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 civilization 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 documenting 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 inextricably 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 domination.⁵ Bengali literature celebrated the natural, healthy Santal way of living, the black lissome Santal women providing a counterpoint to the pale cloistered ladies of urban Calcutta. An erotic undercurrent of romantic 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 romanticization culminated in the 1940s in the candid photographs of Sunil Janah.⁶ It is worth remembering that the ‘primitivizing’ process had commenced with colonial expansion. Colonial anthropology created the myth of the timeless ‘noble savage’, even as the imperial regime was suppressing the Santals through brutal counter-insurgency measures.⁷

	Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury, Lotus Pond (Santal Mother and Children), c. 1923, watercolour on paper.
	Sunil Janah, Santal Girl, Bihar, 1940s, black and white photograph.

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 primitivism that identified folk, popular and tribal art – in short, all forms of ‘low’ art – as an ‘authentic’ expression of the Indian soul was something entirely new. In addition to its nationalist implications, it embodied the modernist aesthetics that preferred bold simplification to Victorian over-ornamentation and the simplicity of village life to the ‘decadence’ of 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 booklet 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 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

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

Abanindranath Tagore, ‘Krishna Kills Kamsa’, 1938, tempera on paper, from the Krishnamangal series.

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 hallmark 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 contradictions within the concept of primitivism. Edward Said describes primitivism, ‘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 hegemonic 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 cultural 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 century. In 1909, his revolutionary booklet, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, set out his anti-colonial resistance based on a critique of Western civilization 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, symbolized by the humble spinning wheel. In 1918–19, Gandhi brought the peasants into the orbit of the Indian National Congress, which had hitherto been confined to the urban Western-educated, giving a voice to the people. 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 community of outlook to Eastern and Western critics of industrial capitalism. In the West, the very flexibility of primitivism offered endless possibilities, ranging from ‘going native’, to a radical questioning of Western positivism.21 For the avant-garde, the artistic discourse of primitivism opened up the possibility of aesthetic globalization as part of art historical consciousness.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 primitivism as an alternative to Western ‘rationality’ promised by non-Western thought that formed the crucial bridge between Western and Indian primitivists. Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich and other abstract painters invested in the primitive a spiritual dimension of human culture they found absent in urban modernity. They viewed the distinction between the primitive 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 doctrines were often filtered through the often questionable tenets and practices of Theosophy. Sixten Ringbom and others have systematically documented 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 essentially Western foundations of abstract art.²⁵ Yet there is considerable evidence that Kandinsky’s spiritual progress from the mystical Russian faith to Eastern philosophy, including yogic meditation, paralleled the dissolution 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 convincingly demonstrated.²⁶ Fearing positivist ridicule, Kandinsky tended to be reticent about his debt to Eastern thought, unless he was assured of a sympathetic 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 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 modernity articulated by primitivism that gave Indian artists the leverage to fashion 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 proposed by Western artists such as Kandinsky, colonial artists felt an instinctive 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-naturalists 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 strivings 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 column 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 possibilities to Indian artists. Rabindranath’s primitivism was a playful exploration 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 primitivism at Tagore’s university in Santiniketan and Jamini Roy’s synthesis of art and politics in an alternative vision of Indian identity. Profoundly influential in the works of early Indian modernists, primitivism assigned a new status to marginal culture hitherto ignored in Indian national life, producing 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 accomplishments.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 talented 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 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 pervade 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.

Sunayani Devi, Milkmaids, 1920s, gouache on paper.

A member of the Tagore family in Calcutta, Sunayani was witness to the cultural ferment that was the Bengal Renaissance. At the same time, being brought up in the women’s quarters, which remained more traditional 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 background’.⁷ The men embodied a dual consciousness, using English as a language 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 perform 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 devotional pictures that hung in her aunt’s room, the Ravi Varma prints making 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 afternoon. 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, attributing 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

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 granddaughter 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 husband, 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

Naïve art and Indian nationalism

Sunayani’s dilemma as a woman painter helps us to understand the pressures that inhibit women from gaining recognition and professional success. 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 enthusiastically 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 spontaneity of her untutored talent, her lack of any preconceived ideal, and an inner confidence in her best works. Sunayani’s confident, unbroken flowing 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 painting. 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 touch, thus betraying her limitations. To Kramrisch, her limited skill and narrow horizon were a strength rather than weakness, a form of naïve grandeur.²²

Sunayani Devi, Viraha, c. 1920s, watercolour on paper.

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 influence 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 simplicity 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 popular art, and indeed there was a strong ‘folk’ element in her art.

Sunayani Devi, Ardhdnarisvara, c. 1920s, watercolour on paper.

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

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 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 uninterrupted 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 modernism, 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 critic 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), holding her art as ‘the joyous expression of the natural impulses of an unsophisticated 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.

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 tribute to the Indian countryside and its people.’³³ Sher-Gil attained an iconic status in India because of her legendary beauty, her precocious talent, her outrageous behaviour, her revered position in Indian modernist art, 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 biography written three years after her death by her friend and confidant, Karl Khandalavala. He insisted on her nationalist credentials by judging her Indian paintings to be of greater significance than those produced in either Paris or Hungary.³⁵

Amrita Sher-Gil, 1930s, photograph.

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 personal 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 were also a Hungarian and an Indian Amrita, the Amrita who belonged 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 prominently in post-colonial writings.⁴⁰ The whole notion of ‘hybridity’ posits a 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 spent summers in Budapest in the company of leading 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 huddled 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 Salon des Tuileries known all over the world as the representative exhibition of Modern Art . . . where I can, at least, be sure of receiving some measure of impartiality,’ she added with considerable pique.⁴⁴

Amrita Sher-Gil, Untitled, c. 1930, charcoal sketch.

Amrita Sher-Gil, Hill Men and Woman, 1935, oil on canvas.

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] woman’.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 credentials 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 and grudging respect for her Paris training to the deeper appreciation of a discerning minority.⁴⁹

Amrita Sher-Gil, Three Women, 1937, oil on canvas. This work won the gold medal of the Bombay Art Society.

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 monuments 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 settle 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 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 exhibition at the Punjab Literary League in Lahore, which was held posthumously. 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 twentieth 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 institutions 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 discourse.⁵⁵ Sher-Gil too had her share of being stereotyped in a male-dominated 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 feebler 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 professionalism in an assertion of women’s independence.⁶¹ In these images of innocent narcissism, Sher-Gil turned the gaze upon herself, taking sen-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 beautiful eyes that seem to see beyond.’⁶³

Amrita Sher-Gil, Torso, 1931, oil on canvas.

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 concerned, I fall out of love or rather fall in love with someone else before any 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 procreation. 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 attitude. 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 prizewinning 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 someone to physically meet my sexual needs because I believe that it is impossible 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, carving out a central position in Indian modernism. She refused to let her emotional 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 precisely because she considered him a free soul who remained an artist to the very end.⁶⁹ Muggeridge often watched ‘with fascination the animal intensity 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 considerable 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 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 primitivism was tied up with her self-definition as a modernist and her agonistic relationship to the historicism of the Bengal School. Ferociously committed 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 exhibition 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 academic 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, 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 consider herself a primitivist.⁸⁵ Sher-Gil’s primitivism sprang from a melancholy 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 interpreting rural poverty, simplifying form at the expense of the subject matter, prettiness or effeminacy, in short, attaining what Roger Fry calls ‘significant 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-impressionism, 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 psychological 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 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 reminiscent 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, 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 brilliantly 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

Amrita Sher-Gil, Man in White, 1935, oil on canvas.

Amrita Sher-Gil, Young Man with Apples, 1932, oil on canvas.

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 and women who move silently looking almost like silhouettes and over which an indefinable melancholy reigns. It was different from the India, voluptuous, colourful, sunny and superficial, the India [of] travel posters that I had expected to see.93

Sher-Gil is celebrated as a painter of melancholy rural India. It does not matter if India is really melancholy or cheerful – perhaps it is both – 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 precisely 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

Amrita Sher-Gil, The Brahmachari, 1937, oil on canvas.

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 vulnerability often surfaced when faced with a hostile critic like the orientalist 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 cultural 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 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 trauma in Paris when her fiancée left her pregnant and infected. She reflected 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 passionate 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 statement. 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 piercing 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

At the age of twelve, Amrita had a premonition about women’s tragic 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 exhibited 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 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 allegiance 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 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.

Amrita Sher-Gil, Young Girls, 1932, oil on canvas.

Amrita Sher-Gil, Child Wife, 1939, oil on canvas.

Amrita Sher-Gil, Two Girls, 1939, oil on canvas.

Amrita Sher-Gil, The Professional Model, 1933, oil on canvas.

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, unbelievably empty. She and her husband were fond of each other but they sat for 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 departure left undeveloped at her death.¹¹¹ The tensions in her art between avant-garde formalism and the value of emotions, the essential modernist 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 gifted 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 penultimate year, she informed Khandalavala that she had outgrown her sentimental 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 foreground 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 primitivists were not social realists but visionaries of an ‘authentic’ India filtered through their particular experience. These last works had not compromised 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.

Amrita Sher-Gil, The Haldi Grinder, 1940, oil on canvas.

II

Rabindranath Tagore’s Vision of Art and the Community

Photograph of Rabindranath Tagore, c. 1913.

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 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 modernism, 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 primitivist paintings were a ludic expression of his inner subjectivity.² Tagore did not reach his artistic ‘Damascus’ until his sixties, when he renounced 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 dating from about 1880.3 In the 1870s, while in Paris, the young poet expressed admiration for an academic 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 longingly ‘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 imagination, 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 exhibition of African and Oceanic art. Tagore’s paintings consisted of faces, 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 unexpected beauty of the works that revealed a rich imagination and a hitherto unknown facet of his personality. Henri Bidou, a close ally of the beleaguered 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 revolutionary ideas on dreams and the archaeology of childhood, the ideas that had also impressed Tagore. A short essay on automatic drawing was published in The Modern Review in Calcutta in 1917, some seven years before Breton’s manifesto.⁹

Rabindranath Tagore, untitled sketch of his wife, c. 1880, pencil on paper.

Rabindranath Tagore, Architecture, Berlin, 1930, coloured ink and wash on paper.

After the judgement of Paris, Tagore’s works were exhibited in various British cities, but they were cold-shouldered by English critics offended 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 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

Rabindranath Tagore, Animal, Berlin, 1930, coloured ink and wash on paper.

Olaf Gulbranson, ‘Die Grosse Mode’ (‘The Height of Fashion’), cartoon from Simplicissimus dated 18 May 1921; inspired by Tagore, showing the fashionable Berlin practice of contemplating the navel on the occasion of his visit to Germany.

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 levels, 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 amused by Tagore’s forwardness.¹³

There were of course kindred spirits such as his devoted friend Albert Einstein. More intriguingly, Tagore’s mystical pantheism seems to have been in sympathy with Walter Gropius’s educational ideals of ‘integrated life’ and his preference for handicrafts to mechanized work. We have no direct evidence of their having met in 1921 when Tagore visited 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 philosophy, more congenial.¹⁴ The reception of Tagore’s paintings in 1930 was also influenced by the German perception of the poet as a cultural mediator 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 displayed 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 effusions for Tagore’s expressionist art were possibly prompted by the fact 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, commenting 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 simplifications 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 naturalistic 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, but the cumulative effect of Jugendstil graphics, especially those of Gustav Klimt, Adolf Hölzel, Kolo Moser and Otto Eckmann, is seen in his marginal drawings. In addition, Tagore adapted the spiky geometrical forms of Art Deco, which became influential from 1924, though once again he did not copy specific motifs. The only exception was his ‘nude woman riding a flying monster’, which suggests his familiarity with McKnight Kauffer’s famous poster, The Early Bird (1919), possibly seen at underground stations during his visit to London in 1920.²⁵

Rabindranath Tagore, Nude on a Bird, Berlin, 1930, coloured ink and wash on paper.

Detail from E. McKnight Kauffer’s famous 1918 poster for the Daily Herald, ‘Soaring to Success! The Early Bird’. This poster must have made a deep if subliminal impression on Tagore, who, as a man of letters, was always more alert to graphic art than to painting in his own paintings.

More interestingly, there is an uncanny similarity in approaches to art between Tagore and the Jugendstil artist Adolf Hölzel, one primarily a writer and the other an artist, but both interested in incorporating written 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 ornaments were often placed alongside handwritten texts. He also incorporated 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 energy, 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 experiments.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 backbone of his painting.³⁰ In 1930, Tagore explained his art as ‘versification in lines’, describing his ultimate aim as the search for the ‘rhythmic significance 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 to make my corrections dance [and] connect them in a rhythmic relationship . . .’³²

Rabindranath Tagore, Page from Purabi MS., 1920s, pen and ink.

Adolf Hölzel, Abstract Ornament with Text, before 1900, pen and ink.

The dark landscape of the psyche

What took Tagore’s work from the decorative to a more radical modernist 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 primitive masks.³⁵ Tagore turned the human face into a mask by cropping the ears and suppressing other details, thereby stressing the mask’s ‘impassive’ 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

Rabindranath Tagore, Untitled after Primitive Art, c. 1932, coloured ink and wash on paper.

Although Victoria Ocampo was the first to be credited with discovering 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 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

Rabindranath Tagore, Rakta Karabi, 1923, coloured ink and wash on paper.

Rabindranath Tagore, Untitled (Mask), 1932, coloured ink and wash on paper.

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 previous 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 reinforce 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 whitewashed 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 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 introduced this free creative atmosphere at Santiniketan and visited the pioneering 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.

Above all, it was Freud’s authority that provided modernist artists with the theoretical wherewithal to ‘regress’ to childhood.42 The relevance 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 creativity 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 ambiguities 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 provable, but they can act as a spur to creativity.⁴⁸ Ambiguity, randomness, unpredictability, indeterminacy, the sense of ‘something in-between’ conferred an enigmatic power on Tagore’s images. The Danish Berlingske Tidende aptly described them as shapes produced by children with blotting 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 blotting 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, phantasmagoric 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-lences and its fractured consciousness. In India ambiguity and suggestiveness 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 fragmentation 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 ‘conventionally’ beautiful; the images that plumbed the dark depths were primal and transgressive. In 1927 he felt the need for reassurance from the European modernists, as he did from Roy, that they too deliberately expunged the Good and the Beautiful from their art.⁵⁵ Wendy Steiner has spoken of the troubled relationship between modernism and beauty.⁵⁶ One of the most tantalizingly ambiguous motifs in Tagore is the primitive mask. Masks, after all, are meant to conceal one’s identity – we are thus left with some 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’ literature, they were oblique, allegorical and intensely mystical.⁵⁷ By contrast 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 threateningly 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.

Rabindranath Tagore, Untitled (Nude Male), 1934?, coloured ink and wash on paper.

Rabindranath Tagore, Untitled Cowering Nude Woman, 1934, coloured ink and wash on paper.

The justification Tagore offered for his primitivism was self-expression, which was part and parcel of the Romantic revolt against the aesthetics 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 ‘authenticity’ 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 stinging attacks on Western jingoism, did not spare aggressive Hindu nationalism. It lost him friends on both sides of the divide. Tagore’s ideals of universal 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 language. He came to the conclusion that painting transcended the limitations 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 generation. 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 recognize 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 abruptly 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 universalist painter. In 1909, in his seminal essay, he had portrayed the Indian village as the very antithesis of the colonial city. His environmental primitivism was to be realized through his holistic educational experiments at his Visva Bharati University in rural Santiniketan in the 1920s. The institution 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

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 ideological 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 ‘hermitage’ 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 colonial institutions. One such individual was the artist Nandalal Bose (1882–1966) who was to become a pivotal figure at Santiniketan. At this university, 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 education; Tagore had long considered Abanindranath’s pupil Nandalal the best person to give it shape. As his project advanced in 1919, with consummate 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 government-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 student a personal instructor, aiming to revive the pre-colonial apprenticeship under a master.79

While respecting spontaneity, Nandalal nonetheless expected the student 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 concession to them, he devised schematic ‘stick’ figures to work out naturalist poses rather than using nude models, at the same time introducing vigorous 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 representation, 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 importance 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 orientalists, can be partly explained by his symbiotic relationship with Tagore and his friendship with the small international contingent at the university, 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, 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, taking 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 evolving 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: ‘Who can deny that much that passes for science and art today . . . panders to our basest passion?’⁹² His insistence from 1928 onwards that real art was concerned with the beauty of moral acts reflected 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 laissez 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 concern 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 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 introduced 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

Nandalal Bose, Dandi March (Bapuji), 1930, linocut.

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 conscious 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 overwhelmed 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, which he affectionately called Nanda Babu’s art school.107 (‘Babu’ is an honorific 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 village 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 ambitious 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 purpose 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 plastered over before the conference. In line with his ‘practical’ morality, he had little sympathy for these ancient sculptures and accordingly consented 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

Nandalal Bose, Dhaki, Haripura poster, 1937, tempera on paper.

Nandalal and the Santiniketan mural experiment

Historical murals expounding national allegories have always been grist 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 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 endeavours, Nandalal saw the need to make a truly independent cultural assertion that owed little to the colonial regime. The rise of an alternative mural movement at the Kala Bhavan with the aim of creating a convincing indigenous expression was also in accord with Tagore’s environmental 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 integral part of the environment, Nandalal and his pupils seem to have quietly 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 pedagogic 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 mentor of the nationalist Bengal School of painting, had urged them to decorate 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 experience, 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 through his researches in life sciences. According to The Times, Bose’s inaugural address at the institute made a powerful impression even in distant 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 deteriorating frescoes at the Bagh Caves.¹²³ These caves in central India were second only to Ajanta in importance and thus afforded a valuable experience to Nandalal. The artist recorded the process and the difficulties of copying the works, he and his colleague Surendranath sending back the copies to Santiniketan regularly. Later they gifted a large copy of a Bagh painting (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 including 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, especially 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 students’ 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 mistakes. In 1922 Patrick Geddes, the British urban planner and biographer of Jagadish Bose, visited Santiniketan. He advised them to use charcoal 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 essential 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 students 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 correctly surmised that the bright flat colours and bold lines of Jaipur painting were better at achieving the two-dimensional effect he was aiming for than the chiaroscuro and ‘three-dimensionality’ of Ajanta or Bagh.¹³¹ Nandalal also explored Nepalese wall painting and village wall decorations, consulted ancient treatises such as the Shilparatnam, and followed the practices of local craftsmen.¹³² The artist summed up the heterogeneous 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 Bose, Halakarshan (detail), 1930, fresco buono, Sriniketan, Santiniketan.

Nandalal Bose, Halakarshan (detail), 1930, fresco buono, Sriniketan, Santiniketan.

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 turning 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 compositions. The originality of Nandalal’s mural experiments lay in their non-illusionist monumental style, which depended for their effect on the 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 supporting 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 eventually 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 Buddhist Stupa.¹³⁸ However Nandalal’s narrative sources ranged from the epics and mythology to historic figures. In 1939, he completed the Gangavatarana (Descent of the River Ganges) based on the mythology of Shiva, on the South Wall of the cenotaph, selecting the North Wall the following 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

Nandalal Bose, Natir Puja, 1943, fresco buono, Kirti Mandir, Baroda.

Nandalal Bose, Abhimanyu Vadha, 1945, fresco buono, Kirti Mandir, Baroda.

Benodebehari, Ramkinkar and the avant-garde at Santiniketan

Romantic primitivism in the sense of a new perception of peasants, craftsmen, 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 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 format of the orientalists, which would have been an easy option, but by aiming for formal clarity with bold lines and flat colours with details suppressed. 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 monumental 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 can succeed without its underlying representational foundations. These lines may be taken as Benodebehari’s credo for the murals.¹⁴⁴

Nandalal Bose, Santals in Birbhum Landscape, c. 1920s, line and wash on paper.

Benodebehari 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 subsequently 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 reality lacked strength. Benodebehari’s direct approach, he felt, helped balance representation with formal clarity. His monumental murals, which capture 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 rhythmic structure to comprehend the dynamic Indian life . . . between community and dissent. A radical consciousness of traditional India is visualized.’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, followed 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 understand 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 composition. 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 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

Benodebehari Mukhopadhyaya, Saints, 1947, fresco buono, Hindi Bhavan, south central portion.

Nandalal Bose, Birbhum Landscape, c. 1920s, watercolour on paper.

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 nationalist 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 festivals, dances and other activities in which they were presented as living in harmony with nature. Among these, we may take the series representing 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 students, 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 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 during her brief sojourn there.¹⁵⁷

Ramkinkar Baij, Bust of Rabindranath, 1938, cast cement.

Lanteri’s peasants and Bourdelle’s dramatic lyricism and, above all, their rough broken surfaces appealed to Ramkinkar. However, it was 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 training. 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 explanation 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 concrete, 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 preliminary maquettes, making only a few quick sketches. He then constructed 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 transparency 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 people.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 discourse 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 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.

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.

Ramkinkar Baij, Sketch of Santals, 1930s?, watercolour on paper.

III

Jamini Roy and Art for the Community

Jamini Roy, 1940s.

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-colonial struggle, spilling over into independent India (1887–1972). He displayed a restless desire to explore dazzling pastiches of styles, Eastern and Western. As a critic once commented on one of his exhibitions, it ‘showed 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 competing 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 displayed 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 community 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 transnational dialogue in the ‘virtual cosmopolis’ that I described in my introduction.⁶

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 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 authenticity, 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

Jamini Roy, A Divine Moment, c. 1920, watercolour on paper.

Jamini Roy, Krishna and his Mother, c. 1920s, gouache on paper.

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 tribal 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 ability 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 brushstrokes exuded a crude vigour hitherto unknown in Indian art, his dull yellow and slate green figures and brick-red backgrounds emulating the terracotta 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 panels. Roy’s juxtaposition of his own paintings with pats became one of the key tenets of his primitivist ideology.¹²

Jamini Roy, After Bankura Clay Figures, c. 1930, gouache on paper.

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

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 environment as an appropriate setting for his paintings:

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 patterns. 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 of making the local signify the national.

By 1935 Roy’s strikingly original vision began to penetrate public consciousness. 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 drawing 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 pointed 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.

Jamini Roy, Seated Woman, line painting, 1930s, gouache on paper.

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 eminent 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 seventeen 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 respective 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 novelist 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 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 containing the finest works that demonstrated his sheer power of abstraction.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 psychology. 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 perennial source of his inspiration is the folk art of Bengal, which is strong and gay and masculine.’²⁸

Jamini Roy, ‘Sita with Hanuman’, from the Ramayana Series, 1935, gouache on board.

Jamini Roy, Weeping Cow, c. 1946, gouache on paper.

Jamini Roy, Woman with Child, c. 1940s, gouache on paper.

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 public 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 ‘lonely 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 friendless, 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 Indian independence, von Leyden reinscribed the popular myth: ‘this famous artist who sacrificed so many years of his life to the ideal of integrity 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 provided 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 vacillations of representational painters who had chosen either the ‘easy option’ of revivalism or compromise with the West. Suhrawardy was particularly 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 intellectual 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 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 modernism and Indian art.⁴⁶ The reviews in London were ambivalent about Roy’s achievements. Iris Conlay spoke of the ‘fascinating Christian paintings 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 manual 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 reputation, found his work lacking Matisse’s spontaneity and Gauguin’s emotional 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 various 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’ painting 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

Jamini Roy, Krishna and the Gopis, c. 1955, Steuben Crystal, exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1956.

CONSTRUCTING AN ANTI-COLONIAL UTOPIA

Roy’s striking formalist pictorial language, his simple monumental images of sari-clad women, madonnas, village dances and domestic animals, 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 studied 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 village scroll painting, the pat, which offered him an ideal synthesis of ‘formalist’ strength and political theory. In discussing Roy’s debt to the pat, Rudi von Leyden explained that by ‘extreme simplification and concentration 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 despised artisans, who paint our remarkably expressionist pats, though now unfortunately in aniline dyes and in conformity to a debased iconography, taught [Roy] the secret of the fundamental rapid line, the expressive contour enclosing the human form in one vital sweep.’55 If the radical simplicity of the pat helped wean Roy away from anecdotal naturalism, 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, vermilion, 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 contemporaries 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 outsider, 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 village, 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 claustrophobic, 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 loneliness. Let me know if it is possible to return [to Calcutta].’⁶²

Roy as a modern man did not deny the importance of technology in modern life but he refused to accept the teleological certainty of modernity. His world-view consisted in restoring through art the pre-colonial community that had been severed from national life during the Raj, causing 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 ‘critical 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 nationalist 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 embellishments, 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 dawned on him that these folk painters, who had migrated to the colonial city from the countryside, lost the rural ideal when they applied their folk ‘language’ to urban themes. I have mentioned the seminal primitivist document, ‘The Hermitage’, by Tagore, which advocated the restitution of India’s rural heritage.⁶⁷ Roy, who read it in 1923, underlined the following 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 months’.⁶⁸ Three years hence Roy was to embark on his quest for ‘genuine’ rural art untainted by colonial culture.

Jamini Roy, Madonna and Baby Jesus (after a Byzantine painting), c. 1940s, gouache on board.

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. Prehistoric (primitive) art fell victim to civilization, to the lures of meretricious 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 particular 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 condescendingly, 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 deeper ‘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 hieratic, 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 mythology 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 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.

Jamini Roy, The Last Supper, c. 1940s, tempera on cloth.

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 individual 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 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 important feature of radical primitivism in the West was a belief in political heterogeneity and its rejection of universals, whether from a unifying ‘capitalist’ or from a ‘nationalist’ perspective.⁷⁹ By the 1920s we already notice in India the tensions between the global and re-assertions of regional identity, 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 authenticity of the local tradition was predicated on an ‘a-historical’ and ‘synchronic’ 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 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 primitivists’ 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 primitive peoples as having similar objectives of integrating individual experience to communal life by means of myths and rituals.⁸⁶ Roy himself insisted 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 signing 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

Roy’s use of tempera and cheap materials of the village craftsmen often caused the deterioration of his paintings in a short time. In this period, 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 perfection 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 deliberately 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 decorative 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 pattern. 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 artistic objectives, this supreme individualist was now voluntarily returning to the anonymity of tradition. Significantly, Roy eschewed artistic individualism 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 useful 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 sophisticated man who lost “that simple feeling” may, though highly educated, 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, Mother and Child, c. 1940s, gouache on board.

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 considerable 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 synthesis 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 expression, became a vehicle for his deep but understated social commitment.