Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

by Pavan K. Varma

  It is a commentary on the contradictions that colonialism creates that the high-minded intentions of the Bengal School did not have universal support among Indians themselves. In fact, the students of the Calcutta College went on strike and the local press was equally critical, condemning any invocation of India’s past in preference to western ‘modernity’ as retrogressive. This ideological confusion—wherein what is western is considered relevant even if it is alien, and what is indigenous is perceived as irrelevant—is among the most insidious consequences of colonialism. Of course, any attempt at revivalism has a tendency to be extreme, and some of the criticism of Abanindranath and his devoted followers was not entirely off the mark. Mukul Dey, the learned art critic, and principal of the Government College at Calcutta in the 1960s, rightly points out that the Bengal School artists ‘were in the beginning somewhat afraid of modern life, lest they should be drawn merely into imitative representation. This led them to avoid landscapes or portraits, the representation of present day objects or events, so their work remained somewhat artificial, in the sense that it was not the outcome of their own actual experiences, but rather of a dreamland which they made real by giving it colour and form … Painting was found to be the best medium for expressing this dream life of theirs, and so the first group of Abanindranath’s disciples completely neglected other mediums of art such as sculpture, architecture, or means of reproduction like lithography, woodcut, etching etc. Oil paintings were also disliked as being too decidedly European.’

  The puritanical awkwardness of the Bengal School mellowed in time; artists like Nandalal Bose and Jamini Roy dexterously dipped into the folk idiom and created works that had considerable aesthetic appeal without the straitjacketed approach and self-consciousness of the early years. But the deliberate glorification of a pre-colonial past was bound to create its own antibodies. The third ‘oscillation’ took place when leading painters in many parts of the country rebelled against both the revivalism of the Bengal School and the ‘Royal Academy’ style taught in the government art colleges. This led to the Progressive Artists Group (PAG), founded in 1947 by F.N. Souza, K.H. Ara and S.H. Raza, and included M.F. Husain, H.A. Gade and S.K. Bakre. They were all young men then, the youngest twenty-four, the oldest thirty-five, and were expectedly irreverent in stating their credo. They wanted, so they proclaimed, to ‘paint with absolute freedom for content and technique, almost anarchic, save that we are governed by one or two sound elemental and eternal laws, of aesthetic order, plastic coordination and colour composition’. This revolutionary restatement of artistic ideals had an enduring impact, but the PAG itself fell apart quite quickly. In 1950, just three years after it was formed, two of the founding members, Souza and Raza, bid farewell to the group: the former left for London, the latter for Paris. Some others, like V.S. Gaitonde, Krishan Khanna and Mohan Samant, joined the PAG, but the group was finally disbanded in 1956. Thereafter, ‘Group 1890’, formed in 1962 in Delhi, and the artists of the Cholamandal village, set up near Chennai in 1964, continued the rebellion. J. Swaminathan, who was the chief spokesman of Group 1890, proclaimed, ‘We reject the … pastoral idealism of the Bengal School … and the imposition of concepts evolved by successive movements in modern European art.’ The artists of the Cholamandal village in their first manifesto lamented that ‘what passes for Indian art in many quarters here is, at best, an almost sterile Indian version of a European way of expression. It still lacks vital Indian inspiration which alone can ultimately fuse the apparent contradictions into an acceptable pattern.’

  The three ‘oscillations’ in Indian art since the arrival of the British were a direct consequence of colonial distortion. For over 150 years Indian art was only about reaction, not about normal evolutionary progression. The latter was a luxury only the colonizing power could enjoy. Within that evolutionary progression there could be radical changes, such as, for instance, Dadaism, Cubism and the entire corpus of the European avant garde, but these changes came from stimuli within, not as a reaction to what was imposed from outside. The contrast with the options available to the colonized is stark: Indian artists had little option but to suppress their natural artistic heritage to conform to the requirement of the Company School; the well-meaning pioneers of the Bengal School could think of little else than to try and eliminate that colonial imposition by blindly reverting to the past; and the imperative before Souza and others like him was only to rebel against both the imposition of colonial techniques and an uncritically resurrected past. The Indian masters of the Company School who painted market scenes and religious fairs and processions and made life-like images of barbers and ironsmiths and weavers to satisfy the curiosity of foreigners, were caricaturing themselves against their will. The Bengal artists who were reluctant to experiment with anything that was not an element of their glorified past were, by the very acceptance of this limitation, caricaturing their potential. And the Progressive Artists in Bombay, seeking the anarchic freedom of the unconditioned, were, in the very process of denying their past, unknowingly caricaturing their rebellious vision of the future. In fact, all the artists of the PAG and similar post-Independence groups, and in particular the firebrand Souza, were heavily and unnaturally influenced by European modernism, leading the art critic John Bergman to comment that Souza ‘straddles many traditions but serves none’.

  The impact of colonialism on a people’s sensibilities does not disappear with political freedom. The Empire continues to exercise its sway at the psychological level. The formerly ruled deny this, and yet their mental servitude is apparent in so many ways, including in their reactions to the west: excessive outrage at any criticism and a disproportionate sense of validation at the slightest praise. The musical genius of Ravi Shankar became real for most Indians only when he was fêted in Europe and America and the Beatles came to hobnob with him. Ravi Shankar himself considered this to be a most befitting recognition, and has spent much of his life in the west. Satyajit Ray became an Indian icon only after he was recognized in the west as a legend of world cinema.

  Undoubtedly, there has been, in the last six decades, some attempt at reappropriation of cultural space. But the overall picture leaves much to be desired. We still haven’t developed the kind of confidence in our culture that would enable us to see it as a defining part of our personal and our national life. The result is neglect and shoddiness. In spite of the very early attention given to culture after 1947,16 the infrastructure for it is still woefully inadequate. There are few, if any, world-class auditoriums and conference centres, and those that exist are mostly in poor condition. New Delhi, the capital of the republic, has only one auditorium of more than 2000 capacity, the Siri Fort, and it is in a deplorable condition; the interiors are musty, and no one seems to care that the stage and light equipment is horribly out of date. I recall that when President Medvedev of Russia was perforce required to visit it for the concluding session of the Festival of Russia in 2008, a temporary reception room had to be built outside for our President to receive him because the facilities inside were so shabby. In stark contrast was Moscow’s Bolshoi theatre, with its lush interiors and enviable technical excellence, where the Festival of India was inaugurated soon thereafter.

  Venues like the Bolshoi are, of course, not uncommon throughout the west, and particularly in Europe, and there are historical reasons for this, including the fact that these nations were never colonized. But many other parts of the world are now waking up to the need to upgrade and expand their cultural infrastructure. The gallery district in Beijing, which was earlier the site of a munitions complex, has more than 150 galleries, neat cobbled streets and rows of street-side cafés. It was built on the eve of the Olympics, and is now a major tourist attraction. Even Shanghai boasts at least a hundred art galleries, and smaller towns throughout China are being encouraged to develop gallery districts. Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines have recently taken the decision to invest in a dozen state-of-the-art museums each. Hong Kong had devised a new cultur
al plan for 2008 which would cost $2.8 billion, an unprecedented investment per capita for an area so small. The oil-rich UAE has earmarked over $30 billion for museums and art programmes. And China, which destroyed a considerable part of its classical heritage during the Cultural Revolution, has invested in eighty-three national museums, and plans to boost the figure to a hundred by 2010. By contrast, our museums, the repositories of so much of our heritage, remain in visible neglect. There is no proper display, no worthwhile scholarship, no cataloguing commensurate with international standards, and no sense of pride in our priceless artefacts that would make us give them the attention and funds they deserve. The state of our monuments is not much better. The colonial devaluation of India’s history has its most obvious manifestation in the manner in which we treat our monuments, leaving them—apart from a few high-profile structures—dilapidated, overrun, illegally occupied or defaced. The most worrying part is the ignorance: an overwhelming majority of people know next to nothing about the monuments of great antiquity and beauty which they pass every day. In New Delhi, for instance, most people living in Hauz Khaz or Safdarjung Enclave don’t know—and don’t think it is important to know—after whom their ‘colonies’ are named.

  There has been no serious effort at taking the appreciation of art and antiquity to the masses. Schoolchildren make the mandatory visits, but in the absence of imaginatively designed capsules integrated with their school curriculum, or the latest interactive software at the museums, the visits hardly achieve their purpose of evoking in them an interest in their heritage. Without proper packaging and display even tourist footfalls are far below potential. The National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), has one of the richest collections of contemporary Indian art, but gets a paltry 30,000 visitors annually. Its branch in Mumbai, the financial capital of the country, gets even less. When in March 2009 the NGMA opened a new branch in Bangalore, the state government, in a shocking but symbolic decision, nominated the deputy minister of medical education to be the chief guest! Even if mechanical comparisons are not applicable, an idea of what is being lost can be gauged by the fact that the Museum of Modern Art in New York gets 2.5 million visitors a year at $30 a ticket; the Louvre in Paris as many at €12.5 per head; and the Tate in London four million at £20 per person.

  Cultures cannot be fossilized, they must change and adapt with time. But malleability is not necessarily a constant and universal virtue. When cultures are the end-product of centuries of evolution, their forms and structures can be trifled with only for very good reasons; and the need to cater to the lowest common denominator of an unfortunately ignorant audience is not a good enough reason. Indian classical music is perhaps one of the oldest in the world; we see the beginnings of its structure in the musical recitation of the Sama Veda several hundred years before the birth of Christ. Narada’s Sangita Makarandha of the eleventh century AD laid down rules that brought the discipline closer to how we know it today. With the coming of the Islamic rulers, a fusion of Hindu and Muslim creativity added to the refinement and complexity of our classical music. In southern India, Carnatic music, similar in grammar to the Hindustani music of the north but less influenced by Islamic musical traditions, had its own internal evolution. The two great composers Annamacharya (1425–1503) and Purandaradasa (1484–1564) laid the foundations of Carnatic music as we know it today, and the glorious trinity of Tyagaraja (1767–1847), Muttuswami Dikshitar (1775–1835) and Syama Sastri (1762–1827) gave it a definitive oeuvre and structure that prevails to this day.

  This very brief enumeration is meant to merely illustrate the long and considerable evolutionary lineage of Indian classical music, well into the twentieth century. One of the reasons why classical music could evolve relatively undisturbed is that even as a subject to be critiqued, it did not figure high among the ‘reforming’ priorities of the colonial rulers. Most of them found it incredibly opaque, staggeringly complex and ‘occult’—the very basics of Indian music being so different from the western form—that they thought it best not to tinker with it. However, partly because of the rupture that colonial intervention causes an indigenous creative traditions, and partly because of foreign influences (to which post-colonial societies are disproportionately susceptible), we are witnessing today an onslaught on the basic tenets of classical music which is quite unprecedented. The centre piece of Indian classical music is, of course, the raga, a melodic (not harmonic, as in western classical music) scheme composed of a given structure of notes. The raga, through its slow elaboration, is meant to evoke a mood, redolent of the different seasons or the different times of the day or of different emotions. It is a remarkably intricate structure that allows the artist a great deal of creative freedom—within a framework of inflexible rules—for slow and careful elaboration. However, many leading exponents of the genre today, whether vocalists or instrumentalists, seem to have no inclination to patiently develop the spirit of a raga in their performances. In a manner more appropriate in an adolescent pop band, they are in a hurry to race through the initial, slow phases of a composition to reach the fast-paced crescendo, thereby foundationally mutilating the genre.

  The excuse given, that this is what appeals to the audience, is fundamentally untenable. For centuries, great musicians have attempted to mould and educate their audience; and cultured societies cannot claim to be so if their role models are adept only at practising the policy of least resistance. If audiences do not know better and judge a classical artist only by his or her ability to emulate the beat of popular music, they need to be educated. Some pioneering work to this end has been done by SPIC MACAY (Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music and Culture Amongst Youth) set up by Dr Kiran Seth in 1977. Their campaign to take the legacy of classical music to schools and colleges, and expose the young to some of its best exponents, has made a difference, but it is hardly enough. Classical musicians continue to mostly pander to the lowest common denominator, and the danger of a centuries’-old tradition gradually emasculating itself is growing.

  Amjad Ali Khan, the great exponent of the sarod, tells a story where his father Hafiz Ali Khan, himself a musical giant, was asked by the then President of India, Zakir Husain, if he could do anything to help him. Hafiz Ali Khan replied that by the grace of God he had all he needed, but since the President had asked, could he use his high position to save the chastity of the raga Darbari Kangra? The anecdote is not, Amjad says, apocryphal. His father was even in the 1950s concerned about the erosion of the time-tested traditions for the exposition of a raga. Undeniably, classical soirees, earlier confined to the salons of the rich or the royal, have seen over time a welcome democratization, with ordinary people having greater access to performances. But the widening of the audience, and the concomitant commercialization, requires greater vigilance to ensure that the basics are not diluted. In London, Hyde Park gets thousands of people when there is a pop group performing, but the theatres for western classical music, too, have people queuing up for tickets. In a mature cultural civilization, audience appreciation cannot be about monoculture; the popular must flourish with, and not at the cost of, the classical. What prevents even a few—even one—of the hundred-odd FM radio and satellite TV channels in India from hosting at least a weekly programme of Indian classical music? There is, however, a full one-hour programme devoted to western classical music on a private FM channel. This is truly incredible—even allowing for the fact that a small minority listens to pure classical music, surely the numbers of those in India with a genuine interest in Hindustani and Carnatic music, rather than western classical, is far higher? Only the single government-owned FM channel will air a programme of Indian classical music, but either at midnight or in the afternoon when few people, if any, will tune in.

  Classical dance, earlier exiled to the fringes because of the derisive British assessment equating all dancers with ‘nautch girls’ or devadasis, has got over this taint and appears to be flourishing. But in this case too there is much that is disquieting below
the surface. Here again, we are dealing with a discipline of great antiquity, whose principles were codified as far back as Bharata’s Natyashastra. About Bharatanatyam,17 the oldest of the classical dances, Leela Venkataraman, the country’s leading dance critic, writes: ‘Starting with the mnemonics and dance profile of the Alaripu, to the introduction of the first musical note in the Jatiswaram, to the word making its entry in the Shabdam, then the elaboration of all these features in the Varnam, the climax of the performance, to the intimate quiet of the Padam and finally … the abstraction of the Tillana where the dancer symbolically, through movement, aims to reach the state of non-movement, the entire designing leaves one speechless …’18 But it is a sad commentary that even the finest dancers, who represent a tradition refined over two millennia, find it difficult to fill an auditorium. More often than not (with some venues in Chennai during the winter season being exceptions) the shows are not ticketed because people, including those who can well afford to, are not willing to pay. (When a famous ballet from Europe comes to town, however, the rich and famous and the aspiring will kill for tickets and passes and pack the auditoria.) More of the young, especially girls, are learning Indian classical dance today, but a leading dancer once told me that their knowledge of the language, literature, mythology, symbolism and philosophy underlying the dance compositions is unacceptably perfunctory, and they are content to mechanically learn only the technique of dance.