Painting a flawed impression
Of all the charges brought against Donald J Trump, one of the most damning is that he spends so much time in an alternative reality of his own making, and that the former American president has lost touch with the real world.
The same charges could be brought against the writer of this compendium which, its potential notwithstanding, takes the reader down the rabbit hole to ‘blunderland’. She creates an alternative history of Indian art that significantly diverges from its well-documented trajectory. Only extreme deprivation of knowledge could have led to this.
Way back in the 1980s, Kamal Sarkar had published an invaluable listing of the biographies of Indian sculptors and artists in Bengali, titled Bharater Bhaskar O Chitrashilpi. Bina could have used that slim volume as her model. Instead, we have a 710-page clunker fumbling in the dark.
Consider the specious qualifying subtitle of the book: An Illustrated History of Indian Art from its Origins to the Present Day. Bina achieves the impossible by encapsulating entire periods of India’s dynamic and complex art history, which scholars have devoted several learned tomes on, in short paragraphs with headers like Pre-Mauryan Sculpture (642-320 BC), Upanishads, Buddhist, and Jain Periods, The Gupta Period (320-600 CE), and suchlike. Compression leads to confusion.
In ‘Pre-Mauryan Sculpture’, for example, she crams Indian art history from “early art” (when “…There was no romance in the stone nor refinement in form…”) up to the 19th century, into three brief paragraphs. Can this be taken seriously?
What are the Calcutta Museum and the Calcutta School she refers to repeatedly? Bina, similarly, constricts our glorious miniature and folk art traditions. When she comments on the famed Kalighat patuas, and the bold and unhesitant lines that created Hindu deities, and later satirised societal mores, her words speak for themselves: “These were their own spontaneous forms of Cubism and Impressionism”.
Bina’s choice of adjectives is quite misleading. She describes Buddha’s images as “soft, sensual”. If she is to be believed, Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906), who used the Western academic style to depict Hindu mythological figures, was the “father of Modern Indian art”. Since when was Gaganendranath Tagore a Brahmo? Unlike his uncle Rabindranath’s branch, his family never converted. Nandalal Bose is summarily dismissed: he “…failed to make any impact at a national scale with his art”. These are samplers of her bloopers; the tip of the iceberg of errors, so to speak.
Even stranger—Bina never mentions the Bauhaus exhibition of Kolkata held in 1922, which changed the course of Indian art. How can any discourse on modern Indian art be complete without a reference to this eye-opener?
After making short work of aeons and centuries, from page four, Bina reveals her true intent —making a listing of Indian artists from the 19th century up to present times. But the book’s format itself is problematic. Each artist is assigned approximately one-and-a-half to two pages.
So how does one separate the wheat from the chaff? How can Rabindranath Tagore, who in his 60s had struck out on his own as an artist and charted the path of Indian modernist art, and M F Husain, who had single handedly placed Indian art on the international map, be equated with some minnow that the writer introduces?
Acquainting Johnny-come-latelys with Indian art is fine, but not at the cost of ignoring the masters and other worthies. This arbitrary selection is blighted by an alarming lack of fact-checks. Consider the list of Bengal-based artists? How could one miss Upendrakishore Ray and his son Sukumar Ray, both masters of pure humour; master printmakers Haren Das and Pinaki Barua; rhythmic sculptor Sushen Ghosh, Reba Hore and Zainul Abedin; the ever-inventive Partha Pratim Deb, and Aditya Basak, to name a few?
It is impossible to read the book from cover to cover, but the dearth of information on individual artists, Bina has selected, is quite appalling. In most cases, each entry is a register of data instead of an appreciation and evaluation of his or her art.
The book is handy, but the paper used is little better than the newsprint. Consequently, the art work is blurred and hazy, quite in keeping with its writer’s vision.