Time is denuded of its progressional ballast: it goes haywire.
-- J. Swaminathan, “Time: The Wings of Art,” 1987 [1]
The modern artist, writer and institution-builder Jagdish Swaminathan’s vision lay in reinterpreting the trajectories of Indian art history and art practices through a fresh lens. He departed from concepts of linear chronology and historical progress that were dominant in Western philosophy and aesthetic theory, harnessed on the belief that art “vanquishes time”. [2] Known for reviving folk and Adivasi traditions, Swaminathan’s contributions helped carve a new identity and space for the indigenous within the landscape of contemporary Indian art.
In June 2024, New Delhi’s Dhoomimal Gallery paid tribute to this multifaceted figure on his 96th birth anniversary with the launch of the publication, The Era of Jagdish Swaminathan. The book brings together Prayag Shukla and Shruti Lakhanpal Tandon’s comprehensive collection of the artist’s writings, poetry and art, spanning from the 1960s to the 1990s. The occasion saw a gathering of the Swaminathan’s close associates, who revisited his eccentric personality, his love for nature, and his commitment to the evolution of modern art in the country.
Following a political career with the Congress Socialist and Communist Parties in the 1940s, Swaminathan joined the Delhi Polytechnic and returned to his childhood love for painting under the guidance of Sailoz Mukherjea. Following this, he also entered the art scene as a critic in the late 1950s. [3] Swaminathan’s understanding of indigenism was influenced by Mexican poet Octavio Paz, who he later introduced to an artist collective he founded in 1962, called Group 1890, which stood firmly against the dominant Western trends. [4] However, in his pursuit of indigenism, there were instances where he unconsciously adopted primitive tropes. In a 1969 piece titled “The Cost of Progress”, he referred to “backward communities” as “children of nature” with “childlike joy”, thus falling into the colonial trap of infantilizing their position in human civilization. [5]
In 1968, Swaminathan received a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship to study “traditional numen” within the pastoral and tribal communities of Kinnaur, Bastar and Kutch, and explore their potential to be reinterpreted as and/or converted into “contemporary art”. [6] This research would eventually lead him to create the unique model of Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, which held a diverse collection of Indian modern and folk art under the same roof. From this period onwards, he furthered his ‘egalitarian’ outlook by discovering more talents from the folk communities of north and central India and introducing them to art camps and gallery spaces, his brightest find being the young artist Jangarh Singh Shyam. Despite finding a new language and audience for his art, Shyam lost his ‘authenticity’ and Pardhan-Gond identity to modern pigments and materials, and had to cater to imageries and representations distant from his culture. [7]
Thirty years after his passing, Swaminathan’s ideas and oeuvre continue to stand for a fruitful convergence of diverse cultural insights that help understand nature and the complexities of human existence. But beyond this celebration, we are also led to wonder about the extent to which his interventions shaped the lives of those practising and deriving their identity from ‘folk art’ in India. Even as it provided some interesting anecdotes and new insights, the event and book launch at Dhoomimal seems to forget his Tamil ancestry, access to cultural capital, and training in Western education and philosophies that allowed him to enter and promote subaltern lives from a privileged position. A fresh reading of Swaminathan’s legacy must move beyond a mere praiseworthy reading of his efforts to critically consider the impact of his work and assess to what extent he changed a world which still rests on binaries and hierarchies between modern, contemporary and folk art.
Notes
[1] In The Perceiving Fingers, Catalogue of Roopankar Museum of Folk and Adivasi Art from Madhya Pradesh (Bhopal: Bharat Bhavan, 1987), 28.
[2] Katherine Hacker, “‘A Simultaneous Validity of Co-Existing Cultures’: J. Swaminathan, The Bharat Bhavan, and Contemporaneity,” Archives of Asian Art 64, no. 2 (2014): 203.
[3] S. Kalidas, “Transit of a Wholetimer,” in Transits of a Wholetimer -- J. Swaminathan: Years 1950-69 (New Delhi: Gallery Espace, 2012), 12 and 16.
[4] Sandip K. Luis, “Between Anthropology and History: The Entangled Lives of Jangarh Singh Shyam and Jagdish Swaminathan,” in Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia: Decoding Visual Worlds, edited by Sasanka Perera and Dev Nath Pathak (Springer, 2019), 143, 146, 149 and 158.
[5] J. Swaminathan, “The Cost of Progress,” in Transits of a Wholetimer, 2012, 110.
[6] Luis, “Between Anthropology and History,” 2019.
[7] Ibid.