In pre-independent India, writings on Indian art varied from that of exaltation of the ruined state of the monuments to the glorification of the symbolic concepts encased in those structures depending on which side of the fence the historian stood in the colonial discourse. James Fergusson and Percy Brown followed the archaeological, ethnographical, scientific and empirical approach with an academic aloofness that flowed in accordance with the colonial political policy of looking at India as a congregation of ethnicities rather than a nation. E B Havell and Ananda Coomaraswamy continuously stood outside the existing mainstream of European and official thought: determined to set the record right in favour of the Indians, they set up an alternate front in Orientalist scholarship,” wrote Tapati Guha-Thakurta. While Coomaraswamy and Havell were busy building up the national style, their late contemporary, Stella Kramrisch, tried to bring out the regional styles into the foreground of art historical studies on India.
Among the scholars who worked on India, Kramrisch still remains the most prolific with her works on various subjects like architecture, sculpture, painting, folk art, iconography, iconology, canonical texts, contemporary art, etc. She deviated from the mainstream art history of the nation to look into the unknown, unappraised regional histories of art and wrote works such as The Pala and Sena Sculpture (1929), Nepalese Painting (1933), Kalinga Temples (1934), Arts and Crafts of Travancore (1948), The Art of Nepal and Tibet (1960), and Unknown India: Ritual Art in Tribe and Village (1968). Many of these such as the Pala-Sena sculptures and Kerala wood carvings did not figure in the discourses on Indian art prior to Kramrisch as they did not follow the “Indo-Aryan Style” of Havell nor the “National Style” of Coomaraswamy and remained excluded from art historical scrutiny.
Kramrisch’s contribution lies in the fact that she, though concentrating on Tiruvitankur, envisaged the whole Kerala region as a singular cultural entity much before the political unification of the state became a reality. Kerala temple architecture and art poses a difficult art historical riddle as many features of the Karnata region and Tamil Nadu get mixed up with local building traditions and ritual requirements. A roof pattern similar to that in Kerala is seen in far-off regions like Himachal Pradesh and Nepal. The layouts of the temples appear to be closer to Sri Lanka and Gandhara rather than neighbouring Tamil Nadu. While the stone sculptures of Kerala show similarities to those in Tamil Nadu, the bronzes and wood carvings have Hoysala-like fullness and momentum (but devoid of the ornamentation). The mural paintings of Kerala trace their ancestry to the Vijayanagara and Nayaka style. All these influences are artistically woven into one style, which is characteristically Kerala, as observed by Kramrisch.
Kramrisch came to Kerala probably through her connections in Bengal and the channels of friendship between Bengal and Kerala (Travancore). The channel of connection between Bengal and Kerala passed through Madras, which was the British administrative capital in South India. Under the British administration, many officers working in Madras Presidency were transferred to other Presidencies, which led to the connections between these regions. A well-documented example is the transfer of T Madhava Rao from Travancore to Baroda and the subsequent activity of Raja Ravi Verma in the Baroda court. The same connection saw the architect Chisholm designing the Napier Museum in Trivandrum and Baroda College and Picture Gallery at Baroda. Similarly, Charles William Edgerton Cotton, the director of commercial intelligence (1903–10), was transferred to Travancore in the second decade of the 20th century. Cotton’s interest in history and antiquities brought him closer to the scholars in Travancore, with whom he founded the Kerala Society in 1927. It may be also worth mentioning that C W E Cotton was working in Calcutta when E B Havell was actively involved in the cultural activities of the city as the principal of the Government College of Art and Crafts. Later, these connections were further nurtured through the invitation to O C Ganguly to deliver lectures at Trivandrum in the late 1920s and the sculptor Debi Prasad Roy Choudhury to work on the portrait of the Maharaja of Travancore.
Kramrisch and her biographers do not reveal much concrete information about the travelling she did in India for documenting art and architecture, but it is obvious that she traversed the length and breadth of the country looking at monuments and museums. While working on her book A Survey of Painting in the Deccan, Kramrisch is likely to have visited the Travancore and Kochi regions and met R Vasudeva Poduval, one of her co-authors of the book The Arts and Crafts of Travancore. When Kramrisch first published it with the Royal India and Pakistan Society, Poduval was at the helm of affairs of Travancore archaeology. It is quite possible that he urged Kramrisch to write on the subject.
The academic significance of a scholar in a discipline can be judged based on the respect given to the author through the writings on the same subject by later experts. Scholars such as K R Srinivasan and H Sarkar, who wrote on Kerala architecture after Kramrisch, accepted the hypothesis and nomenclature of the latter. “In a way,” writes H Sarkar, “the former states of Travancore and Cochin have been served better: Kramrisch’s survey of temples in the former Travancore state bring to fore some of the basic facts of the ‘Kerala Style’, which she prefers to distinguish from Dravida of the neighbouring Tamil Country”. Many questions raised by Kramrisch regarding the origin, development and the possible connections of these regional styles to mainstream Indian art remain unanswered.
Being an art historian who has studiously gone through the works of the scholars who wrote on Kerala architecture and art, I can confidently state here that the observations of Kramrisch—whose birth anniversary falls tomorrow—still remain relevant to the study of the subject.
Jayaram Poduval
Head, Department of Art History, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda