Unlike the bombs that devastated the planet as the second
world war blurred the lines between East and West, civilian and combatant,
honour and terror, the bombs that exploded in the salons of colonial
Bombay’s art scene in the late 1940s were crisp and bright, smelling of
fresh paint and fresh ideas.
Many of Bombay’s art lovers, brought up on the genteel
aridities of academic realism, found themselves grappling with shock. What
did they find on these canvases bearing unknown signatures? Statuesque
women modelled in planes jagged enough to draw blood, strangers to the
sedate portraits favoured by the patrons of the age. Landscapes laid in
impasto thick enough to chew, startling when mounted beside the delicate
vistas and faux Mughal-Rajput miniatures approved by prevailing taste.
Voluptuous nudes that had cast aside the coyness of their demure life
class counterparts, to delight in the immediacy of skin and breath.
A new group of painters had made up their minds to seize
centre stage, convinced that they alone could pick up the storyline of the
Contemporary in India from where it had been dropped in 1941, after the
deaths of the brilliantly idiosyncratic Rabindranath Tagore and the
flamboyant but demon-haunted Amrita Sher-Gil.
Souza and Ara, Raza and Husain, Gade and Bakre: these
young men were "strange and powerful animals", as one of them recalled
fondly, in the course of a conversation with this writer some years ago.
They were intense; and intensely frustrated with the canons that guided
the practice of painting and the conventions that conditioned its
reception in society. They were eager to record unfamiliar sensations, to
grasp new and vibrant ways of putting brush and knife to canvas.
Even as India attained independence, they banded
themselves into the short-lived but legendary Progressive Artists’ Group.
Husain, the oldest, was slow to come on board; Souza, the youngest, was
the febrile leader and ideologist. Amazingly, and this is a tribute to
early post-colonial India’s – and specifically to early post-colonial
Bombay’s – inclusive spirit, most of them belonged to religious minorities
that had been shaken and dislocated during the partition that had been the
dark twin to independence, their sense of self challenged and their
reasons for belonging questioned.
Between the 1940s and the 1980s, the Progressives
established themselves as the standard-bearers of India’s first
post-colonial generation of artists and dominated the art scene in this
country. They decided to explore a path distinct from the indigenously
achieved modernism of Santiniketan, the utopian forest-university that
Tagore had established in Bolpur, in the tribal heartland of eastern
India. For the brilliantly eclectic Santiniketan artists, the toy-making
and bell-casting techniques of tribal shamans went into the same crucible
as Brancusi’s sculptures and Picasso’s epiphanies.
But the Progressives were Bombay artists. Although they
were later to change their minds, the hinterland of India represented all
that was to be left behind; the future lay elsewhere, in the metropolitan
centres of the West. They were intense in their engagement with Art (they
always speak of pictorial practice in the upper case), certain that it
should be autonomous (even if they were not always certain of what it
should be autonomous of), and quick to dismiss many who did not belong to
their circle as social decorations, charlatans, or simply, as
‘non-artists’. They were convinced, also, that they should aim for
standards of excellence that were international rather than merely local.
And yet, these firebrands may never have been transformed into the
sophisticated and magisterial figures that they later became without a
crucial encounter that stimulated their energies, catalysing their
enthusiasm into achievement.
The volatile Souza may well have wasted his life in
prolonged tirades against god, the state and society, like many other Goan
cranks. Husain may have hesitated, despite his resourcefulness and
pragmatism, to break free of his anchorage in the Muslim artisanate and
upper working class and redefine himself as an international nomad. The
cautious Raza may not have received the impetus, so early, to book a
passage to France and devote himself to a switching between the
parentheses of Indic metaphysics and European urbanity.
These young men may not have transformed themselves so
radically without the gifts of three eastward bound magi of Central
European provenance answering to the names of Rudolf von Leyden, Walter
Langhammer and Emmanuel Schlesinger. Without this troika of expatriate
patrons who introduced them to the powerful languages of European
modernism, the Progressives may well have remained raw, troubled rebels
with the vaguest glimmering of a cause. And how intriguing that these magi
should themselves have been affiliated to a minority group that had been
stigmatised in Europe, herded into annihilation or driven into exile.
***
This meeting between the Central European magi and the
future masters of post-colonial Indian art is a classic example of the
enabling fortuity of the great city, the serendipity with which a global
metropolis can nourish intercultural encounter. Von Leyden, Langhammer and
Schlesinger were refugees from a Europe overshadowed by the Third Reich,
who had made Bombay their home. Situated safely midway between the
embattled harbours of the second world war’s eastern and western theatres
– with Marseilles and Suez at one end, and Shanghai and Singapore at the
other – Bombay played host to a varied cast of characters transiting from
one uncertainty to another.
In this exodus were men and women who had narrowly escaped
the SS, leaving behind sumptuous apartments or villas in Berlin, Munich,
Frankfurt, Vienna, Salzburg, Budapest, Prague and many other glittering
cities that had fallen under the jackboots of Hitler’s armies. Like their
diasporic forefathers, who had been forced from their homes first in the
Levant and later in Reconquista Spain, these representatives of the
refined German-speaking Jewish elite had carried into exile what was most
precious to them: their culture. Theirs was a connoisseurial heritage, its
amplitude measured in musical scores and instruments, paintings and books.
Von Leyden, Schlesinger and Langhammer had arrived in
Bombay at various points after the Nazis had seized power in Germany in
1933 and re-established their interrupted lives. Each had prospered
reasonably by the mid-1940s and found a place in their host society:
Langhammer was art director of The Times of India; von Leyden was a
senior executive with the Swiss-Jewish firm of Volkarts and also art
critic for The Times of India; Emmanuel Schlesinger owned a
pharmaceuticals firm. Together, they had formed a circle into which they
gradually invited some of the most gifted young artists who had appeared
on a scene benumbed by British colonial taste. The Progressives were
invited to the Sunday morning meetings that Langhammer held at his home,
which von Leyden and Schlesinger also attended. Here, these transplanted
Europeans would open before their protégés the sophistications of the Eden
they had known and from which they had been expelled.
For the Progressives, whose knowledge of modern
Euro-American art came mainly from art books printed on war quality paper
and confined to black and white reproductions, the full-colour amazements
of Schiele, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Rouault, Modigliani, Klee and Picasso,
these were invaluable lessons. In retrospect, it also seems clear that the
troika also infected their acolytes with a nagging sense of discontent and
dislocation, the belief that the horrors of experience could only be
healed by the affirmations of art, which could only be found in the lost
Europe of their nostalgia.
To the Progressives – both the nucleus of founder members
and their associates, Akbar Padamsee, VS Gaitonde, Tyeb Mehta, Krishen
Khanna and Mohan Samant, life could no longer go on as before. They were
seized by a yearning to travel, to unchain themselves from the familiar.
Despite Nehru’s stirring evocation of the "soul of a nation, long
suppressed, [finding] utterance" at the threshold of independence, the new
India had begun to devote itself obsessively to the practical rather than
the imaginative aspect of collective life: while culture was celebrated
and even institutionalised as a monopoly of the dirigiste,
developmentalist state, cultural practitioners did not necessarily receive
support unless their activities could be brought into the ambit of an
official national art. If they could paint murals and produce public
sculpture, this was acceptable; more conceptual, experimental or private
departures were not regarded as pertinent.
The Progressives, like many other young artists elsewhere
in India at this time, wanted to remake themselves in societies that were
hospitable to the imagination and where they did not have to assert their
preference to be artists rather than engineers, social workers or medical
practitioners dedicated to the task of building a new nation. Most of them
went westward: some to Paris, others to London, one or two brave souls to
New York. Some settled in their new homes; others returned after varying
periods of residence abroad; and yet others among them have shuttled back
and forth for decades.
***
The trouble with latter-day magi, as O. Henry’s Christmas
parable suggests, is that their gifts can go tragically awry. While the
Central European troika gave the unruly talent of the Bombay artists a
sense of direction and purpose, their patronage also had a certain
negative and even limiting effect. The acolytes, flying on their guides’
instructions to Europe, missed the transatlantic flight of talent, capital
and knowledge that had already taken off during the war. Painters and
critics, collectors and dealers, museum specialists and historians had all
escaped the Nazi onslaught to settle in the USA, mainly in enclaves on the
east coast. Apprenticing themselves to the School of Paris, which was
already fading before the School of New York, some of the Progressives
condemned themselves to years of epigonic work justified by an exhausted
rhetoric of originality and heroic quest; a fate from which they were not
released until changed historical or personal circumstances allowed them
to grow beyond the context of their apprenticeship.
Fortunately, some of the Progressives and their associates
took up the challenge of formulating an artistic language that addressed
its immediate location and yet could communicate across borders without
restricting itself to the auto-Orientalism of ethnic or nativist choices.
As the impact of personal encounter and the charisma of their European
mentors faded, the Progressives could discard the biases and preferences
they had imbibed, and distil the lesson of transcultural receptivity from
their encounter with the magi.
Over the decades they have opened themselves to diverse
artistic lineages, becoming attentive, variously, to impulses that came
from T’ang painting and the Japanese ukiyo-e prints, from Gupta
sculpture and the Rajput raga-malika paintings, from cinema and
mathematics, Sanskrit grammar and Santhal mythology. The leading spirits
of the Progressive Artists’ Group emerged strengthened from this
confluence of lineages and have remained committed to a lifelong quest for
the crucial rather than the alluring image, seeking it through the icon of
the heroic survivor, the allegorical tableau, the visionary landscape and
the symbol that mediates between time’s decay and the luminosity of the
eternal.
