Published in Indian Art since the early 40s- a search for identity, 1974, Artists' Handicrafts Association, Cholamandal Artists' Village, Madras.
In the history of modern Indian art the last thirty years are bound to be considered of signal importance if only for the widening and deepening of the scene. During this time the number of artists and art institutions have increased many fold; art galleries have mushroomed up in metropolitan centres; art museums have become more receptive to contemporary art objects; there has been an awakening of interest on the part of the state in matters of art and culture, even if the machinery it has set up to foster them falls short of the professed objectives; art scholars, Indian and foreign, have sought to uncover the complete spectrum of Indian art activity, and their probes have reached out from the professional to the nonprofessional without the hierarchical reserve of the previous half century, uniting painting, sculpture, handicrafts, ritual and folk arts into a continuous panorama. So today, the Indian artist does not find himself a lone juggler on a barren stage (as he thought himself to be some time ago) seeking kindred in a larger global arena; he is in the midst of a multifarious environment, crowding upon him and forcing his attention, and it is no wonder that he is trying afresh to come to terms with it. Besides this, most Indian artists are now more aware of the various bands of the global art spectrum; many of them have travelled widely or have come into contact with foreign artists visiting the country; there has been exchange of exhibitions and considerable cross-assessment of performance. However small this contact or scrappy this exposure, it has certainly led to a refinement of our artists’ attitude, disabusing them of various misconceptions they used to nourish about the arts outside their country, their value or non-value, relevance or non-relevance with reference to the local context, saving them thereby from a position of either undue adoration or ill-formed criticism.
The fifty years that preceded these thirty were loaded with the culture-conflicts latent in a colonial situation and the artists who lived through them carried this burden. It overcame some of them and sapped their confidence; others it irritated into resistive counterpostures. The situation was made more difficult by art writers who were more partisan than the artists themselves and who, whether out of ignorance or intellectual indolence, took upon themselves to classify artists, glibly, into contra-distinct camps, calling one ‘modern’ and the other ‘revivalist’ and thus distorting the perspective, for the so-called moderns did seek contemporaneity, if we go by their work, or by what the articulate among them say. Says Amrita Shergil in 1936, after seeing the Ajanta murals, “…it is because there are many possibilities in Indian art that I am literally opposed to those that have not explored these possibilities…”. Abanindranath in his Bageswari lectures (delivered between 1921 and 1929) says “…it may be true that there can be no art without its yesterdays but it is equally true that no art can survive out of contact with the present… In the history of art we observe that when a people or a group hold on to something as a traditional ideal their aesthetic experience gets impaired and art declines in quality…”
In any case the artists of modern India, of any denomination, had certain things in common; they were a new tribe, outside the old professional guilds, concerned with the creation of self-dependent works to embody their personal experience of things and their paintings were conceived as a united visual image, (a tendency that can be observed even in our later miniature traditions of the 18th and 19th century, whether of the hills or the plains). They were no more time-spread pictorial narratives with a semantic and gestural rhythm as of old, they were scenes depicting visual facts in a united image, whether or not their content was a story, or a landscape, or a group of things. This brought their art- concept near to the post-renaissance European concept with its various corollaries- exposure to nature, the refinement of the resultant impressions in the alembic of the artists’ imagination and their condensation into works of art -- , and a work was discussed on the basis of the emergent image, its originality and uniqueness, its visual correspondence; it was true, robust and articulate to the extent it had this, it was weak, sentimental or stylized to the extent it did not. Its rationale was an outgrowth of the realist aesthetic, though realism was never a force in Indian art and even in the work of the late 19th century portraitists and genre painters it was only a thin veneer. One of the reasons for this may be looked for in the fact that when this aesthetic found acceptance with Indian artists the realist scene in contemporary Europe had undergone radical change, through the impressionist and post-impressionist phases, and its artists, more widely aware of the world art spectrum in time and space, were rationalizing to themselves its contradictory specialties from within their position in the realist aesthetic. In this way they leaned out to study the various “transformations” nature underwent in art and to identify their conditional logic and under the shadow of their formulations grew various kinds of eclecticism and swapping of culture traits. The relationship of areas of Moore’s work to Mayan sculpture, Picasso’s to African art, Matisse’s to Persian painting, Klee’s to Moorish arabesque and calligraphy is too well known to deserve special mention.
The Indian art of the forties and fifties has to be studied against this background. It was self-conscious, and, although based loosely on the realist aesthetic, was eclectic, and many Indian artists, with justification or otherwise, assumed that there were basic similarities between art modes of the traditional orient and contemporary west. So they threw themselves open to similar encounters with the art of the orient, both laying store by a common international idiom. The difference, however, was that, while in the west, these cultural encounters were an incentive to radical change in the art-concept itself, in India, by and large, it resulted in reconciliations of various kinds. This was probably because the modern Indian artists, although they accepted the realist aesthetic, never assumed a stolid objective-realist position and consequently, did not have to struggle hard to break out of its confines. Probably this also accounts for the lack (or, least, the rarity) of any subsequent preoccupation on their part with problems of non-objective abstraction. They were satisfied to forge visually evocative images; their departures from reality was hardly drastic or complete; and when they used an iridescence of colour similar to that of the impressionists or theinterpenetration of planes similar to that of the cubists, or simplifications or distortions of form, or linearities or colour contrasts, their purposes and rationale were not comparable to those of their western counterparts, to whom these accrued out of an effort to de-throne the illusionistic objective-realist art-concept that had held sway over their minds for over five-centuries.
This position of the Indian artist had its own strengths as well as weaknesses. Its strengths lay in that it was not overly oppressed by the frustrations inherent in the object-illusion, art-communication axes and was not pushed by these into puristic blind alleys, and in that it has not been forced since into linguistic precocities and mono-maniac exercises as bound in the global art scene today. Its weakness lay in that, without such preoccupations, it tended to move towards stylistic quibblery, ornamentation and pastiche, especially when it drifted away from pressing environmental contact or content.
The Indian artists of the late fifties seem to have been, if only distinctly, aware of this. A large number of them, explicitly or otherwise, were unhappy with the internationalist position, if only because of its growing unsteadiness and lack of depth. The world art arena had by this time, enlarged and quickened and art had become a commodity among other commodities, subject to the same compulsions, as promotion, speculation and change in taste. On the other side, in the absence of strong religious commitments, art had become, for people, a sort of church with its various pulpits and preachers, its prophets and imposters, its hacks and medicine-men, its crypts and corners for esoteric experience and neurotic workouts. The Indian artist was not terribly enamoured of this position any longer and sought local roots.
This search has gone on through the last decade and continues till today. Understandably, this search is different for different artists. To some it is the rediscovery of an Indian ethos which they could become heirs to, within the present; to some it is involvement with the existing human situation; to others it is conformity with or extension of the physical environment; and to a large number it is a facile contact with certain archetypes of the Indian art landscape, a sort of neotradionalism, mitigated only with a larger awareness of its variety. Whatever be the shortcomings, this search is different from the one envisaged by an earlier generation of artists, in that it does not attempt a walk-back into the past; nor is it impelled by any nationalistic chauvinism. By and large it is based on the premise that all at, if it has to have depth and validity, has to be thrown up by the compulsions of the environment (whatever the nature of those compulsions may be) and it is this depth and validity that will ensure its place in the world spectrum, not superficial conformities.
Published in Indian Art since the early 40s- a search for identity, 1974, Artists' Handicrafts Association, Cholamandal Artists' Village, Madras.