Gaganendranath Tagore. Magician. Watercolour on paper. 34 cms x 26.7 cms.
IMAGE COURTESY THE NGMA, NEW DELHI.

MODERN ART AND NATIONAL MYTHS

Today, many critics see India's National Gallery of Modern Art as a slow-moving beast entangled in red tape, unable to respond to the quick-changing art scene and its needs. But in 1954 when it was established, the NGMA was an institution far ahead of its time, being virtually a unique example of a modern art museum in a newly independent land.

The decade after the Second World War had seen colonial empires retreat, leading to the formation of a slew of decolonized nations. In a ritual celebration of their newly-gained sovereignty, country after country founded a National Museum or renamed a pre-existing colonial museum as such. Typically, these National Museums celebrated the art of the past: the grandeur of ancient civilizations would testify to the new nation's long history and high culture. In the narrative of these museums, the nation's future greatness became an inevitability, a renewal of a glorious pre-colonial past. ^vi

Modern art had no role to play in this national myth, and it should not surprise us that practically no new state in Asia or Africa established a modern art museum by national fiat at this time. Instead, modern art produced in these states was occasionally tacked on to the tail-end of the civilizational narrative of the national museum. Where separate modern art galleries or museums were established in the newly decolonized states in their early years, these tended to be relatively modest institutions set up through private initiatives, typically, by artists’ groups or by private collectors. State-sponsored museums of modern art began to appear in post-colonial nations only in the 1980s, and the majority of these were founded much later, in the 1990s or the first years of the 2000s. A notable exception to this pattern, then, is India, with its nationally-mandated National Gallery for Modern Art established in 1954, a mere six years after the coming of Independence.^vii

The exigencies that led to the establishment of the National Gallery compose a curious tale.^viii Briefly recounted, this is a story of the group of artists trained in the traditionalizing Bengal school who petitioned the government of newly independent India to set up a prestigious modern art museum, one that they intended to control. The government resisted these demands, not in order to deny the project, but to appropriate it, in order to ensure that India's premier art gallery would be more modern, and more broadly representative, than any institution the artist group was likely to produce.

Through the 1930s and 40s, the two Bengal-school-trained brothers Sarada and Barada Ukil had built a national artists' network and mounted annual art exhibitions, making themselves spokespersons for the constituency of Indian artists. They also appealed to the government and to other likely sources of patronage, to grant them land and funds to build a National Gallery of Art. Given the indigenist leanings of their own practice, however, their project was likely to be a Gallery of National Art: art that displayed an 'Indian' character by reviving traditions of the past. In 1949, what the Ukils wished for was both given and taken away: they received a piece of land in the heart of New Delhi for their gallery; but what they would build here would be just a gallery – the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society — while the government itself decided to build and control the gallery of independent India – the National Gallery of Modern Art.

In their own special ways, Jawaharlal Nehru and Amrita Sher-Gil were crucial to the development of the NGMA. Here, they meet in an imagined encounter in Vivan Sundaram’s Meeting in Gorakhpur, 1940 (Detail) from 2002. Each panel is 20”x 24”. (The work is based on two photographs in the third panel taken at Saraya Sugar Factory, 1940. The photographer remains unknown.)

As with many forward-looking projects of the time, the NGMA too is said to have come about at Jawaharlal Nehru's behest. Amrita Sher-Gil, an artist Nehru had known and admired, had died, and her family offered her works to the nation. In the absence of an appropriate institution that could buy and display Sher-Gil's paintings, Nehru saw to the acquisition of the works, and then to the founding of a National Gallery of whose collection these works would form the core. At one stroke, Nehru founded a major, new institution, and gave it a decisive direction by allying it with 'forward-looking', internationalizing currents in modern Indian art. The presence of more than one hundred works by Sher-Gil in the collection simply would not allow the NGMA to become an outpost of the Bengal School. Instead, when the works of Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose and other Bengal School artists were acquired by the NGMA, the collection began to take on the contours of an impartial and even handed representation of the history of modern Indian art.