Modernisms in India

Modernisms in India Modernisms in India Supriya Chaudhuri The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms Edited by Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gąsiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker Print Publication Date: Dec 2010 Subject: Literature, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards, Literary Studies - Postcolonial Literature Online Publication Date: Sep 2012 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199545445.013.0053 Abstract and Keywords This article examines the history of modernism in India. It suggests that though the dis tinctions between modernity, modernization, and modernism are particularly complicated in the case of India, they remain crucial to a historical understanding of the ‘modern’ in all its senses. The article argues that the characteristic feature of Indian modernism in In dia is that it is manifestly social and historical rather than a hypostasis of the new as in the West. It contends that modernisms in India are deeply implicated in the construction of a secular national identity at home in the world, and in this respect answer a historical need to fashion a style for the modern as it is locally experienced. Keywords: modernism, India, modernization, modernity, national identity, hypostasis THE distinctions between modernity, modernization, and modernism are particularly com plicated in the case of India, but remain crucial to a historical understanding of the ‘mod ern’ in all its senses. Modernity, as a social and intellectual project, and modernization, as its means, are associated with the influence in India of Europe and of Enlightenment ra tionality from the eighteenth century onwards. Modernism, as an aesthetic, is far more limited in period and scope. Nevertheless, just as recent cultural criticism has proposed the existence of ‘alternative modernities’1 not native to the West, so too our attention has been drawn to ‘alternative modernisms’, or ‘modernisms at large’.2 The question of peri odicity, as of location, is complicated by the historical fact that modernism as an aesthetic was simultaneously restricted and elitist, and international and democratic. In India, moreover, the impact of the style of European modernism was intensified by the belief that its internationalism suited the experience of modernity and would further the mod ernization of public spaces and cultural life. A politics of modernism, setting this percep tion against a counter‐argument that saw modernism as an essentially Western mode op posed both to tradition and to national or local experience, emerges in the early twentieth century. Page 1 of 19 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: University of Washington; date: 07 September 2020 Modernisms in India (p. 943) Raymond Williams's phrase ‘the politics of modernism’ may remind us of another problem that he posed and left to some extent unanswered: ‘When was modernism?’3 This is a question that has been asked with particular urgency by Indian cultural critics such as Geeta Kapur, and, interestingly, Kapur's answer appears to involve a sense of the mod ern as a state of freedom: that is, as a set of social and historical conditions. Indeed Ka pur argues that ‘The characteristic feature of Indian modernism, as perhaps of many postcolonial modernisms, is that it is manifestly social and historical’—rather than being posited, as in the West, as ‘a hypostasis of the new’.4 Whether or not one agrees with Kapur's description of Indian modernism, Homi Bhabha's notion of the ‘time‐lagged colo nial moment’5 within modernity might serve to furnish the argument that modernism too was a late phenomenon in India. In fact, however, this is not the case. Both in respect of the influence of European modernist ideas, and in the development of indigenous mod ernisms, India offers striking evidence of the emergence of a new aesthetic in the first decades of the twentieth century. Partly this is because of the cultural work carried out by a highly educated bourgeoisie responsive to the latest international developments; but more importantly, it is rooted in political and social circumstances, in the disputes over a ‘national’ style, and in the struggle to find an authentic modern identity. As Partha Mitter urges in his account of the ‘triumph of modernism’ in Indian art, the study of influence, so integral to the discipline of art history, is not finally useful in understanding the complex mechanics of this process.6 It is true that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the growth of a cosmopolitan culture, distributed over great urban centres located all across the globe (a ‘virtual cosmopolis’, in Mitter's phrase7), is conducive to the transmission of ideas: but at the same time the pressure of historical circumstances and political impera tives, as well the creative energy of the local, tends to disrupt and reconfigure patterns of ‘reception’. Art On 7 May 1921 the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore celebrated his sixtieth birthday in Weimar, and used the opportunity to visit the Bauhaus, where he found the (p. 944) teach ing practices of Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten, and Georg Muche akin to his own radical educational experiments at Vishva Bharati, the university he had founded at Shantinike tan in Bengal. Two years previously, he had appointed Stella Kramrisch to teach art histo ry there; now, at Tagore's suggestion, a selection of Bauhaus works was shipped to Cal cutta to be exhibited, in December 1922, at the fourteenth annual exhibition of the Soci ety of Oriental Art, patronized by the Tagores. Among the exhibits (which mysteriously never returned to Europe) were two watercolours by Wassily Kandinsky and nine by Paul Klee, as well as works by Johannes Itten, Georg Muche, Lyonel Feininger, Gerhardt Mar cks, Lothar Schreyer, Sophie Körner, and Margit Tery‐Adler, a single painting by the Vorti cist Wyndham Lewis, and reproductions of contemporary art from Europe. The exhibition was well received, but, as Mitter shows, what was perhaps even more important about it was that a number of Cubist paintings by Rabindranath's nephew Gaganendranath Tagore and folk‐primitivist works by his niece Sunayani Devi were also shown on this oc casion. In earlier decades the example and influence of the Tagores, particularly of Page 2 of 19 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: University of Washington; date: 07 September 2020 Modernisms in India Rabindranath's other nephew Abanindranath, had been linked to the Orientalism of the Bengal School of art, which drew upon Mughal and Rajput miniatures and Japanese brush‐and‐ink techniques to create an anti‐colonial, ‘pan‐Asian’ style of narrative painting welcomed by bourgeois nationalists. By 1922, however, Rabindranath himself appears to have moved away from the Orientalism of the Bengal School, and to be seeking a new di rection for his art school at Shantiniketan. Even before the December exhibition, the soci ologist Benoy Sarkar, exposed to modernist art in Berlin and Paris, had initiated a heated dispute in the Orientalist journal Rupam by urging India's artists to adopt the internation al avant‐garde's ‘aesthetics of autonomy’ in accordance with their quest for political au tonomy.8 In fact much of the cultural debate is carried out in journals such as Rupam, Modern Review, Prabasi, and Bharati. Sarkar and Kramrisch wrote approvingly of Gaganendranath's Cubist fantasies, and Kramrisch's careful critical evaluation of Sunayani's work is still relevant.9 If we admit the happy coincidence of ‘the modernist moment’ with the year 1922, in India as in Europe, it must be noted that it is not the influence of the Bauhaus, but the experi ments of Gaganendranath and Sunayani, that initiate a modernist idiom.10 Gaganendranath's Cubism, harshly dismissed as trivial by the colonial British critic W. G. Archer,11 must be seen as a radical liberation of narrative art from naturalistic represen tation, substituting a dynamic, fluid, mysterious play of light and shade and colour for the relatively static geometry of Analytical Cubism. The titles of his works (p. 945) (The Poet on the Island of the Birds, The House of Mystery, Aladdin and His Lamp, The City of Dvaraka, The Seven Brothers Champa) suggest an imagination steeped in literature and myth, and his experiments with reflected and broken light create a haunting, fantastic world beyond naturalism, even leading towards Expressionism, as the avant‐garde critic Max Osborn suggested in reviewing one of his paintings at an exhibition of modern Indi an art in Berlin in 1923.12 But his Cubism had no immediate following, while his sister Sunayani's adoption of subjects and styles from folk art appears to have been the first step in the constitution of an Indian primitivism. Mitter associates the emergence of primitivism in Indian art with a number of social and political phenomena: ‘the transformation of elite nationalism into a popular movement led by Mahatma Gandhi’, the move towards ruralism and environmentalism in the social philosophies of both Gandhi and Tagore, and the admiration of nationalists, including painters of the Bengal School, for the bold simplicity of folk painting, notably that of the Kalighat patuas, popular artists associated with the area around the Kali Temple in Cal cutta.13 There is a difference, however, between these responses to indigenous traditions and the excitement of Picasso, Matisse, or Brancusi over African sculpture, tribal masks, and other non‐Western art.

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