Early Modern Indian Art

Instructor: Sanjoy Kumar Mallik

August 26 to 28, 2011 | 9:30 am to 5:30 pm
YMCA Seminar Room, Mumbai

The 2010 course for Art History intends to take off from where the 2009 course concluded, tracing the idea of the ‘modern’ (itself an infinitely vexed and much contested category) as it manifests through linguistic, thematic, conceptual as well as stylistic shifts from the terminal stages of the courtly traditions to the advent of new practices around the nineteen forties. The course does not intend to be overtly theoretical, save where such deductions evolve from the material of our concern, the visual images themselves; it would rather be an exercise in ‘looking’ at art and attempting to ‘read’ them contextually. The decades following the nineteen forties have been intentionally compressed into the second half of the final day, with the hope that this post-script will once again become an introductory lead to a more detailed and specialized presentation in a future course.

Lectures:
Day I:

1. A short introduction with two coordinates: (a) locating ‘modern’ in a context called India, & (b) tracing the shifts via art as pictorial language – ‘reading’ visual images
2. Early encounters: (i) from the courtly traditions to the phenomenon of the “Company school”; (ii) the urban transformation of the folk, as in Kalighat “pata” paintings; (iii) the “Bat-tala” prints of Kolkata
3. “Ravana fighting Jatayu” by Raja Ravi Varma: pictorial realism and recreation of a mythic past
4. “The hunchback of the fish bone” and “Sindbad the sailor” from the ‘Arabian Nights’ series by
Abanindranath Tagore: stepping beyond the nationalist prerogatives of a ‘new’ Indian pictorial style
5. Gaganendranath Tagore’s “The coming of the princess” & Rabindranath Tagore’s portraits – claims to a tradition infinitely larger than the indigenous

Day II:

6. The “Halakarshana mural” at Sriniketan by Nandalal Bose – re-invocation of the mural tradition at Santiniketan and the contextuality of theme and language
7. Benodebehari Mukherjee’s tile mural in Kala Bhavana – a visual statement about tactile space: a proposition for the aural
8. The “Thresher” by Ramkinkar Baij as a distinctive sculptural statement of the ‘Famine’ of 1943- 44
9. A proposition for shifting our attention from the Jamini Roy of the paintings to the Jamini Roy of the drawings – the issue of the folk in a contemporary artist’s personal expression
10. Amrita Sher-Gil: from the “Two Girls” to the “Ancient story-teller

Day III:

11. The artists’ collectives of the 1940s and an aspiration towards internationalism – the Calcutta Group (Kolkata) and the Progressive Artists’ Group (Mumbai)
12. Political convictions and that brief moment of a social realism in Indian art of the 1940s – Chittaprosad’s “Hungry Bengal” and Somnath Hore’s “Tebhagar diary”
13. An overview to the subsequent decades, through a random selection of examples, tracing the shifting concerns in theme and content, language and style, medium and material

Dr. Sanjoy Kumar Mallik, Senior Lecturer in the Department of History of Art at Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati (Santiniketan), is a graduate in Painting from Visva Bharati, and holds a post-graduate and a doctoral degree in Art History from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda.With a master’s-level dissertation on the pictorial language and narrative structure in 17th century ‘Malwa’ miniatures, and a doctoral thesis addressing the issue of the ‘modern’ in Bengal for the transitory decade of the nineteenforties, his interest ranges from traditional Indian art to issues of contemporary practice. His essays have appeared in the art history journals Nandan (Visva Bharati, Santiniketan), Bichitra (Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata), Lalit Kala Contemporary (Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi), Varta/discussing art (Akar Prakar Art, Kolkata) and Art & Deal (Art Konsult, New Delhi). He has contributed modest sections on the art of the nineteen-forties to the publications Indian Art: an overview” (Ed. Gayatri Sinha; Rupa & Co., New Delhi, 2004), and Art and Visual Culture in India: 1857 – 2007 (Ed. Gayatri Sinha; Marg Publications, Mumbai and Bodhi Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2009). Apart from several catalogue notes for exhibitions, one of his major projects has been a comprehensive book on the artistic oeuvre of the artist Chittaprosad (for a private gallery based in New Delhi), the publication of which has been conceived to coincide with a touring retrospective exhibition of the artist in the near future. He had also been invited by the Lalit Kala Akademy to curate a travelling exhibition to Cairo, titled To opt is to commit/ young artists from India (October 2008).