CHAPTER TWO

Early Contributions by
South Asian Artists

The evolution of the ‘Black’ artist in Britain is a story that has many intriguing parts. In marked contrast to the collective identity of Black artists in the US, Britain gave rise to a unique and decidedly British manifestation of the ‘Black’ artist – one characterised by a definition of ‘Black’ artists that came to include artists of South Asian origin. Such a development came about during the course of the mid 1980s, after decades during which artists of African and African-Caribbean origin and those of South Asian origin essentially pursued different agendas and initiatives. During the 1950s, 60s and 70s, the commonality that these two groups of artists shared was similar to that shared by all artists – that is, the desire to have their work exhibited on its own, in solo exhibitions, or in the company of their (white) peers, in group exhibitions. The artists who arrived in this country in the postwar decades were able, to varying degrees, to have their work shown in a variety of exhibitions in which pronounced references to ethnic identity (in the titling and framing of exhibitions) were conspicuous by their absence. This excludes, of course, those exhibitions in which these artists represented their countries of origin. A number of artists of African and Asian heritage represented their countries in the inaugural exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute, Commonwealth Art Today,¹ which took place from late 1962 through to early 1963. The countries represented were the countries of the artists’ birth, rather than the country of their subsequent residence. Frank Bowling and Aubrey Williams represented British Guiana, Ivan Peries was one of the artists who represented Ceylon, Avinash Chandra and Francis Newton Souza were two of the artists who represented India.

And yet, simultaneously during this fascinating period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, several artists from what used to be commonly referred to as the ‘Asian subcontinent’ were explicitly regarded as British, rather than as immigrant artists. Intriguingly, given the subsequent decades in which the practice of a select group of white male artists tended to be called on to represent Britain in the international arena,² Souza, in 1958, ‘Represented Great Britain in the Guggenheim International Award in New York.’³ One of the focal points of London’s cosmopolitan, international art scene of the time was Victor Musgrove’s Gallery One, which celebrated a decade of activity in 1963.⁴ In his introduction for the tenth anniversary exhibition’s catalogue, Musgrave stated:

5. Francis Newton Souza, Negro in Mourning (1957).

Here is a selection from some of the artists we have presented over the last ten years. It includes British artists who had their first one-man showings at this gallery (Henry Mundy, Gwyther Irvin, F. N. Souza, Bridget Riley, and others) as well as the first exhibitions in England of such artists as Henri Michaux, Rufino Tamayo, Enrico Baj, and Kemeny.⁵

Musgrave referenced the significance of Souza and located his practice and his contributions of the time in several important contexts:

Our artists have been prizewinners in every one of the John Moores Liverpool Exhibitions since they began. The acceptance in this country and then abroad of the work of Souza paved the way more easily for other exponents of the postwar Indian School, and such group exhibitions as ‘Oeuvres d’Art Transformables’ in 1958 brought together in London the newcomers and the pioneers of optical, kinetic and mechanical works of art – Man Ray, Duchamp, Albers, Agam, Bury, Tinguely, Vasarely, and others.⁶

The significance of Gallery One’s programme cannot be overstated, as it had been the venue for the first exposure, within London, of several South Asian artists, including Tyeb Mehta, who had been born in Bombay in 1925 and had his first one-man exhibition at Gallery One in 1962.

South Asian artists coming to Britain in the 1950s and 60s found themselves engaging, albeit in piecemeal fashion, with an art world seemingly happy to interact with these artists as individuals, rather than as a homogenous group. The same could be said of the ways in which Caribbean artists such as Moody, Bowling and Williams were exhibited. Within two or three decades, however, a marked trajectory could be noticed, in which many artists, for better or for worse, one way or another, found themselves and their practice associated with a somewhat trans-racial umbrella term of ‘Black’. To these artists could be added those practitioners of a younger generation who declared a particular embrace of the ‘Black Art’ label. In the 1950s, however, such developments (and indeed, the ensuing complications of the 1980s) were still several decades off. The Black-British artist had not yet been created, had not yet arrived.

Anwar Jalal Shemza’s work was included in the landmark exhibition The Other Story: Afro-Asian artists in post-war Britain, Hayward Gallery, London, 1989. When a detail of his painting The Wall (1958) was used on the front, spine and back cover of the catalogue for The Other Story, it was perhaps the first time new audiences were made aware of the work of this pioneering artist. Alongside South Asian artists such as Ashu Roy, Viren Sahai, Kamil Khan and Ahmed Parvez, Shemza was one of the first South Asian artists to settle in the UK, having arrived in the mid 1950s. His work came to be characterised by an intriguing and often visually charged fusion of modernist Western abstraction and motifs that appeared derivative of Islamic aesthetics. The Wall was an inspired choice for the cover of The Other Story catalogue, as it represented the extent to which artists such as Shemza breezily embraced the language of Modernism in their careers, that frequently began with art school training in the countries from which they migrated. In The Wall, Shemza was said to have used ‘the Roman letters B and D to make a calligraphic pattern that reminded him of the marble screens in the Shish-mahal of Lahore Fort.’

Shemza apparently struggled to make the transition from confident young artist from Lahore, Pakistan, to confident young artist in London. Shortly after arriving in London, he sought to continue his art education by enrolling in the Slade School of Art. A few years later, he recounted dispiriting developments that echoed some of the setbacks that would be faced by Bowling and Williams some time later:

within a few months […] I had failed my drawing test and all the paintings I’d submitted for the annual Young Contemporaries were rejected. These two shocks were too much for me. I could not forget that at home [in Pakistan] I was an ‘established’ painter.⁷

Like several artists in this story, Shemza’s most substantial critical appreciation was perhaps posthumous. Towards the end of 1997 Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery mounted a sizeable exhibition of the artist’s work. Shemza had made his home in nearby Stafford, so Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery was perhaps a fitting venue for an appraisal, a reconsideration, of Shemza’s practice.

The accompanying catalogue opened with this poignant summary, which had strong echoes of the sentiments he had expressed in the early 1960s, about his somewhat rude awakening:

When Anwar Shemza lived in Lahore, he was, in his own words ‘a very happy man, a celebrated artist who had his work in the national collections of his country.’ In 1956 he came to England and although his work moved in a new direction which gave it greater strength and originality, he did not become ‘a celebrated artist’ here. Shemza’s work was appreciated by critics in London in the 1960s but his name is today too little known in this country.⁸

Shemza’s The Wall had emerged as one of the star exhibits in The Other Story and the work was one of two paintings by Shemza acquired by Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 1998. It was the interplay between the language of Modernism and motifs and symbolism strongly evocative of South Asian Islamic culture that accounted for much of the dynamism of Shemza’s work. It was this profound respect for two apparently quite different cultural traditions that lay at the core of energetic and lively works such as Love Letter (1960). Utilizing the modernist grid, the shapes and lines of Love Letter are in some ways an exercise in both control and movement. Looking at a work by Shemza, the viewer is unable to settle on any one part or aspect of the painting. Instead, the paintings must be engaged with as remarkable undertakings of motion coupled with composure. A near-tactile sense of dynamism and optimism exuded from Shemza’s paintings, including Love Letter. It was in some ways a painting of its time. At once celebrating the artist’s cultural heritage, the newness of Pakistan, and the promises of progress offered by Modernism, Love Letter was a painting that had no one focal point. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the painting had multiple focal points.

There was, within Shemza’s work, a pronounced sense of a somewhat secularised sacred beauty. Traditionally, Islamic arabesques reflected the use of ornate patterning in repetitive formations, meant to represent the Islamic concept of the immutable oneness of God. Shemza’s work echoed the tradition of creating often intricate abstract patterning, signifying the complexity of God’s creation. This fascinating and highly original device for representing God and creation was born of Islamic art’s eschewal of figurative artistic representations of human and animal forms. This intriguing aspect of Shemza’s cultural heritage was fused with the liberating structural possibilities of Modernism, to produce remarkable paintings.

A unique confluence took place in mid twentieth century London. In various parts of the world, artists such as Shemza regarded the new language of Modernism as having a universal appeal and application. Rather than viewing Modernism as having a regional (and thereby racial) application, Modernism was seen and indeed embraced for its dynamism and its global dialogue. In mid twentieth century London, this embrace of Modernism coincided with the arrival of numbers of immigrants from the countries of the rapidly disintegrating British Empire. It was the presence, amongst these immigrants, of young artists, poets, and others steeped in various cultural histories that created this confluence.

This sense of certain artists being able to make work that was an ‘expression which is Indian in spirit but also an original contribution to the modern movement’ was a sentiment that lay at the heart of an appreciation of Indian artist Avinash Chandra that appeared in The Studio magazine of January 1961.⁹ The article opened with the following biographical outline:

6. Anwar Shemza, The Wall (1958).

Avinash Chandra was born in India in 1931 and brought up in Simla and Delhi. He early showed a flair for drawing but it was not until 1947 when he entered the Delhi Polytechnic that he began to acquire a detailed knowledge of painting. At that time his main medium was tempera and in the works which he executed after he had joined the staff he expressed a youthful nostalgia for the trees and vegetation of the Punjab hills. His style was, at first, a continuation of that of Amrita Sher Gill, another Punjabi artist, but it is significant that he shrank from overtly portraying human figures and concentrated mainly on trees. He remained at Delhi Polytechnic for nine years. The atmosphere of Delhi, however, failed to satisfy him and in 1956, he came to London and settled with his wife in the comparative seclusion of Golders Green.¹⁰

Chandra’s work was introduced to the London art public in 1958, by way of an exhibition held at Gallery One, entitled Seven Indian Painters. Alongside Avinash Chandra, the exhibition featured paintings by Raza, Husain, Padamsee, Souza, Kumar and Samant.¹¹ Texts such as the one on Chandra that appeared in The Studio magazine tended to reference the not insignificant examples of successful exposure and career advancement that artists such as Chandra sometimes laid claim to. The reader of this feature learned that the Victoria and Albert Museum recently acquired one of Chandra’s drawings and that the artist recently had his work shown at the Bear Lane Gallery, Oxford and the Molton Gallery, London.

There was a pronounced sense, in the ways in which critics framed Chandra, that he represented a distinct possibility that Asian artists might join those artists of Europe and the US in decisively contributing to modern art. W. G. Archer, in his catalogue text for a Chandra exhibition of 1965,¹² pointed to such a hope.

Since its origins in Europe during the nineteenth century, modern art has undergone a series of injections. International in scope, it has drawn on one country after another in order to discover and achieve fresh modes of expression. In this process, many countries have assisted – Spain through Picasso and Miro, Russia through Kandinsky and Chagall, France through Braque, Leger and Dubuffet, Germany through Ernst and Klee, America through Jackson Pollock. Asia has been slow to rally, but in the work of Avinash Chandra, India – it might be claimed – has now made a vital contribution to modern painting.¹³

Chandra’s paintings themselves were bold, emphatic, almost primeval constructions, full of certainty, movement and definition. With its earthy hues, Chandra’s City of Churches (c.1960) consisted of jagged spires, aggressively jutting towards the heavens, where, in turn, a violent sun returns the sentiments transmitted by the spires. The scene is almost messianic, as a half-moon and other symbols of cosmic occurrence make their presence felt within the firmament of the painting, attesting to Chandra’s skill in presenting bold, yet intriguingly ambiguous symbolism within his paintings. City of Churches also presents itself as a landscape, as much as it might be seen as a cityscape. The reds, browns, and oranges of the painting lend themselves to the idea of a daunting and formidable mountain range, violently interrupting the landscape. These singular characteristics of Chandra’s paintings were described in The Studio text as

the employment of fiery passionate colour – reds, yellows, blues, glowing with the intensity of medieval stained glass – its sense of muscular rhythm, welding both architectural and vegetative forms into compulsive unities of structure, its air of radiant bursting confidence, gorgeous grandeur, joyous vitality.¹⁴

Perhaps not surprisingly, appreciations such as this, about artists such as Chandra, tended to stress, or make mention of, the Indian-ness of the artist, as if the work itself provided faithful clues of cultural identity. ‘Certain features – the palette comparable to that of Basohli and Mewar painting, the sexual symbolism, the love of suns and moons – are directly Indian.’¹⁵

A particularly intriguing Indian artist of the pioneering generation was Francis Newton Souza, who arrived in England from India in 1949. Sometimes referred to as F. N. Souza, or just Souza, he was born in Goa in 1924. Until relatively recently, Goa existed as something of a Portuguese enclave within India, a small state bordering on India’s western coastline. Portugal’s lasting influence on Goa was evidenced by the fact that when Souza arrived in England in 1949, he apparently did so using a Portuguese passport. It is, however, to Portugal’s distinct yet somewhat pernicious legacies of Catholicism that we must look to identify fascinating influences on Souza’s practice. As Araeen noted,¹⁶ ‘The significance of Souza’s work in fact lies in its paradoxes, which are made further complicated by his ambivalence towards the religion in which he was brought up. Catholicism, and his use of religious imagery and allusions.’ In his section in The Other Story catalogue, Araeen summarised something of Souza’s significance in the British art scene of the mid 1950s to mid 1960s:

For almost ten years, from 1956 to 1966, he dominated the British art scene, showing his work and selling regularly. He was written about extensively and received praise from critics such as John Berger, Edwin Mullins and David Sylvester, to name a few. In India he is now considered to be one of the most important artists of his generation.

Subsequently, Araeen reports that, ‘Souza’s first few years in Britain were marked by terrible poverty and misery, until he began to show his work in France and Italy.’ Notwithstanding such personal difficulties, Souza had his first one-man exhibition in London, at Gallery One, in 1955 and within a few years his work had made its way into the collection of the Contemporary Art Society.¹⁷ By 1963 his work had appeared in prestigious galleries in London and around the country, including the Tate Gallery, the Royal Academy, the Whitechapel Art Gallery, Bradford Museum, and Castle Museum, Norwich.

If ever a mid twentieth-century immigrant artist symbolised an impulse towards the universal languages of art that were simultaneously grounded in individual particularities of identity, it was Souza. His paintings were characterised by an astonishingly liberated approach to both execution and subject matter. And yet, on numerous occasions, the conflicted and sometimes hypocritical expressions of the Christianity, indeed, the Catholicism of his native Goa were clearly discernible strands of his practice. Many artists from the mid to late twentieth century onwards have utilised the image of the martyring of Saint Sebastian within their painting. Indeed, a portrait of Aubrey Williams in his West Hampstead studio taken around 1962 showed him executing a painting of the third century Christian saint and martyr. But few of the twentieth century depictions of the saint can match the representations undertaken by Souza. One of his mid 1950s depictions showed the saint with half a dozen arrows sticking out from his head and neck, whilst ‘Mr Sebastian’ himself wears a dress suit, complete with smart shirt and tie. Geeta Kapur has been quoted as commenting on the work in the following terms:

This painting takes after Saint Sebastian but [he] wears a dark suit and the arrows that pierced the innocent body of the saint are here stuck into the man’s face and neck with a vengeance which, judging from his evil countenance, he seems to merit.¹⁸

Example after example of Souza’s work reveal him to be an artist of astonishing bravery, in his willingness to sample, reinterpret and extend iconic works by any given number of celebrated artists of the Western canon, from Titian through to Picasso. In this regard, Souza’s Young Ladies in Belsize Park (1962) stands him in good stead. In comprehending the painting, one recognises, instantly, his studious reinterpreting of Picasso’s iconic Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907. An admirer of Souza’s work made the following notes of Souza’s interpretation, executed some half a century or more after Picasso’s original.

The aetiology of Souza’s adaptation […] is particularly interesting. Firstly, the improvised title Young Ladies of Belsize Park, and secondly, the structural and thematic similarity to Picasso’s original, which shocked Parisian society and was decried as aggressively erotic. In Souza’s adaptation of what is essentially a brothel scene, there are five female figures in similar positions in Picasso’s original. The figure seated on the extreme right bears the marks of an African head, which may also have been inspired by Picasso’s painting. However, Souza’s colours are much darker, with black outlines, and quite different from Picasso’s soft beige nudes. Souza, living in Belsize Park (north London) around 1962 may have felt that a nearby red light area presented him an opportunity to produce an adaptation.¹⁹

But other factors must also be considered, to appreciate what Souza attempted in his singular interpretation of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Picasso’s painting was itself a sampling, an appropriation, of the dramatic elements of line, shape, and form that were such a compelling aspect of the objects of African art recently discovered by early European modernists. Picasso sampled African art, and Souza, in Young Ladies of Belsize Park, made explicit, or reminded viewers of, the connection. More than a quarter of a century later, South African born painter Gavin Jantjes (who himself plays an important role in narratives of Black-British art history) took the dialogue a dramatic step further by his cosmic rendering of the what-goes-around-comes-around interplay between African art and Cubism, and the subsequent interplay between Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and the work of painters such as Souza, and indeed, Jantjes himself. In Jantjes’ fascinating painting, the central figure in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is isolated on the right hand side of a rectangular, landscape canvas. The figure of the woman, from the waist up, is rendered in frugal but distinctive outline, as if in a cosmic galaxy, filled with twinkling stars. The outline of the figure is conjoined, by way of a lateral figure of eight loop, to an umbilical cord that emerges from, and returns to, the nasal and mouth orifices of a suspended-in-space African mask that bears more than a passing resemblance to one of the faces of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles. Jantjes depicts a heavenly symbioticism though, pointedly perhaps, the mask faces away from, rather than towards, the figure.

Despite some career successes in London, (including the acquisition by The Tate of two of his works, in 1964) Souza, like Bowling before him, looked to New York to advance his life and career. Souza left for New York in 1967, settling there the following year. In the early 1980s, Souza’s work was included in India: Myth and Reality Aspects of Modern Indian Art, an exhibition of contemporary Indian artists’ work organised by the Museum of Modern Art Oxford.²⁰ His biographical notes in the exhibition catalogue included the following comments,

One of the founder members of the Progressive Artists’ Group (Bombay, 1947), he was born in Portuguese Goa in 1924. Always a rebel, he organised protests against the insipid, academic system of training of the J. J. School of Art where he was a student. As a result of this, he was expelled. His paintings of the late forties project the rural life of Goa and the urban scene of Bombay in a strong expressionist idiom.

He left India in 1949 and lived in London where, for almost two decades, his cruel, almost diabolical paintings and writings created a sensation and established him as an original, irrepressible talent. There is a savage intensity in most of his works where contemporary man is presented in a harsh and bitter light, as is the religious imagery connected with the Catholic church. On the other hand, the female nude is invariably rendered with a touching tenderness of feeling.²¹

However, it was not until Araeen included Souza in The Other Story that his contributions to the British art scene were recalled. More than two decades later, Souza has perhaps reverted to his familiar status as a somewhat peripheral figure of postwar British art, notwithstanding the substantial scholarship on this intriguing artist, particularly since his death in Mumbai in 2002.

As mentioned earlier, art criticism on South Asian artists in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s (and indeed, the decades beyond) tended to stress, or make mention of, the Indian-ness of the artist, as if the work itself provided faithful clues of cultural identity. Artists tended to find themselves in something of a double bind. Either they were perceived as demonstrating an artistically debilitating over-reliance on their Indian heritage, or they were perceived as somehow being in denial of their true selves, if their work failed to clearly demonstrate evidence of their ethnic or cultural heritage. As recently as 1980, the following sort of sentiment was being expressed:

Balraj Khanna has no need to question his Indianness. Although he has lived in France and England since 1963, his work is suffused with a purely Indian sensibility. Its content is modestly universal, but lacks, happily, any of that overwhelming claim to Total Insight. As a true artist he tills the field of his own emotions and responses. He is by birth a Punjabi, who is following the Western twentieth-century European artistic tradition of exploring the reservoir or matrix of his self; and this is unequivocally India, root and flower.²²

Araeen for one took issue with such an apparently constrained understanding of the work of artists such as Khanna:

I find it difficult to recognize Khanna’s ‘Indianness’, which seems to me to be a quality invented by Western critics who find it hard to come to terms with Khanna’s modernity. It is not a question of denying this ‘Indianness’, but of recognising as ‘Indian’ that aesthetic quality which has become part of the sensibility of modern works of art, which one would find in the works of Klee, Miró or Matisse, for example; to emphasize Khanna’s ‘Indianness’ is to emphasize his Otherness.’²³

Years earlier, Araeen had set out his stall with regards to such matters when he wrote, ‘The question here therefore is not and should not be of ethnicity. One’s creative ability in the contemporary world is not necessarily determined by one’s own culture, the cultural knowledge or the country of one’s origin.’²⁴

The impulse of sections of the art world to assert, or seek to identify, some kind of perceptible ethnicity on the part of South Asian artists contrasted markedly by these artists’ own attempts to locate themselves and their practice within a modernist discourse that lay beyond restricting notions of ethnicity and cultural identity. A somewhat aggravating factor to locate itself within this tension was the reality that South Asian artists, on occasion, either came together or were put together, in exhibitions such as Seven Indian Painters of 1958 and Six Indian Painters of 1964. Such exhibitions sometimes tended to generate a disproportionate commonality between the artists, thereby further rendering them vulnerable to an accentuated inscribing of ethnicity. In this regard, exhibitions such as those hosted by the New Vision Centre in London’s West End offered audiences an opportunity to see artists’ work in a mixed programme. Typical in this regard was a one-man show by Balraj Khanna, held there in October and November of 1965.²⁵

Given that its landmass and population dominate those of its South Asian neighbours, it is perhaps no surprise that India has produced so many contemporary artists, and that significant numbers of them have made Britain their home in the postwar decades. But artists from India’s neighbours, particularly Pakistan (formerly West Pakistan) and Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) are also to be numbered amongst the early generations of immigrant artists who were making Britain their home during the 1950s and 60s. Chief amongst the artists from Pakistan were painters such as Anwar Shemza, discussed earlier, and Ahmed Parvez.²⁶ Chief amongst the artists from Sri Lanka was Ivan Peries. A versatile, at times almost eclectic painter, Peries nevertheless had a distinctive approach to paintings that were often decidedly strange, surreal, and dreamlike in their content and construction. Peries was the subject of a substantial monograph, posthumously produced. Within the lavish and extensively illustrated book, Peries was introduced in the following terms:

In a lifetime of painting, extending over fifty years of consistent activity, Ivan Peries produced a body of work that makes an impressive artistic statement and a distinctive contribution to modern art in Asia. Best known for his symbolic and expressive landscapes and seascapes, and his subtle, almost musical, use of colour and tone, his works range from portrait studies, figure compositions and abstract collages to large, panoramic panels and delicate miniatures in acrylic and watercolour. Part of the post-colonial diaspora, he spent more than half his life in self-imposed exile in London and Southend-on-Sea, but his art remained to the end a prolonged meditation on his native Sri Lankan experience, and firmly takes its place in a tradition of contemporary Sri Lankan painting, exemplified in the work of the ’43 Group.²⁷

In 1963, a number of recently arrived artists from India came together to form the Indian Painters Collective. This was, however, a relatively short-lived initiative. One of the ventures of the Indian Painters Collective was an exhibition, Six Indian Painters, held at the Tagore India Centre, London, in 1964.²⁸ The exhibition was introduced in its catalogue as follows:

The artists exhibited here are also the founder members of ‘The Indian Painters Collective’. The group consists of Indian artists living and working in London. It has been formed with the intention of holding frequent exhibitions under their own auspices and also to participate in other exhibitions here and on the continent. Their work represents a cross section of Indian painting today. The young and talented members of this group have won a good deal of acclaim in India and some are also known abroad.²⁹

A decade and a half later, a similar venture was launched that proved to be altogether more resilient in its longevity, and more active in its profile. This was Indian Artists United Kingdom, which often went under the acronym IAUK. It was an important initiative involving a number of key artists of Indian birth and background, and involved artists such as Balraj Khanna, Yeshwant Mali, Prafulla Mohanti, Lancelot Ribeiro, Suresh Vedak, Ibrahim Wagh, and Mohammad Zakir. The brochure for an exhibition of work by IAUK artists, held in 1980, featured the following useful introduction to group:

Throughout the history of art, at least throughout the history of modern art, there have been groups of artists. The reasons for the existence of these groups have been perhaps as diverse as the ideas behind them. But invariably there have been sound human reasons for these groups to come about.

The IAUK too has similar reasons for its existence. It is an Association of Professional Artists of Indian origin who have lived and worked in the UK for the last fifteen years or more. It is a revised version of an earlier body – The Indian Painters Collective, 1963 – a revival which is influenced by practical reasons derived from the result of its members’ efforts during their individual struggle for recognition.

We, the members of IAUK, have come to believe that if the issues concerning us are approached collectively, we stand a better chance of succeeding and thus of making a positive contribution to the arts and culture of this country we have now made our home.

Among the IAUK’s aims are the recognition of its members’ work on an equal basis with their British contemporaries and the fulfilment of their rights to the amenities and facilities available in this democratic society. The IAUK would like to assist and promote Indian artists living in this country by showing their work. And, through exhibitions at 8 South Audley Street, London W1, and other selected places, it will attempt to create a growing awareness of the Indian arts and culture amongst the general public.

The IAUK is the only organisation of its kind outside India. It functions on strict democratic lines.’³⁰

IAUK had no pronounced agenda of activism, though when Mali, who had been a member of the group, exhibited at the Horizon Gallery in 1990, he was responsible for the single most pronounced episode of activism related to Indian artists in the UK. Responding to a news item in India Weekly of 31 August – 6 September 1990, Mali wrote a letter to the ‘Director or Visual Arts Officer’ of the Victoria and Albert Museum, regarding the news that ‘The Nehru Gallery [at the V&A] will be opened by Her Majesty the Queen on 22 November 1990.’ The letter read:

Dear Sir/Madam, I am delighted with the news in India Weekly News Paper (31.08.90) that Her Majesty the Queen is going to open the Nehru Gallery at the V&A in November. I have several questions; 1. Who is funding this Gallery? 2. How much funds have they got? 3. Which visual artists are going to get the benefit from this Gallery? I have been in this country since 1962, working as a visual artist. There will be many artists like me, asking the same questions. Can anyone shed some light on this matter?³¹

Mali was clearly irked at the ways in which Indian artists such as himself, who had been based in the UK for several decades, were now experiencing somewhat reduced levels of visibility and were seemingly absent from considerations of how the Nehru Gallery might function. Copies of the letter, together with the brochure for Mali’s exhibition at the Horizon Gallery³² were sent to, amongst others, Her Majesty the Queen, the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Commonwealth Institute, the Indian Arts Council, and the Minister for the Arts. Mali may have been additionally irked by India Weekly’s description, in its Nehru Gallery announcement, of M.F. Husain as ‘India’s most famous contemporary artist’, perhaps feeling that such a designation more rightfully belonged to him (or at least, that others were more befitting of such status).