A place is an anchor, not only a piece of ground to bear one’s footprints but a fulcrum that manoeuvres all human relations connected to it; within and outside of its boundaries—both defined and blurred. Artists mirror their environments, as much as they do their internal worlds. Place can be a marker of individual and collective identity, location and culture; even a metaphor for the body itself. The fine lines between observed reality, imagined reality and fantasy mingle as contextual changes bring about diverse interpretations of place.
BELONGING
Bengal is the place where it all began—the story of Indian printmaking, the inception of modern Indian art. A series of situations contributed to the productivity of that time, situations weighed down with tension and violence. There is one element that binds the artists Nandalal Bose, Benode Behari Mukherjee, Ramendranath Chakaravarty, Ramkinker Baij, Mukul Dey, Haren Das, Chittaprosad, Somnath Hore and others—that of belonging to Bengal, and the fact that they pictorially and conceptually navigated the meaning of this belonging. Calcutta (now Kolkata) was a port city developed by the British as its capital until 1911, after which the centre shifted to Delhi. India’s milieu over the nineteenth century was one of complex paradox and change; on the one hand there was a gradual absorption of British systems into a society already steeped in a strong local culture; on the other hand there was a steady growth of the nationalist movement, dissent towards the colonisers of the land, and the urge to reject everything concerned with them. In these circumstances artists were torn between following Western academic frameworks and indigenous visual languages. The Government College of Art and Craft, begun in 1854 in Calcutta, underwent a change in 1896 under the principalship of E.B. Havell, an Englishman sympathetic to Indian interests and cultural expression. Under the direction of Abanindranath Tagore, and with the encouragement of Havell and the next principal Percy Brown, a new Indian style of art was created, known as the Bengal school. This style was cultivated at Kala Bhavan, the art college established by Rabindranath Tagore (Abanindranath’s brother) in the
Arjun and Chitrangada, Ramendranath Chakravorty, woodcut, 23 x 23 cm, 1941.
idyllic locales of Santiniketan in 1919. As part of the larger Viswa Bharati (later Viswabharati University) and under the liberal and intellectual encouragement of the Tagores, it was the centre for immense exchange with cultural minds of both the east and west. Nandalal Bose was one of Abanindrath’s students, becoming head of Kala Bhavan in 1922. Bose absorbed the ideals of the Bengal School and looked to Indian classical art, folk art, and mythological literature for inspiration. In 1924 he travelled to the Far East and brought back Chinese rubbings and Japanese woodcut prints. It was a time when printmaking (etching, woodcut, engraving, PLACE 55