The Calcutta Group

It was near about the time that Amrita Sher-Gil passed away (she died in 1941 at the age of 28) that a band of eight artists in Calcutta who formed a group in 1942-43, were aligned to her thinking. Similarly they summed up their view when they declared their manifesto:

"The guiding motto of our group is best expressed in the slogan ‘Art should aim to be international and interdependent’. In other words, our art cannot progress or develop if we always look back to our past glories and cling to our traditions at all costs. The vast new world of art, rich and infinitely varied created by masters of the world over beckons us…We have to study all of them deeply, develop our appreciation of them and take from them all that we could profitably synthesise with our own requirements and tradition. This is all the more necessary because our art has stood still since the eighteenth century. During the past two hundred years the world outside of India has made vast strides in art, has evolved epoch-making discoveries in forms and techniques. It is therefore absolutely necessary for us to close this hiatus by taking advantage of these developments in the Western world."

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The Calcutta Group was encouraged by a few pioneer critics like Prof Shahid Suhrawardy, Sudhindra Dutta and Bishnu Dey. The poets and writers, who were closely associated with the Group and gave their unstinted support, usually had left leanings in their political attitude. Mulk Raj Anand, who came in contact with the Group in 1944, at their first public exhibition, wrote about it thus:

"The exhibition of the Calcutta Group showed that the younger Bengalis were all highly talented, and that they were aware of crisis on Indian painting. But, as they were all individuals who had got together in a group, their work fortunately proceeded in unique directions without any subservience to the written words of a manifesto. And if they achieved only a few pictures and sculptures of great worth, they had shown tremendous courage in confronting the conservatives with a new direction for creative art."

They were, however, cautioned as far back as 1945 by the art correspondents of Amrita Bazar Patrika against the dangers of being trapped by political propagandists. Pradosh Das Gupta, referring to the Group’s exhibition in 1949, tells us that the members made innovative, progressive strides in the pursuit of understanding the basic aesthetics of form, colour, harmony, balance, etc. and creating something significant where form and context merged into one another without one being in anyway perfidious to another.

Reacting to Calcutta Group’s exhibitions, held in Bombay in 1944 and 1945, which roused great interest in Bombay artists, Rudolph Van Leyden, the art critic of the Times of India wrote:

"Bengal has exercised a very strong influence on modern Indian art ever since Abanindranath Tagore and his followers inspired the ‘Indian Renaissance’ movement some forty years ago…we welcome this exhibition of the ‘Calcutta Group’ which brings to Bombay the first specimen of modern Bengal art since Jamini Roy’s exhibition 3 years ago."

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The group worked for nearly a decade - from 1943 to 1953 - to create an avant garde movement on an all India basis. Though it was basically tradition-bound, it had a liberal attitude in respect of borrowing from alien sources to enrich itself to express in a better and fuller way as is marked in the work of some of the more prominent earlier members of the group: the lyrical landscapes in water colours by Gopal Ghose, the forceful and robust human forms imbued with emotional feeling in stone, cement and bronze by Prodosh Das Gupta, the portrayal of life by the socially conscious spirit of Paritosh Sen and the elongated figures possessing a great decorative appeal by Rathin Moitra and Pran Krishna Pal.

The artists of Calcutta Group tried to get over the nostalgic feeling of the Bengal school and inspire a new ideology creating a new synthesis between East and West, for which their forerunners - Gagenendranath, Rabindranath and Jamini Roy had already paved the way. But, as it was believed by the Group, it was only a spirit of adventure and more as a matter of individual exploration in the field without formulating any collective effort to a new systematic re-organisation that these stalwarts worked. They, however, opened the possibilities that, in fact, helped in augmenting the resurgence of a new movement, initiated by the Calcutta Group. As Pradosh Das Gupta puts it: “The time to preoccupy oneself with Gods and Goddesses was over. The artist could no longer be blind to his age and surroundings, his people and society.” But the Group members, though deeply conscious of the human values and their surroundings, were not given to relate any propagandist art. As Prodosh Das Gupta once said, “We never took a pledge to follow the path of social realism. All we want is to understand life and interpret it in terms of creative art. Indeed, we believe in humanism without any political binding or direction.”