Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization by Sanjukta Sunderason explores the entanglements of art and history – war, famine, mass politics, and displacements – in the transitional decades that went before and came after India’s Independence and Partition. In her preface, Sunderason states:
This book reads art as archive, and understands artistic form as and via entanglements of art and history itself. Its protagonists are not key artists or institutions of 20th century Indian modernism but rather the granular histories of an aesthetic field formed through convergences of art and politics during late colonial and early postcolonial India. Decolonization read in its longue durée, as the book will show, made such histories gain particular configurations – what I am calling partisan aesthetics.
The book comprises five chapters divided into two parts under the broad themes of ‘Dialogues and Dissonances’ and ‘Postcolonial Displacements’.
Chapter 1 focuses on reviews and essays on Jamini Roy’s art by members and affiliates of the circle that grew around the Bengali quarterly Parichoy – in which, Sunderason argues, a new discursive space was created for progressive art and art criticism. Chapter 2 draws our attention to the commissioned work of the artist-cadres of the CPI all through the 40s – on war, famine, popular resistance – and the socialist visual reportage that they pioneered. Chapter 3 is about the Calcutta Group that was formed in 1943 with the express desire to create art that would be commensurate with their prevailing reality – in doing which, for a decade, the Group both aligned with and deviated from socialist art. These three chapters make up Part I of the book. In Part II, Chapter 4 follows the afterlives of left-wing political art in Nehruvian India; and Chapter 5 returns to Calcutta, in postcolonial times, when, the author contends, an aesthetic of darkness (tamashik rasa) permeated the work of most artists of the city, ravaged by the aftermath of Partition and defined by hunger, destitution and volatile politics.
Mining art criticism of late colonial and early postcolonial India
One of the most distinct features of the book is its mining of art criticism – reviews, essays and articles – from books and (often, out-of-print) magazines, both known and unknown. While all chapters draw liberally from an array of such publications, Chapter 1 is predicated upon a single such influential magazine of its time in Bangla – Parichoy – and the circle that grew around it.
In this chapter, Sunderason analyses, at length, five pieces of criticism on Jamini Roy: a review of Roy’s 1937 Exhibition in Calcutta written by Shahid Suhrawardy, soon after it was held, in his volume of collected essays; a study of his artistic career by Sudhindranath Datta, reprinted in Longman’s Miscellany in 1939; an essay on him by Bishnu Dey, coauthored with John Irwin, in 1944; Mulk Raj Anand’s review of this essay in Our Time, in 1944; and a lengthy sociological analysis of Bengali painting (of which Roy was a part) by Dhurjatiprasad Mukhopadhyay, published in the PWA organ New Indian Literature in 1938.
None of these pieces were published in Parichoy, but they were all written by people who were part of the literary circle it spawned. Parichoy had begun its journey in 1931, soon after Sudhindranath Datta, its founder-editor, returned to Calcutta – post his travels to Europe and America accompanying Tagore. In time, he gathered around him writers and intellectuals of diverse political persuasions, some of whom had overt leftist sympathies. One such person was the poet Bishnu Dey.
Indeed, all the art-critical pieces on Roy mentioned above were written not by art critics but by academics, writers and poets, who tried “to connect the local ‘folk’ idiom of Roy with global discourses on an artistic modernity drawn from ruralist idioms”.
‘Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization’ by Sanjukta Sunderason. Stanford University Press, 2020.
Figures that stand out
Though this book is avowedly not about key artists of the 20th century, some figures do stand out by their recurring presence in some of the chapters, and the space that is given to the significance of their work in the overall argument of the book. Two such figures deserve mention – Bishnu Dey and Chittaprosad Bhattacharya.
We have just met Bishnu Dey in Chapter 1, as a node of connection between Jamini Roy and the Parichoy circle. He would be an even more important point of contact for the artists who came together to form the Calcutta Group – (originally consisting of) Shubho Tagore, Nirode Mazumdar, Rathin Moitra, Prankrishna Pal, Gopal Ghosh, Paritosh Sen, Pradosh Das Gupta and Kamala Dasgupta – with the front organisations of the CPI like the IPTA and the Anti-Fascist Writers’ and Artists’ Association. Dey became the group’s patron-critic; his seminal writings on them including: his critical introduction to the group’s album of Famine exhibits, ‘Bengal Painters’ Testimony’, in 1944; an essay in People’s War, ‘When Artists Awake… Pen-Picture of the Calcutta Group’, in 1945; and his introduction to the group’s Bombay exhibition, also in 1945. In them, he repeatedly emphasised what Sunderason terms the “contextual specificities” of their work:
The experiments in the studios of the Calcutta Group have a social justification behind them […]. It is not so much the wind from distant Europe but rather the savage reality of our life which [has] informed the spirit of interrogation and revolt in the young artists of Calcutta. . […] It is in the context of political upsurge and growing economic crisis and on the background of recurring floods and famines and chronic epidemics that our young artists seem to turn to a revision of visual thinking.
Dey also played a catalyst in the group’s association with the renowned British ICS officer-art historian Willam Archer (then DC of Dumka) and anthropologist Verrier Elwin, which resulted in a Dumka phase of the group. And predictably, he introduced them to Jamini Roy, whom he considered to be the chief inspiration behind their modernist experiments. This view was, however, not accepted by some of the members, Prodosh Dasgupta in particular. It may be noted that it is Dasgupta who drafted the Group’s first manifesto at the time of their 1949 Exhibition, a modified version of which became the catalog-text of their last exhibition in 1953. By then, both Dey and the group had distanced themselves from the CPI; and Dasgupta – one of the most articulate members of the group – would expressly deny any ideological commitment on their part to “socialist realism”, emphasising that they believed “in humanism without any political binding or direction”.
Chittaprosad looms large in Chapters 2 and 4. Eight out of the eleven illustrations in Chapter 2 are images of his artworks, published in various CPI outlets – People’s War and People’s Age, among others. Sourced from the P.C. Joshi Collections, Courtesy of Archives on Contemporary History, at the B.R. Ambedkar Central Library, Jawaharlal Nehru University, these illustrations are a testament to the range of his propagandist art – from sketches and anti-war cartoons (1943) to posters (Inter-Asian Conference, March 1947) and his unforgettable reportage of the Bengal Famine (‘Life Behind the Front Lines’, ‘Visit to Cox’s Bazar’, September 1944).
One of the most striking illustrations is a sketch (one of a set of six) that he had done in support of the Naval Mutiny of 1946, reproduced in People’s Age. It exemplified, Sunderason says, “his new socialist expressionism: a wounded striker, wielding a rifle, rising like a leviathan over the image of the royal navy. The image of the striker’s turbulent rise, shattering his fetters, brings forth an element of expressionist horror, as well as an outburst of popular fury.”
We meet the artist again Chapter 4, where, once more, the maximum illustrations are his (six out of eight); but more importantly, which charts his fascinating trajectory as an artist: prominent in the 1940s, who went missing from discourses of postcolonial Indian art from the 50s to the 70s, but was later salvaged from obscurity by an art-market revival of interest in him in the late 2000s.
It may be pertinent to mention here the first-ever retrospective on the artist by DAG – ‘Chittaprosad: A Retrospective, 1915-1978’ – that had its first run in New Delhi (2011) followed by Mumbai (2014) and then New York (2018). It was accompanied by a set of five books, edited by Sanjoy Mallik – focusing, respectively, on his life and art (first two books), political sketches, letters, with the final volume being a reproduction in full of the only surviving copy of Hungry Bengal, all copies of which were burnt by the British when it was originally published in 1943.
The visual element
One of the most important components of a book on art – even if academic – is its visual element. Given the constraints of academic publishing (which, for the most part, rules out color images) and the challenges of securing permissions, it is remarkable that a 5-chapter book could manage to incorporate 35 illustrations. Several chapters have a single major source for its images: the ‘Archives on Contemporary History’ at JNU has already been mentioned (for Chapter 2); another such important source (for Chapter 5), is ‘Album, Drawings by Fourteen Contemporary Artists in Bengal’, from the Private papers of Rabin Mondal, Courtesy of Rabin Mondal. Images included from this archive are Mondal’s own illustration for Kolkata-r-Karcha (The Annals of Kolkata, 1971), Gopal Sanyal’s Towards Heaven (1969) and Bijan Choudhury’s War (1968). Other images in Chapter 5 – from separate sources – are a page from Nikhil Biswas’s diary on his ‘Combat Series’ (1960s, courtesy of Debabrata Biswas) and one from Bikash Bhattacharjee’s ‘Doll Series’ (1971, courtesy of NGMA, New Delhi).
Of the 35 illustrations in Partisan Aesthetics, of particular significance are the ones with which each chapter begins, providing a thought-provoking visual entry point for the content to follow. Perhaps the most memorable among them is the one with which Chapter 3 (on the Calcutta Group) begins: a cartoon from a scrapbook titled “Famines of Bengal”, with cutouts from 1943-44 (sourced from the Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata). It shows an exhibition titled ‘Modern Bengal’, full of artworks on the Famine: “destitution, vultures, piles of rotting bodies, and graves”. From a gilded portrait, the poet Dwijendralal Roy (known for his patriotic songs) gapes in horror at these images, and in frustration, tears apart a famous song of his celebrating the bounty of his motherland!
The only image to appear twice in the book is a detail from Somnath Hore’s Wounds Series (c.1977) – in Chapter 4, and on the cover. Courtesy of Akar Prakar Gallery, Kolkata and the artist’s estate, the image is of that of a paper pulp print, a white-on-white composition that dramatizes a wound on a gouged surface. Hore would follow this Series (done between 1971 and 1979) with a sculpture series on hunger in the 1980s – full of emaciated beings, their bodies contorted unimaginably by prolonged hunger. He had lived through the tumultuous 40s and been an eyewitness to all its harrowing markers: reporting for the CPI, like Chittaprosad, on the Famine of 1943 (after having been mentored at the Government School of Art, Calcutta, by Zainul Abedin); maintaining a journal (Tebhaga Diary) while formally documenting for the party the peasant unrest of 1946 in North Bengal; and seeing communal tensions escalate into riots in 1946 and the country being partitioned in 1947. That decade would scar him for life; and though he left the CPI in 1956 and settled into the life of a teacher, first at the Delhi Polytechnic and then in Santiniketan, the horrors of the 40s would return to his sculpture and prints. Speaking about this obsession, he once said:
I am all the time involved in one concern. What I call the Wounds. Social wounds you may call it. Whether it is famine or refugees, or the riots, or whatever it is. For this concept, I don’t have to think, it is there inside me. I don’t have to think in terms of the material… I remember seeing the metal plate in nitric acid, and the bubbles of anger, making wounds on the metal. I thought this was a most appropriate means to express my own ideas, by this etching process.
Hore offers a compelling example of an artist who straddled the decades of India’s long decolonisation, bearing the stamp of its many transitions in his own art practice.
Partisan Aesthetics is a seminal publication – intellectually rigorous, inventive and a richly persuasive study of the intersection of art and politics in mid-twentieth century India. First published by Stanford University Press in 2020, it was awarded the ICAS Book Prize 2021 for Best Art Publication. Jadavpur University Press has recently published a more affordable edition of the book which, it is hoped, will make it available and accessible to a wider audience than is usually the case with academic books (especially on art).
Rituparna Roy is a writer based in Kolkata. She can be reached at royrituparna.com
