Modernism in India: Art and its time during Post Second world war, by Samit Das

In a country as com­plex and vast as India, notions of cul­ture and his­tory can be dif­fi­cult to grasp. Few his­tor­ical accounts exist or have been pre­served in regional lan­guages, and a visual journey across the country remains open to inter­pre­ta­tion. India was and, despite the age of glob­al­i­sa­tion, remains a unique trea­sure trove of cre­ativity, expressed in its many and diverse cul­tures, lan­guages and reli­gions. Some see it as a vast living museum where tra­di­tions are pre­served yet evolve, while for others it remains the land of exoti­cism and mys­ti­cism par excel­lence.

In India, cre­ativity finds innu­mer­able forms of expres­sion. The elite may call them “art” but often, for those cre­ating them, they are an expres­sion of their lives. Whether we agree or dis­agree with reli­gious belief, it involves activ­i­ties that can also be seen as a form of art. Given these diverse per­spec­tives, what is Modernism in Indian art? How do we grasp the sub­tleties of the new visual per­spec­tives that Indian artists bring to their age old myths and tra­di­tions, or their manner of embracing new visions and tech­niques, to com­bine them with the influ­ence of their specific Indian cul­ture? This exhi­bi­tion, titled Punashcha Parry (“Res­o­nance of Parry”, pho­netic spelling of “Paris”), is an attempt to explore and revisit the idea of so-called “In­dian Modern art”, and the very idea of Modernism in India. The title is bor­rowed from artist Nirode Mazumdar’s epony­mous book, a memoir from his years in Paris pub­lished in 1983, which became very influ­en­tial in India but was not trans­lated into French or English until now.

What is con­sid­ered modern Indian art has existed in India since the early 20th cen­tury and first appeared in Bengal with painter Abanindranath Tagore, but it has never been clearly elu­ci­dated or under­stood. In a move away from the aca­demic genres pre­vi­ously pro­moted in India, a new style of imagery emerged in what was known as the Bengal school of art. However, because of Abanindranth’s involve­ment in the Swadeshi* move­ment this school was largely misun­der­stood and reduced to its nation­al­istic aspects. In reality, the Bengal school rep­re­sented a refor­ma­tion pro­cess that focused on every aspect of art, visual cul­ture and edu­ca­tion. It was nei­ther a narrow expres­sion of nation­alism, but a mod­ernist approach that pro­moted other genres of new Indian art, com­bining both reli­gious and sec­ular ele­ments.

While in the West Modernism gen­er­ally describes an urban tra­di­tion and a search for a new visual cul­ture, largely influ­enced by the Industrial Revolution and the social changes taking place at the time, Modernism in India cannot be so closely related to the metropolis, cities and urban­i­sa­tion. In the Western world, modern urban­iza­tion occurred very dif­fer­ently from the way it did in India and the Indian con­cept of the urban does not cor­re­spond to the notions it is asso­ci­ated with in the West. The his­tory of urbanism and archi­tec­ture in India, from the Indus valley civ­i­liza­tion (3300–1300 BCE) to the suc­ces­sive king­doms and their royal patronage onward, is deeply inter­con­nected with that of visual arts — a large number of archi­tec­tural ref­er­ences are depicted in art forms over the ages. In the late nine­teenth cen­tury, the Kalighat Pata paint­ings* became a source that recorded clear evi­dence of urban art in India. They were mostly made by Muslim artists, who did not all belong to the higher casts, although they depicted Hindu mytho­log­ical sto­ries as well as social inci­dents.

I believe that a con­sid­er­a­tion of Modernism in India involves thinking in terms of time and periods. This notion is not the same as the deriva­tive term mod­ernism in world art, as it is envis­aged in the West. If we were to try to see it in this light, it would not do jus­tice to art in India. India is a land of many layers of com­mu­ni­ties and States, castes and reli­gious beliefs. Every genre of visual art con­sciously or uncon­sciously includes all these fac­tors and an appre­ci­a­tion of the evo­lu­tion of Indian art needs to take the specific con­text into account while moving away from cat­e­go­riza­tions of art into high and low. Dalit* and lower casts are also impor­tant to include within the idea of Modernism in India. The his­tory and course of Indian art are com­plex sub­jects and art in India should not be approached from a hier­ar­chical per­spec­tive. The devel­op­ment of imagery is inter­twined with oral his­tory, mythology, legends and archae­o­log­ical exca­va­tion including in its most ephemeral forms, and any attempt to under­stand the evo­lu­tion of art in India requires an encom­passing approach to the country’s living tra­di­tions.

We must also, of course men­tion the great con­tri­bu­tion made by the Indian Theosophists to the idea of Modernism in India after the Second World War. Personalities like Aurobindo, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Ramana Maharshi and Annie Besant had a huge influ­ence on the artists of their time. Printmaker and sculptor Krishna Reddy was deeply marked by Krishnamurti’s phi­los­ophy and his art would be incom­plete if we were not to quote this thinker. Krishnamurti said that “in noth­ing­ness, there is every­thing, energy. The ending is a begin­ning”, and all Reddy’s prints involving vis­cosity are clear reminders of these words.

After inde­pen­dence, Indian artists started looking towards the West, and Paris of the 1950’s was nat­u­rally con­sid­ered one of the most attrac­tive cul­tural cap­i­tals of the time. Punashcha Parry looks at a few of the little known Indian artists who studied and worked in Paris during the 1950s and until the 1970’s. They came to Paris for a variety of rea­sons, some to explore their own forms of expres­sion through the vibrant art world of the West, others ben­e­fit­ting from French gov­ern­ment schol­ar­ships, but all of them remained deeply rooted in their own cul­ture. They were not seeking to make a mark as Indian artists cre­ating Indian art, but wanted to take India to the wider world. For the most part, they do not seem to have man­aged to gain access to major exhi­bi­tions in the right con­texts, or to have been rec­og­nized while they were there. Their artistic jour­neys were not simple, and demanded a great deal of inner strength to live and create in a world so dif­ferent from their own. Their journey was one of tran­scending bor­ders and recre­ating links with the essence of human cul­ture that Rabindranath Tagore expressed so aptly in the fol­lowing words:
“When we talk of such a fact as Indian Art, it indi­cates some truth based upon the Indian tra­di­tion and tem­per­a­ment. At the same time we must know that there is no such thing as abso­lute caste restric­tion of human cul­tures; they, human cul­tures … ever have the power to com­bine and pro­duce new vari­a­tions, and such com­bi­na­tions have been going on for ages, proving the truth of the deep unity of human psy­chology. It is admitted that in Indian art the Persian ele­ment found no obsta­cles, and there are signs of var­ious other alien influ­ences. China and Japan have no hesi­ta­tion in acknowl­edging their debt to India in their artistic and spir­i­tual growth of life. Fortunately for our civil­i­sa­tions, all such inter­min­gling hap­pened when pro­fes­sional art critics were not ram­pant and artists were not con­stantly nudged by the warning elbow of clas­si­fiers in their choice of inspi­ra­tion. Our artists were never tire­somely reminded of the obvious fact that they were Indian; and in con­se­quence they had the freedom to be nat­u­rally Indian in spite of all the bor­row­ings that they indulged in.”*

Some of the artists I had the oppor­tu­nity to study as part of my research with the Pernod Ricard Fellowship are fea­tured in this show. They include Krishna Reddy, Nirode Mazumdar, Akbar Padamsee, MF. Hussain, Zarina Hashmi, Leela Lakshmanan, Francis Newton Souza and Jean Bhowanagary. All of them lived and worked for pro­longed periods in Paris at some point in their careers. In addi­tion, none of them want to be por­trayed as Indian artists although they were all influ­enced by var­ious ele­ments of their Indian roots. For Nirode Mazumdar, it was the essence of spir­i­tu­alism; for Krishna Reddy, the theosophists; sec­u­larism in Hussain’s case; or Islamic scripts and the con­cept of home for Zarina Hashmi. Zarina’s child­hood home in Aligarh and the garden her mother had cre­ated there became the starting point of her journey through a series of draw­ings and graphic works.
The artists who appear in this exhi­bi­tion studied a variety of sub­jects and were trained in dif­ferent areas, but there is a point where they all con­verge on the same plat­form.

Padamsee, M.F. Husain and F.N. Souza were looking for inner beauty and strength, not only seeking to create external pat­terns or forms, and one can per­ceive a cer­tain grotesque beauty in their works. Theirs was a pro­cess of building up layers, where art works never remained solely on the sur­face of the canvas but drew the viewer in to explore the depths of life. A con­ver­sa­tion with Leela Lakshmanan, who played an impor­tant role as film editor in Paris, and Jean Bhownagary’s films reveal the idea of India in those days and the impor­tance of looking back and accepting the idea of social respon­si­bility. In Jean Bhowanagary’s work, we find the idea of post-inde­pen­dence Indian cul­ture and ambi­tion, while Akbar Padamsee explores the deep psy­chology of middle class expres­sion. During these early days of inde­pen­dence, they were also involved in a con­tinual search for their own iden­tity amidst the far reaching changes taking place at home. Paris, stim­u­lating and provoca­tive, was the power cap­ital of the art world at that time, but this very inten­sity gave rise to its own chal­lenges in the search for a new imagery to make their own.

Through their works and their expe­ri­ences in Paris, the exhi­bi­tion explores the con­cept of Modernity in Indian art, taking the form of a single long thread, as a journey through archives and visuals. Our reading of these artists will sug­gest a dif­ferent approach to the art that emerged in the trans­for­ma­tional days of nation­alism, India’s inde­pen­dence and the early post-inde­pen­dence period. Conceived as both an artistic and art his­tor­ical pro­ject, Punashcha Parry also includes my own work, which I con­sider an inte­gral part of my pro­cess of research, as it has been inspired by these artists’ jour­neys, allowing me to extend fur­ther thought through my own visual vocab­u­lary. The exhi­bi­tion thus embraces a sub­jec­tive per­spec­tive, with the desire to share a wider view of a journey that unfolds through my work and that of the artists pre­sented in the show.

This journey of Modernism in Indian art, and par­tic­u­larly in this group of artists may best be expressed by Annie Besant, in this quote where she speaks “not as an Artist but as a stu­dent of what may be called the Philosophy of Beauty, its nature, its deriva­tion from the Supreme Self, its expres­sion in beau­tiful things, its rela­tion to Humanity in its evo­lu­tion, its influ­ence on National and Individual evo­lu­tion, the Ideal of all Art, not only of its par­tial real­i­sa­tion in the Fine Arts. The Shilpa (Art…) also paid atten­tion to (the arts) which con­cerned the crafts of the working craftsman, as well as to those which dealt with the major Arts, Music, Architecture, Painting, Sculpture, wherein great achieve­ments meant excep­tional genius in the Artist, the Priest of the Beautiful.”

I believe a con­sid­er­a­tion of Modernism in India should pay par­tic­ular atten­tion to the Ancient approach to beauty, and the con­trast between the Ancient and the Modern, so clearly expressed by Annie Besant* in her text Indian Ideals: “Is Beauty a mere matter of con­ven­tion, whether modern, each embodying the method of the Age to which it belongs: The Ancient way of Knowing, the Knowledge of THAT by whom all things are known, the descending from the Universal to the par­tic­u­lars, from the Idea to the forms; the Modern Way of Knowing, the study of the par­tic­u­lars by the pro­cess of obser­va­tion, clas­si­fi­ca­tion, induc­tion, hypoth­esis, ver­i­fi­ca­tion by exper­i­ment, and finally the asser­tion of a law.”

*The Swadeshi move­ment, part of the Indian inde­pen­dence move­ment and the devel­oping Indian nation­alism, was an eco­nomic strategy aimed at removing the British Empire from power and improving eco­nomic con­di­tions in India by fol­lowing the prin­ci­ples of swadeshi and which had some suc­cess. Strategies of the Swadeshi move­ment involved boy­cotting British prod­ucts and the revival of domestic prod­ucts and pro­duc­tion pro­cesses. Source : Wikipedia (N.E.)

*Kalighat painting or Kalighat Pat orig­i­nated in the 19th cen­tury Bengal, in the vicinity of Kalighat Kali Temple, Kalighat, Kolkata, India, and from being items of sou­venir taken by the vis­i­tors to the Kali temple, the paint­ings over a period of time devel­oped as a dis­tinct school of Indian painting. From the depic­tion of Hindu gods, god, and other mytho­log­ical char­ac­ters, the Kalighat paint­ings devel­oped to reflect a variety of themes. Source: Wikipedia (N.E.)

*Dalit, meaning "oppressed" in Sanskrit and "broken/scat­tered" in Hindi, is a term for the mem­bers of lower indige­nous abo­rig­inal com­mu­ni­ties in India which have been con­verted from a tribe to a caste by Sanskritisation. The term is mostly used for the ones that have been sub­jected to untouch­a­bility. Dalits were excluded from the four-fold varna system of Hinduism and thought of them­selves as forming a fifth varna, describing them­selves as Panchama. Dalits now pro­fess var­ious reli­gious beliefs, including Buddhism, Christianity and Sikhism. Source: Wikipedia (N.E.)

*In “Art and Tradition”, in The Visva-Bharati Quarterly, May-July 1935. A revised form of The Meaning of Art, a lec­ture deliv­ered at Dacca University in 1926.

*Annie Besant, born Wood (1 October 1847 – 20 September 1933) was a British socialist, theosophist, women’s rights activist, writer and orator and sup­porter of Irish and Indian self-rule. Source : Wikipedia