THE RISE AND FALL OF ARTS IN BENGAL
By dr.v.s. gopalakrishnan ph.d., ias retd.
‘Glorious Bengal’ has become an image of the distant past. The richest region in the world nearly three centuries ago, and where the British established a Capital at Calcutta and ruled India from there during most of their presence, has seen a rise and fall in several respects, including in arts. Here we are restricting ourselves mostly to drawings and paintings.
The arrival of the East India Company in Bengal and its taking powerful and authoritarian roots there in 1765 in circumstances of violence, perfidy, dishonourable conduct and hateful insolence exhibited by the British traders led by Clive is well known to us. But the British conquest was meant to be all-embracing, including the cultural areas, by slow degrees. “Company painters” came over to Calcutta from England, even at the cost of early illness and fatality, and painted Indian scenes as if to assure their masters that they were real rulers and not virtual rulers. The British sense of adventurism that prevailed then should not however be ignored by us in this matter, nor their ‘Renaissancic’ quest into every knowledge-area.
“Company painters” such as Thomas Daniell and his nephew William Daniell, Charles D’Oyly, James Fraser, James Moffat, Balthazar Solvyns et al came to Calcutta to paint the city and environs. The natives, the bazaars, the festivals, the ghats, the monuments, horse carriages, Nawabi palaces etc as well as the British structures came to be accurately depicted by these artists. Other cities like Bombay, Madras, Surat, Meerut etc where the Company had also its presence, were not as favoured for paintings as Calcutta was. The main reason was that Calcutta grew fast into a fine city with lovely buildings as in Europe, and its beauty was considered remarkable. Many of the British painters did cover many areas in India apart from Calcutta. The works were mainly aquatint or etchings. (The Book titled “Scenic Splendours: India through the Printed Image” written by Pheroza Godrej and Pauline Rohatgi provide marvellous images and texts relating to the Britishers’ work).
Old Fort, Calcutta - by Thomas Daniell
The native or Indian painters sometimes called Mughal painters began to receive decreasing patronage from the Nawabs of Lucknow, Patna and Murshidabad as the latters’ wealth and influence declined. These painters shifted to Calcutta and were picked up by the Company officials and trained under the British artists. The Mughal painters in a sense thus became “Bazaar painters’.
And the British painters and the Indian painters at Calcutta made works of their Masters’ mansions, portraiture of the Masters and of rich merchants, their servants as well as of natives of different trades and castes, and of all that was in nature like birds, animals, flowers etc. These paintings came to be known as “Company School Paintings”.
Then followed the development in Calcutta of an indigenous school of painting that came to be known as “Kalighat School”. This evolved local idioms and made a departure from the Western based concepts of the Company School paintings. These painters lived in the near-about of the Kali temple at Kalighat and this explains why this school that evolved and lasted roughly from 1830s to 1920s was called Kalighat School. It is said that ‘patuas’ who were Bengali rural scroll painters and also minstrels, migrated to Kalighat and were the early Kalighat painters. The buyers were the pilgrims to the Kali temple. The patuas had to make single works instead of scrolls for selling to the pilgrims. Initially local hand-made papers and organic colours were used. The style was modern and bold. The lines were thick and strong. Bright and strong colours were used to fill in the spaces between the thick lines. Some thick and dark shades gave a rounded instead of a flat (as in moghul miniatures) effect to the images. The subjects were varied, ranging from the jolly and the ridiculous to the subtle and the sublime. Cats, dogs, fish, babus, priests, drunk Englishman, rural women, courtesans, man courting a woman, a Britisher on an elephant, gods, goddesses – such were the subjects, depicted in a bold and modern style, uncannily anticipating the style of cubism that appeared in Europe much later. Jamini Roy was the foremost Kalighat stylist.
A Kalighat Painting
a Kalighat painting
In the latter part of the 19th century, the Britishers established Government Schools of Art at Provincial Capitals like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. Mr.E.B.Havell who headed the Calcutta School of Arts made a huge contribution towards further Indianisation of the techniques and subjects and the actual ‘revivalism’ of old traditions. Havell broke from the European traditions and promoted Indian traditions based on mythologies, folklore, epics and the like. The three Tagores carried on the tradition established by Havell. Abanindranath Tagore was closely associated with Havell as the latter’s disciple. His elder brother Gaganendranath Tagore worked almost in the same style. Their uncle Rabindranath Tagore took to painting late in life. This ‘revivalist movement’ became the “Bengal School” which produced luminaries such as Nandlal Bose, A.K.Haldar, Sailoz Mukherjee and many others.
Painting by Abanindranath Tagore-
Bengal School
Thanks to the hardships of famine, war, tragedies witnessed at that time, a new school called “Calcutta Group” was formed in 1943. Paritosh Sen and Nirode Majumdar are outstanding examples of this “Calcutta Group”. The Group melted away by 1953 as many of the painters went away to Europe’s pastures.
Bengal has since been on the artistic map with a less significant impress, while most of the action shifted to Bombay and Delhi. With declining industrialization, declining prosperity, increasing poverty, prominent communism, active trade unionism etc., taking hold of Bengal, art went to a back seat.
(by v.s.gopalakrishnan)
(Credit for images: google)
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