The fine art of a coarse India

In 2023, Modi government co-opted much of Indian art, but the resilience of a few artists who challenged this dominance emerged as a silver lining.

Visitors inspect a painting at the India Art Fair which was held at NSIC Exhibition Grounds in New Delhi from February 9 to 12. | Photo Credit: INDIA ART FAIR

As we end one year and begin with another, we often attest to a cycle of timelines that denotes periods of art history. We seek out relevant timelines that correspond to art historical cycles—modernism, contemporary practice, conceptualism, post-Internet, and so on. Fragmented by art schools, metropolises, galleries and forms of patronage, India, we see, creates an unusual setup for visual art.

The book When was Modernism? (2000) collects seminal essays art historian and critic Gita Kapur wrote from 1987 to 1997. Here, Kapur situates the idea of the “modern” in art within the context of India’s post-independent political history. Published at the turn of the century, the book is also an art historical document that chronicles a decade of immense turmoil. Kapur began writing these essays in 1987, a time when the failure of Indira Gandhi’s nationalisation policies had begun to result in India’s flirting with bankruptcy. Things eased with liberalisation in 1991, when the precursors of an art market began to form.

In the early 2000s, auctions became awaited moments in the art calendar. Suddenly, paintings that were languishing in South Bombay and South Delhi homes became essential investment commodities. Auction houses promised square foot rates and art market indices. Various newspapers published art auction records, but their headlines signalled a false financial education, underpinned by the idea that art was an asset. At the time, the country had a nationalist government, led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a Prime Minister who used his affable nature to blunt the ends of what nationalism intended to achieve.

From the time of Rabindranath Tagore, nationalism in Indian art sought to illustrate myths and reinvigorate techniques, seeking a renaissance that emerged from the indigenous. ‘Modernity’ was to reject Western Classical education in sculpture and painting. In 1857, the same year the Sir JJ School of Art was established in Bombay, India waged its first ‘War of Independence’ against the British East India Company. This replaced a mercantile trading corporation with an Emperorship of the British Crown. The JJ School of Art was established to change the way we painted and sculpted, so as to build the edifices of Empire and give vocations to children of artisans who had been made redundant by goods from Manchester and the trade surplus England enjoyed because of industrialisation.

Members of the Progressive Artists’ Group— M.F. Husain, Sadanand Bakre, V.S. Gaitonde and K.H. Ara—pose for a picture with their supporters and benefactors in 1947. | Photo Credit: THE HINDU ARCHIVES

The artists who together formed the Progressive Artists’ Group—M.F. Husain, Bhanu Athaiya, F.N. Souza, Tyeb Mehta, S.H. Raza, K.H. Ara, Abdul Aziz Raiba and Akbar Padamsee—included JJ School alumni. Egged on by emigres leaving war-torn Europe, the group embraced secular progressive ideas as binding principles for its manifesto, as also a visual universalism. They were keen to shed indigeneity in both visuals and practice. They wanted to participate in a world where they saw themselves as free, an India on the brink of becoming a modern society.

The group dissipated as many of its members left for higher education in Paris and London, but their presence dominated many future decades of Indian art practice. Interestingly, Geeta Kapur contested this dominance in her book by talking about women artists practising in those times and before—Amrita Sher-Gil, Nalini Malani, Nasreen Mohammedi. The “modern” was always a space as contested as the “national”.

Moving away from the project of decolonisation, nationalism in India today erodes the very pillars of a secular and equitable Constitution which made this country a Republic in 1950. In several of his essays, Dr B.R. Ambedkar warned against conflating the possibilities of an independent India with the demands of a “nation”. Decades before him, Rabindranath Tagore had described “nationalism” as “the worst form of bondage”, because it forced one country to think of itself as superior to others. Governments which derive their political legitimacy through religion and race often invent a mythical ethnic bind that stokes an unending and viscous circle of violence. A failure of “modern” values or ethics is inevitable when it is drawn from an unclear past, hazy with pride and steeped in nostalgia.

Across the world, visual culture is being co-opted by the nationalist right who wants to use it to disseminate false truths, but modernism is still an aspirational emotion for many millions living in postcolonial developing societies. To escape poverty, ignorance and exploitation, these people seek freedom, comfort and progress through science, innovation and change, but often it is in culture where the success of such change is determined. This is perhaps an important truth to remember when recounting Indian art highlights of 2023, and when measuring the scope of challenges that lie ahead.

“Shikwa” (2023), a cutout panel by artist Salik Ansari that was on display at “A Room of One’s Own”, a group show at Mumbai’s Sakshi Art Gallery that was on view from January 12 to February 9. | Photo Credit: BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

In early January 2023, Salik Ansari, a young conceptual painter from Mumbai, presented a series of cut-out paintings at an exhibition—”A Room of One’s Own”—in the city’s Sakshi Art Gallery. Ansari’s cut-outs were made with photorealistic quality, depicting the burnt-out arches of a riot-affected building, a JCB Bulldozer demolishing a Muslim home, or riot police blockading a farmer protest. The scenes were familiar, but among them was an arresting work, “Shikwa”, that had been placed on the floor—the cutout of a man in a white kurta and pyjama, crouched in a foetal position, seeking mercy during a riot. The foetal position demonstrates childlike vulnerability, but it is also the shape of a man in prayer, offering namaz.

Having studied at the Sir JJ School of Arts, and later at IIT Bombay, Ansari is one of India’s most accomplished conceptual artists, both in technique and critical thinking. He was born in Bhiwandi, a power loom capital on the outskirts of Mumbai, populated a century ago by Muslim immigrants from Uttar Pradesh, and then by those fleeing the Mumbai riots of 1992-93. Ansari’s rise from a neglected suburb on the margins of the city to artistic acclaim has come on the basis of pure merit, but he is an outlier. The art scene in India is very vocal when it comes to flaunting its secular credentials, but a brief overview reveals that artists from Muslim backgrounds are seldom prominent faces. In terms of representation, they fall well below 14.2 per cent, their statistical fraction of India’s population.

Many early precursors of the Indian modernist movement were Muslims, but with M.F. Husain leaving for Qatar in 2010 because of constant harassment and censorship at home, the dynamics of the art world changed. The conservative right began infringing on its freedoms. Muslim artists who were allowed to flourish often became caricatures of what is falsely imagined as “Islamic Art”. Islamic art is imagined as a melee of intricate lines and diagrams or calligraphy, but this is an inaccurate description as none of these have any inherent connection with Islamic faith, nor do they act as forms of benediction.

S.H. Raza’s ‘Gestation’ (1989) was sold at a Pundole’s auction in Mumbai for Rs.51.75 crore ($6.27 million) on August 31. | Photo Credit: BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

On February 15, a major retrospective of S.H. Raza opened at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It put on display more than a hundred paintings that encompassed Raza’s career. Curators Catherine David and Diane Toubert intelligently placed his practice within the context of contemporary art, rather than slot him within the constraints of “Modernism”. In August this year, ”Gestation”, a 1989 Raza painting, sold for more than $6 million at a Pundole’s auction. The work was representative of his practice that became prominent in the 1970s, where circular diagrams and neo-tantric inspired forms were drawn using a colour palette reminiscent of the textiles of Rajasthan’s nomadic communities, or the indigenous communities of Raza’s home State, Madhya Pradesh.

Initially, auction records were reserved for Raza’s works from the 1960s, all marked with distinct abstract landscapes, a series I often regard as his strongest phase. Catherine David proposed that his retrospective not be pegged to the practices of geometrical optical artists who practised in France in the same period or spiritualists such as Mark Rothko. The National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi declined to host the show after it ended at the Pompidou. This seemed ironic because Raza left France in his twilight years to return to India. In 1981, he titled one of his paintings “Maa, laut kar jab aaunga, kya launga?” (‘Mother when I return, what should I bring?’) An artist who sought India in his work, was perhaps not institutionally accepted in the country because of his religious identity.

A poster for Amol K. Patil’s solo show, “The Politics of Skin and Movement”, which was on view at the Hayward Gallery in London from October 11 to November 19. | Photo Credit: BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

B.R. Ambedkar was a keen student of the arts. He met his benefactor Shahu Maharaj of Kolhapur through the artist Dattoba Dalvi, and he also practised drawing in his later years. Amol K. Patil’s solo, “The Politics of Skin and Movement”, at the Hayward Gallery in London this October was the culmination of a dream Ambedkar had even when studying at the London School of Economics a hundred years ago: dismantling the Indian caste system.

Patil’s father and grandfather were both Ambedkarites. They were part of an enlightened avant-garde of working-class people who practised art as a performance of resistance against caste. Through performances, sculpture and drawing, Patil delineates the architecture and character of Mumbai, a city that simultaneously liberates you from caste and consigns you to a caste role. It was, in fact, Ambedkar who had urged India’s Dalits to leave their villages and move to cities. This is how Patil’s family had come to Mumbai.

We saw the emergence of the Black Arts Movement with “The Other Story”, a seminal 1989 show at the Hayward Gallery that had been curated by artist Rasheed Araeen. Inspired by this, Prabhakar Kamble curated a show at the Showroom in London in 2018, which attempted to create solidarity between the Ambedkarite and Black Consciousness movements. The thirteenth edition of the Bamako Encounters, an African biennale of photography, took place between December 2022 and February 2023. The organisers had invited Kamble to curate a special section of Dalit photographers, wanting to open channels of communication between them and African artists.

Photographs are displayed at “Plea to the Foreigner”, a special section at African biennale Bamako Encounters (December 2022-February 2023) that featured the work of Dalit photographers. | Photo Credit: BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT  

Kamble has long been the convener of the Secular Art Movement. He is also a committed anti-caste activist. True to his Ambedkarite credentials, Kamble invited artists from a cross-spectrum of subaltern castes, but he also invited Akshay Mahajan, an upper-caste artist who had photographed a portrait of Babasaheb in a school for Roma children in the Hungarian village of Sajokaza. The universalism of Ambedkarite philosophy has relevance outside South Asia, too, and by inviting a non-Dalit artist, Kamble demonstrated Ambedkar’s vision for the Indian Republic. The title of the exhibition, ”Plea to the Foreigner: What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables?”, was borrowed from an essay Ambedkar had written in 1945, one in which he shows how the British and the Congress had been complicit in drowning out alternative voices, especially those of Dalits. He feared that after Independence, the freedom enjoyed by lower castes would be mitigated by caste oppression.

There have been some prominent artists from the Dalit community—K.H. Ara, Ambadas Khobragade—but in a largely elitist scene, caste fault lines have not yet been dismantled. Contemporary artists—Patil, Rajyashri Goody, Prabhakar Pachpute—have only found acceptance in India after tasting success abroad. Several curators from Africa—Simon Njami, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Kader Attia, Marie Hélène Pereira—have understood the need to mirror socio-cultural challenges in India, and have opened up exhibition opportunities to Dalit artists. Solidarity performed on an international scale has a long history. The Senegalese-Mauritanian artist Hamedine Kane had his first solo show in India in 2018. The opportunities that have opened up for Dalit artists post the Black Lives Matter movement should be reciprocated with invitations to Black artists from India.

A visitor looks at an untitled work by American artist Keith Haring as she visits “Pop: Fame, Love and Power”, an exhibition at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre in Mumbai that is on view until February 11, 2024. | Photo Credit: INDRANIL MUKHERJEE/AFP

Going by published numbers, the art industry in India is valued at $144 million. It is much smaller than Africa’s, which is pegged at $1.2 billion. When the price India’s modern masters fetch is compared to that of living Chinese superstars, they, sadly, trail by many millions. Indonesia, also, has better infrastructure when it comes to alternative art spaces, art fairs and biennales, with a market much larger than ours. Despite them having a fraction of our population and size, artists from Europe leave us lagging far behind.

This November, Art Mumbai opened with a resurgent art market that reminded us of the heyday before the financial crash of 2008. It was welcome relief for the Indian art scene, which over the years had increasingly become Delhi-centric. Delhi’s own India Art Fair also saw similar enthusiasm this year, but foreign galleries and collectors were missed at both fairs. Unlike others fairs around the world, the fairs in India restrict themselves to the subcontinent, in the composition of both artists and collectors. International fairs like Art Dubai and 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair are comparatively much more diverse. The chicanery of Indian Customs rules makes it impossible to import art and visualise international art shows, but regardless, Indian collectors much prefer Indian modernist masters to any other kind of art from abroad.

In April this year, the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre opened in Mumbai’s business district of Bandra Kurla. The museum has since imported a series of shows from New York. They are all well produced, but as happens when cultural infrastructure shifts to private hands, these shows are all politically neutral. The same, however, cannot be said of one particular art event in the summer.

Narendra Modi is given a walkthrough of “Jana Shakti” on May 14, an exhibition at NGMA, New Delhi, that celebrated the ideas he proposed during the hundred episodes of his ‘Mann ki Baat’ radio series. | Photo Credit: ANI

Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the NGMA, Delhi, in May, where he was given a walkthrough of “Jana Shakti”, an exhibition that celebrated the ideas he had proposed during the hundred episodes of his ‘Mann ki Baat’ radio series. Philanthropist, collector and founder of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), Kiran Nadar, it turned out, had participated in an advisory role for the exhibition. The uproar in the art world was cacophonic. While the exhibiting artists were accused by their colleagues of being co-opted by the right-wing, Nadar’s curatorial involvement came under the scanner, too. Seeing how many of India’s present and future museums are being funded by billionaires, this collusion with the Modi government is hardly surprising. Most of these investors have economic interests that leave them vulnerable to right-wing persuasion.

The India Art, Architecture and Design Biennale 2023 ran from December 9 to 15 at Delhi’s Red Fort. In his inaugural speech, the Prime Minister said he wanted to build infrastructure and promote international exhibition-making on the lines of Sao Paolo, Venice and Sydney. Incorporating decolonisation in his discourse, Modi has advocated for the repatriation of museum objects that left India before Independence. It was also announced that the next Venice Biennale would again have an India Pavilion supported by the Ministry of Culture.

Those on the left have constantly ceded space to a right which is acutely aware of the need to instrumentalise visual culture. It does so with sophistication, funding and technocratic efficiency. We seek billionaire patronage for making exhibitions, but we make no space for progressive values. Tellingly, the conflict in Palestine has led to artistic censorship in Germany, and its resonance was also felt here in India when poet and art critic Ranjit Hoskote resigned from the Documenta 16 Curatorial Search Committee in November.

Atul Dodiya’s “Dr. Banerjee in Dr. Kulkarni’s Nursing Home” (2020-2022) was on display at the gallery Chemould Prescott Road in Mumbai from January 12 to February 25.   | Photo Credit: BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT 

The weakening of solidarity, it must be said, began much before the BJP came to power in 2014. Even then, artists from northeast India and Bahujan backgrounds found no representation in our art scenes. Previous centre-left governments made no efforts to build cultural infrastructure, and these parties continue to show little enthusiasm for such initiatives in States they now rule. An internationalist solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, or reciprocal efforts of inviting artists from the “Global South”, have been minimal and superficial. Also, our continuous blind-spots around representation of minorities within our own ranks is quite often a challenge we deliberately ignore.

Celebrating 60 years, gallery Chemould Prescott Road in Mumbai put on view a two-part show titled “CheMoulding | Framing Future Archives” in September. Curator Shaleen Wadhwana has invited artists to delve into the archives of the gallery and respond with works that resonate a commitment to history and democratic socio-political discourse. In one archival letter, the gallery’s founders Kekoo and Khorshed Gandhy, who had sheltered anti-Emergency activists in their home, disparage M.F. Husain for his support of Indira Gandhi during her brief dictatorship.

In January 2023, artist Atul Dodiya opened a solo show at Chemould—“Dr. Banerjee in Dr. Kulkarni’s Nursing Home and Other Paintings 2020-2022”—of hand-painted stills captured from Bollywood movies such as Anand and Kagaz Ke Phool. By colouring black-and-white stills, Dodiya brought them back to life, touching on a very important aspect of Indian visual culture. The moving image is the most acceptable form of art to the Indian masses, one which has been politicised, but one which has also, almost always, pushed back creatively.

A display at “The Mind’s Cupboard”, a retrospective of Lalitha Lajmi’s work that was inaugurated at the NGMA, Mumbai, on January 12 this year, a month before the artist’s death. | Photo Credit: BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

In a recent talk with art historian Jyotindra Jain, Dodiya spoke fondly of his meeting with painter N.S. Bendre, someone he had gone to as a teenager, looking for advice. I saw a sea of students beam with hope as Dodiya recounted his journey as an artist, perhaps mirroring their working-class concerns and backgrounds—Dodiya comes from Ghatkopar, a distant Mumbai suburb. If the progressive sections of India’s art world want to remain relevant, they, too, should, similarly, find a vocabulary to engage this large subaltern audience.

On January 12, a retrospective exhibition of the printmaker and painter Lalitha Lajmi—“The Mind’s Cupboard”—opened at the NGMA, Mumbai. This was her first ever large-scale institutional exhibition that I had the honour to curate. Her works are all studies of the subconscious mind, dreams and nightmares that narrated the story of a woman who faced the personal tragedies of a difficult life with remarkable courage. Lajmi’s triumph as an artist and political thinker was the eventual truth of her practice, even though she never saw market success and was opposed by male painters who were disturbed by her depictions of nudes as self-portraits. A month later, on February 13, she passed away having realised her long dream of living bravely. Artists, curators and writers, too, need to hold on to their courage and stay true to their practices going forward. Their concern for those facing oblivion on the margins must manifest in art the same way it did in Ambedkar’s Constitution.

Sumesh Manoj Sharma is an artist, writer and curator based out of Bombay. He founded the Clark House Initiative in 2010.