Iqbal believed that the conception of time as finite and limited induced a passive attitude toward life; if time itself is limited, nothing that exists in time can be of everlasting value, and all that is achieved by human action must perish. To combat this tendency toward inertia, he extols a positive, active attitude to the world: since time is eternal, human action has a lasting importance. This idea militated against both inaction and mere expediency.
The cause of Time is not the revolution of the sun:
Time is everlasting, but the sun does not last forever.
Time is joy and sorrow, festival and fast;
Time is the secret of moonlight and sunlight.
Thou hast extended Time, like Space,
And distinguished Yesterday from Tomorrow.
Thou hast fled, like a scent, from thine own garden;
Thou hast made thy prison with thine own hand.
Our Time which has neither beginning nor end,
Blossoms from the flower bed of our mind.
To know its root quickens the living with new life:
Its being is more splendid than the dawn.
Life is of Time, and Time is of Life.
[From Iqbal, The Secrets of the Self, 137–138.]
In the following passages from his second Persian poetry collection, Mysteries of Selflessness (1918), Iqbal emphasizes the Muslim community. Reflecting the concern of Muslims at that time over the fate of the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim lands conquered or threatened by European powers, Iqbal advocates a pan-Islamism based on the doctrine of an indivisible Muslim community. Muslims are united throughout space and time by a common faith and a common history.
A common aim shared by the multitude
Is unity which, when it is mature,
Forms the Community; the many live
Only by virtue of the single bond.
The Muslim’s unity from natural faith
Derives, and this the Prophet taught us,
So that we lit a lantern on Truth’s way.
This pearl was fished from his unfathomed sea,
And of his bounty we are one in soul.
Let not this unity go from our hands,
And we endure to all eternity. …
Our Essence is not bound to any Place;
The vigor of our wine is not contained
In any bowl; Chinese and Indian
Alike the shard that constitutes our jar,
Turkish and Syrian alike the clay
Forming our body; neither is our heart
Of India, or Syria, or Rum,26
Nor any fatherland do we profess
Except Islam.
[From Iqbal, The Mysteries of Selflessness, trans. Arthur J. Arberry (London: John Murray, 1953), 20, 29.]
In 1930 Iqbal published The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, a compilation of lectures he had delivered in Madras, Hyderabad, and Aligarh. The leitmotif of the volume is the call for a radical reinterpretation of Islamic thought in which there is room for human reason, democratic government, and reform of Sharia law.
During the last five hundred years religious thought in Islam has been practically stationary. There was a time when European thought received inspiration from the world of Islam. The most remarkable phenomenon of modern history, however, is the enormous rapidity with which the world of Islam is spiritually moving towards the West. There is nothing wrong in this movement, for European culture, on its intellectual side, is only a further development of some of the most important phases of the culture of Islam. Our only fear is that the dazzling exterior of European culture may arrest our movement and we may fail to reach the true inwardness of that culture. During all the centuries of our intellectual stupor Europe has been seriously thinking on the great problems in which the philosophers and scientists of Islam were so keenly interested. Since the Middle Ages, when the schools of Muslim theology were completed, infinite advance has taken place in the domain of human thought and experience. The extension of man’s power over nature has given him a new faith and a fresh sense of superiority over the forces that constitute his environment. New points of view have been suggested, old problems have been restated in the light of fresh experience, and new problems have arisen. … No wonder then that the younger generation of Islam in Asia and Africa demand a fresh orientation of their faith. With the reawakening of Islam, therefore, it is necessary to examine, in an independent spirit, what Europe has thought and how far the conclusions reached by her can help us in the revision and, if necessary, reconstruction, of theological thought in Islam. Besides this it is not possible to ignore the generally antireligious and especially anti-Islamic propaganda in Central Asia which has already crossed the Indian frontier. …
The task before the modern Muslim is, therefore, immense. He has to rethink the whole system of Islam without completely breaking with the past. … The only course open to us is to approach modern knowledge with a respectful but independent attitude and to appreciate the teachings of Islam in the light of that knowledge, even though we may be led to differ from those who have gone before us.
[From Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Lahore: M. Ashraf, 1944), 7–8, 97.]
The creed of Islam states, “There is no god but God and Muhammad is His prophet.” The second half of the statement is taken by Muslims to mean that Muhammad was the last of the prophets. Iqbal here interprets the closing of the age of prophecy as opening a new age in which individuals must explore for themselves the realm of inner, mystical experience, while maintaining the spirit of critical, independent judgment about it.
Now during the minority of mankind psychic energy develops what I call prophetic consciousness—a mode of economizing individual thought and choice by providing ready-made judgments, choices, and ways of action. With the birth of reason and critical faculty, however, life, in its own interest, inhibits the formation and growth of non-rational modes of consciousness through which psychic energy flowed at an earlier stage of human evolution. … The Prophet of Islam seems to stand between the ancient and the modern world. In so far as the source of his revelation is concerned he belongs to the ancient world; in so far as the spirit of his revelation is concerned he belongs to the modem world. In him life discovers other sources of knowledge suitable to its new direction. The birth of Islam, as I hope to be able presently to prove to your satisfaction, is the birth of inductive intellect. In Islam prophecy reaches its perfection in discovering the need of its own abolition. This involves the keen perception that life cannot forever be kept in leading strings; that in order to achieve full self-consciousness man must finally be thrown back on his own resources. The abolition of priesthood and hereditary kingship in Islam, the constant appeal to reason and experience in the Quran, and the emphasis that it lays on Nature and History as sources of human knowledge, are all different aspects of the same idea of finality. The idea, however, does not mean that mystic experience, which qualitatively does not differ from the experience of the prophet, has now ceased to exist. …
God reveals His signs in inner as well as outer experience, and it is the duty of man to judge the knowledge-yielding capacity of all aspects of experience. The idea of finality [the belief that Muhammad was the final prophet], therefore, should not be taken to suggest that the ultimate fate of life is complete displacement of emotion by reason. Such a thing is neither possible nor desirable. The intellectual value of the idea is that it tends to create an independent critical attitude towards mystic experience by generating the belief that all personal authority, claiming a supernatural origin, has come to an end in the history of man. … The function of the idea is to open up fresh vistas of knowledge in the domain of man’s inner experience, just as the first half of the formula of Islam [“There is no god but God”] has created and fostered the spirit of a critical observation of man’s outer experience by divesting the forces of nature of that divine character with which earlier culture had clothed them. Mystical experience, then, however unusual and abnormal, must now be regarded by a Muslim as a perfectly natural experience, open to critical scrutiny like other aspects of human experience. This is clear from the Prophet’s own attitude towards Ibn-i-Sayyad’s psychic experiences.
[From Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, 125–127.]
An innovative feature of Iqbal’s thinking is his further extension of the traditional Sunni view that one important source of guidance is the consensus (ijmā) of the community—as arrived at by Muslims who have exercised ijtihād, the strong mental effort required to form a judgment on a question of Islamic law. Iqbal interpreted this, in light of the need of contemporary Muslim societies for adaptive strategies, as an endorsement of the legitimizing power of the legislature.
The third source of Mohammedan [i.e., Islamic] Law is Ijma,28 which is in my opinion perhaps the most important legal notion in Islam. It is, however, strange that this important notion, while invoking great academic discussions in early Islam, remained practically a mere idea, and rarely assumed the form of a permanent institution of any Mohammedan country. Possibly its transformation into a permanent legislative institution was contrary to the political interests of absolute monarchy that grew up in Islam. … It is, however, extremely satisfactory to note that the pressure of new world forces and the political experience of European nations are impressing on the mind of modern Islam the value and possibilities of the idea of Ijma. The growth of republican spirit, and the gradual formation of legislative assemblies in Muslim lands constitutes a great step in advance. The transfer of the power of Ijtihad from individual representatives of schools to a Muslim legislative assembly which, in view of the growth of opposing sects, is the only possible form Ijma can take in modern times, will secure contributions to legal discussion from laymen who happen to possess a keen insight into affairs. In this way alone we can stir into activity the dormant spirit of life in our legal system, and give it an evolutionary outlook. In India, however, difficulties are likely to arise; for it is doubtful whether a non-Muslim legislative assembly can exercise the power of Ijtihad.
[From Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, 173–174.]
The poem quoted below comes from Iqbal’s last, posthumous book, The Gift from Hijaz (1938), and concerns Kashmir—a place for which he felt great affection, since his grandfather had been a Kashmiri Pandit from Srinagar and had converted to Islam.
Known once on polished lips as Little Persia,
Downtrodden and penniless is Kashmir now,
A burning sigh breaks from the Heavens, to see
Their children crouch in awe of tyrant lords.
Telling the story of the heartless times,
An old peasant’s home of misery under the hill—
Ah, this fine nation, fertile of hand and brain!
Where is Your judgment-day, oh God of ages?
The free man’s veins are firm as veins of granite;
The bondman’s weak as tendrils of the vine,
And his heart too despairing and repining—
The free heart has life’s tingling breath to fan it.
Quick pulse, clear vision, are the free man’s treasure;
The unfree, to kindness and affection dead,
Has no more wealth than tears of his own shedding
And those glib words he has in such good measure.
Bondman and free can never come to accord:
One is the heavens’ lackey, one their lord.
[From Iqbal, Poems from Iqbal, trans. V. G. Kiernan (London: John Murray, 1955), 90.]
Nationalist debates over how best to free India from colonial influence were not confined to the political sphere. They also took place in many other cultural arenas, including literary genres, music, dance, architecture, and the fine arts. What should an “authentic” Indian music, dance, or art look like? In this section we look at three Indian artists or art historians, all of whom struggled to resolve the tension between creating a cohesive cultural form as demanded by the nationalist project, and reflecting a more individual, even alienated, artistic sense, such as exists in most modernist movements. Indeed, the relationship between global modernity and Indian national identity—a relationship molded by the colonial context—dominated the Indian art scene from the early twentieth century on, especially in the pre-Independence years.
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the ideals of the Bengal School, started by E. B. Havell in 1896 to restore an “authentic” Indian art to students trained too much in the styles of the West, predominated. Reacting against the Calcutta Art Studio’s reliance on academic naturalism, perspective, and materialism, and seeking instead what they felt to be the lost spirituality of Indian art, Havell and his associates encouraged a return to Mughal miniature painting styles as being more genuinely Indian. For many artists and viewers, the pathos associated with this recovery of past artistry meshed well with a nationalist idealization of a real or imaginary Indian unity, especially during the swadeshi political period after 1905. Others interpreted this traditionalist call as an attempt to obstruct their artistic progress by blocking training in Western canons. Interestingly, early nationalists were able to reconcile political resistance to the Raj with a faith in the absolute values of Western art.
By the 1920s, the Bengal School was in decline, under the onslaught of various modernist movements that emphasized individualism over unity; the parochial, primitive, or indigenous over the universal; and the depiction of reality over the expression of swadeshi sentimentality. After 1920, too, there was diminishing space for art in the nationalist program, for under Gandhi’s leadership politics and art went their separate ways. In this context of controversy and experimentation, two famous Indian artists—Abanindranath Tagore and Amrita Sher-Gil—attempted to carve out for themselves a space for genuinely Indian and yet individual art styles, and they described the thinking behind their efforts in some of their essays and memoirs. Although initially a supporter of the Bengal School, Indian art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy had the foresight, even in 1910, to predict this break from slavish imitations, whether of Western conventions or of the Indian past.
Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (1877–1947) was the son of a Tamil father and a British mother. He was educated in England, where he received a doctorate in geology, but on an assignment as a geologist to Ceylon in 1903 he realized that his true passion was South Asian art. In 1909 he moved to Calcutta, in the middle of the Swadeshi movement, and devoted himself to the creation through art of a cultural nationalism. Professionally, he aligned himself with Havell and other Bengal School supporters in their critique of the colonial art schools, their denigration of the mass-produced, “undignified,” falsely naturalistic deities of the celebrated Indian painter Ravi Varma (1848–1906), their utopian disparagement of industrialization, and their championing of indigenous decorative arts and crafts. Before leaving India for the United States in 1917, Coomaraswamy made a major contribution to scholarship on late medieval painting by distinguishing the Rajput style from the Mughal style (although he declared that the latter was not genuinely Indian). From 1917 until his death he held the post of Keeper of Indian and Islamic Arts in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Famed in his time as the finest scholar of Indian art, Coomaraswamy was known as one of the first Indians to interpret the meaning of Asian art for Western audiences.
Coomaraswamy aimed to revive an authentic Hindu art; for him, swadeshi was a spiritual ideal, not a political goal, and in fact he decried the harm done to art by an interpretation of swadeshi that was merely economic and political. He berated Indian nationalists for condemning Lord Curzon: more important than Curzon’s bad political decisions about Bengal were his praiseworthy patronage and preservation of Indian art.
All those who have studied the Industrial Arts of India unite in recognizing and deploring their profound decay, and in very many cases, their practical extinction. Investigation invariably shows that goods that ought to be, and once were, common in the market, are now only to be seen in museums. One hundred, or even fifty years ago, it would have been possible to fill many museums worthily with the everyday handiwork of Indian artisans: now this would be possible only after years of patient collecting in remote districts. During the nineteenth century India has in fact ceased to excel in those Industrial arts which provided the bulk of her exports, the main sources of her wealth (after agriculture), and of the refined luxury of her homes. …
During this period—if we are to judge from the wreckage of her Industrial arts remaining to us—we must rank the civilization of India indeed highly, for it could have been truly said that in her homes, whether of rich or poor, there could be found nothing that was not either useful or beautiful. In exchange for this world of beauty that was our birthright, the nineteenth century has made of our country a “dumping ground” for all the vulgar superfluities of European over-production; and all that the Swadeshi movement of the twentieth century has done is to provide us with many spurious imitations. …
It could hardly have been otherwise, for behind the Swadeshi movement there is no serious and consistent ideal. Its leaders have had but one thought before them—to save money. The movement has lacked almost totally in those constructive elements which we meet with in similar movements in other countries, such as Denmark or Ireland. Never have I seen in any Swadeshi literature the wish expressed to preserve Indian manufacturers on account of their intrinsic excellence, or because the presence amongst us of these highly skilled craftsmen represented an important element in the national culture, or because these craftsmen still worked under conditions of life still infinitely superior, physically and spiritually, to those of the European factory-slaves.
Too often the leaders of our political movement have forgotten (as men forgot in the early days of the development of European industrialism) that elementary principle of statecraft, that men are of more account than things. They have forgotten that the goal of all material civilization is not labour but leisure, and that industry without art only brutalizes and degrades. For things then—things economic, political, temporary—they have been willing to undermine both our immemorial industrial culture, and to degrade the status and destroy the physique of those artisans who once served us so faithfully and who even now if we would let them would make our cities and our houses beautiful again. I know no sign more ominous for the future of the Indian civilization than our utter indifference to social industrial ideals, and the heartless callousness with which we have cast aside the services of those who built our homes … leaving them to eke out a precarious living by making petty trivialities for tourists, curio-collectors, and for Anglo-Indian bungalows, or to drift into the ranks of menial labourers or factory hands. Do you think that we can thus degrade the status of so many men without impairing the vitality of our national life and without injuring the basis of its possible prosperity?
We, who think that we are educated and progressive, we, who attend conferences and sit on legislative councils, who are rulers of states, or earn more princely incomes in courts of law, we ourselves have despised and hated everything Indian, and it is by that hatred that we have destroyed our industries and degraded the status of our artisans. And when at last our pockets were touched—then so far from realizing what we had done, we set ourselves to form Swadeshi companies for making enamelled cufflinks (with pansies on them), for dyeing yarn (with German dyes), or making uncomfortable furniture (for Anglo-Indians). We never thought that the fault was in ourselves. We lived in caricatured English villas, and studied the last fashion in collars and ties and sat on the verandahs of Collectors bungalows and strove to preserve our respectability by listening to gramophone records of the London music halls instead of living Indian singers—we learned to sit on chairs and eat with spoons and to adorn our walls with German oleographs and our floors with Brussels carpets: and then we thought to save our souls by taking shares in some Swadeshi company for making soap.
True Swadeshi is none of these things: it is a way of looking at life. It is essentially sincerity. Seek this first, learn once more the art of living, and you will find that our ancient civilization, industrial no less than spiritual, will re-arise from the ashes of our vulgarity and parasitism of today. …
Yet so far as I am aware it has never occurred to any Swadeshi politician to demand from Government that in public buildings Indian architecture should be the rule, and Indian architects employed so that the State should again patronize and foster Indian artistic industries. Nearly everywhere in India there are still living hereditary and most capable working architects … like other craftsmen they are being starved by neglect and forced to adopt menial or agricultural work for a bare living. …
I should like to say in passing, that in speaking thus I do not mean in any way to disparage things European, as such. Nothing is further from my thoughts than that absurd notion which is expressed in the not uncommon saying, “that our ancestors were civilized when Europeans were ‘dressed’ in woad.” As a matter of fact early Keltic and Teutonic Europe was much more civilized in some respects than we are today—at least it cared more for creative and imaginative art. What I do wish to point out is that our imitations, whether in Swadeshi factories or in our lives, of things European are and must always be for ourselves socially and industrially disintegrating. …
Nor do I mean that we should never assimilate or adopt any foreign idea or custom. On the contrary I believe that even in such things as music and the plastic arts, and still more in sociology we have some things to learn from others, as well as to recover from our own past. …
What is necessary is that we should let the real love of our country allow us to realize that Her gifts are (with the rarest exceptions) really and intrinsically better than those which we can import—that our dyes, our handmade gold thread, our designs, our ways of dressing and building, our jewellery, our carpets and all that goes to make the daily environment of our lives—are better than the things we import from Europe—more beautiful, more enduring, more vital in response and more a part of our real life. Then it will not be so difficult perhaps to spend a little more in the first instance on such things. But all this is not a matter of political platforms, it is simply and solely a matter of National Education, the sort of education that will help us some day to prefer a living singer to what an Indian friend of mine has very aptly called “the voice of the living dead.” Then we shall be saved not only the expense of importing gramophones, but all the bother of trying to make them in local factories, with indifferent success. This is the parable of all the other Industrial Arts.
[From Coomaraswamy, “Swadeshi: True and False,” from a speech in Allahabad, 1910, reprinted in Art and Swadeshi, 2nd ed. (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1994), 7–9, 12, 13, 16–17.]
Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951), a nephew of Rabindranath, was a protegé and ally of E. B. Havell; he was also the principal artist of the Bengal School, and the first major exponent of swadeshi art. After early training in the techniques of Western painting at the Government School of Art, Abanindranath veered away from the Western aesthetic, believing it to be too “materialistic.” Like many others in his day, he critiqued what he perceived as the crudely realistic fleshly beauties of Ravi Varma’s painting; his own early attempts to recover an Indian painting style commenced by experimenting with depictions of Radha and Krishna, who became, in his hands, thin and ethereal—fit for the conveying of a spiritual mood. Under Havell’s influence Abanindranath discovered Mughal paintings, which amazed him for their fine detail, and he began to paint in a style reminiscent of Mughal miniatures. Havell and he agreed that Indian art needed to be revitalized from within as a means of countering the European colonial models, and together they formed a “national” art movement in Bengal that encouraged artists to develop homegrown or locally inspired styles. In this search for authenticity, Abanindranath joined with pan-Asianists like the Japanese artist Okakura (1862–1913), a group of artists who mutually influenced one another and thought of their art as “Oriental” or “Asian” rather than as tied to their own particular country. In his later work, Abanindranath incorporated elements of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy into his Mughal-inspired paintings of epic stories, deities, and nationalist heroes. It was in this “Oriental,” swadeshi period that he produced one of his most famous pieces—a depiction of Bhārat Mātā, or Mother India, who is nonmartial, slender, dreamlike, and conveyed in pale colors.
Eventually, by the 1920s, the Mughal style failed to satisfy Abanindranath, for he found the form ineffective for the expression of feeling, or emotion. He turned away from nationalist swadeshi art to the folk art of Bengal, to his own private world of images.
Abanindranath’s essay “Notes on Indian Artistic Anatomy” makes two important points that reflect his long-standing commitments first to artistic creativity and license, and second to the recovery and use of an indigenous style. While conversant with and influenced by the directives on image production in the traditional Sanskrit art treatises (shilpa shāstras), Abanindranath felt that the true artist should be led, not bound, by their prescriptions. Homogeneity, whether in the service of the country or otherwise, is harmful.
Art is not for the justification of the Shilpa Shastra, but the Shastra is for the elucidation of Art. It is the concrete form which is evolved first, and then come its analyses and its commentaries, its standards and its proportions—codified in the form of Shastras. The constraints of childhood are meant to keep us from going astray before we have learnt to walk, to give us the chance of learning to stand upright; and not to keep us cramped and helpless for ever within the narrowness of limitations. He who realizes Dharma (the Law of Righteousness) attains freedom, but the seeker after Dharma has at first to feel the grappling bonds of scriptures and religious laws. Even so, the novice in Art submits to the constraints of shastric injunctions, while the master finds himself emancipated from the tyranny of standards, proportions and measures, of light, shade, pers pective, and anatomy. …
When the inexperienced pilgrim goes to the temple of Jagannath, he has to submit to be led on step by step by his guide, who directs him at every turn to the right or to the left, up and down, till the path becomes familiar to him, and the guide ceases to be a necessity. And when at last the deity chooses to reveal himself, all else cease to exist for the devotee—temples and shrines, eastern and western gates and doorways, their symbols and their decorations, up and down, sacerdotal guidance and the mathematical preciseness of all calculating steps. The river strikes down its banks to build anew, and a similar impulse leads the artist to break down the bonds of shastric authority. Let us not imagine that our art-preceptors were in any way blind to this or that they were slow to appreciate the fact that an art hampered on all sides by the rigid bonds of shastric requisitions would never weigh anchor and set sail for those realms of joy which are the final goal of all art.
If we approach our sacred art-treatises in the spirit of scholarly criticism, we find them bristling all over with unyielding restrictions, and we are only too apt to overlook the abundant, though less obvious, relaxations which our sages have provided for, in order to safeguard the continuity and perpetuation of our art. “Sevaya-sevaka-bhabeshu pratima-lakshanam smritam.” Images should conform to prescribed type when they are to be contemplated in the spirit of worship. Does that not imply that the artist is to adhere to shastric formulae only when producing images intended for worship and that he is free, in all other cases, to follow his own art instinct? …
A perfectly built figure, faultless in its details, is one of the rarest things in the world; and in spite of general resemblances of features and form, between man and man, it is impossible to take any particular figure as a standard of ideal for all. Features like hands, feet, eyes or ears, are given to all men in pairs, and, roughly speaking, these are structurally the same in one man as in another. But, our intimate acquaintance with the human race, and our habit of paying close attention to the details of a man’s features, make us so acutely conscious of minute differences of physiognomy that the choice of the aesthetically ideal figure becomes a matter of serious difficulty for the artist. But in the case of the lower animals and plant organisms, the resemblances are apparently much closer and there seems to be a certain well defined fixity of form in the different specimens of the same object. Thus, there is apparently not much difference in form between, say, two birds or animals of the same species or between two leaves or flowers of the same variety of trees. The eggs laid by one hen have the same smoothness and regularity of contour as the eggs of any other hen, and any leaf taken from one peepul (ficus religiosa) tree has the same triangular form and pointed tip that we find on any other. It is for this reason, probably, that our great teachers have described the shapes of human limbs and organs not by comparison with those of other men but always in terms of flowers or birds or some other plant or animal features.
[Abanindranath then goes on to explain—with line illustrations—the scriptural conventions for the depiction of ideal human body parts: the face is rounded like an egg or a betel leaf; the forehead like a drawn bow; the eyebrows like neem leaves, the ear like a vulture; the nose like a parrot’s beak; the lips like bimba fruit; the chin like a mango-stone; the lines of the neck like those of a conch shell; the trunk like the head of a cow; the midriff like a lion’s body; the shoulders like an elephant’s head; the forearms and the thighs like plantain trunks; and the fingers like beans. The description of the eyes comes right after that of the ears.]
THE EYES have been described as “fish-shaped.” But the similes used to describe the eyes are as endless as the range of emotions and thought that can be expressed through them. If we are to confine our similes to the safari fish, we have to ignore the round eyes, the wide open eyes, and a host of other varieties of eyes. Fresh additions have therefore constantly been made to our stock of similes. Thus the eyes have been compared among other things to the khanjana, the common wagtail, a small bird with a lively dancing gait; the eyes of the deer; the water-lily; the lotus leaf; and the little safari. Of these the first two are used chiefly in painted figures of women, while the other three are to be seen in the stone or metal images of gods as well as goddesses. … The eyes of women are by their very nature restless; but it must not be supposed that it is this characteristic alone that our art preceptors have tried to convey in choosing three such restless animals as the deer, the khanjana, and the safari for their similes. The forms and expressions peculiar to different types of eyes are very well suggested by these similes. …
[In sum,] the following are the general advices given by our Acharyas. … Where it is intended that the images should be approached in the spirit of a devotee before his deity, or of a servant before his master, the image must be made to adhere scrupulously to the forms and character prescribed by the shastras. All other images, which are not meant for worship, are to be made according to the artist’s own individual preferences. … Images that are drawn or painted, or made of sand, clay or plaster—it is no offence if such images fail to conform to the prescribed types. For these are intended only for temporary use and are usually thrown away, afterwards, and as they are generally made by the women themselves for worship, or recreation, or for the amusement of the children, it would be too much to expect that they would adhere strictly to the conventions demanded by the shastras. So our texts here definitely conceded absolute liberty to the artists in the cases considered above.
[From A. Tagore, “Some Notes on Indian Artistic Anatomy,” translated from the original Bengali of 1913 by Sukumar Ray (Calcutta: Indian Society of Oriental Art, 1914), 2–3, 7–8, 15–16.]
Although Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) properly belongs to the period covered by chapters 6 and 7, we include her here because in a sense she closes the chapter in Indian art history that began with swadeshi art and its patronage by the Bengal School. The first professional woman artist in India, she is remembered today as much for her outlandish lifestyle choices, sexual partners, vital personality, and mysterious death as for her painting. The daughter of a Hungarian-Jewish musician and a Sikh nobleman, she spent her early years in Budapest and Paris, in training at the École des Beaux-Arts, where she was influenced by European modernism, and moved to India only in 1934, at the age of twenty-one. Initially influenced by Mughal miniatures and Ajanta cave paintings, she evinces in her mature style an instinctive empathy for women, a melancholic idealization of the poor, and a rejection of lofty, romanticized artistic nationalism in favor of depictions of poverty and despair.
Sher-Gil speaks about herself and the evolution of her art in the following undated essay.
Evolution of My Art
It seems to me that I never began painting, that I have always painted. And I have always had, with a strange certitude, the conviction that I was meant to be a painter and nothing else. Although I studied, I have never been taught painting in the actual sense of the word, because I possess in my psychological make-up a peculiarity that resents any outside interference. I have always, in everything, wanted to find out things for myself.
With this tendency it is rather fortunate that in 1929 when our parents decided to take my sister and myself to Paris for the study of music and painting respectively, the great French professor Lucien Simon took a fancy to my work and admitted me to his studio at the École des Beaux Arts. Before leaving for Europe I had worked entirely from imagination, and, although I went through an academic phase in Paris, I had never imitated nature servilely; and now I am deviating more and more from naturalism towards the evolving of new, and “significant” forms, corresponding to my individual conception of the essence of the inner meaning of my subject.
Lucien Simon never “taught.” He made us think for ourselves and solve technical and pictorial problems ourselves, merely encouraging each of those pupils whose work interested him, in his or her own individual forms of self-expression.
I worked for some time at the École des Beaux Arts and got prizes at the annual portrait and still life competitions for three consecutive years. My work in those days was absolutely Western in conception and execution except for the fact that it was never entirely tame or conventional.
I had not in those days learnt that simplicity is the essence of perfection. One sees with such exuberance, so uncritically, when one is very young that one is liable to sacrifice the artistic whole to unessential details, if it happens to be pleasing to the eye. One lacks the faculty of discrimination, so essential to the production of the true art.
Towards the end of 1933 I began to be haunted by an intense longing to return to India, feeling in some strange inexplicable way that there lay my destiny as a painter. We returned at the end of 1934. My professor had often said that, judging by the richness of my colouring, I was not really in my element in the grey studios of the West, that my artistic personality would find its true atmosphere in the colour and light of the East. He was right, but my impression was so different from the one I had expected, and so profound that it lasts to this day.
It was the vision of a winter in India—desolate, yet strangely beautiful—of endless tracks of luminous yellow-grey land, of dark-bodied, sad-faced, incredibly thin men and women who move silently looking almost like silhouettes and over which an indefinable melancholy reigns. It was different from the India, voluptuous, colourful … superficial, the India … [of] … the tempting travel posters that I had expected to see.
Before leaving for Europe as a very young girl I had been so wholly an introvert that I had never really seen or observed anything round or outside me. I worked entirely from imagination in those days, and living on pictures instead of reality I conceived India through the medium of those unutterably mediocre specimens of fifth-rate Western art that still abound in the local exhibitions. … And I “regret” to say that, not satisfied with the production ad infinitum of this type of painting by the Europeans here, it is perpetuated, in blissful ignorance as to its artistic demerits, by a number of Indian artists! … I call this tourist painting … being absolutely superficial, both pictorially and psychologically … where there is no room for artistic conception, penetration or insight.
Those so called paintings that depict an India where the sun shines with an inevitability only equaled by the mediocrity of the conception and execution of that sunlight as it plays on flesh tints of standardized grey-browns and gives opportunity to the ambitious artists to exploit the possibilities of orange reflected lights and blue “half lights” (cheap tricks of the trade that have to be learnt but must be forgotten before one can even think of producing true works of art). Those serene or sun-flooded landscapes, consciously naturalistic, with authentically Indian ruins in the “middle distance” serve as trade marks, conclusive, irrefutable proofs as to the genuineness of the article (manufactured in India), but not one brush stroke of which conveys India really. … Those portraits of beggars, of the miserable, the proof of India, viewed as objects of topographical interest without an atom of either artistic or human understanding.
My violent reaction to both the pictorial and psychological conventions of this type of painting and my own mode of pictorial expression will be understood, to some extent, when viewed in the light of my first impression of India, as opposed to the pictures I had mentally made of it, thanks to the above mentioned forms.
I am an individualist, evolving a new technique, which, though not necessarily Indian in the traditional sense of the word, will yet be fundamentally Indian in spirit. With the eternal significance of form and colour I interpret India and, principally, the life of the Indian poor, on the plane that transcends the plane of mere sentimental interest.
[From Amrita Sher-Gil: Essays by Vivan Sundaram and Others (Bombay: Marg, 1972), 139–140.]