Gaganendranath Tagore. A Cubist Scene. Watercolour on paper. 1922.

A Paean to The Pioneers

Amrita Gupta Singh delineates Partha Mitter’s argument that early modern Indian artists did not draw blindly from western models and constituted our first avant-garde.

Partha Mitter’s The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-garde, 1922-1947 challenges the dominant discourse of western art history, and is a significant contribution to literature on art and South Asian historiography. With several illustrations and four broad sections outlining the various aspects, paradoxical and otherwise, of Indian modernism, British imperialism, and globalisation, art history comes alive for the reader.

Lucid and free of jargon, the book addresses global modernism, colonial ideology and art historical canons against acts by imperial powers to impose structures of classical taste. Mitter contests closed systems of western art history, exploring narratives bearing the asymmetrical and rhizomatic tendencies of Indian modernism/s. He prefers the term “paradigm shift” over “influence”, initiating a two-way dialogue on global modernity where “heterogeneity” and “plurality” become counterpoints to the “civilizing agenda” of the colonisers. Scrutinising the tenets of western modernism, the international avant-garde and its multiple receptions in India (particularly Bengal), Mitter investigates the essentialisation of non-western modernism as ‘derivative’ and inherently ‘inferior’ by scholars during the colonial times. Ironically, such similar borrowings by western artists were termed as ‘affinities’, the search for ‘pure form’, ‘originality’ and a ‘radical’ break from the past.

Geeta Kapur, in When was Modernism (2000), points out how there was no possibility of the avant-garde in colonial India, given that the art practices – in their progression and rebellion – were directed towards the nationalist cause. In contrast, Mitter sees in the 1922 Bauhaus exhibition in Calcutta the “beginning of the avantgarde in India”. This first period of modernism (1922–1947) witnessed a language of resistance against colonial rule. Like the western avant-garde which rebelled against urban industrial capitalism, Indian modernists too reacted against the urban values of the colonialists, which Mitter argues, allowed them to respond to “global aesthetic issues”.

Partha Mitter. The Triumph of Modernism, India’s Artists and the Avantgarde, 1922-1947 Oxford University Press 2007 Rs. 1750/-

Through Gaganendranath Tagore, who symbolised the shift in taste from Victorian naturalism and history painting to non-representational art, Mitter explores the impact of the Bauhaus exhibition on artists in Calcutta. Initially, Gaganendranath echoed the orientalist and nationalist preoccupations of Abanindranath Tagore, but moved on to find a new visual diction through Cubism, while remaining rooted in his cultural milieu. He became the first modernist to explore Analytical Cubism before the 1940s and Mitter aptly calls him “Poetic- Cubist”. Colonial historians like W. G. Archer found it hard to frame Gaganendranath within the western canon, and termed his cubist experiments “bad imitations of Picasso”, even as critics like Stella Kramrisch and Benoy Sarkar responded to his poetic worlds filled with prismatic light as expressions of ‘pure’ art. Archer’s position is still echoed by many western scholars who remain indifferent to the discourses taking place outside New York, Paris, Berlin or London.