‘ART AND NATIONALISM IN INDIA’ by Partha Mitter

In Colonial India, Art and Nationalism are the canons of a vehicle. Indian art is a vital expression
of its cultural diversity, geography and its strata. India who had suffered by many alien invasion
which somehow affected the deep rooted art and culture heritage of india. In British Raj, when
India had started a battle for its freedom, art has plays a major role in it. Art had interwined
with the assertion of nationalism, raised the muted voice of Indian people who wanted their
freedom from the ruthless British rule.

In 19th century Britishers opened many art schools to trained the elite class of Indian artist in
the western art idiom. Westernization of India, following the establishment of Raj, had been
accomplished with the active support of the elite, whose own aspirations ensured their
continued allegiance to modern western artist. Indian art which previously lacked perspective
and true likeliness of subject matter, had now changed with the coming of devices such as linear
perspective and chiaroscuro techniques of renaissance art.

Indian artist came out with many equations to stand out from western representational art
idiom. These change didn’t occur in a moment, there has been a long journey of change in the
consciousness of Indian artist. They were oscillating from the enthusiastic and wholehearted
acceptance of western art to strong resistance to it. The reception of western art coincides with
the gathering momentum of a new national consciousness at the turn of this century, when
Indian civilization was rediscovered by Indian and their western allies. As an act of nationalism,
Indian artist began to comeback to rediscover its past values and collections. The conflict
between the two world views, one archaic and other modern, represented by what could be
called westernizers and orientalists, made the task of choosing a style all the more difficult for
the artist during the first four decades of this century down to 1947, the year of Indian
independence. The search for true indigenous culture and values by the artist, lead them
toward the opposition of the western art techniques and resuscitation of its core traditional
fundamentals values. The late nineteenth century saw the split between the moderate
politicians in favour of power sharing with the rulers, and the extremists who increasingly
articulated the call for total independence through their slogan, swaraj(self rule). But as
Mahatma Gandhi was to enunciate so eloquently in the 1920s, swaraj was not implied self
government by Indians, it also meant evolving a truly indigenous culture, stripped of its western
moorings.

By the nineteenth century, the decline of the imperial Mughal dynasty and other local courts
had led to rthe loss of patronage for the traditional artist. The british who now ruled india, were
able to stem this decline for a while by employing artist to execute portraits, picturesque views,
ethenographic and natural history themes. The short lived school of company paintings, which
combined English water color and Indian miniature styles, however, merely postponed the
approaching end of the tradition rather than averting it altogether.

The great exhibition of 1851, in London, had revealed the strength of traditional Indian
manufacture inasmuch as it had exposed the undistinguished quality of English industrial arts
such as carpets, wallpapers and furniture.

The most powerful example before the westernisers was the unprecedented, almost overnight
success of Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906) of kerela, the first professional artist from the Indian
upper strata, whose legendary career did much to elevate this lowly profession. Raja Ravi Varma
came out as a first modern artist of India, but this modernism was antimodern in the west, he
subtley fuses the western academic realism with the Indian subject matter (hindu mythological
themes). He himself straddled two worlds, modern western and old hindu, modelling his career
on professional European painters, being on familiar terms with the rulers, representing india at
the great exhibition in Vienna in 1873, yet refusing to go abroad for fear of losing caste. At the
time of his death, varma was hailed by the leading nationalist periodical, The Modern Review,
as the greatest modern Indian painter and nationbuilder.

During the initial era of westernization under the Raj, the Indian elite had suffered a severe
crisis of intellectual confidence, bruised by Macaulay’s famous Minute On Education, James
Mill’s stricture on Indian society and Evangelical castigation of Hinduism. Two developments
helped their recovery: first, Modern Bengali Language and literature serving as a vehicle of
nationalistaspirations, initial Bengali aspirations flowing into larger Indian ones; second,
Hinduism receiving a boost with Theosophists presenting it as a spiritual alternative to the
materialist west. EB Havell, as the principal of Calcutta art school in 1896, havell engaged in
wresting ‘just’ recognition for Indian art in the west on the one hand, and in encouraging a
‘genuine’ contemporary Indian art among students on the other, for he believed that the two
went together Paradoxically, his two measures, the removal of classical antiques from
classrooms and replacing European paintings in the gallery with the fine Mughal art.

What changed the course of art in India was Havell’s meeting the young Bengali painter,
Abanindranarth Tagore (1871-1951), nephew of the poet Rabindranath Tagore. Abanindranath
was already moving toward a more indigenous expression, his discovery of the deligacy of
Mughal art was through Havell. Havell insisted him on his artistic journey to move towards
indigenous traditional art. The two, the older man, an English art teacher, the younger man, an
Indian artist, joined forces to create the first modern art movement in India, later the
movement known as Bnegal School. Abanindranath’s ‘The last Hours of Shahjahan’ an
amalgamation of Mughal and Japanese Wash Techniques. Abanindranath contribution as a
nationalist was to restoring the lost language of Indian art, by choosing themes of past glories
from Indian history.
Formation of Indian Art society in London in 1910 to encourage the study of Indian Art in west
and Indian society of Oriental Art in Calcutta soon followed with official patronage, to act as the
centre for Indian art, with Abanindranath incharge as art teacher. The orientalism of Bengal
reflected the emerging national consciousness among the Asian Intellectuals, led by Indian poet
Rabindranath Tagore and the Japanese intellectual Okakura Kakuzo, who sought to create an
ideal of Asian unity. The cross fertilization of Indian and Japanese culture had a radical effect on
Abanindranath’s own work and some of his finest atmospheric paintings were done after the
encounter with far eastern art. The battle against western art was fought not merely with the
brush but the pen as well, in contemporary journals, The Modern Review in English and Prabasi
in Bengali.

R..M. Raval after leaving Bombay school of art, returned to Ahemdabad to setup an art school
under Bengal’s inspiration, spreading at the same time orientalist ideas through his journal,
Kumar, closely modelled on Prabasi, Fyzee Rahamin, a jew from Bombay and trained by the
Edwardian portrait painter, John Singer Sargent, renounced his western portraiture in 1920s in
the wake’s of Mahatma Gandhi’s nationalist movement. The highest accolade for orientalism
was won when Nandalal bose and his pupils at Santiniketan were selected by Gandhi to
decorate the Haripura congress marquee in 1937.

Sahitya and Prabasi lay in their crucial role in forming public taste through high quality
reproduction of European and Indian Art; they also provided an outlet for the growing art of
political and social cartooning. In twentieth century, more imaginative were the cartons of
Gagendranath (1867-1938), whose grotesque character and the use of large flat areas of black
white and greys, remind us of cartoons in the german satirical magazine, Simplicissimus.

Amrita Shergil, a Hungarian born artist, who was trained in post impressionism and deeply
influenced by Paul Gaughin’s work, when came back in India and travelled many heritage sites,
affect her deeply and her works would soon become the pioneer of Modern Indian art.

The old debate between westernisers and the orientalists continued, giving rise to a very
individual artist of the pre-independence generation. Trained in Calcutta art school, Jamini Roy
(1887-1972) went through an academic phase, followed by an orientalist reaction, as was the
case with many young men of the period. He then experimented with the series of eastern and
western styles, creating pastiches, parodying them =, whilst seeking to learn from them in order
to create an indigenous style, but this didn’t fill his hunger and finally he turned to folk art of his
village.