Independence Day in India 1947, and my mind goes back to my parents telling me that everyone wanted to read the newspaper in Malayalam in Kerala ( Changanacherry and Champakulam) and in the vernacular in different parts of India.
In 2016, when I curated Tatwamsi at the India International Centre of Kerala’s Silent Valley photographs the distinguished Chairman of Indian International Centre Prof MGK Menon spoke to me about his role in collecting India’s Modern Masters for Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Bombay (Mumbai) for Homi Bhabha. Menon said:
“ In the 1950’s , Bombay was a different place.Independence Day 15th August 1947 was a historic event, that was equal in importance to the most momentous happenings of our crowded days. We couldn’t believe that the British flag was being brought down all over India, and the Indian Tirana would be hoisted. Amidst great sadness of partition was the breath of freedom and the thought that two hundred years of British rule over our teeming subcontinent and its ancient civilization had come to an end in a manner far more noble than it began.”
Thus so many years hence it is a good time to look at the collection of the TIFR Mumbai which has been documented by the brilliant art curator, historian and author Mortimer Chatterjee and wife Tara Lal in Mumbai. Replete with photographs of Homi Bhabha and Prof Menon and many other paintings, this collection is a veritable toast to India’s Moderns.
Chatterjee and Lal go back in history to create fascinating facets of collection memories. Homi J Bhabha’s deep interest in the cosmopolitan aesthetics nurtured by the Bombay Progressives resulted in Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) spending government money to buy paintings and other works of art. With Nehru’s permission, he began spending one per cent of the institute’s annual budget on purchasing works of art. Bhabha started the TIFR collection in the early 1950s, and, within a decade, had amassed the most significant collection of Indian modern art anywhere in the world.
MF Husain Alaap 1960
MF Husain created many works as a series and his musician series is one amongst them. We can see the lines the tones and the tenor of this work which was born of his love for Indian cultural customs which became the essential idiom for his art and it provided him with the navigational resources for his other odysseys. The layered vocabulary of this painting, sets the tone for his preoccupation which was to tap the pulse of a nation in its making, viewing it from the aisle of an observer as it were. The cubist characteristic of colour tones and the grace of the musician all belong to an early era of composed classicism. His friend and one of India’s greatest collectors Ebrahim Alkazi wrote:
“It is in a fundamental sense that we speak of Husain being in the authentic tradition of Indian art. He has been unique in his ability to forge a pictorial language which is indisputably of the contemporary Indian situation but surcharged with all the energies, the rhythms of his art heritage.”
Maqbool Fida Husain, revolutionised the Indian art aesthetic. The years 1956 to 1961 saw extensive travel and international exhibitions, and his paintings were a reflection of what he learned and saw on his travels to the east.The muted colours and bronze undertones in the paintings of his later 50s and early 60s works indicate that he was inspired by Japanese screen painting. Although limited in palette, these works contained a multitude of themes, including animals, bathers, lovers, dancers, musicians and nudes.
Alap is a horizontal beauty, its fragmentary compositional technique reveals strikingly complementary subjects.The kurta pyjama clad Veena player is set against a blue sky with a black sun.The impasto treatment reveals an array of influences: the use of a high horizon line and flattened perspective reminiscent of the compositions of Indian miniature painting. The portrait evokes the concert recital postures of classical performers at baitakhs .
F N Souza’s Still Life 1962
Souza’s painterly Still Life is an amalgam of colours and contours defined by a collection of looping circles and short strokes.While they remind us cosmological diagrams of ancient yantras in Hindu philosophy they could also be a amorphous mix of the Eucharist.We see a gestural fluid approach to his painting, which bursts through in joyful ebullience in the early 1960s, of which the current painting is a magnificent example.
We also see that Souza moves away from a strictly religious interpretation of the genre with portrayals of impressive liturgical vessels on an altar. Instead, he portrays a kinetic mix. Fine hatched strokes further emphasise the forms . He also bridges the divide between secular and sacred, mundane and enigmatic.
“ Comedy is funny, religion is not. Religion is dead serious. But those entrusted with it are clowns! Not a single scientist has ever defined God. They use the scriptures. Even Einstein and Hawking kept mum. My religion is nature. Nature is the sole principle, beginning-less and endless. Nature is the creator of God in man’s mind. Not only God, but gods, goddesses, devils and spirits. They are all living in the minds of men and women all over the world! Their creator is none other than the forces of nature. Nature is the creator of everything. I am using energy from the same universal source which men used to write the Vedas and the scriptures! … Have fun guys and dolls! Today, tomorrow and always…’ (F. N. Souza, Foreword to the 2nd Edition of Words and Lines, New Delhi, 1997, p. 4)
Tyeb Mehta Christ 1958
Flat planes of colour to conjure space and creating divisions within the human figure were simple techniques that Tyeb Mehta envisioned when he created his impasto works and portraits in a modernist mold. The colours of Prussian blue with charcoal strokes echo his love for creating expression with colour and contour.Christ for Tyeb was more than just a Biblical story ,it was a sojourn of human testimony and it played out through its many stories.He loved the beatitudes and the many references that spoke of the parallels of faith.
Tyeb was a voracious reader.His book shelf at his home in Lokhandwala in Mumbai is a gorgeous array of great writers, great art critics, and the world’s best philosophers.He loved the European Masters as much as he loved reading the Indian Puranas.His love for Christ stems from his philosophic readings and contemplative idioms.
This work by Tyeb Mehta achieved an unexpectedly high price at Christies in New York in July 2020. In the South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art auction, the work Christ sold for USD 16,250.00 (€ 13,801.60) – well above the upper estimate of USD 7,000.00.The work was acquired for the TIFR Collection.
Yatra Ram Kumar 1964
Tyeb’s closest was friend Ram Kumar.The artist Kumar who went to Benares in the 1960s with MF Husain and became a pilgrim of the small bylanes of Benares. This early work Yatra is a paradigm in the nuances of architectural symbolism.In an earth toned palette of browns the tiny cubicle houses are reduced to flat squares or rectangles that look like ripples of an aerial relief study.
Ram Kumar’s brother Nirmal Verma the author noted that his early stories had a certain mood of ‘melancholic warmth.’ In a review Ram’s friend the giant of abstraction and author and activist Jagdish Swaminathan stated that these are not naturalistic representations of the City, but cityscapes of Ram Kumar’s ‘inner world’.
Of those years, Ram Kumar stated, “My work is now guided by a concern with plastic qualities. I am more deeply involved with the form than with the content. When one is young and beginning, one’s work is dominated by content, by ideas – but as one grows older, one turns to the language of painting itself. I have grown detached – I want to find the same peace that the mystics found” (Artist statement, Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi, 1996, p. 117).
Kumar’s abstracted landscape is an orchestration of monochromatic browns with a hint of mossy greens that have their sensation of solitude. They are also suggestive of minimalism – within his astute inferences of landforms, of the passage of by lanes that saw cows walking out with bells tinkling in the morning and returning at godhuli. This work is sensorial for its qualities of tranquil light, which we see enmeshed in a palpable mood of soliloquy.
Krishen Khanna Spring Nude 1954
99 year old Krishen Khanna’s nude study is a beauty to behold. Admiring this work in softened hues and controlled contours, one cannot help but be overwhelmed by the emotionally charged image, its effective composition, and the artist’s control of his paint brush and use of colours. Exemplifying his fresh interpretation of the ‘contemplative nude’—a classic theme that has fascinated countless Western masters for centuries, this pioneering work is a symbiotic association between contour and colour, the artist conceiving a pictorial language that resonates deeply with traditional art aesthetic ideals. It reflects Krishen’s deep understanding of both classical and modern approaches to space.
In terms of treatment more importantly, we see the interplay of the physical and the imaginary. Its pictorial idiom is evidently derived from his early rendition of the texture of the body and its contours in light renditions. By coupling contoured lines with subtle techniques, his brushwork encompasses the sharpness and fluidity of modern masters.Intriguing however are the tiny leaves that accompany the feminine form lost in thought.
NS Bendre’s Jhabua Bhils 1961
Bendre’s career was a celebration of the rural Indian landscape and way of life. His paintings are firmly rooted in Indian subject matter, usually inspired by scenes of everyday life he witnessed around him. He enjoyed capturing women engaged in simple maternal activities, home-made beauty regimens, or engaged in various forms of household chores or labour. Even when depicting the mundane, he always managed to create a poignant composition. In the current painting, suggestive of a setting in Madhya Pradesh , Jhabua district he captures a group of women. Bendre used modernist vocabulary to signify Indian settings. Here we see that he creates the huts in the background to create a pastoral scene to visualize an idyllic rural rhythm, as he recreates a celebration of a pre-industrial society, seen in ‘Jhabua Bhils’.
The brightly attired women generally stand together in a group. The focus of the painting is squarely in the foreground, as the background appears more abstracted in lighter tones. Upon closer inspection, the treatment of the entire work is in an early experimental semi realist style far removed from Bendre’s distinctive pointillist style that was apparent in later years.
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