ART & the MATTER of IDENTITY K G Subramanyan When An
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ART & THE MATTER OF IDENTITY K G Subramanyan When an octogenarian like me is asked to talk on an occasion like this he is likely to rummage a little in his rag-bag of memories. You will kindly bear with me. I came to Baroda in 1951 as a young teacher in the newly instituted Faculty of Fine Arts of the M.S. University. It had started functioning the year before in a small residential building within a large ground opposite the Baroda Museum. Ravishankar Raval was certainly one of its early mentors. This was inevitable. Ravibhai's position in the cultural scene of Gujarat was at that time comparable to that of Nandalal Bose in Bengal. They were both trying to invigorate the pads of artistic creativity in each region and give them new horizons in their individual ways. In this Ravibhai, with his highly influential cultural periodical Kumar, reached out to a larger public and was an institution by himself. I am not sure about what the basic contribution of Ravibhai was, to the initial teaching philosophy of the Faculty. But I remember to have seen him once or twice on the campus in those early days - a singularly handsome man with an aristocratic look, dressed in immaculate white khadi and sporting a white Gandhi cap, soft-spoken, un-aggressive, easy to approach. Having grown up with strongly nationalist ideas, he may not have fully appreciated the new institution's so-called modern, even global, approach. So when the institution grew and its activities diversified, he was seen less and less on the campus. Nevertheless he did keep alive a loose relationship. I remember his asking me to write an article on Benodebehari Mukherjee for Kumar, later in the day. I wrote it in English; its Gujarati translation appeared in Kumar first, before its English text was printed elsewhere. Later still, sometime in the early seventies, when I was the Dean of the faculty, and had spelt out some of my ideas to the press in an interview, Ravibhai wrote to me an affectionate and appreciative letter. I have unfortunately lost the letter. Nor do I remember clearly what I had said in the interview. I have, however, discovered the draft of a letter I wrote to him to follow, which I will share with you for whatever it is worth. Obviously, he had slightly misread some of what I had said 2nd I was moved to clarify. The letter is dated 17th August, 1972. Dear Ravibhai, I am happy to get your letter. The views I have expressed in the interview are the views I have always held; only I am a little clearer about them now. I feel our problem has been that we have tried to contact the norms of the contemporary west or the norms of our historical past; we have rarely tried to contact our contemporary environment, and find out its norms. The problem is not new; it dates from your own generation — which dilly-dallied with the academic manner of the west and courtly manner of the miniaturists; it has continued into our own except for the fact that it dilly-dallies now with minimal abstraction and tantric diagrams. When I am pleading for a contact with the environment I am pleading for something more basic; not one at the level of languages and manners in vogue at a time, here or elsewhere; but an awareness of the physical and cultural facts around us in our time and its compulsions which will give a new rationale to our work. This will probably result in a work that is as different from the work that has gone before us, as the miniatures were themselves different from the work of the Ajanta caves; it may even find parallels in the work of the modern west, as our miniatures have parallels in the Gothic miniatures in their time or as the Amaravati reliefs have parallels in certain Graeco-Roman reliefs. So really speaking, I am pleading for the discovery of this rationale by artists in their own individual ways, irrespective of what subsequent parallelisms might result. So I will not like to be construed as an advocate of cultural puritanism. I do think that there are many things which are part of our thought and environment today which we owe to the west and gainfully so. So it is not a straight choice between East or West. My view is that the Indian artist should view works of art, Indian or Western, in their contextual propriety (not by the external look or manner) and if he does so, it will help him to find out a suitable vocabulary for his present context. After all, when we know that structures as conceptually different like the Taj Mahal and the Shore Temple of Mahabalipuram are both environmentally appropriate in their different ways, why should I think that a modern architect will not produce something different from both these and still environmentally appropriate? But I believe that the appropriateness will depend on how he reads his contexts right, not in fiddling about with modalities. To amplify what I have said I am mailing you the typed script of a lecture I delivered in Santiniketan a year ago (which they have later published). Let me mention again that it warms my heart to know that you took interest in my published interview; I hope this finds you in good health and you will visit Baroda as you promise. We want you to come and see what we are doing at present. With my regards, Sincerely, KG Subramanyan This was written thirty-five years ago. The issues have dated. From what I have tried to explain it appears that Ravibhai had probably mis read my plea for cultivating an awareness of our cultural context as a plea for stylistic indigenism. Those days there was a lobby for indigenism within and without. This was a post-colonial phenomenon. All of you are familiar with the background. First the colonists - (political like in India; cultural, like in Iran or elsewhere) devalued the cultural antecedents of the country in question. Then they introduced it to their own cultural forms they rated superior. This threw the colonials into a state of confusion, estranged from one and stranger to another. But a resurgent section of the colonials learnt to see their antecedents in a new light and draw fresh resource from them. Initially this had a kind of political colour. They tried to raise a kind of cultural counterforce that would withstand or overcome the colonist's attempts at their cultural alienation. Out of this arose the concept of an indigenist style, which was a kind of fabrication and largely emblematic; often a conglomerate of various features drawn from different categories of practice. An enlightened section of the colonists themselves gave support to this with their own kind of ratiocination and re-exposition. They were a little ashamed of the official readings of our cultural scene. Sir George Birdwood's preposterous comment on the aesthetics of a Buddhist icon in a public lecture in London and the subsequent formation of the India League is known to all of you. Birdwood himself was an admirer of Indian artisanry though the imagery of Indian sculpture bewildered him. But such uneven appreciation can be seen amongst the cultivated Indians too; even those who strove later to demonstrate the depth and gravity of Indian art's contribution to the world art scene. Abanindranath (Tagore) was not a great admirer of Indian sculpture to start with, even though his Japanese friend Okakura Kakuzo considered Indian sculpture as a unique pinnacle of achievement in world art. And Auguste Rodin (whose work Abanindranath admired) had written an effusive panegyric on the Nataraja and Abanindranath was aware of it. It may be that these educated his understanding with the passage of time. He does mention in one of his Vageswari lectures how sometimes foreign observers respond more fully to our art objects than we tend to do. Both Abanindranath and his uncle Rabindranath were not great admirers of the celebrated murals of Ajanta either; they found their compositions too overcrowded; like some foreign observers they found they were afflicted by horror vaccui (to mean fear of empty spaces) Nandalal refers to this in a discussion with Kanai Samanta while explaining that concepts of space can differ from work to work, even tradition to tradition. I am mentioning all this to say that even if one is open minded and free from culturat prejudice, it may take him some time and effort to see each art form in its functional propriety and context. In any case, Indian and foreign scholars unravelled at their own pace various aspects of our art tradition. Its sequence was doubtless influenced by the shift in the interest of foreign Indophiles. First the Moghul miniatures; then the murals of Ajanta; then the lyrical narratives of Rajasthan and the Punjab hills; then the so-called folk and village arts; then esoteric abstractions; and more recently the kitschy graphics of the urban bazaar. This unravelling has brought to light that the body of Indian art is not strictly homogeneous. It has many categories of practice, many patterns of intention$. It has diverse thematic and technical inputs; even cross-liaisons with sister forms outside its territorial borders. Taken together it is a world by itself. Naturally, a sensitive artist wanted to scrutinize each form and understand the working context of each. Nandalal Bose's interest in understanding the language system of each and their serviceability in the living context exemplifies this.