Overview of Indian Art
Contemporary
Indian Painting
A glance over the terrain traced by modern and contemporary Indian painting
shows a diverse range of artistic responses to reality. While in the early years
of the past century Indian painters seem to concern themselves primarily with
the societal, the following decades variegate their gaze. Their assertions
become, at different times, either nationalist or modernist, socially
responsive or intensely subjective, fiercely indigenist or defiantly
international, or self consciously traditionalist or fashionably
post-modernist. These moments do not, of course, necessarily follow in the
order listed, but help us mirror to a great extent, the diversity of the artistic
impulses developed.
Throughout these phases, one may discern three emphases
common to artistic practice in most countries with a colonial past: an
interrogation of Western influences on artistic expression, the overpowering
need to establish a distinct identity and idiom for Indian art, and an
engagement with the role and function of the artist in a country like India.
The questioning of the West, and the attempt to
resuscitate the cultural identity suppressed by the British, commenced in early
1900 and took momentum from the ongoing nationalist (Swadeshi) movement. An
aspect of this project was the artistic rejection of the romanticisation of
Indian reality by Company Painting and the mannered portraits of Raja Ravi
Varma.
The artists who adopted this mandate belong to what is
called the Bengal
School of Painting. They received their initial impetus from the ideas of an
Englishman, the Orientalist-Romantic E.B. Havell, who had taken over as
Principal of the Calcutta Government College of Art in 1896, the painter
Abanindranath Tagore and the critic A. K. Coomaraswamy.
Among the artists who expressed themselves through the
form and style of this school were Nandalal Bose, D.P. Roy Choudhury, A. K.
Haldar, K. Venkatappa, Samarendranath Gupta, Kshitindranath Mazumdar, Sarada
Ukil and M.A.R. Chugtai.
The main traits of the work in this school are the
artist's sources of inspiration, choice of media and artistic technique.
Given their aims, the artists' themes derived mainly from Indian mythology
and religion; they also consciously followed the principles of painting they
could discern in Indian miniature paintings and Indian sculptures,
particularly temple sculpture and the frescoes at Ajanta. As oils were a
Western medium, water-colour, tempera and ink and the Japanese wash technique
were preferred.
Rabindranath Tagore, also a poet and Nobel laureate,
allied with the school's general goals, but preferred to devote himself to
his more personal and universal vision, though one that was expressed in
paintings executed in strikingly modernist terms. It would be in the latter's
Shantiniketan Institute too that Ramkinkar Vaij and Benode Behari Mukherjee would
express their love for nature and its rhythms in work that would be
recognised as pioneering only much later.
However, not all artists were prepared to subserve the
demands of the prevailing isms. Jamini Roy, taking a more individualised
stance, turned his gaze onto the immediate reality around him. It is his
studies of the Santhal tribals, with their sharp angular lines and clear
colours, which indicated the possible direction that must be taken to
discover an indigenous idiom and sensibility.
Gaganendranath Tagore was another artist to follow his
personal impulses, freely responding to artistic influences from all
directions, including from the derided West, and choosing to delineate the
hypocrisies of the society around him.
A seemingly more direct challenge to the revivalists came in the thirties in the form of the bold,
post-impressionistic colours of Amrita Sher Gill, and in the forties through
the 'socially responsive' work of the Calcutta
Group; the latter artists consciously choosing to integrate foreign
influences in their work in order to "enrich our art" and to create
an art both "international and interdependent."
The country's independence from colonial rule in 1947
might have seemed like the right moment for a form of expression that would
match the significance of the occasion. However, it appears that art does not
always take its cues from events seen as historical or defining; and if it
does, seems to make references that appear to veer sharply from the direct.
The so-called 'artists of transition', for instance, seem to be engrossed in
a contemplation of life's simpler pursuits, the everyday, small and trivial.
Perhaps it was a way of suggesting that now that the overriding objective had
been attained, it was time to savour the pure sense of being alive. These
artists, among them Sailoz Mukherjea, N.S. Bendre, K.K. Hebbar, Shiavax
Chavda and K.H. Ara, seem at peace with life around and feel they must
capture its fleeting, and now intensely more joyous, moments. This innocent
interlude is characterised by simplified forms and lively
colours.
The response of the Progressive
Artists Group (1947-1956) in Bombay, too, seems apolitical, the fact of
their coming together in the year of Independence being purely coincidental.
What these artists were more exercised about was the fact that art as
practised in India till then had to change; a total break with the past and
its stultifying constraints, both cultural and artistic, was called for. F.
N. Souza, S. H. Raza, K. H. Ara, M.F. Husain, S. H. Gade and S. Bakre were
determined to fashion an art that was 'entirely Indian but also modern'.
Their work does contain the latter two elements in ample degree, though the
modernism relies a great deal on Parisian abstract Expressionism and
post-Impressionism. The group was joined briefly, in the fifties, by Mohan
Samant, V. S. Gaitonde and Krishen Khanna.
Up north in the capital, the Delhi
Silpi Chakra, a group of artists displaced from Lahore after the
country's Partition in 1947, deployed a finely-honed technical skill to
register their anguish at the trauma of displacement. They also continued the
quest for a national style of expression, turning to local craft traditions
for inspiration in this direction. These artists (B. C. Sanyal, Kanwal
Krishna, Dhanraj Bhagat, P.N. Mago, K.S. Kulkarni and others) would also
prove to be instrumental in the future artistic development of K.G.
Subramanyam, Satish Gujral, Bimal Dasgupta, Shanti Dave and others).
In the late fifties and intermittently over the next two
decades, the centre of artistic endeavour seemed to shift, if ever so
briefly, to Baroda, where the Fine Arts department of M. S. University had
been very ambitiously put together. The result was the group of practitioners,
styled the Baroda
Group, whose experiments in abstraction, Pop Art and Neo-Dada would
considerably deepen contemporary Indian art's engagement with modernism.
As though in reaction, the overarching need for a
'national' art came to a head around the same time. J. Swaminathan and his Group
1890, declared that Indian artists must reject the "hybrid
mannerisms" imported from Europe. And a group of artists in south India
cocooned themselves in the Cholamandal
Artists Village and consciously attempted to distil an Indian idiom through
the use of techniques derived from rural handicraft traditions, textile
design and the inspiration of Jamini Roy. K.C.S. Paniker, J. Sultan Ali, S.G.
Vasudev, K. Ramanujam were some of the artists following this persuasion.
It was also late in this decade that several artists,
Biren De, Shanker Palsiker, Ghulam Rasool Santosh and Jagdish Swaminathan
among them, turned to a form of abstraction inspired by Indian Tantra art,
the symbolic and religio-erotic interplay of circles, triangles and squares.
This Neo-Tantric
turn, it was hoped, would show the way to an unmistakably-Indian and modern
idiom.
The turbulent seventies saw a more intense turn towards
the social. The 1971 war with Pakistan, the Naxalite Movement in Bengal, and
the curtailing of democracy during the Emergency, formed the political
backdrop for this phase. In the cities of Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi, Gieve
Patel, Sudhir Patwardhan, Vivan Sundaram, Ganesh Pyne and Bikash
Bhattacharjee, among others, felt it incumbent on them to directly refer to
the national situation and document the pain of the people. A pre-occupation
with the role of the artist in a poor country and the need for social
responsiveness also gained greater urgency now.
But artistic journeys can also be intensely personal and
idiosyncratic. Tyeb Mehta, A. Ramachandran, Rameshwar Broota, Akbar Padamsee,
Jehangir Sabavala, Laxman Shreshta, Laxma Goud, Anjolie Ela Menon and others
would carry forward their individual pre-occupations, trying to tease out the
insights they sensed lurking somewhere.
The decade also saw many more women artists come forward
on the artistic scene, the majority of them delineating a point of view that
combined the feminist and the subjective. As may be expected, Nalini Malani,
Arpita Singh, Madhvi Parekh, Ira Roy, Veena Bhargava, Suruchi Chand, Navjot
and others address the central issues of subjectivity and victimhood, but the
introspective and the apparently apolitical also find a voice in their work.
The obsessions of their male counterparts (modernism, indigenism etc.) seem
relatively peripheral concerns.
This trend would, of course, be a prefiguration of the
tone of artistic practice in the eighties and nineties. During these two
decades, the preoccupations of the earlier part of the century get
considerably attenuated and, with some younger artists, become a non-issue.
The hard fact of the globalised economy makes a post-modernised utterance
seem de rigeur now. Thus, in keeping with the tenor of the times,
installation art, mixed media, and digital representations insinuate their
way into public awareness. The "hybrid mannerisms" excoriated by Jagdish
Swaminathan now become "hybrid signs", and ironically, begin to
seem normal and familiar. The earlier divides blur; the borders between the
imported and the indigenous seem to suture, though the edges continue to
show.
Thus, Bhupen Khakkar will combine a sinuous mix of both
influences, the local and the foreign, but also not hesitate to draw in the
viewer to the fact of his alternate sexuality. And M. F. Husain will take
further the project that he has made his very own: to mix the religious with
the secular and the elite with the popular. His attachment to Hindu icons
will, however, not be seen in the proper light by religious fundamentalists,
who will vandalise his paintings in protest against his alleged
misinterpretation of the true spirit of Hinduism. But in keeping with his
image as the painter most representative of the Indian ethos, Husain will
also go overboard celebrating his discovery of a woman, the Hindi film star,
Madhuri Dixit, who, he will claim, is the living embodiment of the
quintessential Indian woman (Bharatiya nari). (Such an entity, it seems, can
really exist! Isn't it usually artistic intuition which discovers this before
the rest of us?!)
Among the younger artists, the pluralist and fragmentative
mood predominates. With the old, archaic bonds loosened, Atul Dodiya's montages
will take cognisance of this new place we find ourselves in, while Anandjit
Ray will combine his colours as easily as his narratives.
In the work of Baiju Parthan, the past and the present
will cohere without too much dissonance. As it does with most of the artists,
too numerous to mention, painting today. An unexpected nuance comes into the
picture with the work of artists emanating from the Indian diaspora.
Additionally, the opening up of the market for Indian modern art abroad, as
also the profusion of art galleries within the country, will mean that the
Indian artist now has no choice but to address a more diffuse audience,
through themes that resonate with the local and the global.
But alongside these highly
personalized and contemporary gestures, the thematic concerns of the past
still continue to haunt the artist: the search for that elusive Indian voice,
the anxiety over the looming shoulder, and the guilt over an activity which
seems like so much fiddling while the country burns. In short, through the
obsessions of its painters, Indian art seems to yield a picture of a vital
and vigorous creative practice, which, at times, also seems a bit bewildering
and confusing. But let the poet phrase the matter:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself.
I am large, I can contain multitudes.
It is this heterogeneity, this multiple and plural nature of Indian art
which, perhaps, will, eventually, deliver up the insights its practitioners
pursue so dedicatedly.
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Recommended Reading
The Flamed-Mosaic - Indian Contemporary Painting
Neville Tuli (Abrams, Harry N. Inc.)
Creative Arts in Modern India
Ratan Parimoo and Indra Mohan Sharma (Books & Books, New Delhi)
Expressions and Evocations: Contemporary Women Artists of India
Gayatri Sinha (Marg Publications, Mumbai)
Indian Contemporary Art Post Independence
Yashodhara Dalmia, Ella Datta et al (Vadehra Art Gallery, Delhi)
India's Culture, the State, the Arts, and Beyond
B. P. Singh (Oxford University Press)
The Art of Modern India
Balraj Khanna, Aziz Kurta (Thames and Hudson, London)
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