India International Centre is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to India International Centre Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org The Folk in Modern Art Author(s): SUNEET CHOPRA Source: India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Monsoon 1990), pp. 63-81 Published by: India International Centre Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23002163 Accessed: 04-01-2016 16:10 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. This content downloaded from 202.41.10.3 on Mon, 04 Jan 2016 16:10:23 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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India International Centre is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to India International Centre Quarterly.
http://www.jstor.org
The Folk in Modern Art Author(s): SUNEET CHOPRA Source: India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Monsoon 1990), pp. 63-81Published by: India International CentreStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23002163Accessed: 04-01-2016 16:10 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.3 on Mon, 04 Jan 2016 16:10:23 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
architect Mharte taking on the main burden of work. Gandhi, who
remained largely behind the scenes at this Congress, took a special interest in the exhibition and inaugurated it on 28 March. He
congratulated the artists for:
The simply but exquisitely decorated walls done by Nandalal Bose, the eminent artist from Santiniketan and his co-workers, who have
tried to represent all the villagers and crafts in simple artistic symbols. And when you go inside the art gallery, on which Babu Nandalal Bose
has lavished his labours for several weeks, you will feel, as I did, like
spending hours there together.2
A few days later, on April 12, he again called on people to visit the
exhibition, commenting that it is "not a spectacular show, but a kind
of fairyland. But our tastes have been so debased that the miracles
happening before our eyes appear like so much dust or clay and
trifles coming from abroad become exquisite pieces of art."3
During the winter of the Faizpur session of the Congress Gandhi
wanted the exhibition of folk arts and crafts to be the chief attraction.
When Nandalal Bose was hesitant, saying, "I am merely a painter and I know little of architecture and, therefore, am not competent,"4 Gandhi overruled his objections. When we examine his instructions
for those constructing the venue of the Faizpur, and later, the
Haripura Congress, he states that while the stress was on what was
available in the rural areas, it was not to be an excuse for reproducing backwardness. In fact, he specifically called for the .electrification of
the venue, even though he knew that the villagers would not be able
to get electrification for quite some time afterwards. He appealed for
an innovative approach to our folk tradition; and in this his choice of
Nandalal Bose was most appropriate. This is borne out by a student of his, Bon Behari Ghosh, who
worked as chief artist in the Calico mills of Ambalal Sarabhai in
Ahmedabad at the time of the Faizpur Congress, and who had
helped Nandalal Bose with the exhibition there.
Nandalal started with works in the pat (Bengal folk) idiom but after
that he emerged from its influence. He broke with its conventions and
retained only its structure. In this he was very different from Jamini
Roy. Take his masterpiece, The Birth of Chaitanya: the treatment of the
house, the simplified trees, the contrasts, the use of dabs of colour—
they are all reminiscent of pat, but it is pat with his own innova
tions.5
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raw materials like lamp-black, ochre and chalk, and the use of bold
strokes to highlight forms and figures he makes a radical departure from the practice in art-studios and colleges of his time. He remarks:
I had once done some practice in Kalighat Pata—it was after all not a
waste of time. I reaped its fruits at Haripura Congress. What I drew
there was just a playful extension of the Kalighat Pata.9
He is, however, being modest. If one looks at the panel entitled
Cutting the Vegetables, one can see in it already a blend of the Kalighat tradition with that of Jain manuscripts (like the three-quarters face
that gives it its three dimensionality). This becomes a precursor of
the linear art of later artists like Bendre, as well as the choice of a
commonplace rural figure as the subject-matter of art. Today, when
the Haripura "posters" are over fifty years old, these things might not appear to be unusual. But half a century ago, they were definitely a radical break with the past—not only because of their technical and
formal qualities, but also because they led to developments that
were even more far-reaching in artists like Ram Kinkar Baij. He
joined Nandalal Bose at Santiniketan and sold his first work outside
Bengal from the exhibition which his teacher had organised at the
Lucknow session of the Congress. Ram Kinkar Baij's entry into the art world adds a new dimension
in the relationship of folk-art to modern Indian art. So far it had been
educated upper and middle-class Indians who had turned to folk
art, either as a reflection of changing tastes in the west, or of the stress
on village crafts and self-reliance that gripped the national move
ment from the Swadeshi period onwards.
Speaking of Mukul Dey, the Principal of the Government School
of Art at Calcutta and the critic Ajit Ghose, Mildred Archer recounts
how Bengalis were among the first to appreciate the fact that:
Modern painters such as Picasso, Braque, Matisse and Leger had
reacted against delicacy and refinement. They had ignored perspec tive, used colour for its own sake or for symbolic purposes and had
freely distorted and modified the human form. They had aimed at
intense simplifications and had abandoned the natural in favour of the
abstract or the geometric. Their work was seen to carry with it great
prestige and to have created a revolution in European artistic circles.
At the same time it was clear that these artists had been deeply influenced and fortified by the example of primitive art—in particu lar by that of Negro sculpture. Primitive and popular art were at last
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interest for they appeared to possess many of the qualities admired in
the work of modern painters. Popular painting in Bengal seemed in
this respect no different from Negro sculpture and it was in a mood of
excited patriotism that certain Bengali writers, critics and painters
began to re-appraise Kalighat painting and at the same time to seek
out and collect another and distinctive form of village painting—the
scrolls made by the patuas of rural Bengal.10
While
it may be true that this shift of interest in the West
may have lent a certain credibility to a movement devel
oping inside the country, for a number of reasons it is
difficult to agree that the act movement in India was the same as that
in the West. The essential difference lies in the fact that here were
artists in search of their own roots, which had not dried up. For one thing there was never any wholesale rejection of the
figurative in India as there was in the West, for, photographic
representation was a relative rarity in Indian art. Folk forms, though
they had lost much of their vigour, were much alive. So they did not
need to be rediscovered, except in the case of a narrow English educated elite. Also, as we saw in the case of Nandalal Bose, folk
forms were only one element on which the developing Indian artist
of the modern sort relied, from a whole gamut of "tradition"
including the paintings of Ajanta and Bagh, the sculptures of Ellora
and the many schools of miniature painting. Finally, Mukul Dey returned to India in 1923, when the Gandhian movement was
already in full swing, with its stress on self-reliance and rediscovery of the village by the urban middle classes.
In fact, an account by Bon Behari Ghosh of how Ram Kinkar Baij came to Santiniketan (and whose room-mate he was from 1928 to
1931) is illustrative of this trend:
He came to Santiniketan in 1925. He was of a barber (Nai) family and
his parents served the local Bhadralok in Bankura. Ram Kinkar spent his childhood among the craftsfolk and was attracted to the potters, one of whom let him paint toys, and later even images, for him. Then
came the 1921 movement, and Ram Kinkar was active in it. The
Principal of a local college, Anil Baran Ray, was its leader. His
supporters had got Ram Kinkar to make posters for the movement.
Their quality and sharpness brought him to Baran Ray's notice and he
recommended him to Ramananda Chatterjee, editor of the Pravasi,
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monumental works of such intensity are rare, now for joy in the
abstract or from self-gratification can never be compared with the
intense joy of a huge country in the process of liberating itself.
While
the artistic expression of post-independence could
never again achieve the holism of the artist expression of
the national movement, a number of trends emerge. These return to folk idiom for a far more specific and limited purpose which may lack the heady days of the late thirties and early forties,
but they are imbued with different qualities that give them rele
vance.
Take the work of Meera Mukherjee, starting with the bronze He
Who Saw. In terms of size this monumental figure of a tribal youth reminds one of the work of Ram Kinkar but the similarity is super ficial. The urban sculptor has to integrate herself with her subject
using the ancient technique of the tribal artisans, in this case the
Gharuas of Bastar. But that in itself does not make her work notewor
thy or even distinguish it from the craftsmen. It is the attitude of the
giant youth, with one arm behind the head, that links him with a
tradition going back to the Mohenjodaro dancing girl. Here, just as
in Nandalal Bose's Birth of Chaitanya, there is a blend of the folk and
classical that places this sculpture in a far broader framework of
artistic tradition than the average work of the Gharua craftsmen. In
1965-66, when she cast her statue of the tribal figure, Meera Mukher
jee was treading the same path as Ram Kinkar—but from the
opposite side, as it were.
This process, begun in the sixties, culminated in a work Andolan
(struggle) whose originality reminds one of Ram Kinkar's creations
of the late thirties and early forties.12 The visual image which domi
nates the sculpture is a tree, sacred to the tribals whose techniques she has ingrained in herself, a proper symbol for a hallowed institu
tion. And the students, another sacred element, tongues of fire,
devour it. Here we see a reflection of how institutions, hallowed and
sacred, at one stage of social development, are devoured by the
forces of the future. Such concepts of the transitory nature of our
institutions and the forces of change transforming them are unhear
dof in the world of craftsman. When they began to inhabit the world
of timeless images, then indeed, new art is born. If in Ram Kinkar Baij
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irony reminds one of the same emotion expressed in the works of
other artists who have integrated the folk tradition in their paintings, like K.G. Subramanyan and Jogen Chaudhuri. He integrates this
with the metaphor of the space-flight —so much a part of the twenty first century scenario that was being touted by trendy political ad
vertisers—but he deflates it quitely by giving us the image of a scare
crow flying in an air-balloon. The image reflects both the urge of the
rural young to free themselves of an oppressive environment, and at
the same time, their physical incapacity to do so.
Here we find folk art serving a new purpose. It is the full-throated
cry of our rural masses to be liberated from the fake-paradise which
the artists of the past had thrust on them. Their aggression is
reflected in bright colours that characterize the warning systems of
nature, be it in male birds or poisonous plants; and their ingenuity in breaking the age-old barriers which insult the art of the oppressed
by making it the vehicle of general discontent and the desire for a
better world. Yet, while he expresses his discontent and anger
against social limitations, oppression and backwardness, he also
expresses his joy in being able to transmit concepts unthinkable for
the traditional folk. It is this joy that brings an irrepressible buoyance to his work.
Today, when we look back at the last five decades or so of modern
Indian art, it is evident that the broadbased liberating passion that
gripped a whole people is no longer there; but many different
streams of emancipatory struggles have taken its place. It is in
finding a proper language to voice these concerns that our multiple
regional folk-traditions have played a powerful role, and found
themselves a new lease of life in our present-day culture. In a sense,
they are admirably suited to this purpose, being so varied that each
artist can find his own mode of expression, while liberating these
languages from their local restraints. So, while the folk-idiom pro vides our modern artist with plenty of raw material for originality, he in turn gives it a universality which it never possessed in its
traditional confines.
References
1. Tendulkar, D.G. Mahatma, Vol. IV, 1952, p. 68.
2. Tendulkar, op. cit., pp. 82-83.
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