The Modern Indian Art

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT Fine Arts Class XII (An Introduction to Indian Art Part II), Chapter 7.

Why does a cement sculpture of a Santhal family count as modern art?

Because of what it is not. It is not marble, not a king or a god, and not locked in a museum. In 1937 Ramkinkar Baij made a larger-than-life family out of cement and pebbles, and put it outdoors in a school compound. That choice of subject, material and place tells you what "modern" meant in India: ordinary people, new materials and art for everybody. This chapter walks through the whole century of such choices, from Shantiniketan in the 1920s to video and installation in the 1990s.

The big idea: one pull, two directions

Modern Indian art moved between two poles. Internationalism means freely using Western modern styles such as Cubism, Expressionism and Abstraction. Indigenous means turning to native art and tradition. Almost every group in this chapter is a different answer to the same question: how much of each?

Why colonial art schools provoked a response

The British saw fine arts as European and felt Indians lacked the training and sensibility to create and appreciate them. By the mid and late nineteenth century, art schools were set up in Lahore, Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. They promoted traditional crafts and an academic, naturalist art that reflected Victorian taste. Even the crafts that received support were those based on European taste and market demand. The Bengal School of Art, nurtured by Abanindranath Tagore and E. B. Havell, rose against this colonial bias.

Kala Bhavana, India's first nationalist art school, was set up in 1919 as part of the new Visva-Bharati University at Shantiniketan, conceived by Rabindranath Tagore. It carried the vision of the Bengal School but followed its own path. This was a time of intense political turmoil after World War I. Besides the Bauhaus exhibition that came to Calcutta, modern European art reached Indian artists through art magazines. So artists of the Tagore family knew of Cubism and Expressionism, which had rejected academic realism and experimented with abstraction. They held that art need not copy the world but can create its own world from forms, lines and colour patches.

Two Tagores' answers: Gaganendranath and Rabindranath

Gaganendranath Tagore used the language of Cubism to build a style of his own. His mysterious halls and rooms are made of vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines, unlike the geometrical facets of Pablo Picasso, who invented the style. His A Cubist City is dated 1925.

Rabindranath Tagore turned to visual art late in life. While writing poems, he made patterns out of doodles and developed a calligraphic style from crossed-out words. Some became human faces and landscapes. His palette was limited to black, yellow ochre, reds and browns, and his small visual world was a complete departure from the elegant, delicate Bengal School.

Shantiniketan's rural eye

Nandalal Bose joined Kala Bhavana in 1921–1922. His training under Abanindranath made him familiar with nationalism in art, yet he let students and colleagues explore new directions. Two of his most creative students took different paths.

Shantiniketan had a large Santhal population on its outskirts, whom these artists often painted and sculpted. The contrast the textbook draws is with the sculptor D. P. Roy Choudhury, who used academic realism to celebrate working-class labour in Triumph of Labour.

Jamini Roy made his art relevant to the same rural context. Trained at the Government School of Art, Calcutta, he saw the futility of academic art. He noticed that Bengal's rural folk art had much in common with how modern European masters like Picasso and Paul Klee painted. Picasso, after all, reached Cubism by learning from the bold forms of African masks. Roy used simple, pure colours, made them from vegetables and minerals like village artists, and his art could be reproduced by others in his family, like village craft practice. What separated him from village artists is that he signed his paintings. His style is personal, distinct from academic naturalism, from Ravi Varma's Indianised naturalism, and from the delicate style of some Bengal School artists.

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941), half Hungarian and half Indian, contributed immensely to modern Indian art through the 1930s. She was trained in Paris and had direct experience of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. After choosing India as her base, she developed art with Indian themes and images, assimilating miniature and mural traditions with European modernism. She died young but left a body of work remarkable for its experimental spirit.

Art and politics in the 1940s: the Calcutta Group

World War II and the Bengal famine, which forced massive rural migration to cities, made artists think about their role in society. In 1943, under sculptor Prodosh Das Gupta, young artists formed the Calcutta Group, which included Nirode Mazumdar, Paritosh Sen, Gopal Ghose and Rathin Moitra.

The group wanted an art that was universal and free of older values. They found the Bengal School too sentimental and too interested in the past, and wanted their art to speak of their own times. They simplified their visual expression by leaving out details, to stress elements, material, surface, form, colour, shade and texture. The textbook offers a comparison with the South Indian sculptor P. V. Janakiram, who worked with metal sheets in a creative way.

Seeing poverty in villages and cities, many young artists in Calcutta were drawn to socialist ideas, especially Marxism, which asks questions about class difference. Chittoprasad and Somnath Hore, the two political artists of India, found printmaking a strong medium because many copies can be made and more people reached. Chittoprasad's etchings, linocuts and lithographs showed the poor in a harsh condition. He was asked by the Communist Party of India to travel to the villages worst hit by the Bengal famine and sketch. The sketches were later published as pamphlets named Hungry Bengal, which the British authorities disliked.

Pause and predict: why would a political artist in 1943 choose printmaking over oil painting on canvas?

Check your answer: a print can be made in many copies, so it reaches many people. The textbook gives this as the reason Chittoprasad and Somnath Hore preferred etching, linocut and lithograph for their social concerns.

The Progressives of Bombay

With Independence, the desire for freedom, political as well as artistic, spread among young artists. In Bombay a set of artists formed The Progressives in 1946. Francis Newton Souza was the outspoken leader of a group that included M. F. Husain, K. H. Ara, S. A. Bakre, H. A. Gade and S. H. Raza.

Because Husain successfully combined a modern style with Indian themes, his art came to represent Indian modern art in the international art world.

Abstraction and the search for Indian identity

While Husain largely remained figurative, Raza moved towards abstraction. Later Gaitonde also pursued abstraction, while K. K. Hebbar, S. Chavda, Akbar Padamsee, Tyeb Mehta and Krishen Khanna kept moving between abstraction and the figure. Abstraction mattered for sculptors like Piloo Pochkhanawala and printmakers like Krishna Reddy, for whom material was as important as the new shapes. In South India, K. C. S. Paniker, who later established the artist village Cholamandalam near Madras, was a pioneer of abstraction. By taking motifs from Tamil and Sanskrit scripts, floor decorations and rural crafts, he showed that abstraction has a long history in India.

By the late 1970s, the tension between internationalism and the indigenous had become acute. Sculptors like Amarnath Sehgal balanced abstraction with the figure in wiry works such as Cries Unheard. Mrinalini Mukherjee leaned towards abstraction in the innovative medium of hemp fibre, as in Vanshri.

Many artists and critics worried about imitating Western modern art and felt the need for an Indian identity. In the 1960s, Biren De and G. R. Santosh in Delhi, and Paniker in Madras, turned to the past and local artistic traditions to create a unique Indian abstract art. This became known as Neo-Tantric art, because it uses geometrical designs seen in the traditional diagrams for meditation called yantras.

Two views. For the exam: Neo-Tantric art is Indianised abstraction, created when artists turned to local traditions and yantras to answer the worry about imitating the West. Another reading: the textbook also notes that these works were made at the height of the Hippie movement in the West and found a ready market with galleries and collectors, which shows that the Indian identity in them was also something a global market was looking for. Read the style as a response to both an inner search and an outer demand.

Eclecticism. Many Indian modernists freely borrowed ideas from many sources. Ram Kumar, Satish Gujral, A. Ramachandran and Meera Mukherjee are some examples.

Manifestos and Group 1890

From the time of the Bombay Progressives, artists started writing their own manifestos to explain their aims. In 1963 another group formed under J. Swaminathan, named Group 1890, with its own manifesto. The artists claimed to be free from any ideology. Instead of a set programme, they took a fresh look at the materials of painting and wrote about the importance of rough texture and surface as a new artistic language. Members included Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Jyoti Bhatt, Ambadas, Jeram Patel and the sculptors Raghav Kaneria and Himmat Shah. The movement was short-lived but influenced the next generation, especially those linked to the Cholamandalam School near Madras.

How to read the whole story

Two views. For the exam: modern Indian art took some ideas from the West but differed significantly from it. Modernism arrived when India was still a colony, and the artists made a careful selection; it was not blind imitation. Another reading: in Europe, modern art grew when academic realism was rejected and artists saw themselves as avant garde, working outside main art institutions after the Industrial Revolution made the older church and palace art lose its meaning. In India modernity and colonialism were closely tied, and cultural nationalism, with ideas like swadeshi in art, shaped what "modern" meant. Artists like F. N. Souza and J. Swaminathan, who rebelled against art institutions, identified with the Western avant garde even so.

It is also noteworthy that the subject matter of painting and sculpture was largely drawn from rural India, even for the Bombay Progressives and the Calcutta Group in the 1940s and 1950s. City life rarely appeared. Perhaps it was felt that real India lived in villages.

New figurative art and the Baroda narrative

Since the 1970s, many artists moved back to recognisable figures and stories. This may have been a way of voicing concern about social problems after the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971 and the birth of Bangladesh. In Baroda, K. G. Subramanyan, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and Bhupen Khakhar used storytelling in painting. In West Bengal, Jogen Chowdhury, Bikash Bhattacharjee and Ganesh Pyne painted the social problems that disturbed them. Like earlier generations they explored old miniature painting and popular forms like calendar and folk art to paint stories the larger public could understand.

Printmakers showed figures of people and animals: Jyoti Bhatt (Devi), Laxma Goud (Man Woman, Tree) and Anupam Sud (Of Walls), often about conflict between men and women in an unequal world. Arpita Singh, Nalini Malani and Sudhir Patwardhan turned to the plight of people in big cities, seeing the world through the eyes of the oppressed.

In the 1980s the Baroda Art School, set up in the late 1950s, showed an important change: artists became interested in their immediate surroundings and aware of their role as citizens in a democracy. They combined fact with fiction and autobiography with fantasy, and drew on other art-historical styles.

The 1981 exhibition Place for People, shown in Delhi and Bombay, had six artists: Bhupen Khakhar, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malani, Sudhir Patwardhan and Jogen Chowdhury. The art critic Geeta Kapur wrote about it, which is notable because earlier manifestos were written by artists, while here a critic explained what the artists wanted to say. Younger painters in Mumbai took a clue from Khakhar and from Baroda's celebration of popular art, using calendar images, advertisements and film hoardings, even photographic images on canvas.

New media art since the 1990s

With the liberalisation of the economy in the 1990s, globalisation was first felt in big cities. Easel painting and sculpture lost importance, and artists turned to new mediums. Video and photography (which allows many copies to reach many people at once) became attractive. Installation, which combines painting, sculpture, photography, video and even television in one space, came to be seen as the most contemporary form. Early installation artists came from big cities: Nalini Malani from Mumbai and Vivan Sundaram from Delhi.

Photography, long the rival of painting, gave rise to photorealism, used by Atul Dodiya in Bapu at the Rene Block Gallery, New York. T. V. Santosh and Shibu Natesan used photorealism to comment on communal violence and on the new look of cities. Sheba Chhachhi, Ravi Agarwal and Atul Bhalla photographed people on the margins of society and showed concern about ecology, such as river pollution and urban congestion.

Timeline

Key works, described in words

Works in detail

The Lives of Medieval Saints (Benode Behari Mukherjee, 1946–47). A mural in the Hindi Bhavana, Shantiniketan, done in fresco buono and covering about 23 metres of the upper half of three walls. It recalls the syncretic and tolerant tradition of Indian life through the teachings of Bhakti poets like Ramanuja, Kabir, Tulsidas and Surdas. Despite poor eyesight, he sketched directly on the wall without compositional sketches. Each figure is made with bare minimum lines, yet connects to its neighbour in a rhythmic network of lines, like a painted woven tapestry, which many of these saints made their livelihood from. He was one of the earliest modern Indian artists to see a mural as public art.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: fresco buono is the technique of this mural. In reality: it means true fresco, in which pigment is applied on wet lime plaster so that the colour sets into the wall as it dries. The painter cannot easily correct mistakes, which makes Mukherjee's direct, sketch-free work on a wall all the more striking. Why it matters: the answer to "which technique" is fresco buono, and the point to remember is a modern artist using an old mural technique for a public message.

Mother Teresa (M. F. Husain, 1980s). A faceless Mother appears several times, each time holding a baby, with attention to the hand. The seated central Mother has a grown man lying across her lap, which shows the artist's familiarity with European art, especially Michelangelo's Pieta. The flat shapes look like a collage of paper cutouts. He gives bare suggestions, and a kneeling woman at one side hints that the story of healing and nursing is unfolding in India.

Haldi Grinder (Amrita Sher-Gil, 1940). Indian women busy grinding dry turmeric. She uses bright, saturated pigments, and her training led her to see parallels between north Indian miniatures and the modern art of Paul Gauguin, whom she admired. Bright colour patches sit close together and shapes come from colour contrast, not outline, recalling Basohli painting. Women and trees are flat, and she prefers a semi-abstract pattern to depth.

Fairy Tales from Purvapalli (K. G. Subramanyan, 1986). Water and oil colours on an acrylic sheet. The title refers to his home in Purvapalli, Shantiniketan. His imaginary world has birds and animals rubbing shoulders with humans and trees growing feathers instead of leaves. The style is sketchy with quick brush strokes in earthy ochres, greens and browns. The figures at the top recall urban folk art like Kalighat painting of colonial Calcutta, and figures sit on top of each other rather than behind, making a flat space typical of modern art.

Whirlpool (Krishna Reddy, 1963). A print in many shades of blue, each blending into the next in a web of design. He developed the technique called viscosity printing with Stanley William Hayter at the studio Atelier 17. Different colours are applied to the same metal plate, each mixed with linseed oil in varied concentrations so they do not run into each other. The subject, a water current, fits a technique built on how water and oil behave. The print is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Children (Somnath Hore, 1958). An etching with aquatint. Hore carried the memory of the Bengal famine of 1943. Five standing figures, with no background, perspective or setting, speak among themselves. Their bodies are skeletal, with enlarged ribcage and spleen, a big skull with a small face, and stick-like legs. Strong straight lines etch every rib and cheekbone like deep wounds. The children stand for the most vulnerable.

Santhal Family (Ramkinkar Baij, 1937). A Santhal man carries his children in a double basket on a pole, and his wife and dog walk alongside, as if a family moving from one place to another with their few possessions. An everyday scene is given monumental status. It is made in the round and set on a low pedestal so that viewers feel part of the same space. It is regarded as the first public modernist sculpture in India. He avoided marble, wood or stone and used cement, the symbol of modernisation.

Triumph of Labour (D. P. Roy Choudhury, 1959). A large bronze installed on Marina Beach, Chennai, on the eve of Republic Day 1959. Four men struggle to move a rock, honouring the importance of human labour in nation building. It is the romantic nineteenth-century subject of labour against the forces of nature, with strong musculature, bones and veins. It can be viewed from all sides, and group labour on a high pedestal replaces the portraits of kings or British dignitaries.

Cries Unheard (Amarnath Sehgal, 1958). A bronze of three stick-like figures in flat rhythmic planes, easy to read as a family of husband, wife and child with arms flung up, crying for help in vain. It can be read as socialist and as homage to destitute families. The socialist writer Mulk Raj Anand wrote about it. It is in the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.

Ganesha (P. V. Janakiram, 1970). Oxidised copper sheets, beaten into concave planes with linear details welded on, which form facial features and decorative motifs. He was influenced by ancient South Indian temple sculpture, and the frontal Ganesha, playing the vina, has the character of cave and temple sculpture. It is conceived in linear silhouettes, not three-dimensionality, and mixes folk and traditional craftsmanship.

Vanshri (Mrinalini Mukherjee, 1994). Hemp fibre, a medium she began experimenting with in the early 1970s, knotted and woven into a complex shape. For many years her works were dismissed as craft; only recently have they drawn attention for originality. Vanshri, "Goddess of the Woods", turns an ordinary material into a monumental form with an inward-looking face, protruding lips and a powerful presence of natural divinity.

The prints Devi (Jyoti Bhatt), Of Walls (Anupam Sud) and Rural South Indian Man–Woman (Laxma Goud) show the printmaking tradition in the chapter. In Devi a frontal woman's face is recast with folk motifs as an iconic image, and the words and motifs around it express Tantric ideas of Shakti. In Of Walls a woman's face is hollowed out, giving a brooding sadness, as she sits on a pavement before a ruined wall while the lower part of a poor sleeping man is glimpsed in the front. Goud's etching combines ornate contours, realistic peasants and gentle stylisation that gives the figures a puppet-like touch.

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous: The Bengal School and Cultural Nationalism gives the Swadeshi and Shantiniketan background to this chapter.
• Next: The Living Art Traditions of India covers the folk and tribal sources that Jamini Roy, Subramanyan and the Baroda artists drew on.
• Earlier traditions: The Pahari Schools of Painting and The Mughal School of Miniature Painting are the miniature styles that Sher-Gil and others recalled.