Tracing the Journey of Indian Modernism

By Girish Shahane

Framing India offers glimpses into the layered story of Indian modern art through a substantial selection of paintings by recognised masters. The journey begins with Orientalist artists (Edwin Lord Weeks and Ludwig Hand Fischer) who travelled to India and other far-flung nations to capture romantic landscapes and exotic individuals for audiences in their homelands. The dominant European style of painting was eventually adopted by Indians, as seen in Raja Ravi Varma’s powerful portrait of the Bombay-based barrister John Duncan Inverarity. A revolt against Western forms was initiated in Bengal in the early 20th century, represented here by Jamini Roy’s dancer in a tribhanga pose, although several Bengali artists like Hemendranath Mazumdar continued to uphold Western academic realist conventions.

The tension between the opposed poles of Indian tradition and Western influence continued to condition the course of Indian art after the nation gained its independence in 1947. In the words of the art historian Geeta Kapur, “Several artists’ groups claiming modernism came into existence during the 1940s and 50s in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. Of these the Bombay Progressives were the most ‘correctly’ modernist”, offering, “a formalist manifesto that was to help the first generation of artists in independent India to position themselves internationally.” (Geeta Kapur, "Detours From the Contemporary", When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000, p 304) K H Ara, S H Raza, F N Souza, H A Gade and Tyeb Mehta demonstrate the globally transmissible mode to which Kapur alludes, although cultural inflections were not entirely missing from the oeuvre of the Progressives. The manner of M F Husain, in particular, was thoroughly modernist while also manifestly Indian.

If the Progressives were ‘correctly’ modernist, who were the ‘incorrectly modernist’ artists of that epoch? K K Hebbar, Mohan Samant and J Sultan Ali come to mind among a group of explorers who attempted to blend motifs from Indian miniatures and decorative traditions with modernist figuration. Although Mohan Samant was a member of the Bombay Progressives and Sultan Ali of the Madras Progressives, they are rarely grouped with Husain, Souza and Raza because their interest lay less in forging a coherent modernist idiom than in synthesising two disparate approaches to artmaking.

The 1960s witnessed a paring down of forms that on occasion extended to full-fledged abstraction. Within Framing India, the luminous composition of J Swaminathan, the enigmatic arrangements of Prabhakar Barwe, the mystical patterns of Sohan Qadri and the sensitive nocturne of Ganesh Haloi are rooted in the ethos of this era, although created in later periods. The abstract turn, doubtless a major development in the history of Indian modernism, never came to dominate the field as it did in the United States, perhaps because of Indian culture’s profound iconophilia.

A Ramachandran, B Prabha and Sakti Burman were among artists born in the mid 1930s who matured in the 1960s yet remained committed to lush figuration through their careers. Each was influenced by the Ajanta murals and, in the case of Ramachandran, the murals of Kerala. An important early work by Ramachandran in the display which engages with social issues of inequality and chronic hunger is very different in subject and appearance from the signature look he later developed. Prabha relates interestingly with Orientalist painting in her depictions of humble idylls that contain elements of cultural self-exoticisation.

The figure returned to centre stage in the 1970s led by artists born at the end of the 1930s or in the 1940s like Jogen Chowdhury, Bikash Bhattacharjee, and Madhvi Parekh. Rameshwar Broota also belongs to this cohort, though the canvas on view is from a series titled Traces of Man in which the figure is abstracted away. These artists, who experienced British rule only in its dying years, felt less anxiety about the India/West polarity, picking and choosing from eclectic sources, feeling at ease in a wider range of idioms and producing a considerably greater variety of styles as a consequence.