A BRIEF REFRACTIVE IMAGE OF PROGRESSIVE ARTISTS GROUP – BOMBAY 1947

Avik Jana

O nce upon a time in India’s pre-independent era, the ‘Bombay

Arts Society’ acted as a catalyst, when the judging committee of
that time didn’t just select an artist based on a specific art values.
Then it was Francis Newton Souza who said, artists should get
together to talk about their common problems and initiate the
development of a new national art in India. During that turmoil year
of Indian Independence, December 5th, 1947, Bombay, The
Progressive Artists’ Group born. That time the founder members
strongly felt together that artists should have freedom of expression
and hence they came together as a group by the name of
‘Progressive’ which was inspired from the Progressive Writers’
Association (PWA) movement, started by Indian Marxist litterateur of
novelists and poets.

The desire for absolute freedom for content and technique, as well
as artistic but almost anarchic, spread widely like a hot cake among
the young artists, who just started to witnessed Independence from
the British Raj. In a way, on that time multicultural port-city Bombay
was a symbolic microcosm of the new India and so were the founder
members of the group. The members were too came from different
social and religious backgrounds, but they were also the part of
cosmopolitan part of the country, who were experiencing the new
socio-political change. This ‘Progressive Artists’ Group’ was formed
by Francis Newton Souza, Sayed Haider Raza and Krishnaji Howlaji
Ara formerly. In 1947, Souza, Raza and Ara, along with art critic
Rashid Husain set up an independent judging committee aimed at
introducing transparent selection process in response to the existing,
arbitrary judging process in art exhibitions across the country; and
allowing greater participation of emerging artists. However through
the invitation each of them inducted one artist each, the group

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grew to include Maqbool Fida Hussain, Hari Ambadas Gade and
Sadanand Bakre. Ara brought on board painter and sculptor
Sadanand Bakre, while Raza introduced Hari Ambadas Gade and
Souza got the iconoclastic Maqbool Fida Hussain, who was then
incidentally quit his job at the furniture store in Church-Gate, and
widely proclaimed that with India’s independence came his own
from a fulltime job. Hussain persuaded fellow painters Vasudeo S
Gaitonde and Krishen Khanna to join up with the Progressive Artists’
Group as well. Although the esteemed artist Akbar Padamsee was
by no means a recognized member of the PAG, but he founded a
life time connection with its people. Eventually, PAG did broaden
and recognized artists like others who became associated with the
group included Manishi Dey, Ram Kumar, Akbar Padamsee, Tayeb
Mehta and later on Mohan Samant, Bhanu Rajopadhye Athaiya,
Abdul Aziz Raiba, G.M. Hajarnis, Nashur D. Chapgar, Ebrahim Alkazi,
Bal Chhabda who were grew to be affiliated with the group by
1950s.

The beginning associates were properly referenced to F.N. Souza like

as mentioned ‘heralds of a new dawn in the world of Indian Art’ by
nation’s one of the recognized author Mulk Raj Anand. In keeping
with this spirit, the Group which held its initial meetings in the office
of the Friends of Soviet Union at Girgaum. Subsequently the PAG
members showed their work at the Bombay Art Society salon for the
first time. The climate was ripe for a new era of modernism which
reflected across every cultural sections like; literature, architecture,
theatre, drama, film or poetry – in everywhere the touch of
progressiveness of cultural reformative think encompasses within it.
The ‘’Progressive Writers’ Association’’ which was also led by Mulk
Raj Anand, who later inaugurated the Progressive Artists’ Group’s
exhibition held in the year 1949, Bombay. Followed by another in
1950 at Rampart Row in Bombay as a part of the Bombay Art
Society’s Annual salon, to critical success. However, the artists
admitted that their goal of bridging the gap between the lives of
everyday people and the artist could not be accommodated in the

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exhibition. The group’s third and the last exhibition was held in
Calcutta, September, 1953. In their catalogue they had used
Samuel Butler’s quotation as their motto, as follows, ‘young art must
be working out its own salvation from efforts in all fear and
trembling’. Apparently, at the crucial occasion of the PAG exhibition
the member artists frankly admitted that the ideology expressed in
the manifesto which was set at the time of formation of the Group,
‘was not practicable’. They confessed that ‘we have changed all
the chauvinist ideas and the leftist fanaticism which we had
incorporated in our manifesto at the inception of the group’ and
that ‘the gulf between the people and the artists cannot be
bridged’. After that around 1956 the group disbanded and dissolved
officially as most of the founding members went overseas or turned
as an opportunist, the group ultimately collapsed.

The PAG artists pushed the traditional arts organizations of their

periods and uphold a practical frame of mind. They wanted to paint
with absolute freedom for content and technique, while the entire
group was basically an omnium-gatherum of different styles and
influences. They wanted to break away with the revivalist cultural
nationalism established by Abanindranath Tagore, with the rest of
Bengal School artists and to encourage an Indian avant-garde,
engaged at an International level. In point of fact once, F.N. Souza
criticized the Bengal School of Art paintings as ‘sentimental pictures’
for the nostalgic gouaches of pining damsels according to him.
Mainly the group was so much influenced by the inner version or the
Antar-Gyaan and the same was being portrayed in their art rather
than the European realism. The consequence was the PAG grew to
be the most influential group of Modern artists in India, seeking new
forms of expression to capture and convey India’s complex past,
along with its emerging post-colonial future. The fusion of Indian
subject matter with Post-Impressionist colours, influenced by the art
featuring movements of Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Cubist forms
and Expressionist gestures forged a synthesis between early
European modernist techniques and the ever-shifting cultural and

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historical identities of India. The wound of post-independence’s
separation and partition is considered to have sowed the seed
among them to establish the new criteria of their new language of
art work. Demanding the conventional art institution of their periods,
the affiliates preferred to split aside from the Bengal School of Art,
and rather, encourage a modern style that was on par with
intercontinental enhancements. The primary concept was to
appear out of the colonial hangover and embrace the profane
mind.

The PAG members often merged Indian themes and imageries for
the western creative tactics. Oldest member of the PAG, K. H. Ara
painted in his leisure hours when he started exhibiting in art
exhibitions and surprisingly won prizes also. That time, Walter
Langhammer, the art director of Times of India and Rudi Van
Leyden, the art critic, noticed his talent and encouraged him. It has
been acknowledged that, Ara blossomed into a painter under their
guidance, so, he won the ‘Times of India prize’, in 1939. In 1941 he
won a prize for the second time for his ‘Flora Fountain’. Leyden saw
a quality of genius in his careless dashes of paint and rather crude
drawing, insisting that Ara take a few elementary lessons in Art. In his
first one-man show of 1942, Ara revealed a dynamic spontaneity in
his water colour paintings which were mostly still-lives, wine glasses,
grapes, pine apples and earthen pots. His colour schemes and
dynamic force were noted which are qualities associated with naïve
or folk artists. Ara came into lime light when he won the Governor’s
prize at the Bombay Art Society’s exhibition. While K.H. Ara designed
impressive watercolour and gouache artwork that was similar to folk
and indigenous tribal art style, F.N. Souza’s expressionist’s style
presented with the use of distinct colour palette, apocalyptic vision
that dominated his landscapes, also presented irregular, swerving
brushstrokes creates an unsettling non-traditional deformation of
form and perhaps surprisingly amalgamated Goan-Peasant folk-art
with European styles like as cubism. Souza wanted to question the
conventions that had prevailed in art schools. For him, modern art

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stood for a new freedom that could challenge the traditional sense
of beauty and morality. However, his experimental works were
focused mainly on women, whom he painted as nudes,
exaggerating their proportions and breaking the standard notions of
beauty. When in the year 1947, Souza briefly joined Communist Party
of India as an active comrade by socially, then he also portrayed his
artworks as per Marxist social reformative ideals. His primarily painting
small format watercolours of Goan landscapes and illustrating the
plight of the Indian poor class people, deprived class struggle,
protest for social justice and injustice occurred by the proletariats of
the high-brow society people, though he did experiment with oil on
board and canvas, too. Among the most compelling paintings from
Souza’s this period are Indian Family (1947), an oil on board
depicting a family of four outside a house with empty bowls at their
feet, while fish and fruit sit atop a table inside the house behind
them; and Pieta (1947), an oil painting featuring the Virgin Mary.
Souza applies daubs of brightly coloured paint to heighten religious
iconography such as the Pieta. He exhibited many of these
provocative paintings in the working-class colonies of Bombay. He
was hailed in the ‘People’s Age’, the Communist Party Daily
newspaper, as “a patriot and a revolutionary”. According to
renowned Art historian and critic Ranjit Haskote, ‘the Progressives
didn’t come together until 1947-1948, and constituted, as per
Haskote’s argue, it is more a moment than a movement, its
ephemeral existence assuming fleshly solidity in the nostalgic
retrospection of artists, art critics, and art historians rather than in the
reality of its brief apogee”. Also Haskote said that, ‘Even the name
of the group is deceptive: it came from Souza’s short-lived flirtation
with Communism, an ideology from which some of his confreres,
such as Hussain and Raza, and associates such as Gaitonde and
Padamsee, maintained a cautious and conservative distance’. The
refined and multilingually well-read K. Khanna was doubtless well
attuned to the analogy F.N. Souza intended with the Left-wing
Progressive Writers Association (PWA), whose members included a
constellation of brilliant Urdu writers including Saadat Hasan Manto,
Sahir Ludhianvi, Ismat Chughtai, Kaifi Azmi, Sajjad Zaheer and

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Rajinder Singh Bedi. It is unlikely that K. Khanna, as a young merchant
banker had joined the Grindlays Bank, 1946, from which he would
resign to set out as an independent artist only in 1961, and he would
display any manifest enthusiasm for an anti-capitalist position.
Besides this unproductive circling around a chimera, Bhanu
Rajopadhye Athaiya’s artistic practice had its origins and deep
historical horizon in her formative contexts, genealogies of the
modern Indian art practices. K.H. Ara’s achievement had laid in
fusing a raw sensuality with a calculated structure in compositional
artwork. Ara thereby revitalizing the entire still life genre and
constantly experimented with paint to acquire what he describes as
the honest expression of form. But F.N. Souza’s work seemed to be
driven by a cataclysmic force, which wreaks havoc. Souza’s later
experiments with non-conventional idea of landscapes established
as like a pristine and romantic gateway, and used the theme to
explore his fears of impending destruction. Souza’s crisp black lines
and confident handling of structure are clearly visible in this
expressive work. Although reluctant to participate in any
controversies, yet Husain too had experienced poverty and
difficulties as a youngster and yielded to Souza’s persuasion.
However it was only since 1937, when he decided to fully devote
himself to painting, living in a cheap room in the slum area near
Grant Road undertaking all kinds of odd jobs. He painted cinema
posters, designed nursery furniture, embellishing cots and rocking
horses in colourful designs. The oil painting ‘Sunehra Sansar’ brought
him to limelight in 1946 when it was awarded a prize at the Annual
exhibition of Bombay Art Society for its remarkable composition.
When in 1948 Souza saw Husain’s painting ‘Potters’ at the Bombay
Art Society’s exhibition he decided to bring Husain into the fold of
the PAG. In form and contrast, H.A. Gade is regarded as amongst
the first contemporary painters of post-independent India, who
usually coloured themes connected to landscaping. His paintings
were noticed from 1946 onwards for good understanding of
emotional qualities of colour and a certain kinship with Raza’s
landscapes. Hari Ambadas Gade also experimented in various
directions which may be the reason S.H. Raza insisted that he join

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the PAG. In H.A. Gade’s early days, figurative works he was
influenced by Shergil-sque elements and elementary simplification
of forms in child art. His paintings were noticed from 1946 onwards
for good understanding of emotional qualities of colour and a
certain kinship with Raza’s landscapes. Such comments had been
made for the two of his paintings ‘Narrow Lane’ and ‘Fountain
Jubbulpore’ displayed in 1947 exhibition of Bombay Art Society.
Temperamentally Raza was much different than Souza if consider
the fact that the former was happy appreciating nature’s beauty
and expressing his own pleasure through his paintings. Raza’s Nasik
landscapes earned the scholarship offered by Art Society of India
for a tour of India for the purpose of landscape paintings. 1944, at
the Bombay Art Society’s Annual exhibition he exhibited a group of
water colour landscapes depicting Bombay Street Scenes which he
combined the element of opaque colour popularized by N.S.
Bendre and Salgaonkar, known as Indore School of Art along with
the broad execution and the panoramic bird’s eye-view observed
in Austrian expressionist Walter Langhammer’s landscapes., usually
the oil paintings. Raza’s water colour landscapes at the 1944
exhibition were admired by critics as ‘juicer’ and ‘delightful’. In 1946,
his landscapes displayed at the Bombay Art Society’s annual
exhibition, he won the Silver medal and were specially commented
by the critic, Rudy Von Leyden, such as ‘Bori Bundar’ and ‘The
Dasasvamedh Ghat’. He was hailed as the surest and most sensitive
painter of landscapes in the whole exhibition. His main intention to
discard the old naturalistic style and evolve his own to suit his
expression, may be the main reason for agreeing to join the
grievances of his fellow artists to the PAG. The only sculptor member
of PAG, Sadanand Bakre developed himself as a special flair in the
genre of portraiture. As early as 1940 his portrait bust ‘My Father’ was
exhibited in the annual exhibition of Bombay art Society of that year.
His portrait titled ‘Seer’ won a prize in the exhibition of 1942. His
exhibit in the next year, was a bust given the title ‘My Deeper Self’
was much more interesting and expressive. His sculptures were
characterized by sensitive modelling and distinct expression.
Replacing naturalistic techniques he adopted the modelling

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technique of the British sculptor, Jacob Epstein, and experimented
with cubist planes as in his portrait of Ara. He was interested in the
art of painting also having won a prize for ‘Sketch from Ambarnath’
in 1942. Bakre too had developed some kind of resentment against
the so-called highbrows and orthodox art critics. Due to this reason
and his friendship with Ara he was motivated to join the PAG as its
founder member. Since the time of the Bombay Progressive Artist’s
Group, artists began to write their own manifestos or writings, in
which they declared the main aims of their art and how it differed
from others. An interesting fact to note about the PAG’s artistic style
and the subject matter in painting and sculpture was largely drawn
from rural India. This is the case even with the Calcutta group during
1940s and 1950s. City and urban life rarely appeared in works of
Indian artists. Perhaps, it was felt that real India lives in villages. The
Indian artists of the 1940s and 1950s rarely looked at their immediate
cultural milieu. Anything new especially something that is against the
traditions and society norms is difficult to establish. This was also the
case with Modern Art and members of the PAG faced harsh criticism
for their art. Souza was criticized for his erotic paintings (especially a
painting in his early exhibition in which he painted himself full length
nude), Akber Padamsee was taken to court. Despite these criticisms’
members of the PAG continued their movement and travelled from
all parts of Bombay to meet up at Chetna Restaurant, Bombay Art
Society, Marine Drive and Rampart Row to discuss their art.

Ebrahim Alkazi and his wife Roshen Padamsee were significantly

responsible for promoting many members of the Progressive Artists’
Group not only India but also at an international level. Apart from
Alkazi; Mulk Raj Anand, Walter Langhammer, Emmanuel
Schlesinger, Rudi Von Leyden and Kekoo Gandhi were also active
as art collectors. Alkazi established himself as a theatre director
making plays inspired from west along with being tweaked to have
Indian viewpoints. Apart from loving the other group artists’
artworks, Alkazi also friendly intimated with Hussain. So he invited
Hussain to design the sets and costumes of his plays to showcase

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both Greek and Indian realism. Alkazi also launched a monthly arts
publication called the ‘Theatre Group Bulletin’ to promote the
emerging art scenario in India. He paid specific attention to works
of the Progressive Artists by putting them on the cover page,
painting, mentioning their awards and invitations they received to
go abroad. This merchandising endorsement helped the PAG gain
popularity and publicity not only in India, but also among Theatre
Group Bulletin’s International subscriptions. When Souza moved to
London, he worked as a journalist side by to make a living. He
wrote an autobiographical essay in Stephen spender’s Encounter
Magazine and that is when Spender introduced him to the owner
and art collector of Gallery One. That was his turning point, while
Souza’s 1955’s exhibit of paintings were all sold out. Not only Souza,
also Ara, Raza, Bakre, Hussain and Gade everyone gained their
endorsement help widely and made their art collectable and
renowned. However Bhanu Rajopadhye Athaiya made her career
as a sophisticated contributor of costume designer to the Hindi
cinema where she had little to do with the influence or tutelage of
the Progressives. She had won an Oscar for Best Costume Design
for Richard Attenborough’s 1982 masterpiece, Gandhi. Bombay’s
cultural life in the 1940’s and 1950’s was dominated and shaped by
an array of magisterial visionaries and institution-builders including
the scientist and science administrator Homi Bhaba, who was a
leading patron and institutional art collector; the novelist and art
critic Mulk Raj Anand, also founder editor of Marg magazine; the
novelist and cultural thinker Raja Rao; that champion of artists,
Kekoo Gandhy, who would establish one of the Bombay’s earliest
private galleries, Chemould, in 1964; the collector and historian Karl
Khandalavala; the patron of the arts, Sir Cowasji Jehangir; the
Central European émigré connoisseurs and the collectors Rudolf
von Leyden, Austrian expressionist Walter Langhammer, Emmanuel
Schlesinger who were the refugees from Hitler’s Nazi Germany
came to the contact with Progressive Artist Group.

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The PAG founding artists’ reflected India’s diverse range of socio-
economic and linguistic backgrounds, and such a pluralism would
be the driving force for the Group’s alignment against the artistic
styles and practices that had come to dominate the Indian artistic
scenario in the 20th century. Though their styles, philosophies, and
modes of art making often differed greatly, what united these artists
was an acknowledgement that the dominant mode of art making,
which emphasized an orientalist and nostalgic nationalism inspired
by the influence of Bengal School of Art, was no longer appropriate
for a newly independent India according to them. To realize this new
mode of thinking of PAG artists, they looked to the rich tradition of
the past, from the composition of 17th century Mughal and Pahari
miniatures to the sensuous carvings of Khajuraho temples or Ellora
rock cut temple architectures. In mining this past for inspiration, the
artists combined elements from Hindu, Jain imageries and Islamic
symbolic motifs and tradition, espousing in these process an
argument for a secular modernity. Incorporating both formalist
techniques and spiritual, metaphysical themes, the PAG invocation
of the past was an attempt to accurately evoke the pluralism of their
modernist present; by tracing a trajectory of simultaneous histories
that led to the 20th century, their aim was to take stock of the rich
landscape in which their own practices developed. True to their
expansive idea of Modernism, the PAG artists didn’t limit themselves
to the inheritance of doctrinal Indian tradition but looked to the
styles and modes of Asian painting, including Korean landscape
and Japanese ink painting, as seen in the numinous forms of
Padamsee and Gaitonde. Vernacular and folk traditions of tribal
peoples within India also served as a crucial mode of inspiration for
Raza and Hussain, whose depictions of rural village life were newly
invigorated by gestural strokes, resplendent colour and tightly
composed forms that placed the pastoral sharply into India’s rapidly
industrialized present. Such contradiction have come to define the
legacy of the Progressive Artist’s Group, the cohesiveness of which
began to erode following Souza’s departure for London in 1949,
where he would remain until the late 1960’s. His fellow compatriots
would follow suit Raza to Paris, and Bakre to London. The remaining

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artists still committed to the Group’s principles in their wake an
indelible imprint on the development of an International Modernism,
with manifold perspectives, subjects, and aesthetic registers. This
PAG’s vision and approach continues to this day as a measure of art
development, the reverberations of which continue to reverberate
in the contemporary field of Indian art, and the eclecticism inherent
in their artworks as a whole. An artist, critic, cultural thinker Badri
Narayan, from his essay named ‘Artists of the Third Epoch’, published
from Lalit Kala Contemporary 3, New Delhi, 1965, where he mention
the term “the artists of the third epoch”. Badri wrote that, “The First
Epoch in Modern Indian Art belongs to what is now called the
Bengal School led by Abanindranath Tagore…the Second to
independent and stylistically divergent painters like Jamini Roy and
Amrita Sher-Gil; and the Third Epoch to those many painters, too
numerous to be named individually, too varied in their outlook, those
artists who emerged about the 1950s of this century, turning for
inspiration not only to their own primitive, prehistoric and the more
archaic and early miniature traditions but also to the makers of the
new patrimony – Klee, Mondrian, Miro, Villon, Brancusi, Moore,
Orozco, Marini, Giacometti, and the host of those eclectic masters
of the post-impressionist period”.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

1. Mago, P.N., Contemporary Art in India: A Perspective. National

Book Trust, India 2001.
2. Parimoo, Ratan, Art of Francis Newton Souza, A study in
Psychoanalytical Approach 2003.
3. Dalmia, Yashodhara, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The
Progressives, New Delhi, 2001
4. Jumabhoy, Zehra, and Hui, Boon, edited, The Progressive
Revolution: Modern Art for a new India
5. Majithia, Rudra, The Progressive Artist Group
6. Berlia, Neha, Francis Newton Souza-Enfant Terrible of Modern Art
7. Sinha, Gayatri, India Today, 2016
8. Raj, Neelam, God, Sex & Souza, Times of India, 2010
9. Haskote, Ranjit; Grey, Abby; The Disordered Origins of Things: The
Art Collection as Pre-canonical Space
10. Narayan, Badri, Artists of the Third Epoch, Lalit Kala
Contemporary 3, New Delhi, 1965
11. Mitter Partha, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the
Avant-Garde 1922-1947, New Delhi, Oxford University, Press, 2007
12. Haskote, Ranjit, Opening Lines: Ebrahim Alkazi, Works 1948-1971,
Art Heritage, New Delhi

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