Epilogue

The year 1947 marked the end of the British Empire and the creation of modern India and Pakistan in the midst of anarchy and communal violence. It also brought an end to the debates on art as a vehicle for nationalist resistance. The heroic age of primitivism, the most compelling voice of modernism in India, had in effect ended in 1941. Two of its chief protagonists died in that year, Rabindranath Tagore at the age of 79, and Amrita Sher-Gil at 28. The surviving member of the trio, Jamini Roy, only added refinements to the striking artistic language that he had perfected in the 1930s. However, younger artists such as Ramkinkar and Benodebehari continued well into the 1940s, as did some of the figurative artists, notably sculptor Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury.

How can we sum up this defining period, which threw up larger than life figures that changed the face of Indian art through their compelling visions of Indian modernity? Their modernity was, as we know, viewed through a wide range of artistic lenses in resistance to colonial rule. By 1905 the nationalist Bengal School had rejected the Victorian history painting of the previous era as the handmaiden of imperialism, constructing their own historicism by an amalgam of flat non-illusionist styles. In contrast, most of the artists of the 1920s and ’30s disavowed the historicist master narrative, which had obsessed the previous generation. They sited their nation, not in the historic past, but in the local and the present, which allowed for multiple aesthetic possibilities. The debate between the modernists and the naturalists in this period was essentially within the broader spectrum of global modernity, as they drew their inspiration from international figures such as Tagore, Gandhi, Marx and Freud. When the discourse of modernism came to India in the 1920s, its flexible radical language provided the artists with a new tool to construct their images of anti-colonial resistance. Modernism’s most fervent advocates, the Indian primitivists, proposed a far-reaching critique of colonial modernity, drawing upon peasant culture in an affirmation of the local and the present. Yet their anti-urban, anti-capitalist counter-modernity had global implications. Interestingly, even the naturalists, who were sceptical of the modernist discourse, believed in the ‘here’ and the ‘now’ rather than the past. However their engagement with modernity was negotiated through the universal ‘rational’ order of illusionist art and their faith in the ultimate triumph of the toiling masses as a vindication of the inexorable human progress.

L. P. Khora, Independence Day, 15 August 1947, 1947, watercolour on paper.

The key primitivists, Tagore, Sher-Gil and Roy, did not spawn any devoted followers. They were individualists, shunning groups and movements, but making their ideological differences with the naturalists and orientalists clear through their own work. In the 1940s, the last decade of the empire, the differences between the primitivists and their adversaries began to fuse as artists, writers and intellectuals were drawn into the vortex of war, famine and peasant revolts in the dying empire. The art of this decade reflected less colonial anxieties than global anti-fascist resistance. The Communists declared their solidarity with the ‘proletariat’, viewing anti-colonial struggle as part of a wider resistance to world capitalism. Communist artists produced pamphlets depicting the struggle of the masses, in a style reminiscent of Käthe Kollwitz, Mexican popular prints and Russian ‘agit prop’ art. The momentous events taking place could not but affect the young. as we see in a series of paintings by the students of the Bombay art school glorifying Indian resistance to the empire.

Against this background two artistic agendas emerged that brought out the tensions between avant-garde formalism and socialist radicalism, both having global implications. The Calcutta Group, a band of ‘progressive’ artists, consciously adopted an experimental approach to painting, looking to Paris as their source of inspiration. The Progressive Artists of Bombay, also formalists, briefly flirted with Communism but remained sympathetic to social causes. They were initiated into international modernism by three refugees from Vienna who were resident in the city in the 1940s: Walter Langhammer, Rudi von Leyden and Emmanuel Schlesinger, who helped wean these artists away from the provincial modernism of Britain. The Progressive Artists were some of the main architects of Indian modernism, which came to fruition later in Nehruvian India – another story.

In this book I have tried to bring home to the reader the complex interactions of a whole set of competing, not to say contradictory, tendencies which modernity gave rise to, infusing local colours into what was a global phenomenon.