Ever since the eruption of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, the world has started to take skin tones seriously. So the publication of this lavishly illustrated book that tries hard to make a case for a reappraisal of the work of the little-known artist, José Nicholas Angelo da Fonseca (1902-67), who was born in Santo Estêvão, Goa, could not have been better timed.
For going against the injunctions of staunchly Catholic Goa, Fonseca dared to depict figures from the New Testament, including Christ, as brown-skinned Indians, and Madonna as an Indian mother in a sari in innumerable paintings.
For centuries, European artists had represented them as Caucasians, and therefore white as they were painted–– white, of course, symbolising their purity. They strongly held this belief in Christ’s fair-skinned appearance, although this flew in the face of the facts of Christ’s West Asian origins.
Délio Mendonça is a Jesuit priest of Goan origin, born in 1958 in Mozambique. He has taken upon himself the mission of finding a place for Fonseca in the pantheon of great Indian artists, a status, he feels, the Santiniketan-trained painter was unfairly denied because of his aesthetic commitments––
fusing Christian iconography with the artistic conventions of traditional Indian art––that didn’t go down well with orthodox Catholics.
The “forgotten master”, to quote Mendonça, did his primary education in his village, and thereafter, like many well-off students, went to Belgaum in British India, followed by Pune and ultimately to Mumbai, where he enrolled to study science at St. Xavier’s College. Next, he trained to become a physician, but dissatisfied, he joined the JJ School of Art in Mumbai. He disliked the Eurocentric approach and travelled all the way to Santiniketan.
Mendonça writes that the artist trained under Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose for a little over a year from 1929 till 1931, although the former joined Santiniketan only in 1942.
Prolix, tediously repetitive and needlessly detailing the minutiae of church history of Goa that in no way add to our understanding of the artist in question, Mendonça is trying to rewrite art history, but a fact-check is the least one could have expected of him.
What is “Santiniketan College (founded near Calcutta in 1901)”? Rabindranath Tagore had founded Brahma Vidyalaya in Santiniketan in 1901. The foundation of his Visva-Bharati, where Fonseca must have trained, was laid in 1918. It was formally established in 1921 in the presence of luminaries like Brajendra Nath Seal and Sylvain Lévi in 1921 in Santiniketan, Bolpur (not Belpur, as Mendonça writes).
To counter the training of European academism in art schools, Abanindranath and his disciples had sought inspiration from the glories of Indian art, thereby ushering in Indian modernism, which is quite different from the Western model because of the totally different social and political situation. Fonseca had joined Santiniketan at that juncture.
Mendonça argues, “Fonseca strongly felt only a home-grown pictorial Christian art form in India could connect Christians to their history and social duties. His remarkably rich array of ‘brown’ water colour Christs and Madonnas... constitute an unspoken critique of imported instruments and elements, when India could just as well offer them. It was his way of practising swadeshi to halt Western cultural dominance.”
Christianity being the religion of the colonisers, it was Fonseca’s endeavour to make it more acceptable to the people of the subcontinent by turning New Testament characters into Indians identified by their swarthiness and attire. Fonseca adapted Abanindranath’s Bengal School style with hints of art deco, although he never deviated from Christian iconography and symbolism.
Mendonça would have us believe that Fonseca deserves international adulation and compares him with some Modern masters who painted Christian themes. Skilled though he was, and a rebel, too, in his own way for refusing to mindlessly produce blond Christs, choosing to go native instead, Fonseca’s
art lacks the magic that makes sacred art great.
His bloodless and insipid paintings in the wash technique favoured by Bengal School artists are at best nice illustrations that faithfully follow the Biblical storyline. How can an artist as conservative as Fonseca, who cannot be accused of ever experimenting and innovating with forms, shapes, colours
and lines, and who remained far removed from burning social issues of his times, be termed modern, as Mendonça tries to establish.
As to Indian art, since when were Hindu gods and goddesses so bashful about their bodies? Even his religiosity lacked the passion that animates great religious art. Little wonder, Fonseca remained a footnote to the history of modern Indian art.