Modern Indian painting

thumb|Ravi Varma's work, such as Ameya and Nimeya (pictured), considered to be that of the finest painter till then, was later criticised for being trivial. Modern Indian painting is a reactive style of painting to the Western influence on traditional Indian painting. Quotes about Doordarshan National (The Public Broadcasting Service of India) I think after the colonial encounter there is clearly a rupture in that continuity. And I think its the consequences of that rupture that Indian artists had to tackle and work around in the last hundred years. Ranjit Hoskote, (03:20 - 03:36), in the documentary Development of the Modern Idiom Part -I, in the series The Paintings of India, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnjt34Mpr6A&list=PLPahQu0Yh9xDgnKMM1wq7hP9J7xULD4vP&index=4 The Paintings of India - Development of the Modern Idiom Part -I National Doordarshan youtube.com live 10 May 2026) There was this wonderful balance between the social needs of the painting as well as individual expressions. This wonderful balance ...got disrupted ever since the colonial period where old ateliers were broken but the new forms that came into being did not have a historical past. So willy-nilly the individual painter was in a limbo. One the one hand he didn't have a system by which to formulate his ideas and his forms and on the other hand as an individual as though he felt a strong need to express himself at the same time he was uprooted because there wasn't a past or a tradition to go by. Yashodhara Dalmia (03:36 - 04:31) One normally begins the story of modern Indian art with the history of Abanindranath Tagore and the movement he began which later came to be called the Bengal school but I think there's a case for also looking back further...further backwards...to the middle years of the nineteenth century, to the beginnings...of the first art schools in India because I think a new social and professional category of art and artists is really born in that period, so what I think is important to also take into consideration that there is a new group of middle class professional artists very different from earlier craftsmen and artisans who come into the picture and who initially are really practitioners of oil painting a certain kind of academic realism, but who do command the scene of that period and of course one has in mind a figure like Raja Ravi Varma in the South, who does become a figure of national importance. What is equally important to remember that many of these first academic western-style artists so to quote are equally involved trying to build a category which they consider is a national art for modern India so they're interested in working on Indian themes specifically cultivating a new kind of tasteful art among an Indian art public. Tapati Guha Thakurta (06:35 - 08:03) ...essentially Ravi Varma's importance came from using the Western Academic style and bringing in the Indian theme rooted in its myth, in his mythology its religious aspects its sense of color, its sense of dress, sense of ritual, stories from the Ramayana, from Mahabharata, from other kind of stories of which already had a root in the Indian ethos, but the style was totally alien. Neville Tuli (08:41 - 9:10) He is working within a colonial period, he is also trying to make his own place within the colonial regime. He is not in actual fact a victim or a servant of that context. He is actually making major transformations through a new medium that he has learned of his own will and through a degree of symbiosis with what he understands European painting to be but which he has intelligence and the skill to be able to make into an idiom appropriate to the late 19th century where major historical changes are taking place. Geeta Kapur (09:50 - 10:31) In reaction to Ravi Varma, and the kind of school that he propagated the Bengal School or as the people would say that which was started by Abanindranath Tagore, Coomaraswamy, Havel together in which they went back to the Indian miniatures, Mughal Miniatures, Pahari Miniatures to Ajantha taking the inspiration from Indian traditional art and deriving a new style which again had the myth and religioun as the substance of the painting but the use of a line, a different use of color, a different sense of perspective which against Ravi Varma. Neville Tuli (11:25 - 12:11) There isn't a way in which the new art movement completely rejects this academic past and purely labels it as something derivative, colonial and something which is not of any aesthetic merit. What Abanindranath and his first phase of students were trying to do was to really rebuild a new nationalist art. But still largely concerned with ways in which to break out of the Western academic mode and build what they considered an idealistic spiritual art. With Abanindranath's movement there is an equal emphasis on building an artistic collective. Because he does want to build a school he feels that the project of a new national art cannot be achieved by a single person. It requires a whole movement, it requires a following. I think that becomes a kind of paradox that the success of the movement relied so much on the dissemination of a certain stereotype of what was then...highly...applauded as this is true Indian art. But that also becomes the main weakness of the movement, that it becomes repititive, it becomes very formulaic. And in the later history of modern Indian art we find that those we consider the new modern masters would consciously break away from the collective. Tapati Guha Thakurta (13:28 - 28:43) When the Kalabhavan is set up in 1920, it does reprsent a major break within the nationalist art movement. In fact its Rabindranath's own dissatisfaction with the very closeted and haute hause's nature of Indian style painting as it came up in the Joresaco household which propels him to set up this new art center. And its prime concern is to reintegrate art with nature, with everyday life, and particularly as he says with living folk and rural traditions. And I think that does signal a major shift within the modern art movement where Indian art moves away from its ancient, classical, sources. Or purely away from its medieval courtly traditions. And begins to look at art at a more everyday level so this is the living tradition around them. By the time we come to the (19)20's I think there is less talk about transcendentalism and idealism and more talk about invigorating Indian art, bringing (it you know) the spirit of India and the living India was really village India which they discovered around. Tapati Guha Thakurta (15:42 - 28:43) One offshoot of the Bengal school to some extent was Nandalal Bose, one of the finest artists of the modern India, who first started as as student of Abanindranath Tagore and when Rabindranath asked him to join him at Shantiniketan, a whole new openness of views came to him where the countryside, the rural daily life of the artist and the crass person became a more natural inspiration along with the nature. Neville Tuli (17:55 - 18:24) I think Nandalal is really at the forefront of this attempt to reintegrate a modern artist's sensibility with these folk traditions. And I think one major point of this merger comes about in the (19)30's when he is called on by Gandhi to decorate the panels of the Haripura Congress. This is in 1938. Nandalal's Haripura Congress Posters, they do represent a time when the modern artist is able to fully impersonate a folkstyle. And its extremely important because he is using the most simple of material. He is using a series of characters which are drawn from everday village life. Village musicians, trades and castes, village Gods, and he's using the style of Odisha Pattochitra. And together he packages it in a way that it was still unmistakably the hand of Nandalal Bose. But it represents now a new modern art which can signify the people's traditions. Tapati Guha Thakurta (18:25 - 28:43) Jamini Roy's importance is pivotal in the sense he was probably one of the first modern Indian artists who decided to go back to the folk and tribal traditions of Indian art, used the color and the line, use of (let's say) the Kalighats or even the folk traditions to evolve an idiom totally his own and this was best represented by eventually his work of the 1940's in which he took even a theme so alien as "study of the Bible" or themes based on Christianity to which he did not feel a natural emotional empathy, but he realized that if his style could represent themes of such nature, he had truely developed a new style. Neville Tuli (19:55 - 20:42) Along with Jamini Roy, there was Gaganendranath Tagore who to some extent was an individualistic artist. A man who followed no group, no school, no movement, a true connoiseur of the arts and a man who genuinely supported and nurtured many artists. Gaganendranath in many ways started a look into the West as a source of inspiration to some extent in the 1920's, him along with Rabindranath Tagore, to go abroad, the German Expressionists, very large exhibition of wood cuts, and that inspired many to look at Cubism which was a very important movement at that time, but to India, it has not come so early. Neville Tuli (20:42 - 21:31) By the early 1940s, a whole new interest in European Modernism had emerged and a pivotal player in that whole process was Amrita Sher-Gil. Being open to the West, she brought in a kind of post-Impressionist sense of color, form which was very new for India. And in the late 1930s, she became quite an icon figure and inspired many artists to study the use of color and given structure to Indian modern art. Neville Tuli (22:06 - 22:48) She (Amrita Sher-Gil) had seen the Indian people from the point of view of an outsider who wanted to become an insider. Mulk Raj Anand (22:50 - 23:03) Ajantha is part of her (Amrita Sher-Gil's) itenarary when she goes visits them, she visits the south Indian temples, the mural paintings, and for her its a whole new rediscovery. She is coming out of an academic training and a modernist background, and she's out to rediscover a new Indian lineage. And Ajantha to her becomes a symbol of a grandeur on the greatness of India's artistic past against what she considered the mediocrity of the present. Nothing she saw around her inspired her as much as some of these great traditions, either miniatures or Ajantha would. And there is a distinct way which tries to again work out her own visual codes. Drawing on the colors, the stylyzations, the physiognomy of the Ajantha figures. And I think in the late thirties this represents another very critical moment when Ajantha becomes very central in defining a lineage for the modern Indian artists. Tapati Guha Thakurta (23:17 - 24:20) I am an individualist, evolving a new technique, which though not necessarily Indian in the traditional sense of the word, will yet be fundamentally Indian in spirit. With the eternal significance of form and color, I interpret India and principally the life of the Indian poor on the plane that transcends that of mere sentimental interest. Amrita Sher-Gil (24:23 - 25:03) She was already in Paris, connected with a view that could be called a kind of new Humanism, Realism that developed between the two world wars. And coming with that kind of view she encountered India with a boasted element of a kind of nostalgia because she had lived here before of trying to represent the people. Vivan Sundaram (25:03 - 25:38) So in a sense there was a social contract among patrons, artists and viewers. And this social contract of understanding if you like has broken down. And I think that its the consequences of this breakdown that really informs Indian art from 1947 to the present. Ranjit Hoskote, (04:10 - 04:30), in the documentary Development of the Modern Idiom Part -II, in the series The Paintings of India (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voQnMRaAMHE&list=PLUiMfS6qzIMywfcZB9u9T77GjZQeoFdrB&index=9 The Paintings of India - Development of the Modern Idiom Part -II National Doordarshan youtube.com live 13 May 2026) The Progressive Artist Group was established which has been given a lot of attentoin and critical acclaim...and six of them...tried to break out from the established orthodoxies prevailing in Bombay at that time. Neville Tuli (05:37 - 06:10) It started with the independence and the freedom movement. There was a completely new new world. Geeti Sen (06:11 - 06:21 reading the words by S. H. Raza) We could move mountains. We were in the process of becoming ourselves. S. H. Raza (06:32 - 06:38) Both the Calcutta Group...and the Progressive Artists are important because the ushered in Modernism. This is around the (19)40's when international modernism itself was being mediated to them through the war emigrees, and then there were books and prints that were coming into the country as well as their own encounters with artists in the West. So they were being exposed to international Modernism and on the other hand because this was a period of gaining independence, slowly they were beginning to reinvent their past by which they had to understand and delve into historical and cultural past. And make sense out of it in the present period. Yashodhara Dalmia (06:39 - 07:47) I saw all the Indian works and then felt that I should paint something else. After visiting the exhibition, I combined three periods. The form of the Gupta period, the strong colors of the Basohli period and the innocence of folk art. M. F. Husain (08:03 - 08:29) Husain, obviously, legend, a man who has energy which is unmatched by most of the artists...his style becomes something which is easily recognizable by anyone and that's the hallmark always of a great artist. Neville Tuli (08:48 - 09:06) Raza, Gade both brilliant colourists. Raza sustaning the journey far, deeper, evolving different idioms, different styles over the last 40 years...Each of them represented different styles different ways by which they imbibe the Indian traditional art. They expose themselves and share the Western academic schools. Especially the influence of Paris Neville Tuli (09:07 - 09:40) ...their importance as we know lay precisely in being able to put together a medlely of cultures and events and form a cohesive modern idiom which was to influence Indian art in the decades to come Yashodara Dalmia (09:41 - 10:01) Husain needs no introduction of course. But as much as one admires his vitality, his energy, his capacity to invent and reinvent art, he would be important also because he was thinking historically about art. He was thinking about the direction it had to take, the way in which it could become Indian as well as international. In those early years in the 40s and early 50s, he was making some of his most significant paintings. Yashodara Dalmia (10:02 - 10:42) There is no way of making an aged art young again. It must be born a new, and grow up from infancy as a new thing, working out its own salvation from effort, in all fear and trembling. F. N. Souza 11:10 - 11:26 in his manifesto for Progressive Artists Group, Bombay I think the traditional concept of beauty has had a great deal to do with the imperative of harmony... bringing about of harmony between or accord between the viewer, what is perceived and the essence of that experience. And somehow with the onset of the modernity it appears that the possibilities of harmony become diminished in someway...what the art experience would aim at is not necessarily the savoring of beauty but possibly the recognition of terror. So rather than the beautiful, I think the states of being that come into play now are much more those of the grotesque. And a great deal of contemporary Indian art is really addressed towards these states. And I can't help but think that this is one of the inevitable outcomes of what you might call the experience of modernity, which is one of fragmentation, of alienation, and of general breakdown of what traiditionally would be seen as harmonic systems of being. Ranjit Hosakote (12:28 - 13:54) Today, all over the world and in India, there are lot of tensions. There is lot of not only disparity, but lot of turmoil, lot of friction, lack of grace. And the innocence is lost in the world today. Jatin Das (13:55 - 14:14) ...in certain periods, there is almost no option for art but to take on the horror of reality and to address it. And this cannot be addressed as art goes through the process of representing the horror and dealing with it in someway. Ranjith Hoskote (14:15 - 14:39) After 25 years of work, I was not satisfied. I looked at my own paintings and I told myself, "Raza, you are not there! This is French Contemporary Art. There are hundreds of paintings doing this." And I went into introspect. Serious thinking was necessary. It was an inner journey which meant instead of European concepts, I started to study what was Oriental art, what was Indian art which revealed to me as a colossal civilization. S. H. Raza (15:29 - 29:13) ...the Baroda school became a very important influence in the whole development of modern Indian art. Neville Tuli (16:49 - 16:55) Baroda (school) visualized a new artist, that is an artist who is not only a studio bound, but an artist who is a...modern new citizen of India of a free nation. Hence the pioneers of the school decided that besides the studio training...of Painting, Sculpture, print making etc., they would also get a good grounding in art history, in languages, in aesthetics etc., and hence it is a very different kind of artist they visualized. Gulmohammed Sheikh (16:57 - 17:32) This link between the artists finding their own originality and finding their own Indianness was always a dominant theme which was in a large extent linked to India finding herself also as a nation after independence. Neville Tuli (18:02 - 18:19) Believe me, twenty years back when I discovered Bindu and the potentials in the seed, the energy, the Shakti, that it revealed, it has changed my work, it has changed my life. Since 1982, I believe my work has a different sense, a different meaning, a different quality. S. H. Raza (20:02 - 20:27) What the ancient or medieval Indian artist would have done is to affirm a life-giving worldview that was shared by society at large. But since we've lost that life-giving world views, since we don't have that coherent image of society in the cosmos, the artist's role changes completely from an affirmative one to a critical one. But in a way still what the artist is doing is still the same thing which is to remind people of their own creativity, their own freedom, their own dignity. Ranjith Hoskote (21:02 - 21:37) If one is to give the serious difference between the art of the past and the modern contemporary art, obviously it is in the nature of this joy and the role of this joy in the creative process. Neville Tuli (21:38 - 21:51) Images of the past hold out a very different kind of promise...what they stand for is hope...the self balancing properties of the society. But when you live in a society, that now no longer has this kind of image of coherence, it is very difficult for the art that is produced in that soceity to offer such images. Ranjith Hoskote (21:52 - 22:21) Universal is the external observer who is seeing them. So people talk about universal language: Art has a universal language. But then, as far as the practitioner goes, there is no universal language. It is a personal language. There are some people who are sold out to this idea, well, we are one world kind of a thing. There might be people like me who belong to smaller units of place. K. G. Subramanyam (22:37 - 29:14) The Hindu, a leading Daily in India The efforts of the Bengal School of art were to revive the Indian language in art. They tried to study Indian miniature art, Ajanta paintings and so on, and imbibe those elements into contemporary paintings. It was very similar to neoclassicism in 19th century France when French artists tried to revive the Greek and Roman classical idiom during Napolean’s reign. Dr. Deepak Kannal to The Hindu, with Shilpa Elizbeth for the column Revisiting Haripura Panels and the vivid brush strokes of Indian history. It was an outcome of a pan-Indian and a retrospective understanding of visual arts. Nanda Babu not only borrowed from Ajanta, Mughal or Rajasthani paintings, but he tried to understand Indian art and its language in retrospective and introduce that language in these Haripura panels. Dr. Deepak Kannal I really admire that he has formulated this idiom very carefully. He has borrowed from so many sources, and unless you are conversant with these traditions deeply, you will not notice that. The amalgam is so beautiful. Dr. Deepak Kannal I think he borrows profusely from the classical tradition too. That is why it is a retrospective and pan-Indian understanding of Indian art. He chooses from every corner of the country and every period of history. He borrows from Ajanta, manuscript paintings of Rajasthan, and profusely from Jain paintings. Dr. Deepak Kannal In many of the Haripura panels, the idea is borrowed from the Company School and the idiom from the Traditional School. Dr. Deepak Kannal External links Category:Art Category:India