Sona Datta

In praise of … Jamini Roy

"If anyone can be called the father of modern Indian art, it must be Roy. His depictions of Hindu mythology and especially contemporary peasants and workers retain an unblinking directness that make them powerful 70 years on. Painted with bold, thick lines and with trademark almond-shaped eyes, his figures could strike a passerby as childlike - but their uprightness and willingness to stare back at the viewer (Roy arranged his subjects so they were often facing dead ahead) turns them into adults, not to be argued with over trifles. This style of painting is aptly dubbed urban patua by Sona Datta in her new book on Roy. Patua was the folk style used for Bengali village paintings. Himself a village boy, Roy adopted that style for nationalist, leftwing Kolkata. It marked a rupture in established Indian art, which up till then had been exquisite, courtly, beautiful. As the British Museum's Datta deftly suggests, Roy took a gamble and broke with that tradition. If only Delhi's designers had put such thought into their work." - The Guardian

Art On The Line

Calcutta 1946: While playing in Calcutta’s back alleys a young Ganesh Pyne (1937-2012) stumbled upon a barrow piled high with dead bodies during the city’s brutal sectarian violence that saw the slaughter of some eight thousand Hindus and Muslims over the space of a couple of weeks. Pyne’s startling early encounter with death would provide the creative force behind the melancholy and magical realism of his mature work. “Assassin” powerfully captures the violence of those times. Hunched over in the shadowy half-light, the assassin wields a large machete and stalks across the canvas, intent, with a haunted look on his face. A headless woman floats in the upper right quadrant, at the bottom are scattered human remains. Melancholy hangs in the air.

Harvard South Asia Institute 2017

Huma Mulji, Arabian Delight 2008

Despite a constitution that paid tribute to religious diversity, Pakistan quickly came to define itself as an Islamic Republic with a state-sponsored Islamic agenda that had far reaching implications for both national and international politics. Its official denial of a shared heritage with India plays out in Arabian Delight by Huma Mulji (b.1970): a taxidermy camel is forced into a battered old suitcase - a pointed reference to the wholesale import of an alien Arab culture into Pakistani society (image courtesy of the artist).

Husain, Man 1952

Husain's Man sits like The Thinker of a new India surrounded by the chaos of post-colonial life. A large eye observes opposing forces - old and new, Eastern and Western, vulnerable yet powerful that encompassed the citizen-artist in post-Independence India (Peabody Essex Museum).

Modern Indian Painting

Mapin 2019

The Paradox of Modernism: Art in Bengal after Independence

The roots of India’s modernity are as complex as the disparate cultures that make up the subcontinent. The De Boer collection mirrors the arc of India’s tumultuous history in the twentieth century, so much of which focused around Calcutta as the capital of British India, and the locus of a nascent nationalism where the very ‘idea’ of India as a post-colonial reality came into being.

Kali devotion, always been popular in Bengal, now acquired new political meaning. Like the fecund river goddesses of the Hindu pantheon, the country became re-birthed as Ma or ‘Mother’ and Kali became synonymous with Bengal as India, and a martyr to British callousness.

Beginning at the critical moment in Indian art when artists started to reject Western academic teaching of the British Raj, Modern Indian Painting presents Indian art from the close of 19th century to the present day. It is remarkable for its historical scope and range of artists and charts the incredible arc of events in India during the 20th century. Authors include: Yashodara Dalmia, Sona Datta, Partha Mitter and Giles Tillotson.

Modern Indian Painting presents a survey of Indian painting from the late 19th century to the present day, drawn from the private collection of Jane and Kito de Boer remarkable for its broad historical scope and wide range of artists. The book clearly delineates major developments over a long period of time, while contextualising them with previously unpublished examples by major artists. The first part of the book features the de Boers talking about their passion for India and Indian art. The second part presents a history of modern Indian painting, with essays on the Bengal School, the so-called Dutch Bengal artists, the Calcutta naturalists, the portrait painters of the Bombay School in the early 20th century, the Progressive Artists Group and the post-Independence artists of Bengal. The de Boer collection also contains strong representations of a few individual artists, such as Chittaprosad, Ganesh Pyne, Ramachandran and Broota, whose works are explored through essays and interviews. The fact that many of these chapters draw almost exclusively on the de Boer collection is a testament to its incredible size and breadth. In this volume, we hope to show how the collection takes a dispassionate view of the global status of Indian art, while at the same time revealing a commitment and long-term engagement with the country and its creativity. - New York Public Library

Coming Soon

A story of an ordinary Indian family pivoting on race, colonialism and diasporic dysfunction. And a girl who stopped speaking. Only in writing did I realise when I became mute at 14, I did not lose my voice but was in fact protecting it. Kali appears in multitudes of variations across the landscape of my life. She is the girl I wanted to be when I was removed to India aged 8, dancing with hair unhindered who never ever seeks permission to simply be. She appears in 1940s Calcutta during the tumultuous time my parents were born into - a nation in the process of self-determination at the end of empire, brutal sectarian violence, Partition and Independence.

Housewives with Steak-Knives, 1985, Sutapa Biswas Bradford Museums & Art Galleries

Seeing India

Coming Soon

Seeing India challenges how South Asia has been constructed in the Western imagination through our museum displays, which is enriching but problematic. This is not a chronology - so does not start in a cave and end in a cube but draws across time, media and multiple collections showing how our lens is constricted to favour the familiar and old tropes of Taj Mahal and Bollywood yet remain wide of today's contemporary cultural production from South Asia. This radical, audacious and counter-intuitive book brings Datta’s long career in major museums into fierce appraisal.

Sona Datta

WRITING

Urban Patua, The Art of Jamini Roy

Marg 2010

Jamini Roy signifies the advent of the modern Indian artist, a special relationship between "modern" and "Indian" uniquely tied to the historical moment. Jamini Roy was modern because he created a new and distinct style, and his art was distinctly Indian because of its technique and conception.

In praise of … Jamini Roy