References

The Bengali calendar used here bears the following relationship to the Christian one, for instance 1352 = 1945AD.

Prologue

1   J.-P. Sartre, Black Orpheus, trans. S. W. Allen (Paris, 1951), p. 39, quoted in R. Linley, ‘Wifredo Lam: Painter of Negritude’, Art History, II/4 (December 1988), p. 533. See L. S. Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923–1982 (Austin, TX, 2002). Césaire was an iconic West Indian poet of Negritude.

2   W. G. Archer, India and Modern Art (London, 1959), may be taken as a classic example of the study of non-Western art essentially as a derivative enterprise. In an essay on ‘decentring modernism’, to be published in Art Bulletin (Intervention series), I develop the relationship of power and authority between the West and its others as expressed in histories of non-Western avant-garde art and possible ways of thinking beyond current practices.

3   W. Rubin, ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York, 1984). I do not need to rehearse here the arguments and rebuttals in this controversy except to add that Hal Foster, ‘The “Primitive” Unconscious of Modern Art’, October, XXXIV (Fall 1985), pp. 45–70, and James Clifford, ‘Histories of the Tribal and the Modern’, Art in America (April 1985), pp. 164–215, offer trenchant critiques of the Western art historical canon. For my own work on Western representations of Indian art, see Much Maligned Monsters: History of Western Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford 1977), especially chap. VI. See also critique of Eurocentric discourses of modernism by Latin American critics, R. A. Greeley, ‘Modernism: What El Norte Can Learn from Latin America’, Art Journal (Winter 2005), pp. 82–93.

4   M. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (Berkeley, CA, 1985), pp. 85ff., on the passage: ‘influence is a curse of art criticism primarily because of wrong-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who the patient: it seems to reverse the active-passive relation which the historical actor [the artist] experiences and the inferential beholder will wish to take into account’.

5   Thomas Crow, The Intelligence of Art (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1999). Elizabeth Cropper in The Domenichino Affair (New Haven, CT, 2006) persuades us of the limitations of applying Vasarian teleological concepts of mimesis and authorship.

6   J. Clark, ‘Open and Closed Discourses of Modernity in Asian Art’, in Modernity in Asian Art, ed. J. Clark (Sydney, NSW, 1993), pp. 1–17. Clark applies Umberto Eco’s theory of semiotics to the process of knowledge transfer, distinguishing between open and closed systems of discourses.

7   A. Stokes, ‘Reflections on the Nude’, The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes (London, 1978), pp. 336–7. I am indebted to Stephen Bann for the reference. Criticism of the avant-garde, particularly with an engagement with Marxism, is a vast field, going back to Walter Benjamin and Carl Einstein with Clement Greenberg’s influential defence of the aesthetics of autonomy in the 1930s providing the benchmark through the 1950s and ’60s. In the post-war era, the powerful and nuanced works of the October group of postmodern critics, Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster, social historians of art, namely T. J. Clark and Thomas Crow, and the theoreticians of visual culture have defined the field. I cannot do more than briefly acknowledge the importance of these works here.

8   For a revisionist discussion of this problem in Renaissance art, see Emilia e Marche nel Renascimento: L’Identita Visiva della ‘Periferia’, curated by Giancarla Periti (Azzano San Paolo, 2005), introduction by Pier Luigi De Vecchi and Giancarla Periti, pp. 7–11. Taking up Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginsberg’s essay, ‘Centre and Periphery’, in History of Italian Art, I, trans. C. Bianchini and C. Dorey, preface by P. Burke (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 29–112, Periti argues that the centre–periphery relationship in art is not spatial but art historical, which articulates hierarchical power relations.

9   Crow, The Intelligence of Art.

10   Keith Moxey, ‘Discipline of the Visual: Art History, Visual Studies and Globalization’, in Genre, 36 (2003), pp. 429–48. N. G. Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. C. Chiappari and S. Lopez (Minneapolis, MN, 1995). G. Kapur, ‘When was Modernism in Indian Art?’, in When Was Modernism? Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi, 2000), pp. 298–9. P. Bourdieu, ‘The Production of Belief: Contributions to an Economy of Symbolic Goods’, trans. R. Nice, in Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, ed. R. Collins et al. (London, 1986), pp. 154–5. G. Mosquera, ‘Modernity and Africana: Wilfredo Lam on his Island’, in Fondació Joan Miró, cited in Sims, Wilfredo Lam, p. 174.

11   In ‘Border Lives: The Art of the Present’, in The Location of Culture (London, 1994), pp. 1–9, H. K. Bhabha, a proponent of the subversive function of hybridity, states: ‘[The] interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.’ See the critics of hybridity, Journal of American Folklore, Special Issue: Theorising the Hybrid, CXII/445 (Summer 1999), especially Andrew Causey’s thoughtful paper.

12   See the critical engagement with these issues in K. Mercer, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Cambridge, MA, 2005).

13   T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL, 1962).

14   This is especially true of the Greeks, despised by the conquering Romans for their lack of valour, and yet revered by them for their art and intellect.

15   R. Schwab, La Renaissance orientale (Paris, 1950). On G. F. Hamann and the German rejection of Western Enlightenment, see F. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, MA, 1959).

16   Today it is intimately connected with post-modern and post-colonial thought. See J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought (London, 1997), who argues persuasively that any serious history of Western thought must take note of the impact of philosophical ideas from India, China and Japan on the West. See also W. Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (New York, 1988). On Heidegger and Eastern thought, see infra, p. 341.

17   J. Head and S. L. Cranston, Reincarnation, an East West Anthology (New York, 1961), on Tolstoy’s interest in Indian thought. See L. P. Sihare on Bergson and Worringer, p. 30.

18   E. Forgács, The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics, trans. J. Bátki (Budapest, 1995), p. 78.

19   P. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge, 1994). See also Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920 (Cambridge, 1992), and more recently a work on Bengal covering the period from the last decade of the Raj to independent India until the 1970s: Nicolas Nercam, Peindre au Bengale, 1939–1977 (Paris, 2006), which deals with national identity and post-independence ‘progressive’ art.

20   C. Harrison and P. Wood, eds, Art in Theory (Oxford, 1992), p. 3.

21   Mitter, Art and Nationalism.

22   A. Abbas, ‘Cosmopolitan Descriptions: Shanghai and Hong Kong’, in Public Culture, XII/3 (Fall 2000), p. 775. Cosmopolitanism is now seen to be a global phenomenon. See its critiques in the same issue.

23   P. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ, 1993), speaks of two spaces, the inner spiritual and the outer secular space of colonial Bengal. On the socio-cultural phenomenon of the Bengali Bhadralok and their role in creating an autonomous culture in Calcutta, see S. Chaudhuri, Calcutta: The Living City, I (The Past) (Delhi, 1990).

24   Mitter, Art and Nationalism, p. 268, and J. Broomfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society: Twentieth-Century Bengal (Berkeley, CA, 1968). On the Viennese intelligentsia, see C. E. Shorske, Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Cambridge, 1979).

25   The exception was Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the widely travelled poet, composer, playwright, essayist, political thinker and renaissance personality. See K. Kripalani, Rabindranath Tagore (New York, 1962), as well as R. Chatterjee, ed., The Golden Book of Tagore (Calcutta, 1931), on the international tribute paid on his seventieth birthday. The other cosmopolitan was the polyglot essayist Nirad C. Chaudhuri, whose intellectual development took place in colonial Bengal. One of the sites of such negotiations of modernity was the ‘adda’, which is a cross between leisurely intellectual conversation and local gossip among close friends, similar in spirit to French café culture. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Adda: A History of Sociality’, in Provincialising Europe (New Delhi, 2001), chap. 7, p. 180, speaks of the practice ‘as a struggle to be at home in modernity’. He considers ‘adda’ as a Bengali intellectual meeting-point. I would add that the addas were sites that allowed virtual cosmopolitans to function in colonial Calcutta.

26   I extend Benedict Anderson’s imagined community of print culture as the component of modern nationalism to the global scene. The members of this intellectual community will never know most of their fellow-members personally: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins of Nationalism (London, 1983).

27   In the 1930s when the younger modernist poets in Calcutta, Bishnu Dey and Sudhindranath Datta, moved out of Tagore’s shadow, they turned to French literature, and poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stephane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry.

28   D. Pan, Primitive Renaissance (Lincoln, NE, and London, 2001), on whose excellent work I base some of my arguments.

29   Indian artists were by no means the only ones to valorize primitivism. The Cuban artist of mixed Chinese, African and Spanish ancestry, Wifredo Lam, offered a critique of colonalism by combining Western primitivist aesthetic with contemporary African elements. His Afro-Cuban themes were a form of political assertion: Sims, Wifredo Lam, 1, p. 223.

30   Pan, Primitive Renaissance, p. 112.

31   See R. Rumold and O. K. Werkmeister, The Ideological Crisis of Expressionism (Columbia, SC, 1999), and especially C. W. Haxthausen’s article, ‘A Critical Illusion: “Expressionism” in the Writings of Wilhelm Hausenstein’, pp. 169–91.

32   B. Elliott and J.-A. Wallace, Women Artists and Writers (London, 1994), mention that their strategy of exposing the particular discourse of modernism as a matter of power relations aims at empowering women artists on the margins. Their ideas could well apply to my discussion here. See a recent work on the nationalist art of ‘marginal’ Europeans such as the Slavs in relation to the avant-garde: S. A. Mansbach, Standing in Tempest: Painters of the Hungarian Avant-garde (Cambridge, MA, 1991).

1. The Formalist Prelude

1   S. Roy, ‘Shilpe Atyukti’, Prabasi (Asvin 1321 [1914]), pp. 94–101. The great Indian director Satyajit Ray’s father, Roy was a brilliant satirist and creator of nonsense poems, dying of the tropical disease kala azar at age 32. On his contribution to the graphic arts, see P. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 133–6.

2   ‘Gleanings: Automatic Drawing as a First Aid to the Artist’, Modern Review, XXI/1 (January 1917), pp. 63–5. My special thanks to Ted Dalziel of the Library, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, who took considerable trouble to obtain the journal for me.

3   Tagore’s novels, Gora (1909) and Gharey Bairey (1916), and his lectures on nationalism delivered in Japan in 1916 condemned jingoism and extreme nationalism. His letters from Japan in 1916 urged his nephews to travel to broaden their minds: K. Kripalani, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (Calcutta, 1962); he took his protégé Nandalal to Japan in 1924 to help broaden his mind and invited a Polish and a Japanese artist to teach at his university at Santiniketan. On Kramrisch, see B. Stoler Miller, ed., Exploring India’s Sacred Art (New Delhi, 1994), pp. 3–29.

4   B. K. Sarkar, ‘The Aesthetics of Young India’, Rupam, IX (January 1922), pp. 8–24. Agastya (Canopus), ‘Aesthetics of Young India: A Rejoinder’, Rupam, IX (January 1922), pp. 24–7. In The Futurism of Young Asia (Berlin, 1923), Sarkar offered a blueprint for the modernization of India. Listed as one of the pioneering sociologists, Sarkar was a fascinating character whose contribution to social science is only now being recognized (see http://www.multiworld.org/m_versity-/articles/alatas.htm. of Syed farid Alatas, accessed 16 April 2007) Among a number of his papers published in different European languages in Europe and the US, he put forward a universalist view repudiating racial difference, accepting only historically contingent ones. Despite his own views, Sarkar generously secured the German National Gallery in Berlin for the Bengal School exhibition, see O. C. Gangoly, Bharat Shilpa o Amar Katha (Calcutta, 1969), p. 313. Gangoly also mentions that the German Orientalist Wilhelm Cohn was one of the sponsors of the show.

5   Sarkar, ‘Aesthetics’, pp. 16–18. See also his Futurism of Young Asia. In his lectures in the West, Sarkar criticized European Orientalists for creating a false dichotomy between East and West. Stephen Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West (Cambridge, MA, 1970), p. 260, however comments that Sarkar evinced deep ambivalence about modernism and the ‘Asian Spirit’.

6   C. Bell, ‘The Aesthetic Hypothesis’, in Art (London, 1914), excerpted in C. Harrison and P. Wood, eds, Art in Theory (Oxford, 1992), p. 116. On Fry and Bell’s influence in India, see Giles Tillotson, ‘A Painter of Concern’, India International Centre Quarterly, XXIV/4 (Winter 1997), pp. 57–72.

7   Agastya, ‘Aesthetics of Young India: A Rejoinder’, p. 25. B. Ghosh, ‘Panditer Lage Dhanda’, Bijoli (15 Vaisakh 1329/28 April 1922). The sage Agastya was Gangoly’s nom de guerre.

8   I am indebted to Mark Haxthausen for pointing this out.

9   S. Kramrisch, ‘The Aesthetics of Young India: A Rejoinder’, Rupam, X (April 1922), pp. 65–6; ‘An Indian Cubist’, Rupam, XI (July 1922), pp. 107–9; In the early twentieth century, colonial representations of Indian art were challenged by critics led by E. B. Havell and A. Coomaraswamy (P. Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: History of Western Reactions to Indian Art [Oxford 1977], chap. VI). Kramrisch in ‘Indian Art and Europe’, Rupam, XI (July 1922), pp. 81–6, rejected the colonial idea that the higher aspects of ancient Indian art were derived from Greece and Rome, an intervention that later flowered into her major studies of Indian art.

10   Johannes Itten’s notes for 7 May 1921: ‘Rabindranath Tagore tritt an seinem 60. Geburtstag mit einem Programm aus Rezitationen und liedern im Deutschen Nationaltheater auf’; and 1 October 1922–March 1923, ‘Bauhaus-Ausstellung in der Society of Oriental Art in Kalkutta; Leitung: Dr Abanindranath Tagore (ein Neffe der Dichter’s). Organisation in Weimer durch Georg Muche’, in Das frühe Bauhaus und Johannes Itten (catalogue of exhibition celebrating 75 years of Bauhaus, Weimar), (Ost Fildern-Ruit, 1994), pp. 516, 518. R. K. Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus (Stuttgart, 2000), p. 82. The works, expected to remain there from October 1922 until March 1923, never returned to Europe. The whole saga is recounted by R. Parimoo, The Art of the Three Tagores (Baroda, 1973), pp. 168–9.

11   ‘Internationale Kunstausstellung Das Bauhaus, Kalkutta, 1.12.1922–1.1.1923’, in Paul Klee: Catalogue Raisonné, Paul Klee Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts, III (Berne and London, 1999). I owe the reference to the Calcutta show to C. R. Haxthausen.

12   Catalogue of the 14th Annual Exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art (Calcutta, December 1922), International Section: Modern Phases of Western Art, Introduction by St K (Stella Kramrisch), pp. 21–3. I am grateful to Arif Rahman Chughtai for making the catalogue available for me to study. There were also 5 pen-and-ink sketches, 14 watercolours and 6 woodcuts by Lyonel Feininger, 5 watercolours, one pastel and one coloured painting [?], 5 action pictures (examples of teaching method) and 11 lithographs of the Tyrolese landscape by Johannes Itten, 29 woodcuts by Gerhard Marcks, 9 etchings by George Muche, 7 watercolours by Lothar Schreyer, works by Margit Tery-Adler, Sophie Körner and 49 ‘practice [student] work in the course of instruction’. The recent Director of the Bauhaus Museum at Weimar states that the student works were priced between £5 and £15 and the work of Sophie Körner was £3. I am not sure if it is given in the current price or of that period (‘Legend of the Bauhaus’ in The Hindu, online edition, Sunday, 8 July 2001.) More intriguingly, even Klee and Kandinsky priced their works between £15 and £20, which may suggest that these were their less important works. However, there were people who knew their precise worth and the works never returned to Europe, causing Itten to complain until his death (as expressed by his widow in Zurich). On the disappearance of the works, see Parimoo, The Three Tagores.

13   The Statesman and The Englishman of 15 December 1922. Review in Rupam, XIII/XIV (January–June 1923), pp. 14–18.

14   The Catalogue, pp. 3–4.

15   S. Ringbom, ‘Art in the Age of the Great Spiritual’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1966), p. 389.

16   A. Tagore, Bageswari Shilpa Prabandhabali (Calcutta, 1962), p. 119. This lecture was given around 1922–3.

17   S. Kramrisch, ‘An Indian Cubist’, Rupam, XI (July 1922), pp. 107–9. See Mitter, Art and Nationalism, Epilogue, on the political reasons for the decline of orientalism. A review of Bauhaus works appeared in Rupam, XIII/XIV (January–June 1923), p. 18. The impact of Cubism in Bengal in this period is attested in a letter of Nandalal’s, see note 22.

18   Obituary tributes to the Marquess of Zetland and William Rothenstein in Visva Bharati Quarterly, n.s., IV/1 (May 1938), pp. 1–4.

19   The exhibition of Gaganendranath’s works at the Academy of Fine Arts, Calcutta, on 26 May 1976, suggests early dates for his work such as 1888. See Mitter, Art and Nationalism, p. 275 on William Rothenstein’s admiration for his uncle Jyotirindranath’s phrenological portraits; Rothenstein had them published (Twenty-five Collotypes from the Original Drawings by Jyotirindranath Tagore [London, 1914]).

20   D. Chatterjee, Gaganendranath Tagore (New Delhi, 1964), p. 15; Purnima Devi, Thakur Badir Gogonthakur (Calcutta, 1381), p. 29, and Mitter, Art and Nationalism, on his cartoons, pp. 174–5 and colour pl. XI. Also S. Bandopadhaya, Gogonendranath Thakur (Calcutta, 1972).

21   Rupam, XI (July 1922), pp. 108–9. Because of his interest in dynamic forms he eventually turned to the Futurists. Issues of derivation and originality were also being debated at this time, as is evident from comments in the next pages of Rupam. Devi, Thakur Badir Gogonthakur, p. 131, mentions his explorations of Cubism.

22   The Englishman (28 December 1922). Postcard from Gaganendranath to his ex-pupil Roop Krishna in Lahore. Postmark illegible but it belongs to a group written in the early 1920s. Obverse shows a ‘Cubist’ painting. Text on reverse: I am sending you a sample of my cubism. What do you think of it? (Sotheby Sale, 15 October 1984, lot 13). On Gaganendranath, also Nandalal to Asit Haldar, 29 June 1922, ‘While thinking of Cubism I was reminded of something. When the potter turns his wheel the centre appears to be simultaneously whirling and yet remaining still’ (letter deposited at Bharat Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan).

23   Indian Daily News (10 January 1924).

24   The Englishman (5 January 1924).

25   The Statesman (6 January 1924).

26   Forward (6 January 1924).

27   Forward (19 December 1925); The Englishman (29 January 1925, 19 December 1925).

28   B. K. Sarkar, ‘Tendencies of Modern Indian Art’, Review of the 17th Annual Exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art, Rupam, XXVI (1926).

29   The Englishman (4 September 1928).

30   Welfare (24 September 1928).

31   Devi, Thakur Badir Gogonthakur, pp. 151–3; ‘Indian Society of Oriental Art Exhibition’, The Englishman (24 December 1929).

32   Bombay Chronicle (30 June 1926).

33   Forward (6 January 1924); E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (London, 1979), p. 149.

34   Bombay Chronicle (30 June 1926).

35   Obituary tributes to the Marquess of Zetland and William Rothenstein in Visva Bharati Quarterly, IV/I, pp. 1–4.

36   Welfare (24 September 1928). One of the more informed reviews of Gaganendranath’s 1928 retrospective at the Indian Society of Oriental Art acknowledges Roger Fry’s importance. See T. Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club (Aldershot, 1990). I am grateful to Sheila Rowbotham for the reference.

37   In ‘A Painter of Concern’, Giles Tillotson describes this aspect of Roger Fry’s work as a divorce between formalism and emotional life. I think he is right but the most interesting thing is Fry’s own ambivalence with regard to pictorial representation (India International Centre Quarterly, XXIV/4 [Winter 1997], pp. 57–72). L. D. Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Mysticism as the “Tie that Binds”: The Case of Edward Carpenter and Modernism’, Art Journal, XLVI (1987), pp. 29–37, discusses the mystic elements in Fry’s early seminal Essay in Aesthetics (1909). Fry was impressed with Edward Carpenter’s mystical ideas about art being the expression of emotions of the imaginative life. But Fry’s ideas underwent a change from 1909 to 1920, when he published his retrospective selection of essays (Vision and Design, London 1920). Although he seems to agree with Bell’s formalist notion of significant form he also contradicts it in terms of his early ideas, which he never quite gave up. In sum, what he disliked was ‘anecdotal’ Victorian art, but about ‘representation’ as such he was more ambivalent than Bell.

38   W. G. Archer, India and Modern Art (London, 1959), p. 43.

39   See M. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity (Cambridge, 1991).

40   The Vertical Man: A Study in Primitive Indian Sculpture (London, 1947). On his patronizing condescension towards Indian nationalism, see India and Modern Art, pp. 34–7. These primitivist sentiments, we know, were disseminated by Roger Fry, Clive Bell and later in Herbert Read, the conduits for modernism in the colonies.

41   On the essentializing myth of the ‘good’ docile primitive in Raj policy while suppressing actual tribal uprising, D. Rycroft, Representing Rebellion: Visual Aspects of Counter-Insurgency in Colonial India (New Delhi, 2006).

42   Similar sentiments were first expressed by Lord Curzon in 1905 (see Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 235, 377 and passim), who dismissed the Bengali nationalists as being unrepresentative.

43   Archer, India and Modern Art, p. 43.

44   Golding, J. Cubism: A History and an Analysis, 1907–1914 (London, 1968). Franz Marc and Lyonel Feininger created an imaginary world of animals and of architecture respectively while the left-wing revolutionary Georg Grosz put fragmentations and a distorted perspective at the disposal of a powerful political narrative, Homage to Oskar Panizza. Their contents were more revolutionary than those of the classic Cubists. My thanks to C. W. Haxthausen for our discussions on these issues, which confirmed several of my ideas.

45   Max Osborn’s review, cited in Rupam, XV/XVI (July–December 1923), p. 74. On Osborn covering the Berlin Sezession of 1911, Kunstchronik, XXII/25 (5 May 1911), col. 385–90. On Osborn, D. E. Gordon, ‘On the Origin of the Word “Expressionism”’, Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXIX (1966), p. 371, note 17.

2. The Indian Discourse of Primitivism

1   Dey, Reverend Lalbehari, Govinda Samanta, or the History of a Bengal Raiyat, 2 vols (Calcutta, 1874), p.4. The great nineteenth-century novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay often set his stories in the village but not with peasant characters.

2   From the website bengalon-line.sitemarvel.com/saratchandra.html (accessed 3 October 2006), Bengali Greats Series, The Immortal Wordsmith of Bengal. Source: Sarat Sahitya Samagra, 1993. Prem Chand’s Godan, his famous novel on rural poverty and despair, was published in the year of his death.

3   Tagore’s poem in the Chaitali collection, addressing civilization, demands that primitive forest life be returned to India in exchange for the colonial city, see Rabindra Rachanabali, I (Calcutta, 1961), p. 550.

4   Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, XI, p. 589. ‘Tapoban’ was originally published in Prabasi in 1316 (1909). On his holistic ideal of education, see below, chapter Two, ii.

5   J. Rosselli, ‘The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal’, Past and Present, LXXXVI (February 1980), pp. 121–48. On Bengali idealization of Santal sexuality, for instance, S. Bandopadhaya, Shilpi Ramkinkaralapchari (Kolkata, 1994), p. 4; Tagore’s poems, ‘Saontal Meye’ (the Santal Girl) in Bithika, Rabindra Rachanabali, III, pp. 294–6, or on the Oraon tribal girl, in the poem ‘Shyamali’ (The Dark Beauty), where he comments admiringly on their tradition of free love, Rabindra Rachanabali, III, pp. 435–6.

6   Classic photographs of tribal women were taken in the 1940s by Sunil Janah. To photograph the tribals, Janah lived with them, recording their uninhibited lifestyle: S. Janah, The Second Creature (Calcutta, 1949).

7   D. Rycroft, Representing Rebellion (Oxford, 2006). On the pioneering anthropologist, see R. Guha, Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals and India (Chicago, 1999).

8   D. C. Ghose, ‘Some Aspects of Bengal Folk Art’, Lalit Kala Contemporary, XXIX (1952), pp. 38–9. J. Jain, Kalighat Painting: Images from a Changing World (Ahmedabad, 1999); Susan Bean, ‘The Kalighat Style: Triumph of Invention and Tradition’, catalogue of the exhibition ‘Kalighat Pat’, Arts India (New York, 2003). Bean quotes Mukul Dey’s 1932 article that he coined the phrase Kalighat in 1910, but Kramrisch used the phrase as early as 1925 (see below, note 11). On folk art at nationalist fairs in the 1860s, Mitter, Art and Nationalism, p. 222. Rudyard Kipling’s father, Lockwood Kipling, was the first collector of this art. Mrs S. C. Belnos, Twenty-Four Plates Illustrative of Hindu and European Manners in Bengal (London, 1832), p. 14, who was probably the first elite artist to draw attention to it, illustrated a Kalighat painting hanging in a ‘native hut’.

9   K. Samanta, Nandalal (Bolpur, 1982), I, pp. 393–8.

10   Banglar Brata (Calcutta, 1919), was translated by Andrée Karpélès and T. M. Chatterjee into French as L’Alpona: ou les décorations rituelles au Bengale (Paris, 1922).

11   S. Kramrisch, ‘Sunayani Devi’, Der Cicerone, Halbmonatsschrift für Künstler, Kunstfreude und Sammler, XVII (1925), I Teil, p, 88.

12   A. Ghosh, ‘Old Bengal Paintings’, Rupam, XXVII/XXVIII (July–October 1926), pp. 98–103, and Ghose, ‘Some Aspects of Bengal Folk Art’, pp. 38–9. Indeed there is some suggestion of Matisse and Léger having seen Kalighat paintings.

13   Quoted in W. G. Archer, India and Modern Art (London, 1959), p. 101. V. Dey and J. Irwin, Journal of Indian Society of Oriental Art (1944), p. 33. Dutt’s major collection was shown at an exhibition (The Statesman, 23 March 1932).

14   In 1942, in Cyril Connolly’s Horizon, Ajit Mookerjee described the Kalighat painters’ ‘collective’ as representing people’s rebellion against elite decadence and extolling its modernist character: ‘Kalighat Folk Painters’, Horizon, V/30 (June 1942), pp. 417–19.

15   E. W. Said, ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA, 2000), p. 203. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, La Mentalité primitive (Paris, 1922), proposed the notion of the ‘primitive mind’ as the pre-rational stage of the modern mind, which was also Freud’s view.

16   S. Hiller, The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art (London, 1991), especially her excellent introduction and persuasive chapters by Daniel Miller and Rasheed Araeen. This penetrating work lays bare the hegemonic aspects of colonial primitivism. On the controversy over the MOMA exhibition, see Hal Foster, supra, Prologue n.3. S. Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress (Berkeley, CA, 1998).

17   H. Foster, ‘Primitive Scenes’, Critical Inquiry, XX/1 (Autumn 1993), pp. 71–2.

18   The primitivist critique of civilization went back to the ancient Greeks and Romans but returned with added force in the colonial period: G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages (Baltimore, MD, 1948) and A. O. Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, MD, 1997).

19   M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj (Ahmedabad, 1938), reprint of 1909 translation by himself from Gujarati. One of the influences on his primitivism was Ruskin, a great critic of Western industrial capitalism.

20   M. K. Gandhi, Collected Works, XLIX (Delhi, 1958–84), p. 298. In contrast to Gandhi, Marx’s critique of capitalism was trapped within the teleological foundations of Western ideology. E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (London, 1973), a critique of the Western model of development, was based on Gandhian intermediate technology. Gandhi launched his peasant movement in 1918 in Champaran in Bihar and Kheda in Gujarat, thus creating a rural power base for his Non-Cooperation movement of 1921: J. M. Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power (Cambridge, 1972).

21   Zhang Xianglong, ‘Heidegger’s View of Language and the Lao-Zhuang Fao-Language’, trans. S. C. Angle in Chinese Philosophy in an Era of Globalization, ed. R. R. Wang (Albany, NY, 2004). See Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language (New York, 1982). I am in Joel Kupperman’s debt for the reference.

22   F. Pellizzi, ‘Anthropology and Primitivism’, Res, XLIV (Autumn 2003), pp. 8–9. Much work has been done in tracing the complex role of primitivism in modern European art. See the pioneering R. Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Painting (New York, 1938), on the MOMA catalogue, Foster, supra, Prologue, n.3, and C. Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art (London, 1994). For a useful summary of primitivism, P. Mitter, ‘Primitivism’, in Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, ed. D. Levinson and M. Ember, III (New York, 1996), pp. 1029–32.

23   David Pan, The Primitive Renaissance (Lincoln, NE, and London, 2001), pp. 100–01, is particularly perceptive on this issue. He questions the conventional formalist wisdom about primitivism and non-representational art that tends to underplay its cultural importance. Tagore’s perception in the West as a prophet of spirituality found followers and detractors in equal numbers, which ultimately proved to be his downfall. Even if full of ambiguities and redolent of nationalist essentialism, the expressionist dream of restoring a unified and integrated community shared certain ideas of the anti-colonial primitivists (see C. W. Haxthausen, ‘A Critical Illusion: “Expressionism” in the Writings of Wilhelm Hausenstein’, in R. Rumold and O. K. Werkmeister, The Ideological Crisis of Expressionism [Columbia, MO, 1999], pp. 171–191).

24   S. Ringbom, ‘Art in the Age of the Great Spiritual’, Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXIX (1966), pp. 386–418. L. Sihare, ‘Oriental Influences on Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, 1909–1917’, dissertation completed under Robert Goldwater at New York University, 1967. While his scholarship is impressively exhaustive, his combative partisanship is over the top. Kandinsky was called ‘un prince mongol’ by the influential critic Will Grohmann because of his interest in Theosophy. James J. Sweeney, ‘Piet Mondrian’, Partisan Review, XI/2 (1944), pp. 173–6; Peter Fingensten, ‘Spirituality, Mysticism and Non-Objective Art’, Art Journal, XXI (Fall 1961), pp. 2–6. Ringbom was a contributor to the major show organized by M. Tuchman, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, 1986). See a reiteration of the influence of the Upanshadic notions of Brahman and Atman on Mondrian in Robert Welsh, who is unconvinced of the importance of Calvinist stress on logic in the artist as claimed by M. H. J. Shoenmaekers, ‘Mondrian and Theosophy’, in Piet Mondrian, 1872–1944, Centennial Exhibition (New York, 1972), pp. 35–51. J. Baas, The Smile of the Buddha (Berkeley, CA, 2005), is a recent popular work on the subject.

25   J. Golding, Paths to the Absolute (Princeton, NJ, 2000).

26   Pan, The Primitive Renaissance, pp. 102–20.

27   T. Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Art Club, 1893–1923 (Aldershot, 1990), p. 180. Michael Sadler was a founding member of the radical socialist Leeds Arts Club. Sihare too mentions Kandinsky’s public reticence about mysticism, whose aim of attaining the transcendental by rational means has been described as ‘rational irrationalism’; R. K. Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus (Stuttgart, 2000), pp. 119–220.

28   Tuchman, The Spiritual in Art, p. 37, on Vivekananda’s influence on Malevich. See the important discussion, ‘Primitivism and Abstraction’, in Pan, The Primitive Renaissance, pp. 102–20.

29   Sihare, ‘Oriental Influences on Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, 1909–1917’, pp. 31–6.

30   M. A. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialism and the Advent of Abstract Painting (Cambridge, 1991), p. 164.

31   On the Raj project of inculcating good taste in Indians through academic naturalism, Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 29–34 and passim.

32   W. Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 2nd edn (Munich, 1912), in Complete Writings, ed. K. C. Lindsay and P. Vergo (Boston, MA, 1982), p. 173.

I TWO PIONEERING WOMEN ARTISTS

1   Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 184, 204.

2   B. Sadwelkar, The Story of a Hundred Years: Bombay Art Society (Bombay, 1988), xxii–xxiii. Illustrated Catalogues of Bombay Art Society Annual Exhibitions, 1938–1947 (forty-seventh to fifty-seventh year).

3   In personal communication, Satyajit Ray mentioned to me one Pareshbabu who gave art lessons to middle-class women at home. Mrs Dwijendranath Maitra, wife of an eminent doctor and friend of the Tagores, received favourable reviews for her competent academic still-lifes, which I saw at her son Satyen Maitra’s residence in Calcutta. Satyajit’s aunt from his father’s side, Sukhalata Rao, brought up in a liberal Brahmo atmosphere, received Vivekananda’s Irish disciple Sister Nivedita’s encouragement to paint.

4   The Statesman (24 December 1922); she showed two works, Pink Lotus and Worshipper; see also The Englishman (31 January 1921); The Statesman (30 January 1925); Empire (29 December 1919).

5   Quoted in K. Chatterjee, ‘Sunayani Devi: A Pioneering Primitive, 1875–1962’, in Sunayani Devi: Alliance Française (Calcutta, 8–18 September 1982), p. 11.

6   Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, ‘Childhood’, X, p. 150.

7   A. Kar, ‘Sunayani Devi – A Primitive of the Bengal School’, Lalit Kala Contemporary, IV (1966), p. 4.

8   Interestingly, Kramrisch speaks of men’s schizophrenic bilingual existence. P. Chatterjee, ‘The Nation and Its Women’, in A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995, ed. R. Guha (Minneapolis, MN, 1997), on material/spiritual distinction in nationalist discourse also reflected in social space, bahir (world)/ghar (home), women occupying the inner and spiritual.

9   D. Chatterjee, ‘Conversation with Sunayani Devi’, in Sunayani Devi Retrospective, ed. C. Ghosh (Birla Academy, 22–7 February 1977).

10   Chatterjee, ‘Conversation with Sunayani Devi’.

11   In 1915 they exhibited at the annual exhibition of ISOA (Screen A), but Sunayani was singled out (Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 326–7).

12   K. Chatterjee, Sunayani Devi: Alliance Française.

13   Ibid., pp. 3–4.

14   G. Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters (Bombay, 1927), p. 84.

15   K. Chatterjee, Sunayani Devi. Her admirers included Mukul Dey, O. C. Gangoly, Nandalal Bose and Jamini Roy.

16   G. Chattopadhaya, ‘Sunayani Devi’, Triparna (1360), p. 33.

17   K. Chatterjee, Sunayani Devi.

18   M. Mukhopadhaya, ‘Sunayani Devi’, in Ghosh, Sunayani Devi Retrospective, unpaginated.

19   S. Kramrisch, in a German periodical translated into Bengali as ‘Svatasphurtti (Spontaneity)’, Prabasi, XXII, I/4 (Sravan, 1329 [1922]), pp. 543–4. This has been mentioned in all earlier works on Sunayani but I have not been able to trace the German periodical. Unfortunately the Bengali translation only mentions the title Kunst. One assumes Kramrisch gave the details herself to the translator. Here my translation is from the Bengali.

20   Kramrisch, ‘Sunayani Devi’, p. 93, on her creative process, also confirmed by her grandson Kishore Chatterjee.

21   Kramrisch, ‘Sunayani Devi’, pp. 93 and 87.

22   Ibid.

23   Kar, ‘Sunayani Devi – A Primitive of the Bengal School’, 7; K. Chatterjee, ‘Sunayani Devi: A Pioneering Primitive (1875–1962)’.

24   Kramrisch, ‘Sunayani Devi’, pp. 87 (doll) and 88 (Kalighat). See Oskar Schlemmer on the importance of primitive dolls in modernism (Folkwang Museum, Essen, infra, III, note 77).

25   Sunayani was influenced by the elite vogue for Kalighat but according to K. Chatterjee, ‘Sunayani Devi: A Pioneering Primitive, 1875–1962’, it is not recorded when she saw village dolls. In 1919 her brother Abanindranath wrote the classic booklet on Bengali women’s ritual art, see supra, note 10.

26   Kramrisch, ‘Sunayani Devi’, p. 87, Her claim that Sunayani owed a debt to no colonial style is contradicted in another passage (p. 93), where she correctly identifies her watercolour washes with the Bengal School.

27   Modernist admiration for naïve, mentally disturbed, children’s and primitive art is widely known.

28   Kramrisch, ‘Sunayani Devi’, p. 87.

29   Ibid. See also note 24 above.

30   Kramrisch, ‘Svatasphurti’, Prabasi, XXII, I/4, p. 545.

31   Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters, pp. 82–3. See also his essay, ‘Peasant Art in India’, 4 Arts Annual (Calcutta, 1934), pp. 175–6.

32   J. Fineberg, Discovering Child Art (Princeton, NJ, 1998), pp. 95–121.

33   M. Casey, Tides and Eddies (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 183.

34   A. S. Raman, ‘The Present Art of India’, The Studio, CXLII (July–December 1951), pp. 97–105, calls her the author of real art renaissance, her greatness lying in the discovery of a new plastic synthesis of East and West. H. Goetz, ‘Amrita Sher-Gil’, The Studio, CL (July–December 1955), pp. 50–51, calls her the greatest modern Indian painter. Charles Fabri, a close friend and admirer, writes about the difficulty of writing about her and disbelieves the ‘objectivity’ of those who knew her, ‘Amrita Sher-Gil’, Lalit Kala Contemporary, II (December 1964), pp. 27–30. For an exposition of her nudes in the context of Indian culture and feminist concepts, see G. Sen, ‘Woman Resting on a Charpoy’, in Feminine Fables: Imaging the Indian Woman in Painting, Photography and Cinema (Ahmedabad, 2002), pp. 63–100.

35   K. Khandalavala, Amrita Sher-Gil (Bombay, 1944).

36   Primary sources on Amrita Sher-Gil are in the public domain as they have been published for some time. The Sher-Gil memorial volume of the journal The Usha is an important contemporary source as it includes the responses of her contemporaries and her own writings. N. Iqbal Singh’s biography, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Biography (New Delhi, 1984), with extensive quotations from her letters, is valuable, and I use it extensively as primary material for her life. The important critical work is V. Sundaram et al., Amrita Sher-Gil (Bombay, n.d). I was not allowed access to her letters written in the late 1930s as her nephew Vivan Sundaram intends to publish them. However, my feeling is that my basic argument about her primitivism as a surrogate for her divided self will not be substantially modified with their publication. Rather I trust they will confirm my conclusions. As the book went to press, I came across Yashodhara Dalmia’s charming biography, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life (London, 2006). In May–July 2006, Vivan Sundaram held an important show of digital photomontages, based on mainly family photographs, at the Sepia International Gallery in New York, which vividly brought back to life Amrita, her family and her milieu: Vivan Sundaram, Retake of Amrita, with essay by Wu Hung (New York, 2006); a shorter Re-take of Amrita, first published in Delhi in 2001. The Sher-Gil bandwagon has started rolling at last beyond India. In 2001–2, a major exhibition was held in Budapest, which claimed Amrita for Hungary with a richly documented catalogue based on material provided by her relations, Ervin Baktay, Ernö Gottesmann and Vivan Sundaram: Keserü Katalin, Amrita Sher-Gil the Indian Painter and her French and Hungarian Connections (Ernst Muzeum, Budapest, and the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, 2002). In 2006–7 Munich will show her work. Note also Sára Sándor’s documentary film, which I have not been able to see.

37   M. Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, No. 2: The Infernal Grove (London, 1972), p. 322.

38   V. Sundaram, Re-take of Amrita (Delhi, 2001). This digital photo-montage is a collaborative project, ‘radiating desire’, by her nephew who combines photographs including those by her father Umrao Singh, the ‘essential photographer’, reproductions of Sher-Gil’s work, and a ‘fictional’ account of the father–daughter relationship. In a letter to her mother Amrita states that she prefers sari not only because it is beautiful, but because only Eurasians wear Western dress in India (Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, pp. 93–4). In fact from her mother’s side she also had French, German and Jewish blood and her Hungarian name was Dalma.

39   Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, p. 322.

40   See above, Prologue, note 2. The nationalist nostalgia for a mythical ‘authenticity’ or ‘purity’ is now increasingly exposed as a spurious one.

41   The Académie was a well-known place for art training and had among its students Alexander Calder and Isamo Noguchi. See Kaoru Kojima’s list of Japanese artists who worked at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1871 to 1958, ‘Furansu Kokuritsu Bijutsu Gakko ni Mananda Nihonjin Ryugakusei’, Aesthetic and Art History, Jissen Women’s University, XIII (Tokyo, 1998). J. Milner, The Studios of Paris (New Haven, CT, 1988), pp. 17–25. The École was the oldest art academy in Paris and had Carolus-Duran as a teacher, infra, II, note 4.

42   In Paris, Sher-Gil epitomized the West’s view of otherness. Proutaux exoticized her as ‘an exquisite and mysterious little Hindu princess [who] conjures up the mysterious shores of the Ganges’. The late Khandalavala kindly gave me access to her drawings in his collection, some of which are reproduced here. The facts of her life are recorded extensively, including in Iqbal Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil. Other details I have also taken from Vivan Sundaram’s family accounts in Re-take of Amrita.

43   ‘Sher-Gil, Evolution of My Art’, originally published in the memorial volume Usha (reproduced in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 139).

44   Khandalavala, Amrita Sher-Gil, 22, reproduces the letter.

45   Letter dated c. April 1941, from Saraya to her sister in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 100. See also Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 140.

46   Amrita Sher-Gil, Special Number, The Usha, III/2 (August 1942), p. 34.

47   The exhibition took place on 21 November–7 December 1937. Charles Fabri and Rabindranath Deb quoted in Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, pp. 87, 108–9.

48   J. P. Foulds, ‘Amrita Sher-Gil and Indian Art’, Civil and Military Gazette (7 November 1936). He also wrote ‘The Art of Amrita Sher-Gil’, 4 Arts Annual (Calcutta, 1936–7), p. 34. I am indebted to Deborah Swallow for information on Foulds.

49   Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, pp. 83–4.

50   Her letter of 6 November 1937 to Nehru about his autobiography, A Bunch of Old Letters (New York, 1960), p. 192. Sundaram’s ‘Re-take on Amrita’ exhibition contains rare photographs of Nehru with the artist. She seems to have died mysteriously, with allegations of a botched abortion that led to a fatal infection. See Dalmia, Amrita Sher-Gil, for a balanced view of the event.

51   Letter of 17 April 1937 to Khandalavala, in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 111.

52   In standard anthologies of women artists she finds no place. Honourable exceptions are Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art and Society (London, 2002); Marina Vaizey in Dictionary of Women Artists, ed. Delia Gaze, II (Chicago, IL, 1997), pp. 126–68; Geeta Kapur in Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Shoaf Turner, XXVIII (London, 1996), pp. 593–4.

53   Brian Eno thinks that Popova did not suffer from gender distinctions but this is doubtful (‘Forgotten Heroes’, The Independent Arts and Books Review, 22 October 2004, p. 2).

54   L. Prieto, At Home in the Studio (Cambridge, MA, 2001), p. 5.

55   See Chadwick’s succinct summary in Women, Art and Society. We can think of many remarkable painters who remained in the male shadow, namely Gontcharova, the photographer Lee Miller, and even the writer Colette herself, especially in her early days.

56   Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 116.

57   Letter to sister, Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 92; letter to sister, 2 February 1937, mentions Barada Ukil as ‘staring at me in his silly way’, Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 105.

58   E. Billeter, The Blue House: The World of Frida Kahlo (Houston, TX, 1993); see also G. Kapur, ‘Body as Gesture’, When Was Modernism (New Delhi, 2000), pp. 12–17, who adds class as a form of alienation in Sher-Gil’s case. My thanks to Viktoria Villanyi who suggested that I look more closely at the similarities between Sher-Gil and Kahlo.

59   Prieto, At Home in the Studio, pp. 94–6. F. Borzello, Seeing Ourselves (London, 1998), also writes on female Bohemians, in ‘Breaking Taboos’. Judith Thurman’s biography, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (New York, 1999), offers insights into some of the predicaments of modern women, even though Sher-Gil and Colette were significantly different.

60   Vivan Sundaram interviewed several of the surviving lovers, see Re-take of Amrita.

61   Prieto, At Home in the Studio, pp. 192–4.

62   Borzello, Seeing Ourselves, pp. 137–9, ‘The Naked Self’ on female nude self-portraits.

63   Vaillant, quoted in Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 37.

64   Letter to Khandalavala, 16 May 1937, in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 112.

65   Letter to Khandalavala, 17 January 1937, in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 102.

66   J. Augustine, ‘Bisexuality in Hélène Cixous, Virginia and H. D.: An Aspect of L’Écriture Féminine’, in Sexuality, the Female Gaze and the Arts, ed. R. Dotterer and S. Bowers (Toronto, 1992), pp. 13–14. It is only today that such ideas are theorized as bursting the boundaries of sexual identity.

67   Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 28. Marie Louise avoided physical consummation even though she made overtures, which led Sher-Gil to conclude that she had sexual hangups.

68   Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 58.

69   B. Dhingra, Sher-Gil (New Delhi, 1965), p. ii, who was a friend, mentions her admiration for Dostoyevsky, writing about her deep feeling for the miserable existence of the ordinary people.

70   Muggeridge, Chronicle of Wasted Time, p. 47.

71   Chadwick, Women, Art and Society, p. 9. Julia Kristeva, ‘Is there a Feminine Genius?’, Critical Inquiry, XXX/3 (Spring 2004), pp. 493–504, suggests that in the erosion of earlier notions of natural procreation in the age of sexual polymorphism and lack of fixed identities, each individual invents his or her domain of intimacy, wherein lies genius, or simply creativity. The incommensurability of the individual is rooted in sexual experience and one’s genius rests in the ability to question the socio-historical conditions of one’s identity, the legacy of Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein and Colette (slightly paraphrased).

72   Khandalavala, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 29. Her letter to him dated 13 February 1937 mentions her French professors’ habit of making devastating criticisms. I remember this unpleasant trait in the talented painter Nirode Mazumdar who had been trained in André Lhote’s studio in Paris.

73   Letters to Khandalavala, dated 24 August 1937 and September 1937, in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, pp. 115, 117.

74   Letter of 17 April 1937, in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 111. In her article, ‘Indian Art Today’, she mentions Roy’s experiments in folk art, ibid., p. 140.

75   Letter to Khandalavala, February–March 1938, in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 124.

76   Letter to Khandalavala, February–March 1938, in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 124. and yet in 1939 she wrote less dismissively, ibid., p. 129.

77   Sher-Gil, The Usha, p. 24.

78   Letter to Khandalavala, 15 January 1937, referring pejoratively to Solomon, in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 102.

79   Sher-Gil, ‘Trends of Art in India’, in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 142.

80   Khandalavala was the first to mention her connection with the soil, and later Archer, whose chapter on her is titled, ‘Art and the Village’, India and Modern Art, pp. 80–99.

81   Sher-Gil, ‘The Story of My Life’, The Usha (Special Number: Amrita Sher-Gil), III/2 (August 1942), p. 96.

82   Ukil quoted in Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 45.

83   E. Sen, ‘Prominent Women in India’, Sunday Statesman (5 April 1936); Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, pp. 55–6.

84   Prabasi, VIII (Agrahayan, 1346), pp. 237–8.

85   Letter to Khandalavala, 24 August 1937, in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 115.

86   Sher-Gil, ‘The Story of My Life’, p. 96.

87   Sher-Gil, ‘Art and Appreciation’, in V. Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil: Life and Work, Marg, pp. 42, 142. She actually quotes Clive Bell. See the influence of significant form and aesthetic emotion popularized by Bloomsbury critics on Indian artists, Tillotson, ‘A Painter of Concern’, pp. 57–72.

88   Sher-Gil, The Usha, III/2 (August 1942), p. 22.

89   Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 20, on the Hungarian painters known to her. Rather than modernists, I find her work bears some resemblance to the post-Impressionist and realist works of the lesser-known Hungarian artists. On the Hungarian art movement, see Arte figurative in Ungheria tra 1870 e il 1950 (Milan, 1987) (catalogue of exhibition, 5–30 November 1987), pp. 40, 53–4 and S. A. Mansbach, Standing in Tempest: Painters of the Hungarian Avant-garde (Cambridge, MA, 1991), introduction and chap. 6, ‘Hungary’, pp. 267–313. In 1979, when I was examining her work at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, I was struck by the fact that, contrary to the general view, her work was far closer to the Central and East European ‘realists’ than to French modernists, an idea I presented in my Radhakrishnan Lecture at Oxford in 1991. G. Wojtilla, Amrita Sher-Gil and Hungary (New Delhi, 1981), was the first scholar to mention the influence of Hungary on her and more recently, Keserü Katalin, Amrita Sher-Gil the Indian Painter.

90   See Lerch’s work in K. Schröder, Neue Sachlichkeit: Österreich, 1918–1938 (Vienna, 1995), pp. 151–7, and the catalogue, Der Maler Franz Lerch (Museum of the City of Vienna, 1975), which contains a number of works remarkably similar to Sher-Gil’s. S. A. Mansbach, Standing in Tempest, pp. 93–7.

91   Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, pp. 42–3, who gives the name Prem Chand (who was later a general?), a young student who was intrigued enough to sit for her. This is of course not the great novelist.

92   Compare pls 5 and 6 in Wojtilla, Amrita Sher-Gil and Hungary and Szöny’s Funeral in Zebegény.

93   Sher-Gil, ‘Evolution of My Art’, originally published in the memorial volume Usha, in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 139.

94   Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 19.

95   On Muggeridge, Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 52.

96   Letter of 13 February 1937 to Khandalavala, Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, pp. 105–6. Kafka’s alienation may have partly been a reflection of his being a Jew in Czechoslovakia. Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 99. In this letter to Tandon she even acknowledges the importance of the Bengal School.

97   Sher-Gil, ‘Evolution of My Art’, p. 140.

98   Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 5.

99   Letter of 1938 to her parents, Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 126.

100   Letter of 10 June 1935, in M. Muggeridge, Like It Was: The Diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge, ed. J. Bright-Holmes (New York, 1982), p. 133.

101   Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 97.

102   One would have to be careful not to exaggerate this intimacy with women as she had an intense affair with Muggeridge and unhesitatingly shared her intimate thoughts with Khandalavala, though the relationship seems to have been platonic.

103   E. L. Buchholz, Women Artists (New York, 2003), p. 95. See the importance of portraits for the Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo (Rome and New York, 2001) published by the Banco de Mexico, Trustee for the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, English translation by Mark Eaton and Louisa Panichi (New York, 2001). The painting, ‘Earth Herself’, p. 154, shows a white and a dark woman. Diego Rivera in ‘Frida Kahlo’, pp. 233–4, speaks of two Fridas as German versus Indian and Spanish, which lie at the heart of her achievement. The two women in The Conversation are her sister and her friend Denise Prouteaux.

104   Excerpt from her diary, 1 August 1925, in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 87.

105   Published in Paris in Minerva, in The Usha, III/2 (August 1942), p. 41.

106   Sen, ‘Prominent Women in India’.

107   Sher-Gil, Usha, III/2 (August 1942), p. 39.

108   Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 48.

109   Ibid., p. 52.

110   See her letters to her sister dated 6 December 1940 and 14 March 1941, and to her close friend, Helen Chamanlal, July 1941, in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, pp. 136–7.

111   With regard to this late style I can think only of Nicholas de Stael in the 1950s who developed a radical form of colourism.

112   Tillotson, ‘A Painter of Concern’, pp. 57–72, on modernist formalism versus the emotions.

113   Archer, India and Modern Art, p. 99.

114   Sher-Gil, ‘Evolution of My Art’, p. 139. Privately too she felt obliged to repudiate her early work.

115   Letter of 1 July 1940 in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, pp. 132–3.

116   Geeta Kapur makes the important connection between these works and miniatures in ‘Sher-Gil’, The Dictionary of Art, XXVII (London, 1996), pp. 593–4.

117   See Csontváry, published by Bibliotheca Corviniana (Hungary, n.d.). This was suggested to me by Swasti Mitter after her visit to Budapest where a Csontváry retrospective was being held in 1995, and Viktoria Villanyi who is Hungarian. Csontváry, like Amrita’s mother, was Jewish Catholic.

118   Kapur, ‘Sher-Gil’.

II RABINDRANATH TAGORE’S VISION OF ART AND THE COMMUNITY

1   D. Souhami, Paris, Sappho and Art: The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks (London, 2005). Among others, Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony and Janáček’s Wandering Madman were based on Tagore’s poems. Tagore’s visit to Hungary is commemorated in a plaque by Lake Balaton. See also R. Chatterjee, ed., The Golden Book of Tagore (Calcutta, 1931).

2   R. Parimoo, The Three Tagores (Baroda, 1973), is a pioneering, scholarly work on Rabindranath. W. G. Archer, India and Modern Art (London, 1959) also offers us insights into his use of the Unconscious. Thanks to them we know what primitive sources Tagore used, but only when we pose the question of why he used them do we realize the wider global implications of his work. In short, we need to go beyond style to appreciate Tagore’s modernism. For reproductions of Tagore’s paintings, see A. Robinson, The Art of Rabindranath Tagore (London, 1989).

3   This is one of two in the collection of I. K. Kejriwal of Calcutta. Jyotirindranath’s phrenological drawings (see supra, I, note 19). Rabindranath also produced a few drawings with strong outlines, notably a pen-and-ink puzzle dated 1893, as part of a parlour game played in the family (Rabindra Bhavan Ms. 277(A) 27).

4   Tagore, ‘Urop Jatrir Diari’, 23 September 1297, Rabindra Rachanabali, X (Calcutta, 1961), pp. 398–9. Carolus-Duran was the assumed name of Charles-Emile-Auguste Durand, 1837–1917; The Dictionary of Art, V (London, 1996), p. 812. The French artist was commissioned by King Chulalongkorn of Thailand to paint his portrait; A. Poshyananda, Modern Art in Thailand (Singapore, 1992), pp. 12, 15, 16 and colour pl. 1.

5   Letter to Indira Debi, July 1893, in R. Tagore, Chhina Patrabali, quoted in S. Bandyopadhyaya, Rabindra Chitrakala Rabindra Sahityer Patabhumika (Bolpur, 1388), p. 3. Letter of 17 September 1900 to the scientist Jagadish Bose humorously deprecating his sketching activity, in Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Works of Art (NGMA catalogue) (Delhi, 1981), p. 15.

6   S. Ghosh, Okampor Rabindranath (Calcutta, 1973), p. 87 (translation of Victoria Ocampo’s Tagore en las barrancas de San Isidro). See his son’s amusing comment about Victoria not allowing him to travel to Peru: Rathindranath Tagore, On the Edges of Time (Calcutta, 1958), p. 148. S. Walsh, Stravinsky, The Second Exile, France and America, 1934–1971 (London, 2006).

7   On Rivière, a major figure in the diffusion of modernism, see W. Rubin, Primitivism in 20th Century Art, exh. cat., New York Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1984), I, pp. 162–3. On Victoria’s part in this, see Tagore, On the Edges of Time, p. 148. It was held on 9–16 May (Daily Mail, 11 May 1930) under the auspices of the Association des amis de L’Orient, which had a long connection with the Tagores through Susanne and Andrée Karpelès (Parimoo, The Three Tagores, pp. 121–2), and coincided with the year of the poet’s Hibbert Lectures at Oxford. On the number of works shown, see Tagore’s letter to Rothenstein, in W. Rothenstein, Since Fifty (London, 1939). I have counted eight masks and eleven other subjects in Tagore’s show.

8   Bidou translated in Rupam, XLII/3–4 (April–October 1930), p. 27. Le Semaine à Paris (9–16 May 1930) was favourable, unlike the critic Saint Jean Bouche D’Or. It called his work, ‘le setiment d’un masque humain’.

9   Excerpted in C. Harrison and P. Wood, eds, Art in Theory (Oxford, 1992), p. 448. See The Modern Review, supra, I, note 2. C. R. Haxthausen points out that the Calcutta interest in automatic drawing had predated Breton by some years.

10   Southall’s introduction (I use the European reviews of Tagore’s 1930 exhibitions, including Joseph Southall’s, preserved at Rabindra Bhavana, Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, under the heading, Foreign Comments, Henceforth all the reviews will be sourced as Foreign Comments except where stated otherwise). On the dates of the shows in different cities, see Bandyopdhyaya, Rabindra Chitrakala Rabindra Sahityer Patabhumika, pp. 298–9. Tagore renounced his knighthood after the massacre of unarmed demonstrators by General Dyer. Parimoo, Three Tagores, p. 112, on his Dartington visit. Sixty Works of Joseph Southall in the Fortunoff Collection, exh. cat. with essays by Richard Breeze et al. (London, 2005), on the artist.

11   S. Appelbaum, ed. and trans., Simplicissimus: 180 Satirical Drawings from the Famous German Weekly (New York, 1975), p. 55, cartoon by Olaf Gulbransson (‘The Height of Fashion inspired by Rabindranath Tagore. Fashionable Berlin practises contemplation of the navel’).

12   M. Kämpchen, Rabindranath Tagore and Germany: A Documentation (Calcutta, 1991), for a balanced account of the range of reactions. Thomas Mann Diaries, 1918–39, trans. R. and C. Winston (New York, 1982), p. 117. Mann complained that Tagore did not seem to know who the novelist was.

13   E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, III (New York, 1957), p. 128. Freud was offended by the off-hand way Tagore summoned him.

14   Letter to Lily Klee, 27 October 1917, in F. Klee, Paul Klee: Briefe an die Familie, 1893–1940, vol. II: 1907–1940 (Cologne, 1979), p. 885. Klee found Tagore’s book lacking intensity, eroticism and humour. R. K. Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus (Stuttgart, 2000), pp. 72–7, 92–130, on Gropius and Itten. Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, p. 338, on Gropius. See also infra, p. 79. On favourable views of Tagore, see Kämpchen, Rabindranath Tagore and Germany, infra, note 15.

15   Max Osborn on the Indian art exhibition in Berlin in 1923, Rupam, XV–XVI, p. 74. On Tagore’s role and reputation, A. Aronson, ‘Tagore Through Western Eyes,’ in Rabindranath Tagore: A Celebration of His Life and Work, ed. R. Monk and A. Robinson (London, 1986), p. 23, and, more comprehensive, Kämpchen, Rabindranath Tagore and Germany.

16   Reporters from Hamburg, Breslau, Leipzig, Baden, Vienna, and even distant Budapest attended the show (Walter Habiger in Neues Wiener Journal, 19 July 1930). L. Thormachten’s letter on behalf of the National Gallery to the Möller Gallery expressed interest in acquiring the works chosen by Justi though unable to pay for them. Tagore in a letter of 16 August 1930 to Justi donated the works in appreciation of German hospitality (Foreign Comments). Tagore spoke in a number of cities on his philosophy of art.

17   Tagore, ‘Rusiar Chithi’, in Rabindra Rachanabali, vol. X, pp. 673–746 on his view of Russia. On Russian response, A.P.G. Danil’chuk, A Dream Fulfilled (Calcutta, 1986). Tagore mentions that about 5,000 people visited the exhibition, Rabindra Rachanabali, X, p. 698. Visva Bharati Bulletin, XV (November 1930), pp. 1–5. I am grateful to Naresh Guha for the information on Russia. Catalogue of the Danish exhibition: Udstilling Akvareller Og Tegninger Af Rabindranath Tagore (Charlottenburg, 1930).

18   A. K. Coomaraswamy’s Foreword, Exhibition of Paintings by Rabindranath Tagore: Souvenir Catalogue, The Fifty–Sixth Street Galleries (New York 1930). R. Lipsey, Coomaraswamy, III (Princeton, 1977), p. 85, on Coomaraswamy’s disillusionment with the Indian nationalist movement by this time.

19   R. Rolland, Inde, Journal 1915–43: Tagore, Gandhi et les problemes indiens (Paris, 1951), pp. 285–6.

20   Münchener Telegramm-Zeitung (23 July 1930); Vorwärts (21 July 1930); Hamburger Fremdenblatt (26 July 1930).

21   Vossiche Zeitung (17 July 1930).

22   Though Rothenstein may have preferred more traditional art, he was imaginative enough to appreciate Tagore’s originality: Rothenstein, Since Fifty, pp. 175–6. Tagore and Rothenstein’s correspondence: M. Lago, Imperfect Encounter (Cambridge, MA, 1972), pp. 325–9.

23   Purabi, Rabindra Bhavan Ms. 102 (1924); Rakta Karabi, Ms. 151 (1923), Kheya Ms. 110 (1905), see also P. Mukhopadhyaya, Rabindra Jivani Katha (Calcutta, 1961), pp. 98–9 (date of Ms. 21, Asvin 1312).

24   P. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, p. 126.

25   McKnight Kauffer’s poster is familiar to us from the cover of E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion. This American artist was quite influential in the early twentieth century and his poster The Early Bird, for the Daily Herald, was a familiar sight in London Underground stations, which Rabindranath could not have missed on his visit to Britain in 1920 or later. Tagore’s interpretation is a loose one and his image is the reverse of Kauffer’s, but he uses the forward thrust of the poster. Nude on a Flying Bird was shown in Berlin and Paris in 1930.

26   P. Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich (Princeton, NJ, 1979), p. 173. Compare illustrations of Tagore, Hölzel and Eckmann: H. H. Hofstaetter, Jugendstil (Baden-Baden, 1968), p. 132. I had seen the example of a page of ‘erasure’ by Klimt in a short film on Art Nouveau called ‘Women and Flowers’ at the Academy Cinema, London, about 30 years ago but I have not yet been able to trace the exact source. The Klimt page seemed remarkably like Tagore’s erasures. But see the catalogue of an exhibition at the Kunsthaus, Zurich, by Toni Stooss (Stuttgart, 1992), fig. ‘Z’ 36 Sketches for initials, p. 242, postcards, p. 353, and Klimt’s letter to Marie Zimmermann, where he crosses out words in a decorative manner or uses letters to create designs. C. M. Nebehay, Gustav Klimt (Vienna, 1969), p. 54. See Mitter, Art and Nationalism, on Indian graphic art inspired by Art Nouveau. However, the point to remember is that from Aubrey Beardsley and William Morris to Art Nouveau and Jugendstil, all of them were deeply involved in the connection between word, text, typology and decorative design. See M. Bisanz-Prakken, Heiliger Frühling (Munich, 1999), for the range of Jugendstil designs. For Hölzel’s composition with writing, see C. Hänlein, Adolf Hölzel, Bilder, Pastelle, Zeichnungen, Collagen (Hanover, 1982), several examples of ‘Komposition mit Schrift’, 1900 (fig. 129, p. 76), and 1920 (fig. 188, p. 52). I have not been able to find any reference in Hölzel to Tagore, and Tagore seldom mentions the people he met.

27   N. G. Parris, ‘Adolf Hölzel’s Structural and Color Theory and Its Relationship to the Development of the Basic Course at Bauhaus’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1979, pp. 154–61, discusses Hölzel’s method in detail.

28   Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich, p. 44. It is interesting that Hölzel later reintroduced figures in his work and became more concerned with painting (on Hölzel’s last drawings and pastels and his conversation with the author, Margot Boger-Langhammer et al, Adolf Hölzel (Konstanz, 1961); A. Hildebrandt, Adolf Hölzel, Bauhaus Archive (Darmstadt, 1969)). Hölzel later went for an early Abstract Expressionism, as colour became his main interest (I am grateful to Norbert Lynton for this information about Hölzel in the 1920s).

29   In a work of considerable scholarship, Ketaki Kushari Dyson proposes Tagore’s colour blindness as a factor in his painting, see Ronger Rabindranath: Rabindranather sahityae o chitrakalay ronger vyavyahar (Kolkata, 1997). The idea was first mooted by Kramrisch which she based on Tagore’s self-confessed colour blindness, see S. Kramrisch, ‘Form Elements in the Visual Work of Rabindranath Tagore’, Lalit Kala Contemporary, II (December 1962), p. 38.

30   ‘What is Art’, in P. Neogy, ed., Rabindranath Tagore on Art and Aesthetics (Calcutta, 1961), p. 29. ‘The Religion of an Artist’, 1924–6, ibid., p. 37.

31   ‘My Pictures (I)’ (28 May 1930), Foreword to the exhibition catalogue, ibid., pp. 97–8.

32   ‘My Pictures (II)’ (2 July 1930), p. 100.

33   See Parimoo, The Three Tagores, pl. 269. Friedrich Ratzel’s three-volume The History of Mankind (London, 1896), trans. A. J. Butler, with an introduction by the anthropologist E. B. Tylor, was a standard work. Again Tagore does not use an image as such but combines a whole range of objects. See vol. I, pp. 65–87, on art and religion, pp. 38–106, 145–300, and vol. II, pp. 1–203, on Native Americans and Pacific Islanders. T. Dacosta Kaufmann, ‘Stereotypes, Prejudice and Aesthetic Judgements’, in M. A. Holly and K. Moxey, Art History Aesthetics and Visual Studies (New Haven, CT, 2002), pp. 71–84, on Ratzel’s importance in art history.

34   This manuscript is preserved at the Rabindra Bhavan in Santiniketan.

35   W. Kandinsky and F. Marc, The Blaue Reiter Almanac, intro. K. Lankheit (New York, 1965), pp. 82–9.

36   Tagore mentions her death in his reminiscences, leaving out the possibility that he was in love with her, Rabindra Rachanabali, X, p. 118. Bandyopadhaya, Rabindra Chitrakala, p. 144, on her suicide. Tagore’s purported depiction, She Has Committed Suicide, is listed as no. 191 in Exhibition of Drawings, Paintings, Engravings, Pottery and Leatherwork by Rabindranath Tagore (Calcutta, 1932). Also A. Mitra, ‘The Dark Lady of Tagore’s Paintings’, Statesman Supplement (9 May 1983), and A. Chaudhury, ‘Jyotirindra Rahasya’, Kolkata, V/1 (August 1977), p. 46. In any case, whether he did depict her or not is less interesting than his use of masks for faces.

37   On Gropius, see Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus, p. 58.

38   Coomaraswamy, Exhibition of Paintings by Rabindranath Tagore: Dresdener Anzeiger (19 July 1930); Nationaltidende (9 August 1930); Kaines-Smith, Bidou (Foreign Comments).

39   Letter to Rothenstein, 30 March 1930, in Lago, Imperfect Encounter, p. 326.

40   Tagore, ‘Jibansmriti’, Rabindra Rachanabali, X, p. 50.

41   Wilhelm Viola, Child Art (Kent, 1944), quoted in Parimoo, The Three Tagores, 118. On Klee, see M. Francisco, ‘Paul Klee and Children’s Art’, in J. Fineberg, Discovering Child Art (Princeton, NJ, 1998), pp. 95–121, and ‘There is an Unconscious Vast Power in the Child’, pp. 68–94. J. Boissel, ‘Quand les enfants se mirent á dessiner, 1880–1914’, Les cahiers du Muséee national d’art moderne, XXXI (1990), p. 30.

42   Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. J. Strachey et al., 24 vols (London, 1953–74), p. 21. P. Gay, Sigmund Freud and Art (New York, 1989), p. 18; S. Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents (London, 1930), p. 57.

43   E. Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York, 1952), pp. 13–31. E.H.G. Gombrich, ‘Freud’s Aesthetics’, Encounter, V, XXVI/1 (January 1966), pp. 30–40.

44   On Freud’s ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’, see J. J. Spector, The Aesthetics of Freud (New York, 1973), pp. 53 and 110; Gombrich, ‘Freud’s Aesthetics’. Gombrich writes of infantile play of combinations and associations as a key to joke in Freud but to be meaningful this play must be anchored to conventions and culturally given meaning in literature and art. Creative people have the mastery of what Freud calls ‘undeveloped dispositions and suppressed wishes liberating dominant memories’, ‘Psychoanalysis and the History of Art’, in B. Nelson, Freud and the 20th Century (New York, 1957), pp. 186–206.

45   Comtesse de Noailles, A. E. de Brancovan, ‘The Visible Dreams of Rabindranath Tagore’, Calcutta Municipal Gazette, Tagore Memorial Special Supplement, May 1986 (reprint of 1st edn of September, 1941), pp. 176–9. Vossische Zeitung (16 July 1930). Tagore speaks of unpredictability in a letter dated 7 January 1928, see Neogy, Tagore on Art, p. 90.

46   ‘My Pictures’, 28 May 1930, Neogy, Tagore on Art, p. 97.

47   Letter dated 1931 to Ramananda Chatterjee, editor of Modern Review, in Neogy, Tagore on Art, p. 105.

48   Spector, The Aesthetics of Freud, p. 169. Gombrich, ‘Verbal Wit as a Paradigm of Art: The Aesthetic Theories of Sigmund Freud’, in Tributes (London, 1984), pp. 93–105.

49   Berlingske Tidende (9 August 1930).

50   Gombrich, Art and Illusion, pp. 89, 155–7.

51   The essay by Current Opinion, ‘Gleanings: Automatic Drawing as a First Aid to the Artist’, Modern Review, XXI/1 (January 1917), pp. 63–5, based on the work of the English artists Austin Spare and Frederick Carter, inspired by Freud and Jung, describes the limitations of representation and the usefulness of dredging up memory from the subconscious in releasing creative energy in drawing. However, unlike Tagore, these artists are representational and merely use the subconscious to improve their drawing. Tagore’s radicalism totally discarded representational accuracy.

52   ‘My Pictures (II)’ (2 July 1930), Neogy, Tagore on Art, p. 101. He had a more ambivalent relationship with psychoanalysis, ibid., p. 54.

53   B. Dey, Jamini Rai (Kolkata, 1384), p. 86, letter dated 7 June 1941.

54   Letter, 7 November 1928, Neogy, Tagore on Art, p. 89. This is even more explicitly suggested in a letter to his daughter-in-law from Paris in 1930, where he says that his flow of writing has stopped and he paints (Pratima Devi, ‘Gurudeva’s Paintings’ [1954] in commemoration of Tagore’s death and dedicated to Leonard and Dorothy Elmhurst of Dartington, deposited at Rabindra Bhavan, Santiniketan). In the play Rakta Karabi (1923), he began to change his lyrical naturalist style, moving towards gesture, as suggested by Binode Bihari Mukhopadhyaya, Chitra Katha (Kolkata, 1390), p. 307. Neogy, Tagore on Art, p. 87.

55   Neogy, Tagore on Art, p. 70. These prehistoric monsters complemented his late whimsical essay, ‘Shey’, an exercise in free fantasy, ostensibly written for his granddaughter (Rabindra Rachanabali, VII, pp. 849–940).

56   W. Steiner, Venus in Exile (New York, 2001), p. xix, comments on the revival of interest in the nineteenth-century academic nude in the early twenty-first century, charting the cultural anxieties behind the avant-garde resistance to the female subject as a symbol of beauty. More recently Arthur Danto in The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (New York, 2003), has reasserted the importance of beauty in mediating between objects and our sensibility, which he points out was a serious aesthetic crime to modernists. As an option in art, beauty is, he says, a necessary condition of life as we want to live it.

57   Take for instance, the stanza from a famous song, ‘More, oh more, O Master! Please strike me more’, from a spiritual song for the Brahmo community on the adoration of the Deity with a tinge of Vaishnava sacred poetry. The stanzas movingly refer to life’s sufferings endured by the poet. (‘Aro aro prabhu, aro aro/emni kore amay maro/’) The particular imagery lends itself to an interpretation on the level of the sacred erotic, as is often is the case with mystical poetry. However, the masochistic image suggested here is entirely allegorical, the suffering for which the Lord is responsible, ‘Prayaschitta, Puja’ series Poem No.228 from Gitabitan o Bibidha Kavita, in Rabindra Rachanabali, IV, pp. 76–7. I am grateful to Monisha Bhattacharya for locating the passage I vaguely remembered from my younger days.

58   See an amusing episode with the male nude model in Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 275–6. The first frank full-frontal nude was John Newton Souza’s self-portrait in 1947, which scandalized Bombay.

59   Nude, 12 November 1934, Rabindra Bhavan (1854.16).

60   D. Pan, Primitive Renaissance (London, 2001), pp. 19–20. ‘What Is Art?’, Neogy p. 16; ‘The Religion of an Artist’, Neogy, Tagore on Art, p. 56.

61   ‘My Pictures (III)’, Neogy, Tagore on Art, p. 104.

62   ‘What is art?’, Neogy, Tagore on Art, p. 16; ‘The Religion of an Artist’, Neogy, Tagore on Art, p. 56.

63   ‘The Religion of an Artist’, ibid., p. 41. R. Rolland, Tagore, Gandhi et les problemes indiens, pp. 285–6.

64   Tagore’s views on nationalism and his return of the knighthood after the Amritsar massacre made him unpopular in Britain. Nor did Tagore remain silent at Japan’s military aggression against China in 1938, as seen in his indignant letter to the Japanese poet, Yone Noguchi: K. Kripalani, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (Calcutta, 1962), p. 385. On Tagore’s importance in nationalism, Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal (Calcutta, 1973). His critical 1916 lecture on nationalism aroused widespread hostility, including in America, Kripalani, Rabindranath Tagore, p. 257.

65   Berlingske Tidende (9 August 1930).

66   Interview in 1925 with Dilip Roy, a widely travelled Bengali intellectual, ‘Alap Alochana, Rabindranath o Dilip Kumar Rai’, Rabindra Rachabali, XIV, pp. 930–32.

67   ‘Entretiens Tagore – Romain Rolland, 24.6.26’, Rabindranath et Romain Rolland, Lettres et autres écrits, Cahiers Romain Rolland (Paris, 1961), XII, pp. 179–86.

68   Notably the annual exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art (Calcutta, 1933), the India Society exhibition (London, 1934), an exhibition in Ceylon, and finally an one-man show at the Kalman Gallery in London, which last did not repeat his triumph of 1930.

69   On a recent reappraisal of Tagore’s position in modernity and his view of the ‘Orient’ in the light of Edward Said’s Orientalism, Amit Chaudhuri, ‘Two Giant Brothers’, London Review of Books, XXVIII/8 (20 April 2006), pp. 27–30.

70   See Uma Dasgupta on Tagore’s pedagogic ideals of integrated life, ‘Santiniketan: The School of a Poet’, in Knowledge, Power and Politics: Educational Institutions in India, ed. M. Hasan (New Delhi, 1998), pp. 258–303. J. A. Palmer, Fifty Major Thinkers on Education (London, 2001), on Tagore’s importance in twentieth-century pedagogy. During his visit to England in 1930, Tagore found time to paint at the home of his devoted friend Leonard Elmhurst in Devon, whose school Dartington Hall was inspired by Tagore’s educational ideals. A. Nandy, Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self (New Delhi, 1994).

71   On teaching at the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy’s The New Vision (London, 1930), in B. B. Mukhopadhay, Adhunik Shilpasiksha (Kolkata, 1972), pp. 143–4.

72   To Otto Meyer, 7 December 1921, in The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, selected and ed. T. Schlemmer (Middletown, CT, 1972), p. 115.

73   Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus, pp. 190–220. Uma Dasgupta on the Indian origins of Tagore’s holism, pp. 9–159. The atmosphere was purposely anti-materialist with very simple lifestyle in a ‘commune’, discarding shoes and other ‘luxuries’. There was a sense of creating something Indian that was not dependent on the colonial regime.

74   Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, p. 338, on Gropius. Also Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus, pp. 11–14, 30–8, 56–8, 72–7, on parallel concepts. See also N. Tuli, ‘Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan’, The Flamed Mosaic: Indian Contemporary Painting (Ahmedabad, 1997), p. 195; Dasgupta, ‘Santiniketan: The School of a Poet’, on Tagore’s pedagogic ideals of integrated life; Palmer, Fifty Major Thinkers on Education.

75   Tagore, ‘Tapoban’, Rabindra Rachanabali, XI, p. 589. See T. Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New Indian Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 308–12, on the importance of rural life in Santiniketan, and also Tuli, ‘Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan’, pp. 195–6.

76   In a letter to Abanindranath, Tagore urges him to release Nandalal, which he said would be beneficial for the artist and the nation: B. B. Mukhopadhyaya, Adhunik Shilpasikhsha (Calcutta, 1974), pp. 139–40.

77   P. Mandal, Bharat Shilpi Nandalal, I (Bolpur, 1982), pp. 484–92 including Tagore’s article on the function of Santiniketan, 1919.

78   See supra, p. 74.

79   N. Bose, ‘Art, Patronage and Institution’, Visvabharati Quarterly, Nandalal Number, XXXIV/1–4 (January 1971), pp. 70–76. B. B. Mukhopadhyaya, Chitrakatha (Kolkata, 1984), p. 159.

80   Mukhopadhyaya, Chitrakatha, p. 185.

81   Ibid., pp. 51–2.

82   N. Basu, ‘Drawing Humans and Animals’, Drishti o Shristi (Kolkata, 1985), p. 161.

83   Basu, ‘Artistic Perception’, in ibid., pp. 38–50.

84   Mukhopadhyaya, Adhunik, pp. 172–3.

85   Ibid., pp. 271–3.

86   Interestingly, he retained the use of geometrical shapes and the blackboard, Mandal, Bharat Shilpi Nandalal, I, pp. 561–76. Mukhopadhyaya, Chitrakatha, pp. 51–2. On Okakura, Abnindranath Tagore and Pan-Asian art, see Mittel, Art and Nationalism, pp. 262–6.

87   Mukhopadhyaya, Chitrakatha, p. 159. N. Basu, ‘Application of Anatomy in Art’, Drishti o Shristi, pp. 21–30; ‘Rhythm’, Drishti o Shristi, pp. 31–4 (mention of Okakura triadic principle).

88   Mukhopadhyaya, Adhunik shilpashikhsha, pp. 53–5. See his student manuals using a wide range of Eastern and Western art techniques and artist’s materials in Basu, Drishti o Shristi, pp. 61–143.

89   The title is Dandi March (Bapuji), 12 April 1930. Linocut, NGMA, Acc. No. 4893, the catalogue: Nandalal Bose, 1882–1966: Centenary Exhibition, National Gallery of Modern Art (New Delhi, 1982), p. 184.

90   Letter of 25 January 1932, M. K. Gandhi, Collected Works, XLIX (Delhi, 1958–84), p. 37.

91   Interview with the musicologist Dilip Roy on 2 February 1924, Gandhi, Collected Works, XXIII, p. 193.

92   Gandhi, Young India, in Collected Works, XXXIV, p. 319. This was in response to Anton Chekhov’s stories. Tolstoy was one of Gandhi’s inspirations and his favourable response to Gandhi is too well known to bear repeating here. L. Fisher, ‘Tolstoy and Gandhi’, in The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (London, 1982), pp. 123–30.

93   Interview in The Island (14 October 1931) in London, Gandhi, Collected Works, XLVII, pp. 149–50. Letter dated 11 May 1928, Gandhi, Collected Works, XXXVI, p. 305. In 1929 he again rejects the art for art’s sake argument, Collected Works, XL, p. 342.

94   S. Bhattacharya, The Mahatma and the Poet (Delhi, 1997), on the debate between Gandhi and Tagore.

95   N. Basu, ‘The Place of Art in Education’, in Drishti o Shristi, pp. 9–18, originally read at Calcutta University. On his use of crafts as a Gandhian nationalist, see his close associate Prabhatmohan Bandopadhaya, ‘Nandalal: Karusangha o Jatiya Andolan’, Desh Binodan (Nandalal birth centenary number) (1389), pp. 34–47.

96   Mukhopadhyaya, Adhunik Shilpashiksha, pp. 43–53.

97   C. Deb, ‘Shiksha Kshetre Nandalal Basur Chhatrider Bhumika’, Desh Binodan (Nandalal birth centenary number) (1389), p. 152.

98   Mukhopadhyaya, Adhunik Shilpashiksha, p. 56. Interestingly, on his visit to Santiniketan in 1924, Abanindranath, deeply disillusioned with orientalism, urged the cultivation of village crafts.

99   S. Ghosh, ‘Rupkar Nandalal’, Desh Binodan (Nandalal birth centenary number) (1389), pp. 18, 20, 22.

100   G. S. Dutt, Folk Arts and Crafts of Bengal: The Collected Papers, ed. S. Bandyopadhyay (Calcutta, 1990), Folk Arts, XVII–XIX.

101   Gandhi, Collected Works, LXII, pp. 299–300.

102   Speech at Khadi and Village Industries Exhibition, Haripura Congress, 10 February 1938, Gandhi, Collected Works, LXVI, p. 358.

103   Mukherjee, Adhunik, p. 84.

104   Gandhi, Collected Works, LXII, pp. 299–300.

105   N. Basu, ‘Bapuji’, Drishti o Shristi, pp. 244–250. This was written circa 1940, and describes his relationship with Gandhi. Mukherjee, Adhunik, p. 84. The sculptor Mhatre also took part in the decoration, M. Guha, ‘Gandhiji o Nandalal’, Desh Binodan (1389), pp. 124–5, translation from Harijan, 2 January 1937.

106   Letter to Nandalal, 31 October 1937; Gandhi, Collected Works, LXVI, p. 282.

107   Letter to Tagore, 6 November 1937; Gandhi, Collected Works, LXVI, p. 289.

108   Basu, ‘Bapuji’, p. 248.

109   K. G. Subramanyan, ‘Nandalal Bose: A Biographical Sketch’, Nandalal Bose (1882–1966): Centenary Exhibition (New Delhi, 1982), p. 25; Sankho Chaudhury, Nandalal Bose Haripura Panels (for the commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of India’s independence and Jawaharlal Nehru centenary – 1987–9) (New Delhi, 1988), pp. 4–5. In an interview with Nimai Chatterjee in 1954 (infra, note 150), Nandalal spoke forcefully against communalism in art.

110   Guha, ‘Gandhiji o Nandalal’, p. 125.

111   N. Basu, ‘Wash’, Drishti o Shristi, p. 143.

112   Mukhopadhyaya, Chitrakatha, p. 265.

113   Speech at Haripura of 10 February 1938; Gandhi, Collected Works, LXVI, p. 359.

114   Mukhopadhyaya, Adhinik Shilpashiksha, p. 86.

115   P. Bandopadhaya, ‘Nandalal: Karusangha o Jatiya Andolan’, Desh Binodan (1389), p. 47. Interestingly, Bose was President of the Haripura Congress session, which marked his conflict with Gandhi, the Mahatma forcing his resignation. L. Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists, Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose (New York, 1990). Although he never wavered in his admiration for Gandhi, Bose’s humiliation at Haripura caused him to withdraw from active participation in Congress sessions.

116   As related by Nandalal, Gandhi demanded why these immoral objects should be spared but listening to his forceful argument he relented (‘Rabibasariya Alochani’, Ananda Bazar Patrika, 20 December 1953).

117   Subramanyan, Nandalal Centenary, 24.

118   For the story of the Santiniketan mural movement, see J. Chakrabarty et al., The Santiniketan Murals (Calcutta, 1995), and the exhibition catalogue, R. Siva Kumar, Santiniketan: The Making of a Contextual Modernism (New Delhi, 1997).

119   Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 256, 305–6.

120   K. G. Subramanyan, ‘Nandalal Basur Bhittichitra’, Desh Binodan (1389), p. 130.

121   See Patrick Geddes’s classic work, Life of Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose (London, 1920), p. 243; S. Sengupta, Sansad Bangali Charitabhidhan (Calcutta, 1976), 165–6 for details of his life.

122   G. Bhaumik, ‘Vijnyanacharya Jagadishchandrer Shilpanurag’, Sundaram, III/2 (1365), pp. 166–72.

123   Mandal, Bharat Shilpi Nandalal, I, p. 644. In 1925 Mukul Dey, another of Abanindranath’s students, had made his obligatory ‘pilgrimage’ to Ajanta and Bagh: My Pilgrimages to Ajanta and Bagh (London, 1925).

124   Ibid., I, pp. 644–5. One of the three at Bagh, Asit Haldar published his experience with an endorsement by Tagore, who reaffirmed the importance of murals to the nation.

125   Subramanyan, Desh Binodan (1389), p. 128.

126   Letter quoted in introduction by Samik Bandyopadhyay to G. Dutt, Folk Arts and Crafts of Bengal, p. xviii.

127   Mandal, Bharat Shilpi Nandalal, I, pp. 450–51. He also read Mrs Merrifield’s standard 1846 translation of Il Libro dell’Arte by Cennino Cennini (c.1370–1440). On Lady Herringham’s extensive writings on tempera including translating Cennini, M. Lago, Christiana Herringham (London, 1996), pp. 36–8, 44–7, 49, 51.

128   Basu, Drishti o Shristi, p. 92.

129   Ibid., p. 14. On Morris, see Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 248–9.

130   Mandal, Bharat Shilpi Nandalal, I, pp. 428–46.

131   Ibid., pp. 428–46, contains transcripts of Nandalal’s own sayings and writings on wall paintings faithfully recorded by the author. Nandalal’s sketches of Narsinglal are extant.

132   N. Basu, Shilpa Charcha, originally published in 1362, see Drishti O Shristi, pp. 92–110. Mandal, Bharat Shilpi Nandalal, II, p. 446. Nandalal consulted the Sanskrit scholar Haridas Mitra on the text.

133   Mandal, Bharat Shilpi Nandalal, II, p. 452. See also Basu, Shilpa Charcha.

134   Mukhopadhyaya, ‘Nandalal’, Chitrakatha, p. 264.

135   Subramanyan, ‘Nandalal Basur Bhittichitra’, Desh Binodan (1389), p. 130.

136   Mandal, Bharat Shilpi Nandalal, I, pp. 445, 447.

137   Mukhopadhyaya, ‘Nandalal’, pp. 275–8.

138   T. Gupte, Gaekwad Cenotaphs (Baroda, 1947), p. 156. See also Mukhopadhyaya, ‘Nandalal’, p. 265.

139   He had tried out this theme in the China Bhavan at Santiniketan some years earlier.

140   Mandal, Bharat Shilpi Nandalal, II, p. 447. Gupte, Kirti Mandir, pp. 156 and passim, on the details of the paintings.

141   Siva Kumar, Santiniketan.

142   See Subramanyan, Benode Behari Mukherjee, exh. cat. (Delhi, c. 1958).

143   On his personal link with Nandalal, see Mukhopadhyaya, Chitrakatha, pp. 266–7.

144   Mukhopadhyaya, ‘Baratiya Murti or Bimurtabad’, in Chitrakatha, pp. 39–52. We have encountered this influential idea a number of times.

145   Siva Kumar, Santiniketan, pp. 50–64.

146   G. Kapur, Contemporary Indian Art, Royal Academy exh. cat. (London, 1982), p. 5.

147   Mukhopadhyaya, ‘My Experiments with Murals’, Chitrakatha, pp. 404–5.

148   Film director Satyajit Ray, who was a student of his, made a moving documentary on him, The Inner Eye.

149   D. K. Dev Barman, ‘Shilpacharya Nandlalal Basu’, Desh Binodan (1389), p. 11, his close pupil, speaks of the profound influence of the rural atmosphere in Santiniketan. See also another student, Prabhatmohan Bondopadhyaya, ‘Nandalal: Karusangha o Jatiya Andolan’, Desh Binodan (1389), pp. 34–47, who mentions his using Santals as live models at a late age.

150   Interview with Nimai Chatterjee in Uttam Chaudhuri, ed., Sholati Sakhyatkar (Calcutta, 1985), pp. 71–6.

151   Supra, pp. 30–1.

152   Mukhopadhyaya, ‘Nandalal’, pp. 278–9. The early one dates from 1919 and the later from 1941.

153   R. Siva Kumar, Santiniketan: The Making of a Contextual Modernism (New Delhi, 1997), unpaginated (p. 23).

154   On Ramkinkar, see Mukhopadhyaya, Chitrakatha, p. 179. See also Ram Kinkar, ‘Mastermashay’ and ‘An Interview with Ramkinkar’, Visvabharati Quarterly, Nandalal Number, XXXIV/1–4 (May 1968–April 1969), pp. 77–84.

155   See Somenandranath Bandopadhyaya, Shilpi Ramkinkar: Alapchari (Calcutta, 1994), p. 150.

156   E. Lanteri, Modelling: A Guide for Teachers and Students, 3 vols (London, 1902–11). See Dictionary of Art, XVIII, p. 751, for his biography.

157   Siva Kumar, Santiniketan, p. 27 (unpaginated). On Bourdelle (1861–1929), see Dictionary of Art, IV, pp. 568–9.

158   Bose was the first non-European to be elected an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy. See Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 117–18, for his fascinating story and untimely death.

159   S. Gardiner, Epstein: Artist Against the Establishment (New York, 1992), pp. 84, 119, 128–9, 131–2.

160   P. Das, Ramkinkar (Calcutta, 1991), p. 38. His earliest representations of the Santals were outdoor reliefs on the mud building, Shyamali; Siva Kumar, Santiniketan, p. 23.

161   Bandopadhyaya, Shilpi Ramkinkar, pp. 20–23.

162   Kinkar’s sculptures of unidealized nudes and his working from the human figure caused scandals in Santiniketan (Das, Ramkinkar, pp. 140–41).

163   Mukhopadhyaya, ‘Sadhak Shilpi Ramkinkar’, Chitrakatha, p. 337. He drank profusely and lived with a woman without marrying her, both unusual in Hindu society.

164   Bandopadhaya, Shilpi Ramkinkar, p. 38, on the artist’s statement that he belongs to the same milieu as them.

165   Ibid., p. 54.

166   Ibid., p. 54.

III JAMINI ROY AND ART FOR THE COMMUNITY

1   M. Casey, Tides and Eddies (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp. 182 (first published 1966). R. G. Casey was the penultimate Governor of Bengal (1944–6), married to Maie, the daughter of the surgeon-general of Australia. I met her daughter Mrs Jane MacGowan in Darlinghurst, a suburb of Sydney, New South Wales; she provided me with much material and valuable information on Lady Casey, and I wish to recall her kindness here. I am also grateful to Dr J. C. Eade of Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, for arranging the visit.

2   Casey, Tides and Eddies, p. 183.

3   In Jamini Roy, Seminar Papers in the Context of Indian Folk Sensibility and His Impact on Modern Art, deputy ed. A. Mukhopadhaya (New Delhi, 1992), discusses his role as leader of the folk renaissance.

4   Shanta Devi, ‘Shilpi Srijukta Jamini Ranjan Rayer Pradarshani’, Prabasi, I (Baisakh 1339), pp. 127–31.

5   On the rise of artistic individualism in India, see P. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 79–119, 179–218.

6   In the aftermath of the war, Carl Einstein was seen as a right-wing conservative but recent writers have reappraised Einstein’s social critique of Western modernism. See D. Pan, Primitive Renaissance (London, 2001), as well as C. W. Haxthausen and S. Zeidler’s critical translations and introductions: C. W. Haxthausen, ‘Bloody Serious, Two Texts by Carl Einstein’, October, CV (Summer 2003), pp. 105–24; Carl Einstein, Negro Sculpture, trans. C. W. Haxthausen and S. Ziedler, October, CVII (Winter 2004), pp. 122–38; Carl Einstein, Revolution Smashes Through History and Tradition, tr. C. W. Haxthausen, October, CVII (Winter 2004), pp. 139–45; Carl Einstein, Methodological Aphorisms, trans. C. W. Haxthausen, October, CVII (Winter 2004), pp. 146–50.

7   B. Dey, Jamini Rai (Kolkata, 1384), p. 18.

8   G. Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters (Bombay, 1927), p. 85. Millet came via his teacher, Jamini Prakash Gangooly, Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 110–13.

9   See supra, p. 30.

10   I was able to examine the pats he owned that were still in his studio in South Calcutta. See Shanta Devi, ‘Shilpi Srijukta Jamini Ranjan Rayer Pradarshani’, on his pat collecting.

11   ‘Art Exhibition in Calcutta – Mr. Jamini Roy - Modern Indian School of Painting’, The Statesman (1 October 1929). A. Bose, Reminiscences of Atul Bose, unpaginated (collection of Sanjit Bose).

12   The Statesman (9 July 1930).

13   Shanta Devi, ‘Shilpi Srijukta Jamini Ranjan Rayer Pradarshani’, p. 25. In fact, the Tagores had pioneered Swadeshi furniture. Here Roy showed images of Mother and Child, which was to become his hallmark.

14   On Nandalal’s response to Kalighat, Drishti o Srishti (Kolkata, 1985), pp. 282–3.

15   Catalogue of the Academy of Fine Arts (Calcutta, 1935), included Suhrawardy’s article. As his friend Atul Bose recalled, the praise paved the way for his success (Kshanika, Jamini Rai Number, II/4 (1378), p. 16.)

16   K. Sarkar, ‘Jamini Rai Prasange’, Baromash (March–April 1979), p. 10, the show coinciding with the mysterious death of his son Jimut.

17   S. Suhrawardy, A Short Note on the Art of Jamini Roy (Calcutta, 1937); Ananda Bazar Patrika, 19 September 1937.

18   ‘Mr. Jamini Roy: Calcutta Exhibition of Paintings’, The Statesman (4 September 1938), p. 6.

19   See Roy’s letters to Bishnu Dey below. The 350 or so letters have been published in different editions. See also his unpublished letters, written in 1942–4, edited by Arun Sen and published in Baromash, IV–V (September–October 1978), pp. 2–18. Jamini Roy, ‘Kajer Bhitar Diyei Jana, Nijekeo Jana’, in Parichay (Saradiya, 1384), pp. 1–8. One of the greatest French novels, Le Grand Meaulnes, by Alain-Fournier (Henri-Alban Fournier) was published in Paris in 1912.

20   The paintings exist in the K. C. Das mansion in North Calcutta; Ashoke Bhattacharya, ‘The Epic Art of Jamini Roy’, The Statesman (23 November 1987). On decorations for the Congress, infra note 35.

21   R. Von Leyden, ‘Jamini Roy’, in The Art of Jamini Roy, A Centenary Volume, exh. cat., Birla Academy (Calcutta, 1987), pp. 31–9. Datta’s Parichay has been compared with T. S. Eliot’s Criterion in its impact. Roy obituaries: The Statesman (26 April 1972, 5 May 1972).

22   Radio broadcast by the English officer, Jack Hugh, about 1942.

23   B. Dey, Jamini Rai: tanr shilpachinta o shaiplakarma bishaye kayekti dik (Kolkata, 1977), pp. 43, 57.

24   E. M. Milford, ‘A Modern Primitive’, Horizon, X/59 (November 1944), pp. 338–9. Milford visited him with a friend in 1942. I am grateful to Nimai Chatterji for the reference.

25   Casey, Tides and Eddies, p. 184. She organized several shows, including one of Cecil Beaton and another of Rabindranath Tagore.

26   Ibid., and letter dated 29 December 1964 (copy with his son who had translated into English Roy’s letter for Lady Casey). When the Caseys left India, Roy gave a parting gift of his own colour set consisting of little pots decorated in white, and the picture of a cow with sad eyes. The painting is with her daughter. Roy sent Christmas cards every year until 1971, the year before his death. John Irwin was one of the small band of civil servants in India who were radical critics of empire, unlike W. G. Archer, who had also met Roy. Irwin later became a distinguished authority on Indian art.

27   Kshanika, Jamini Rai Sankhya, Yr. 2, no. 4 (1378), p. 18.

28   B. Nichols, Verdict on India (London, 1944), p. 116. The masculinity of formalist art as opposed to effeminate narrative art was a well-aired topos going back to Roger Fry.

29   B. Sanyal, ‘Indian Folk Sensibility and Its Impact on Modern Art’, in Jamini Roy, Seminar Papers in the Context of Indian Folk Sensibility, p. 3. Sanyal, a young artist when he met Roy in Calcutta in 1938, mentions this.

30   This was his friend Sudhin Datta’s article ‘Jamini Roy’ in Longman’s Miscellany (Calcutta, 1943), pp. 122–47, which the publisher Jack Adams was keen to illustrate with his works. But the artist turned down the blocks as unsatisfactory. He was so overwrought that he felt he would die if the book came out. The article appeared without illustrations.

31   Roy’s letters to Dey of 5 December 1944 and 22 September 1944. There were clashes with Kramrisch, see Roy’s letter to Dey of August 1944 and of 8 March 1945.

32   Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters (Bombay, 1927), p. 93. This second edition, which contains his piece on Roy, suggests that he met the artist in about 1944. As late as 9 July 1968 in a letter to Maie Casey he complains of people’s antagonism (copy in son’s possession). Milford, ‘A Modern Primitive’, p. 338.

33   ‘Jamini Roy’, reproduced in The Art of Jamini Roy: A Centenary Volume, exh. cat., Birla Academy (Calcutta, 1987), p. 31. P. C. Chatterji, ‘Jamini Roy: A Profile’, Indian Oxygen House Journal (c. 1965), p. 39, on how Roy was reluctantly persuaded after his refusal to do any radio interviews for his 70th birthday in 1957.

34   Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters, pp. 85–92.

35   Suhrawardy, A Short Note, p. 1.

36   Von Leyden, All India Radio broadcast, 6 January 1947; Suhrawardy, ‘The Art of Jamini Roy’, Prefaces, pp. 27–35.

37   R. Chanda, ‘Manush Nandalal’, Desh Binodan (1389), pp. 55–6. She mentions that Roy and Nandalal used to meet occasionally as friends and he would tease Roy. See J. C. Bagal, Centenary of the Government College of Art (Calcutta, 1964), p. 40, on the exhibition held on 30 September 1929.

38   B. B. Mukhopadhyaya, Adhunik Shilpashiksha, p. 84.

39   S. Suhrawardy, ‘The Art of Jamini Roy’, pp. 2, 5. A late article, ‘Jamini Roy: New Trends’, Sunday Statesman (3 June 1954), reiterates his tiredness of fighting against odds for just recognition, as well as for the quest for the ultimate simplicity of expression. His friend Austin Coates and others as late as 1972 stressed his reclusive character.

40   Milford, ‘A Modern Primitive’, p. 341.

41   Suhrawardy, Prefaces. Austin Coates mentions his dedication to work and utter concentration, often sitting hours in darkness before dawn broke, thinking before painting, ‘The Peasant Painter’, Imprint (August 1973), p. 46.

42   Suhrawardy, A Short Note, p. 2.

43   Anonymous (Suhrawardy?), ‘Bengali Artist’s Exhibition: Jamini Roy, Modern and Versatile Themes’, Sunday Statesman (12 January 1941).

44   S. Kramrisch, Jamini Roy (Calcutta, 1944), p. 22.

45   Milford, ‘A Modern Primitive’, pp. 338–42.

46   Jamini Roy, exh. cat., Arcade Gallery, London (London, 1945) with an introduction by J. Irwin (London, 1945).

47   I. Conlay, ‘A Hindu Who Paints Christian Subjects’, in Art Section of a London paper in 1946 (from the family collection: the title obliterated).

48   P. Jeannerat, ‘Art in England: ‘India’s Greatest Living Painter’, Daily Mail (25 May 1946).

49   ‘Art and Artists’, Herald Tribune (30 August 1953).

50   Asian Artists in Crystal: Designs by Contemporary Asian Artists Engraved on Steuben Crystal (New York, 1956), p. 47. The show went on to New York.

51   American Reporter, XX/16 (21 May 1971), back page. Mary Margaret Byrne, ‘Jamini Roy Paintings Open Tuesday at Museum’ (unfortunately only the year 1957 is recorded in the collection). Hervé Masson’s piece is reproduced in The Art of Jamini Roy, pp. 40–1. List of artists exhibiting with American Federation of Arts (exhibition programme), Smithsonian Archives of American Art, compiled by W. Bruton and B. D. Aikens (Jamini Roy under annual exhibitions, pp. 85–42), see www.aaa.si.edu. I was unable to consult the archives as they were closed indefinitely for re-siting in 2006. For alerting me about Peggy Guggenheim’s interest in Roy, I am grateful to Sundaram Tagore of Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York. See her autobiography, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (London, 1979), pp. 351–3, as well as Holland Cotter’s ‘Art in Review; “The Promise of Modernism”: Art in India, 1890–1947’, New York Times (17 December 1999; published online 27 August 2006), in which he mentions that Guggenheim acquired Ray’s painting Woman with a Parrot.

52   B. Dey, ‘Jamini Raier Chitrasadhana (conversation with the artist)’, Jamini Rai, p. 57 and also pp. 22, 101, 115. Letter to Dey of 18 September 1942, on his plans to show folk, child art and his works together.

53   Letter of 6 June 1946. Dey and Irwin, The Art of Jamini Roy, p. 32. S. Nandy, ‘Shilpi Jamini Raier Chitra Sadhana’, Kshanika (1378), II/4, p. 29. The Amrita Bazar, 1 February 1937, mentions that he had turned to child art. On Klee using his childhood drawings as well as his daughter’s, supra, chapter Two note 41.

54   Von Leyden, ‘Jamini Roy’, in, The March of India (1947), p. 16.

55   Suhrawardy, Prefaces, pp. 126 and 134, originally delivered as Bageswari Lectures.

56   Dey and Irwin, The Art of Jamini Roy, p. 32. He also painted on wood panels.

57   Von Leyden, ‘Jamini Roy’, p. 16.

58   Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters, p. 86.

59   Jamini Roy, Indian Society of Oriental Art Catalogue (1944), p. 28.

60   Nichols, Verdict on India, pp. 130–31.

61   H. Gangopadhyaya, ‘Jamini Rai’, Amrita, IV/4 (3 Vaisakh 1372), p. 811; Kshanika, II/4 (1378), pp. 20–21.

62   Letters to Bishnu Dey, 22 July 1942, 9 September 1942, 22 September 1942 and 30 October 1942.

63   F. J. Korom, ‘Inventing Traditions: Folklore and Nationalism as Historical Process in Bengal’, in D. Rightman-Augustin and M. Pourzahovic, Folklore and Historical Process (Zagreb, 1989), pp. 57–83. Dinesh Chandra Sen, History of Bengali Language and Literature (Calcutta, 1911) and Folk Literature of Bengal (Calcutta, 1920).

64   G. S. Dutt, Folk Arts and Crafts of Bengal: The Collected Papers (Calcutta, 1990), introduction by S. Bandyopadhyay, p. xiv.

65   R. Italiaander, ‘Meetings with a Great Master’, in The Art of Jamini Roy (Calcutta, 1987), p. 43. He met the artist around the early 1960s.

66   Coates, ‘The Peasant Painter’, in The Art of Jamini Roy, p. 50, a tribute published after his death in 1972.

67   Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, XI, p. 589, see supra, chapter Two, note 4. Roy had underlined the bits that he found stirring.

68   Dey, Jamini Rai, p. 48. In Bengali it was 18 Jyestha 1330. See Kshanika, II/4 (1378), p. 21.

69   Casey, Tides and Eddies, p. 183. See Einstein’s discussion of the nature of myth in African sculpture, C. W. Haxthausen, ‘Negro Sculpture’ (Neger Plastik), October, CVII (Winter 2004), pp. 130–31. Milford, ‘A Modern Primitive’, p. 341.

70   The Statesman, date obliterated (artist’s collection). Roy’s interest in Christ dates from 1934, according to Irwin in his Arcade Gallery introduction, Jamini Roy (London, 1945).

71   Dey, Jamini Rai, p. 42. The painting is in the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi.

72   Roy, Kshanika, pp. 12–15.

73   See ‘Kandinsky’ in Pan, Primitive Renaissance, pp. 98–120.

74   J. Rai, ‘Potua Shilpa’ (dictated to Devi Prosad Chattopadhaya), in Dey, Jamini Rai, pp. 87–8. We must realize that this was Roy’s own construction of local identity since he did not have a deep knowledge of the West.

75   Milford, ‘A Modern Primitive’, p. 341. There have been claims of his being a devout Vaishnava.

76   A. K. Dutta, Jamini Roy (New Delhi, 1973), unpaginated.

77   In an article in Museum der Gegenwart, XXIX (1930–31), pp. 147–51, ‘Zu meinen Wandbildern für das Museum Folkwang in Essen’, Schlemmer explained his doll-like figure types. I am indebted to C. W. Haxthausen for this passage and its translation. Schlemmer’s ‘dolls’ may have sought to approximate the art of the past as a collective cultural expression: ‘I still wish to say something about my figural type in general and in particular about these paintings [his Folkwang Museum murals], something in response to the charge against their doll-like character. Whenever formal construction, free composition, and not natural verisimilitude, is the primary goal – when, in short, style is the goal – the figural type will assume a doll-like character. For the abstraction of the human form that is at issue here creates an image in a higher sense, it creates man not as a natural being, but as an artificial being, it creates a simile, a symbol of the human form. In all earlier cultures, high cultures, in that of the Egyptians, the early Greeks, in early Indian art, the human form was far removed from a naturalistic image, but was accordingly that much closer to a lapidary symbolic form: to the idol, to the doll. These symbolic forms were formerly nourished and generated out of religions dedicated to Gods or to Nature. We today, who lack the great symbols and ways of seeing of the Ancients, because we live in a time of decadence, of realignment, and one hopes, of renewal, what else can we do at present but be simple, simple in our own mode of representations, open to all that gathers in our conscious and unconscious, in order gradually to give form?’

78   Milford, ‘A Modern Primitive’, pp. 341–2.

79   Pan, Primitive Renaissance, p. 5.

80   The three vows taken by participants were: I am a Bengali, I love the land of Bengal and I shall serve the land of Bengal, all of them related to the Bengali village culture, Korom, ‘Inventing Traditions’, in D. Rightman-Augustin and M. Pourzahovic, Folklore and Historical Process, p. 74.

81   Dutt, ‘Folk Art and Its Relation to National Culture’, in Folk Arts and Crafts (Calcutta, 1990), p.9. In the passage he uses the word ‘race’ to mean culture – this was a period when race and culture were used interchangeably.

82   Dey, ‘Srijukta Jamini Raier Rabindrakatha’, Jamini Rai, p. 72. Pan, Primitive Renaissance, p. 5, on the ‘local’ in primitivist thought. Shanta Devi, ‘Shilpi Srijukta Jamini Ranjan Rayer Pradarshani’, p. 26, on Roy’s rejection of Rajastani art as a source for his painting.

83   Dey, Jamini Rai, p. 12. There is evidence of late Marxist thinking in Russia in favour of small decentralized communities.

84   Pan, Primitive Renaissance, p. 5.

85   See C. W. Haxthausen, ‘A Critical Illusion: “Expressionism” in the Writings of Wilhelm Hausenstein’, in The Ideological Crisis of Expressionism, ed. R. Rumold and O. K. Werkmeister (Columbia, SC, 1990), pp. 177–9, where he expands on what he calls his ‘flawed theory’ because of his growing religiosity. Restoring the pre-industrial community was often linked with German nationalist assertions though, in fairness, Hausenstein preferred socio-economic explanation to the ‘essence’ of an age.

86   Pan, Primitive Renaissance, pp. 121–46. On Einstein’s radical views on art and the people, C. W. Haxthausen, ‘Carl Einstein on Primitive Art’, October, CV (Summer 2003), p. 124. But see also his ‘A Critical Illusion’: ‘an anonymous, collective art, integrated with the praxis of life, and in this sense the original concept of expressionism is more in harmony with Peter Bürger’s theory of the avant-garde’, 172. Unlike Walter Benjamin, who accepted the unfortunate passing of myth and ritual in modern societies, Einstein argued that the modern psyche embodied two contradictory aspects: modern and traditional: Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations (London, 1982), pp. 226–7.

87   Pan, Primitive Renaissance, p. 5.

88   Ibid., p. 16.

89   Milford, ‘A Modern Primitive’, pp. 338–9.

90   Coates, ‘The Peasant Painter’, in The Art of Jamini Roy, p. 51. See also A. K. Dutta, Jamini Roy, note 76.

91   A. Mitra, ‘Jamini Roy’, in Four Painters (Calcutta, 1965), citing the critic Prithvis Neogy who suggested this was Roy’s belief in Vaisnava religion and the importance of repeating the seed word in that religion.

92   Dey and Irwin, The Art of Jamini Roy, p. 35.

93   Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters, p. 91.

94   Suhrawardy, A Short Note on the Art of Jamini Roy (Calcutta, 1947), p. 4.

95   Von Leyden, ‘Jamini Roy’, p. 17.

96   A. S. Raman, ‘Jamini Roy: An Interpretation’, Times of India (26 September 1954), p. 7, claims as late as this date that Roy’s discovery of folk art lacks the intellectual basis of the Cubist discovery of African art!

97   See Mitter, Art and Nationalism, chs 1 and 2.

98   Personal communication from his oldest son, Dharmadas Roy, who mentioned to me Roy’s interest in the work. Tolstoy’s What is Art and Essays on Art was translated into English by Aylmer Maude (London, 1930), which would fit into the defining period for Roy.

99   Tolstoy, What is Art and Essays on Art, pp. 270–71. See also E. H. Gombrich on Tolstoy’s primitivism in The Preference for the Primitive: Episodes in the History of Western Taste and Art (London, 2002), pp. 214–15.

3. Naturalists in the Age of Modernism

1   P. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge, 1994), traces the rise of academic art in India in the Victorian era and subsequent nationalist resistance to illusionism. See T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (London, 1973), pp. 9–20, where he formulates a complex theory of the social implications of art. He rejects the ‘heroic’ interpretation of the avant-garde as relentless progress towards the art of pure sensation, in favour of multiple viewpoints that accommodate artists like Rodin who are rejected in the light of modernist teleology, and brings out the ambivalence of the whole project of modernity.

I THE REGIONAL EXPRESSIONS OF ACADEMIC NATURALISM

1   J. C. Bagal, ‘History of the Government College of Art and Craft’, Centenary of the Government College of Art & Craft, Calcutta (Calcutta, 1964), p. 38.

2   See the full story in Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 294–303.

3   On Gangooly’s art given publicity in Bharati, a journal run by the Tagores, ibid., pp. 111–12.

4   Ibid., pp. 114–18. Sashi Hesh apparently emigrated to Canada while Phanindranath Bose settled in Scotland.

5   P. C. Chakravarty, ‘Banglar Bastavbadi Shipladhara o Atul Basu’, Chatushkon, XIV/9 (Paush 1381 [1973]), p. 583. His series of articles in this journal is a valuable assessment by a contemporary but fair-minded academic painter.

6   Chakravarty, ‘Banglar Bastavbadi Shilpa’, Chatushkon, XIV/11 (Phalgun 1381), p. 699. Roy was at the school for a decade (1906–16).

7   The government art schools routinely engaged students to produce artwork to welcome the visiting royalty in this period to demonstrate loyalty to the empire, see infra, pp. 188–90.

8   Second number of the Indian Academy of Art (April 1920).

9   Sukumar Roy and his father ran U. Ray & Son, producing superb reproductions of art. On U. Ray’s innovative halftone process, S. Ghosh, Karigari Kalpana o Bangali Udyog (Calcutta, 1988), p. 122. On Sukumar’s help to the Indian Art Academy, Chakravarty, ‘Banglar Bastavbadi Shilpa’, Chatushkon, XV/1 (Asharh 1382), pp. 275–6. Orientalists were not always uncompromising as proved by the publication even in Rupam, XI (July 1922), pp. 80–81 of Mazumdar’s painting Village Beauty.

10   They praised the orientalist Abdur Rahman Chughtai; Indian Academy of Art, III (July 1920), p. 51.

11   Reported in Indian Art Academy, 29 March 1921. Jamini Roy’s painting, The Shadow of Death, won a special prize at the art school exhibition. Praying for the Child and Widower were commended at the Bombay Art Society while his Divine Moment was adjudged the best work in Indian style. Another member of the group, Jogen Seal, received the silver medal of the Society for his Tulasi Pradip; Indian Academy of Art, III (July 1920), pp. 43–5. See also Indian Academy of Art, II (April 1920). Tilak is reproduced in the latter as a supplement and Tagore in the former.

12   See catalogue of the first exhibition and Chakravarty, Chatushkon, XV/III (Ashar 1382), p. 278. Among those who took part were painters Jamini Roy, Atul Bose, Hemendranath Mazumdar, Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury, D. Rama Rao, Thakur Singh, A. X. Trindade, and sculptors R. K. Phadke, Hironmoy Roychoudhury, Pramatha Mallik and V. P. Karmarkar. The highest price was demanded by the European F. Weeksler (Rs 3,000), followed by H. Mazumdar (Night, Rs 1,900 and Palli Pran, Rs 1,800) and J. P. Gangooly (Rs 1,000). Minor orientalists from outside Bengal, such as M. Inayatulla and Rameswar Prasad Varma, also took part.

13   The Statesman (22 December 1922).

14   B. Chaudhury, ‘Chitra Pradarshani’, Bharat Barsha, year 10, vol. 2, no. 5 (1329), pp. 725–30. Chaudhuri raises an important feature of portraiture and caricature, namely, even if the subject’s features are changed one may be able to recognize the person; E. H. Gombrich, ‘The Mask and the Face: The Perception of Physiognomic Likeness in Life and in Art’, in Art, Perception and Reality (Baltimore, MD, 1972).

15   Chakravarty, Chatushkon, XV/III (Ashar 1382), p. 283. The obituary is in the Times Literary Supplement (30 May 1924).

16   Quoted in B. B. Ghosh, Chiltrashilipi Hemen Mazumdar (Kolkata, 1993), p. 20, and Desh Binodan (1388), p. 87. The Thirtieth Annual Show of Bombay Art Society opened on 29 March 1920. Smriti (Reminiscence) won a gold medal while his Abhiman (Hurt Feeling) won praise.

17   See for instance, Shilpi, I/3 (Autumn 1929), p. 38, on commissions from Jodhpur and Cooch-Behar. His patrons included the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar, who gave a testimonial that although he had met many artists in Bombay he had not found one so talented. The Maharaja of Mayurbhanj bought a large number of his works, providing him with regular commissions. On the calendar painting for Lalchand and Sons, B. Ghosh, ‘Chitrashilpi’, p. 87.

18   One of the members of his group holds that he had taken another artist, B. Mazumdar, to help him with landscape work. Hemendrarath had kept a diary of his sojourn in Patiala which is now lost. In one letter he mentions that he had so pleased the ruler that he was able to accompany him on tours, and painted portraits of the ladies of the family. The letter dated 18 May 1931 mentions that the orientalist Baroda Ukil was also in Patiala at that time hoping to sell 31 of his works. He left after a disappointing sale. From Hemendrarath’s letters, too, we learn of Mazumdar’s wife’s money worries. In one he asks her to settle all the outstanding debts and reveals his dream of building his own house. I tried to trace the screen through the kind generosity of the present descendant of the Maharaja but my visit to Patiala failed to unearth it, though I found a landscape by B. Mazumdar.

19   See H. Mazumdar, Chhabir Chashma, ed. U. Mazumdar (Calcutta, 1991), pp. 81, 98 and passim.

20   This was published in a catalogue of All India Exhibition (Fine Arts Section), (Delhi, c.1947), p. XIV (courtesy of Mazumdar’s daughter-in-law). I am deeply indebted to Pradyot Roy for introducing me to her.

21   D. P. Mukerji, ‘The Modern Movement’, Shilpi, I/3 (Autumn 1929), pp. 17–19.

22   A.M.T. Acharya, Indian Masters (Calcutta, 1928), unpaginated. On him see, Shilpi, I/1 (July 1929), p.4. A partisan, Acharya mentions that Abanindranath, ‘the distinguished and chief apostle of this [orientalist] school of painting decidedly refused to extend his support to the Publishers for reasons not unintelligible.’

23   One such, somewhat corny, poem is ‘The Gift of the Artist’: Demands the client of the artist/A trivial picture/Why so dear?/Paints, oils, worn fabric,/Weapons – a mere few brushes/Such high price for what?/Even more trivial is the subject/ Platted tresses on her bare shoulders/ Delicately Treads the belle, Draped in a wet sari/ She is there everyday/In weather, rainy or dry/I spy her on the steps of the pond/ Thirty years hence/ From the sagging body shall/ Depart the sweet bloom of youth/ The belle of my picture/ Behold her a century hence, Still a maiden. Fair/ Forever in this fashion/ Will she rest by your side, In her wet sari/ Did the artist make much? When in return, he gave/ Eternal youth and beauty?

24   The International Exhibition of Portraits of Great Beauties of the World was held at Long Beach, California in 1952. Mazumdar’s work was the Indian entry, The Statesman (31 May 1952); see B. B. Ghosh, Chitrashilpi Hemen Majumdar (Kolkata, 1993). It was recently offered at an auction in New Delhi (Catalogue of Auction of Paintings and Works of Art by Bowrings Fine Art Auctioneers, Oberoi, New Delhi, 5 November 2001, no. 18).

25   For instance, Land of Love by B. Varma, Mitter, Art and Nationalism, colour pl. XXX. On the three brothers, Ranada, Barada and Sarada Ukil, see supra, p. 51 and infra, p. 224.

26   Ghosh, Chitrashilpi, pp. 38–40.

27   However, in the last years of her life, the artist’s widow confirmed that she sat for him, which finds support in his intimate letters to her. In a letter from Patiala in 1931 he mentions that he had sold paintings for which she had sat. From the evidence, one may conjecture that for the figures, his wife was the model, but the faces were often of different women. The painting, Rose or Thorn? (1936), was supposedly based on the photograph of a fourteen-year-old girl distantly related to him. I am grateful to his daughter-in-law for the information.

28   E. L. Collingham, Imperial Bodies (Cambridge, 2001).

29   See for instance, a recent exhibition at Tate Britain, Exposed: The Victorian Nude, ed. Alison Smith (London, 2001), on Victorian ambivalence towards nudity and erotic subjects. Also P. Gay, ‘“Victorian Sexuality”: Old Texts and New Insights’, American Scholar, XXXXIX (1980), pp. 372–8, and The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, II, The Tender Passion (Oxford, 1984). For a feminist analysis of Western images of the female body as a contribution to the debate on art and pornography, L. Nead, The Female Nude (London, 1992).

30   Rabindra Rachanabali, XI, p. 580.

31   The Indian Charivari (13 June 1873), inside front cover, carried an advertisement entitled ‘The Gallery of Beauty’, offering ‘exquisite recent Photographs, taken from Life, of the most beautiful Actresses and Celebrities, in costume and otherwise.’ A. A. Gill in ‘Nude Awakening’, Sunday Times Magazine (12 September 2004), pp. 33–9, describes the threat to the ideal nude with the advent of photography.

32   B. Tagore, in A. Acharya and S. Som, Bangla Shilpa Samalochanar Dhara (Calcutta, 1986), p. 293. See also ‘Deyaler Chhabi’, ibid., pp. 212–13; B. Tagore, ‘Nagnatar Saundarja’, Bharati o Balak (1889), pp. 85ff.

33   N. C. Chaudhuri, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (London, 1951), pp. 453–4. See Pal’s Character Sketches.

34   B. C. Pal, ‘Religion, Morality and Art’, Narayan, I/2 (1322), pp. 1160ff.

35   N. K. Gupta, Narayan, II/2 (1323), pp. 681ff. In his memoirs, Nalinikanta Gupta writes with amusement that Chittaranjan was so impressed by the article that he refused to believe that it was not by Aurobindo, see N. Gupta, Smritir Pata (Kolkata, 1370), pp. 138–9.

36   R. K. Mukherjee, ‘Sahitya o Suniti’, Narayan, II/2 (1323), p. 998. Strangely, even Mukherjee, an ancient historian, was unable to appreciate the erotic art of Hindu temples.

37   H. Mazumdar, Shilpa Neeti (Kolkata, c. 1926), pp. 326–7. It is interesting that the Indian Academy of Art published some of the earliest photographs of nudes based on Indian models: III (July 1920).

38   Acharya, Indian Masters, unpaginated.

39   Shilpi (July 1929).

40   I am indebted to Sidhartha Ghosh. The joke is ascribed to Sajani Kanta Datta, editor of the satirical journal Shanibarer Chithi in the 1930s.

41   Chakravarty, Chatushkon, XV/4 (Sraban 1382), pp. 615–16.

42   On the politics of the art school in the years 1905–15, Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 279–85, 302–6, 313–14.

43   Shilpi, I/1 (July 1929), p. 5. Mukul Dey received a diploma in mural painting from the Royal College of Art in 1922, where he specialized in etching, for which he is best known (the artist’s letter to Mary Lago dated 3 April 1970).

44   Bagal, ‘History of the Government College of Art and Craft’, pp. 44–50. M. Dey, Amar Katha (Kolkata, 1402), pp. 100–19, where he offers a different version, claiming Gangooly’s hostility to him though making clear his dislike of Brown. Interestingly, neither Dey nor the official report mentions any difference with Bose.

45   Shilpi, I/1 (July 1929), pp. 6–7, 38; Shilpi, I/3 (Autumn 1929), pp. 37–8. Dey himself, however, organized two major shows: Jamini Roy in 1929 and Tagore in 1932. These were official portraits of the reigning monarch King George V and Queen Mary, personally chosen by the king for decorating one of the state drawing rooms in the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi. The leading portraitists Bose of Calcutta and Lalkaka of Bombay were chosen to demonstrate the evenhanded treatment of Bengal and Bombay, the two artistic rivals, by the Raj.

46   Chakravarty, Chatushkon, XIV/12 (Chaitra 1381), pp. 757–60. Though somewhat rambling, these articles offer us another and more objective viewpoint.

47   Chakravarty, Chatushkon, XV/4 (Sraban 1382), pp. 318–19 on enlisting the support of Maharaja Pradyot Kumar Tagore that led to the founding of the society.

48   Chakravarty, Chatushkon, XIV/11 (Phalgun 1381), pp. 706–7.

49   Ananda Bazar Patrika, 16 August 1933. The move to have a central body with a national art policy originated early in the twentieth century as part of the objective of the colonial government to use art as indirect propaganda, see infra, p. 195. A central institution was in fact set up after Independence in 1947 by the first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Lalit Kala Akademi was to be the coordinating central body for the nation’s art.

50   See Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 300–01.

51   Chakravarty, Chatushkon, XV/4 (Sravan 1382), pp. 319–20.

52   Annual Exhibition, Academy of Fine Arts, 1st year, Calcutta (December 1933– January 1934). Included were J. P. Gangooly, Dhurandhar, S. L. Haldanker, L. N. Taskar, Manchershaw Pithawalla, Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury, Thakur Singh, B.C. Law, Jamini Roy, Atul Bose, the leading orientalists and their pupils. There were also younger unknown artists.

53   Annual Exhibition, Academy of Fine Arts, 2nd year (December 1934–January 1935). Paintings by the Europeans Edwin Landseer, William Orpen, William Etty and Thomas and William Daniell came from various collections in Calcutta. Indian painters were Atul Bose, M. V. Athavale, Jainul Abedin, A. R. Chughtai, M. V. Dhurandhar, J. P. Gangooly, B. C. Law, Hemen Mazumdar (landscape sent from Patiala), Pramatha Mallik, Jamini Roy (a set of three: Krishna Balaram, Gopini, Mother and Child), Thakur Singh, L. N. Tasker and Sarada and Ranada Ukil. The Japanese painter Taikwan’s Kali and Saraswati, done in 1905, were now put up for sale (on him, Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 289–94.)

54   Chakravarty, Chatushkon, XV/4 (Sraban 1382), pp. 319–21.

55   Preface of catalogue of Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings of Atul Bose, (Calcutta, December 1939).

56   S. Datta, ‘Mr Atul Bose’s Exhibition’, a newspaper review dated December 1939 with title obliterated (probably The Statesman) in the artist’s family.

57   Ibid.

58   A. Bose, Verified Perspective (Calcutta, 1944), p. 67. Bose’s inspirations were Joshua Reynolds, Edwin Poynter and other academic artists (thanks to his son Sanjit Bose for the information).

59   K. C. Aryan, 100 Years Survey of Punjab Painting, 1841–1941 (Patiala, 1977), pp. 109–10.

60   A. Naqvi. Image and Identity (Karachi, 1998), pp. 99–133 and figs 26, 35, 36.

61   See Aryan, Punjab Painting for details of painting in the region. On Sobha Singh, see also Wikipedia and Harbans Singh, ed., Encyclopedia of Sikhism (Patiala, 1997); M. Kaur, Sobha Singh Painter of the [sic] Destiny (Amritsar, 1986).

62   Shilpi, I/1 (Summer 1929), p. 41.

63   Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 63–79.

64   Ibid.

65   I am indebted to the important doctoral dissertation of Nalini Bhagwat, ‘Development of Contemporary Art in Western India’, University of Baroda 1983, section on ‘Open Air School’.

66   See The Studio in the 1920s and ’30s: LXXXIX/386 (May 1925), p. 291, on E. Vignal, on W. Russell Flint, XCII/400 (July 1926), p. 83. Rather than individual artists, a general interest is evident. By this time, the French Impressionists and post-Impressionists also featured regularly in the magazine.

67   There is a particularly impressive painting by Satwalekar of the Himalayas in the Sri Bhavani Musueum in the old princely state of Aundh, Maharastra.

68   Transcript of Haldankar obituary (unpublished) by his student, Baburao Sadwelkar, p. 7.

69   See catalogue, M. R. Acharekar, Retrospective Art Exhibition (Bombay, 1973), p. 2.

70   Acharekar, Rupadarsini (Bombay, 1958), p. vii. I met Acharekar through V. R. Amberkar, a close associate of the group in the early 1980s.

71   The Indian Academy of Art, III (July 1920), p. 50. Also reproduced in A.M.T. Acharya, Indian Masters (Calcutta, 1928), 1. On Talim, ed., Artists Directory, Lalit Kala Akademi (New Delhi, 1962). On the Mhatre episode, Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 102–7.

72   J. Sen, ‘Nabin Bhaskar’, Bharat Barsha, yr 4, vol. 1, no. 1 (1323), pp. 60–63.

73   I had an opportunity to visit the late artist’s studio where most of the later sculptures were spread around the garden. See for reproductions, An Exhibition of His (Karmarkar) Sculptures at the Nehru Centre, Worli (Mumbai, December 1996–January 1997). Interestingly, his studio contained a number of books on drawing and modelling published in England, including F. R. Yerbury’s well-known work, The Human Form and Its Use in Art (London, 1925).

74   See his sculpture, Spring, Indian Academy of Art, III (July 1920), unpaginated pl.

75   K. Sarkar, Shilpi Saptak (Kolkata, 1977), p. 80.

76   For Bose’s life and career see Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 117–18.

77   Indian Masters, 1928, p. xi.

78   My section on Rao is largely based on the rare monograph on the artist, Damerla Rama Rao: Masterpieces, published in 1969 by Damerla Rama Rao Memorial Art Gallery and School. I am indebted to Madhu Jain for making it available to me. She published the first essay that gave India-wide publicity to the artist (M. Jain, ‘A Forgotten Treasure’, India Today, 15 November 1990, pp. 66–8). His sudden death may have robbed him of recognition but he left a small band of disciples and admirers. See chapter Four on Solomon.

79   Ravishankar Rawal, ‘My Memories of Rama Rao’, in Damerla Rama Rao, p. 15. Rao’s older contemporary at Bombay art school, who went on to found a nationalist art school in Gujarat under Bengal School’s inspiration, Rawal speaks here of his admiration for the artist. On Rawal, Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 8–9, 125, 330–32.

80   G. Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters (Bombay, n.d.[1940s]), pp. 95–100.

81   Catalogue of the Academy of Fine Arts Exhibition, 1921–2. Damerla Rama Rao, pp. 4–7,

82   Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters, pp. 77–8.

83   Damerla Rama Rao, p. 6. Nakula is mentioned by Madhu Jain in ‘A Forgotten Treasure’.

84   Acharya, Indian Masters, I (June 1928), p. XIII.

85   See the revised and enlarged edition of 1951 published by the Government of India, New Delhi, pl. 68.

II FROM ORIENTALISM TO A NEW NATURALISM: K. VENKATAPPA AND DEVIPROSAD ROY CHOWDHURY

1   This brief account of Venkatappa’s life is based on his diaries preserved in the Karnataka Archives. I am grateful to the Ministry of Education, Karnataka Government, for permission to consult the Venkatappa diaries and to the Venkatappa Museum for permission to document the paintings. I am also grateful to R. Eswar Raju of Chitra Shilpi K. Venkatappa Trust, Chiranjiv Singh, Nanjunda Rao, Munuswami, Y. Subramaniya Raju and Akumal Ramachander for all their help. For a general account on Venkatappa, see V. Sitaramiah, Venkatappa (Delhi, 1968).

2   Mrs D. P. Roy Chowdhury, ‘Life with an Artist’, Swatantra (January 1953–August 1953) [ten articles]. I had the privilege of knowing the artist who was a friend of my parents. Mrs Roy Chowdhury was a cultivated lady from a distinguished family in Calcutta. Her sister was cast by Jean Renoir in The River, based on Rumer Godden’s story and filmed in India.

3   Sitaramiah, Venkatappa, pp. i–ii. Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters, pp. 36–7. K. Sarkar, Bharater Bhaskar o Chitrashilpi (Kolkata, 1984), p. 151.

4   Though Percy Brown had just joined the institution as Principal, Abanindranath continued to be influential until his resignation in 1915.

5   Sister Nivedita and A. Coomaraswamy, Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists (London, 1918), pls pp. 30, 56, 60, 64, 72, 78, 102; A. Tagore, Notes on Indian Artistic Anatomy (Calcutta, 1914).

6   In 1913, as Venkatappa’s first year at the art school drew to a close, he started keeping a diary in which he noted that he had obtained a photograph of the great musician, Veena Sheshanna. He probably had some instructions on the vina in 1912, but did he know that this great musician would later be his teacher?

7   The offer came from the Director of Public Instruction in Bengal, probably at Brown’s instance.

8   His chief patron, the Maharaja of Mysore, bought two of his works at the Madras Fine Arts Society exhibition (1918). In 1920 he was sent Rs 153.7 by the Indian Society of Oriental Art, subsequent to the annual exhibition and a further Rs 87.8 for another painting. He instructed the society to continue to display his landscape in their showroom in the hope that it would sell.

9   Treasurywalla expressed dissatisfaction with his purchase The Buddha and His Disciples, forcing the artist to make corrections. There followed further correspondence from the collector, offering Rs 100 for one work and returning another, with suggestions for improving the figure of Radha. Venkatappa, who became irritated with this bargaining, refused to accept less than Rs 200. He received a lame reply on 20 February that although the work was possibly worth Rs 500, he could not afford the high price, offering only Rs 130. This was finally accepted. Treasurywalla continued with his importunities, showing interest in other paintings, especially the celebrated Mad After Veena, but he forced the artist to reduce his price. The collector was Amrita Sher-Gil’s friend Karl Khandalavala’s uncle (infra, p. 46. Another patron, the Maharani of Cooch Bihar, wanted Venkatappa to improve her husband’s portrait, which he bluntly refused to do. An exception was James Cousins, the Theosophist and a fervent champion of orientalist art, who never haggled over price.

10   One example of his modern approach is his relief of Sakuntala and Kanva. Like his teacher Abanindranath, he sought to represent the complex mixture of regret and satisfaction on Kanva’s face at the imminent departure of his adopted daughter for her husband’s house.

11   Later on he criticized Nandalal’s illustration of the mythical Garuda in Myths of the Hindus and the Buddhists. The powerful painting showed Garuda with a green body and vermilion feet, which to Venkatappa was unnatural: although art must be informed by idealism, it should not sacrifice verisimilitude.

12   This obsession with accuracy can, for instance, be seen in the episode related to Sister Nivedita’s Myths of the Hindus and the Buddhists. One of Venkatappa’s illustrations was printed in reverse, showing the hero accepting a gift with his left hand, a solecism. The artist took the Ramakrishna Mission, the executors of her will, to court for this and felt vindicated when a token fine of one rupee was imposed on the Mission.

13   Mitter, Art and Nationalism, colour pl. XXV.

14   Diary entry, 5 September 1926.

15   This period was documented by B.G.L. Swami who came to know him well in the 1940s, See the articles in Sudha, 3 parts (30 July 1978, 6 August 1978 and 30 September 1978). Mysore was made famous by the novelist R. K. Narayan as Malgudi.

16   Musically gifted, in his later years he attained proficiency in classical Karnataka music. This too became a solitary exercise, as he often practised late into the night, rarely performing for an audience. The title of the celebrated painting Mad After Veena was an allegory of Venkatappa’s decision to take up music. His guru Abanindranath had expressed concern that Venkatappa’s new interest would lead to the neglect of his art. The artist represents himself as an emaciated ascetic adoring the musical instrument vina, whilst the bust of Abanindranath gazes disapprovingly at him. The work, inspired by Rajput and Mughal miniatures, became renowned because of its complex narrative. Venkatappa sent the picture to Abanindranath for comments. He gave a qualified approval that the technique of the work was excellent, but its theme was not universal enough to appeal to everyone.

17   Diary entry, March and April 1924.

18   His reputation for asceticism was known in Calcutta, as shown by the half-humorous remark of Rabindranath Tagore’s in 1922: ‘You have not yet become a sannyasi?’ Ever a perfectionist, he once told Abanindranath, ‘I am married to art and she is a jealous mistress.’ Venkatachalam’s ‘K. Venkatappa’, in Contemporary Indian Painters, pp. 35–41, is one of the first detailed analyses of the artist.

19   In the 1940s Swamy, the author of the articles on Venkatappa, in Sudha, supra note 14, who was keen to meet this ‘strange’ man he had heard so much about, took a letter of introduction to the artist’s house. When he knocked on the door, the person who opened it told him that Venkatappa was out and was generally unavailable. He took this man to be the servant and only later did he learn that Venkatappa himself had opened the door. A few years later, a chance meeting and their common interest in plants did bring them together, a friendship that lasted until the artist’s death.

20   Obituary, Ananda Bazar Patrika (16 October 1975). Mainichi (Japan) (25 August 1954), called him India’s greatest sculptor.

21   Nichols, Verdict on India, p. 130. Mrs Roy Chowdhury, ‘Life with an Artist’, Swatantra (June 1953), p. 17.

22   Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters, pp. 48–9.

23   Excerpt from Langer’s To Yokohama and Back, in German Democratic Review, XV (September 1974), p. 57.

24   K. Biswas, Devi Prosad Roy Chowdhury (Delhi, 1973), unpaginated. Boeiss has been mentioned by various Indian authors as an Italian but with no further information. His name does not seem Italian but I have not been able to trace him.

25   S. Kramrisch, ‘A Great Indian Sculptor’, The Englishman (24 December 1926).

26   The Hindu (20 January 1936).

27   Talk at the Rotary Club, ‘The Impact of the West’, The Hindu (17 January 1936) and Madras Mail (17 January 1936). See, even earlier, Forward (14 November 1928). Review of art exhibition of the Madras School of Art, Prabasi, XXXIX/12 (Chaitra 1342), pp. 875–7.

28   See his short story, ‘Genius’, reprint from Shanibarer Chithi (Kartik 1366).

29   Mrs Roy Chowdhury, ‘Life with an Artist’, p. 23.

30   Revolutionary terrorists such as M. N. Roy had already left India to join the International Communist movement to spread revolution worldwide. Meanwhile British radicals were trying to send trade unionists to India to organize the labourers without success until the mid-1920s. On a good overview of the rise of left movements in India, see Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (London, 1989), chap. V (1922–7), chap. VI (1928–9, 1935–7), chap. VII (1942–5).

31   P.R.R. Rao, ‘Devi Prasad Roy Choudhury: “A Portrait”’, in Choudhury and His Art (Madras, 1943), p. 9.

32   Ibid., p. 11. This was my own impression of him.

33   Ibid., p. 13.

34   Lanteri, E. Modelling: A Guide for Teachers and Students, 3 vols (London, 1902–11). Supra, p. 95. On Fanindranath Bose’s meeting with Rodin, Mitter, Art and Nationalism, p. 117.

35   D. Roy Chowdhury, ‘Directions in Sculpture’, All India Radio broadcast for Southeast Asia and Far East, 24 January 1951. Typically, he admired Picasso, I think because of his phenomenal skill, which made modernism less suspect. See Deviprosad’s criticism of Tagore’s painting as frighteningly modern (Presidential address, Prabasi Banga Sahitya Sammelan, 12th Session, Town Hall, Calcutta, 10 Paush 1341).

36   Rao, ‘Devi Prasad Roy Choudhury: “A Portrait”’, p. 1. Individual sculptures in the Travancore Temple Entry group express the extremes of degradation.

37   Ibid. See also the front page report on his death in Ananda Bazar Patrika.

38   Roy Chowdhury, ‘Directions in Sculpture’.

4. Contested Nationalism: The New Delhi and India House Murals

1   R. G. Irving, Indian Summer: Lutyens, Baker and Imperial Delhi (New Haven, CT, 1981), pp. 91, 101, 104.

2   Quoted in Mary Lutyens, Edwin Lutyens by His Daughter (London, 1980), pp. 104, 116 and 114.

3   T. R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and the British Raj (London and Boston, MA, 1989), esp. pp. 55–104.

4   C. Hussey, The Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens (London, 1953), p. 245. On the view of Indians being capable only of ingenious but intellectually lower forms of art, i.e. decoration, see P. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge, 1994), chap. 2, esp. p. 52.

5   H. Baker, Architecture and Personalities (London, 1944), pp. 67–8.

6   Irving, Indian Summer, p. 105. Baker, Architecture and Personalities, pp. 216–22. The Times (3 October 1912).

7   Irving, Indian Summer, pp. 106–7. Report on Modern Indian Architecture by Government of India, India Society, London, 1913 (IOL (India Office Library)). Hussey, Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens, p. 245.

8   Irving, Indian Summer, p. 108. Samarendra Gupta, Vice Principal of the Lahore art school, was one of Abanindranath’s pupils.

9   Irving, Indian Summer, pp. 108 and 194. B. S. Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 165–210, on Raj recycling of Mughal rituals of empire.

10   M. Lutyens, Edwin Lutyens by His Daughter, p. 126.

11   Hussey, Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens, pp. 347–8, on Lutyens’s 1916 and 1922 Memoranda to the government.

12   J. Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture (London, 1855), p. xii.

13   H. Smith, ‘Decorative Painting in the Domestic Interior in England and Wales, c. 1850–1890’, London University dissertation, pp. 84, 91, 107, 144.

14   B. Petrie, Puvis de Chavannes (Aldershot, 1997). J. Mucha et al., Alphonse Mucha (London, 1974). See also brochure on the Municipal Hall, Prague (n.d.).

15   D. Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America (New Haven, CT, 2002). The Indian communists seem to have known their works in the 1940s.

16   On Abanindranath’s mural, Kaca O Devajani, see Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 298–300. During the second half of the nineteenth century, attempts were made by the Romantics, especially Gothic Revivalists, to re-establish murals as architectural decoration in homes (see Smith, ‘Decorative Painting in the Domestic Interior in England and Wales’).

17   On Cennini, see Smith, ‘Decorative Painting in the Domestic Interior in England and Wales’, p. 289. Tempera method with egg yolk as a binding agent was studied in Cennini’s text by Herringham, who along with Joseph Southall (see supra, p. 68), was a leading figure in English tempera revival. She studied tempera work at Ajanta: M. Lago, Christiana Herringham and the Edwardian Art Scene (London, 1996), the definitive biography of a key figure in the late Victorian and Edwardian art world.

18   See Mitter, Art and Nationalism, chap. 9.

19   On Rawal, see Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 8–9, 125, 330. Diamond Jubilee of BAS (unpaginated) on the prize. From 1916 onwards, Raval’s pupils also showed nationalist works at BAS.

20   M. V. Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham (Bombay, 1940), pp. 70–71.

21   See Mitter, Art and Nationalism, p. 61.

22   On Solomon, The Times (22 December 1965). On his panel fresco for the Royal Academy, ‘The Masque of Cupid’, The Studio, XXV (1902), p.38. Toiles marouflées had been sanctified by Puvis de Chavanne himself in his portrayal of Sainte Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris, in the Panthéon.

23   Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, pp. 71–2. W.E.G. Solomon, The Bombay Revival of Indian Art (Bombay, 1924), pp. 68ff.

24   The outgoing Principal Cecil Burns’ Confidential Memo to the Department of Education, 1918, ‘Hogarth is unfit to work as Principal but as there is no other person available, I am compelled to recommend him. . . He is absolutely unfit to impart higher Art Education’ (quoted in Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 66).

25   Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, pp. 71–3. Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, pp. 73ff. and 85. J. Charmley, Lord Lloyd and the Decline of the British Empire (London, 1987), on the career of George Lloyd, a junior member of the banking family.

26   Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, pp. 68ff. He mentions that public interest in the school was kindled by the efforts of Marmaduke Pickhall, editor of the Bombay Chronicle, founded by the early Congress leader, Phirozeshah Mehta. Kanhaiyalal Vakil, art critic of the paper, became a valuable Solomon ally.

27   W.E.G. Solomon, Mural Painting of the Bombay School (Bombay, 1930), p. 19. Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, p. 73. Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 71. Burns was a student of the academic painter Hubert Herkomer but following previous precedents he did not encourage fine art tradition in Bombay, anon., Story of Sir J. J. School of Art, 1857–1957 (Bombay, 1957), p. 89. In Dhurandhar’s memoir, an incident does indicate the occasional use of undraped models: we came to know that the model was having her monthly period and as she had to sit without clothes, she refused to come back but Cable Sahib (a teacher) made her stand half naked there (Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 60).

28   Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, p. 64. Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, pp. 74, 76ff. See Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 90–92.

29   Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 74. This mural has been preserved at the school. The sum offered was Rs 5000 (Story of Sir J. J. School, p. 91).

30   Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, pp. 67, 75. On Alphons Mucha, his son J. Mucha et al., Mucha (London, 1971). Indian seasons are six in number.

31   Solomon, Mural Paintings, p. 23.

32   On Birley, who painted the portrait of the King, Times of India (27 February 1935).

33   V. S. Metta, ‘Revival of Mural Decoration in India’, Apollo, VI (July–December 1927), pp. 24–6.

34   Times of India (25 March 1904).

35   Times of India (8 March 1907).

36   Solomon, Mural Paintings, pp. 59–60.

37   Solomon, Mural Paintings, pp. 83ff. Solomon was keen to preserve the ‘flat’ quality of Indian art and yet inject naturalism into it, an impossible task among art teachers as we know from earlier debates (Mitter, Art and Nationalism, p. 43), Solomon’s letter to Dhurandhar, 29 April 1922 (Diary, Appendix).

38   Solomon, Mural Paintings, p. 5.

39   W.E.G. Solomon, Jottings at Ajanta (Bombay, 1923); The Women of Ajanta (Bombay, 1923); The Charm of Indian Art (Bombay, 1926); Essays on Mughal Art (Bombay, 1932) and introductions to the collections of the Prince of Wales Museum, Bombay.

40   Solomon, Mural Paintings, pp. 19–20.

41   Rupam, VIII (October 1921).

42   K. Vakil, ‘Humours of Havellism’, Times of India (8 August 1931), cited during India House murals controversy. But see his From Havellism to Vital Art (Bombay, n.d.). His brush with Havell must have begun in the 1920s. On his attack on oriental art, Bombay Chronicle (18 May 1930).

43   L. Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (London, 1951), p. 247.

44   Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 33. As we have seen with Percy Brown in Calcutta, the heads of art schools recruited students to produce welcoming art works for every visit of the Prince of Wales.

45   Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, pp. 75ff. Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 76.

46   Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, p. 14 (pylons).

47   Solomon’s letter to Dhurandhar is in the Appendix of his memoir. The Leader, XVII (21 November 1921, 19 March 1922). For Chapekar’s deposition before his execution, see E. Kedourie, Nationalism in Asia and Africa (London, 1970). On the riots during the Prince’s visit, J. Brown, Modern India: the Origins of an Indian Democracy (Oxford, 1985), p. 217.

48   Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, p. 76. Sarasvati is the Hindu goddess of learning.

49   Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, p. 78.

50   On Lloyd’s opposition to the 1935 act, P. A. Spear, A History of India, II (Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 203.

51   Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, p. 77. On Lloyd’s comment about Indians, Piers Brendan, Sunday Observer (13 December 1987), p. 22. He was one of the founders of the British Council.

52   Talk at the Bombay Students Brotherhood, Story of Sir J. J. School of Art, 1857–1957, p. 93.

53   On the India Society’s role in the appreciation of Indian art and culture in Britain, Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 311–13.

54   Rothenstein to Tagore, 6 April 1923, in M. Lago, Imperfect Encounter (Cambridge, MA, 1972), p. 307.

55   On Fine Arts Committee, see British Empire Exhibition Descriptive Catalogue of Modern Indian Paintings and Sculptures, Calcutta, Bombay, Lahore (Bombay, 1924). I am grateful to the Chughtai Museum for permission to use this rare catalogue printed by the Times of India.

56   Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, chap. 3 on the Indian Room. See also pp. 112ff, and Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, pp. 78, 80.

57   Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, chap. 3. On Mhatre, Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 102–6.

58   Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 81.

59   Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, p. 60, and chaps 4 and 5.

60   British Empire Exhibition Catalogue.

61   Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 80.

62   These two paintings were sold at Sotheby’s along with one of Asit Haldar’s shown at Wembley.

63   Brief biography compiled by Mukul Dey himself (supplied by Mary Lago). On Bose-Dey enemity, infra, p. 140.

64   V. B. Metta, ‘Modern Art at Wembley: Bengal’, Rupam, XXI (January 1925), pp. 14–15.

65   L. Heath, ‘Modern Art at Wembley: Punjab’, Rupam, XXI (January 1925), p. 14. Also ‘Modern Bengal Painting at Wembley’ Art Notes, Rupam, XXIV (October 1925), p. 109.

66   The Studio, LXXXIX (January–June 1925), p. 138.

67   Ibid., p. 145.

68   Rothenstein to Tagore, in Lago, Imperfect Encounter, p. 307.

69   Indian Art and Letters, I/1 (May 1925), p. 26. Born in India, a prime actor in establishing British supremacy in Central Asia, Francis Younghusband (1863–1942) was also in search of spiritual enlightenment in Tibet; see Benedict Allen, The Faber Book of Exploration (London, 2003). Younghusband’s The Heart of Nature was published in 1921. J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment (London, 1997), p. 139, uses Younghusband to argue the nature of Western hegemony in that it admired those it dominated, the case also of the Lutyens family.

70   Havell’s letter of 29 August 1925, Indian Art and Letters, I/2 (November 1925), p. 106. Havell: ‘Indian Art at Wembley’, Rupam, XXI (January 1925), p. 12.

71   Indian Art and Letters, I/1 (May 1925), p. 20. On the way to England, Solomon spoke on his school at the Musée Guimet in Paris. Lord Ronaldshay had been a fervent champion of oriental art during his period as the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal (Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 317, 377).

72   Conference on Indian Art held at the British Empire Exhibition on Monday, 2 June 1924 (IOL), p. 50.

73   Conference on Indian Art, p. 3. Havell’s books had helped establish the aesthetic importance of Indian art.

74   Conference on Indian Art, pp. 1–14. The exhibition’s Indian commissioner was Dewan Bahadur Vijayaraghavacharya.

75   Conference on Indian Art, p. 19.

76   Conference on Indian Art, p. 19.

77   E. H. Gombrich’s famous criticism of the innocent eye and his concept of schema and correction, Art and Illusion (London, 1954) put paid to this view.

78   Rupam, XIX–XX (July–December 1924), pp. 130 and 124–30. Conference on Indian Art, p. 10.

79   Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 73. See supra, p. 160, on Damerla Rama Rao’s participation in the exercise.

80   P. Brown, ‘The Mural Paintings at New Delhi’, Indian State Railways Magazine, IV/5 (February 1931), p. 399.

81   Lago, Imperfect Encounter, p. 300.

82   Hussey, Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens, p. 497.

83   Irving, Indian Summer, p. 296. Baker had a fine collection of primitive art.

84   Baker, Architecture and Personalities, p. 68.

85   The Times, 3 October 1912. Baker, Architecture and Personalities, p. 222. On Baker’s views on decoration, see Baker, Architecture and Personalities, chap. 10. Gilbert Scott’s Architecture of Humanism is quoted on the marriage of the arts: ‘Architecture controls and disciplines the beauty of painting, sculpture, and the minor arts.’

86   Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, p. 81.

87   Ibid., p. 81.

88   Conference on Indian Art, p. 10.

89   Bombay Chronicle (13 December 1924); New India (7 January 1925); Times of India (6 January 1925); The Englishman (5 January 1925); The Hindu (17 January 1925).

90   Mentioned in Indian Art and Letters, I/1 (May 1925), 3. Indian Daily Mail (9 January 1925).

91   Council of State Debates, Wednesday, 28 January 1925, Official Report of the Debates, IV (New Delhi, 1925), pp. 73–5.

92   Council of State Debates, pp. 76–8.

93   Council of State Debates, pp. 79–80.

94   Legislative Assembly Debates, 2nd Session, 2nd Legislative, 16 February–3 March 1925, V, pt II (New Delhi, 1925), p. 2033. Irving, Indian Summer, pp. 347–8.

95   Legislative Assembly Debates, pp. 2033–4.

96   Story of Sir J. J., p. 99. On Ahivasi, Artists Directory, Lalit Kala Akademi (New Delhi, 1962).

97   Bombay Chronicle (20 March 1925).

98   Encourage Indian Art, The Prize of Delhi Scheme (Prize of Delhi Committee Pamphlet) (Bombay, 1925).

99   Encourage Indian Art, pp.3–5. O. C. Gangoly, ‘Prize of Delhi Scheme and Official Patronage of Indian Art’, Rupam, XXVI (April 1926), pp. 68–71, complained of the nationalist agitators jumping on the art bandwagon whereas actual revival was achieved by Havell and the orientalists earlier in the century.

100   Vakil to India Society (IOL); Times of India (2 April 1925); Bombay Daily Mail (4 April 1925); Bengalee (4 April 1925).

101   Bombay Chronicle (4 April 1925).

102   Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 84. Solomon’s letter no. 735 of 12 November, Report on Prize of Delhi Scheme, 1925.

103   E. B. Havell, Indian Sculpture and Painting (London, 1928), p. 103.

104   Indian Art and Letters, I/2 (November 1925), p. 106.

105   Havell, Indian Sculpture and Painting, p. 102. Mitter, Art and Nationalism, p. 279 and passim for Havell’s definition of nature.

106   Havell’s letter of 5 July 1929 in Roopa Lekha, I/3 (1929); K.Vakil, in Roopa Lekha, I/4 (1929), pp. 32ff.

107   E. B. Havell, ‘Indian Architecture’, Roopa Lekha, I/5 (1930), pp. 16–18.

108   Vakil, ‘Art Notes’, Roopa Lekha, I/6 (1930), pp. i–vi.

109   E. B. Havell, ‘Modern Indian Architecture’, Roopa Lekha, 6 and 7 (1930–31), pp. 1ff.

110   Rupam, XXIV (October 1925), p. 59.

111   K. Vakil, ‘Art World, Some Prominent Figures’, Bombay Chronicle (30 June 1926).

112   Vakil was probably thinking here of the well-known art lover and collector, Rai Krishanadasa. An admirer of Abanindranath, he started the famous Bharat Kala Bhavan collection of traditional and modern Indian art at Benaras Hindu University.

113   On O. C. Gangoly’s talk at the Bharat Kala Bhavan, Bombay Chronicle (18 May 1930). On Gaganendranath, see supra, pp. 15–27.

114   K. Vakil, ‘Art Notes’, Roopa Lekha, I/4 (1929), p. 33, on Gangoly lecture; ‘Art Notes’, Roopa Lekha I/1 (1929), p. 44, on founding of Rasa Mandal.

115   Solomon, Mural Paintings, pp. 27–8. Marshall was Director of the Archaeological Survey of India.

116   Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 98.

117   Brown, ‘Mural Paintings at New Delhi’, pp. 395–6. Solomon, Mural Paintings, p. 32.

118   Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 103.

119   Solomon, Mural Paintings, chaps III and IV.

120   Brown, ‘Mural Paintings at New Delhi’, pp. 392–3. Brown provides us with the most balanced and informative account of these murals.

121   Ibid., pp. 395–6.

122   Solomon, Mural Paintings, p. 40.

123   Solomon, Mural Paintings, p. 19.

124   Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, pp. 81–2. Story of Sir J. J. School of Art, 94.

125   Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 99–100. He was also known as Fyzee Fyzee-Rahamin.

126   Attiya Begam (and) Fyzee Fyzee-Rahamin, Music of India (London, 1925), where she relates the romantic story of their love and the discovery of ancient Indian music in 1913, her singing and him illustrating the ragamala.

127   H. Furst, ‘Mr Fyzee Fyzee-Rahamin’s Paintings’, Apollo, II (July–December 1925), pp. 91–4. The show was held in August 1925. E. H. Gombrich, ‘Kokoschka in His Times’ refers to Furst (unpublished lecture, 2 July 1986).

128   Although not explicitly stated, the two works at the Tate must have come from the same exhibition held in 1925, see M. Chamot et al., Tate Gallery Catalogues: The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, I (A–L) (London, 1964), pp. 199–200. The Sassoons, originally from Baghdad, had extensive family and trade connections with Bombay.

129   See Apollo, II (July–December 1925), p. 97. On his paintings at the Tate, see Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 330–1. The Hindu (8 December 1934) [on Sheshanna]; Madras Mail (10 December 1934) [on Arlington Gallery].

130   Furst, ‘Mr Fyzee Fyzee-Rahamin’s Paintings’, pp. 91–4.

131   Times of India (19 July 1926) refers to article of 19 June by Fyzee-Rahamin. Lalkaka won the competition to paint royal portraits at Windsor with Atul Bose in 1929. Seodia chose Western subjects for his New Delhi murals, see infra, p. 206.

132   H. Furst,’Mr Fyzee Fyzee-Rahamin’s Decorations at Delhi’, Apollo, X (July 1929), pp. 13–14.

133   Ibid., pp. 11–13.

134   K. Vakil: ‘Art Notes’, Roopa Lekha, I/5 (1930), pp. iiiff.

135   Irving, Indian Summer, p. 287. Baker, Architecture and Personalities, p. 74.

136   Confidential letter of T. S. Shilton to G. Wiles of BAS, 25 May 1931, on Baker’s misgivings (IOL).

137   Baker, Architecture and Personalities, p. 172.

138   Ibid., p. 74.

139   Ibid., pp. 131–5.

140   Confidential letter of Alan Green of India House, London, to Wiles, 7 May 1931, and demi-official letter of T. S. Shilton, Secretary, Department of Industries and Labour, to Wiles for publication, dated 23 May 1931, Doc. No 1311 on the date of announcement of the competition and other details (IOL). See also B. Ukil, ‘Art Notes’, Roopa Lekha, I/4 (1929), pp. 35ff. Lago, Imperfect Encounter, p. 173.

141   S. Fyzee-Rahamin to William Rothenstein, 6 March 1928 (1148, by kind permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University).

142   Rothenstein to S. Fyzee-Rahamin, 5 April 1928 (1148 [1679] by kind permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University).

143   Document No. 1311 (India Office Library) on the date of the announcement of the competition and other details (IOL Eur F 147/74).

144   On the government balancing act, Green’s letter (note supra, 140). On Choudhury, K. Sarkar, Bharater Bhaskar, pp. 218ff. See also Roopa Lekha, I/4 (1929), pp. 36–7. Rothenstein felt cornered enough to say that the choice was entirely fortuitous.

145   Rothenstein, Since Fifty, p. 173.

146   D. K. Deb Barman, ‘Londone India Houser Deyal Chitra’, Prabasi, XXXI/7 (Kartik 1339 [1932]), pp. 90–92.

147   Ibid., p. 92. The Times (30 March 1930).

148   Deb Barman, ‘Londone India Houser Deyal Chitra’, pp. 93–7. I had an opportunity to meet Mr Dinkel through his son, who was a friend of mine, when he vividly reminisced about his time with the Bengali students and his Italian journey with them.

149   Deb Barman, ‘Londone India Houser Deyal Chitra’, pp. 94–5. Anonymous, ‘Indian Mural Painting, The Work of Four Indian Artists at the New India House’, The Studio (March 1932), p. 148.

150   Rothenstein, Since Fifty, p. 174.

151   Rothenstein, Since Fifty, pp. 174–5. Letters between Lord Willingdon and Rothenstein on the artists working at India House. Lord Willingdon’s handwritten note to Rothenstein, 21 March 1932, followed by a long protest letter by Rothenstein at the termination of the Indian House murals. (Rothenstein to Willingdon, 6 December 1933, WR–RT 1148 [1697]), and Willingdon’s formal response (Willingdon to Rothenstein, 29 December 1933, 1148 [1623]). I am grateful to the Houghton Library, Harvard University, for permission to quote the letters. Deb Barman, ‘Londone India Houser Deyal Chitra’, p. 97.

152   Deb Barman. Smritipote (Santiniketan), 1991.

153   Baker to Rothenstein, Lago, Imperfect Encounter, p. 340. This is not entirely true as the dome, for instance, is very colourful with the gold lending a certain lustre.

154   One assumes that arrangements must have taken at least half a year and the fact is that the controversy went on until 1931.

155   Times of India (6 April 1931).

156   Roopa Lekha, I/5 (1930), p. viii on the portraits.

157   Times of India (7 April 1931, 10 April 1931).

158   Times of India (12 April 1930). See also Note on the Exhibition of Work by Students of the Bombay School of Art, India House (Bombay, 8 October 1930), organized by Chatterjee.

159   Times of India (24 April 1931).

160   Times of India (6 May 1931).

161   Green to Wiles (see infra note 140).

162   Wiles to Younghusband, 8 May 1931 (IOL). As a member of the India Society, Wiles sent cuttings from the Times of India to appraise the Society of the developments. He then had lunch with the editor of the Times of India in order to find out what his grievance was.

163   Times of India (22 May 1931).

164   Confidential letter of Alan Green of India House London to G. Wiles of BAS, 7 May 1931 (IOL Eur F 147/47). Though written in exasperation at the attack on the government, it reflects the general feeling that egg tempera was a more genuine form of fresco.

165   T. S. Shilton to Wiles, 25 May 1931. He wrote again on 12 June 1931, congratulating Wiles on his letter to the Times of India, Demi Official 1311 (99).[AQ: ??]

166   Younghusband to Wiles, 29 May 1931 (IOL Eur F 147/74). Times of India (29 May 1931).

167   Times of India (4 June 1931).

168   Times of India (7 June 1931).

169   Sethna to Wiles, 8 June 1931 (IOL).

170   Wiles to Younghusband, 13 July 1931 (IOL).

171   Rothenstein to Tagore, Lago, Imperfect Encounter, p. 339.

172   Roopa Lekha, II/9 (1932), pp. 28–30.

173   Roopa Lekha, II/9 (1932), pp. 31–4.

174   Roopa Lekha, II/9 (1932), pp. 35–8.

175   Solomon, Bombay Revival of Indian Art, p. 48.

176   See Alan Green’s letter of 7 May 1931.

177   See for instance, Interior view of the Oratory of St John, Co-Cathedral of St John, Valletta, C. Puglisi, Caravaggio (London, 1998), p. 150.

178   See Brown, ‘Mural Paintings at New Delhi’, pp. 392–3, on criticism of the murals.

179   Times of India (27 December 1930).

180   Story of Sir J. J. School of Art, pp. 91, 98. Solomon involved his pupils with ambitious local projects, such as the murals at the Batliwalla Theatre and Jayakar’s bungalow.

181   Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 83. In 1905 Havell had also tried to found a fine arts department at the Calcutta University, but this had failed owing to opposition from within the university and the government.

182   Report of Public Instruction in Bombay, nos 33–34 (Bombay, 1928), pp. 76–7. Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, pp. 93–6. Roopa Lekha, I/2 (1929), pp. 43–4. Dhurandhar had approached Jayakar on Solomon’s behalf.

183   G. A. Thomas, Report of the Reorganisation Committee Bombay (Bombay, 1933); Roopa Lekha, I/2 (1929), pp. 43–4. Thomas, Report of the Reorganisation Committee, Resolution No. 8300 (11 July 1932), pp. 154–7.

184   Reports of Public Instruction in Bombay, Nos 33–4, 76–7. Times of India (30 March 1933) (Bombay Art Society).

185   Solomon on his return to London exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1938: Béatrice Créspon-Halotier, with introductory essay by Olivier Meslay, Les peintres britanniques dans les salons parisiens des origins à 1939 (Dijon, 2002), p. 216.

186   J. M. Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power, 1915–22 (Cambridge, 1972).

187   Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 72.

188   J. M. Brown, Gandhi and Civil Disobedience: The Mahatma in Indian Politics, 1928–34 (Cambridge, 1977).

189   Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 109.

190   Ibid. On the 1935 Act, see J. M. Brown, Modern India (Oxford, 1985), pp. 274ff.

191   Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, pp. 109–10 (photograph in the book shows several students wearing the white Gandhi cap, a symbol of defiance). The paintings on nationalist themes are preserved in the art school archives.

192   Note on the Exhibition (Bombay, 1930), pp. 5, 6–8.

193   Morning Post (IOL Eur M F 147/105)? Times of India (2 October 1930).

194   Wilson’s letter of thanks, 28 March 1931, Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 108. A catalogue of the exhibition was published by the Times of India as ‘Note on the Exhibition of Work by Students of the Bombay School of Art’, India House, 8 October 1930. Handwritten letter to Dhurandhar by Sir Leslie Wilson dated 28 March 1931, ‘it was, of course, a great honour that Her Majesty, the Queen should have desired the picture, and I was very proud to be able to present it to her, but I was, at the same time, not unnaturally, sorry to part with it, and am glad indeed to think that the copy will soon be hanging on the wall’ (Dhurandhar, Kalamandirantil Ekechallish Varsham, p. 157).

195   Barman, Smritipate (Santiniketan), p. 96.

196   The Hindu (8 December 1934) [on the Queen]. On Ranada Ukil who decorated India House, Morning Post (19 January 1932). On Sarada Ukil’s exhibition at India House, The Times (19 January 1932). Another brother, Barada Ukil, ran the lavishly produced Roopa Lekha and had started a class for oriental art in New Delhi. See on his relationship with Sher-Gil (supra, p. 51). He was prominently reported in the newspapers during the hanging of paintings at the Burlington Gallery.

197   American Arts News (20 June 1932). For instance, in the News Chronicle (London) in June, and in The Yorkshire Post (14 July 1932, 14 July 1933). News Chronicle (June 1933). The Evening Standard (31 January 1934). The Manchester Guardian (6 April 1934). Vakil’s lecture appeared in the Times of India (7 July 1933). A souvenir of the Bombay contribution to the Burlington exhibition, Modern Art in Western India, 1934, contained Solomon’s lectures given in London before the exhibition. Solomon’s lecture, ‘Indian Art and the Bombay Movement’, English Review (November 1934). Also Madras Mail, 1 December 1934. Times of India, 3 December 1934. Indian Art and Letters, n.s., VIII/2 (December 1934), p. 100.

198   Even the Rangoon Gazette (27 November 1934) announced the opening (Indian Art and Letters, n.s., VIII/2, December 1934, pp. 87ff.) Zetland’s speech on 14 November 1930 to Round Table Conference participants, Indian Art and Letters, n.s., IV/2 (1930), reported in The Times (15 November 1930). On Zetland, Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 317, 377.

199   BBC broadcast of 18 December, by John de la Valette, Indian Art and Letters, n.s., VIII/2 (December 1934).

200   Manchester Guardian, quoted in Chatterjee (see infra note 203).

201   The India Society’s Exhibition of Modern Indian art at the New Burlington Galleries, 10–22 December 1934. The first generation of orientalists included Surendranath Ganguly, who had died young, and Venkatappa, now a naturalist landscape painter. Academic artists, Hemendranath Mazumdar, Atul Bose, Thakur Singh, as well as the veterans, Pestonji Bomanji, Manchershaw Pithawalla and A. X. Trindade were part of the show but not Abalal Rahiman, Archibald Muller or Dhurandhar, although Dhurandhar’s students Ahivasi and Nagarkar were there. The modernists, Gaganendranath Tagore, Jamini Roy, Rabindranath Tagore and the younger generation, N. S. Bendre, Bhanu Smart, Sudhir Khastagir, Ramendranath Chakravarty and Roop Krishna were included. The Hindu (8 December 1934), on the Queen’s collection.

202   The Times (10 December 1934), which also published a photo of the opening ceremony. On the misty colours of oriental art and its affinities with Japanese Nihonga, Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 267–307.

203   R. Chatterjee, ‘Exhibitions of Indian Art in London and New Delhi, December Last Year’, Modern Review (July 1935), pp. 60ff.