CHAPTER I

A CAPSULE HISTORY OF MODERN ART IN INDIA

Beginnings, be it art or science, liave often been a matter of contestation. There

is no brief history still that could establish the beginning of time. Same is the
case with the beginnings of modernism in art whether it is East or the West.
The older text books on art negotiate with the tenn "'modem' referring back to
early Renaissance in Europe where Giotto is seen as a revolutionary for
breaking with the crude Byzantine style of medieval times. His major break
and contribution lies in bringing the technique of drawing accurately from life,
which brought the European notion of "modem" close to the classical Greco-
Roman concept of imitation. Throughout Renaissance until the advent of
Romanticism, (which revolted against the hegemony of classical ideals), the
concept of '"modem" found its major associations in the classical/realistic
tradition. However, with the passage of time the word "modem" assumed
different and often contradictory meanings. It meant as much a thing of now as
it became a thing of the past. Moreover, it also became possible to perceive art
not as a linear and deterministic progress but rather a fluid and circular
phenomena, which unlike West, is generally considered very much central to
eastern/Asian thought and sensibility. It is interesting, for instance, to bring in
the element of contingency and shock while referring to different events of
European modem art. The naturalistic realism, which, more or less, guaranteed
the modemism of Renaissance to break with the perspective-less traditions of
the medieval past was, with more force and explicitness, deconstmcted by the
analytical cubism, the most articulate point of 20th century modem art -
questioning the forward looking avantgardist stand of modemity. As we know
between Renaissance and early 19**^ century Realism, (both sharing the ideals of
truth and accuracy), the nature of art saw many shifting points of discontinuity
and contingency, for instance, in the moments of the Mannerist intervention

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and Baroque accesses. Similarly, in India we can notice how Rajput painting
deviates from Mughal realistic/naturalism and assumes a more idealized and
mannered outlook. At a certain point it may also seem a matter of discontinuity
to see Rajput painting closer to Safavid (which was the main point of departure
for Mughal painting) in its love for pure lines and color. The shifting positions
of revivalist and anti-revivalist stands shared by the artists of Bengal School
fiirther enhanced the complexity of the evolution of art. In its early phase the
urgency offindingan indigenous alternative to the Victorian academic realism
assumed a nationalist 'revivalist' tempo, which was subject to serious criticism.
And later the students of Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951), the founder of
Bengal School, in Santinekatan preferred the immediate and empirical over the
historicist oriental sense of Indian modem. The story of art as a non-linear and
considerably conflicting historical discourse becomes more complex in the
failures or myths of modernism deliberated in the postmodern theories.

Comparatively, if the sense of 'modernity' is generally attributed to

Renaissance Florence (c. 1400-1600) for encouraging an impersonal state,
urbanism, individualism, and objective approach to nature, then it is Mughal
India (1526-1757), roughly of the same time, for anticipating similar values. It
is difficult to understand 'why this burgeoning 'modernity' in Mughal India
failed to take firm roots.'' Whether it was the Hindu caste system or the
monarchy of the Mughal court for restricting the dissemination of ideas
borrowed in exchange with other developing civilizations 'modernity' in India
was subjected to a snail pace as compared to the Europe. However, the open-
minded and pluralistic approach of the Mughal painting, especially in history
painting and portraiture, shares some of the major concerns identified with the
classical/realistic values of Renaissance art. In the same vein later Rajasthani
and Pahari paintings strike a deep chord with the western Romanticism for
sharing concerns like epic legends of romance, lyricism, a sense of immediacy
and individualism. One of the major reality checks for Indian art was during the

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colonial era where the direct exchange with western culture replaced the
Mughal Rajput naturalism with Victorian illusionistic art. The highly ambitious
patronization and strategic policies of dissemination devised by the British Raj
was one big thing, (the one thing that Mughal lacked) which prompted the local
artists to adapt to the new genres like oil portraits, naturalistic landscape and
academic nudes. On the other hand this direct contact and access to the foreign
influence gave rise to the construct of nationhood, which anticipated a
nationalist movement of resistance and colonialism. "The period is
characterized, as the noted art historian Partha Mitter states, "by a dialectic
between colonialism and nationaUsm and the construction of cultural difference
in a rapid globalization of culture."^ The local artists or 'native artists', (as they
were initially called to segregate from the elite) on the one hand found
sufficient avenues to make a living and on the other hand felt disconnected
from their own heritage. With the passage of time the rise of national
movement triggered a certain sense of discontent for illusionistic art and artists
once again, but this time with a sense of anxiety, turned to the pre-colonial
indigenous past. This seesaw between the tastes, genres and influences is
characteristic not only of Indian art but, more or less, of the whole global art
scene of the nineteenth century - a Zeitgeist. At this point of crisis it was Raja
Ravi Verma (1848-1906) the most successful academic artist who came to the
rescue by providing a different and more articulate perception of 'modem'.

The recent developments in Indian art criticism anticipate a more complex and
open-ended position of modem in India. Ravi Verma's contribution for
assimilating western technique to articulate Indian subjects by means of which
he constmcted images of gods from the epic mythological text was suddenly
perceived as 'modern'.^ Verma's paintings gained a huge national popularity
partly because he was able to cater the sentiment of the masses by painting
theatrical presentation of Hindu mythological subjects and partly due to his
ingenious marketing strategies for starting a printing press in Bombay in 1894,

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which made it possible to make as many copies of his paintings as was
demanded. And soon mass-produced oleographs got even more multiplied in
the form of bazaar prints and calendar art anticipating new methods of cultural
dissemination, and the fact anybody could now have access to art, is
tantamount to the Industrial urban ambition of modernity. Venna's major
contribution and fame lies in his history paintings of ancient Indian epics and
classical literary works. He meticulously learned the Victorian dialect of salon
art, especially the skill of oil painting, and articulated Indian subjects, which
are both conspicuously different from the western carmon and at the same time
convincingly modem. The hybridity of his art was at one point criticized for
being 'kitschy' and unspiritual but now seems to have come a long way to be
addressed as a possible choice in the general paranoia of nationalism and
modernism. The position of Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941) as the first Indian
modem may be claimed on the basis that she returned to India after being
groomed in the mainstream western art world in Paris known as the Meca of
art. However, it was not her immediate contemporary movements in Paris that
she choose, but instead brought the influence of Post-Impressionism and in a
certain sense re-enacted Gauguin-Tahiti with the 'poor, downtrodden' and '
silent images of infinite submission' of India. She identified with the Post-
Impressionists not only in terms of formal language but also in their
passionately nonconformist lifestyle and destiny making her a fitting example
of a modem rebel. Sher-Gil's position is also of considerable importance in the
feminist context of modem for leading an individual and purely professional
life in the world of patriarchal chauvinism. In 1934 she retumed to India after
obtaining training at the famous Ecole-des-Beauz-Arts, Paris. Bom to a mixed
Sikh-Hungarian parentage she became a living emblem blending East and the
West. There was something about her enigmatic personality and the fact she
choose Gauguin's influence, one of the legendary heroes of European modem
art, out of the host of mainstream styles and movements like Cubism,

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Expressionism and Surrealism. And her sudden death in 1941 has made her the
most remembered legend of the Indian modem art history. In her brief career,
however, she incorporated post-impressionism idiom with indigenous traditions
like Pahari and Ajanta by which she arrived at a pictorial solution to the
everyday of life of India marking a considerable difference both from the
European influence and the local Bengal School.

It was the emergence of Santinekatan in 1920s that Indian art attained some
kind of solemn repose and commensurability. Rabindranath Tagore (1861-
1941) being its main architect who devised the educational fomiula of art
practice that was adherent to the laws of nature. He talked about the art
manifesting human contact with the nature/environment, which European art of
the time was more or less disenchanted with. It was Nandalal Bose (1882-
1966) who, especially in his landscapes, realized the dreams of Tagore for
bringing art closer to nature and nature closer to art. Tagore's initiative was
remarkable in the sense that the school realized the inevitability of the
departure from the revivalist historicist temperament of Abanindranath and the
urgency of the relationship with the local and the immediate - the reflexive
nexus in which art and its enviroimient can grow into a mutually enriching
relationship. In this way, particularly in the works of Benodebehari, art was
rescued from the hypothetical idealized space and became as real as the
empirical experience. The extensive experimentation of Ramkiner Baij is
another aspect of Indian modernism symptomatic of his cubist-expressionist
contemporaries in the west and its future in the avant garde of Bombay
progressives. The gulf between individualism and institutions is one of the
important aspects of modem art in general, which finds its specific examples in
the diverse stands taken up by artists like Nandalal Bose, Benodebehari, and
Ramkiner Baij the 'reigning trinity' of Indian modem. In the midst of the
demands of Santinekatan for a definite collective identity the official 'national'

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position of Nandalal is often contrasted with the more individualistic departure
from the cannons of institution towards future. "*

Rabindranath Tagore was more radical in his experimentation than Sher-Gil for
paving the way towards higher aims of modernism. Tagore's painterly
intervention in the mid-twenties anticipated the surreal expressionist idiom of
free associations where scratches, scribbles, erasures, and doodles transformed
into fantastic melancholic primordial forms. At that time no other artist of India
enjoyed the serious attention of European intellectuals as Tagore's art works
did, partly due to his legendary reputation. And partly because of his radical
imagination for expressing his unconscious obsessions with a sense of awe and
mystery, which was strikingly reminiscent of his European contemporaries like
Paul Klee and Max Ernst. Tagore's profoundly personal style is attributed to
what came to be defined as 'erasures' erupted from the game of creating shapes
out of crossed-out texts, which interestingly makes a dialectic link with his
discursive scriptural engagement of a prolific poet. In other words, if one
feigns to speculate, Tagore's conscious and prolonged engagement with the
production of text suddenly demanded explosion of images - which attained a
concrete and plastic presence in the forni of human and animal forms. He
needed a break from the controlled foraial restrain of the writer and seek some
kind of refiige in the subjective and spontaneous release offered by the act of
painfing. His art, however, finds a better license in the European art released in
the event of Freud's discoveries of the subconscious/unconscious, which
triggered experimentation in children's art and automatic drawings.

One of the most exciting moments for modem art movement in India is the
December 1922 exhibition in Calcutta. With the help of Tagore, an
International art exhibition was organized where the works of some of the very
important Bauhaus artists like Paul Klee, Kandinsky, Johannes Itten and others
was put on display. It must have been an overwhelming experience for the

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Indian artists to get to see the original works of western modem art. However,
this event added more to the rising crisis between the disconcerting dichotomy
between global and the local. On the one hand the rising national resistance
movement was gearing up and on the other hand Indian art was getting more
ambitious in realizing global modernism. These seemingly conflicting
aspirations, the global modernity and national identity, remained the most
inevitable preoccupation of the twentieth century Indian art.

The individualistic stance attributed to Rabindranath Tagore and Amrita Sher-

Gil was ftirther discovered in the primitivism of Jamini Roy (1887-1972).
Roy's development came a long way to find a distinctively individual aesthetic.
He had to brush shoulders with various styles ranging from academic
naturalism, Impressionism, and Chinese wash painting until he rescued himself
from the enchanting of European idioms of art and found his raison d'etre in
the Bengali folk painters. Taking a break from the mainstream influences Roy
absorbed and imbibed the unique characteristics of Kalighat painting. The
astonishing simplicity and deftness of Roy's work was initially motivated by
the art of Kalighat in its result of the special handling of the pictorial form, the
sense of volume evoked by the use of shade and light or the skillful linear
treatment of fonn. Later out of his swadeshi impulse he abandoned foreign art
materials, like oil painting, and turned to indigenous earth colors and organic
pigments. And due to the rising anxiety and the ambition to identify with the
national/modem he renounced Kalighat painting for being liberal, urban and
colonial and turned to village scroll painting instead. His long journey of art
with consistent discontent is suggestive of the modernist aspirations for
individuality and distinctiveness. It shows that his interest in folk art had a
bigger reason and deeper implications than merely stylistic. As Sanjoy Mallik
writes about Roy's position in relation to his efforts to work in the manner of
craft guild of folk artists and yet reflect his work is quite distant.

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Although his [Jamini Roy's] pictorial style does remind us of the folk
conventions, his urban self proclaimed itself over and above it, in the way in
which he remodeled and re structured his sources. The vivacity of his
references often turned into disciplined and highly refined schema that stands
at a remote extreme from its source. ^

1940s is marked with the significant upsurge in the radical experimentation in

Indian modem art. With the exemplary and extraordinary individualism of
Sher-Gil, Rabindranath and Jamini Roy as progenitors, Indian modernism
geared up in full swing to move along the global forces of art. The Calcutta
Group was formed in 1943 in the midst of the catastrophic trauma of Famine
and pestilence. The main members of the group were Prodosh Das Gupta,
Gopal Ghosh, Nirodh Majumdar, Rathin Moitra, Prankrishna Pal, and Paritosh
Sen. The Group's ideological stand emphasized an ambitious yearning to seek
their foraial and stylistic solutions in the western art. Instead of looking
backwards for indigenous sources they sought inspiration from European artists
like Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Braque and Brancusi. The Group's
anthropocentric stand abandoned the old gods and goddesses of epic classical
literature and replaced it with the 'supreme man' as the protagonist of their
aesthetic expression. As for as the Calcutta Group's general approach towards
the west is concerned, they were not unlike other Indian modernists for aiming
at a modem aesthetic, but their art could not negotiate beyond formal and
stylistic concerns. Nirodh Majumdar was the first artist to receive a scholarship
by the French government to visit Paris in 1946 and Paritosh Sen is the only
Indian artist to have met Picasso. ^ 1940s/50s is also significant for locating
the earliest events of modem art activities in Kashmir. Such was the influence
of these Groups that even a place like Kashmir, so remotely far from the Indian
metropolis, its force could be feh, which inspired local artists to join the
movement. The possible justification for their claim lies in the very ideology of
the 'progressives, for their uninhibited advocacy of European examples of

29
modem art 'an opening upto a heritage unrestricted by national/geographic
limits.'^

However, it was in the Bombay Progressive Artists' Group that the forces of
40s found its most articulate expression. The Group emerged in the form of a
most dynamic artistic force launching a resistance and break from the nec-
romantic rural position of the Bengal School and the anaesthetic art taught at
the colleges. By 1950s Bombay became the centre of Indian modem art
engaging enlightened critics and ambitious patrons. F.N. Souza (1924-2002),
the most articulate and the founder member of the group was accompanied by
M.F. Husain, S.H. Raza, K.H. Ara, S.K. Bakre, and H.A. Gade. Their rigorous
determination to realize the kind of art that was 'entirely Indian but also
modem' was backed by the association of the radical novelist Mulk Raj Anand,
the influential Chemould Gallery owner Kekoo Gandhy; the three refugees
from the Nazi: the Expressionist painter Walter Langhammer, who joined as art
director to Times of India in 1938, became their mentor; Emmanuel
Schlesinger, who set up a pharmaceutical concem in Bombay, became their
main collector; and Rudy von Leyden, who joined Times of India as art criticd.
As is the fate of any such collective art movement, the group did not sustain for
a long time. The most of ambitious leading artists left for Europe to confront
and engage with the groundbreaking innovations happening in the mainstream
westem modernism. Souza left for London and Raza to Paris, however, Husain
stayed back. Souza as notoriously called the 'angry young man of Indian art'
demonstrated a tme nonconformist by debunking his Catholic upbringing to
shock the complacency of the clergy, the rich, and the powerful. His cynic
and gnawing temperament injected some kind of wild anarchism in his mgged
use of paint and bmtal gesture of lines. Souza shares with Picasso the
ruthlessness and intimidating robustness, which was as much a matter of
fascination as it was a shock to the artists and art connoisseurs. By his deft
method of handling pigments, Souza's ability lies in his dauntless ability to

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transform his compulsive erotic-religious feelings in the convulsive discipline
of expressionist language, which earned him an international acclaim by
1950s. S. H. Raza's initial interest in expressionist landscapes (the
fascination which brought him to the picturesque Kashmir also plays a vital
role for inspiring the Kashmiri artists to engage with the modem, which is the
major preoccupation of the next chapter) evolved into a geometric abstraction
which eventually culminated into the target-like metaphorical icon of Bindu -
(the dot or the epicenter). Unlike Souza, Raza was not really interested in the
human figure. Even his landscapes and cityscapes retain a cold distance from
the identifiable representation of a figure, rather his art showed more
tendencies towards abstraction. By 1970s in France, Raza's struggle to
reconcile the eastern mind with the western dialect brought him close to the
esoteric philosophy and abstract symbols of the Neo-Tantric tradition. Raza
imbibed European grammar of fonnalism and sought to express the spiritual-
mystic dimensions of Hindu philosophy.

M. F. Husain the most popular modem artist of India has constantly been the
subject and the center of media attention incomparable to any other living artist
of India. His charismatic and multidimensional personality brought him a long
standing fame, which however, is supplemented with the bites of controversy
in the recent years. Husain was not privileged enough like his contemporaries
to think of settling abroad. His story has quite a romantic ting: Bom to a poor
family and starting off by painting Bollywood hoardings for living and
eventually attaining the position of an undisputed leader in modem Indian art.
His phenomenal body of work and tireless experimentation has kept him
significantly alive in the minds of critics, connoisseurs, patrons and art lovers.
Engaging with as diverse resources as the flamboyance of Basholi, spontaneity
and lyricism of Islamic calligraphy, the naivety and innocence of folk art, pop
images of Bollywood, and classical Indian sculpture - bridging the gulf
between mral and urban, popular and elite, east and west. His

31
 incommensurable output and the range of concerns have left the art scholars
bedazzled, as Alkazi would confirm: 'They have barely been able to categorize
one phase of his when he has stormed his way into another.' Husain's position
as a national/modem is far more articulate than most of the other artists
aspiring the same. As Chaitanya Sambrani writes:

Working within the agenda for the development of a secular,

socialist, non-aligned economy, Husain emerges as the major
allegorist for the nation with his ceaseless endeavor to give plastic
expression to the entire gamut of co-existing myths, faiths,
conflicts and personae that make up a vision of the nation. His
Zameen (1955)...the I4-foot-long canvas teems with images culled
as though from a primeval memory of the archetypal Indian
village, presenting a panorama of persons, animals, objects and
activities that stand in as metonyms of national essence. "

The similar impulses of 40s/50s are seen in the Delhi Silpi Chakra. The artists
associated were B. C. Sanyal, Kanwal Krishna, Dhanraj Bhagat, K. S.
Kulkami, D. N. Mago and others. The group came into existence after the
catastrophic Partition where many artists who migrated from Pakistan chose to
form an art circle in Delhi where they could exchange ideas and express their
experiences with the new reality. Apart from the concerns of colossal human
tragedy of the Partition they too addressed the then contemporary issues of
Indian modem art. Their main distinctiveness lied in incorporating the skill of
handicraft traditions of Lahore. At that moment Delhi was far behind for
providing some infrastructure for the promotion of art. This brings the eventful
alliance between Silpi Chakra and Dhoomimal, India's first private art gallery,
which has earned a great reputation for promoting some of the very important
modern artist of India during their earliest struggle. It is the legacy of Silpi
Chakra that today Delhi claims to be one of the most important centers of
contemporary Indian art. Artists like Satish Gujral, Ramkumar, K.G.
Subramanyam, Bimal Dasgupta, Shanti Dave and Ambadas were beginners

32
 when under the patronage of Delhi Silpi Chakra they embarked on their
respective journey of art. '^

The modernist/internationalist position upheld by the militant progressive

movements intensified the debate and refreshed the questions about western
orientation, which increased the skepticism towards the authenticity of Indian
national Identity. In the south artists negotiated with this existential flux by the
inspiring and intellectually motivated initiatives of K. C. S. Paniker. Paniker's
inspiring personality motivated his students to join his cause for working out
different solutions for a nativist language of modem Indian art. It is due to his
pedagogic commitment and ingenious methods that made him the protagonist
'of the large corpus of art activity in Madras in 1940s and 5os, and later,
mentor and motivator of his incredible dream-child, the Cholamandal Artists'
Village.' The prominent figures of Cholamandal included S. Dhanapal, the
Reddepa Naidu, P.V. Janakiraman and others. The other notable events in the
stream of evolving modernism in India is the Group 1890 (a misnomer), led by
Jagdish Swaminathan (1928-1994), came to Delhi with a passionate reactionary
manifesto declaring Raja Ravi Venna's naturalism and the 'pastoral idealism'
of Bengal School as vulgar. They asserted the rejection of the "memories of a
glorious past" and the ambitiousness of "catching up with the times", but
instead emphasized to start right from the scratch. Swaminathan's numinous
ideal in the form of a bird-like thing appears to be in space (reminiscent of
Brancusi) in the colorful brightly lit landscape comes to mind. However, partly
due to his leftist-orientation, Swaminathan's writings were instrumental 'for
voicing through his paintings a political resistance of a third-world nation
against the imperialist, affluent West.''"* The artists who joined him in Delhi
included Jeram Patel, Himmat Shah, Rajesh Mehra, S.G. Nikam, Redeppa
Naidu, Balkrishna Patel, Jyoti Bhatt, Ambadas, Eric Bowen, Raghav Kanneria
and Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh. However, this group was never seen together
after their first and only exhibition in 1963.

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 The other dimension in the quest for the essentially indigenous and spiritually
Indian came in the fomi of Neo-Tantric Art. In 1960s the term Tantric,
basically an ancient religio-philosophical cult involving a ritualistic association
with symbolic geometric and abstract diagrams came into prominence in
1960s. The influence of Tantra and its concepts of vital force operating in all
living beings had a far reaching resonance and fascination, which could be
traced in the pioneer abstract painters, particularly the circle of Kasimir
Malevich. But its influence was widely feh when in 1960s the art historian Ajit
Mukherjee's besides publishing the book Tantra Art in 1967 brought a historic
exhibition of Tantra art in the West. Since abstraction was in the vogue the
Tantric abstract imagery became one of the possibilities to seek inspiration
from. ^ However, the affinities between traditional Tantric imagery and
modem non-figurative abstraction have been subject to doubt and skepdcism.
Among the artists who came to be identified or referred as or associated with
the Neo-Tantric are Nirode Mazumdar, G .R. Santosh, Biren De and K. C.
Paniker. Mazumdar, the product of Lhote's studio, is considered an early neo-
Tantric painter, for incorporating the geometric shapes in his semi-figurative
experimentation. Biren De's switchover from figurative to abstraction brought
his work closer to the Tantric diagrams. His simplified images of male and
female in sexual union with dramatic light and dark effects are suggestive of an
esoteric numinous dimension implicit in Tantric designs. As Ratan Parimo
points out, 'The original Tantric diagrams are actually aids to meditation or
visual symbolization in geometrical configuration of complex philosophical
concepts.' In this context even S. H. Raza's Bindu or Ma paintings of the late
1970s incorporate a language based on geometric diagrams to embody the
concept of meditation. Among these Santosh (who occupies the third chapter of
my thesis for being the pioneer and the most celebrated Kashmiri artist)
embodies a sustained and longest engagement with the Neo-Tantric aesthetics.
Interestingly, these abstract-oriented initiatives of the Indian artists were,

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 formalistically, contemporaneous to American hard-edge abstraction, which
lent a certain validation to this specific trend from an international point of
view. This aspect of seeking and appropriating the esoteric and
transcendental abstract imagery from ancient classical/traditional sources of
India with the international conventions of non-objective/abstraction is also of
great significance in the context of post-Santosh modern art scene in Kashmir.
For instance, the Baroda trained Gayoor Hassan and his student Shuja Sultan
who also traverse along the numinous terrain of transcendental and meditative
aesthetic formulas.

The indigenist alternative to the modernist/internationalist conventions of art

found its most articulate engagement in the fine arts department of the
Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. Its progenitors and academicians
included artist-teachers like N.S. Bendre, Sankho Chaudhuri, V. R. Amberkar
and K.G. Subramanyam. Baroda plays a vital role for bringing the pictorial and
figurative narration back to art - the fact by which Baroda artist established a
close link with the Royal College of Art in London. Bendre came to Baroda in
1950 to head the Department of Painting after having attained a wide reputation
as an artist and a traveler. He began his journey from painting picturesque
landscapes aligning with the nineteenth century British artists. Bendre's
engagement with the conventions of modernism had a stylistic resonance of
Post-impressionism, Fauvism and Expressionism. But his real contribution lies
in his live demonstrations where his ingenious virtuosity to handle different
mediums and the skill to execute a harmonious and well balanced fonnal
design were efficiently imparted to his students.

Sanko Chaudhuri was a student of Ramkiner Baij. With Ramkiner he shared

his interest in portraiture and monumental outdoor sculptures. His early stint
with Cubist aesthetics, reminiscent of Archipenko and Arp, gradually evolved
into more lyrical fornial design. Sanko Chaudhuri, on the one hand, striking a

35
 kind of ideological link with Russian Constructivists, was the first to encourage
the use of Industrial materials, which opened up the new possibilities in
sculpture, and on the other hand his adherence to Gandhian ideals anticipated
new directions in the development of Indian sculpture. This seeming
dichotomy about Sanko's position is best described by his colleague and friend
Subramanyan: "'Caught between his two contrapoised personality traits of
romantic enthusiasm and urban restraint, his work escapes being aggressively
analytical or sentimental, melodramatic or quiescent. It ploughs a non-
committed furrow between these and at its best combines the qualities of
movement and stasis in a kind of congealed elegance."

Subramanyan joined Santinekatan under the tutelage of Nandalal, Benode

Bihari Mukherjee, and Ramkiner Baij who played the role of a mentor during
his burgeoning years. They provided the basic inspiration for his significant
contribution as a teacher in Baroda. By introducing and implementing the
'living tradition' of rural and tribal art into the educational curriculum of
Baroda he launched his manifesto of bridging the gulf between the artisan and
the modem artist. Subramanyan vigorously re-claimed the importance of
Bengal School, which had suffered disavowal in the post-Independent semi-
figurative art forces. Subramanyan's prodigious contribution as an artist is
supplemented by his celebrated position as a pedagogue and a writer. As an
artist he was able to fonnulate a conceptual scheme where this
multidimensionality finds a cohesive expression. Subramanyan's art is an
embodiment of concerns as varied as craft, language, virtuosity and wit. As
Geeta Kapur's monograph on K. G. Subramanyam elucidates: Language 'as a
system where objects have a workable correlation with pictorial signs, and
where these signs in turn transpose a universe of meanings upon the material
world.' Virtuosity by means of which the relationship between perception and
skill is perfected to the point where forms spring forth by the mere gesture of
the hand. And wit as an artist's trick to abbreviate, upturn, reanimate the

36
 signs.' And it is in the tradition of mural, the legacy of his Santinekatan
days, where the technical ingenuity of a craftsman finds its way to integrate art
with the social environment. With Subramanyan's initiatives in particular, and
the developments in the fine art department of the Baroda in general, the artist
was expected to address the rising postcolonial concerns and negofiate with
socio-cultural and environmental issues.

The 1970s and 1980s with the rise of postcolonial/postmodem criticism/

theories the Indian art practice went through disparate and diverse phases. This
period is also characterized on the one hand with the general decline of the
artists' groups and art institutions and on the other hand the rise of artist as
activist. The state sponsored attempt to launch the first Indian modem art event
called triennale at the Intemafional level by the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1968
was faced with a protest by the Delhi Silpi Chakra. Swaminathan, Tyeb Mehta
and Krishen Khanna, in spite of being awarded, strongly criticized the event for
its methods of the process of selecfion. The criticism of the first triennale
assumed even more vigorous protest and boycott in the second triermale.
Swaminathan, Geeta Kapur, Vivan Sundram, Ghulam Sheikh and Bhupan
Khakhar took a single stand to reject the cult of internationalism. In Vrishchik
(scorpion), (the magazine published in Baroda, which was very instrumental
for voicing and disseminating the ideological development of art), Geeta Kapur
writes: "My point of view is that intemafionalism as a cult imposes upon the
individual artist and especially outside the western metropolis, a set of false
imperatives that must be examined". And the continued resistance led the third
triennale on the verge of cancellafion in 1975 when Ghulam Sheikh wrote that
"if the Akademi does not change its policy... all practising artists and writers
artists should do it (boycott) and if we decide to boycott the Akademi a
counter-exhibition should be planned as an answer". To everybody's surprise,
in a certain sense like the French Salon des Refuses, the protest exhibition titled
Six Who Declined to Show at the Triennale did actually take place."

37
 From the iconoclastic pop art to the confessional position Bhupan Khakhar was
actually addressing the politics of the marginal, which along with feminism
remains to be one of most serious concerns defended in the liberal ethics of
postmodernism. Bhupen's breakthrough in 1960s came after his departure
from the design-oriented aestheticism of Baroda and vigorous fascination for
the vulgar, subversive and iconoclastic anti-aestheticism of American Pop art -
establishing him as, conspicuously, the first Indian pop artist. Pan shops,
domestic interiors, temples and religious sites and all that glitz and glitter
which identifies the middle class taste was his main themafic engagements. He
made spoof of high art, not only at ideological but also material level, by
incorporating the methods as banal as the sloppiness of popular oleographs,
mirrors, plaster of paris and even enamel paint.

Baroda also plays a crucial role in the development of art history as an integral
part of fine arts. In India the discipline of art history has somewhat remained
aloof from the overall development of modem Indian art. It is in the early
twentieth that scholars like Ananda Coomaraswamy and E. B. Havell who
emerge in the form of a scholarship with strong nationalistic resistance to the
colonial cultural hegemony. However, this counter- movement could not
disengage itself from the colonial enterprise, where all the methods of
evaluating historical remains were essentially based on European assumptions.
It is in this context that Ratan Parimoo's criticism, what he called the
'antiquarian search' of India's history within which sculpture, manuscripts,
coins and inscriptions were gathered and recorded as disembodied objects by a
dispassionate cataloguer. His mitiatives emphasizing the need of teaching
art history in Indian Universities, so that Indian art will be taken up as a serious
study with passionate commitment, anticipates a breakthrough in the field of
art theory in India.

38
 Parimoo is generally held to be instrumental in bringing art history in the
curricula of Baroda's cultural development. But with the significant
intervention of Gulammohammed Sheikh Baroda evolved into a self-reflexive
critical/intellectual platfonn. His major contribution as an academician, art
critic and a teacher included initiatives like developing new course in art
history, editing the famous art journal Vrishchik, organizing workshops, and
turning his home into a live open-door forum where artists, poets, critics, and
committed students could join for brainstorming. Sheikh as a teacher shares
the same reputation as that of Santinekatan teachers and Subramanyan. His
charismatic influence as a teacher/gwri/ has groomed Indian students to find
their own distinctively original directions. As a painter he traverses along and
negotiates the realm of home, city and landscape. Identifying and appropriating
the paintings ofHamza-nama of Akbar period and simultaneously reflective of
Italian Renaissance art Sheikh builds a complex pictorial world of conflicting
and converging meanings. Sheikh's broken and fragmented canvas is reflective
of his keen observation of the way life in India is structured - a complex web
with all its contradictory and conflicting disjunctures, which at times appears
closer to the stream of consciousness experience. He writes:

Living in India means living simultaneously in several

cultures and times... The past exists as a living entity alongside the
present, each illuminating and sustaining the other. As times and
cultures converge, the citadels of purism explode. Traditional and
modem, private and public, the inside and outside continually
telescope and reunite. The kaleidoscopic flux engages me to
construe structures in the process of being created.

In the more recent series Kahat Kabir (1998) Sheikh is slightly at variance
with his earlier use of space and imagery in order to negotiate the potentially
rich tradition of bhakti. Here he addresses the urgency of social syncretism by
referring to the medieval poet Kabir - cherished and claimed both by Hindus
and Muslims.

39
 Since 1970s Indian art scene went through a significant change due to the
revolutionary events triggered by the emergence of postcoJonial/postmodem
discourse. Baroda became the mainstream where self-reflexive artists
negotiated with the changing world and the paradigm shifts in the cultural
discourse. The demands of the time were such where artist were required to
break free from the narcissistic 'enchanting circle' of artistic engagement and
act with more responsibility to respond to the socio-political issues. Among
the artist who explicidy demonstrated the spirit of an activist and made
conspicuously discreet political statements was Vivan Sundaram. After his
return from the Commonwealth scholarship in England in 1970 he vigorously
committed himself to political concerns. His initiatives as artist-activist include
the exhibition of photographs of the Bangladesh war, which he organized in
Delhi in 1971. His sustained commitment with Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust
(SAHMAT) as a founder-member and trustee kept where he is actively
engaged to organize events to protest against communal violence in India.
Vivan's work has shown a sustained commitment to the political upheaval in
our time in works like the series of drawings titled The Indian Emergency of
1977; the installation of photographs and sculptures called Memorial in
response to the demolition of the Babri masjid and the subsequent riots in
Bombay. In spite of the strong leftist temperament he did not abandon the oil
painting, (like Mexican artists who rejected oil painting and developed wall
painting (mural) as a public, national art forni.). But rather he transformed the
traditional oil format from a seductive illusionist pictorial device into a 'public'
art fonn to serve in his, what he calls Marxist ideological struggle.

With the rise of self- conscious female artists the 1970s assumes another most
significant phase in the development of Indian art. It was also during this time
that the wave of feminist revolution in the west was strongly felt in Indian
subcontinent. However, until 50s the presence of women artists in India was
confined to a very few names who emerged during colonial period among

40
 which Amrita Sher-Gil occupies a highly exceptional position. As Gayatri
Sinha writes:

Unlike western women artist of the seventeenth,

eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, there is no documented
tradition of Indian women artists before the twentieth century. We
have very little by way of names, faces, and histories." ^"^

However, it is Amrita Sher-Gil's position as the first truly self-conscious artist

that the study of Indian women artists finds its begiiming. During 1950s and
60s the presence of women, who later made a very significant contribution to
Indian Art, became visible in art schools. Meera Mukherjee (1928-98) had her
initial training at the Government School of Art in Calcutta and the Delhi
Polytechnic. In 1953 she received a scholarship to study in Munich, where she
worked under Toni Stadler and Heinrich Kirchner. She remains to be one of the
most outstanding Indian sculptors to emerge after Independence. She took
Subramanyan's initiative of bridging the gap between artist and the artisan to
its most convincing conclusion by actually living with the Bastars in order to
know their life and work intimately. Mukherjee's heroic position is justified by
the monumental scale of her work and sustained courage to realize her
ambitious projects. But at the same time she was very sensitive to the cause of
the tribal, who in a certain way gave her art a sense of direction.

Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-89) after studying at St. Martin's School of Art in

London from 1954 to 1957 returned to India and joined the Bhulabhai Institute
for the Arts. Nasreen took a very unconventional position by engaging with the
pure minimalist paradigm. Partly due to her privileged position for having a
firsthand interaction with European art at the age of seventeen her work
assumes a solitary engagement among the Indian artists. Minimalism
represented a significant attitude of the 1960, especially in America. It emerged
out of or in relation with or in opposition to a number of significant tendencies

41
 of the decade. It was in the process of breaking away from the gestural or brush
paintings of Abstract Expressionists and seeking new directions, which came to
be labeled as Hard-Edge, Post-Painterly Abstraction, Color Field painting and
later Minimal Painting. However, the one thing that more or less each label
emphasized was on pure, abstract painting, in distinction to figuration, optical
illusion, object-making, fantasy, and the like. But it is interesting to notice
that among the Minimalists Nasreen identified with Agnes Martin, which also
brings to mind Amrita Sher-Gil's preference of Gauguin's post-impressionism
over the host of other more radical styles. Agnes Martin, considered the senior
most among the minimalists, often reflected an interest in Eastern philosophy,
especially Taoist. Martin's work involved a rigorous mathematical precision,
exquisite economy, nuance, and eventually in a counter-act the whole process
is reduced to nothing but a large canvas griddled all over with lines evoking 'an
evanescent image of luminous atmosphere, making visible the artist's sense of
life's essence as a timeless, shadowy emanation.'" Nasreen's admiration from
lyrical abstractionist Kandinsky to the supermatist Kasimir Malevich and then
ideological adherence to the late modernist minimalism aligns her to Utopian
aspirations of twentieth century formalism. However, in the 1980s she broke
free with ethics of the grid. As Geeta Kapur appropriately quotes Roland
Krauss: "... the grid announces among other things, modem art's will to
silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse." and Kapur writes:

If Martin would say that in the diagonal the ends hang

loose, or that the circle expands too much, Nasreen, on the other
27
hand, would use precisely those forms."

Anjolie Ela Menon (b. 1940) briefly studied at the Sir J.J. Institute of Applied
Art, Mumbai and later got a scholarship to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in
Paris in 1961-62. Menon's interaction with the Mexican painter Francesco
Toledo plays a very significant role in developing her personal expression. He

42
 introduced her to technical possibihties in the process of working with layered
surfaces and textures. Her sustained representation of somewhat iconic female
forais, domesticated animals, and a distanced involvement in Window series
negotiates the interplay between personal histories with collective social
concerns. Her body of work encompasses various influences, ranging from
Van Gogh, Expressionists, Modigliani, Husain, Frida Kahlo, and Amrita Sher-
Gil. At the same time her work is confronted with the moments of fixity,
symptomatic of the modem artist's anxiety to break free from the self-
constructed cliches, that she is driven to seek new solutions to revitalize her
visual vocabulary.

Kishori Kaul was bom in Srinagar Kashmir in 1939. She joined the Faculty of
Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda in 1959. Kaul's career as an artist has
passed the tragic condition of suffering from tuberculosis and how she finds
somewhat therapeutic salvation in art. Kaul's body of work is largely imbued
with a passionately romantic engagement with the colorful and invigorating
environment of her native place in Kashmir. In her impressionist/expressionist
treatment to landscapes, a genre not much in vogue, especially the depiction of
autumnal trees , as if on fire, shooting a shocking medley of pink, orange and
blooming reds, has earned her work a certain identity quite distinct from her
contemporaries. In the late 1989 and early 1990 Kashmiri Pandits, in a state
of fear psychosis and paranoia, were driven to vacate the Kashmir valley due to
the rise of insurgency. One wonders about the possible changes in her creative
outlook and the romantic engagement with the personal and picturesque world
of her home. But Kaul's work refuses to indulge into a dark and morbid state
of diasporic condition. However, in a nostalgic mind, she draws largely from
her childhood stories and the personal memories of the times she lived in the
Valley. The persistence of her memory is still sustained in her landscapes and
still lifes, which resonate with the brilliance of color, the vivid gestural
bmshwork and the deft subtlety of line. For her motifs she always turns to

43
nature and in a somewhat Cezannesque manner she seeks the fonnal solution of
the pictorial surface not just by perceptual means alone but by her intuitions as
well. She writes:

My process of conceiving a work is linked with Nature's

inherent structures and their ability to strike a deep resonance
within my memory. The downward rush of the crystalline water or
a mountain stream, splattered with light streaking through the
overhanging branches of trees, determines the structure of a
painting...The sudden, swift flight of a bird, the limb of a tree
cutting across space, the little world of my garden in the middle of
the city-all become starting points for the reconstruction, through
color, of fleeting but profound sensations". ^^

Since 1970s there has been a dramatic rise in the participation of women artists,
self-consciously transcending the political frontiers that separate the three
nations of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It is also during this time that the
questions of gender, the identity of a woman artist in the male dominated
infrastructure, and 'feminist' art were gaining currency. The responses to the
global impulses of 70s onwards, especially in America, where feminist art grew
in accordance with the so-called 'second wave' of feminism, were starkly
visible in some of the Indian women artists while implicitly subtle in others.

Arpita Singh's (b.I937) painterly journey is marked by her shifts from

figurative to abstraction and then back to figurative. Her paintings are imbued
with a strange aura where the living and the inanimate appear to be engrossed
in a secret communication. Drawing largely from the day to day domestic
space of a woman, Arpita anticipates a feminine condition where her female
figures share an enigmatic imaginary world with things like jars, bottles,
tablecloths, chairs, apples, a paper boat, picture frames, flowers. The
Chagallesque flying figures, the invading objects, and the animated inanimate
objects are somewhat counteracted by the women figure who usually appears
still or absentminded. Arpita's work is not existentially morbid, but her

44
distinctiveness lies in the subtle use of wit and humor to illuminates the
complex and distraught. Her response to feminine concerns is not confined to
the domestic space. The notable references are the stories of Kidwai family
and the aftennath of the Sikh 1984 riots in Delhi, which anticipated the
potentially protective image of the woman in acts of nurturing gthe girl child.
And in a recent series of her works called Feminine Fable, (1997) Arpita is
addressing the ageing woman's sexual self, a conspicuously feminine
condition. As Gayatri Sinha writes: 'Terhaps even among her world
contemporaries, no single artist has produced a body of works on feminine acts
of reparation, love and the deeply tragic vicissitudes of domesticity as Arpita
Singh.""^

Anupam Sud (b. 1944) excelled in the medium of printmaking and remains to
be one of the finest printmakers among her contemporaries. Her most sustained
concerns are, conspicuously, in elucidating the psychological tension between
the body and its other. Her figurative-orientation involves a persistent
delineation of the nude forni, especially female, by means of which her figures
enter into some kind of interrogative confrontation with the multiple identities
of the self In this way her figurative art goes beyond the narrative and the epic
and ventures the existential aesthetics of the pure human figure. Anupam's
work is potentially mediated by John Burger's viewpoint where he discusses
the distinction between the nude and the naked, the different in their
psychological positions where men look at women and women watch
themselves being looked at. However, Sud's body of work encompasses a
varied range of complex responses, which considerably depart from Berger's
viewpoint. As Geeti Sen writes:

Anupam's body of work possesses its own intrinsic logic. This

is a process in the search for identity, through a long joumey over
some thirty years; from anonymous embryonic forms, struggling to
be bom through Earth Mother, to the superb mastery of torsos in her
compositions titled Windows, to the faceless, undisclosed mysteries

45
 of You and Homage to Mankind. Even when she turns to
commenting on Indian society in those bold indehble images of
Darling, Get me a Baby Made! And Pickup Girls, it is never the
faces but the torsos and animated gestures which tell the story..." ^^

Arpana Caur's (b. 1954) feminist viewpoint remains to be the most

conspicuously articulate as compared to other women artists of India. She
eloquently contested the universal male chauvinistic identity of the art by
sharing her personal self in the creation of a female protagonist. Caur adopted
and preferred the strong feminine figures of Basohli and reinterpreted them by
somewhat de-eroticizing the nayika in order to protect their feminine force
from the male gaze. On the other hand with the expanding proportions of her
female figures, the male figure is considerably shrinking and diminishing.
Besides her politically charged feminist concerns, Arpita engages with the
variety of concerns like the existential themes of ahenation and claustrophobia,
bhakti, and the political violence. For having had difficult early years and a
passionate empathy for social concerns, her work mediates across the
autobiographical, the communal, and the humanitarian.

The legacy of the radical artists and the pedagogy of Binode Bihari Mukherjee
and Ramkiner Baij, the tutelage under Subramanyan, and the close association
with Ghulam Sheikh provide the essential impetus to Nilima Sheikh (b. 1945).
Her work draws from a panorama of sources like the everyday life, the socio-
political issues, the drama of the home, the ambiguities of interpersonal
relationships, the children at play, animals, and the popular legends and
ballads. Her pictorial language is imbued with the ingenuity of a combined
aesthetic by incorporating the poetic idioms in the muki-planal perspective of
Indian miniatures and the compositional efficiency of seventeenth-century
Japanese woodcut. Her stylistic empathy with the 'living tradition' becomes
more pronounced and intimate by perfecting herself in the Wasli technique of
tempera of the medieval Indian miniatures. The laborious and meticulous care

46
involved in laminating of several sheets or handmade paper which are coated
and covered with whiting in several layers before being painted on with soft
and brilliant cake colors with the use of fixer. ^' Nilima's epic series When
Champa Grew Up, which addresses the menacing phenomenon of 'bride
burning', is a very powerful socio-political statement. It is in the significant
exchange of technical and stylistic idioms between the urban and the traditional
artist, which serves as her ideological position in line with her
Santinekatan/Baroda legacy, that her use of Wash technique makes the effect
even more intense.

Recently, after a gap of six years the Gallery Espace in New Delhi hosted an
exhibition of Nilima's work called 'Drawing Trails'. The new works reflect a
sustained engagement with the socio-political concerns where the trauma of
Kashmir occupies most of the space. In her characteristic aesthetic paradigm,
which engages through a careful positioning of diverse techniques and histories
with the contemporary, Nilima's work takes account of the pain and suffering
of the people living in conflict zones. She quotes directly from literary sources
like the very famous fifteenth century Kashmiri saint and poet Sheikh Noor-ud-
din, also known as Nund Rishi, Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali,
Salman Rushdie and others, where this mediation of the written-word works as
a supplementary to enhance the emotive identity of the images. ^^

With Nalini Malani, the autobiographical, the psychological and the political
finds references in the everyday urban reality. Her convictions are deeply
informed by her intellectual experience during her stay in Paris in 1970s where
she was in a certain close proximity with the stimulating cross-section of
thinkers, writers and artists. The highly charged period of the May 1968
student's revoft instigated intellectual restlessness and vigorous self-
questioning for Malani, which kept surfacing in her works. Her 1980s works
like Old Arguments about Indigenism, Of Monsters and Angels, and Flux of

47
Experience, engage with the urgent questions of globalization, nationalism, and
the Third World poverty. Due to her sustained engagement with the
contemporary socio-political concerns, her committed adherence, like
Subramanyan, Meera Mukherjee, Nilima Sheikh, to smudge the gap between
traditional art practice and the avant-garde, and her use of radically new
mediums like installation, video art, and performance, that she can safely be
positioned as a postmodern artist - the claim which is as much controversial as
it is the Zeitgeist. However, by using new mediums she does not lose the grasp
of the basic structure of narrative, ideas and images but rather transgresses the
limits of the picture frame by incorporating the space, light, and three-
dimensionality of the installation/performance to provide a direct and living
space for the viewer to enter her work. Her site-specific project City of Desires
(1992) where she first painted the entire wall at the Chemould Gallery in
Bombay and later whitewashed the whole wall was meant to be a protest
against the neglect of the rapidly disintegrating nineteenth-century frescos of
Nathdvara in Rajasthan. At the same time, however, somewhat paradoxically,
the performance was a lucid and moving statement on the non-capitalist
impulse, quite visible in the recent projects of Vivan Sundram, where art is
rescued from the burden of capitalist commodity by the symbolic gesture of
whitewashing or the impermanent nature of such projects - aligning to the
"dematerialization of the art object", which anticipated the Postmodern/
Conceptual Art of 70s in the West.

Mirinalini Mukherjee (b.l949) emerges as one of the innovative and powerful

sculptor in the 1980s. Her distinctively individual vocabulary is a result of her
discovery of an unconventional material, a species of vegetable fibre
resembling hemp. Her process involves dying of the material in deep colors,
such as purple or camiine, and then knots and weaves it. In Mirinalini's case
the feminist or the feminine enters via the very intimate and time consuming
domestic engagement of the act or the process of the work. However, as she

48
slowly kneads the material into some identifiable human fonn they assume a
mysterious aura of primordial or the sexually ambiguous beings. ^^

Among the important women artists whose ideologically motivated art practice
dominated the 1990s was Nayjot (b. 1949). Her enormous multi-media
installation called Links Destroyed and Rediscovered, (occupying the entire
space of the auditorium at the Jehangir Art Gallery), a collaborative project
with a musician and two filmmakers, addresses both the explicit tragedy of the
1993 Bombay riots and the implicit faith to recover the loss. This twofold,
somewhat akin to the process of destruction and reconstruction, recurs as one
of the significant commitment throughout her career. For example the painted
wood sculpture I Have no Fate Lines - Thank God is a parody suggesting both
power and resistance.

Geeta Kapur's critical stand positioning postmodern proposes to revise the

Theodor Adorno's stand, which foreground the 'negative commitment' or the
notion of aesthetic as subversive and work out a new strategy of interference
associated with Gramsci. ^ Kapur finds the most potent example in the Indian
Radical Painters' and Sculptors' Associafion (1987-89), which came to be
called as the Kerala Radical group. This short-lived collective was fonned on
the lines of ultra-left political activism, claiming alternate art practices where
narrafives are condensed into political gestures, the humanitarian and the
social. Their intervention came as a rejecfion to the international, commercial
and Western. The group included Krishnakumar, Alex Mathew, C K Rajan and
Anita Dube.^^ Geeta Kapur aligns with the argument where the understanding
of postmodernism anticipated the possibilities for black ideologies and
feminists to conceptualize greater degree of freedom. However, it is in the
cinematic space that Kapur finds the most conspicuous clues for situating
postmodern in India. Moreover, it is also evident in her advice for the

49
politically inclined artists, while quoting Hal Foster, to make the most out of
this conjectural moment (modernism-postmodernism).

The significant impulses of the contemporary Indian art scene share a

politically motivated collective position with the larger group of South Asian
countries. In the wake of postcolonial critique in India, initiated by theorists
like Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, engaged in questioning and di-
stabilizing the west/eurocentricism, and therefore dislocate the subaltern in
order to claim an alternative discourse 'to subvert the authority of those who
had hegemonic power'. The earliest response to the postcolonial/postmodem
concerns was seen in 70s/80s Baroda but it was around 90s that a more
vigorous participation involved not only its ideological content but also the
radical revolutions and paradigmatic shift in the choice of means, new
strategies and the use of new mediums of expression/interaction like
installation, perforaiance, video art, multi-media and so on. However,
installation art was met with a lot of hostility by a section of the art community
and still invites a lot of controversy and discussion in terms of its relevance to
the Indian environment and for its non-possessable, impermanent and at times
anti-commercial position. But younger generation of artists are showing a great
enthusiasm for installation and multi-media as it provides a more varied scope
to address varied concerns from formal to personal and socio-political. And at
the same time there is a certain anxiety implicit in the ambitious artists' choice
in order to be a part of the international art world, which certainly involves as
many dangers as there are adventures. The discussion on installation and the
varied viewpoints of different scholars and artists foreground on the one hand
the polarities like conservatism and liberalism, the percept and the concept, the
local and the global and on the other hand it is celebrated as a new medium
allowing a greater freedom and being capable of translating the contemporary
experience.

50
 Among the artists who have shown a sustained engagement with the new
approaches and new mediums since 1990s are Valsan KoUeri (b. 1953), whose
ecological and enviromnental concerns takes him to hunt for the ageing
discards and re-create a lost space by mean of random and casual display of
found objects, which anticipates the urge for a physical intervention in the
viewer's mind. The use of materials like cow dung, straw, ash, charred wood,,
printed textiles, kumkum, bits of newspaper, show somewhat anti-aesthetic
vocabulary of artists like Sheela Gowda (b. 19570 and Subodh Gupta (b.l964),
who came up with shockingly new ways of incorporating the organic and
indigenous materials to address the turbulent social issues. ^^ For its scale and
scope to incorporate a host of materials and multi-media installation became a
potentially efficient strategy for politically motivated artists to negotiate with
the India's political history.

Rummana Hussain, bom in Bangalore and educated at the Ravensboume

College of Art and Design, Kent, United Kingdom, 1972-74, lived and worked
in Bombay until her death in 1999. In order to sustain her activism she
remained engaged with SAHMAT as an active participant. While responding to
the politically charged event of Ayodhya tragedy she choose to shift from her
allegorical paintings to the conceptual vigor of installation art and therefore,
renegotiate her identity in a newly contentious political climate. "Fragments-
Multiples," her first exhibition after this transition, was held concurrently at
Gallery Chemould and Jehangir Art Gallery in 1994. The domical shape of the
shattered mosque became a central motif anticipating a ghostly appearance in
her sculptures, drawings, and assemblage works. Her other installation called
'"Home/Nation" at Gallery Chemould in 1996 states the disconcerting condition
where the personal and the national meet, as if on a dissecting table, to
reconstruct a new reality. Juxtaposing Islamic architecture in Ayodhya and her
photographs with text, personal artifacts, and images of her own body she
subverted the distinction between public memorial and private nostalgia.

51
Rummana demonstrates her conspicuously feminist position in the perfomiance
called Living on the Margins, which negotiates with the subjective experience
of a lower-middle class Indian women. ^''

Vivan Sundaram's response to the demolition of Babri masjid comes in the

forni of his interactive installation called Memorial (1993). The work takes the
viewer in and kind of hypnotizes to confront and be confronted with the
complex metaphorical world alluding to the human experience - the haunting
tragedy of loss. Subodh Gupta's artistic engagement is imbued with a rural
sensibility and the deeply ethnic identity justified in his use of materials like
cowdung, the potentially village icon, wooden stools, domestic and sacred
objects or found objects that are identifiable icons of everyday Indian life, like
stainless steel, kitchenware, bicycles, scooters and taxis. His work draws
largely from his own experience, especially in context to his native Bihar and
its labor class, of cultural dislocation through migration from rural to urban
areas.

At least one thing that makes a predominating thread among most of the artists
working with installation is their politically motivated position. As Roobina
Karode writes:

A shift from the personal to the political also translates into a

desire to work in and through public space, which is a real
possibility with installation art this is not to suggest that in dealing
with contemporary issues, painting has diminished in relevance in
India. I would like to record here that Surrendran Nair, Sudhir
Patwardhan, Arpita Singh, Atul Dodiya and Rekha Rodwittiya to
name a few, paint compelling images of social, political and
gender entanglements with the beauty of bright colours and the
sensual languorous line, inventing a contemporary vocabulary that
if anything, heightens the potency and comprehensibility of the
content. Their art does confirm that the two-dimensional format
has not expended itself and can be as provocative as other
conceptual genres."

52
Among the younger artists, the pluralist and fragmentative mood predominates.
With the old, archaic bonds loosened, Atul Dodiya's montages will take
cognizance of this new place we find ourselves in, while Anandjit Ray will
combine his colours as easily as his narratives.

Recent developments shows a rapidly growing scholarship in the study of

South Asian art, the vigorous intensity in the art practice to engage with the
socio-political and at the same time a dramatic increase in the value of
contemporary art. The post 1990s, with a rampant increase in the dissemination
of information and the ever-expanding technology of telecommunication, poses
new challenges while opening greater opportunities for Indian artists at the
same time. With growing international interest in the contemporary Indian art,
the new sources of patronage, the advent of transnational gallery, which
provides an international forum to exhibit art works, grants, fellowships,
residencies and trans-border projects, the Indian artist is enjoying a global
experience as never before. Against this backdrop Ranjit Hoskote devises four
distinctive approaches, which emerged as the updated internationalism. The
first one as the breakdown of a classic painted frame urges the revitalization of
painfing where artists like Surrendran Nair, Atul Dudiya, Anandajit Ray and
Amit Ambalal figure in. the understanding of postmodernism is tested by their
use of quotage, appropriation and wit. The second approach comes as a
breakdown of the formal sculpture is situated with Vivan Sundaram's transition
fi-om painting to installation, Ravinder Reddy's large painted terracotta and
fiberglass heads spoofing the gap between High Art and bazaar kitsch. The
third approach addresses the expansion of human experience in the context of
the virtual space of Internet and the new possibilities to negotiate with the
Virtual reality. The fourth deals with the post-studio/gallery/museum
experience of the public space. Although at its embryonic stage in India artists
like Nalini Malani, Anita Dube, Valsan Kolleri and Subodh Gupta engage with
the 'critiques of power asymmetries grappled along differenfials of gender,

53
entitlement and region; they expose the latent pathologies of India's Collective
Life'.-^'

Considering the rampantly growing archive of art scholarship this brief account
is but a contour of the larger narrative of modem Indian art.

54
Footnotes

1. Partha Mitter, Indian Art (Oxford University Press 2001), p. 107

2. lbid.,171
3. Sinha, Gayatri, Editor, Indian Art: An Overview, Rupa & Co, 2003, p 1
4. Ganesh, Kamala, Thaickar, Usha, Culture and the making of identity in
contemporary India, Asiatic Society of Mumbai, SAGE Publications
India Pvt., Ltd. 2005, p.98
5. Sinha, Gayatri, Editor, Indian Art: An Overview (Rupa & Co
2003),pp.,81-82, Chapter : Modem Art India
6. Pande, Alka, Contemporary Indian Painting, An article published on
Internet (http://www.alkapande.com/acad_mod_painti.htm)
7. Mallik, Sanjoy, Impulses of the 1940s', Gayatri Sinha, Editor, Indian Art:
An Overview (Rupa & Co 2003), 83 - (Chapter Chapter: Modem Art
India)
8. Mitter, Partha, Indian Art (Oxford University Press 2001), p.206, Chapter:
Indian Modem Art
9. Dalmia, Yashodhara, Salima Hashmi-edt, Memory, Metaphor, Mutations
- Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan (Oxford University Press
2007), 105 -(Chapter: Modem Art India)
10. Tuli, Neville, The Flamed Mosaic - Indian Contemporary Painting
(Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd 1997), 204 - (Chapter: Indian Modem Art)
11. Ibid.,206
12. Sambrani, Chaitanya -The Progressive Artists' Group, Indian Art: An
Overview (Rupa & Co 2003), pp 106-107 - (Chapter: Modem Art India)
13. Indian Contemporary Art - Schools/Groups -Retrieved from the article -
(http://www.legacyart.in/Display.asp?pagename=schoolsgroup)

14. Panikkar, Shivaji K. - Indigenism: An Inquiry into the Quest for

'Indianess" in Contemporary Indian Art, Indian Art: An Overview (Rupa
& Co 2003), p i 19
15. Mitter, Partha, Indian Art (Oxford University Press 2001), p 211
16. Panikkar, Shivaji K,Indigenism: An Inquiry into the Quest for 'Indianess"
in Contemporary Indian Art, p 119
17. A Post-Independent Initiative in Art - Nilima Sheikh, Contemporary Art
in Baroda(Tulika 1997), 64-65
18. Ibid., 92
19. Kapur, Geeta, Monograph on K. G. Subramanyam (Lalit Kala Akademi,
Rabrindra Bhavan, New Delhi 1987), p 3
20. Sinha, Gayatri - The 1970s - Simultaneous Streams, Indian Art: An
Overview, pp. 127, 129
21. Sinha, Ajay J., Envisioning the Seventies and the Eighties - Contemporary
Alt in Baroda, p 151

55
22. Ibid., 165
23. Ibid., pp. 173-175
24. Sinha, Gayatri, Expressions & Evocations, Edited by Gayatri Sinha (Marg
Publications 1996), p 8
25. Amason, H. H., A History of Modern Art (Thames and Hudson, 1988), p
520
26. Ibid., 487
27. Kapur, Geeta, Nasreen Mohamedi: Dimensions out of Solitude,
Expressions & Evocations, pp. 62-63
28. Prof. Sonmath Wakhlu, The Rich Heritage ofJammu and Kashmir Studies
in Art, Architecture, History and Culture of the Region (Retrieved from:
www.koausa.org/painters/kishorikaul.html)

29. Sinha, Gayatri - The 1970s - Simultaneous Streams, Indian Art: An

Overview, p\35
30. Sen, Geeti, Anupam Sud; The Ceremony of Unmasking, Expressions &
Evocations, pp. 112-113
31. Marwah, Mala, Nilima Sheikh: Human Encounters with the Natural
World, Expressions & Evocations, p 121

32. Gallery Espace presents Drawing Trails by Nilima Sheikh - 17 April to 30

May 2009 (Retrieved from: [http://artabase.net/exhibition/1426-gallery-
espace-presents-drawing-trails-by-nilima-sheikh]

33. Mitter, Partha, Indian Art, p 235

34. Kapur, Geeta, When Was Modernism - Essay on Contemporary Cultural
Practice in India ,Tulika Press, New Delhi, 2000, pp. 317-319

35. HORN ?LEASE:The Narrative in Contemporary Indian Art, Exhibition at

the Museum of Fine Arts Berne, September 21, 2007, accessed Jan 6,
2008, at 13:00 hrs, < http://www.e-flux.com/shows/view/4013>

36. Karode, Roobina, Installation Art in the 1990s, Indian Art: An Overview,
pp.218-220

37. Hussain, Rummana, Artist's online profde, Chemould Prescott Road,

Contemporary Art Gallery, accessed Jan 6, 2008, at 14:00 hrs,
<http://www.gallerychemould.com/artists/rummana_bio.html>

38. Karode, Roobina, Installation Art in the 1990s, Indian Art: An Overview,p
229

39. Hoskote, Ranjit, Indian Art: Influences and Impulses in the 1980s and
1990s, Indian Art: An Overview, pp.206-210

56