There is a conundrum familiar to historians of modern art that is often dubbed ‘Picasso and the Africans’. How is it, one asks, that Picasso's adaptations of African sculpture are generally seen as brilliantly inventive and original, while any assimilation of European modernism by African or Asian artists is often derided as derivative? Does the seeming double standard reflect nothing deeper than a continuing prejudice of the sort that was common in the colonial era? Partha Mitter's engrossing new book goes some way towards addressing this issue in relation to painting in late colonial India.
The quarter-century preceding Independence in 1947 was a rich period for Indian art, laying the foundations for the various scene we find today. It was marked by Indian artists' adoption of some of the diverse modes of the western avant-garde, as seen in the poetic cubism of Gaganendranath Tagore and various versions of primitivism, from the naïve watercolours of Sunayani Devi and the pastoralist idylls of Amrita Sher-Gil, to the untutored introspective visions of Rabindranath Tagore. An obsession with the local tribal people amongst artists of the Santiniketan School was carried forward to fashion the distinctive primitive idiom of Jamini Roy.
All of these artists have been written about before, though mostly individually and in Indian publications and exhibition catalogues that are not readily available to the general reader. Mitter's well-illustrated survey, The Triumph of Modernism, contains brilliant essays on each of them and brings them together for the appreciation of a wider audience. Along the way, he highlights some seminal but hardly noticed exhibitions that served as milestones, such as the Bauhaus exhibition in Calcutta in 1922, and an exhibition of modern Indian art at the Burlington Galleries in London in 1934.
From the outset, Mitter resists the notion that we should understand the work of the Indian modernists as signs of western ‘influence’, a traditional view that locks Indian artists into a dependent relationship and characterises their work as derivative. He prefers to see their responses to the West as active rather than passive: the colonised artists made conscious choices, redeploying the syntax of the avant-garde for their own ends. But what were those ends? Mitter identifies their primitivism as part of a wider challenge to the colonial urban civilisation. Many nationalists saw the village rather than the city as the authentic expression of India, and found an alternative to western rationality in a version of primitivism that was grounded in eastern thought, in a Tagorean move back to the hermitage in the forest.
Indian nationalism was overtly part of the artistic agenda in the preceding period (covered by Partha Mitter's previous book, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850–1922) when Abanindranath and the new school of Orientalist artists had established themselves. Their outlook therefore certainly provides a context for interpreting the modernists who followed, but it is not clear how far this reading reflects their own personal intentions, which are crucial if we are to think in terms of artists making deliberate choices rather than merely responding to external influences. Amrita Sher-Gil was more interested in social concerns that she is usually given credit for, but she was too cosmopolitan to make a nationalist. Rabindranath's drawings, as Mitter points out, were essentially private expressions; and Jamini Roy was a recluse. Only Nandalal Bose attempted direct political engagement with the nationalist cause, and briefly with some success, but he soon became disenchanted and withdrew. Despite Mahatma Gandhi's early encouragement to Nandalal, he and other leading nationalist figures for their part were surprisingly indifferent to the potential of visual art to express and disseminate nationalist views.
We might also question whether modernism did actually triumph so early as this in India. The later parts of the book shows how, aside from the mavericks, the period was dominated by a tussle between Orientalists of the post-Abanindranath generation (still looking backwards to reclaim Indian history and redefine it through an aesthetic derived from ancient India) and academic realism, represented most strongly at this time by H. Mazumdar and the Bombay School of Art under W.E.G. Solomon. The rivalry between these two groups became overt in the competition to bag commissions to paint murals for New Delhi and India House in London. Round One of this squabble (over Delhi) went to the Bombay School, though the prize was reduced in scale as Lutyens refused to let any Indian artists work on Viceroy's House. Round Two (over London) went to the Bengalis, though this project too was curtailed before completion. Mitter describes the competition between these factions as a case of ‘contested nationalism’ – a disagreement over which style of art best represents India. But his account shows that it had as much to do with regional and personal ambitions, including those of colonial officials.
The select band of primitivists here defined as the modernists did not feature in these high-profile commissions, which suggests that the period as a whole was not simply the tale of their triumph. The Last Gasp of Academic Realism might have been a less evocative but more accurate title. Before 1947 the modernists were in a minority, though they certainly facilitated the later decisive rejection of colonial art schools methods that was made by the subsequent generation, after Independence.
The book's compelling subtext is about how looking at these Indian images changes our perspective on modernism globally. We see it as more diffused. With regard to the mechanism of that spread, Mitter deconstructs any idea of one discrete culture influencing another, replacing it with a pattern of cultural interaction. After all, some of the Bauhaus artists engaged with Indian mysticism, while re-inventing it for their own purposes; and if Modernism became an international currency then Indian artists' responses to some of its formal means could reasonably be called the other side of the same coin.
