THREE

Naturalists in the Age of Modernism

The decades of the 1920s and ’30s witnessed the gradual ascendancy of modernism, as represented by its leading exponents, Amrita Sher-Gil, Rabindranath Tagore and Jamini Roy. But the spread of modernism by no means ended the era of naturalist art. Modernism’s triumph can make us forget the revolutionary impact of academic art in late nineteenth-century India. Even in the 1920s, it continued to play a significant role in shaping Indian identity. Academic naturalism had transformed Indian taste in the 1860s through Victorian institutions such as art schools and art exhibitions, while the processes of mechanical reproduction disseminated naturalist art widely. Ravi Varma’s history paintings, the zenith of Indian academic art, profoundly moved early nationalists. During the anti-colonial Unrest of 1905, these very same paintings were accused of being debased colonial products. The new brand of nationalists sought to exhume past ‘indigenous’ styles in a repudiation of mimesis. Both the ‘indigenists’, and their opponents, the academic artists, claimed superior ‘authenticity’ for their own particular brand of history painting. Both of them based their art on nationalist allegories, though their artistic language differed.

In the 1920s, with a major paradigm shift, the construction of national identity took on different dynamics and primitivism emerged as the particular Indian response to global modernism. One may ask what relevance could naturalist art have during the ascendancy of the formalist avant-garde? Prima facie, modernist developments should have spelt the end of representational art. For an explanation of the continued importance of naturalism in the 1920s, though with radically different inflections, we need to recognize the limitations of conventional wisdom, which presents modernism’s ‘progress’ as linear and does not allow for the coexistence of its different trajectories. History teaches us that there have been movements that fall outside the dominant discourse and yet reflect aspects of modernity relevant to our times.

The artistic language of the new generation of naturalists is often dismissed as anachronistic, but they as much as the primitivists were shaped by the same ideologies of modernity. They shared an aversion to historicism, the preoccupation of the previous generation. Instead of grand narratives, the naturalists, as with the primitivists, turned to the self and to immediate experience, placing their art in the service of the local and the quotidian. Whether it was the figurative painter Hemendranath Mazumdar and Atul Bose of Bengal, or the ‘Open Air’ artists of Bombay, they were without exception concerned with the ‘here’ and the ‘now’. Some of them delved into the intimacy of domestic life, while others drew inspiration from the common people’s struggle for equality and distributive justice.

Though suspicious of modernist ‘distortions of reality’, academic artists did not necessarily set out an oppositional agenda; they simply represented another facet of global modernity, sharing the concern for the global filtered through the local. Indeed, the concept of modernity adhered to by the 1920s generation was fraught with paradoxes. While professing allegiance to the local, all of them were inspired by ‘global values’. We know that Jamini Roy, Nandalal Bose and other primitivists drew upon the teachings of Tagore, Gandhi, Tolstoy, Marx and Freud, the universalist thinkers who also inspired the naturalists. Primitivism, the most powerful Indian discourse of modernism, repudiated Enlightenment notions of progress in seeking to restore the pre-industrial community, while the naturalists, who were suspicious of ‘modernist’ distortions, anchored their faith in modernity and the inevitability of social progress. Sculptor Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury, for one, made social realism the cornerstone of his art, believing progress towards economic justice and social equality to be inevitable. It appears that both the ‘primitivists’ and the ‘naturalists’ expressed deep ambivalence towards the general project of modernity. There it would be a failure of understanding to simply divide them unequivocally and schematically into two dichotomous ‘essential’ categories. Here T. J. Clark’s admonition not to take an instrumentalist view of modernism but to allow for a multiplicity of perspectives is richly suggestive.1

I

The Regional Expressions of Academic Naturalism

ACADEMIC ARTISTS REGROUP IN CALCUTTA

In the period under review, a naturalism of considerable variety and richness, anchored on the immediate environment, replaced the earlier engagement with history painting. But let us first remind ourselves of the genesis of Indian nationalist art. In the late nineteenth century, the ground for the reception of naturalism had been prepared by, among others, Ramananda Chatterjee, who furnished the intellectual justification for admiring Victorian naturalism. This encouraged academic artists to serve the motherland through this ‘universal’ language of art. In Calcutta, private institutions that took pride in offering courses in academic naturalism mushroomed. The best known among them were the Albert Temple of Science and School of Art, the Indian Art School and the Jubilee Art Academy.1

During the nationalist Unrest of 1905, with the ascendancy of the nationalist Bengal School of Art under Abanindranath Tagore, the fortunes of academic art sank. E. B. Havell, the English Principal of the government art school in Calcutta, appointed Abanindranath his deputy, ruthlessly cleansing the institution of Western art teaching.² The triumph of the orientalists within the art school was short-lived. Percy Brown was appointed Principal after Havell’s retirement in 1909. Being passed over, Abanindranath resigned in disappointment, his post going to his cousin, the landscape painter Jamini Gangooly. Though an academic artist, Gangooly had hitherto been close to the orientalists who now viewed his action as a betrayal.³

Brown was open-minded and a competent scholar of Mughal art, but he allowed Gangooly to reinstate academic naturalism at the school. The 1920s generation of academic artists of Bengal must be studied against these vicissitudes of artistic fortune. Between 1905 and 1915, as oriental art went from strength to strength, academic artists of Calcutta lost prestige and patronage, some being forced to emigrate.⁴ Though seen by the nationalists as déracinés, Bombay artists continued to enjoy professional success. In the 1920s, naturalism re-emerged in Calcutta partly under Percy Brown’s encouragement and partly because of the rise of two gifted and ideologically active artists: Hemendranath Mazumdar, a specialist in female nudes, and the portrait painter Atul Bose. Interestingly, Jamini Roy, who started as an academic painter, belonged to the Mazumdar and Bose circle in his initial career though he also maintained his links with Abanindranath. To their circle belonged the talented but reticent B. C. Law (Bimala Charan Laha), an artist of independent means, and the figure painter Jogesh Seal.

B. C. Law (Bimala Charan Laha), A Bengali Lady, c. 1930s, oil on canvas.

Atul Bose, sketch of his wife, 1940s, pencil on paper.

The book illustrator Satish Sinha and the sculptors Prohlad Karmakar and Pramatha Mallik were also active in this period. Many of the academic artists had their initial training at Ranada Gupta’s Jubilee Art Academy. Gupta, who was convinced that artistic excellence was possible only within the secure foundations of naturalism, had quit the government art school during the nationalist restructuring of 1905. He carried a lonely torch for the academic nude at his school, nurturing budding academic painters, offering them food and shelter if they had no ostensible means of support.5 Several artists from outside Bengal came in search of an artistic career in Calcutta, notably the painter S. G. Thakur Singh from Punjab and the sculptor V. P. Karmarkar from Maharastra.

Satish Sinha, The Maiden of the Deep, c. 1921, lithograph.

Satish Sinha, Mother Breastfeeding Baby, 1940, chalk study from life.

The art school under Percy Brown offered the three following artists basic academic training. Jamini Roy lingered over a decade at the art school where his precocious talent and wayward ways assumed legendary proportions.⁶ The childhood friends Hemendranath Mazumdar (1898–1948) and Atul Bose (1898–1977), who were from rural Maimansingh, had dreams of becoming artists. Knowing that his zamindar (landowning class) father would not let him take up the vocation of an artist, Mazumdar ran away from home to enrol at the art school in Calcutta. This proved to be a mistake for the headstrong Mazumdar who hated routine work, his disappointment reaching its nadir in 1911. Refusing to join other students in producing artwork to welcome the visiting monarch George V, he left the school to join Gupta’s Jubilee Academy.⁷ However both these institutions disappointed him in his ambitions of mastering figure painting. Eventually, he taught himself anatomy and figure drawing by means of books that he had sent from England. Atul Bose was from a more modest background and did not face similar family opposition. After spending some years at the Jubilee Academy, Bose moved on to the government art school. His hard work and precocious drawing ability won him the schools’ highest accolade in his final year.

Hemendranath Mazumdar, Cast Out, c. 1921, oil on canvas.

Atul Bose, Hemendranath Mazumdar and Jamini Roy began as penniless artists, doing sundry artistic odd jobs, such as painting scenery for the theatre, or producing paintings of the deceased for the family based on photographs, a popular ‘Victorian’ custom in Bengal. Bose tried to set up portrait practice with little success. One evening the three friends gathered at Mazumdar’s dingy studio in north Calcutta to form a circle of academic artists. The Indian Academy was more of a convivial club, the highly temperamental and ambitious artists thriving on endless discussions on art. As Bose reminisced later, the burning issue of the day was whether the pursuit of naturalism was tantamount to a betrayal of national ideals, and whether the historicism of the Bengal School was the sole path to India’s artistic revival. Though admired for his intellect, Roy was often teased for his weakness for orientalism. Yet, as Bose was to admit later, Roy rejected both the historicism of the Bengal School and the ‘crude’ representational methods of the academic hack. As early as 1920, Roy’s originality was confirmed, if confirmation were needed, by the mounting number of prizes he won. Roy astonished his friends with his remarkable gift. To prove his point about the economy of form, he would, for instance, bring out a drawing in a drastically shorthand style; yet no academic drawing could be more lively.8

Hemendranath Mazumdar, the moving spirit of the group, proposed that they bring their work to the attention of the Bengali public by publishing it in Bharat Barsha, Masik Basumati and other ‘middle-brow’ magazines, as the orientalists had already done in the influential monthlies Modern Review, Prabasi and Bharati. In addition, the orientalists had been able to launch, with a handsome government subsidy, their own scholarly art journal, Rupam. To counteract Rupam’s dominance, the academic group launched the Indian Art Academy in 1920. Sukumar Roy, whom we have encountered before, had been a champion of academic art, and owned an advanced printing firm. He readily came to their aid.9 While being conciliatory, to the extent of agreeing to include any oriental art of ‘merit’, the journal asserted the right of the academic artists to participate in nationalist efforts towards artistic progress.¹⁰ To prove their credentials, they published Bose’s elegant sketch of Rabindranath Tagore and of the recently deceased Maharastran leader, Balgangadhar Tilak, based on a photograph. The magazine got off to a good start, since artists from all over India were keen to send works for publication. To ensure a wide readership, the modestly priced but elegantly produced Indian Art Academy targeted the average well-read laity by covering a wide variety of topics. In addition to articles on art theory that expatiated on naturalism, notably Bose’s discussion of Immanuel Kant’s view of art, it supplied art news and gossip, travelogues, short stories and humorous pieces. However, the ultimate intention of the Indian Art Academy was to publicize the works of Mazumdar, Bose and Roy. Unsurprisingly, it was dominated by full-colour plates of their prize-winning pictures.¹¹

The journal proved to be a white elephant. In any case, for the artists, nothing could replace exhibitions as a vehicle for publicity. During the ascendancy of the Bengal School, government patronage had been transferred from the pro-academic Art Gallery in Calcutta to the Indian Society of Oriental Art. The Tagores exercised strict control over this institution by excluding all academic painters. Effectively debarred from exhibitions, academic artists of Bengal were forced to send their works to shows outside Bengal, even though many could ill afford the cost. The group resolved to challenge the authority of the Indian Society of Oriental Art by founding the rival Society of Fine Arts. The society planned ambitious all-India exhibitions, for which their former teacher Percy Brown readily offered them space in the art school. The group felt it politic to propitiate Abanindranath, the guru of orientalism, by inviting him to be an honorary member of the society, but was cold-shouldered by him.

The first exhibition of the Society of Fine Arts (22 December 1921–4 January 1922) showed over a thousand paintings from academic artists from all over India, which went some way towards closing the longstanding gap felt among academic artists.¹² The Statesman, which covered the second exhibition (22 December 1922–2 January 1923), singled out Atul Bose’s Comrades as a ‘fine, strong work’.¹³ The reviewer in the Bengali periodical, Bharat Barsha, Biswapati Chaudhury, a minor artist, collector and critic, chose a select number of works, notably those of Jamini Roy, Atul Bose and the sculptor V. P. Karmarkar for detailed analysis. Chaudhury showed imagination in recognizing the qualities in Roy that were to be uniquely his: boldness, simplicity and ‘cultural specificity’. Even more strikingly, as early as 1922, he reflected the shift to local identities in his comment that not only Western art but also Ajanta and Mughal painting were alien to Bengali culture, a sentiment that would grow in momentum within this decade.

Chaudhury praised Bose’s Bengal Tiger, a spirited portrait sketch of the Bengali educationist Sir Asutosh Mukherjea, making an intelligent observation that the convincing likeness of an individual depended on the artist’s ability to capture his characteristic expression.14 The sketch won Bose a scholarship to the Royal Academy in London, widely regarded as the Mecca of academic art. The young artist’s encounter with Sir Asutosh has become the stuff of legend, much as the portrait has won a place in the public’s affection. Sir Asutosh’s opinion was known to carry weight with the members of the selection committee. In order to impress him, Bose arrived at his doorstep one morning. When the educationist asked him curtly what his business was, Bose boldly proposed to draw the great man. Sir Asutosh was puzzled, for no one had ever made such a demand. However, curiosity got the better of him. To test the young man’s skill, he stipulated that Bose would have to complete his drawing within the short time that he would keep still while he received his daily oil massage. The outcome was the remarkable Bengal Tiger, which the Times Literary Supplement was to use for the educationist’s obituary in 1924.¹⁵ Bose spent two years (1924–6) at the Royal Academy, where he produced some fine drawings and oil paintings from the nude, but his most valuable experience was his work with the leading English post-Impressionist, Walter Sickert, whose influence is seen in Bose’s occasional use of sombre greys and browns.

Atul Bose, Bengal Tiger, 1922, pencil sketch on paper.

HEMENDRANATH MAZUMDAR, EROS AND THE NATION

With Bose’s departure for England in 1924 the circle was disbanded. But this had no effect on Roy and Mazumdar’s careers, which blossomed. Mazumdar won no less than three prizes at the venerable Bombay Art Society in three successive years, including the gold medal of the society for his painting Smriti (Memories) in 1920. The parochial Kanhaiyalal Vakil of the Bombay Chronicle grumbled: ‘One Mr H. Mazumdar of Calcutta won three times the first prize of the Exhibition. It is a disgrace to the Bombay artists . . . Either the Judging Committee must be incompetent or Mr Mazumdar is too high for the exhibition.’16 Around 1926 Mazumdar had his first financial success when a commercial firm acquired the reproduction rights to his painting Village Love for a substantial sum. The painting provided the main attraction for its annual calendar.

Mazumdar’s large sensuous oils of partially clothed or nude women and his intimate, voyeuristic eroticism attracted the maharajas of Jaipur, Bikaner, Kotah, Kashmir, Cooch Behar, Mayurbhanj, Patiala and the other princely states who threw open their palaces to him.¹⁷ Among the nobility, the Maharaja of Patiala, Sir Bhupindranth Singh (1891–1938), was the most devoted, engaging him as a state artist for five years on a handsome salary. Some of Mazumdar’s works cost as much as 15,000 rupees, an exceptionally large price for the period. Apart from his figures and portraits, he completed an ambitious screen triptych with the help of assistants. In a letter to his wife, Mazumdar proudly tells her that the Maharaja prefers him to the orientalist Barada Ukil, a remark that gives a hint of sweet revenge. The Maharaja’s generosity enabled him to fulfil his dream of building his own house with a spacious studio in Calcutta.18

Even as he consolidated his reputation, Mazumdar kept a wary eye on the Bengali public. Bose was absent in England; Roy was preoccupied with evolving his primitivist style. Mazumdar was left to publish the Indian Academy of Art single-handed. He continued to cover all Indian artists but gave considerable publicity to his own work. The publication showcased The Art of Mr H. Mazumdar in five volumes (1920–28?), as well as presenting Mazumdar’s polemical attack on historicism, the ideological foundations of the Bengal School. History painting, he contended, was out of touch with contemporary India. Believing in the universality of mimetic art, he insisted that only direct observation of nature could provide an objective standard. Mazumdar waged a relentless war against the orientalists until the end of his life. Unlike Bose, he never craved their friendship. In his posthumous essays, he excoriated the orientalists who only parroted ancient texts but lacked the sensibility to appreciate contemporary art (by which he meant naturalism). Mazumdar’s faith in teleology made him assert that the ancient paintings of Ajanta were advanced only for their period, but judged by modern criteria, they were full of errors.¹⁹ In a late article, ‘Cobwebs of the Fine Arts World’, he summed up his contempt for the ‘authenticity’ of the Bengal School, claiming that their inability to draw was camouflaged by their assertion of a ‘spiritual’ world beyond appearances.²⁰ Yet it was not all polemics. In 1929, Mazumdar launched a new illustrated journal, Shilpi (Artist), offering ‘an arena for free discussion and exchange of thoughts relative to the fine arts – Oriental and Occidental, Ancient and Modern’. He even included an admiring review of R. H. Wilenski’s standard work, The Modern Movement in Art (1927). The reviewer however was clearly sympathetic to the Bengal School, seeing its aims as the same as those of the Western avant-garde, and describing current academic art as an aberration. He admonished Mazumdar and his circle not to go down a blind alley on the grounds of ‘universal principles’.²¹

Mazumdar’s most opulent publication was the Indian Masters series, containing high quality colour and black-and-white plates, devotedly edited by the Gandhian nationalist A.M.T. Acharya until his untimely death.²² The first volume printed Mazumdar’s well-known painting Palli Pran (The Soul of the Village) shown at the first exhibition of the Society of Fine Arts in 1921, one of the most successful realizations of his ‘wet-sari’ effect, which was to become the artist’s signature style. The subject of a rustic maiden returning home in a wet sari after her daily ablutions gave the artist scope to represent the model’s fleshy buttocks and rounded shoulders partially visible through her wet cloth. Figures à dos were Mazumdar’s favourite. He lovingly delineated the rounded nape of the neck, the fleshy contours of the shoulders, the small of the back, the concave of the spinal column, the hips and the buttocks. For all its clever suggestion of an arrested movement, the work was carefully realized in the studio. In order to capture the particular pose he also used photographs. Mazumdar created a new genre of figure painting in India, suggesting sensuous flesh tones and soft quality of the skin, spied through the semi-transparent garment. Although Ravi Varma’s brother C. Raja Raja Varma had first treated la drape mouillée, Mazumdar created an independent genre, spawning imitators, the best-known being Thakur Singh of Punjab. Having discovered a successful formula, Mazumdar exploited it to the full, producing a succession of ‘wet sari’ paintings, revealing the figure from different angles. These more conventional poses never attained the easy grace and eroticism of Palli Pran.

Hemendranath Mazumdar, Palli Pran, 1921, oil on canvas.

Raja Raja Varma, Water Carrier, c. 1890s, oil on canvas.

His one other successful attempt to capture translucent flesh tones was a large ambitious watercolour nude suggestively titled Dilli ka Laddu, loosely translated as ‘the obscure object of desire’. Mazumdar was obsessed with capturing the sexual appeal of the lighter-skinned elite women of Bengal, and even wrote verses on his paintings.23 Most probably the model or inspiration for all these different women was his wife, but the subjects cannot be definitively identified. His draped studies capture the dreamy sensuousness of his sitters absorbed in their own reveries. The subject of Rose or Thorn?, a young woman in a silk sari, wearing elegant earrings and armlets, stands engrossed in her own dream world. The rose in the back-ground has been suggested as symbolizing the pain and pleasure of love. It was shown at the annual exhibition of the Academy of Fine Arts in Calcutta in 1936 and was later to draw accolades at an exhibition of Portraits of Great Beauties of the World, held in California in 1952.²⁴

Hemendranath Mazumdar, Dilli ka Laddu, c. 1930s, watercolour on paper.

Hemendranath Mazumdar, Rose or Thorn?, 1936, watercolour on paper.

In socially conservative Bengal in the 1920s, it is hard to gauge people’s true feelings about Mazumdar. As his images were diffused in Bengali journals, his readership could not but have taken a guilty pleasure in looking at them. Classical nudes, occurring on the pages of the same journals since the early twentieth century, did not hold the same shocked fascination because of their cultural distance. Then there were the Bengal School’s mannered, voluptuous semi-nudes.25 The disturbing power of Mazumdar’s women lay in their palpability and immediacy: his subject a young Bengali woman enacting an everyday village scene of returning home after her daily bath. A critic put it well: at a time when women were behind purdah, it was daring to represent someone from the respectable middle-class, someone unapproachable in real life.²⁶ In short, the beholder experienced the frisson of spying on a ‘respectable’ housewife, the proverbial girl next door. The artist’s tantalizing silence about the identity of the model heightened the mystery surrounding her.²⁷

The voyeuristic aspect of his paintings called forth questions about his motives as well as the quality of his work. The Empire had given rise to extreme ambivalences with regard to the body, as its representations became central to the construction and maintenance of British authority in India.²⁸ The rulers were responsible for a new concept of modesty, which provoked serious differences between them and the colonized as to how much body could be exposed without outraging decency. In the past, and at least from the fourteenth century, under the impact of Muslim empires, ‘respectable’ women no longer appeared unveiled in public. Peasant women had no such constraints, nor did respectable Nair women of Kerala hesitate to go bare-breasted as late as the twentieth century. Victorian evangelism discouraged Indian erotic art, and yet turned a blind eye to the Classical nude, which stood for moral purity and the height of art. And yet, in no culture was artistic nudity more ubiquitous than the Victorian.²⁹

Such contradictory pressures created tensions with regard to issues of taste and morality. Tagore led in ‘cleansing’ the Bengali language of its ‘vulgarisms’. But even he reacted against the prevalent ‘Victorian’ prudery. The new concept of shame among the educated was so exaggerated, he wrote in his essay on education (1906), that ‘we start blushing if we see bare table legs’.³⁰ Academic nudes found their way into the mansions of the rich. However, since the Classical nude was not part of the Indian tradition, it became hard to distinguish it from pornography. The situation was made worse by the influx of Victorian and Edwardian pornography, especially ‘art photographs’ from Paris, from the end of the nineteenth century.³¹ Tagore’s nephew Balendranath Tagore, a discriminating critic, took the Classical nude as his model, admiring the Platonic idealization of the unadorned state of nature.32 Yet Balendranath was repelled by the erotic sculptures of Hindu temples.

Morality entered the nationalist agenda early on. Swadeshi ideology imagined the modestly draped mother figure or the self-effacing sati or chaste woman as the highest Indian ideal. Interestingly, taste and morality became the subject of a heated debate in 1917. Several nationalist leaders, who normally showed little interest in art, expressed strong opinions on the function of art in shaping the national character. The debate took place in Narayan, a journal edited by the leading nationalist politician Chittaranjan Das, and drew contributions from other prominent figures such as Bepin Pal and Barindranath Ghosh. The writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri, a struggling intellectual in the 1920s, describes Narayan as a diehard conservative paper, in contrast to the liberal Sabuj Patra, endorsed by the Tagores.³³ However, the difference between the two groups was more a matter of degree than of kind. Although the Extremist politician Bepin Pal often employed Hindu nationalist rhetoric in his stand against the empire, his response to modernity was not so different from that of the Moderates.

In ‘Religion, Morality and Art’, published in Narayan in 1917, Pal ventured that the sole purpose of art and literature was aesthetic pleasure (rasa). Arguing that morality was historically contingent, he reminded his readers of Emile Zola’s works – morally questionable, yet great art.³⁴ The following year an essay, purportedly written by the charismatic Aurobindo Ghosh (actually written by his acolyte, Nalinikanta Gupta), contended that an artist’s aims were different from those of a saint. Unlike a man of religion, the artist treated all aspects of life, even morally questionable ones. Thus the nude must be judged by its treatment, for, unlike photography, a successful painting was able to transmute its subject matter.³⁵ The nationalist historian Radhakamal Mukherjee objected to such irresponsible hedonism: an ‘ugly’ subject could never be a vehicle for beautiful art. The nude, he insisted, was lowest on the artistic scale; it could not encourage exalted thoughts, only lascivious ones. The editor felt obliged to intervene: the aims of the artist and the saint were incompatible; art attained its higher goal only through the profane path.³⁶

The cultural climate demanded that Mazumdar justify his erotic paintings against charges of prurience.³⁷ The editor of the Indian Masters, his ardent admirer, offered a rather disingenuous explanation of Palli Pran. According to him, the village belle’s déshabillé betrayed unselfconscious innocence: although we caught a glimpse of her naked flesh through her wet cloth, her ‘half-turned face and timid gaze’ represented her modesty. He piously admonished the reader against imputing any base motive to her: ‘the healthy growth of a nation’s life is possible only when its women lead the purest of lives’.³⁸ Mazumdar had claimed a high moral ground for his art in competition with the Bengal school. He was thus forced to make strenuous efforts to prove his integrity. In Shilpi he offered lessons in figure drawing for the interested amateur, stressing the discipline and hard work that he claimed were absent in photography.39 Not only did the artist’s dedication elevate figure painting to a higher plane, he contended, but the beholder also had the duty to approach it with a pure heart, accepting nakedness as natural and beautiful. The implication was that the onus rested on the beholder. Despite such protestations, the public perception of the dubiousness of his ‘voyeuristic’ works remained. As a famous Bengali wit once quipped, ‘after Mazumdar, [our] mothers and daughters hardly dared to go down to the local pond for fear of artists lurking behind trees and bushes’.⁴⁰

ATUL BOSE AND THE POLITICS OF ART IN CALCUTTA

On Atul Bose’s return from London in 1926 Percy Brown invited him to teach informally at the government art school, in order to help consolidate academic art at the school.⁴¹ On Brown’s retirement within two years, however, the orientalists returned in triumph to the school. Mukul Dey, a close associate of the Tagores, was appointed its first Indian Principal.⁴² After his initial schooling at Santiniketan, Dey learned drypoint etching in Chicago, followed by a period in London at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks and Sir William Rothenstein’s mural class at the Royal College of Art. Dey spent several ‘high-profile’ years in London painting, etching and giving lectures. In 1924, he took part in decorating the Indian pavilion at the Empire Festival in Wembley. Bose, who was at the Royal Academy at this time, refused to join him in the decoration, which led to a lifelong animus between them.⁴³

On joining the art school in 1928, Mukul Dey embarked on reforms of teaching and student discipline. He showed an open contempt for Brown and his Deputy, Jamini Gangooly, who was soon eased out of the school.⁴⁴ Dey then disallowed the annual exhibitions of the Society of Fine Arts, which were held at the art school. Losing his allies at the school and well aware of Dey’s hostility, Bose withdrew from teaching. Although Dey was close to the orientalists and painted in an orientalist style in his formative years, his opposition to the naturalists was not entirely ideological. He himself had trained at the Slade and the Royal College and was a successful graphic artist. One of Dey’s aims was to restore student discipline at the school, which he felt was non-existent. However, the students launched a successful boycott of the school, demanding better teaching of academic art. Consequently, Dey was forced to appoint Bose as Jamini Gangooly’s successor. Bose did not stay long enough to consolidate academic art at the school. In 1929, the government of India announced an all-India competition to produce copies of royal portraits at Windsor Castle for the Viceroy’s Residence in New Delhi. The architect of the new capital, Sir Edwin Lutyens, in consultation with the Viceroy, chose Atul Bose and J. A. Lalkaka of Bombay. Bose left for England in 1930. Lutyens, who had a low opinion of Indian artists, was impressed with Bose, asking him to draw his likeness.45 Mukul Dey himself became the next victim of the internecine struggle at the school, being forced to take early retirement, the feud claiming Bose as its final victim. In 1945, two years before Independence, Bose became Principal of the art school, only to hand in his resignation within two years, as he found his every move at the school blocked.⁴⁶

Mukul Dey, Festive Season, 1940s, drypoint.

One of Bose’s lasting achievements was to help found an art society that would not be dominated by any one faction. The Fine Arts Society, we have seen, lost its space at the art school with Dey’s appointment, but Bose soon found a more permanent site.⁴⁷ In the early 1930s, he enlisted the support of a wealthy benefactor, Maharaja Pradyot Kumar Tagore. Under his aegis, a meeting of Calcutta notables was held on 15 August 1933, which passed a resolution to found an all-India association, with government blessing, to promote the fine arts.48 As local newspaper Ananda Bazar Patrika claimed, there was no central organization to coordinate the cultivation of art in India, a gap which the newly founded Indian Academy of Fine Arts filled. This demand for a central government-backed institution to be in charge of the nation’s art had been widespread since the 1920s. It was placed on the agenda at a conference held in connection with the Empire Festival at Wembley in 1924.⁴⁹

The meeting held in Calcutta reiterated the need for a gallery of European art in the metropolis, which had been abolished in the wake of the Havellian revolution.⁵⁰ Atul Bose was made secretary of the Academy conjointly with an expatriate European. However, Calcutta’s ambitions of hosting an India-wide organization ran into rough waters. The proposal had come in the aftermath of the bitter conflict between Bombay and Calcutta over the spoils of the New Delhi murals (see Chapter Four). The academy, fully aware of this, tried in vain to reassure Bombay of its non-factional intentions. The partisan journalist Kanhaiyalal Vakil and the art teacher Gladstone Solomon held a protest meeting in Bombay, objecting to the elevation of a ‘regional’ organization to a pan-Indian level. The government, already sensitive to the charge of favouritism, persuaded the working committee of the new Academy of Fine Arts to drop the word ‘Indian’.⁵¹

Bose organized the first exhibition, which opened on 23 December 1933 at the Indian Museum. It showed 800 works sent by Indian and expatriate European artists from all over India, as well as the art collections of leading Calcutta families. The best prizes for oils went to Satish Sinha, primarily a graphic artist and a member of the Mazumdar circle, to the expatriate Englishman F.C.W. Forcebury, and to L. M. Sen, one of the muralists at the India House in London. Jamini Roy’s Jashoda won the best prize for painting in the Indian style.⁵² The second exhibition opened on 22 December 1934, the prize for painting in the Indian style once again going to Roy, while V. P. Karmarkar’s Waghari Beauty won the sculpture prize.⁵³ Despite these successes Bose, disillusioned with factional politics, resigned from the Academy.⁵⁴

Perhaps what has endured in Bose’s career is his art. From his student days, he had shown a precocious gift for naturalism, as seen in his portraiture and later in remarkable academic studies from the nude at the Royal Academy. On his return from London he tried to resume his portrait practice in earnest with little success. In 1939 Bose had his first retrospective, which at last brought him a measure of recognition. The orientalist guru, Abanindranath, in a spirit of reconciliation, told Bose: you may worship a different god [of art] but you are not godless. Jamini Roy wrote a generous tribute in the catalogue and two influential critics, Shahid Suhrawardy and Sudhindranath Datta, known to us as staunch champions of Roy, were sympathetic to the show.⁵⁵

Atul Bose, preparatory sketch for a portrait of his wife Devjani, 1939, red chalk on paper.

Atul Bose, The Artist’s Wife Devjani, 1939, oil on canvas.

Datta singled out the striking portrait of Bose’s future wife, Devjani, as one of his finest achievements, as the sensitive painting, and the remarkable sketch on which it is based, testify. He recognized the delicate quality of Bose’s drawing, having ‘few rivals in this country’, and also noting the treatment of his academic nudes, ‘faultless yet full of life’. Mindful of the orientalist charge that Indian naturalism smacked of colonial hybridity, Datta argued that the outstanding quality of his work rested on his complete mastery over the medium that he had so deliberately chosen. Pointing out that the impact of European civilization on other cultures was not uniformly disastrous, he argued that Bose’s pictures, despite their European technique, were ‘expressions of the Indian vision of reality’.56 Interestingly, Datta noted that the prevailing political turmoil had made Bose aware of social injustices as evident in some of the works.

An admirer of Jamini Roy, Sudhindranath Datta’s appreciation of Bose was necessarily muted. The limitations of Bose’s work, he pointed out, lay in its over-elaboration, an absence of boldness and an over-dependence on the subject matter to the detriment of its formal structure, and ‘in his least successful moments [Bose] is a trifle too academic to be wholly satisfactory’.⁵⁷ Datta’s modernist critique of Bose is like comparing chalk with cheese, because Bose and Roy’s objectives were entirely incompatible. Bose himself, and his well-wishers, regarded his career as a teacher and a painter as a failure, a career of frustrations and the missed opportunities of an undoubtedly gifted man. Part of his failure may be ascribed to his ‘misplaced’ faith in the essential ‘objectivity’ of representational art. To counter the ‘subjective’ vision of the visual world proposed by both orientalism and the avant-garde, he prepared a sophisticated teaching manual to teach correct drawing with his invented device, the ‘Perspectograph’. Regretting the global excesses of modern art, he dreamed of returning to an art of ‘greater reticence, discipline and self-control’, based on solid empiricism.58

Atul Bose, Preparatory sketch for a portrait of Rani Goggi Devi Birla, c. 1940s, pencil on paper.

THAKUR SINGH, ALLAH BUKHSH AND THE NATURALISTS OF PUNJAB

Lahore, the capital of Punjab, saw an efflorescence of academic naturalism in the early twentieth century. The Mayo School of Art, shaped by Lockwood Kipling, tended to favour the decorative arts. Hence few successful academic artists received training at the school. The earliest academic artist of note in Lahore was Sri Ram (1876–1926), born in Madras and trained at the art school there. Ram was an accomplished landscape and figure painter in oils and watercolours.59 The most sought-after Punjabi academic painter, Allah Bukhsh (1895–1978), had no formal training in art. A simple man of artisan origins, he absorbed the lessons of naturalism by observing others and by apprenticing with commercial craftsmen-artists. His peripatetic early career included painting stage sets for a theatre in Calcutta, a career also pursued by Thakur Singh, another Punjabi painter in the city, as well as Jamini Roy and Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury. Large stage sets gave Allah Bukhsh the experience to tackle canvases of an impressive scale. Wealthy patrons lined up in Lahore for his history painting, especially ambitious works on Hindu mythology, Punjabi folk tales and grand landscapes. His style ranged from a soft-focus treatment of genre scenes or mythological subjects and misty ‘Corotesque’ landscapes to hard-edged outdoor scenes. Winnowing with Buffaloes, for instance, is a masterly evocation of the midday Indian sun, mimicking photography by painting the farmers and the buffaloes in deep shadows to emphasize the blinding light. Allah Bukhsh’s final works express his deep anguish at the mindless carnage of 1947 in two remarkable semi-abstract, almost surrealist landscapes, Anthropomorphic Landscapes 1 and 11.⁶⁰

Allah Bukhsh, Before the Temple, c. 1920s, oil on board.

Sobha Singh, Interior Scene, 1940s, oil on canvas.

Sobha Singh (1901–1986) came to art late in life after having spent some years in the Middle East as a soldier in the First World War. While there, he became fascinated with the land and its inhabitants.61 Singh is best known for his portrait series of Sikh religious leaders and paintings based on Punjabi folk tales in an accomplished but somewhat sugary style that reminds us of Edmund Dulac. The most enterprising among Punjabi academic painters was S. G. Thakur Singh (1894–1970), who left the province to make his fortune in Bombay, where he assisted a professional scene painter for a brief period. He then moved to Calcutta, spending the next 30 years in the city. From making a living as a scene painter for the popular Madan’s Theatre, he joined the Pioneer Film Studio as art director.⁶² The Tagores became Singh’s patrons, while reproductions of his works in vernacular journals, especially seductive paintings of women, endeared him to the Bengali public. Immensely energetic, he set up the Punjab Academy of Fine Arts single-handedly to promote his own works, steadily publishing his paintings from the 1920s. Among these, the most ambitious were the four-volumed The Art of Mr S. G. Thakur Singh and Glimpses of India, with introductions by the poet Tagore and Abanindranath. His painting After the Bath, which pays homage to Mazumdar’s ‘wet sari’ paintings, won a prize at Wembley in 1924. Thakur Singh became best known as a painter of the Taj Mahal and other famous Indian monuments, and picturesque landscapes. In 1935, he moved back to his home town of Amritsar where he established the Indian Academy of Fine Arts, becoming a leading figure in the art world of the province.

S. G. Thakur Singh, After the Bath, c. 1923, oil on canvas.

S. G. Thakur Singh, A River Landscape at Sunrise, 1939, oil on canvas.

S. G. Thakur Singh, A River Landscape at Sunset, 1937, oil on canvas.

HALDANKAR, ACHAREKAR AND THE OPEN AIR SCHOOL OF BOMBAY

The academic artists of Bombay boasted a flourishing naturalist tradition from the late nineteenth century, partly aided by the powerful presence of the Bombay Art Society, which had a long and colourful history as the bastion of academic art. The reputation of Bombay academic artists suffered briefly during the rise of oriental art in Bengal, but from 1918 to 1934 Gladstone Solomon, the energetic Principal of the art school, helped restore its position in the art world (see Chapter Four). Parallel to the debate on modernism in Calcutta in the 1920s, Bombay witnessed a new generation of academic artists who responded to modernism in the light of their own preoccupations. We have to wait until the late 1940s for fully fledged modernism in the province, but the lightened palette and thick impasto brushwork of these artists betrayed their allegiance to the new anti-academic tendencies in the West.

This generation forsook the earlier historicist treatment of ancient mythology that had been the hallmark of a Herman Muller or a M. V. Dhurandhar, turning to the ‘here and now’ and the quotidian, which had interesting parallels with the preoccupation of artists in other provinces. To these artists the quality of the light and the outdoors became more important than the niceties of period details.63 Landscape painting emerged as a major genre in Bombay and Maharastra between the years 1917 and 1930. Of course there had been fine landscape painters before: Raja Varma, the tragic Abalal Rahiman, Jamini Prakash Gangooly and Lucy Sultan Ahmed, all of whom with the exception of Abalal regularly exhibited at the Bombay Art Society, and won plaudits from the critics.⁶⁴ Viewers at the annual exhibition of the Bombay Art Society in 1922 noticed a keen interest in the natural environment and architecture among a number of rising artists, which prompted the Times of India to dub this new trend the Open Air School. Most noticeably they had shaken off the smooth chiaroscuro and precise drawing of their academic forebears.

As Nalini Bhagwat has shown, this new interest paralleled developments in Maharastran poetry that moved away from historicism to a love for the minutiae of nature.⁶⁵ In terms of style, a modified form of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting took hold of these artists, who now applied freer brushstrokes and thick paints straight from the tube. They sometimes laid on the paint as strips or stipples of bright unmixed colours. In watercolours, a more ‘fluorescent’ surface, created with repeated applications of transparent layers and highlights picking out details of objects, brought in a new treatment of natural light. In the work of these Indian artists, the most noticeable aspect was the sketch-like character of the paintings, a treatment that reminds us of the British versions of French Impressionism, particularly Frank Brangwyn colours, William Russell Flint brushstrokes and generally the artists encountered on the pages of The Studio.66

M. K. Parandekar, Landscape, 1930s, oil on canvas.

Among the leading ‘Open Airists’, M. K. Parandekar from Kolhapur won the position of ‘Artist by Appointment’ to the Governor of Bombay. M. S. Satwalekar produced impressive picturesque scenes of the Himalayas before he gave up painting to join the nationalist movement.67 Of this new generation, I have chosen two who had long and successful careers in Bombay to suggest a flavour of these developments, particularly the new impressionistic treatment of landscape and figures. S. L. Haldankar (1882–1968) was a prize-winning student at the J. J. School of Art from 1903 to 1908. He emerged as the most prolific portrait and landscape painter of the region, winning commendation at an exhibition held at the Royal Society of Arts in London in 1915. The enterprising Haldankar set up a highly successful private art school, Haldankar’s Fine Art Institute, soon after graduation, and founded with his friends the nationalist Art Society of India in 1918 to rival the official Bombay Art Society. As he explained, he felt dissatisfied with the society for being a mouthpiece of the colonial rulers. Yet the Society was not slow to honour the artist in 1925 for his oil painting A Mohammadan Pilgrim. The work was in the late nineteenth-century genre of picturesque ethnography popular at the art school. An artist who used a variety of expressions and media, one of his favourite devices was to illuminate the figure from an artificial light source, such as a lamp placed below the figure, to create a dramatic effect. Among these, the most popular is The Glow of Hope. However, it is the large number of sketchbooks as well as watercolour and oil sketches left by Haldankar that give us an opportunity to study his systematic observation, in the plein air tradition, of the surrounding regions, including the ancient ruins in Bombay and its environs. These painting sketches once again remind us of British watercolours of the period that blended the French Impressionist treatment of light with the English Picturesque tradition. In this Haldankar may have been influenced by the watercolours of Cecil Burns, a student of Hubert Herkomer and his teacher at the Bombay art school.68

G. M. Solegaonkar, Mahiari, 1935, oil on can canvas. This prize-winning painting shown at the Bombay Art Society exhibition in 1935 encapsulated the mottled effect and heightened post-impressionist colours typical of British posters of the 1920s and ’30s.

M. S. Satwalekar, Himalayan Scene, 1920s, oil on canvas.

S. L. Haldankar, Glow of Hope, c. 1920s, oil on canvas.

Portrait painter, watercolourist, illustrator, art teacher, and later cultural delegate to Hollywood in post-Independence India, M. R. Acharekar (1907–1979) took his art training at the privately run Ketkar Art Institute in Bombay, before he joined the government art school at the late age of 21. Later he completed his training at the Royal College of Art in London. In 1929, he secured his reputation with the prize-winning watercolour Concentration, which emphasized the rough-textured, ‘sketch-like’ quality of the painting. While at the Royal College, Acharekar was chosen by the Raj to paint the historic opening session of the Indian Round Table Conference held in London in 1932. In 1935 the Viceroy, Lord Willingdon, selected him for recording George V’S Silver Jubilee celebrations in London.69

Acharekar wrote books on art, among which Rupadarsini: the Indian Approach to Human Form is the most interesting. A burning issue of colonial art teaching was whether drawing from the antique and the nude harmed the Indian student, the orientalists eschewing life study altogether on the grounds that it betrayed crass materialism. Acharekar attempted to reconcile colonial art teaching with nationalist anxieties by distilling his years of experience as a teacher. In the book, he juxtaposed ancient Indian temple sculptures with drawings of nude models posed after these sculptures. His aim was to invite students of a modernist bent to examine how ancient Indian artists used their knowledge of anatomy to produce brilliantly simplified forms.70 In contrast to Haldankar’s luminous watercolours, Acharekar specialized in a loose impressionist style with heavy impasto colours, quick brushstrokes and loose applications of paint, to build up a sketch-like rough surface with speckled light distributed over the whole painted surface.

KARMARKAR AND THE NATURALIST SCULPTORS

The academic sculpture tradition, founded at the Bombay art school by Lockwood Kipling in the nineteenth century, became widely respected because of G. K. Mhatre’s celebrated student work To the Temple. This tradition continued with the rise of a number of professional sculptors in the 1920s, Mhatre’s son Shyamrao Mhatre, B. V. Talim, S. Pansare and V. P. Karmarkar. Talim specialized in sentimental and literary narratives in the ‘Victorian’ mode. The Indian Academy of Art illustrated his sculpture In Tune with the Almighty, an Indian ascetic playing a musical instrument in praise of god. The journal wrote approvingly that the ‘anatomical accuracy of sinews, bones and muscles and the expression of pure bliss . . . convincingly attest how the ideal can touch and blend with the real . . . The sculpture is a silent and direct refutation of the theory that the ideal and the real are [the] opposites which can never meet.’⁷¹

S. L. Haldankar, Landscape, 1930s, watercolour on paper.

M. R. Acharekar, Nude at Rest, c. 1940s, watercolour on paper.

M. R. Acharekar, a page from Rupadarsini (Bombay, 1958).

V. P. Karmarkar (1891–1966), who was attracted to the formalist simplifications of modernism, including Art Deco sculptures, was perhaps the most original among the Bombay sculptors of the 1920s. Born in a family of traditional image-makers, Karmarkar was discovered by a colonial civil servant, Otto Rothfeld, who arranged for his admission to the art school in Bombay. In 1916, on the advice of Rabindranath Tagore’s elder brother Satyendranath, then posted in Bombay, Karmarkar moved to Calcutta. The Maharastran set up practice in the city, producing busts of leading nationalists and graceful draped female figures inspired by Mhatre.72 In 1920 he went for further training at the Royal Academy, returning to Calcutta after three years. In his absence his earlier patronage had dried up, forcing him to return to his home province in 1925. However, now he was taken up by the Maharastran nationalists who wished to commemorate the nationalist icon Chhatrapati Shivaji with an over-lifesize equestrian statue. While these standard public commissions were heroic in scale they lacked the spontaneity and formal simplifications of his smaller bronze, plaster and cement sculptures, many of which graced the garden of his studio near Bombay. He was one of the first to use cement as a medium though he did not use it as radically as Ramkinkar in the 1940s. These smaller sculptures, namely the Conch Blower and Fishergirl, were typical of the period in drawing inspiration from the local poor, especially the rural fishing community.⁷³

B. V. Talim, In Tune with the Almighty, c. 1920, plaster of Paris.

B. V. Talim, Takali (‘Threadmaking’), 1932, plaster of Paris. The work won the gold medal of the Bombay Art Society that year.

V. P. Karmarkar, Graceful Worry, c. 1930, plaster. A regular contributor, he won the Society’s gold medal for his work Koli Girl, shown at the same exhibition, c. 1930.

V. P. Karmarkar, Fishergirl, c. 1930s, plaster

In Calcutta, sculptors were thinner on the ground. Jyotirmoy Roychaudhury, a protégé of the Tagores, received his training at the Royal College of Art, spending his life as an art teacher at various government institutions. One of his early sculptures, titled Spring, was a rather close imitation of a Victorian Cupid and Psyche figure but he went on to produce some competent pieces, including portraits of national leaders such as Gandhi.74 The other Bengali sculptor of the time, Pramatha Mallik, received sculpture lessons from Karmarkar when he was living in Calcutta,⁷⁵ and was invited by Karmarkar to Bombay to assist him in his public sculptures, which he declined for personal reasons. One of his most assured works, The Soul of the Soil, was reproduced in Indian Masters in 1928. The rough surface treatment of the bronze reminds us of an earlier Bengali sculptor, Fanindranath Bose, who had settled in Scotland at the turn of the twentieth century.⁷⁶ The editor, Acharya, describes The Soul of the Soil as being inspired by the

marvellous poetry of toiling humanity . . . His studies of peasant and poor life . . . have been executed with noteworthy truthfulness and realism . . . Strong, virile and painstaking, this tiller of the soil is no ideal creation of the Sculptor, but is . . . part and parcel of the land he tills and constitutes the very life of his country.⁷⁷

Here we have yet another sculptor drawing inspiration from the Indian peasantry.

DAMERLA RAMA RAO AND THE ARTISTIC RENAISSANCE OF ANDHRA

Damerla Rama Rao (1897–1925) is virtually a forgotten artist today. Belonging to a well-to-do family of Rajamundhry, his attempts to create a local form of artistic nationalism based in the Andhra region of South India were cut short by his untimely death from smallpox at the age of 28. He left behind 34 completed oils, 129 watercolours, 29 sketchbooks and numerous loose sheets in addition to an art school where he had begun to train students in his own style. O. J. Couldrey, Principal of the Government College of Arts at Rajamundhry, discovered his precocious talent. The Englishman would take him on trips to Ajanta to inspire him, eventually sending him to the art school in Bombay in 1916 where he felt Rao would receive proper training. The Andhran came under Gladstone Solomon’s spell as his mural painting student at the school, as is evident in his painting Siddhartha Ragodaya, completed in 1922. Rama Rao spent the years 1916–20 at the school, winning the first prize for painting,⁷⁸ and was among the senior students who were presented to Sir Edwin Lutyens by Solomon when he was seeking to impress the architect in order to win the New Delhi mural commission for the Bombay art school (see Chapter Four). Rao’s drawing is said to have pleased Lutyens.⁷⁹

Pramatha Mallik, The Soul of the Soil, c. 1928, bronze.

On his return to Andhra after graduation and a brief visit to Gujarat, where he did portraits of the local aristocracy as well as a sketch of Rabindranath Tagore, Rao set up a painting school at his home in Rajamundhry, assisted by his wife, sister and two friends. In the 1920s, the Bengali painter Pramode Kumar Chatterjee introduced oriental art to Andhra by founding the Jathiya Kalashala (Andhra National Art Institution) in Masulipatan.80 Once a Westernizer, Chatterjee had a change of heart following a personal crisis, embracing the ‘spiritual’ message of the Bengal School in his work. Although a nationalist at heart, Rao opposed the Bengal School’s particular approach, founding his school in direct challenge to Chatterjee at Masulipatan. He had been impressed with Solomon’s contention that the Bengal School’s weakness stemmed from its rejection of life drawing as ‘un-Indian’. In response to the orien talists, Rao emulated Solomon’s ‘nationalist’ mural class, which aimed to improve oriental art with academic figure drawing. Yet, unlike Solomon, he had no personal animus against the orientalists, enjoying his meeting with Abanindranath and Nandalal on his visit to Calcutta in 1921. It seems most likely though that he felt more at home with Bose and Mazumdar’s Society of Fine Arts. He sent his painting Rishyasringa’s Captivation, inspired by an ancient legend, to the first exhibition of the society held in 1921, carrying off its highest accolade, the Viceroy’s Prize. Lord Reading, the Proconsul, met the artist and purchased his landscape painting The Godavari in the Eastern Ghats. Rao was chosen for the Empire Exhibition held at Wembley in 1924 and was also included among the Indian artists under the Raj at a Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto.81

Damerla Rama Rao, Siddhartha Ragodaya, 1922, watercolour on paper. The work is based on Edwin Arnold’s classic book Light of Asia (Boston, 1891).

Damerla Rama Rao, Nagna Sundari (‘Naked Beauty’), 1924, watercolour on paper.

We have had occasion to come across the influential critic G. Venkatachalam who had been ‘talent scouting’ in the 1920s for innovative artists. He befriended Rao on his return to Andhra. Venkatachalam’s natural sympathies lay with both oriental art and the avant-garde, but he recognized Rao’s talent and his ambition to develop his own style. On the artist’s sudden death, he offered a balanced view of his work, acknowledging his courage, independence and originality in sensing the limitations of the Bengal School. Nonetheless, the critic regretted his inability to break out of the ‘artificial experiment’ of Solomon’s mural class.82 What did Rama Rao achieve in his all too brief career? A number of his works are indistinguishable from those of Solomon’s students in their colour schema and figures. But the few promising ones, such as Nagna Sundari (Naked Beauty) and The Dancer, painted in 1924 and 1925, showed a new departure, a very personal vision of women with elongated figures, heralding a striking mannerist style. The fact that these overcame the monotony of conventional figures can be explained by his insistence on regular life studies. Unusually daring for the period in Andhra, he painted full frontal nudes modelled by a local woman named Nakula.⁸³ In 1928, Indian Academy of Art paid a handsome tribute to him, regretting his early death, and commenting that his lively works demonstrated ‘a competent naturalist technique with a sound knowledge of the Indian classics’.⁸⁴ Damerla Rama Rao was remembered in 1947, the year of Indian Independence, in the celebration volume Indian Art through the Ages, published by the newly formed Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.⁸⁵

Damerla Rama Rao, The Dancer, 1925, watercolour on paper, one of his last works.

II

From Orientalism to a New Naturalism: K. Venkatappa and Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury

Not only the naturalists but also Abanindranath’s disciples were gradually turning their backs on orientalism, notably K. Venkatappa and Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury, both of whom, in very different ways, projected a heroic image of the artist as a genius. No fewer than forty odd volumes of Venkatappa’s densely packed diary, the most extensive ever maintained by an Indian artist, offer us an insight into the mentality and artistic process of a colonial artist poised on the cusp of modernity and tradition.1 Fiercely jealous of his artistic mission, Venkatappa’s evolution from a painter of the Bengal School to magic realism makes fascinating reading. A muscular hero, the urbane uomo universale, Deviprosad was a larger-than-life figure who projected his own physical prowess on to his ‘Michelangelesque’ sculptures. A versatile artist, his work ranged from delicate ‘orientalist’ miniatures, romantic watercolours and commissioned portraits to colossal public sculptures celebrating national allegories in the late colonial era and two and half decades of Independence. We are allowed an insight into his quirks and idiosyncrasies as well as his powerful mind in the candid memoirs of his wife and lifelong companion.² In these two supreme individualists, naturalism became inflected in the light of their own specific objectives.

VENKATAPPA: FROM COURT PAINTER TO A COLONIAL ARTIST

K. Venkatappa (1887–1962) was born into a family of traditional Tanjore painters attached to the princely court of Mysore. These ‘artisan’ painters used transparent paints for figures, while reserving opaque pigments for costumes and other details, lastly using gold leaf to enhance the whole effect. Venkatappa began as his father’s apprentice when his talent came to the notice of the Maharaja, who sent him to the local art school and engaged an English tutor for him, thus ensuring his entry into the modern colonial world.³ In 1912, he was sent to the Government School of Art in Calcutta, reputed as the leading centre of nationalist art under Abanindranath.⁴ Venkatappa discovered the cosmopolitan world of Calcutta, joining the inner circle of Abanindranath’s students, who in their turn were intrigued by his artisan background. Abanindranath respected his innate skills, choosing him as one of the students to illustrate his booklet Some Notes on Indian Artistic Anatomy, and Sister Nivedita’s posthumous work Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists.5

K. Venkatappa, Rama’s Marriage, c. 1918, watercolour on paper.

In Calcutta, Venkatappa started keeping a diary, recording in meticulous detail everyday transactions, which is a uniquely revealing document of his personality and creative process.⁶ While studying art, he toured north India, visiting major Hindu pilgrim sites. He records his experiments with fasting and other examples of personal endurance with a punctiliousness that verges on ‘anal compulsiveness’ in a Freudian sense. In 1914, Percy Brown, the Principal, recommended him highly for the post of Government Art Adviser. Brown also introduced Venkatappa to the visiting English sculptor, George Frampton, who was commissioned to execute a memorial bust of the Viceroy, with a view to sending him to Britain to learn bronze casting.

Venkatappa turned these offers down because he did not wish to renege on his obligation to his patron, the Maharaja of Mysore. In 1916, he returned to Mysore for a brief visit, and was never to leave the princely state again. Appointed the state artist, he found Mysore boring after cosmopolitan Calcutta, suffering ill health and difficulties at work. He tried to maintain his links with former friends, took part in major art exhibitions around the country and even took out a subscription to the English newspaper, the Statesman. In 1918, for the second time, the Government of Bengal offered him an art position but he again felt unable to take it up.7 Slowly and painfully, he found himself adjusting to his new life, keeping regular hours at the studio, cultivating the Western habit of taking daily walks, and spending his leisure hours at a local club. Venkatappa produced relief sculpture and painting for the Maharaja but also began selling privately as his works began to be known widely.⁸ In 1922–4, among his comments on patrons, he recorded an acrimonious encounter with the art collector B. N. Treasurywalla from Bombay who haggled endlessly about the prices of pictures, sending them back for ‘improvements’. These humiliations embittered the proud Venkatappa.⁹

In his initial years, Venkatappa continued with orientalist historicism, even delving into Sanskrit texts, constantly seeking the advice of scholars at the local University. In 1918 he started taking Sanskrit lessons in earnest, much to the consternation of the Maharaja’s secretary who reminded him of the cost to the state. For all his obsessive punctiliousness, he was a modern colonial artist and not a traditional Tanjore painter. In short, Venkatappa’s self-conscious ‘archaeology’ of ancient Indian culture was at odds with living Hinduism. In addition, Venkatappa took the mastery of representation as a sine qua non of artistic perfection, dismissing the Ragamala miniatures as rigid and formal.¹⁰ Venkatappa even ‘modernized’ Shiva with two arms rather than four, which brought him into conflict with the orthodox.

NATURE UNDER A MICROSCOPE

Historicism was no more than a passing phase with Venkatappa about which he expressed reservations even in his student days.¹¹ The story of his very personal form of naturalism began with a sneaking admiration for English watercolours under Percy Brown. In 1926, finally shedding his allegiance to oriental art, he embarked on a careful, empirical exploration of nature, creating in the process a magical vision of Karnataka landscape that transcended mere representation. He had known the Ootacamund and Kodaikanal regions intimately since his youth; he now invested his beloved hills, valleys, meadows and lakes with an uncanny quality. Modern Indian critics, who view Venkatappa as displaying mere photographic accuracy, lacking any creative spark, miss out the imagination, self-discipline and the relentless pursuit of an idea that went into the construction of his landscapes.

Venkatappa approached his objective in the spirit of an intellectual adventure, recording every single, even trivial detail of his daily life in his diary. This is particularly instructive for 1926, the year that he produced striking contemporary landscapes. He spent six concentrated months between 10 May and 25 October 1926 on the Elk Hill in Ootacamund, a lush green terrain with a cool damp climate punctuated with long spells of ferocious rains. A solitary figure who preferred his own company, Venkatappa took long walks sketching and spending hours in his room at the YMCA hostel completing his landscapes. He set himself the task of rendering faithfully what he saw in microscopic detail, devoting four to six months to each painting. For instance, he prepared for his Ootacamund in Moonlight by climbing the hill every evening in near freezing conditions and perching on a precipitous rock to study the surroundings. Before commencing the painting he immersed himself in the environment, repeatedly returning to the same spot to check the details.12

For The Tempest he made an initial sketch from his window as heavy downpours confined him indoors. His obsession eventually drew him outdoors, to observe for several days the effects of the rain on natural light. These paintings of 1926 afford us an intimate understanding of the forests, valleys, mountains and the sky under varying light conditions. The luminosity of his landscapes had been anticipated in the nocturnal glow of his orientalist painting Shiva Ratri.¹³ With an unusual combination of colours, especially indigos, blues and greens, which he explained as ‘colour perspective’, Venkatappa obtained a glittering brightness in his washes. He never gave up synthetic European paints entirely, but in 1912 he had already prepared a chart of vegetable and mineral dyes that he may have inherited from his artisan family.

K. Venkatappa, Monsoon Clouds Breaking, 1926, watercolour on paper.

K. Venkatappa, The Lake View, 1926, watercolour on paper.

In September, as the rains came to an end, he embarked on the defining work of his entire career. The diary takes us through the process of painting The Lake View almost clinically. Choosing the light at dawn as his subject, Venkatappa rose at 4.55 am for several days, went down to the hillside before it became light, sketching the scene and later making improvements back at the YMCA. For the actual painting, he set out with his easel for the lakeshore every morning, long before daybreak. There he sought to capture the strange sight of dawn breaking on the distant mountains, the intense light mirrored in the perfectly still waters of the lake. We do not know what emotions it aroused in him, a solitary witness to a desolate, almost primeval world. He makes a typically laconic observation in his diary: ‘I could study the reflections thoroughly to my satisfaction till 8 a.m. [and at] 8.15 a.m. began to work on reflections.’¹⁴ The sense of oppressive isolation in the painting is matched by the intensity of natural light. The Lake View, Venkatappa’s most complex work, remained unsold.

A MOST PECULIAR OBSESSION

In provincial Mysore Venkatappa aroused admiration and fear in equal measure for his extreme fastidiousness and blunt outspoken manner. His unconventional comportment, eccentricities and contempt for the ‘philistine’ public became even more pronounced after his retirement from the Mysore court.¹⁵ Ever a solitary figure, he took up classical music late in life, attaining considerable mastery of it.16 Venkatappa forms a bridge between the old courtly painter and the colonial artist. Here we have the conscious reinvention of the self as artistic genius, not bound by normal conventions, a colonial phenomenon that marked the changing relationship between artists and patrons. Once Venkatappa visited the Public Library in Mysore in order to consult Webster’s Dictionary for the ‘true distinction between the artist and the artisan’ – a distinction that would have mattered little to his traditional painter father.¹⁷ As his obituary in the Deccan Herald put it, Venkatappa had a high regard for his own genius, and waged a heroic battle against mean-minded and exploitative patrons. Yet such reinvention rested on the slippery ground between traditional Hinduism and the modern West. An ascetic bachelor, he claimed to be ‘married’ to his art, practising the Hindu rite of aparigraha, which involved a fierce aversion to taking help from others.¹⁸ Venkatappa’s entry into the modern colonial world was owed to his patron Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV, Maharaja of Mysore, to whom he remained steadfastly loyal. The price he paid for his loyalty was to decline with some regret the British government’s prestigious invitation to participate in the decoration of New Delhi in the 1920s. The Maharaja for his part reciprocated his loyalty: ‘you have made a great name, brought much credit to the state, I . . . proudly show visitors my countryman’s work’. Yet the coda to Venkatappa’s career was the arbitrariness of tied patronage. With the Maharaja’s death in 1940, his successor cruelly terminated his appointment, forcing the artist to leave Mysore. Feared by the public, Venkatappa withdrew into himself, making rare public appearances, and slowly fading from popular memory.¹⁹

K. Venkatappa, Mad After Vina, 1926, watercolour on paper. The painting explains to his guru Abamindranath why he chose music.

DEVIPROSAD: THE ARTIST AS L’UOMO UNIVERSALE

Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury (1899–1975), widely regarded as the most important sculptor of late colonial India, was the scion of a Bengali zamindari family of Punjabi extraction. Controversialist, imperious, proud of his good looks, intelligence, noble descent and physical prowess, with an innate sense of his own genius, Deviprosad cut a larger than life figure. In addition to painting and sculpting, he wrestled, played the flute, shot big game and wrote short stories in his spare time.20 Inspired by Michelangelo and Rodin, he cast bronze monumental groups 6–9 m high that celebrated the trials and triumphs of the labouring man. Beverley Nichols, who was unimpressed with Indian artists with the sole exception of Jamini Roy, described his work; ‘It is not calculated to set the Ganges on fire, but at least it is alive. Choudhuri has something to say on canvas and is technically competent to say it.’21 In his breathless stride across the subcontinent, Nichols missed Deviprosad’s large-scale sculptures, his particular strength. Critic G. Venkatachalam, who wrote essays defending Indian artists against Nichols’s judgement, wrote admiringly of the sculptor: ‘For originality, individuality, strength and expressiveness his sculptural works are easily the best in the country. Even the Rodinesque touch which characterized his earlier studies . . . was only superficial. Roychoudhury’s art is definitely his own.’²² The East German visitor to India, Heinz Langer, was impressed with his ‘profound feeling for plasticity’, as well as his ‘artistic genius and human charm’.²³

Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury, Self-portrait, c. 1924, watercolour on paper.

Deviprosad had his first painting lessons with Abanindranath, giving evidence of a precocious talent in the two paintings submitted to Wembley, a self-portrait and a primitivist Lotus Pond (see p. 30). Treated in an orientalist style, the penetrating self-portrait and the primitivist figures anticipate his characteristic sense of design and firm drawing. However, his métier was modelling, kindled by his first sculpture teacher, a European named Boeiss. His next teacher, Hironmoy Roychaudhury, trained at the Royal College of Art, taught him to ‘build in’ rather than ‘carve in’ his figures.24 As in the case of Hemendranath Mazumdar, Deviprosad’s choice of art as a vocation caused a permanent rift between him and the head of his family, his zamindar grandfather, who disinherited him. He was forced to take up work as a scene painter for a theatre in north Calcutta, followed by teaching art at a boy’s school in the city. However, recognition was not long in coming. Stella Kramrisch was one of the first to recognize his talent, writing of his bronzes as ‘the first serious contribution modern India has made to the portrait sculpture of modern man’.²⁵ He taught briefly at Santiniketan where he had Ramkinkar among his students. In 1929 he became head of the government art school in Madras, one of the first Indians to run a government educational institution. In the 30 years he was at the school, he inspired generations of art students in South India, helping to end its reputation as an industrial arts centre. The Hindu voiced public recognition of the importance of his appointment. In 1936, reviewing the annual art exhibition of the school, it commented on how Deviprosad had sparked a new creativity among the students who had hitherto produced only conventional work.²⁶ A pupil of Abanindranath, Deviprosad finally cut the orientalist ‘apron strings’ at a public lecture in Madras in 1936, criticizing the unquestioning adherence to tradition and recommending that one learn even from Western art if it was of value.²⁷

Deviprosad delighted in épater les bourgeois with his outrageous views on sexuality, in part an outcome of his discovery of Freud.²⁸ I have mentioned his physical strength. English soldiers stationed in Calcutta were generally feared by the slender-limbed Bengalis for their often violent and unpredictable behaviour. Deviprosad enjoyed picking a fight with them. Bristling with energy, he worked from early morning till evening every single day without fail, often on large-scale sculptural pieces. Despite being in charge of a major government institution for 30 years, he was remarkably productive. We read about the artist’s fiery personality from his wife’s memoirs, published in the 1950s, where she describes him with a mixture of admiration and exasperation as over-frank, oversensitive and overbearing.²⁹

A SCULPTOR FOR THE TOILING HUMANITY

Deviprosad commanded a wide range of artistic media from the most delicate jewel-like watercolours, such as Sumatra Birds, Expressionist landscapes and commissioned portraits, to massive bronze sculptural groups. His high professional standards brought him a steady stream of private and public commissions, notably portrait busts of British dignitaries, which left him unsatisfied. Deviprosad sought inspiration from the heroic forbearance of the salt of the earth – the fisherman making his weary way home, weighed down by his dripping net, or the peasant resigned to his humble lot, going about his daily toil. He produced some moving images of the great famine in Bengal in 1943, notably of a mother with her starving infant. Of course, this harrowing subject inspired not only Deviprosad but a number of artists in Bengal.

The question is: if his work expressed sympathy for the salt of the earth, what then was his difference from Ramkinkar and the primitivists? Indeed, Deviprosad’s heroic vision of the toiling masses had many similarities with that of the primitivists but the differences were significant. The primitivist idealization of the innocent Santals as the denizens of an unchanging community was essentially a critique of global capitalism, urban modernity and Enlightenment notions of progress. On the other hand, Deviprosad’s sources were an uneasy mix: he drew nourishment more from nineteenth-century Romantic notions of struggling humanity than from a ‘primitivist’ avant-garde critique of modernity. His sculptures of the industrial proletariat were rooted in a progressivist Marxian mode that saw history as inexorably moving forward towards a socialist utopia rather than backward to the village. Deviprosad did not show an overt interest in Marxism, but as a well-read man he shared the elite interest in socialist thought and the trade union movement in India within the larger nationalist struggle of the 1920s.30 Revealingly, his most ambitious compositions glorified urban labourers, such as road builders, rather than peasants or fishermen. Deviprosad’s oppressed humanity was fired by the idea of social justice and had a definite goal. One of his first multiple-figure reliefs completed in the 1930s was on the theme of social justice, the Travancore Temple Entry Proclamation, which celebrated the admission of the Untouchables into the Hindu caste temples in South India. In the 1940s, a critic summed up the artist’s optimistic vision of nationhood in his painting Road-Makers, but his comments could equally well apply to his ambitious sculptural group Triumph of Labour:

Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury, Sumatra Birds, 1920s?, watercolour on paper.

Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury, An Old Kashmiri Smoking, 1940s?, watercolour on paper.

Choudhury, strangely for all his aristocratic antecedents, is a socialist on canvas. His striking pictures of labouring proletariat are at once a challenge and an appeal. They are monuments of dignity and strength. [Choudhury’s sculptural group] are of the like who forge mighty highways for the conquest of nations. The ‘Road-makers’ are the forgers of Man’s empire, his extending dominion over elemental forces.31

Deviprosad’s Road-Makers were not simply labourers struggling to dislodge a massive boulder; they were ‘indomitable men [and women] wrestling with nature, doggedly, determinedly, powerfully’, a vision that pitted man against the elements, a well-known romantic topos of the nineteenth century. The Michelangelesque body became his romantic metaphor for man struggling as much against the elements as against injustice. His equation of emotional power with physical strength was closely connected with his obsession with his own body and physical culture. He took an almost sexual pleasure in forcing obstinate metal or clay into shape.³² Deviprosad loved to dwell on the wiry musculature of his workers, revealing their bones, veins and sinews through their flesh, often creating an écorché effect. With female figures, he chose to bring out the fleshy, earthy voluptuousness of peasant women in contrast to the emaciated waifs of the Bengal School. An admiring critic waxed eloquent about his virility:

Roy Choudhury, like Rodin, is rugged, original and virile; his sculpture has the same elemental fury and strength . . . His genius, for all his great achievements on the canvas, is essentially and pre-eminently three-dimensional . . . The sculpture . . . stands out massive, compelling and alive.33

Perhaps no modern master had explored the body more intensely in its myriad forms and convoluted expressions than Rodin, who created a new form of ‘expressionist’ bronzes with broken, rugged surfaces and fragmented non finito works. Deviprosad seems to have reached Rodin indirectly through Edouard Lanteri, the French sculptor settled in Britain, whose vigorous naturalism celebrating labourers and peasants influenced the new sculpture movement in Britain. Deviprosad recommended his standard treatise, Modelling: A Guide for Teachers and Students, to his students in Santiniketan. Indeed, a whole generation of English and French sculptors were influenced by Rodin’s rough-surfaced bronze, including the previously mentioned Pramatha Mallik and Fanindranath Bose, who had settled in Scotland in the early twentieth century.³⁴

Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury, detail of Travancore Temple Entry Proclamation, 1936, bronze relief.

Deviprosad’s rough-hewn style and unpolished bronze were appropriate to his heroic story of the downtrodden. Yet in his most powerful bronzes he moved beyond Rodin in his exaggerated forms, which suggests an ambivalent relationship between him and the discourse of modernism. He often used strong anti-modernist rhetoric, identifying ‘artistic truth’ with mimetic art containing a strong social content, and refusing to ally himself with the modernists because of his ideological commitment to naturalism. He welcomed the new language of art. However, for him the objective of art was to express emotions in a controlled manner, which was only possible with the skill that he found lacking in many of the modernists.35 Yet not only did his gnarled écorché figures go beyond representation towards expressionist distortions, but he himself showed a fascination with the physically ‘ugly’, the grotesque and the macabre in his paintings and short stories as well.³⁶

Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury, Road-Makers (later renamed Triumph of Labour), c. 1940, bronze.

Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury, Dignity of Labour, 1950s, bronze.

Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury, Old Woman, 1930s, bronze.

In Travancore Temple Entry Proclamation, Deviprosad highlighted the expressions of fear and hope in the Untouchables, depicting the oppressed as physically ravaged individuals with gnarled faces and hollow bodies, their degradation presented in an Expressionist manner. In Dignity of Labour, he portrayed the extreme physical effort of trying to loosen a massive, immoveable boulder. After Independence in 1947, his grandiose conceptions and social commitment were found to be appropriate for memorializing India’s anti-colonial struggle. Deviprosad’s interpretations of national allegories – the Martyrs’ Memorial, Triumph of Labour and his over-lifesize statues of Gandhi – are a common sight in India. A version of the Dignity of Labour stands in front of the International Labour Organization offices in Geneva. The artist was working on a colossal version of the Martyrs’ Memorial, which was to be the largest group composition in the world, when he died in 1975.37 The memorial would have decorated the great open space in front of the Red Fort in Delhi, symbolizing the unity in diversity that was modern India. The artist’s radio broadcast of 1951 constituted a testament to his life’s achievement: imposing statues on a gigantic scale were an essential quality of sculpture, rather than dainty figures for embellishing drawing rooms.³⁸