SHOW EXPLORES HOW INDIAN ARTISTS DEPARTED FROM WESTERN STYLE OF PAINTING
The theme is Indian modernity
PAINTING FREEDOM: India’s Modernist Rebels is the largest exhibition of its kind ever held in the UK. It opened at the New Walk Museum in Leicester on September 11 and runs until November 11.
With a principal lender in Singapore, public and private collections in London, co-curators in Milan and Bristol and working entirely on Zoom during a global pandemic when the world’s borders were closed, I am amazed we ever pulled it off.
But it is the unsung heroes in the painted works of Hemendranath Mazumdar, Jamini Roy and Rabindranath Tagore (carefully pieced together by technicians, graphic designers, painters of walls, conservators, registrars and team managers) without which none of this could have been realised.
A book called Painting Freedom accompanies the show and includes leading essays by both curators, collectors and academics in the field. Many of the works have been kindly loaned by Nirmalya Kumar, who is a leader in global marketing by day and avid collector of 20th century Indian art by night. His personal curator, Caterina Corni, and myself have curated this show together. Dr Corni is a Milanese Indophile, who has worked as extensively on the artist Mazumdar, as I have on the artist Roy.
I have spent most of my career inadvertently (or quite vocally) challenging the grand narrative of Western Modernism that sits at the high temple of MoMA in New York. Having worked in big museums in major cities, one way to challenge this narrative was to speak directly to the people themselves who vote with feet and so I wondered whether the challenge might begin with gently moving the visitor from the metropolitan centres of London or Manhattan to smaller civic spaces, like Leicester.
The British in India were intent on trying to get the Indians to paint in a western style because Western style painting was believed to be the true pinnacle of great art and so, for each of our rebels, this statement became a point of entry and then departure in establishing themselves as three rebels of new kind of painting for a new India, seeking freedom from colonial rule and birthing itself in a new era of political and cultural independence.
Painting Freedom is an exhibition that explores this theme of critical importance not only for India, but also the UK and, by extension, their relationship with the making of modernity.
This exhibition charts the emergence of Indian modernism on the eastern sea board, centred in the Presidency town of Calcutta which, until 1911, had been the capital of British India since the transfer of power from the East India Company to the British Empire in 1858. The British rulers set up art schools in Calcutta, Bombay, Lahore and Delhi to teach Indians about art because, as Macaulay had echoed the sentiments of a century, ‘there is no such thing as fine art in India’.
The British believed that Indians, while clearly experts in ‘traditional design,’ were incapable of fine art as it was understood in the West and so were to be inducted into the formalities of Western style painting: a realism that used three-dimensional perspective and shading as opposed to flat forms, to deliver a realistic approach to painting. This practice was epitomised in the great hand of Mazumdar who then put his skills to the project not of western subjects but of Indian ones, not of historic painting, but of contemporary ones. His ‘wet sari’ technique became his name-sake exposing for a Victorian India – a selection of upper class Hindu women revealed via oil on canvas, affording a glimpse into a world never previously seen in public.
The show contextualises, through 100 plus works, the emergence of three giants who each charted an independent course within the context of the Orientalism of the Bengal School, the new urban modernity of the Kalighat painters and the first modernists such as Ram Kinker Baij and Somnath Hore. By the turn of the 20th century, as the freedom movement gathered pace in Calcutta, there was a frantic search for roots and identity.
Roy departed from his own academic training to return to the visual stimuli of his childhood and re-invested in his boyhood fascination with the folk decoration of a surface. This he supplanted to the modernist concerns of the two-dimensional reality of the picture plane, thus rightly claiming his place as an Urban Patua – the first Indian artist whose style was both Indian and modern.
Finally, Rabindranath Tagore who had none of the formal training of his rebel cohort, but who was a son birthed in the humanist culture castle of the Tagores at Jorasankho in North Calcutta, issued a call to all Indians for ‘individualism’ – “In the name of Indian art... we smother our souls under idiosyncrasies unearthed from buried centuries. I strongly urge our artists vehemently to deny their obligation carefully to produce something that can be labelled as Indian art according to some old world mannerism. Let them proudly refused to be herded into a pen like branded beasts as cattle not as cows.”
It is worth drawing attention to a number of works, including Mazumdar’s Wet Sari; Roy’s Blue Boy; Tagore’s Bull, on loan from the British Museum; and also My Love of my Country Is as Big as I Am (pen and ink on paper, c. 1917) by Gaganendranath Tagore (1867-1938).
The British needed the support of Indian elites to rule the vast country with limited manpower. To ingratiate themselves, some Indian elites adopted the British lifestyle. This painting satirises the colonial relations and mores of the Westernised bhadralok, or “gentlemen class”, of Calcutta. It draws from a broad range of sources, including contemporary satirical Kalighat paintings, Japanese prints, as well drawings of the English illustrator, Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898).
There are five outstanding loans from the British Museum, which were last exhibited during the 2006 Voices of Bengal season and brought in more people of south Asian extraction than any project in the British Museum’s history, even today.
If Tagore’s Nobel prize-winning Gitanjali has all the beauty of his humanist vision gifted to the world, his paintings are replete with the darkness of his inner psyche, which is in all of us and shared with some of us who will happen upon this show.
I suggest you go. It may change the way you see yourself in this world.
Dr Sona Datta is a curator, writer, broadcaster of south Asian art and a 2020 Clore Leadership Fellow. She was head of south Asian art at the Peabody Essex Museum (USA), having previously worked at the British Museum where she redefined the museum’s engagement with modern collecting. She has curated exhibitions in London, Venice, Calcutta, New Delhi and New York. Her new book Seeing India will be published by Bloomsbury in 2023.