Sometime in the late 1890s, Nandlal Bose’s mother would refurbish toys and dolls for her son. That sparked the young boy’s interest in art and craft, and he began decorating Puja pandals in his birthplace, Bihar’s Munger district.
Eventually, this graduate from the Calcutta School of Art became an integral part of India’s history when he was given the task of illustrating the pages of the Indian Constitution.
India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru also commissioned Bose to design the emblems of India’s highest civilian awards, including the Bharat Ratna and Padma Shri.
Almost seven decades later, as the world faces one of the worst crises in history, Bose’s sketch ‘Diwali’ gives hope for better times.
Bose’s ‘Diwali’ and several other paintings by prominent artists are part of gallery DAG’s latest festive exhibit, titled ‘The World Will Go On’, to be held from November 2 to 12. Celebrating India’s unique visual language of pre-modern and modern art, the show features artworks from the cusp of change when European and Indian art met to create a hybrid vocabulary, including rare paintings from the 19th century onwards by unknown masters, who oversaw this development and have left behind their art.
Says Ashish Anand, MD and CEO, DAG, “We wanted the selection to have a positive spirit, to bring a sense of healing as salve for our souls. In India, we are lucky that so much of our art addresses the sacred space, ideal for this season. But we also looked for examples of the joys of life, things we are grateful for—beautiful dawns, the plenitude of still-lifes, the rhythm of dance, the unheard but felt tones of music; we wanted to celebrate life.”
Just like artist Manu Parekh’s untitled work that was done in the 1960s that depicts a sacred idol in an abstract manner. Says Parekh, “I lived in Kolkata in the 1960s and was completely taken in by the atmosphere during Durga Puja. I feel abstractions haven’t been dealt enough in India which has such a rich religious iconography. Our pictorial heritage needs to be depicted well.”
His wife Madhvi Parekh’s work too reminisces their days spent in the ‘City of Joy’ with a painting on goddesses Durga and Kali. She says, “I vividly remember the beautiful Kali Puja I witnessed in Kolkata.”The exhibition brings to art lovers many other exquisite works like Bose’s, including Kshitindranath Mazumdar’s ‘Shiva and Parvati’, M F Husain’s ‘Devi’, ‘The Bindu’ by S H Raza and Krishen Khanna’s ‘Bandwallas’.
‘The World Will Go On’ (The Claridges, New Delhi, Nov 2-12)
It comprises research into the styles of each artist/work included in:
Epic Tales from the Ramayana
The Goddess Principle: The feminine in Indian art and literature through the ages
The Art of Living: Riparian bounty, plenitude, the seasons, harvests, still-lifes, cityscapes
Romancing the Gods: Divine love and harmony is characteristic of all that we celebrate as culture today
A Celebration of Colour and Energy: Abstraction, neo-tantra and the power of colour as an expression of sentiment
Sacred Iconography: Symbols as representation of a sacred language