The recently concluded
Sailoz Mookherjea exhibition in New Delhi threw up several questions. The show,
“Revisiting Sailoz Mookherjea”, organised by Mohit Jain, owner-director of
Dhoomimal Art Centre, hoped there would be more than some octogenarians to see
it, including the few surviving students of the artist who passed away in 1960.
Yes, there were many young and middle-aged visitors who knew nothing about
Sailoz but went away amply rewarded.
The exhibition had
works from the last decade of his life, including pen and ink drawings for the
Delhi edition of The Statesman depicting certain aspects of daily life
in the city and to celebrate the man-in-the-street. Activities on the steps of
Jama Masjid, old Delhi, sugarcane juice vendors at work, labourers tarring the
road in Connaught Circus; these drawings put him in the swim of things, making
him a socially engaged artist.
Sailoz’s work was
about the everyday aspects of the rural India of his times as well as urban
Delhi where he came to settle before the end of World War II. His work,
“realistic” in the beginning, gradually moved towards a more abstract version
of reality and culminated in a rage of brush-strokes and scratches towards the
end of his life.
His work was
recognisably Indian in character and international in spirit and in his
lifetime he was hugely popular. Thanks to air travel and new routes over land
and sea, people could travel and acquaint themselves with cultures and
civilisations other than their own. Sailoz, who went to Europe in the early
1930s was the first Indian artist to benefit from the exposure to European art
and culture. His work, though, was accessible only to the educated urban middle
and upper classes, as art and the finer things in life were (unjustly) their
exclusive privilege.
Art in Delhi of the
1950s was the preserve of the diplomatic corps posted in the city. There were
not many Indian lovers of contemporary art with deep enough pockets to
appreciate and buy works by modern artists. Sailoz became a great favourite of
diplomats, particularly from France, England and the United States, who saw
something distinctly Indian, in addition to a modernist sensibility, at work.
Dhoomimal Dharamdas had the only art gallery in Delhi, in Connaught Place, the
cultural hub of the capital of a newly independent India.
In Sailoz’s time, the
art school—it was called Delhi Polytechnic—was a new phenomenon. Starry-eyed
art students were seeking formal instruction in the vague hope of creating
beauty, being appreciated for their efforts and possibly earning a living
whether by selling these works, or from teaching; the latter being a remote
possibility as teaching jobs in art schools, or even in the art departments of
just plain schools, were scarce and badly paid.
The government,
following the example of other foreign counterparts, commissioned sculptures
and murals dealing with the freedom struggle, for example, the group sculpture
behind Rashtrapati Bhavan done in the “British” naturalistic mode with
considerable skill by Debi Prasad Roy Choudhury. Its location—unusual for a
public art work—has not attracted the gaze of too many people over the years.
In contrast, the
massive twin sculptures by Ramkinkar Baij of the Yaksha and Yakshi outside the
Reserve Bank of India on Parliament Street, New Delhi are seen, mostly in
passing, by thousands of people, and possibly appreciated by a few. Ramkinkar
was the first dynamic, modern sculptor to work on public commissions with
notable artistic success in India—he was, however, not happy with the
Yaksha-Yakshi sculptures, which he thought needed a bit more work before
installation. He couldn’t have his way, though, as both time and money had run
out as had the patience of the generous government led by Jawaharlal Nehru.
Ramkinkar was more than
equal to the task of creating large, even monumental public sculptures. “Mill
Call”, for example, in Shantiniketan, where he worked in the art department at
Kala Bhawan, is a huge masterpiece of a Santhal family, on hearing the early
morning siren, going to work in a (rice) mill, possibly located nearby. Made
with cement and stone chips, its poetic intensity has been admired by many over
the years.
The depth of emotion
in “Mill Call” displayed in a public space in the campus of Vishwabharati
University in Shantiniketan, is matched by another sculpture, “Santhal Family”,
also displayed in an open space in Vishwabharati. Ramkinkar did a tall,
controversial sculpture of Mahatma Gandhi in Guwahati, Assam, in which he is
seen as stepping on human skulls. It is displayed in a public garden in the
city. What response it evokes in viewers has not been properly analysed over
the years, though individual responses range from outrage to mirth.
Binode Behari
Mukherjee, also from Kala Bhavan, Shantiniketan and a master like his colleague
Ramkinkar did two frescoes that immortalised him. The first was on the lives of
medieval saints from the Bhakti period on the northern wall of Hindi Bhavan on
the campus and the second in Cheena Bhavan. Binode Behari was a man of wide
reading, and an exquisite artistic sensibility, capable of absorbing such
diverse influences as Giotto (Italian) to Tawarya, Sotatsu (Japanese), the
frescoes of Ajanta, the sculptures of Mamallapuram (both ancient), Mughal and
Rajput miniature painting as well as cubist techniques (multi perspective and
faceting of planes) from early 20th century France.
It is difficult to
assess the impact of his “public art” on lay viewers although it continues to
hold the cognoscenti in sway. The condition of his frescoes in Shantiniketan,
to put it mildly, is not good. What the Vishwabharati University administration
is doing to address the issue is anyone’s guess. The government of India ought
to treat the Binod Behari frescoes, indeed all his work, as a national
treasure, in practice not just theory.
Art appreciation in India is the exclusive preserve of the well-heeled, educated upper class, hence upper castes. In a country where economic disparity is so large between the privileged minority and the overwhelming majority struggling to survive, it is a luxury even to think of art, leave alone practise it.
Art appreciation in
India is the exclusive preserve of the well-heeled, educated upper class, hence
upper castes. In a country where economic disparity is so large between the
privileged minority and the overwhelming majority struggling to survive, it is
a luxury even to think of art, leave alone practise it. Ironically, India’s
most successful contemporary artist Maqbool Fida Husain came from a humble
background and struggled long and hard in the years of apprenticeship painting
large cinema banners well into middle-age when he finally got noticed and fame
and fortune came and stayed till he died at 94, in 2010, in exile.
His contemporaries
S.H. Raza, V.S. Gaitonde, Francis Newton Souza who also sold at very high
prices in the international market, came from the middle-class. Therein lay the
advantage of upward mobility, though Souza, and more so Gaitonde, were wary of
being lionised; Souza with a fine sense of irony—he made and lost a lot of
money, and Gaitonde, distrustful of accolades by the glitterati with fat bank
accounts. He died in obscurity in 2001. Now his paintings sell for millions
abroad.
To come back to the
original question what purpose or to be more accurate, public purpose did their
art serve? A precise answer would be
that a microscopic number of Indians have seen their work or got any pleasure
out of it, despite their obvious interest. Art in India is a luxury. Sometimes,
however, it can have enormous public influence.
At the turn of the 20th century and into the first two decades a prince from the kingdom of Travancore revealed a talent for drawing and painting in the prevalent style of European academic painting; his name was Ravi Varma. He painted for his own pleasure and did coloured oleographs with the printing press he had bought for the purpose. He became, willy-nilly, the father of “calendar art” in India. He printed figures from Hindu mythology which were reproduced in the thousands, and eventually lakhs of calendars that hung in (Hindu) households all over India. It has shaped the way we see our deities to a degree that we probably don’t realise.
The notions of God,
nationhood and, subliminally, selfhood, were born in British India in the 20th
century and may well have inspired “upholders” of the faith—which at that point
was nebulous—into thinking of India as the land of the faithful—of a people
wedded to a peculiar kind of Hinduism (itself a term coined by the British) hostile
to the practitioners of all other faiths, especially Islam.
Ravi Varma’s imagery
of Hindu mythology and its important figures was turned on its head as other
printing presses became available to do coloured calendars on a large scale.
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, iconic figure of the militant Hindu Right, is said to
have rallied the Maharashtrian Brahmins in particular, to slowly but surely
paralyse the Muslim” enemy who had “occupied” India nearly a thousand years
ago. He was aided and abetted by the Hindu bania businessman, and the
Rajput warrior class that had a long standing grievance against the erstwhile
Muslim rulers of India.
The visual stimulus was provided by a clever reworking of Ravi Varma’s image base to give a decidedly communal slant, including calendars of Rana Pratap and his legendary horse Chetak, symbols of vaour and defiance against Mughal tyranny. There were also calendars depicting the Prithviraj (Chauhan) and Samyukta romance, and others that hailed his heroic fight against the invader Mohammad Ghori.
The visual stimulus
was provided by a clever reworking of Ravi Varma’s image base to give a
decidedly communal slant, including calendars of Rana Pratap and his legendary
horse Chetak, symbols of vaour and defiance against Mughal tyranny. There were
also calendars depicting the Prithviraj (Chauhan) and Samyukta romance, and
others that hailed his heroic fight against the invader Mohammad Ghori. Of
course, it is conveniently forgotten that their dalliance aroused the ire of
Jaichand, Prithviraj’s father-in-law, who sought the help of Mohammad Ghori to
fix the man who had eloped with his daughter. A political move against an adversary
was cleverly turned into another occasion to rouse nativist passions.
Indeed, Jaichand is
today regarded as a traitor rather than the ruler of an independent state with
a legitimate grievance. The public impact of such art is hard to quantify but the
purpose is clear. Today’s “Us” and “Them” politics was probably helped along by
images such as these on the walls of almost every middle-class Hindu household
in northern and western India in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. They continue to
serve that function even in 2018.
Another, more secular
kind of calendar that was influential from the 1930s to the early 1980s came
with images of Bhagat Singh, Raj Guru, Sukhdev, and Chandra Shekhar Azad, all
of whom died a martyr’s death in a vastly unequal armed struggle against the
British. There were variations on this theme that had Subhas Chandra Bose,
founder of the Indian National Army, after resigning from the presidency of the
Indian National Congress over irreconcilable differences with Gandhi, the
ruling deity, along with Bhagat Singh and his contemporaries. Bose’s “Dilli
Chalo” image also appeared by itself in calendars. Then there were calendars of
Gandhi, Nehru, Bose and, as a variation, Maulana Azad. But it is difficult to
remember an image of the Dalit icon B.R. Ambedkar, either with other important
Congress leaders or by himself. Politics in India was controlled then as now,
by the upper castes who enjoyed the fruits of power that grew out of it.
In the early 1950s
Shilpi Chakra, a group of artists led by Bhabesh Sanyal in Delhi, came out with
a novel idea to popularise art among the educated middle-class. They sold
paintings at affordable prices, and had a scheme for selling by instalment,
even one for hiring paintings by the month. The idea petered out after a while.
Unlike now, when the privileged classes have money to spare, there was not that
much available to the middle-class. The rich mostly regarded art as an idler’s
pastime.
It was with the coming
of foreign art houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s, and the penchant of the
non-resident of considerable means for contemporary Indian art that interest
has been awakened, and how! Indian art auctions, particularly those conducted
by Neville Tuli, an England–born Indian were hugely successful, and for the
first time, fetched really high prices. Other auction houses proliferated and
did well for a decade or more till the financial recession. Then there was a
slump.
Did public awareness
about art increase through these events? No, not particularly. The Internet
was/is used aggressively to promote a particular artist or group of artists
representing a common commercial interest. The “common man” represented by the
relatively educated lower middle-class hardly gets a chance in the small towns
or in cities other than metropolises like Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai and
Bangalore.
There are exceptions,
however. Ashok Bajpai, IAS officer, well-known Hindi writer and poet did
something unprecedented while serving in Madhya Pradesh. He set up Bharat
Bhavan in Bhopal, a unique institution, in his capacity as director of the Raza
Foundation, with the corpus left by S.H. Raza (who got fame and fortune in old
age).
In collaboration with
the painter J. Swaminathan he set up the Tribal Arts Museum, which inspired local
artists to paint, sculpt and draw. It also led to the discovery of Jangarh
Singh Shyam, a gifted tribal artist who killed himself in Japan when still in
his thirties.
Bharat Bhavan, apart
from helping young talent from Madhya Pradesh in the visual arts also served as
a cultural hub in northern India. Hindustan musicians like Kumar Gandharva,
Mallikarjun Mansoor and many others came to sing here, as did the Gundecha
brothers, exponents of Dhrupad. Theatre personalities like B.V. Karanth and
Habib Tanvir and writers from all over India came over to read from their work.
In short Bharat Bhavan helped to inspire and educate not just visual artists
but practitioners of the other arts as well. Need one add it became popular
with local population, which was exposed for the first time to the arts.
Tourists flock to
Badami, Aihole, Hampi and Pattadakkal in Karnataka to see the remains of
monuments with figures from the Hindu pantheon along with the royal patrons who
commissioned sculptors to find a via-media between Heaven and Earth with their
mastery of craft and magnificent yet self-effacing heart. Who were these
artists? To which caste did they belong? Were they allowed on completion of
their task to see their achievements and access their true quality? There is no
telling, but one fact is unassailable. It was the Brahmin-Kshatriya-Vaishya
nexus that held the reins of economic power and the lower orders were their
slaves, to be exploited and shunned at the same time. Has the situation changed
all that much in 21st century?
The Constitution
guarantees equal rights to all citizens, regardless of caste or religion but it
is violated every day, with Muslims and Dalits the favourite targets. What
about art, then? M.F. Husain and S.H Raza found fame and fortune in independent
India, so how can be it be assumed that Muslims artists have been discriminated
against?
Husain’s persecution
on specious charges led to his exile from India. His paintings of Hindu deities
in the nude inspired religious extremists to slap hundreds of cases in courts
across the country, on the ground of hurt sentiment. The Supreme Court rejected
all the cases in a landmark judgement in 2008 but the government failed to
stand by him. He was still forced to leave the country and die an exile. Did
they succeed in destroying him? Of course not! He became much more successful
abroad.
Raza never was a
figurative painter like Husain. He took the path of abstraction upon
discovering a richly illustrated manuscript of Jain cosmology in Paris,
courtesy (the late) Ravi Jain. Raza’s discovery of what he called the ‘Bindu’
and subsequent progress from there led to huge commercial success in the
international market. The buyers were probably very rich NRIs, subliminally
influenced by the trends in abstraction in western art that began with the
Russian master Kazimir Malevich a century ago.
Success came very late
in life to Raza. The old, childless widower left his money to a foundation to
encourage practitioners in all the arts. Unlike the magnetic, sexually
attractive (even in old age) Husain, Raza, looked like an amiable grandfatherly
professor.
Why should a piece
that began with Sailoz take such a circuitous route to try and explain the
nature of public appreciation of the visual arts in india and the efforts of
the state to bring it to the people? It is important to establish the social
context in which art is produced in a given country.
In medieval Europe,
and late into the 18th century, it was patronised by royalty and the
aristocracy. Considered by many to be acme of renaissance art, the Sistine
Chapel in Rome was commissioned by the Pope. Michelangelo, who did this fresco
on Biblical themes immortalised himself. But Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, a
portrait of a woman with an enigmatic smile was commissioned by her
aristocratic husband. The Church, the aristocracy and the merchant class formed
a phalanx of political power and artistic patronage in Italy and elsewhere in
Europe, from the 15th to the late 18th century, till the French revolution in
1789. That is when the nature of artistic patronage began to change in the
continent. What about India?
Patronage vested in
royalty and the landed aristocracy well into British times. The opening of
British-style art schools in late 19th century Calcutta, Bombay and later
Madras, introduced a new element, “decadent” English art. The great age of
public art in the form of temple sculpture was over by then and miniature
painting with Indian themes and motifs too was gasping for breath for lack of
patronage. European (British) style portraiture, with a smattering of interiors
and landscapes was all that was taught in the government-run art institutions.
Abanindranath Tagore of the Tagore family learnt western art in Calcutta and
also traditional Indian painting. He became principal of the Calcutta Art School
in 1905 and stayed there for the next five years. He wanted Indian artists to
learn from the past in their own tradition and integrate it into their work to
produce a new art that was vital.
Two students from the
Government Art College in Calcutta in the late 1920s, Bhabesh Sanyal and Sailoz
distinguished themselves in later life, having integrated into their own work
the best from the West and their own tradition. Abanindranath, a master in his
own right was more successful in implementing his ideas at Shantiniketan set up
by his cousin Rabindranath where the art department at Kala Bhavan under
Nandlal Bose, produced Binode Behari Muherjee (a Brahmin) and Ramkinkar (barber
community). Both were startlingly original. Ramkinkar could only have
flourished in Shantiniketan, as Rabindranath (1861-1941) a Brahmo Samajist
believed in the merit of the individual rather than in his caste or religion.
In the post-Tagore era, particularly in the late 1950s, Ramkinkar was harassed
and humiliated by the administration in Shantiniketan.
The only monumental
sculptural work he did then was the Yaksha-Yakshi duo for the RBI in Delhi,
thanks to Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi.
Creating art in and
for public spaces was an initiative of the Congress government in the 1950s
onwards. The idea was to make the lay public aware of contemporary art. How
successful this effort has been remains to be seen. The recently deceased Nagji
Patel created monumental sculptures of enduring value that grace public spaces.
The Banyan Tree at Jodhpur, and another massive sculpture, also in stone in
Udaipur, are but two examples. He created beauty in sandstone and granite in
several places. How many people have seen them, and how many with discerning
eyes have enjoyed their aesthetic pleasures is a moot point.
Art in public spaces
in Europe and America is a reality. The people, not necessarily of the middle
and upper class are far better educated and informed than their counterparts in
India. There is no deliberate attempt at mystification or indeed at depriving
an individual of his basic rights as in India because he/she may have different
(religious) beliefs or dietary habits, or skin colour.
To come back full circle, the Sailoz Mookherjea, mini exhibition in his memory, came as an eye-opener. His work, sensitive and sophisticated, was completely Indian. His commitment to the ordinary Indian was unwavering, he immortalised them in his art. But how many people have seen his work and recognised its enduring merit? Is it not because art and its appreciation in India are available only to a privileged few?
is a writer on the Arts based in Delhi.
