resonate with the rhetoric of the ‘national.
Jogamaya Prakasani, 1984), pp. 16, 136, 191, (New Delhi: Indian Council for Cultural Relations,
formal resolutions that she sought within them. Prompted by almost implicitly harking back to the left-wing aesthetic: Partha Mitter, Art. and Nationalism in Colonial India 1970),
ns
her mentor in Munich, Tony Staedler, Mukherjee is known to lation of the 1930s and 1940s: a translation intosculpture 1850-1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge Dasgupta, Prodosh, Smritikatha Shitpakatha (Kolkata:
have grappled with questions of her identity as an Indian artist, resolution of modernism invoked by Jamini Roy in and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Pratikshan, 1996).
of finding what she described as ‘my own way to myself, rooted
pp. 102-7, Guha-Thakurta.Tapati, Locating Gandhi in indian Art
of the
and an active reframin of the post-colon
g identity tn Calcurca,O. C, Ganguly, the patron-critic of the History: Nandaial Bose and RamkinkarBaif’,
in Anjan
w
in the great Indian tradition." This quest, and her exposure to of
as artisan. Testimony to this ambiguous framing Bengal School, launched one such critique ~ or rather, Ghosh, Tapati Guha-Thakurta
and Janaki Nair, eds,
samples of cast bell-metal sculptures from tribal central India artistic identity in the 1960s is her receipt in 1968 of tl a vitriolic attack — against the academic sculpture of Theorizing the Present: Essays for Partha Chatterjee
Fanindranath Bose, who had left for Britain (New Dethi: Oxford University Press, 201 1),
upon her return to Calcutta in 1956, eventually pushed Mukher- dent's Award of Master Craftsman in Metalwork, b earlier. pp. 121-51.
jee to leave the comforts of urban life; through the 1960s, she commercial acknowledgment of her workin the the! 4 Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modemism: India’s Artists James, Josef, Contemporary Indian Sculpture: An Algebra of
travelled ceaselessly to the various tribal belts of eastern, central The confluence in Mukherjee’s art of the realist,# and the Avant-Garde, 1922-1947 (London: Reaktion Figuration (Chennai: Oxdord University Press, 1998}.
Books; New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), Kumar, R. Siva, Ramkinkor Bai-A Retrospective, 1906-1980
and southern India. These travels inscribed her expanding iden- ernist, the folk and the national-popular makes her wo pp. 172, 175, (New Dethi: Deihi Art Gallery and National Gallery of
tity as an artist, anthropologist, scholar and writer, as well as her point in Indian sculpture of the transitional period. Catalogues of Third Annual Exhibition (21 December Modern Art. 201 1).
ra
exercises in documenting, interacting and reorienting tribal and seen as a logical development of the tensions between 1935-9 January 1936) and Fourth Annual Exhibition Kar, Chintamoni, Smritichinhito (Kolleata: Ghashlar Bhawan,
(22 December 1936-10 january 1937) of the Academy 1983),
folk metal-casting traditions. Her own work in the 19605 was and non-figurative, realist and modernist works of Fine Arcs, Calcutta. Mukherjee,
Meera, Prabchito Jiboner Bhashkarja
shaped through these interfaces. Mukherjee was senior fellow gered through the 1950s; traces of early-2oth-century 4 Sanjukta Sunderason, Partisan Aesthetics: Modem Art
~
of the Anthropological Society of India and had close associa- converge in her work to create both tensions and re: and India’s Long Decolonization (Stanford: California Dabiprasad,
ed, Prasanta Daw, Shilpa
tions with patrons and connoisseurs of ‘living traditions’, such that are historically constitutive of the subject of Probandhabal
(Kolkata: Sarswata Library, 2006),
7 Prodosh Dasgupta, My Sculpture (Kolkata: Oxford
as Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and the sculptor Prabhas Sen; in Indian sculpture. In the 1960s, Mukherjee also Book and Stationery
Co., 1955), p.20,
areturn to the monumental, while the general trend was 8 Ibid
she became what can be called an artist-anthropologist, a role 9 Ibid
she affirmed and reinvented time and again in her publications more concentrated formal experiments in small dim 10 Prodosh Dasgupta, ‘Contemporary Indian Sculpture’,
on folk traditions in metal casting across India, of which the Geometrical works in wood and metal dominated, in Jaya Appasamy, ed., 25 Years of Indian Art Paintings,
seminal Metal Craftsmen of India (1978) is an early example. in works of the new generation of sculptors in the19 Sculpture and Graphics in the Postindependence
Era
(New Dethi: Lalit Kala Academy, 1972), p.23.
Yet this encounter with the ‘folk’ or with ‘tradition’ was never Pilloo Pochkhanawala and A. Davierwalla in Bombay | Ibid, p.20,
stable, and it was not translated seamlessly into Mukherjee’s Baroda sculptors training under Sankho Chaudhuri). M '2 Ramkinicar Balj, Self-Portrait
Writings and Interviews,
Mukherjee worked with a radically different idiom 1962-79 (Kolkata: Monfakira,
2006), p. 15,
art. Tradition, both as rhetoric and idiom, is mediated by ten- 13 Ibid,p. 66.
sions and asymmetries; these disrupted the interface between she stands both next to and far away from her peers IK 14 Ibid,
p. 61.
Roy Chowdhuri in Calcutta and Janakiram in thes 15 Henry Moore, ed. Philip James, Henry Moore on
the ‘indigenous techniques’ that Mukherjee documented and
followed and the creative refiguring that she sustained across used, in their own terms, iconic and totemic cons! Sculpture (London: Macdonald, 1966),
p. 72.
metal, Through the early decades ofher work, she 16 "indian Contemporaries’,
Marg, Special Volume on
her art, This speaks of the artist's perennial struggles both to 7 imemborary
Indian Sculpture (December 1962). p41,
perfect and to restructure the indigenous through her charac- ieties regarding patronage and installation, Ratan Parimoo, Studies in Modem Indian Art:A Collection
teristically modernist resolutions of form. phenomenal material and labour costs involved it 18 9 Ei80¥ (New Delhi: Kanak Publications, 1975)
Meera Mukherjee, ‘Gharuas:A Metal Artisan Group
Asymmetry is connected with ‘the desire to be organic rather sive works. It was only in 1977 that Ashoka, after and Their Art’, Man in India, 54 (4), p. 288.
than geometric’, observed Henry Moore.” Meera Mukherjee met in her courtyard for many years, was finally bought 19 Moore, ed, James, Henry Moore on Sculpture,
hotel group; indeed, continuing anxieties of patron P.70,
Moore during her stay in Europe and found striking conceptual 20 Meera Mukhopadhyay, Prabohitajibon-er Bhashkorjo
similarities with the British artist.” In the 1960s, Mukherjee
ated non-naturalistic public sculpture in post 3) Cotas: Monfaksira, 2008), p. 59,
worked extensively with the monumental, as is evident in her During the 1950s and 1960s, public on Geet Kapur, When wes Modem: Essays 6
compositions like the almost-six-feet-high He Who Saw (1968),
be restricted to naturalistic works in the herolc™®" = temporary Cultural Proctice in India (New Delhi:
compositions did not receive grand commission : m lila, 2000), p. 368.
and the eleven-feet-high Ashoka at Kalinga [Fig. 9.3]. These works hiya ‘An Introductionto Modem Indian
are both early essays from Mukherjee in the cire perdue (ost- ture a public aesthetic and limited themselves1° Sculpture (New Delhi: indian Counell for Cultural
wax) technique of folk craftspeople, which she perfected in the
dimensions and an exclusivist aesthetic, butit = 23 Relations, 1970), p. 23,
sculpture dedicated to monumental figuratione Tg Conte ttt Str Coiien Wer
course of her travels in Bastar, Ashoka at Kalinga, produced in unded, Special Volume on Contemporary
twenty-six separate pieces before being assembled together, is an
suffered from lack of patronage before being Indian Sculpture (December 1962), p. 2.
ding art market from the 1980s- S Conca! Marg volume was dedicated to the
iconic example of Mukherjee’s signature style: striated surfaces
and elongated limbs, with a somewhat internalized meditative
ar maitre the ‘sculptors of transition’ Ja) yet alee world and Indian sculpture. Mang
patron critic of the new artist collectives in ae

posture (which she sustained even in her latter-day miniature
compositions of everyday sights and sites). of visible markers of transition: from a dominance
CHAPTER 9 + STRUCTURES IN PLACE: MODERNITY AND SCULPTURAL IMAGINATION IN 20TH:CENTURY INDIA 135
ART AND
PART | * COLONIAL
arta.
A i
aaa. fs =
ee 0 ee Jn I See
THE CLASSICAL AND THE ise
{ie ging, suggesting there is latent masculinity while the female Spirit, Yakshi represen
ts prosperity through
MONUMENTAL IN INDIAN
up hin | {f the stance of the sculpture is modernist
agriculture. He appears quite surly, with a gear in one hand and
in his ‘ a thus enigmatic, the head is completely figur-
a moneybag in the other. She looks impassive and not partic
and abst i. ind legible as the portrait of a bespectacled ularly interested in guardingor sharing the prosperity for
SCULPTURE (1947-PRESENT)
which
anys i Sy ring a Gandhi topi or hat. To further complicate
she is the custodian [see Figs 9.2a, 9.2b, p. 124]
gate odes, Shankar, the cartoonist, has placed the figure
Today, Ramkinkar’s Yaksha and Yakshi have acquired a canon-
the 0s 1 chat looks like an unfinished rock. Is the figure
ical status in Indian art. As they are among the first major
on ne sy has it decided to alight here? Nehru, in all his sar sculptures after independence to qualify as public art on
emerging a mon
srial elegance, stands in front of this strange, hybrid sculpture umental scale, it can be tempting to imagine that the pair was
i proudly proclaims, ‘T bought iv. In front of him stand the uncontested from the moment of installation. But classicism — an
ciesiiob and culture minister, Maulana Abdul
How is a sculpture from the classical past reconsidered in the present? Through the Kalam Azad, and appropriation of and orientation towards an ancient culture
pre-modern iconic pairing of the Yaksha and Yakshi, a conversation is staged between aes of well-known politicians of the day from various commu- and its productions — has always had a complex history in
ties, including Rajendra Prasad and Lal Bahadur Shastri, who modern India, just as it has in the West.’ It involves the desire
modern and contemporary art. Re-use of the sculpture rethinks nationalist ideologies nities, ‘
Jook at the sculpture with varied attitudes. A very short fellow to monumentalize the past, i.e. to assume it must have lasting
at the time of independence and in the context of globalization.
inthe front stands obsequiously, gazing up at the sculpture. The significance for the present and the future, and reveals a deep
ANNAPURNA GARIMELLA slightly taller igure in black, wearing é a shorter version: of the fear of its disruptive power anda disregard for its seeming irrel-
Nehru jacket, appears to turn away in annoyance but is unable evance,* This complex mix of veneration and historical distance
toresist a glance at the statue. Azad, Nehru’s minister, fingers his (‘the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’*)
chin in bewilderment at this inexplicable acquisition, Through dogged the entire Yaksha-Yakshi project. The Yaksha appeared
its sharply calibrated presentation of various engagements with to mock independent India's private capital while the Yakshi
Sometime after 1966, following the death of atomic scientist architectural setting founded by a scientist who is regarded by modern art, the cartoon also raises the question of whose taste challenged its sense of propriety, The RBI website informs us:
Homi Bhabha, M, G. K. Menon, Director of the Tata Institute of many as a polymath, a connoisseur and the founder of India’s the state’s coffers funds, whether good old-fashioned narcis-
Fundamental Research (TIFR), installed a four-armed, granite atomic-energy programme. How does a sacred image come sism is behind the elite’s enthusiastic identification with visual When the statues were finally installed, it was over ten
Pandyan Vishnu sculpture, seated in lalitasana (the position of to be treated as a modern sculpture while retaining some of modernism and whether the hybrid character of indian modern years since they had been commissioned; in the mean-
royal ease), at the institute in Bombay [Fig. 20.1]. It came from its historical and ritual charge? In what way does this work of art can really represent and become comprehensible to many while, the times and circumstances, and the outlook of the
a temple setting and was clearly designed for worship. When it art relate to the many contemporary-art purchases that Homi when there are such diverse views even among those at the top. country and its leaders had changed. The statues, when
entered TIFR's collection is unknown, but Menon had it installed Bhabha and TIFR were making from artists in Bombay and other In the 1950s, Nehru was committed, as the cartoon lam- being installed at the Reserve Bank's New Delhi Office
in the foyer of the Bhabha Auditorium. Later it moved toa plat- Indian cities? How did contemporary sculptors who sought poons, to state patronage of the arts. As the Reserve Bank of at Parliament Street, did seem to offend the prudish sen-
form outside the auditorium, in a location that is used today for such patrons address their various desires for modernity, clas India (RBI) website notes: ‘Jawaharlal Nehru. . Suggested that sibilities of parts of the populace; the specific cause of
gatherings and group photos.’ The sculpture is on a pedestal'so sicism, cosmopolitanism and Indianness when they composed public buildings, many of which were large imposing struc- provocation was the statue of the Yakshini, depicted in
as to make possible viewing in the round, for which it was not their work? Has this relationship to the Indian classical and to tures, could be utilised to “encourage Indian artists to function her natural beauty.
originally designed. Yet there is an element of the performative the monumental scale continued and evolved oyer the last six in some way” and sculptors, painters, designers, etc. could be
that continues and evolves through the sculpture’s siting, The decades? More broadly, how might we think about the practice asked to cooperate. Nehru opined that the art work “...should
The issue of the statues was raised rather starkly in the
large open space in front of it and the limited space at the back of modern sculpture in independent India and what relation cost very little in comparison with the total cost of the
build- Rajya Sabha by Prof. Satyavrata Siddhantalankar:
might it have had to the practice of sculpture internationally? ings. But it will encourage Indian artists and would be greatly
suggest that the image could act as a backdrop, The deity could
A 1956 cartoon from Shankar's Weekly published in New Delhi welcomed, I think, by the public."
be seen as a benevolent, auspicious presence for the viewer. “Will the Minister of Works and Housing and Supply be
BELOW LEFT
Fig, 20.1 Pandyan Vishnu Vishnu is an apt subject in an institution focused on atomic- provides us with further insight into period perceptions of mode pleased to state:
installed at TIFR, Mumbai energy research: he is believed to be filled with brilliance (tejas) ern sculpture and its patrons [Fig. 20.2]. In the visual, Prime Ramkinkar Baij’s Yaksha and Yakshi * — Is ita fact that the statue of a naked woman has
and associated with maintaining cosmic order. Minister Jawaharlal Nehru stands in front of a modern sculpture pond iL mk SSNtITES be built was the Reserve Bank been erected in front of the Reserve Bank of India,
BELOW RIGHT
Many intriguing questions are posed by the placement of of a male figure, wiry in body and macho in stance, who lis He ee in New Delhi. A committee was formed,
which Parliament Street and
Fig. 20.2 1956 cartoon his right arm to hold his hat in place. The muscle in the figures aus t two sculptures should adorn the entrance of the
from Shankar's Weekly Vishnu in a modern science institution, situated in a secular + — If so what is the object in erecting this statue of
idk - on each side. The committee then consulted the a naked woman?”
letorand conn tt Patton J: R. D. Tata and the lawyer, art col
‘Salon De Refuses’ that the foes Karl Khandalavala. The latter suggested An exegesis that the ‘naked woman’ was essentially
shi kind nc of the commission should be a yaksha and a yak- an allegorical interpretation, representing agriculture
treasures by, ae Spirits entrusted with the care of the natural and wealth was perhaps convincing though not without
he tied in the earth, especially around trees. further supplementary questions regarding costs incurred
Consideration artists who were asked to present proposals for and the details of the committee who recommended
etches and oo Ramkinkar Baij (1906-1980) submitted the art.
Sttist, renowned rh By this time, Ramkinkar was an established
Compositie ‘or his experimental use of materials, themes While the cause of disquiet generally was the Yakshani,
ONcrete lsee — Such as the 1938 Santhal Family sculpted in the popular weekly tabloid, Blitz, certainly not prudish
For this Pr9j '& 7:19, p. 108; Box 7.4, p. 107; Box 9.1, p. 130]. in its outlook or ill informed of art, characteristically put
dbo knoe Be took as his models a sculpture of Manibhadra, an entirely different angle to the statues and likened the
amet Sucaal Yaksha (200-50 uce), housed inthe Yaksha to resemble Sadoba Patil, an industrialist. Against
log (2nd and wm, Mathura, and the Bisnagar orDidargan) the title “Yaksha Patil,” Blitz depicted.a photograph of the
‘Ndian Use 3rd century sce,) housed respectively in the statue and commented “.... But artist Ram Kinker's con-
From y Se wn in Kolkata and the Patna Museum in Bihar. ception ofa modern Yaksha, which now guards the Reserve
Mere Sculptures, Ramkinkar developed two figures that Bank, has, coincidentally enough, taken an amazing
like-
‘Pon them; for the ambivalent monumentality he endowed ness to Sadoba Patil, one of the most zealous ‘guardians’
Male spitie, oe yet reluctant stone idols [Fig. 20.3], of wealth and big business in the country...7
An exbaba
af reyectrdien
paimaings wes bed in Dotti by 0 Ged of omit
Gksha, represents prosperity through industry
IN VISUAL ART PRACTICES

266 «= PARTI * POST-COLONIAL DECADES CHAPTER 20 + THE CLASSICAL AND THE MONUMENTAL IN INDIAN SCULPTURE (1947-P
EEE
; e Rags’s Appropria
tion of historic
entice } Ik discours
a obit } their
r a anti-histor ical
torica o > would have to involve themsel
han ling of the im as rep ves in a rethinking of how
we know and narr
i »ntiD
rest ollective's disinterest in art history or their ate our modernit
y
freeing from history and allow
ig them te occ upy the
A Complex Narrat
em) ive:
a - n of such disinterest the RBI Yaksha and
and the mode of appropri Yaks hi
aw ed on the fact that Rags If one enters the archi
ve of m aterials surrounding
ak ism of these
takes for granted the the making
sculptures, of the Ramkinkar
and that Ramkinkar Baij RBI sculptures, a more
Baij and detailed and com
plex ~ even if incom nplete ~ narrati
the sculptures ve emerges, which helps us to
sriation of and heorientation
made are fully comfortable in their appro think about their classic
ism in a dif| ferent way,
towards their anc lent We gain insight
a this, Raqs’s position is surprisingly exemplars into what modern artis
similar, ulthough politi * had to contend with when they took
ily opposed ta less avant-garde an art-historical form that
discourses on golden had been accorded classical
ages and Status,
especially when the Project was
ni stional- heritages, which celebrate art as something that is born
a commission for an institution
= that sought ta tepresent
its durability by u:
of f history
history but transcends attempts at Historicization in order sing ancient themes.
to become classical. Recounting some incidents surrounding the inspiration
Because there is no deep attempt and
in Rags’s process behind the creation of the
discourse to look at these sculptures as historica final Yaksha and Yakshi will
l objects with help elucidate this point
Hi spec ific producers, materials, circumstances and temporalities,
The first incident comes from the
the callective may be seen to accept and further the classicist artist A. Ramachandran's
memoir of Ramkinkar Baij, whom
discourse of modern art. Also implicit in their writing is a crit- he knew well; Ramkinkar
was his teacher at Santiniketan Ramac
jque of such a modern artist as Ramkinkar, who comes from handran notes that Ram-
kinkar's maquettes and models of the
Fig. 20.3 Ramkinkar a lower-class, lower-caste background (a
point emphasized by
Yaksha and Yakshi are of
Baij, Yoksho ond Yokshi, great variance when compared to the
most writers) and who also is thought of as a Pioneering genius monumental figures out
Commissioned in 1955 and side the RBI [Fig, 20.5]. The maquet
Rags instead wants to see the artist and his creation as inhabit tes are smaller and made
completed in 1964. Stone of concrete: some are sweet faced,
Entrance of the Reserve ing that space between the not-quite-subalt some adhere more closely BELOW LEFT
ern and the almost to their art-historical exemplars, some Fig. 20.5 Ramkinkar Balj,
Bank of India, New Dethi avant-garde - and, in the process, allowing their own contem- could be seen to derive
energy from Santhal women whom Ramkin Yokshi, 1953-56. Plaster-of-
porary art project to gain more critical kar knew from San- Paris maquecte
traction, In this sense, tiniketan [Fig. 20.6}, and one more c
Rags Media Collective, like many others, accepts the learly refers to modern
categories classics, such as the British sculptor
Yaksha: of the classical and the monumental Jacob Epstein's 1929-31 BELOW CENTHE
and reauthorizes them, Genesis [Fig- 20.7]. Ramachandran provid Fig. 20.6 Ramkinkar
Why do banknotes carry portraits? even as they criticize the commissioning instituti es an insight into
on and per- Ramkinkar’s process for composing these Baij, Santhal Family (derail),
Rags: haps even the modern artists who provide the sculptures between 1938. Cement and laterite
institution with the time he received the commission in 1956
Because the promise to pay the bearer can have no mean- classicizing art. The classicizing modern must and the date of mortar
remain intact in the sculptures’ installation in 1966, descri
ing if it is not backed by a picture of the head of a king,a order for many recent critiques of it to hold: if bing his approach as
the classicizing follows: BELOW RIGHT
dowager, a dictator, a dead prophet or at the very leasta modern is troubled and separated, then the
critiques against it Fig. 20.7 Jacob Epstein,
magnificent wild beast. Because a banknote without a pie Genesis, 1929-31, Marble
ture is like a security guard without a uniform
Yakshi: =
In that case, why did Ramkinkar Baij sculpt me nake
Rags:
Because he knew the answer to the previous question: And
because, though everyone knows that the emperor eee po
Fig. 20.4 Raqs Media clothes, it is less well known that hisi treasury y we
is actu a
Collective, The Reserve paar a1
empty, and that its guards keep their vigil, naked an
Army. 2010, Installation
This aspect of the project has been more or less Forecnen in In the coda to Yaksha Prashna: The Riverbank Episode, they WH
more contemporary engagements with Rarmkinkar Baij’s ore:
yre, although the Yaksha and Yakshi at the Reserve Bank of India Ram Kinkar Baijs Yaksha and Yaksbi figures me a
have been widely discussed by curators in recent retrospectives outside the gates of the Reserve Bank, India’s oe 2
of Ramkinkar's work, as well as by contemporary artists, includ on Parliament Street in New Delhi. Their monumen a
ing Rags Media Collective [Fig. 20.4} ence is the secret of their invisibility in the discourse van
Ram Kinkar Baij and his so-called subaltern mae? the
Raqs Media Collective's Yaksha and Yakshi They can neither be resolved into a ce ee
Rags Media Collective (Rags; £ 1992) created an installation mythic category of the "people," nor be seen ~ {mnpassi"e
work, Yaksha Prashna: The Riverbank Episode (2010), in which the state, We could speculate that the Yakshi's ae
these figures were placed on the edge of the Yarnuna in Delhi, blank stare, and the Yaksha’s barely disguised oa ‘
symbolically returning the pair to the riverine environment with for what he sees embody Ram Kinkar Baijs oN
which they have been associated historically, to guard the liquid Prashna” to the Indian Republic. As of now, vehase
gold that courses through the river, The work is a pun on cur- know of any answers that have a satisfactory PS
rency and current; it intends to illuminate the flows of capital. It Ram Kinkar’s sculpted question marks.”
questions the appropriation of ancient spirits by an artist in the size the
service of the newly founded nation-state. In ‘Yaksha Prashna: The collective’s sophisticated poetics rightly a Y
The Yaksha's Questions’ (2010), Rags records an imaginary dia- oo se
Strange visages and the indeterminate
logue between themselves and the Yaksha and Yakshi. ded in the seemingly impassive monumental fig'
28 PARTII * POST-COLONIAL DECADES IN VISUAL ART PRACTICES

CHAPTER 20 + TH £ CLASSICAL AND THE MONUMENTAL IN INDIAN SCULPTURE (1947-PRESENT) 269
y
singiuig Variatior
of past "golden ages’ reveal ty the con
Mun;
THA iV mikinkar Baij} tried many usually pre-industrial and rural) self;
SUMUat
e
natives ee ty Initially, they we of the community by bidding it to Tealix this
e a t ERNIST CLASSICAL Chaudhuri’s sculpture is in marble, which speaks of
thase of Mathura Ya ind Didarganj Yakshi. f jer modern conditions”*
» luxury and classicism. One might also consider Pro-
more he worked and re ed. they started a { post-independence modernism, from 1
is that there was a.widespread effort to fate : pamkit i's Yaksha-and Yakshi provides a fas- dosh Das Gupta’s reclining igure sculptures, which
independent charactert s through his modern an
what was often framed as the ‘classical’ va cinating ile of what might be considered are evocative of Orientalist odalisques, as well as
sibilities blendin th his understanding
of the cla indian ist classicism. It is one of several art- more Indic representations of women lying in bed.
tradition. The Yakshi images startling similarity contemporary contexts, One such example hax 7 Inte
works t! might consider in order to rethink In order to draw together diverse time periods
with the female figure o amily. This liseussed: the Pandyan Vishnu at TIFR [Fig. Teady
, 20,1}, artists’ use of Jassicism since the nation’s birth in in their work, artists turned to such materials as
must have triggered him to enquire into Pre-modern art was repeatedly used to. mediate modernity
1947; throws! the 1960s and 1976s, and in the con-
amiliar world bronze, enamel and granite, and learned such tech-
and
of Santhals, who were icans of the earth All the imag iness during the creation of the decolonizing, secul
true of pre-modern sculp lar temporary period. To develop a richer and more niques as dokra, enamelling and stone carving.
nation-state; this was particularly
of working women planting seedlings and reaping har complex understanding of the use of classicism The resultant modernist classical artworks possess
vest must have gone to the making of Yakshi. One of the because it embodied and engendered spatial and pce during this timeframe, we need to analyze at least 4 quality that is, samewhat paradoxically, both his-
collective experience." Indeed, the anxieties Produced tae
last variations was a pregnant woman almost holding ber twoattitudes, the classical and the modern, which torical and timeless.
bulging underbelly, where he must have referred to Epstein's
come together to represent the past differently, Such a construct is undermined by contempor-
cultural elite’s interest in modern art, as Shankar so humorously
controversial work Genesis. The Yaksha image shows all and succinctly captures in his cartoon [Fig. 20.2], is precise One way in which artists have approached the ary practice, as made evident in The Reserve Army
the connotations of Kubera, the god of wealth with a very mirrored in the choice of a Yaksha and Yakshi as the ayiakche modernist classical is with an attitude of sincerity (2010) by Rags Media Collective, which uses digital
stark look and crude expression of a moneylender in con- faces of the RBI and celebration, devoid of irony, in the -way they imagery to subvert the modernist classical’s claims
trast to the voluptuous, graceful fertility figure of Yakshi." By the time the Yaksha~Yakshi theme arrived in Ramkinkay made modernist sculptures with classical themes. of materiality and monumentality.
Baijs workshop, it had already undergone a transformation. Sankho Chaudhuri’s Toilet (1949) isa case in point. Annopur a Gar i nella
Ramachandran'’s reading of the maquettes indicates that Ram The Santiniketan sculptor was not content with a vision of the The sculpture shows a seated woman dressing her
pair that was inspired solely by the pre-modern past; he alsy hair, asubject common in temple sculpture as well
kinkar went through several exercises to develop his sculptures.
turned to other sources, as Ramachandran indicates in his mem. asin Pahari painting, but at the same time, itis cub-
In the early stages, the Yaksha and Yakshi were not intended
oir. Non-bourgeois women, such as the Santhals, had already
to have the ‘impassive stare’ and the ‘disguised contempt’ that
ist in form and invokes the woman with the raised
entered his work with the groundbreaking Santhal Family (1938) arm from Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907).
Raqs Media Collective sees in the sculptures that stand out-
[Fig. 7.19, p. 108] and Mill Call (1956); in the Yaksha—Yakshi
side the RBI. In his memoir, Ramachandran provides further
project, a subaltern woman contributed to helping Ramkinkar
details about Ramkinkar’s process of translating the maquettes [I ] ———————————
develop his modernist classicism, especially with regard to the
and carving the stone figures.
female body. The photographer Devi Prasad quotes.a1ggo essay
take by Ravi Pal, a staff member at Kala Bhavan, who asked Ram-
s POST-PEDESTAL SCULPTURES (Lamp Lady), using materials and technologies
like as the National Gallery of Modern Art and the Lalit
Looking back, I realise how simple and naive he was to
9
x
kinkar whether he ever experienced ‘transcendental power';the “ wood, stainless steel and even camphor.
The irony Kala Akademi, as well as of the interpretive cate-
up such a huge commission without realising the enormity 2 and sadnes imbued in such sculp i
no sculptor responded by discussing how during a ‘critical period) = From the early 19905 to the p sculpture gories and ideologies used by such writers and art
of responsibilities he was undertaking. Besides, he had has often been marked by irony and/or melan-
mis- an incident gave him a sense of such a power that made its pres- the memory of the pedestal, whether actually in critics as Richard Bartholomew, J. Swaminathan,
experience of working on granite stone. The greatest cholia. This approach, adopted by G. Ravinder place or not. The artist uses this approach to mock KG. Subramanyan, Jaya Appaswamy and Geeta
and ence felt within him.
take was to take up the entire task of selecting, cutting Reddy, A. Balasubramaniam, Subodh Gupta and or reflect upon beauty as well as such concepts as Kapur [see Chapter 23]. A comparison can be made
transporting of stones from the quarry to Delhi, besides
he In Kala Bhavan it is not possible to study the nude. None LN, Tallur, among many others, uses the potential ephemerality, sublimity and the instability of iden- between the meaning of the pedestal in post-World
engraving the colossal final image The first assistant me to study ofart-historical or vernacular objects and images to tity and materiality, The task for the art historian is
up the of you can imagine how essential it was for War If Europe and North America and in post-in-
employed, an ex-student of Kala-Bhavana, messed context of making the sculptures of Yakshil make pointed ideological statements: from a god- to analyze each instance individually
and to interdependence India.
of his life. the nude in the
work and Kinkarda landed in the greatest crisis gone one evening dess’s mukuta (crown) to a funerary bust, aclassic rogate the pedestal’s absence. The lack of pedestal Annapurna Garimetla
prob- and Yakshi..., During that period I had
‘The mental tension which arose from many unsolved personal rés- photograph of an atomic cloud or a Deepasundart
to Malancha, Mira Devi's house, for some
inyites a critique of institutional
structures, such
for a simple
Jems and bureaucratic procedure was too much nt, was Inthe
drowning his son. | saw that Radharani, their maidserva
person like him to bear, and Kinkarda started met, and I's!
The conse- kitchen engaged in cooking. Our eyes
sorrow with large quantities of country liquor. the way to my house in Shripalli.
T asked her to come
so haunted her
quence of not being able to complete the work Even after we had
and there at night, And that was that...
him, that one night, | remember him breaking down she was not prepared
some become intimate acquaintances,
saying he might have to land up ina jail. Here I give tried to make her ul a
undress herself completely. I
credit to Pranab Dev Burman, another ex-student...who I told her about my assignment to make:
the my problem.
with his organisational experience, managed to get was 4 wen pin
sculpture of Yakshi. Radharani
stones transported and with the help of traditional stone she accepted }
. But Taking the Yakshi to be a goddess,
carvers from South India had the project completed i. She never again rem
ment in connection with Yaksh 10 d0@
the discrepancy in quality between the original maquettes ver Lasked her
to be studied in the nude whene
and the end product remained a tragedy forever, Herein- contex t of art. In that way she jhelped me treimeh
” in the
after, Kinkarda became a broken man and an alcoholic.
dously in my vocation."
For Ramkinkar, historical Buddhist sculpture became important h has been said about Rey " <
In recent literature, muc!
because of the way the commission was framed. The commit- ority positionig
j GS. Ray
Subodh Gupta, Line of L.N-Tallur, Lamp (Deepa
the own subaltern status and his ‘min Head. Srelsens A. Balasubramaniam, Untitled
tee that monitored the commissioning process, especially such as the Bengal ie
ale
Control, 201 |. Stainless-steel sundari), 2010. Bronze and
langua ges, nelded, (cast from self), 2004. Sand,
art critic Karl Khandalavala, saw the RBI building as an oppor- Bainged non
major visual
and primit ivism. ” This readin g of his wor his fiberglass resin fibregiass, evaporating compound, utensils concrete
way English cubism
tunity to stage an indigenous classicism, much in the in ane
and becomes particularly meaningful
acrylic and wood. On the right
stabil-
banks had staged the Greco-Roman past to express their Santhal Family and Mill Call:
sa is the portrait at a lacer stage.
1947 works, such as
ity and power. Here it is useful to recount Athena Leoussi’s S,'s discussion of these
when the details evaporated
in art historian Santhosh
summarization of the scholarship on national revivalism in the
he writes:
West: "Triggered offby sudden socio-cultural change or political
THE CLASSICAL AND THE MONUMENTAL IN INDIAN SCULPTURE (1947-PRESENT) 271
CHAPTER 20 *
POST-COLONIAL DECADES IN VISUAL ART PRACTICES

me PART II
-
led analysis of Ramkinkar’s deployment of Jan process of becoming’ and not, as perhaps Rags woul
guage would explore the way in'which he deterritorializes
havety 4 Athena S. Leoussi, From
see it, as an already-consolidated classical.’ Nee hich sculptures Bhabha intended Civic to Ethnic Classic FURTHER READING
the major languages in order to destabilize the grand nar fo create Yaksha and Yakshi, Ramkinkar had to wi
The Cult of the Greek Body in Late Aassaai
for outs lisplay. Private email communication Ahuja, Naman, Romkinkar through the Eyes of Devi Prasad
Ork with Century French Society and Art’, Internatio
(13 July ) from Oindrilla Raychaudhuri, Archivise, nal‘Journat (New Dethi:The School of the Arts and Aesthetics,
rative of nationalism and its primitivist discourses. In the many divergent factors: his own legacy of experim, of the Classical Tradition, vol. 16, no. 3/4
history of Bengal School Ramkinkar possesses a unique ancient Indic art, primitivism, cubism,
etitation,
a pre-World War Tata Insticuee of Fundamental Research Archives ; ne 2009), p. 394,
(September— 2007),
(TIFRA) The sculpture was registered ac TIFRA
Annapurna Garimella, ‘Inheriting the Dasgupta, Anshuman, et al,, eds, Santhal Family: Positions
position. He is one among the foremost figures who have British modernist sculpture by Jacob Epstein (who was i somerinye around oF in 1978, Past’, Mulk around an Indian Sculpture (Belgium: Museum van
Raj Anand: Shoping the Indian Modern (Mumbai;
moved away from the diktats of the oriental aestheticism engaged with early Buddhist art), the living art of Stone 2 <heepil/wornt biorg.in/scripts/mis_anec3.aspx> Marg Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, 2008)
t Publications, 2005), pp. 88-105,
(or the pastoral naturalism) of Bengal School. It is not to ple sculpture, Santhal women, the body of a female accessed 5 February 2014. Nehru talks more about This proverb is the Opening tine from LP. Prasad, Devi, Romkinkar Vaij Sculptures (New Deihi, 2007).
dom, 7 cost than about art He rationalizes the patronage of
Hardey’s Radhakrishnan, K. S., Ramkinkar’s Yaksho—Yokshi
claim that he has completely rejected the contribution of worker, who was also his lover, and the intersection ok en The Go-Between (London: Hamish Hamitto
n, (New Delhi: Musui Art Foundation. 2012)
the ares, which he mandates, but also constrains the
Bengal School. But unlike almost all of the practitioners religiosity with the self-sacralization of his artisticdesig ¢ of art as a political discourse through a form of 7 ‘Shetp://veww.rbi.org in/scripes/mis_a
Ramachandran,A., Romkinkar:The Man and the Artist
nec3.aspx> (New Delhi: National Gallery of Modern Art, 2012)
of his time he had deeply engaged with the modernist lan- The sculpture thus became, whether or not it was Ramkinkar rationalism that burdens the artist. He is arguing for accessed 4 April 2014.
Santhosh, S.,"What Was Modernism (in Indian Art)?", Socal
guage of Europe. The Cubist and Expressionist languages intention, an important opportunity for imagining anditseaia public-sized sculpture as an exercise in public-making 8 Rags Media Collective. Yaksha Prashna:The
because a new stare needs new objects that represent Yaksha's Questions’, Seepage (Berlin and New
Scientist, vol. 40, no. 5/6 (May-June 2012), pp. 59-75.
have motivated his persuasion for a distinct language ating an Indian modernist classicism, not assomething atreah its nationhood to itself. Yet, in these early years, no York, Sternberg Press and Rags Media Collective:
which facilitates a minoritarian positioning. Early works resolved but as a possibility bristling with all sorts of tensions readymade public existed for such art as Shankar's ae pp. 59-60. Available online at <hetp/fissuu
of Ramkinkar show his mastery over the orientalist pic- [Box 20.1]. These tensions extend to artistic explorations cartoon indicates.
com/raqsmediacollective/docs/seepage>
ofart. 3 Nehru’s logic, premised on the need to justify 18 June 2020,
torial traditions... His works have an aspect of spontaneity historical and classical motifs even in the late 20th century and spending government funds on public art. as well as
ro
9 Ibid.
(like in the case of Expressionists) as well as they are struc- the present [Box 20.2]. The complicated legacy ofthe modern. the artist's ambition, colluded to incite the forms of 10 Vidya Shiemail vad communi
as, cation (12 March 2014)
tural at the same time (like the Cubists). His sculptures ist classical continues. criticism these sculptures eventually received. The RBI 11 Santhosh S..’Ramkinkar Baij:A Chronicle of
More often than not, writers evaluate the large sculptures
as website <http://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/mis_anec3. Redemption Forecold’, Utharakalam (12 March 2012),
for instance are structurally constructional and stable as
aspx>.accessed 4 April 2014, tells us what happened shttp://utharakalam.com/english/?p=204> accessed
balanced by axis lines either centralized or distributed but failures and the maquettes as successes. But perhaps if we view
when an article appeared in Bitz:'In the wake of the 5 February 2014.
through the peculiar mixture of techniques (like moulding the RBI Yaksha and Yakshi not as a final product but as another Blicz article, it was felt that the misunderstandings 12. A Ramachandran, Romkinkar-The Man and The Artist
and chiselling), the compound of conflicting representa- stage in Ramkinkar's experimentation, we can perhaps under- the statues gave rise to could perhaps be addressed (New Delhi: National Gallery of ModArt,
ern 2012),
stand that beinga modernist in the period after 1947 was notan by issuing a suitable Press Comminique and issuing pp. 70-80,
tional strategies (like figuration and abstraction) and the hand outs on the art the Bank had commissioned; 13 Ibid, p. BI.
special emphasis on the tactility of surfaces they overcome easy task. No one had single-handedly worked with a classical alternately it was felt that ‘issuing handouts 14 Leoussi, From Civic to Ethnic Classicism’", p- 396.
the rigidity of all structures. They are objective and sub- material such as stone on this scale in the history of modem and communiques would once again revive the 15 Annapurna Garimella, Inheriting the Past’.and Devika
jective at the same time." India, during the Raj or after independence. The sculptures were controversies. The consensus finally veered in favour of Singh, ‘Approaching the Mughal Past in Indian Art
silence. The early nineteen fifties, when Pandit Nehru Criticism: The Case of Marg (1946~1963Modem
completed by South Indian sculptors who were habituated to )',
had conceived the idea of encouraging art. were an Asian Studies 47, | (2013). pp. 167-203.
making granite idols and were here tasked with working with
After 1947, the question of this ‘minontarian positioning’ of era of optimism, different from the lean period of the 16 Devi Prasad, Rarnkink Vail: Sculpture
ar s (New Delhi:
Himalayan stone and carving images that were at once shilpa:
Ramkinkar becomes complicated in the context of the artist's sixties when, art had, perhaps, to be relegated to the Tulika Books, 2007), p. 39.
shastric (following the principles of the Shilpa Shastras) and background. Governor P.C. Bhattacharyya, perhaps '7 Santhosh S..‘Ramkinkar Baij’.
own fame, his desire to attempt a substantial project and the had his fingers on the pulse when he remarked “Let 18 Ibid.
agendas of the newly formed nation. Like any ambitious artist, cubist, based on models made in another material; in hindsight, sleeping dogs lie! Neither the decision to spend the 19 Ibid.
he sought to expand the scale of his work, to wrestle with new this might be considered more of a nation-building exercise than money nor the delay associated with the execution of 20 For Epstein’s engage with Buddhist sculptur
men t e,
languages and themes (in this instance an art-historical one), asure way to create aesthetically successful images. Ultimately, the project can be justified in the present day context see Peter Caracciolo, ‘Buddhist Typologies in "Heart
KC would be equally futile to explain through a press
to work with new patrons and to find new contexts for situat- these sculptures pose a challenge to anyone who interprets Ram: note the symbolic significance of the figures put up.
of Darkness” and “Victory” and their Contribution to
ing his ideas. The modernisms that he experimented with and kinkar’s oeuvre teleologically as a series of significant works We can deal with any question that may be asked in
the Modernism of Jacob Epstein, Wyndham Lewis and
into the T.S. Eliot’, The Conradian, vol. 14, no. 1/2 (December
successfully mastered in the context of Santiniketan had to be or processes that lead up to his eventual absorption Parliament on and ad hoc basis.”
1989), pp. 67-91.
recalibrated, even discarded, to fulfill the RBI commission. nation’s sense of its own modernity, The mixed reception the
His minoritarian positioning becomes allied to the project of sculptures received when they were finally installed, and the
creating a visual culture for the new Indian nation even as he profound ambivalence that Ramkinkar Bai) felt towards them,
becomes alienated from the production of the final sculptures. place a burden on the art historian or critic to keep rea
the artist's oeuvre.
Yet Ramkinkar’s modernism is made richer and more complex,
and as Santhosh S. says, ought to be seen as a language ‘in the
CHAPTER 20 + THE CLASSICAL AND THE MONUMENTAL IN INDIAN SCULPTURE (1947-PRESENT) 273
272 sO PART * POST-COLONIAL DECADES IN VISUAL ART PRACTICES
.
THE BLESSINGS OF THE SKY
Charles Correa
17
Rajasthani chattris
In India, the sky has profoundly affected our relationship to

builtform, and to open space. For in a warm climate, the best place
to be in the late evenings and in the early mornings, is outdoors,
under the open sky. Such spaces have an infinite number of
variations: one steps out of a room. . . into a verandah. . . and
thence on to a terrace from which one proceeds to an open
courtyard, perhaps shaded by a tree . . . or by a large pergola
Throughout human history, the sky has earned a profound and overhead. At each moment, subtle changes in the quality of light
sacred meaning.Man intuitively perceived it as the abode of the and ambient air generate feelings within us feelings which are
Supernatural. Hence to climb a path to the top of the hill, where the central to our beings. Hence to us in Asia, the syrnbol of Education
Gods dwell, is a paradigm of such mythic power that it has been has never been the Little Red Schoolhouse of North America, but
central to the beliefs of almost every society, since the beginning of the guru sitting under the tree. True Enlightenment cannot be
time. achieved within the closed box of a room one needs rnust be
Thus the great Hindu temples of South India are not just a outdoors, under the open sky.
collection of shrines and gopurams, but a movement through the These open-to-sky spaces have very practical implications as
open-to-shy pathways that lie between them. Such a path is the well. To the poor in their cramped dwellings, the roof terrace and the
essence of our experience it represents a sacred journey. A courtyard represent an additional room, used in many different ways
pradakhshina, a pilgrimage. And this sense of the sky extends to the during the course of a day: for cooking, for talking to friends, for
architectonic vocabulary as well: as witness the walls around sleeping at night, and so forth. And for the rich, at the other end of
Rajasthan palaces and Moghul forts, crowned with patterns that the income spectrum, the lawn is as precious as the bungalow itself.
interlock builtform with sky – and the wonderfully evocative chattris Thus in traditional villages and towns all over India, such open-to-
(umbrellas) along the roofscape, capturing fragments of the infinite sky spaces are an essential element in the lives of the people.
heavens above. Examine, for instance, the village of Banni in Kutch, where the
18
The Red Fort at Agra
The Lord Buddha at Borabudhur
Diagrammatic section of Red Fort
Guru under the tree
House in Banni village
Houses consist of a series of circular huts around a central

courtyard. Each hut has a specialised function: one for visitors,
another for storing grain, a third for sleeping, and so forth.The family
moves from one hut to the next, depending on their need, the time Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya
of day, etc, in a nomadic pattern of astonishing style and natural
sophistication. The terrace level in the cold but sunny winters, this pattern is
Then again, consider the Moghul Emperors in their magnificent reversible: the terrace gardens being used during the day, and the
Red Forts at Agra and Delhi, living in a similar poly-centric typology. lower level of rooms at night. The result is a brilliant re-invention of
On the roof terraces of these forts, we find truly elegant patterns of the desert tents of Central Asia from whence the Moghuls came.
free-standing pavilions, placed in immaculate gardens, inlaid with These Moghuls generated a life-style as royal as Versailles – but
fountains and channels of running water. As in the village of Banni, with truly aristocratic finesse, their palaces are built on the scale of a
these pavilions are differentiated as to use: the Diwan-l-Am for tennis court, not a parting lot.
receiving visitors, the Moti Masiid for prayers, the hamams for The typologies revealed in these examples are astonishing:
bathing, and so forth. flexible and incremental, achieving great spatial richness through
Given the cold winters of North India and the annihilating heat minimalist means.They exercise a seminal influence on many of the
of its summers, how did the Moghuls manage to live in such a projects in these pages – starting with one of the earliest, the
disaggregated pattern of pavilions? The answer lies in the sunken Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya (1958-63) at the Sabarmati Ashram in
courtyards, which give access to a lower level of rooms in the early Ahmedabad. This memoral to the Mahatma is a museum and
morning of the summer months, a velvet shamiana (canopy) is research centre where scholars come to study his letters, books and
stretched over the rim of the courtyards, trapping the cold overnight photographs. These are housed in a disaggregated plan connected
air in the lower level of rooms. This is where the Moghul Emperor by covered and open areas – a pattern which not only allows for
spends his day. In the evening, the shamiana is removed, and the more flexible growth but also gives to the users areas of visual quiet
Emperor and his court come up on to the gardens and pavilions of where the eye can rest and the mind meditate.
19
Final
sacrifice
Instruction,
Enlightenment
Preparation
Devotion
Salvacao Church
Archaeological Museum
Participants
Jama Masjid, Delhi Arena
Another example is the Salvacao Church (1974-77) in Bombay

which speculates on what church typology might have been if
Christianity had not been headquartered in Europe, but had stayed Kapur Think Tank
in Asia where it originated. Yet another is the Sen Farmhouse
(1972, unbuilt) outside Calcutta which has four caves (living, This concept has also generated the Museum of Archaeology
sleeping, cooking and washing) placed around a pergola-covered (1985, unbuilt) Bhopal, where the system of courtyards is first clearly
courtyard; at different times of the day, this courtyard can be used in defined by a continuous rnasonry wall, and then the exhibition
conjunction with any particular cave, depending on the activity. The galleries are built separately and incrementally on the other side of
same principle also generates the Patwardhan Houses (1967-69) in it. This typology of the inside-out sock can also cope more easily
Poona, where the sleeping and cooking functions are housed in with the constantly fluctuating budgets and time-tables of an
square masonry boxes, grouped in a pattern which creates breeze- economy like India's, since the basic architectural statement – the
ways for the living areas. wall – is completed in the first instance. It places the highest
These typologies were further developed into a pattern which emphasis on open-to-sky space – as do the great Islamic mosques,
might be termed the Inside-Out Sock. An example is the project for like the Jama Masjid in Delhi, which is really just a large open
a mud Farmhouse for Mrs. Indira Gandhi (1972, unbuilt) – a concept courtyard with enough builtform around the periphery to make one
which re-surfaces again in the Kapur Guesthouse (1976, unbuilt) to feel one is within a piece of architecture.
accommodate participants in a high–powered think-tank discussing
India's future.Here the main arena is a square courtyard made of COURTYARDS & TERRACES
earth, defined by a high mud wall – with the rooms for each of the Open-to-sky space is also of vital importance in housing
visitors as appendages on the other side of this wall. Each suite of where it can make a decisive difference between livable habitat and
rooms has a door opening on to the courtyard, in the centre of which claustrophobia – particularly so for the lowest income groups.Even
the discussions take place – surely a configuration which should in reasonably dense housing, individual terraces and/or gardens for
serve to wonderfully focus the mind! What is crucial hare are not the each family can be provided – as in the Jeevan Bima townships
formless rooms that lie on the other side of the wall, but the clarity of (1969-72) in Borivli and Bangalore (1972-74), and the low-income
the central core – hence the analogy of the sock turned inside-out. housing (1971-72) for the Gujarat Housing Board in Ahmedabad.
20
Low-income housing; Kanchanjunga
Gujarat Housing Board
Master spaces Subsidiary

spaces
Bed Living Bed
Colonial Bungalow
Rallis Apartments
Porch
Jeevan Bima Nagar, Borivili Verandah
Such open-to-sky spaces not only improve living conditions, but Bed Living Bed
can also have considerable economic value in a developing

Bed Dining Bed
economy like India, where families augment their income by keeping
chickens, or goats (or even a buffalo!). Usually such activities are Bath Verandah Bath
not encouraged in company-owned townships, but the Malabar
Cements Corporation township (1978-82) was an exception. All the to Kitchen
Plan
families, including those at first floor levels, connect directly to a
small piece of land for their exclusive use. Another variation that this buffer zone can take is to turn the
These principles are viable also in the high-rise buildings of verandah into a garden – preferably of double-height. This was the
Bombay, where the issue is compounded by the hot humid climate. genesis of the Cosmopolis Apartments (1958, unbuilt) in Bombay,
An east-west orientation catches the prevailing breezes, and also and later of the Boyce Houses (1962, unbuilt) in Pune. Finally came
the best views in the city, but it also exposes the building to the the opportunity to actually construct this concept : Kanchanjunga
blistering sun and the monsoon rains. The old colonial bungalows (1970-83), a condominium of luxury apartments in Bombay where
solved this problem intelligently by locating the main living areas in the large terrace-garden in the corner forms the central focus for the
the centre, protected by a continuous verandah running along the whole apartment. Double-height terrace gardens are also the focus
periphery - a concept used in the Sonmarg Apartments (1962), the for each family in Tara Group Housing (1975-78), a high-density
Rallis Apartments and later in the DCM Apartments, where a belt of complex of maisonettes in Delhi. Here the terraces are covered by a
verandahs, studies and bathrooms forms a protective zone around light pergola, since sleeping under the night sky is an age-old
the main living areas. custom in the hot dry climate of North India.
21
Possible location for
New Growth Centres
New
Centre
Fort area
Panvel
to Poona
Planning for Bombay
Belapur Housing, New Bombay
Ulwe: The CBD of New Bombay
URBANIZATION
Such open-to-sky spaces are of course of crucial importance to
the poorest inhabitants: the squatters. For the great wave of distress
migration that is engulfing our cities in the Third World poses not just
the issue of poverty (in actual fact of course, rural poverty is worse);
it is really the brutal and de-humanizing patterns that this poverty
takes on in the urban context. Obviously there is an appalling Squatter Housing
mismatch between the way our cities have been built and the way
we use them today. For a whole family forced to live in a small Because such patterns of low-rise housing can be reasonably
all-purpose room, open-to-sky space is truly essential for all the dense (particularly in Third World cities where occupancy per room
activities for which they cannot find place indoors. is extremely high), the overall land needed by the city does not
Hence the Squatter-Housing (1973, unbuilt) in Bombay, in which increase very much. In any case, since only about one-third of a
4 units are clustered together under one roof in a pattern which city's land is devoted to housing, even doubling this area
generates such a continuum (ranging from the most private to the necessitates only a marginal Increase in the overall size of the city
most public) of open spaces. This was further developed in the but it can make a decisive difference to the lives of the people,
incremental housing at Belapur, New Bombay (1983-86). Here the particularly of the poorest.
housing units are closely packed (at a density, including open How do we increase the supply of urban land? The section
spaces and schools, of 500 persons per hectare). Yet each unit is Planning for Bombay, outlines some possible strategies for
separate, so that it can grow, quite independently of its neighbours. restructuring she city. Also discussed is the development of Ulwe
Though the housing typologies provided here cover the entire range (1990), the Central Business District of New Bombay, which seeks to
of income groups, the plot sizes differ only marginally – thus establish affordable housing typologies and coherent urban form for
introducing the principle of Equity (an issue of the greatest political the entire spectrum of our urban population, Including the poorest.
significance to the Third World) – as well as other equally crucial In short: by opening up the supply of urban land, one is using Space
principles, such as: people's participation, income generation, as a Resource – a principle of fundamental importance to our urban
identity, pluralism, and so forth. centres.
22
Resting
Writing
Cooking Loft
Living
Parekh House
Eating Patio WC
Tube House
Windscoop houses, Sind
Correa House
mechanism for dealing with the elements (truly, a machine for

Ramkrishna House
living!) this is the great challenge and opportunity of the
developing world.
In this, the old architecture – especially the vernacular – has
much to teach us, as it always develops a typology of fundamental
sense. For instance, in the hot dry climate of North India, most
Hindustan Lever Pavilion houses are narrow units with common party walls. The two long
sides have no heat input, all ventilation and light enters from the
THE MACHINE FOR LIVING short ends and via interior courts. An interesting variation of this
Another equally critical parameter: Energy. In this century, pattern can be used to develop a section which modulates
architects have depended more and more on the mechanical temperatures through convection currents: as the heated air rises, it
engineer to provide light and air within the building. But in India, we moves along the sloping surface of the ceiling, slipping out through
cannot afford to squander resources in this manner – which is of a vent at the top, thus drawing in new air from the lower level to
course actually an advantage, for it means that the building itself replace it. This principle, first developed in the Tube House
must, through its very form, create the "controls” which the user (1961-62) also forms the basis for the Hindustan Lever Pavilion
needs. Such a response necessitates much more than just sun- (1961) and the Ramkrishna House (1962-64).
angles and louvres; it must involve the section, the plan, the shape, The idea progresses further in Cablenagar (1967, unbuilt), a
in short, the very heart of the building. township near Kota, Rajasthan, for which we developed two
Thus the wonderfully inventive wind-scoop houses of Iran, or the pyramidal sections, Summer and Winter, to be used at different
Alhambra in Granada – where the courtyards and water pools are times of the day and seasons of the year. The Summer section (for
not just arbitrary ornamental decorations, but crucial passive-energy the daytime) entraps and humidifies the dry air, thus cooling it; the
devices serving to make this exquisite palace at least 10 degrees Winter Section (for early morning, and at night) opens up to the sky
cooler than the surrounding countryside. In such examples indeed, above. These formed the basis of the Parekh House (1966-68) and
the challenges of a difficult climate have triggered off architectural the Correa House (1968, unbuilt). In order to "open-up” the narrow
responses that are not wilful and trivial, but are generated deep spaces usually generated between the parallel walls of row-housing,
in the wellspring of the human imagination. Consider that we developed for the Gujarat Housing Board (l961, unbuilt)
fundamental typology: the house around a courtyard. To cross a interlocking units which create varying dimensions internal
desert and enter even the humblest such abode is a pleasure dimensions – an idea later expanded in the Previ Project (1969-73)
beyond mere photogenic image-making. Architecture as a in Lima, Peru.
23
ECIL Offices, Hyderabad Section through
Padmanabhapuram
Administration Offices,
Vallabh Vidyanagar
MRF Headquarters, Madras

Bay Island Hotel, Andamans
WORK SPACES
Are these concepts relevant to other building typologies, as for
instance, work spaces? Earlier attempts to deal with solar protection LEISURE
involved various forms of brise-soleil – as in the Administration Another marvellously inventive example of natural ventilation is
Offices (1958-60) for Vallabh Vidyanagar University at Anand. One the Padmanabhapuram Palace in Trivandrum – the oldest wooden
soon discovered that this kind of concrete louvre, while providing building in India. Here, in the hot and humid climate of southern
powerful visual imagery for the builtform, can be counter-productive. India where cross-ventilation is essential, we find a truly remarkable
The concrete heats up during the long hot day and then acts as an section where the pyramidal form of the plinth rises parallel lo the
enormous radiator in the evening, rendering the rooms unbearable. slope of the tiled roof above – thus minimising the need for
So the ECIL Offices (1965-68) in Hyderabad, tries to develop a enclosing walls to keep out the sun and rain. From within the
workspace in which the very pattern of the builtform itself creates a pavilion, one's line of vision is deflected sharply downwards to the
special micro-climate. Through this and other similar efforts, grass around (a cool fresh green, blissfully therapeutic on a hot day).
gradually a kit-of-parts came into existence: the section which This principle formed the genesis of the Bay Island Hotel
facilitates convection currents, the internal zone of micro-climate, the (Andamans,1979-82) and the Dona Sylvia Beach Resort (Goa,
stepped terraces, the pergola roof. Variations of this kit-of-parts 1988-91). The inner spaces in both these projects are protected not
were used in the MPSC Office Building (1980-92) in Bhopal and the by enclosing walls but by very large sloping roots. For centuries,
LIC Centre (1975-86) in Delhi. Other examples are the MRF sloping tiled roofs have been part of the indigenous architecture in
Headquarters in Madras (1987-92), the Nuclear Power Corporation most of South-India in fact, in most of South-east Asia. And they
in Bombay (1988, unbuilt) and the LIC Centre (1988-92) in Port occur throughout these projects, from the Sadiq Futehally House
Louis, Mauritius, where the pergola becomes a huge urban gesture, (1959, unbuilt) in Bombay, the Mascarenhas House (1964-65) in
protecting the builtform within and at the same time creating a Bangalore, and the Kovalam Beach Resort (1969-74) in Trivandrum,
much-needed sense of public space in the very heart of a to the L&T Township (1982-88) at Awarpur and the houses along the
crowded city. Mandovi river at Verem (1982-89).
24
Services Auditorium Kitchen
Court
Industrial
exhibits
Handloom Pavilion, Delhi
Entrance
Enquiry Exhibits Amphitheatre
India Pavilion, Osaka
understanding of the Subtleties and ambiguities of such spaces. The

irony is that the very same cultures, which produced the original
The Acropolis at Athens typologies, are now happily importing the closed box model
(complete with wallpaper) from the “advanced" countries of the
THE RITUAUSTIC PATHWAY north, to fill up their towns and cities from Athens to Singapore to
Padmanabhapuram is important because it is the key to Tokyo to Sao Paulo.
typologies (and to Architectural syntax) quite different from those Fortunately, in India one cannot build a closed box (unless one
developed in the cold climates of Europe and North America – can also afford the air-conditioning that will make it habitable). Thus
where life must be protected throughout the long winter by a this issue was intuitively addressed head-on, right from the first
sealable weather-resistant box. Thus though the wealthy English project undertaken, the Handloom Pavilion (1958) in Delhi. Though
travelers visiting the Parthenon in the 17th and 18th Centuries must generated by a precise and disciplined plan of sixteen squares, it
nave been profoundly moved by the sacred pathway up to the top of actually creates a highly ambiguous space, neither quite covered
the Acropolis, they soon realised that the only thing they could really nor quite uncovered, containing a series of platforms in an
take back and re-cycle within the hostile environment in which they ascending – and then descending – spiral. At some distance above
lived were the marble columns and pediments which were rapidly is a "sky" of handloom cloth, separated from the peripheral walls by
turned into surface tattooing (mere wallpaper!) to decorate the a gap all around. So also the Kasturba Gandhi Samadhi (l962-65) in
outside of the sealed boxes they had to build. Poona, where the memorial consists of a gently descending path
Now a box generates a very simplistic architectural equation. defined by a series of parallel brick walls, on a shifting axis,
One is either inside this box or outside it. The transition from one culminating in the Samadhi itself.
condition to the other is through a precise and clearly defined Other variations on this theme of pedestrian path, shifting axis
boundary: the front door. Inside and outside co-exist as opposites, and low-key builtform are the Gandhi Darshan (1968-69) in Delhi
in a simple duality. How very different from the pluralistic and subtle and the India Pavilion (1969, unbuilt) at Osaka, Japan. Here the
variations of air and light conditions generated by the open-to-sky pathway is extended to also cover the root surfaces. Architecturally,
spaces we have been discussing! The old architecture of the warm the form is a kind of "non-building', given scale principally by
climates of this globe – from the acropolis of Athens to the pyramids the flights of external stairs (echoing the bathing ghats of
of Teotihuacan to the temples of Kyoto were generated by an Benares).
25
Darbar
Crafts
Gandhi Darshan at Rajghat
Village Temple
Crafts Crafts
National Crafts Museum, Delhi
Corb and Mies at the Kala Akademi
Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal
This processed unfolding of spaces, some enclosed, some Urban Window, Mexico City
open-to-sky, is also further developed in Bharat Bhavan (1975-81), Cidade de Goa

Bhopal – which is a re-interpretation of the old Pleasure Gardens
which are still the most popular spot for Indian families in the cool of Kanchanjunga, suspended high above Bombay, which act as
hours of sunset and in the early dawn.In the JNIDB in Hyderabad "urban windows" framing the city. Another example is the office
(1986-91), the pathway moves like a river through the building, building in the Alameda Park project in Mexico (1994 - to date) which
conceding the teaching areas lo the Library and Faculty Offices, uses these urban windows (floating just above the tree tops of the
and up to the hostel rooms on the sloping site, while in the National historic park) to recall the great tradition of public art in Mexico City.
Crafts Museum (1975-85), it becomes a continuous pedestrian spine
METAPHORS
running through the heart of the museum – a metaphor for the Indian
street, taking the visitor from village to temple to palace. The relationship of architecture to the other arts is a crucial one.
In the British Council Headquarters and Library in Delhi In the Hotel Cidade de Goa (1978-82) at Dona Paula, for instance,
(1987-92), this pathway becomes a formal axis, running down the murals and sculpture are used not just to provide references to local
centre of the site from the entrance gate right up to the rear traditions and events, but really to bring back into balance the
boundary. Along it are located three mythic paradigms that have spatial tensions generated by the builtform. This is also attempted in
generated the history of this sub-continent, recalling the historic the Kala Akademi (1973-83) in Panaii.These projects, both sited in
interfaces that have existed between India and England over the Goa, use elements from the kit-of-parts developed together earlier
centuries.The large square cut-outs on the street facade not only with abstract colour and realistic images, setting up a dialectic
encase the Hodgkin mural like a proscenium but also, from within between builtform and visual imagery – a complex interaction which
the building, act as “urban windows" framing views of the city can adds layers of metaphorical and metaphysical dimensions to
outside a visual and gesture that recalls the double-height terraces architecture.
26
Temple town of Srirangam
Vidhan Bhavan
New Bagalkot
by its proximity to the Buddhist Stupa at Sanchi nearby, and by form

of the Parliament in New Delhi.
Vastu-purush-mandalas
The second is the town of New Bagalkot in the Stale of
Such dimensions are an essential part of the old architecture we Karnataka. Here the principles of equity, affordability, job generation
see around us. These buildings possess not only an extraordinary etc., (discussed in the section on Ulwe) are developed within an
beauty of proportion, materials, etc., but they also project, with overall urban form which has deeper cultural relevance, recalling
astonishing force, polemic ideas about ourselves and our Srirangam – the ancient temple town on the river Cauvery, built as
relationship with the Non-manifest World. Strange indeed that since set of concentric rectangles, in the form of a Vedic mandala,
the beginning of time, Man has always used the most inert of depicting the non-Manifest World.
materials, like brick and stone, steel and concrete, to express the The third is the JN Centre for Advanced Scientific Research at
invisibilia that so passionately move him. Today our architecture is Bangalore (1990-94), the new campus for the Indian Institute of
banal – partly because of contemporary existence is so, but also Science. Here the centre of the site is occupied by a forest, with the
perhaps because we do not seek to express anything profound (or scientists' laboratories, seminar rooms and living quarters on the
deeply felt) about ourselves, or the society in which we live. other side of the stone wall encircling this forest. Scientists (truly the
The next few projects are really but faltering steps in that new rishis!) crossing through the stone wall to enter the
direction, metaphors for our relationship to something outside (and open-to-sky space in the grove of trees, recall metaphorically the
beyond) ourselves. The first is the Vidhan Bhavan (1980 - to date), a withdrawal of the ancient sages into the forest in search of wisdom
highly complex interlock of pathwavs, builtform and open-to-sky and enlightenment.
spaces for the new State Assembly of the Government of Madhya Metaphysical aspects of the sky are also addressed in the next
Pradesh. It is a citadel of democracy – built in a circular form two examples: the Jawahar Kala Kendra (1986-92) in Jaipur and
determined by its location (on top of a hill in the centre of Bhopal), IUCAA (1988-93) in Pune. These two projects, seemingly so different
27
Navgraha: the symbols and colours of the nine planets Galaxy in an Expanding Universe
in form and function (one is an art centre, the other an academic the central paradigms through which the ancient vastu-purush-
institution), are not so dissimilar after all. Both seek to project mandalas (with their emphasis on the centrality at the vortex) are not
Architecture as a Model of the Cosmos – each expressing a so different from contemporary scientists' notions about the Black
transcendental reality, beyond the pragmatic requirements of the Holes of Outer Space. Is this mere coincidence? Or is there a far
programme that caused them to be built. In this sense, they are more fundamental explanation? After all, both theories have been
quite symmetrical. generated from the same human mind . . . which, over all these
The first, the Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur, is double-coded centuries, has not changed. And just as the pragmatic and
(like the plan of Jaipur city itself), a contemporary construct based pleasurable qualities of open-to-sky space that we discussed earlier
on an ancient perception of the non-Manifest World, as expressed in seem to have remained undiminished, so also its metaphysical and
the vastu-purush-mandalas – those sacred Vedic diagrams that mythic qualities as well.
have been of seminal importance to Hindu, Buddhist and Jain Perhaps the reason is not so hard to fathom. The sky, all said
architecture over many many centuries. and done, is the source of light - which is the most primordial of
The second, IUCAA (the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy stimuli acting on our senses. And across its face, every day, passes
and Astrophysics) at Pune, seeks to express a totally different mind- the sun – the origin of Life itself ! . . . Small wonder then that man
set, viz., our own 20th century notions of the Expanding Universe in has always perceived the sky above to be the abode of the gods,
which we live – an understanding generated by the extraordinary and that down all these many millennia, it has exerted such
scientists (Einstein, Rutherford, Hoyle, and others) who in making extraordinary power on us and on the architecture we build.
the Universe comprehensible, have helped generate our own
contemporary sensibilities.
The Cosmos as it was comprehended thousands of years ago Bombay, January 1996
and as it is perceived today. These two projects seem to be based
on two very different mind-sets . . . or are they? For astonishingly,
28
India—Challenges for architecture and urban planning in the next century
Author(s): Rusi Khambatta
Source: Ekistics , January/February-March/April-May/June 1999, Vol. 66, No.
394/395/396, Futures 1 (January/February-March/April-May/June 1999), pp. 115-122
Published by: Athens Center of Ekistics
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India - Challenges for architecture and
urban planning in the next century
Rusi Khambatta
The author, Immediate Past President of the Commonwealth Asso- A large part of this agenda relates directly or indirectly to
ciation of Architects (CAA), Mumbai, India, is an architect and town settlements and quality of life, and therefore also to the
human
planner educated in India and the U.K. Parallel to his over four dec-
role of architects and urban planners in all parts of the world,
ades of practice in the field of town planning and industrial building,
particularly in countries with acute problems in terms of both
including projects related to engineering complexes, textile mills, sugar
scale and spread of related problems as in the case of India,
factories, fertilizer factories, paper plants, distilleries etc. - and also
commercial buildings, public buildings, railway stations, hospitals,which is the second largest country of the world in terms of
high-rise and low-cost residential buildings and interiors - population.
he has
taught and acted as member of the Board of major schools and Before going into the future it would be useful to try to review
the 20th century and some of the important successes and
colleges of architecture in New Delhi, Mumbai, Nagpur, Bandra,
failures that it leaves us as a heritage.
Rachna Sansad, and is also a member of a wide spectrum of govern-
ment committees. He has been affiliated to important Indian, Com-
monwealth and other international institutes, where he has held a
variety of key positions such as President of the Indian Institute of
Architects, Chairman of the Architects Regional Council for Asia
The 20th century
(Arcasia), and many others. He has also held positions in the Council For historic reasons and taking into consideration a realistic
of Architecture; the Royal Institute of British Architects; the United general assessment of problems and achievements in the
Towns Organisation; and the Institut Mondial des Cités Unies pour evolution of Indian human settlements, it is advisable to briefly
l'Environnement et Urbanisme, Paris. Mr Khambatta is also a member discuss separately the first half of the century and the last 50
of the World Society for Ekistics. The text that follows is based on a years.
presentation by the author on the same theme at the UIA Conference
in Beijing in June 1999. The first 50 years
The first half of the 20th century in India was dominated by
British architects who practiced a hybrid adaptation of classical
architecture with Indian forms evolving what was termed as
"Indo-Saracenic" - a style of its own. This era is highlighted
by two epoch-making ventures:
• Lutyens' Delhi, and
• Le Corbusier's Chandigarh.
In Lutyens' Delhi, land was used extravagantly to house a few
inhabitants - significant of a colonial way of life. Out of 20 lakh
population in Greater Delhi, Lutyens' Delhi, which covers a
huge area, accommodates only 3 lakhs (1 lakh = 100,000)
population. In contrast to this, in other metropolises like
Mumbai and Calcutta which are also subjected to increasing
migration of population, the quality of life deteriorates but
paradoxically shows exuberance of vitality and offers great
opportunities to inhabitants.
Le Corbusier in Chandigarh wanted to achieve a new
form without sliding into spurious orientalism. He wanted to
translate India's culture into modern symbolic forms respecting
what the future held for India with the growth of science and
technology as a means to avert poverty and ensure rapid de-
velopment. The automobile holds a center stage in the de-
Introduction
signing of Chandigarh. The impact of Chandigarh in India is as
The coming century, inevitably a continuation of the century intense as Brasilia in Brazil or Versailles in France.
that ends with the year 2000, is leaving us with a long list of Le Corbusier in his Capital complex created a very powerful
global problems and an equally long agenda of priority issuesdirection. Its monumentality displaying a brutal quality invites
for action by humanity in general and decision makers the criticism. The theory of dividing a city into separate zones for
world over. living, working and recreation dictated the city form by creating
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a hierarchy of communication patterns, to cover long distances. countered in history. The change of millennium has a magical
touch. It has set us off with a sense of achievement, urgency
The last 50 years of action and a determination to enter the new era with our best
foot forward.
In less than 50 years planners are rethinking the issue of com-
partmentalized planning to avert loss of time and energy in
Shelter
commuting.
Chandigarh has become an archetype of modernity believ- Next to food, nothing takes greater priority than shelter. The
ing that this would transform the people living in it. Has this declared figures of homelessness differ. Perhaps, it is due to
been brought about, or have the Indians "Indianized modern- the definition of homelessness. Shelters are built from rags,
ity"? Like the Chinese who establish a Chinatown wherever from metal sheets, from waste building materials, and even
they settle, regardless of whether it is Southhall or Wembley in from cardboard in the form of street beds, largely prevalent in
London, Indians Indianize wherever they settle but continue developed countries. The United Nations Centre for Human
their strong attachment to rituals and traditions. Settlements (UNCHS) places one billion people as homeless
The industrial revolution in India was synonymous with mid- and a further 600 million as homeless and living in a health-
century Indian independence. It was also the start of modern- threatening situation. The symptoms are varied, but the dis-
istic architecture. With the advent of globalization and wide- ease is universal. Numbers are uncertain, but human misery
spread revolution in information technology, pressures mount- is real. From a predominantly rural community, the world is
ed to push the ethnic to annihilation. Indian architects are transforming very rapidly into an urban community.
subjected to layers of culture from the days of Mohenjodaro to Today, already one half of the world population are living in
Lutyens to Le Corbusier. They have seen symbols in the ar- cities. This trend will continue and by the year 2025, cities will
chitecture of Sanchi and Ajanta, scale and craftsmanship in grow to double the rural population. The bulk of the increase in
the conclaves of Fatehpursikri, a play of light and shadows in urban areas will take place in cities of developing countries
the palaces of Chitor and Mandu. They have seen India as an which as of today are in disarray and cannot cope with existing
example of contrast where mud huts and skyscrapers, wooden problems of urbanization.
ploughs and computer technology run in parallel. The problem of the 21st century is urban - more partic-
Within this background a heroic comeback is noticed in the ularly in developing countries (fig. 1) where population will
works of young architects who invent modernity contextually grow many more times and 90 percent of the urban population
with heritage and culture. Regionalism in architecture gained will be living in cities of the developing world. In India the
momentum. In a vast country like India it found different present urban population of 280 million will grow over two and
expressions in different parts relating itself to local conditions. a half times to 740 million in 25 years' time. In 15 years' time
A new dimension is added to the practice of architecture. The there will be 28 mega-cities in the world of which four will be in
age-old traditions manifested in the scriptures "Vastu Shastra" India and Mumbai will be the second largest in the world.
lay down the principles of planning to result in a harmonious It is not uncommon to find cities where 40 to 50 percent of the
fusion of man's interaction with the environment. Vastu Shastra population live in slums.
has its parallel in "Feng Shui." Its relevance to built form and Formal and informal housing grow side by side (fig. 2).
urbanization today is viewed with a mixed reaction. Can it cater From their open living people migrate into an area where
to present-day socio-economic demands? Can it meet the space is a constraint. People living in developing countries are
transformations of the constantly advancing building tech- highly adaptable and accept the evils of social and economic
nology? degradation of slums.
Population growth will be a bigger story in the next century
Housing and urban land: Till 1970 Government was the sole than in this one. Shortly our world will enter the third millennium
provider of public housing, and it failed miserably to keep pace
with lower standards of living environment than what humanity
with housing needs. The plan for development of small towns
encountered at the start of the second millennium. It is primarily
and villages to curtail the exodus of population to larger cities our urban areas that need all our attention to improve the
also failed to make a significant impact, and migration con- quality of life.
tinued. A National Housing policy to formulate an overall pro- The city is a throbbing dynamic receptacle of spontaneous
gram was adopted in the 1990s. It spelt out an ambitious activity; a place of opportunity; a place where things happen.
housing target of constructing two million units per year.
Cities have been built, wiped out and rebuilt to rise to greater
Most of the programs like self-help housing and sites-and- heights.
services schemes were successful in smaller towns. Since the
The informal community grows and finds its roots within the
very nature of this development is horizontal, such low density
city (fig. 3). The problem is to be viewed as a human resource
development necessitates large areas of land, not available in
rather than an unsustainable labor force. We need to knit the
starved metropolitan areas, except on their periphery making community as one whole that reflects social justice, furthers its
life impossible for the neediest section of society. This prob-
aspirations and ensures a minimum quality of life.
lem does not occur in small towns.
Years of experience have shown that we cannot halt urban
The urban land ceiling Act which was primarily enacted togrowth. Efforts to slow down or prevent people from moving
take away land at practically no cost from the landowners tointo large cities of high economic activity have failed. People
provide housing for the homeless froze all potential land fromin developing countries, being highly adaptable, accept the
private developers. Thereafter, only a fraction of land was de-evils of social and environmental degradation in favor of city
veloped by government agencies, compounding a huge short-lights and better prospects in cities.
age of housing. The Act created an artificial shortage of land, Rural-based attitudes are apparent, bringing in their life style
resulting in the spiraling cost of land and creating unaffordable
and traditions which create a conflict (fig. 4). The fusion of
housing. The Act was counter-productive and is in the process urban and rural society is to be attained by a non-coercive
of being repealed. democratic process. Is the solution to homelessness merely
provision of houses? Or is it environmental upliftment? Ob-
servance of hygiene? Discipline for collective living?
The next fifty years Congestion is viewed as synonymous with high density. A
This century leaves us with a legacy of problems never en-prime example is Navi Mumbai (New Bombay) which propa-
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Fig. 1 : Total population and urban population in selected countries of the developing world, in the years 2000 and 2025.
Fig. 2: In major urban agglomerations of rapidly urbanizing poor countries, formal and informal housing grow side by side.
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Fig. 3: The informal community grows and finds its roots within the city.
Fig- 4: Rural-based attitudes are apparent, bringing in their life style and traditions.
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Fig- 5: The three models of future population growth.
gates half the density of the metropolis of Mumbai, with ad- • the second model shows a catastrophic rise to 27 billion if the
verse repercussions. It will further subject the users to longer present world fertility rate does not show a decline.
distances to travel, and bring about an increase in the cost of • a more probable model is a rise of population to 1 1 billion if
infrastructure and amenities. To a developing country in a
family planning programs are implemented in developing
state of transition, intermediate technology appears to be countries - that means a further doubling of population in 50
economically feasible and hence an immediate answer, but years' time.
where does it place us in a long-term perspective of devel-
opment? The prime question is, are we under-utilizing our Urban land
land? Can we afford such low densities? Are our norms
sustainable? A balance is to be maintained between what is Despite all measures experience has shown that urbanization
desirable and what is achievable. cannot be halted; it can only be slowed down by intensified
rural development. Unless judicious urban densities are
The world population which took 150 years to double, took
created, in 50 years' time in India our urban areas will cover
only 40 years this century to double again. The future growth
three times the present area, eating away our valuable agricul-
of population has three models (fig. 5):
tural land. Barring a few countries, India will be one of the most
• by 2050 the present 6 billion world population may rise to densely populated countries in the world (figs. 6 and 7).
8 billion which is an extremely optimistic figure and, con- Let us look at this problem from another angle: land. Today
sidering the present world fertility trend, is not possible; we have 2,800 sq.m of arable land per capita in the world. By
Figs. 6 and 7: India - Urbanized areas in the years 2000 and 2050.
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Fig. 8: Available agricultural land in the world and in developing India in the years 2025 and 2050.
2025 the spread of urbanization will reduce it to 1,700 sq.m duce our land under crops, destroy our environment, displace
per capita. Even these areas are disproportionately dis- and deprive hordes of farmers of their ancestral land and
tributed. The developed countries have a larger share com- livelihood.
pared to the developing nations. In Asia, there is only 900 sq.m More particularly in India by AD 2025, agricultural land will
of arable land per person, and it will have to feed 2 to 3 billion be reduced to 900 sq.m per person and by AD 2050 to 400
more in the next few decades. Urban sprawl will further re- sq.m per person (fig. 8). India will be unable to feed Indians.
Fig. 9: Existing built-up area in Mumbai and its metropolitan area. Fig. 10: Mumbai - Proposed development through generous density
by the year 2025.
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The situation leaves no option but to intensify our urban devel- depriving hordes of farmers from their ancestral land and
opment and make every effort to conserve land - the greatest livelihood.
non-renewable asset. The need for radical interference in guiding growth to the
It makes sense for urbanization to be intensive, contained benefit of nature and people is known to all.
and thereby cut down travel distances, reduce cost of infra-Today in Mumbai 40 million man hours per day are lost in
structure and cause minimum encroachment on agricultural travel time (fig. 12). Judicious intensive and mixed develop-
land. Squandering of our most precious and non-retrievable ment can reduce time in traveling, fatigue, cost of infrastruc-
asset, "land," should be our prime concern. Land will be in- ture, and waste of land.
creasingly in short supply, both for living as well as for food. Meeting the needs of the present by development which
The reality of the situation is that massive humanity will does not restrict the future generation to fulfill their need is
continue to live in small and densely populated urban con- "Sustainability" and a key to ensuring quality of life for all times.
tainers. It is here that we need to knit the community into one This raises quite a few issues:
whole that reflects social justice, furthers peoples' aspirationsIs the solution of homelessness in merely provision of
and ensures a minimum quality of life. houses? Or does the solution lie elsewhere? For example:
If we have failed to organize our towns in the past, we have
• in environmental upliftment (slum upgradation) - a Geddian
to face reality today; save our metropolis from melting away to
diagnostic approach;
necropolis and plan for sustainable urban growth. The vul-
• in reducing the negative impact of urbanization, by creating
nerability of our urban areas is a result of lack of infrastructure,
facilities for people to observe common norms of hygiene;
absence of amenities, outlived structures, and ill-planned
• in raising the standards of livelihood;
distribution. Obviously, congestion is a result of inaction and
• in educating communities to feel housng is a need, and thus
mismanagement. Our cities are encroaching upon fragile
stop downward revision, viz. people sell formal housing and
ecosystems at rates and scales really unprecedented. Let us
revert to squatter colony;
look at the example of Mumbai.
• in inculcating at an early age discipline of collective living.
Figure 9 shows the existing built-up area in Mumbai and its
metropolitan area where light grey is agricultural land; medium
But all this does not minimize the importance of weaving first-
aid plans such as sites-and-services programs, slum up-
grey is built-up area; black is intensive forest land. It is pro-
posed to develop this area through generous density resulting, gradation programs with a vision to create our urban areas
by AD 2025, in figure 10. with long-term solutions to meet the exponential growth of
population.
By using the same standards of land utilization (fig. 11), ur-
banization by AD 2050 will cover most of the land, destroying We cannot ignore the fact that by its very nature the
environment, further reducing agriculture and forest land and sites-and-services program in a metropolis is a failure
Fig. 11: Mumbai - Probable urban expansion by the year 2050. Fig. 12: Present land use in metropolitan Mumbai.
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Fig- 13: Example of "low-rise" sites-and-services project on the periphery of metropolitan Mumbai.
(fig. 13). It brings about horizontal development with low Conclusion

density and hence could be built only on the periphery of the
space-starved metropolis involving long travel distances for Unrestricted human activity on the living environment has
the poorest section of society making life expensive and created devastating results, shattering the global equilibrium.
impossible. However, all these shortcuts do not minimize the Enduring survival extends beyond the realms of architecture.
importance of weaving these solutions with a vision to create Human ecology is pivotal for housing the billions. In our own
our urban areas with long-term solutions to meet exponential field, sustainable solutions will have to be sought through - if
growth of population. a word can be coined - "Ecotecture," an environmentally sen-
The economics of housing is to be viewed as income- sitive practice of architecture.
generation creation of employment, capital formation and ac- It is primarily our urban areas that need all attention for
quisition of skills. It is economically prudent for later financial survival. Collectively, architects have a vital role to play in
policies by revamping tax structure, introducing appropriate shaping our environment, and making this world a better place
rules and controls to encourage entrepreneurship for rental to live in. If we fail, we have a crisis of civilization. Hence, we
housing. This will make housing affordable. cannot fail.
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ART407A: 20th-21st Century Visual Culture in India
Rajarshi Sengupta
Fine Arts, HSS
What is Visual Culture?
What is 20th-21st Century Visual Culture in India?
Left: Rand McNally's late 1947 view of Partition, Image:

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00maplinks/modern/maps1947/maps1947.html
ART 101
20th-21st Century Visual Culture in India
Rajarshi Sengupta
Course Description: By emphasising the salient features of the 20th and 21st century Indian visual culture, this
course foregrounds the necessity to perceive the history of Indian modern and contemporary art from the
point of view of making. The course analyses how societal interests, history and individual approaches intersect
in art-making. A focus on the production of artworks—explored through a diverse range of topics, including
wash water colour, printmaking, post-independence architecture, craft production and installation art—thus
promises to yield newer insights into our visual culture. The course aims to integrate art theories and art
production while fostering creative thinking in students.
Aims and Objectives
• Objectives: Understanding art history from the perspectives of material, technique, theme and human
interaction promises to integrate art theories and hands-on production of art.
• It elucidates how materials and techniques stimulate creative thinking and decision-making through a
series of case studies allowing students to explore them in their practice.
• The course content may help students recognise the potentials in the materials and tools from our
surroundings and utilise them to address societal problems.
Lesson Plan: Lecture Topics
Module 5
Architecture: The construction of a New Nation
Module 1
• New Capital cities and institutions after 1947
Patches of Wash: Japanese watercolour and Indian Nationalism • Urban, public, private spaces and new materials
• Charles Correa, B. V. Doshi
• Colonial Art Education and Bengal School
• Nationalism in methods and visual language Midterm Examination (30 marks)
• Kakuzo Okakura, Abanindranath Tagore, Abdur Rahman Chughtai
Module 2
Impressions: Printmaking and knowledge circulation
• 1943 Famine and the role of printmaking
• Printmaking as an artistic medium in the post-independence India
• Chittoprasad, Krishna Reddy, Zarina
Quiz 1 (15 marks)
Module 3
Canvas as a Construct: Western Modernity and beyond
• Rise of Professional Artists in India and art galleries
• Significance of Oil painting on canvas
• Bombay Progressives to recent experiments
Module 4
Sculpture: Objects and Spaces
• Traditional and new materials in sculpture
• Institutional and public sculptures
• Ramkinkar Baij, N. N. Rimzon, L. N. Tallur
Module 6
Contemporary Indigeneity
• “Revival” projects, folk and tribal communities
• Village artisans to urban artists, change in material, spaces
• Jangarh Singh Shyam, Bhuri Bai, Swarna Chitrakar, J. Swaminathan
Module 7
Bazar Art or Bazar and Art?: Discourses on the Popular visual culture
• Impact of posters, comic books, cinema, television on art making
• Visual culture of streets, markets and public
• Bhupen Khakhar, Chitra Ganesh, Orijit Sen
Quiz 2 (15 Marks)
Module 8
Installation Art: Media, expressions and boundary
• “Found” materials, readymade objects and artistic practice
• Multisensory expressions, art and technology
• Vivan Sundaram, Atul Dodiya, Shilpa Gupta
Module 9
Craft-Art Interface
• Gandhian movement, Khadi and post-1947 craft revival
• Art and Craft binary and interconnections
• Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Suraiya Hasan, Gurappa Chetty
End Term Examination (40 marks)

Grading
Grading will be done according to the Undergraduate Manuel.
Grades are earned and not given. No request for upgrading except for any miscommunication/typing error
will be entertained.
Seeing/Reading an Image
1. What is it? Is this an object? A piece of paper? A canvas? A

building? A bridge?
2. What material is used there?
3. How was it made? What all techniques are used there?
4. What is the story behind them? What is it telling us?
5. Who all are involved with it? Artist/maker? Who used them?
Who is using them now?
Module 1
Patches of Wash: Japanese watercolour and Indian Nationalism
Left: Abanindranath Tagore, painting on postcard (wash watercolour), 1920, Image: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O82359/painting-tagore-abanindranath/ Right:William Simpson (British, 1823-1899), Agra, 1864, watercolor over
graphite, Gilbert Davis Collection.
European Art education in the Indian subcontinent
Left: Tympanum in Crawford Market, Bombay, depicting trade in India, carved by John Lockwood Kipling and his students in c. 1869–71, Image source:https://www.apollo-magazine.com/the-
crafty-imperialist-john-lockwood-kipling/; Right: Sir J. J. School of Arts, Bombay, Image source:https://www.sirjjschoolofart.in/programmes/general.aspx?id=mzi02FJa0LU=
Left: Victoria Terminus in Bombay, circa 1900. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Right: Fountain at the Crawford Market, 1868, Image source:
https://bombaywalla.org/now-and-then-theres-a-fool-such-as-mumbai/
Raja Ravi Varma, The Coquette, oil on canvas, late 19th century, Image:
https://artsandculture.google.com/project/raja-ravi-varma
A. N. Tagore, Okakura and Watercolour
Left: Nandalal Bose, The Studio of Abanindranath Tagore, ink on paper, early 20th century, Image: Okakura Kakuzo, Image: https://www.stonebridge.com/authors/Kakuzo-Okakura
Abanindranath Tagore, Krishna-Lila series (Left: Birth of
Krishna; Right: Raas), watercolour on paper, Image:
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/birth-of-krishna-
abanindranath-tagore/4QEwoBmU2gXDTQ and
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/to-the-moonlight-
dance-abanindranath-tagore/AQGbRtB_q48Xhg
Left: Abanindranath Tagore, “The Passing of Shah Jehan,” 1902, oil on Canvas, Image: https://www.theheritagelab.in/jahanara-shah-
jahan/ Right: Shah Jahan in Shalimar Garden, watercolour, late 19th/early 20th century, Image:
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/night-at-the-shalimar-the-emperor-shah-jahan/TQF9ygDhMEs3SQ
Japanese Wash watercolour demonstration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZmaPzBDBqc
“An imperialised
people have nothing to
struggle for, and
without the struggle
there can be no great
genius, no great
poetry.”
Sister Nivedita, Excerpt

from “The Function of Art in
Shaping Nationality”
Abanindranath Tagore, “Bharat Mata,” Wash and tempera on paper, 1905, Image: https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/kolkata/abanindranaths-bharat-mata-on-display/article6949692.ece
Similarities/Differences?
How is the colour scheme?
What about the anatomy?
What about the clothing

and attributes?
What about the

background? What do you
see there?
Right: "Hind Devi", in a print from the 1920's-30’s, Image: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00routesdata/1800_1899/congress/bharatmata/bharatmata.html

Left: A R Chughtai, Passing of Shah Jahan, wash watercolour, Image: https://www.theheritagelab.in/jahanara-
shah-jahan/
Left: Abdur Rahman Chughtai, “Saqui,” watercolour, Image source: https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/24941/lot/101/
Right: A. R. Chughtai, “Arjuna as a Victor,” watercolor on paper, Image source: https://artist.christies.com/Abdur-Rahman-Chughtai-15961-bio.aspx
Left: Abdur Rahman Chughtai, “To Mecca,” etching, Image source: https://www.grosvenorgallery.com/artists/52-abdur-rahman-chughtai/works/255/ Right: A. N. Tagore, “Journey’s End,” 1913, Image source:
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/journey-s-end-abanindranath-
tagore/7AEBFkuScHG1nA?hl=en&ms=%7B%22x%22%3A0.5%2C%22y%22%3A0.5%2C%22B%22%3A9.026300506682206%2C%22z%22%3A9.026300506682206%2C%22size%22%3A%7B%22width%22%3A1.8051822811522442
%2C%22height%22%3A1.2374999999999992%7D%7D
Left: Rabindranath Tagore in Santiniketan; Right: Aims and Objects of Visva-Bharati, Image: https://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/biographies/rabindranath-tagore-poet-of-power-visva-bharati-university/
What is Art?
“Man has a fund of emotional energy

which is not all occupied with his self-
preservation. This surplus seeks its
outlet in the creation of Art, for man’s
civilisation is built upon his surplus…”
Rabindranath Tagore, an excerpt from

a 1931 lecture
“Singha Sadan,” Visva Bharati University campus, 2014, Photograph: RS

Left: Nandalal Bose, Untitled drawing on paper (copy of a mural from Bagh caves), early 1900s, Image: https://framemark.vam.ac.uk/collections/2013GK1361/full/1400,/0/default.jpg Right: weeping woman,
mural from Bagh caves, 5th century
Left: Nandalal Bose, Untitled drawing from Santiniketan, Image:
https://www.tarunartgallery.com/artwork?type=Drawing Right: Nandalal Bose, drawing on paper, 1955, Image:
https://www.artsy.net/artwork/nandalal-bose-untitled-1
Left: Nandalal Bose, Illustrations for Sahaj Path, books for primary education in Bengali, Image: https://in.pinterest.com/pin/490259109412407574/ Right: Nandalal Bose, Untitled, drawing, Image:
https://dagworld.com/artwork/bosen262/
Nandalal Bose, Haripura posters, natural pigment on paper, 1930s, Image: https://www.theheritagelab.in/haripura-posters-nandalal-bose/
Left: Nandalal Bose, Haripura posters, natural pigment on paper, 1930s, Image: https://artsandculture.google.com/story/AwXRNpSFHeWVJw Right: F. B. Solvyns, Koummars, coloured etching, 1799, Image:
The Printed Picture, DAG, New Delhi
Binode Behari Mukherjee, Medieval Saints, murals in Hindi Bhavan, Santiniketan, 1940s, Image: https://halwasiya.org/hindi-bhawan-shantiniketan/
Left: Binode Behari Mukherjee, Image: https://www.vadehraart.com/artists/53-benode-behari-mukherjee/ Right: Binode Behari Mukherjee, Conversation, collage on paper, 1960
Module 2
Impressions: Printmaking and knowledge circulation
Left: Unfinished woodblocks, workshop of K. Gangadhar and K. Narsaiah, Pedana, AP; Right:A woodblock and its print showing the theme of St. Sebastian, Europe, area and artist unidentified,
Courtesy: Science Museum group collections, UK;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jzVjjRudfo&t=1s
Relief and Planographic techniques
Left: Representation of relief printing, Image: https://www.spudnikpress.org/classes/relief-printmaking-3/ Right: Surface of a lithographic stone with image area, Image: https://www.rohcollection.com/printmaking-1
Printmaking in the 19th and early 20h century
Left: Thomas Daniell, Part of the Kanaree Caves, Salsette, 1808, Metal engraving, Image: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/part-of-the-kanaree-caves-salsette Right: Raja Ravi Varma, Krishna
as envoy, oleograph, late 19th century, Image: https://artsandculture.google.com/project/raja-ravi-varma
Left: Nandalal Bose, Bapuji, Linocut, 1930, Image: https://www.artic.edu/artists/78227/nandalal-bose Right: Binode Behari
Mukherjee, Untitled, woodcut on paper, https://jnaf.org/artist/benode-behari-mukherjee/
1940s: Famine, Impression and Wound
Left: Zainul Abedin, Famine sketch from Calcutta, 1943, ink on paper, Image: https://arthistoryproject.com/artists/zainul-abedin/famine-sketch/ Right: Abedin, Famine sketch, 1943, Image:
https://bengalfoundation.org/featured-artist/zainul-abedin-2/
Left: Chittaprosad, “Children of Upendra Rishi Das, Rancha, Bikrampur,” (1944) brush and ink on paper, Image: https://hyperallergic.com/439619/the-artist-who-sketched-a-famine-in-
india/ Right: Chittaprasad, May Day 1947, Image: https://www.gallerie.net/chittaprosad-voice-of-dissent/
Chittaprasad, a copy of Hungry Bengal (1943-44), displayed at Kessel Museum, Germany, 2017, Image: https://scroll.in/magazine/846805/being-safe-is-scary-at-germanys-documenta-14-chilling-
reminders-that-history-repeats-itself Right: Chittaprasad, Gone mad, Liocut, 1952, Image: https://collection.waswoxwaswo.com/early-bengal-gallery.php?galleryid=26#prettyPhoto[artwork]/1/
Left: Chittaprasad, Untitled, Linocut, Image: https://collection.waswoxwaswo.com/early-bengal-
gallery.php?galleryid=26#prettyPhoto[artwork]/1/ Right: Chittaprasad, Untitled, linocut, Image:
https://dagworld.com/artwork/chittap0797/
Left: Somnath Hore, Famine – Calcutta streets, mid-50s, woodcut (Somnath Hore used several of his drawings of the Bengal famine in the 1940s for woodcuts later); Right: Somnath Hore, meeting at a market, early-50s, woodcut, Image: https://thewire.in/the-
arts/somnath-hore-the-artist-who-remained-preoccupied-with-the-concept-of-the-wound
Left: Somnath Hore, Untitled print, Etching/viscosity, 1960s/1970s, Image: https://www.deccanchronicle.com/lifestyle/books-and-art/240517/wounds-of-life.html ; right: Somnath Hore, Untitled, Etchig/Viscosity, 1965, Image:
https://www.cimaartindia.com/project/2618/
Right: Somnath Hore, Wounds-14, early pulp print, 1970s, Image: https://www.cimaartindia.com/project/2618/
Left: Someath Hore, Wounds, 1972, Pulp print. Courtesy: Prashant Tulsyan; Right: Someath Hore, Cry of the Molested (Rape at Itbhata), Bronze. Courtesy: Samiran Nandy, Image:
https://thewire.in/the-arts/man-artist-wound-somnath-hore-as-i-knew-him
Artistic Printmaking after independence
Left: Krishna Reddy in his studio in NYC, 2011, Image:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/obituaries/krishna-reddy-dead.html Right: Atelier 17, Paris, Image:
https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/ruminations/2016/workshop-and-legacy-stanley-william-hayter
Krishna Reddy, Whirlpool, Etching viscosity, 1963, Image: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/633973
Left: Zarina; Right: Zarina, “Letters from Home”, Woodcut and letterpress print, 2000s,
Image source: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hashmi-letters-from-home-p80181
Zarina, “Letters from Home”,
Woodcut and letterpress
print, 2000s
(right): Display of the series in

Tate London, 2013, Image
source:
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/
artworks/hashmi-letters-
from-home-p80181
Zarina, Book of Travels, 2012. Accordion Book, 11.5 × 42 inches (open). Image courtesy the artist. Image source: https://www.4columns.org/d-souza-aruna/zarina
Left: Zarina, Starting Over, 2016. Crushed Indian handmade paper, 18.5 × 14 inches. Image courtesy the
artist; Right: Zarina, Shadow House I, 2006, Image source: https://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2012/zarina-
paper-like-skin
Artistic Printmaking and installations
Left: Display of “The Printed Picture,” Punjab Kala Bhavan, Chadigarh, 2018, Image: https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/archive/lifestyle/making-an-impression-654499 Right: Paula Sengupta,
“Rivers of Blood,” 2009, Image source: https://www.artslant.com/global/artists/show/98732-paula-sengupta?page=1&tab=ARTWORKS;
Left: Paula Sengupta, (Detail) Rivers of Blood: Burma to Benapole, 2009, Image courtesy: The Harrington Street Art Centre, Kolkata; Paula Sengupta, “Rivers of Blood,” 2009, Image source:
https://www.artslant.com/global/artists/show/98732-paula-sengupta?page=1&tab=ARTWORKS;
Module 3
Canvas as a Construct
Left: Tilly Kettle, the Teshu Lama (D 1780) Giving Audience 1775, Oil on canvas, Image: https://www.rct.uk/collection/407227/the-teshu-lama-d-1780-giving-audience; Right: Right: Amrita
Sher-Gil, Three Girls, 1935, oil on canvas, Image: https://theculturetrip.com/asia/india/articles/india-s-frida-kahlo-amrita-sher-gil-s-contribution-to-indian-modern-art/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iib_imkZ5fk
Bombay Progressives and Formal Exercises
Left: Image source: https://www.artnewsnviews.com/view-article.php?article=progressive-artists-group-of-bombay-an-overview&iid=29&articleid=800; Right: F. N. Souza, “Houses at Night,” 1957,

Image source: https://blog.saffronart.com/tag/bombay-progressives/
Left: F. N. Souza, “Head of a man with glasses”, Oil on canvas, 1958, Image: HTTPS://WWW.GROSVENORGALLERY.COM/ARTISTS/28-FRANCIS-NEWTON-
SOUZA/WORKS/3901-FRANCIS-NEWTON-SOUZA-HEAD-OF-A-MAN-WITH-GLASSES-1958/ Right: F. N. Souza, Still Life with three fishes, oil on canvas, 1960
Left: Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, https://www.wired.com/2007/11/gallery-lastsupper/ Right: F. N. Souza, Last Supper, oil on canvas, 1989, Image:
https://auctions.pundoles.com/lots/view/1-4TLCQ/last-supper
Krishen Khanna and Sub-culture of the Streets
Left: Krishen Khanna - News of Gandhiji's Death, 1948. Oil on canvas, Image: https://postwar.hausderkunst.de/en/artworks-artists/artworks/news-of-gandhijis-death-die-nachricht-von-gandhis-tod : Right: Krishen Khanna, Serenading Lajwanti, oil on canvas, 2005,
Image: https://criticalcollective.in/ArtistInner2.aspx?Aid=107&Eid=266
M. F. Husain, Zameen, oil on canvas, 1955, Image: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/zamin-maqbool-fida-husain/iwHUdYLtb88WQg?hl=en
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHg2AR8_UeM&t=794s
Left: M. F. Husain, Draupadi, Oil on canvas, 1971, Image: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/maqbool-fida-husain-draupadi-mahabharata-3 Right: Husain, 18th day of Kurukshetra, oil on canvas,
1971, Image: http://www.artnet.com/artists/mf-husain/mahabharata-18th-day-of-kurukshetra-FwTwoFlDUfjoo7--ctTieg2
Left: Maqbool Fida Husain, detail of Ramayana mural. ea. 1967, Dhoomimal Gallery, ConnaughtPlace, New Delhi. Artwork © Estate of the artist; image © Sona! Khullar; Right: B. V.
Doshi and M. F. Husain, Interior of Amdavad ni Gufa, Ahmedabad, 1995, Image: https://homegrown.co.in/article/802437/m-f-hussains-paintings-find-a-home-at-this-underground-
cave-gallery
Group 1890 of Baroda and Reclaiming of Indian Pasts
Left: (From left to right): Jeram Patel, Geeta Kapur, Jagdish Swaminathan, Ambadas Khobragade, Rajesh Mehra, Balkrishna Patel, and Jyoti Bhatt, Image:
https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/archive/gulammohammed-sheikh-archive-group-1890/object/meeting-of-group-1890-5541 Right: Catalogue of Group 1890’s exhibition in New Delhi, 1963,
Image: https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/archive/geeta-kapur-and-vivan-sundaram-archive-exhibition-catalogues-from-geeta-and-vivans-collection/object/group-1890-191155
Left: Returning Home after Long Absence, Gulammohammed Sheikh, 1969–73, 122 x
122 cm, oil on canvas, Image: https://thepunchmagazine.com/arts/art-design/the-
gulammohammed-sheikh-interview-portrait-of-an-artist Right: The miraj, isfahan, third
quarter 17th century, Image:
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00xcallig/mughalmid/zziran/miraj.html
Left: Speechless City by Gulammohammed Sheikh, 1975, Image:
https://scroll.in/article/948167/the-art-of-resistance-gulammohammed-
sheikhs-speechless-city-is-about-refusing-to-look-away Right: A page from
Hamzanama, produced in Aakbar’s court, late 16th century, Agra(?)/north
India, Image: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/a-page-of-the-dastan-i-
amir-hamza-hamzanama-mughal/rgG3VJ1dVK78-w
Right: A. N. Tagore, From Arabian Nights series, 1930
Sudhir Patwardhan’s Bombay/Mumbai
Left: Sudhir Patwardhan, Untitled/ Irani Restaurant, 1970s, oil on canvas, Image: https://www.saffronart.com/auctions/postwork.aspx?l=2779 Right: Sudhir Patwardhan, Accident on May Day,
1981, oil on canvas, Image: https://twitter.com/ranjithoskote/status/913707430810226688
Sudhir Patwardhan, Erase, 2017, Acrylic on Canvas, Image: https://www.vadehraart.com/artists/58-sudhir-patwardhan/works/35148-sudhir-patwardhan-erase-2017/
“When I started work on the painting ‘Two Men With Handcart’, a particular
tone of pink. The pink would cover the entire canvas. I realised that the
colour would be difficult to control, and associations around it would have
to be changed since a garish finish was not what I intended. Already I was
in the middle of a technical problem.
A technical problem can become a net into which creative decisions are
enticed. In this case I was rewarded by a happy end result: the pink was
held at a point where it was neither delicious nor repulsive. The sky and
the ground are both pink, but it does not provoke disbelief. The different
qualities of sky and earth are obtained not by any local modification, but
by the treatment of the area of canvas between them. The pink has now
become an environment, in which the two men can have their relaxed chat.
This is how I justified the use of pink to myself. It came to me as a slight

shock later, September of that year, looking out of my window, that the
evening sun refracted through the dense and variegated clouds with which
the monsoon departs from Bombay was casting a pink glow over everything
I could see. As clear and dramatic as a stage light beaming
through a sheet of pink cellophane. This then was where my original confidence
would have come from, a sight seen year after year and subsumed,
to surface again disguised as a technical problem.”
Gieve Patel, “Two Men with Handcart,” 1979, oil on canvas

Atul Dodiya and Extension of Canvas
Lelft: Atul Dodiya, Bapu at Rene Block Gallery, New York, 1974, watercolour, 1998, https://www.gallerychemould.com/artists/43-atul-dodiya/works/2884-atul-dodiya-bapu-at-rene-block-
gallery-new-york-1974-1998/ Image: Right: Joseph Beuys, I Like America and America Likes Me (1974)., Performance, Image: https://culturacolectiva.com/art/performance-coyote-joseph-
beuys/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TeQw1GRt50
Lelft: Atul Dodiya, Gangavatarana, after Raja Ravi Varma, 1998, Oil ad acrylic on canvas, Image:
https://www.vadehraart.com/privateviews/94ce31f0ef131821e401d0/39014-atul-dodiya-gangavataran-after-raja-
ravi-verma-1998/ Right: Raja Ravi Varma, Gangavatarana, Oleograph, Image:
https://www.mojarto.com/artworks/printmaking/raja-ravi-varma/ganga-avataran--1-1-/MA281391
Right: Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 3), 1916, Drawing on photograph, Image:
https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/51451
Atul Dodiya, Holy Cash: An artistic interpretation of Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, Courtesy
Atul Dodiya and Chemould Prescott Road, Image:
https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/ngfMXf60hrs98bDW6bxETN/Money--The-makeastash-
philosphy.html
Module 4
Sculpture: Objects and Spaces
Left: Figure of a Deity, brass, 19th century, Image: https://museumsofindia.gov.in/repository/record/im_kol-6141-596 Right:

Interior of Marble Palace,
Left: Drawing from Life at the Royal Academy, Somerset House, 1 January 1808, Image: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/drawing-from-life-at-the-royal-academy-somerset-
house Right: A student making a portrait of Ramkinkar Baij, Image: https://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/art-and-culture/five-landmark-works-by-india-foremost-sculptor-ramkinkar-baij-
6434287/
Ramkinkar Baij and
Representation of People
Ramkinkar Baij, Santhal Family, 1938, Image:

https://www.frieze.com/article/santhal-family
Left: Ramkinkar Baij, study, Image: https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1626770
Right: Ramkinkar Baij, model study, drawing, Image: https://jnaf.org/artist/ramkinkar-baij/
Ramkinkar Baij, “Mill Call,” Santiniketan, Photograph: RS
Left: Yaksha, Mathura, 100 BC, Image: https://twitter.com/dalrymplewill/status/1416002845669797892 Right: Ramkinkar Baij, Yaksha-Yakshi, Sandstone carving, RBI, New Delhi, 1964,
Image: https://www.telegraphindia.com/business/rbi-help-sought-to-bail-out-nbfcs/cid/1722774
Ramkinkar Baij, Yaksha-Yakshi, RBI, New
Delhi, Image:
https://www.atreyeegupta.com/public-art-
street-art
D. P. Roy Chowdhury and Anti
Colonial Movement
‘Gyarah Murti’ in Delhi by DP Roy Chowdhury, 1962, Image: https://www.theheritagelab.in/sculptures-deviprasad-roy-chowdhury-indian-history/

D. P. Roy Choudhury, Triumph of Labour, 1959, Marina Beach Chennai (Left) and NGMA, New Delhi (Right), Images: https://openthemagazine.com/art-culture/sculpture-the-primeval-
and-the-modern/ and https://www.theheritagelab.in/sculptures-deviprasad-roy-chowdhury-indian-history/
Left: Ramkinkar Baij, Tagore, 1940, Image: https://thewire.in/the-arts/remembering-indias-first-modern-sculptor-ramkinkar-baij Right: D. P. Roy Chowdhury, Victims of hunger, Bronze,
1952, Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/wilsonraj/15035763209
Modern Art meets Folk forms
Dhanraj Bhagat, Cosmic Dace/Durga (?), preparatory drawings and the metal sculpture, Images:
https://prinseps.com/research/mis-reading-dhanraj-bhagat-and-his-durga/ and Sunderason, “Structures in Place”
Left: Dhanraj Bhagat, Utitled, terracotta on wooden pedestal, Image: https://dagworld.com/artwork/bhagatd07/ Right: Dhanraj Bhagat, Untitled, wood and metal, Image:
https://www.artsy.net/artwork/dhanraj-bhagat-untitled-1
Meera Mukherjee, Ashoka at Kalinga, bronze, 1972, installed at ITC Maurya Sheraton, Image:
https://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/digital/collection/Civilization/id/762/
Left: Meera Mukherjee, Horses, drawing, 1996; Right: Meera Mukherjee, Forest scene, bronze, Image: https://jnaf.org/artist/meera-mukherjee/
Problems in Craft+Art collaborations?
Left: Meera Mukherjee, “Ashoka in Kalinga,” New Delhi, Image

source:https://thewire.in/books/the-king-and-kalinga-an-excerpt-from-ashoka-in-
ancient-india Right: Jaidev Baghel, “Athlete,” Image source: Sahapedia
Fibreglass and its impact on Sculptures
Left: Representation of fibreglass, Image: https://www.amazon.in/Fiberglass-Biaxial-Molding-Roofing-Compatible/dp/B07RLRB7GW Right: N. N. Rimzon, Inner

Voice, Fibreglass and metal, 1992, Image: https://www.forbesindia.com/article/live/installations-the-tools-of-artistic-activism/40409/1
Left: N. N. Rrimzon, Blood Rain, Image: https://www.indulgexpress.com/culture/art/2022/feb/04/acclaimed-painter-sculptor-nn-rimzon-talks-about-art-and-what-inspires-his-life-size-sculptures-
38806.html Right: N. N. Rimzon, untitled drawing, Image: https://alchetron.com/N-N-Rimzon
Historicity of materials and sculpture making
Left: L. N. Tallur, Image source: https://indiaartfair.in/programme/interference-fringe-tallur-l-n; Right: L. N. Tallur, “Veni, vidi, vici I came, I saw, I conquered,”
Mangalore terracotta tiles, iron, 2012, Site specific : Aspinwall house - Kochi Muziris biennale, Image source: http://tallur.com/
Left: Elephant from Elephanta, presently at the BDL Museum, Mumbai, Image source: Twitter; Right: L. N. Tallur, “Quintessential,”
https://www.chemouldprescottroad.com/artists-works/tallur-homepage/tallur-l.n-aw2522.html
L. N. Tallur, “Quintessential,” 2012, Image source: http://tallur.com/
L. N. Tallur, Unicode, metal casting, concrete, currency, 2011, Image: https://www.gallerychemould.com/artists/48-tallur-ln/works/3021-tallur-ln-unicode-2011/
Architecture: The construction of a
New Nation
Capital Complex, New Delhi, Image courtesy:

Robert Grant Irving
Architecture before 1947
Left: Viceroy’s House or Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi; Centre: Secretariat, New Delhi, Image courtesy: Robert Grant Irving; Right: Coronataion ceremony, Delhi,
1911
Left: Central dome of the University College of Arts and Social Sciences, Osmania University, Image source: https://telanganatoday.com/now-osmania-
university-profs-to-submit-academic-plan; Right: Arts College, Osmania University, Image source: https://siaphotography.in/blog/arts-college-osmania-
university/
Left: Shyamoli, Santiniketan, 1935, Image source: https://www.santiniketan.in/visva-bharati-university-rabindranath-tagore/visva-bharati-shyamali/; Centre: Right: Design
Dept., Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan, Image source: https://thewire.in/the-arts/kg-subramanyan-shantiniketan; K. G. Subramanyan during the making of the murals,
Image source: http://blog.rarh.in/2011/03/whose-walls-are-these/
Constructing a New Capital city:
Chandigarh
Left: Le Corbusier, Capitol Complex, Chandigarh, Image source:

https://www.archdaily.com/806115/ad-classics-master-plan-for-
chandigarh-le-Corbusier; Right: Map of Chandigarh, Image courtesy:
Peter Serenyi
Left: Le Corbusier, “Notre dame du Ronchamp,” 1954, France, Image source: https://www.archdaily.com/84988/ad-classics-ronchamp-le-Corbusier; Right: Le
Corbusier, Assembly, Capitol Complex, Chandigarh, Image source: https://www.dezeen.com/2016/08/07/le-corbusier-capitol-complex-unesco-world-heritage-listing-
chandigarh-india-benjamin-hosking/
Up: Palace of Assembly, Capitol Complex, Chandigarh, 1963, Image: https://www.archdaily.com/155922/ad-classics-ad-classics-
palace-of-the-assembly-le-corbusier Lower right: Diwan-e-Am complex, Red Fort, Delhi, Image:
https://thecreativityengine.wordpress.com/2013/12/13/the-red-fort-ix-architecture-diwan-i-aam/
Post Independence Brick + Concrete Structures
Louis Kahn, IIM Ahmedabad, 1962-74, Image: https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/case-studies/a4963-iim-ahmedabad-by-louis-kahn-blending-modern-architecture-and-indian-tradition/

Louis Kahn, Sher-e-Bngla Nagar, Dhaka, Image source (left); https://www.architectural-review.com/buildings/revisit-louis-kahns-sher-e-bangla-nagar-dhaka-
bangladesh/10045420.article; (right): http://www.interiordesign-addict.com/2017/09/interior-design-addict-via-_roomonfire-national-assembly-building-of-bangladesh-
louis-kahn-1982/
Achyut Kanvinde, IIT Kanpur Library anddouble-level walkway, Image:
https://architectuul.com/architecture/indian-institute-of-technology-kanpur
Charles Correa, Contexts and Architecture
Left: Charles Correa, Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur, Image source: https://www.architecturaldigest.in/content/charles-correa-best-loved-courtyard-amongst-
elements-architecture/ ; Right: Charles Correa, Image source: https://news.mit.edu/2015/charles-correa-influential-architect-and-planner-dies-0617
Left: Charles Correa, Kanchanjunga Apartments, Mumbai, Image source:
https://www.archdaily.com/373265/charles-correaindia-s-greatest-architect/5193c35fb3fc4b37410000e1-
charles-correa-india-s-greatest-architect-photo; Right: Charles Correa, Belapur Housing Project, Navi Mumbai,
Image source: https://theculturetrip.com/asia/india/articles/indias-greatest-architect-charles-correa/
Historical concepts of Architecture and Contemporaneity
Charles Correa, Elevation drawing and planning of building and non-building, Bharat
Bhavan, Bhopal, 1970s-1980s, Image: https://www.archdaily.com/791942/ad-classics-
bharat-bhavan-charles-correa
Left: Vishnu temple/ Dasavatara temple, Deogarh, UP; 5-6th century, Gupta period, Image: https://sarmaya.in/spotlight/auspicious-start-how-the-earliest-temples-of-india-came-to-be
Right: Representation of an open courtyard house from Chettinad, Tamil Nadu, Image: https://in.pinterest.com/pin/861454234969566526/
Charles Correa, Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, 1980s, Image:
https://www.archdaily.com/791942/ad-classics-bharat-bhavan-charles-correa
Charles Correa, Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, 1980s, Image:
https://www.archdaily.com/791942/ad-classics-bharat-bhavan-charles-correa
Left: Charles Correa, Plan of “Jawahar Kala Kendra,” Jaipur, 1986-92, Image source: https://theculturetrip.com/asia/india/articles/indias-greatest-architect-charles-correa/; Right: Plan of the city of
Jaipur, Image: https://architexturez.net/file/10-chapter-2-pp-60-jpg
Left and Right: Jawahar Kala Kendra, Image sources: http://inditerrain.indiaartndesign.com/2016/04/jawahar-kala-kendra-soulful.html and https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Jawahar-Kala-
Kendra-Jaipur-1986-by-Charles-Correa-Photo-author_fig3_328407091
Left: Pushkarini, Vijayanagara period, Hampi, Photograph: RS; Right: Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur, 1992, Image source:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Correa
Left: Charles Correa, Ismaili Centre, Toronto, Photograph: RS; Upper right:
Muqarnas, Barid Shahi tombs, Bidar, Photo: RS; Lower right: Interior of the Ismaili
Centre, Toronto, Image source:
https://the.ismaili/ismailicentres/toronto/architecture-toronto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwbgTGhYyWw
B V Doshi, Housing and Nation Building
Left: Initial stage of the Aranya Low-cost Housing Project, Indore, Image: https://www.architectural-review.com/buildings/revisit-aranya-low-cost-housing-indore-balkrishna-doshi Right:
Demonstration houses, Aranya Housing
https://www.akdn.org/architecture/project/aranya-community-housing
The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in
South Asia, 1947–1985, MoMA, New York, 2022, Image:
https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/698
Left: IITK; Right: Installation shot of the exhibition, MoMA

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Introduction

 this book arises from a paradox located at the heart of artistic

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The letter states in a nutshell the idea of Visva-Bharati as Rabindranath con-

R. Siva Kumar (&)

© Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla 2017 95

they are in me, these simple-hearted peasants, with their children–cows–ploughs–

examinations’ (Das Gupta 2009, p. 117). Further, by encouraging the children to

both evenly balanced in relation to one another—both deserve to sit on their

Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, Volume 4, Number 2, 2004,

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

I went on a journey, the ﬁrst piece I saw by Zarina, is a bronze sculpture of a

[Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 2004, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 168–194]

168 ranu samantrai

cosmopolitan cartographies 169

170 ranu samantrai

Zarina: In 1980, in Spaces to Hide.

Samantrai: But the house is gestural, is it not?

Zarina: It is not a house, it is an abstract form. I came to it by accident. I

Samantrai: Why do you prefer the pure form to gestural work?

cosmopolitan cartographies 171

172 ranu samantrai

Samantrai: For symmetry?

Samantrai: Is order necessary to shape, or to comment on a life that has

Zarina: I need to keep a center. I understood that in 1975 when I was on a

Samantrai: Modern European art validated older Indian and Muslim

cosmopolitan cartographies 173

Zarina: I may have known that instinctively when I began to experiment

Samantrai: What about Islamic calligraphy?

Samantrai: Does it share the particular experience of space and openness

Zarina: Yes, that’s exactly right.

Samantrai: Do you consider what you do Islamic art?

Zarina: No, I do not. It is not in the Islamic tradition of calligraphy or

Samantrai: That would be suffocating, to be enclosed in a monolithic

174 ranu samantrai

cosmopolitan cartographies 175

sculpture. The hybridity of Zarina’s chosen medium matches the hybridity

176 ranu samantrai

Samantrai: Why are you fascinated by the house motif ?

Zarina: I came to it when I needed to put my life in order. I suppose it

Zarina: I use it because few people can read it now.

Samantrai: When did you decide to move from English to Urdu?

Zarina: Yes, out of concern for my physical safety.