Markers of An Unending Odyssey (Santo Datta)

Contemporary Indian Art Scene

The qualifying word 'contemporary' hides baffling multivalence. Should it denote only those works by artists who are still working, covering the period, say, of the last two decades? Or, should we not go backwards by four more decades that made it possible for the artists of the eighties and nineties to become what they are now?

There are many points of overlaps and interfaces in between 'period styles', or 'period practices', between the 'early modernists' and later 'postmodernists'. Besides, it will be rather naïve thinking on our part if we assume that any particular 'period' can be represented by a set of homogeneous styles and art practices. Such homogeneity is non-existent. Our constant efforts to periodize the chaotic simultaneity or sequence of events during any stretch of historical time can at best provide us only with some conceptual comforts.

In fact, at any point of time, retarded forms and practices from historical past may coexist with bold, futuristic experiments of the present; survivals of old plastic traditions of one country may have points of fusion with exotic art ideologies from far away cultures. There has never been any clear cut-off point in between periods, or art movements. We have seen how continuous cross-fertilization between Indian and other cultures enriched such points of overlaps or fusion. Our art experience at points of fusion in history, where meet deep waters from far away lands, is at times spellbinding, if not a life-enhancing experience. A large part of our enjoyment of plastic arts may be derived from our discovery of such or broad areas of fusion. The main point of curating an exhibition of artists belonging to a particular period or from different periods or age groups is to stimulate and inform the art lovers' awareness of such an historical phenomenon we usually overlook.

For instance, even during the heyday of Abanindranath Tagore's Neo-Bengal School, his elder brother, Gaganendranath, created a new world with his cubistically fractured forms and fragments of geometric planes, which he imbued with such lyricism that was totally absent in the Cubism of Picasso-Braque-Gris. Gaganendranath took this radical turn to European modernity in the twenties of the last century. The news of European modernist movement then did not reach the Indian artists working in Calcutta or Bombay. Rabindranath Tagore, the Poet, could never endorse the 'revivalist' core of Abanindranath's Swadeshi art. During his frequent lecture tours of Europe, he had already been deeply stirred by European modernist movement. At the age of 68 he made a breakthrough with his untutored, therefore, unspoiled plastic vision in a series of unconventional paintings and drawings that brought about the first flush of modernity in Indian art. The exhibitions of his paintings were held in European capitals in the thirties. This was the time when Abanindranath's Neo-Bengal School had matured into a Swadeshi art movement and wielded great influence on the budding artists all over India.

In the works of early modernists of Santiniketan, Nandalal Bose, Binodebehari Mukherjee and Ramkinkar Baij, the primary tenets of modernity (progressive reduction of naturalistic details and literary load, and creatively responding to the everyday reality) were thoroughly worked out in painterly techniques. In the first two artists, we feel the pulsation of the Far Eastern art heritage in rhythm with Indian classical tradition of plastic arts. In Ramkinkar we find probing exploration of both Cubist and Expressionist pictorial idioms and techniques. Jamini Roy turned his back to his academic training and urban art experience of European modernity. He went back to the folk traditions of Bengal and Orissa.

The point of all the foregoing illustrative details is to bring home to the visitors to art galleries that 'contemporaneity' in Indian plastic arts is not an isolated stream in time. It is like a broad river, flowing and taking in streams from the past, from distant contemporary cultures, and from folk-tribal traditions. And our artists, like those in other countries, are on an unending odyssey, weathering storms and blizzards, enjoying and responding to the exotica of art experiences at their different ports of call.

In the thirties and forties, the withering away of the 'revivalist' Neo-Bengal School left in its wake a renewed and deeply informed interest in folk or vernacular art traditions, which gave a new turn to the academic skill of the new generation of artists. During the war years in the forties, some Indian artists absorbed the first shock of modernity in world art through the prints and books imported from abroad and through occasional interactions between them and some members of the allied forces passing through or posted in Calcutta and Bombay.

Such creative interactions between the artistically gifted members of the allied forces and the native artists and intellectuals were noted by Satish Gujral in his autobiography A Brush with Life, and by the modern Bengali poet Buddhadeva Basu in his memoirs Aamaader Kabitabhaban. This fortuitous cultural cross-pollination inspired small groups of Indian artists to adopt new techniques and materials, which initiated exploration of almost limitless plastic potential of the familiar and the new. In a changing socio-cultural context, the second generation of Indian modernists appeared on the scene.The European aesthetics of abstract art radically changed the perception of Indian artists who had already been creatively responding to the mystical geometry of ancient Tantric diagrams of the Yantras and their medieval symbolism. After the pioneering Haridasan and Biren De, S.H.Raza and later Viswanadhan, just to name a few, took off from this Tantra point, and worked out their highly personalized pictorial expressions, enriching the emerging 'tradition' of early moderns; G.R.Santosh gave this Neo-Tantric trend in Indian modernism his own complex geometry spelled out in terms of rich colour schemes and dramatic tonalities.

By 1960s, if not before, it became a widely shared knowledge among the early Indian modernists how Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) and the Neo-Plasticists assiduously worked out the hard-edged Cubist abstraction to its logical goal (roughly between 1911 and 1940s), “where the deadweight of objects are thrown overboard to bring out the parallel reality of pure forms” and music of colours and pure tones (Santo Datta, Gopi Gajwani: The Music of Colours, 2003). Purely non-objective painters like Gaitonde, Nasreen Mohammedi, Rajendra Dhawan, Viswanadhan, Prabhakar Kolte, Gopi Gajwani, Suhas Nimbalkar and others created a new tradition of abstract art. All of them were well versed in academic art practices and were profoundly influenced by European moderns of early twentieth century.

M.F.Husain, Gade, Gaitonde, S.H.Raza, F.N.Souza and other pioneers of the Progressive Artists Group, and later, Satish Gujral, Tyeb Mehta and Krishen Khanna, while absorbing waves of new art ideas, materials and techniques from the West, responded with their essentially Indian sensibilities to the fast changing world around them. Their contextual interpretations of classical Indian sculptural forms and memories of traditional Indian miniatures, when fused with their experience of world art and human situation of their times, gave their creativity new points of departure. A. Ramachandran went back to the nomadic tribes in Rajasthan for a fresh look at human figuration and a new concept of the 'beauty of human forms' and to re-interpret centuries-old epic-puranic myths in mural dimension. His programme is perhaps to create a twentieth-century parallel to the Ajanta murals.

The Calcutta Group of 1943, and the Calcutta Painters of 1963, co-existed in time-overlaps. All of them must have been influenced or impressed by the uninhibited use of techniques and materials, and were amazed at the unimaginable plastic potential of familiar forms.

The Calcutta Group of the early forties, with Nirode Mazumdar, Paritosh Sen, Pradosh Dasgupta and others responded to their times with paintings and sculptures that showed similar features of rejuvenation ushered in by brisk cross-fertilization between the urban and the folk-tribal, and that between India and Europe.

At an imaginatively curated group show, if a patient viewer considers only the treatment of human form, he will be struck by the wide range of variations made by different artists in different epochs. Apart from the varied use of materials and surface, characteristic of individual artists, the almost innumerable shades of 'meanings' emanating from the simplification, distortion and positioning of the forms in the pictorial space may suggest to the patient viewer as many aesthetic and socio-cultural concerns of the artists.

It is time we made it clear to the art lovers that this small essay is not a 'history of Indian art' of our times. That would necessarily include literally thousands of Indian artists and observations on their works, which would fill volumes. The names so far mentioned are simply many senior stalwarts and many more important artists of younger generations have not been mentioned. The focus is on the strange alchemy of acculturation between plastic traditions of different cultures in different epochs in rapidly changing historical situation. It is up to the art lovers to enjoy the points of fusion or interfaces of multiple plastic traditions as revealed in paintings and sculptures.

In the fifties and sixties what became a socially significant feature of Indian art scene was the heartening emergence of many women artists of international repute. In their daring experiments in different media and techniques, the women artists of India brought in a new range of sensibilities and societal concerns. Their names are now familiar to the Indian and international art audience.

The 'contemporary art scene' is always replete with the near and remote past, carrying an inarticulate load of the future. And this incontrovertibly proves that living cultures are always robust participants in the ceaseless process of acculturation between countries, cultures and historical epochs.

The Elders & Their Next Generation

The present show of recent works by senior Indian moderns may be divided into two broad categories. But then, such categorization is meaningful only in a limited way, that is, as far as it helps the common viewer enjoy the art experience from a definite perspective, and that is not the only one. It is the old line of division between the abstract and the figurative, rather hazily covering the wide cross-section of contemporary styles, techniques and artistic concerns of the participants who have left behind long decades of creativity. The division is 'hazy' because the line of demarcation will appear rather volatile if we push the dividing wedge too far between the two.

If the common sense view of figurative art is taken, that is, when the artist paints/draws or photographs recognizable objects or familiar views, then we must also underscore the fact that even the most naturalistic representation of objects in a painting or photograph is nothing but an 'abstraction' of the real object out there. The painting/snapshot of an object is the image of the object, fabricated with paint or impressions of light and shadow on a chemically sensitized paper.

This will be quite evident when the viewer considers side by side the sitting nude painted by Anupam Sud, the standing figures in Jai Zharotia's large paintings, and the elongated figuration of Ved Nayar, the curvilinear suavity of Ramananda's open forms, or the emotional pressure expressed in the distortion of forms in Arpana Caur. Again, Paritosh Sen, Satish Gujral, Haku Shah, Manjit Bawa, Laxma Goud, Badri Narayan, Lalu Prasad Shaw and Gogi Saroj Pal, for instance, are all 'figurative artists', yet they stand poles apart from each other in their aesthetic and human concerns. The shaven headed female nudes of Anupam, always painted with realistic musculature, are not more real than the men and women we see in Satish Gujral's mystifying geometry of compositions that always verge on the musical and abstract. The reality of Anupam' s women is in the artist's critique of the females' 'space' in society. They reside in a universe different from that of the rustic, voluptuous and irresistible women of Laxma Goud. When Haku Shah vertically elongates the habitués of his universe he means the enduring poetry in the life of the people. Manjit Bawa and Jai Zharotia mythologise the human forms.

Amitava Das, who has long been painting apocalyptic incarnations of Man always appearing in freezing emptiness, is rhetorical' linearity. And it is rather difficult to draw a line between the charcoal landscapes of Paramjit Singh and the muted calligraphic landscapes Rajendra Dhawan ushers us in. Ram Kumar's diluvial sweep of brush-spatula work destroys the world of object and preserves bits of it at the same time. Thus he makes his landscapes tremble on the verge of pure abstraction. Prabhakar Kolte, Gopi Gajwani and Suhas Nimbalkar seem to draw a curtain aside and invite us to look at things familiar and banal which in their paintings appear swathed in sidereal mystery. Ambadas, K.M. Adimoolam, Achutan Kudallur and Mona Rai, all abstract painters like the preceding ones, and Pulak and Usha Biswas in this show, strongly suggest that the doors of our perception must be cleansed so that we may discover the ineffable presence hidden behind the familiar forms-colours-light of this broad, busy, violent and dusty earth of ours.

Art can re-new our tired perception and enhance our life. It is not enough that we should have 'experience' of countless 'new' things. It is perhaps more important that we perceive the same thing in varying light coming from countless angles of vision.