The Triumph of Modernism

India’s artists and the avant-garde 1922–1947

Partha Mitter
the triumph of modernism
The Triumph of Modernism
India’s artists and the avant-garde,
1922–1947

Partha Mitter

REAKTION BOOKS
To my parents, true cosmopolitans

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

33 Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2007

Copyright © Partha Mitter 2007

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publishers.

Published with the assistance of The Getty Foundation

Printed and bound in China

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Mitter, Partha
The triumph of modernism : India's artists and the avante-garde, 1922–1947
1. Art, Indic – 20th century 2. Art, Indic – European influences
3. Modernism (Art) – India 4. Nationalism and art – India – History –
20th century 5. Avant-garde (Aesthetics) – India – History – 20th century
I. Title
709.5'4'0904

isbn–13: 978 1 86189 318 5

isbn–10: 1 86189 318 3
Contents
Prologue 7
one
The Formalist Prelude 15
two
The Indian Discourse of Primitivism 29
i Two Pioneering Women Artists 36
ii Rabindranath Tagore’s Vision of Art and the Community 65
iii Jamini Roy and Art for the Community 100
three
Naturalists in the Age of Modernism 123
i The Regional Expressions of Academic Naturalism 125
ii From Orientalism to a New Naturalism: K. Venkatappa and
Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury 163
four
Contested Nationalism: The New Delhi and India
House Murals 177
Epilogue 226

References 228
Bibliography 256
Acknowledgements 261
Photo Acknowledgements 263
Index 264

Gaganendranath Tagore,
A Cubist Scene, c. 1923,
watercolour on postcard.
Gaganendranath and his
circle often sent postcards
they painted themselves
to students and friends.
Prologue
the picasso manqué syndrome
The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once stated that Surrealism was
stolen from the Europeans by ‘a Black [the poet Aimé Césaire] who used
it brilliantly as a tool of Universal Revolution.’1 Sartre’s admiring and yet
enigmatic comment encapsulates the problematic relationship between
non-Western artists and the international avant-garde, which is enmeshed
in a complex discourse of authority, hierarchy and power. Even cultural
subversion, as suggested above, prompts the common perception of non-
Western modernism as a derivative one, a phenomenon that I would like
to christen the ‘Picasso manqué’ syndrome. Let me elaborate with an
example. The English art historian W. G. Archer wrote an influential
account of Indian modernism. His analysis of the painting of
Gaganendranath Tagore, one of the first Indian modernists, consisted almost
entirely of tracing Picasso’s putative influence on him. Unsurprisingly,
Archer drew the conclusion that Gaganendranath was un cubiste manqué;
in other words, his derivative works, based on a cultural misunderstanding,
were simply bad imitations of Picasso (see p. 18). Behind this seemingly
innocent conclusion rests the whole weight of Western art history. We need
to unpack its ramifications here.2
Stylistic influence, as we are all aware, has been the cornerstone of art
historical discourse since the Renaissance. Nineteenth-century art history,
in the age of Western domination, extended it to world art, ranking it
according to the notion of progress, with Western art at its apex. Influence
acquired an added resonance in colonial art history. For Archer, the use
of the syntax of Cubism, a product of the West, by an Indian artist, imme-
diately locked him into a dependent relationship, the colonized mimick-
ing the superior art of the colonizer. Indeed influence has been the key
epistemic tool in studying the reception of Western art in the non-
Western world: if the product is too close to its original source, it reflects
slavish mentality; if on the other hand, the imitation is imperfect, it rep-
resents a failure. In terms of power relations, borrowing by artists from
the peripheries becomes a badge of inferiority. In contrast, the borrowings
7
of European artists are described approvingly either as ‘affinities’ or
dismissed as inconsequential, as evident in the primitivism exhibition
held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1985. The very sub-
title of the exhibition, ‘affinity of the tribal and the modern’, character-
izes Picasso’s emulation of African sculpture as no more than a mere
formal ‘affinity’ with the primitive.3 In short, Picasso’s integrity was in
no way compromised by the borrowing, in contrast to the colonial artist
Gaganendranath.
Here, in the context of affinity versus emulation, we need to explore
whether influence as an analytical tool has outlived its usefulness. I can do
no better than invoke Michael Baxandall’s magisterial interrogation of
this obsession among art historians, or the ‘anxiety of influence’, to use
Harold Bloom’s celebrated phrase. As Baxandall puts it succinctly, the
artist responds to circumstance, making an intentional selection from a
range of sources.4 This is a purposeful rather than passive activity, which
involves making conscious choices. There have been other art historians
who have proposed a more agonistic relationship between the artists and
their sources than allowed for in more standard art histories. Recently, the
artist as an active conscious agent and the sovereignty of the art object
have been reiterated by Thomas Crow in his penetrating discourse on The
Intelligence of Art.5
One of the problems besetting the discourse of modernism has been
its Vasarian art historical foundations, which pursue a linear trajectory
according to the dictates of a relentless teleology that does not allow for
dissidence, difference and competition. John Clark has called Western
modernism a ‘closed’ system of discourse, which cannot accommodate
new discourses that modernisms outside the West give rise to.6 And yet,
what is most exhilarating about modernisms across the globe is their plur-
ality, heterogeneity and difference, what one may describe as a ‘messy’
quality lacking symmetry which makes them all the more exciting and
rich with possibilities.
No one can deny that the flexible revolutionary syntax of Cubism
became synonymous with the global avant-garde. Nor would one dis-
agree with Adrian Stokes that Cézanne’s Bathers, which inspired Picasso’s
Demoiselles d’Avignon, and turned the European artist’s attention to
African sculpture in repudiation of classical taste, opened up a new space
for cosmopolitanism. Nor can one ignore the achievements of the critics
of modernism from Walter Benjamin and Carl Einstein through Clement
Greenberg to post-war scholars of social history of art, postmodernists
and proponents of visual culture. Here I am simply concerned with the
art historical representations of non-metropolitan forms of modernism.7
Set against the originary discourse of the avant-garde, emanating from
metropolitan centres such as Paris, other modernisms are dismissed as
peripheral to its triumphal progress. Yet, the centre–periphery relation-
ship is not one of geography but of power and authority that affects not
8
only race and gender but also regions. We notice the operation of this para-
digm even in the field of Renaissance art. The Vasarian master narrative
of artistic progress defines cities, such as Florence, Rome and Venice, as
centres of innovation, presenting peripheries as sites of delayed growth
and derivation. This has affected the reputation of an artist such as
Correggio. Hailing from Parma, considered to be peripheral compared
with Rome, Venice and Florence, Correggio’s innovative work has until
now been assessed in the light of Raphael or Michelangelo’s achievement,
rather than as an independent achievement.8
In our post-colonial environment, scholars have proposed ways of
empowering non-Western modernism that seek to restore the artists’
choice and to view them as active rather than passive agents of transmis-
sion.9 Let me offer a flavour of their arguments: Keith Moxey suggests the
flexible and inclusive concept of ‘visual culture’ that goes beyond the
Renaissance hierarchy of art, which has been responsible for reinforcing
global inequality in power relations. Néstor García Canclini’s ‘multi-
temporal heterogeneities’, Geeta Kapur’s ‘restructuring’ the international
avant-garde and Bourdieu’s reminder that modes of representations are
expressions of political conflicts, are some of the emerging possibilities.
Gerardo Mosquera argues that the periphery is ceasing to be a reservoir of
traditions, creating at once multiple sites of international culture as well
as strengthening local developments in constant hybridization of cultures.10
Hybridity, originally a concept in biology, has been vigorously theorized
with a view to empowering the colonized which has given rise to intense
debates.11
Such a plethora of persuasive arguments indicates the positive direction
art history is taking in the twenty-first century, leading to some ‘loosen-
ing’ of the canon.12 It is however possible to examine these issues from a
different perspective in order to formulate concepts that will address
complex interactions between global modernity and regional art produc-
tions and practices. This book engages precisely this issue of artistic pro-
duction and the construction of national identity in late colonial India.
First of all, instead of using ‘influence’ as a convenient tool to describe
the introduction of modernism in the non-Western societies, we may turn
to the concept of ‘paradigm change’ postulated by Thomas Kuhn in the
history of science. The adoption of the new language of modernism by
Indian artists was necessitated by the changes in artistic imperatives in a
rapidly globalizing world, which prompted them to discard the previous
artistic paradigm centring on representational art.13 Second, influence as
an art historical category misses out more significant aspects of cultural
encounters, as for instance, the enriching value of cultural mixtures that
have nourished societies since time immemorial. The claimed purity of
cultures is simply a nationalist myth fabricated in the nineteenth century.
Arguably, the strongest cultures have often developed through constant
cross-fertilizations and crossing of cultural frontiers, though the original
9
forms and ideas necessarily acquire a new meaning in the new environ-
ment. But what one must remember is that these exchanges of ideas and
forms need not necessarily be a question of domination and dependence
nor do they represent a loss of self.14
Colonial mentality asserts cultural transmissions to be a one-way
process flowing from the Occident. Yet one could offer one documented
instance of cross-fertilization in which the West has been an enthusiastic
recipient. This is the persistent fascination with Eastern thought that has
periodically surfaced in the West in different guises. Raymond Schwab,
who named the impact of Indian thought on nineteenth-century
Romanticism the Oriental Renaissance, considered this challenge to the
West to be as radical as the ‘first’ Renaissance.15 This critical tradition
continued in the Transcendental Idealism of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
down to Heidegger and the twentieth-century Existentialists.16 In the
field of modernist art we find three influential figures, the philosopher
Henri Bergson, the art historian Wilhelm Worringer and the novelist Leo
Tolstoy, all of them intellectually engaging with the alternative tradition
represented by Indian philosophy.17

narratives of the local and the global

This preamble leads us to the topic of the book: the rise of modernist art
in India. An ambitious exhibition of the works of Paul Klee, Wassily
Kandinsky and other Bauhaus artists held in Calcutta in 1922 marks the
beginning of the avant-garde in India.18 This first phase of modernism,
which was an artistic expression of resistance to colonial rule, came to an
end around 1947, the year of Indian independence. Before we proceed, let
us remind ourselves of the useful distinction between modernity as a glob-
al phenomenon with wide political, economic and social implications, and
the more specific aesthetic movement known as modernism, which has
engaged fruitfully and critically with the predicament of modernity.
Global modernity as such arrived in India with the consolidation of the
British Empire in the nineteenth century. Introduction of art schools, art
exhibitions, the processes of mechanical reproduction and other modern
institutions in India was part of Westernization, which transformed
artists’ status and outlook as well as art patronage.19 In the 1920s, during
a further paradigm shift, the radical formalist language of modernism
offered Indian artists such as Rabindranath Tagore and Jamini Roy a new
weapon of anti-colonial resistance. In their intellectual battle with colo-
nialism, they readily found allies among the Western avant-garde critics
of urban industrial capitalism, leading them to engage for the first time
with global aesthetic issues.20
The modernists idolized rural India as the true site of the nation,
evolving artistic primitivism as an antithesis to colonial urban values. For
the artists Sunayani Devi and Amrita Sher-Gil, village India became a
10
surrogate for their own predicament as women within the wider nation-
alist struggle. In parallel with the primitivists, artists belonging to a
‘naturalist’ counter-stream, engaged with quotidian life, some of them
expressing deep sympathies for the underclass. Where both these streams
that emerged in the 1920s and ’30s were in tacit agreement was in their
common distaste for history painting and the master narrative of nation-
alism that had obsessed the previous generation.21 Yet strange to say, his-
toricism continued to flourish, partly because of Raj espousal of Indian
cultural nationalism as a safe alternative to active and violent resistance.
Its final flowering took place in the decoration of the new imperial capi-
tal in Delhi and the India House in London. Finally, as a coda, I touch
upon the changing nature of modernism in the closing decade of the
empire which anticipated developments in post-colonial India. War, famine,
peasant rebellions and widespread political unrest radicalized artists
who looked beyond personal validation towards active participation in
communist and other popular movements as they swore allegiance to the
formalist vanguard of Paris.
In this pioneering phase of Indian modernism, the interactions
between the global and the local were played out in the urban space of
colonial culture, hosted by the intelligentsia who acted as a surrogate for
the nation. Western expansion gave rise to a series of ‘hybrid’ cosmopolises
around the globe: Calcutta, Bombay, Shanghai, Singapore, São Paulo,
Mexico City, Hanoi, Cairo and Beirut, to name the best known.22 The
two cosmopolitan cities in India, Bombay and Calcutta, which acted as the
locus of colonial encounters, were beneficiaries as well as interlocutors of
colonial culture. I have chosen to explore Calcutta as a hybrid cosmopolis
here because of its pioneering role in Indian modernism. In the city, the
nineteenth-century intellectual movement known as the Bengal Renaissance
represented a hybrid intellectual enterprise underpinned by a dialogic
relationship between the colonial language, English, and the modernized
vernacular, Bengali.23 The Bengali elite, the Bhadralok, who took to the
new colonial learning with alacrity, had less commitment to traditional
Hindu culture on account of its ambiguous status in the caste hierarchy.
Its role as a marginal group in traditional Hindu society had telling par-
allels with the post-emancipation Jewish intellectuals of Vienna, who
became major players in twentieth-century modernism.24
The Bengali intelligentsia negotiated cosmopolitan modernity largely
through the printed medium, since few of them had any direct physical
contact with Europeans.25 Yet they were deeply imbued with Western
literature and Enlightenment values. Modernity created a globally ‘imag-
ined community’ based upon print culture, whose members may never
have known one another personally, and yet shared a corpus of ideas on
modernity.26 To explain this community’s critical engagement with
modern ideas, I propose here the concept of the ‘virtual cosmopolis’. The
hybrid city of the imagination engendered elective affinities between the
11
elites of the centre and the periphery on the level of intellect and creativ-
ity.27 Their shared outlook was possible not only through the printed
media but also through hegemonic languages such as English and
Spanish spread by colonial rule. In sum, the encounters of the colonial
intelligentsia with modernity were inflected through virtual cosmopoli-
tanism. One of the products of such encounters was global primitivism
and the common front made against urban industrial capitalism and the
ideology of progress. As I argue later, primitivism was not anti-modern;
it was a critical form of modernity that affected the peripheries no less
than the West. Primitivists did not deny the importance of technology in
contemporary life; they simply refused to accept the teleological certainty
of modernity.28
The Western primitivists were chiefly concerned with the predica-
ment of urban existence, whereas Indian artists used primitivism as an
effective weapon against colonial culture.29 The interest of the Cubists in
African art as an aspect of primitivism has been thoroughly explored.
Though radical in its formal innovations, early Cubism was less radical
politically than, let us say, certain expressions of non-objective art. In their
development of flat non-figurative art, Kandinsky and others sought
affinities with the ‘decorative’ art of the ‘primitive’ and non-Western peo-
ples untouched by Renaissance naturalism. However, to my mind even
more important was their radical quest for an alternative to materialism.
That is when they turned to Eastern, particularly Indian Buddhist and
Hindu philosophy, which is described by David Pan as ‘the intellectual
context of the abstract method’.30 Their quest, they felt, was met less by
institutional Christianity than by a form of syncretism that offered fresh
existential and epistemological possibilities. It would of course be an over-
simplification to consider these painters as merely reproducing Eastern
spiritual concepts in their works. They engaged with Eastern philosophy
critically, their interpretations of Eastern thought were in the light of
their own sense of crisis in the West and deeply felt creative needs that
went beyond mere fashion.31 I intend to show how in very many diverse
and interesting ways such ‘primitivism’ had its counterpart in the colonial
world of India where artists saw parallels between their own resistance to
Western rationality and urban modernity, and that of the Western mod-
ernists. Global ‘critical modernity’ has multilateral and multi-axial origins
and reasons; its global impact forces us to revise a simple notion of cultural
influence as a one-way flow of ideas from the West to other cultures.
Finally, a personal note: why did I decide to write this book? One
urgent reason was to understand what modernism has meant in the cul-
ture of my origins. The other reason, as someone who has lived most of
his life in the West, is to make a wider transnational audience aware of
this little-known story of Indian modernism. Contrary to colonial repre-
sentations of the non-West as the recipient in a long one-way ‘civilizing’
process, global modernity has been a two-way dialogic transaction in which
12
the enriching role of the peripheries remains imperfectly understood.
Acknowledgement of the ‘cosmopolitan’ and heterogeneous character of
the avant-garde may help us to break down the West’s ‘parthenogenic’
self-image, enabling it to gain a deeper understanding of its own self in
relation to its ‘significant others’. This may well be a celebration of plural-
ity rather than the reinscription of a monolithic canon.32

13

Gaganendranath Tagore,
Poet on the Island of the Birds,
c. 1925, watercolour on paper.
one
The Formalist Prelude
bauhaus artists in calcutta
To many of us Cubism’s revolutionary mode of representation is synony-
mous with modernism. It was the first Western movement to attract
Indian artists, although it failed to leave any lasting mark until its resur-
gence in the 1940s. We may take December 1922 as a convenient entry
point for modernism in India. An exhibition of works of the Bauhaus
artists in Calcutta in that year symbolized the graduation of Indian taste
from Victorian naturalism to non-representational art. We first hear of
the Western avant-garde in 1914 in the Bengali journal Prabasi, which
described Brancusi’s Mlle Pogany as unacceptably bizarre. Its author
Sukumar Roy, a fervent believer in naturalism, had previously been a crit-
ic of orientalist distortions of reality. (I use orientalism, orientalist artists
and oriental art in lower case to refer to the first nationalist art movement
in India known as the Bengal School and use capitals for European
Orientalists in the Saidian sense.) In his essay, ‘Exaggerations [distortions]
in Art’, Roy acknowledged Cubism’s revolutionary objective of challeng-
ing academic naturalism, but he rejected its extreme distortions of reality,
while he condemned outright Futurist glorifications of war, the machine
age and other odious trappings of progress.1
Others were more welcoming of modernism. In 1917, the widely read
Modern Review carried an anonymous piece on ‘automatic drawing’, which
dealt with Freud’s impact on avant-garde art.2 The poet Rabindranath
Tagore, who had increasing misgivings about the nationalist Bengal
School of art, was intent on broadening the artistic horizon of his univer-
sity at Santiniketan. In 1919, during a visit to Oxford, he hired Stella
Kramrisch (1898–1993) to teach art history at the fledgling art department
(Kala Bhavan). Of Austrian-Jewish descent, Kramrisch had received a
thorough grounding in art history at the University of Vienna, becoming
a renowned authority on Indian art in later life. She became one of the
foremost figures in the dissemination of Indian modernist art. At
Santiniketan her personal knowledge of the avant-garde made it a living
reality for the students.3
15
 In January 1922, the globe-trotting polymath and fervent nationalist
Benoy Sarkar (1887–1949) decided on a ‘much-needed infusion of mod-
ernism’ into the art of Bengal. His controversial article ‘Aesthetics of
Young India’, sent from Paris to the orientalist journal Rupam in 1922,
prompted a heated debate.4 Dismissing the Bengal School’s much vaunt-
ed ‘spirituality’ of Indian art as a species of myth making, Sarkar made a
passionate plea on behalf of the avant-garde ‘aesthetics of autonomy’,
comparing it with the nationalist demand for self rule or autonomy from
the Raj. Finally, he demanded the emancipation of Indian art from the
tyranny of literary critics, historical analysts, nationalists and Bolsheviks.
A ‘dyed-in-the-wool’ formalist, who extolled the objectivity of the ‘artis-
tic eye’, Sarkar considered modernism to be a truly international style that
overcame all cultural barriers.5 Sarkar was in Berlin in the 1920s, where
he came under the spell of modernism. His rousing manifesto welcoming
formalism and the immediacy of art appreciation however recalls Clive
Bell’s notion of ‘significant form’ that distinguished art from ‘descriptive
painting’. In 1914, Bell asserted that in order to appreciate a work of art
we need bring with us nothing ‘but a sense of form and colour . . .
Significant form stands charged with the power to provoke aesthetic emo-
tion in anyone capable of feeling it.’6

The nationalists felt impelled to respond to Sarkar. Barindranath Ghosh,

an intellectual and a former political prisoner, rejected Sarkar’s ideas as
inimical to Indian culture. Ordhendra Gangoly, editor of Rupam and the
leading ideologue of the Bengal school, mocked Sarkar’s presumption that
Indians were unaware of recent developments in Western art: ‘I have a
secret sympathy for the latest Parisian craze over Negro sculpture. I can
recall my own feeling of ecstasy at seeing Polynesian images when I first
set foot in Java . . . I can therefore understand Picasso, Matisse and Derain’s
first thrills on viewing the Tami masks from New Guinea.’7 Kramrisch
exposed the flaws in Sarkar’s formalist canon. A relativist, she rejected the
primacy of Western art, arguing that ‘significant form’ in each individual
artistic tradition was a product of a complex interaction of form, content
and wider cultural values which suggests her familiarity with Alois Riegl.8
Referring to the Bengali painter Gaganendranath Tagore’s recent
experiments in Cubism, she contended that even if an Indian artist used a
‘foreign’ form such as Cubism, he would still remain Indian since he had
internalized the peculiar cultural experience of India.9
This engaging dialogue in Rupam set the scene for the key date of
December 1922, the year that introduced the works of Paul Klee, Wassily
Kandinsky and other Bauhaus artists to Calcutta, an Asian city far removed
from the metropolitan West. The German school of design (later architec-
ture) in Weimar, the Bauhaus, had attracted radical artists, theoreticians
and pedagogues to the institution. In 1921, the Indian Nobel Laureate,
Rabindranath Tagore (best known in the West as Tagore), undertook one
16
of his periodic trips to Europe. On 7 May he celebrated his sixtieth birthday
in Weimar with readings from his poetry and a recital of his songs at
the German National Theatre. Visiting the Bauhaus in Weimar, Tagore
quickly sensed the affinities between its teaching methods, imparted by
Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten and Georg Muche, and his own holistic
experiments at Santiniketan (q.v.). As Oskar Schlemmer, also then at the
Bauhaus, noted, there were two elements at the school, a penchant for mys-
ticism and a commitment to the machine, the latter ultimately taking over.
Muche and the mystically oriented Itten were deeply involved with Eastern
philosophy. At Tagore’s suggestion, Muche arranged for a selection of
Bauhaus works to be shipped to Calcutta for an exhibition there.10
The 14th annual exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art,
which opened in Calcutta on 23 December, showcased the Bauhaus
works. Among the 250 items shown at the exhibition, the most important
were Kandinsky’s two watercolours dated 1915 and 1921, and Paul Klee’s
nine watercolours.11 There were also works by Lyonel Feininger,
Johannes Itten, George Muche, Gerhardt Marcks, Lothar Schreyer,
Margit Tery-Adler, Sophie Körner and 49 ‘practice work[s] in the course
of instruction’. The show also included an original work by the English
Vorticist Wyndham Lewis and reproductions of other European modern
artists. The Bauhaus artists were interested in selling their works and
priced them modestly but, with the exception of one of Sophie Körner’s
works, they remained unsold.12
The reverential press previews reaffirmed Kandinsky’s international
reputation, The Statesman of 15 December making it clear that he was the
most important figure in the show. The Englishman congratulated the
society for showing original works by the European avant-garde never
before seen in India, paying homage to ‘the great Russian’, whose Art of
the Spiritual had discovered ‘emancipation in new forms of art un-
dreamed of in its previous history’.13 Kramrisch, who wrote the intro-
duction to the catalogue, praised Kandinsky as the first artist to paint
pictures without any subject matter and infusing his works with his inner
experience. She exhorted the Indian public to study this exhibition, ‘for
then they may learn that European art does not mean naturalism and that
the transformation of the forms of nature in the work of an artist is
common to ancient and modern India’.14 This was to remind not only the
public but also critics such as Sukumar Roy that the Bengal School’s anti-
naturalist credo was akin to Kandinsky’s rejection of a materialist concep-
tion of art. Her comment highlights the fact that while the artistic
objectives of the Western abstract artists and the orientalists were differ-
ent, they were making a common front against academic art.15
The exhibition offered a tantalizing glimpse of an art hitherto known
mainly through publications to a milieu that had until now feasted on Alma-
Tademas and Lord Leightons. The immediate impact of this show was
not obvious but it sounded the death knell not only for academic art in
17
India but also for orientalism, and its engagement with the past. Even
Abanindranath, the archpriest of orientalism, quoted Kandinsky a few
years later to repudiate his own historicism as an anachronism because,
he confessed, it was impossible to live and feel like the ancients.16 This was
in the 1920s when the ‘here and now’ would seriously challenge histori-
cism, which was administered the final coup de grâce by Abanindranath’s
own brother Gaganendranath. Once sympathetic to oriental art, Gaganen-
dranath had gone down the path of modernism even before the Bauhaus
show, and indeed made his ‘Cubist’ début at the very same show.17

gaganendranath tagore, a poetic cubist

Gaganendranath Tagore (1867–1938) was the only Indian painter before
the 1940s who made use of the language and syntax of Cubism in his paint-
ing. Older than Abanindranath by a few years, Gaganendranath was an
individualist, who impressed people with his intellect and personal charm.
The English painter William Rothenstein met him in 1910 and was much
taken with the breadth of his culture and reading. The former Governor
of Bengal, the Marquess of Zetland, was a particular admirer of his, com-
menting on his dynamism tempered by an inner serenity and refinement.18
Always keen to experiment, Gaganendranath began in the 1880s with
‘phrenological’ portraits inspired by his uncle’s work, followed by delicate
pen-and-brush paintings, learned from the visiting Japanese Nihon-ga
painter, Taikan.19 These black and white works, notably of rain-soaked

Gaganendranath Tagore, Crow,

c. 1905, watercolour wash on
paper.

18
Gaganendranath Tagore,
The Fake Brahmin Dispensing
Blessing for Lucre, c. 1918,
hand-coloured lithograph.

crows, a familiar sight in Calcutta, prepared him for his later monochrome
Cubist interiors. In 1908 he joined the oriental art movement, acquiring a
major collection of Mughal and Rajput miniatures in the process.
Until the 1920s, Gagenendranath was best known for his brilliantly
savage lithographs caricaturing the social mores of colonial Bengal.20 In
early 1922, he seized the ‘modernist moment’ to realize his artistic vision
through Cubism. Evaluating Gaganendranath’s Cubism in an essay
19
published that year, Kramrisch asserted, somewhat provocatively, that Gaganendranath Tagore,
even though Cubism was a European discovery, its formalist simplicity A Cubist Scene, c. 1922,
watercolour on paper.
was neither unique nor significantly different from the objectives of other
forms of non-illusionist art. The Indian artist’s ‘musical’ paintings, she
argued, avoided the danger of becoming a sterile form of abstraction by
their blend of the allegorical and the formal. His cubes did not build up a
systematic structure, but rather externalized the turbulent forces of inner
experience, transforming the static geometry of Analytical Cubism into
an expressive device. However, she cautioned that Gaganendranath’s
dynamic diagonal compositions tended to set up a contradiction
between the flowing life of Indian art and the geometric rationality of
Cubism.21
Gaganendranath’s Cubist fantasies, including his well-known House of
Mystery, had their first public exposure alongside the Bauhaus artists at the
exhibition of 1922.22 Two years later, he held an ambitious one-man show,
mainly consisting of his Cubist works including Aladdin and His Lamp,
Duryadhana at Maidanab’s Palace, The City of Dwarka, Symphony and other
well-known pieces. Kramrisch once again engaged in establishing his
essential difference with the European Cubists. While not glossing over
his failed experiments, she brought out his strength as a storyteller through
20
Gaganendranath Tagore,
A Cubist City, c. 1922,
watercolour on paper.

his own brand of Cubism, as also his ability to soften Cubism’s formal
geometry with ‘a seductive profile, shadow or outline of human form’.23
The paintings were well received in the daily papers, though the
reviews dwelled more on his poetic qualities than on the new language of
Cubism. The Englishman, which had been following his artistic career
closely, described his Cubism as a new phase of oriental art, compliment-
ing the artist on his beautiful colours.24 While the Statesman admitted the
difficulty of appreciating Cubism’s revolutionary language, it praised the
painting Symphony for successfully blending ‘rigid telling cubist lines with
mysterious lighting effects reminiscent of Rembrandt’.25 Forward found
21
 Gaganendranath Tagore,
Cubist Subject, c. 1922,
watercolour on paper.

him to be one of the finest painters of light, confessing that the appeal of
his works lay in their beautiful colours, not to mention their intelligibility.26
By 1925, the Englishman acknowledged the power of Gaganendranath’s
personal treatment of Cubism though it was less certain about Cubism as
such.27 Benoy Sarkar, the avowed modernist, gave Gaganendranath’s
exhibition at the Indian Society of Oriental Art his unqualified endorse-
ment as ‘object lessons in pure art’. ‘In such compositions’, he wrote, ‘we
begin to appreciate without the scaffolding of legends, stories, messages
and moralizings, the foundations of a genuine artistic sense’.28
In 1928 Gaganendranath held his last major retrospective at the
Indian Society of Oriental Art. The Englishman, once again reviewing the
show, crowned him the ‘master of modern art in Bengal’.29 The Welfare
gave an indication of its awareness of Roger Fry in describing the artist’s
synthesis of the Bengal School and Cubism as a quest for ‘significant form’.
22

Gaganendranath Tagore,
Interior, c. 1922, watercolour
on paper.
Interestingly, the reviewer seemed uncer-
tain about the worth of avant-garde for-
malism, suggesting that despite his eclectic
sources, the Bengali artist had ‘shown
himself a great painter in the originality
and the intenseness of his vision’.30 In 1930,
at 63, a cerebral stroke left the painter
paralysed and speechless. He died eight
years later.31
Around 1915, as Gaganendranath
began quietly to withdraw from his broth-
er’s nationalist preoccupations, he moved
into a poetic fairytale world drawing upon
the Bengali stage and literature. While lit-
erature nourished his imagination, unlike
the orientalists, he was not interested in
painterly historicism. It was at this junc-
ture that he discovered Cubism’s possibili-
ties. As he later confessed to the journalist
Kanhaiyalal Vakil, ‘the new technique is
really wonderful as a stimulant’.32 The
multiple viewpoints and jagged edges of
Cubism offered him the means to create
compositions with many-faceted shapes
evoking a remote mysterious world, for
instance in his imaginary cities, such as
the mythical Dwarka, the god Krishna’s legendary abode, or Swarnapuri
(The Golden City). Mountain ranges also gave him scope for the interplay
of diamond-shaped planes and prismatic colours, resulting in fragmented
luminosity. What held these zigzagging planes together was a tight for-
mal structure. His other preoccupation was what he called the House of
Mystery, inspired by his involvement with his uncle Tagore’s plays staged
in their home, for which he designed the sets. His growing preoccupation
with imaginary interiors mysteriously illuminated by artificial lights hidden
from view shows this involvement with the theatre. The painter conjures
up a magic world of dazzling patterns, crisscrossing lights and shadows
and light-refracting many-faceted forms. His paintings from the 1920s
make constant references to stage props, partition screens, overlapping
planes and artificial stage lighting. Their endless corridors, pillars,
halls, half-open doors, screens, illuminated windows, staircases and vaults
remind us a little of Piranesi’s Carceri prints or Alain Resnais’ film L’année
dernier à Marienbad.
The obsession with ‘prismatic luminosity’ led Gaganendranath to look
for mechanical devices for intensifying colour patterns. He is known to
have often held up a crystal against the light to capture the rainbow colours
23
 Gaganendranath Tagore,
Sat Bhai Champa, 1920s,
watercolour on paper, inspired
by a popular Bengali tale for
children.

on the paper placed below. He eventually possessed a kaleidoscope, a device

that broke up objects into a fascinating variety of bright hues and geomet-
ric shapes. E. H. Gombrich suggests that the inventor of the kaleidoscope
had vainly expected it to create ‘a new art of colour music’. However, it is
precisely this quality that enabled Gaganendranath to compose paintings
described by critics as ‘less pictures indeed, than visible music and pulsat-
ing light’.33 As his pictorial language evolved, the Indian artist found the
dynamic forms of the Futurists more suitable than the more static Analyt-
ical Cubism. Yet Gaganendranath’s visual conventions remained within
the bounds of oriental art. Despite the criticism of the nationalists, the
artist insisted that Cubism had simply ‘enabled me to [express] better with
my new technique…than I used to do with my old methods’.34 William
Rothenstein was convinced that he remained an ‘oriental miniaturist with
his eye for exquisite lapidary details’.35
In the brief seven years (1922 to 1929) that Gaganendranath was
engaged in his modernist excursions, he created a fairytale world with
the ‘language’ of Cubism, but without ever spelling out the actual tales
24
themselves. On the surface, his watercolours purported to tell stories, but
the stories themselves were hidden behind a mysterious twilight world of
artificial lights and deep shadows that could not be easily deciphered. The
very ambiguities of his poetic imagery prevented the paintings from becom-
ing illustrative, the whole effect heightened by his use of evocative titles, such
as The Poet on the Island of the Birds, The Seven Brothers Champa or the House
of Mystery. The Englishman aptly called these a ‘new phase of oriental art’
with their exquisite colours and miniature format. Gaganendranath’s
Cubism raises questions about the reception of modernism in India in the
1920s. Revelations of the Bauhaus show notwithstanding, his Cubist excur-
sions threw into sharp relief the problem of reading the avant-garde visual
language in a culture that had not yet fully confronted modernism. Today
we perhaps take for granted modernism as the natural style of the twentieth
century. However, in the 1920s, even in Britain modernism was still a minor-
ity affair, let alone in colonial India. At the same time, the initial unease
about the new syntax began to give way to its gradual acceptance.36

modernism and colonial art history

How are we to read these works – are they Cubist or are they oriental? It
was this no-man’s-land between Cubist formalism and a poetic narrative
that infuriated the colonial art historian W. G. Archer, reared on Clive
Bell and Roger Fry’s separation of formalist purity from the ‘sentimental
clutter’ and literary associations of narrative art. Fry’s aesthetic polarity
simply does not make allowances for works that do not fall into either of
these categories.37 Let me take a striking passage in Archer: ‘apart from
their very evident lack of power – a power which in some mysterious way
was present in the work of Braque and Picasso – Gogonendranath’s [sic]
pictures were actually no more than stylized illustrations . . . weak as
art, but what was more important, they were un-Indian. Not only had
Gogonendranath’s style no vital affinities with other forms of Indian
expression but its prevailing tone seemed frigidly indifferent to Indian
feelings, interests or sensibility. As a result, his pictures, despite their
modernistic manner, had an air of trivial irrelevance.’38
Archer’s assessment of Gaganendranath’s painting – illustrative qual-
ity, lack of power, un-Indian, modernistic ‘manner’ rather than substance
– tells us a great deal about his art historical discourse. He accepted the
Western modernist canon, as did his contemporaries, including Indians,
as the standard against which all modernist art must be judged. The ide-
ology of ‘purity’, with its moral connotation, was integral to modernism.
Its critique of representational art was inspired by the Platonic distinction
between truth and appearance. Its extreme form was the notion of the
absolute values of abstract art.39 His linked expressions, ‘stylized illustra-
tion’ and ‘lack of power’ were an essential foil to the ‘pure’ and robust
formalism, the very antithesis of meretricious and fussy narrative art. The
25
word ‘power’ also suggests obvious gender connotations. Archer’s primi-
tivist longing found the ‘power’, absent in Gaganendranath’s painting, in
abundance in India’s tribal sculptures. In The Vertical Man, he expressed
admiration for the ‘masculine’ vigour and abstract geometry of Indian
tribal art, as he did for the ‘peasant art’ of medieval Britain. Primitivism
had bestowed on modernist art criticism the notion of virility as standing
for bold simplicity, as opposed to the weakness of complicated ‘feminine’
anecdotal painting.40
Archer’s modernism found both the high sculptures of English cathe-
drals and Indian temples to be less ‘authentic’ than their respective exam-
ples of primitive art. Yet the English art historian’s preference for Indian
tribal art in comparison with Indian modernist art did not rest solely on his
allegiance to the avant-garde. Notions of virility have been a compelling
metaphor of power relations in colonial history, a metaphor derived from
anthropology and its myth of the timeless ‘primitive’ tribes nestling in
British protection.41 Archer’s idealization of tribal sculptures as the authen-
tic art of India highlights his ambivalence about Indian nationalism, which
he had to confront as a colonial civil servant. One of the persistent asser-
tions of the Raj was that the nationalist movement was unrepresentative.
Hostile to the Bengal School, Archer dismissed Gaganendranath’s paint-
ings as déraciné efforts that lacked the national mandate.42 There are of
course parallels between the new nationalist discourse of primitivism
and Archer’s idealization of tribal India. However, in contrast to the anti-
colonial primitivism of Mahatma Gandhi, for instance, Archer’s primi-
tivism was grist to his colonialist mill. Archer’s final objection to
Gaganendranath’s work was its failed modernism. Let us read on: ‘His
picture, Light and Shadow . . . is made up of blacks, whites and greys and
is a simple illustration of geometric architecture. . . There is no attempt to
break the shapes into their fundamental structure or to link them into a
single cohering rhythm…The artist merely selected a scene that looked
Cubistic and set it down with academic care.’43 I have already discussed
Archer’s conclusion that Gaganendranath’s works were simply bad imita-
tions of Picasso, and need not repeat the arguments here.
By what criteria can we judge Gaganendranath today? The artist
named his paintings ‘Cubist’, even though he was perfectly aware that he
was not seeking to reproduce Picasso. His Cubism makes sense in a global
context and against the reception of Cubism in countries other than
France. Analytical Cubism or the Braque/Picasso revolution of 1909–10,
the great achievement of modernism, finally laid to rest the 500-year-old
history of illusionism. Painters since Giotto had related different objects
within a picture by means of consistent, directional lighting. Cubists set
out to destroy illusionism by arranging objects within a picture formally,
and by creating conflicting relationships of light and shadow. Thereby
they restored the internal cohesion of a picture so that it was no longer a
window to the external world. The implications of its revolutionary form
26
did not affect other artists, Western and non-Western, so much as its flex-
ible non-figurative syntax which could be put to different uses. The driv-
ing force behind the Expressionists, Franz Marc, Lyonel Feininger and
Georg Grosz, behind the visual poetry of Marc Chagall and behind the
orientalist Gaganendranath was the same: objects could be distorted and
fragmented at will to create dazzling patterns. But their specific cultural
contexts were as different as their artistic aims, not to mention their differ-
ent artistic agendas. We now know that Eastern European artists created
their own versions of Cubism that did not reproduce the Braque-Picasso
experiment.44
The flexible language of Cubism, with its broken surfaces, released a
new energy in Gaganendranath, enabling him to conjure up a painterly
fairytale world. The German avant-garde critic Max Osborn, reviewing
the exhibition of modern Indian art in Berlin in 1923, singled out
Gaganendranath’s Poet on the Island of the Birds as having affinities with
Feininger in its indifference to Analytical Cubism’s formal implications.45
The Indian artist represents the decontextualizing tendency of our age –
a tendency shared as much by artists in the centre as in the peripheries, a
tendency we come across again and again: styles past and present can be
taken out of their original contexts for entirely new modernist projects.
In short, Cubism served as a point of departure for Gaganendranath,
the particular Western ‘device’ yielding a rich new crop in the Indian
context. Although its revolutionary language released a new energy in
the Bengali artist, Cubism was merely a passing phase in India. It was
primitivism that would dominate the decades of the 1920s and ’30s, a story
I take up next.

27

Kshitindranath Majumdar,
Jamuna, c. 1915, watercolour
on paper.
two
The Indian Discourse of
Primitivism
inventing the indian peasant
In the late nineteenth century, Lal Behari Dey’s classic treatise on the
condition of rural Bengal had offered its readers an ‘unvarnished tale of
a plain peasant’.1 Two of the greatest Indian novelists, Sarat Chandra
Chattopadhyay (1876–1938) and Prem Chand (1880–1936), made it their
life’s mission to champion the weak, the deprived and the oppressed, ‘who
gave all to the world but received nothing in return’.2 If sympathy for the
poor was nothing new, the elite discovery of the peasant in the 1920s as the
‘authentic’ voice of the nation was altogether novel. Part of the reason for
the rise of a form of political primitivism in India was the transformation
of elite nationalism into a popular movement led by Mahatma Gandhi. It
added a new urgency to the age-old debate: was nationalism to revolve
around the city or the countryside?
As early as 1895, the leading nationalist environmentalist,
Rabindranath Tagore, had rejected the trappings of colonial urban civi-
lization in favour of the ‘primitive’ simplicity of the proverbial hermitage
set at the edge of the forest.3 In 1909 he expanded this idea in his seminal
essay, ‘The Hermitage’, describing a rural site where man and nature
joined in a mystical communion in renunciation of Western materialism.4
By 1915, the locus of the nation was clearly shifting from the historic past
to the countryside as anti-colonial environmentalism joined forces with a
new commitment to ‘the wretched of India’. Under its impact, the
Bengali historian Dinesh Chandra Sen started painstakingly document-
ing the oral literature of rural Bengal. This is also the era when the
nationalists came to admire the hunting and gathering communities of
India for their robust innocence uncorrupted by colonial culture. To the
Bengali elite the ‘sexualized’ image of the Santal women became inextri-
cably linked with the myth of their innocent ‘vitality’, serving as a foil to
the trope that blamed the ‘loss’ of the Bengali vigour on colonial domina-
tion.5 Bengali literature celebrated the natural, healthy Santal way of liv-
ing, the black lissome Santal women providing a counterpoint to the pale
cloistered ladies of urban Calcutta. An erotic undercurrent of romantic
29
Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury,
Lotus Pond (Santal Mother and
Children), c. 1923, watercolour
on paper.

Sunil Janah, Santal Girl, Bihar,

1940s, black and white
photograph.
 primitivism flowed even stronger in paintings, such as Kshitindranath
Majumdar’s allegorical work Jamuna, featuring the dark sister of the pale
river goddess, Ganga (Ganges); Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury’s painting of
a Santal mother and her children, shown at the Empire Exhibition at
Wembley in 1924, and the early works of Jamini Roy. This erotic roman-
ticization culminated in the 1940s in the candid photographs of Sunil
Janah.6 It is worth remembering that the ‘primitivizing’ process had com-
menced with colonial expansion. Colonial anthropology created the myth
of the timeless ‘noble savage’, even as the imperial regime was suppress-
ing the Santals through brutal counter-insurgency measures.7
Nowhere did primitivism have a more powerful impact than in art.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, the revival of ‘lowbrow’ or practical
arts of India had formed the central plank of government policy, a policy
that was later adopted by the nationalists. Kalighat pat or scroll painting,
a popular ‘lowbrow’ art of urban Calcutta, was the first such to receive
prominence, at an exhibition in London in 1871.8 However, the primi-
tivism that identified folk, popular and tribal art – in short, all forms of
‘low’ art – as an ‘authentic’ expression of the Indian soul was something

Kalighat brush drawing,

Jashoda and Krishna, c. 1900,
brush drawing on paper.

31
entirely new. In addition to its nationalist implications, it embodied the Abanindranath Tagore,
modernist aesthetics that preferred bold simplification to Victorian over- ‘Krishna Kills Kamsa’, 1938,
tempera on paper, from the
ornamentation and the simplicity of village life to the ‘decadence’ of Krishnamangal series.
urban existence. Because Kalighat painting emanated from a familiar and
easily accessible Kolkata suburb, the urban primitivists seized upon it as
an ideal ‘folk art’, although strictly speaking the Kalighat artists no longer
had any link with their village background. In 1915, the orientalist
Nandalal Bose recorded for posterity the likeness of the last Kalighat
painter, Nibaran Ghosh; he also had ambitions to produce pats after
Kalighat to beautify poor households.9 Abanindranath, who wrote a book-
let on Bengali women’s ritual art in 1919, sought to capture the rugged
quality of Bengali folk art in his paintings based on the religious texts
Kabikankan Chandi and Krishnamangal.10 When the sculptor Deviprosad
Roy Chowdhury met Abanindranath with a view to train under him, the
master advised the young artist to study Kalighat. Stella Kramrisch drew
the attention of the European avant-garde to the bold simplifications of
Kalighat in 1925.11 The following year, Ajit Ghosh’s influential article
alerted the reading public to the importance of this ‘folk art’, comparing
its formal boldness to that of Cubism.12 It was left to a colonial official,
Gurusaday Dutt, to document the vigorous rhythm and ‘colour music’ of
the ‘unlettered men and women’ of rural Bengal. Imbued with nationalist
32
sentiment, he lamented that the urban elite had lost all the aesthetic sense
that survived only in rural Bengal, though he was slightly encouraged that
the intelligentsia had at last begun to take pride in the humble peasant.13
Dutt too sought affinities between Bengali village painting and Western
modernist art.14

india and global primitivism

The new ‘ruralism’ was the particular Indian expression of a global
response to modernity – the romantic longing of a complex society for the
simplicity of pre-modern existence. The crisis of the industrial age, which
was traced back to Enlightenment rationality, made nineteenth-century
utopians embrace primitivism with fervour. If modernity was the hall-
mark of the colonial-industrial age in the West, primitivism acted as its
conscience and alter ego, tempering the rampant progressivism coursing
through its veins. Yet one cannot ignore the inner tensions and contradic-
tions within the concept of primitivism. Edward Said describes primi-
tivism, ‘the age-old antetype of Europe’, as ‘a fecund night out of which
European rationality developed’.15 Primitivism has come under the
intense scrutiny of the post-colonial microscope, which exposes its hege-
monic representations of the non-West as the West’s primitive Other,
making us conscious of Western consumption of primitive art.16 Yet as
Hal Foster has pointed out, the avant-garde’s identification with the
primitive, ‘however imaged as dark, feminine, and profligate, remained a
disidentification with white, patriarchal, bourgeois society’.17
What cannot be denied is that the word primitivism is replete with
ambiguities and contradictions. It is these ambiguities that are open to a
rich variety of possibilities, offering the colonized certain modes of
empowerment. In effect, what the colonized did was to turn the outward
‘gaze’ of the West towards itself, deploying the very same device of cultur-
al criticism used since Greco-Roman antiquity, to interrogate the ‘urban-
industrial’ values of the colonial empires.18 In this sense, Mahatma Gandhi
was the most profound ‘primitivist’ critic of the West in the twentieth cen-
tury. In 1909, his revolutionary booklet, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule,
set out his anti-colonial resistance based on a critique of Western civiliza-
tion as a slave to the machine.19 He advocated a self-sufficient village India
with a rural industrial base as an alternative to industrial capitalism, sym-
bolized by the humble spinning wheel. In 1918–19, Gandhi brought the
peasants into the orbit of the Indian National Congress, which had hither-
to been confined to the urban Western-educated, giving a voice to the peo-
ple. As he put it, ‘I have believed and repeated times without number that
India is to be found not in its few cities but in its 7,000,000 villages.’20 It is
perhaps no exaggeration to say that Gandhi ‘invented’ the Indian peasant.
Primitivist challenges to Enlightenment rationality lent a certain com-
munity of outlook to Eastern and Western critics of industrial capitalism.
33
In the West, the very flexibility of primitivism offered endless possibili-
ties, ranging from ‘going native’, to a radical questioning of Western posi-
tivism.21 For the avant-garde, the artistic discourse of primitivism opened
up the possibility of aesthetic globalization as part of art historical con-
sciousness.22 For instance, the simplicity of African art was pitted against
academic naturalism by a series of artists. Even though the simplicity of
African art is a myth, since it is governed by strict aesthetic conventions, it
proved to be an effective weapon against the nineteenth-century salon.
The excitement generated by primitive art in Picasso, Matisse, Amedeo
Modigliani, Constantin Brancusi, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Karl
Schmidt-Rotluff and E. L. Kirchner, to name some of the most important,
is common knowledge. But however important, I am not concerned with
the formal or stylistic aspects of primitivism here. It is the vision of primi-
tivism as an alternative to Western ‘rationality’ promised by non-Western
thought that formed the crucial bridge between Western and Indian prim-
itivists. Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich and other abstract painters invest-
ed in the primitive a spiritual dimension of human culture they found
absent in urban modernity. They viewed the distinction between the prim-
itive and the modern as the difference between spiritual and material
dimensions of human existence. The Expressionists, who saw primitivism
as a universal phenomenon, sought to bring out the primitive dimension of
European culture, in their critique of rationality. One finds interesting
parallels here with Rabindranath Tagore’s own quest for spirituality as an
alternative to colonial materialism.23
The issue of the abstract artists’ precise debt to Eastern thought
remains contentious. It has not been helped by the fact that Eastern doc-
trines were often filtered through the often questionable tenets and prac-
tices of Theosophy. Sixten Ringbom and others have systematically docu-
mented Kandinsky and several other abstract painters’ debt to Eastern
thought, foregrounding the importance of Indian Upanishadic philosophy
in abstract art.24 Most recently, the distinguished art historian John
Golding has questioned this view, reiterating what he considers the essen-
tially Western foundations of abstract art.25 Yet there is considerable evi-
dence that Kandinsky’s spiritual progress from the mystical Russian faith
to Eastern philosophy, including yogic meditation, paralleled the dissolu-
tion of corporeal form in his art. Indeed, the evolution of spirituality in his
art as an integral part of his artistic makeup has recently been convincing-
ly demonstrated.26 Fearing positivist ridicule, Kandinsky tended to be ret-
icent about his debt to Eastern thought, unless he was assured of a sympa-
thetic audience. However, Michael Sadler, a champion of modernist art in
Britain, who visited Kandinsky in Germany in 1912 with his son, was ‘so
fascinated by [his] mystical outlook that they missed the last train…’27
Malevich was deeply moved by Swami Vivekananda’s Chicago lectures.
His definition of Suprematism as ‘objectlessness’ rather than abstraction is
strongly reminiscent of Vedantic notions of consciousness and the self.28
34
Mondrian admired the Bhagvad Gita and the Upanishads and treasured
the Indian mystic Krishnamurti’s ‘little book’ until his death.29 Theo van
Doesburg justified his non-representational art by quoting a purported
statement by the Buddha.30 These are only a few examples among many.
What the abstract artists represented here was the anxiety about the crisis
of Western materialism, from which the world, they felt, could be rescued
by the spirituality of non-representational art, a spirituality owed to non-
Christian Eastern thought, mediated partly, though not entirely, through
Theosophy. The abstract painters were not unaware of the dubious aspects
of Theosophy, but for them it served as a useful entry point for Indian
thought. Their response to these non-Western ideas was not a simple one
of influence but rather a complex dialectical process that reconfigured
these new ideas in the light of their creative needs and cultural experience.
It was precisely the questioning of the teleological certainty of moder-
nity articulated by primitivism that gave Indian artists the leverage to fash-
ion their own identity. This was less easy with academic naturalism, the art
most unequivocally identified with the triumphalist Western empires.31
Because of the radical alternative to Western materialist rationalism pro-
posed by Western artists such as Kandinsky, colonial artists felt an instinc-
tive kinship with them. This questioning of ‘Western’ rationality across
the world for diverse reasons prompts us to probe more deeply the global
issues of cultural crossovers in our time. The particular formal aspects of
the art of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Doesburg or Malevich had little impact
on the Indian primitivists. Their artistic priorities were very different. Yet,
as Kramrisch pointed out in the Bauhaus exhibition catalogue, the Bengali
artists saw themselves making a common cause with them as anti-natural-
ists against academic art, as much as they shared their questioning of
Western industrial capitalism. Kandinsky’s treatise, On the Spiritual in Art,
is quite telling in this respect. He speaks of the inner, spiritual-moral striv-
ings that unite modernists and ‘primitives’, those pure artists who want to
capture the inner essence of things. The wisdom of those ‘primitives’, who
are held in condescension by the West, he explains, are now being studied
by the Theosophists. Strikingly, he declares that ‘the “crudely” carved col-
umn from an Indian temple is animated by the same soul as any living,
“modern” work’.32
Because of its protean nature, with shifting meanings and significance,
primitivism as a form of critical modernity offered rich and different pos-
sibilities to Indian artists. Rabindranath’s primitivism was a playful explor-
ation of the Unconscious. Amrita Sher-Gil projected a tragic vision of
rural India that acted as a surrogate for her divided identity. In some
respects the most complex artistic responses were the environmental prim-
itivism at Tagore’s university in Santiniketan and Jamini Roy’s synthesis of
art and politics in an alternative vision of Indian identity. Profoundly influ-
ential in the works of early Indian modernists, primitivism assigned a new
status to marginal culture hitherto ignored in Indian national life, produc-
35
ing memorable artistic expressions. To be sure, this elite perception of the
worth of the subalterns was necessarily from the perspective of otherness,
but no less genuine for that. The most intense period of this complex motif
in art was from the 1920s to the early ’40s, but the tendency continued
beyond 1947 and even today its powerful message inspires artists.

i
Two Pioneering Women Artists
The first two women painters in India to gain public recognition were
Sunayani Devi (1875–1962) and Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941), who also
happened to represent two different facets of the primitivism spectrum.
Sunayani was essentially a housewife in an affluent household whose
enlightened husband was partly responsible for her brief fame; after his
death, she lost her inspiration, entering a period of decline and lassitude.
Trained in Paris, Amrita competed with men as a professional painter,
gaining fame and notoriety in equal measure, though her early promise
was cut short by her sudden death. The two of them – one a housewife
and the other a professional – exemplify women’s changing social position
in India as well as the predicaments of women artists of the time. Before
Sunayani, we know only of the leading painter Ravi Varma’s sister,
Mangalabai Tampuratti, who reached professional standards and helped
her brother with his ambitious history paintings. Mangalabai remains
unknown apart from her one portrait of her brother.1 Women amateurs
participated in art exhibitions in Calcutta from as early as the 1880s.
The best-known early woman painter at the Bombay Art Society was an
Englishwoman, Lucy Sultan Ahmed, married to an Indian. From the late
1930s women began exhibiting at the Society in growing numbers.2 Girls
generally did not attend art schools, except those who were from Eurasian
or Parsi communities in Bombay. On the other hand, elite families hired
private tutors to teach painting to girls at home as part of their accom-
plishments.3 Not until the 1920s do we find girls going to art schools, the
earliest possibly at Tagore’s Visva Bharati university at Santiniketan.

sunayani devi and naïve art

A housewife artist in the limelight
The first Indian ‘primitivist’, Sunayani Devi, was born to a family of talent-
ed writers and painters. Her uncle was Rabindranath Tagore and her
two older brothers were Abanindranath and Gaganendranath. As with
her older brother’s Cubism, it was the ‘modernist moment’ that brought
36
Sunayani Devi, Milkmaids,
1920s, gouache on paper.

Sunayani’s ‘primitivist’ art to public attention in 1920–21. The Englishman

commented on the bold originality of her paintings, which resembled
ancient Jain paintings in their hieratic quality. Sunayani found a place in the
important 14th exhibition of the Society, in which the Bauhaus artists took
part. In 1925 the Statesman wrote approvingly that although she was a
woman, she showed vigour and originality.4 In 1927, she was included in
the exhibition held by the Women’s International Art Club in London. The
Austrian painter Nora Pursar Wuttenbrach, who contributed the catalogue
essay on her, was as charmed by the lotus-eyed women and enchanting
colours as she was impressed by the monumental fresco-like quality of
these small paintings. ‘A breath of life from a distant past seemed to per-
vade them’, she wrote.5 The Austrian painter had met Sunayani during
her visit to Calcutta to produce murals for a local Art Deco movie theatre.
A member of the Tagore family in Calcutta, Sunayani was witness to
the cultural ferment that was the Bengal Renaissance. At the same time,
37
being brought up in the women’s quarters, which remained more tradition-
al and secluded in these families, she shared these intellectual excitements
only indirectly. Her uncle, Rabindranath mentions in his autobiography
that men lived in the outer quarters while women occupied the inner ones.6
Amina Kar, a woman sculptor from the post-independence period, explains
that it ‘was unknown and unheard of for women to do anything, even
“Art”, on a professional basis, and they remained very much in the back-
ground’.7 The men embodied a dual consciousness, using English as a lan-
guage of modern discourse for professional purposes, while keeping
Bengali as an intimate language for domesticity. Most women on the other
hand, educated at home in the vernacular, were expected to look after the
household and uphold Hindu values. Kramrisch contended that the
strength of Sunayani’s naïve art lay in her cultural integrity for, unlike men
who had succumbed to colonial culture, Indian women continued to per-
form the domestic rituals that had once played a central role in Indian life.8
Sunayani mentioned that as a child she was fascinated by the devo-
tional pictures that hung in her aunt’s room, the Ravi Varma prints mak-
ing the strongest impression on her.9 As a young woman, Sunayani took
art and music lessons as part of her feminine accomplishments. Spying on
her two older brothers’ experiments in Japanese wash techniques, she
secretly longed to pick up the brush and paint.10 However, it was not until
in her thirties that she actually summoned up the courage to take up
painting, and then only with her husband’s encouragement. From 1915
onwards, she and Pratima Devi, Rabindranath’s daughter-in-law, took
part in exhibitions at the Indian Society of Oriental Art run by the
Tagores.11 During her fifteen active years (between the ages of 30 to 45)
she maintained a strict painting regimen, working every day from eight
in the morning until midday, and from three until four-thirty in the after-
noon. Her grandson offers us a vivid account of her work method.
‘Matriarch’ in a large well-to-do household, she was expected to oversee
its daily routine: she would sit on a taktaposh (divan), propped up with
bolsters, painting and occasionally dipping her painting in the water bowl
that had been used for washing vegetables, all the while supervising her
daughters-in-law who made preparations for the cooking.12 Her routine
suggests a remarkable degree of tolerance from her husband not often
granted to women in this period. The idyllic arrangement came to an end
with his death in 1934, when Sunayani lost all impetus to paint.13 Yet as
early as 1927 the young critic Govindaraj Venkatachalam noticed that she
no longer painted in the enthusiastic manner of her earlier years, attribut-
ing it to the pressures of family life. Sunayani ultimately failed to serve
two mistresses, art and family, especially in a society that discouraged self-
expression.14 In 1935 her loyal admirers arranged a showing of her works
at her home, which was to be her last public exposure. In the 1940s, her
family suffered a series of misfortunes, causing her deep despondency and
her departure from the world of art.15
38
Sunayani Devi, Two Women,
c. 1920s, watercolour on paper.

Feminists have focused on Sunayani’s ‘double bind’: she balanced a

career and a home, unlike the professional painter Amrita Sher-Gil.
There is a hint of melancholy in Sunayani’s confession to her grand-
daughter that she was always short of time to paint in her busy household,
often being obliged to hide her paintings from being damaged by her
unruly children.16 Again, however much she was encouraged by her hus-
band, marriage was her career as a woman. Arguably, the duality of her
existence as a housewife and an artist ultimately took a toll on her creative
work.17 As a woman sculptor of the 1950s put it, ‘Sunayani’s sorrow was
of a different kind. Only we who are professional artists can feel it. She
may not have starved on the streets to produce art. She may not have felt
the pangs of poverty, she may not have been socially or politically aware,
but her sorrow was of another kind, so private that she could not express
it. I felt it that morning as she asked me to comment on her paintings.’18
39
 Naïve art and Indian nationalism
Sunayani’s dilemma as a woman painter helps us to understand the pres-
sures that inhibit women from gaining recognition and professional suc-
cess. But there is another side to Sunayani’s naïve paintings that I think
is equally significant. Although she herself did not consciously produce
‘nationalist’ art, her work came to epitomize Indian primitivism as an
expression of anti-colonial resistance. In 1921, as modernism slowly
impinged on the consciousness of the intelligentsia, critics spoke enthusi-
astically about Sunayani’s simplicity and ‘artlessness’, her naïve work as a
validation of the formal values of Bengali village art. Stella Kramrisch
became Sunayani’s powerful champion, providing the first serious study
of the artist, and discovering in Sunayani, much more than in
Gaganendranath, an Indian modernist after her own heart. The Austrian
art historian was responsible for giving publicity to her work in serious
German journals as a rare example of genuine naïve art no longer found
in the West. In 1922 she waxed eloquent about the simplicity and spon-
taneity of her untutored talent, her lack of any preconceived ideal, and an
inner confidence in her best works. Sunayani’s confident, unbroken flow-
ing lines, she wrote poetically, contained a variety of expressions: serenity,
swiftness, languidity, assertiveness and restraint. Although Kramrisch did
not gloss over her occasional weakness for sentimental and descriptive
subjects, she found Sunayani’s best works to be expressive of two kinds of
rhythm: a measured tranquillity and dignity that gave the works their
unity and truthfulness; and the very opposite, a light touch full of high
spirits and movement.19
Kramrisch’s second essay on Sunayani in Der Cicerone, published in
1925, remains the foundational study of the artist, valuable because of the
critic’s personal knowledge of her evolution. Kramrisch described her
painting process, which was influenced by Abanindranath’s wash paint-
ing. Sunayani first drew a red or black outline with brush on paper, which
was then filled in with watercolours prepared by herself and applied with
a thin paintbrush. She then dipped the sheet into a circular drum of water
allowing the colours to be absorbed by the paper. The wash was used as a
continuous process through which the form emerged without taking
recourse to drawing. She firmed up the outline with the brush once the
hazy shapes started emerging out of the washes, the washes themselves
investing her works with a delicate hue. Her avoidance of drawing
prompted Kramrisch to declare that her pictures had no design but grew
organically, gushing ‘out of her very nature’.20 This unselfconscious
quality was emphasized by Kramrisch who disclosed that she would often
paint on the front and the back of the paper with no concern for its worth:
painting for her was simply a form of relief from her creative urges.21
But when she tried to paint consciously, she would lose her delicate Sunayani Devi, Viraha,
touch, thus betraying her limitations. To Kramrisch, her limited skill c. 1920s, watercolour on paper.

40
and narrow horizon were a strength rather than weakness, a form of
naïve grandeur.22
The subject matter of Sunayani’s art belonged to a private inner
world. ‘Most of my paintings’, she once confessed to her grandson, ‘I have
seen in dreams – after seeing them I have put them down.’23 Her artistic
sources were quite eclectic and she had no hesitation about turning to
images that appealed to her, often choosing the pictures that were in her
household, as respectable women seldom ventured out. We know that
Ravi Varma’s prints thrilled her, and later she saw Rajput miniatures and
Abanindranath’s watercolours. However, in line with the growing cult of
folk art, Kramrisch identified only two main inspirations: village clay
dolls that often adorned urban homes and Kalighat pats.24 Kalighat,
which came into vogue around 1915, made a strong impression on the
artist.25 Kramrisch is conspicuously silent about the Bengal School influ-
ence on Sunayani, even though one of the illustrations in her article makes
this abundantly clear. Nor does she acknowledge Ravi Varma, insisting
only on the folk elements in her work.26 Her naïve work was singled out
as a continuation of the ‘simple’ art of the Indian village, a contemporary
expression of authentic India. The modernist discourse of primitive sim-

Sunayani Devi, Ardhdnarisvara,

c. 1920s, watercolour on paper.

42
Sunayani Devi, Radha Krishna,
c. 1920s, watercolour on paper.

plicity and the nationalist discourse of cultural authenticity come together

in the image of Sunayani Devi as a nationalist artist. Much later in 1927
she was to speak of her deep attachment to the simplicity of folk and pop-
ular art, and indeed there was a strong ‘folk’ element in her art.
Her attachment was part of the elite valorization of ‘low’ art as the
cultural site of the nation. Hence we need to probe Sunayani’s place in the
nationalist mythology as a ‘folk artist’. Kramrisch presented a complex set
of arguments in which she identified Sunayani’s naïve self-taught art as
representing in its simplicity the best of modern, primitive and traditional
Indian art. In this global fellowship of primitivism, child art, naïve art and
primitive art were embraced as the Other, whose formal simplicity and
clarity was the very antithesis of the anecdotal naturalism of academic
art.27 In the West, Kramrisch contended, the Indian artist’s unschooled
43
images would have been considered ‘an aberration, but in India it
belonged to a time-honoured tradition, the tradition of an agricultural
people’.28 In the same vein Kramrisch found Sunayani’s naïve paintings
continuing the humble doll-carver’s craft and village women’s art.
According to the Austrian scholar, her figures retained the same uninter-
rupted flow of round, modelled lines, while the colours that filled the
outlines were reduced to flat surfaces.29 The modernist also found her
‘naïveté’ prefigured in the primitive simplicity of the Sienese painters,
thus weaving for the Indian painter a seamless fabric of universal mod-
ernism, primitivism and artistic nationalism. Although there is no evidence
that the ancient Buddhist painters at Ajanta foreswore any preliminary
sketches for their frescoes, Kramrisch claimed that Sunayani’s innocence
of drawing attested to her heritage from ‘a people whose race had long
ago coated houses, temples, and rock grottoes with pictures’.30 Though
she was an ally of the orientalists, Kramrisch was painfully aware that
they had been unable to eliminate naturalism entirely. With Sunayani,
she was on a firmer ground, and could happily construct the continuum
of Indian art from ancient Ajanta to contemporary village art.
Temporarily disrupted by colonialism, the thread was once again restored
by this naïve modernist painter, an authentic child of the soil, untouched
by colonial pedagogy.
The myth of Sunayani’s roots in the Indian soil became even more
pronounced in writers that followed the art historian. The modernist crit-
ic Venkatachalam followed her footsteps in viewing Sunayani’s paintings,
Ajanta frescoes, medieval European painting and Bengali folk art as
reflecting the same artistic spirit. Lamenting the degeneration of national
life in the colonial era, he declared that Indian civilization was, ‘and still
is, to a large extent a rural civilization and not urban and Indian art,
therefore, was and still is the art of the people. Its exponents could not be
produced in the academies or be turned out of art schools as so many
ready-made goods.’31 Of course Venkatachalam was correct to identify
her as the first modern artist to turn to village scroll painting (pat), hold-
ing her art as ‘the joyous expression of the natural impulses of an un-
sophisticated heart and mind’. But was he correct to equate her naïveté
with that of folk art? Sunayani Devi was a genuinely untutored painter,
an artist of simplicity, lacking hubris, often generously giving away her
works to her admirers. Her untrained simplicity and directness were part
of the Romantic topos of the authenticity of personal vision, which
Kramrisch extolled.32 But the fact is, Sunayani belonged to the urban
intelligentsia and had a privileged upbringing. On the other hand, the
unlettered village scroll-painter (patua), while lacking urbanity, was the
product of a long artistic tradition governed by strict conventions.
Therefore, rather than describing her as a folk painter, we should view
her as a genuine naïve painter who used folk motifs with immense charm
and feeling.
44
Sunayani Devi, Self-Portrait,
c. 1920s, watercolour on paper.

amrita sher-gil and the fragmented self

The making of a legend
Maie Casey, who was in Calcutta in the 1940s with her husband, the
Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, was fully aware of the Amrita Sher-Gil
phenomenon: ‘An Indian with a measure of European blood, she
returned to India to shed her acquired skin . . . She saw her country with
new vision and has left a legacy of pictures, simple and grand . . . as a trib-
ute to the Indian countryside and its people.’33 Sher-Gil attained an icon-
ic status in India because of her legendary beauty, her precocious talent,
her outrageous behaviour, her revered position in Indian modernist art,
45
and finally her brief turbulent life and tragic death at
the age of twenty-eight.34 Her pre-eminence as an
Indian artist, even though her mother tongue was
Hungarian, was underlined in the standard biogra-
phy written three years after her death by her friend
and confidant, Karl Khandalavala. He insisted on her
nationalist credentials by judging her Indian paint-
ings to be of greater significance than those produced
in either Paris or Hungary.35
How can we recover the real Amrita underneath
layers of myths, legends and claims?36 There were
two Amritas, the brash, opinionated controversialist,
who enjoyed ‘épater les bourgeois’, created scandals,
made outrageous statements, enjoying the freedom
of spirit granted only to the truly young. The acerbic
English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who had a
brief all-consuming affair with her, described her as
‘rose water and raw spirit’.37 The other Amrita was
introverted, melancholic, riven by unresolved per-
sonal relationships, traumatized by sexual infections
and abortions, the Amrita who longed for her
father’s approval, the Amrita who remained a virgin
emotionally in the midst of her numerous sexual adventures. There Amrita Sher-Gil, 1930s,
were also a Hungarian and an Indian Amrita, the Amrita who belonged photograph.

nowhere, desperately seeking her identity in India. She was far too young
when she died, long before achieving her full potential. If by modernism
we mean radical non-illusionist art, she was less radical, except in the late
works, than either Rabindranath Tagore or Jamini Roy. Her modernism
straddled the cusp of representation and abstraction. And yet paradoxically,
as a modern woman, she was at least half a century ahead of her times. We
who live in a globalized world today, where modernity embraces cultural
diaspora, dislocation, and the intellectual as an outsider, understand better
the tragic contradictions of her existence.
These contradictions make the study of her life and work complicated.
Her self-fashioning as an artist and a cosmopolitan informs her vision of
‘authentic’ India. Of mixed Sikh-Hungarian parentage, she did not enjoy
the secure sense of Indian identity that Tagore and Roy took for granted.
Thus her self-invention became all the more compelling. Her nephew
Vivan Sundaram’s photomontage, which juxtaposes her Western persona
elegant in wool and fur with her Indian persona resplendent in silk saris
and brocade blouses, underscores her dual Sikh-Hungarian consciousness.38
Muggeridge described her as the ‘weird amalgam of the bearded
Tolstoyan star-gazer and the red-haired pianist pounding away at her
keyboard’.39 Questions about identity and ‘hybridity’ have figured promi-
nently in post-colonial writings.40 The whole notion of ‘hybridity’ posits a
46
 mythical ‘authenticity’ in the construction of nationhood. However, if one
allows, as one must, that nationhood does not consist in a fixed ‘authentic’
heritage, then her tragic vision of India becomes all the more compelling,
for it lays bare the contradictions of modern existence: what it is to be a
woman, an artist, a cosmopolitan and, above all, an Indian. All these
different scenarios were played out in her short turbulent life.
Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia, Sikh nobleman, philosopher,
Sanskrit scholar and amateur photographer, married Marie Antoinette
Gottesmann, an opera singer from a cultivated Hungarian-Jewish-
German Catholic family in Budapest. Their first daughter, Amrita, was
born in the city on 30 January 1913, and spent her first eight years there,
the next eight in India. Her early drawings bring out her melancholy
temperament, a sense of insecurity heightened by her parents’ turbulent
marriage. They took her to Europe to enrol her at the Académie de la
Grande Chaumière in Paris at the age of sixteen. Later she trained under
the Post-Impressionist painter Lucien Simon at the École des Beaux-Arts.41
Her early charcoal drawings of the human figure show a precocious gift
for reducing details to masses and volumes. At nineteen she won the top
prize at the Grand Salon, becoming one of its youngest Associates. While
in Paris, she plunged headlong into its Bohemian pleasures as the exotic
‘little Indian princess’.42
Amrita Sher-Gil, Untitled, Amrita spent summers in Budapest in the company of leading
c. 1930, charcoal sketch. nationalist writers and artists. Towards the end of 1933, she longed to
return to India, drawn to the desolate vision of an
Indian village in winter, with its sad villagers hud-
dled together, so different, she felt, from the exotic
India of tourist posters.43 Her French teachers
welcomed her decision, conceding that she was
temperamentally better suited to India than the
West. Immediately upon her arrival in India, she
decided to court controversy, determined to make
her mark in what she considered a ‘provincial
artistic milieu’, grandly informing a journalist that
she was trying to introduce a new ‘living’ element
in Indian art. In 1935, the Simla Fine Arts Society
awarded her a prize for one of her paintings, but
turned down some of her works. Shocked, perhaps
with some justification, that any of her works could
be rejected, she declined the prize, writing to the
Society in an injured tone that the prize should
go to someone who was more in tune with the
hidebound conventionality fostered by the Society.
‘I shall in future be obliged to resign myself to
exhibiting them merely at the Grand Salon Paris,
of which I happen to be an Associate, and the
47
Amrita Sher-Gil, Hill Men and Salon des Tuileries known all over the world as the representative exhibi-
Woman, 1935, oil on canvas.
tion of Modern Art . . . where I can, at least, be sure of receiving some
measure of impartiality,’ she added with considerable pique.44
The Society, the most venerable in colonial India, exacted its revenge
by excluding her work from a show several years later. In 1939 she became
convinced of the general hostility of the Indian art world: the Bombay Art
Society rejected some of the works submitted; the Fine Arts Exhibition
held in Delhi failed to make any special commendation of her work. For
her part, lacking all diplomacy, she lost a lucrative sale of her works in
Hyderabad because she ridiculed the art collector’s taste for Victorian
painting. By the end of 1939, she felt demoralized by what she interpreted
as indifference to her work. Amrita wrote ruefully, ‘Funny that I, who
can accept a present without the least pang of conscience, should not be
able to say that a bad picture is good even if it is in my interest to do so.’45
Her behaviour reflects the romantic topos of artists placing themselves
above ‘philistine criticism’, even at the cost of their livelihood. It is of
course true that society was prepared to tolerate such behaviour in men,
forcing us to admire her courage when she wrote that the ‘artist has every
right to reject or accept public estimates of her work. When the public
makes a mistake regarding a picture, it is the business of the artist by some
gesture to show that the public is un-informed and dull.’46
Nonetheless she craved for recognition. Let us also not forget that
despite her pessimism, her energy and originality had begun to have an
impact in India quite early on. In fact in 1937, the Bombay Art Society,
with her champion Khandalavala on the jury, had awarded her a gold
medal for her painting Three Women. She was deeply moved because she
felt she did not have to compromise her artistic integrity to receive this
recognition. Sher-Gil held her first solo exhibition at the fashionable
Faletti’s Hotel in Lahore in November 1937. Charles Fabri, the
Hungarian art critic of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore,
expressed his admiration for the kind of modernism he could relate to,
modern but not ugly or incomprehensible. Another critic, Rabindranath
Deb, spoke of the ‘masculine strength [of her work], which shows the
immense intellectual quality of the artist . . . a rare quality in [a] wom-
an’.47 The English artist and son of the composer John Foulds, Patrick
Foulds, remarked that she had been acclaimed all over India as an artist
of exceptional talents, the author of a new Indian art form ‘more vital –
more closely connected with the soil’.48 R. C. Tandon, a professor at the
Allahabad University, organized an exhibition on the campus in
February 1937. He was smitten by her beauty and fascinated by her
unconventional personality, but was unsure about her cultural creden-
tials for interpreting India. Other critics felt that her brutally realistic
works were more typical of modern French art than Indian. The public
however flocked to her show, drawn by stories of her unconventional life
and ‘immoral’ subjects. Response to Sher-Gil ranged from bewilderment
49
 Amrita Sher-Gil, Three
Women, 1937, oil on canvas.
This work won the gold medal
of the Bombay Art Society.

and grudging respect for her Paris training to the deeper appreciation of
a discerning minority.49
In the action-filled seven years 1934–41, Sher-Gil pursued a vigorous
painting career, crossed swords with the art establishment, met prominent
Indians, including Jawaharlal Nehru, and made trips to ancient monu-
ments to learn her heritage.50 In 1938 she paid a brief visit to Hungary to
marry her doctor cousin Victor Egan, returning to India with him to set-
tle on the family estate in Saraya. She died on 5 December 1941 at the age
of 28, when the brief illness treated by her husband turned fatal. By the
time she died, her fame had spread all over India. Condolences poured in
from political leaders, including Gandhi and Nehru. The latter found her
50
work to show ‘strength and perception . . . different . . . from the pasty-
faced lifeless efforts that one sees so frequently in India’.51 Her former
teacher at the Grande Chaumière, Pierre Vaillant, sent a photograph of a
portrait he had done of her as ‘hommage d’admiration pour sa talent,
pour sa beauté’. She died as she was preparing for her second solo exhibi-
tion at the Punjab Literary League in Lahore, which was held posthu-
mously. The coda to Amrita’s story is the suicide of her grieving mother,
Marie Antoinette, a few years following her death.

Modern woman as a professional

Amrita Sher-Gil was the first professional woman artist in India whose life
and career were very different from many other women artists of the twen-
tieth century.52 Women artists in the West seem destined to be a mirror
image of, or a muse to men, struggling to scoop out a niche for themselves,
such as the tragic Camille Claudel or more successful Natalia Gontcharova
and Liubov Sergeevna Popova.53 Laura Prieto attributes the paucity of great
women artists to the exclusion of women from the credentials and institu-
tions that would qualify them for greatness, in addition to their ‘double bind’
as a woman and an artist.54 Feminist art historians have rightly exposed the
power structure that has erased women artists from the art historical dis-
course.55 Sher-Gil too had her share of being stereotyped in a male-dominat-
ed profession. In France she was ‘a mysterious little Hindu princess’; her
work was never praised without a mention of her beauty, a situation she also
faced in India. The All India Fine Arts and Crafts Exhibition at Delhi
awarded her the prize for the best work by a lady artist, which she, with
justification, resented because ‘it rather smacks of concession due to the fee-
bler sex’.56 But the most striking thing about Sher-Gil was that she was
nobody’s muse, a free spirit who amused herself when she pleased, taking in
tow a gaggle of infatuated males, led by the ‘spineless’ Sarada Ukil, whom
she considered in private as her doormat.57 The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo
is perhaps closest to Sher-Gil in her erotic tortured life. The child of a mixed
marriage, the bisexual Kahlo was a strong individualist who projected a
Mexican identity that became entwined with her own self-image.58
In the 1920s, women with unconventional lifestyles were making
their mark in Paris, the bohemian cosmopolis. The most famous was
Colette, who may have provided a role model for Sher-Gil.59 Highly
sexed, Sher-Gil led a wild life in Paris with multiple lovers, showing off
her voluptuous body without inhibition in sensuous nude self-portraits,
notably Torso, dated 1931, an accomplished study of masses and textures.60
There was a rush of nude self-portraits by women in the early twentieth
century, which aimed at blurring the distinction between the artist and
the model, thus challenging the boundaries between femininity and pro-
fessionalism in an assertion of women’s independence.61 In these images
of innocent narcissism, Sher-Gil turned the gaze upon herself, taking sen-
51
 Amrita Sher-Gil, Torso, 1931,
oil on canvas.

suous pleasure in her own body as she did of her sister Indira in a nude
study of her.62 Sher-Gil was conscious of the effect she had on people,
especially men, not simply for her physical beauty but for her unbridled
nature. Typically, her French art teacher Pierre Vaillant, who did a portrait
of her, wrote: ‘You must give me a chance to keep your sweet memory
alive and to be able to look on the familiar, noble features and those beauti-
ful eyes that seem to see beyond.’63
She shared with many gifted people a voracious sexual appetite as an
outlet for her abundant energy, and an ‘amoral’ outlook on life, a hedonist
who believed in the healing power of pleasure. She once confessed, ‘I am
always in love, but fortunately for me and unfortunately for the party con-
cerned, I fall out of love or rather fall in love with someone else before any
52
damage can be done! You know the type of alcoholic who stops drinking
at the merry stage?’64 This was eroticism free of commitment or procre-
ation. She married her cousin because she needed someone to take care of
her. He knew of her affairs, but promised her freedom after marriage.
Her behaviour seems to have been an inversion of the accepted male atti-
tude. One of the heroic myths of male artists, such as Modigliani or
Picasso, was their highly charged sex life, considered unacceptable in
women. Sher-Gil refused to suppress her instincts, though admittedly her
privileged background helped her to ignore opprobrium in India.
Strikingly, Sher-Gil accepted the subjective nature of gender identity,
disavowing the idea of socially constructed sexual desire as exclusively
masculine or feminine. Having won professional kudos, she felt no need
to identify with women, claiming that they could not paint because they
were sentimentalists who lacked passion.65 Today we may understand
Sher-Gil’s bisexuality as a feminist trope and an integral aspect of gender
identity. Hélène Cixous views female bisexuality as a feminist response to
‘phallic monosexuality’, suggesting ‘the possibility of the humankind to
expand in energy, creativity, and jouissance – a word often used by her to
denote total sexual and aesthetic pleasure’.66 Sher-Gil pursued women
with transparent honesty. She was attracted to the daughter of the poet
Sarojini Naidu and had an affair with Edith Lang, a Hungarian prize-
winning pianist. With the Frenchwoman, Marie-Louise Chassany, she
had a more complicated relationship. Though it had strong homoerotic
overtones it was not consummated. Explaining to her mother the risks of
casual relationships with men, Amrita stated with candour: ‘I need some-
one to physically meet my sexual needs because I believe that it is impos-
sible to fully transform one’s sexual desires into art . . . I thought I would
have something with a female when the opportunity arises.’67
Sher-Gil successfully asserted her independence in a male world, carv-
ing out a central position in Indian modernism. She refused to let her emo-
tional life compromise her art, a separation between life and art generally
admired in a male artist, whose profession always took precedence. Her
friend Rashid Ahmad noted that while she was not overburdened with
social taboos, the strong balancing factor was her self-discipline, indulging
in sensuality but ‘not a slave to it’.68 Sher-Gil admired Dostoyevsky pre-
cisely because she considered him a free soul who remained an artist to the
very end.69 Muggeridge often watched ‘with fascination the animal inten-
sity of her concentration, making her short of breath, with beads of sweat
appearing on the faint moustache on her upper lip’.70 Art was a question
of life and death to her, an intense period of work usually followed by con-
siderable exhaustion. Feminist art historians have rightly cautioned us
against using culturally charged terms such as genius, since these in effect
excluded women artists from mainstream art histories.71 And yet Sher-
Gil’s self-presentation successfully inverted the dominant power relations.
She never faltered in her faith in her own ‘genius’ – a free agent who
53
placed herself beyond the norms of ordinary behaviour. This was indeed a
modern professional woman much ahead of her time.

Primitivism, melancholy and the alienated self

A key player in the evolution of Indian modernism, Sher-Gil’s primi-
tivism was tied up with her self-definition as a modernist and her agonis-
tic relationship to the historicism of the Bengal School. Ferociously com-
mitted to her art, she constantly displayed utter condescension towards
fellow artists. This may have been a trait acquired in Paris, where it was
common practice to offer ruthless criticisms of student work to toughen
them up. Even Karl Khandalavala, her friend and admirer, regretted her
lack of charm in discussing art.72 Sher-Gil was particularly ambivalent
towards the two other key modernists. She was unaware of Tagore’s exhi-
bition at the Pigalle in Paris in 1930, even though she was a member of the
Students Circle there. Later on, she came to like his works. But her
impetuosity very often degenerated into abuse. Disagreeing with
Khandalavala’s comparison of Tagore with Soutine, she added: ‘As for
Tagore’s piddling little poetry, I have [a] profound contempt . . . the only
thing that Tagore can do is paint.’73 In 1937, she thought well of a Jamini
Roy portrait at the Travancore Art Gallery.74 But later she told
Khandalavala, ‘while admitting that Jamini Roy has a certain talent . . . I
feel that you are doing a vast injustice to the age-old fresco-painters
[Ajanta] by comparing [his work] with theirs?’75
Her most devastating criticisms were reserved for the Bengal School
because even in decline its historicism defined artistic nationalism, which
she needed to demolish in order to establish her own artistic ‘authenticity’.
Forced to acknowledge Nandalal’s pre-eminence, privately she dismissed
his ‘uninspired cleverness’, which was ‘capable of producing good work
only under the inspiration of a particular school’.76 Far from fulfilling its
vast ambitions, she declared, the renaissance in Indian painting led by the
Bengal School was responsible for the stagnation of Indian art. Its only
raison d’être was to have made at least ‘a certain layer of people’ in India
aware of the great art of the past.77 Her radio broadcast of 19 August
1941, months before her death, publicly denouncing the Bengal School,
has earned justified notoriety. But she was even less sparing of the aca-
demic artists of Bombay led by Gladstone Solomon.78
She offered a double repudiation: against clinging to the past that had
become an empty formula and against a slavish imitation of inferior
Western art. Instead, ‘I should like to see the art of India . . . produce
something vital connected with the soil, yet essentially Indian.’79 It is this
rejection of historicism for an art connected with the soil that forms the
cornerstone of her ‘artistic authenticity’. She discovered village India after
shuttling between India and Hungary in the early years of her life.80 As
she explained in a crucial passage, as soon as she set foot on the Indian soil,
54
her painting underwent a great change in theme, spirit and technical
expression, becoming more fundamentally Indian. She then realized that
her real artistic mission in life was to interpret the lives of poor Indians
pictorially; to paint ‘those silent images of infinite submission and
patience, to depict their angular brown bodies, strangely beautiful in their
ugliness; to reproduce on canvas the impression their eyes created on
me’.81 Art must be connected with the soil, she once told the artist Barada
Ukil, if it was to be vital.82 In 1936, the journalist Ela Sen explained that
Sher-Gil’s life’s ambition was to present the misery of Indian life to a
wider audience and to elevate it to a higher plane through the medium of
colour, form and design.83 The Bengali monthly Prabasi paid her a rare
tribute in 1939: though her style was foreign, her authentic image of a
poor, melancholy, rural India struck a chord in Indians.84
Once again, we return to the locus of the nation in the countryside as
opposed to the historic past, though interestingly, Sher-Gil did not consid-
er herself a primitivist.85 Sher-Gil’s primitivism sprang from a melan-
choly vision of village India. Aware as a modernist that such a subject
could pander to the emotions, she sought to balance her empathy for the
subject with a ‘formalist’ technique.86 By 1936, she felt she had evolved an
appropriate ‘technique’ of abstract lines, colours and design for interpret-
ing rural poverty, simplifying form at the expense of the subject matter,
prettiness or effeminacy, in short, attaining what Roger Fry calls ‘signifi-
cant form’.87 Her two terms, ‘aesthetic emotion’, which interpreted rather
than imitated nature, and ‘significant form’, were Bloomsbury favourites.
Sher-Gil worried about using pictorial narratives as emotional pegs, and
yet the conviction of her works lay as much in their emotional truth as in
their formal qualities.88
Sher-Gil’s romantic vision of rural India evolved out of four distinct
strands in her artistic make-up: a Hungarian version of neo-impression-
ism, a post-impressionist ‘flat’ style reminiscent of Gauguin, the powerful
influence of the ancient Buddhist paintings of Ajanta, and the final
‘colourism’ that she left incomplete at her death. Although it has been
noted, I was surprised by the extent of Hungarian influence in her Indian
oeuvre, which blended in with her Paris training. In the 1920s,
Hungarians had developed a nationalist form of neo-impressionism,
which had joined forces with the popular Free School of Painting at
Nagybánya, led by István Réti and Simon Hollósy (1857–1918), both of
whom had worked in Munich. It was a follower of Hollósy in Paris who
had recommended young Sher-Gil to Lucien Simon at the École des
Beaux-Arts. Sher-Gil spent some time at the artists’ colony in Zebegény
near Budapest, where István Szönyi, a modern ‘primitivist’ worked.89
Sher-Gil’s exposure to these influences brought new standards of psycho-
logical depth to portraiture in India. Her works combined incisive outlines,
clean colours and Courbet’s painterly texture, with a distant echo of the
Austrian Neue Sachlichkeit movement, possibly through Franz Lerch.90 One
55
 Amrita Sher-Gil, Man in White,
1935, oil on canvas.

of her most striking works is Man in White, the portrait of a dark-skinned

Indian, whose striking ‘ugliness’ fascinated her. The painting’s unusual
power lies in its simple diagonal structure that endows the sitter with a rare
monumentality.91 Sher-Gil’s second, and best known, ‘flat’ style reminis-
cent of Gauguin is seen in her early works in India, notably Hill Men and
Hill Woman – monumental, impassive and virtually monochrome – with a
few primary colours set against a plain background. However the turning
point in her work was her visit to Ajanta, whose austere shades enabled her
to develop her ‘formalist’ style. She was deeply moved by these frescoes,
choosing their slightly ‘up-tilted’ three-quarter faces to convey recession, as
well as adapting the skin colours of their dark figures. In The Fruit Vendors,
56
 for instance, she now added austere shades such as red ochre to
her plain backgrounds, to pick out brightly coloured figures and
objects. From Ajanta she went down to South India, finding the
dark-skinned Tamils ideal for her vision of rural India, as in The
Bride’s Toilet, Market Scene and, possibly the finest of the genre,
The Brahmachari. In this group of Brahmin acolytes, she bril-
liantly combines ‘Ajanta’ with her South Indian figures. On the
other hand, one also notices her Indian experience applied to the
Hungarian folk style of István Szönyi in a Market Scene, painted
on her visit to Hungary in 1938.92
Aged twenty, on the eve of her return to India, Amrita had
a remarkable premonition that defined her entire painting
career. Her epiphany is worth quoting here:

It was the vision of a winter in India – desolate, yet

strangely beautiful – of endless tracks of luminous yellow-
grey land, of dark-bodied, sad-faced, incredibly thin men
Amrita Sher-Gil, and women who move silently looking almost like silhouettes
Young Man with Apples, and over which an indefinable melancholy reigns. It was differ-
1932, oil on canvas.
ent from the India, voluptuous, colourful, sunny and superficial,
the India [of] travel posters that I had expected to see.93
Amrita Sher-Gil,
The Brahmachari, 1937, Sher-Gil is celebrated as a painter of melancholy rural India. It does
oil on canvas. not matter if India is really melancholy or cheerful – perhaps it is both –

57
what matters is how she imagined it. With her abstract idiom she creates
a ‘distancing’ effect in her elegiac paintings of austere villagers. Absorbed
in their daily activities, these impassive figures give the impression of a
state of equilibrium and immobility, which is not disturbed by the gaze of
the outsider, a condition of stasis achieved by her formalist language. The
artist is the outsider here who is transfixed by this world that she knows
only vicariously. And yet her stylized, melancholy peasants haunt us pre-
cisely because they become a metaphor for her alienated self. Her nephew
Vivan Sundaram, for instance, considers her peasant faces with sad eyes
and pouting lips to be her own ‘visage’.94
On the surface, her mixed ancestry caused no undue anxiety, her
social position enabling her to move with ease in a culturally plural
India, quickly winning admirers and a dominant position in the art
world. The prescient Muggeridge however diagnosed her as a victim of
the tensions and displacements of the modern world, half European and
half Indian.95 She was the classic Kafkaesque outsider, the modern
alienated intellectual, expressing a lack of centre, her anguish not the
result of any specific unhappiness, but of an existential malaise. Her vul-
nerability often surfaced when faced with a hostile critic like the orien-
talist Asit Haldar. In private she was assailed by doubts about her
Indian-ness and her ‘un-Indian’ work. But she was outraged that those
Indian artists whose escapist works helped conceal ‘the tragic face of
India’ had the gall to tell her what the ‘true’ interpretation of Indian
society was.96 Her modernist technique did not stem from ‘traditional’
art, she readily conceded, but it was fundamentally Indian in spirit. She
was confident that her universal language of modernism enabled her to
portray ‘the life of the Indian poor on the plane that transcends . . . mere
sentimental interest’.97
In Sher-Gil’s images of the melancholy countryside personal and cul-
tural identities coalesced, her insecurities going back to her troubled
childhood, a sensitive child of an unhappy union. She was a rebel and yet
she longed for her father’s approval, and mourned the loss of his love. She
was deeply hurt when her father tried to discourage her from settling in
India, stating that she was not interested in India or its art. But he was
really worried about the family reputation.98 Umrao Singh was not
unloving but increasingly out of step with Amrita’s life. During her
absence, he destroyed her intimate letters partly out of distaste and partly
for fear of scandal. Amrita’s letter to him makes sad reading: ‘I must
admit it was a bit if a shock to hear all my letters are being perused and
destined to the flames . . . These letters . . . were dear to me, amused me,
or were important from the artistic point of view . . . I had left them
behind not because I thought them dangerous witnesses of my evil past
but because I didn’t wish to increase my already heavy luggage.’99
Her jouissance and bid for freedom had a price tag attached to it.
Muggeridge accused Amrita of being emotionally frigid; she ‘had many
58
 lovers but they left no scar’.100 He failed to see the deep scars left in the
painful aftermath of sexual encounters. Amrita experienced her first trau-
ma in Paris when her fiancée left her pregnant and infected. She reflect-
ed sadly after an abortion, ‘I am like an apple, all red from outside, but
rotten inside.’ Amrita spoke candidly about her ambivalence towards
men: ‘At the commencement of a love affair I usually conceive a passion-
ate antagonism akin almost to hatred for my lovers, which serves as a
stimulant in a way, and also enables me to bring my love affairs to a rapid
and painless termination.’101 Amrita’s most moving subjects were
women. I would take two works here, an early and a late work, both non-
Indian, which show her deep understanding of women.102 At 21, she
painted Young Girls, a study of relaxed intimacy between two women, one
of them sitting with one breast bared, a masterly study in objectivity. A
more sexually charged late painting seems to be in the nature of a state-
ment. Painted in Hungary in 1938 in a flat stylized manner, Two Girls was
one of Amrita’s largest works. A nude young white woman, with pierc-
ing blue eyes, stands in a provocative pose next to a demure black woman
lightly touching her, who modestly covers parts of her naked body. We
are tempted to read in this an allegory of the fragmented self, Hungarian
and Indian. There is a strikingly similar painting by Frida Kahlo dated
1939, The Two Fridas, one European and the other Indian, as her two
selves.103
Amrita Sher-Gil,
Young Girls, 1932, At the age of twelve, Amrita had a premonition about women’s trag-
oil on canvas. ic destiny. The poor little Indian bride, she wrote in her diary, sat forlorn
in a corner surrounded by ladies in gorgeous
finery, with an expression of weariness in her
liquid dark eyes as if she guessed the cruel fate
awaiting her.104 Years later, she painted the
poignant Child Wife, as if remembering this
episode. The Professional Model is a study of an
aging life model with sagging breasts and
sunken eyes, a picture of misery. It was exhib-
ited at the Salon du Cercle International
Feminin in 1933. On seeing it, the Parisian
critic Denise Proutaux asked in astonishment:
where did this young girl learn to see life with
such pitiless eyes and without any illusions?105
The Bengali journalist, Ela Sen, mentioned
that many in India found her subjects ugly, but
that her conception of beauty was different to
that of the ordinary person.106 When Sher-Gil
was berated for her obsession with the ugly, she
replied that she found sad and ugly models
beautiful, confessing that an inner trait in her
nature drew her to things that were sad rather
59
 Amrita Sher-Gil, Child Wife,
1939, oil on canvas.

than ‘exuberantly happy or placidly contented’.107 Muggeridge seems to

have known that her self-assertive exterior concealed an infinite sadness,
a wall she had built between herself and the world, ‘her sensuality being
just fire signals that she sent up from her solitude to indicate where she
was to any passing stranger’.108 The English journalist wrote in 1936,
‘Why I love Amrita is that she, like myself, is a bare soul, without any alle-
giance or beliefs or hopes, just a sense of animality, so strong that she can
paint as I write, reproducing bare forms of life without idealizing
60
Amrita Sher-Gil,
Two Girls, 1939,
oil on canvas.
 Amrita Sher-Gil,
The Professional Model,
1933, oil on canvas.

upwards or downwards. By the time she’s my age, she’ll be as ready to die

as I am.’109 Muggeridge lived to a ripe old age but Amrita had barely five
years left.
There exists a dark, revealing letter written to her younger sister
about a year before her death where she looks into the abyss. In response
to her complaint that Amrita’s life was all sunshine and roses, she told her
that nothing in life, even misery, was absolute, which helped one muddle
through it. Often she woke up with the feeling of unutterable lassitude
and vague dread at the thought of the years ahead of her. At such
moments she considered life as infinitely grey and melancholy, unbeliev-
ably empty. She and her husband were fond of each other but they sat for
62
hours in bored silence as she sank deeper and deeper into depression,
being unable to break down the barrier. A few months before her death,
on the verge of a breakdown, she uttered a forlorn cri de coeur: ‘I passed
through a nervous crisis and am still far from being over it . . . Feeling
impotent, dissatisfied, irritable, and not even able to weep.’110 Sher-Gil’s
romanticism could easily have descended into mawkish sentimentality
without the discipline of her formalist idiom. What ultimately conferred
a redemptive value to her work was her ability to transmute this sense of
alienation and loss into something permanent and universal, creating
grandeur out of unhappiness.
One detects a third and final style that marked a striking new depar-
ture left undeveloped at her death.111 The tensions in her art between
avant-garde formalism and the value of emotions, the essential mod-
ernist polarities, have exercised critics ranging from G. Venkatachalam
and the novelist Mulk Raj Anand to W. G. Archer, who were also deeply
influenced by the Bloomsbury group.112 Archer went so far as to claim
that the obsession with abstract colour and the abandonment of human
sympathy in her last paintings caused her art to dry up.113 Today we may
dismiss this ‘artificial’ dichotomy between formal clarity and emotional
value, the preoccupation of the heroic age of modernism. Nonetheless,
her modernist sensibilities were dismayed by the emotional intensity of
her paintings. She feared that the pathos evoked in her Mother India
compromised her artistic integrity.114 If this was the exuberance of a gift-
ed young artist, in her final years, she gradually shed this anatomy of
melancholy for a detached primitivism, observing village India from an
Archimedean vantage point, but no less moving for that. In her penulti-
mate year, she informed Khandalavala that she had outgrown her senti-
mental period, developing an ironic detachment worthy of Mughal
artists.115 This observation gives us a clue as to her new ‘colourism’, seen
as early as 1938 in Ganesh Puja, the bright red clay elephant in the fore-
ground dominating the flat landscape. Copying the motifs, figures and
manners of Mughal and Pahari miniatures helped her eliminate
chiaroscuro. Her discovery of the ‘hot’ deep colours – acid green, lemon
yellow, vermilion red and cobalt blue – of Basohli painters enabled her
to build up masses and planes simply with pigments.116 Gradually, she
eliminated outlines to concentrate on pure colour values and simple
masses. In her final rural idylls, she slowly reintroduced depth and the
natural environment, abandoning her shallow neutral background.
Among these, the Haldi Grinder (1940) is a singular study of pure bright
pigments that literally ‘jump’ out of the dull grey-green landscape.
Strikingly, these works also brought out her affinities with the visionary
Hungarian primitivist K. T. Csontváry, whose spiky geometrical tree
trunks and acid colours remind us strongly of Sher-Gil.117
For Archer these late formalist works were devoid of human emotions
and social commitment. Amrita or, for that matter, other Indian primi-
63
Amrita Sher-Gil, The Haldi tivists were not social realists but visionaries of an ‘authentic’ India filtered
Grinder, 1940, oil on canvas.
through their particular experience. These last works had not compro-
mised her empathy for the rural poor, nor reneged on her monumental
vision of ‘authentic India’. But by now she could stand apart and observe
the distant village through a ‘colourist’ lens. She applied her new discovery
to elegiac images of rural women ‘closeted together in states of intimacy
and ennui’ that she had encountered in Rajput and Pahari painting.118
This was no longer the bleak Indian winter of her first encounter, but an
autumnal India seen through the detached eye of radical modernism.

ii
Rabindranath Tagore’s Vision of Art
and the Community
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was India’s greatest poet and the first
non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. Probably the
best-known world figure in the inter-bellum years, he counted Albert
Einstein, Wilfred Owen, André Gide and Charlie Chaplin among his
numerous admirers. He was among the luminaries that graced the
Sapphic painter and hedonist Natalie Barney’s legendary salon. His
poems inspired Leoš Janáček, Alexander von Zemlinsky and a host of
Photograph of Rabindranath
Tagore, c. 1913.
other European composers.1 An avowed cosmopolitan, he undertook
twelve world tours, challenging in the process colonial representations
of India as an inferior subject nation. The enthusiastic reception in the
West not only of his writings but also of his painting underscores yet
again the emerging transnational discourse of global modernity. Tagore,
who took up painting late in life, had a powerful impact on Indian mod-
ernism, but he was also an influential educationist and founder of a
holistic experimental university in Bengal. Tagore’s primitivism took
two forms, private and public: in his painting, Tagore used primitive art
to explore his unconscious, but in the public sphere, much like Gandhi,
Tagore laid claim to a primitivist anti-colonial resistance located in the
countryside.

the seduction of the unconscious

The self-fashioning of a modernist

Unlike Sher-Gil’s romantic image of the Indian peasant, Tagore’s primi-

tivist paintings were a ludic expression of his inner subjectivity.2 Tagore
did not reach his artistic ‘Damascus’ until his sixties, when he renounced
65
his love for illusionism in favour of avant-garde art.
He had taken drawing lessons in his youth, as was
expected in his affluent milieu. There exist early
sketches by him including a portrait of his wife dat-
ing from about 1880.3 In the 1870s, while in Paris,
the young poet expressed admiration for an academ-
ic nude by the fashionable French painter Carolus-
Duran, accusing social prudery of drawing a veil
over the beauty of the human body.4 He had always
taken a lively interest in art but felt diffident about
taking up painting seriously, often glancing longing-
ly ‘like a disappointed lover, at the muse of fine art’.5
His dramatic conversion to modernism was first
noted in 1924 by the Argentinian writer Victoria
Ocampo, who was later to be Stravinsky’s patron.
While she was nursing the poet back to health in her
villa in Buenos Aires, she chanced upon his notebook
where he had made doodles by joining together
crossed-out texts.6 Impressed with his radical imagi-
nation, she contacted Georges-Henri Rivière,
Curator of the Trocadéro Museum in Paris.
Knowing of Rivière’s commitment to ‘primitive’ art,
she prevailed upon him to arrange a show of Tagore’s
works. The hastily organized exhibition opened at
the avant-garde Galerie du Théâtre Pigalle on 2 May 1930, alongside an Rabindranath Tagore, untitled
exhibition of African and Oceanic art. Tagore’s paintings consisted of faces, sketch of his wife, c. 1880,
pencil on paper.
lovers, animals, landscapes and imaginary architecture, including the well-
known ‘bird sitting on an unwieldy humanoid beast’ and ‘nude woman
riding a flying monster’.7
Tagore’s reputation drew the French glitterati to the exhibition.
Reviews in general were complimentary, expressing surprise at the unex-
pected beauty of the works that revealed a rich imagination and a hitherto
unknown facet of his personality. Henri Bidou, a close ally of the belea-
guered Surrealists, penned the most penetrating analysis. He contrasted
Tagore’s ‘mimetic’ poetry with his ‘pure paintings’, uninfluenced by
academic art, finding a remarkable convergence of spirit between him
and the European modernists.8 Not only had the phrase ‘pure painting’
entered avant-garde vocabulary by now but André Breton’s ‘First
Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924), had defined Surrealist art as psychic
automatism in its pure state uncontrolled by reason, ‘the disinterested
play of thought’ as in a dream. Breton was influenced by Freud’s revolu-
tionary ideas on dreams and the archaeology of childhood, the ideas that
had also impressed Tagore. A short essay on automatic drawing was pub-
lished in The Modern Review in Calcutta in 1917, some seven years before
Breton’s manifesto.9
66
Rabindranath Tagore,
Architecture, Berlin, 1930,
coloured ink and wash on
paper.

After the judgement of Paris, Tagore’s works were exhibited in vari-

ous British cities, but they were cold-shouldered by English critics offend-
ed at the poet’s denunciation of the infamous Amritsar massacre. An
exception was the artist Joseph Southall in Birmingham, a Socialist Pacifist
and a leading figure in the English Tempera Revival. In his introduction
to the exhibition, he described Tagore’s lack of conventional art training as

Rabindranath Tagore, Animal,

Berlin, 1930, coloured ink and
wash on paper.

67
his strength because he made people see the unexpected.
The Birmingham Mail also expressed admiration for his
unconventional art as ‘a marvellous example of the sense
of balance and harmony, even in the most fortuitous of
its forms’. 10
Reactions were more complex in ‘Mitteleuropa’,
where Tagore was a household name, adoring crowds
following him everywhere and hanging on to his every
utterance. Tagore had an experimental mind of
immense fecundity that worked on many different lev-
els, but the ‘Tagore Bandwagon’ in Germany expected
him to be a prophet of Eastern spirituality, as wittily
captured by the satirical magazine Die Simplicissimus.11
Thomas Mann was among those who were put off by
this, dismissing him in 1921 ‘as a refined old English
lady’.12 Nor was Tagore himself entirely blameless.
Intoxicated with the charisma he exuded, he courted
adulation, a weakness partly caused by his failing
health. He alienated Freud by inviting him to visit him
at his hotel in Vienna where he was staying on 25
October 1926, which Freud did, but the father of psychoanalysis was not Olaf Gulbranson, ‘Die Grosse
amused by Tagore’s forwardness.13 Mode’ (‘The Height of
Fashion’), cartoon from
There were of course kindred spirits such as his devoted friend Simplicissimus dated 18 May
Albert Einstein. More intriguingly, Tagore’s mystical pantheism seems to 1921; inspired by Tagore,
have been in sympathy with Walter Gropius’s educational ideals of ‘inte- showing the fashionable Berlin
practice of contemplating the
grated life’ and his preference for handicrafts to mechanized work. We navel on the occasion of his
have no direct evidence of their having met in 1921 when Tagore visited visit to Germany.
the Bauhaus in Weimar, but it was at Tagore’s request that Klee,
Kandinsky and other Bauhaus artists sent their works to Calcutta, even
though Klee was personally unimpressed with Tagore’s poetry. However,
Tagore must have found Johannes Itten, an admirer of Eastern philoso-
phy, more congenial.14 The reception of Tagore’s paintings in 1930 was
also influenced by the German perception of the poet as a cultural medi-
ator between India and Germany. Inter-bellum Germany saw Indian
spirituality as a panacea for the moral crisis facing the nation. In 1924 the
critic Max Osborn, reviewing the exhibition of the Bengal School in
Berlin, had compared India’s quest for cultural regeneration with the
struggle for the validation of the German soul.15 Tagore’s works were dis-
played in major galleries in Berlin, Munich and Dresden. Ludwig Justi,
Director of the National Gallery in Berlin, who had been responsible for
organizing the 1924 Bengal School show, planned to acquire Tagore’s
works for the National Gallery.16 There were shows in Copenhagen,
Geneva and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Even though the avant-
garde was at that time out of favour in the Soviet Republic, official effu-
sions for Tagore’s expressionist art were possibly prompted by the fact
68
that his views carried weight in world opinion.17 In North America, the
works were shown in Toronto, New York and Philadelphia. For the New
York show, Ananda Coomaraswamy, art historian and curator of the
Asian Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, wrote admiringly
of his paintings as examples of modern primitive art, untouched by his
self-conscious literary output.18 A few dissenting voices in the West
included his erstwhile friend, Romain Rolland. The novelist was shocked
that Tagore could indulge his private passion and be carried away by
Western adulation. ‘One wonders about his egoism when all the Indian
leaders are in prison and India suffers its heroic passion’, he confided in
his diary.19
Tagore’s succès d’estime in 1930 certainly owed much to the mystery,
vitality and nervous energy displayed in his paintings. The most obvious
reaction among reviewers was to find the mystic Orient in them.20 The
more discerning, however, appreciated the imagination and originality of
the watercolours and their experimental quality that drew upon the
Unconscious. They underlined their affinities with global primitivism, com-
menting on their difference with the pantheistic naturalism of his poems.
The Vossiche Zeitung drew parallels between Tagore’s manner of piercing
through outer reality and that of modern European artists, particularly
Munch and Nolde, as well as his free play in the manner of Klee, finding
affinities between Indian abstractions and modern European ones.21

Line and rhythm in Tagore’s art

Why did Tagore appeal to the European modernists? By 1930, avant-
garde aesthetics had filtered through to public consciousness and acquired
a substantial following. Tagore’s lack of technical skill, his childlike sim-
plifications and his ‘stream of consciousness’ treatment appealed to the
avant-garde, attuned to primitive and child art. Even the academic artist
William Rothenstein was forced to acknowledge the ‘strange vitality’ of
his drawings, far superior to the ‘effeminate’ oriental art.22
Between 1915 and 1924, Tagore’s taste underwent a sea change, at the
end of which he symbolically renounced the eraser, a sine qua non of nat-
uralistic drawing, declaring art to be an act of self-expression, rather than
a ‘correct’ representation of the visual world. There were two distinct
sources of his modernism: Art Nouveau and Jugendstil graphics and
‘primitive’ masks and totemic objects. His first playful forays into the
world of graphic design can be seen in an altered text page around 1905,
leading on to the calligraphic ‘erasures’ on the manuscript pages of Purabi
and Rakta Karabi in the 1920s.23 Illustrations in Bengali and Gujarati
publications in the early twentieth century, which combined Art
Nouveau volutes, flowing tendrils, entwined creepers and sinuous
arabesques with traditional Indian decoration, were widely known
among the Indian educated.24 Tagore did not copy any particular motif,
69
but the cumulative effect of Jugendstil graphics, especially those of Gustav Rabindranath Tagore, Nude on
Klimt, Adolf Hölzel, Kolo Moser and Otto Eckmann, is seen in his mar- a Bird, Berlin, 1930, coloured
ink and wash on paper.
ginal drawings. In addition, Tagore adapted the spiky geometrical forms
of Art Deco, which became influential from 1924, though once again he Detail from E. McKnight
did not copy specific motifs. The only exception was his ‘nude woman Kauffer’s famous 1918 poster
for the Daily Herald, ‘Soaring
riding a flying monster’, which suggests his familiarity with McKnight to Success! The Early Bird’.
Kauffer’s famous poster, The Early Bird (1919), possibly seen at under- This poster must have made a
ground stations during his visit to London in 1920.25 deep if subliminal impression
More interestingly, there is an uncanny similarity in approaches to art on Tagore, who, as a man of
letters, was always more alert
between Tagore and the Jugendstil artist Adolf Hölzel, one primarily a to graphic art than to painting
writer and the other an artist, but both interested in incorporating written in his own paintings.
texts in a work of art. There is no evidence that Tagore knew the author
of ‘creative automatism’. However, Hölzel was Itten’s teacher and a key
influence at the Bauhaus, though he did not usually publish his designs in
art journals.26 Somewhat like Tagore’s doodles, Hölzel’s abstract orna-
ments were often placed alongside handwritten texts. He also incorporat-
ed printed texts in his doodles and designs, sometimes supplying his own
texts for them.27 Tagore, who belonged to a self-conscious literary milieu
that cherished elegant calligraphy, became well known for his Bengali
handwriting. Yet, even though his starting point was the text page, the
meaning of the text was ultimately sacrificed in the finished drawing.
The second element they shared was the notion of rhythm. Hölzel
spoke of the ‘inner rhythm of the soul’, and of the line as a form of ener-
gy, urging artists to study the ‘linear expressive movement’.28 Tagore’s
economical forms and sparing colours in his painting were held together
by a flowing rhythmical line that grew out of his calligraphic experi-
ments.29 A poet and a composer of songs and dance-dramas, Tagore was
acutely sensitive to rhythm, describing the universe in 1916 as an ‘endless
rhythm of lines and colours’. Indeed rhythm was to constitute the back-
bone of his painting.30 In 1930, Tagore explained his art as ‘versification
in lines’, describing his ultimate aim as the search for the ‘rhythmic sig-
nificance of form’ rather than the representation of an idea or a fact.31 Just
before his German exhibition, Tagore reflected on his work method: ‘I try
70
Rabindranath Tagore, to make my corrections dance [and] connect them in a rhythmic relation-
Page from Purabi ms., 1920s, ship . . . ’32
pen and ink.

Adolf Hölzel, Abstract

Ornament with Text, before
The dark landscape of the psyche
1900, pen and ink.
What took Tagore’s work from the decorative to a more radical mod-
ernist plane was his discovery of Native American, Oceanic and African
ritual masks, totemic animals, face ‘scars’ and body tattoos, some of which
drew upon Friedrich Ratzel’s popular work, The History of Mankind
(1896).33 Nor could he have been oblivious to the profusely illustrated
ethnographic articles regularly published in Bengali journals. A page of
the poet’s jottings in the text of Kheya dated 1905 shows an early interest
in the Haida and Tlingit art of North America, which matured into the
fearsome reptile in the Rakta Karabi manuscript dated 1923.34 The face as
a mask was one of Tagore’s most obsessive images. Tagore may have
encountered primitive masks at the Trocadéro while he was in Paris in
1872, making a sketch of a primitive mask as early as 1892. Primitive
masks began to be prominently displayed in European collections from
the late nineteenth century, and were soon to be part of the modernist
vocabulary. Apart from Picasso’s celebrated Demoiselles d’Avignon, in 1912
the Blaue Reiter Almanac carried August Macke’s seminal article on prim-
itive masks.35 Tagore turned the human face into a mask by cropping the
ears and suppressing other details, thereby stressing the mask’s ‘impassive’
71
 Rabindranath Tagore, Untitled
after Primitive Art, c. 1932,
coloured ink and wash on
paper.

character in a series of faces and ‘free’ portraits. Scholars have identified

these haunting faces with the poet’s beloved sister-in-law Kadambari
Devi, whose tragic suicide left an indelible mark in his life. Even if these
were inspired by her, their abbreviated style took on the intensity of a
primitive icon.36
Although Victoria Ocampo was the first to be credited with discover-
ing Tagore’s new art, the actual turning point in his artistic perception
was possibly 1921, though it did not become full-blown modernism until
later. Tagore had an unusually lively curiosity. Because of his eminence
and his friendship with many of the leading cultural figures, he had first-
hand experience of the German cultural scene, including modernism, not
least at the Bauhaus in Weimar during his visit to Germany in 1921. If he
72
Rabindranath Tagore, Rakta
Karabi, 1923, coloured ink and
wash on paper.
Rabindranath Tagore, Untitled
(Mask), 1932, coloured ink and
wash on paper.
is silent in his memoirs on this it is not at all surprising. For instance, he
makes no mention of Freud, whom he insisted on meeting in Vienna. The
primitivism espoused by the Bauhaus Expressionists resonated with him,
and later seems to have flowered into his expressionist paintings.37
European reviewers, especially Henri Bidou, the ideologue of
Surrealism, were impressed with Tagore’s naïve ‘automatic’ self-taught
quality, especially as they were aware of his highly formal ‘mimetic’ literary
output. Coomaraswamy was convinced that Tagore had expunged all pre-
vious literary experience to produce a truly naïve art, like a child, inventing
his own technique as he went along.38 Tagore himself was eager to rein-
force the artless quality of his painting, describing himself as an autodidact
in his address to a distinguished gathering in Dresden, and disclosing to
Rothenstein earlier on that his drawings ‘certainly possess psychological
interest being products of untutored fingers and untrained mind’.39
If Tagore had limited representational skills, the watercolours reveal
artistic control, a strong sense of formal design and an ability to discard
unnecessary details. The reason behind his description of himself as an
‘unskilled dauber’ was not diffidence. Tagore consciously embraced a self-
taught ‘automatic’ style, insisting that his art was a recapitulation of his
childhood experience: ‘I lay with my face to the wall; the faint light drew
myriad black and white patterns created by the peeling plaster on white-
washed walls. I put myself to sleep inventing weird shapes.’40 He needed
to ‘regress’ to childhood in order to recover this fantasy world, as this
73
passage suggests. We can think of parallels with artists such as Klee, who
sought to learn from their own childhood drawings. The late nineteenth
century had discovered the autonomous world of children and the value
of their creativity unhampered by traditional pedagogy. Tagore intro-
duced this free creative atmosphere at Santiniketan and visited the pio-
neering educationist Franz Cizek’s free drawing class for children in
Vienna in 1921.41

Rabindranath Tagore, Untitled,

c. 1930s, coloured ink and wash
on paper.

74
 Above all, it was Freud’s authority that provided modernist artists
with the theoretical wherewithal to ‘regress’ to childhood.42 The rele-
vance of childhood in the mental life of an adult is no longer in question,
though the function of the Unconscious in artistic expression is unclear.
Ernst Kris warns us against oversimplifying the relationship between cre-
ativity and childhood experience, while E. H. Gombrich points out that
for children’s play of associations to be meaningful, it must be anchored to
the conventions that give meaning to art.43 A passage in Freud suggests a
clue to Tagore’s own approach to his art: the psychoanalyst compared
child’s play or daydreaming with creative imagination, which through its
mastery over ‘undeveloped dispositions and suppressed wishes, liberated
dominant memories’.44
Not only did Tagore insist on the childlike quality of his art but he
repeatedly emphasized two other elements, unpredictability and dream
imagery.45 In his introduction to his painting Tagore claimed to possess
the unconscious courage of the unsophisticated, like one who walks in a
dream on a perilous path.46 Furthermore, the poet offered a Freudian
explanation of his artistic process as a series of accidental discoveries,
rather than premeditation.47 Freud spoke of double entendres and ambi-
guities as offering access to the inner recesses of our psyche. J. J. Spector,
writing on Freud’s aesthetics, comments that apparitions, accidents and
distortions that reveal the ‘essence’ may not be psychoanalytically prov-
able, but they can act as a spur to creativity.48 Ambiguity, randomness,
unpredictability, indeterminacy, the sense of ‘something in-between’ con-
ferred an enigmatic power on Tagore’s images. The Danish Berlingske
Tidende aptly described them as shapes produced by children with blot-
ting paper, something in between ‘an insect and a woman, a blue fairy
bird and a poetic nameless flower’.49 The paper had in mind the Rorschach
test, whose origins lay in the children’s game of inventing forms. (The
ambiguous shapes that appear by chance when a drop of ink falls on blot-
ting paper can be interpreted endlessly.)50
The precise nature of the relationship between the poet and the father
of psychoanalysis would be interesting to know.51 We do not have a clue
as to what they discussed when Tagore met Freud in Vienna in 1926, nor
why the poet had wished to see him. But there can be no doubt about the
shadow cast by Freud in Tagore’s descriptions of the apparitions, phantas-
magoric creatures and nightmarish shapes that inhabited his pictorial
imagination.52 In the last year of his life, he felt the need to unburden
himself to the painter Jamini Roy, both of whom felt that they were
kindred spirits: ‘when I started my painting, the flora and fauna of this
universe began to appear before me in their true forms. I represented
these true forms.’53
These images dredged up from the depths of his psyche – primitive
masks, deformed monsters and erotic encounters – and their sombre
mood of alienation, link him directly to modernism, its anxieties, its ambiva-
75
lences and its fractured consciousness. In India ambiguity and suggestive-
ness as artistic devices were absent in academic art or the nationalist
allegories of the Bengal School. More to the point, modernist issues of
alienation and displacement had not formed part of Tagore’s ‘mimetic’
literary corpus. His mystical lyricism, expressed in a mellifluous language,
was governed by a strict decorum originating in Victorian evangelism.
From the late 1920s, with age, failing health, disappointments and a sense
of loss, he began to question these very same aesthetic standards. By the
1930s, Tagore, like Marcel Proust in France, had been turned into a
national monument in India. Bishnu Dey and Sudhindranath Datta, the
younger generation of modernist poets in Bengal, who preferred the frag-
mentation and discontinuities of modern life to his Olympian prose and
emotionally charged poetry, quietly ignored him. A letter dated 1928
already hints at his loss of poetic inspiration, when lines began to cast a
spell on him.54 Tagore felt liberated from the ‘high’ canon of good taste,
over which he had presided for many years in Bengal, producing some two
thousand paintings (c.1928–41).
For a poet known for his exaltation of beauty, truth and goodness,
Tagore’s pictorial nightmares unequivocally repudiated the ‘convention-
ally’ beautiful; the images that plumbed the dark depths were primal and
transgressive. In 1927 he felt the need for reassurance from the European Rabindranath Tagore, Untitled
modernists, as he did from Roy, that they too deliberately expunged the (Nude Male), 1934?, coloured
Good and the Beautiful from their art.55 Wendy Steiner has spoken of the ink and wash on paper.
troubled relationship between modernism and beauty.56 One of the most
Rabindranath Tagore, Untitled
tantalizingly ambiguous motifs in Tagore is the primitive mask. Masks, Cowering Nude Woman, 1934,
after all, are meant to conceal one’s identity – we are thus left with some coloured ink and wash on paper.

76
unanswered questions: what do they reveal or conceal? However, in
terms of their disturbing suggestiveness no other works of Tagore came
close to the very small number of enigmatic ‘erotic’ paintings that offer us
glimpses of unresolved inner tensions. I can suggest only very tentative
explanations for them. Tagore never hesitated to exalt physical beauty in
his writings; we may recall his admiration for a late nineteenth-century
nude. Nonetheless, if Tagore introduced erotic images in his ‘mimetic’ lit-
erature, they were oblique, allegorical and intensely mystical.57 By con-
trast his non-representational nudes are very different even if we allow
for his limited skill. They are ‘artless’, uninhibited and ‘unbeautiful’, the
male figures in particular displaying their genitals, thereby breaking an
‘unstated’ taboo of Victorian India.58 One of his strangest paintings is of a
submissive androgynous figure that hints at an ambiguous sexuality
which none of his literary works ever does. Take Untitled Cowering Nude
Woman, with its clothed figures (judges? torturers?), hovering threaten-
ingly over a crouching naked female.59 The power of this subliminal
work lies in its suggestion of a tormentor-victim relationship rendered
through a ‘primitivist’ non-representational mode.
The justification Tagore offered for his primitivism was self-expres-
sion, which was part and parcel of the Romantic revolt against the aes-
thetics of ‘effects’. Even as early as 1916, his comments recall the credo of
Expressionism: art mediated between the outside world and inner forces
and was not a representation of objects.60 From around 1928, he took an
increasingly formalist view of art in his critical writings, politely refusing
to explain the meaning of his works at the India Society in London in
1930: ‘People often ask me about the meaning of my pictures. I remain
silent even as they are. It is for them to express and not to explain . . .’61

A cosmopolitan confronts nationalism

Tagore’s expressionist art rejected the narrow focus of cultural ‘authentic-
ity’ as espoused by the Bengal School, welcoming cultural borrowings as
inevitable in an expanding global culture.62 Tagore’s inward journey in
view of the growing political crisis in India called into question his
commitment to nationalism both within India and without.63 Few Indians
had done more than the poet to overturn the colonial image of India’s
inferiority. Yet his complex response to colonialism, which included sting-
ing attacks on Western jingoism, did not spare aggressive Hindu nation-
alism. It lost him friends on both sides of the divide. Tagore’s ideals of uni-
versal human values that transcended asymmetrical power relations were
part of his self-definition as a cosmopolitan.64 The Berlingske Tidende was
astute enough to observe that Tagore’s paintings mirrored the man ‘who
has travelled all over the globe and investigated the various cultures of the
East and the West’.65 The tension in his creativity between universalism
and cultural specificity made him an optimist about art as a universal
77
language. He came to the conclusion that painting transcended the limita-
tions of language, a reflection of his growing pessimism about the survival
of his poetry. The conventions that governed language, he argued, inhibited
their cross-cultural understanding.66 On 24 June 1926, Tagore and Romain
Rolland met in Villeneuve to exchange ideas about the universality of art
and music. Ironically, the discussion, conducted through interpreters, posed
the very difficulties of ‘translating’ from one culture to another that Tagore
had raised; they failed to appreciate each other’s musical taste at all.67
For us today, it is perhaps difficult to share Rabindranath Tagore’s
optimism about the universality of art, an optimism common to his gen-
eration. It is true that a foreign language can be totally incomprehensible,
whilst the subject of foreign art can at least be recognized in most cases.
But recognition is not the same as appreciation. The optimism of Tagore’s
generation sprang from their faith in the objectivity of knowledge. An
instance of this is nineteenth-century art criticism, which failed to recog-
nize that artistic language differed because art was concerned not so much
with the objective world as with its representations.
After the wide exposure of his paintings in the West in the year 1930,
there were a few more local shows during his lifetime. Under the shadow
of war and depression, global enthusiasm for Tagore imploded as abrupt-
ly as it had exploded in the interwar years. With his European triumphs
fading, Tagore increasingly turned inward in his last years, for the first
time enjoying painting for its own sake.68 In the aftermath of World War
II and the Holocaust, Tagore’s paeans to universal brotherhood became
discredited. But today as the ‘clash of civilizations’ and identity politics
dominate our global society, Tagore’s universalism and his scepticism
about nationalism do not seem out of place. His artistic language and
skills were limited, but within those limitations he created a very personal
form of modernism with the power to disturb and astonish.69

santiniketan and environmental primitivism

Art and Tagore’s educational ideology
Tagore the reformer of education was very different from Tagore the uni-
versalist painter. In 1909, in his seminal essay, he had portrayed the Indian
village as the very antithesis of the colonial city. His environmental prim-
itivism was to be realized through his holistic educational experiments at
his Visva Bharati University in rural Santiniketan in the 1920s. The insti-
tution began as a high school in 1901, gradually acquiring in the 1920s a
cultural centre, a university, a department of agriculture and an institute
for rural reconstruction, the last two reflecting urgent nationalist concerns.
A cultural critic of imperialism, Tagore did not reject modern science and
technology at Santiniketan, but adapted modern educational methods to
the Indian environment.70
78
 The poet’s pedagogic ideology had remarkable parallels with the
Bauhaus movement, even as its driving force was a critique of Western
urban colonialism based on ancient Indian thought.71 In a letter dated 1921
the artist Oskar Schlemmer remarked on the existence of two separate ide-
ological strands at Bauhaus, a form of primitivism that drew inspiration
from Eastern ‘spirituality’ versus commitment to progress and technology.72
Tagore showed little interest in Bauhaus reform of industrial design, but he
must have responded to Kandinsky’s search for an alternative spiritual
expression and Johannes von Itten’s mystical approach to art.73 He shared
Gropius’s ideas about the individual’s place in the wider environment. The
architect was less mystical than Itten, but there are telling parallels between
Tagore’s educational ideals of ‘integrated life’, and Gropius’s dislike of
‘mechanized work’, his insistence on individual creativity and allegiance to
the Deutscher Werkbund ideal of communal art, as expounded in The
Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus.74 As early as 1909, Tagore had
rejected bookish, vocation-oriented colonial education in favour of a ‘her-
mitage’ university inspired by ancient Indian thought that would nourish
emotion and intellect. Santiniketan was founded in 1921, the year Gandhi
launched his Non-Cooperation movement, inspiring many to boycott colo-
nial institutions. One such individual was the artist Nandalal Bose
(1882–1966) who was to become a pivotal figure at Santiniketan. At this uni-
versity, primitivism as the repudiation of urban colonial culture permeated
all levels of education. It drew upon Tagore’s environmentalism, Gandhi’s
critique of Western capitalism, the elite valorization of village India, and
finally the nationalist myth of the ‘innocent’ adibasis (aboriginals).75
At Santiniketan, art was to be an integral part of an all-rounded edu-
cation; Tagore had long considered Abanindranath’s pupil Nandalal the
best person to give it shape. As his project advanced in 1919, with con-
summate skill, he was able to entice Nandalal away from the Indian
Society of Oriental Art in Calcutta to Kala Bhavan (Art School) at
Santiniketan.76 Nandalal, for his part, felt relieved to leave the govern-
ment-funded institution, which he found stifling.77 Modest, taciturn,
somewhat rigid, but a man of strong moral fibre and iron resolve,
Nandalal was prepared to renounce urban comforts in order to realize
Tagore’s educational vision. Santiniketan developed an integrated system
of education from the primary school stage to the university level, in
which art was to play a humane role. Tagore, who was convinced that art
could not be learned, allowed children to develop unfettered creativity.
In 1921, he witnessed the confirmation of his favourite ideas in Cizek’s
art class for children in Vienna.78 Nandalal’s curriculum incorporated
Tagore’s notions about creativity and experimentation in addition to his
own ideas of a non-hierarchical artistic community at the Kala Bhavan.
In 1925, in order to encourage student-teacher bonding, he arranged for
them to work side by side in a studio, with students having the freedom
to pursue their own particular interests. In 1928–9, he assigned to each
79
student a personal instructor, aiming to revive the pre-colonial appren-
ticeship under a master.79
While respecting spontaneity, Nandalal nonetheless expected the stu-
dent to harness his creativity to discipline. Although he had been part of
the nationalist rebellion against academic art, Nandalal retained a respect
for basic colonial art school training, especially geometry as a foundation of
drawing. Conscious of the need for an underlying formal structure in a
painting, he was never comfortable with the hazy wash technique of
Abanindranath. His departure from Calcutta completed the ideological
rift with his teacher, although he continued to profess respect for him in
public.80 At Santiniketan, he helped wean students away from the morotai
wash technique of oriental art towards the impasto effect of tempera.81
Nandalal’s curriculum was quite eclectic; he was prepared to accept
even colonial art teaching, including scientific anatomy, which had been
anathema to the orientalists, if it helped artistic progress. However, as a con-
cession to them, he devised schematic ‘stick’ figures to work out naturalist
poses rather than using nude models, at the same time introducing vigor-
ous life studies of animals.82 By the 1930s, however, Nandalal was forced to
introduce a more conventional curriculum, including Renaissance art, after
his failure to ensure competent levels of art training. Students were also
encouraged to draw the scantily clad Santal women at work in order to
understand the body in movement. Yet Nandalal’s criticism of Western
art’s lurches from trompe l’oeil to abstraction, and his preference for the
‘more balanced object-centred’ approach of oriental art, suggests his
attempts at a synthesis of East and West.83 For instance, his view of repre-
sentation, not a mimetic reproduction of nature but a communion with its
myriad forms, encouraging creativity and a respect for the environment,
clearly recalls East Asian art.84 This is evident in his numerous sketchbooks
filled with quick brush drawings of local flora, fauna and the seasons that
served as mental notes for teaching.85 Indeed, we notice the central impor-
tance of Okakura Kakuzo’s art theories, which he had imbibed as a student,
in Nandalal’s curriculum. The Japanese ideologue had developed his Pan-
Asian artistic principles in collaboration with the Tagores around 1905,
evolving three cardinal principles, nature, tradition and creativity, as a
selective response to Westernization.86 In the final analysis, however, strong
decorative lines and a unified formal structure in art remained the core of
Nandalal’s teaching.87
Nandalal’s growing openness to Western art, shunned by the orien-
talists, can be partly explained by his symbiotic relationship with Tagore
and his friendship with the small international contingent at the univer-
sity, the political activist Charles Freer Andrews, the Orientalist Sylvain
Lévi, the art historian Stella Kramrisch, the artist Andrée Karpelès and
the urban theorist Patrick Geddes. Among these, Kramrisch’s presence
was decisive in introducing Western art history at Santiniketan. These
various influences laid the foundations of modernism at Santiniketan,
80
 the finest flowerings of which were Benodebehari Mukhopadhyaya and
Ramkinkar Baij.88

The artist and the saint

Nandalal considered himself a spiritual disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, tak-
ing up the spinning wheel as a tribute to the Non-Cooperation movement.
His linotype of Gandhi’s celebrated salt march to Dandi in 1930, depicting
the ‘father of the nation’ in his heroic determination, remains a classic in its
austere blend of economy and expressiveness.89 Gandhi’s vision of a higher
moral purpose of art was to bring him and Nandalal together in the 1930s.
Initially Gandhi held the ‘hallowed’ view of the spirituality of Indian art,
which had been part of the nationalist discourse since the late nineteenth
century.90 His ideas about art began to change in response to his own evolv-
ing doctrine of moral force as an instrument of change. In 1924, he told an
interviewer that he had no sympathy for what was currently regarded as
art’.91 In 1927 Gandhi made clear in Young India his Tolstoyan view of art:
Nandalal Bose, Dandi March ‘Who can deny that much that passes for science and art today . . . panders
(Bapuji), 1930, linocut. to our basest passion?’92 His insistence from 1928 onwards that real art
was concerned with the beauty of moral acts reflect-
ed his objective of utilizing art to build the nation’s
moral character.93
Nandalal was particularly moved by Gandhi’s
respect for the common man, not to mention his
efforts to confer human dignity on the Untouchables.
His interventionist form of artistic nationalism shows
uneasy attempts to bridge the gap between the two
opposing poles of nationalism represented by Tagore
and Gandhi respectively: while agreeing with
Gandhi’s critique of Western materialism, Tagore
did not share the Mahatma’s brand of active politics.
Gandhi for his part was unhappy with Tagore’s lais-
sez faire attitude to caste inequities at Santiniketan.94
Nandalal urged students to be aware of both the
wider community and the environment, an idea that
owed as much to Gandhi’s respect for the common
people as to Tagore’s environmentalism.95 His con-
cern for the disadvantaged led him to give simple art
lessons to housewives and to incorporate women’s
domestic art, such as alpona, in the Kala Bhavan
curriculum.96 Nandalal also took a personal interest
in training women students in decorative art. This
would, he convinced himself, arouse an aesthetic
sense in women who in their turn would influence
their families.97 Under the graphic artist Andrée
81
Karpelès and the fresco painter Pratima Devi, students learned not only the
fine arts of oils, frescoes and woodcut, but also decorative arts, such as book
binding, lithography, lacquerwork, leatherwork and batik, as well as
women’s art, namely, alpona, embroidery and stitchwork.98 Nandalal intro-
duced rustic costumes for plays staged at the university to raise awareness
about the culture of the rural poor.99 Likewise, his interest in folk art
stemmed from his Gandhian respect for the humble artisan, rather than
any intrinsic interest in its formal qualities. Although he had dabbled
briefly in Kalighat pat during its vogue in Calcutta about 1915, he did not
seek inspiration from it in his own work. Believing originality and progress
to be the driving force of art – both colonial legacies – he did not wish to
return to folk art, nor did he admire its alleged ‘modernist’ simplicity.
Indeed, in 1932, he dismissed Gurasaday Dutt’s romanticization of folk art
as entirely artificial. He described the patuas as ‘backward’, saying their
conventional work could only improve with ‘scientific’ art education.100
On his visit to Santiniketan in 1922, Gandhi came to know of
Nandalal’s role in the rural reconstruction programme at the university.
Nandalal was in the crowd that greeted Gandhi but was too shy to
approach him. A convergence of interests eventually brought them
together. The power base of Gandhi’s political revolution, we know, was
rural India. The Mahatma constantly reminded his compatriots that true
India resided in India’s countless villages. Yet Gandhi was acutely con-
scious that many of the Congress leaders were from the cities, and hence
had only vague notions about indigenous art. In 1935, he set to redress this
by helping to form the Village Industries Association in order to revive
the indigenous arts and crafts. In 1936, an ambitious Exhibition of Khadi
and Village Industries was held during the annual Congress conference in
Lucknow.101 In 1938, in his speech to the Khadi and Village Industries
Exhibition held during the Congress conference at Haripura, he
expressed the hope that these exhibitions would be a ‘training school . . .
and not a place of entertainment’.102
In view of Gandhi’s ambitious plans for art, it is not at all surprising
that in 1936 he turned to Nandalal, asking him to organize the exhibition
of Indian art for the Lucknow Congress.103 In his speech at the exhibition,
Gandhi paid a handsome tribute to Nandalal’s efforts in bringing to life the
local villagers’ crafts through simple artistic symbols.104 Nandalal felt over-
whelmed that the Mahatma spent time at the exhibition taking a personal
interest in the works of the artists. In 1937, for the Congress session at rural
Faizpur, Gandhi entrusted him with the ambitious task of designing a
whole township with cheap local materials such as mud, bamboo and straw,
to house the numerous delegates attending from all over India. For the
Mahatma the township became an object lesson in rural self-reliance
through art.105 From this time, Nandalal enjoyed Gandhi’s affection and
became his confidant in artistic matters.106 In 1937 Gandhi intervened with
the industrialist G. D. Birla to provide a subvention for the Kala Bhavan,
82
which he affectionately called Nanda Babu’s art school.107 (‘Babu’ is an hon-
orific address, like ‘Mr’, used to address the Bengali Bhadralok or elite.)
Nandalal’s posters (wall panels) for the Haripura Congress, produced
at Gandhi’s behest, gave him the greatest personal satisfaction and
brought him nationwide attention. This time Gandhi set him the task of
organizing the exhibition displays in such a way that the local villagers
could gaze at them as they went about their daily business.108 Gandhi’s
encouragement to artists to reach the ordinary villagers became a
Congress ideal from now on. As a preparation for the Haripura Congress,
Nandalal made pen-and-ink and brush studies of the local villagers to
lend the posters a touch of authenticity. The same idea of creating a vil-
lage ambience was behind the treatment of these posters, done in thick
tempera in a bold cursory style and broad brushwork reminiscent of the
patuas or scroll painters. If he considered folk art to be unworthy of
emulation, why had he changed his mind? In this case, he clearly wished
to make a political statement. The folk style of these panels was seen as
appropriate for representing rural life and labour – cobblers, carpenters,
drummers, barbers and nursing mothers. Indo-Islamic scalloped arches
framing the figures underlined the shared Hindu-Muslim heritage to
counter communal tensions.109 Preparing the 400 posters was an ambi-
tious undertaking, involving the whole Kala Bhavan; Nandalal produced
81 of them.110 The strong sense of formal design in these panels suggests
his apprenticeship at Ajanta rather than the amorphous wash technique
of oriental art.111 His student and close associate Benodebehari compared
these posters with murals because of their bold colour scheme and their
blend of nature and convention.112 Gandhi exhorted the delegates at
Haripura to study the exhibition carefully to learn about the moral pur-
pose of art with a warm acknowledgement of Nandalal’s contribution.113
The Mahatma profoundly affected Nandalal’s thinking about the
moral purpose of art. Nandalal began to use simple affordable material
for buildings, frescoes and sculptures at Santiniketan, a building practice
that Gandhi wanted to introduce at his ashram commune at Wardah.114
However, after Haripura, Nandalal withdrew from participating in
Congress sessions as he was a little disappointed with Gandhi’s treatment
of Subhas Bose, his other hero, though he never wavered in his devotion
to the Mahatma.115 As the next incident demonstrates, nor did Gandhi
ever lose respect for the artist. When Puri in the province of Orissa was
chosen as the venue for a Congress session, the delegates persuaded
Gandhi that the erotic temple sculptures in the vicinity should be plas-
tered over before the conference. In line with his ‘practical’ morality, he
had little sympathy for these ancient sculptures and accordingly consent-
ed to the plan. In fairness to Gandhi, he changed his mind after Nandalal’s
intervention. He trusted the artist’s integrity sufficiently to accept the
aesthetic defence of the sculptures.116

83
 Nandalal and the Santiniketan mural experiment Nandalal Bose, Dhaki,
Haripura poster, 1937,
Historical murals expounding national allegories have always been grist tempera on paper.
to the nationalist mill. Later we shall examine the much-trumpeted
nationalist murals produced for the Raj in New Delhi and London (see
Chapter Four). There is an almost total silence at Santiniketan over these
lucrative commissions. (The one exception was Dhirendra Krishna Deb
84
Barman, who won the competition to paint the murals at India House in
London. He was one of the four that decorated India House but he was
not the most influential artist at Santiniketan.) As with his other endeav-
ours, Nandalal saw the need to make a truly independent cultural asser-
tion that owed little to the colonial regime. The rise of an alternative
mural movement at the Kala Bhavan with the aim of creating a convinc-
ing indigenous expression was also in accord with Tagore’s environmen-
tal nationalism. Engrossed in developing a new artistic expression
through murals, trying out ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ processes from East and West,
and seeking to make the murals blend with the surroundings as an inte-
gral part of the environment, Nandalal and his pupils seem to have qui-
etly ignored the battle of styles in distant Bombay and Calcutta.117 The
Santiniketan murals have been documented in considerable detail by
scholars.118 Hence I shall not be concerned so much with their stylistic
and iconographic analysis as with the political and cultural implications
of this movement and its impact on national self-imagining. One of the
major contributions of Nandalal’s pupils was to create an open air mural
tradition, as an integral part of architecture, to be accessible to the whole
community even at the risk of their rapid deterioration. Santiniketan also
led in concentrating on everyday subjects and landscapes for murals in
preference to national allegories.
The murals were collaborative experiments between teachers and
students with Nandalal at the helm, which was in keeping with his ped-
agogic vision. There were important learning stages in Nandalal’s mural
experiments, each new experience enhancing his own skills at the same
time as they fed into his art teaching. Nandalal’s first encounter with
mural painting went back to his student days with E. B. Havell, who had
initiated mural experiments at the Calcutta art school. However, for the
aspiring nationalist, there was no greater model than the ancient Buddhist
murals at Ajanta. Sister Nivedita, Vivekananda’s Irish disciple and men-
tor of the nationalist Bengal School of painting, had urged them to deco-
rate modern ‘temples’ to the nation with inspiring murals. In 1909, she
arranged for them to help the muralist Christiana Herringham with her
work at Ajanta. Lady Herringham, who along with Joseph Southall was
the leader of the Tempera Revival in England, had come to study these
ancient murals in India. Nandalal was the only one among
Abanindranath’s students to have been profoundly affected by the experi-
ence, helping him to break out of the hazy brushwork of oriental art
towards clearly modelled hard-edged figures and complex compositions
reminiscent of these ancient paintings.119
Nandalal’s initial aim of undertaking monumental painting met with
institutional indifference.120 An exception was Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose
(1859–1937), who commissioned him to decorate his home and the Bose
Institute (Basu Vijnan Mandir) in 1917. The great scientist had done much
to help overcome Western stereotypes about the ‘mystical’ Indian mind
85
through his researches in life sciences. According to The Times, Bose’s
inaugural address at the institute made a powerful impression even in dis-
tant Britain. The Athenaeum described the founding of the institute for
research in pure science as a momentous event in the history of science.121
The greyish-purple sandstone building of the institute was of pre-Islamic
inspiration, with its ceiling painting in the great Lecture Hall emulating
Ajanta. For the front wall, Nandalal chose the figure of Surya, the sun
god, driving a seven-horsed chariot, while the rear wall was decorated
with an elaborate allegorical frieze, ‘The Triumph of Science and
Imagination’. It represented Intellect brandishing a naked sword, sailing
down the sacred river towards true knowledge with his bride
Imagination playing the flute by his side.122
Nandalal’s move to Santiniketan in 1918 gave him the opportunity to
experiment with outdoor murals that could withstand the elements. In
1920–21, he and his colleagues, Asit Haldar and Surendranath Kar, were
offered a generous fee by the Gwalior government to copy the deteriorat-
ing frescoes at the Bagh Caves.123 These caves in central India were sec-
ond only to Ajanta in importance and thus afforded a valuable experience
to Nandalal. The artist recorded the process and the difficulties of copy-
ing the works, he and his colleague Surendranath sending back the copies
to Santiniketan regularly. Later they gifted a large copy of a Bagh paint-
ing (1219 x 137cm) to the university. Nandalal used this experience to
teach his students the technical aspects of ancient frescoes. Tagore, who
subscribed to the view that monumental works contributed to the nation’s
glory, warmly endorsed Nandalal’s Bagh experience.124
Nandalal’s exposure to Bagh and Ajanta strengthened his resolve to
make mural painting rather than miniature watercolours the cornerstone
of his teaching.125 However, recalling Havell’s unfortunate experience
with the Jaipur fresco, he made sure that the teething problems did not
prove insuperable and was prepared to learn from other traditions includ-
ing Western tempera: ‘We seek access now to all the artistic traditions of
the world. After knowing all that, if we still find Indian art the best, we
shall stick to it with greater determination . . . I don’t see anything wrong
in such borrowing.’126 He found the translation of Cennino Cennini by
Lady Herringham, under whom he had worked at Ajanta, particularly
useful, trying out her egg tempera method on sand-treated walls, especial-
ly in the Cheena Bhaban building.127 In 1924, Tagore’s daughter-in-law
Pratima Devi joined him at the Kala Bhavan. His former student, she
had exhibited with Sunayani Devi at the Indian Society of Oriental Art
around 1915. She later took training in Paris in the Italian ‘wet fresco’
method.128
The Kala Bhavan library bears witness to Nandalal and his stu-
dents’ first unsure attempts to emulate Ajanta and Bagh. He and
Surenendranath Kar also experimented with painting on untreated clay
surfaces, which ended in disaster. They, however, learned from their
86

Nandalal Bose, Halakarshan
(detail), 1930, fresco buono,
Sriniketan, Santiniketan.
mistakes. In 1922 Patrick Geddes, the British urban planner and biogra-
pher of Jagadish Bose, visited Santiniketan. He advised them to use char-
coal as a durable medium for the foundational drawing and suggested
that they decorate the exteriors of buildings with paintings in order to
make them an integral part of the environment. Decoration as an essen-
tial part of architecture had a distant resonance with William Morris, but
it also appealed to Nandalal’s own ideal of making painting matter in
everyday life.129
Having gained experience in egg tempera, Nandalal turned in 1927
to indigenous fresco techniques. At his request, Sailendranath Dey,
Principal of Jaipur School of Art and one of his old friends from the art
school days, despatched a traditional Rajasthani painter, Narsinglal
Mistri, to Santiniketan. As a Gandhian, Nandalal admonished his stu-
dents not to treat the humble artisan with condescension.130 The
Rajasthani stayed in Santiniketan until 1933, completing a 24 m2 mural
on the front wall of the library with the collaboration of Nandalal and his
students. This marked the next stage in Nandalal’s development. He cor-
rectly surmised that the bright flat colours and bold lines of Jaipur paint-
ing were better at achieving the two-dimensional effect he was aiming for
than the chiaroscuro and ‘three-dimensionality’ of Ajanta or Bagh.131
87
Nandalal also explored Nepalese wall painting and village wall decora- Nandalal Bose, Halakarshan
tions, consulted ancient treatises such as the Shilparatnam, and followed (detail), 1930, fresco buono,
Sriniketan, Santiniketan.
the practices of local craftsmen.132 The artist summed up the heteroge-
neous sources of the mural tradition in Santiniketan: Patas of Jagannath,
illuminated manuscripts, Tibetan thang-ka, Rajasthani miniatures, chao
technique, chikan (embroidery) work, Chinese and Japanese paintings on
silk, Sinhalese frescoes, Jaipur arayaesh, our Bengali ponkha work and
Italian frescoes.133
Nandalal’s achievement was to assimilate the diverse techniques he
had experimented with in a unified expression, in 1930 completing his first
ambitious mural in Sriniketan, the agricultural science building, based on
the Italian ‘wet fresco’ technique. In this multiple-figure composition, a
lively observation of nature was firmly controlled by a fine sense of
design.134 The subject was Halakarshan (ploughing), a ceremony with
which Tagore inaugurated seasonal cultivation every year by ritually turn-
ing up the earth with a plough. Vriksha Ropan (tree planting) and
Halakarshan were the two fertility rituals introduced in 1928 as part of the
poet’s concern for the environment. In these two works Nandalal replaced
historic murals with everyday activities, such as cultivation and other
forms of seasonal work, making the Santals the central figures in his com-
positions. The originality of Nandalal’s mural experiments lay in their
non-illusionist monumental style, which depended for their effect on the
88
 formal arrangement of lines and colours. The ‘mundane’ genre scenes and
the landscape backgrounds greatly contributed to their effectiveness.
Nandalal’s more impressive murals were produced between 1938 and
1945 quite independently of the nationalist debates that had raged for
decades over murals in the New Delhi Secretariat and India House in
London. In 1938, in keeping with Maharaja Sayaji Rao’s tradition of sup-
porting national culture, the Gaekwad family invited him to decorate the
ancestral memorial, Kirti Mandir (Temple of Glory), in their capital,
Baroda.135 For these murals Nandalal went back to historicism as he felt
the commission demanded subjects more majestic than genre scenes. He
made a preliminary visit to Baroda on his way back from the Congress
session at Faizpur in 1938, revisiting the state in October 1939, and even-
tually undertaking seven visits to Baroda to complete the project.136 His
foremost pupil and colleague Benodebehari has left us an account of his
work method. Nandalal had originally planned the whole work as an
interplay of black and white to complement the predominantly white
walls, relieving the monotony with brightly coloured wall insets. This
however proved to be unattainable. The actual production was shared
with his students, the master producing the outline drawing, to be filled
in with colours by student assistants. However, in order to impose an
overall structural unity, Nandalal made the finishing touches himself.137
The overall inspiration for the four large egg tempera panels was the
Nandalal Bose, Natir Puja,
1943, fresco buono, Kirti Buddhist Stupa.138 However Nandalal’s narrative sources ranged from
Mandir, Baroda. the epics and mythology to historic figures. In 1939, he completed the

89
Gangavatarana (Descent of the River Ganges) based on the mythology of Nandalal Bose, Abhimanyu
Shiva, on the South Wall of the cenotaph, selecting the North Wall the fol- Vadha, 1945, fresco buono,
Kirti Mandir, Baroda.
lowing year for his painting of the medieval female saint Mira Bai. In 1943,
after a gap of several years, he represented Tagore’s play, Natir Puja,
inspired by a Buddhist story, on the East Wall.139 Finally, in 1945, for the
remaining West Wall, he turned to the great epic Mahabharata. Treated in
a ‘wiry’ linear style reminiscent of the Tibetan thang-ka, the impressive
Abhimanyu Vadha (Slaying of the Young Hero Abhimanyu), consists of a
complex linear composition endowed with febrile energy, a scene full of
frenzied movement and furious action. This, as well as several other scenes
at Baroda, including the second version of the Gangavatarana, show traces
of the same wiry, hard lines of Tibetan painting. The Kirti Mandir was a
grand project covering 502 m2, a work that brought to a climax Nandalal’s
ideas about murals as well as vindicating his strong sense of design.140

Benodebehari, Ramkinkar and the avant-garde at Santiniketan

Romantic primitivism in the sense of a new perception of peasants, crafts-
men, the tribals, and rural regions untouched by urban colonialism, as the
true uncorrupt India, permeated the art movement in Santiniketan. For its
impact on the mural movement, we now turn to Benodebehari
Mukhopadhyaya, who offers us some of the most strikingly original
visions of subaltern India. Nandalal’s murals led logically to
90
 Benodebehari’s monumental series on the medieval saints, completed in
the 1940s. The secret of Nandalal’s success had lain in his consistent two-
dimensionality that the early orientalists had not quite been able to
achieve. This was given a radical gloss by Benodebehari, in whose work
modernism intersected with indigenous expression. As his remarkable
paintings show, the way forward was not by enlarging the miniature for-
mat of the orientalists, which would have been an easy option, but by aim-
ing for formal clarity with bold lines and flat colours with details sup-
pressed. This modernist approach considerably simplified the overall
design of murals, which were usually meant to be viewed from a distance
where details did not matter that much. As opposed to Nandalal’s use of a
horizontal format for the murals, Benodebihari developed what has been
described as a ‘multiple focus’ approach derived from diverse traditions,
including Japanese scrolls.141 His style inspired by East Asian art has been
described as calligraphic, a style that enabled him to create flowing monu-
mental images of the human pageant in his murals of Indian saints.142
Benodebehari is a valuable guide to his own evolution. In addition, he
has left us a historical overview of art education in India by placing in
context Santiniketan experiments and his own work in it. In Benodebehari,
we sense a creative tension between nature and tradition, and between
decoration and firm structural drawing, these existing in a state of delicate
balance in his work.143 As he pointed out, he felt the urge to learn from past
Indian art but he also believed in the need to progress. In his ‘Indian
Imagery and Abstraction’, for instance, he subjected Abanindranath’s
analysis of ancient Sanskrit canons to a modernist analysis. The tension
between geometry and representation underpinned all art and no art could
be successful without its underlying formal structure, a tension he found
present in both ancient Indian and European modernist art. And yet no art

Nandalal Bose, Santals in

Birbhum Landscape, c. 1920s,
line and wash on paper.

91
can succeed without its underlying representational foundations. These Benodebehari
lines may be taken as Benodebehari’s credo for the murals.144 Mukhopadhyaya, Travellers,
1947, watercolour.
Benodebehari’s first effort was an unsuccessful experimental mural in
his living quarters at the university inspired by ancient texts and based on
local materials. Subsequently, as Nandalal’s apprentice, he produced a
series of sixteen murals on the theme of Santal life, and also accompanied
him on his first visit to Baroda.145 These early efforts, though not entirely
successful, taught him to treat murals as architectural decoration. He sub-
sequently studied the Italian wet fresco process with Pratima Devi, which
he eventually found more durable and suited to his own aims. In 1940, he
and his students decorated the students’ residence at the Kala Bhavan,
aiming to meld various Western and Indian traditions. In these murals
Benodebehari dispensed with the preliminary cartoons, choosing to work
directly on the walls. Preliminary cartoons, he felt, tended to reinforce the
conventions of naturalist art, whereas murals required directness and a
grasp of the ‘abstract’ form. On the other hand, murals divorced from real-
92

Benodebehari
Mukhopadhyaya, Saints, 1947,
fresco buono, Hindi Bhavan,
south central portion.
ity lacked strength. Benodebehari’s direct approach, he felt, helped balance
representation with formal clarity. His monumental murals, which cap-
ture the flux of Indian history like an ever-flowing river, display a certain
ruggedness that is commensurate with his theme of medieval saints and
mystics who had inspired people’s resistance against caste and other social
injustices. Geeta Kapur puts it succinctly: ‘In his mural based on the lives
of saints (who were peasants and artisans) Mukherjee works out a rhyth-
mic structure to comprehend the dynamic Indian life . . . between commu-
nity and dissent. A radical consciousness of traditional India is visual-
ized.’146 What was also compelling in his art is a new ‘subaltern’ canon, the
swarthy elongated faces with large noses and thick lips that had little in
common with either the delicate oval-faced women of the Bengal School
or the nubile beauties of the academic artist Ravi Varma.
Benodebehari decorated the Cheena Bhavan building in 1942, fol-
lowed by the Hindi Bhavan in 1947. All the while, he made careful notes
of the success and failure of these experiments, which help us to under-
stand his method. He tells us he produced a number of small preliminary
sketches with the intention of establishing the relationship between
‘filled-in’ and ‘empty’ spaces, and between dark and light areas in a com-
position. Instead of realistic proportions he developed a comparative ratio,
using the hand as a unit of measurement in the Indian tradition, though
also learning from Giotto and Masaccio. For him, these tensions between
93
 Nandalal Bose, Birbhum
Landscape, c. 1920s,
watercolour on paper.

forms and blank spaces (pictorial objects and the field in a painting) that
he tried to set up were not easily achieved with proportions based on
three-dimensional volumes or masses.147 Tragically, Benodebehari lost his
sight after a botched operation but continued to paint, his bravery and his
experiments providing inspiration to future generations.148
One of Nandalal’s major contributions to the Kala Bhavan was to
translate Tagore’s anti-colonial environmentalism into art practice.
Brought up in the city of Calcutta, his move to the rural university opened
his eyes to the beauties of nature, a love he sought to inculcate in his
pupils.149 However nothing epitomized the nationalist commitment to
the environment more strikingly at Santiniketan than the romantic image
of the Santals as the innocent children of nature. Nandalal’s attachment to
the Santals, living in close proximity to the campus, was part of national-
ist mythologizing.150 These simple people, he was convinced, had
retained the humanity that had been lost with colonial rule. Castigating
the use of cheap foreign prints with which the elite decorated their homes,
he argued that despite their material poverty the Santals had retained an
innate aesthetic sense.151 He constantly sketched them, painting their fes-
tivals, dances and other activities in which they were presented as living
in harmony with nature. Among these, we may take the series represent-
ing the three stages in a Santal woman’s life: the youthful maiden with her
supple graceful strength; the woman with her lost youth working in the
field; finally the lonely hag gathering fruits in the forest.152 With his stu-
dents, Benodebehari completed sixteen ambitious panels on Santal life in
the Santoshalaya Building in 1925.153
In the final analysis, the artist most closely associated with the image
of the Santals was the modernist sculptor Ramkinkar Baij. Of humble
origins, Ramkinkar (1906–1980) began under Nandalal in the 1920s,
initially as a painter; on discovering his unusual modelling talents
Nandalal transferred him to the sculpture class. From the outset,
Ramkinkar showed a keen interest in the European avant-garde, an
interest actively fostered by Nandalal, despite his own suspicions about
modernist painting.154 Ramkinkar took lessons from visiting sculptors,
while Kramrisch opened up the world of Western modernism to him.155
The leading sculptor, Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury, who taught for a
while in Santiniketan, recommended Edouard Lanteri’s Modelling: A
94
Ramkinkar Baij,
Bust of Rabindranath,
1938, cast cement.

Guide for Teachers and Students to him. The French sculptor was known
for his vigorous sculptures of labouring people.156 Ramkinkar had further
instructions from the Austrian Lisa von Pott and the Englishwoman
Margaret Milward. Tagore, who had sat for Milward for his bust, offered
her a teaching assignment at Santiniketan. A pupil of Emile-Antoine
Bourdelle, she presented a sculptural piece by him to the university dur-
ing her brief sojourn there.157
Lanteri’s peasants and Bourdelle’s dramatic lyricism and, above all,
their rough broken surfaces appealed to Ramkinkar. However, it was
95
Rodin’s transformation of the sculpture surface from the smoothness of
Canova’s Classical marble to a restless, expressive roughness that made a
whole generation follow the Frenchman. This included not only Lanteri
and Bourdelle, but also the first Bengali sculptor to receive Western train-
ing. Fanindranath Bose, who followed Rodin’s particular treatment of
bronze, was complimented by the great sculptor.158 In the 1920s,
Deviprosad also began producing powerfully rugged figures of working
men. However, Ramkinkar’s own modernist approach found closer
affinities with Jacob Epstein, who was himself inspired by ancient Indian
sculpture. The English sculptor’s primitivist works and his incorporation
of ‘non-aesthetic’ machines like the rock drill in his sculpture may have
prompted Ramkinkar to use unconventional materials like cement.159
In the 1940s, Ramkinkar became a man obsessed with realizing his
grand designs. His heroic images of the Santals were some of the most
memorable ever produced in India, his choice of coarse, unconventional
material, such as rubble, cement and concrete, commensurate with the
ruggedness of their lives. The artist however offered a very mundane expla-
nation for his use of cement: he simply could not afford the bronze. If
indeed a new expression had been born out of necessity, the works have not
survived well.160 Ramkinkar has left us a fascinating account of his radical
work methods. His first method involved making an initial clay maquette,
which was then transferred to a plaster mould into which he poured con-
crete, which was allowed to set. This was more conventional and in his
view inimical to spontaneity. The second and later method was more ‘fun’
for him, for it retained the spontaneity of the work process. He gave up pre-
liminary maquettes, making only a few quick sketches. He then construct-
ed iron armatures for the figures, filling these by aiming large chunks of
cement compound at them instead of using a trowel, finally chiselling the
figures into shape. Ramkinkar enjoyed the tactile quality of this process
even though the cement compound was corroding his hands. This trans-
parency of the artistic process, which we have also noticed in Benodebehari,
marked the rise of modernism in Santiniketan. Ramkinkar viewed this
‘natural effect’ as appropriate for the heroic Santals. The roughness, he
insisted, was not mere technique but an essential part of his expression.161
Ramkinkar was consistent in drawing inspiration from the Santals,
asking them to pose in the nude in his studio, which shocked the local peo-
ple.162 There is an amusing anecdote about his relationship with the
Santals. When he was at work on his best-known piece, the Santal Family
(1938), the Santals kept hovering around it until one of them asked if these
were gods, while another blurted out: with such a big man, why have you
made the ground so small, where will he sleep? Apparently, the sculptor
took him seriously and made the ground more spacious.163 In him the dis-
course of primitivism and personal commitment fused. Temperamentally
unconventional, he enjoyed the company of the Santals, who took him to
their heart.164 Ramkinkar explains his ability to relate to the Santals: ‘I
96
Ramkinkar Baij, Radha Rani,
1980s?, pen and ink on paper.

Ramkinkar Baij, Santal Family,

1938, cast cement,
Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan.
 Ramkinkar Baij, Mill Call,
c. 1938, sand and pebble cast
sculpture, Kala Bhavan,
Santiniketan.

came from a humble family, used to seeing labouring people. Their simple
easy life, mode of working, their movement – these were my subjects.
Santals in Santiniketan especially influenced me. Both Santal men and
women work cheerfully and break into a song and dance at any pretext.
Their needs are few but they have an infinite capacity for happiness and
for giving pleasure to others. I have tried to capture moments from their
dynamic life in my painting and sculpture.’165 The Santal Family is static
in its monumental grandeur, whereas his other well-known sculpture, The
Mill Call, is an ebullient portrayal of two Santal women running against a
gale force wind. One with a pot on her head looks ahead, while the other
looks back, the rough texture echoing the dynamism and elemental life-
force of the subject. Ramkinkar admired the rhythm and light gait of the
Santals, their healthy labouring bodies, their happy temperament, their
simplicity, strength and vitality.166 With Ramkinkar the myth of the
happy, innocent Santals attained its apotheosis.
98
Ramkinkar Baij, Sketch
of Santals, 1930s?, watercolour
on paper.
 iii
Jamini Roy and Art for the Community
the fashioning of a folk artist
‘Jamini Roy was most impressive in personality and looks; his head had
some of the massive beauty of Picasso’s though his deep eyes were gentler
and more withdrawn’, wrote Maie Casey admiringly about the artist.1
Roy’s long artistic life spanned almost the entire era of Indian anti-colo-
nial struggle, spilling over into independent India (1887–1972). He dis-
played a restless desire to explore dazzling pastiches of styles, Eastern and
Western. As a critic once commented on one of his exhibitions, it ‘showed Jamini Roy, 1940s.
his characteristic catholicity, a copy of Van Gogh’s self-portrait, another à
la manière Cézanne, a lady in a Chinese manner, and a free rendering of
Ajanta’. However, it is not this virtuosity but his compelling modernist
vision of folk art that made him a memorable artist of the late colonial era.
Maie Casey correctly sensed Roy’s influence on the primitivist Amrita
Sher-Gil, ‘if not directly by his art then by his philosophy, which drew its
strength from life and not from the past’.2 Jamini Roy has been called the
father of the folk renaissance in India who created an alternative vision of
modern Indian identity.3 While Roy acknowledged his debt to the naïve
painter Sunayani Devi, he achieved his radical simplifications through a
slow, deliberate and systematic process.4 With him we return to compet-
ing ideas of nationhood in modern societies, to the debate among the
intelligentsia – should the nation centre on the urban metropolis or the
countryside? We know that from the 1920s the definition of nationhood
had started shifting from the Pan-Indian to the local, which inspired a
whole generation of artists and writers. It is in Jamini Roy’s art however
that we find the most radical expression of local identity in opposition to
the Pan-Indian historicism of the Bengal School.
Through the folk idiom, Roy sought to restore the collective function of
art and thereby disavow artistic individualism and what Walter Benjamin
calls the ‘aura’ of a work of art, the hallmarks of colonial art. In the process,
he radically recast ‘indigenism’, the nationalist paradigm.5 Roy’s primitivism
however went beyond indigenism in an increasingly global era. Roy dis-
played what I call structural affinities with the avant-garde in the West who
engaged in challenging the teleological certainty of modernity though they
arrived at their respective critiques of modernity through different routes.
Western primitivists sought to restore the values of the pre-industrial com-
munity in the life of the alienated modern individual, while Roy used the
notion of the village community as a weapon of resistance to colonial rule.
Their response to the forces of global modernity was part of the transnation-
al dialogue in the ‘virtual cosmopolis’ that I described in my introduction.6

100
Jamini Roy, Landscape, 1940s?,
oil on board.

Jamini Ranjan Roy belonged to a minor landed family of rural

Bankura in Bengal, a region that boasted a rich tradition of terracotta
sculptures and folk art. As a child Jamini encountered ‘primitive’ Santals
in Bankura, who were to feature prominently in his early art. In 1906, he
enrolled at the government art school in Calcutta under Abanindranath,
during the heyday of orientalism. Percy Brown, who soon replaced the
leading orientalist, was quick to recognize Roy’s remarkable gifts and his
maverick personality, allowing him a large measure of independence.7
After leaving art school, Roy made a living by doing portraits, copying
101
Jamini Roy, Krishna and his
Mother, c. 1920s, gouache on
paper.
Jamini Roy, A Divine Moment,
c. 1920, watercolour on paper.
photographs and painting stage sets. Though he belonged to the circle of
academic artists hostile to Abanindranath (q.v.), he remained close to the
master. He also shared the Bengal School’s concern with artistic authen-
ticity, but ‘historicism’ left him cold. His paintings, for instance The
Ploughman, A Mohamadan at Sunset Prayer and the Shadow of Death, based
on orientalist wash technique, were set in twilight landscapes reminiscent
of Jean-François Millet.8
In the 1920s, Roy came briefly under the spell of the prevailing
romantic image of the tribals, painting some very sensuous pictures of
Santal women, as redolent of eroticism as the classic photographs of trib-
103
al women by Sunil Janah.9 As we shall see, this formative phase of Roy’s
primitivism was less profound than his later achievement. However, even
in these early exercises in erotic nostalgia, Roy displayed a singular abili-
ty to distil the essential form that anticipated the formalist simplicity of his
later works. To his contemporaries, Roy’s strong drawings were a healthy
antidote to the cloying emaciated figures of oriental art.
Roy’s closeness to Abanindranath, the excitement generated by
Kalighat paintings and the wide publicity given to Sunayani’s paintings
made him conscious of this ‘lowbrow’ urban art. As his early works after
Kalighat show, he was able to mimic the artisanal style so well that one was
hard put to tell the difference. Soon however Roy rejected Kalighat artists
for having lost the rural ideal when they moved to Calcutta to serve an
urban population. In the mid-1920s, he embarked on his epic journey to the
Bengal countryside to collect folk paintings (pats) and to learn from the folk
painters. He was convinced that the ‘revival of Bengali art will not come
from Ajanta, Rajput and Mughal art . . . [for] one may learn a language that
is not one’s own but one cannot enter its inner thoughts’.10 In 1929, Roy
showed his first experiments with folk art at an exhibition organized by
Alfred Henry Watson, the English editor of the Statesman newspaper.11 His
next exhibition, held at the Indian Society of Oriental Art on 9 July 1930,
marked his transition from a half-hearted orientalist to a robust primitivist.
Roy’s bold simplifications and thick outlines applied with sweeping brush-
strokes exuded a crude vigour hitherto unknown in Indian art, his dull yel-
low and slate green figures and brick-red backgrounds emulating the ter-
racotta reliefs of his home village in Bankura. This show gives us the first
glimpse of Roy’s conscious efforts to identify with the folk painters. He had
worked with them in order to gain a ‘hands-on’ experience and he now
included three panels painted by them in his show. Yet, revealingly, Roy
maintained control over their work by putting finishing touches to the

Jamini Roy, After Bankura Clay

Figures, c. 1930, gouache on
paper.

104
A traditional pat from
Jamini Roy’s studio, water-
based paint on cloth.

panels. Roy’s juxtaposition of his own paintings with pats became one of the
key tenets of his primitivist ideology.12
In 1931, Roy was ready to share his artistic ideology with the public.
The exhibition, inaugurated by Stella Kramrisch at his modest residence
in North Calcutta, was no less than a political manifesto. Shanta Devi,
daughter of the nationalist journalist Ramananda Chatterjee, remarks on
Roy’s transformation of the exhibition space into a ‘traditional’ Bengali
105
environment as an appropriate setting for his paint-
ings:

The artist gives evidence of consummate stage

management, embellishing three rooms with
his paintings emulating village pats . . . Actual
village pats are on display in an adjacent room
. . . Little lamps are lit and incense burnt. Floors
are covered in traditional Bengali alpona pat-
terns. In this room decorated in a Bengali style
indigenous seats take the place of chairs, which
are of European origin.13

Roy’s objective was not to imitate the village

artisans but to learn from the expressive power of
their lines. In his search for formal simplicity, Roy
emphasized lines at the expense of colours, using
black outlines painted with a brush on white paper.
He forsook oils for tempera and concentrated on
primary colours. Acknowledging Roy’s startling
originality, the reviewer confessed that even
Nanadalal had failed to shake off the hold of high
art, especially Ajanta, even though he had briefly
flirted with pats.14 Nor did she fail to notice Roy’s essentially political act Jamini Roy, Seated Woman, line
of making the local signify the national. painting, 1930s, gouache on
paper.
By 1935 Roy’s strikingly original vision began to penetrate public con-
sciousness. He received the highest accolade at the Academy of Fine Arts
in Calcutta for his Santal and Child. Even though this work harked back
to his romantic eroticism, Roy’s special strengths, such as the tight draw-
ing of the figures and naturalism tethered to simple harmonious masses,
were evident.15 Two years later, a major retrospective inaugurated by the
first Indian Chief Minister of Bengal at the Indian Society of Oriental Art,
secured his reputation.16 Shahid Suhrawardy, the influential art critic of
the Statesman, hailed the show as an event of first-rate importance in the
world of modern Indian art. Roy’s paintings, no longer detracted from by
the surrounding mediocre works, stated the reviewer, now revealed their
true grandeur and originality.17 Interestingly, the most noticeable aspect
of the next exhibition held in September 1938 was Roy’s fascination with
pastiche, a temptation he never quite gave up. Yet, as the reviewer point-
ed out, this ‘distinguished Bengali artist’s’ singularity constantly broke
through his bravura displays of Eastern and Western techniques.18 Roy’s
reputation continued to grow throughout the 1940s, with his exhibitions
held in 1941 and 1944 being major critical successes.

106

Jamini Roy, ‘Sita with
Hanuman’, from the Ramayana
Series, 1935, gouache on board.
roy and his champions
As his remarkable style unfolded before an astonished public in the 1930s,
Roy found himself being courted by a motley crowd. Jamini-da (‘da’
means ‘older brother’) assumed the ‘Grand Meaulnes’ role to his young
band of admirers, among them Bishnu Dey, the rising star of Bengali
avant-garde poetry.19 Sudhindranath Datta, the other leading modernist
poet of Bengal and editor of the influential avant-garde magazine
Parichay, lavished praise on his modernist sensibility and serious attempts
to solve ‘formal problems’. Mrinalini Emerson, the daughter of an emi-
nent Congress leader, and her English husband became devoted admirers.
Stella Kramrisch settled on Roy as the modernist she had been searching
for. His blown-up versions of pats were displayed at the Lucknow
Congress of 1936 side by side Nandalal’s panels. In 1935, K. C. Das, a
leading confectioner of Calcutta, commissioned a major series of seven-
teen paintings, each 91 x 396 cm, based on the epic Ramayana, for his
sumptuous reception room, which were completed in 1940.20
Perhaps most unexpected was the cohort of Roy’s European admirers.
The Bombay-based Austrian critic Rudi von Leyden noted that the war
with its influx of foreigners turned his home into a place of pilgrimage:
‘Many a British or American service man found his way to Jamini’s house
right in the middle of the teeming city of Calcutta. Often you could hear
khaki-clad figures in messes or clubs discussing the merits of their respec-
tive Roys.’21 One of them paid a tribute to Roy at a radio broadcast for
revealing that good art had an innate simplicity which enabled one to
appreciate ‘art’ and its ‘colour and composition’ without difficulty.22
Foreign celebrities, such as the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane, the nov-
elist E. M. Forster and the Soviet film director Vsevolod Pudovkin paid
visits to him.23 Mary Milford, wife of a clergyman in India, published a
pen portrait of the artist in England in 1944. Roy would sit on a low seat
107
 Jamini Roy, Weeping Cow,
c. 1946, gouache on paper.

supported by a bolster, surrounded by earthen pots of brilliant colours,

working all day. On her arrival, he would rise up to greet her. They had
animated discussions on art despite his halting English. She describes his
residence where his works were hung in three rooms: one comprising
decorative art, another pastiches of Impressionism, and the last one con-
taining the finest works that demonstrated his sheer power of abstrac-
tion.24 Maie Casey, wife of the last Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, was
one of Roy’s most devoted patrons. This widely travelled and cultivated
woman had a lively interest in and knowledge of the European art world.
She developed a passion for Indian art, organizing exhibitions at
Government House including an ambitious one in April 1945 in the teeth
of opposition from the English staff.25 John Irwin, who had come to
know the Bengali intellectual milieu intimately, introduced her to Roy.
She became a devoted friend of the artist and continued the friendship
after she left India. He wrote to her regularly even as late as a few weeks
before his death. Maie found his letters deeply moving, reproducing the
letter dated 29 December 1964: ‘I often recollect the memories of our
meetings and discussions. How shall I express my mind’s sweet feelings
towards you? Perhaps those golden days would not come again.’26 Few
Europeans were more entertaining than Beverley Nichols.27 In his Verdict
on India, the novelist considered Jinnah a giant and Gandhi a pigmy,
offering his verdict on modern Indian art as a pointer to national psycho-
logy. After his visit to Roy’s studio, he concluded that Roy was the only
modern Indian artist of consequence: ‘After the sickly, smoky effects of
his contemporaries his pictures have the effect of high explosives . . . the
108

Jamini Roy, Woman with Child,
c. 1940s, gouache on paper.
perennial source of his inspiration is the folk art of
Bengal, which is strong and gay and masculine.’28
We cannot be certain whether this sudden
eruption of Roy’s fame aroused envy in other artists
but his sensitive, highly strung nature made him
suspicious of people. For instance, Abanindranath’s
innocent question at his 1938 exhibition as to his
future plans was read by him as sarcasm.29 Roy
refused to show his works to Gandhi, lest the great
leader failed to give him his due as an artist. Ever
suspicious of publishers, he refused permission to
reproduce his paintings for a monograph on him
by his admirer Sudhindranath Datta.30 The most
serious misunderstanding broke out with his close
friend, Bishnu Dey, who had introduced him to the
Europeans. Feeling overwrought, he declared to
Dey that his health could not bear these tensions
and misunderstandings.31 Roy poured out his heart
to Venkatachalam in the 1940s, confiding to him
that for ten years he had not attended a single pub-
lic function. This is confirmed by Mrs Milford, who
mentions that he seldom went out. The iron had
entered his soul, making him defensive, and even
well meaning praises put him on his guard. He
failed to understand, he told Venkatachalam, why
his fellow-artists waged a campaign of vilification
against him, for he had never wronged them.32
Roy’s persecution complex and his intensely
reclusive nature (to the extent of not allowing any
photographs of himself) simply reinforced legends
about his lonely misunderstood genius. We read in the introduction to his
exhibition at the Indian Society of Oriental Art held in 1944 that the ‘lone-
ly search for form became for Jamini Roy a great intellectual adventure . . .
to achieve integrity in painting, he has endured years of unremitting, often
unrewarded, labour’.33 Again we hear Venkatachalam: ‘poor and friend-
less, he sought solace and sympathy in such creations . . . Years of struggle
and the cruel indifference of his own countrymen have embittered his
heart and have made a cynic of him.’34 The heroic image can be traced
back to the influential critic Suhrawardy. Roy’s first retrospective ‘made
one realize his tenacious artistic intention since [hardly] any patronage
came his way during the period of his struggle. For years he was held to be
a crank, a rebel against the traditions of the Bengali revivalist movement,
a fanatic in vain pursuit of originality.’35 In Prefaces, Suhrawardy declared
Roy to be an unlettered outlaw who enjoyed no patronage, his life full of
neglect and bitterness tinged with personal tragedy. In 1947, on the eve of
109
Indian independence, von Leyden reinscribed the popular myth: ‘this
famous artist who sacrificed so many years of his life to the ideal of integri-
ty in art when hardly anyone would look at his picture; not to speak of
buying them. Today I am glad to say he is popular.’36
There is no doubt that the early 20s were difficult for Roy, but he was
not the only artist to face hardship. His son’s mysterious death also left an
indelible scar. On the other hand, by the 1930s, he had become an iconic
figure, the only non-orientalist to be lionized by the Indian Society of
Oriental Art. The arch-orientalist Mukul Dey, on his appointment as the
first Indian Principal of the Calcutta government art school in 1928, drove
the academic artists out of the institution. But Dey admired Roy and pro-
vided the struggling artist with painting materials and a spacious room in
the school. He also arranged Roy’s first major exhibition at the art school
in 1929. At the end of the show, as Roy was squatting on the floor with
paper and paint, Dey came in and showered him with the banknotes
received for his works.37 Even though Nandalal had his differences with
Roy, he respected him, commissioning him to decorate the venue of the
Lucknow Congress.38
The myth of the heroic artist was part of the rhetoric of modernism,
and indeed Roy’s single-mindedness and his refusal to be a public figure
had a heroic dimension.39 To a question put by Mrs Milford the artist
replied: ‘Peace is not good for an artist, art is born of experience, of stress
and strain, wrestling with problems, intellectual and physical.’40 His
fierce integrity and unswerving concentration were set against the vacil-
lations of representational painters who had chosen either the ‘easy
option’ of revivalism or compromise with the West. Suhrawardy was par-
ticularly scathing about the Bengal School, though he offered faint praise
to Nandalal, whose austere linotype of Mahatma Gandhi represented
‘moments of our cultural preoccupations’.41 For Roy’s pursuit of pure
form and his ruthless elimination of illustrative content he had only
unstinted admiration.42 ‘Jamini Roy’s obsession, like that of the most vital
painters in Europe today,’ he wrote, ‘seems to be the absolute search after
the simple and the pure form, which would derive solely from the two-
dimensional nature of painting.’43 Another influential figure, Stella
Kramrisch, argued that Roy cut through the formlessness of oriental art
to reach universal forms which had ‘a moral value which irritates his
detractors, eludes his imitators and makes his work the standard against
which contemporary Indian painting is to be measured’.44
From the 1940s, Roy’s international reputation began to grow. Mary
Milford’s essay ‘A Modern Primitive’, in the influential literary magazine
Horizon, edited by Cyril Connolly, introduced him to the modernist intel-
lectual milieu of London.45 In 1945, on John Irwin’s return to England, he
persuaded the India Society to organize an exhibition of Roy’s paintings
at the Arcade Gallery in London, which was inaugurated by the novelist
E. M. Forster. The exhibition included Irwin’s collection, as well as those
110
Jamini Roy, Krishna and the
Gopis, c. 1955, Steuben Crystal,
exhibited at the National
Gallery of Art, Washington, dc,
1956.

of Reverend and Mrs Milford, Harold Acton, Maie Casey and Anthony
Penny. In the catalogue Irwin expressed confidence that Roy had solved
the problem of authenticity in his work, achieving a synthesis of mod-
ernism and Indian art.46 The reviews in London were ambivalent about
Roy’s achievements. Iris Conlay spoke of the ‘fascinating Christian paint-
ings by a Hindu painter from Calcutta’. She added, ‘Do not be put off by
his slit-eyed faces and his stiff figures . . . there were not only an intellect
and technical skill behind these apparently expressionless formalities, but
also a deep sympathy with, and understanding of humanity.’47 Pierre
Jeannerat in his article, ‘India’s Greatest Painter’, in the Daily Mail made
a more condescending assessment: ‘I will not say that Roy takes rank
among the great artists of our era; he seems too responsive to mere man-
ual dexterity and repeats ad nauseam facile formulae [but] nationalism in
art normally bears fine fruit, whatever the effects in politics.’48 In 1953, in
the US, the Herald Tribune, while acknowledging his considerable repu-
111
tation, found his work lacking Matisse’s spontaneity and Gauguin’s emo-
tional depth, though it did have a charming ingenuousness.49 In 1956, the
catalogue to the major exhibition of Steuben glass, ‘Asian Artists in
Crystal’, held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, dc, described
Roy as an internationally renowned master who was a modest, rather
retiring ‘medieval’ craftsman in private life.50 The year after, the
Smithsonian Institution Travelling Exhibition Service showed Roy at vari-
ous places, including the Columbus Museum of Arts and Crafts in
Columbus, Ohio. Roy was one of the artists chosen to design unicef
Christmas cards. One of Roy’s admirers was the celebrated French
Mauritian painter, Hervé Masson, who considered him to be among the
great contemporary masters. In 1971, his paintings curated by Roy Craven
were exhibited at the University of Florida Art Gallery to popular acclaim
as part of the cult for things Oriental. In 1954, when Peggy Guggenheim
visited India, she met Roy. She was impressed with his simplicity despite
the fact that he had been shown in London and New York. She noted his
disapproval of three-dimensional painting, finding his ‘primitive’ paint-
ing similar to the work of the Romanian Surrealist painter Victor
Brauner. Considering him to be the only worthwhile modernist in India,
she bought his painting of a scene from the Ramayana for the nominal
sum of Rs 75.51

constructing an anti-colonial utopia

Roy’s striking formalist pictorial language, his simple monumental
images of sari-clad women, madonnas, village dances and domestic ani-
mals, have become iconic. The biologist J.B.S. Haldane once described his
paintings as full of simplicity and yet one never tired of gazing at them.
Roy himself aspired towards simplicity in an increasingly complex world,
as tired adults longed to return to childlike simplicity.52 He carefully stud-
ied drawings by his own children and by his friend Bishnu Dey’s little
daughters, ‘not because of my affection for them, but because they are
vitally important for me’.53 This search for formal simplicity drew him
also to prehistoric art; he believed it possessed an honest, unselfconscious
‘everyday’ language that captured the essential form without imitating it.
This was also the reason for his admiration for Tagore’s paintings. In
short, for this Bengali formalist, ‘true’ art did not consist in copying
nature, but in offering the essential form in all honesty and without frills.
Roy’s search for formal clarity eventually led him to the Bengali vil-
lage scroll painting, the pat, which offered him an ideal synthesis of ‘for-
malist’ strength and political theory. In discussing Roy’s debt to the pat,
Rudi von Leyden explained that by ‘extreme simplification and concen-
tration on essentials, every object in a pat achieved the significance of a
symbol, easily recognizable, understandable, and because almost
unchanging, universally valid’.54 Suhrawardy also pointed out that ‘These
112
despised artisans, who paint our remarkably expressionist pats, though
now unfortunately in aniline dyes and in conformity to a debased iconog-
raphy, taught [Roy] the secret of the fundamental rapid line, the expres-
sive contour enclosing the human form in one vital sweep.’55 If the radi-
cal simplicity of the pat helped wean Roy away from anecdotal natural-
ism, his academic training lent a firmness of drawing and geometrical
structure to his painting not usually associated with folk art. Roy made
careful preparations to attain the volume, rhythm, decorative clarity and
monumentality of the pat in his work (for example Seated Woman, p. 106).
In order to recover the purity of the pat, he commenced with an austere
phase of monochrome brush drawing, graduating to seven basic colours
applied with tempera: Indian red, yellow ochre, cadmium green, vermil-
ion, charcoal grey, cobalt blue and white – all made from organic matter
such as rock-dust, tamarind seeds, mercury powder, alluvial mud, indigo
and common chalk. Roy used lamp black for outline drawing and started
making his own ‘canvas’ with home-spun fabric (pats used paper or cloth-
backed paper).56 In other words, ‘indigenous’ expression could not be
achieved with imported Winsor & Newton oils.
While being appreciative of prehistoric or child art, Roy’s choice of
folk art in particular, I have suggested, was a political act. As von Leyden
puts it, Roy admired the elementary ‘honesty’ of the patua, returning to
his home village to learn from its patua the meaning of artistic integrity,
seeking to ‘raise’ himself to the level of the artisan.57 Most of Roy’s con-
temporaries misunderstood this intellectual journey. Kramrisch described
him as a villager who had returned to the village in his art.
Venkatachalam asserted confidently that Roy had no opportunities for
wider contacts or interests, ‘finding joy and inspiration in the natural
unsophisticated life that surrounded him.’58 Even his close friends Bishnu
Dey and John Irwin claimed that ‘he approached folk-art not as an out-
sider, but as one who had an intimate knowledge and understanding of
the living experiences of the people where lay the roots of the folk-culture
itself’.59 Beverley Nichols wrote in the same vein; Roy, finding himself
‘stifled by the deadly atmosphere of commercial Calcutta, cut short a
career which had every promise of success and had fled to a remote vil-
lage, where he proceeded to remodel his life, and his art, anew’.60
Jamini Roy was not a man of the people tout court. His father belonged
to the landed gentry and had returned to the village in mid-life to take up
Swadeshi rural reconstruction.61 The formative years of this patrician
painter were spent in his home village before he left for Calcutta, only to
return very occasionally. In 1942, Roy briefly took refuge there during
Japanese air raids on Calcutta. He found this sojourn boring and claustro-
phobic, longing for the company of friends in Calcutta. In desperation he
wrote to Bishnu Dey on 30 October 1942: ‘I cannot stand it here any longer.
Though I am [now] able to concentrate on painting, I cannot bear the lone-
liness. Let me know if it is possible to return [to Calcutta].’62
113
 Roy as a modern man did not deny the importance of technology in
modern life but he refused to accept the teleological certainty of moderni-
ty. His world-view consisted in restoring through art the pre-colonial
community that had been severed from national life during the Raj, caus-
ing the alienation of the urban elite from its cultural roots. His utopian
vision of village art was indeed a product of complex crosscurrents, laying
bare the contradictions of his position as an urban elite artist. It was not so
much his peasant origins, erroneously claimed by some critics, but his
compelling vision of communitarian primitivism as an iteration of ‘criti-
cal modernity’ that is of significance. Roy’s formalist utopia was carefully
constructed and austerely ideological, the outcome of deep reflection and
single-mindedness. It was also the artistic expression of the wider nation-
alist discourse on rural India.
Although modern nationalism has generally been led by urban elites
worldwide, the countryside has formed part of its mythology, though as
represented from above. One of the most important contributions to the
discourse on rural India was made by the imperial civil servant (ics)
Gurasaday Dutt who systematically documented the art and culture of
rural Bengal between the years 1929 and 1933.63 In the introduction to his
seminal exhibition dated 1932, Dutt offered a thoroughly ‘formalist’
interpretation of folk art: ‘this true art avoided inessential embellish-
ments, relying on pure, robust lines and colours, an innate sense of design,
a spontaneous harmonizing of abstract and naturalistic expressions . . . ’.64
It is not a coincidence that Roy’s major exhibitions took place from the
mid-1930s, at a time when Dutt’s researches were aiming to establish the
modernist credentials of Bengali folk art.

roy and the politics of art

Jamini Roy was first and foremost a painter, yet his obiter dicta had the
same incisive quality as his painting. Shy, reclusive and somewhat remote
with a slow and deliberate diction, Roy impressed those who met him
with his intelligence and clarity of thought. One of his German admirers
spoke of his ‘noble, I would say, classical head’.65 An English friend was
taken with his gentle personality which inspired immediate wordless
respect. He felt more in the presence of a philosopher than an artist who
conveyed ‘to an intense degree of the dignity of human suffering’.66 His
aphoristic statements over the years allow us to reconstruct his artistic
doctrine with some accuracy. One of Roy’s initial concepts was a series of
moral contrasts he made between rural and urban values: rural honesty
pitted against urban ‘decadence’. Initially he had been drawn to Kalighat,
when it was on the lips of the Bengali intelligentsia. Soon however it
Jamini Roy, Madonna and Baby
dawned on him that these folk painters, who had migrated to the colonial
Jesus (after a Byzantine
city from the countryside, lost the rural ideal when they applied their folk painting), c. 1940s, gouache
‘language’ to urban themes. I have mentioned the seminal primitivist on board.

114
document, ‘The Hermitage’, by Tagore, which advocated the restitution
of India’s rural heritage.67 Roy, who read it in 1923, underlined the fol-
lowing passage: ‘if India forces itself to imitate Western civilization it
would not be genuine Europe but distorted India’, adding on the margin,
‘today I read something that says what I have felt for the last eight month-
s’.68 Three years hence Roy was to embark on his quest for ‘genuine’ rural
art untainted by colonial culture.
Roy offered further reasons for his choice of folk art. The ‘artistic
truth’, namely concern for the ‘essential form’, once shared by prehistoric
art across the world, was lost with the spread of colonial culture. Pre-
historic (primitive) art fell victim to civilization, to the lures of meretri-
cious objectivity and to the false promise of illusionism. The reason for its
decline lay in its lack of a ‘coherent’ mythological tradition, an assertion
by Roy, which was addressed less to primitive art per se than to the need
to establish the cultural significance of the Bengali pat. Traces of ‘artistic
truth’, he contended, survived in Bengali folk art even though colonial
culture had sapped its vitality. However, the continued strength of the
folk art of Bengal lay in its non-illusionist pictorial language nourished by
a coherent and unified mythological lore. According to Roy, sacred art
created the richest mythological traditions, the reason why he took a par-
ticular interest in Byzantine painting. To Mary Milford, wife of Reverend
Milford, his interpretation of Christ was ‘strong, relentless and pure’.
Maie Casey owned Roy’s ‘superb drawing in lamp-black, and a painting
of Christ with his disciples – strange solemn picture in which the enlarged
central figure has long eyes that project beyond the face’. She demanded
to know why an orthodox Hindu should be moved by Christianity. The
artist replied that ‘he wanted to attempt a subject remote from his own
life and to show that the human and the divine could be combined only
through symbols’.69 As the Statesman explained somewhat condescend-
ingly, Roy’s creativity had allowed him to go beyond his own faith and
narrow nationalism to depict, with the limited resources of Bengali folk-
art, a Christ that recalled the best periods of Byzantine art.70
No doubt these statements are true but I think there was also a deep-
er ‘structural’ reason for Roy’s engagement with Byzantine art. Bishnu
Dey noted that Roy felt a deep satisfaction at finding confirmation of his
own aims in Byzantine art whose symbolic forms expressed the spiritual
certainty of Christian mythology. The Bengali artist had started copying
Byzantine art, possibly from the late 1930s, in search of a perfectly hierat-
ic, full-frontal monumental style, inspiring one of his most successful
compositions, Three Women, the details reduced to a few essential colours
and lines in the manner of sacred icons.71 Roy attributed the desperate
search for an ‘artistic ideal’ in the West to the erosion of religious mytho-
logy during the Enlightenment with its cult of individualism. Even
though the twentieth-century modernists had liberated themselves from
the false glamour of illusionism, the artistic crisis attending the loss of
116
Jamini Roy, The Last Supper,
c. 1940s, tempera on cloth.
religious mythology remained.72 Roy seems to imply here that the crisis of
Western modernism was not only a crisis of industrial capitalism but also
a crisis of conscience. Losing its myth-enriched folk-tradition, the West
was forced to resort to primitive art for inspiration.
Perhaps Roy was unduly severe on Picasso for taking recourse to
African art. Nor was he aware that an artist such as Kandinsky drew
upon the richness of Russian folk painting and indeed that spirituality
played a crucial role in his art.73 Once we leave aside the formal aspects of
their art, we notice striking parallels between Roy’s primitivism and that
of Kandinsky and other abstract artists. Unaware of their primitivism,
Roy felt himself to be at an advantage in comparison with the Western
modernists, being confident that ‘primitive’ culture had continued to
flourish in rural Bengal.74 It is not certain whether Roy was particularly
religious. He told Mary Milford, ‘I am not a Christian. I meditate on what
I hear. Religious art is abstract and symbolical.’75 Indeed, Mrs Milford saw
similarities between Roy and Jacob Epstein, both unbelievers but making
an objective statement about the profound character of Christ. What is
important here is not his religious faith but his belief in the connection
between a vital artistic tradition and its mythological richness that sprang
from the cohesion of its community. This became a central plank in his
theory of the communal function of art.76
Parallel debates on the function of art, whether it should be for indi-
vidual pleasure or for the community, were raging in Germany in the
1930s. Roy’s use of the Bengali pat in an effort to restore art as a collective
activity nourished by a deeply symbolic religious mythology has very
interesting parallels with Oskar Schlemmer’s murals at the Folkwang
Museum in Essen in Germany. The German Expressionist, who like
Roy wished to create an art of collective identity, offered the following
justification for his widely criticized doll-like figures: non-naturalist
treatment of the human form was superior because of its symbolic nature,
as seen in ancient cultures, Egyptian, Greek and Indian, nourished by
religious faith. The modern man, living in a period of decadence, had lost
these ancient symbols. Schlemmer’s use of simple modes of representation
sprang from his feeling that the earlier social function of art was about to
117
be regenerated in his period.77 Interestingly, Roy told Mrs Milford that
the world was facing a crisis and he longed for the dawn of a new age.
There can be no clearer statement than this of the objectives of global
primitivism as practised by Roy and Schlemmer in two far-flung corners
of the earth. Significantly, Schlemmer stressed the ‘severe regularity’ of
these archaic forms, which perfectly fits Roy’s finest paintings.78
Roy’s insistence on ‘locality’ as the site of the nation and the German
Expressionist ideas of cultural specificity are yet another example of what
I call the ‘structural’ affinities in a ‘virtual global community’. An impor-
tant feature of radical primitivism in the West was a belief in political het-
erogeneity and its rejection of universals, whether from a unifying ‘capital-
ist’ or from a ‘nationalist’ perspective.79 By the 1920s we already notice in
India the tensions between the global and re-assertions of regional identi-
ty, which we today witness in our so-called global village. Of course, Roy
was not alone in challenging Pan-Indian nationalism, as evident from
Shanta Devi’s comments on his 1931 show. Gurusaday Dutt’s Bratachari
organization that blended nationalism, folk dance, ‘aerobics’ and physical
fitness spread throughout India, but its originary inspiration was the
Bengali village.80 Dutt proposed a multiple foci of Indian nationalism,
explaining why he chose to concentrate on the region rather than the
whole nation: ‘I have deliberately spoken of the Bengali people and the
folk arts of Bengal and not in more general terms of the Indian people and
the folk arts of India; for, although, politically, Indians aspire to a united
life, and although the different races inhabiting the Indian subcontinent
are pervaded by a common culture . . . the synthesis of Indian art is but
the sum total of the . . . arts of the Rajput, the Mugal, the Bengali, and the
Dravidian races of India [each of which have] its distinctive character.’81
It is well to remember that neither Dutt nor Roy was concerned with
linguistic chauvinism here. The Bengali painter’s emphasis on the authen-
ticity of the local tradition was predicated on an ‘a-historical’ and ‘syn-
chronic’ critique of the nationalist ‘grand narrative’. Roy refused to draw
inspiration from classical Hindu temple sculptures because he considered
them to be a product of high Brahminical culture, outside the everyday
experience of the villagers. Equally, the spontaneous pat paintings and
Bankura clay figurines were more relevant to the Bengali experience than
the distant Rajput miniatures, one of the sources of the historicist Bengal
School. Significantly, Roy viewed Tagore’s painting through the same
‘local’ lens: ‘for two hundred years from the Rajput period to the present
we lacked something in art . . . Rabindranath wished to protest . . . against
all Indian high art as well as oriental art.’82 We are told an amusing but
instructive anecdote: Roy explained to the Soviet consul visiting his studio
that even if centralization was inevitable in the modern age, our ideal must
be small, heterogeneous (svatantra) communities, which restored man’s
intimate connection with the soil. As the story goes, the startled consul
gave Roy a bear hug, amazed that Roy was uttering what he felt to be the
118
most advanced Marxist thought. This reaction apparently left the artist
somewhat perplexed.83 As the Expressionists believed in multiple local
aesthetic possibilities, Roy contended that the mythology that nourished a
community art had of necessity to be local and timeless. His view allowed
for the plural aesthetic possibilities of the folk art of different regions.84
I have spoken of the parallels between Roy’s and German primitivist-
s’ questioning of Western modernity. The critic, Wilhelm Hausenstein,
for instance, explained the modernist movement in terms of restoring the
collective function of art.85 Carl Einstein, who also defined ‘primitive art’
in terms of its communal function, saw the modern ‘primitives’ and prim-
itive peoples as having similar objectives of integrating individual experi-
ence to communal life by means of myths and rituals.86 Roy himself insist-
ed on the importance of mythology as expressed in art as a bonding agent
for a community. I do not mean to suggest here that the artistic sources
and priorities of Roy and the Western primitivists were the same, nor can
one deny the ambivalence of the German Expressionists with regard to
mystical ‘Volkish’ nationalism. Yet Roy’s challenge to colonialism as an
expression of urban, industrial capitalism had clear ‘structural’ affinities
with the Western critiques of modernity. Einstein sought to restore the
values of the pre-industrial community in the life of the alienated urban
individual. Roy used folk art to restore the collective function of art in
India. In both cases we find a clear recognition of the importance of myth
in human society, which had declined with the rise of modern rationality.
There was however one crucial difference between the Indian artist
and the German Expressionists. While Western primitivists aimed at
merging art with life in a disavowal of the aesthetics of autonomy, they
never ceased to believe in the unique quality of aesthetic experience.87 Roy
sought to erase it, deliberately seeking to subvert the distinction between
individual and collaborative contribution in a work of art.88 Tradition was
a collective experience for Roy, the village art for the community, as
opposed to the individualist aesthetics of urban colonial art. Roy often
asked his sons to collaborate with him, his oldest son Patal, particularly,
and putting his own signature on the finished work, sometimes not sign-
ing it or sometimes signing Patal’s pictures. Roy’s objective of making the
signature meaningless was his playful way of subverting what Walter
Benjamin calls the ‘aura’ of a masterpiece. In addition, he turned his studio
into a workshop to reproduce his works cheaply. This was art for the
community, cheaply produced and anonymous, inexpensive enough to be
afforded by even the humblest. His concern with making useful objects was
extended to making elegant decorated pots that benefited from his innate
sense of abstract design.89 Of course, Roy did not cease to sell his works to
the cognoscenti, but he was determined from the outset to sell them also to
the ordinary people who could not afford artworks. This prompted the
Communist Party of India to urge him to declare himself a ‘people’s artist’,
but the artist refused to be involved in doctrinaire politics.90
119
 Roy’s use of tempera and cheap materials of the village craftsmen Jamini Roy, Mother and Child,
c. 1940s, gouache on board.
often caused the deterioration of his paintings in a short time. In this peri-
od, when installations, performance art or other forms of transient art
forms were still in the distant future and art generally meant painting or
sculpture, Roy was easily misunderstood and disappointed his admirers
and patrons. It became known that Roy did not set great store by the
uniqueness of a signed work. People complained that he seldom had any
original works, only numerous copies.91 By 1944, even his close friends
Bishnu Dey and John Irwin were convinced that Roy had reached the end
of the road: having ‘created a style with its own logic whose very perfec-
tion became congealed without the warmth of the transient outside
world’, he became ‘a martyr to his own mastery’.92 Though sympathetic,
Venkatachalam was equally troubled by Roy’s ‘factory’, though admitting
that the works were moderately priced, considering their demand. ‘This
I know is very much used against him. He is strongly condemned for this
mechanical craftsmanship, for this soulless repetition of an original idea
for the sake of money and popularity . . . Truth to tell, there is something
to be said in favour of this criticism.’93 In 1937, Suhrawardy had been the
first critic to half sense the artist’s motive: ‘Jamini Roy, having deliberate-
ly placed himself under the yoke of our folk and historical iconography,
cannot be accused of striving after originality.’94 Yet he hastened to add
that despite limitations imposed by tradition on his creativity, his works
showed freedom and vigour. Hence it was wrong to describe him as a decor-
ative painter. Only Rudi von Leyden, who had first-hand knowledge of
the avant-garde in Austria and Germany, showed unusual perspicacity:

Some critics complained about the picture factory in which

Jamini worked with his son and another young relative. The
same themes were executed again and again in unchanging pat-
tern. Style became routine. This criticism is not quite justified.
Reproduction and ease of duplication are part of the craft of folk
art and amongst the reasons for its simplifications. Whoever
accepts the manner must not complain about the practice.95

What the cognoscenti have simply failed to grasp is Roy’s emergence as a

radical critic of colonialism through his art.96 By the logic of his own artis-
tic objectives, this supreme individualist was now voluntarily returning to
the anonymity of tradition. Significantly, Roy eschewed artistic individu-
alism and the notion of artistic progress, the two ‘flagships’ of colonial
art.97 Unsurprisingly, Roy found Leo Tolstoy’s tract What is Art?, which
was translated into English in 1930, a source of inspiration.98 Passionate
about the worth of ordinary working people, Tolstoy held that art must
have moral goodness and be connected to life. Good art had a socially use-
ful purpose, and was not a plaything of the rich. He felt that ‘a peasant, a
child, or even a savage, may be susceptible to the influence of art, while a
120
sophisticated man who lost “that simple feeling” may, though highly edu-
cated, be immune to art.’ Interestingly, though not in sympathy with
modernism, the Russian thinker stressed simplicity in art, imagining that
all the members of the community would be involved in all future art and
the artist would earn his livelihood by the sweat of his brow. Tolstoy
pointed out that it ‘“is impossible for us, with our culture, to return to a
primitive state” say artists of our time . . . but not for the future artist who
will be free from all the perversion of technical improvements . . . ’.99
Jamini Roy’s primitivism sought confirmation not only in Tolstoy but
also in Tagore. His communitarian painting turned its back on colonial
culture, seeking to restore the simple goodness of art, lost to the elite of the
colonial metropolis. Roy’s heroic search for ‘authentic Indian art’ and his
utopian formulation of the village as the site of the nation were of consid-
erable importance to the creation of Indian identity. Roy lived his ideology
in his art but that did not necessarily make him the most remarkable
painter of pre-Independence India. It was his ability to create a perfect syn-
thesis of political and artistic ideas that made him such a charismatic
painter. His art of austere uncompromising simplicity reminds us of
Mondrian’s intellectual journey in search of an idea. Jamini Roy’s intense
concentration and his ruthless ability to pair down the inessential details to
attain a remarkable modernist brevity, boldness and simplicity of expres-
sion, became a vehicle for his deep but understated social commitment.

122
 three

Naturalists in the Age

of Modernism

The decades of the 1920s and ’30s witnessed the gradual ascendancy of
modernism, as represented by its leading exponents, Amrita Sher-Gil,
Rabindranath Tagore and Jamini Roy. But the spread of modernism by no
means ended the era of naturalist art. Modernism’s triumph can make us
forget the revolutionary impact of academic art in late nineteenth-century
India. Even in the 1920s, it continued to play a significant role in shaping
Indian identity. Academic naturalism had transformed Indian taste in the
1860s through Victorian institutions such as art schools and art exhibitions,
while the processes of mechanical reproduction disseminated naturalist art
widely. Ravi Varma’s history paintings, the zenith of Indian academic art,
profoundly moved early nationalists. During the anti-colonial Unrest of
1905, these very same paintings were accused of being debased colonial
products. The new brand of nationalists sought to exhume past ‘indige-
nous’ styles in a repudiation of mimesis. Both the ‘indigenists’, and their
opponents, the academic artists, claimed superior ‘authenticity’ for their
own particular brand of history painting. Both of them based their art on
nationalist allegories, though their artistic language differed.
In the 1920s, with a major paradigm shift, the construction of nation-
al identity took on different dynamics and primitivism emerged as the
particular Indian response to global modernism. One may ask what rele-
vance could naturalist art have during the ascendancy of the formalist
avant-garde? Prima facie, modernist developments should have spelt the
end of representational art. For an explanation of the continued impor-
tance of naturalism in the 1920s, though with radically different inflec-
tions, we need to recognize the limitations of conventional wisdom, which
presents modernism’s ‘progress’ as linear and does not allow for the co-
existence of its different trajectories. History teaches us that there have
been movements that fall outside the dominant discourse and yet reflect
aspects of modernity relevant to our times.
The artistic language of the new generation of naturalists is often
dismissed as anachronistic, but they as much as the primitivists were
shaped by the same ideologies of modernity. They shared an aversion to
123
historicism, the preoccupation of the previous generation. Instead of
grand narratives, the naturalists, as with the primitivists, turned to the
self and to immediate experience, placing their art in the service of
the local and the quotidian. Whether it was the figurative painter
Hemendranath Mazumdar and Atul Bose of Bengal, or the ‘Open Air’
artists of Bombay, they were without exception concerned with the ‘here’
and the ‘now’. Some of them delved into the intimacy of domestic life,
while others drew inspiration from the common people’s struggle for
equality and distributive justice.
Though suspicious of modernist ‘distortions of reality’, academic
artists did not necessarily set out an oppositional agenda; they simply rep-
resented another facet of global modernity, sharing the concern for the
global filtered through the local. Indeed, the concept of modernity
adhered to by the 1920s generation was fraught with paradoxes. While
professing allegiance to the local, all of them were inspired by ‘global val-
ues’. We know that Jamini Roy, Nandalal Bose and other primitivists
drew upon the teachings of Tagore, Gandhi, Tolstoy, Marx and Freud,
the universalist thinkers who also inspired the naturalists. Primitivism,
the most powerful Indian discourse of modernism, repudiated Enlighten-
ment notions of progress in seeking to restore the pre-industrial commu-
nity, while the naturalists, who were suspicious of ‘modernist’ distortions,
anchored their faith in modernity and the inevitability of social progress.
Sculptor Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury, for one, made social realism the
cornerstone of his art, believing progress towards economic justice and
social equality to be inevitable. It appears that both the ‘primitivists’ and
the ‘naturalists’ expressed deep ambivalence towards the general project
of modernity. There it would be a failure of understanding to simply
divide them unequivocally and schematically into two dichotomous
‘essential’ categories. Here T. J. Clark’s admonition not to take an instru-
mentalist view of modernism but to allow for a multiplicity of perspec-
tives is richly suggestive.1

124
 i
The Regional Expressions of Academic
Naturalism
academic artists regroup in calcutta
In the period under review, a naturalism of considerable variety and rich-
ness, anchored on the immediate environment, replaced the earlier
engagement with history painting. But let us first remind ourselves of the
genesis of Indian nationalist art. In the late nineteenth century, the
ground for the reception of naturalism had been prepared by, among
others, Ramananda Chatterjee, who furnished the intellectual justifica-
tion for admiring Victorian naturalism. This encouraged academic artists
to serve the motherland through this ‘universal’ language of art. In
Calcutta, private institutions that took pride in offering courses in aca-
demic naturalism mushroomed. The best known among them were the
Albert Temple of Science and School of Art, the Indian Art School and
the Jubilee Art Academy.1
During the nationalist Unrest of 1905, with the ascendancy of the
nationalist Bengal School of Art under Abanindranath Tagore, the for-
tunes of academic art sank. E. B. Havell, the English Principal of the gov-
ernment art school in Calcutta, appointed Abanindranath his deputy,
ruthlessly cleansing the institution of Western art teaching.2 The triumph
of the orientalists within the art school was short-lived. Percy Brown was
appointed Principal after Havell’s retirement in 1909. Being passed over,
Abanindranath resigned in disappointment, his post going to his cousin,
the landscape painter Jamini Gangooly. Though an academic artist,
Gangooly had hitherto been close to the orientalists who now viewed his
action as a betrayal.3
Brown was open-minded and a competent scholar of Mughal art, but
he allowed Gangooly to reinstate academic naturalism at the school. The
1920s generation of academic artists of Bengal must be studied against these
vicissitudes of artistic fortune. Between 1905 and 1915, as oriental art went
from strength to strength, academic artists of Calcutta lost prestige and
patronage, some being forced to emigrate.4 Though seen by the nationalists
as déracinés, Bombay artists continued to enjoy professional success. In
the 1920s, naturalism re-emerged in Calcutta partly under Percy Brown’s
encouragement and partly because of the rise of two gifted and ideological-
ly active artists: Hemendranath Mazumdar, a specialist in female nudes,
and the portrait painter Atul Bose. Interestingly, Jamini Roy, who started
as an academic painter, belonged to the Mazumdar and Bose circle in his
initial career though he also maintained his links with Abanindranath.
To their circle belonged the talented but reticent B. C. Law (Bimala Charan
Laha), an artist of independent means, and the figure painter Jogesh Seal.
125
B. C. Law (Bimala Charan
Laha), A Bengali Lady, c. 1930s,
oil on canvas.

Atul Bose, sketch of his wife,
1940s, pencil on paper.
Satish Sinha, The Maiden of the
Deep, c. 1921, lithograph.
The book illustrator Satish Sinha and the sculptors
Prohlad Karmakar and Pramatha Mallik were also
active in this period. Many of the academic artists had
their initial training at Ranada Gupta’s Jubilee Art
Academy. Gupta, who was convinced that artistic
excellence was possible only within the secure founda-
tions of naturalism, had quit the government art school
during the nationalist restructuring of 1905. He carried
a lonely torch for the academic nude at his school, nur-
turing budding academic painters, offering them food
and shelter if they had no ostensible means of support.5
Several artists from outside Bengal came in search of
an artistic career in Calcutta, notably the painter S. G.
Thakur Singh from Punjab and the sculptor V. P. Karmarkar from
Maharastra.
127
 Satish Sinha, Mother
Breastfeeding Baby, 1940,
chalk study from life.

The art school under Percy Brown offered the three following artists
basic academic training. Jamini Roy lingered over a decade at the art school
where his precocious talent and wayward ways assumed legendary pro-
portions.6 The childhood friends Hemendranath Mazumdar (1898–1948)
and Atul Bose (1898–1977), who were from rural Maimansingh, had
dreams of becoming artists. Knowing that his zamindar (landowning class)
father would not let him take up the vocation of an artist, Mazumdar ran
away from home to enrol at the art school in Calcutta. This proved to be a
mistake for the headstrong Mazumdar who hated routine work, his disap-
pointment reaching its nadir in 1911. Refusing to join other students in
producing artwork to welcome the visiting monarch George v, he left
the school to join Gupta’s Jubilee Academy.7 However both these institu-
tions disappointed him in his ambitions of mastering figure painting.
Eventually, he taught himself anatomy and figure drawing by means of
books that he had sent from England. Atul Bose was from a more modest
background and did not face similar family opposition. After spending
some years at the Jubilee Academy, Bose moved on to the government art
school. His hard work and precocious drawing ability won him the school-
s’ highest accolade in his final year.
128
Hemendranath Mazumdar,
Cast Out, c. 1921, oil on canvas.
Atul Bose, Hemendranath Mazumdar and Jamini Roy began as penni-
less artists, doing sundry artistic odd jobs, such as painting scenery for the
theatre, or producing paintings of the deceased for the family based on pho-
tographs, a popular ‘Victorian’ custom in Bengal. Bose tried to set up portrait
practice with little success. One evening the three friends gathered at
Mazumdar’s dingy studio in north Calcutta to form a circle of academic
artists. The Indian Academy was more of a convivial club, the highly tem-
peramental and ambitious artists thriving on endless discussions on art. As
Bose reminisced later, the burning issue of the day was whether the pursuit
of naturalism was tantamount to a betrayal of national ideals, and whether
the historicism of the Bengal School was the sole path to India’s artistic
revival. Though admired for his intellect, Roy was often teased for his weak-
ness for orientalism. Yet, as Bose was to admit later, Roy rejected both the
historicism of the Bengal School and the ‘crude’ representational methods of
the academic hack. As early as 1920, Roy’s originality was confirmed, if con-
firmation were needed, by the mounting number of prizes he won. Roy
astonished his friends with his remarkable gift. To prove his point about the
economy of form, he would, for instance, bring out a drawing in a drastical-
ly shorthand style; yet no academic drawing could be more lively.8
129
 Hemendranath Mazumdar, the moving spirit of the group, proposed
that they bring their work to the attention of the Bengali public by pub-
lishing it in Bharat Barsha, Masik Basumati and other ‘middle-brow’ maga-
zines, as the orientalists had already done in the influential monthlies
Modern Review, Prabasi and Bharati. In addition, the orientalists had been
able to launch, with a handsome government subsidy, their own scholar-
ly art journal, Rupam. To counteract Rupam’s dominance, the academic
group launched the Indian Art Academy in 1920. Sukumar Roy, whom we
have encountered before, had been a champion of academic art, and
owned an advanced printing firm. He readily came to their aid.9 While
being conciliatory, to the extent of agreeing to include any oriental art of
‘merit’, the journal asserted the right of the academic artists to participate
in nationalist efforts towards artistic progress.10 To prove their creden-
tials, they published Bose’s elegant sketch of Rabindranath Tagore and of
the recently deceased Maharastran leader, Balgangadhar Tilak, based on
a photograph. The magazine got off to a good start, since artists from
all over India were keen to send works for publication. To ensure a wide
readership, the modestly priced but elegantly produced Indian Art
Academy targeted the average well-read laity by covering a wide variety of
topics. In addition to articles on art theory that expatiated on naturalism,
notably Bose’s discussion of Immanuel Kant’s view of art, it supplied art
news and gossip, travelogues, short stories and humorous pieces.
However, the ultimate intention of the Indian Art Academy was to publi-
cize the works of Mazumdar, Bose and Roy. Unsurprisingly, it was domin-
ated by full-colour plates of their prize-winning pictures.11
The journal proved to be a white elephant. In any case, for the artists,
nothing could replace exhibitions as a vehicle for publicity. During the
ascendancy of the Bengal School, government patronage had been trans-
ferred from the pro-academic Art Gallery in Calcutta to the Indian
Society of Oriental Art. The Tagores exercised strict control over this
institution by excluding all academic painters. Effectively debarred from
exhibitions, academic artists of Bengal were forced to send their works to
shows outside Bengal, even though many could ill afford the cost. The
group resolved to challenge the authority of the Indian Society of Oriental
Art by founding the rival Society of Fine Arts. The society planned ambi-
tious all-India exhibitions, for which their former teacher Percy Brown
readily offered them space in the art school. The group felt it politic to
propitiate Abanindranath, the guru of orientalism, by inviting him to be
an honorary member of the society, but was cold-shouldered by him.
The first exhibition of the Society of Fine Arts (22 December 1921–4
January 1922) showed over a thousand paintings from academic artists
from all over India, which went some way towards closing the long-
standing gap felt among academic artists.12 The Statesman, which covered
the second exhibition (22 December 1922–2 January 1923), singled out
Atul Bose’s Comrades as a ‘fine, strong work’.13 The reviewer in the
130
 Bengali periodical, Bharat Barsha, Biswapati Chaudhury, a minor artist,
collector and critic, chose a select number of works, notably those of
Jamini Roy, Atul Bose and the sculptor V. P. Karmarkar for detailed
analysis. Chaudhury showed imagination in recognizing the qualities in
Roy that were to be uniquely his: boldness, simplicity and ‘cultural speci-
ficity’. Even more strikingly, as early as 1922, he reflected the shift to local
identities in his comment that not only Western art but also Ajanta and
Mughal painting were alien to Bengali culture, a sentiment that would
grow in momentum within this decade.
Chaudhury praised Bose’s Bengal Tiger, a spirited portrait sketch of
the Bengali educationist Sir Asutosh Mukherjea, making an intelligent
observation that the convincing likeness of an individual depended on the

Atul Bose, Bengal Tiger, 1922,

pencil sketch on paper.

131
artist’s ability to capture his characteristic expression.14 The sketch won
Bose a scholarship to the Royal Academy in London, widely regarded as
the Mecca of academic art. The young artist’s encounter with Sir Asutosh
has become the stuff of legend, much as the portrait has won a place in the
public’s affection. Sir Asutosh’s opinion was known to carry weight with
the members of the selection committee. In order to impress him, Bose
arrived at his doorstep one morning. When the educationist asked him
curtly what his business was, Bose boldly proposed to draw the great man.
Sir Asutosh was puzzled, for no one had ever made such a demand.
However, curiosity got the better of him. To test the young man’s skill, he
stipulated that Bose would have to complete his drawing within the short
time that he would keep still while he received his daily oil massage.
The outcome was the remarkable Bengal Tiger, which the Times Literary
Supplement was to use for the educationist’s obituary in 1924.15 Bose spent
two years (1924–6) at the Royal Academy, where he produced some fine
drawings and oil paintings from the nude, but his most valuable experi-
ence was his work with the leading English post-Impressionist, Walter
Sickert, whose influence is seen in Bose’s occasional use of sombre greys
and browns.

hemendranath mazumdar, eros and the nation

With Bose’s departure for England in 1924 the circle was disbanded. But
this had no effect on Roy and Mazumdar’s careers, which blossomed.
Mazumdar won no less than three prizes at the venerable Bombay Art
Society in three successive years, including the gold medal of the society for
his painting Smriti (Memories) in 1920. The parochial Kanhaiyalal Vakil
of the Bombay Chronicle grumbled: ‘One Mr H. Mazumdar of Calcutta
won three times the first prize of the Exhibition. It is a disgrace to the
Bombay artists . . . Either the Judging Committee must be incompetent or
Mr Mazumdar is too high for the exhibition.’16 Around 1926 Mazumdar
had his first financial success when a commercial firm acquired the repro-
duction rights to his painting Village Love for a substantial sum. The paint-
ing provided the main attraction for its annual calendar.
Mazumdar’s large sensuous oils of partially clothed or nude women
and his intimate, voyeuristic eroticism attracted the maharajas of Jaipur,
Bikaner, Kotah, Kashmir, Cooch Behar, Mayurbhanj, Patiala and the
other princely states who threw open their palaces to him.17 Among the
nobility, the Maharaja of Patiala, Sir Bhupindranth Singh (1891–1938),
was the most devoted, engaging him as a state artist for five years on a
handsome salary. Some of Mazumdar’s works cost as much as 15,000
rupees, an exceptionally large price for the period. Apart from his figures
and portraits, he completed an ambitious screen triptych with the help of
assistants. In a letter to his wife, Mazumdar proudly tells her that the
Maharaja prefers him to the orientalist Barada Ukil, a remark that gives
132
a hint of sweet revenge. The Maharaja’s generosity enabled him to fulfil
his dream of building his own house with a spacious studio in Calcutta.18
Even as he consolidated his reputation, Mazumdar kept a wary eye
on the Bengali public. Bose was absent in England; Roy was preoccupied
with evolving his primitivist style. Mazumdar was left to publish the
Indian Academy of Art single-handed. He continued to cover all Indian
artists but gave considerable publicity to his own work. The publication
showcased The Art of Mr H. Mazumdar in five volumes (1920–28?), as well
as presenting Mazumdar’s polemical attack on historicism, the ideological
foundations of the Bengal School. History painting, he contended, was
out of touch with contemporary India. Believing in the universality of
mimetic art, he insisted that only direct observation of nature could pro-
vide an objective standard. Mazumdar waged a relentless war against the
orientalists until the end of his life. Unlike Bose, he never craved their
friendship. In his posthumous essays, he excoriated the orientalists who
only parroted ancient texts but lacked the sensibility to appreciate con-
temporary art (by which he meant naturalism). Mazumdar’s faith in tele-
ology made him assert that the ancient paintings of Ajanta were advanced
only for their period, but judged by modern criteria, they were full of
errors.19 In a late article, ‘Cobwebs of the Fine Arts World’, he summed
up his contempt for the ‘authenticity’ of the Bengal School, claiming that
their inability to draw was camouflaged by their assertion of a ‘spiritual’
world beyond appearances.20 Yet it was not all polemics. In 1929,
Mazumdar launched a new illustrated journal, Shilpi (Artist), offering ‘an
arena for free discussion and exchange of thoughts relative to the fine arts
– Oriental and Occidental, Ancient and Modern’. He even included an
admiring review of R. H. Wilenski’s standard work, The Modern
Movement in Art (1927). The reviewer however was clearly sympathetic to
the Bengal School, seeing its aims as the same as those of the Western
avant-garde, and describing current academic art as an aberration. He
admonished Mazumdar and his circle not to go down a blind alley on the
grounds of ‘universal principles’.21
Mazumdar’s most opulent publication was the Indian Masters series,
containing high quality colour and black-and-white plates, devotedly
edited by the Gandhian nationalist A.M.T. Acharya until his untimely
death.22 The first volume printed Mazumdar’s well-known painting Palli
Pran (The Soul of the Village) shown at the first exhibition of the Society
of Fine Arts in 1921, one of the most successful realizations of his ‘wet-
sari’ effect, which was to become the artist’s signature style. The subject of
a rustic maiden returning home in a wet sari after her daily ablutions gave
the artist scope to represent the model’s fleshy buttocks and rounded
shoulders partially visible through her wet cloth. Figures à dos were
Mazumdar’s favourite. He lovingly delineated the rounded nape of the
neck, the fleshy contours of the shoulders, the small of the back, the concave
of the spinal column, the hips and the buttocks. For all its clever suggestion
133
Raja Raja Varma, Water Carrier,
c. 1890s, oil on canvas.
Opposite: Hemendranath
Mazumdar, Palli Pran, 1921,
oil on canvas.
of an arrested movement, the work was carefully realized in the studio. In
order to capture the particular pose he also used photographs. Mazumdar
created a new genre of figure painting in India, suggesting sensuous flesh
tones and soft quality of the skin, spied through the semi-transparent gar-
ment. Although Ravi Varma’s brother C. Raja Raja Varma had first treat-
ed la drape mouillée, Mazumdar created an independent genre, spawning
imitators, the best-known being Thakur Singh of Punjab. Having discov-
ered a successful formula, Mazumdar exploited it to the full, producing
a succession of ‘wet sari’ paintings, revealing the figure from different
135
angles. These more conventional poses never attained the easy grace and Opposite: Hemendranath
Mazumdar, Rose or Thorn?,
eroticism of Palli Pran.
1936, watercolour on paper.
His one other successful attempt to capture translucent flesh tones was
a large ambitious watercolour nude suggestively titled Dilli ka Laddu,
loosely translated as ‘the obscure object of desire’. Mazumdar was obsessed
with capturing the sexual appeal of the lighter-skinned elite women of
Bengal, and even wrote verses on his paintings.23 Most probably the model
or inspiration for all these different women was his wife, but the subjects
cannot be definitively identified. His draped studies capture the dreamy
sensuousness of his sitters absorbed in their own reveries. The subject of
Rose or Thorn?, a young woman in a silk sari, wearing elegant earrings and
armlets, stands engrossed in her own dream world. The rose in the back-

Hemendranath Mazumdar,
Dilli ka Laddu, c. 1930s,
watercolour on paper.

136
ground has been suggested as symbolizing the pain and pleasure of love. It
was shown at the annual exhibition of the Academy of Fine Arts in Calcutta
in 1936 and was later to draw accolades at an exhibition of Portraits of
Great Beauties of the World, held in California in 1952.24
In socially conservative Bengal in the 1920s, it is hard to gauge people’s
true feelings about Mazumdar. As his images were diffused in Bengali
journals, his readership could not but have taken a guilty pleasure in look-
ing at them. Classical nudes, occurring on the pages of the same journals
since the early twentieth century, did not hold the same shocked fascina-
tion because of their cultural distance. Then there were the Bengal School’s
mannered, voluptuous semi-nudes.25 The disturbing power of Mazumdar’s
women lay in their palpability and immediacy: his subject a young Bengali
woman enacting an everyday village scene of returning home after her
daily bath. A critic put it well: at a time when women were behind purdah,
it was daring to represent someone from the respectable middle-class,
someone unapproachable in real life.26 In short, the beholder experienced
the frisson of spying on a ‘respectable’ housewife, the proverbial girl next
door. The artist’s tantalizing silence about the identity of the model height-
ened the mystery surrounding her.27
The voyeuristic aspect of his paintings called forth questions about his
motives as well as the quality of his work. The Empire had given rise
to extreme ambivalences with regard to the body, as its representations
became central to the construction and maintenance of British authority
in India.28 The rulers were responsible for a new concept of modesty,
which provoked serious differences between them and the colonized as to
how much body could be exposed without outraging decency. In the past,
and at least from the fourteenth century, under the impact of Muslim
empires, ‘respectable’ women no longer appeared unveiled in public.
Peasant women had no such constraints, nor did respectable Nair women
of Kerala hesitate to go bare-breasted as late as the twentieth century.
Victorian evangelism discouraged Indian erotic art, and yet turned a
blind eye to the Classical nude, which stood for moral purity and the
height of art. And yet, in no culture was artistic nudity more ubiquitous
than the Victorian.29
Such contradictory pressures created tensions with regard to issues of
taste and morality. Tagore led in ‘cleansing’ the Bengali language of its
‘vulgarisms’. But even he reacted against the prevalent ‘Victorian’ prud-
ery. The new concept of shame among the educated was so exaggerated,
he wrote in his essay on education (1906), that ‘we start blushing if we see
bare table legs’.30 Academic nudes found their way into the mansions of
the rich. However, since the Classical nude was not part of the Indian trad-
ition, it became hard to distinguish it from pornography. The situation
was made worse by the influx of Victorian and Edwardian pornography,
especially ‘art photographs’ from Paris, from the end of the nineteenth
century.31 Tagore’s nephew Balendranath Tagore, a discriminating critic,
138
took the Classical nude as his model, admiring the Platonic idealization of
the unadorned state of nature.32 Yet Balendranath was repelled by the
erotic sculptures of Hindu temples.
Morality entered the nationalist agenda early on. Swadeshi ideology
imagined the modestly draped mother figure or the self-effacing sati or
chaste woman as the highest Indian ideal. Interestingly, taste and morality
became the subject of a heated debate in 1917. Several nationalist leaders,
who normally showed little interest in art, expressed strong opinions on the
function of art in shaping the national character. The debate took place in
Narayan, a journal edited by the leading nationalist politician Chittaranjan
Das, and drew contributions from other prominent figures such as Bepin
Pal and Barindranath Ghosh. The writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri, a struggling
intellectual in the 1920s, describes Narayan as a diehard conservative paper,
in contrast to the liberal Sabuj Patra, endorsed by the Tagores.33 However,
the difference between the two groups was more a matter of degree than of
kind. Although the Extremist politician Bepin Pal often employed Hindu
nationalist rhetoric in his stand against the empire, his response to modern-
ity was not so different from that of the Moderates.
In ‘Religion, Morality and Art’, published in Narayan in 1917, Pal
ventured that the sole purpose of art and literature was aesthetic pleasure
(rasa). Arguing that morality was historically contingent, he reminded
his readers of Emile Zola’s works – morally questionable, yet great art.34
The following year an essay, purportedly written by the charismatic
Aurobindo Ghosh (actually written by his acolyte, Nalinikanta Gupta),
contended that an artist’s aims were different from those of a saint. Unlike
a man of religion, the artist treated all aspects of life, even morally ques-
tionable ones. Thus the nude must be judged by its treatment, for, unlike
photography, a successful painting was able to transmute its subject mat-
ter.35 The nationalist historian Radhakamal Mukherjee objected to such
irresponsible hedonism: an ‘ugly’ subject could never be a vehicle for
beautiful art. The nude, he insisted, was lowest on the artistic scale; it
could not encourage exalted thoughts, only lascivious ones. The editor felt
obliged to intervene: the aims of the artist and the saint were incompati-
ble; art attained its higher goal only through the profane path.36
The cultural climate demanded that Mazumdar justify his erotic
paintings against charges of prurience.37 The editor of the Indian Masters,
his ardent admirer, offered a rather disingenuous explanation of Palli
Pran. According to him, the village belle’s déshabillé betrayed unselfcon-
scious innocence: although we caught a glimpse of her naked flesh
through her wet cloth, her ‘half-turned face and timid gaze’ represented
her modesty. He piously admonished the reader against imputing any
base motive to her: ‘the healthy growth of a nation’s life is possible only
when its women lead the purest of lives’.38 Mazumdar had claimed a high
moral ground for his art in competition with the Bengal school. He was
thus forced to make strenuous efforts to prove his integrity. In Shilpi he
139
offered lessons in figure drawing for the interested amateur, stressing the
discipline and hard work that he claimed were absent in photography.39
Not only did the artist’s dedication elevate figure painting to a higher
plane, he contended, but the beholder also had the duty to approach it
with a pure heart, accepting nakedness as natural and beautiful. The
implication was that the onus rested on the beholder. Despite such protes-
tations, the public perception of the dubiousness of his ‘voyeuristic’ works
remained. As a famous Bengali wit once quipped, ‘after Mazumdar, [our]
mothers and daughters hardly dared to go down to the local pond for fear
of artists lurking behind trees and bushes’.40

atul bose and the politics of art in calcutta

On Atul Bose’s return from London in 1926 Percy Brown invited him to
teach informally at the government art school, in order to help consolidate
academic art at the school.41 On Brown’s retirement within two years,
however, the orientalists returned in triumph to the school. Mukul Dey, a
close associate of the Tagores, was appointed its first Indian Principal.42
After his initial schooling at Santiniketan, Dey learned drypoint etching
in Chicago, followed by a period in London at the Slade School of Art
under Henry Tonks and Sir William Rothenstein’s mural class at the
Royal College of Art. Dey spent several ‘high-profile’ years in London
painting, etching and giving lectures. In 1924, he took part in decorating
the Indian pavilion at the Empire Festival in Wembley. Bose, who was at
the Royal Academy at this time, refused to join him in the decoration,
which led to a lifelong animus between them.43
On joining the art school in 1928, Mukul Dey embarked on reforms of
teaching and student discipline. He showed an open contempt for Brown
and his Deputy, Jamini Gangooly, who was soon eased out of the school.44
Dey then disallowed the annual exhibitions of the Society of Fine Arts,
which were held at the art school. Losing his allies at the school and well
aware of Dey’s hostility, Bose withdrew from teaching. Although Dey was
close to the orientalists and painted in an orientalist style in his formative
years, his opposition to the naturalists was not entirely ideological. He
himself had trained at the Slade and the Royal College and was a success-
ful graphic artist. One of Dey’s aims was to restore student discipline at the
school, which he felt was non-existent. However, the students launched a
successful boycott of the school, demanding better teaching of academic
art. Consequently, Dey was forced to appoint Bose as Jamini Gangooly’s
successor. Bose did not stay long enough to consolidate academic art at the
school. In 1929, the government of India announced an all-India competi-
tion to produce copies of royal portraits at Windsor Castle for the Viceroy’s
Residence in New Delhi. The architect of the new capital, Sir Edwin
Lutyens, in consultation with the Viceroy, chose Atul Bose and J. A.
Lalkaka of Bombay. Bose left for England in 1930. Lutyens, who had a low
140
Mukul Dey, Festive Season,
1940s, drypoint.

opinion of Indian artists, was impressed with Bose, asking him to draw his
likeness.45 Mukul Dey himself became the next victim of the internecine
struggle at the school, being forced to take early retirement, the feud
claiming Bose as its final victim. In 1945, two years before Independence,
Bose became Principal of the art school, only to hand in his resignation
within two years, as he found his every move at the school blocked.46
One of Bose’s lasting achievements was to help found an art society
that would not be dominated by any one faction. The Fine Arts Society,
we have seen, lost its space at the art school with Dey’s appointment, but
Bose soon found a more permanent site.47 In the early 1930s, he enlisted
the support of a wealthy benefactor, Maharaja Pradyot Kumar Tagore.
Under his aegis, a meeting of Calcutta notables was held on 15 August
141
1933, which passed a resolution to found an all-India association, with
government blessing, to promote the fine arts.48 As local newspaper
Ananda Bazar Patrika claimed, there was no central organization to co-
ordinate the cultivation of art in India, a gap which the newly founded
Indian Academy of Fine Arts filled. This demand for a central govern-
ment-backed institution to be in charge of the nation’s art had been wide-
spread since the 1920s. It was placed on the agenda at a conference held in
connection with the Empire Festival at Wembley in 1924.49
The meeting held in Calcutta reiterated the need for a gallery of
European art in the metropolis, which had been abolished in the wake
of the Havellian revolution.50 Atul Bose was made secretary of the
Academy conjointly with an expatriate European. However, Calcutta’s
ambitions of hosting an India-wide organization ran into rough waters.
The proposal had come in the aftermath of the bitter conflict between
Bombay and Calcutta over the spoils of the New Delhi murals (see
Chapter Four). The academy, fully aware of this, tried in vain to reassure
Bombay of its non-factional intentions. The partisan journalist
Kanhaiyalal Vakil and the art teacher Gladstone Solomon held a protest
meeting in Bombay, objecting to the elevation of a ‘regional’ organiza-
tion to a pan-Indian level. The government, already sensitive to the
charge of favouritism, persuaded the working committee of the new
Academy of Fine Arts to drop the word ‘Indian’.51
Bose organized the first exhibition, which opened on 23 December
1933 at the Indian Museum. It showed 800 works sent by Indian and
expatriate European artists from all over India, as well as the art collec-
tions of leading Calcutta families. The best prizes for oils went to Satish
Sinha, primarily a graphic artist and a member of the Mazumdar circle,
to the expatriate Englishman F.C.W. Forcebury, and to L. M. Sen, one of
the muralists at the India House in London. Jamini Roy’s Jashoda won the
best prize for painting in the Indian style.52 The second exhibition opened
on 22 December 1934, the prize for painting in the Indian style once again
going to Roy, while V. P. Karmarkar’s Waghari Beauty won the sculpture
prize.53 Despite these successes Bose, disillusioned with factional politics,
resigned from the Academy.54
Perhaps what has endured in Bose’s career is his art. From his student
days, he had shown a precocious gift for naturalism, as seen in his portrai-
ture and later in remarkable academic studies from the nude at the Royal
Academy. On his return from London he tried to resume his portrait prac-
tice in earnest with little success. In 1939 Bose had his first retrospective,
which at last brought him a measure of recognition. The orientalist guru,
Abanindranath, in a spirit of reconciliation, told Bose: you may worship a
different god [of art] but you are not godless. Jamini Roy wrote a generous
tribute in the catalogue and two influential critics, Shahid Suhrawardy and
Sudhindranath Datta, known to us as staunch champions of Roy, were
sympathetic to the show.55
142
Atul Bose, preparatory sketch
for a portrait of his
wife Devjani, 1939, red chalk
on paper.
Atul Bose, The Artist’s Wife
Devjani, 1939, oil on canvas.
Datta singled out the striking portrait of Bose’s future wife, Devjani,
as one of his finest achievements, as the sensitive painting, and the
remarkable sketch on which it is based, testify. He recognized the deli-
cate quality of Bose’s drawing, having ‘few rivals in this country’, and
also noting the treatment of his academic nudes, ‘faultless yet full of life’.
Mindful of the orientalist charge that Indian naturalism smacked of colo-
nial hybridity, Datta argued that the outstanding quality of his work
rested on his complete mastery over the medium that he had so deliber-
ately chosen. Pointing out that the impact of European civilization on
other cultures was not uniformly disastrous, he argued that Bose’s pic-
tures, despite their European technique, were ‘expressions of the Indian
vision of reality’.56 Interestingly, Datta noted that the prevailing political
turmoil had made Bose aware of social injustices as evident in some of
the works.
An admirer of Jamini Roy, Sudhindranath Datta’s appreciation of Bose
was necessarily muted. The limitations of Bose’s work, he pointed out, lay
in its over-elaboration, an absence of boldness and an over-dependence on
the subject matter to the detriment of its formal structure, and ‘in his least
successful moments [Bose] is a trifle too academic to be wholly satisfacto-
ry’.57 Datta’s modernist critique of Bose is like comparing chalk with
cheese, because Bose and Roy’s objectives were entirely incompatible. Bose
143
 Atul Bose, Preparatory sketch
for a portrait of Rani Goggi
Devi Birla, c. 1940s, pencil on
paper.

himself, and his well-wishers, regarded his career as a teacher and a painter
as a failure, a career of frustrations and the missed opportunities of an
undoubtedly gifted man. Part of his failure may be ascribed to his ‘mis-
placed’ faith in the essential ‘objectivity’ of representational art. To counter
the ‘subjective’ vision of the visual world proposed by both orientalism and
the avant-garde, he prepared a sophisticated teaching manual to teach cor-
rect drawing with his invented device, the ‘Perspectograph’. Regretting the
global excesses of modern art, he dreamed of returning to an art of ‘greater
reticence, discipline and self-control’, based on solid empiricism.58
144

Allah Bukhsh, Before the
Temple, c. 1920s, oil on board.
thakur singh, allah bukhsh and the
naturalists of punjab
Lahore, the capital of Punjab, saw an efflorescence of academic naturalism
in the early twentieth century. The Mayo School of Art, shaped by
Lockwood Kipling, tended to favour the decorative arts. Hence few suc-
cessful academic artists received training at the school. The earliest aca-
demic artist of note in Lahore was Sri Ram (1876–1926), born in Madras
and trained at the art school there. Ram was an accomplished landscape
and figure painter in oils and watercolours.59 The most sought-after
Punjabi academic painter, Allah Bukhsh (1895–1978), had no formal train-
ing in art. A simple man of artisan origins, he absorbed the lessons of nat-
uralism by observing others and by apprenticing with commercial crafts-
men-artists. His peripatetic early career included painting stage sets for a
theatre in Calcutta, a career also pursued by Thakur Singh, another
Punjabi painter in the city, as well as Jamini Roy and Deviprosad Roy
Chowdhury. Large stage sets gave Allah Bukhsh the experience to tackle
canvases of an impressive scale. Wealthy patrons lined up in Lahore for his
history painting, especially ambitious works on Hindu mythology, Punjabi
145
 Sobha Singh, Interior Scene,
1940s, oil on canvas.

folk tales and grand landscapes. His style ranged from a soft-focus treat-
ment of genre scenes or mythological subjects and misty ‘Corotesque’
landscapes to hard-edged outdoor scenes. Winnowing with Buffaloes, for
instance, is a masterly evocation of the midday Indian sun, mimicking
photography by painting the farmers and the buffaloes in deep shadows to
emphasize the blinding light. Allah Bukhsh’s final works express his deep
anguish at the mindless carnage of 1947 in two remarkable semi-abstract,
almost surrealist landscapes, Anthropomorphic Landscapes 1 and 11.60
Sobha Singh (1901–1986) came to art late in life after having spent some
years in the Middle East as a soldier in the First World War. While there, he
became fascinated with the land and its inhabitants.61 Singh is best known
for his portrait series of Sikh religious leaders and paintings based on Punjabi
folk tales in an accomplished but somewhat sugary style that reminds us of
Edmund Dulac. The most enterprising among Punjabi academic painters
was S. G. Thakur Singh (1894–1970), who left the province to make his for-
tune in Bombay, where he assisted a professional scene painter for a brief
period. He then moved to Calcutta, spending the next 30 years in the city.
From making a living as a scene painter for the popular Madan’s Theatre, he
joined the Pioneer Film Studio as art director.62 The Tagores became Singh’s
patrons, while reproductions of his works in vernacular journals, especially
seductive paintings of women, endeared him to the Bengali public.
Immensely energetic, he set up the Punjab Academy of Fine Arts single-
handedly to promote his own works, steadily publishing his paintings from
the 1920s. Among these, the most ambitious were the four-volumed The Art
of Mr S. G. Thakur Singh and Glimpses of India, with introductions by the poet S. G. Thakur Singh, After the
Tagore and Abanindranath. His painting After the Bath, which pays homage Bath, c. 1923, oil on canvas.

146
S. G. Thakur Singh,
A River Landscape at Sunrise,
1939, oil on canvas.
S. G. Thakur Singh,
A River Landscape at Sunset,
1937, oil on canvas.
to Mazumdar’s ‘wet sari’ paintings, won a prize at Wembley in 1924. Thakur
Singh became best known as a painter of the Taj Mahal and other famous
Indian monuments, and picturesque landscapes. In 1935, he moved back to
his home town of Amritsar where he established the Indian Academy of
Fine Arts, becoming a leading figure in the art world of the province.
haldankar, acharekar and the open air school
of bombay
The academic artists of Bombay boasted a flourishing naturalist tradition
from the late nineteenth century, partly aided by the powerful presence of
the Bombay Art Society, which had a long and colourful history as the
bastion of academic art. The reputation of Bombay academic artists suf-
fered briefly during the rise of oriental art in Bengal, but from 1918 to
1934 Gladstone Solomon, the energetic Principal of the art school, helped
restore its position in the art world (see Chapter Four). Parallel to the
debate on modernism in Calcutta in the 1920s, Bombay witnessed a new
generation of academic artists who responded to modernism in the light
of their own preoccupations. We have to wait until the late 1940s for fully
fledged modernism in the province, but the lightened palette and thick
impasto brushwork of these artists betrayed their allegiance to the new
anti-academic tendencies in the West.
This generation forsook the earlier historicist treatment of ancient
mythology that had been the hallmark of a Herman Muller or a M. V.
Dhurandhar, turning to the ‘here and now’ and the quotidian, which had
interesting parallels with the preoccupation of artists in other provinces.
To these artists the quality of the light and the outdoors became more
important than the niceties of period details.63 Landscape painting
emerged as a major genre in Bombay and Maharastra between the years
1917 and 1930. Of course there had been fine landscape painters before:
Raja Varma, the tragic Abalal Rahiman, Jamini Prakash Gangooly and
Lucy Sultan Ahmed, all of whom with the exception of Abalal regularly
exhibited at the Bombay Art Society, and won plaudits from the critics.64
Viewers at the annual exhibition of the Bombay Art Society in 1922
noticed a keen interest in the natural environment and architecture among
a number of rising artists, which prompted the Times of India to dub this
new trend the Open Air School. Most noticeably they had shaken off the
smooth chiaroscuro and precise drawing of their academic forebears.
As Nalini Bhagwat has shown, this new interest paralleled develop-
ments in Maharastran poetry that moved away from historicism to a love
for the minutiae of nature.65 In terms of style, a modified form of
Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting took hold of these artists,
who now applied freer brushstrokes and thick paints straight from the
tube. They sometimes laid on the paint as strips or stipples of bright
unmixed colours. In watercolours, a more ‘fluorescent’ surface, created
149
with repeated applications of transparent layers and highlights picking
out details of objects, brought in a new treatment of natural light. In the
work of these Indian artists, the most noticeable aspect was the sketch-
like character of the paintings, a treatment that reminds us of the British
versions of French Impressionism, particularly Frank Brangwyn colours,
William Russell Flint brushstrokes and generally the artists encountered
on the pages of The Studio.66
Among the leading ‘Open Airists’, M. K. Parandekar from Kolhapur
won the position of ‘Artist by Appointment’ to the Governor of Bombay.
M. S. Satwalekar produced impressive picturesque scenes of the
Himalayas before he gave up painting to join the nationalist movement.67
150
opposite: G. M. Solegaonkar,
Mahiari, 1935, oil on canvas.
This prize-winning painting
shown at the Bombay Art
Society exhibition in 1935
encapsulated the mottled effect
and heightened post-impres-
sionist colours typical of British
posters of the 1920s and ’30s.
M. K. Parandekar, Landscape,
1930s, oil on canvas.
Of this new generation, I have chosen two who had long and successful
careers in Bombay to suggest a flavour of these developments, particular-
ly the new impressionistic treatment of landscape and figures. S. L.
Haldankar (1882–1968) was a prize-winning student at the J. J. School of
Art from 1903 to 1908. He emerged as the most prolific portrait and land-
scape painter of the region, winning commendation at an exhibition held
at the Royal Society of Arts in London in 1915. The enterprising
Haldankar set up a highly successful private art school, Haldankar’s Fine
Art Institute, soon after graduation, and founded with his friends the
nationalist Art Society of India in 1918 to rival the official Bombay Art
Society. As he explained, he felt dissatisfied with the society for being a
mouthpiece of the colonial rulers. Yet the Society was not slow to honour
the artist in 1925 for his oil painting A Mohammadan Pilgrim. The work
was in the late nineteenth-century genre of picturesque ethnography pop-
ular at the art school. An artist who used a variety of expressions and
media, one of his favourite devices was to illuminate the figure from an
artificial light source, such as a lamp placed below the figure, to create a
dramatic effect. Among these, the most popular is The Glow of Hope.
However, it is the large number of sketchbooks as well as watercolour and
oil sketches left by Haldankar that give us an opportunity to study his sys-
tematic observation, in the plein air tradition, of the surrounding regions,
including the ancient ruins in Bombay and its environs. These painting
151
sketches once again remind us of British watercolours of the period that M. S. Satwalekar, Himalayan
blended the French Impressionist treatment of light with the English Scene, 1920s, oil on canvas.

Picturesque tradition. In this Haldankar may have been influenced by the S. L. Haldankar, Glow of Hope,
watercolours of Cecil Burns, a student of Hubert Herkomer and his c. 1920s, oil on canvas.
teacher at the Bombay art school.68
Portrait painter, watercolourist, illustrator, art teacher, and later cul-
tural delegate to Hollywood in post-Independence India, M. R.
Acharekar (1907–1979) took his art training at the privately run Ketkar
Art Institute in Bombay, before he joined the government art school at the
late age of 21. Later he completed his training at the Royal College of Art
in London. In 1929, he secured his reputation with the prize-winning
watercolour Concentration, which emphasized the rough-textured,
‘sketch-like’ quality of the painting. While at the Royal College,
Acharekar was chosen by the Raj to paint the historic opening session of
the Indian Round Table Conference held in London in 1932. In 1935 the
Viceroy, Lord Willingdon, selected him for recording George v’s Silver
Jubilee celebrations in London.69
Acharekar wrote books on art, among which Rupadarsini: the Indian
Approach to Human Form is the most interesting. A burning issue of colo-
nial art teaching was whether drawing from the antique and the nude
harmed the Indian student, the orientalists eschewing life study altogeth-
152

S. L. Haldankar, Landscape,
1930s, watercolour on paper.
er on the grounds that it betrayed crass materialism. Acharekar attempt-
ed to reconcile colonial art teaching with nationalist anxieties by distill-
ing his years of experience as a teacher. In the book, he juxtaposed
ancient Indian temple sculptures with drawings of nude models posed
after these sculptures. His aim was to invite students of a modernist bent
to examine how ancient Indian artists used their knowledge of anatomy
to produce brilliantly simplified forms.70 In contrast to Haldankar’s
luminous watercolours, Acharekar specialized in a loose impressionist
style with heavy impasto colours, quick brushstrokes and loose applica-
tions of paint, to build up a sketch-like rough surface with speckled light
distributed over the whole painted surface.
karmarkar and the naturalist sculptors
The academic sculpture tradition, founded at the Bombay art school by
Lockwood Kipling in the nineteenth century, became widely respected
because of G. K. Mhatre’s celebrated student work To the Temple. This
tradition continued with the rise of a number of professional sculptors in
the 1920s, Mhatre’s son Shyamrao Mhatre, B. V. Talim, S. Pansare and V.
P. Karmarkar. Talim specialized in sentimental and literary narratives in
153
M. R. Acharekar, Nude at Rest, c. 1940s, watercolour on paper.
M. R. Acharekar, a page from Rupadarsini (Bombay, 1958).
the ‘Victorian’ mode. The Indian Academy of Art illustrated his sculpture
In Tune with the Almighty, an Indian ascetic playing a musical instrument
in praise of god. The journal wrote approvingly that the ‘anatomical
accuracy of sinews, bones and muscles and the expression of pure bliss
. . . convincingly attest how the ideal can touch and blend with the real
. . . The sculpture is a silent and direct refutation of the theory that the
ideal and the real are [the] opposites which can never meet.’71
V. P. Karmarkar (1891–1966), who was attracted to the formalist
simplifications of modernism, including Art Deco sculptures, was per-
haps the most original among the Bombay sculptors of the 1920s. Born
in a family of traditional image-makers, Karmarkar was discovered by
a colonial civil servant, Otto Rothfeld, who arranged for his admission
to the art school in Bombay. In 1916, on the advice of Rabindranath
Tagore’s elder brother Satyendranath, then posted in Bombay, B. V. Talim, In Tune
with the Almighty, c. 1920,
Karmarkar moved to Calcutta. The Maharastran set up practice in the plaster of Paris.
city, producing busts of leading nationalists and graceful draped female
figures inspired by Mhatre.72 In 1920 he went for further training at the B. V. Talim, Takali
(‘Threadmaking’), 1932,
Royal Academy, returning to Calcutta after three years. In his absence
plaster of Paris. The work
his earlier patronage had dried up, forcing him to return to his home won the gold medal of the
province in 1925. However, now he was taken up by the Maharastran Bombay Art Society that year.

156
V. P. Karmarkar, Graceful
Worry, c. 1930, plaster. A regular
contributor, he won the Society’s
gold medal for his work Koli
Girl, shown at the same exhibi-
tion, c. 1930.

nationalists who wished to commemorate the nationalist icon

Chhatrapati Shivaji with an over-lifesize equestrian statue. While these
standard public commissions were heroic in scale they lacked the spon-
taneity and formal simplifications of his smaller bronze, plaster and
cement sculptures, many of which graced the garden of his studio near
Bombay. He was one of the first to use cement as a medium though he
did not use it as radically as Ramkinkar in the 1940s. These smaller
sculptures, namely the Conch Blower and Fishergirl, were typical of the
period in drawing inspiration from the local poor, especially the rural
fishing community.73
157
 In Calcutta, sculptors were thinner on the
ground. Jyotirmoy Roychaudhury, a protégé of
the Tagores, received his training at the Royal
College of Art, spending his life as an art teacher
at various government institutions. One of his
early sculptures, titled Spring, was a rather close
imitation of a Victorian Cupid and Psyche figure
but he went on to produce some competent pieces,
including portraits of national leaders such as
Gandhi.74 The other Bengali sculptor of the time,
Pramatha Mallik, received sculpture lessons from
Karmarkar when he was living in Calcutta,75 and
was invited by Karmarkar to Bombay to assist
him in his public sculptures, which he declined for
personal reasons. One of his most assured works,
The Soul of the Soil, was reproduced in Indian
Masters in 1928. The rough surface treatment of
the bronze reminds us of an earlier Bengali sculp-
tor, Fanindranath Bose, who had settled in
Scotland at the turn of the twentieth century.76
The editor, Acharya, describes The Soul of the Soil
as being inspired by the

marvellous poetry of toiling humanity . . .

His studies of peasant and poor life . . . have
been executed with noteworthy truthfulness
and realism . . . Strong, virile and painstak-
ing, this tiller of the soil is no ideal creation
of the Sculptor, but is . . . part and parcel of
the land he tills and constitutes the very life
of his country.77

Here we have yet another sculptor drawing inspi-

ration from the Indian peasantry. V. P. Karmarkar, Fishergirl,
c. 1930s, plaster.

damerla rama rao and the artistic renaissance

of andhra
Damerla Rama Rao (1897–1925) is virtually a forgotten artist today.
Belonging to a well-to-do family of Rajamundhry, his attempts to create
a local form of artistic nationalism based in the Andhra region of South
India were cut short by his untimely death from smallpox at the age of 28.
He left behind 34 completed oils, 129 watercolours, 29 sketchbooks and
numerous loose sheets in addition to an art school where he had begun to
train students in his own style. O. J. Couldrey, Principal of the Govern-
158
Pramatha Mallik, The Soul of
the Soil, c. 1928, bronze.
ment College of Arts at Rajamundhry, discovered his precocious talent.
The Englishman would take him on trips to Ajanta to inspire him, even-
tually sending him to the art school in Bombay in 1916 where he felt Rao
would receive proper training. The Andhran came under Gladstone
Solomon’s spell as his mural painting student at the school, as is evident
in his painting Siddhartha Ragodaya, completed in 1922. Rama Rao spent
the years 1916–20 at the school, winning the first prize for painting,78 and
was among the senior students who were presented to Sir Edwin
Lutyens by Solomon when he was seeking to impress the architect in
order to win the New Delhi mural commission for the Bombay art
school (see Chapter Four). Rao’s drawing is said to have pleased
Lutyens.79
On his return to Andhra after graduation and a brief visit to Gujarat,
where he did portraits of the local aristocracy as well as a sketch of
Rabindranath Tagore, Rao set up a painting school at his home in
Rajamundhry, assisted by his wife, sister and two friends. In the 1920s,
the Bengali painter Pramode Kumar Chatterjee introduced oriental art
Opposite: Damerla Rama
to Andhra by founding the Jathiya Kalashala (Andhra National Art Rao, Nagna Sundari (‘Naked
Institution) in Masulipatan.80 Once a Westernizer, Chatterjee had a Beauty’), 1924, watercolour
change of heart following a personal crisis, embracing the ‘spiritual’ mes- on paper.
sage of the Bengal School in his work. Although a nationalist at heart,
Rao opposed the Bengal School’s particular approach, founding his school Damerla Rama Rao, Siddhartha
in direct challenge to Chatterjee at Masulipatan. He had been impressed Ragodaya, 1922, watercolour
on paper. The work is based
with Solomon’s contention that the Bengal School’s weakness stemmed on Edwin Arnold’s classic book
from its rejection of life drawing as ‘un-Indian’. In response to the orien- Light of Asia (Boston, 1891).

160
talists, Rao emulated Solomon’s ‘nationalist’
mural class, which aimed to improve oriental
art with academic figure drawing. Yet, unlike
Solomon, he had no personal animus against
the orientalists, enjoying his meeting with
Abanindranath and Nandalal on his visit to
Calcutta in 1921. It seems most likely though
that he felt more at home with Bose and
Mazumdar’s Society of Fine Arts. He sent his
painting Rishyasringa’s Captivation, inspired by
an ancient legend, to the first exhibition of the
society held in 1921, carrying off its highest
accolade, the Viceroy’s Prize. Lord Reading,
the Proconsul, met the artist and purchased his
landscape painting The Godavari in the Eastern
Ghats. Rao was chosen for the Empire
Exhibition held at Wembley in 1924 and was
also included among the Indian artists under
the Raj at a Canadian National Exhibition in
Toronto.81
We have had occasion to come across the
influential critic G. Venkatachalam who had
been ‘talent scouting’ in the 1920s for innova-
tive artists. He befriended Rao on his return to
Andhra. Venkatachalam’s natural sympathies
lay with both oriental art and the avant-garde,
but he recognized Rao’s talent and his ambi-
tion to develop his own style. On the artist’s
sudden death, he offered a balanced view of his
work, acknowledging his courage, independ-
ence and originality in sensing the limitations
of the Bengal School. Nonetheless, the critic
regretted his inability to break out of the ‘arti-
ficial experiment’ of Solomon’s mural class.82
What did Rama Rao achieve in his all too brief
career? A number of his works are indistin-
guishable from those of Solomon’s students in
their colour schema and figures. But the few
promising ones, such as Nagna Sundari (Naked
Beauty) and The Dancer, painted in 1924 and
1925, showed a new departure, a very personal
vision of women with elongated figures,
heralding a striking mannerist style. The fact
that these overcame the monotony of conven-
tional figures can be explained by his insistence
161
 Damerla Rama Rao, The
Dancer, 1925, watercolour on
paper, one of his last works.

on regular life studies. Unusually daring for the period in Andhra, he

painted full frontal nudes modelled by a local woman named Nakula.83
In 1928, Indian Academy of Art paid a handsome tribute to him, regret-
ting his early death, and commenting that his lively works demonstrated
‘a competent naturalist technique with a sound knowledge of the Indian
classics’.84 Damerla Rama Rao was remembered in 1947, the year of
Indian Independence, in the celebration volume Indian Art through the
Ages, published by the newly formed Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting.85
162
 11
From Orientalism to a New Naturalism:
K. Venkatappa and Deviprosad Roy
Chowdhury

Not only the naturalists but also Abanindranath’s disciples were gradually
turning their backs on orientalism, notably K. Venkatappa and
Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury, both of whom, in very different ways, pro-
jected a heroic image of the artist as a genius. No fewer than forty odd
volumes of Venkatappa’s densely packed diary, the most extensive ever
maintained by an Indian artist, offer us an insight into the mentality and
artistic process of a colonial artist poised on the cusp of modernity and trad-
ition.1 Fiercely jealous of his artistic mission, Venkatappa’s evolution from
a painter of the Bengal School to magic realism makes fascinating read-
ing. A muscular hero, the urbane uomo universale, Deviprosad was a larg-
er-than-life figure who projected his own physical prowess on to his
‘Michelangelesque’ sculptures. A versatile artist, his work ranged from
delicate ‘orientalist’ miniatures, romantic watercolours and commissioned
portraits to colossal public sculptures celebrating national allegories in the
late colonial era and two and half decades of Independence. We are
allowed an insight into his quirks and idiosyncrasies as well as his power-
ful mind in the candid memoirs of his wife and lifelong companion.2 In
these two supreme individualists, naturalism became inflected in the light
of their own specific objectives.

venkatappa: from court painter to a colonial

artist
K. Venkatappa (1887–1962) was born into a family of traditional
Tanjore painters attached to the princely court of Mysore. These ‘arti-
san’ painters used transparent paints for figures, while reserving opaque
pigments for costumes and other details, lastly using gold leaf to
enhance the whole effect. Venkatappa began as his father’s apprentice
when his talent came to the notice of the Maharaja, who sent him to the
local art school and engaged an English tutor for him, thus ensuring his
entry into the modern colonial world.3 In 1912, he was sent to the
Government School of Art in Calcutta, reputed as the leading centre of
nationalist art under Abanindranath.4 Venkatappa discovered the cos-
mopolitan world of Calcutta, joining the inner circle of Abanindranath’s
students, who in their turn were intrigued by his artisan background.
Abanindranath respected his innate skills, choosing him as one of the
students to illustrate his booklet Some Notes on Indian Artistic Anatomy,
163
 K. Venkatappa, Rama’s
Marriage, c. 1918, watercolour
on paper.

and Sister Nivedita’s posthumous work Myths of the Hindus and

Buddhists.5
In Calcutta, Venkatappa started keeping a diary, recording in metic-
ulous detail everyday transactions, which is a uniquely revealing docu-
ment of his personality and creative process.6 While studying art, he
toured north India, visiting major Hindu pilgrim sites. He records his
experiments with fasting and other examples of personal endurance with
a punctiliousness that verges on ‘anal compulsiveness’ in a Freudian sense.
In 1914, Percy Brown, the Principal, recommended him highly for the
post of Government Art Adviser. Brown also introduced Venkatappa to
164
the visiting English sculptor, George Frampton, who was commissioned
to execute a memorial bust of the Viceroy, with a view to sending him to
Britain to learn bronze casting.
Venkatappa turned these offers down because he did not wish to
renege on his obligation to his patron, the Maharaja of Mysore. In 1916,
he returned to Mysore for a brief visit, and was never to leave the prince-
ly state again. Appointed the state artist, he found Mysore boring after
cosmopolitan Calcutta, suffering ill health and difficulties at work. He
tried to maintain his links with former friends, took part in major art
exhibitions around the country and even took out a subscription to the
English newspaper, the Statesman. In 1918, for the second time, the
Government of Bengal offered him an art position but he again felt
unable to take it up.7 Slowly and painfully, he found himself adjusting to
his new life, keeping regular hours at the studio, cultivating the Western
habit of taking daily walks, and spending his leisure hours at a local club.
Venkatappa produced relief sculpture and painting for the Maharaja but
also began selling privately as his works began to be known widely.8 In
1922–4, among his comments on patrons, he recorded an acrimonious
encounter with the art collector B. N. Treasurywalla from Bombay who
haggled endlessly about the prices of pictures, sending them back for
‘improvements’. These humiliations embittered the proud Venkatappa.9
In his initial years, Venkatappa continued with orientalist historicism,
even delving into Sanskrit texts, constantly seeking the advice of scholars
at the local University. In 1918 he started taking Sanskrit lessons in
earnest, much to the consternation of the Maharaja’s secretary who
reminded him of the cost to the state. For all his obsessive punctiliousness,
he was a modern colonial artist and not a traditional Tanjore painter. In
short, Venkatappa’s self-conscious ‘archaeology’ of ancient Indian culture
was at odds with living Hinduism. In addition, Venkatappa took the mas-
tery of representation as a sine qua non of artistic perfection, dismissing the
Ragamala miniatures as rigid and formal.10 Venkatappa even ‘modern-
ized’ Shiva with two arms rather than four, which brought him into con-
flict with the orthodox.

nature under a microscope

Historicism was no more than a passing phase with Venkatappa about
which he expressed reservations even in his student days.11 The story of
his very personal form of naturalism began with a sneaking admiration
for English watercolours under Percy Brown. In 1926, finally shedding
his allegiance to oriental art, he embarked on a careful, empirical explor-
ation of nature, creating in the process a magical vision of Karnataka
landscape that transcended mere representation. He had known the
Ootacamund and Kodaikanal regions intimately since his youth; he now
invested his beloved hills, valleys, meadows and lakes with an uncanny
165
quality. Modern Indian critics, who view Venkatappa as displaying mere
photographic accuracy, lacking any creative spark, miss out the imagina-
tion, self-discipline and the relentless pursuit of an idea that went into the
construction of his landscapes.
Venkatappa approached his objective in the spirit of an intellectual
adventure, recording every single, even trivial detail of his daily life in his
diary. This is particularly instructive for 1926, the year that he produced
striking contemporary landscapes. He spent six concentrated months
between 10 May and 25 October 1926 on the Elk Hill in Ootacamund, a
lush green terrain with a cool damp climate punctuated with long spells
of ferocious rains. A solitary figure who preferred his own company,
Venkatappa took long walks sketching and spending hours in his room at
the ymca hostel completing his landscapes. He set himself the task of
rendering faithfully what he saw in microscopic detail, devoting four to
six months to each painting. For instance, he prepared for his Ootacamund
in Moonlight by climbing the hill every evening in near freezing condi-
tions and perching on a precipitous rock to study the surroundings.
Before commencing the painting he immersed himself in the environ-
ment, repeatedly returning to the same spot to check the details.12
For The Tempest he made an initial sketch from his window as heavy
downpours confined him indoors. His obsession eventually drew him
outdoors, to observe for several days the effects of the rain on natural
light. These paintings of 1926 afford us an intimate understanding of the
forests, valleys, mountains and the sky under varying light conditions.
The luminosity of his landscapes had been anticipated in the nocturnal
glow of his orientalist painting Shiva Ratri.13 With an unusual combina-
tion of colours, especially indigos, blues and greens, which he explained
as ‘colour perspective’, Venkatappa obtained a glittering brightness in his

K. Venkatappa, Monsoon
Clouds Breaking, 1926,
watercolour on paper.

166
K. Venkatappa, The Lake View,
1926, watercolour on paper.

washes. He never gave up synthetic European paints entirely, but in 1912

he had already prepared a chart of vegetable and mineral dyes that he
may have inherited from his artisan family.
In September, as the rains came to an end, he embarked on the defin-
ing work of his entire career. The diary takes us through the process of
painting The Lake View almost clinically. Choosing the light at dawn as
his subject, Venkatappa rose at 4.55 am for several days, went down to the
hillside before it became light, sketching the scene and later making
improvements back at the ymca. For the actual painting, he set out with
his easel for the lakeshore every morning, long before daybreak. There he
sought to capture the strange sight of dawn breaking on the distant
mountains, the intense light mirrored in the perfectly still waters of the
lake. We do not know what emotions it aroused in him, a solitary witness
to a desolate, almost primeval world. He makes a typically laconic obser-
vation in his diary: ‘I could study the reflections thoroughly to my satis-
faction till 8 a.m. [and at] 8.15 a.m. began to work on reflections.’14 The
sense of oppressive isolation in the painting is matched by the intensity of
natural light. The Lake View, Venkatappa’s most complex work, remained
unsold.

a most peculiar obsession

In provincial Mysore Venkatappa aroused admiration and fear in equal
measure for his extreme fastidiousness and blunt outspoken manner.
His unconventional comportment, eccentricities and contempt for the
‘philistine’ public became even more pronounced after his retirement
from the Mysore court.15 Ever a solitary figure, he took up classical
167
music late in life, attaining considerable mastery
of it.16 Venkatappa forms a bridge between the
old courtly painter and the colonial artist. Here
we have the conscious reinvention of the self as
artistic genius, not bound by normal conven-
tions, a colonial phenomenon that marked the
changing relationship between artists and
patrons. Once Venkatappa visited the Public
Library in Mysore in order to consult Webster’s
Dictionary for the ‘true distinction between the
artist and the artisan’ – a distinction that would
have mattered little to his traditional painter
father.17 As his obituary in the Deccan Herald put
it, Venkatappa had a high regard for his own
genius, and waged a heroic battle against mean-
minded and exploitative patrons. Yet such rein-
vention rested on the slippery ground between
traditional Hinduism and the modern West. An
ascetic bachelor, he claimed to be ‘married’ to his
art, practising the Hindu rite of aparigraha,
which involved a fierce aversion to taking help
from others.18 Venkatappa’s entry into the mod-
ern colonial world was owed to his patron
Krishnaraja Wadiyar iv, Maharaja of Mysore, to whom he remained K. Venkatappa, Mad After Vina,
steadfastly loyal. The price he paid for his loyalty was to decline with 1926, watercolour on paper.
The painting explains to his
some regret the British government’s prestigious invitation to partici- guru Abamindranath why he
pate in the decoration of New Delhi in the 1920s. The Maharaja for his chose music.
part reciprocated his loyalty: ‘you have made a great name, brought
much credit to the state, I . . . proudly show visitors my countryman’s
work’. Yet the coda to Venkatappa’s career was the arbitrariness of tied
patronage. With the Maharaja’s death in 1940, his successor cruelly termin-
ated his appointment, forcing the artist to leave Mysore. Feared by the
public, Venkatappa withdrew into himself, making rare public appear-
ances, and slowly fading from popular memory.19

deviprosad: the artist as L’UOMO UNIVERSALE

Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury (1899–1975), widely regarded as the most
important sculptor of late colonial India, was the scion of a Bengali
zamindari family of Punjabi extraction. Controversialist, imperious,
proud of his good looks, intelligence, noble descent and physical
prowess, with an innate sense of his own genius, Deviprosad cut a larg-
er than life figure. In addition to painting and sculpting, he wrestled,
played the flute, shot big game and wrote short stories in his spare
time.20 Inspired by Michelangelo and Rodin, he cast bronze monumen-
168
 tal groups 6–9 m high that celebrated the trials and triumphs of the
labouring man. Beverley Nichols, who was unimpressed with Indian
artists with the sole exception of Jamini Roy, described his work; ‘It is
not calculated to set the Ganges on fire, but at least it is alive. Choudhuri
has something to say on canvas and is technically competent to say it.’21
In his breathless stride across the subcontinent, Nichols missed
Deviprosad’s large-scale sculptures, his particular strength. Critic G.
Venkatachalam, who wrote essays defending Indian artists against
Nichols’s judgement, wrote admiringly of the sculptor: ‘For originality,
individuality, strength and expressiveness his sculptural works are easi-
ly the best in the country. Even the Rodinesque touch which character-
ized his earlier studies . . . was only superficial. Roychoudhury’s art is
definitely his own.’22 The East German visitor to India, Heinz Langer,

Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury,

Self-portrait, c. 1924,
watercolour on paper.

169
was impressed with his ‘profound feeling for plasticity’, as well as his
‘artistic genius and human charm’.23
Deviprosad had his first painting lessons with Abanindranath, giving
evidence of a precocious talent in the two paintings submitted to Wembley,
a self-portrait and a primitivist Lotus Pond (see p. 30). Treated in an orien-
talist style, the penetrating self-portrait and the primitivist figures antici-
pate his characteristic sense of design and firm drawing. However, his
métier was modelling, kindled by his first sculpture teacher, a European
named Boeiss. His next teacher, Hironmoy Roychaudhury, trained at the
Royal College of Art, taught him to ‘build in’ rather than ‘carve in’ his fig-
ures.24 As in the case of Hemendranath Mazumdar, Deviprosad’s choice of
art as a vocation caused a permanent rift between him and the head of his
family, his zamindar grandfather, who disinherited him. He was forced to
take up work as a scene painter for a theatre in north Calcutta, followed by
teaching art at a boy’s school in the city. However, recognition was not long
in coming. Stella Kramrisch was one of the first to recognize his talent,
writing of his bronzes as ‘the first serious contribution modern India has
made to the portrait sculpture of modern man’.25 He taught briefly at
Santiniketan where he had Ramkinkar among his students. In 1929 he
became head of the government art school in Madras, one of the first
Indians to run a government educational institution. In the 30 years he was
at the school, he inspired generations of art students in South India, help-
ing to end its reputation as an industrial arts centre. The Hindu voiced
public recognition of the importance of his appointment. In 1936, review-
ing the annual art exhibition of the school, it commented on how
Deviprosad had sparked a new creativity among the students who had
hitherto produced only conventional work.26 A pupil of Abanindranath,
Deviprosad finally cut the orientalist ‘apron strings’ at a public lecture in
Madras in 1936, criticizing the unquestioning adherence to tradition and
recommending that one learn even from Western art if it was of value.27
Deviprosad delighted in épater les bourgeois with his outrageous views
on sexuality, in part an outcome of his discovery of Freud.28 I have men-
tioned his physical strength. English soldiers stationed in Calcutta were
generally feared by the slender-limbed Bengalis for their often violent and
unpredictable behaviour. Deviprosad enjoyed picking a fight with them.
Bristling with energy, he worked from early morning till evening every
single day without fail, often on large-scale sculptural pieces. Despite
being in charge of a major government institution for 30 years, he was
remarkably productive. We read about the artist’s fiery personality from
his wife’s memoirs, published in the 1950s, where she describes him with
a mixture of admiration and exasperation as over-frank, oversensitive and
overbearing.29

170
 a sculptor for the toiling humanity
Deviprosad commanded a wide range of artistic media from the most del-
icate jewel-like watercolours, such as Sumatra Birds, Expressionist land-
scapes and commissioned portraits, to massive bronze sculptural groups.
His high professional standards brought him a steady stream of private
and public commissions, notably portrait busts of British dignitaries,
which left him unsatisfied. Deviprosad sought inspiration from the hero-
ic forbearance of the salt of the earth – the fisherman making his weary
way home, weighed down by his dripping net, or the peasant resigned to
his humble lot, going about his daily toil. He produced some moving
images of the great famine in Bengal in 1943, notably of a mother with her
starving infant. Of course, this harrowing subject inspired not only
Deviprosad but a number of artists in Bengal.
The question is: if his work expressed sympathy for the salt of the
earth, what then was his difference from Ramkinkar and the primi-
tivists? Indeed, Deviprosad’s heroic vision of the toiling masses had
many similarities with that of the primitivists but the differences were
significant. The primitivist idealization of the innocent Santals as the
denizens of an unchanging community was essentially a critique of glob-
al capitalism, urban modernity and Enlightenment notions of progress.
On the other hand, Deviprosad’s sources were an uneasy mix: he drew
nourishment more from nineteenth-century Romantic notions of strug-
gling humanity than from a ‘primitivist’ avant-garde critique of moder-
Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury,
Sumatra Birds, 1920s?, nity. His sculptures of the industrial proletariat were rooted in a progres-
watercolour on paper. sivist Marxian mode that saw history as inexorably moving forward
towards a socialist utopia rather than back-
ward to the village. Deviprosad did not show
an overt interest in Marxism, but as a well-read
man he shared the elite interest in socialist
thought and the trade union movement in
India within the larger nationalist struggle of
the 1920s.30 Revealingly, his most ambitious
compositions glorified urban labourers, such as
road builders, rather than peasants or fisher-
men. Deviprosad’s oppressed humanity was
fired by the idea of social justice and had a defi-
nite goal. One of his first multiple-figure reliefs
completed in the 1930s was on the theme of
social justice, the Travancore Temple Entry
Proclamation, which celebrated the admission
of the Untouchables into the Hindu caste tem-
ples in South India. In the 1940s, a critic
summed up the artist’s optimistic vision of
nationhood in his painting Road-Makers, but
171
 Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury,
An Old Kashmiri Smoking,
1940s?, watercolour on paper.

his comments could equally well apply to his ambitious sculptural group
Triumph of Labour:

Choudhury, strangely for all his aristocratic antecedents, is a socialist

on canvas. His striking pictures of labouring proletariat are at once
a challenge and an appeal. They are monuments of dignity and
strength. [Choudhury’s sculptural group] are of the like who forge
mighty highways for the conquest of nations. The ‘Road-makers’
are the forgers of Man’s empire, his extending dominion over
elemental forces.31

Deviprosad’s Road-Makers were not simply labourers struggling to dis-

lodge a massive boulder; they were ‘indomitable men [and women]
wrestling with nature, doggedly, determinedly, powerfully’, a vision that
pitted man against the elements, a well-known romantic topos of the
nineteenth century. The Michelangelesque body became his romantic
metaphor for man struggling as much against the elements as against
injustice. His equation of emotional power with physical strength was
closely connected with his obsession with his own body and physical cul-
ture. He took an almost sexual pleasure in forcing obstinate metal or clay
into shape.32 Deviprosad loved to dwell on the wiry musculature of his
172

Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury,
detail of Travancore Temple
Entry Proclamation, 1936,
bronze relief.
workers, revealing their bones, veins and sinews through their flesh, often
creating an écorché effect. With female figures, he chose to bring out the
fleshy, earthy voluptuousness of peasant women in contrast to the emaci-
ated waifs of the Bengal School. An admiring critic waxed eloquent about
his virility:
Roy Choudhury, like Rodin, is rugged, original and virile; his
sculpture has the same elemental fury and strength . . . His
genius, for all his great achievements on the canvas, is essentially
and pre-eminently three-dimensional . . . The sculpture . . .
stands out massive, compelling and alive.33
Perhaps no modern master had explored the body more intensely in its
myriad forms and convoluted expressions than Rodin, who created a
new form of ‘expressionist’ bronzes with broken, rugged surfaces and
fragmented non finito works. Deviprosad seems to have reached Rodin
indirectly through Edouard Lanteri, the French sculptor settled in
Britain, whose vigorous naturalism celebrating labourers and peasants
influenced the new sculpture movement in Britain. Deviprosad recom-
mended his standard treatise, Modelling: A Guide for Teachers and
Students, to his students in Santiniketan. Indeed, a whole generation of
English and French sculptors were influenced by Rodin’s rough-sur-
faced bronze, including the previously mentioned
Pramatha Mallik and Fanindranath Bose, who had
settled in Scotland in the early twentieth century.34
Deviprosad’s rough-hewn style and unpol-
ished bronze were appropriate to his heroic story of
the downtrodden. Yet in his most powerful bronzes
he moved beyond Rodin in his exaggerated forms,
which suggests an ambivalent relationship between
him and the discourse of modernism. He often used
strong anti-modernist rhetoric, identifying ‘artistic
truth’ with mimetic art containing a strong social
content, and refusing to ally himself with the mod-
ernists because of his ideological commitment to
naturalism. He welcomed the new language of art.
However, for him the objective of art was to express
emotions in a controlled manner, which was only
possible with the skill that he found lacking in many
of the modernists.35 Yet not only did his gnarled
écorché figures go beyond representation towards
expressionist distortions, but he himself showed a
fascination with the physically ‘ugly’, the grotesque
and the macabre in his paintings and short stories
as well.36
173
Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury,
Old Woman, 1930s, bronze.

In Travancore Temple Entry Proclamation, Deviprosad highlighted the

expressions of fear and hope in the Untouchables, depicting the oppressed
as physically ravaged individuals with gnarled faces and hollow bodies,
their degradation presented in an Expressionist manner. In Dignity of
Labour, he portrayed the extreme physical effort of trying to loosen a
massive, immoveable boulder. After Independence in 1947, his grandiose
Opposite: Deviprosad
Roy Chowdhury, Road-Makers
conceptions and social commitment were found to be appropriate for
(later renamed Triumph of memorializing India’s anti-colonial struggle. Deviprosad’s interpretations
Labour), c. 1940, bronze. of national allegories – the Martyrs’ Memorial, Triumph of Labour and his
over-lifesize statues of Gandhi – are a common sight in India. A version
Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury,
Dignity of Labour, 1950s, of the Dignity of Labour stands in front of the International Labour
bronze. Organization offices in Geneva. The artist was working on a colossal
175
version of the Martyrs’ Memorial, which was to be the largest group com-
position in the world, when he died in 1975.37 The memorial would have
decorated the great open space in front of the Red Fort in Delhi, symbol-
izing the unity in diversity that was modern India. The artist’s radio
broadcast of 1951 constituted a testament to his life’s achievement: impos-
ing statues on a gigantic scale were an essential quality of sculpture, rather
than dainty figures for embellishing drawing rooms.38

176
 four

Contested Nationalism:
The New Delhi and India
House Murals
In spite of the dominance of the local and the quotidian in the art of the
1920s and ’30s, historicism continued to display an amazing resilience. Its
final efflorescence gave rise to two competing definitions of nationalism,
as advocated by the artistic rivals, Bombay and Bengal, between the years
1912 and 1931. In these crucial years, the two provinces fought tooth and
nail to win lucrative Raj commissions for the grand historical murals in
the New Delhi Secretariat and in India House in London. This section
unfolds the story of these murals, bringing out the ambivalent relation-
ship between the British overlords and their Indian subjects, throwing
into bold relief the complex interface of colonialism and nationalism. This
is also a story of rivalry and ambition, intrigue and character assassination;
it is above all the story of one man’s determination to win the primacy of
his institution by any means. The man was Gladstone Solomon, the
Principal of Sir Jamsethji Jijibhai School of Art in Bombay in the crucial
years 1918–36.

the prix de delhi and the murals for the

new capital
Competition among artists for decorating the public buildings of New
Delhi became inevitable once the decision to build the new imperial
capital was made public by King George v at the magnificent Durbar
held in Delhi in 1911. Almost immediately, a heated controversy broke
out over the choice of style: Western or Eastern? The influential E. B.
Havell, Principal of the government art school in Calcutta (1893–1906),
led those who championed a purely Indian style, to be realized by indige-
nous craftsmen, as the only way to promote India’s much-needed artistic
revival.1 However, attempts to win the main urban plan for Indian
architects ultimately failed, because the weight of opinion was in favour
of a European architect. The Royal Institute of British Architects (riba)
nominated Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens in 1912, an eminent architect
who had acquired a high reputation as a builder of elegant English
177
country villas, a nomination eagerly accepted by the Indian government.
A dyed-in-the-wool Classicist, Lutyens abhorred any form of decoration
in his buildings, especially Hindu decoration, stating, ‘Personally I do not
believe there is any real Indian architecture or any great tradition.’ Hence,
he insisted on ‘the influence of a Western style – i.e. logic, and not the mad
riot of the tom-tom’. Armed with this ‘rational’ style, he wished to
encourage India’s ‘amazing sense of the supernatural, with its compli-
ment [sic] of profound fatalism and enduring patience’.2
Viceroy Lord Hardinge, weighing the political cost of openly flout-
ing Indian sentiment in a period of mounting political unrest, favoured
a strong indigenous element in Delhi. Imposing a European style would
also be a betrayal of imperial trusteeship. The trauma of 1857 had dent-
ed Raj confidence in fashioning India in the progressive Western image.
Henceforth, Indo-Sarasenic architecture came to symbolize the ‘Oriental
Raj’ that held together the conglomeration of races, castes and religions
under stern paternalism.3 The compromise solution for Delhi was ‘West-
ern architecture with an Oriental motif’, reflecting the notion of senior
and junior partners in the empire. Indians were to take charge of deco-
ration in which they excelled, whilst the conception, design and overall
control should and must remain with Europeans.4
Sir Herbert Baker, who had become celebrated for his public buildings
in South Africa, volunteered his own views on the envisaged capital in The
Times of 3 October 1912. Lutyens, he ventured, ‘concentrated his extraordi-
nary powers . . . on the abstract and geometrical qualities, to the disregard of
human and national sentiment’.5 Not that he disagreed with Lutyens on the
guiding principles, which must be modern and Western. But Baker was pre-
pared to incorporate certain resonant elements from Indian architecture
because ‘sentiment and tradition have such a deep signi-ficance’ in the sub-
continent. Like a number of romantic imperialists, Baker saw the Empire as
a true successor to Pax Romana, with its medley of cultures and races. Since
nowhere was this more true than in India, Baker wished to seize this oppor-
tunity to celebrate the unity gifted to India by Pax Britannica and the
imposition of Western rational order on the Eastern riot of imagination.6
The letter also made clear that he would be the ideal choice to soften
Lutyens’s uncompromising Classicism, an argument that won him the
collaboration with Lutyens. The senior partner would design the urban
layout and the Viceroy’s House, the seat of imperial authority, while Baker
would be responsible for the two wings of the Imperial Secretariat flanking
the processional avenue leading up to the House. These two eminent archi-
tects had been friends for many years. Hardinge, who took the credit for this
compromise solution, was in accord with the Raj view that the main archi-
tectural plan was to remain European, while Indians could profitably be
employed in many of the details.
Next came decoration. In 1913, the pro-Indian lobby in Britain, led by
the influential India Society, published a substantive report on traditional
178
Indian masons, carvers and master-builders. In response to a petition
drawn up by this lobby and signed by prominent figures in Britain, the
government gave public reassurance of its intention to use New Delhi as
a ‘school’ for encouraging Indian decorative skills.7 A studio for Indian
craftsmen, supervised by an Indian, to work on wood and stone carvings
for the buildings, was one of the ideas mooted by the government. In
1912, Percy Brown, Principal of the Calcutta art school, proposed a work-
shop for architectural decoration in order to train his students for New
Delhi. Hardinge, aware of the orientalists’ disappointment at Brown’s
recent appointment to the school (see Chapter Three), cold-shouldered
the idea, proposing instead Abanindranath’s pupil Samarendranath Gupta,
Deputy Principal of the Mayo School of Art in Lahore, as supervisor of
the studio.8
These plans were interrupted by the Great War of 1914–18. But as
the official buildings reached an advanced stage of completion in the early
1920s, the question of decoration once again loomed large. Special consid-
eration was given to the Durbar Hall in the Viceroy’s House, conceived as
the ritual centre of the imperium, its symbolism derived from the Mughal
emperor Shah Jahan’s Diwan i-Aam i-Khass at Agra. Lutyens contem-
plated a continuous frieze adapted from indigenous art, but clearly recall-
ing Roman narrative cycles. The work would serve as a school for Indian
artists, for without ‘the benefit of such a school or meticulous tutoring and
supervision . . . no Indian painter was sufficiently imaginative and adapt-
able to create a coherent design’.9
Lutyens was well aware of Indian nationalist sentiment through his
wife Emily, their friend Annie Besant and the Theosophists, all of whom
closely identified with Indian culture. His wife, a niece of Lord Lytton
(Viceroy 1876–80) and a pioneering suffragette, represents British imperi-
alism’s obsession with the spiritual alternative to material progress, as
exemplified, for instance, by Sir Francis Younghusband. An aggressive
imperialist, he had brought Tibet to its knees and yet longed for the spirit-
uality of this defeated nation that he found lacking in the West. Luytens’s
own ambivalence towards Indians was not helped by the growing crisis in
his marriage. His view is summed up in a letter to his wife: ‘No one seems
well here – no vigour . . . The squalor, unkempt ugliness, the dirt, the las-
situde is depressing – and oh the flies wherever natives are left alone –
horrible.’10 Hence he was keen to use the Delhi project as an education for
Indian artists, a missing counterpart to ‘the immense material and intel-
lectual benefits brought to India by the English’. In 1916, he sent a mem-
orandum to the Committee in charge of Building the Capital, proposing
an applied Indian School at Delhi, in the medieval European guild tradi-
tion, to promote the fine arts of painting. On 30 March 1922, Lutyens pre-
sented a ‘Joint Memorandum for the Encouragement of Indian Art’ to the
same Committee, this time signed also by Baker and Hugh Keeling, Chief
Engineer in charge of building the new capital. The memorandum put
179
forward the Prix de Delhi scheme for decorating the capital. The prize
students would be offered government commissions, helping this Indian
school in the capital to spread its ‘influence and labours over the whole
subcontinent’.11
There were compelling precedents for the choice of mural decora-
tions for New Delhi. To nineteenth-century nationalists, nothing less than
historic murals on an epic scale adorning public spaces could truly serve
the nation. The political potential of murals was fully realized with the
spread of Gesamtkunstwerk ideas in architecture, an example of which was
the Palace of Westminster, completed in the 1840s. (Gesamtkunstwerk or
the marriage of the different arts was a Wagnerian idea that affected
William Morris’s notion of architecture as the mother of all the arts, for
instance.) Ruskin had described the architect as a mere large-scale
frame-maker unless he was also a painter and a sculptor.12 By the 1860s
even the Royal Academy, the bastion of easel painting, judged artists by
their ability to produce decorative murals.13 The patron saint of murals
was the Frenchman, Puvis de Chavannes, whose murals for the nation in
the Panthéon in Paris had become justly celebrated. Take also the case of
Alphons Mucha. The Czech poster artist had made his fame and fortune
in fin-de-siècle Paris; in 1899, in a fit of conscience, he pledged that ‘the
remainder of my life would be filled exclusively with work for the nation’.
His impressive murals on the Slav nationalist struggle adorn the Municipal
Building of Prague.14 The Mexican murals of Diego Rivera, Alfaro
Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco in the 1920s were surely the apothe-
osis of the public mural project and yet unknown to India until as late as
the 1940s.15
In 1902–4 E. B. Havell, head of the art school in Calcutta, who put
forward the idea of decorating Indian homes with murals in the manner
of Gothic Revivalists, first planted the idea of nationalist murals. In order
to equip his students with indigenous fresco techniques, Havell brought
in traditional muralists from Rajasthan. His efforts were unfortunately
confined to a few experimental fresco buono slabs in the Jaipur method
produced by his young collaborator, Abanindranath. A master of deli-
cate miniatures, Abanindranath did not have much luck with large-scale
works.16 During the Swadeshi unrest of 1905, Nivedita, the Irish disciple of
Vivekananda and a mentor of the nationalist artists of Bengal, proposed
that public buildings be decorated with epic murals to serve as modern tem-
ples to the nation. The ancient Buddhist frescoes at Ajanta, rediscovered in
the nineteenth century, were promptly adopted by the nationalists as a
model for emulation. In 1909–11, Christiana Herringham, a moving force
in the English mural movement and a translator of Cennini’s Il libro dell’
arte o trattato della pittura (c. 1390), visited India in order to copy the Ajanta
frescoes. Nivedita arranged for Abanindranath’s pupils to assist her so that
they might gain first-hand experience of these ancient achievements.17

180
Abanindranath Tagore, Kacha
o Devjani, 1906, fresco on stone
slab.

the wisdom of solomon

When the Raj decided on embellishing the New Delhi buildings with
murals, it naturally turned to the two leading government art schools in
Bombay and Calcutta. By 1915 Calcutta had stolen a march on Bombay,
establishing non-illusionist oriental art as the true expression of the
Indian spirit, its claim heartily endorsed by the colonial regime, the self-
appointed guardians of ‘traditional art’. In the darkening political hori-
zon, the regime considered artistic nationalism to be a safer alternative to
terrorist ‘outrages’.18 As the art establishment, the Bengal School creamed
off lucrative state patronage, causing widespread envy or emulation by
artists in other regions. The orientalist art theory penetrated even
Bombay, the bastion of the ‘Westernizers’. Ravi Shankar Rawal, a prom-
ising student of the Bombay art school, defected to the orientalist camp,
181
sacrificing his promising career as a portrait painter. An admirer of
Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, he set up a modest art
school in Ahmedabad in 1919, which gave rise to a Gujarati version of ori-
entalism. Rawal won the coveted gold medal of the Bombay Art Society
with a picture treated in a ‘flat’ Rajput manner, which however was dis-
missed by a disgruntled Parsi artist of Western persuasion as merely ‘a
printed label on mill cloth’.19
With Calcutta’s unimpeded ascendancy, Bombay’s decline was wide-
ly accepted as inevitable. The situation was dramatically reversed in 1918
with the retirement of Cecil Burns as Principal (1896–1918), which ended
the era of the old guards, haphazard developments and endless vacilla-
tions over the school’s objectives. William Ewart Gladstone Solomon, the
son of a South African politician of Jewish extraction settled in Britain,
arrived from London to take charge of the school on 25 November 1918.
The Indian Headmaster M. V. Dhurandhar vividly recalls the day in his
memoirs. As he was the senior Indian teacher at the school, his new boss
curtly instructed him to submit his works for inspection.20 This assertion
of authority by European superiors to remind the Indian staff of their
subordinate status was a routine practice in government institutions.
Being sufficiently impressed with his works, Solomon mellowed, thus
laying the foundations of future collaborations on a series of key projects.
In time, Solomon even came to treat the Indian teacher with affection.
Ambitious, bristling with energy, relentlessly pursuing his objective of
undermining Bengal’s artistic pre-eminence, Solomon left his personal
stamp on the school in its crucial years.
Solomon was determined to inject a new energy into the moribund
art school and provide a persuasive ‘indigenous’ alternative to Abanin-
dranath’s orientalism, the favoured recipient of imperial largesse: Abanin-
dranath’s pupils, for instance, ran premier art institutions in Jaipur,
Lucknow, Madras and Lahore, to name only the major ones. But such
favours paled into insignificance with the announcement of the govern-
ment’s ambitious mural project. Solomon resolved to wrest as large a slice
of the imperial cake for his students as possible. This he did in well-
planned stages that involved making mural painting the cornerstone of
art teaching, in order to bid successfully for the New Delhi murals.
Solomon enjoyed an advantage. The ground had already been prepared
by Solomon’s predecessors at the school, Lockwood Kipling and John
Griffiths, who had secured commissions for their students to decorate
public buildings.21 Solomon himself had the advantage of training at the
Royal Academy in marouflage (a mural technique consisting of attaching
large painted canvases on to the walls as part of decoration instead of
painting directly on to the wall). In 1900 his wall panel won him an ra
travelling scholarship to study historical murals in Italy. The Studio pub-
lished it in 1902, with the complaint that the young man was a realist ‘who
does not see’.22
182
W.E.G. Solomon, The Masque
of Cupid, c. 1902, oil on canvas
(from The Studio, xxv, 1902).
A veteran of World War i, Captain Solomon’s war experience had
prepared him for planning the school’s future with military efficiency,
each measure a step towards making it the leading art institution in India.
However, in order to carry out any reform at all he needed a free hand
within the school. This involved the tricky business of divesting the all-
powerful Director of Public Instruction (dpi) and his cronies of their hold
over the school.23 Events, however, played into his hands. In 1915, the dpi
had appointed R. W. Hogarth, a corrupt and incompetent man, as
Inspector of Drawing to exercise control over the school.24 Solomon
found this situation intolerable. Being a consummate strategist, he had an
instinctive grasp of the precise source of power. Having gained the ear of
the Governor of Bombay, Solomon succeeded in curbing not only
Hogarth but also the dpi’s control over the school. Impressed with
Solomon’s single-mindedness, Sir George Lloyd became a fervent cham-
pion of his reforms.25 Nor did Solomon underestimate the importance of
the local press in shaping public opinion, taking the two leading dailies,
the government mouthpiece Times of India and the local nationalist paper
the Bombay Chronicle, into his confidence.26
Fresh from this strategic victory, Solomon divested the school of the
foundational South Kensington curriculum with decorative arts as its
cornerstone. This is unsurprising since Solomon had been nurtured at the
rival institution, the Royal Academy, with its fine art bias. In December
1919 he made the revolutionary break by introducing drawing from the
nude as a sine qua non for large-scale, many-figured mural compositions.
The occasional employment of undraped models was not previously
unknown, and indeed under his predecessor Cecil Burns students had
turned out life-size figures for mural decoration, but the systematic use of
nude models was new.27 The early history of South Kensington, the men-
tor of Indian art schools, had been one of resistance to this central doctrine
of the Renaissance. Solomon’s reform also challenged the prevailing
opinion that Indians were capable only of flat decorative drawing. This
183
‘naturalization’ of the Royal Academy practice final-
ly consecrated the school as a ‘fine arts’ institution, a
process that had started in the late nineteenth centu-
ry. Solomon’s task was made easier by the fact that
his Indian deputy Dhurandhar was a devotee of the
nude.28
The year was barely out when Solomon set in
motion his pivotal scheme of starting mural painting
as an advanced specialist course. The first genera-
tion of students, notably S. Fernandes, A. R.
Bhonsale, G. H. Nagarkar and N. L. Joshi, under-
took the decoration of the school walls in earnest,
the crowning achievement being an experimental
lunette, Kala Deva Pratistha (Installation of the God
of Art), measuring 308 m2. Executed in the central
hall, it marked the ritual inauguration of the school’s
new calling. The Governor duly unveiled the
murals at a prize-giving ceremony in 1920, offering
a generous sum to the school as an encouragement.
The public viewing of the murals soon followed.29
The murals aimed at combining European nat-
uralism with Indian decorative ‘sensibility’. Solomon,
who had a weakness for allegories in the manner of Alphons Mucha, Art School, Bombay, Drawing
encouraged students to paint personifications of the four quarters of the from the Nude, c. 1920s, pencil
on paper.
day and the four [European] seasons.30 Two prizes were instituted, one
for mural design and another for enlarging figures to scale from small
sketches to life-size, a prerequisite for any large figure composition.
Drawing and painting from the nude now occupied the pride of place in
the school. As Solomon was to argue later, every ‘student’s colour is his
own. But he may be taught to draw correctly . . . [When] a student can
draw the human head and the human figure accurately [he] has mastered
the grammar of the language of Art.’31 The visiting English portrait
painter Oswald Birley wrote approvingly in 1935 that ‘the work of the
Life classes in the Bombay School of Art is well up to the level of the
standards of European Schools of Art’.32 In 1923 a commission to deco-
rate the Government House in Bombay followed. A medallion and three
panels on the theme of personification were executed in its Durbar Hall,
the four of them measuring 396 x 213 cm each, with life-size figures,
demonstrating the success of the new department.
However strongly Solomon may have stressed the importance of nat-
uralistic drawing for large-scale murals, he must have known that even in
Bombay winds of orientalism had been blowing for some time. The jour-
nalist Vasudev Metta, otherwise sympathetic to the murals, commented
on their ‘un-Indian’ character.33 Back in 1904, the Times of India, the
184
V. G. Shenoy, The Gupta
Period, c. 1920s, watercolour on
paper, student work for Delhi
murals inspired by an Alphons
Mucha poster.
 Unknown artist, Composition
with Figures, 1926, gouache on
paper, student work.

official organ of the province, had made unflattering comparisons

between Bengal and Bombay on grounds of cultural authenticity, dis-
missing Dhurandhar’s paintings as lacking in national characteristics.34
In 1907 the paper again castigated Dhurandhar, as well as M. F. Pithawala
and Rustam Seodia. Instead it praised Jamini Prokash Gangooly, an ally
Abanindranath Tagore, Female
of the Bengali orientalists, who had ‘the same decorative arrangement of Figure in Landscape, c. 1910,
line and harmony of colour . . . so much prized in the ancient Persian and watercolour on paper.
Indian pictures’. The reviewer concluded:

It is a scathing commentary upon the

standard of taste possessed by the princes
and wealthy merchants of India, that, at a
time when the voice of the swadeshiwal-
lah is heard so loud in the land, the walls
of their palaces and houses should be
lined by third class European originals,
or cheap reproductions of the vulgarities
of Italian or French painting, while
imaginative and beautiful works . . . by
painters like [Abanindranath] Tagore and
Gangooly, are neglected.35

With such a powerful body of opinion, one

simply could not ignore the ‘language’ of
Indian art, as enunciated by the Bengal School.
Solomon proceeded to learn it with alacrity
if only to beat the enemy at his own game.
Ajanta murals, the national symbol, had been
copied by John Griffiths’s students in Bombay
186
Unknown artist, 1921, student
line drawing based on Ajanta.

between 1872 and 1881, but it was only in 1909, under the impact of the
Bengal School, that ‘pilgrimages’ to this nationalist ‘shrine’ became de
rigueur. Solomon took his students to the caves in 1921 in order to study
the paintings, claiming that these paintings vindicated his own approach to
art. Rejecting orientalist ‘pretensions’ that such art could spring from reli-
gious dedication alone, he argued that they demonstrated a ‘scientific’
approach and the constant use of living models:

[in] every phase of these decorations pulses a throbbing, vigorous,

energetic life . . . They were a band of tremendously practical hard
workers. This is a point that cannot be too strongly insisted upon today
when there exists a tendency to approach Indian art from the mystical
or antiquarian rather than the genuinely artistic point of view.36
187
Solomon’s target here was the denigration of life drawing as un-Indian
and grossly materialist by the orientalists. Solomon questioned the orien-
talist abolition of life classes in Calcutta, vigorously defending Bombay’s
curriculum with its core teaching of drawing from the antique and from
life. The ‘Classic’ styles of Europe and India, he contended, could be com-
bined without any harm to the student. If indeed Greek theory was
understood better, it would help the Indian student tackle his own ‘dec-
orative’ heritage more effectively.37 In short, figure study could only
strengthen Indian decorative skill, since ‘the inherent love of . . . decora-
tive drawing has been a religious ordinance ever since Vedic times [and
was a] deeply-rooted national talent’.38
In keeping with the tradition of British art teachers in India, Solomon
published a number of books on Indian art, including Ajanta, partly to
propagate his own ‘Indian Art Renaissance’.39 Solomon’s basic credo was
that style, whether Eastern or Western, must be chosen in accordance
with the needs of a specific mural. But regardless of style, it must be
grounded in Western ‘scientific’ figure drawing. He mocked the oriental-
ists ‘who profess to foresee deadly danger in progressive discoveries in art
such as drawing a life size figure accurately from life’. Yet Solomon
refused to face the uncomfortable fact that the new generation of students
was drawn to oriental art as a nationalist discourse which he dismissed as
mere expediency.40
Not only through his writings but also through his speeches Solomon
engaged in shadow boxing with his orientalist adversaries, constantly
challenging their claims to cultural authenticity. Open hostility between
him and the orientalists of Bengal broke out almost the moment
Bombay’s mural department gained publicity. In October 1921 O. C.
Gangoly, editor of the orientalist organ Rupam, took up the cudgels on
their behalf.41 Havell, the mentor of the Bengal School, had returned to
London in 1906, but continued to make vigorous interventions in Raj art
policy from there. He was plainly outraged by the developments in
Bombay. It particularly galled him that Solomon had won government
support for public murals, the very genre that Havell had sought to make
the cornerstone of his own revival. Conversely, to Solomon and his ally,
Kanhaiyalal Vakil, the waspish journalist at the Bombay Chronicle,
Abanindranath’s mentor was their natural target. Vakil was to unload his
vitriol in ‘Humours of Havellism’.42
In 1920 no sooner had the mutual back-slapping over the murals of
the Government House in Bombay died down, than the state visit of the
British Heir Apparent offered Solomon’s students a particularly ambi-
tious public project. Outraged by the Amritsar Massacre of 1919,
Mahatma Gandhi launched his Non-Cooperation movement the follow-
ing year against what he dubbed the ‘immoral’ empire. On 21 October
1921, the Congress Working Committee passed a resolution that ‘it is the
duty of every Indian soldier and civilian to sever his connection with the
188
M. V. Dhurandhar, Welcome
address to the Prince of Wales by
the Parsi Panchayat Fund and
Charities, 1921, watercolour on
paper pasted on glass and
framed. The text reads : ‘We
pray, may you live long, / May
you live happy, to help / The
righteous and punish / The
unrighteous, Amen.’
Dhurandhar was also
commissioned to design this
loyal address.

Government and find some other means of livelihood’.43 The visit of the
Prince of Wales in November, which was a gesture to mollify Indian pub-
lic opinion, was seen for what it was, and boycotted by the Congress.
Bombay, being close to Gandhi’s power base in Gujarat, was chosen as the
likely site for the demonstration of loyalty to the crown. The provincial
government embarked on a lavish welcome with the help of the art
school, a state institution. Dhurandhar, entrusted by Solomon with real-
izing the ambitious project, describes it in his memoir. What a difference
it was from Dhurandhar’s earlier work in 1905 for the Principal Cecil
Burns. For that royal visit, Dhurandhar had prepared a sizeable
‘bird’s-eye view’ perspective drawing of the Alexandra Docks of Bombay.
For his efforts he received a small fee and an impersonal letter of thanks
from Burns.44
Because of the political stakes involved, the Bombay reception commit-
tee of 1921 conceived the idea of massive pylons (rather than arches) to be
placed at prominent street corners in Bombay to give scope for ambitious
decoration. A modest sum of 8,000 rupees was initially allowed for the
entire work. On Dhurandhar’s advice, however, Solomon approached the
committee for the much larger sum of 20,000 rupees in order to carry out
the job properly. This was sanctioned on condition that the work be com-
pleted in eight days. Dhurandhar was the right choice for such a large-scale
work, as seen earlier in 1905 and later in New Delhi. Because of the short
time within which he had to deliver, Dhurandhar farmed out the work
among local artists in addition to his senior students so that each one of
them had to execute only two to four paintings within the deadline.45
The decoration of the pylons was finished within a record six days.
The 54 m high figures, inspired by the Hindu pantheon, stood on 1.5 m
high plinths, ‘displaying multifarious emblems’. When they were com-
plete, Solomon took the Indian Headmaster in his automobile to admire
them, declaring that ‘the emblems . . . of the Gods, far from being a com-
189
plex burden seemed in this instance a pure joy and solace to their delin-
eators’.46 That joy was short-lived. Of course, as the main author of the
venture, Dhurandhar received the encomia of the pro-government press.
Solomon seized the opportunity to publicize the pylons in the Times of
India. However, furious letters from the Hindu nationalists to the Bombay
Chronicle excoriated Dhurandhar for the depiction of Hindu gods on the
pylons, demeaning them by making them wait upon the mleccha (pollut-
ing foreigner) rulers. (In the late nineteenth-century the Maharastran revo-
lutionary terrorist Chapekar had publicly branded the British as mlech-
has.) As the main identifiable ‘perpetrator’, Dhurandhar was forced to
seek police protection after receiving anonymous death threats. On 31
October 1921, Solomon asked Dhurandhar anxiously whether the head-
dresses and the familiar symbols should be removed from the figures so
that they could no longer be identified as Hindu gods. They could then
represent abstract qualities like ‘justice’, ‘love’ or ‘art’. On the day of the
Prince’s visit, the streets of Bombay were deserted except for pitched bat-
tles between the loyalists who came out to welcome the Prince and their
nationalist enemies.47
In spite of the debacle, the art school collected rich dividends from
this display of loyalty. Solomon proclaimed himself a facilitator of Indian
nationalism, viewing the project as a triumphal union of naturalism with
Indian decoration. The presence of nationalist politicians at the school
prize-giving ceremony the following year further vindicated the ‘nation-
alist’ character of his efforts: ‘the School’s compound is neutral ground
where rival factions fraternally mix, where Cosmopolitan hearts beat in
unison to the gentle but irresistible music of Saraswati’s Vina which can
still the pulsations of Politics . . .’.48 Grateful for this demonstration of loyal-
ty, Sir George Lloyd proclaimed that ‘the lines upon which the Principal
and the School then chose to work were emphatically the right lines – the
lines of assimilating to the national Indian genius the best in modern
art . . . I have always held that successful art in India must be . . . backed
by national enthusiasm.’49 Since Bombay had made European drawing
the foundation of Indian art, Indianization had not taken ‘the form of a
return to a hide-bound convention, but is acquiring a real sense of form
and colour, and at the same time developing the decorative instinct, which
so strongly national in character’. It is well to recall here the 1935 Act,
offering autonomy to Indians, which was delayed for at least two years by
the determined resistance of the ‘“die-hard” group led by . . . Churchill
and Lord Lloyd’.50 A romantic imperialist, Lloyd had his own ideas about
promoting cultural nationalism in the empire, art being one of his pet
projects. In appreciation of Solomon’s efforts during the royal visit, Lloyd
declared eight scholarships for the fledgling mural class.51
Solomon was acutely aware of the economic implications of the
school’s success, firmly setting his sights on public commissions for the
mural class. In a public lecture in September 1923, he appealed to the
190
municipal authorities to offer his students public spaces to paint and to
hold public competitions to select art works for them.52 The appeal in itself
was not that different from the concerns of the previous art teachers who
had consistently secured public commissions. But Solomon had his sights
beyond mere local sponsorship. He wanted a larger share in the British
Empire Exhibition planned for Wembley in 1924. Such a coup would
strike at the very heart of Bengal’s domination of the art world. Equally
important, the exhibition would also enable Solomon to enlist the support
of the influential India Society of London in his bid for the Delhi murals.53

the british empire exhibition

The Government of India planned an ambitious display of the natural and
artificial products of the empire in 1924, including contemporary Indian
art, as a triumph of enlightened patronage. What better way to publicize
the success of the new mural class than to win a prominent place in this
lavish imperial showcase? Prima facie this was an uphill task for Solomon
because in official circles the Bengal School was synonymous with contem-
porary art in India. Sir William Rothenstein, head of the Royal College of
Art, wrote to his friend Rabindranath Tagore on 6 April 1923:

[Laurence] Binyon, [William] Foster & myself are acting as official

advisers in the matter of Indian representation in the Fine Art sec-
tion at next year’s Exhibition. We feel that if your nephews could
send over their collection of paintings we could show a portion of
them & give our people here a chance of seeing the extent and quality
of the portfolios.54

Abanindranath’s disciples, a number of whom headed government art

schools, were entrusted with the selection of works for Wembley. A Fine
Arts Committee was formed which included two orientalists, O. C.
Gangoly, the ideologue of the Bengal School, and Samarendranath
Gupta, Deputy Principal of the Mayo School of Art in Lahore. However,
in order to appear even-handed, Lionel Heath, Principal of the Mayo
School, and Solomon were also nominated to the committee. Once there,
with the dedicated support of Lloyd and his own forceful canvassing,
Solomon was able to secure a strong representation for Bombay.55 His stu-
dents were invited to send an entire Indian Room, decorated by the dif-
ferent departments, in a triumphant demonstration of Gesamtkunstwerk.
Dhurandhar organized the work, which took nine months to complete.
On the eve of his retirement, Lloyd paid a last visit to the school to admire
the Indian Room before it was shipped to London.56
Entirely built of Malabar teak, the Indian Room boasted a richly
painted ceiling, depicting the Hindu sun god Surya and the eight planets,
and was embellished with decorative borders of Ajantan inspiration.
191
 The Indian Room at the Empire
Exhibition, Wembley, 1924,
photograph.

Though Solomon claimed to have preferred actual frescoes to prove

Bombay’s credentials in this area, for convenience of shipping the students
used the marouflage technique. However, we must not forget that
Solomon’s speciality was marouflage. The seven main oil panels of differ-
ent dimensions, executed by the senior students, were of individual inspir-
ation to emphasize the range at the risk of sacrificing overall unity. The
carpets, furniture and sculptures were contributed by different depart-
ments. To put a final touch to the school’s claims to excellence, Mhatre’s
celebrated student work, the plaster sculpture To the Temple, originally
exhibited in 1896, greeted the visitors at the entrance.57 To coincide with
the exhibition, Solomon’s book The Bombay Revival of Indian Art was on
sale in London. Before leaving for Wembley, he had sent an inscribed
copy to Dhurandhar in appreciation, ‘A souvenir of the sunshine and
gloom through which we have passed together since Nov 25th 1918.’58
Ostensibly the story of the developments at the school, its true purpose
was to make the case for a rival ‘renaissance’. Each chapter relentlessly
trumpeted the superiority of Bombay’s naturalist methods over those of
Calcutta. In a comparative account of different mural traditions, the
chapter on Bombay was placed judiciously next to ancient Ajanta, invit-
ing the intelligent reader to draw the obvious conclusion.59
Despite Solomon’s efforts, it must be said that orientalism remained the
acknowledged style of contemporary Indian art at Wembley. Bombay was
only a small part of this vast imperial exercise. The exhibition aimed at
catholicity in not excluding any established artist, but the colonial art centres
dominated.60 Salon artists from Bombay included Dhurandhar and his col-
league A. X. Trindade, the veteran portraitists Pestonji Bomanji and M. F.
Pithawala, the ‘Open Airists’ S. L. Haldankar, R. D. Panwalkar and M. K.
Parandekar as well as S. P. Agaskar, L. N. Tasker and M. V. Athavale. The
192

Asit Haldar, Shiva and Parvati,
c. 1924, watercolour on paper.
Last Touch by Pestonji was priced at 200
guineas, and the much-praised Glory of
Pandharpur by Dhurandhar at £150. The
Empire Review described it as a ‘remark-
able pictorial record of a no less remarkable
scene. This widely known artist gave us . . .
a vivid glimpse of a celebrated place . . .
The crowd he has depicted . . . with such
wonderful fervour.’61 The aristocratic
amateur Panth Pratinidhi of Aundh also
managed to be included. Punjab was rep-
resented by Allah Bukhsh, Thakur Singh
and A. R. Ashgar, while Calcutta sent
members of the Indian Academy of Art,
Hemendramath Mazumdar, Jamini Roy
and B. C. Law.
The orientalist heavyweights included
Gaganendranath, Abanindranath and
his disciples, Kshitindranath Majumdar,
Nandalal Bose, Sailendranath Dey, Sarada
Ukil, Asit Haldar and K. Venkatappa, as
well as the younger generation, namely
Samarendranath Gupta, Roop Krishna,
Bireswar Sen and the precocious
Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury. We have
already encountered his self-portrait (p.
169) and Lotus Pond (p. 30) shown at
Wembley. His supple, erotically charged
figures were a departure from the Bengal
School that anticipated his powerful fleshy
sculptures.62 The prominent orientalists from outside Bengal were Samuel
Fyzee-Rahamin and Abdur Rahman Chughtai. The ‘naïve’ paintings of
Sunayani Devi, who was by now a modernist icon, also featured at
Wembley, as well as the work of the Andhran Damerla Rama Rao. Mukul
Dey, already a familiar figure in the art world of London, was entrusted
with decorating the exhibition site with murals, receiving wide publicity in
the process. Atul Bose, who was at the Royal Academy at the time, was also
invited, possibly by Dey, to decorate the exhibition pavilion. His refusal to
do so caused a lasting enmity between them.63
The contemporary Indian art section was well covered in the press. In
Rupam, Vasudev Metta gave a favourable account of Bengal’s contribu-
tion.64 In the Empire Review, Lionel Heath, Principal of Lahore art
school, paid a tribute to the Tagores as the main artistic inspiration in
India, while singling out the independent orientalist from Lahore, Abdur
Rahman Chughtai, for his ‘beauty of line and composition . . . ’.65 The
193
Studio, the oldest ally of the orientalists, invited their chief ideologue,
O. C. Gangoly, to review the show. Refusing to acknowledge the presence
of any other style, Gangoly repeated what had become a well-worn cliché:
‘the coining of types from the inner vision, untrammelled by the limita-
tions of a living model, is a distinguishing feature of orientalism’.66
Gangoly then proceeds to play courtier to his imperial patrons:

It is said that the supreme significance of the British connection in

India is to help modern India to recover the glories of her ancient
culture. In the sphere of art, the sleeping princess is opening her
eyes to the golden touch of British sympathy. She appears to have
sent precious jewels to add to the lustre of the Imperial crown.67

The Bengal Government under Lord Ronaldshay (now the Marquess of

Zetland) had been the champion of the Bengal School whose achieve-
ments seemed to be self-evident in Wembley. In Rothenstein’s letter of 6
April we learn of plans to acquire the works of the Bengal School at
Wembley ‘for a national museum’ in London.68 A letter from the mem-
bers of the India Society was published in Indian Art and Letters, backing
the purchase of these works for a nominal sum of £200 to be the nucleus
of a permanent gallery of modern Indian art in London. It was signed by
powerful figures, including its President, Sir Francis Younghusband,
intrepid explorer, ruthless imperialist and a devotee of Eastern spirituali-
ty, as well as E. B. Havell and Lord Carmichael, former Lieutenant-
Governor of Bengal.69 Wembley was the first grand display of imperial
patronage in which Bombay received considerable recognition but it still
had an uphill task against the orientalist hold on Western imagination.

the battle for the new delhi commission

Wembley became a battleground for the rival schools of Bengal and
Bombay. Havell penned a scathing attack in Indian Art and Letters on the
‘schoolboyish’ work of the Bombay students. They, he complained in
Rupam, filled nearly half the gallery, the remaining space being divided
between Bengal and the Punjab. However,

in spite of the unsympathetic atmosphere in which they are placed, a

few of the exhibits of the Bengali artists stand out from the rest and
dominate the whole Gallery as the work of artists who have some-
thing to tell which is worth telling, who are sure of themselves and
of their art – artists who have ‘arrived’.70

Solomon visited London in 1924 ostensibly to attend the empire spectacle

but also to win over the India Society, the redoubt of orientalism which
had a ‘casting vote’ in the decision on the New Delhi murals. On 23
194
October he addressed the Society, countering Lord Ronaldshay who had
recently reminded the Society of the importance of the Bengal School.
Solomon concentrated on two of Bombay’s claims: they were the first to
discover Ajanta and they had a systematic training in sculpture, both of
which qualified them for their ‘alternative’ mural project. In addition,
Solomon’s Royal Academy experience of figure study reinforced the exist-
ing Indian talent for decorative murals, correcting the tendency to ‘over-
spiritualize’. Offering economic reasons for the present artistic stagnation
in Bombay, he demanded that Bombay be made the ‘spokesman for
Indian artists’, in India’s artistic revival.71
A conference on future government art policy centring on state
patronage, organized by the India Society, was held at Wembley on
Monday, 2 June 1924. Recently ennobled Lord Lloyd and Solomon dom-
inated the conference from the start, since the orientalists and their well-
wishers had been unprepared for the onslaught planned by the duo. Only
Rothenstein raised a lone voice of protest.72 Chairing the meeting, Sir
Francis Younghusband addressed the need to pay attention to the artistic
development of India in a tone of benign paternalism. As the chief speak-
er, Lloyd began by re-affirming his faith ‘in the Indian artist and in the
value on his mission to the world’, in a tacit acknowledgement of the ori-
entalist contribution.73 Since the meeting was organized by the India
Society, he felt he needed to make this diplomatic gesture towards the
Bengal School. Art schools in India, Lloyd reminded his audience, occu-
pied ‘a very unique position, because in that country there exist no salons,
or academies, or rather Art Control apart from these institutions’. Lloyd
was simply reaffirming the propaganda value of art institutions for the
colonial government, a cornerstone of imperial art policy since the 1850s.
Despite recent eclecticism, he admitted, the Bengal School had retained
its oriental (though not always Indian) flavour, as well as its immediately
recognizable conventions. Lloyd then proceeded to expatiate on Bombay’s
unique position by invoking Mhatre’s famous work. Except for Calcutta,
no other art school practised the fine arts. Not only was the city close to
Ajanta but it enjoyed active public patronage, and had a fund of unex-
pended energy which could be usefully applied to awaken ‘Indian artistic
sense’. He readily accepted that Bombay had lost its artistic purpose for a
while and took the credit for encouraging ‘Solomon to start murals with
stipends and strong life study’ because the murals would compensate for
the lack of public art galleries. Lloyd’s talk received the endorsement of
the Indian commissioner on the Wembley committee, who was also keen
to see Bengal’s monopoly ended.74
Following Lloyd’s ‘temperate’ yet persuasive presentation of Bombay’s
case, Solomon introduced his favourite refrain, the success of naturalism at
the school: ‘some of the drawings and paintings of the undraped figure
compare favourably with some of the best art schools in the West, consid-
ering it has been such a short time’.75 Was he causing the ‘de-orientation’
195
of the student body? Solomon reassured his audience: ‘No – there is no
fear of that. They are being taught to copy not Europe but nature, and
Nature cannot be a faulty teacher.’76 It is worth pondering that until the
1950s, nature was considered by art critics to be a neutral domain that
needed to be reproduced faithfully in art, a notion of the unbiased ‘inno-
cent’ eye that has been seriously questioned in the post-war years.77
The high point of the session was the passing of the Prix de Delhi res-
olution proposed by Lloyd and seconded by Solomon, an idea that had
originated with Lloyd’s friend Lutyens, as we have seen. The prize was
conceived along the lines of the French Prix de Rome, the successful can-
didates spending three to four years at a central postgraduate institution, a
kind of tropical Villa Medici. These trained students could then be utilized
for decorating the public buildings of the new capital. A second resolution
was passed aiming to prevent Indian art from being confined to one
school, which implied Bengal though it was not mentioned by name. O. C.
Gangoly described the Prix de Delhi resolution in Rupam as grossly inad-
equate, demanding a complete revamping of art education (perhaps wish-
ing to see a more thoroughgoing orientalism in art schools). Dismissing
Solomon’s claim that Bombay enjoyed an enlightened public patronage,
Gangoly repeated his idée fixe of inviting the government to assume the
role of an enlightened patron ‘in the absence of a cultured public in
India’.78
At Wembley, Solomon had the satisfaction of ensuring the success of his
proposals. Let us now retrace our steps to the events that led to the Prix de
Delhi. In 1916, Lutyens, we may recall, had presented a memorandum on
the decoration of his buildings by Indian artists to the New Delhi
Committee, accompanied by a note on craftsmanship by Baker. When
Solomon took up his position in India in 1918, the debates surrounding New
Delhi were quite intense given the advanced state of its construction.
Lutyens had already visited art schools in India to examine their fitness to
embellish his buildings. In 1921, Solomon approached Lutyens to consider
the students of the Bombay art school for the Delhi murals. Dhurandhar
took the students to Delhi, where they were invited to lunch by the great
man. The students were then asked to draw from a piece of Hindu sculp-
ture, kept in an octagonal cabinet in his bungalow. Lutyens’s purpose was to
test their competence to carry out the decoration of his buildings.79
Meanwhile Lutyens was having second thoughts about the Indian
contribution. On 30 March 1922, he presented a Joint Memorandum with
Baker to the New Delhi Committee, elaborating the idea of the Prix de
Delhi. It was this that Lloyd had unveiled at Wembley. Significantly,
Baker had added a dissenting note in the Memorandum that it did not
embody his view of what was essential and of immediate significance. Not
only was Baker keen on the Gesamtkunstwerk principles popular in
Britain at the time, but he regarded Indian participation in decoration as
vital to his buildings. The 1922 Memorandum thus amounted to a com-
196
promise solution in response to the wishes of the New Delhi Committee.
Subsequently, in deference to Lutyens, plans for the mural decoration of
the Viceroy’s Residence, which was to be Lutyens’s main architectural
endeavour, were dropped. Only the Viceroy’s Council Room would dis-
play a map in oils showing the full extent of the empire.80 Why did
Lutyens change his mind? This had partly to do with his own aesthetic
preference even in his English domestic buildings since he discouraged
any contribution of painters and sculptors except under the strictest
supervision. He had also accepted the New Delhi commission on condi-
tion that his architecture followed a severe Neo-classical style.81
More intriguingly, Lutyens began to display a growing anxiety about
the Indian artists’ ability to decorate his buildings. Indeed, his own out-
look was one of the reasons for Baker’s eventual rift with him. During
their travels through India, Lutyens and Baker paid a visit to the Tagores,
the ‘ideal community of culture’. This left a more noticeable mark on
Baker, who quotes Rabindranath’s poems movingly in his memoirs. India
hardly touched, let alone moved, Sir Edwin perching on his lofty heights.
The architect’s unhappy conjugal life, exacerbated by Emily’s infatuation
with the adolescent Indian ‘messiah’ Krishnamurti, may have had some-
thing to do with his insensitivity. Lutyens’s feelings are captured in a let-
ter, probably not meant to be sent, mocking what he saw as the preten-
sions of an Indian artist (perhaps Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin) who wished to
be employed in New Delhi:

My Dear Michael, (May I drop the Angelo?) I thank you so much

for your letter. The only remark I can make is what a pity it is
you cannot design, draw, or observe.82

Indeed, the only Indian artist he ever showed warmth towards was the
academic painter Atul Bose, who was invited to sketch his likeness. Baker
was ultimately responsible for the decorative experiments in seven rooms
of the Imperial Secretariat, representing Indian history and mythology.
From his school days Baker had been open ‘to the influences of foreign
ideas and methods’.83 As he confides in his memoirs, ‘content in art,
national and human sentiment, and their expression in architecture, seem
to me to be of the greatest importance’.84 To bring out the peculiarly
‘Indian’ character of the Raj, he delved into Mughal history and Hindu
epics with enthusiasm. A firm believer in craftsmanship and the ‘mar-
riage of the arts’, in 1912 he had stated what was to be the architect’s credo
in New Delhi, ‘he [the architect] must so fire the imagination of the
painters, sculptors, and craftsmen of the Empire, that they may, interfus-
ing their arts with his, together raise a permanent record of the history,
learning, and romance of India’.85
To return to Bombay, Solomon was fully aware of the economic ben-
efits of the New Delhi murals for his students. On 27 February 1923
197
Lloyd in his speech to the school fully supported Solomon’s economic
argument:

But the greatest opportunity of all is the one which your Principal
has mentioned at length in his report. And let me assure you at once
that I have supported and shall continue to support as strongly as
possible your desire to be admitted to a part in the decoration of
New Delhi.86

By further suggesting at the Wembley conference in 1924 that those

responsible for planning the capital would not wish to thwart the revival
of Indian art, he implied that support for Bombay was tantamount to
guaranteeing Indian artistic revival. He also informed the conference that
Sir Phiroze Sethna, a member of the Indian Council of State from the
Bombay Presidency, had already pledged his support at a Council meet-
ing in 1922.87
Following Wembley, the India Society held discussions on the Delhi
murals and the Prix de Delhi resolution, the topics that were also debat-
ed in the Council of State for India. Speaking at the India Society, Lord
Birkenhead, Secretary of State for India, lent his support to the Wembley
resolutions, but felt the need to limit the damage caused to the oriental-
ists. After stressing the non-political nature of the Society, he reminded
his audience of the contribution the Tagores had made to Indian cul-
ture.88 The lecture was widely reported in the Indian press, prompting
the Bombay Chronicle to read a sinister motive in Birkenhead’s talk. On 13
December 1924 it accused the government of arrogance in refusing to lis-
ten to Indian opinion (read Bombay opinion) on the mural issue. If its
intentions were truly serious, the paper declared, it would heed the sug-
gestions made by Lord Lloyd at Wembley.89 Solomon, who had taken the
Bombay public into his confidence before his departure for the Empire
Festival, drummed up support for the Wembley resolutions on his return.
He addressed the nationalist Art Society of India and the Bombay
Architectural Association in order to publicize the Wembley resolutions.
Announcing his Wembley success, he declared that the art school’s unfair
neglect had at last been rectified by the publicity received at the Empire
Exhibition. He painted an optimistic picture of the vast undecorated wall
spaces in India waiting to be filled with nationalist murals.90
On Wednesday, 28 January 1925, the Council of State for India con-
sidered the resolution of Haroon Jaffer, the honourable member from the
Bombay Presidency, to appoint a committee in order to implement
Lloyd’s Wembley proposals. These, Jaffer claimed, would promote art
throughout the empire, which would also have commercial implications.
India was undergoing an artistic renaissance, even though a national art
was yet to emerge, and the Raj should provide cultural stability by cen-
tralizing artistic enterprises. The call for a central authority to oversee
198
artistic progress seems to have been a leitmotiv in discussions in the 1920s.
Jaffer’s statement also implied that oriental art had failed to create condi-
tions that would make it truly pan-Indian.91 Sethna, another member
from Bombay, added the amendment that the envisaged institute would
not engage one permanent principal, but have rotating ones, each in
charge of a particular region. This was to demonstrate that Bombay was
acting from selfless motives, although he did not hesitate to add that
Solomon was the most able among the heads of art schools.92
A. H. Ley, Secretary to the Department of Industry and Labour, the
government spokesman on the Council, expressed his reservations about
centralization, suggesting that funding should not be shouldered either
directly or entirely by the Central Government. His view was that the
whole Prix de Delhi question should be examined further by the Standing
Advisory Committee of the Department of Industries and Labour,
charged with building the capital. This was passed by the Council.93 At
the Legislative Assembly session of Friday, 6 March 1925 N. L. Joshi,
another Bombay member of the Council, put a question to Sir
Bhupendranath Mitra, the government spokesman, on the progress of
Lutyens’s 1922 memorandum. Mitra confessed that nothing had as yet
been done, promising to consult the Standing Advisory Committee on the
matter.94 The next day Mitra gave the following answer to Joshi: although
the Government had not yet accepted the Council resolution of January,
it would abide by the decision made by Lutyens and others in 1922. On 12
March, following the deliberations in the Legislative Assembly, the Prix
de Delhi resolution passed at Wembley was approved, and a small com-
mittee was formed to consider it.95
Solomon had received endorsement for his efforts to prevent modern
Indian art being a monopoly of Bengal. He also had the satisfaction of see-
ing the progress of the Prix de Delhi resolution. In anticipation of success,
Solomon engaged, as Havell had done before him, a traditional fresco
painter from Jaipur to instruct his students. The artist decorated a lunette
at the school with earth pigments transported from Jaipur. It was at this
time that J. M. Ahivasi, one of the traditional Nathdwara painters in
Rajasthan, was admitted to the school. He later won a government schol-
arship to study traditional mural techniques. His painting, which won the
Bombay Art Society gold medal in 1927, was one of the most successful in
capturing the ‘flat’ Rajput style (see p. 206).96
The Bombay Chronicle too kept up the pressure on Solomon’s behalf.
On 20 March 1925 it fired a salvo against the Government and its chief
architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, who had now turned totally against decora-
tion by Indians. Quoting Lutyens’s Memorandum of 1922, it claimed that
Bombay had proposed mural decorations for the state buildings long
before him. In addition, both Sethna and Jaffer had been pressing for the
rights of Indian craftsmen in the Council of State, but their efforts had
been stalled by the authorities. Meanwhile, the paper clamed, Lutyens’s
199
rejection of Indian decoration was suddenly sprung on the unsuspecting
public.97 Solomon and his ally Kanhaiyalal Vakil, the acerbic journalist
with the Chronicle, managed to pack the entire Prix de Delhi Committee
with members from Bombay, with the sole exception of the stunned O. C.
Gangoly. Not only was Sethna on the Committee, but it also had the dom-
inating presence of M. R. Jayakar, a vociferous member of the Legislative
Assembly. Jayakar was a high profile Swarajist politician from the Pathare
Prabhu caste in Maharastra, a caste to which Dhurandhar and the sculp-
tor Mhatre belonged, as well as S. A. Brelvi, the editor of the Chronicle. To
clinch the matter, Vakil was made Secretary of the Committee.98
The Committee met on 2 April 1925 to pass the Prix de Delhi resolu-
tion. Its ostensible purpose was to campaign for the Delhi murals to be
offered to Indians. But crucially, national art was to be fostered by encour-
aging regional differences rather than opting for a superficially ‘attractive’
unity, for there was no single definition of oriental art. Centralization was
to be prevented by frequent exhibitions not only at the new capital but in
the provinces as well. The hidden agenda of this ‘decentralization’ of art
was to undermine Bengal’s favoured treatment by the Raj. The Committee
decided that the ‘Prix de Delhi ‘ was to be a separate issue from the mural
commission itself. This last was to ensure that even if the prize scheme
failed (and it eventually did) this would not affect the mural commission
for Bombay artists.99
On the same evening in Bombay, a public meeting held at the Parsi
Rajakeya Sabha gave an enthusiastic welcome to the resolution. Jayakar
made a blistering attack on the ‘rival’ scheme of Lutyens and Baker, dis-
missing Lutyens as a ‘builder of English country villas’. Vakil followed
with an assault on Lutyens. He had meanwhile written to the India
Society in London to seek their support for the Indian artists against the
architect.100 The Bombay Chronicle described Lutyens’s 1922 scheme as
‘an insult too glaring and obvious to be tolerated by a self-respecting
nation’.101 Finally, in November, Solomon forwarded his plan for a cen-
tral art institution in Delhi, in which postgraduate students from each
region would work for two to three years, to the government. Modestly,
he nominated himself as its director and Dhurandhar as his deputy,
describing him in the memorandum as ‘affable in his manners [with] a
distinguished career behind him . . . a member of the Pathare Prabhu
caste which has reputation for devotion to art for art’s sake’. He also rec-
ommended that Dhurandhar be appointed Superintendent of the Bombay
section of the Central Art Institute for a term of three years.102 The insti-
tute never saw the light of day.
Havell was watching these developments with mounting indigna-
tion. Solomon’s success in winning government funds was a glaring
reminder of his own failure with public murals. He held Lutyens and
Baker personally responsible:

200
 who as universal providers were commissioned to restore the arts
of the Empire, commend these paintings and propose that the
same rhythmical formula, which can be adjusted to all the races
of mankind, as an ingenious rhymester turns out limericks, shall
be taught in an Imperial School of Design at Delhi by European
masters who have acquired ‘reputations in a world-arena’.103

Declaring that Abanindranath was not ‘unrecognized in a world-arena’, he

blamed circumstances beyond their control that prevented the orientalists
from becoming successful mural artists. On 29 August 1925 he dismissed
Solomon’s claim that he had the unanimous support of the members of the
India Society, remarking that not a single picture of the Bombay art school
shown at Wembley had an Indian outlook.104 In the 1927 edition of his clas-
sic Indian Sculpture and Painting, Havell once again questioned the legiti-
macy of the Bombay revival; while professing to admire Indian art, art
teachers now sought to impart ‘universal’ principles of art, insisting on a
faithful study of nature, ‘through the paraphernalia and technique of mod-
ern European academies’. Havell simply disliked Solomon’s particular defi-
nition of nature, offering this verdict: ‘The mural paintings of the
Government House, Bombay, the latest and technically perhaps the best
products of the system, are a facile parody of Leighton’s fresco of The Arts
of Peace . . . but they are neither Indian nor true to nature.’105
Between 1929 and 1930 Havell and Solomon’s close ally Vakil
engaged in an open feud in the periodical Roopa Lekha. In response to
Havell’s letter to the editor dated 1929, complaining that the indifference
of the Public Works Department (pwd) towards Indian art was painfully
conspicuous in the building of New Delhi, Vakil accused him of an
‘anaemic attachment to ancient canons’.106 Havell rejoined, with some
justification, that Vakil’s writings on architecture threw ‘no light on
India’s peculiar architectural conditions and needs’. Had the journalist
paid attention to Havell’s books, he would have appreciated the prob-
lem.107 Not wishing to be branded a déraciné, Vakil protested profusely
that not only was he devoted to Havell’s works, but unlike the orientalists,
he alone had been trying to put his precepts into practice. On the other
hand, his followers have ‘obstructed hitherto all attempts for a systemat-
ic, nation-wide, programme for reconstructive efforts’.108 In 1931, Vakil
published a damning judgement on orientalism. Its stagnation, Vakil
wrote, was caused by its doctrinaire archaism, which had failed to inspire
the younger generation. Indian artists were encouraged to appreciate
everything – archaeology, iconography, mythology, philosophy, history
and theology – all except the values of art. Once again, he claimed that the
English art teacher’s followers had stuck to the letter of his inspiration,
but not the spirit. Sensing that the feud had gone on long enough, Havell
finally extended an olive branch to his opponents, blaming government
indifference for the ‘status quo’ in modern Indian art.109
201
 For their part, the orientalists had not remained silent during the rise
of Bombay as an alternative nationalist style which threatened their very
existence. As early as 1921, Gangoly had dismissed Solomon’s efforts.
Reviewing Solomon’s book The Charm of Indian Art in 1926, he took him to
task for daring to use the frivolous word ‘charm’ with regard to Indian art.
Questioning the claims of Bombay as the new Ajanta, Gangoly queried, ‘if
the Indian artist was as imaginative as claimed by Solomon, why impose life
classes on him?’110 In that year, Vakil paid a visit to Calcutta to gain
first-hand knowledge of his adversaries. He described the atmosphere in
the Tagore residence with a touch of irony as ‘the realm of fancy and beau-
ty where logic and routine purposely fear to tread’.111 He particularly
resented the reverential attitude the Tagores seemed to generate in people,
though reporting favourably on their endorsement of the newly founded
Benaras Hindu University as the best antidote against public indifference to
art.112 Rabindranath’s open-mindedness about art made a strong impres-
sion on Vakil, whilst Gaganendranath’s Cubist experiments fascinated him.
O. C. Gangoly he could not stand, but then they held irreconcilable views.
In 1929, at the height of the Bengal–Bombay rivalry, Vakil described
Gangoly’s lecture at the Bharat Kala Bhavan in Benaras as full of vague
generalizations and lacking any concrete plans.113 However, by the 1930s,
the animus had died down considerably and Vakil wrote sympathetically
on Gangoly’s lecture at the newly formed Rasa-Mandal, yet another socie-
ty to rival the established Bombay Art Society.114

the murals of the imperial secretariat

In 1927 the Government of India held an open competition for decorat-
ing the Imperial Secretariat designed by Herbert Baker with murals. Well
primed by Solomon, in January 1928 Dhurandhar paid a visit to Delhi
with his students to study at first-hand the architectural plan, elevations
and other details. Dhurandhar measured the dimensions of the Law
Members’ Chamber, in order to prepare the preliminary pencil, water-
colour and oil sketches for the murals. His experience with large aerial
drawings for Cecil Burns, followed by the pylons, had equipped him for
large-scale work. The deadline for submitting the coloured sketches to
the judges was 7 March 1928, which barely left him a month. But capable
of working at great speed, he completed four water-colour sketches, each
measuring 183 x 30cm. In August the Department of Industries and
Labour asked him to submit the preliminary cartoons for the murals. The
senior students of Solomon’s mural class also submitted preliminary
watercolour sketches to the committee. As widely expected, in 1928 the
Government of India, on the recommendation of the Advisory
Committee chaired by Sir John Marshall, offered the lion’s share of the
murals to Bombay artists, especially the art school.115 In 1928, the govern-
ment sanctioned fifty lakhs of rupees (5,000,000), of which one lakh
202
M. V. Dhurandhar, The
cartoon for Stridhanam, Law
Members’ Chamber, left, 1929,
watercolour on paper.

M. V. Dhurandhar, The
cartoon for the Stridhanam,
Law Members’ Chamber, right,
1929, watercolour on paper.

M. V. Dhurandhar, Stridhanam,
Law Members’ Chamber, left,
1929, oil on canvas.

M. V. Dhurandhar, Stridhanam,
Law Members’ Chamber, right,
1929, oil on canvas.

203
(100,000) was to be divided among the artists in proportion to their impor-
tance. Dhurandhar was entrusted with the important murals in the
Law Members’ Chamber, for which he received the handsome fee of
17,000 rupees.116
The government expected Dhurandhar to complete the paintings
by September 1929, leaving him approximately a year. Although
Dhurandhar was able to keep to the deadline, he suffered ill health and
even despaired of completing the work on time. However, after taking
several months off from work, he was able to regain his confidence.
Dhurandhar was assigned two generous wall spaces in the chamber, each
7.3 m long and 1.5 m wide, divided into three parts, each to accommodate
a 2.4 m long canvas. Dhurandhar’s theme was the dispensation of colonial
justice: two laws from the Hindu Civil Code, Bride Wealth (stridhanam)
and Adoption (datta vidhana), and an example of the Muslim Shariah
law, Last Will and Testament. ‘Framing’ these scenes of civil law was an
East India Company court scene, celebrating the empire as an impartial
upholder of law and justice.
These marouflage panels for the Law Members’ Chamber, consisting
of over 300 figures, were completed in the third week of July 1929 in his
studio, well ahead of schedule. An informal exhibition, on the eve of their
transportation to Delhi, was attended by his close allies, including the
politician M. R. Jayakar and Vakil. Explaining his success, Dhurandhar
made a public statement that his student experience at Ajanta had left a
lasting impression, a somewhat unconvincing statement in view of his
lifelong love affair with Western art. Dhurandhar’s friezes in the Law
Members’ Chamber were praised by Percy Brown for their draughtsman-
ship, colours and symbolism.117 Dhurandhar personally accompanied the
works to Delhi in order to supervise their attachment to the walls with the
help of his students. Solomon, who was directing his own mural students
in Delhi, congratulated him with the wish that 50 years hence the
Maharastran would be known as the Titian of India.118 Solomon’s senior
students were awarded the decoration of the North Block of the
Secretariat. As a preparation for the murals, special drawing courses,
using Dhurandhar’s large drawing of an undraped figure as exemplar,
were conducted at the school. Students also studied details from living
models and learned to enlarge sketches to scale in order to produce life-
size watercolour cartoons for the murals.119
The upshot of the Lutyens–Baker clash was that only one of the 340
rooms in Lutyens’s vast palace for the Viceroy was adorned with a visual
image: an ambitious map in oil colours of the largest empire in the world,
designed by Percy Brown, head of the Calcutta art school, and executed
by Munshi Gulam Husain of Lucknow with his assistants. The rest of the
murals found a home in the North Block of Herbert Baker’s Secretariat,
which was conceived as two massive blocks, with myriad chambers,
flanking the ceremonial King’s Way. The uppermost impression created
204
 by the motley subjects was one of conscious Raj attempts to put Hindu,
Muslim and Western elements through a paternalist sieve to produce a
cultural purée. Miran Baksh, Assistant Principal of the Mayo School of
Art in Lahore, and his students decorated the domes of the loggia of the
North Conference Room with Quranic inscriptions, sinuous arabesques
and Buddhist geese (hamsa). The narrative murals were executed entirely
by artists from Bombay. The veteran Rustam Seodia, the first Indian
painter to be trained at the Royal Academy, depicted the four seasons (a
European version of four, unlike the Indian six). Four additional lunettes
sported a cultural mishmash such as an oriental slave market, Bluebeard,
Cinderella and stories from Harun al-Rashid.120
Bombay art school’s contribution, including Dhurandhar’s, was
mainly in the marouflage (oils) method, introduced by Solomon, though
tempera murals were not entirely absent. The South Loggia was in the
care of G. P. Fernandes, one of the first students to be trained by
Solomon. He used marouflage on the dome but had the versatility to
paint the rest in tempera. The lantern of the dome was brightened by the
use of colourful costumes for the artisan figures. G. H. Nagarkar, anoth-
er senior student of Solomon’s, covered the dome, arches and spandrel
with an elaborate series on ‘Hindu Aryan life’, represented by well-
drawn figures in low-key colours. The lofty dome crowning the North
Block was decorated by Solomon’s students under his supervision, with
figures representing different periods of Indian history (see The Gupta
Period, p. 185). Eight further lunettes were filled mostly with female
figures personifying themes of painting, architecture, music, dancing,
poetry and drama. A typical lunette, for instance, on the theme of music
represented the classical Indian Todi ragini in the manner of miniatures.
J. M. Ahivasi from traditional Nathdwara, who painted the lunette
‘Drama’, was versatile enough to range from a Rajasthani miniature style
to deeply modelled figures.121

Poetry, fresco lunette,

Secretariat, North Block,
1929, oil on canvas.

205
 J. M. Ahivasi, Message, 1929,
tempera on paper.

With a few exceptions, the main problem faced by Solomon’s students

was their lack of experience in handling large-scale projects of this kind.
Solomon tried to rectify this by seeking the assistance of the students of
the Architectural School, who helped with the decoration of the dome.122
Nonetheless, the paintings, completed in Bombay and transported to
Delhi to be attached to the walls of the Secretariat, did no service to them.
Although the individual figures were often attractive, overall the paint-
ings failed to blend in with the surrounding architecture. Frequently the
proportions looked distorted from below on account of the great height at
which these paintings were placed. Even a senior artist like Seodia, basic-
ally an easel painter, lacked experience with heights and large spaces,
which required compensatory optical devices. (Exceptionally, one of the
most successful with the heights was G. H. Nagarkar.) Yet Solomon was
convinced that the Indian students’ ‘love of decoration’ was vindicated in
206
G. H. Nagarkar, Vaishya caste,
detail from the Ceiling,
Secretariat, North Block, 1929,
fresco buono.

the New Delhi murals. His formula, as we have seen, was to meld Indian
decorative talents with Western figure drawing, dismissing the

theory that an Indian Art student should be able to evolve a life-

size figure entirely out of his inner consciousness, because he is an
Indian, means that his art must degenerate into the repetition of
conventions, as did the art of Egypt. There may be a good philo-
sophy in it, but it is not a working proposition.123

The story of the New Delhi murals would not be complete without a con-
sideration of the work of a ‘heavyweight’ from Bombay among the cho-
sen. Trained at the art school earlier in the century, Samuel Fyzee-
Rahamin did not belong to the Solomon coterie and indeed became his
implacable enemy. As a wit once quipped, Bombay was not big enough to
hold these two supreme egotists. Solomon’s first public clash with Fyzee-
Rahamin took place in 1924, when he approached Solomon with a view
to being the acting head during his absence at Wembley. On
Dhurandhar’s advice Solomon decided not to recommend him. Feeling
slighted, Fyzee-Rahamin started a vendetta against the school in the
Times of India. The feud lasted two years, until the weary editor refused
to publish any further letters on the subject.124
The Solomon/Fyzee-Rahamin conflict also had a deeper ideological
reason. Trained at the Royal Academy under the fashionable portrait
painter John Singer Sargent, Fyzee-Rahamin began his career as a suc-
cessful portrait painter.125 He was among those who sacrificed their lucra-
tive ‘Western’ career under Mahatma Gandhi’s inspiration. However, he
did not simply turn out historicist subjects in the manner of Ravi Varma
or Herman Muller. Fyzee-Rahamin renounced naturalism in order to
revive the two-dimensional character of Rajput painting, somewhat in the
207
manner of Bengal. It is difficult to establish the precise date of his conver-
sion. His romantic liaison with the classical singer Atiya Begum in 1913
may have been a catalyst. The artist from the ancient Bene Israel commu-
nity of Maharastra converted to Islam and added his wife’s surname
‘Fyzee’ to his own. One of the fruits of their joint explorations of the
delights of Indian classical music was Music of India, written by the diva
and illustrated by the artist in 1925.126
Fyzee-Rahamin enjoyed a high reputation in London in the inter-war
years. Having held a successful one-man show at the Goupil Galleries in
1914, he showed his watercolours of Rajput inspiration in 1925 at Arthur
Tooth’s Gallery under the rubric ‘Indian Vedic, Mythological and
Contemporary Watercolours’. A leading English critic, Herbert Furst,
praised his portrait of Gandhi as ‘a masterpiece of characterization’ in
Apollo, in one of his several essays on the artist.127 A Ragamala painting
from the album Amal i- Faizi-Rahamin was gifted by the industrialist
Victor Sassoon to the Tate Gallery. Another, The Rajput Sardar, was
acquired by the Tate at the same time.128 Queen Mary lent Fyzee-
Rahamin’s portrait of Veena Sheshanna, the famous musician of Karnataka
admired by Venkatappa, to the exhibition of modern Indian art held in
Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin,
London in 1934. The following year, he showed 45 pictures at a one-man Rajput Sardar, c. 1925,
show at the Arlington Galleries.129 These works expounded Fyzee- watercolour on paper.
Rahamin’s vision of artistic nationalism, claiming to
offer a viable alternative to both the ‘archaistic’ Bengal
School and the ‘Western’ approach of Bombay. How-
ever, in a penetrating though favourable review, Furst
diagnosed the predicament of the erstwhile pupil of
Sargent. The uneven mixture of Western ‘realism’ and
flat ‘decorative’ elements appeared to him to indicate a
clash of Western and Indian approaches, the artist
revealing an acute hesitation in seeking ‘to turn his view
into vision’. Sargent’s ‘realist’ training was incompatible
with Eastern ‘decorative’ sensibility, concluded Furst, a
problem not faced by traditional Mughal artists.130
Fyzee-Rahamin was among those from Bombay
selected to decorate the Imperial Secretariat but he care-
fully distanced himself from Solomon’s entourage. On
17 June 1926, after winning the commission, he pub-
lished an article, ‘On Indian Art and Burne-Jones’, in
the Times of India, questioning the Bombay art school’s
nationalist credentials for the murals, holding natural-
ism to be incompatible with Indian idealism. In passing,
he took a dig at J. A. Lalkaka, an academic portraitist
belonging to his own generation. In a sarcastic response,
Lalkaka demanded to know the ‘message’ emanating
from Indian art. His friend Rustam Seodia, one of the
208
Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin, detail
figure, Secretariat, North
Block, 1929, fresco buono.
Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin,
Knowledge, Secretariat, North
Block, 1929, fresco buono.
Delhi muralists, then joined in, commenting that to ‘establish painting
methods on the idealistic basis – as according to Fyzee-Rahamin, Indian
art was supposed to have been based on it – would be impracticable and
ridiculous as the ideas of a red hot communist’.131
Fyzee-Rahamin’s treatment of Hindu and Muslim allegories in a lin-
ear style in two domes of the North Block gives us an insight into his
particular approach. Aiming to revive the ancient methods of Ajanta
and Bagh, ‘and to preserve only the absolute flatness of Oriental art’,
Fyzee-Rahamin mentioned having consulted an ancient text on mural
techniques, the Karmabuddhisara. Choosing a limited palette based on
finely ground precious stones, he applied them straight on to the dry
plaster. Fyzee-Rahamin’s four major themes were inspired by the
Western allegorical tradition: Justice,
Knowledge, Peace and War. Justice,
for example, was visualized as a
raven-haired, rather European-
looking female figure draped in
white, standing on a white lotus and
holding in her right hand the scales
of justice. Following the tradition of
symbolic art, Fyzee-Rahamin made
the central allegorical figure, such
as Knowledge, larger than the ancil-
lary ones. Below the main personifi-
cations he painted six seasons in the
Sanskrit tradition, in contrast to
Seodia’s four seasons of Western
inspiration. The smaller dome con-
209
tained the images of the Hindu trinity, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva,
while the spandrels were adorned with ashtanayikas (eight conventional
heroines of ancient Sanskrit literature).132
Furst, this time reviewing Fyzee-Rahamin enthusiastically, observed
that the strength of oriental art was its flatness, whereas modern
European artists were caught in a dilemma over whether to eliminate
depth altogether. However, tradition had collapsed in both East and West
and all ‘artists of today come to their task primarily with the intellect, and
consequently, with a self-consciousness that prevents them from doing
what their forebears were able to do; that is to say, to ply their art as trade
naturally, without doubtings and questionings’. Convinced that no gen-
uine Indian style could survive in the cultural tide of colonialism, he wel-
comed Fyzee-Rahamin’s attempts to create a unified expression in New
Delhi that avoided the drawbacks of both Calcutta and Bombay, which
was in his view, ‘the only sound alternative’.133 Percy Brown, who also
made a careful analysis of the murals in Delhi, complimented the artist on
his delicate drawing and painting. Solomon’s cantankerous ally Vakil
however rubbished them: ‘they were distinctly Western . . . his figures of
women are uniformly wooden [with] apparently no mural feeling in the
work . . . ’.134
The murals, on view from 1931 following the inauguration of New
Delhi, did not win universal approbation. Baker initially felt that the
murals would inspire Indians for generations. He even urged the govern-
ment to print a small explanatory pamphlet. Arthur Gordon Shoosmith,
builder of public edifices in India, criticized the faulty draughtsmanship
and cloying romanticism of some of the works.135 And Baker soon had
private misgivings. In 1931, the Secretary to the Department of Industry
and Labour confided to the President of the Bombay Art Society that
Baker had found the work in New Delhi to be ‘very unsatisfactory’ and
the outcome of ‘the first impatient efforts’.136 Baker later reflected:

In the buildings of New Delhi, where I felt that encouragement

should have been given to India’s great traditional art of mural
painting, my advice as to the training and selection of artists was not
taken, and painters with no thorough training in the difficult tech-
nique were for political reasons turned loose and uncontrolled upon
my walls, and the architect was ignored.137

As we shall see, this may have been one of the reasons for leaving out both
the Bombay art school and the ‘marouflage’ method for the murals of
India House, London.

210
the india house murals
Unquestionably Solomon had pulled off a spectacular coup for his students,
which had followed inexorably from the Wembley resolution of 1924.
However, during the same period, another important project was being
hatched: the decoration of India House at the Aldwych in London. The
building was conceived by Sir Atul Chatterjee, the first High Commissioner
for India in London, designed by Baker and Gilbert Scott, and completed in
1928. Baker had become good friends with Chatterjee during the period that
the Bengali was Minister of Public Works in Delhi. Chatterjee shared
Baker’s vision of ‘romancing’ India through her craftsmen and when he was
transferred to London, ‘some of the work of artistic expression, [which] we
might have done in the Delhi buildings, happily found place on the walls of
the India House’.138 Baker and Scott’s attention to the details of Indian his-
tory as well as of Indian architecture is evident in the building. As a leading
colonial architect, Baker had also been involved with the neighbouring
South Africa House. In both projects, the imperial government sought to
give scope to the local mural painters. South African artists, Baker conclud-
ed, had by and large failed because they produced the work before undergo-
ing rigorous training. The architect was convinced that in order to execute
the murals successfully Indian painters required the necessary training.139
On Baker’s advice, Chatterjee approached the government in August
1927 with a scholarship scheme for decorating India House. Sir William
Rothenstein, head of the Royal College of Art, was the right person to con-
sult. He had been active in the British mural movement, and had set up an
experimental mural studio in the college. Moreover he was a friend of the
Tagores as well as of Baker’s. Four successful candidates were to train under
him in painting on plaster, followed by a year in Italy studying old masters,
before embarking on the actual murals at India House. On completion of
the project, these artists could expect further work in the new capital.140
The New Delhi murals had whetted Fyzee-Rahamin’s appetite and
he considered himself to be best suited for the London project.
Rothenstein was not actually on the selection committee, but his opinion
was known to carry weight. Fyzee-Rahamin decided to make a personal
plea to him. On 6 March 1928, when the deliberations were going on,
Fyzee-Rahamin despatched a letter to him that was a mixture of transpar-
ent flattery, moral outrage and blatant self-promotion. He began by sug-
gesting that four young students would be incapable of executing murals
along ‘Indian lines’ after only eighteen months experience in England.
Continuing in an indignant tone he alleged that the proposal would
impede the progress of Indian art because a European training was bound
to destroy ‘whatever Indian element may still have remained with them’.
Rothenstein, he added flatteringly, was one of the few who knew the
importance of preserving the Indian tradition, which would suffer if
students were to rush to foreign countries for training.141 Finally appealing
211
to the English artist’s good sense, he suggested that the best alternative
would be to entrust the work to those who were already experienced in
the indigenous tradition. Although a senior artist, Fyzee-Rahamin was
even prepared to be ‘retrained’ by Rothenstein in order to obtain the com-
mission. Rothenstein poured cold water on this unwarranted solicitation,
disagreeing that ‘a little training’ in European mural decoration would
‘blight’ the Indian spirit. ‘I seem to remember that you yourself claimed
that you have been a student of Sargent, yet this has not prevented you
from adopting Indian conventions’, he wrote.142
The India House Scheme was publicly announced by the
Department of Industries and Labour on 9 November 1928. At an open
competition held on 12 March 1929 the selection committee chose, on
Rothenstein’s advice, four artists out of some 74 contestants. Fyzee-
Rahamin was shortlisted, along with Seodia, because of their previous
work at the Secretariat. However, in the end the committee turned them
down because of their seniority and experience. The scholarships were
meant to encourage artists in their early or mid-career who would bene-
fit from further training.143
The chosen four were Bengalis: Sudhansu Sekhar Chaudhury, Ranada
Ukil, Lalit Mohan Sen and Dhirendra Krishna Deb Barman. Sen, who was
a teacher at the government art school in Lucknow, had already completed
a mural course at the Royal College in London in 1926. His works had been
acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum and Laurence Binyon,
Keeper of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum, had engaged him to
copy the ancient frescoes of the Bagh Caves in central India. The other
three were all trained in oriental art. A prize-winner at exhibitions, Ukil
had learned Indian painting at the government art school in Calcutta in
1922–4, followed by tutelage under Abanindranath. Deb Barman had been
a student of Nandalal’s mural class at Santiniketan and had accompanied
the poet Tagore to Java. Chaudhury had been in prison as a revolutionary
terrorist. After his release, as part of rehabilitation, he took up painting
under Abanindranath. One may speculate that his selection was meant to
be a magnanimous gesture on the part of the Raj. Although it was denied
at the time, the choice of the Bengali artists was swayed by the government
policy of balancing different interest groups in India. Because Bombay had
swept the board in New Delhi, Bengal was to be placated with India
House. In any case, Solomon’s students were preoccupied with the New
Delhi murals at this time. As they admitted later, they could not prepare for
the competition in the short time at their disposal.144
The four arrived at the Royal College on 23 September 1929. In wel-
coming them, Rothenstein exhorted them to bring out the Indian quality
in their work, for all they lacked was a knowledge of modern techniques.
They quickly settled down and gained much from the practical advice of
Professor Ernest W. Tristram and E. Michael Dinkel in the mural depart-
ment. Hitherto they had little experience of working together; yet the
212
 design made jointly by them for the decoration of the dome of India House
was perhaps the most successful of their works.145 One of the artists, Deb
Barman, has left us a lively account of his experience in London. At
Santiniketan, his teacher Nandalal used to urge students to work in natu-
ral surroundings and approach art in a spirit of contemplation. The Royal
College was the very opposite, resembling a factory, full of bustle and hub-
bub, with some 500 extremely keen students jostling for the cramped
space. The Bengalis gradually became adept at producing large designs at
the college.146 The Times of 30 March 1930 reported Queen Mary’s visit to
the college. She was gratified that the Bengalis had ‘kept to the Indian trad-
ition’, purchasing Sen’s work Girl Working in a Potter’s Yard. At a garden
party held at Buckingham Palace the artists turned up in white Bengali
dhoti and panjabi which was much admired.147
After spending a year at the college, the students visited Florence,
Arezzo and Padua in Michael Dinkel’s company to perfect the egg tem-
pera method. Deb Barman was charmed by Florentine maidens, who lit-
erally ‘stepped out of the canvases of Raphael and Botticelli’. Later they
visited Vienna while Dinkel returned to London. The Bengali artists
commenced work at India House on 9 April 1931, coincidentally a few
months after the murals of New Delhi were thrown open to the public. A
studio was allocated to them in India House where they prepared their
preliminary cartoons, measuring between 2.8 m2 and 12/15 m2, with larger-
than-life figures. Ten months were spent on designing. The dome posed
special problems because of the curvature, a problem that was known to
have beset Solomon’s students in New Delhi. Initially, the artists expect-
ed to use oils but egg tempera was found to be more suitable as it was
supposed to bring out the flat linear quality of oriental art. Twenty-four
carat gold paint was lavished on the background.148

The Dome, India House, 1931.

213
 The Dome, India House, 1931,
fresco buono, detail showing
the emperor Ashoka’s court.

The iconographic programme for India House decoration was as fol-

lows: the lunettes in the exhibition Hall on the ground floor by Ranada
Ukil and Sudhansu Sekhar Chaudhury represented Hindu and Muslim
subjects. Lalit Mohan Sen was assigned a large space in the library, while
Deb Barman was in charge of the pendentives of the Octagonal hall on the
first floor, where he depicted the four great classes of Hindu society and the
four great stages of Hindu life (varnasramadharma). Then followed the
decoration of the quadrants. However, the dome was by far the most ambi-
tious as it represented great moments in Indian history, notably the reigns
of the Buddhist emperor Ashoka and the Mughal emperor Akbar.
According to The Studio, ‘All four artists are united in the design and exe-
cution of the decoration of the dome, which is admirable in its effect of
colour and as a complete scheme . . . [The] work carried out is a successful
example of traditional Indian painting applied to modern use.’149
The art magazine expressed the hope that the whole scheme would
see a successful completion. However, before its completion Sir Atul
Chatterjee was replaced by Sir Bhupendranath Mitra, the cautious official
at the centre of the construction of New Delhi, whom we have encoun-
tered before. Rothenstein complained that the new High Commissioner,
‘a financial expert, with no sense of the arts . . . sent for me constantly,
fearful always that the painters were idling, and again doubtful of the rea-
sonableness of their claims to payment’.150 For the head of the Royal
College, it was a trying situation. Not only were excessive demands made
on his time, but he was also expected to act as a policeman. The political
climate in India was changing rapidly as well, prompting the government
directive that the artists return to India immediately after completing the
painting in the dome, and without further work on the project.
Rothenstein tried to interest the Indian leaders attending the Round
214
The Dome, India House, 1931,
fresco buono, detail showing
the emperor Akbar’s court.

Table Conference in the future of the artists Deb Barman and L. M. Sen,
but they had the future of India on their mind. Rothenstein wrote to the
Viceroy on behalf of Ranada Ukil and Sudhansu Chaudhury. However,
acutely aware of the ugly controversy raging in Bombay, he added that he
did not wish to press the claims of the Bengali artists. Lord Willingdon
assured him that something would be done for them on their return.151
This never happened. It is quite significant that Deb Barman is silent on
the India House work in his later memoirs.152
Baker predictably felt disappointed with the murals, as he had done
with the New Delhi ones, expressing this in a letter to Rothenstein, ‘What
I did see of their colour I did not think very good. It seems to me that all
Indian painters make the vital mistake of following the colour scheme of
Ajanta, where, accidentally, I think, and due to decay, browns prevail.’153
Baker had correctly noticed that the general predominance of browns in
Ajanta had something to do with the fact that the blues and whites had
perished. He was convinced that the close imitation of Ajanta had led to
the prevalence of red-earth colour at India House. However, the architect
did concede that a good start had been made in restoring India’s ‘great
tradition’.
In 1930 an exhibition of paintings of the Bombay art school at India
House, arranged through the good offices of Chatterjee and the India
Society, did nothing to assuage the resentment of Solomon’s allies.154 In
1931 the Times of India unleashed a virulent campaign on the choice of the
Bengalis for India House. This led to an acrimonious and protracted
exchange between the Times of India, the Bombay Art Society, the India
Society of London and the Government of India over claims and counter-
claims regarding favouritism towards Bengal that lasted a good part of
the year.
215
 The Times of India alleged a conspiracy between the India Society and
the Indian government to deprive Bombay of its legitimate prize. On 6
April 1931, three days before the Bengali artists were to commence their
work at India House, the Times of India, mouthpiece of the Bombay art-
school faction, issued a warning under the heading, ‘India Society’:
‘Bombay should realize that very intelligent forces are mobilizing in Delhi
and London to scoop the big stakes in art revival.’155 When constructive
efforts in art education were in their infancy and confined to Bombay, the
India Society supported the ‘Prize of Delhi’, alleged the paper, but now
Baker was playing fairy godmother to Rothenstein’s Indian mural paint-
ing class, while Bombay watched helplessly as its scheme was ‘hijacked’ for
the benefit of another province. In an allusion to the celebrated passage in
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the paper addressed the Marquess of Zetland
and Lord Lytton (a former Governor of Bengal and a former Viceroy),
Laurence Binyon, the Keeper of Oriental Art at the British Museum, and
Rothenstein ironically as ‘honourable men’.
The next day, Lalkaka, who was chosen to copy royal portraits at
Windsor, felt obliged to register his own protest.156 On 10 April, under
the heading ‘India Society Again’, the Times of India accused the Bengali
High Commissioner, Chatterjee, of securing ‘this regrettable family
arrangement’. Nor were the four artists spared. Bombay must insist on
her rights, concluded the paper sanctimoniously.157 The paper fired the
next salvo on 12 April 1931, claiming a sort of ‘copyright’ for Bombay
over the ‘invention’ of Indian murals: ‘It is a fact that Bengal did not com-
pete in the first and then most difficult competition, though criticisms
have emanated from that province which now wants to join the competi-
tion . . . [as] the initial problems of mural painting on a really comprehen-
sive and unusually difficult scale have actually now been solved.’158
On 24 April, the pugnacious Vakil joined the fray, describing the India
Society as a reactionary setup and claiming that ‘its pet henchmen, both in
London and in India, have prevented many ideas and resisted many recon-
structive endeavours for the advancement of art in India’. Forestalling any
rebuttal that Bombay had already won the New Delhi commission, he
described the ‘hard earned’ commission as a mere ‘earnest of good inten-
tions of the government of India’. Vakil joined in the personal vilification
of Chatterjee, Rothenstein and Sir John Marshall, Director-General of the
Archaeological Survey of India and member of the selection committee.159
The India Society, learning that its members had been libelled in the Times
of India, issued a formal protest on 6 May, pointing out that it never backed
any specific school but only gave general encouragement to Indian art. Nor
did it take responsibility for opinions expressed by individual members,
reminding the paper that it was through the Society’s efforts that the exhi-
bition of Bombay art students at India House in the Aldwych had been
possible.160 There were activities behind the scenes as well. On 7 May, Alan
Green, Deputy High Commissioner for India, had sent a confidential let-
216
ter to Wiles, regretting that the whole affair was based on a misunder-
standing, but then ‘it would be too much to expect a journalist to acquire
correct information from public records’. Green was especially peeved that
the accusation followed closely on the heels of Chatterjee’s generosity to
the Bombay art school. He went so far as to suggest that the very limita-
tions of Solomon’s ‘marouflage’ murals in Delhi had led to the decision to
train Indians in proper frescoes at the Royal College. ‘I think you will
agree’, Green offered, ‘that marouflage is a somewhat unworthy form of
mural decor.’ However, as a comforting gesture, he assured Bombay that
there was still plenty of room in India House to cover.161
Wiles, who also happened to be a member of the India Society in
London, was seen by the art-school faction as an ally of the Society, and
complicit in helping the Bengalis. Feeling obliged to clear his name, Wiles
sought public clarification about the India House commission from the
President of the Society.162 Younghusband wrote to the Times of India on 20
May denying any favouritism shown by the Society. The paper however
refused to accept this, assuming a tone of outraged reasonableness: ‘we
never asked for more than that Bombay should be allowed to participate
with other provinces in the work in London and New Delhi’. Complaining
further that the committee for the forthcoming Burlington House exhibi-
tion of modern Indian art consisted almost entirely of orientalists, it refused
to accept that Bombay had received any special favours in merely being
invited to exhibit at India House. Two days later, the combative Jayakar
joined the fray, firing at random at a number of favourite targets. He felt it
an affront that Indian artists were never shown with contemporary British
artists, demanding that the planned museum of ancient Indian art in
London must expand to include modern Indian art. The recent publication
on Ajanta by Laurence Binyon, a friend of the orientalists, was dismissed as
lacking first-hand experience. The Maharastran finally accused Chatterjee
of rigging the India House project in favour of Bengalis, the ‘art litterateurs,
dilettantes and connoisseurs, who have unfortunately made of Indian art
elsewhere a symbol of preciosity and practical ineffectiveness’.163
The next day T. S. Shilton, Secretary to the Department of Industries
and Labour responsible for the Delhi and London projects, wrote to
Wiles, ostensibly to correct certain ‘misunderstandings’, but in fact to
answer Solomon’s faction. In the first of the two government schemes, he
pointed out, Bombay had swept the board. In the second, the four
Bengalis were chosen at an open competition. Shilton made no bones
about the underlying political reason, the balancing of different interest
groups in India:

You will thus see that equal opportunities were afforded to all artists
and schools of art in India in both the above schemes and there is no
justification at all for any heart burning in Bombay over the award
of scholarships to Bengali artists. In fact so far as the Government
217
 of India are concerned there has been much greater work given to
Bombay School of Art than to Bengal.164

Shilton then gleefully informed Wiles: ‘You may be pleased to hear that
we have had a protest from Sir Herbert Baker against the decoration of
the ceilings and walls of a building designed by him with paintings which
he describes as “very unsatisfactory” and to which he refers as “first impa-
tient efforts”. This is of course not for publication.’165
On 29 May 1931, Sir Francis Younghusband, President of the India
Society, wrote to George Wiles, President of the Bombay Art Society,
insisting that no council member of the India Society was on the selection
committee. Wiles decided to go public in the Times of India the very same
day. Objecting to the character assassination of individuals, especially of
high officials, Wiles sought to cut the ground from under Solomon’s feet.
He pointed out that many artists both in India and abroad had doubted
whether the methods of training followed by the Bombay School were
consistent with the ideals of Indian painting.166 He also revealed that the
vociferous Sethna and Jayakar were both on the Finance Committee of the
Assembly when the measure was passed, but not a squeak was heard from
them. Sethna’s later claim that the presence of the majority of Bombay
artists in the New Delhi project was a mere accident was plain poppycock.
The issue was not allowed to die a natural death, for it had opened old
sores. Though disappointed at failing to obtain the India House commis-
sion, in the Times of India of 4 June 1931, Fyzee-Rahamin aired his own
grudge against Solomon, which he had harboured since 1924. His own ori-
entalism, which sought, like the Bengal School and the Gujarati artists, to
revive the indigenous tradition of flat decorative painting, had little
patience with Bombay’s ‘naturalist’ revival. While Rahamin accepted that
the Government communiqué had misled the artists and the public in not
making clear that the project was meant for young artists, he deplored the
lack of public interest in obtaining the commission for Bombay. He also
criticized Jayakar’s conduct as unbecoming in favouring the art school
rather than Bombay artists in general, adding:

Mr Jayakar’s assumption that I tried and failed in the competition is

amusing . . . I need no certificate from the dilettante and school mas-
ters who at their best only entertain the novice. My attempt to com-
pete, as Sir William Rothenstein himself put it, could not be in order
to learn from him, but to protect the reputation of Indian art in
Europe by representing the best.167

This provoked Sir Phiroze Sethna, Member of the Council of State, to

retort:

[Fyzee-Rahamin] as your readers must know, avails every opportuni-

218
 ty to attack the art school and its supporters, including myself. As a
committee member, I must put right mistakes. The condition was
that they must train under Rothenstein and Fyzee-Rahamin was
willing to do that. So Jayakar was right to point out his own selfish
motives in trying to deprive others. An artist of fifty cannot improve
much and young men were taken.

As a member of the government, Sethna also felt obliged to defend

Chatterjee against baseless allegations of corruption. Somewhat mistakenly,
in his letter of 29 May to the Times of India, he also objected to Wiles’s criti-
cism of the art school, expressing surprise that Wiles, who was Finance
Secretary to the Bombay Government, was attacking another government
institution. Wiles felt obliged to deny the charge vigorously in the paper of 7
June.168 Realizing his mistake, Sethna apologized to Wiles in a personal let-
ter, admitting that he had been misled by the Bombay Chronicle and Fyzee-
Rahamin’s letter. But he urged Wiles to write to the Times of India in sup-
port of the Bombay artists, adding, ‘I intend to move a resolution for more
help to Indian art and we should all come together.’169 On 13 July, Wiles
informed Younghusband of deliberate distortions by the Times of India.170
On 30 March 1932, at the agm of the Bombay Art Society, it was strenuous-
ly denied that the institution was a mouthpiece of the India Society. If some
individual members had expressed reservations about the art school, this
was not a result of collusion. Lalkaka, who attended the meeting, made
another vociferous protest. As for Rothenstein, he was disillusioned with
the whole India House affair, showing signs of strain in this clash of two
very different cultural expectations, Indian and European. As he com-
plained to Tagore in a rather lofty vein, ‘The paintings [of India House] are
among the best I think, of any Indian mural paintings; and these young men
have learned something I think: how to work together . . . But I wonder how
much aesthetic sense there is in truth among your countrymen.’171 Bombay’s
parochialism had soured his view. He also felt used by the government
and abused from different quarters for all the trouble he had taken.
The long feud between Bombay and Calcutta over the murals had an
amusing sequel. On 15 March 1932, at a Council of State session, Sethna
presented a resolution that if the Delhi murals were deemed satisfactory,
further work should be offered to Indian artists. Although he was careful
not to demand the commission exclusively for Bombay, he suggested that
because of its seniority and pre-eminence as well as the burden carried by
it during the campaign for New Delhi murals, it ought to be given special
consideration. He was astute enough not to deny the success of the India
House murals, but suggested that their importance was diminished by the
fact they were outside India.172 Sethna’s move stirred a hornet’s nest.
While J. C. Banerjea, a member of the Council from Bengal, supported his
general plea for Indian artists, he took this chance to air Bengal’s griev-
ance. Describing Bombay as neither Indian nor modern, but a ‘queer
219
amalgam’, he blamed Bombay’s propaganda and provincial rivalry for
Bengal’s failure to obtain a just share in the Delhi murals. And yet, he
asserted, Bengal had created the renaissance and had moreover Nandalal
Bose as a muralist.173 J. A. Shillady, Secretary to the Department of
Industries and Labour, responded to Sethna with sarcasm, reminding the
house of his blatantly partisan statement made in 1924, ‘the work shall be
entrusted to Indian artists, and preferably to the Bombay School of Arts’.
Sethna had also been one of the members to complain that Bombay artists
could not compete in the India House scheme because they were engaged
in the New Delhi murals. This caused some merriment in the house, for it
demonstrated to the members that Bombay was not starved of commis-
sions. The resolution was then withdrawn. Shillady, speaking for the gov-
ernment, reassured the members that, funds permitting, it had no objec-
tion to helping artists.174

solomon’s MAROUFLAGE: the final balance sheet

How successful was Solomon’s mural project and its claims to introduce a
new Indian style? Judged by the economic criteria, Solomon was remark-
ably successful. He ensured the livelihood of his students, thereby revers-
ing Bombay art school’s decline in the early years of the last century.
Solomon’s artistic revival also had the ambitions of ‘restoring the traditional
entente’ between the painter and the architect as a critical element in
India’s artistic revival.175 His much-trumpeted entente through marou-
flage, which consisted of pasting large canvas panels onto the walls, was
dismissed by the Deputy High Commissioner for India as ‘a somewhat
unworthy form of mural décor’.176 The late nineteenth-century view of
proper murals as painting directly on the walls, as expounded by Cennini
for instance, may seem a trifle limited to us today. After all, the great
Caravaggio produced canvases to be attached to the walls as part of archi-
tectural decoration.177 Nonetheless, one of the serious problems faced by
Solomon was that the panels for the Secretariat were pre-painted in
Bombay and then taken to Delhi, which contributed to their failure to
blend in with the overall architectural design. Their defective proportions
arose from the fact that there was no understanding of the architectural
peculiarities of the site even though Solomon had consulted students of
architecture. Several artists were not even aware that the great height of
the dome and the large spaces covered required compensating optical
devices. Hence, one of the persistent criticisms of the murals was that,
while the details were often attractive enough, overall the works suffered
from a lack of experience in working with large spaces.178 Solomon seems
to have been aware of marouflage’s weakness, and paid Havell a back-
handed compliment by engaging a traditional Jaipur mural painter for his
students. But this had only a limited success, since Solomon himself lacked
personal expertise in this technique. Only J. M. Ahivasi from Nathdwara
220
in Rajasthan, and Fyzee-Rahamin, who was not part of the faction and
appears to have consulted an ancient Sanskrit text, had success in this area.
What about Solomon’s claim that he had created a new ‘national’
style? Here too we are on a slippery ground. He persistently broadcast that
a sound understanding of nature, in other words, Western illusionist
drawing, enhanced the decorative instincts of Indian students by improv-
ing their representational skills. The difference, as perceived by Solomon,
lay in the use of naturalistic figures based on a knowledge of anatomy, as
opposed to the flat ‘mental’ images of the Bengal School. Yet, when we
examine the works of Bombay we cannot escape the fact that they were not
that very different from oriental art. Indeed if one were to describe paint-
ings from Solomon’s mural class in a few words, it would be personifica-
tions à la Mucha overlaid with traces of Ajanta and the Bengal School.

solomon and enemies within

While Solomon achieved national success by his brilliant tactics, his own
position within Bombay was far from secure. Among local celebrities,
Fyzee-Rahamin took every occasion to denigrate the school in his lectures in
Bombay and abroad well into the 1930s. On 27 December 1930 in his talk at
the Students’ Brotherhood Hall in London on the ‘eternal’ and ‘divine’ non-
representational mainsprings of Indian art, he did not fail to cast aspersions
on the Bombay art school.179 Following his Wembley triumph of 1924,
Solomon resumed the restructuring of the school.180 In 1925, the University
Reform Committee, chaired by Jayakar, proposed a Fine Arts Faculty that
would include the art school. Solomon was initially in favour, as this would
have raised the status of art students, but quite inexplicably he backed out,
claiming that ‘an ounce of practice was better than tons of theory’.181
Between 1926 and 1928 his old enemies, Hogarth, the Inspector of
Drawing, and P. Lorry, the Director of Public Instruction, began plotting
to crush him. The dpi ordered an audit of the school with a view to forcing
Solomon’s early retirement. This, however, backfired. Following an
enquiry instigated by Jayakar, Hogarth himself had no option but to take
early retirement. In the process, Solomon won total independence from
the Education Department in all curriculum and policy matters. In 1928, the
Governor, Frederick Sykes, announced at a meeting: ‘In order that the
School of Art may develop on its own lines, we have decided that from April
1 next the School of Art is to be constituted into a separate Department,
independent of the Education Department.’182 This marked a momentous
change, as the school, hitherto an adjunct of industry, became an independ-
ent academy, completing a process that had begun way back in the 1880s.
The final threat to Solomon and the art school came in 1932. Faced with
an acute financial crisis, a committee appointed by the Bombay government
reached the conclusion that the province could not afford the luxury of a fine
art institution, whereas its valuable land could be sold for profit. After
221
considering the alternatives, namely charging a higher school fee or staff
redundancies, the committee recommended its closure unless it could be
taken over by the Federal Government, which was due to be established.183
This drastic recommendation may have in part been prompted by the con-
tinued hostility of the dpi. In response, Jayakar launched a campaign to save
the school. The Bombay Art Society was conspicuously lukewarm in its sup-
port, possibly because of the India House affair. The campaign succeeded,
earning the school a reprieve.184 By now Solomon had lost his appetite for
controversy. In 1935, the year before his retirement, he penned a letter of
thanks to the India Society for all the help extended to the art school.185
Let us finally consider briefly the wider nationalist politics affecting the
art school in the crucial decades of the 1920s and ’30s. As the cultural poli-
tics of the New Delhi murals were unfolding, the Gandhian movement bit
deeply into the daily routine of this colonial institution. In 1921, in nearby
Gujarat, in the wake of the Non-Cooperation movement launched by
the Mahatma, widespread riots broke out in large towns, culminating in
the Chauri Chaura massacre.186 Many students donned khadi (homespun
cloth), not only as a way of declaring solidarity with the Congress but also
to defy the school authorities. Dhurandhar was a natural target because of
his close association with the government, a number of them boycotting his
classes. However, most students lacked commitment. As they encountered
no opposition from the teachers, they soon returned to class.187 During the
Civil Disobedience of 1928–30, Gandhi was thrown into prison, Jayakar
being one of the leaders negotiating with the Raj on his behalf. It was an
explosive period, hardly a time for students to concentrate on art. Public
meetings were convened every day; demonstrations were taken out every
morning; many students joined the picket lines. The Congress boycott of
law courts, universities, legislative assemblies and other imperial institu-
tions was remarkably effective. The movement peaked in the summer of
1930 with a general strike that virtually paralysed the government.188 A few
students initially came to the school. However, from the third day students,
led by one Khadilkar, commenced their picketing. Dhurandhar was then
the Acting Director. When he learned that Khadilkar was threatening
students who refused to join the strike, he successfully reined him in by
appealing to his nationalist sentiment and reminding him of his previous
kindness to him. According to Dhurandhar, Khadilkar was harassing a
fellow Indian who had reached a senior position.189
Dhurandhar’s memoirs claim that the civil agitation failed to disrupt
school activities. As a civil servant, he felt it his duty to maintain discipline
at the school during the unrest. His contribution to the nationalist strug-
gle, he believed, was through his art and the government commissions he
won for his students. He saw no contradiction between his professional
ambitions and political conscience, which gives us a glimpse into the com-
plexities of Indian responses to the anti-colonial struggle. Dhurandhar’s
confidence sprang partly from the example of the nationalist politicians
222
who were not averse to joining the provincial governments from the 1920s
onwards. The peak of power-sharing was reached in 1935 when the
Congress formed ministries in the majority of the provinces in India. Even
in 1939, when the Congress withdrew its co-operation with the government
after it was snubbed by the Viceroy over the declaration of war, other polit-
ical groups rushed in to co-operate with the regime. For instance, Vasantrao
Dabholkar, who had Dhurandhar’s vote, was one such non-Congress
politician who stood at the Council of State elections at this time.190
In the 1940s, this accommodation between the Raj and the national-
ist politicians became increasingly difficult. Political conditions worsened,
polarizing opinions and putting intolerable burdens on Indian loyalties.
Few students at the art school in Bombay remained untouched by the
tales of the heroism of the Indian National Army in Southeast Asia or the
mutiny of the Indian naval ratings and their subsequent repression. A
moving testament to this period is a series of paintings produced by the
students of the art school inspired by these events.191

the swansong of imperial patronage

It is appropriate that I end the section on Raj patronage with the exhibition
of modern Indian art in Britain in 1934, the largest ever to be held in Britain
until the Festival of India in 1982. It was foreshadowed by an exhibition of
decorative designs, paintings, architectural drawings, modellings, copies of
murals and other products of the Bombay art school which opened at India
House on 8 October 1930. As the catalogue claimed, there ‘does not at pres-
ent exist enough demand for painting in the archaic style [orientalism] to
refuse to give training also in portraiture and figure painting’.192 The
Morning Post singled out for praise The Creation of Tilottama by D. G.
Badigar, a former student of Solomon, who was now studying at the Royal
Academy. Not only had this work been enlarged to scale, opined the paper,
‘which confirmed Solomon’s successful training, but its exquisite decorative
design was not marked by the distortions and monotonous colours of the
Bengal School’.193 Queen Mary, who paid a visit to the show, expressed an
interest in Dhurandhar’s sketch for the New Delhi mural Stridhanam
(Bride Wealth). The sketch belonged to Leslie Wilson, the former Governor
of Bombay, who felt obliged to present it to her. As Wilson cherished the
work, Dhurandhar made another copy for him.194 Dhirendra Krishna Deb
Barman, one of the artists working on the India House murals at the time,
ruefully admitted the success of Solomon’s propaganda in England.195
The India Society had been accused by Solomon’s group of being
an obscurantist body obsessed with ancient Indian art. In 1934, it sought
to prove them wrong by hosting an immensely ambitious exhibition of
modern Indian art at the Burlington Galleries. By this time an undeclared
truce had broken out between Bombay and Bengal, leaving the oriental-
ists once again in power. The enterprising brothers Barada and Ranada
223
Ukil (one of the Indian House four) were given charge of organizing the
event.196 There were elaborate preparations, a lot of diplomatic flurries
and much advance publicity in the press, journalists closely following the
brothers’ every move. Notices appeared even in the distant American Art
News on 20 June 1932, not to mention the English papers. Both Vakil and
Solomon visited London before the exhibition to safeguard Bombay’s
interests, but they were now in a more conciliatory mood.197 The opening
of the exhibition on Monday 10 December was carefully orchestrated to
squeeze in as much publicity as possible. To underscore noblesse oblige, the
Duchess of York, who formally opened the exhibition, and the
Maharajkumari (princess) of Burdwan posed for press photographs. The
President of the Royal Academy was in attendance as the chief guest. The
Marquess of Zetland, the loyal friend of the Bengal School, introduced the
exhibition. In 1930, he had urged the members of the Round Table
Conference, who had met in London to decide the political fate of India,
not to neglect art.198 The secretary of the India Society expressed his own
satisfaction with the flowering of two vigorous renaissances under impe-
rial patronage though once more reaffirming Bengal’s pre-eminence.199
Notices appeared in a variety of papers, notably the Illustrated London
News, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and Manchester
Guardian, the last admonishing Indians to revive the glories of ancient art
by resisting the lures of Western art.200 The 500 works at Burlington
House included a number of large format paintings. Augmented by works
from the collections of the Queen, the Marquess of Zetland and quite a few
Maharajas, the show represented virtually all the reputed Indian artists of
older and younger generations that spanned three decades of the twentieth A. C. Rodrigues, Scene, 1942,
century. The only surprising omission was the controversial Amrita Sher- watercolour on paper.
Gil.201 The Times, which reviewed the show in extenso,
failed to discover any masterpieces, though it
recognized the abundance of talent, not to mention
Bengal’s primacy. Although hesitating to speak with
authority on the orientalists’ symbolic colours, since
that subject was ‘not to be touched by anybody
unversed in Indian philosophy’, it felt dismayed by
their misty gradations borrowed from Japan.
Gaganendranath ‘excited the greatest interest’, while
admiration for Rabindranath had by now been
reduced to mere curiosity.202 Ramananda Chatterjee,
the veteran journalist from India, who had done
much to shape Indian taste, covered the show for his
Modern Review.203
In the wake of this grand spectacle of empire,
which had opened with so much fanfare, the memory
of Indian artists in Britain gradually faded away. The
political situation in India was deteriorating even as
224
M. S. Kerkar, Stretcher, 1943,
watercolour on paper.

the war clouds started gathering on the distant European horizon. This
particular swansong of imperial patronage had all the panoply of a state
occasion before Raj politics entered its final meltdown. The government
expected the grand exhibition to demonstrate the limited popularity of
the Congress and highlight its cordial relations with the hereditary
princes who trusted the Raj more than the nationalists. For the artists this
was the last demonstration of ambitious government patronage. From
this moment artists would rely on private patronage and their own
resources rather than on the endorsement of the colonial regime.
225
Epilogue

The year 1947 marked the end of the British Empire and the creation of
modern India and Pakistan in the midst of anarchy and communal vio-
lence. It also brought an end to the debates on art as a vehicle for nation-
alist resistance. The heroic age of primitivism, the most compelling voice
of modernism in India, had in effect ended in 1941. Two of its chief pro-
tagonists died in that year, Rabindranath Tagore at the age of 79, and
Amrita Sher-Gil at 28. The surviving member of the trio, Jamini Roy,
only added refinements to the striking artistic language that he had per-
fected in the 1930s. However, younger artists such as Ramkinkar and
Benodebehari continued well into the 1940s, as did some of the figurative
artists, notably sculptor Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury.
How can we sum up this defining period, which threw up larger than
life figures that changed the face of Indian art through their compelling
visions of Indian modernity? Their modernity was, as we know, viewed
through a wide range of artistic lenses in resistance to colonial rule. By
1905 the nationalist Bengal School had rejected the Victorian history
painting of the previous era as the handmaiden of imperialism, construct-
ing their own historicism by an amalgam of flat non-illusionist styles. In
contrast, most of the artists of the 1920s and ’30s disavowed the historicist
master narrative, which had obsessed the previous generation. They sited
their nation, not in the historic past, but in the local and the present,
which allowed for multiple aesthetic possibilities. The debate between the
modernists and the naturalists in this period was essentially within the
broader spectrum of global modernity, as they drew their inspiration
from international figures such as Tagore, Gandhi, Marx and Freud.
When the discourse of modernism came to India in the 1920s, its flexible
radical language provided the artists with a new tool to construct their
images of anti-colonial resistance. Modernism’s most fervent advocates,
the Indian primitivists, proposed a far-reaching critique of colonial
modernity, drawing upon peasant culture in an affirmation of the local
and the present. Yet their anti-urban, anti-capitalist counter-modernity
had global implications. Interestingly, even the naturalists, who were
226

L. P. Khora, Independence Day,
15 August 1947, 1947,
watercolour on paper.
sceptical of the modernist discourse, believed in the
‘here’ and the ‘now’ rather than the past. However
their engagement with modernity was negotiated
through the universal ‘rational’ order of illusionist
art and their faith in the ultimate triumph of the
toiling masses as a vindication of the inexorable
human progress.
The key primitivists, Tagore, Sher-Gil and
Roy, did not spawn any devoted followers. They
were individualists, shunning groups and move-
ments, but making their ideological differences
with the naturalists and orientalists clear through
their own work. In the 1940s, the last decade of the
empire, the differences between the primitivists
and their adversaries began to fuse as artists, writ-
ers and intellectuals were drawn into the vortex
of war, famine and peasant revolts in the dying
empire. The art of this decade reflected less colonial
anxieties than global anti-fascist resistance. The
Communists declared their solidarity with the ‘pro-
letariat’, viewing anti-colonial struggle as part of a
wider resistance to world capitalism. Communist
artists produced pamphlets depicting the struggle
of the masses, in a style reminiscent of Käthe Kollwitz, Mexican popular
prints and Russian ‘agit prop’ art. The momentous events taking place
could not but affect the young. as we see in a series of paintings by the stu-
dents of the Bombay art school glorifying Indian resistance to the empire.
Against this background two artistic agendas emerged that brought
out the tensions between avant-garde formalism and socialist radicalism,
both having global implications. The Calcutta Group, a band of ‘progres-
sive’ artists, consciously adopted an experimental approach to painting,
looking to Paris as their source of inspiration. The Progressive Artists of
Bombay, also formalists, briefly flirted with Communism but remained
sympathetic to social causes. They were initiated into international mod-
ernism by three refugees from Vienna who were resident in the city in the
1940s: Walter Langhammer, Rudi von Leyden and Emmanuel Schlesinger,
who helped wean these artists away from the provincial modernism of
Britain. The Progressive Artists were some of the main architects of
Indian modernism, which came to fruition later in Nehruvian India –
another story.
In this book I have tried to bring home to the reader the complex interac-
tions of a whole set of competing, not to say contradictory, tendencies
which modernity gave rise to, infusing local colours into what was a global
phenomenon.
227
References
The Bengali calendar used here bears the following relationship
to the Christian one, for instance 1352 = 1945ad.
Prologue
1 J.-P. Sartre, Black Orpheus, trans. S. W. Allen (Paris, 1951),
p. 39, quoted in R. Linley, ‘Wifredo Lam: Painter of
Negritude’, Art History, ii/4 (December 1988), p. 533. See
L. S. Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde,
1923–1982 (Austin, tx, 2002). Césaire was an iconic West
Indian poet of Negritude.
2 W. G. Archer, India and Modern Art (London, 1959), may
be taken as a classic example of the study of non-Western
art essentially as a derivative enterprise. In an essay on
‘decentring modernism’, to be published in Art Bulletin
(Intervention series), I develop the relationship of power
and authority between the West and its others as expressed
in histories of non-Western avant-garde art and possible
ways of thinking beyond current practices.
3 W. Rubin, ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the
Tribal and the Modern (New York, 1984). I do not need to
rehearse here the arguments and rebuttals in this controversy
except to add that Hal Foster, ‘The “Primitive” Unconscious
of Modern Art’, October, xxxiv (Fall 1985), pp. 45–70, and
James Clifford, ‘Histories of the Tribal and the Modern’,
Art in America (April 1985), pp. 164–215, offer trenchant
critiques of the Western art historical canon. For my own
work on Western representations of Indian art, see Much
Maligned Monsters: History of Western Reactions to Indian
Art (Oxford 1977), especially chap. vi. See also critique of
Eurocentric discourses of modernism by Latin American
critics, R. A. Greeley, ‘Modernism: What El Norte Can
Learn from Latin America’, Art Journal (Winter 2005),
pp. 82–93.
4 M. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (Berkeley, ca, 1985),
pp. 85ff., on the passage: ‘influence is a curse of art criti-
cism primarily because of wrong-headed grammatical
prejudice about who is the agent and who the patient: it
seems to reverse the active-passive relation which the his-
torical actor [the artist] experiences and the inferential
228
beholder will wish to take into account’.
5 Thomas Crow, The Intelligence of Art (Chapel Hill, nc, and
London, 1999). Elizabeth Cropper in The Domenichino
Affair (New Haven, ct, 2006) persuades us of the limitations
of applying Vasarian teleological concepts of mimesis and
authorship.
6 J. Clark, ‘Open and Closed Discourses of Modernity in
Asian Art’, in Modernity in Asian Art, ed. J. Clark (Sydney,
nsw, 1993), pp. 1–17. Clark applies Umberto Eco’s theory of
semiotics to the process of knowledge transfer, distinguish-
ing between open and closed systems of discourses.
7 A. Stokes, ‘Reflections on the Nude’, The Critical Writings
of Adrian Stokes (London, 1978), pp. 336–7. I am indebted
to Stephen Bann for the reference. Criticism of the avant-
garde, particularly with an engagement with Marxism, is a
vast field, going back to Walter Benjamin and Carl Einstein
with Clement Greenberg’s influential defence of the aes-
thetics of autonomy in the 1930s providing the benchmark
through the 1950s and ’60s. In the post-war era, the power-
ful and nuanced works of the October group of postmodern
critics, Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster, social historians of
art, namely T. J. Clark and Thomas Crow, and the theoreti-
cians of visual culture have defined the field. I cannot do
more than briefly acknowledge the importance of these
works here.
8 For a revisionist discussion of this problem in Renaissance
art, see Emilia e Marche nel Renascimento: L’Identita Visiva
della ‘Periferia’, curated by Giancarla Periti (Azzano San
Paolo, 2005), introduction by Pier Luigi De Vecchi and
Giancarla Periti, pp. 7–11. Taking up Enrico Castelnuovo
and Carlo Ginsberg’s essay, ‘Centre and Periphery’, in
History of Italian Art, i, trans. C. Bianchini and C. Dorey,
preface by P. Burke (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 29–112, Periti
argues that the centre–periphery relationship in art is not
spatial but art historical, which articulates hierarchical
power relations.
9 Crow, The Intelligence of Art.
10 Keith Moxey, ‘Discipline of the Visual: Art History, Visual
Studies and Globalization’, in Genre, 36 (2003), pp. 429–48.
N. G. Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and
Leaving Modernity, trans. C. Chiappari and S. Lopez
 (Minneapolis, mn, 1995). G. Kapur, ‘When was Modernism
in Indian Art?’, in When Was Modernism? Essays on
Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi, 2000),
pp. 298–9. P. Bourdieu, ‘The Production of Belief:
Contributions to an Economy of Symbolic Goods’, trans. R.
Nice, in Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, ed. R.
Collins et al. (London, 1986), pp. 154–5. G. Mosquera,
‘Modernity and Africana: Wilfredo Lam on his Island’, in
Fondació Joan Miró, cited in Sims, Wilfredo Lam, p. 174.
11 In ‘Border Lives: The Art of the Present’, in The Location of
Culture (London, 1994), pp. 1–9, H. K. Bhabha, a proponent
of the subversive function of hybridity, states: ‘[The] inter-
stitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the
possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference
without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.’ See the critics of
hybridity, Journal of American Folklore, Special Issue:
Theorising the Hybrid, cxii/445 (Summer 1999), especially
Andrew Causey’s thoughtful paper.
12 See the critical engagement with these issues in K. Mercer,
ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Cambridge, ma, 2005).
13 T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, il,
1962).
14 This is especially true of the Greeks, despised by the con-
quering Romans for their lack of valour, and yet revered by
them for their art and intellect.
15 R. Schwab, La Renaissance orientale (Paris, 1950). On G. F.
Hamann and the German rejection of Western
Enlightenment, see F. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century
Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, ma, 1959).
16 Today it is intimately connected with post-modern and
post-colonial thought. See J. J. Clarke, Oriental
Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western
Thought (London, 1997), who argues persuasively that any
serious history of Western thought must take note of the
impact of philosophical ideas from India, China and Japan
on the West. See also W. Halbfass, India and Europe: An
Essay in Understanding (New York, 1988). On Heidegger
and Eastern thought, see infra, p. 341.
17 J. Head and S. L. Cranston, Reincarnation, an East West
Anthology (New York, 1961), on Tolstoy’s interest in Indian
thought. See L. P. Sihare on Bergson and Worringer, p. 30.
18 E. Forgács, The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics, trans. J.
Bátki (Budapest, 1995), p. 78.
19 P. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922:
Occidental Orientations (Cambridge, 1994). See also Tapati
Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists,
Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920
(Cambridge, 1992), and more recently a work on Bengal
covering the period from the last decade of the Raj to inde-
pendent India until the 1970s: Nicolas Nercam, Peindre au
Bengale, 1939–1977 (Paris, 2006), which deals with national
identity and post-independence ‘progressive’ art.
20 C. Harrison and P. Wood, eds, Art in Theory (Oxford, 1992),
p. 3.
21 Mitter, Art and Nationalism.
22 A. Abbas, ‘Cosmopolitan Descriptions: Shanghai and Hong
Kong’, in Public Culture, xii/3 (Fall 2000), p. 775.
Cosmopolitanism is now seen to be a global phenomenon.
See its critiques in the same issue.
23 P. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and
Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, nj, 1993), speaks of two
spaces, the inner spiritual and the outer secular space of
colonial Bengal. On the socio-cultural phenomenon of the
Bengali Bhadralok and their role in creating an
autonomous culture in Calcutta, see S. Chaudhuri, Calcutta:
The Living City, i (The Past) (Delhi, 1990).
24 Mitter, Art and Nationalism, p. 268, and J. Broomfield, Elite
Conflict in a Plural Society: Twentieth-Century Bengal
(Berkeley, ca, 1968). On the Viennese intelligentsia, see C.
E. Shorske, Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture
(Cambridge, 1979).
25 The exception was Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the
widely travelled poet, composer, playwright, essayist, politi-
cal thinker and renaissance personality. See K. Kripalani,
Rabindranath Tagore (New York, 1962), as well as R.
Chatterjee, ed., The Golden Book of Tagore (Calcutta, 1931),
on the international tribute paid on his seventieth birthday.
The other cosmopolitan was the polyglot essayist Nirad C.
Chaudhuri, whose intellectual development took place in
colonial Bengal. One of the sites of such negotiations of
modernity was the ‘adda’, which is a cross between leisurely
intellectual conversation and local gossip among close
friends, similar in spirit to French café culture. Dipesh
Chakrabarty, ‘Adda: A History of Sociality’, in
Provincialising Europe (New Delhi, 2001), chap. 7, p. 180,
speaks of the practice ‘as a struggle to be at home in moder-
nity’. He considers ‘adda’ as a Bengali intellectual meeting-
point. I would add that the addas were sites that allowed
virtual cosmopolitans to function in colonial Calcutta.
26 I extend Benedict Anderson’s imagined community of print
culture as the component of modern nationalism to the
global scene. The members of this intellectual community
will never know most of their fellow-members personally:
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins of
Nationalism (London, 1983).
27 In the 1930s when the younger modernist poets in Calcutta,
Bishnu Dey and Sudhindranath Datta, moved out of
Tagore’s shadow, they turned to French literature, and
poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud,
Stephane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry.
28 D. Pan, Primitive Renaissance (Lincoln, ne, and London,
2001), on whose excellent work I base some of my argu-
ments.
29 Indian artists were by no means the only ones to valorize
primitivism. The Cuban artist of mixed Chinese, African
and Spanish ancestry, Wifredo Lam, offered a critique of
colonalism by combining Western primitivist aesthetic with
contemporary African elements. His Afro-Cuban themes
were a form of political assertion: Sims, Wifredo Lam, 1,
p. 223.
30 Pan, Primitive Renaissance, p. 112.
31 See R. Rumold and O. K. Werkmeister, The Ideological
Crisis of Expressionism (Columbia, sc, 1999), and especially
C. W. Haxthausen’s article, ‘A Critical Illusion:
“Expressionism” in the Writings of Wilhelm Hausenstein’,
pp. 169–91.
229
 32 B. Elliott and J.-A. Wallace, Women Artists and Writers
(London, 1994), mention that their strategy of exposing the
particular discourse of modernism as a matter of power
relations aims at empowering women artists on the mar-
gins. Their ideas could well apply to my discussion here.
See a recent work on the nationalist art of ‘marginal’
Europeans such as the Slavs in relation to the avant-garde:
S. A. Mansbach, Standing in Tempest: Painters of the
Hungarian Avant-garde (Cambridge, ma, 1991).
1. The Formalist Prelude
1 S. Roy, ‘Shilpe Atyukti’, Prabasi (Asvin 1321 [1914]), pp.
94–101. The great Indian director Satyajit Ray’s father, Roy
was a brilliant satirist and creator of nonsense poems, dying
of the tropical disease kala azar at age 32. On his contribu-
tion to the graphic arts, see P. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in
Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations
(Cambridge, 1994), pp. 133–6.
2 ‘Gleanings: Automatic Drawing as a First Aid to the
Artist’, Modern Review, xxi/1 (January 1917), pp. 63–5. My
special thanks to Ted Dalziel of the Library, National
Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, who took considerable
trouble to obtain the journal for me.
3 Tagore’s novels, Gora (1909) and Gharey Bairey (1916), and
his lectures on nationalism delivered in Japan in 1916 con-
demned jingoism and extreme nationalism. His letters from
Japan in 1916 urged his nephews to travel to broaden their
minds: K. Kripalani, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography
(Calcutta, 1962); he took his protégé Nandalal to Japan in
1924 to help broaden his mind and invited a Polish and a
Japanese artist to teach at his university at Santiniketan. On
Kramrisch, see B. Stoler Miller, ed., Exploring India’s Sacred
Art (New Delhi, 1994), pp. 3–29.
4 B. K. Sarkar, ‘The Aesthetics of Young India’, Rupam, ix
(January 1922), pp. 8–24. Agastya (Canopus), ‘Aesthetics
of Young India: A Rejoinder’, Rupam, ix (January 1922),
pp. 24–7. In The Futurism of Young Asia (Berlin, 1923),
Sarkar offered a blueprint for the modernization of India.
Listed as one of the pioneering sociologists, Sarkar was a
fascinating character whose contribution to social science is
only now being recognized (see http://www.multiworld.org/
m_versity-/articles/alatas.htm. of Syed farid Alatas, accessed
16 April 2007) Among a number of his papers published in
different European languages in Europe and the us, he put
forward a universalist view repudiating racial difference,
accepting only historically contingent ones. Despite his own
views, Sarkar generously secured the German National
Gallery in Berlin for the Bengal School exhibition, see O. C.
Gangoly, Bharat Shilpa o Amar Katha (Calcutta, 1969),
p. 313. Gangoly also mentions that the German Orientalist
Wilhelm Cohn was one of the sponsors of the show.
5 Sarkar, ‘Aesthetics’, pp. 16–18. See also his Futurism of
Young Asia. In his lectures in the West, Sarkar criticized
European Orientalists for creating a false dichotomy
between East and West. Stephen Hay, Asian Ideas of East
and West (Cambridge, ma, 1970), p. 260, however comments
230
that Sarkar evinced deep ambivalence about modernism
and the ‘Asian Spirit’.
6 C. Bell, ‘The Aesthetic Hypothesis’, in Art (London, 1914),
excerpted in C. Harrison and P. Wood, eds, Art in Theory
(Oxford, 1992), p. 116. On Fry and Bell’s influence in India,
see Giles Tillotson, ‘A Painter of Concern’, India International
Centre Quarterly, xxiv/4 (Winter 1997), pp. 57–72.
7 Agastya, ‘Aesthetics of Young India: A Rejoinder’, p. 25. B.
Ghosh, ‘Panditer Lage Dhanda’, Bijoli (15 Vaisakh 1329/28
April 1922). The sage Agastya was Gangoly’s nom de guerre.
8 I am indebted to Mark Haxthausen for pointing this out.
9 S. Kramrisch, ‘The Aesthetics of Young India: A
Rejoinder’, Rupam, x (April 1922), pp. 65–6; ‘An Indian
Cubist’, Rupam, xi (July 1922), pp. 107–9; In the early twen-
tieth century, colonial representations of Indian art were
challenged by critics led by E. B. Havell and A.
Coomaraswamy (P. Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: History
of Western Reactions to Indian Art [Oxford 1977], chap. vi).
Kramrisch in ‘Indian Art and Europe’, Rupam, xi (July
1922), pp. 81–6, rejected the colonial idea that the higher
aspects of ancient Indian art were derived from Greece and
Rome, an intervention that later flowered into her major
studies of Indian art.
10 Johannes Itten’s notes for 7 May 1921: ‘Rabindranath
Tagore tritt an seinem 60. Geburtstag mit einem Programm
aus Rezitationen und liedern im Deutschen Nationaltheater
auf’; and 1 October 1922–March 1923, ‘Bauhaus-
Ausstellung in der Society of Oriental Art in Kalkutta;
Leitung: Dr Abanindranath Tagore (ein Neffe der
Dichter’s). Organisation in Weimer durch Georg Muche’, in
Das frühe Bauhaus und Johannes Itten (catalogue of exhibi-
tion celebrating 75 years of Bauhaus, Weimar), (Ost
Fildern-Ruit, 1994), pp. 516, 518. R. K. Wick, Teaching at
the Bauhaus (Stuttgart, 2000), p. 82. The works, expected to
remain there from October 1922 until March 1923, never
returned to Europe. The whole saga is recounted by R.
Parimoo, The Art of the Three Tagores (Baroda, 1973),
pp. 168–9.
11 ‘Internationale Kunstausstellung Das Bauhaus, Kalkutta,
1.12.1922–1.1.1923’, in Paul Klee: Catalogue Raisonné, Paul
Klee Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts, iii (Berne and
London, 1999). I owe the reference to the Calcutta show to
C. R. Haxthausen.
12 Catalogue of the 14th Annual Exhibition of the Indian Society
of Oriental Art (Calcutta, December 1922), International
Section: Modern Phases of Western Art, Introduction by St
K (Stella Kramrisch), pp. 21–3. I am grateful to Arif
Rahman Chughtai for making the catalogue available for
me to study. There were also 5 pen-and-ink sketches, 14
watercolours and 6 woodcuts by Lyonel Feininger, 5 water-
colours, one pastel and one coloured painting [?], 5 action
pictures (examples of teaching method) and 11 lithographs
of the Tyrolese landscape by Johannes Itten, 29 woodcuts by
Gerhard Marcks, 9 etchings by George Muche, 7 water-
colours by Lothar Schreyer, works by Margit Tery-Adler,
Sophie Körner and 49 ‘practice [student] work in the course
of instruction’. The recent Director of the Bauhaus
Museum at Weimar states that the student works were
 priced between £5 and £15 and the work of Sophie Körner
was £3. I am not sure if it is given in the current price or of
that period (‘Legend of the Bauhaus’ in The Hindu, online
edition, Sunday, 8 July 2001.) More intriguingly, even Klee
and Kandinsky priced their works between £15 and £20,
which may suggest that these were their less important
works. However, there were people who knew their precise
worth and the works never returned to Europe, causing
Itten to complain until his death (as expressed by his widow
in Zurich). On the disappearance of the works, see
Parimoo, The Three Tagores.
13 The Statesman and The Englishman of 15 December 1922.
Review in Rupam, xiii/xiv (January–June 1923), pp. 14–18.
14 The Catalogue, pp. 3–4.
15 S. Ringbom, ‘Art in the Age of the Great Spiritual’, Journal
of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1966), p. 389.
16 A. Tagore, Bageswari Shilpa Prabandhabali (Calcutta, 1962),
p. 119. This lecture was given around 1922–3.
17 S. Kramrisch, ‘An Indian Cubist’, Rupam, xi (July 1922),
pp. 107–9. See Mitter, Art and Nationalism, Epilogue, on the
political reasons for the decline of orientalism. A review of
Bauhaus works appeared in Rupam, xiii/xiv (January–June
1923), p. 18. The impact of Cubism in Bengal in this period
is attested in a letter of Nandalal’s, see note 22.
18 Obituary tributes to the Marquess of Zetland and William
Rothenstein in Visva Bharati Quarterly, n.s., iv/1 (May 1938),
pp. 1–4.
19 The exhibition of Gaganendranath’s works at the Academy
of Fine Arts, Calcutta, on 26 May 1976, suggests early dates
for his work such as 1888. See Mitter, Art and Nationalism,
p. 275 on William Rothenstein’s admiration for his uncle
Jyotirindranath’s phrenological portraits; Rothenstein had
them published (Twenty-five Collotypes from the Original
Drawings by Jyotirindranath Tagore [London, 1914]).
20 D. Chatterjee, Gaganendranath Tagore (New Delhi, 1964),
p. 15; Purnima Devi, Thakur Badir Gogonthakur (Calcutta,
1381), p. 29, and Mitter, Art and Nationalism, on his car-
toons, pp. 174–5 and colour pl. xi. Also S. Bandopadhaya,
Gogonendranath Thakur (Calcutta, 1972).
21 Rupam, xi (July 1922), pp. 108–9. Because of his interest in
dynamic forms he eventually turned to the Futurists. Issues
of derivation and originality were also being debated at this
time, as is evident from comments in the next pages of
Rupam. Devi, Thakur Badir Gogonthakur, p. 131, mentions
his explorations of Cubism.
22 The Englishman (28 December 1922). Postcard from
Gaganendranath to his ex-pupil Roop Krishna in Lahore.
Postmark illegible but it belongs to a group written in the
early 1920s. Obverse shows a ‘Cubist’ painting. Text on
reverse: I am sending you a sample of my cubism. What do
you think of it? (Sotheby Sale, 15 October 1984, lot 13). On
Gaganendranath, also Nandalal to Asit Haldar, 29 June
1922, ‘While thinking of Cubism I was reminded of some-
thing. When the potter turns his wheel the centre appears
to be simultaneously whirling and yet remaining still’ (letter
deposited at Bharat Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan).
23 Indian Daily News (10 January 1924).
24 The Englishman (5 January 1924).
25 The Statesman (6 January 1924).
26 Forward (6 January 1924).
27 Forward (19 December 1925); The Englishman (29 January
1925, 19 December 1925).
28 B. K. Sarkar, ‘Tendencies of Modern Indian Art’, Review of
the 17th Annual Exhibition of the Indian Society of
Oriental Art, Rupam, xxvi (1926).
29 The Englishman (4 September 1928).
30 Welfare (24 September 1928).
31 Devi, Thakur Badir Gogonthakur, pp. 151–3; ‘Indian Society
of Oriental Art Exhibition’, The Englishman (24 December
1929).
32 Bombay Chronicle (30 June 1926).
33 Forward (6 January 1924); E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of
Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (London,
1979), p. 149.
34 Bombay Chronicle (30 June 1926).
35 Obituary tributes to the Marquess of Zetland and William
Rothenstein in Visva Bharati Quarterly, iv/i, pp. 1–4.
36 Welfare (24 September 1928). One of the more informed
reviews of Gaganendranath’s 1928 retrospective at the
Indian Society of Oriental Art acknowledges Roger Fry’s
importance. See T. Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts
Club (Aldershot, 1990). I am grateful to Sheila Rowbotham
for the reference.
37 In ‘A Painter of Concern’, Giles Tillotson describes this
aspect of Roger Fry’s work as a divorce between formalism
and emotional life. I think he is right but the most interest-
ing thing is Fry’s own ambivalence with regard to pictorial
representation (India International Centre Quarterly, xxiv/4
[Winter 1997], pp. 57–72). L. D. Dalrymple Henderson,
‘Mysticism as the “Tie that Binds”: The Case of Edward
Carpenter and Modernism’, Art Journal, xlvi (1987), pp.
29–37, discusses the mystic elements in Fry’s early seminal
Essay in Aesthetics (1909). Fry was impressed with Edward
Carpenter’s mystical ideas about art being the expression of
emotions of the imaginative life. But Fry’s ideas underwent
a change from 1909 to 1920, when he published his retro-
spective selection of essays (Vision and Design, London 1920).
Although he seems to agree with Bell’s formalist notion of
significant form he also contradicts it in terms of his early
ideas, which he never quite gave up. In sum, what he dis-
liked was ‘anecdotal’ Victorian art, but about ‘representa-
tion’ as such he was more ambivalent than Bell.
38 W. G. Archer, India and Modern Art (London, 1959), p. 43.
39 See M. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity (Cambridge, 1991).
40 The Vertical Man: A Study in Primitive Indian Sculpture
(London, 1947). On his patronizing condescension towards
Indian nationalism, see India and Modern Art, pp. 34–7.
These primitivist sentiments, we know, were disseminated
by Roger Fry, Clive Bell and later in Herbert Read, the con-
duits for modernism in the colonies.
41 On the essentializing myth of the ‘good’ docile primitive in
Raj policy while suppressing actual tribal uprising, D.
Rycroft, Representing Rebellion: Visual Aspects of Counter-
Insurgency in Colonial India (New Delhi, 2006).
42 Similar sentiments were first expressed by Lord Curzon
in 1905 (see Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 235, 377 and
231
 passim), who dismissed the Bengali nationalists as being
unrepresentative.
43 Archer, India and Modern Art, p. 43.
44 Golding, J. Cubism: A History and an Analysis, 1907–1914
(London, 1968). Franz Marc and Lyonel Feininger created
an imaginary world of animals and of architecture respec-
tively while the left-wing revolutionary Georg Grosz put
fragmentations and a distorted perspective at the disposal of
a powerful political narrative, Homage to Oskar Panizza.
Their contents were more revolutionary than those of the
classic Cubists. My thanks to C. W. Haxthausen for our dis-
cussions on these issues, which confirmed several of my
ideas.
45 Max Osborn’s review, cited in Rupam, xv/xvi
(July–December 1923), p. 74. On Osborn covering the
Berlin Sezession of 1911, Kunstchronik, xxii/25 (5 May
1911), col. 385–90. On Osborn, D. E. Gordon, ‘On the
Origin of the Word “Expressionism”’, Journal of Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes, xxix (1966), p. 371, note 17.
2. The Indian Discourse of Primitivism
1 Dey, Reverend Lalbehari, Govinda Samanta, or the History of
a Bengal Raiyat, 2 vols (Calcutta, 1874), p. 4. The great nine-
teenth-century novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay
often set his stories in the village but not with peasant char-
acters.
2 From the website bengalon-
line.sitemarvel.com/saratchandra.html (accessed 3 October
2006), Bengali Greats Series, The Immortal Wordsmith of
Bengal. Source: Sarat Sahitya Samagra, 1993. Prem Chand’s
Godan, his famous novel on rural poverty and despair, was
published in the year of his death.
3 Tagore’s poem in the Chaitali collection, addressing civiliza-
tion, demands that primitive forest life be returned to India
in exchange for the colonial city, see Rabindra Rachanabali, i
(Calcutta, 1961), p. 550.
4 Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, xi, p. 589. ‘Tapoban’ was
originally published in Prabasi in 1316 (1909). On his holistic
ideal of education, see below, chapter Two, ii.
5 J. Rosselli, ‘The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical
Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal’,
Past and Present, lxxxvi (February 1980), pp. 121–48. On
Bengali idealization of Santal sexuality, for instance, S.
Bandopadhaya, Shilpi Ramkinkaralapchari (Kolkata, 1994),
p. 4; Tagore’s poems, ‘Saontal Meye’ (the Santal Girl) in
Bithika, Rabindra Rachanabali, iii, pp. 294–6, or on the
Oraon tribal girl, in the poem ‘Shyamali’ (The Dark
Beauty), where he comments admiringly on their tradition
of free love, Rabindra Rachanabali, iii, pp. 435–6.
6 Classic photographs of tribal women were taken in the
1940s by Sunil Janah. To photograph the tribals, Janah lived
with them, recording their uninhibited lifestyle: S. Janah,
The Second Creature (Calcutta, 1949).
7 D. Rycroft, Representing Rebellion (Oxford, 2006). On the
pioneering anthropologist, see R. Guha, Savaging the
Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals and India (Chicago, 1999).
232
8 D. C. Ghose, ‘Some Aspects of Bengal Folk Art’, Lalit Kala
Contemporary, xxix (1952), pp. 38–9. J. Jain, Kalighat
Painting: Images from a Changing World (Ahmedabad, 1999);
Susan Bean, ‘The Kalighat Style: Triumph of Invention and
Tradition’, catalogue of the exhibition ‘Kalighat Pat’, Arts
India (New York, 2003). Bean quotes Mukul Dey’s 1932
article that he coined the phrase Kalighat in 1910, but
Kramrisch used the phrase as early as 1925 (see below, note
11). On folk art at nationalist fairs in the 1860s, Mitter, Art
and Nationalism, p. 222. Rudyard Kipling’s father,
Lockwood Kipling, was the first collector of this art. Mrs S.
C. Belnos, Twenty-Four Plates Illustrative of Hindu and
European Manners in Bengal (London, 1832), p. 14, who was
probably the first elite artist to draw attention to it, illustrat-
ed a Kalighat painting hanging in a ‘native hut’.
9 K. Samanta, Nandalal (Bolpur, 1982), i, pp. 393–8.
10 Banglar Brata (Calcutta, 1919), was translated by Andrée
Karpélès and T. M. Chatterjee into French as L’Alpona: ou
les décorations rituelles au Bengale (Paris, 1922).
11 S. Kramrisch, ‘Sunayani Devi’, Der Cicerone,
Halbmonatsschrift für Künstler, Kunstfreude und Sammler,
xvii (1925), I Teil, p, 88.
12 A. Ghosh, ‘Old Bengal Paintings’, Rupam, xxvii/xxviii
(July–October 1926), pp. 98–103, and Ghose, ‘Some Aspects
of Bengal Folk Art’, pp. 38–9. Indeed there is some sugges-
tion of Matisse and Léger having seen Kalighat paintings.
13 Quoted in W. G. Archer, India and Modern Art (London,
1959), p. 101. V. Dey and J. Irwin, Journal of Indian Society
of Oriental Art (1944), p. 33. Dutt’s major collection was
shown at an exhibition (The Statesman, 23 March 1932).
14 In 1942, in Cyril Connolly’s Horizon, Ajit Mookerjee
described the Kalighat painters’ ‘collective’ as representing
people’s rebellion against elite decadence and extolling its
modernist character: ‘Kalighat Folk Painters’, Horizon, v/30
(June 1942), pp. 417–19.
15 E. W. Said, ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, Reflections on Exile
and Other Essays (Cambridge, ma, 2000), p. 203. Lucien
Lévy-Bruhl, La Mentalité primitive (Paris, 1922), proposed
the notion of the ‘primitive mind’ as the pre-rational stage
of the modern mind, which was also Freud’s view.
16 S. Hiller, The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art
(London, 1991), especially her excellent introduction and
persuasive chapters by Daniel Miller and Rasheed Araeen.
This penetrating work lays bare the hegemonic aspects of
colonial primitivism. On the controversy over the moma
exhibition, see Hal Foster, supra, Prologue n.3. S.
Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other
Tales of Progress (Berkeley, ca, 1998).
17 H. Foster, ‘Primitive Scenes’, Critical Inquiry, xx/1 (Autumn
1993), pp. 71–2.
18 The primitivist critique of civilization went back to the
ancient Greeks and Romans but returned with added force
in the colonial period: G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas
in the Middle Ages (Baltimore, md, 1948) and A. O. Lovejoy
and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity
(Baltimore, md, 1997).
19 M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj (Ahmedabad, 1938), reprint of
1909 translation by himself from Gujarati. One of the influ-
 ences on his primitivism was Ruskin, a great critic of
Western industrial capitalism.
20 M. K. Gandhi, Collected Works, xlix (Delhi, 1958–84), p.
298. In contrast to Gandhi, Marx’s critique of capitalism
was trapped within the teleological foundations of Western
ideology. E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (London,
1973), a critique of the Western model of development, was
based on Gandhian intermediate technology. Gandhi
launched his peasant movement in 1918 in Champaran in
Bihar and Kheda in Gujarat, thus creating a rural power
base for his Non-Cooperation movement of 1921: J. M.
Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power (Cambridge, 1972).
21 Zhang Xianglong, ‘Heidegger’s View of Language and the
Lao-Zhuang Fao-Language’, trans. S. C. Angle in Chinese
Philosophy in an Era of Globalization, ed. R. R. Wang
(Albany, ny, 2004). See Martin Heidegger, On the Way to
Language (New York, 1982). I am in Joel Kupperman’s debt
for the reference.
22 F. Pellizzi, ‘Anthropology and Primitivism’, Res, xliv
(Autumn 2003), pp. 8–9. Much work has been done in trac-
ing the complex role of primitivism in modern European
art. See the pioneering R. Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern
Painting (New York, 1938), on the moma catalogue, Foster,
supra, Prologue, n.3, and C. Rhodes, Primitivism and
Modern Art (London, 1994). For a useful summary of primi-
tivism, P. Mitter, ‘Primitivism’, in Encyclopedia of Cultural
Anthropology, ed. D. Levinson and M. Ember, iii (New
York, 1996), pp. 1029–32.
23 David Pan, The Primitive Renaissance (Lincoln, ne, and
London, 2001), pp. 100–01, is particularly perceptive on this
issue. He questions the conventional formalist wisdom
about primitivism and non-representational art that tends
to underplay its cultural importance. Tagore’s perception in
the West as a prophet of spirituality found followers and
detractors in equal numbers, which ultimately proved to be
his downfall. Even if full of ambiguities and redolent of
nationalist essentialism, the expressionist dream of restoring
a unified and integrated community shared certain ideas of
the anti-colonial primitivists (see C. W. Haxthausen, ‘A
Critical Illusion: “Expressionism” in the Writings of
Wilhelm Hausenstein’, in R. Rumold and O. K.
Werkmeister, The Ideological Crisis of Expressionism
[Columbia, mo, 1999], pp. 171–191).
24 S. Ringbom, ‘Art in the Age of the Great Spiritual’,
Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxix (1966),
pp. 386–418. L. Sihare, ‘Oriental Influences on Wassily
Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, 1909–1917’, dissertation
completed under Robert Goldwater at New York
University, 1967. While his scholarship is impressively
exhaustive, his combative partisanship is over the top.
Kandinsky was called ‘un prince mongol’ by the influential
critic Will Grohmann because of his interest in Theosophy.
James J. Sweeney, ‘Piet Mondrian’, Partisan Review, xi/2
(1944), pp. 173–6; Peter Fingensten, ‘Spirituality, Mysticism
and Non-Objective Art’, Art Journal, xxi (Fall 1961), pp.
2–6. Ringbom was a contributor to the major show organ-
ized by M. Tuchman, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting
1890–1985, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art
(Los Angeles, 1986). See a reiteration of the influence of the
Upanshadic notions of Brahman and Atman on Mondrian
in Robert Welsh, who is unconvinced of the importance of
Calvinist stress on logic in the artist as claimed by M. H. J.
Shoenmaekers, ‘Mondrian and Theosophy’, in Piet
Mondrian, 1872–1944, Centennial Exhibition (New York,
1972), pp. 35–51. J. Baas, The Smile of the Buddha (Berkeley,
ca, 2005), is a recent popular work on the subject.
25 J. Golding, Paths to the Absolute (Princeton, nj, 2000).
26 Pan, The Primitive Renaissance, pp. 102–20.
27 T. Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Art Club, 1893–1923
(Aldershot, 1990), p. 180. Michael Sadler was a founding
member of the radical socialist Leeds Arts Club. Sihare too
mentions Kandinsky’s public reticence about mysticism,
whose aim of attaining the transcendental by rational means
has been described as ‘rational irrationalism’; R. K. Wick,
Teaching at the Bauhaus (Stuttgart, 2000), pp. 119–220.
28 Tuchman, The Spiritual in Art, p. 37, on Vivekananda’s
influence on Malevich. See the important discussion,
‘Primitivism and Abstraction’, in Pan, The Primitive
Renaissance, pp. 102–20.
29 Sihare, ‘Oriental Influences on Wassily Kandinsky and Piet
Mondrian, 1909–1917’, pp. 31–6.
30 M. A. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialism and the
Advent of Abstract Painting (Cambridge, 1991), p. 164.
31 On the Raj project of inculcating good taste in Indians
through academic naturalism, Mitter, Art and Nationalism,
pp. 29–34 and passim.
32 W. Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 2nd edn (Munich,
1912), in Complete Writings, ed. K. C. Lindsay and P. Vergo
(Boston, ma, 1982), p. 173.
i two pioneering women artists
1 Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 184, 204.
2 B. Sadwelkar, The Story of a Hundred Years: Bombay Art
Society (Bombay, 1988), xxii–xxiii. Illustrated Catalogues of
Bombay Art Society Annual Exhibitions, 1938–1947 (forty-
seventh to fifty-seventh year).
3 In personal communication, Satyajit Ray mentioned to me
one Pareshbabu who gave art lessons to middle-class
women at home. Mrs Dwijendranath Maitra, wife of an
eminent doctor and friend of the Tagores, received
favourable reviews for her competent academic still-lifes,
which I saw at her son Satyen Maitra’s residence in
Calcutta. Satyajit’s aunt from his father’s side, Sukhalata
Rao, brought up in a liberal Brahmo atmosphere, received
Vivekananda’s Irish disciple Sister Nivedita’s encourage-
ment to paint.
4 The Statesman (24 December 1922); she showed two works,
Pink Lotus and Worshipper; see also The Englishman (31
January 1921); The Statesman (30 January 1925); Empire (29
December 1919).
5 Quoted in K. Chatterjee, ‘Sunayani Devi: A Pioneering
Primitive, 1875–1962’, in Sunayani Devi: Alliance Française
(Calcutta, 8–18 September 1982), p. 11.
6 Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, ‘Childhood’, x, p. 150.
7 A. Kar, ‘Sunayani Devi – A Primitive of the Bengal School’,
233
 Lalit Kala Contemporary, iv (1966), p. 4.
8 Interestingly, Kramrisch speaks of men’s schizophrenic
bilingual existence. P. Chatterjee, ‘The Nation and Its
Women’, in A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995, ed. R.
Guha (Minneapolis, mn, 1997), on material/spiritual distinc-
tion in nationalist discourse also reflected in social space,
bahir (world)/ ghar (home), women occupying the inner and
spiritual.
9 D. Chatterjee, ‘Conversation with Sunayani Devi’, in
Sunayani Devi Retrospective, ed. C. Ghosh (Birla Academy,
22–7 February 1977).
10 Chatterjee, ‘Conversation with Sunayani Devi’.
11 In 1915 they exhibited at the annual exhibition of isoa
(Screen a), but Sunayani was singled out (Mitter, Art and
Nationalism, pp. 326–7).
12 K. Chatterjee, Sunayani Devi: Alliance Française.
13 Ibid., pp. 3–4.
14 G. Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters (Bombay,
1927), p. 84.
15 K. Chatterjee, Sunayani Devi. Her admirers included
Mukul Dey, O. C. Gangoly, Nandalal Bose and Jamini Roy.
16 G. Chattopadhaya, ‘Sunayani Devi’, Triparna (1360), p. 33.
17 K. Chatterjee, Sunayani Devi.
18 M. Mukhopadhaya, ‘Sunayani Devi’, in Ghosh, Sunayani
Devi Retrospective, unpaginated.
19 S. Kramrisch, in a German periodical translated into
Bengali as ‘Svatasphurtti (Spontaneity)’, Prabasi, xxii, i/4
(Sravan, 1329 [1922]), pp. 543–4. This has been mentioned
in all earlier works on Sunayani but I have not been able to
trace the German periodical. Unfortunately the Bengali
translation only mentions the title Kunst. One assumes
Kramrisch gave the details herself to the translator. Here
my translation is from the Bengali.
20 Kramrisch, ‘Sunayani Devi’, p. 93, on her creative process,
also confirmed by her grandson Kishore Chatterjee.
21 Kramrisch, ‘Sunayani Devi’, pp. 93 and 87.
22 Ibid.
23 Kar, ‘Sunayani Devi – A Primitive of the Bengal School’, 7;
K. Chatterjee, ‘Sunayani Devi: A Pioneering Primitive
(1875–1962)’.
24 Kramrisch, ‘Sunayani Devi’, pp. 87 (doll) and 88 (Kalighat).
See Oskar Schlemmer on the importance of primitive dolls
in modernism (Folkwang Museum, Essen, infra, iii, note
77).
25 Sunayani was influenced by the elite vogue for Kalighat but
according to K. Chatterjee, ‘Sunayani Devi: A Pioneering
Primitive, 1875–1962’, it is not recorded when she saw vil-
lage dolls. In 1919 her brother Abanindranath wrote the
classic booklet on Bengali women’s ritual art, see supra,
note 10.
26 Kramrisch, ‘Sunayani Devi’, p. 87, Her claim that Sunayani
owed a debt to no colonial style is contradicted in another
passage (p. 93), where she correctly identifies her water-
colour washes with the Bengal School.
27 Modernist admiration for naïve, mentally disturbed, chil-
dren’s and primitive art is widely known.
28 Kramrisch, ‘Sunayani Devi’, p. 87.
29 Ibid. See also note 24 above.
234
30 Kramrisch, ‘Svatasphurti’, Prabasi, xxii, i/4, p. 545.
31 Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters, pp. 82–3. See
also his essay, ‘Peasant Art in India’, 4 Arts Annual (Calcutta,
1934), pp. 175–6.
32 J. Fineberg, Discovering Child Art (Princeton, nj, 1998),
pp. 95–121.
33 M. Casey, Tides and Eddies (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 183.
34 A. S. Raman, ‘The Present Art of India’, The Studio, cxlii
(July–December 1951), pp. 97–105, calls her the author of
real art renaissance, her greatness lying in the discovery of a
new plastic synthesis of East and West. H. Goetz, ‘Amrita
Sher-Gil’, The Studio, cl (July–December 1955), pp. 50–51,
calls her the greatest modern Indian painter. Charles Fabri,
a close friend and admirer, writes about the difficulty of
writing about her and disbelieves the ‘objectivity’ of those
who knew her, ‘Amrita Sher-Gil’, Lalit Kala Contemporary,
ii (December 1964), pp. 27–30. For an exposition of her
nudes in the context of Indian culture and feminist con-
cepts, see G. Sen, ‘Woman Resting on a Charpoy’, in
Feminine Fables: Imaging the Indian Woman in Painting,
Photography and Cinema (Ahmedabad, 2002), pp. 63–100.
35 K. Khandalavala, Amrita Sher-Gil (Bombay, 1944).
36 Primary sources on Amrita Sher-Gil are in the public
domain as they have been published for some time. The
Sher-Gil memorial volume of the journal The Usha is an
important contemporary source as it includes the responses
of her contemporaries and her own writings. N. Iqbal
Singh’s biography, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Biography (New
Delhi, 1984), with extensive quotations from her letters, is
valuable, and I use it extensively as primary material for her
life. The important critical work is V. Sundaram et al.,
Amrita Sher-Gil (Bombay, n.d). I was not allowed access to
her letters written in the late 1930s as her nephew Vivan
Sundaram intends to publish them. However, my feeling is
that my basic argument about her primitivism as a surro-
gate for her divided self will not be substantially modified
with their publication. Rather I trust they will confirm my
conclusions. As the book went to press, I came across
Yashodhara Dalmia’s charming biography, Amrita Sher-Gil:
A Life (London, 2006). In May–July 2006, Vivan Sundaram
held an important show of digital photomontages, based on
mainly family photographs, at the Sepia International
Gallery in New York, which vividly brought back to life
Amrita, her family and her milieu: Vivan Sundaram, Re-
take of Amrita, with essay by Wu Hung (New York, 2006); a
shorter Re-take of Amrita, first published in Delhi in 2001.
The Sher-Gil bandwagon has started rolling at last beyond
India. In 2001–2, a major exhibition was held in Budapest,
which claimed Amrita for Hungary with a richly docu-
mented catalogue based on material provided by her rela-
tions, Ervin Baktay, Ernö Gottesmann and Vivan
Sundaram: Keserü Katalin, Amrita Sher-Gil the Indian
Painter and her French and Hungarian Connections (Ernst
Muzeum, Budapest, and the National Gallery of Modern
Art, New Delhi, 2002). In 2006–7 Munich will show her
work. Note also Sára Sándor’s documentary film, which I
have not been able to see.
37 M. Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, No. 2: The
 Infernal Grove (London, 1972), p. 322.
38 V. Sundaram, Re-take of Amrita (Delhi, 2001). This digital
photo-montage is a collaborative project, ‘radiating desire’,
by her nephew who combines photographs including those
by her father Umrao Singh, the ‘essential photographer’,
reproductions of Sher-Gil’s work, and a ‘fictional’ account
of the father–daughter relationship. In a letter to her moth-
er Amrita states that she prefers sari not only because it is
beautiful, but because only Eurasians wear Western dress in
India (Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, pp. 93–4). In fact from
her mother’s side she also had French, German and Jewish
blood and her Hungarian name was Dalma.
39 Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, p. 322.
40 See above, Prologue, note 2. The nationalist nostalgia for a
mythical ‘authenticity’ or ‘purity’ is now increasingly
exposed as a spurious one.
41 The Académie was a well-known place for art training and
had among its students Alexander Calder and Isamo
Noguchi. See Kaoru Kojima’s list of Japanese artists who
worked at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1871 to
1958, ‘Furansu Kokuritsu Bijutsu Gakko ni Mananda
Nihonjin Ryugakusei’, Aesthetic and Art History, Jissen
Women’s University, xiii (Tokyo, 1998). J. Milner, The
Studios of Paris (New Haven, ct, 1988), pp. 17–25. The
École was the oldest art academy in Paris and had Carolus-
Duran as a teacher, infra, ii, note 4.
42 In Paris, Sher-Gil epitomized the West’s view of otherness.
Proutaux exoticized her as ‘an exquisite and mysterious lit-
tle Hindu princess [who] conjures up the mysterious shores
of the Ganges’. The late Khandalavala kindly gave me
access to her drawings in his collection, some of which are
reproduced here. The facts of her life are recorded exten-
sively, including in Iqbal Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil. Other
details I have also taken from Vivan Sundaram’s family
accounts in Re-take of Amrita.
43 ‘Sher-Gil, Evolution of My Art’, originally published in the
memorial volume Usha (reproduced in Sundaram, Amrita
Sher-Gil, p. 139).
44 Khandalavala, Amrita Sher-Gil, 22, reproduces the letter.
45 Letter dated c. April 1941, from Saraya to her sister in
Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 100. See also Singh, Amrita
Sher-Gil, p. 140.
46 Amrita Sher-Gil, Special Number, The Usha, iii/2 (August
1942), p. 34.
47 The exhibition took place on 21 November–7 December
1937. Charles Fabri and Rabindranath Deb quoted in
Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, pp. 87, 108–9.
48 J. P. Foulds, ‘Amrita Sher-Gil and Indian Art’, Civil and
Military Gazette (7 November 1936). He also wrote ‘The Art
of Amrita Sher-Gil’, 4 Arts Annual (Calcutta, 1936–7), p. 34. I
am indebted to Deborah Swallow for information on Foulds.
49 Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, pp. 83–4.
50 Her letter of 6 November 1937 to Nehru about his autobi-
ography, A Bunch of Old Letters (New York, 1960), p. 192.
Sundaram’s ‘Re-take on Amrita’ exhibition contains rare
photographs of Nehru with the artist. She seems to have
died mysteriously, with allegations of a botched abortion
that led to a fatal infection. See Dalmia, Amrita Sher-Gil, for
a balanced view of the event.
51 Letter of 17 April 1937 to Khandalavala, in Sundaram,
Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 111.
52 In standard anthologies of women artists she finds no place.
Honourable exceptions are Whitney Chadwick, Women,
Art and Society (London, 2002); Marina Vaizey in Dictionary
of Women Artists, ed. Delia Gaze, ii (Chicago, il, 1997),
pp. 126–68; Geeta Kapur in Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Shoaf
Turner, xxviii (London, 1996), pp. 593–4.
53 Brian Eno thinks that Popova did not suffer from gender
distinctions but this is doubtful (‘Forgotten Heroes’, The
Independent Arts and Books Review, 22 October 2004, p. 2).
54 L. Prieto, At Home in the Studio (Cambridge, ma, 2001),
p. 5.
55 See Chadwick’s succinct summary in Women, Art and
Society. We can think of many remarkable painters who
remained in the male shadow, namely Gontcharova, the
photographer Lee Miller, and even the writer Colette
herself, especially in her early days.
56 Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 116.
57 Letter to sister, Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 92; letter to sister,
2 February 1937, mentions Barada Ukil as ‘staring at me in
his silly way’, Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 105.
58 E. Billeter, The Blue House: The World of Frida Kahlo
(Houston, tx, 1993); see also G. Kapur, ‘Body as Gesture’,
When Was Modernism (New Delhi, 2000), pp. 12–17, who
adds class as a form of alienation in Sher-Gil’s case. My
thanks to Viktoria Villanyi who suggested that I look more
closely at the similarities between Sher-Gil and Kahlo.
59 Prieto, At Home in the Studio, pp. 94–6. F. Borzello, Seeing
Ourselves (London, 1998), also writes on female Bohemians,
in ‘Breaking Taboos’. Judith Thurman’s biography, Secrets of
the Flesh: A Life of Colette (New York, 1999), offers insights
into some of the predicaments of modern women, even
though Sher-Gil and Colette were significantly different.
60 Vivan Sundaram interviewed several of the surviving
lovers, see Re-take of Amrita.
61 Prieto, At Home in the Studio, pp. 192–4.
62 Borzello, Seeing Ourselves, pp. 137–9, ‘The Naked Self’ on
female nude self-portraits.
63 Vaillant, quoted in Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 37.
64 Letter to Khandalavala, 16 May 1937, in Sundaram, Amrita
Sher-Gil, p. 112.
65 Letter to Khandalavala, 17 January 1937, in Sundaram,
Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 102.
66 J. Augustine, ‘Bisexuality in Hélène Cixous, Virginia and
H. D.: An Aspect of L’Écriture Féminine’, in Sexuality, the
Female Gaze and the Arts, ed. R. Dotterer and S. Bowers
(Toronto, 1992), pp. 13–14. It is only today that such ideas
are theorized as bursting the boundaries of sexual identity.
67 Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 28. Marie Louise avoided physical
consummation even though she made overtures, which led
Sher-Gil to conclude that she had sexual hangups.
68 Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 58.
69 B. Dhingra, Sher-Gil (New Delhi, 1965), p. ii, who was a
friend, mentions her admiration for Dostoyevsky, writing
about her deep feeling for the miserable existence of the
ordinary people.
235
 70 Muggeridge, Chronicle of Wasted Time, p. 47.
71 Chadwick, Women, Art and Society, p. 9. Julia Kristeva, ‘Is
there a Feminine Genius?’, Critical Inquiry, xxx/3 (Spring
2004), pp. 493–504, suggests that in the erosion of earlier
notions of natural procreation in the age of sexual polymor-
phism and lack of fixed identities, each individual invents
his or her domain of intimacy, wherein lies genius, or sim-
ply creativity. The incommensurability of the individual is
rooted in sexual experience and one’s genius rests in the
ability to question the socio-historical conditions of one’s
identity, the legacy of Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein and
Colette (slightly paraphrased).
72 Khandalavala, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 29. Her letter to him
dated 13 February 1937 mentions her French professors’
habit of making devastating criticisms. I remember this
unpleasant trait in the talented painter Nirode Mazumdar
who had been trained in André Lhote’s studio in Paris.
73 Letters to Khandalavala, dated 24 August 1937 and
September 1937, in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, pp. 115,
117.
74 Letter of 17 April 1937, in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil,
p. 111. In her article, ‘Indian Art Today’, she mentions
Roy’s experiments in folk art, ibid., p. 140.
75 Letter to Khandalavala, February–March 1938, in
Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 124.
76 Letter to Khandalavala, February–March 1938, in
Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 124. and yet in 1939 she
wrote less dismissively, ibid., p. 129.
77 Sher-Gil, The Usha, p. 24.
78 Letter to Khandalavala, 15 January 1937, referring pejora-
tively to Solomon, in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 102.
79 Sher-Gil, ‘Trends of Art in India’, in Sundaram, Amrita
Sher-Gil, p. 142.
80 Khandalavala was the first to mention her connection with
the soil, and later Archer, whose chapter on her is titled,
‘Art and the Village’, India and Modern Art, pp. 80–99.
81 Sher-Gil, ‘The Story of My Life’, The Usha (Special
Number: Amrita Sher-Gil), iii/2 (August 1942), p. 96.
82 Ukil quoted in Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 45.
83 E. Sen, ‘Prominent Women in India’, Sunday Statesman (5
April 1936); Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, pp. 55–6.
84 Prabasi, viii (Agrahayan, 1346), pp. 237–8.
85 Letter to Khandalavala, 24 August 1937, in Sundaram,
Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 115.
86 Sher-Gil, ‘The Story of My Life’, p. 96.
87 Sher-Gil, ‘Art and Appreciation’, in V. Sundaram, Amrita
Sher-Gil: Life and Work, Marg, pp. 42, 142. She actually
quotes Clive Bell. See the influence of significant form and
aesthetic emotion popularized by Bloomsbury critics on
Indian artists, Tillotson, ‘A Painter of Concern’, pp. 57–72.
88 Sher-Gil, The Usha, iii/2 (August 1942), p. 22.
89 Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 20, on the Hungarian
painters known to her. Rather than modernists, I find her
work bears some resemblance to the post-Impressionist and
realist works of the lesser-known Hungarian artists. On the
Hungarian art movement, see Arte figurative in Ungheria tra
1870 e il 1950 (Milan, 1987) (catalogue of exhibition, 5–30
November 1987), pp. 40, 53–4 and S. A. Mansbach, Standing
236
in Tempest: Painters of the Hungarian Avant-garde
(Cambridge, ma, 1991), introduction and chap. 6,
‘Hungary’, pp. 267–313. In 1979, when I was examining her
work at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi,
I was struck by the fact that, contrary to the general view,
her work was far closer to the Central and East European
‘realists’ than to French modernists, an idea I presented in
my Radhakrishnan Lecture at Oxford in 1991. G. Wojtilla,
Amrita Sher-Gil and Hungary (New Delhi, 1981), was the
first scholar to mention the influence of Hungary on her
and more recently, Keserü Katalin, Amrita Sher-Gil the
Indian Painter.
90 See Lerch’s work in K. Schröder, Neue Sachlichkeit: Öster-
reich, 1918–1938 (Vienna, 1995), pp. 151–7, and the catalogue,
Der Maler Franz Lerch (Museum of the City of Vienna,
1975), which contains a number of works remarkably simi-
lar to Sher-Gil’s. S. A. Mansbach, Standing in Tempest,
pp. 93–7.
91 Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, pp. 42–3, who gives the name Prem
Chand (who was later a general?), a young student who
was intrigued enough to sit for her. This is of course not the
great novelist.
92 Compare pls 5 and 6 in Wojtilla, Amrita Sher-Gil and
Hungary and Szöny’s Funeral in Zebegény.
93 Sher-Gil, ‘Evolution of My Art’, originally published in the
memorial volume Usha, in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil,
p. 139.
94 Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 19.
95 On Muggeridge, Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 52.
96 Letter of 13 February 1937 to Khandalavala, Sundaram,
Amrita Sher-Gil, pp. 105–6. Kafka’s alienation may have
partly been a reflection of his being a Jew in
Czechoslovakia. Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 99. In this letter
to Tandon she even acknowledges the importance of the
Bengal School.
97 Sher-Gil, ‘Evolution of My Art’, p. 140.
98 Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 5.
99 Letter of 1938 to her parents, Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil,
p. 126.
100 Letter of 10 June 1935, in M. Muggeridge, Like It Was: The
Diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge, ed. J. Bright-Holmes (New
York, 1982), p. 133.
101 Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 97.
102 One would have to be careful not to exaggerate this intima-
cy with women as she had an intense affair with
Muggeridge and unhesitatingly shared her intimate
thoughts with Khandalavala, though the relationship seems
to have been platonic.
103 E. L. Buchholz, Women Artists (New York, 2003), p. 95. See
the importance of portraits for the Mexican artist, Frida
Kahlo (Rome and New York, 2001) published by the Banco
de Mexico, Trustee for the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo
Museums Trust, English translation by Mark Eaton and
Louisa Panichi (New York, 2001). The painting, ‘Earth
Herself’, p. 154, shows a white and a dark woman. Diego
Rivera in ‘Frida Kahlo’, pp. 233–4, speaks of two Fridas as
German versus Indian and Spanish, which lie at the heart
of her achievement. The two women in The Conversation
 are her sister and her friend Denise Prouteaux.
104 Excerpt from her diary, 1 August 1925, in Sundaram,
Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 87.
105 Published in Paris in Minerva, in The Usha, iii/2 (August
1942), p. 41.
106 Sen, ‘Prominent Women in India’.
107 Sher-Gil, Usha, iii/2 (August 1942), p. 39.
108 Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 48.
109 Ibid., p. 52.
110 See her letters to her sister dated 6 December 1940 and 14
March 1941, and to her close friend, Helen Chamanlal, July
1941, in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, pp. 136–7.
111 With regard to this late style I can think only of Nicholas
de Stael in the 1950s who developed a radical form of
colourism.
112 Tillotson, ‘A Painter of Concern’, pp. 57–72, on modernist
formalism versus the emotions.
113 Archer, India and Modern Art, p. 99.
114 Sher-Gil, ‘Evolution of My Art’, p. 139. Privately too she
felt obliged to repudiate her early work.
115 Letter of 1 July 1940 in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil,
pp. 132–3.
116 Geeta Kapur makes the important connection between
these works and miniatures in ‘Sher-Gil’, The Dictionary of
Art, xxvii (London, 1996), pp. 593–4.
117 See Csontváry, published by Bibliotheca Corviniana
(Hungary, n.d.). This was suggested to me by Swasti Mitter
after her visit to Budapest where a Csontváry retrospective
was being held in 1995, and Viktoria Villanyi who is
Hungarian. Csontváry, like Amrita’s mother, was Jewish
Catholic.
118 Kapur, ‘Sher-Gil’.
ii rabindranath tagore’s vision of art and the
community
1 D. Souhami, Paris, Sappho and Art: The Lives and Loves of
Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks (London, 2005). Among
others, Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony and Janáček’s Wandering
Madman were based on Tagore’s poems. Tagore’s visit to
Hungary is commemorated in a plaque by Lake Balaton.
See also R. Chatterjee, ed., The Golden Book of Tagore
(Calcutta, 1931).
2 R. Parimoo, The Three Tagores (Baroda, 1973), is a pioneer-
ing, scholarly work on Rabindranath. W. G. Archer, India
and Modern Art (London, 1959) also offers us insights into
his use of the Unconscious. Thanks to them we know what
primitive sources Tagore used, but only when we pose the
question of why he used them do we realize the wider global
implications of his work. In short, we need to go beyond
style to appreciate Tagore’s modernism. For reproductions
of Tagore’s paintings, see A. Robinson, The Art of
Rabindranath Tagore (London, 1989).
3 This is one of two in the collection of I. K. Kejriwal of
Calcutta. Jyotirindranath’s phrenological drawings (see
supra, i, note 19). Rabindranath also produced a few draw-
ings with strong outlines, notably a pen-and-ink puzzle
dated 1893, as part of a parlour game played in the family
(Rabindra Bhavan Ms. 277(A) 27).
4 Tagore, ‘Urop Jatrir Diari’, 23 September 1297, Rabindra
Rachanabali, x (Calcutta, 1961), pp. 398–9. Carolus-Duran
was the assumed name of Charles-Emile-Auguste Durand,
1837–1917; The Dictionary of Art, v (London, 1996), p. 812.
The French artist was commissioned by King
Chulalongkorn of Thailand to paint his portrait; A.
Poshyananda, Modern Art in Thailand (Singapore, 1992),
pp. 12, 15, 16 and colour pl. 1.
5 Letter to Indira Debi, July 1893, in R. Tagore, Chhina
Patrabali, quoted in S. Bandyopadhyaya, Rabindra
Chitrakala Rabindra Sahityer Patabhumika (Bolpur, 1388),
p. 3. Letter of 17 September 1900 to the scientist Jagadish
Bose humorously deprecating his sketching activity, in
Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Works of Art (ngma catalogue)
(Delhi, 1981), p. 15.
6 S. Ghosh, Okampor Rabindranath (Calcutta, 1973), p. 87
(translation of Victoria Ocampo’s Tagore en las barrancas de
San Isidro). See his son’s amusing comment about Victoria
not allowing him to travel to Peru: Rathindranath Tagore,
On the Edges of Time (Calcutta, 1958), p. 148. S. Walsh,
Stravinsky, The Second Exile, France and America, 1934–1971
(London, 2006).
7 On Rivière, a major figure in the diffusion of modernism,
see W. Rubin, Primitivism in 20th Century Art, exh. cat.,
New York Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1984), i,
pp. 162–3. On Victoria’s part in this, see Tagore, On the
Edges of Time, p. 148. It was held on 9–16 May (Daily Mail,
11 May 1930) under the auspices of the Association des amis
de L’Orient, which had a long connection with the Tagores
through Susanne and Andrée Karpelès (Parimoo, The
Three Tagores, pp. 121–2), and coincided with the year
of the poet’s Hibbert Lectures at Oxford. On the number
of works shown, see Tagore’s letter to Rothenstein, in
W. Rothenstein, Since Fifty (London, 1939). I have counted
eight masks and eleven other subjects in Tagore’s show.
8 Bidou translated in Rupam, xlii/3–4 (April–October 1930),
p. 27. Le Semaine à Paris (9–16 May 1930) was favourable,
unlike the critic Saint Jean Bouche D’Or. It called his work,
‘le setiment d’un masque humain’.
9 Excerpted in C. Harrison and P. Wood, eds, Art in Theory
(Oxford, 1992), p. 448. See The Modern Review, supra, i,
note 2. C. R. Haxthausen points out that the Calcutta
interest in automatic drawing had predated Breton by
some years.
10 Southall’s introduction (I use the European reviews of
Tagore’s 1930 exhibitions, including Joseph Southall’s,
preserved at Rabindra Bhavana, Visva Bharati University,
Santiniketan, under the heading, Foreign Comments,
Henceforth all the reviews will be sourced as Foreign
Comments except where stated otherwise). On the dates of
the shows in different cities, see Bandyopdhyaya, Rabindra
Chitrakala Rabindra Sahityer Patabhumika, pp. 298–9.
Tagore renounced his knighthood after the massacre of
unarmed demonstrators by General Dyer. Parimoo, Three
Tagores, p. 112, on his Dartington visit. Sixty Works of Joseph
Southall in the Fortunoff Collection, exh. cat. with essays by
Richard Breeze et al. (London, 2005), on the artist.
237
 11 S. Appelbaum, ed. and trans., Simplicissimus: 180 Satirical
Drawings from the Famous German Weekly (New York,
1975), p. 55, cartoon by Olaf Gulbransson (‘The Height of
Fashion inspired by Rabindranath Tagore. Fashionable
Berlin practises contemplation of the navel’).
12 M. Kämpchen, Rabindranath Tagore and Germany: A
Documentation (Calcutta, 1991), for a balanced account of
the range of reactions. Thomas Mann Diaries, 1918–39, trans.
R. and C. Winston (New York, 1982), p. 117. Mann com-
plained that Tagore did not seem to know who the novelist
was.
13 E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, iii (New
York, 1957), p. 128. Freud was offended by the off-hand
way Tagore summoned him.
14 Letter to Lily Klee, 27 October 1917, in F. Klee, Paul Klee:
Briefe an die Familie, 1893–1940, vol. ii: 1907–1940
(Cologne, 1979), p. 885. Klee found Tagore’s book lacking
intensity, eroticism and humour. R. K. Wick, Teaching at the
Bauhaus (Stuttgart, 2000), pp. 72–7, 92–130, on Gropius and
Itten. Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, p. 338, on
Gropius. See also infra, p. 79. On favourable views of
Tagore, see Kämpchen, Rabindranath Tagore and Germany,
infra, note 15.
15 Max Osborn on the Indian art exhibition in Berlin in 1923,
Rupam, xv–xvi, p. 74. On Tagore’s role and reputation, A.
Aronson, ‘Tagore Through Western Eyes,’ in Rabindranath
Tagore: A Celebration of His Life and Work, ed. R. Monk and
A. Robinson (London, 1986), p. 23, and, more comprehen-
sive, Kämpchen, Rabindranath Tagore and Germany.
16 Reporters from Hamburg, Breslau, Leipzig, Baden, Vienna,
and even distant Budapest attended the show (Walter
Habiger in Neues Wiener Journal, 19 July 1930). L.
Thormachten’s letter on behalf of the National Gallery to
the Möller Gallery expressed interest in acquiring the works
chosen by Justi though unable to pay for them. Tagore in a
letter of 16 August 1930 to Justi donated the works in appre-
ciation of German hospitality (Foreign Comments). Tagore
spoke in a number of cities on his philosophy of art.
17 Tagore, ‘Rusiar Chithi’, in Rabindra Rachanabali, vol. x,
pp. 673–746 on his view of Russia. On Russian response,
A.P.G. Danil’chuk, A Dream Fulfilled (Calcutta, 1986).
Tagore mentions that about 5,000 people visited the exhibi-
tion, Rabindra Rachanabali, x, p. 698. Visva Bharati Bulletin,
xv (November 1930), pp. 1–5. I am grateful to Naresh Guha
for the information on Russia. Catalogue of the Danish
exhibition: Udstilling Akvareller Og Tegninger Af
Rabindranath Tagore (Charlottenburg, 1930).
18 A. K. Coomaraswamy’s Foreword, Exhibition of Paintings
by Rabindranath Tagore: Souvenir Catalogue, The
Fifty–Sixth Street Galleries (New York 1930). R. Lipsey,
Coomaraswamy, iii (Princeton, 1977), p. 85, on
Coomaraswamy’s disillusionment with the Indian national-
ist movement by this time.
19 R. Rolland, Inde, Journal 1915–43: Tagore, Gandhi et les
problemes indiens (Paris, 1951), pp. 285–6.
20 Münchener Telegramm-Zeitung (23 July 1930); Vorwärts (21
July 1930); Hamburger Fremdenblatt (26 July 1930).
21 Vossiche Zeitung (17 July 1930).
238
22 Though Rothenstein may have preferred more traditional
art, he was imaginative enough to appreciate Tagore’s origi-
nality: Rothenstein, Since Fifty, pp. 175–6. Tagore and
Rothenstein’s correspondence: M. Lago, Imperfect Encounter
(Cambridge, ma, 1972), pp. 325–9.
23 Purabi, Rabindra Bhavan Ms. 102 (1924); Rakta Karabi, Ms.
151 (1923), Kheya Ms. 110 (1905), see also P.
Mukhopadhyaya, Rabindra Jivani Katha (Calcutta, 1961),
pp. 98–9 (date of Ms. 21, Asvin 1312).
24 P. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, p. 126.
25 McKnight Kauffer’s poster is familiar to us from the cover
of E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion. This American artist
was quite influential in the early twentieth century and his
poster The Early Bird, for the Daily Herald, was a familiar
sight in London Underground stations, which
Rabindranath could not have missed on his visit to Britain
in 1920 or later. Tagore’s interpretation is a loose one and
his image is the reverse of Kauffer’s, but he uses the for-
ward thrust of the poster. Nude on a Flying Bird was shown
in Berlin and Paris in 1930.
26 P. Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich (Princeton, nj, 1979), p. 173.
Compare illustrations of Tagore, Hölzel and Eckmann: H.
H. Hofstaetter, Jugendstil (Baden-Baden, 1968), p. 132. I had
seen the example of a page of ‘erasure’ by Klimt in a short
film on Art Nouveau called ‘Women and Flowers’ at the
Academy Cinema, London, about 30 years ago but I have
not yet been able to trace the exact source. The Klimt page
seemed remarkably like Tagore’s erasures. But see the cata-
logue of an exhibition at the Kunsthaus, Zurich, by Toni
Stooss (Stuttgart, 1992), fig. ‘z’ 36 Sketches for initials,
p. 242, postcards, p. 353, and Klimt’s letter to Marie
Zimmermann, where he crosses out words in a decorative
manner or uses letters to create designs. C. M. Nebehay,
Gustav Klimt (Vienna, 1969), p. 54. See Mitter, Art and
Nationalism, on Indian graphic art inspired by Art
Nouveau. However, the point to remember is that from
Aubrey Beardsley and William Morris to Art Nouveau and
Jugendstil, all of them were deeply involved in the connec-
tion between word, text, typology and decorative design.
See M. Bisanz-Prakken, Heiliger Frühling (Munich, 1999),
for the range of Jugendstil designs. For Hölzel’s composi-
tion with writing, see C. Hänlein, Adolf Hölzel, Bilder,
Pastelle, Zeichnungen, Collagen (Hanover, 1982), several
examples of ‘Komposition mit Schrift’, 1900 (fig. 129, p. 76),
and 1920 (fig. 188, p. 52). I have not been able to find any
reference in Hölzel to Tagore, and Tagore seldom mentions
the people he met.
27 N. G. Parris, ‘Adolf Hölzel’s Structural and Color Theory
and Its Relationship to the Development of the Basic
Course at Bauhaus’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Pennsylvania, 1979, pp. 154–61, discusses Hölzel’s method
in detail.
28 Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich, p. 44. It is interesting that
Hölzel later reintroduced figures in his work and became
more concerned with painting (on Hölzel’s last drawings
and pastels and his conversation with the author, Margot
Boger-Langhammer et al, Adolf Hölzel (Konstanz, 1961);
A. Hildebrandt, Adolf Hölzel, Bauhaus Archive (Darmstadt,
 1969)). Hölzel later went for an early Abstract
Expressionism, as colour became his main interest (I am
grateful to Norbert Lynton for this information about
Hölzel in the 1920s).
29 In a work of considerable scholarship, Ketaki Kushari
Dyson proposes Tagore’s colour blindness as a factor in his
painting, see Ronger Rabindranath: Rabindranather sahityae o
chitrakalay ronger vyavyahar (Kolkata, 1997). The idea was
first mooted by Kramrisch which she based on Tagore’s
self-confessed colour blindness, see S. Kramrisch, ‘Form
Elements in the Visual Work of Rabindranath Tagore’,
Lalit Kala Contemporary, ii (December 1962), p. 38.
30 ‘What is Art’, in P. Neogy, ed., Rabindranath Tagore on Art
and Aesthetics (Calcutta, 1961), p. 29. ‘The Religion of an
Artist’, 1924–6, ibid., p. 37.
31 ‘My Pictures (i)’ (28 May 1930), Foreword to the exhibition
catalogue, ibid., pp. 97–8.
32 ‘My Pictures (ii)’ (2 July 1930), p. 100.
33 See Parimoo, The Three Tagores, pl. 269. Friedrich Ratzel’s
three-volume The History of Mankind (London, 1896), trans.
A. J. Butler, with an introduction by the anthropologist E.
B. Tylor, was a standard work. Again Tagore does not use
an image as such but combines a whole range of objects. See
vol. i, pp. 65–87, on art and religion, pp. 38–106, 145–300,
and vol. ii, pp. 1–203, on Native Americans and Pacific
Islanders. T. Dacosta Kaufmann, ‘Stereotypes, Prejudice
and Aesthetic Judgements’, in M. A. Holly and K. Moxey,
Art History Aesthetics and Visual Studies (New Haven, ct,
2002), pp. 71–84, on Ratzel’s importance in art history.
34 This manuscript is preserved at the Rabindra Bhavan in
Santiniketan.
35 W. Kandinsky and F. Marc, The Blaue Reiter Almanac,
intro. K. Lankheit (New York, 1965), pp. 82–9.
36 Tagore mentions her death in his reminiscences, leaving out
the possibility that he was in love with her, Rabindra
Rachanabali, x, p. 118. Bandyopadhaya, Rabindra Chitrakala,
p. 144, on her suicide. Tagore’s purported depiction, She
Has Committed Suicide, is listed as no. 191 in Exhibition of
Drawings, Paintings, Engravings, Pottery and Leatherwork by
Rabindranath Tagore (Calcutta, 1932). Also A. Mitra, ‘The
Dark Lady of Tagore’s Paintings’, Statesman Supplement (9
May 1983), and A. Chaudhury, ‘Jyotirindra Rahasya’,
Kolkata, v/1 (August 1977), p. 46. In any case, whether he
did depict her or not is less interesting than his use of masks
for faces.
37 On Gropius, see Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus, p. 58.
38 Coomaraswamy, Exhibition of Paintings by Rabindranath
Tagore: Dresdener Anzeiger (19 July 1930); Nationaltidende (9
August 1930); Kaines-Smith, Bidou (Foreign Comments).
39 Letter to Rothenstein, 30 March 1930, in Lago, Imperfect
Encounter, p. 326.
40 Tagore, ‘Jibansmriti’, Rabindra Rachanabali, x, p. 50.
41 Wilhelm Viola, Child Art (Kent, 1944), quoted in Parimoo,
The Three Tagores, 118. On Klee, see M. Francisco, ‘Paul
Klee and Children’s Art’, in J. Fineberg, Discovering Child
Art (Princeton, nj, 1998), pp. 95–121, and ‘There is an
Unconscious Vast Power in the Child’, pp. 68–94. J. Boissel,
‘Quand les enfants se mirent à dessiner, 1880–1914’, Les
cahiers du Muséee national d’art moderne, xxxi (1990), p. 30.
42 Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, ed. J. Strachey et al., 24 vols (London,
1953–74), p. 21. P. Gay, Sigmund Freud and Art (New York,
1989), p. 18; S. Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents
(London, 1930), p. 57.
43 E. Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York, 1952),
pp. 13–31. E.H.G. Gombrich, ‘Freud’s Aesthetics’,
Encounter, v, xxvi/1 (January 1966), pp. 30–40.
44 On Freud’s ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’, see J. J.
Spector, The Aesthetics of Freud (New York, 1973), pp. 53
and 110; Gombrich, ‘Freud’s Aesthetics’. Gombrich writes
of infantile play of combinations and associations as a key to
joke in Freud but to be meaningful this play must be
anchored to conventions and culturally given meaning in
literature and art. Creative people have the mastery of what
Freud calls ‘undeveloped dispositions and suppressed wish-
es liberating dominant memories’, ‘Psychoanalysis and the
History of Art’, in B. Nelson, Freud and the 20th Century
(New York, 1957), pp. 186–206.
45 Comtesse de Noailles, A. E. de Brancovan, ‘The Visible
Dreams of Rabindranath Tagore’, Calcutta Municipal
Gazette, Tagore Memorial Special Supplement, May 1986
(reprint of 1st edn of September, 1941), pp. 176–9. Vossische
Zeitung (16 July 1930). Tagore speaks of unpredictability in
a letter dated 7 January 1928, see Neogy, Tagore on Art,
p. 90.
46 ‘My Pictures’, 28 May 1930, Neogy, Tagore on Art, p. 97.
47 Letter dated 1931 to Ramananda Chatterjee, editor of
Modern Review, in Neogy, Tagore on Art, p. 105.
48 Spector, The Aesthetics of Freud, p. 169. Gombrich, ‘Verbal
Wit as a Paradigm of Art: The Aesthetic Theories of
Sigmund Freud’, in Tributes (London, 1984), pp. 93–105.
49 Berlingske Tidende (9 August 1930).
50 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, pp. 89, 155–7.
51 The essay by Current Opinion, ‘Gleanings: Automatic
Drawing as a First Aid to the Artist’, Modern Review, xxi/1
(January 1917), pp. 63–5, based on the work of the English
artists Austin Spare and Frederick Carter, inspired by
Freud and Jung, describes the limitations of representation
and the usefulness of dredging up memory from the sub-
conscious in releasing creative energy in drawing. However,
unlike Tagore, these artists are representational and merely
use the subconscious to improve their drawing. Tagore’s
radicalism totally discarded representational accuracy.
52 ‘My Pictures (ii)’ (2 July 1930), Neogy, Tagore on Art,
p. 101. He had a more ambivalent relationship with psycho-
analysis, ibid., p. 54.
53 B. Dey, Jamini Rai (Kolkata, 1384), p. 86, letter dated 7 June
1941.
54 Letter, 7 November 1928, Neogy, Tagore on Art, p. 89. This
is even more explicitly suggested in a letter to his daughter-
in-law from Paris in 1930, where he says that his flow of
writing has stopped and he paints (Pratima Devi,
‘Gurudeva’s Paintings’ [1954] in commemoration of
Tagore’s death and dedicated to Leonard and Dorothy
Elmhurst of Dartington, deposited at Rabindra Bhavan,
Santiniketan). In the play Rakta Karabi (1923), he began to
239
 change his lyrical naturalist style, moving towards gesture,
as suggested by Binode Bihari Mukhopadhyaya, Chitra
Katha (Kolkata, 1390), p. 307. Neogy, Tagore on Art, p. 87.
55 Neogy, Tagore on Art, p. 70. These prehistoric monsters
complemented his late whimsical essay, ‘Shey’, an exercise
in free fantasy, ostensibly written for his granddaughter
(Rabindra Rachanabali, vii, pp. 849–940).
56 W. Steiner, Venus in Exile (New York, 2001), p. xix, com-
ments on the revival of interest in the nineteenth-century
academic nude in the early twenty-first century, charting
the cultural anxieties behind the avant-garde resistance to
the female subject as a symbol of beauty. More recently
Arthur Danto in The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the
Concept of Art (New York, 2003), has reasserted the impor-
tance of beauty in mediating between objects and our
sensibility, which he points out was a serious aesthetic crime
to modernists. As an option in art, beauty is, he says, a neces-
sary condition of life as we want to live it.
57 Take for instance, the stanza from a famous song, ‘More, oh
more, O Master! Please strike me more’, from a spiritual
song for the Brahmo community on the adoration of the
Deity with a tinge of Vaishnava sacred poetry. The stanzas
movingly refer to life’s sufferings endured by the poet. (‘Aro
aro prabhu, aro aro/ emni kore amay maro/’) The particular
imagery lends itself to an interpretation on the level of the
sacred erotic, as is often is the case with mystical poetry.
However, the masochistic image suggested here is entirely
allegorical, the suffering for which the Lord is responsible,
‘Prayaschitta, Puja’ series Poem No.228 from Gitabitan o
Bibidha Kavita, in Rabindra Rachanabali, iv, pp. 76–7. I am
grateful to Monisha Bhattacharya for locating the passage I
vaguely remembered from my younger days.
58 See an amusing episode with the male nude model in
Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 275–6. The first frank full-
frontal nude was John Newton Souza’s self-portrait in 1947,
which scandalized Bombay.
59 Nude, 12 November 1934, Rabindra Bhavan (1854.16).
60 D. Pan, Primitive Renaissance (London, 2001), pp. 19–20.
‘What Is Art?’, Neogy p. 16; ‘The Religion of an Artist’,
Neogy, Tagore on Art, p. 56.
61 ‘My Pictures (iii)’, Neogy, Tagore on Art, p. 104.
62 ‘What is art?’, Neogy, Tagore on Art, p. 16; ‘The Religion of
an Artist’, Neogy, Tagore on Art, p. 56.
63 ‘The Religion of an Artist’, ibid., p. 41. R. Rolland, Tagore,
Gandhi et les problemes indiens, pp. 285–6.
64 Tagore’s views on nationalism and his return of the knight-
hood after the Amritsar massacre made him unpopular in
Britain. Nor did Tagore remain silent at Japan’s military
aggression against China in 1938, as seen in his indignant
letter to the Japanese poet, Yone Noguchi: K. Kripalani,
Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (Calcutta, 1962), p. 385.
On Tagore’s importance in nationalism, Sumit Sarkar, The
Swadeshi Movement in Bengal (Calcutta, 1973). His critical
1916 lecture on nationalism aroused widespread hostility,
including in America, Kripalani, Rabindranath Tagore,
p. 257.
65 Berlingske Tidende (9 August 1930).
66 Interview in 1925 with Dilip Roy, a widely travelled
240
Bengali intellectual, ‘Alap Alochana, Rabindranath o Dilip
Kumar Rai’, Rabindra Rachabali, xiv, pp. 930–32.
67 ‘Entretiens Tagore – Romain Rolland, 24.6.26’, Rabindranath
et Romain Rolland, Lettres et autres écrits, Cahiers Romain
Rolland (Paris, 1961), xii, pp. 179–86.
68 Notably the annual exhibition of the Indian Society of
Oriental Art (Calcutta, 1933), the India Society exhibition
(London, 1934), an exhibition in Ceylon, and finally an one-
man show at the Kalman Gallery in London, which last did
not repeat his triumph of 1930.
69 On a recent reappraisal of Tagore’s position in modernity
and his view of the ‘Orient’ in the light of Edward Said’s
Orientalism, Amit Chaudhuri, ‘Two Giant Brothers’,
London Review of Books, xxviii/8 (20 April 2006), pp. 27–30.
70 See Uma Dasgupta on Tagore’s pedagogic ideals of inte-
grated life, ‘Santiniketan: The School of a Poet’, in
Knowledge, Power and Politics: Educational Institutions in
India, ed. M. Hasan (New Delhi, 1998), pp. 258–303. J. A.
Palmer, Fifty Major Thinkers on Education (London, 2001),
on Tagore’s importance in twentieth-century pedagogy.
During his visit to England in 1930, Tagore found time to
paint at the home of his devoted friend Leonard Elmhurst
in Devon, whose school Dartington Hall was inspired by
Tagore’s educational ideals. A. Nandy, Illegitimacy of
Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self
(New Delhi, 1994).
71 On teaching at the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy’s The New
Vision (London, 1930), in B. B. Mukhopadhay, Adhunik
Shilpasiksha (Kolkata, 1972), pp. 143–4.
72 To Otto Meyer, 7 December 1921, in The Letters and Diaries
of Oskar Schlemmer, selected and ed. T. Schlemmer
(Middletown, ct, 1972), p. 115.
73 Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus, pp. 190–220. Uma Dasgupta
on the Indian origins of Tagore’s holism, pp. 9–159. The
atmosphere was purposely anti-materialist with very simple
lifestyle in a ‘commune’, discarding shoes and other ‘luxu-
ries’. There was a sense of creating something Indian that
was not dependent on the colonial regime.
74 Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, p. 338, on Gropius. Also
Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus, pp. 11–14, 30–8, 56–8, 72–7,
on parallel concepts. See also N. Tuli, ‘Rabindranath
Tagore’s Santiniketan’, The Flamed Mosaic: Indian
Contemporary Painting (Ahmedabad, 1997), p. 195;
Dasgupta, ‘Santiniketan: The School of a Poet’, on Tagore’s
pedagogic ideals of integrated life; Palmer, Fifty Major
Thinkers on Education.
75 Tagore, ‘Tapoban’, Rabindra Rachanabali, xi, p. 589. See
T. Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New Indian Art: Artists,
Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920
(Cambridge, 1992), pp. 308–12, on the importance of rural
life in Santiniketan, and also Tuli, ‘Rabindranath Tagore’s
Santiniketan’, pp. 195–6.
76 In a letter to Abanindranath, Tagore urges him to release
Nandalal, which he said would be beneficial for the artist
and the nation: B. B. Mukhopadhyaya, Adhunik
Shilpasikhsha (Calcutta, 1974), pp. 139–40.
77 P. Mandal, Bharat Shilpi Nandalal, i (Bolpur, 1982),
pp. 484–92 including Tagore’s article on the function of
 Santiniketan, 1919.
78 See supra, p. 74.
79 N. Bose, ‘Art, Patronage and Institution’, Visvabharati
Quarterly, Nandalal Number, xxxiv/1–4 (January 1971),
pp. 70–76. B. B. Mukhopadhyaya, Chitrakatha (Kolkata,
1984), p. 159.
80 Mukhopadhyaya, Chitrakatha, p. 185.
81 Ibid., pp. 51–2.
82 N. Basu, ‘Drawing Humans and Animals’, Drishti o Shristi
(Kolkata, 1985), p. 161.
83 Basu, ‘Artistic Perception’, in ibid., pp. 38–50.
84 Mukhopadhyaya, Adhunik, pp. 172–3.
85 Ibid., pp. 271–3.
86 Interestingly, he retained the use of geometrical shapes
and the blackboard, Mandal, Bharat Shilpi Nandalal, i,
pp. 561–76. Mukhopadhyaya, Chitrakatha, pp. 51–2. On
Okakura, Abnindranath Tagore and Pan-Asian art, see
Mittel, Art and Nationalism, pp. 262–6.
87 Mukhopadhyaya, Chitrakatha, p. 159. N. Basu, ‘Application of
Anatomy in Art’, Drishti o Shristi, pp. 21–30; ‘Rhythm’, Drishti
o Shristi, pp. 31–4 (mention of Okakura triadic principle).
88 Mukhopadhyaya, Adhunik shilpashikhsha, pp. 53–5. See his
student manuals using a wide range of Eastern and
Western art techniques and artist’s materials in Basu, Drishti
o Shristi, pp. 61–143.
89 The title is Dandi March (Bapuji), 12 April 1930. Linocut,
ngma, Acc. No. 4893, the catalogue: Nandalal Bose,
1882–1966: Centenary Exhibition, National Gallery of Modern
Art (New Delhi, 1982), p. 184.
90 Letter of 25 January 1932, M. K. Gandhi, Collected Works,
xlix (Delhi, 1958–84), p. 37.
91 Interview with the musicologist Dilip Roy on 2 February
1924, Gandhi, Collected Works, xxiii, p. 193.
92 Gandhi, Young India, in Collected Works, xxxiv, p. 319. This
was in response to Anton Chekhov’s stories. Tolstoy was
one of Gandhi’s inspirations and his favourable response to
Gandhi is too well known to bear repeating here. L. Fisher,
‘Tolstoy and Gandhi’, in The Life of Mahatma Gandhi
(London, 1982), pp. 123–30.
93 Interview in The Island (14 October 1931) in London,
Gandhi, Collected Works, xlvii, pp. 149–50. Letter dated 11
May 1928, Gandhi, Collected Works, xxxvi, p. 305. In 1929
he again rejects the art for art’s sake argument, Collected
Works, xl, p. 342.
94 S. Bhattacharya, The Mahatma and the Poet (Delhi, 1997), on
the debate between Gandhi and Tagore.
95 N. Basu, ‘The Place of Art in Education’, in Drishti o
Shristi, pp. 9–18, originally read at Calcutta University. On
his use of crafts as a Gandhian nationalist, see his close asso-
ciate Prabhatmohan Bandopadhaya, ‘Nandalal: Karusangha
o Jatiya Andolan’, Desh Binodan (Nandalal birth centenary
number) (1389), pp. 34–47.
96 Mukhopadhyaya, Adhunik Shilpashiksha, pp. 43–53.
97 C. Deb, ‘Shiksha Kshetre Nandalal Basur Chhatrider
Bhumika’, Desh Binodan (Nandalal birth centenary number)
(1389), p. 152.
98 Mukhopadhyaya, Adhunik Shilpashiksha, p. 56. Interestingly,
on his visit to Santiniketan in 1924, Abanindranath, deeply
disillusioned with orientalism, urged the cultivation of vil-
lage crafts.
99 S. Ghosh, ‘Rupkar Nandalal’, Desh Binodan (Nandalal birth
centenary number) (1389), pp. 18, 20, 22.
100 G. S. Dutt, Folk Arts and Crafts of Bengal: The Collected
Papers, ed. S. Bandyopadhyay (Calcutta, 1990), Folk Arts,
xvii–xix.
101 Gandhi, Collected Works, lxii, pp. 299–300.
102 Speech at Khadi and Village Industries Exhibition,
Haripura Congress, 10 February 1938, Gandhi, Collected
Works, lxvi, p. 358.
103 Mukherjee, Adhunik, p. 84.
104 Gandhi, Collected Works, lxii, pp. 299–300.
105 N. Basu, ‘Bapuji’, Drishti o Shristi, pp. 244–250. This was
written circa 1940, and describes his relationship with
Gandhi. Mukherjee, Adhunik, p. 84. The sculptor Mhatre
also took part in the decoration, M. Guha, ‘Gandhiji o
Nandalal’, Desh Binodan (1389), pp. 124–5, translation from
Harijan, 2 January 1937.
106 Letter to Nandalal, 31 October 1937; Gandhi, Collected
Works, lxvi, p. 282.
107 Letter to Tagore, 6 November 1937; Gandhi, Collected
Works, lxvi, p. 289.
108 Basu, ‘Bapuji’, p. 248.
109 K. G. Subramanyan, ‘Nandalal Bose: A Biographical
Sketch’, Nandalal Bose (1882–1966): Centenary Exhibition
(New Delhi, 1982), p. 25; Sankho Chaudhury, Nandalal
Bose Haripura Panels (for the commemoration of the forti-
eth anniversary of India’s independence and Jawaharlal
Nehru centenary – 1987–9) (New Delhi, 1988), pp. 4–5. In
an interview with Nimai Chatterjee in 1954 (infra, note
150), Nandalal spoke forcefully against communalism in
art.
110 Guha, ‘Gandhiji o Nandalal’, p. 125.
111 N. Basu, ‘Wash’, Drishti o Shristi, p. 143.
112 Mukhopadhyaya, Chitrakatha, p. 265.
113 Speech at Haripura of 10 February 1938; Gandhi, Collected
Works, lxvi, p. 359.
114 Mukhopadhyaya, Adhinik Shilpashiksha, p. 86.
115 P. Bandopadhaya, ‘Nandalal: Karusangha o Jatiya
Andolan’, Desh Binodan (1389), p. 47. Interestingly, Bose
was President of the Haripura Congress session, which
marked his conflict with Gandhi, the Mahatma forcing his
resignation. L. Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj: A
Biography of Indian Nationalists, Sarat and Subhas Chandra
Bose (New York, 1990). Although he never wavered in his
admiration for Gandhi, Bose’s humiliation at Haripura
caused him to withdraw from active participation in
Congress sessions.
116 As related by Nandalal, Gandhi demanded why these
immoral objects should be spared but listening to his force-
ful argument he relented (‘Rabibasariya Alochani’, Ananda
Bazar Patrika, 20 December 1953).
117 Subramanyan, Nandalal Centenary, 24.
118 For the story of the Santiniketan mural movement, see J.
Chakrabarty et al., The Santiniketan Murals (Calcutta, 1995),
and the exhibition catalogue, R. Siva Kumar, Santiniketan:
The Making of a Contextual Modernism (New Delhi, 1997).
241
119 Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 256, 305–6.
120 K. G. Subramanyan, ‘Nandalal Basur Bhittichitra’, Desh
Binodan (1389), p. 130.
121 See Patrick Geddes’s classic work, Life of Sir Jagadish
Chandra Bose (London, 1920), p. 243; S. Sengupta, Sansad
Bangali Charitabhidhan (Calcutta, 1976), 165–6 for details of
his life.
122 G. Bhaumik, ‘Vijnyanacharya Jagadishchandrer
Shilpanurag’, Sundaram, iii/2 (1365), pp. 166–72.
123 Mandal, Bharat Shilpi Nandalal, i, p. 644. In 1925 Mukul
Dey, another of Abanindranath’s students, had made his
obligatory ‘pilgrimage’ to Ajanta and Bagh: My Pilgrimages
to Ajanta and Bagh (London, 1925).
124 Ibid., i, pp. 644–5. One of the three at Bagh, Asit Haldar
published his experience with an endorsement by Tagore,
who reaffirmed the importance of murals to the nation.
125 Subramanyan, Desh Binodan (1389), p. 128.
126 Letter quoted in introduction by Samik Bandyopadhyay to
G. Dutt, Folk Arts and Crafts of Bengal, p. xviii.
127 Mandal, Bharat Shilpi Nandalal, i, pp. 450–51. He also read
Mrs Merrifield’s standard 1846 translation of Il Libro
dell’Arte by Cennino Cennini (c.1370–1440). On Lady
Herringham’s extensive writings on tempera including
translating Cennini, M. Lago, Christiana Herringham
(London, 1996), pp. 36–8, 44–7, 49, 51.
128 Basu, Drishti o Shristi, p. 92.
129 Ibid., p. 14. On Morris, see Mitter, Art and Nationalism,
pp. 248–9.
130 Mandal, Bharat Shilpi Nandalal, i, pp. 428–46.
131 Ibid., pp. 428–46, contains transcripts of Nandalal’s own
sayings and writings on wall paintings faithfully recorded
by the author. Nandalal’s sketches of Narsinglal are extant.
132 N. Basu, Shilpa Charcha, originally published in 1362, see
Drishti O Shristi, pp. 92–110. Mandal, Bharat Shilpi
Nandalal, ii, p. 446. Nandalal consulted the Sanskrit scholar
Haridas Mitra on the text.
133 Mandal, Bharat Shilpi Nandalal, ii, p. 452. See also Basu,
Shilpa Charcha.
134 Mukhopadhyaya, ‘Nandalal’, Chitrakatha, p. 264.
135 Subramanyan, ‘Nandalal Basur Bhittichitra’, Desh Binodan
(1389), p. 130.
136 Mandal, Bharat Shilpi Nandalal, i, pp. 445, 447.
137 Mukhopadhyaya, ‘Nandalal’, pp. 275–8.
138 T. Gupte, Gaekwad Cenotaphs (Baroda, 1947), p. 156. See
also Mukhopadhyaya, ‘Nandalal’, p. 265.
139 He had tried out this theme in the China Bhavan at
Santiniketan some years earlier.
140 Mandal, Bharat Shilpi Nandalal, ii, p. 447. Gupte, Kirti
Mandir, pp. 156 and passim, on the details of the paintings.
141 Siva Kumar, Santiniketan.
142 See Subramanyan, Benode Behari Mukherjee, exh. cat.
(Delhi, c. 1958).
143 On his personal link with Nandalal, see Mukhopadhyaya,
Chitrakatha, pp. 266–7.
144 Mukhopadhyaya, ‘Baratiya Murti or Bimurtabad’, in
Chitrakatha, pp. 39–52. We have encountered this influential
idea a number of times.
145 Siva Kumar, Santiniketan, pp. 50–64.
242
146 G. Kapur, Contemporary Indian Art, Royal Academy exh.
cat. (London, 1982), p. 5.
147 Mukhopadhyaya, ‘My Experiments with Murals’,
Chitrakatha, pp. 404–5.
148 Film director Satyajit Ray, who was a student of his, made a
moving documentary on him, The Inner Eye.
149 D. K. Dev Barman, ‘Shilpacharya Nandlalal Basu’, Desh
Binodan (1389), p. 11, his close pupil, speaks of the profound
influence of the rural atmosphere in Santiniketan. See also
another student, Prabhatmohan Bondopadhyaya,
‘Nandalal: Karusangha o Jatiya Andolan’, Desh Binodan
(1389), pp. 34–47, who mentions his using Santals as live
models at a late age.
150 Interview with Nimai Chatterjee in Uttam Chaudhuri, ed.,
Sholati Sakhyatkar (Calcutta, 1985), pp. 71–6.
151 Supra, pp. 30–1.
152 Mukhopadhyaya, ‘Nandalal’, pp. 278–9. The early one dates
from 1919 and the later from 1941.
153 R. Siva Kumar, Santiniketan: The Making of a Contextual
Modernism (New Delhi, 1997), unpaginated (p. 23).
154 On Ramkinkar, see Mukhopadhyaya, Chitrakatha, p. 179.
See also Ram Kinkar, ‘Mastermashay’ and ‘An Interview
with Ramkinkar’, Visvabharati Quarterly, Nandalal Number,
xxxiv/1–4 (May 1968–April 1969), pp. 77–84.
155 See Somenandranath Bandopadhyaya, Shilpi Ramkinkar:
Alapchari (Calcutta, 1994), p. 150.
156 E. Lanteri, Modelling: A Guide for Teachers and Students, 3
vols (London, 1902–11). See Dictionary of Art, xviii, p. 751,
for his biography.
157 Siva Kumar, Santiniketan, p. 27 (unpaginated). On
Bourdelle (1861–1929), see Dictionary of Art, iv, pp. 568–9.
158 Bose was the first non-European to be elected an Associate
of the Royal Scottish Academy. See Mitter, Art and
Nationalism, pp. 117–18, for his fascinating story and
untimely death.
159 S. Gardiner, Epstein: Artist Against the Establishment (New
York, 1992), pp. 84, 119, 128–9, 131–2.
160 P. Das, Ramkinkar (Calcutta, 1991), p. 38. His earliest repre-
sentations of the Santals were outdoor reliefs on the mud
building, Shyamali; Siva Kumar, Santiniketan, p. 23.
161 Bandopadhyaya, Shilpi Ramkinkar, pp. 20–23.
162 Kinkar’s sculptures of unidealized nudes and his working
from the human figure caused scandals in Santiniketan
(Das, Ramkinkar, pp. 140–41).
163 Mukhopadhyaya, ‘Sadhak Shilpi Ramkinkar’, Chitrakatha,
p. 337. He drank profusely and lived with a woman with-
out marrying her, both unusual in Hindu society.
164 Bandopadhaya, Shilpi Ramkinkar, p. 38, on the artist’s state-
ment that he belongs to the same milieu as them.
165 Ibid., p. 54.
166 Ibid., p. 54.
iii jamini roy and art for the community
1 M. Casey, Tides and Eddies (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp. 182
(first published 1966). R. G. Casey was the penultimate
Governor of Bengal (1944–6), married to Maie, the daugh-
ter of the surgeon-general of Australia. I met her daughter
 Mrs Jane MacGowan in Darlinghurst, a suburb of Sydney,
New South Wales; she provided me with much material
and valuable information on Lady Casey, and I wish to
recall her kindness here. I am also grateful to Dr J. C. Eade
of Humanities Research Centre, Australian National
University, Canberra, for arranging the visit.
2 Casey, Tides and Eddies, p. 183.
3 In Jamini Roy, Seminar Papers in the Context of Indian Folk
Sensibility and His Impact on Modern Art, deputy ed. A.
Mukhopadhaya (New Delhi, 1992), discusses his role as
leader of the folk renaissance.
4 Shanta Devi, ‘Shilpi Srijukta Jamini Ranjan Rayer
Pradarshani’, Prabasi, i (Baisakh 1339), pp. 127–31.
5 On the rise of artistic individualism in India, see P. Mitter,
Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental
Orientations (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 79–119, 179–218.
6 In the aftermath of the war, Carl Einstein was seen as a
right-wing conservative but recent writers have reappraised
Einstein’s social critique of Western modernism. See D.
Pan, Primitive Renaissance (London, 2001), as well as C. W.
Haxthausen and S. Zeidler’s critical translations and intro-
ductions: C. W. Haxthausen, ‘Bloody Serious, Two Texts by
Carl Einstein’, October, cv (Summer 2003), pp. 105–24; Carl
Einstein, Negro Sculpture, trans. C. W. Haxthausen and S.
Ziedler, October, cvii (Winter 2004), pp. 122–38; Carl
Einstein, Revolution Smashes Through History and Tradition,
tr. C. W. Haxthausen, October, cvii (Winter 2004), pp.
139–45; Carl Einstein, Methodological Aphorisms, trans. C.
W. Haxthausen, October, cvii (Winter 2004), pp. 146–50.
7 B. Dey, Jamini Rai (Kolkata, 1384), p. 18.
8 G. Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters (Bombay,
1927), p. 85. Millet came via his teacher, Jamini Prakash
Gangooly, Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 110–13.
9 See supra, p. 30.
10 I was able to examine the pats he owned that were still in his
studio in South Calcutta. See Shanta Devi, ‘Shilpi Srijukta
Jamini Ranjan Rayer Pradarshani’, on his pat collecting.
11 ‘Art Exhibition in Calcutta – Mr. Jamini Roy - Modern
Indian School of Painting’, The Statesman (1 October 1929).
A. Bose, Reminiscences of Atul Bose, unpaginated (collection
of Sanjit Bose).
12 The Statesman (9 July 1930).
13 Shanta Devi, ‘Shilpi Srijukta Jamini Ranjan Rayer
Pradarshani’, p. 25. In fact, the Tagores had pioneered
Swadeshi furniture. Here Roy showed images of Mother
and Child, which was to become his hallmark.
14 On Nandalal’s response to Kalighat, Drishti o Srishti
(Kolkata, 1985), pp. 282–3.
15 Catalogue of the Academy of Fine Arts (Calcutta, 1935),
included Suhrawardy’s article. As his friend Atul Bose
recalled, the praise paved the way for his success (Kshanika,
Jamini Rai Number, ii/ 4 (1378), p. 16.)
16 K. Sarkar, ‘Jamini Rai Prasange’, Baromash (March–April
1979), p. 10, the show coinciding with the mysterious death
of his son Jimut.
17 S. Suhrawardy, A Short Note on the Art of Jamini Roy
(Calcutta, 1937); Ananda Bazar Patrika, 19 September 1937.
18 ‘Mr. Jamini Roy: Calcutta Exhibition of Paintings’, The
Statesman (4 September 1938), p. 6.
19 See Roy’s letters to Bishnu Dey below. The 350 or so letters
have been published in different editions. See also his
unpublished letters, written in 1942–4, edited by Arun Sen
and published in Baromash, iv–v (September–October 1978),
pp. 2–18. Jamini Roy, ‘Kajer Bhitar Diyei Jana, Nijekeo
Jana’, in Parichay (Saradiya, 1384), pp. 1–8. One of the
greatest French novels, Le Grand Meaulnes, by Alain-
Fournier (Henri-Alban Fournier) was published in Paris in
1912.
20 The paintings exist in the K. C. Das mansion in North
Calcutta; Ashoke Bhattacharya, ‘The Epic Art of Jamini
Roy’, The Statesman (23 November 1987). On decorations
for the Congress, infra note 35.
21 R. Von Leyden, ‘Jamini Roy’, in The Art of Jamini Roy, A
Centenary Volume, exh. cat., Birla Academy (Calcutta, 1987),
pp. 31–9. Datta’s Parichay has been compared with T. S.
Eliot’s Criterion in its impact. Roy obituaries: The Statesman
(26 April 1972, 5 May 1972).
22 Radio broadcast by the English officer, Jack Hugh, about
1942.
23 B. Dey, Jamini Rai: tanr shilpachinta o shaiplakarma bishaye
kayekti dik (Kolkata, 1977), pp. 43, 57.
24 E. M. Milford, ‘A Modern Primitive’, Horizon, x/59
(November 1944), pp. 338–9. Milford visited him with a
friend in 1942. I am grateful to Nimai Chatterji for the
reference.
25 Casey, Tides and Eddies, p. 184. She organized several shows,
including one of Cecil Beaton and another of Rabindranath
Tagore.
26 Ibid., and letter dated 29 December 1964 (copy with his
son who had translated into English Roy’s letter for Lady
Casey). When the Caseys left India, Roy gave a parting gift
of his own colour set consisting of little pots decorated in
white, and the picture of a cow with sad eyes. The painting
is with her daughter. Roy sent Christmas cards every year
until 1971, the year before his death. John Irwin was one of
the small band of civil servants in India who were radical
critics of empire, unlike W. G. Archer, who had also met
Roy. Irwin later became a distinguished authority on Indian
art.
27 Kshanika, Jamini Rai Sankhya, Yr. 2, no. 4 (1378), p. 18.
28 B. Nichols, Verdict on India (London, 1944), p. 116. The
masculinity of formalist art as opposed to effeminate narra-
tive art was a well-aired topos going back to Roger Fry.
29 B. Sanyal, ‘Indian Folk Sensibility and Its Impact on
Modern Art’, in Jamini Roy, Seminar Papers in the Context of
Indian Folk Sensibility, p. 3. Sanyal, a young artist when he
met Roy in Calcutta in 1938, mentions this.
30 This was his friend Sudhin Datta’s article ‘Jamini Roy’ in
Longman’s Miscellany (Calcutta, 1943), pp. 122–47, which the
publisher Jack Adams was keen to illustrate with his works.
But the artist turned down the blocks as unsatisfactory. He
was so overwrought that he felt he would die if the book
came out. The article appeared without illustrations.
31 Roy’s letters to Dey of 5 December 1944 and 22 September
1944. There were clashes with Kramrisch, see Roy’s letter to
Dey of August 1944 and of 8 March 1945.
243
 32 Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters (Bombay,
1927), p. 93. This second edition, which contains his piece
on Roy, suggests that he met the artist in about 1944. As late
as 9 July 1968 in a letter to Maie Casey he complains of peo-
ple’s antagonism (copy in son’s possession). Milford, ‘A
Modern Primitive’, p. 338.
33 ‘Jamini Roy’, reproduced in The Art of Jamini Roy: A
Centenary Volume, exh. cat., Birla Academy (Calcutta, 1987),
p. 31. P. C. Chatterji, ‘Jamini Roy: A Profile’, Indian Oxygen
House Journal (c. 1965), p. 39, on how Roy was reluctantly
persuaded after his refusal to do any radio interviews for his
70th birthday in 1957.
34 Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters, pp. 85–92.
35 Suhrawardy, A Short Note, p. 1.
36 Von Leyden, All India Radio broadcast, 6 January 1947;
Suhrawardy, ‘The Art of Jamini Roy’, Prefaces, pp. 27–35.
37 R. Chanda, ‘Manush Nandalal’, Desh Binodan (1389), pp.
55–6. She mentions that Roy and Nandalal used to meet
occasionally as friends and he would tease Roy. See J. C.
Bagal, Centenary of the Government College of Art (Calcutta,
1964), p. 40, on the exhibition held on 30 September 1929.
38 B. B. Mukhopadhyaya, Adhunik Shilpashiksha, p. 84.
39 S. Suhrawardy, ‘The Art of Jamini Roy’, pp. 2, 5. A late
article, ‘Jamini Roy: New Trends’, Sunday Statesman (3 June
1954), reiterates his tiredness of fighting against odds for
just recognition, as well as for the quest for the ultimate
simplicity of expression. His friend Austin Coates and oth-
ers as late as 1972 stressed his reclusive character.
40 Milford, ‘A Modern Primitive’, p. 341.
41 Suhrawardy, Prefaces. Austin Coates mentions his dedica-
tion to work and utter concentration, often sitting hours in
darkness before dawn broke, thinking before painting, ‘The
Peasant Painter’, Imprint (August 1973), p. 46.
42 Suhrawardy, A Short Note, p. 2.
43 Anonymous (Suhrawardy?), ‘Bengali Artist’s Exhibition:
Jamini Roy, Modern and Versatile Themes’, Sunday
Statesman (12 January 1941).
44 S. Kramrisch, Jamini Roy (Calcutta, 1944), p. 22.
45 Milford, ‘A Modern Primitive’, pp. 338–42.
46 Jamini Roy, exh. cat., Arcade Gallery, London (London,
1945) with an introduction by J. Irwin (London, 1945).
47 I. Conlay, ‘A Hindu Who Paints Christian Subjects’, in Art
Section of a London paper in 1946 (from the family collec-
tion: the title obliterated).
48 P. Jeannerat, ‘Art in England: ‘India’s Greatest Living
Painter’, Daily Mail (25 May 1946).
49 ‘Art and Artists’, Herald Tribune (30 August 1953).
50 Asian Artists in Crystal: Designs by Contemporary Asian Artists
Engraved on Steuben Crystal (New York, 1956), p. 47. The
show went on to New York.
51 American Reporter, xx/16 (21 May 1971), back page. Mary
Margaret Byrne, ‘Jamini Roy Paintings Open Tuesday at
Museum’ (unfortunately only the year 1957 is recorded in
the collection). Hervé Masson’s piece is reproduced in The
Art of Jamini Roy, pp. 40–1. List of artists exhibiting with
American Federation of Arts (exhibition programme),
Smithsonian Archives of American Art, compiled by W.
Bruton and B. D. Aikens (Jamini Roy under annual exhibi-
244
tions, pp. 85–42), see www.aaa.si.edu. I was unable to con-
sult the archives as they were closed indefinitely for re-sit-
ing in 2006. For alerting me about Peggy Guggenheim’s
interest in Roy, I am grateful to Sundaram Tagore of
Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York. See her autobiogra-
phy, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict
(London, 1979), pp. 351–3, as well as Holland Cotter’s ‘Art
in Review; “The Promise of Modernism”: Art in India,
1890–1947’, New York Times (17 December 1999; published
online 27 August 2006), in which he mentions that
Guggenheim acquired Ray’s painting Woman with a Parrot.
52 B. Dey, ‘Jamini Raier Chitrasadhana (conversation with the
artist)’, Jamini Rai, p. 57 and also pp. 22, 101, 115. Letter to
Dey of 18 September 1942, on his plans to show folk, child
art and his works together.
53 Letter of 6 June 1946. Dey and Irwin, The Art of Jamini Roy,
p. 32. S. Nandy, ‘Shilpi Jamini Raier Chitra Sadhana’,
Kshanika (1378), ii/4, p. 29. The Amrita Bazar, 1 February
1937, mentions that he had turned to child art. On Klee
using his childhood drawings as well as his daughter’s,
supra, chapter Two note 41.
54 Von Leyden, ‘Jamini Roy’, in, The March of India (1947),
p. 16.
55 Suhrawardy, Prefaces, pp. 126 and 134, originally delivered
as Bageswari Lectures.
56 Dey and Irwin, The Art of Jamini Roy, p. 32. He also paint-
ed on wood panels.
57 Von Leyden, ‘Jamini Roy’, p. 16.
58 Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters, p. 86.
59 Jamini Roy, Indian Society of Oriental Art Catalogue (1944),
p. 28.
60 Nichols, Verdict on India, pp. 130–31.
61 H. Gangopadhyaya, ‘Jamini Rai’, Amrita, iv/4 (3 Vaisakh
1372), p. 811; Kshanika, ii/4 (1378), pp. 20–21.
62 Letters to Bishnu Dey, 22 July 1942, 9 September 1942, 22
September 1942 and 30 October 1942.
63 F. J. Korom, ‘Inventing Traditions: Folklore and Nationalism
as Historical Process in Bengal’, in D. Rightman-Augustin
and M. Pourzahovic, Folklore and Historical Process (Zagreb,
1989), pp. 57–83. Dinesh Chandra Sen, History of Bengali
Language and Literature (Calcutta, 1911) and Folk Literature
of Bengal (Calcutta, 1920).
64 G. S. Dutt, Folk Arts and Crafts of Bengal: The Collected
Papers (Calcutta, 1990), introduction by S. Bandyopadhyay,
p. xiv.
65 R. Italiaander, ‘Meetings with a Great Master’, in The Art of
Jamini Roy (Calcutta, 1987), p. 43. He met the artist around
the early 1960s.
66 Coates, ‘The Peasant Painter’, in The Art of Jamini Roy,
p. 50, a tribute published after his death in 1972.
67 Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, xi, p. 589, see supra, chapter
Two, note 4. Roy had underlined the bits that he found stir-
ring.
68 Dey, Jamini Rai, p. 48. In Bengali it was 18 Jyestha 1330. See
Kshanika, ii/4 (1378), p. 21.
69 Casey, Tides and Eddies, p. 183. See Einstein’s discussion of
the nature of myth in African sculpture, C. W. Haxthausen,
‘Negro Sculpture’ (Neger Plastik), October, cvii (Winter
 2004), pp. 130–31. Milford, ‘A Modern Primitive’, p. 341.
70 The Statesman, date obliterated (artist’s collection). Roy’s
interest in Christ dates from 1934, according to Irwin in his
Arcade Gallery introduction, Jamini Roy (London, 1945).
71 Dey, Jamini Rai, p. 42. The painting is in the National
Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi.
72 Roy, Kshanika, pp. 12–15.
73 See ‘Kandinsky’ in Pan, Primitive Renaissance, pp. 98–120.
74 J. Rai, ‘Potua Shilpa’ (dictated to Devi Prosad
Chattopadhaya), in Dey, Jamini Rai, pp. 87–8. We must
realize that this was Roy’s own construction of local identity
since he did not have a deep knowledge of the West.
75 Milford, ‘A Modern Primitive’, p. 341. There have been
claims of his being a devout Vaishnava.
76 A. K. Dutta, Jamini Roy (New Delhi, 1973), unpaginated.
77 In an article in Museum der Gegenwart, xxix (1930–31), pp.
147–51, ‘Zu meinen Wandbildern für das Museum
Folkwang in Essen’, Schlemmer explained his doll-like
figure types. I am indebted to C. W. Haxthausen for this
passage and its translation. Schlemmer’s ‘dolls’ may have
sought to approximate the art of the past as a collective cul-
tural expression: ‘I still wish to say something about my
figural type in general and in particular about these paint-
ings [his Folkwang Museum murals], something in
response to the charge against their doll-like character.
Whenever formal construction, free composition, and not
natural verisimilitude, is the primary goal – when, in short,
style is the goal – the figural type will assume a doll-like
character. For the abstraction of the human form that is at
issue here creates an image in a higher sense, it creates man
not as a natural being, but as an artificial being, it creates a
simile, a symbol of the human form. In all earlier cultures,
high cultures, in that of the Egyptians, the early Greeks, in
early Indian art, the human form was far removed from a
naturalistic image, but was accordingly that much closer to
a lapidary symbolic form: to the idol, to the doll. These
symbolic forms were formerly nourished and generated out
of religions dedicated to Gods or to Nature. We today, who
lack the great symbols and ways of seeing of the Ancients,
because we live in a time of decadence, of realignment, and
one hopes, of renewal, what else can we do at present but be
simple, simple in our own mode of representations, open to
all that gathers in our conscious and unconscious, in order
gradually to give form?’
78 Milford, ‘A Modern Primitive’, pp. 341–2.
79 Pan, Primitive Renaissance, p. 5.
80 The three vows taken by participants were: I am a Bengali,
I love the land of Bengal and I shall serve the land of
Bengal, all of them related to the Bengali village culture,
Korom, ‘Inventing Traditions’, in D. Rightman-Augustin
and M. Pourzahovic, Folklore and Historical Process, p. 74.
81 Dutt, ‘Folk Art and Its Relation to National Culture’, in
Folk Arts and Crafts (Calcutta, 1990), p. 9. In the passage he
uses the word ‘race’ to mean culture – this was a period
when race and culture were used interchangeably.
82 Dey, ‘Srijukta Jamini Raier Rabindrakatha’, Jamini Rai, p.
72. Pan, Primitive Renaissance, p. 5, on the ‘local’ in primi-
tivist thought. Shanta Devi, ‘Shilpi Srijukta Jamini Ranjan
Rayer Pradarshani’, p. 26, on Roy’s rejection of Rajastani art
as a source for his painting.
83 Dey, Jamini Rai, p. 12. There is evidence of late Marxist
thinking in Russia in favour of small decentralized commu-
nities.
84 Pan, Primitive Renaissance, p. 5.
85 See C. W. Haxthausen, ‘A Critical Illusion:
“Expressionism” in the Writings of Wilhelm Hausenstein’,
in The Ideological Crisis of Expressionism, ed. R. Rumold and
O. K. Werkmeister (Columbia, sc, 1990), pp. 177–9, where
he expands on what he calls his ‘flawed theory’ because of
his growing religiosity. Restoring the pre-industrial com-
munity was often linked with German nationalist assertions
though, in fairness, Hausenstein preferred socio-economic
explanation to the ‘essence’ of an age.
86 Pan, Primitive Renaissance, pp. 121–46. On Einstein’s radical
views on art and the people, C. W. Haxthausen, ‘Carl
Einstein on Primitive Art’, October, cv (Summer 2003),
p. 124. But see also his ‘A Critical Illusion’: ‘an anonymous,
collective art, integrated with the praxis of life, and in this
sense the original concept of expressionism is more in har-
mony with Peter Bürger’s theory of the avant-garde’, 172.
Unlike Walter Benjamin, who accepted the unfortunate
passing of myth and ritual in modern societies, Einstein
argued that the modern psyche embodied two contradictory
aspects: modern and traditional: Benjamin, ‘The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations
(London, 1982), pp. 226–7.
87 Pan, Primitive Renaissance, p. 5.
88 Ibid., p. 16.
89 Milford, ‘A Modern Primitive’, pp. 338–9.
90 Coates, ‘The Peasant Painter’, in The Art of Jamini Roy,
p. 51. See also A. K. Dutta, Jamini Roy, note 76.
91 A. Mitra, ‘Jamini Roy’, in Four Painters (Calcutta, 1965), cit-
ing the critic Prithvis Neogy who suggested this was Roy’s
belief in Vaisnava religion and the importance of repeating
the seed word in that religion.
92 Dey and Irwin, The Art of Jamini Roy, p. 35.
93 Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters, p. 91.
94 Suhrawardy, A Short Note on the Art of Jamini Roy
(Calcutta, 1947), p. 4.
95 Von Leyden, ‘Jamini Roy’, p. 17.
96 A. S. Raman, ‘Jamini Roy: An Interpretation’, Times of
India (26 September 1954), p. 7, claims as late as this date
that Roy’s discovery of folk art lacks the intellectual basis of
the Cubist discovery of African art!
97 See Mitter, Art and Nationalism, chs 1 and 2.
98 Personal communication from his oldest son, Dharmadas
Roy, who mentioned to me Roy’s interest in the work.
Tolstoy’s What is Art and Essays on Art was translated into
English by Aylmer Maude (London, 1930), which would fit
into the defining period for Roy.
99 Tolstoy, What is Art and Essays on Art, pp. 270–71. See also
E. H. Gombrich on Tolstoy’s primitivism in The Preference
for the Primitive: Episodes in the History of Western Taste and
Art (London, 2002), pp. 214–15.
245
 3. Naturalists in the Age of Modernism
1 P. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922:
Occidental Orientations (Cambridge, 1994), traces the rise of
academic art in India in the Victorian era and subsequent
nationalist resistance to illusionism. See T. J. Clark, Image of
the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution
(London, 1973), pp. 9–20, where he formulates a complex
theory of the social implications of art. He rejects the ‘hero-
ic’ interpretation of the avant-garde as relentless progress
towards the art of pure sensation, in favour of multiple
viewpoints that accommodate artists like Rodin who are
rejected in the light of modernist teleology, and brings out
the ambivalence of the whole project of modernity.
i the regional expressions of academic naturalism
1 J. C. Bagal, ‘History of the Government College of Art and
Craft’, Centenary of the Government College of Art & Craft,
Calcutta (Calcutta, 1964), p. 38.
2 See the full story in Mitter, Art and Nationalism,
pp. 294–303.
3 On Gangooly’s art given publicity in Bharati, a journal run
by the Tagores, ibid., pp. 111–12.
4 Ibid., pp. 114–18. Sashi Hesh apparently emigrated to
Canada while Phanindranath Bose settled in Scotland.
5 P. C. Chakravarty, ‘Banglar Bastavbadi Shipladhara o Atul
Basu’, Chatushkon, xiv/9 (Paush 1381 [1973]), p. 583. His
series of articles in this journal is a valuable assessment by a
contemporary but fair-minded academic painter.
6 Chakravarty, ‘Banglar Bastavbadi Shilpa’, Chatushkon,
xiv/11 (Phalgun 1381), p. 699. Roy was at the school for a
decade (1906–16).
7 The government art schools routinely engaged students to
produce artwork to welcome the visiting royalty in this
period to demonstrate loyalty to the empire, see infra,
pp. 188–90.
8 Second number of the Indian Academy of Art (April 1920).
9 Sukumar Roy and his father ran U. Ray & Son, producing
superb reproductions of art. On U. Ray’s innovative half-
tone process, S. Ghosh, Karigari Kalpana o Bangali Udyog
(Calcutta, 1988), p. 122. On Sukumar’s help to the Indian
Art Academy, Chakravarty, ‘Banglar Bastavbadi Shilpa’,
Chatushkon, xv/1 (Asharh 1382), pp. 275–6. Orientalists
were not always uncompromising as proved by the publica-
tion even in Rupam, xi (July 1922), pp. 80–81 of
Mazumdar’s painting Village Beauty.
10 They praised the orientalist Abdur Rahman Chughtai;
Indian Academy of Art, iii (July 1920), p. 51.
11 Reported in Indian Art Academy, 29 March 1921. Jamini
Roy’s painting, The Shadow of Death, won a special prize at
the art school exhibition. Praying for the Child and Widower
were commended at the Bombay Art Society while his
Divine Moment was adjudged the best work in Indian style.
Another member of the group, Jogen Seal, received the sil-
ver medal of the Society for his Tulasi Pradip; Indian
Academy of Art, iii (July 1920), pp. 43–5. See also Indian
Academy of Art, ii (April 1920). Tilak is reproduced in the
246
latter as a supplement and Tagore in the former.
12 See catalogue of the first exhibition and Chakravarty,
Chatushkon, xv/iii (Ashar 1382), p. 278. Among those who
took part were painters Jamini Roy, Atul Bose,
Hemendranath Mazumdar, Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury,
D. Rama Rao, Thakur Singh, A. X. Trindade, and sculptors
R. K. Phadke, Hironmoy Roychoudhury, Pramatha Mallik
and V. P. Karmarkar. The highest price was demanded by
the European F. Weeksler (Rs 3,000), followed by H.
Mazumdar (Night, Rs 1,900 and Palli Pran, Rs 1,800) and J.
P. Gangooly (Rs 1,000). Minor orientalists from outside
Bengal, such as M. Inayatulla and Rameswar Prasad
Varma, also took part.
13 The Statesman (22 December 1922).
14 B. Chaudhury, ‘Chitra Pradarshani’, Bharat Barsha, year 10,
vol. 2, no. 5 (1329), pp. 725–30. Chaudhuri raises an impor-
tant feature of portraiture and caricature, namely, even if
the subject’s features are changed one may be able to recog-
nize the person; E. H. Gombrich, ‘The Mask and the Face:
The Perception of Physiognomic Likeness in Life and in
Art’, in Art, Perception and Reality (Baltimore, md, 1972).
15 Chakravarty, Chatushkon, xv/iii (Ashar 1382), p. 283. The
obituary is in the Times Literary Supplement (30 May 1924).
16 Quoted in B. B. Ghosh, Chiltrashilipi Hemen Mazumdar
(Kolkata, 1993), p. 20, and Desh Binodan (1388), p. 87. The
Thirtieth Annual Show of Bombay Art Society opened on
29 March 1920. Smriti (Reminiscence) won a gold medal
while his Abhiman (Hurt Feeling) won praise.
17 See for instance, Shilpi, i/3 (Autumn 1929), p. 38, on com-
missions from Jodhpur and Cooch-Behar. His patrons
included the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar, who gave a testimo-
nial that although he had met many artists in Bombay he
had not found one so talented. The Maharaja of
Mayurbhanj bought a large number of his works, providing
him with regular commissions. On the calendar painting
for Lalchand and Sons, B. Ghosh, ‘Chitrashilpi’, p. 87.
18 One of the members of his group holds that he had taken
another artist, B. Mazumdar, to help him with landscape
work. Hemendrarath had kept a diary of his sojourn in
Patiala which is now lost. In one letter he mentions that he
had so pleased the ruler that he was able to accompany him
on tours, and painted portraits of the ladies of the family.
The letter dated 18 May 1931 mentions that the orientalist
Baroda Ukil was also in Patiala at that time hoping to sell
31 of his works. He left after a disappointing sale. From
Hemendrarath’s letters, too, we learn of Mazumdar’s wife’s
money worries. In one he asks her to settle all the outstand-
ing debts and reveals his dream of building his own house. I
tried to trace the screen through the kind generosity of the
present descendant of the Maharaja but my visit to Patiala
failed to unearth it, though I found a landscape by B.
Mazumdar.
19 See H. Mazumdar, Chhabir Chashma, ed. U. Mazumdar
(Calcutta, 1991), pp. 81, 98 and passim.
20 This was published in a catalogue of All India Exhibition
(Fine Arts Section), (Delhi, c.1947), p. xiv (courtesy of
Mazumdar’s daughter-in-law). I am deeply indebted to
Pradyot Roy for introducing me to her.
21 D. P. Mukerji, ‘The Modern Movement’, Shilpi, i/3
(Autumn 1929), pp. 17–19.
22 A.M.T. Acharya, Indian Masters (Calcutta, 1928), unpaginat-
ed. On him see, Shilpi, i/1 (July 1929), p. 4. A partisan,
Acharya mentions that Abanindranath, ‘the distinguished
and chief apostle of this [orientalist] school of painting
decidedly refused to extend his support to the Publishers for
reasons not unintelligible.’
23 One such, somewhat corny, poem is ‘The Gift of the Artist’:
Demands the client of the artist/ A trivial picture/ Why so
dear?/ Paints, oils, worn fabric,/ Weapons – a mere few
brushes/ Such high price for what?/ Even more trivial is the
subject/ Platted tresses on her bare shoulders/ Delicately
Treads the belle, Draped in a wet sari/ She is there every-
day/In weather, rainy or dry/I spy her on the steps of the
pond/ Thirty years hence/ From the sagging body shall/
Depart the sweet bloom of youth/ The belle of my picture/
Behold her a century hence, Still a maiden. Fair/ Forever in
this fashion/ Will she rest by your side, In her wet sari/ Did
the artist make much? When in return, he gave/ Eternal
youth and beauty?
24 The International Exhibition of Portraits of Great Beauties
of the World was held at Long Beach, California in 1952.
Mazumdar’s work was the Indian entry, The Statesman (31
May 1952); see B. B. Ghosh, Chitrashilpi Hemen Majumdar
(Kolkata, 1993). It was recently offered at an auction in
New Delhi (Catalogue of Auction of Paintings and Works of
Art by Bowrings Fine Art Auctioneers, Oberoi, New Delhi, 5
November 2001, no. 18).
25 For instance, Land of Love by B. Varma, Mitter, Art and
Nationalism, colour pl. xxx. On the three brothers, Ranada,
Barada and Sarada Ukil, see supra, p. 51 and infra, p. 224.
26 Ghosh, Chitrashilpi, pp. 38–40.
27 However, in the last years of her life, the artist’s widow
confirmed that she sat for him, which finds support in his
intimate letters to her. In a letter from Patiala in 1931 he
mentions that he had sold paintings for which she had sat.
From the evidence, one may conjecture that for the figures,
his wife was the model, but the faces were often of different
women. The painting, Rose or Thorn? (1936), was supposed-
ly based on the photograph of a fourteen-year-old girl dis-
tantly related to him. I am grateful to his daughter-in-law
for the information.
28 E. L. Collingham, Imperial Bodies (Cambridge, 2001).
29 See for instance, a recent exhibition at Tate Britain, Exposed:
The Victorian Nude, ed. Alison Smith (London, 2001), on
Victorian ambivalence towards nudity and erotic subjects.
Also P. Gay, ‘“Victorian Sexuality”: Old Texts and New
Insights’, American Scholar, xxxxix (1980), pp. 372–8, and
The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, ii, The Tender
Passion (Oxford, 1984). For a feminist analysis of Western
images of the female body as a contribution to the debate on
art and pornography, L. Nead, The Female Nude (London,
1992).
30 Rabindra Rachanabali, xi, p. 580.
31 The Indian Charivari (13 June 1873), inside front cover, car-
ried an advertisement entitled ‘The Gallery of Beauty’,
offering ‘exquisite recent Photographs, taken from Life, of
the most beautiful Actresses and Celebrities, in costume and
otherwise.’ A. A. Gill in ‘Nude Awakening’, Sunday Times
Magazine (12 September 2004), pp. 33–9, describes the
threat to the ideal nude with the advent of photography.
32 B. Tagore, in A. Acharya and S. Som, Bangla Shilpa
Samalochanar Dhara (Calcutta, 1986), p. 293. See also
‘Deyaler Chhabi’, ibid., pp. 212–13; B. Tagore, ‘Nagnatar
Saundarja’, Bharati o Balak (1889), pp. 85ff.
33 N. C. Chaudhuri, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
(London, 1951), pp. 453–4. See Pal’s Character Sketches.
34 B. C. Pal, ‘ Religion, Morality and Art’, Narayan, i/2 (1322),
pp. 1160ff.
35 N. K. Gupta, Narayan, ii/2 (1323), pp. 681ff. In his memoirs,
Nalinikanta Gupta writes with amusement that
Chittaranjan was so impressed by the article that he refused
to believe that it was not by Aurobindo, see N. Gupta,
Smritir Pata (Kolkata, 1370), pp. 138–9.
36 R. K. Mukherjee, ‘Sahitya o Suniti’, Narayan, ii/2 (1323),
p. 998. Strangely, even Mukherjee, an ancient historian, was
unable to appreciate the erotic art of Hindu temples.
37 H. Mazumdar, Shilpa Neeti (Kolkata, c. 1926), pp. 326–7. It
is interesting that the Indian Academy of Art published some
of the earliest photographs of nudes based on Indian mod-
els: iii (July 1920).
38 Acharya, Indian Masters, unpaginated.
39 Shilpi (July 1929).
40 I am indebted to Sidhartha Ghosh. The joke is ascribed to
Sajani Kanta Datta, editor of the satirical journal Shanibarer
Chithi in the 1930s.
41 Chakravarty, Chatushkon, xv/4 (Sraban 1382), pp. 615–16.
42 On the politics of the art school in the years 1905–15, Mitter,
Art and Nationalism, pp. 279–85, 302–6, 313–14.
43 Shilpi, i/1 (July 1929), p. 5. Mukul Dey received a diploma
in mural painting from the Royal College of Art in 1922,
where he specialized in etching, for which he is best known
(the artist’s letter to Mary Lago dated 3 April 1970).
44 Bagal, ‘History of the Government College of Art and
Craft’, pp. 44–50. M. Dey, Amar Katha (Kolkata, 1402),
pp. 100–19, where he offers a different version, claiming
Gangooly’s hostility to him though making clear his dislike
of Brown. Interestingly, neither Dey nor the official report
mentions any difference with Bose.
45 Shilpi, i/1 (July 1929), pp. 6–7, 38; Shilpi, i/3 (Autumn 1929),
pp. 37–8. Dey himself, however, organized two major
shows: Jamini Roy in 1929 and Tagore in 1932. These were
official portraits of the reigning monarch King George v
and Queen Mary, personally chosen by the king for decorat-
ing one of the state drawing rooms in the Viceroy’s House
in New Delhi. The leading portraitists Bose of Calcutta and
Lalkaka of Bombay were chosen to demonstrate the even-
handed treatment of Bengal and Bombay, the two artistic
rivals, by the Raj.
46 Chakravarty, Chatushkon, xiv/12 (Chaitra 1381), pp. 757–60.
Though somewhat rambling, these articles offer us another
and more objective viewpoint.
47 Chakravarty, Chatushkon, xv/4 (Sraban 1382), pp. 318–19 on
enlisting the support of Maharaja Pradyot Kumar Tagore
that led to the founding of the society.
247
 48 Chakravarty, Chatushkon, xiv/1i (Phalgun 1381), pp. 706–7.
49 Ananda Bazar Patrika, 16 August 1933. The move to have a
central body with a national art policy originated early in
the twentieth century as part of the objective of the colonial
government to use art as indirect propaganda, see infra,
p. 195. A central institution was in fact set up after
Independence in 1947 by the first Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru. Lalit Kala Akademi was to be the co-
ordinating central body for the nation’s art.
50 See Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 300–01.
51 Chakravarty, Chatushkon, xv/4 (Sravan 1382), pp. 319–20.
52 Annual Exhibition, Academy of Fine Arts, 1st year, Calcutta
(December 1933– January 1934). Included were J. P.
Gangooly, Dhurandhar, S. L. Haldanker, L. N. Taskar,
Manchershaw Pithawalla, Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury,
Thakur Singh, B.C. Law, Jamini Roy, Atul Bose, the lead-
ing orientalists and their pupils. There were also younger
unknown artists.
53 Annual Exhibition, Academy of Fine Arts, 2nd year
(December 1934–January 1935). Paintings by the Europeans
Edwin Landseer, William Orpen, William Etty and
Thomas and William Daniell came from various collections
in Calcutta. Indian painters were Atul Bose, M. V.
Athavale, Jainul Abedin, A. R. Chughtai, M. V.
Dhurandhar, J. P. Gangooly, B. C. Law, Hemen Mazumdar
(landscape sent from Patiala), Pramatha Mallik, Jamini Roy
(a set of three: Krishna Balaram, Gopini, Mother and Child),
Thakur Singh, L. N. Tasker and Sarada and Ranada Ukil.
The Japanese painter Taikwan’s Kali and Saraswati, done in
1905, were now put up for sale (on him, Mitter, Art and
Nationalism, pp. 289–94.)
54 Chakravarty, Chatushkon, xv/4 (Sraban 1382), pp. 319–21.
55 Preface of catalogue of Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings
of Atul Bose, (Calcutta, December 1939).
56 S. Datta, ‘Mr Atul Bose’s Exhibition’, a newspaper review
dated December 1939 with title obliterated (probably The
Statesman) in the artist’s family.
57 Ibid.
58 A. Bose, Verified Perspective (Calcutta, 1944), p. 67. Bose’s
inspirations were Joshua Reynolds, Edwin Poynter and
other academic artists (thanks to his son Sanjit Bose for the
information).
59 K. C. Aryan, 100 Years Survey of Punjab Painting, 1841–1941
(Patiala, 1977), pp. 109–10.
60 A. Naqvi. Image and Identity (Karachi, 1998), pp. 99–133
and figs 26, 35, 36.
61 See Aryan, Punjab Painting for details of painting in the
region. On Sobha Singh, see also Wikipedia and Harbans
Singh, ed., Encyclopedia of Sikhism (Patiala, 1997); M. Kaur,
Sobha Singh Painter of the [sic] Destiny (Amritsar, 1986).
62 Shilpi, i/1 (Summer 1929), p. 41.
63 Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 63–79.
64 Ibid.
65 I am indebted to the important doctoral dissertation of
Nalini Bhagwat, ‘Development of Contemporary Art in
Western India’, University of Baroda 1983, section on ‘Open
Air School’.
66 See The Studio in the 1920s and ’30s: lxxxix/386 (May 1925),
248
p. 291, on E. Vignal, on W. Russell Flint, xcii/400 (July
1926), p. 83. Rather than individual artists, a general interest
is evident. By this time, the French Impressionists and post-
Impressionists also featured regularly in the magazine.
67 There is a particularly impressive painting by Satwalekar of
the Himalayas in the Sri Bhavani Musueum in the old
princely state of Aundh, Maharastra.
68 Transcript of Haldankar obituary (unpublished) by his
student, Baburao Sadwelkar, p. 7.
69 See catalogue, M. R. Acharekar, Retrospective Art Exhibition
(Bombay, 1973), p. 2.
70 Acharekar, Rupadarsini (Bombay, 1958), p. vii. I met
Acharekar through V. R. Amberkar, a close associate of the
group in the early 1980s.
71 The Indian Academy of Art, iii (July 1920), p. 50. Also repro-
duced in A.M.T. Acharya, Indian Masters (Calcutta, 1928), 1.
On Talim, ed., Artists Directory, Lalit Kala Akademi (New
Delhi, 1962). On the Mhatre episode, Mitter, Art and
Nationalism, pp. 102–7.
72 J. Sen, ‘Nabin Bhaskar’, Bharat Barsha, yr 4, vol. 1, no. 1
(1323), pp. 60–63.
73 I had an opportunity to visit the late artist’s studio where
most of the later sculptures were spread around the garden.
See for reproductions, An Exhibition of His (Karmarkar)
Sculptures at the Nehru Centre, Worli (Mumbai, December
1996–January 1997). Interestingly, his studio contained a
number of books on drawing and modelling published in
England, including F. R. Yerbury’s well-known work, The
Human Form and Its Use in Art (London, 1925).
74 See his sculpture, Spring, Indian Academy of Art, iii (July
1920), unpaginated pl.
75 K. Sarkar, Shilpi Saptak (Kolkata, 1977), p. 80.
76 For Bose’s life and career see Mitter, Art and Nationalism,
pp. 117–18.
77 Indian Masters, 1928, p. xi.
78 My section on Rao is largely based on the rare monograph
on the artist, Damerla Rama Rao: Masterpieces, published in
1969 by Damerla Rama Rao Memorial Art Gallery and
School. I am indebted to Madhu Jain for making it avail-
able to me. She published the first essay that gave India-
wide publicity to the artist (M. Jain, ‘A Forgotten Treasure’,
India Today, 15 November 1990, pp. 66–8). His sudden
death may have robbed him of recognition but he left a
small band of disciples and admirers. See chapter Four on
Solomon.
79 Ravishankar Rawal, ‘My Memories of Rama Rao’, in
Damerla Rama Rao, p. 15. Rao’s older contemporary at
Bombay art school, who went on to found a nationalist art
school in Gujarat under Bengal School’s inspiration, Rawal
speaks here of his admiration for the artist. On Rawal,
Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 8–9, 125, 330–32.
80 G. Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters (Bombay,
n.d.[1940s]), pp. 95–100.
81 Catalogue of the Academy of Fine Arts Exhibition, 1921–2.
Damerla Rama Rao, pp. 4–7,
82 Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters, pp. 77–8.
83 Damerla Rama Rao, p. 6. Nakula is mentioned by Madhu
Jain in ‘A Forgotten Treasure’.
 84 Acharya, Indian Masters, i (June 1928), p. xiii.
85 See the revised and enlarged edition of 1951 published by
the Government of India, New Delhi, pl. 68.
ii from orientalism to a new naturalism: k.
venkatappa and deviprosad roy chowdhury
1 This brief account of Venkatappa’s life is based on his
diaries preserved in the Karnataka Archives. I am grateful
to the Ministry of Education, Karnataka Government, for
permission to consult the Venkatappa diaries and to the
Venkatappa Museum for permission to document the paint-
ings. I am also grateful to R. Eswar Raju of Chitra Shilpi K.
Venkatappa Trust, Chiranjiv Singh, Nanjunda Rao,
Munuswami, Y. Subramaniya Raju and Akumal
Ramachander for all their help. For a general account on
Venkatappa, see V. Sitaramiah, Venkatappa (Delhi, 1968).
2 Mrs D. P. Roy Chowdhury, ‘Life with an Artist’, Swatantra
(January 1953–August 1953) [ten articles]. I had the privi-
lege of knowing the artist who was a friend of my parents.
Mrs Roy Chowdhury was a cultivated lady from a distin-
guished family in Calcutta. Her sister was cast by Jean
Renoir in The River, based on Rumer Godden’s story and
filmed in India.
3 Sitaramiah, Venkatappa, pp. i–ii. Venkatachalam,
Contemporary Indian Painters, pp. 36–7. K. Sarkar, Bharater
Bhaskar o Chitrashilpi (Kolkata, 1984), p. 151.
4 Though Percy Brown had just joined the institution as
Principal, Abanindranath continued to be influential until
his resignation in 1915.
5 Sister Nivedita and A. Coomaraswamy, Myths of the Hindus
and Buddhists (London, 1918), pls pp. 30, 56, 60, 64, 72, 78,
102; A. Tagore, Notes on Indian Artistic Anatomy (Calcutta,
1914).
6 In 1913, as Venkatappa’s first year at the art school drew to
a close, he started keeping a diary in which he noted that
he had obtained a photograph of the great musician, Veena
Sheshanna. He probably had some instructions on the vina
in 1912, but did he know that this great musician would
later be his teacher?
7 The offer came from the Director of Public Instruction in
Bengal, probably at Brown’s instance.
8 His chief patron, the Maharaja of Mysore, bought two of
his works at the Madras Fine Arts Society exhibition (1918).
In 1920 he was sent Rs 153.7 by the Indian Society of
Oriental Art, subsequent to the annual exhibition and a fur-
ther Rs 87.8 for another painting. He instructed the society
to continue to display his landscape in their showroom in
the hope that it would sell.
9 Treasurywalla expressed dissatisfaction with his purchase
The Buddha and His Disciples, forcing the artist to make cor-
rections. There followed further correspondence from the
collector, offering Rs 100 for one work and returning
another, with suggestions for improving the figure of
Radha. Venkatappa, who became irritated with this bar-
gaining, refused to accept less than Rs 200. He received a
lame reply on 20 February that although the work was
possibly worth Rs 500, he could not afford the high price,
offering only Rs 130. This was finally accepted.
Treasurywalla continued with his importunities, showing
interest in other paintings, especially the celebrated Mad
After Veena, but he forced the artist to reduce his price. The
collector was Amrita Sher-Gil’s friend Karl Khandalavala’s
uncle (infra, p. 46. Another patron, the Maharani of Cooch
Bihar, wanted Venkatappa to improve her husband’s
portrait, which he bluntly refused to do. An exception
was James Cousins, the Theosophist and a fervent champion
of orientalist art, who never haggled over price.
10 One example of his modern approach is his relief of
Sakuntala and Kanva. Like his teacher Abanindranath, he
sought to represent the complex mixture of regret and satis-
faction on Kanva’s face at the imminent departure of his
adopted daughter for her husband’s house.
11 Later on he criticized Nandalal’s illustration of the mythical
Garuda in Myths of the Hindus and the Buddhists. The pow-
erful painting showed Garuda with a green body and ver-
milion feet, which to Venkatappa was unnatural: although
art must be informed by idealism, it should not sacrifice
verisimilitude.
12 This obsession with accuracy can, for instance, be seen in
the episode related to Sister Nivedita’s Myths of the Hindus
and the Buddhists. One of Venkatappa’s illustrations was
printed in reverse, showing the hero accepting a gift with
his left hand, a solecism. The artist took the Ramakrishna
Mission, the executors of her will, to court for this and felt
vindicated when a token fine of one rupee was imposed on
the Mission.
13 Mitter, Art and Nationalism, colour pl. xxv.
14 Diary entry, 5 September 1926.
15 This period was documented by B.G.L. Swami who came
to know him well in the 1940s, See the articles in Sudha, 3
parts (30 July 1978, 6 August 1978 and 30 September 1978).
Mysore was made famous by the novelist R. K. Narayan as
Malgudi.
16 Musically gifted, in his later years he attained proficiency
in classical Karnataka music. This too became a solitary
exercise, as he often practised late into the night, rarely
performing for an audience. The title of the celebrated
painting Mad After Veena was an allegory of Venkatappa’s
decision to take up music. His guru Abanindranath had
expressed concern that Venkatappa’s new interest would
lead to the neglect of his art. The artist represents himself
as an emaciated ascetic adoring the musical instrument vina,
whilst the bust of Abanindranath gazes disapprovingly at
him. The work, inspired by Rajput and Mughal miniatures,
became renowned because of its complex narrative.
Venkatappa sent the picture to Abanindranath for com-
ments. He gave a qualified approval that the technique of
the work was excellent, but its theme was not universal
enough to appeal to everyone.
17 Diary entry, March and April 1924.
18 His reputation for asceticism was known in Calcutta, as
shown by the half-humorous remark of Rabindranath
Tagore’s in 1922: ‘You have not yet become a sannyasi?’
Ever a perfectionist, he once told Abanindranath, ‘I am
married to art and she is a jealous mistress.’
249
 Venkatachalam’s ‘K. Venkatappa’, in Contemporary Indian
Painters, pp. 35–41, is one of the first detailed analyses of the
artist.
19 In the 1940s Swamy, the author of the articles on
Venkatappa, in Sudha, supra note 14, who was keen to meet
this ‘strange’ man he had heard so much about, took a letter
of introduction to the artist’s house. When he knocked on
the door, the person who opened it told him that
Venkatappa was out and was generally unavailable. He
took this man to be the servant and only later did he learn
that Venkatappa himself had opened the door. A few years
later, a chance meeting and their common interest in plants
did bring them together, a friendship that lasted until the
artist’s death.
20 Obituary, Ananda Bazar Patrika (16 October 1975). Mainichi
(Japan) (25 August 1954), called him India’s greatest sculp-
tor.
21 Nichols, Verdict on India, p. 130. Mrs Roy Chowdhury, ‘Life
with an Artist’, Swatantra (June 1953), p. 17.
22 Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters, pp. 48–9.
23 Excerpt from Langer’s To Yokohama and Back, in German
Democratic Review, xv (September 1974), p. 57.
24 K. Biswas, Devi Prosad Roy Chowdhury (Delhi, 1973),
unpaginated. Boeiss has been mentioned by various Indian
authors as an Italian but with no further information. His
name does not seem Italian but I have not been able to trace
him.
25 S. Kramrisch, ‘A Great Indian Sculptor’, The Englishman
(24 December 1926).
26 The Hindu (20 January 1936).
27 Talk at the Rotary Club, ‘The Impact of the West’, The
Hindu (17 January 1936) and Madras Mail (17 January 1936).
See, even earlier, Forward (14 November 1928). Review of
art exhibition of the Madras School of Art, Prabasi, xxxix/12
(Chaitra 1342), pp. 875–7.
28 See his short story, ‘Genius’, reprint from Shanibarer Chithi
(Kartik 1366).
29 Mrs Roy Chowdhury, ‘Life with an Artist’, p. 23.
30 Revolutionary terrorists such as M. N. Roy had already left
India to join the International Communist movement to
spread revolution worldwide. Meanwhile British radicals
were trying to send trade unionists to India to organize the
labourers without success until the mid-1920s. On a good
overview of the rise of left movements in India, see Sumit
Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (London, 1989), chap. v
(1922–7), chap. vi (1928–9, 1935–7), chap. vii (1942–5).
31 P.R.R. Rao, ‘Devi Prasad Roy Choudhury: “A Portrait”’, in
Choudhury and His Art (Madras, 1943), p. 9.
32 Ibid., p. 11. This was my own impression of him.
33 Ibid., p. 13.
34 Lanteri, E. Modelling: A Guide for Teachers and Students, 3
vols (London, 1902–11). Supra, p. 95. On Fanindranath
Bose’s meeting with Rodin, Mitter, Art and Nationalism,
p. 117.
35 D. Roy Chowdhury, ‘Directions in Sculpture’, All India
Radio broadcast for Southeast Asia and Far East, 24
January 1951. Typically, he admired Picasso, I think because
of his phenomenal skill, which made modernism less sus-
250
pect. See Deviprosad’s criticism of Tagore’s painting as
frighteningly modern (Presidential address, Prabasi Banga
Sahitya Sammelan, 12th Session, Town Hall, Calcutta, 10
Paush 1341).
36 Rao, ‘Devi Prasad Roy Choudhury: “A Portrait”’, p. 1.
Individual sculptures in the Travancore Temple Entry
group express the extremes of degradation.
37 Ibid. See also the front page report on his death in Ananda
Bazar Patrika.
38 Roy Chowdhury, ‘Directions in Sculpture’.
4. Contested Nationalism: The New Delhi and
India House Murals
1 R. G. Irving, Indian Summer: Lutyens, Baker and Imperial
Delhi (New Haven, ct, 1981), pp. 91, 101, 104.
2 Quoted in Mary Lutyens, Edwin Lutyens by His Daughter
(London, 1980), pp. 104, 116 and 114.
3 T. R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and the
British Raj (London and Boston, ma, 1989), esp. pp. 55–104.
4 C. Hussey, The Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens (London, 1953),
p. 245. On the view of Indians being capable only of ingen-
ious but intellectually lower forms of art, i.e. decoration, see
P. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922:
Occidental Orientations (Cambridge, 1994), chap. 2, esp.
p. 52.
5 H. Baker, Architecture and Personalities (London, 1944),
pp. 67–8.
6 Irving, Indian Summer, p. 105. Baker, Architecture and
Personalities, pp. 216–22. The Times (3 October 1912).
7 Irving, Indian Summer, pp. 106–7. Report on Modern Indian
Architecture by Government of India, India Society, London,
1913 (iol (India Office Library)). Hussey, Life of Sir Edwin
Lutyens, p. 245.
8 Irving, Indian Summer, p. 108. Samarendra Gupta, Vice
Principal of the Lahore art school, was one of
Abanindranath’s pupils.
9 Irving, Indian Summer, pp. 108 and 194. B. S. Cohn,
‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, in E.
Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge, 1984), pp. 165–210, on Raj recycling of Mughal
rituals of empire.
10 M. Lutyens, Edwin Lutyens by His Daughter, p. 126.
11 Hussey, Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens, pp. 347–8, on Lutyens’s
1916 and 1922 Memoranda to the government.
12 J. Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture (London, 1855), p. xii.
13 H. Smith, ‘Decorative Painting in the Domestic Interior in
England and Wales, c. 1850–1890’, London University dis-
sertation, pp. 84, 91, 107, 144.
14 B. Petrie, Puvis de Chavannes (Aldershot, 1997). J. Mucha et
al., Alphonse Mucha (London, 1974). See also brochure on
the Municipal Hall, Prague (n.d.).
15 D. Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America (New
Haven, ct, 2002). The Indian communists seem to have
known their works in the 1940s.
16 On Abanindranath’s mural, Kaca O Devajani, see Mitter, Art
and Nationalism, pp. 298–300. During the second half of the
 nineteenth century, attempts were made by the Romantics,
especially Gothic Revivalists, to re-establish murals as archi-
tectural decoration in homes (see Smith, ‘Decorative
Painting in the Domestic Interior in England and Wales’).
17 On Cennini, see Smith, ‘Decorative Painting in the
Domestic Interior in England and Wales’, p. 289. Tempera
method with egg yolk as a binding agent was studied in
Cennini’s text by Herringham, who along with Joseph
Southall (see supra, p. 68), was a leading figure in English
tempera revival. She studied tempera work at Ajanta: M.
Lago, Christiana Herringham and the Edwardian Art Scene
(London, 1996), the definitive biography of a key figure in
the late Victorian and Edwardian art world.
18 See Mitter, Art and Nationalism, chap. 9.
19 On Rawal, see Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 8–9, 125, 330.
Diamond Jubilee of BAS (unpaginated) on the prize. From
1916 onwards, Raval’s pupils also showed nationalist works
at bas.
20 M. V. Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham
(Bombay, 1940), pp. 70–71.
21 See Mitter, Art and Nationalism, p. 61.
22 On Solomon, The Times (22 December 1965). On his panel
fresco for the Royal Academy, ‘The Masque of Cupid’, The
Studio, xxv (1902), p. 38. Toiles marouflées had been sanc-
tified by Puvis de Chavanne himself in his portrayal of
Sainte Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris, in the Panthéon.
23 Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, pp. 71–2.
W.E.G. Solomon, The Bombay Revival of Indian Art
(Bombay, 1924), pp. 68ff.
24 The outgoing Principal Cecil Burns’ Confidential Memo to
the Department of Education, 1918, ‘Hogarth is unfit to
work as Principal but as there is no other person available, I
am compelled to recommend him . . . He is absolutely unfit
to impart higher Art Education’ (quoted in Dhurandhar,
Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 66).
25 Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, pp. 71–3.
Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, pp. 73ff. and 85. J.
Charmley, Lord Lloyd and the Decline of the British Empire
(London, 1987), on the career of George Lloyd, a junior
member of the banking family.
26 Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, pp. 68ff. He men-
tions that public interest in the school was kindled by the
efforts of Marmaduke Pickhall, editor of the Bombay
Chronicle, founded by the early Congress leader,
Phirozeshah Mehta. Kanhaiyalal Vakil, art critic of the
paper, became a valuable Solomon ally.
27 W.E.G. Solomon, Mural Painting of the Bombay School
(Bombay, 1930), p. 19. Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian
Art, p. 73. Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish
Varsham, p. 71. Burns was a student of the academic painter
Hubert Herkomer but following previous precedents he
did not encourage fine art tradition in Bombay, anon., Story
of Sir J. J. School of Art, 1857–1957 (Bombay, 1957), p. 89. In
Dhurandhar’s memoir, an incident does indicate the occa-
sional use of undraped models: we came to know that the
model was having her monthly period and as she had to sit
without clothes, she refused to come back but Cable Sahib
(a teacher) made her stand half naked there (Dhurandhar,
Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 60).
28 Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, p. 64. Dhurandhar,
Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, pp. 74, 76ff. See
Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 90–92.
29 Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 74.
This mural has been preserved at the school. The sum
offered was Rs 5000 (Story of Sir J. J. School, p. 91).
30 Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, pp. 67, 75. On
Alphons Mucha, his son J. Mucha et al., Mucha (London,
1971). Indian seasons are six in number.
31 Solomon, Mural Paintings, p. 23.
32 On Birley, who painted the portrait of the King, Times of
India (27 February 1935).
33 V. S. Metta, ‘Revival of Mural Decoration in India’, Apollo,
vi (July–December 1927), pp. 24–6.
34 Times of India (25 March 1904).
35 Times of India (8 March 1907).
36 Solomon, Mural Paintings, pp. 59–60.
37 Solomon, Mural Paintings, pp. 83ff. Solomon was keen to
preserve the ‘flat’ quality of Indian art and yet inject natu-
ralism into it, an impossible task among art teachers as we
know from earlier debates (Mitter, Art and Nationalism,
p. 43), Solomon’s letter to Dhurandhar, 29 April 1922
(Diary, Appendix).
38 Solomon, Mural Paintings, p. 5.
39 W.E.G. Solomon, Jottings at Ajanta (Bombay, 1923); The
Women of Ajanta (Bombay, 1923); The Charm of Indian Art
(Bombay, 1926); Essays on Mughal Art (Bombay, 1932) and
introductions to the collections of the Prince of Wales
Museum, Bombay.
40 Solomon, Mural Paintings, pp. 19–20.
41 Rupam, viii (October 1921).
42 K. Vakil, ‘Humours of Havellism’, Times of India (8 August
1931), cited during India House murals controversy. But see
his From Havellism to Vital Art (Bombay, n.d.). His brush
with Havell must have begun in the 1920s. On his attack on
oriental art, Bombay Chronicle (18 May 1930).
43 L. Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (London, 1951),
p. 247.
44 Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 33. As
we have seen with Percy Brown in Calcutta, the heads of
art schools recruited students to produce welcoming art
works for every visit of the Prince of Wales.
45 Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, pp. 75ff.
Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 76.
46 Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, p. 14 (pylons).
47 Solomon’s letter to Dhurandhar is in the Appendix of his
memoir. The Leader, xvii (21 November 1921, 19 March
1922). For Chapekar’s deposition before his execution, see
E. Kedourie, Nationalism in Asia and Africa (London, 1970).
On the riots during the Prince’s visit, J. Brown, Modern
India: the Origins of an Indian Democracy (Oxford, 1985),
p. 217.
48 Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, p. 76. Sarasvati is
the Hindu goddess of learning.
49 Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, p. 78.
50 On Lloyd’s opposition to the 1935 act, P. A. Spear, A History
of India, ii (Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 203.
251
 51 Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, p. 77. On Lloyd’s
comment about Indians, Piers Brendan, Sunday Observer (13
December 1987), p. 22. He was one of the founders of the
British Council.
52 Talk at the Bombay Students Brotherhood, Story of Sir J. J.
School of Art, 1857–1957, p. 93.
53 On the India Society’s role in the appreciation of Indian
art and culture in Britain, Mitter, Art and Nationalism,
pp. 311–13.
54 Rothenstein to Tagore, 6 April 1923, in M. Lago, Imperfect
Encounter (Cambridge, ma, 1972), p. 307.
55 On Fine Arts Committee, see British Empire Exhibition
Descriptive Catalogue of Modern Indian Paintings and
Sculptures, Calcutta, Bombay, Lahore (Bombay, 1924). I am
grateful to the Chughtai Museum for permission to use this
rare catalogue printed by the Times of India.
56 Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, chap. 3 on the
Indian Room. See also pp. 112ff, and Dhurandhar,
Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, pp. 78, 80.
57 Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, chap. 3. On Mhatre,
Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 102–6.
58 Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 81.
59 Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, p. 60, and chaps 4
and 5.
60 British Empire Exhibition Catalogue.
61 Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 80.
62 These two paintings were sold at Sotheby’s along with one
of Asit Haldar’s shown at Wembley.
63 Brief biography compiled by Mukul Dey himself (supplied
by Mary Lago). On Bose-Dey enemity, infra, p. 140.
64 V. B. Metta, ‘Modern Art at Wembley: Bengal’, Rupam, xxi
(January 1925), pp. 14–15.
65 L. Heath, ‘Modern Art at Wembley: Punjab’, Rupam, xxi
(January 1925), p. 14. Also ‘Modern Bengal Painting at
Wembley’ Art Notes, Rupam, xxiv (October 1925), p. 109.
66 The Studio, lxxxix (January–June 1925), p. 138.
67 Ibid., p. 145.
68 Rothenstein to Tagore, in Lago, Imperfect Encounter, p. 307.
69 Indian Art and Letters, i/1 (May 1925), p. 26. Born in India, a
prime actor in establishing British supremacy in Central
Asia, Francis Younghusband (1863–1942) was also in search
of spiritual enlightenment in Tibet; see Benedict Allen, The
Faber Book of Exploration (London, 2003). Younghusband’s
The Heart of Nature was published in 1921. J. J. Clarke,
Oriental Enlightenment (London, 1997), p. 139, uses
Younghusband to argue the nature of Western hegemony in
that it admired those it dominated, the case also of the
Lutyens family.
70 Havell’s letter of 29 August 1925, Indian Art and Letters, i/2
(November 1925), p. 106. Havell: ‘Indian Art at Wembley’,
Rupam, xxi (January 1925), p. 12.
71 Indian Art and Letters, i/1 (May 1925), p. 20. On the way to
England, Solomon spoke on his school at the Musée Guimet
in Paris. Lord Ronaldshay had been a fervent champion of
oriental art during his period as the Lieutenant-Governor of
Bengal (Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 317, 377).
72 Conference on Indian Art held at the British Empire
Exhibition on Monday, 2 June 1924 (iol), p. 50.
252
73 Conference on Indian Art, p. 3. Havell’s books had helped
establish the aesthetic importance of Indian art.
74 Conference on Indian Art, pp. 1–14. The exhibition’s
Indian commissioner was Dewan Bahadur
Vijayaraghavacharya.
75 Conference on Indian Art, p. 19.
76 Conference on Indian Art, p. 19.
77 E. H. Gombrich’s famous criticism of the innocent eye and
his concept of schema and correction, Art and Illusion
(London, 1954) put paid to this view.
78 Rupam, xix–xx (July–December 1924), pp. 130 and 124–30.
Conference on Indian Art, p. 10.
79 Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 73.
See supra, p. 160, on Damerla Rama Rao’s participation in
the exercise.
80 P. Brown, ‘The Mural Paintings at New Delhi’, Indian State
Railways Magazine, iv/ 5 (February 1931), p. 399.
81 Lago, Imperfect Encounter, p. 300.
82 Hussey, Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens, p. 497.
83 Irving, Indian Summer, p. 296. Baker had a fine collection of
primitive art.
84 Baker, Architecture and Personalities, p. 68.
85 The Times, 3 October 1912. Baker, Architecture and
Personalities, p. 222. On Baker’s views on decoration, see
Baker, Architecture and Personalities, chap. 10. Gilbert Scott’s
Architecture of Humanism is quoted on the marriage of the
arts: ‘Architecture controls and disciplines the beauty of
painting, sculpture, and the minor arts.’
86 Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, p. 81.
87 Ibid., p. 81.
88 Conference on Indian Art, p. 10.
89 Bombay Chronicle (13 December 1924); New India (7
January 1925); Times of India (6 January 1925); The
Englishman (5 January 1925); The Hindu (17 January 1925).
90 Mentioned in Indian Art and Letters, i/1 (May 1925), 3.
Indian Daily Mail (9 January 1925).
91 Council of State Debates, Wednesday, 28 January 1925,
Official Report of the Debates, iv (New Delhi, 1925),
pp. 73–5.
92 Council of State Debates, pp. 76–8.
93 Council of State Debates, pp. 79–80.
94 Legislative Assembly Debates, 2nd Session, 2nd Legislative,
16 February–3 March 1925, v, pt ii (New Delhi, 1925),
p. 2033. Irving, Indian Summer, pp. 347–8.
95 Legislative Assembly Debates, pp. 2033–4.
96 Story of Sir J. J., p. 99. On Ahivasi, Artists Directory, Lalit
Kala Akademi (New Delhi, 1962).
97 Bombay Chronicle (20 March 1925).
98 Encourage Indian Art, The Prize of Delhi Scheme (Prize of
Delhi Committee Pamphlet) (Bombay, 1925).
99 Encourage Indian Art, pp. 3–5. O. C. Gangoly, ‘Prize of
Delhi Scheme and Official Patronage of Indian Art’,
Rupam, xxvi (April 1926), pp. 68–71, complained of the
nationalist agitators jumping on the art bandwagon where-
as actual revival was achieved by Havell and the orientalists
earlier in the century.
100 Vakil to India Society (iol); Times of India (2 April 1925);
Bombay Daily Mail (4 April 1925); Bengalee (4 April 1925).
101 Bombay Chronicle (4 April 1925).
102 Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 84.
Solomon’s letter no. 735 of 12 November, Report on Prize
of Delhi Scheme, 1925.
103 E. B. Havell, Indian Sculpture and Painting (London, 1928),
p. 103.
104 Indian Art and Letters, i/2 (November 1925), p. 106.
105 Havell, Indian Sculpture and Painting, p. 102. Mitter, Art and
Nationalism, p. 279 and passim for Havell’s definition of
nature.
106 Havell’s letter of 5 July 1929 in Roopa Lekha, i/3 (1929);
K.Vakil, in Roopa Lekha, i/4 (1929), pp. 32ff.
107 E. B. Havell, ‘Indian Architecture’, Roopa Lekha, i/5 (1930),
pp. 16–18.
108 Vakil, ‘Art Notes’, Roopa Lekha, i/6 (1930), pp. i–vi.
109 E. B. Havell, ‘Modern Indian Architecture’, Roopa Lekha, 6
and 7 (1930–31), pp. 1ff.
110 Rupam, xxiv (October 1925), p. 59.
111 K. Vakil, ’Art World, Some Prominent Figures’, Bombay
Chronicle (30 June 1926).
112 Vakil was probably thinking here of the well-known art
lover and collector, Rai Krishanadasa. An admirer of
Abanindranath, he started the famous Bharat Kala Bhavan
collection of traditional and modern Indian art at Benaras
Hindu University.
113 On O. C. Gangoly’s talk at the Bharat Kala Bhavan,
Bombay Chronicle (18 May 1930). On Gaganendranath, see
supra, pp. 15–27.
114 K. Vakil, ‘Art Notes’, Roopa Lekha, i/4 (1929), p. 33, on
Gangoly lecture; ‘Art Notes’, Roopa Lekha i/1 (1929), p. 44,
on founding of Rasa Mandal.
115 Solomon, Mural Paintings, pp. 27–8. Marshall was Director
of the Archaeological Survey of India.
116 Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 98.
117 Brown, ‘Mural Paintings at New Delhi’, pp. 395–6.
Solomon, Mural Paintings, p. 32.
118 Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 103.
119 Solomon, Mural Paintings, chaps iii and iv.
120 Brown, ‘Mural Paintings at New Delhi’, pp. 392–3. Brown
provides us with the most balanced and informative
account of these murals.
121 Ibid., pp. 395–6.
122 Solomon, Mural Paintings, p. 40.
123 Solomon, Mural Paintings, p. 19.
124 Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, pp. 81–2.
Story of Sir J. J. School of Art, 94.
125 Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 99–100. He was also known
as Fyzee Fyzee-Rahamin.
126 Attiya Begam (and) Fyzee Fyzee-Rahamin, Music of India
(London, 1925), where she relates the romantic story of
their love and the discovery of ancient Indian music in 1913,
her singing and him illustrating the ragamala.
127 H. Furst, ‘Mr Fyzee Fyzee-Rahamin’s Paintings’, Apollo, ii
(July–December 1925), pp. 91–4. The show was held in
August 1925. E. H. Gombrich, ‘Kokoschka in His Times’
refers to Furst (unpublished lecture, 2 July 1986).
128 Although not explicitly stated, the two works at the Tate
must have come from the same exhibition held in 1925, see
M. Chamot et al., Tate Gallery Catalogues: The Modern
British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, i (a–l) (London,
1964), pp. 199–200. The Sassoons, originally from Baghdad,
had extensive family and trade connections with Bombay.
129 See Apollo, ii (July–December 1925), p. 97. On his paintings
at the Tate, see Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 330–1. The
Hindu (8 December 1934) [on Sheshanna]; Madras Mail (10
December 1934) [on Arlington Gallery].
130 Furst, ‘Mr Fyzee Fyzee-Rahamin’s Paintings’, pp. 91–4.
131 Times of India (19 July 1926) refers to article of 19 June by
Fyzee-Rahamin. Lalkaka won the competition to paint
royal portraits at Windsor with Atul Bose in 1929. Seodia
chose Western subjects for his New Delhi murals, see infra,
p. 206.
132 H. Furst,’Mr Fyzee Fyzee-Rahamin’s Decorations at Delhi’,
Apollo, x (July 1929), pp. 13–14.
133 Ibid., pp. 11–13.
134 K. Vakil: ‘Art Notes’, Roopa Lekha, i/5 (1930), pp. iiiff.
135 Irving, Indian Summer, p. 287. Baker, Architecture and
Personalities, p. 74.
136 Confidential letter of T. S. Shilton to G. Wiles of bas, 25
May 1931, on Baker’s misgivings (iol).
137 Baker, Architecture and Personalities, p. 172.
138 Ibid., p. 74.
139 Ibid., pp. 131–5.
140 Confidential letter of Alan Green of India House, London,
to Wiles, 7 May 1931, and demi-official letter of T. S.
Shilton, Secretary, Department of Industries and Labour,
to Wiles for publication, dated 23 May 1931, Doc. No 1311
on the date of announcement of the competition and other
details (iol). See also B. Ukil, ‘Art Notes’, Roopa Lekha,
i/4 (1929), pp. 35ff. Lago, Imperfect Encounter, p. 173.
141 S. Fyzee-Rahamin to William Rothenstein, 6 March 1928
(1148, by kind permission of the Houghton Library,
Harvard University).
142 Rothenstein to S. Fyzee-Rahamin, 5 April 1928 (1148 [1679]
by kind permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard
University).
143 Document No. 1311 (India Office Library) on the date of
the announcement of the competition and other details (iol
Eur f 147/74).
144 On the government balancing act, Green’s letter (note
supra, 140). On Choudhury, K. Sarkar, Bharater Bhaskar,
pp. 218ff. See also Roopa Lekha, i/4 (1929), pp. 36–7.
Rothenstein felt cornered enough to say that the choice was
entirely fortuitous.
145 Rothenstein, Since Fifty, p. 173.
146 D. K. Deb Barman, ‘Londone India Houser Deyal Chitra’,
Prabasi, xxxi/7 (Kartik 1339 [1932]), pp. 90–92.
147 Ibid., p. 92. The Times (30 March 1930).
148 Deb Barman, ‘Londone India Houser Deyal Chitra’, pp.
93–7. I had an opportunity to meet Mr Dinkel through his
son, who was a friend of mine, when he vividly reminisced
about his time with the Bengali students and his Italian
journey with them.
149 Deb Barman, ‘Londone India Houser Deyal Chitra’, pp.
94–5. Anonymous, ‘Indian Mural Painting, The Work of
Four Indian Artists at the New India House’, The Studio
253
 (March 1932), p. 148.
150 Rothenstein, Since Fifty, p. 174.
151 Rothenstein, Since Fifty, pp. 174–5. Letters between Lord
Willingdon and Rothenstein on the artists working at India
House. Lord Willingdon’s handwritten note to Rothenstein,
21 March 1932, followed by a long protest letter by
Rothenstein at the termination of the Indian House murals.
(Rothenstein to Willingdon, 6 December 1933, wr–rt 1148
[1697]), and Willingdon’s formal response (Willingdon to
Rothenstein, 29 December 1933, 1148 [1623]). I am grateful
to the Houghton Library, Harvard University, for permis-
sion to quote the letters. Deb Barman, ‘Londone India
Houser Deyal Chitra’, p. 97.
152 Deb Barman. Smritipote (Santiniketan), 1991.
153 Baker to Rothenstein, Lago, Imperfect Encounter, p. 340.
This is not entirely true as the dome, for instance, is very
colourful with the gold lending a certain lustre.
154 One assumes that arrangements must have taken at least
half a year and the fact is that the controversy went on until
1931.
155 Times of India (6 April 1931).
156 Roopa Lekha, i/5 (1930), p. viii on the portraits.
157 Times of India (7 April 1931, 10 April 1931).
158 Times of India (12 April 1930). See also Note on the
Exhibition of Work by Students of the Bombay School of Art,
India House (Bombay, 8 October 1930), organized by
Chatterjee.
159 Times of India (24 April 1931).
160 Times of India (6 May 1931).
161 Green to Wiles (see infra note 140).
162 Wiles to Younghusband, 8 May 1931 (iol). As a member of
the India Society, Wiles sent cuttings from the Times of
India to appraise the Society of the developments. He then
had lunch with the editor of the Times of India in order to
find out what his grievance was.
163 Times of India (22 May 1931).
164 Confidential letter of Alan Green of India House London
to G. Wiles of bas, 7 May 1931 (iol Eur f 147/47). Though
written in exasperation at the attack on the government, it
reflects the general feeling that egg tempera was a more
genuine form of fresco.
165 T. S. Shilton to Wiles, 25 May 1931. He wrote again on 12
June 1931, congratulating Wiles on his letter to the Times of
India, Demi Official 1311 (99).[AQ: ??]
166 Younghusband to Wiles, 29 May 1931 (iol Eur f 147/74).
Times of India (29 May 1931).
167 Times of India (4 June 1931).
168 Times of India (7 June 1931).
169 Sethna to Wiles, 8 June 1931 (iol).
170 Wiles to Younghusband, 13 July 1931 (iol).
171 Rothenstein to Tagore, Lago, Imperfect Encounter, p. 339.
172 Roopa Lekha, ii/9 (1932), pp. 28–30.
173 Roopa Lekha, ii/9 (1932), pp. 31–4.
174 Roopa Lekha, ii/9 (1932), pp. 35–8.
175 Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, p. 48.
176 See Alan Green’s letter of 7 May 1931.
177 See for instance, Interior view of the Oratory of St John,
Co-Cathedral of St John, Valletta, C. Puglisi, Caravaggio
254
(London, 1998), p. 150.
178 See Brown, ‘Mural Paintings at New Delhi’, pp. 392–3, on
criticism of the murals.
179 Times of India (27 December 1930).
180 Story of Sir J. J. School of Art, pp. 91, 98. Solomon involved
his pupils with ambitious local projects, such as the murals
at the Batliwalla Theatre and Jayakar’s bungalow.
181 Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 83. In
1905 Havell had also tried to found a fine arts department
at the Calcutta University, but this had failed owing to
opposition from within the university and the government.
182 Report of Public Instruction in Bombay, nos 33–34 (Bombay,
1928), pp. 76–7. Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish
Varsham, pp. 93–6. Roopa Lekha, i/2 (1929), pp. 43–4.
Dhurandhar had approached Jayakar on Solomon’s behalf.
183 G. A. Thomas, Report of the Reorganisation Committee
Bombay (Bombay, 1933); Roopa Lekha, i/2 (1929), pp. 43–4.
Thomas, Report of the Reorganisation Committee, Resolution
No. 8300 (11 July 1932), pp. 154–7.
184 Reports of Public Instruction in Bombay, Nos 33–4, 76–7.
Times of India (30 March 1933) (Bombay Art Society).
185 Solomon on his return to London exhibited at the Paris
Salon in 1938: Béatrice Créspon-Halotier, with introductory
essay by Olivier Meslay, Les peintres britanniques dans les
salons parisiens des origins à 1939 (Dijon, 2002), p. 216.
186 J. M. Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power, 1915–22 (Cambridge,
1972).
187 Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 72.
188 J. M. Brown, Gandhi and Civil Disobedience: The Mahatma
in Indian Politics, 1928–34 (Cambridge, 1977).
189 Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 109.
190 Ibid. On the 1935 Act, see J. M. Brown, Modern India
(Oxford, 1985), pp. 274ff.
191 Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, pp.
109–10 (photograph in the book shows several students
wearing the white Gandhi cap, a symbol of defiance).
The paintings on nationalist themes are preserved in the
art school archives.
192 Note on the Exhibition (Bombay, 1930), pp. 5, 6–8.
193 Morning Post (iol Eur m f 147/105)? Times of India (2
October 1930).
194 Wilson’s letter of thanks, 28 March 1931, Dhurandhar,
Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 108. A catalogue of
the exhibition was published by the Times of India as ‘Note
on the Exhibition of Work by Students of the Bombay School
of Art’, India House, 8 October 1930. Handwritten letter to
Dhurandhar by Sir Leslie Wilson dated 28 March 1931, ‘it
was, of course, a great honour that Her Majesty, the Queen
should have desired the picture, and I was very proud to
be able to present it to her, but I was, at the same time, not
unnaturally, sorry to part with it, and am glad indeed to
think that the copy will soon be hanging on the wall’
(Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 157).
195 Barman, Smritipate (Santiniketan), p. 96.
196 The Hindu (8 December 1934) [on the Queen]. On Ranada
Ukil who decorated India House, Morning Post (19 January
1932). On Sarada Ukil’s exhibition at India House, The
Times (19 January 1932). Another brother, Barada Ukil, ran
 the lavishly produced Roopa Lekha and had started a class
for oriental art in New Delhi. See on his relationship with
Sher-Gil (supra, p. 51). He was prominently reported in the
newspapers during the hanging of paintings at the
Burlington Gallery.
197 American Arts News (20 June 1932). For instance, in the
News Chronicle (London) in June, and in The Yorkshire Post
(14 July 1932, 14 July 1933). News Chronicle (June 1933).
The Evening Standard (31 January 1934). The Manchester
Guardian (6 April 1934). Vakil’s lecture appeared in the
Times of India (7 July 1933). A souvenir of the Bombay con-
tribution to the Burlington exhibition, Modern Art in
Western India, 1934, contained Solomon’s lectures given in
London before the exhibition. Solomon’s lecture, ‘Indian
Art and the Bombay Movement’, English Review
(November 1934). Also Madras Mail, 1 December 1934.
Times of India, 3 December 1934. Indian Art and Letters, n.s.,
viii/2 (December 1934), p. 100.
198 Even the Rangoon Gazette (27 November 1934) announced
the opening (Indian Art and Letters, n.s., viii/2, December
1934, pp. 87ff.) Zetland’s speech on 14 November 1930 to
Round Table Conference participants, Indian Art and Letters,
n.s., iv/2 (1930), reported in The Times (15 November 1930).
On Zetland, Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 317, 377.
199 bbc broadcast of 18 December, by John de la Valette, Indian
Art and Letters, n.s., viii/2 (December 1934).
200 Manchester Guardian, quoted in Chatterjee (see infra note
203).
201 The India Society’s Exhibition of Modern Indian art at the
New Burlington Galleries, 10–22 December 1934. The first
generation of orientalists included Surendranath Ganguly,
who had died young, and Venkatappa, now a naturalist
landscape painter. Academic artists, Hemendranath
Mazumdar, Atul Bose, Thakur Singh, as well as the veter-
ans, Pestonji Bomanji, Manchershaw Pithawalla and A. X.
Trindade were part of the show but not Abalal Rahiman,
Archibald Muller or Dhurandhar, although Dhurandhar’s
students Ahivasi and Nagarkar were there. The mod-
ernists, Gaganendranath Tagore, Jamini Roy, Rabindranath
Tagore and the younger generation, N. S. Bendre, Bhanu
Smart, Sudhir Khastagir, Ramendranath Chakravarty and
Roop Krishna were included. The Hindu (8 December
1934), on the Queen’s collection.
202 The Times (10 December 1934), which also published a
photo of the opening ceremony. On the misty colours of
oriental art and its affinities with Japanese Nihonga, Mitter,
Art and Nationalism, pp. 267–307.
203 R. Chatterjee, ‘Exhibitions of Indian Art in London and
New Delhi, December Last Year’, Modern Review (July
1935), pp. 60ff.

255
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260
Acknowledgements
The rise of modernism in India is the latest part of my project on
representations of Indian art, beginning with Much Maligned
Monsters and followed in turn by Art and Nationalism in Colonial
India (1850–1922) and the present work. All three deal with
aspects of cultural encounters between India and the West; the last
two deal exclusively with the colonial period. I hope to probe in
greater detail the genesis of post-colonial art in the 1940s and ’50s
in a future volume. My research on modernity, art and identity in
colonial India began in 1979, then very much an uncharted terri-
tory. I published my blueprint for the volume on art and national
identity in India in 1982 as ‘Art and Nationalism in India’ in
History Today (xxxii, July 1982, pp. 28–34). Over the decades, I am
happy to say, these issues have assumed considerable urgency, as
we move on from Saidian Orientalism, through identity politics,
to the dialectics of the global and the local in the twentieth century.
My debt to individuals and institutions has multiplied over
the years and I hope to be forgiven for any unintended omissions
or insufficiently acknowledged help that I have received over the
years. In a true spirit of munificence that reminds us of a bygone
era, diverse institutions have helped sustain my scholarly investi-
gations. The project was initiated with an invaluable British
Academy Readership. However, I was over-ambitious in imagin-
ing that I could encompass the history of this longue durée within
one volume, and I thank Peter Dronke for his perspicacity in sug-
gesting a two-part publication; the volume covering the period
1850–1922 thus came out first. For the research funding for con-
ceiving the present volume I am indebted to the generosity of
the Leverhulme Trust, as well as to the Arts and Humanities
Research Board for field trips to India during my tenure as
Director of the ahrb funded project ‘Modernity, Art and Identity:
India, Japan and Mexico –1860s–1940s’. My warm thanks are due
to Rodney Needham and Richard Gombrich for nominating me
for the Radhakrishnan Lectures at All Souls College, Oxford in
1991, which allowed me to present my ideas to academic col-
leagues and the wider public. I was honoured to be awarded fel-
lowships at research institutions during the different stages of the
project’s gestation: the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton;
the Getty Art Institute, Los Angeles; the Clark Art Institute,
Williamstown, Massachusetts; and finally, the Center for
Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, dc. Over the years my work was carried out at a
number of museums and libraries. I am grateful to the present
Director of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi,
Rajeev Lochan, for his generous assistance, as well that of the pre-
vious directors, Lakhsmi Sihare, Anis Farooqi and Anjali Sen,
and the assistant keeper, K. S. Mathur, and to the Directors of
Bharat Kala Bhavan, Benares, and the Venkatappa Museum,
Bangalore. I would like to express my appreciation for the staff of
the India Office Library and the British Library (especially Dipali
Ghosh and Richard Bingle); the National Art Library (Victoria &
Albert Museum, London); the Bodleian Library and the Sackler
Library, Department of Art History, Oxford; the University
Library, Cambridge; Marquand and Firestone Libraries,
Princeton; the present director Sabujkali Sen, and the late director
Sanat Bagchi, of Rabindra Bhavan, Visva-Bharati University; the
National Library, Calcutta; Getty Research Institute Library; the
Clark Art Institute Library (especially Karen Bucky and Bonghee
Lis); the Library of the National Gallery of Art, Washington,
dc, and its staff (especially Lamia Doumato, Ted Dalziel and
Thomas McGill.
I would like also to thank the following individuals: Vivan
Sundaram, for giving me permission to reproduce the works of
Amrita Sher-Gil; Rabindra Bhavan, Visva-Bharati University,
for permission to reproduce the works of Rabindranath Tagore;
Jamini Roy’s grandson, Subrata Roy, for permission to reproduce
the works of Jamini Roy (and thanks are also due to Jamini Roy’s
grandson Debabrata Roy for his assistance); and Kishore
Chatterjee, for permission to reproduce the works of Sunayani
Devi.
My thanks also go to V. R. Amberkar, Ashish Anand,
Suhash Bahulkar, Nalini Bhagwat, Manisha Bhattacharya,
Patrick Bowring, Vicky Brown, Faya Causey, Anjan Chakravarty,
Nimai Chatterjee, Arif Chughtai, Craig Clunas, Captain S. Das,
Kamal Chandra Dé, Kalpana Desai, Dhritikanta Lahiri
Chaudhury, J. C. Eade, Ellery Foutch, Kekoo Gandhi, Bhaskar
Ghosh, Amiya and Aloka Gooptu, Sadashiv Gorakshkar,
Radhaprasad Gupta, Salman Haider, Madhu Jain, Sambhaji
Kadam, Geeta Kapur, Roobina Karode, Indar Kejriwal, Karl
Khandalavala, Anand Krishna, Mary Lago, Deborah Marrow,
Basudeb Mitra, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Foy Nissen, Indar
Pasricha, Ram Rahman, Akumal Ramachander, Rajat Kanta and
Nupur Ray, Satyajit Ray, Enakhshi Roy, Pradyot Roy, Baburao
261
Sadwelkar, Swadhin Sanyal, Nabodita Sarkar, Gulammohammed
Sheikh, Iqbal Singh, Robert Skelton, Vivan Sundaram, Deborah
Swallow and Sundaram Tagore. Among artists’ families, I wish
to thank Atul Bose’s son, Sanjit Bose, Jamini Roy’s grandsons,
Subrata and Debabrata Roy, and remember the kindness and
courtesy with which the late Benodebihari Mukhopadhyay
received me. Thanks are also due to the Government of India
for their kind permission to photograph the murals of New
Delhi and India House, London.
Friends such as Thomas Crow, Michael Holly, Elizabeth
Cropper and Tapan and Hashi Raychaudhuri gave me their
warm and generous support, and my conversations with Keith
Moxey and C. R. (Mark) Haxthausen greatly enriched my argu-
ments. My former teacher, Ernst Gombrich, was unfailing in his
support till the end of his life. My appreciation of Robert Williams
and Harry Gilonis for all their help and patience needs to be
recorded here. Finally, Ranajit Guha most kindly, enthusiastically
and painstakingly went though my late draft, offering incisive
and appreciative comments. I thank them all here.
It is all too easy to overlook members of my own family,
Swasti, Pamina, Rana and Katharine, who have worked behind
the scene, reading with patience reams of dense early drafts,
showing keenness at every stage of the final labours. In Katharine’s
case, she meticulously scrutinized the text for infelicities and
inadvertent oversights and prepared the Bibliography at an
annoyingly short notice. If the book fails to come up to expec-
tations that will be entirely my own responsibility.

262
Photo Acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to South Wales: p. 108; collection of Ashok Mitra: p. 101; collection
the below sources of illustrative material and/or permission of Claudio Moscatelli: p. 144; photos Samiran Nandy: pp. 87, 88
to reproduce it: (Sriniketan, Santiniketan, West Bengal), 98 (Kala Bhavan,
Santiniketan); National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi: pp. 14, 48,
Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata: p. 186 (foot); photo Ananda 50, 52, 56, 57, 59, 60, 62, 64, 81, 174 (top); images copyright Osian’s
Bazar Patrika Ltd: p. 100; Bharat Kala Bhavan museum and Conoisseurs of Art – artistic copyright rests with the respected
gallery, Benaras Hindu University: pp. 20, 23, 24, 104, 121; photos artist/photographer: pp. 84, 93, 117, 145, 188; Rabindra Bharati
Jyoti Bhatt: pp. 89, 90; collection of Sandip Bose: p. 143; collection Society, Kolkata: pp. 18, 21, 32; collection of the artist (Jamini
of Sanjit Bose: pp. 22, 127 (top); courtesy of Bowrings Fine Art Roy): pp. 103, 106, 115; from Rupadarsini (Taraporevala, Bombay,
Auctioneers: p. 137; collection of Nihar Chakravarty: p. 136; 1958): p. 155; Shri Bhavani Museum, Aundh – reproduced
collection of Kishore Chatterjee: pp. 39, 41, 43, 45; collection of courtesy of the Dept. of Archeaology and Museums, Maharastra
Monishi Chatterjee: p. 42; Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Museum State: pp. 147, 152 (left); Sri Jayachamarajendra Art Gallery,
(formerly the Prince of Wales Museum), Mumbai pp. 150, 206 Mysore, Karnataka: pp. 126, 152 (right); reproduced from
(photos Bharath Ramamrutham); reproduced from Damerla The Studio (xxv, 1902): p. 185; collection of Vivan and Navina
Rama Rao Masterpieces (Rajahmundry, Damerla Rama Rao Sundaram: p. 61; photo courtesy of Vivan Sundaram: p. 46;
Memorial Art Gallery and School, 1969): pp. 160, 161, 162; Tate Britain (photo Tate Picture Library/© Tate, London): p. 208;
collection of K. C. Das and family: p. 107; Delhi Art Gallery: Victoria & Albert Museum, London – with special thanks to
pp. 37, 92, 95, 99, 128, 141, 148, 151, 153, 154, 172; reproduced by the artist’s grandson, Simon Rendell: p. 70 right (photo V&A
permission of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Government of Images/Victoria & Albert Museum, London); private collections:
India: pp. 203 (lower middle and foot), 205, 207, 209; collection of pp. 6, 31, 109; whereabouts unknown: pp. 28, 97 (top), 102, 129,
Ambika Dhurandhar: p. 203 (top and upper middle); courtesy of 131, 134, 137, 156 [left and right], 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164, 171,
the Gaekwards of Baroda: pp. 89, 90; Government Museum and 173, 182, 183, 185, 187, 188.
Art Gallery, Chandigarh: p. 146; Government Museum, Chennai
(Madras): pp. 135, 175; photo Erich Hartmann/Magnum Photos:
p. 111; Indian High Commission, Government of India (photos
Bob Sego): pp. 213, 214, 215; Institute of Tagore Studies and
Research (Rabindra Bhavan), Visva Bharati University,
Santiniketan, West Bengal: pp. 67 top (acc. no. 2021), 67 foot (acc.
no. 1898), 70 left (acc. no.1858-16), 71 (ms 102), 72 (acc. no. 2571),
73 left (acc. no. 151), 73 right (acc. no. 2771), 74, 76 left, 76 right
(acc. no. 12.11.1934 RB); International Labour Organisation,
Geneva: p. 174 (foot); Jamsethji Jijibhai School of Art, Mumbai:
pp. 184, 186 (top), 224, 225, 227; reproduced from Sunil Janah,
The Second Creature (Signet Press, Calcutta, 1949), courtesy of
Mr Janah: p. 30 (foot); Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati University,
Santiniketan, West Bengal: p. 91; collection of the artist
(V. P. Karmarkar), photo courtesy of the artist’s family: p. 158;
Karnataka Government Museum and Venkatappa Art Gallery,
Bangalore – reproduced by permission of the Government of
Karnataka: pp. 166, 167, 168; collection I. K. Kejriwal: p. 66;
collection of Dr Aziz Khan: pp. 30 (top), 169, 193; collection of
Karl Khandalavala: p. 47; collection of Jane Mcgowan, New
263
Index

Abanindranath, see Tagore, Andrews, Charles Freer 80 Barney, Natalie 65

Abanindranath aparigraha 168 Baroda 89, 90, 92
Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris Arcade Gallery, London 110 Basohli painters 63
47, 51 Archer, W. G. 7, 25–6, 63 Basu Vijnan Mandir (Bose Institute) 85
Academy of Fine Arts, Calcutta 106, 138, architecture 16, 26, 66, 67, 85, 87, 149, 178, batik 82
142 180, 197, 201, 205–6, 211, 220 Bauhaus, Weimar 10, 15–18, 25, 37, 68,
Acharekar, M. R. 152–5 Arezzo 213 70, 72, 73, 79
Concentration 152 Arlington Galleries 208 Baxandall, Michael 8
Nude at Rest 154 Art Deco 37, 70, 156 Begum, Atiya
page from Rupadarsini 155 Art Gallery, Calcutta 130 Music of India 208
Rupadarsini: the Indian approach to Art Nouveau 69 Beirut 11
human form 152–3 Art School, Bombay 184 Bell, Clive 16, 25
Acharya, A. M. T. 133, 158 Drawing from the Nude 184 Benaras Hindu University 202
Acton, Harold 111 Art Society of India 151, 198 Bene Israel community of Maharastra 208
adibasis (aboriginals) 79 Arthur Tooth’s Gallery Bengal 29, 32–3, 65, 76, 107, 109, 114, 124,
African art 34, 66, 71, 117 ‘Indian Vedic, Mythological and 125, 127, 129, 130, 136, 138, 149, 171,
ritual masks 71 Contemporary Watercolours’ 208 177, 180, 182, 186, 193–5, 199,
sculpture 8 Ashgar, A. R. 193 219–20, 223, 224
Agaskar, S. P. 192 Ashoka 214 Bengal Renaissance 11, 37
Ahivasi, J. M. 199, 205, 220 Athavale, M. V. 192 Bengal School of Art 15–17, 22, 26, 42, 54,
Message 206 Athenaeum 86 68, 76, 77, 93, 100, 103, 110, 125, 129,
Ahmad, Rashi 53 130, 133, 138, 160, 161, 163, 173, 181,
Ahmed, Lucy Sultan 36, 149 Badigar, D. G. 187, 188, 193, 194, 195, 208, 221, 226
Ahmedabad 182 The Creation of Tilottama 223 Benjamin, Walter 8, 100, 119
Ajanta 44, 55–7, 83, 85–7, 100, 104, 106, Bagh 86–7, 209, 212 Benodebehari, see Mukhopadhyaya,
131, 160, 180, 186, 188, 191, 192, 195, Baij, Ramkinkar 94–9, 157, 170, 226 Benodebehari
202, 209, 215, 217, 221 Bust of Rabindranath 95 Bergson, Henri 10
Akbar 214 Radha Rani 97 Berlin 16, 27, 68
Albert Temple of Science and School of Santal Family 96, 97, 98 Berlingske Tidende 75, 77
Art, Calcutta 125 Sketch of Santals 99 Besant, Annie 179
Alexandra Docks, Bombay 189 The Mill Call 98, 98 Bhadralok, the 11
All India Fine Arts and Crafts Baker, Sir Herbert 178, 196, 197, 200, 202, Bhagvad Gita 35
Exhibition, Delhi 51 204, 210, 211, 215, 218 Bhagwat, Nalini 149
Allahabad University 49 ‘Joint Memorandum for the Bharat Barsha 130–31
Alma-Tadema, Sir Lawrence 17 Encouragement of Indian Art’ 179, Bharati 130
alpona 81–2 196, 199 Bharat Kala Bhavan, Benaras 202
American Art News 224 Baksh, Miran 205 Bhonsale, A. R. 184
Amritsar 149, 188 Banerjea, J. C. 219 Bidou, Henri 66, 73
Anand, Mulk Raj 63 Bankura, Bengal 101, 104 Bikaner 132
Ananda Bazar Pratika 142 Barman, Dhirenda Krishna Deb 84, Binyon, Laurence 191, 212, 216, 217
Andhra 158, 160–62 212–15, 223 Birkenhead, Lord 198

264
Birla, G. D. 82 Festival 140, 142 Chauri Chauri 222
Birley, Oswald 184 British Museum, London 216 de Chavannes, Puvis 180
Birmingham Mail 68 bronzes 96, 157–9, 165, 168, 170–71, 173–5 Cheena Bhavan 86, 93
Blaue Reiter Almanac 71 Brown, Percy 101, 125, 128, 130, 140, 164, Chicago 140
Bloom, Harold 8 165, 179, 204, 210 chikan (embroidery) work 88
Bloomsbury group 55, 63 Buckingham Palace 213 Chinese painting 88, 100
Boeiss 170 Budapest 47 Christianity 12, 116–17
Bomanji, Pestonji 192–3 Buddha 12 Chughtai, Abdur Rahman 193
Glory of Pestonji 193 Buddhism (Buddhist) 35 Civil and Military Gazette 49
The Last Touch 192–3 geese (hamsa) 205 Cixous, Hélène 53
Bombay 11, 54, 85, 125, 140, 142, 146, murals 85 Cizek, Franz 74, 79
149–57, 165, 177, 181, 182, 186, painters 44, 55 Clark, John 8
189–210, 215, 218–20, 227 Stupa 89 Clark, T. J. 124
Bombay Architectural Association 198 Buenos Aires 66 Claudel, Camille 51
Bombay Art Society 36, 37, 49, 132, 149, Bukhsh, Allah 145–9, 193 Colette 51
151, 182, 199, 202, 210, 215, 218–19, Before the Temple 145 Columbus Museum of Arts and Crafts,
222 Anthropomorphic Landscapes I and II Ohio 112
Bombay Chronicle 132,183, 190, 198–200, 146 Communist Party of India 119
219 Winnowing with Buffaloes 146 Composition with Figures 186
book binding 82 Burlington House 217, 223–4 Conlay, Iris 111
Bose, Atul, 124–33, 140–44, 193, 197 Burns, Cecil 182, 183, 189, 202 Connolly, Cyril 110
Bengal Tiger 131, 131, 132 Byzantine art 116 Cooch Behar 132
Comrades 130 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 69, 73
preparatory sketch for a portrait of Cairo 11 Copenhagen 68
his wife Devjani 143 Calcutta 10, 11, 15–17, 19, 29, 36, 66, 80, Correggio 9
preparatory sketch for a portrait of 82, 85, 94, 101, 105, 106, 107, 110, Couldrey, O. J. 158
Rani Goggi Devi Birla 144 113, 125, 127, 129, 142, 146, 149, 156, Courbet 55
sketch of his wife 127 158, 161, 163, 165, 170, 177, 180, 181, Craven, Roy 112
The Artist’s Wife Devjani 143 182, 188, 192, 193, 195, 202, 210, 212, Crow, Thomas
Bose, Fanindranath 96, 158, 173 219 The Intelligence of Art 8
Bose, Sir Jagadish Chandra 85, 87 Calcutta Group 227 Csontváry, K. T. 63
Bose, Nandalal 32, 54, 79–94, 106, 107, Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto Cubism 7–8, 12, 15, 16, 18–27, 32, 36
124, 161, 193, 212, 213, 219 161
‘The Triumph of Science and Canclini, Néstor García 9 Dabholkar, Vasantro 223
Imagination’ 86 Canova, Antonio 96 Daily Herald, The 70
Abimanyu Vadha 90, 90 Caravaggio 220 Daily Mail, The 111
Dandi March 81 Carmichael, Lord 194 Daily Telegraph, The 224
Dhaki 84 Carolus-Duran 66 Das, Chittaranjan 139
Gangavatarana 90, 90 Casey, Maie 45, 100, 108, 111, 116 Das, K. C. 107
Halakarshan 87, 88 Cennini, Cennino 86, 220 Datta, Sudhindranath 76, 107, 109, 142–3
Natir Puja 89, 90 Il libro dell’arte o trattato della pittura Deb, Rabindranath 49
Santals in Birbhum Landscape 91 180 Deccan Herald 168
Bose, Subhas 83 Césaire, Aimé 7 Delhi 11, 49, 177, 178, 196; see also New
Boston 69 Cézanne, Paul, 100 Delhi
Bourdelle, Emile-Antoine 95–6 Bathers 8 Deutscher Werkbund 79
Bourdieu, Pierre 9 Chagall, Marc 27 Devi, Kadambari 72
Brahma (Brahmin) 19, 57, 118, 210 Chand, Prem 29 Devi, Pratima 38, 82, 86, 92
Brancusi, Constantin 34 chao technique 88 Devi, Shanta 105, 118,
Braque, Georges 25–7 Chapekar 190 Devi, Sunayani 10, 36–44, 86, 100, 104, 193
Mlle Pogany 15 Chaplin, Charlie 65 Ardhnarisvara 42
Brangwyn, Frank 150 Chassany, Marie-Louise 53 Milkmaids 37
Bratachari organization 118 Chatterjee, Sir Atul 211, 214–17, 219 Radha Krishna 43
Brauner, Victor 112 Chatterjee, Pramode Kumar 160 Self-portrait 45
Brelvi, S. A. 200 Chatterjee, Ramananda 105, 125, 224 Two Women 39
Breton, André Chattopadhyay, Sarat Chandra 29 Viraha 41
‘First Manifesto of Surrealism’ 66 Chaudhuri, Nirad C. 139 Dey, Bishnu 76, 107, 109, 112, 113, 116, 120
British Empire 10, 138, 226 Chaudhury, Biswapati 131 Dey, Lal Behari 29
Exhibition 161,191–4 Chaudhury, Sudhansu Sekhar 212, 214–15 Dey, Mukul 110, 140, 193,

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 Festive Season 141 formalism 15–28 Goupil Galleries 208
Dey, Sailendranath 87, 193 Forster, E. M. 107, 110 Government House, Bombay 108, 184, 188
Dhurandar, M. V. 149, 182, 184, 186, Forward 21 Government School of Art, Calcutta 163
189–90, 192, 196, 200, 202–4, 207, Foster, Hal 33 Grand Salon, Paris 47
222–3 Foulds, John 49 Green, Alan 216–17
Glory of Pandharpur 193 Foulds, Patrick 49 Greenberg, Clement 8
Stridhanam 203, 223 Frampton, George 164 Greek culture 117
Welcome address to the Prince of France (French) 7, 47, 52, 53, 96 Griffiths, John 182, 186
Wales by the Parsi Panchayat Fund art 49 Gropius, Walter 17, 68
and Charities 189 painters 66, 112 The Theory and Organization of the
Die Simplicissimus 68 sculptor 95 Bauhaus 79
Dinkel, E. Michael 213 Free School of Painting, Nagybànya 55 Grosz, George 27
Diwan i-Aam i-Khass, Agra 179 frescoes 83, 86, 88, 180, 192, 217 Guggenheim, Peggy 112
von Doesburg, Theo 35 Freud, Sigmund 15, 66, 68, 73, 75, 124, Gujarat 189, 218
Dostoyevsky 53 164, 170, 226 Gulbranson, Olaf
Dresden 68, 73 Fry, Roger 22, 25, 55 ‘Die Grosse Mode’ 68
Dulac, Edmund 146 Furst, Herbert Gupta, Nalinikanta 139
Dutt, Gurasaday 32, 82, 114, 118 Apollo 208 Gupta, Ranada 127, 128
Dwarka 23 Futurists, 15, 24 Gupta, Samarendranath 179, 191, 193
Fyzee-Rahamin, Samuel 193, 197, 207–12, Gwalior 86
East Asian art 80, 91 218–20
East India Company 204 ‘On Indian Art and Burne–Jones’ 208 Haida art 71
Eckmann, Otto 70 Amal i-Faizi-Rahamin 208 Halakarshan (ploughing) 88
École des Beaux-Arts, Paris 47, 55 detail figure Secretariat 209 Haldane, J.B.S. 107, 112
Egan, Victor 50 Knowledge, Secretariat 209 Haldankar, S. L. 151–3, 192
Egyptian culture 117 Music of India 208 A Mohammadan Pilgrim 151
Einstein, Albert 65, 68 The Rajput Sardar 208, 208 Landscape 153
Einstein, Carl 8, 119 The Glow of Hope 152
Elk Hill, Ootacamund 165–6 Gaekwad family 89 Haldar, Asit 58, 86, 193
Emerson, Mrinalini 107 Gaganendranath, see Tagore, Shiva and Parvati 193
Empire Review 193 Gaganendranath Hanoi 11
Englishman, The 17, 21, 22, 25, 37 Galerie du Théâtre Pigalle, Paris 54, 66 Hardinge, Lord 178
Enlightenment, the 11, 33, 116, 124, 171 Gandhi, Mahatma, 26, 29, 50, 65, 79, Haripura Congress 82–3
Epstein, Jacob 96, 117 81–3, 108, 109, 110, 124, 158, 175, Hausenstein, Wilhelm 119
eroticism (erotic) 29, 31, 51, 53, 75, 77, 83, 182, 188, 189, 207–8, 222, 226 Havell, E. B. 85–6, 125, 177, 180, 188, 194,
103, 104, 106, 132, 136, 193 Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule 33 200, 220
Eurasian communities 36 Young India 81 Indian Sculpture and Painting 201
Exhibition of Khadi and Village Ganga 31 Heath, Lionel 191, 193
Industries 82 Gangoly, O. C. 16, 188, 191, 194, 196, 202 Heidegger 10
Existentialists 10 Gangooly, Jamini Prokash 125, 140, 149, Herald Tribune 111
Expressionism, Expressionists 27, 34, 73, 186 Herkomer, Hubert
77, 117–19, 175 Gauguin, Paul 55, 112 Herringham, Christina 85–6, 180
Geddes, Patrick 80, 87 Himalayas 150
Fabri, Charles 49 Geneva 68 Hindi Bhavan 93
Faizpur Congress 82, 89 George v 152, 177 Hindu 170
Faletti’s Hotel, Lahore 49 German National Theatre 17 Hindu Civil Code
Feininger, Lyonel 17, 27 Gesamtkunstwerk 180, 191, 196 stridhanam (bride wealth) 204
Fernandes, G. P. 205 Ghosh, Ajit 32 datta vidhana (adoption) 204
Fernandes, S. 184 Ghosh, Aurobindo 139 Hinduism 165, 168
fertility rituals 88 Ghosh, Barindranath 16 Hogarth, R. W. 183, 221
Festival of India 223 Ghosh, Nibaran 32, 139 Hollfisy, Simon 55
Fine Art Institute 151 Gide, André 65 Hollywood 152
Fine Arts Exhibition, Delhi 49 Giotto 26, 93 Holocaust, the 78
Fine Arts Society 141 Golding, John 34 Hölzel, Adolf 70–71
Flint, William Russell 150 Gombrich, E. H. 24, 75 Abstract Ornament with Text 71
Florence 9, 213 Gontcharova, Natalia 51 Horizon 110
Folkwang Museum, Essen 117 Gothic Revivalists 180 Hungary 46, 50, 54, 59
Forcebury, F.C.W. 142 Gottesman, Marie Antoinette 47, 51 Husain, Munshi Gulam 204

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hybridity 9, 46–7, 143 Jubilee Art Academy, Calcutta 125, 128 Kuhn, Thomas 9
Hyderabad 49 Judaism (Jewish) 11, 15, 47
Jugendstil 69, 70 lacquerwork 82
Illustrated London News, The 224 Justi, Ludwig 68 Lahore 49, 145, 182
Impressionism 108, 149, 150, 152 Lalkaka, J. A. 140, 208, 216, 219
India House, Aldwych 11, 85, 89, 142, Kahlo, Frida 51 Lang, Edith 53
177, 210–20, 223 The Two Fridas 59 Langer, Heinz 169
Dome 213, 214, 215 Kakuzo, Okakura 80 Langhammer, Walter 227
India Society, London 77, 110, 178, 191, Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan 15, 79, 82–3, Lanteri, Edouard
194, 195, 198, 200, 201, 215–19, 222, 85, 86, 92, 94 Modelling: A Guide for Teachers and
224 Kala Deva Pratistha (Installation of the Students 94–6, 173
Indian Academy of Art 130, 133, 156, 162 God of Art) 184 Law, B. C. (Bimala Charan Laha) 125,
Indian Academy of Fine Arts 129, 142, Kalighat 31–2, 104, 114 193
149, 193 Kandinsky, Wassily 10, 12, 16, 17, 34, 35, A Bengali Lady 126
Indian Art and Letters 194 68, 79, 117 leatherwork 82
Indian Art School, Calcutta 125 On the Spiritual in Art 35 Leighton, Lord 17
Indian Art Through the Ages 162 Kant, Immanuel 130 The Arts of Peace 201
Indian Independence 162, 163, 175 Kapur, Geeta 9, 93 Lerch, Franz 55
Indian Masters 133, 139, 158 Kar, Amina 38 Lévi, Sylvain 80
Indian Museum 142 Kar, Surenendranath 86 Lewis, Wyndham 17
Indian National Congress 33, 82–3, 89, Karmabuddhisara 209 Ley, A. H. 199
107, 110, 188–9, 222–3, 225 Karmakar, Prohlad 127 lithography 82
Indian Room at the Empire Exhibition, The Karmarkar, V. P. 127, 131, 153–8 von Leyden, Rudi 107, 110, 112, 113, 120,
192 Conch Blower 157 227
Indian School, Delhi 179 Fishergirl 157, 158 Lloyd, Sir George 183, 190, 195, 196, 198
Indian Society of Oriental Art, Calcutta Graceful Worry 157 London 70, 84, 110, 111, 112, 182, 188,
17, 22, 38, 79, 104, 106, 109, 110, 130 Waghari Beauty 142 192, 208, 213
International Labour Organization Karnataka 165, 208 Lorry, P. 221
Offices, Geneva 175 Karpelès, Andrée 80–2 Lucknow 182, 204
Irwin, John 108, 110, 113, 120 Kashmir 132 Congress 82, 107, 110
Italy (Italian) 182, 211 Kauffer, McKnight Lutyens, Sir Edwin Landseer 140, 160,
frescoes 86, 88, 92 The Early Bird 70, 70 177–9, 196–200, 204
von Itten, Johannes 17, 68, 70, 79 Keeling, Hugh 179 ‘Joint Memorandum for the
Kerala 138 Encouragement of Indian Art’ 179,
Jaffer, Haroon 198–9 Kerkar, M. S. 196, 199
Jagannath 88 Stretcher 225 Lutyens, Emily 179, 197
Jain paintings 37, 86–8 Ketkar Art Institute, Bombay 152 Lytton, Lord 179, 216
Jaipur 86–8, 132, 180, 182, 199, 220 Khadilkar 222
arayaesh 88 Khandalavala, Karl, 49, 54, 63 Macke, August 71
frescoes 86 Khora, L. P. Madan’s Theatre, Calcutta 146
painting 87 Independence Day 227 Madras 145, 170, 182
Janáček, Leoš 65 Kipling, Lockwood 145, 153, 182 Mahabharata 90
Janah, Sunil 31, 104 Kirchner, E. L. 34 Maharajkumari of Burdwan 224
Santal Girl, Bihar 30 Kirti Mandir (Temple of Glory) 89, 90 Maharastra 127, 149
Japan (Japanese) 38, 80, 113 Klee, Paul 10, 16, 17, 68, 69, 74 Maimansingh 128
Nihon-ga 18 Klimt, Gustav 70 Majumdar, Kshitindranath 193
paintings 88 Kodaikanal 165 Jamuna 28, 31
scrolls 91 Kolhapur 150 Malevich, Kasimir 34, 35
Jashoda and Krishna 31 Kollwitz, Käthe 227 Mallik, Pramatha, 127, 173
Jathiya Kalashala (Andhra National Art Körner, Sophie 17 The Soul of the Soil 158, 159
Institution), Masuliptan 160 Kotah 132 Manchester Guardian 224
Java 212 Kramrisch, Stella, 15, 17, 20, 32, 35, 38, Mann, Thomas 68
Jayakar, M. R. 200, 204, 217, 218, 221–2 40–44, 80, 105, 107, 110, 113, 170 Marc, Franz 27
Jeannerat, Pierre Der Cicerone 40 Marcks, Gerhardt 17
‘India’s Greatest Painter’ 111 Kris, Ernst 75 marouflage 182, 192, 205, 210, 217, 220–21
Jinnah 108 Krishna 23 Marshall, Sir John 202, 216
J. J. School of Art 151 Krishna, Roop 193 masks 16, 69, 71, 75–6
Joshi, N. L. 184, 199 Krishnamurti 35, 197 Marx, Karl (Marxism) 119, 124, 171, 226

267
Mary, Queen 213, 223 ‘Indian Imagery and Abstraction’ 91 Pahari
Masaccio 93 Saints 93 miniatures 63
Masik Basumati 130 Travellers 92 painting 65
Masson, Hervé 112 Muller, Herman 149, 207 Pal, Bepin
Matisse, Henri 34, 112 Munch, Edvard 69 ‘Religion, Morality and Art’ 139
Mayo School of Art, Lahore 145, 179, 191, Munich 55, 68 Palace of Westminster, London 180
205 Municipal Building, Prague 180 Pan, David 12
Mayurbhanj 132 murals 84–93, 117, 177–225 Pansare, S. 153
Mazumdar, Hemendranath 124, 125, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 69 Panthéon, Paris 180
128–30, 132–40, 161, 170, 193 Museum of Modern Art, New York 8 Panwalkar, R. D. 192
‘Cobwebs of the Fine Arts World’133 Mysore 163, 165, 167 Parandekar, M. K. 150, 192
Cast Out 129 Landscape 151
Dilli Ka Laddu 136, 136 Nagarkar, G. H. 184, 205–7 Parichay 107
Palli Pran 133, 134, 139 Vaishya caste 207 Paris 8, 11, 16, 36, 46, 47, 50, 55, 59, 66–7,
Rose or Thorn? 136, 137 Naidu, Sarojini 53 71, 138, 180
Smriti 132 Nair women 138 Parma 9
The Art of Mr H. Mazumdar 133 Nakula 162 Parsi Rajakeya Sabha 200
Village Love 132 Nandalal, see Bose, Nandalal pat (scroll painting) 31, 42, 44, 82, 106,
Metta, Vasudev 184, 193 Narayan 139 107, 112–13, 116–18
Mexico City (Mexican) 11, 51 Nathdwara 199, 205, 220 patas 88
murals 180 National Gallery of Art, Washington patua (scroll painter) 44, 82, 83, 113
Mhatre, G. K. 200 ‘Asian Artists in Crystal’ 112 Pathare Prabhu caste 200
To the Temple 153, 192, 195 nationalism 11, 16, 24, 40, 44, 54, 77, 78, Patiala 132
Mhatre, Shyamrao 153 85, 87, 111, 114, 116, 118, 177–25 Pechstein, Max 34
Michelangelo 9, 168 Native American art 71 Penny, Anthony 111
Milford, Mary 107, 109, 111, 116–18 naturalism 177–225 Philadelphia 69
‘A Modern Primitive’ 110 Nehru, Jawaharlal 50 photography 139, 140, 146
Milford, Reverend 111, 116 Nepalese art 88 Picasso, Pablo 7–8, 25–7, 34, 53, 100, 117
Millet, Jean-François 103 Neue Sachlichkeit 55 Demoiselles d’Avignon 8, 71
Milward, Margaret 95 New Delhi 84, 168, 189 Pioneer Film Studio 146
miniatures 19, 42, 63, 88, 118, 165, 180, Imperial Secretariat 89, 177–8, 197, Piranesi, 23
205 202–10 Pithawala, M. F. 186
Mira Bai 90 Viceroy’s Residence, New Delhi 140, Poetry 205
Mistri, Narsinglal 87 178, 179, 184, 197 ponkha work 88
Mitra, Sir Bhupendranath 199, 214 murals 142, 160, 177–91, 194–212, Popova, Liubov Sergeevna 51
Mleccha 190 203, 205, 207, 209 Portraits of Great Beauties of the World,
Modern Review, 15, 66, 130, 224 New York 69, 112 California 138
modernism 7–10 Nichols, Beverley, 113, 169 von Pott, Lisa 95
Modigliani, Amadeo 34, 53 Verdict on India 108 Prabasi 15, 55, 130
Mondrian, Piet 34, 35, 122 Nietzsche, Friedrich 10 Pratinidhi, Panth of Aundh 193
Morning Post 223 Nivedita, Sister 85, 164, 180 Prieto, Laura 51
morotai 80 Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists 164 primitivism 8, 12, 26, 29–122
Morris, William 87, 180 Nobel Prize 65 Prix de Delhi 180, 196, 198–200
Moscow 68 Nolde, Emil 34, 69 Prix de Rome 196
Moser, Kolo 70 Non-Cooperation Movement 79, 81, 188, Progressive Artists of Bombay 227
Mosquera, Gerardo 9 222 Proust, Marcel 76
Moxey, Keith 9 Proutaux, Denise 59
Mucha, Alphons 180, 184 Ocampo, Victoria 66, 72 Public Library, Mysore 168
Muche, Georg 17 Oceanic art 66, 71 Pudovkin, Vsevolod 107
Muggeridge, Malcolm 46, 53, 58, 62 Open Air School, Bombay 124, 149–53 Punjab 127, 135, 145, 194
Mughal empire 214 Oriental Renaissance 10 Punjab Academy of Fine Arts 146
art 19, 63, 125, 131, 208 Orientalism 15 Punjab Literary League, Lahore 51
artists 63, 104 Orozco, José Clemente 180 Puri, Orissa 83
history 197 Osborn, Max 27, 68
Mukherjea, Sir Asutosh 131 Owen, Wilfred 65 Rabindranath, see Tagore, Rabindranath
Mukherjee, Radhakamal 139 Oxford 15 Ragamala 165, 208
Mukhopadhyaya, Benodebehari 83, Rahiman, Abalal 149
89–94, 226 Padua 213 Raj, the 11, 16, 26, 84, 114, 161, 177, 178,

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 181, 188, 197, 198, 205, 222–3, 225 Seated Woman 106, 113 Himalayan Scene 152
Rajamundhry 158, 160 Shadow of Death 103 Schlemmer, Oskar 17, 79, 117–18
Rajasthan (Rajput) 180, 199, 221 The Last Supper 117 Schlesinger, Emmanuel 227
miniatures 19, 42, 87–8, 205, 207–8 The Ploughman 103 Schmidt-Rotluff, Karl 34
painting 65, 104, 118, 182, 199 Three Women 116 Schopenhauer 10
Ram, Sri 145 Weeping Cow 108 Schreyer, Lothar 17
Ramayana 107, 112 Woman with Child 109 Schwab, Raymond 10
Ramkinkar, see Baij, Ramkinkar Roy, Patal 119 Scotland 158, 173
Rao, Damerla Rama 158–62, 193 Roy, Sukumar 15, 17, 130 Scott, Gilbert 211
Nagna Sundari 161, 161 Roy Chowdhury, Deviprosad 31, 32, 94, sculpture 98, 101, 118, 120, 139, 142, 163,
Rishyasringa’s Captivation 161 96, 124, 145, 163,168–76, 193, 226 166–70, 192–3, 196, 201
Siddhartha Ragodaya 160, 160 An Old Kashmiri Smoking 172 Seal, Jogesh 125
The Dancer 161, 162 Dignity of Labour 174, 175 Sen, Bireswar 193
The Godaviri in the Eastern Ghats 161 Lotus Pond (Santal Mother and Sen, Dinesh Chandra 29
Rao, Maharaja Sayaji 89 Children) 30, 170, 193 Sen, Ela 55, 59
Raphael 9 Martyrs’ Memorial 175 Sen, Lalit Mohan 142, 212–15
Rasa-Mandal 202 Old Woman 175 Girl Working in a Potter’s Yard 213
Ratzel, Friedrich Road-Makers 171–2, 174 Seodia, Rustam 186, 205, 206, 208–9, 212
The History of Mankind 71 Self–portrait 169 Sethna, Sir Phiroze 198–200, 218–20
Rawal, Ravi Shankar 181–2 Sumatra Birds 171 Shah Jahan 179
Reading, Lord 161 Travancore Temple Entry Shakespeare, William
Red Fort, Delhi 176 Proclamation 171, 175 Julius Caesar 216
reliefs 104, 171 Triumph of Labour 172, 175 Shanghai 11
Resnais, Alain Royal Academy 132, 140, 156, 180, 182, Sharia Law 204
L’année dernier à Marienbad 23 183, 184, 193, 195, 205, 207, 223, 224 Shenoy, V. G.
Réti, István 55 Royal College of Art 140, 152, 158, 191, The Gupta Period 185
Riegl, Alois 16 211, 212, 213, 217 Sher-Gil, Amrita 10, 35, 36, 45–65, 100,
Ringbom, Sixten 34 Royal Institute of British Architects, 123, 224, 226–7
Rivera, Diego 180 London 177 Child Wife 59, 60
Rivière, George-Henri 66 Royal Society of Arts, London 151 Ganesh Puja 63
Rodin 96, 168, 173 Roychaudhury, Hironmoy 170 Hill Men and Woman 48, 56
Rodrigues, A. C. Roychaudhury, Jyotirmoy Man in White 56, 56
Scene 224 Spring 158 Market Scene 57
Rolland, Romain 69, 78 Rupam 16, 130, 193, 194, 196 Mother India, 63
Romanticism 10, 63, 210 Ruskin, John 180 photograph 46
Rome 9 Russia, Russian 17, 34, 122 The Brahmachari 57
Ronaldshay, Lord (Marquess of Zetland), art 227 The Bride’s Toilet 57
18, 194, 195, 216, 224 painting 117 The Fruit Vendors 56–7
Roopa Lekha 201 The Haldi Grinder 63, 64
Rothenstein, Sir William 18, 24, 69, 73, Sabuj Patra 139 The Professional Model 59, 62
140, 191, 194, 195, 211–12, 214–15, 219 Sadler, Michael 34 Three Women 46, 49, 50
Round Table Conference 152, 224 Said, Edward 15, 33 Torso 51, 52
Roy, Jamini Ranjan 10, 31, 35, 46, 54, 75, Salon des Tuileries, Paris 49 Two Girls 61
76, 100–25, 128–32, 142–3, 145, 169, Salon du Cercle International Feminin 59 Untitled 47
193, 226, 227 Sanskrit 47, 91, 165, 209–10, 221 Young Girls 59, 59
‘Sita with Hanuman’ 107 Santals 29, 31, 80, 88, 92, 94, 96–9, 101, Young Man with Apples 57
A Divine Moment 103 103, 171 Sher-Gil, Indira 52
A Mohamadan at Sunset Prayer 103 Santiniketan 15, 17, 35, 78–88, 90, 91, 140, Sheshanna, Veena 208
After Bankura Clay 104 170, 173, 212, 213 Shillady, J. A. 220
Jashoda 142 Santoshalaya Building 94 Shilparatnam 88
Krishna and his Mother 102 São Paulo 11 Shilpi 133, 139
Krishna and the Gopis 111 Saraya 50 Shilton, T. S. 217–18
Landscape 101 Sargent, John Singer 207–8 Shiva 90, 165, 210
Madonna and Baby Jesus 115 Sarkar, Benoy 22 Shivaji, Chhatrapati 157
Mother and Child 121 ‘Aesthetics of Young India’ 16 Shoosmith, Arthur Gordon 210
pat 105 Sartre, Jean-Paul 7 Sickert, Walter 132
photograph 100 Sassoon, Victor 208 Sienese painters 44
Santal and Child 106 Satwalekar, M. S. 150 Simla Fine Arts Society 47

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Simon, Lucien 47, 55 Swadeshi 61, 139, 180 Taj Mahal 149
Singapore 11 Swarnapuri 23 Talim, B. V. 153
Singh, Sir Bhupindranath 132 Sykes, Frederick 221 In Tune with the Almighty 156
Singh, S. G. Thakur 127, 135, 145–9 Szönyi, István 55, 57 Takali 156
A River Landscape at Sunrise 148 Tamils 57
A River Landscape at Sunset 148 Tagore, Abanindranath 18, 36, 40, 42, 79, Tampuratti, Mangalabai 36
After the Bath 146, 147 80, 85, 91, 101, 103, 104, 109, 125, Tandon, R. C. 49
Glimpses of India 146 130, 142, 146, 161, 163, 170, 179, 180, Tanjore 165
The Art of Mr S. G. Thakur Singh 146 182, 188, 191, 193, 201, 212 Tasker, L. N. 192
Singh, Sobha 146–9 ‘Krishna’s Pranks’, Krishnamangal 32 Tate Gallery 208
Interior Scene 146 Female Figure in Landscape 186 Tempera Revival 67, 85
Singh, Umrao Sher-Gil Majithia 47, 58 Kacha o Devjani 181 temples 26, 35, 44, 83, 85, 89, 118, 125,
Sinha, Satish 142 Kahikankan Chandi 32 139, 145, 153, 171, 173, 175, 180, 192
Mother Breastfeeding Baby 128 Some Notes on Indian Artistic Anatomy Tery-Adler, Margit 17
The Maiden of the Deep 127 163 Theosophy 34, 35, 179
Sinhalese frescos 88 Tagore, Balendranath 138–9 Tibetan thang-ka 88, 90
Siqueiros, Alfaro 180 Tagore, Gaganendranath 7–8, 16, 18–27, Tilak, Balgangadhar 130
Sir Jamsethji Jijibhai School of Art, 36, 40, 193, 202, 224 Times, The 86, 178, 213, 224
Bombay 177 A Cubist City 21 Times Literary Supplement, The 132
Slade School of Art, London 140 A Cubist Scene c. 1922 20 Times of India, The 149, 183, 184–6, 190,
Slav nationalism 180 A Cubist Scene, c. 1923 6 207, 208, 215–16, 218–19
Smithsonian Institution Travelling Aladdin and his Lamp 20 Tlingit art 71
Exhibition Service 112 Crow 18 Tolstoy, Leo 10, 124
Society of Fine Arts 130, 133, 140, 161 Cubist Subject 22 ‘What is Art?’ 120–21
Solegaonkar, G. M. Duryadhana at Maidapah’s Palace 20 Tonks, Henry 140
Mahiari 150 House of Mystery 20, 25 Toronto 69
Solomon, William Ewart Gladstone 54, Interior 23 Travancore Art Gallery 54
142, 149, 160–61, 177, 181–91, Sat Bhai Champa 24, 25 Treasurywalla, B. N. 165
194–208, 215, 218, 220–24 Symphony 20 Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow 68
The Bombay Revival of Indian Art 192 The City of Dwarka 20 Trindade, A. X. 192
The Charm of Indian Art 202 The Fake Brahmin Dispensing Tristram, Professor Ernest W. 213
The Masque of Cupid 183 Blessing for Lucre 19 Trocadéro Museum, Paris 66, 71
Soviet Republic 69 The Poet on the Island of the Birds 14,
South Africa 178 25 Ukil, Barada 55, 133, 223–4
South Africa House 211 The Vertical Man 26 Ukil, Ranada 212, 215, 223–4
Southall, Joseph 67 Tagore, Maharaja Pradyot Kumar 141 Ukil, Sarada 51, 193
Soutine 54 Tagore, Rabindranath 10, 15, 16, 34, 35, Unconscious, the 35, 75
Spain, Spanish 12 36, 38, 46, 54, 65–79, 112, 118, 122, unicef Christmas cards 112
Spector, J. J. 75 123–4, 130, 146, 160, 182, 191, 197, University of Florida Art Gallery 112
Sriniketan 88 202, 212, 219, 224, 226–7 Unrest, the 123, 125
Statesman, The 17, 21, 37, 104, 106, 116, Animal 67 Untouchables 81, 171, 175
130, 165 Architecture 67 Upanishads 34, 35
Steiner, Wendy 76 Kheya 71
Steuben glass 112 Natir Puja 90 Vaillant, Pierre 51, 52
Stokes, Adrian 8 Nude on a Bird 70 Vakil, Kanhaiyal 23, 132, 142, 200–2, 204,
Stravinsky, Igor 66 page from Purabi 69, 71 210, 216, 224
Student line drawing based on Ajanta 187 photograph 65 ‘Humours of Havellism’ 188
Students’ Brotherhood Hall, London 221 Rakta Karabi 69, 71, 73 Van Gogh, Vincent 100
Studio, The 150, 182, 193–4, 214 ‘The Hermitage’ 29, 116 Varma, C. Raja Raja 149
Suhrawardy, Shahid 106, 110, 112, 120, Untitled (Mask) 73 Water Carrier 134
142 Untitled (Nude Male) 76 Varma, Ravi 36, 38, 42, 93, 123, 135, 207
Prefaces 109 Untitled after Primitive Art 72 Varnasramadharma 214
Sunayani, see Devi, Sunayani Untitled Covering Nude Woman 76, Vasari 9
Sundaram, Vivan 58 77 Veda 34
Sunday Times, The 224 untitled sketch of his wife 66 Venice 9
Suprematism 34 Untitled, c. 1930s, 74 Venkatachalam, Govindaraj 38, 44, 63,
Surrealism 7, 66, 73 Tagore, Satyendranath 156 109, 113, 120, 161, 169
Surya 86, 191 Taikan 18 Venkatappa, K, 163–8, 193, 208

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 Mad After Vina 168 Vossiche Zeitung 69 Windsor Castle 140
Monsoon Clouds Breaking 166 Vriksha Ropan (tree planting) 88 women’s art 81–2
Oootacamund in Moonlight 166 Women’s International Art Club, London
Rama’s Marriage 164 Wadiyar, Krishnaraja, Maharaja of 37
Shiva Ratri 166 Mysore 163, 165, 168 World War i 179, 183
The Lake View 167, 167 Wagner 180 World War ii 78
The Tempest 166 Wales, Prince of 189 Worringer, Wilhelm 10
Victoria and Albert Museum, London Wardah 83 Wuttenbrach, Nora Pursar 37
212 Watson, Alfred Henry 104
Vienna 11, 15 68, 73, 74, 75, 79, 213, 227 Webster’s Dictionary 168 York, Duchess of 224
Villa Medici 196 Welfare 22 Younghusband, Sir Francis 179, 194, 217,
Village Industries Association 82 Wembley 140, 170 219
Villeneuve 78 ‘wet-sari’ painting 133, 149
‘virtual cosmopolis’ 11–12, 100 Wilenski, R. H. Zamindari (land-owning class) 128, 168,
Vishnu 219 The Modern Movement in Art 133 170
Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan 36, Wiles, George 217–19 Zebegény 55
78 Willingdon, Lord 152, 215 von Zemlinsky, Alexander 65
Vivekananda, Swami 34, 180 Wilson, Leslie 223 Zola, Emile 139

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