Preface
The people in India are art conscious since the dawn of
Indian civilization so much so that it is difficult to find in
this country even the smallest utensil without some decorative
element it, or a piece of cloth without some beautiful design
even though it is the border, or a wall in a house without
some decorative figures, or the floor without some patterns
thereon. Even pots and vessels have some decoration in colour
or pattern worked on them. Art in some form or the other
cannot be missed in everyday life even in the remotest corners
of villages.
As art permeated life in ancient India, fine arts wee
cultivated as a vinodasthana, pastime. Painting being an
easier medium than modeling and sculpture, it was probably ore
readily preferred. The Kamasutra mentions painting as one of
the several arts cultivated by a nagaraka, a gentleman of
taste. His chamber should have a lute (vina) hanging by a peg
on the wall, a painting board (chitraphalaka), a casket full
of brushes, a beautiful illuminated manuscript and
sweet-smelling flower garlands. As recorded in the
(chitraphalaka), a casket full of brushes, a beautiful
illuminated manuscript and sweet-smelling flower garlands. As
recorded in the Harshacharita, the architects, artists
and painters, who had decorated the royal palace on the even
of the marriage of princess Rajyasri, were shown great
respect. This shows the high esteem in which they were held.
When they were commissioned to do some work, they were
honoured before they started working on any art object.
The earliest extant remains of Mohenjodaro and Harappa and
the grandeur Of Buddhist monuments, Hindu temples and the
Mughal architecture point to a legacy of excellence in Indian
art. King Asoka, who zealously propagated Buddhism, chose the
novel form of architecture. He ordered sanctuaries to suit the
needs of ascetics and thus immortalised the traditional
dwelling of the Indian sage. In the shaping of these caves,
the builders, with chisels and hammers as their main tools,
practiced more the craft of sculpture than architecture, The
combination of traditional building forms and applied
sculpture appealed immensely to the flowering genius of the
Indian artist. In course of time, it became the unique essence
of all Buddhist and Hindu architecture in India for centuries
to come. The caves of Ajanta and Ellora are testimony to the
extensive interest in art and sculpture as means to
communicate the life and activity of that time.
The Mahayana Buddhists lavished wealth and new artistic
activity on the proven media of rock-cut cave architecture. In
AD 450, they made numerous additions to the site of Ajanta.
These frescoes are examples of how the Indian artist with his
sharp eye for detail filled the gap created by the traditional
disdain for history writing. All this adds to our information
of ancient Indian society. Under circumstances more trying
than those faced by Michalengelo a thousand years later, the
artists of Ajanta produced a complete and colourful array of
everyday life of the leisurely and the wealthy. Carving out
caves of Elephanta, which are more like canopies of living
rock hanging over generously lit spaces rather than mere
tunnels of twilight run into the faces of cliffs as earlier
caves had been, shows the ingenuity of Indian artist.
Religious fervour at various times gave rise to the
building of numerous temples and mosques all over the county.
They diverted the attention of the ever-suffering commoner
from his daily woes to promises of a blissful existence
through the worship of the expanding Hindu pantheon. The basic
concepts of the design of temples and mosques were evolved
through the creative activity of master craftsmen. The myriad
temples all over India are an eloquent testimony to the
dexterity of indefatigable Indian craftsmen who were able to
create such beautiful works of art. A remarkable profusion of
erotic sculpture on the temple wall sis suggestive of the
expressions of the Indian craftsman's love for life in all its
aspects. The elaborate and extremely graphic presentation in
Khajurraho and Konark temples is not merely restricted to
amorous embraces or copulation between men and women, but also
includes what progressive terminology would describe as free
group sex, and the conservative as downright perverse and
degenerate orgies.
Architecture, the long history of which in India is well
attested by archaeology and literary references of earlier
times, was studied even in the ancient time. It is evident
from several books and treatises like the Mayamata,
Manasara, etc. Vastuvidya or Science of Building
(i.e. Architecture) had been a subject of serious and erudite
concern for the Indians. The texts like the
Vishnudharmottara, Samarangana-sutradhara, Manasollasa,
Aparajitaprichcha, etc., furnish information on, inter
alia, different aspects of fine arts including painting.
Religious iconography was also codified in detail. The
practical applications of expertise in these subjects are
demonstrated by archaeological specimens. A great number of
illustrated manuscripts demonstrate India's illustrious
contribution to the art of miniature painting.
Letters were engraved and sometimes painted on hard
substances like rock or stone, metal, ceramic object, brick,
terracotta, stucco, etc., and written with pen and ink or
stilus and blackening material or even painted with brush or
perishable materials like cotton cloth, silk-cloth, leather,
bamboo, birch-bark, palm-leaf, etc. Pencils were also used for
writing. The vast majority of the known manuscripts of ancient
Indian texts are of palm leaves. Pieces of birch-bark were
employed in some areas as leaves of manuscript. Paper, the
material used for writing in modern times, was probably very
rarely utilized in the last phase of ancient India. The
scribes sometimes took care to embellish the letters. Early
India's calligraphic styles are revealed, inter alia,
by a few Brahmi inscriptions from Nagarjunikonda of the
century AD. As is well attested by the epigraphs in ancient
Indian monuments, India is also known for its fine
calligraphy.
Islamic architecture with its diverse grandeur started
virtually with the arrival of Akbar on the Indian scene.
Humayun had brought back from his exile courtiers and
craftsmen brimming with Persian ideas. During Akbar's rule,
these were blended with the Hindu and Buddhist traditions into
a style as unique as the eclectic personality of Akbar. This
is seen in its best inn Humayun's tomb at Delhi, in the
numerous structures of Akbar's new capital city at Fatehpur
Sikri, and in his own tomb at Sikandra. Akbar's son Jahangir,
proved to be a great builder of empire of architecture. He
kept alive the traditions of art in his court by bestowing
generous patronage on a style of miniature painting. He laid
numerous Mughal gardens particularly in his favourite valley
of Kashmir. His wife replaced the dignified austerity of
Akbar's sandstone architecture with the flamboyance and luster
of pure white Makrana marble.
Jahangir's successor
Shahjahan, turned out to be a
passionate builder and took the traditions of Mughal
architecture to their climactic best in the famous Taj Mahal
at Agra. The Delhi Fort built by him is studded with exquisite
marble pavilions luxuriously embellished and surrounded by
gardens and water channels. Jama Masjid, located opposite to
the Red Fort, the Taj Mahal and the palaces of Shahjahan
proved to be the swansong of Islamic architecture in India.
That tradition came to a close in the nineteenth century.
The old feudal order had broken down. The pressures of
industrialization had begun to build up in Indian society, and
the new British rulers of the country swung between outright
contempt for Indian attainments in art and philosophy and a
well-meaning but uninformed desire to educate the native in
effete Western values of art as represented by the art
schools. Bereft of patronage, miniature painting became
extinct except in pockets of Pubjab and Rajasthan. Its place
was taken, inn succession, by the 'Company painter,' with his
portfolio of native characters, birds, and animals rendered in
water colour; Ravi Varma's portraits, marked by initiative
Anglicism, and his flamboyant re-creation of Indian
mythological themes in a Western manner; the pathetic and
hybrid products of the art schools; and, finally, born of
social and artistic frustration, the revivalist neo-Bengal
school of painting.
The neo-Bengal style of painting was a limited and
artistically regressive response to the situation prevalent in
India in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
Historically, it was perhaps inevitable. The prevailing mood
in the country was compounded of political subjection, social
discrimination by India's British rulers, and spiritual
confusion caused by the inroads made into a traditional
society by industrialization and an alien system of education.
E. B. Havell, the British principal of the Calcutta School of
Art, who arrived in India in 1896, set off the artistic
response. Havell believed that painting in India must remain
Indian in spirit even when it adopted Western techniques of
execution. He found his inspiration in Mughal miniature
painting, which he thought was in direct line of descent from
the idealistic art of the Buddhist and Brahmanical epochs and
had the capacity 'to penetrate to the soul of things.'
Abanindranath Tagore first gave expression in paint to the new
credo. He was followed by a group of other painters who
decided to travel even farther back in time for their
inspiration, to the forms and colours of Ajanta frescoes of
the sixth and seventh centuries. The resulting art as 'too
sentimental in conception, weak in drawing and gloomy
imagination to come to terms with the reality of its own time.
As W.G. Archer points out in his excellent survey, India
and Modern Art (London, 1959), there is a sense in which
pictures presuppose pictures and panting feeds upon painting.
The dilemma that faced the Indian artist in the three opening
decades of the twentieth century was where to look in his
tradition for paintings with which his work could meaningfully
relate. He needed the sap of living tradition to invigorate
his forms and his contemporary perceptions. In its essential
feeling, traditional Indian art was an art of joy and
adoration. It was a celebrative art that proclaimed the
existence of man and his God in a creator-creature unity and
exulted in the spirit and the flesh alike. The new social
reality, as witnessed by contemporary Western painting,
appeared, in contrast, to call for an art of terror and pity,
in which denuded forms of simplicity mixed with passionate
distortion. To be artistically valid, any response to the new
situation must combine a would build upon the past. What
Indian art needed was a creative bridge between the old and
the new.
Starting around 1928, five major Indian painters helped to
shape that bridge, to create an art that is unmistakably
Indian yet contemporary. For their idiom of expression they
took the metaphors of folk art, the rich forms of Mathura
sculpture of the second century AD; the flat planes, hot
colours, and simplistic distortions of Jain miniature painting
of the thirteenth to sixteenth century and of Basohli painting
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They related then
to the techniques of modern Western painting.
The first of the bridge builders, Rabindranath
Tagore, was
primarily a poet, not a painter. His earliest drawings
originated in the erasure of lines of his poetry, the final
forms emerging from the random connection of such erasures.
Tagore's best work was done between 1928 and 1930. Amrita
Shergil received her art education in Paris and formulated her
own style of painting through the influence of Cezanne and
Gauguin, mixed with that of the Ajanta style. Her greatest
pictures, painted in the three year from 1935 to 1937,
portrayed the stark and monumental anguish of Indian life.
Jamini Roy, the third of the bridge builders, spans the styles
of Tagore and Amrita Shergil. His art, from 1928 onward,
symbolizes the folk influence on contemporary Indian painting,
derived from the traditional pata and Kalighat paintings of
Bengal. His favourite subjects are Santal villagers. M.F.
Hussain is the last of the bridge builders. He is the
harbinger of a new mood in Indian art. The four great painters
who preceded Hussain had shown the way. They had grasped a
moribund art tradition and, by the sheer force of their
personalities, breathed into it a new life. It was left to
Hussain to enlarge that life, to give it the authority and
flexibility of a new tradition and a whole new language of
plastic expression. With Hussain modern art finally arrives in
India.
This book, Art and Artists of India, brings to focus the
success stories of some such artists. These stories are not
essentially the biographical essays in the conventional sense.
They are intended to bring to focus the trials and
tribulations our artists had to face in their efforts to
accomplish their objective, thus giving the message of
sincerity, hard work, dedication and the spirit of
perseverance to the humanity at large. Their lives point to
the need for continued efforts to accomplish our goal. There
is no short cut to the path to success. This is their message
to us all.
In my efforts to present before you the lives and
contributions of all such persons, I have consulted a number
of books from various libraries, particularly that of Jamia
Milia Islamia University in New Delhi. I am grateful to the
University Librarian, Dr Gyas-us-din Maksooni and his staff
members for giving me an access to the books. My thanks are
also due to Mr. M.K. Kalsi, Export Director of UBS Publishers
& Distributors Ltd. Who helped me in having access to some
of the books. I would like to thank Rupa & Company for
undertaking publication of the series of books on Creative
Indians, of which the current book is only one part. My wife,
Mrs. Asha Ahuja, also deserves my thanks for cooperating with
me in my efforts to concentrate on this project. My thanks are
also due to various other people who helped me in one way or
the other in any endeavours.
