The Last Harvest

The Last Harvest

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THE LAST HARVEST Paintings of Rabindranath Tagore

Edited by

R. Siva Kumar

Mapin Publishing

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This publication was produced in conjunction with three traveling exhibitions, titled The Last Harvest: Paintings of Rabindranath Tagore as part of Government of India’s National Commemoration of 150th Birth Anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore.

Circuit I (98 works) Germany 1 September–30 October 2011 Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin The Netherlands 18 November 2011–15 January 2012 Jan van der Togt Museum, Amstelveen France 1 February–11 March 2012 Petit Palais, Paris Italy 25 March–27 May 2012 Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome Circuit II (60 works) United States of America 15 September 2011–2 January 2012 Asia Society and Museum, New York 25 January–15 April 2012 The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Circuit III (49 works) South Korea 19 September–27 November 2011 National Museum of Korea, Seoul United Kingdom 13 December 2011–4 March 2012 Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Reprinted in 2012 First published in India in 2011 by Mapin Publishing 502 Paritosh, Near Darpana Academy, Usmanpura, Ahmedabad 380013 INDIA T: +91-79-40228228 | F: +91-79-40228201 E: mapin@mapinpub.com www.mapinpub.com in association with National Gallery of Modern Art Jaipur House, India Gate New Delhi 110003 INDIA T: +91-11- 23384640 | F: +91-11- 23384560 E: info@ngmaindia.gov.in; ngma.delhi@ gmail.com | www.ngmaindia.gov.in on behalf of Ministry of Culture Government of India Shastri Bhawan, New Delhi 110115 Simultaneously published in the United States of America in 2011 by Grantha Corporation 77 Daniele Drive, Hidden Meadows Ocean Township, NJ 07712 E: mapin@mapinpub.com

Text © NGMA, 2011 Images © as listed All photographic illustrations in Essay Section are © Visva-Bharati Archives All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-81-89995-61-4 (Mapin) ISBN: 978-1-935677-18-5 (Grantha) LCCN: 2011935723 Design: Paulomi Shah Copyediting: Vinutha Mallya Printed in India The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standards for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Distributors North America: Antique Collectors’ Club T: 1 800 252 5231• E: info@antiquecc.com www.antiquecollectorsclub.com Southeast Asia: Paragon Asia Co. Ltd T: 66 2877 7755 • F: 66 2468 9636 E: info@paragonasia.com Australia & New Zealand: Peribo Pty Ltd T: 61 2 9457 0011 E: michael.coffey@peribo.com.au Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland: Visual Books Sales Agency T: 49 30 69 819 007 • F: 49 30 69 819 005 E: service@visualbooks-sales.com UK and Europe (excluding Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland): Gazelle Book Service Ltd T: 44 1524 68765 • F: 44 1524 63232 E: sales@gazellebooks.co.uk Distributed in the rest of the world by Mapin Publishing Pvt Ltd

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National Committee for the Commemoration of 150th Birth Anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore* Chairman

National Implementation Committee for the Commemoration of 150th Birth Anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore*

Dr Manmohan Singh Hon’ble Prime Minister of India Chairman

Members Mr S.H. Kapadia

Mr Ratan Thiyam

Mr Pranab Mukherjee

Chief Justice of India

Acting Chairman, Sangeet Natak Akademi

Union Minister of Finance

Ms Sonia Gandhi Chairperson, UPA

Mr Pranab Mukherjee Union Minister of Finance

Prof. Rajat Kanta Ray Vice Chancellor, Visva-Bharati

Prof. Karuna Sindhu Das

Members Ms Mamata Banerjee

Vice Chancellor, Rabindra Bharati University

Union Minister of Railways

Prof. U.R. Ananthamurthy

Mr S.M. Krishna

Mr S.M. Krishna

Former Chairman, Sahitya Akademi

Union Minister of External Affairs

Mr Nirendranath Chakravarty

Mr Kapil Sibal Union Minister of Human Resource Development

Ms Mamata Banerjee Union Minister of Railways

Ms Ambika Soni Union Minister of Information and Broadcasting

Mr Karan Singh, MP Chairman, ICCR

Mr M. Karunanidhi Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu

Mr Nitish Kumar

Chairman, West Bengal Bangla Academy

Mr K.G. Subramanyan Professor Emeritus, Visva-Bharati

Mr Sankha Ghosh Eminent Bengali Poet and Critic

Eminent Hindi Litterateur & Critic

Prof. Bhalachandra Nemade

Member Secretary Mr Jawhar Sircar

Former Member, Sahitya Akademi

Mr Buddhadev Bhattacharjee

Prof. Muchkund Dubey

Mr Tarun Kumar Gogoi Chief Minister of Assam

Ms Sushma Swaraj, MP Leader of Opposition, Lok Sabha

Mr Sitaram Yechury, MP Chairman, Parliament Standing Committee on Culture

Prof. Amartya Sen Nobel Laureate

Kumari Selja

Mr Namvar Singh

Chief Minister of Orissa

Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh

Union Minister of Human Resource Development & Minister of Communications and Information Technology

Eminent Hindi Litterateur & Critic

Former Vice Chancellor, North Eastern Hill University & Director, Indian Institute of Advanced Study

Mr Shivraj Singh Chouhan

Mr Kapil Sibal

Prof. Namvar Singh

Mr Naveen Patnaik

Chief Minister of Maharashtra

Union Minister of Information and Broadcasting

Union Minister of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation & Minister of Culture

Prof. Mrinal Miri

Mr Ashok Chavan

Ms Ambika Soni

Eminent Film Director

Mr Adoor Gopalakrishnan

Chief Minister of Bihar

Chief Minister of West Bengal

Union Minister of External Affairs

Secretary, Ministry of Culture

Former Foreign Secretary

Prof. Tan Chung Former Professor, Cheena Bhavan, Visva-Bharati

Mr Manik Sarkar Chief Minister of Tripura

Kumari Selja Union Minister of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation & Minister of Culture

Dr Narendra Jadhav Member, Planning Commission

Member Secretary Mr Jawhar Sircar Secretary, Ministry of Culture

Mr Sunil Gangopadhyaya Chairman, Sahitya Akademi

Mr Ashok Vajpeyi Chairman, Lalit Kala Akademi

*

In accordance with Gazette Notification No. 5-46/2009-C&M dated 27th April 2010 together with amendment notifications dated 14th May 2010, 9th August 2010 and 15th February 2011.

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*

In accordance with Order No. F.5-46/2009-Special Cell dated 2nd February 2011 of the Ministry of Culture

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Message

I am happy that a remarkable exhibition of Rabindranath Tagore’s art, comprising of paintings and drawings from the collections of Kala Bhavan and Rabindra Bhavan of Visva Bharati in Santiniketan, West Bengal as well as the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, is being shown in so many countries abroad. The exhibition has been curated by art historian Prof. R Sivakumar and NGMA, New Delhi is organizing and coordinating the travelling exposition Rabindranath Tagore is one of India’s most acclaimed artists, who was also a poet, musician, philosopher, educationist and writer. This outstanding exhibition is being mounted on the occasion of his 150th Birth Anniversary.

Called The Last Harvest, the show is a large and comprehensive collection of the works of this creative genius. It is for the first time that such a major show of Rabindranath’s works is travelling to so many art centers in Europe, the USA and East Asia.

The selection of works for this exhibition focuses on his artistic odyssey and creativity. His work negotiates with modernist aesthetic while being rooted in the Indian ethos. His deep artistic sensitivity captures eternity in a moment. His works are national treasures of our country.

I am confident that this travelling exhibition will be a visual feast for art lovers around the world and will build a rich bond between our peoples.

I wish the exhibition all success [Kumari Selja]

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CONTENTS

The Last Harvest Curator’s Note

R. Siva Kumar

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Rabindranath Tagore A Biographical Stetch

Uma Das Gupta

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Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan Where Life and Art Meet

Kathleen O’Connell

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Rabindranath Tagore’s First Ever Exhibition in Paris

France Bhattacharya

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Rabindranath Tagore’s Paintings in Germany

Martin Kampchen

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Stella Kramrisch and the Bauhaus in Calcutta

Kris K. Manjapra

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Tagore’s Sense of Rythm

William Radice

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Rabindrasangeet Rabindranath Tagore’s Musical Legacy

Lars-Christian Koch

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Rabindranath Tagore as a Painter and Catalyst of Modern Indian Art

R. Siva Kumar

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Engagement with Modernity Paintings of Rabindranath Tagore in the NGMA

Rajeev Lochan

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ESSAYS

CATALOGUE OF PAINTINGS Animals, Designs, Composites

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Landscapes and Flowers

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Gesticulating Figures and Dramatic Scenes

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Faces

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Exhibition Credits

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C u r at o r ’ s N o t e

The Last Harvest

Rabindranath Tagore was born on 7 May 1861 in colonial India, and this year marks his 150th birth anniversary.

The world today remembers him primarily as the first Asian poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature way back in 1913, and to a lesser extent as an oriental visionary who tried to bring the world together during the troubled years of the twentieth century that followed. He too often took refuge in the identity of a poet and occasionally played up his role as a missionary of peace. But he was much more. Besides being a poet, he was a novelist, a writer of short stories and plays, a composer of songs, an essayist, a philosopher and a painter. As a writer he shaped modern Bengali literature and language, and inspired writers in other Indian languages as no other writer has done. Through his novels and plays, he connected his readers with the political and cultural issues of his time; through his music, he connected his listeners with nature and their own inner world; and as an activist, educationalist and environmentalist, he tried to change their attitude towards the world they lived in and tried to enhance their sense of human dignity. He left his mark on many facets of culture, and in India, he is a national figure, as important to its shaping as Gandhi was.

of view of a creative person and his expressive needs. To him, whatever an artist used—materials, tools, language—and from wherever he inherited or appropriated them, it had to become his own and had to serve his creative needs. As a writer, he took the language of his predecessors and transformed it, marrying it with forms partly inherited and partly adopted, and making it the vehicle of new expressive needs. Although he himself translated some of his poems into English, which led to more translations in other Indian and world languages, and wrote many of his addresses and essays directly in English, as a writer he needed the Bengali language, and contact with nature and life in Bengal to spur his imagination. In music he was more eclectic and drew on several traditions, but with its stress on the lyrics it was still circumscribed by language, and he believed that it was essentially addressed to the Bengali listeners. But when it came to painting, his creative impulse was almost fully nurtured by alien traditions and their visual languages.

As a multifaceted genius, Rabindranath responded to the world and its challenges creatively. Even his work in the area of rural reconstruction and education, through which he wanted to transform the social and moral fabric of the society, were the imaginative interventions of a creative person. He was a great force in the cultural resurgence of India and in the shaping of its modernism. In colonial India such cultural engagement was often subsumed under the nationalist fight against colonial rule.

But Rabindranath’s anti-colonialism was premised not on the idea of cultural insularity, but of cross-cultural engagement; not on shutting the world out, but on meeting the world cultures as an equal. His creative work and the institutions he founded, therefore, played a significant role in bringing modern India closer to the world.

Painting thus had a special place in this opening to cultures, through which Rabindranath shaped the modern Indian cultural scene. Painting was also the last art form to enter his oeuvre, and his pictures the last harvest, of his rich creative life. Although he had played the role of a catalyst in shaping the modern Indian art scene since the beginning of the twentieth century, he began to paint only in his mid-sixties. This meant that while his creative work in other mediums, along with his engagement with social and political issues, moved through the nationalist, pan-Asian and universal humanist phases, his work as a painter belonged exclusively to the phase of universal humanism.

His painting, more than his work in any other medium, was also moulded by his interactions with world art. Untrained in art, he discovered himself as a painter on encountering certain strands of oriental, ‘primitive’ and modern art. This led him to realise that his innate sense of rhythm, which hitherto found expression only through his calligraphic hand, could also be used for creating rhythmically articulated pictorial forMs

Rabindranath looked at cultures—that of India as well as that of other countries, both ancient and modern—from the point

Given certain stylistic affinities that his paintings have with modern Western art, they also appealed to many Western

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viewers when they were first exhibited, beginning in Paris in May 1930, and then over the next six months in London, Birmingham, Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Copenhagen, Moscow, Boston, New York and Philadelphia. This whirlwind travelling show made Rabindranath the only Indian artist of his time to be extensively exhibited in the West. He undertook these exhibitions at least partly because he believed that while his music and writing were primarily for Bengal and India, his paintings were—as paintings were free from the limitations of language—for the whole world.

Without follow-up exhibitions or publications and discussions, the memory of these early exhibitions abroad faded very soon, but in India he became an inspiration for other modern artists who were keen on forging cultural and artistic links between India and the world.

It was therefore thought fitting by the National Committee for the Commemoration of 150th Birth Anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore, to have a travelling exhibition of his paintings as one of the key events marking the celebrations. The Committee decided that a single large travelling exhibition could be a protracted and unwieldy affair. They felt that three separate exhibitions, travelling simultaneously to different venues, would make his paintings more accessible, in the original, to a larger international audience. The three exhibitions brought together in this publication were conceived thus. They are slightly different in sizes, but similar in structure. While each exhibition is independent, they collectively provide, through this catalogue, a more comprehensive picture of his oeuvre.

Both individually and collectively, the exhibitions reflect four important facets of his oeuvre. His first paintings grew out of the doodles he did in his manuscripts while attempting to turn crossed-out words and discarded lines into visually exciting motifs. These have an element of playful inventiveness and involve morphological cross-projections that defy perceptual experience. If the subliminal played an important part in his first paintings, painting itself led him to pay attention to the pageant of forms in nature. The landscapes included in these selections are a token of this shift. As he progressed he also began to see the human body not merely as form, but as gestures carrying within them the seeds of visual narration and theatre—ambivalent as they may remain, without the benefit of names. A third group of paintings brings this into focus. And finally there are his representations of the human face; hovering between hieratic masks and individualised portraits, they turn countenance into characters.

much of which—with his sensitivity to nature, willingness to learn from other cultures, respect for differences and commitment to innovative cultural changes—might still be found worthy of attention.

To facilitate this, the catalogue also contains essays by a group of specialists, on his life and work as an educationist, his contribution to various arts, the common thread of aesthetics connecting them, and on the climate in which his paintings were made and first exhibited. They do not cover every facet of his work, but they will certainly help the viewers contextualize his paintings and this exhibition, and introduce them to some of his accomplishments in other arts. This in turn will hopefully lead them to look beyond this exhibition, know him more fully, and recognize his contribution to building bridges between cultures.

The exhibition is fully supported by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. The works in the exhibition are drawn from the collections of the Visva-Bharati university, Santiniketan, and the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. Sri Jawhar Sircar, Secretary, Department of Culture; Dr Vijay Madan and Sri Sanjiv Mittal, Joint Secretaries, Department of Culture; and Prof. Rajeev Lochan, Director, National Gallery of Modern Art and head of the nodal agency for these exhibitions, have been very closely associated with the planning and realization of this exhibition. Their involvement and commitment have allowed me to limit myself to the purely academic aspects of this exhibition, and without their support this exhibition would not have been possible. At Visva-Bharati, Prof. Rajat Kanta Ray, ViceChancellor and Prof. Udaya Narayana Singh, Pro- Vice-Chancellor, have also been very helpful, as have been Prof. Ashok Bowmick, Principal, Kala Bhavana, and Sri Nilanjan Banerjee, Special Officer, Rabindra Bhavana. The museum staff of Rabindra Bhavana, Kala Bhavana and the National Gallery of Modern Art deserve due credit. It was great pleasure working with them.

R. Siva Kumar Santiniketan, August 2011

Hopefully, 80 years after they were first exhibited, these paintings will once again be received and responded to by a global audience, just as Rabindranath had hoped. And going beyond it, it will initiate a new interest in other aspects of his life and work, 11

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Rabindranath Tagore A Biographical Sketch

Uma Das Gupta

Family Rabindranath Tagore was born in 1861. He grew up in the heart of Calcutta when India was a British colony. Some of his ancestors worked for the British East India Company. The family lived through varied fortunes and different phases of India’s history. British political power over India was established with the conquest of Plassey in 1757, almost a hundred years before Rabindranath was born.

He was brought up in the family mansion at Jorasanko, on Chitpore Road in north Calcutta. His grandfather, Dwarkanath Tagore (1794–1846), addressed popularly as ‘Prince’ Dwarkanath, was the most successful Indian merchant of his generation.

Dwarkanath’s son Debendranath (1817–1905), addressed popularly as ‘Maharsi’ Debendranath, was Rabindranath’s father.

Debendranath was an austere man, of the high Hindu culture of the Upanishads. A follower of Rammohun Roy’s religious reform movement, Debendranath adopted the monotheistic Brahmo Dharma in 1843.

As reformers and patriots, the Tagore family found themselves drawn into the heated debates on religion and politics of those times. Their interest in English literature also opened a window on the world. The air that young Rabindranath breathed in Jorasanko was described by him: There was something remarkable about our family.

It was as if we lived close to the age of pre-Puranic India through our commitment to the Upanishads…

Along with that there was a genuinely deep love of English literature among my elders. Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott had a strong influence over our family…1 Life at the Jorasanko house was in itself an all-rounded education.

Rabindranath’s elder sister, Swarnakumari, was the first Bengali woman novelist. Their eldest brother, Dwijendranath, was a poet, philosopher, and mathematician, who invented the shorthand in Bengali and introduced musical notations for the piano in Bengali music. The family was also a hub for patriotic activity. They

patronized the annual nationalist fair, Hindu Mela. Rabindranath’s fifth brother, Jyotirindranath, established a revolutionary ‘secret society’ modelled on Giuseppe Mazzini’s Carbonari, and made Rabindranath a junior member of this outfit.

At 17, Rabindranath was asked to go to England with his second brother Satyendranath, the first Indian member of the British Indian Civil Service. The two brothers sailed for England on 20 September 1878. Rabindranath went to the University of London for a few months and took classes in English Literature.

In London, he stayed with an English family, to whom he pays tribute in his Reminiscences: I received no shock calculated to shatter the original framework of my life – rather East and West met in friendship in my person.2

Becoming a Writer On returning home, Rabindranath became immersed in writing. While in England, he had begun to write his first versedrama, Bhagna Hriday (‘The Broken Heart’), on the theme of a tormented poet disappointed in love, just as in Kabikahini (‘The Poet’s Story’), written earlier when he was 16. Bhagna Hriday was from a time in his young life when he harboured an exaggerated image of himself. There was a great parade of universal love in those writings, befitting that of a budding poet.

His first chance of finding ‘himself ’ came in the decade that he spent in rural East Bengal from 1889–1890 where his father sent him to manage the family’s agricultural estates. There, he came into intimate contact with the common man’s struggle for survival. The letters he wrote then stand out most prominently among his literary creations from that period, as do his short stories. The letters were published in 1912, as Chhinnapatra (‘Fragments’). They are full of vivid details of everyday village life and of his encounters with stark nature.

We also learn from these letters that the turning point in Rabindranath’s compassion for humanity came out of his first-hand experience of the miserable condition in which the

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During this period, when he was so completely absorbed by the stark reality of the life of the common people, his poetry expressed a certain inner mysticism, which was later to become an essential part of his writing. This found expression in several of his poems written between 1894 and 1900. One such central poem was Jiban-debata (‘God of life’). He came to realize that the divine was to be found in humanity just as humanity was forever in search of the divine. He explained his concept of Jiban-debata when he wrote, [It is]…the idea of the humanity of our God, or the divinity of Man the Eternal ...5

Rabindranath with tenant farmers at Shilaidaha

majority of his countrymen lived. Born into aristocracy himself, this became a humbling experience for him. He became restless to do something about it. He wrote, I began to feel ashamed of spending my days simply as a landlord, concerned only with my own profit and loss. So I began to think about what could be done.

I did not think helping from outside would help.

I began to try and open their minds towards selfreliance.3 At the time, he wrote some powerful essays for social reform of the country. His drama Achalayatan (‘The Immovable’) addressed the obduracy of Hindu orthodoxy, while his novels Gharey Baire (‘Home and the World’), and Gora attacked the corrupting Hindu influence on swadeshi politics. In 1904–05, he joined the Swadeshi Movement, but withdrew from it when it led to Hindu–Muslim riots. Rabindranath’s nationalist critics accused him of ‘desertion’.

It is remarkable that Rabindranath’s writings from nearly a hundred years ago had alerted us to the social injustices that continue to hurt our lives to this day—the injustices of caste and creed. He was characteristically candid in self-criticism when he wrote explaining his own change of heart thus: There had been a time when I too tried to love and call by sweet names this prison covering our whole country, but my inner soul had remained discontented…Oh, how impenetrable the walls, how solid its foundation! An achievement certainly, but does it deserve to be admired?4

Deaths in the Family Rabindranath was married on 9 December 1883. His young bride, Bhavatarini, belonged to the provincial town of Jessore in East Bengal. Her name, considered as old-fashioned, was changed to Mrinalini. Rabindranath was, at the time, writing a prosedrama called Nalini which was going to be enacted by the Tagore family when his sister-in-law, Kadambari Devi, who was almost the same age as Rabindranath, committed suicide. Recalling the shock in his Reminiscences, Rabindranath referred to it as his first ‘permanent’ acquaintance with Death.

When his mother had died, he was a very young boy. But when Kadambari Devi died, he was utterly distraught. Yet, he also experienced some flashes of joy in the midst of this unbearable grief. The sense that life was not a stable, permanent fixture helped to lighten his mind. He wrote, With the loosening of the attraction of the world, the beauty of nature took on for me a deeper meaning. 6 This forced insight into life and death was of no little significance when we recall that he had to face many deaths in his close family, starting with the death of his wife in 1902, which was followed by the deaths of three out of five of their children. A few months after his wife’s death, their second daughter, Renuka, fell ill. His renowned collection of poems for children, Sisu (‘Child’), was written at this time, while he was tending Renuka and looking after the two younger children bereft of their mother. The poems are so full of innocent delight that it is hard to imagine the grief and anxiety he must have been going through. In 1903, Renuka died, nine months after her mother’s death. There was more sorrow to come, with the deaths of his father in 1905, and of his youngest son, Samindranath, in 1907 when he was only eleven.

In those years, his verse was becoming increasingly an offering to God; finding in Divinity “the medium of a higher love, shorn of all superficial ornaments”. Coming from an inner surrender, after much personal pain, the language of these poems became simple and direct.

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The Santiniketan School There were various stages in the development of Rabindranath’s humanism. His deepening experience in relating to man and Nature gave him his two most persistent drives in life, to bring joy and creativity and sustainable alternative values into urban education, and to bring scientific education to the rural people.

It was in Santiniketan, in rural southern Bengal, that he first began to integrate these strands. Santiniketan, a serene spot, was discovered by his father during his travels in the district of Birbhum. Debendranath bought some land there and built a garden house on it in 1863. He named the house ‘Santiniketan’ (‘Abode of Peace’). In 1887, Debendranath established a Trust Deed for Santiniketan, in which he provided for a hall of prayer, an annual village fair, and a school.

This was the school Rabindranath added to Santiniketan in 1901.

The school was to be a dynamic experiment of building a living connection between the city and the village, by bringing together students who came from urban homes and from peasant families of surrounding villages. The early angst Rabindranath felt for an ignorant and helpless humanity in rural East Bengal became an inspiration and a spiritual force in serving his country, by building a programme for holistic education at the most basic level.

He was greatly concerned with the cultural domination prevailing, not only due to his country’s inherent social stratification, but

also from the colonial English education, which was becoming a divisive element between city and village in early modern India. To Rabindranath, these were more urgent problems than the lack of political freedom. The social stratification of caste was a means by which races with widely different cultures and even antagonistic social and religious ideals, could settle down peaceably, side by side. However, he observed, this peaceable means of settling down also meant that the common man became subservient to the prevailing social system, which was detrimental to manhood. He wrote, Whenever I realize the hypnotic hold which this gigantic system of cold-blooded repression has taken on the minds of our people whose social body it has so completely entwined in its endless coils that the free expression of manhood even under the direst necessity has become almost an impossibility, the only remedy that suggests itself to me and which even at the risk of uttering a truism I cannot but repeat, is – to educate them out of their trance.7 Rabindranath did not take the route of accusing foreign rule for our social malaise. He argued that foreign rule was a political symptom of our social malaise. He hoped that the new ideas of humanism from the West would rejuvenate us to examine ourselves and reverse the process. He described the Santiniketan School as “an indigenous attempt in adapting modern methods of education in a truly Indian cultural environment”.8

The ‘Santiniketan Building’ from which the school and the place took its name 14

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Samaj would not take the Muslims into its fold. He gave powerful expression to his disillusionment in the novel Gora, written and serialized during the years 1907–09.

The novel’s hero, Gora, was an orphan boy of Irish parents brought up by a Brahmin family as their own child. He grows up to become a fiercely patriotic young man and a defender of orthodox Hinduism. But when Gora finally discovers his foreign origins, he also realises he would be rejected by orthodox Hindu society, where he had invested his trust and his social commitment. This brings him to his senses, about the need of being an Indian without caste or creed. At the end of the novel Gora says, Today I am really an Indian! In me there is no longer any opposition between Hindu, Mussulman, and Christian. Today every caste is my caste, the food of all is my food! 10 Girls and boys at the Santiniketan School

Science class in progress at the Sriniketan School, 1928

He thus set out to resurrect the best of the Indian inheritance, in the Santiniketan School, but gave it a universal humanist outlook for a realization of human unity. At Santiniketan, the anniversaries of great men of thought and action, who belonged to India’s multiple cultures and to the world—such as the Buddha, the Christ, Prophet Mohammad, Chaitanya, and Rammohun Roy—were observed with prayer and discourse. He believed that such an education would build a child’s values and enable us to find ‘our own true place in the world’ . 9

Nationalism and his India Rabindranath turned his full attention to the Santiniketan School after withdrawing from the Swadeshi Movement of 1904–05, which he had joined with great patriotic fervour. Until then, he had held his faith in the traditional Hindu Samaj, but was in for a rude shock when he realized that true to orthodoxy, the Hindu

Rabindranath launched his critique of the national chauvinism by writing this novel. Amid growing perplexities of the social, educational and political problems of his times, his mind had been turning to the history of India to discover a central ideal for regulating our life and work. His vision of the meeting of humanity on the soil of India was expressed in a song written in 1912, Day and night, thy voice goes out from land to land, Calling Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains Round thy throne And Parsees, Mussulmans and Christians.

Offerings are brought to thy shrine by the East and the West to be woven in a garland of love.

Thou bringest the hearts of all peoples Into the harmony of one life, Thou Dispenser of India’s destiny, Victory, Victory, Victory to thee.11

Visva-Bharati: The ‘World-In-One-Nest’ University In 1918, Rabindranath began preparations to add a ‘Centre of Indian Culture’ to the Santiniketan School, for the coordinated study of the various religious cultures that flowed through India’s history: Vedic, Puranic, Buddhist, Jain, Islamic, Sikh, Zoroastrian and Christian. Arrangements were made to study contributions of these cultures through the disciplines of philosophy, literature, art, music and dance. The name ‘Visva-Bharati’ dates from that time. Its Sanskrit motto, ‘yatra visvam bhavati eka nidam’, meaning ‘the world in one nest’, is taken from a Vedic text. Officially, VisvaBharati international university was inaugurated at Santiniketan in 1921.

Although an ‘international’ university is a complex idea, Rabindranath kept it simple. He explained that he used the word for the sake of convenience. He wrote, 15

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Stella Kramrisch and the Bauhaus in Calcutta Kris K. Manjapra

In 1922, a major exhibition of Bauhaus art opened in Calcutta.

This was the first time that an exhibition of German modern art or of European avant-garde art more generally, crossed the colonial divide to India. The travelling exhibition has often been portrayed as a transfer of European cultural goods to India, or as an episode of regrettable cultural loss, since the artwork never returned to the Bauhaus collection. But, framing the exhibition in terms of unilateral transfer obscures the actual intensions that motivated the exhibition organizers. And, focusing on the loss of Bauhaus art prevents us from appreciating how far the history of the travelling Bauhaus exhibition actually extends.

This article corrects three misconceptions about the Bauhaus exhibition in Calcutta in 1922–23. First, a close study of newly discovered archival documents clearly shows that Stella Kramrisch (1896–1993), the Austrian art historian who joined Visva-Bharati in late 1921, conceptualized the show and played the main organizational role. Previously, historians have assumed that Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, or perhaps Ordhendra Coomar Gangoly were the main forces behind the event. Second, contrary to common assumptions, the Bauhaus artwork in Calcutta was not only intended to be exhibited, as though in a museum. Rather the works were intended for sale to Calcutta audiences. Bauhaus artists sent their artwork to India in 1922 with the understanding that they were contributing to an art sale. And finally, although a standard view holds that the Bauhaus art ‘disappeared’ in Calcutta, a close investigation of archival evidence points to other conclusions. In 1967, Hans Wingler, a historian of the Bauhaus, informed the German embassy in India that “from there [Calcutta] nothing was heard back, the receipt was never confirmed, and the artwork never returned.”1 The myth of disappearing Bauhaus artwork in Calcutta thus developed. For example, in 1978, an article in the Offenburger Tageblatt erroneously announced that “after the exhibition, [the artwork] was preserved in the collection of the Indian Society for Oriental Art and disappeared.”2 But these claims, based on presumptions and stereotypes, are actually contradicted by a close study of the archives. Archival documents at the Thuringian Hauptstaatsarchiv show that the artwork was duly repackaged and mailed back to Weimar at the conclusion of the exhibition,

and that the Indian Society of Oriental Art kept the Bauhaus apprised each step of the way.

But in addition to correcting the three misconceptions about the conceptualization, organization and conclusion of the Bauhaus exhibition and art sale in Calcutta 1922–23, this article also draws a different context around the travelling exhibition in order to better portray its significance. The Bauhaus exhibition exemplifies the central role of artistic internationalism in the Tagorean cultural programme of the 1920s. Organizing travelling exhibitions of modernist art between Germany and Bengal became a major objective of Tagorean institutions such as the Kala Bhavana at Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan and the Indian Society of Oriental Art in Calcutta. Since European art connoisseurs understood India almost exclusively in terms of ancient artefacts and village handicrafts, displaying contemporary Indian painting abroad was a radical endeavour.

Travelling exhibitions created spaces of international comparison between Indian anti-colonial art movements and the European, especially the German, avant-garde.

Tagorean artistic internationalism relied heavily on go-betweens and cultural interpreters, such as Stella Kramrisch who organized the Bauhaus exhibition in 1922. And throughout the 1920s, cultural go-betweens continued to arrange German– Indian art exchanges. In 1923, Benoy Kumar Sarkar organized a large exhibition of the Bengal School at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. And in 1930–31, Tagorean artistic internationalism reached a high-water mark, when Tagore himself travelled with his paintings and graphic designs through England, France, Germany and Russia. Whereas on previous trips to the West, Tagore had relied exclusively on the power of his words, he now also used images as means for stimulating communication across national bounds. Tagore donated five pieces of art to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which remained part of the collection until the Nazi administration labelled them ‘degenerate’ in 1937.

The travelling exhibition of Bauhaus art to Calcutta in 1922–23 has benefited from the close study of many expert scholars.3 We know that exactly 175 pieces of original art by Bauhaus masters

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and some of their students were packed at the Bauhaus School in Weimar and shipped to Calcutta on 31 August 1922.4 It is well known that the shipment arrived in Calcutta around 18 October 1922, and was impounded at the customs office of the British colonial administration.5 A study of correspondence files housed at the Thuringian Hauptstaatsarchiv in Weimar indicates that the artwork was released by colonial officials only on December 6, after an extra tax of 30 on art sales was agreed to. The exhibition sponsored by the Indian Society of Oriental Art finally opened in Calcutta on 23 December 1922 at the Samavaya Mansions.6 From articles in the Rupam art journal, as well as the VisvaBharati Quarterly, we know the show was received with great enthusiasm by the intelligentsia of Calcutta and Santiniketan.7 The person who conceptualized the Bauhaus exhibition in Calcutta and played the central organizing role was neither Rabindranath Tagore, nor his nephew, Abanindranath, but the young art historian, Stella Kramrisch. She arrived in Santiniketan in December 1921, after having completed a dissertation on ancient Indian art in Vienna and post-doctoral study in London.

Kramrisch taught Indian art history for two years at Santiniketan before taking a post on the faculty of Calcutta University from 1923–1950.

In the archive of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, we find an important document that helps unravel the circumstances that led to the shipment of Bauhaus art to Calcutta in 1922. Stella Kramrisch spent the last phase of her career, from 1954–1993, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as curator of the Indian Department. In 1985, in response to a letter of inquiry by a German researcher, she wrote, “I had met Johannes Itten in Vienna and I subsequently suggested to Abanindranath Tagore to hold an exhibition at the Indian Society of Oriental Art”.8 A consideration of contextualizing historical evidence corroborates Kramrisch’s statement, and establishes her as the figure behind the travelling Bauhaus exhibition in 1922.

Kramrisch enrolled in the Institute of Art History of Vienna University in 1916, and completed her dissertation on the art of Sanchi and Bharhut in 1919.9 Her advisor was the eminent founder of the institute, Josef Strzygowski, a world-renowned comparativist, expert on Byzantine and Middle Eastern Art, and proponent of a new-fangled global art history based on race theory.10 In the same year as Kramrisch began doctoral study, Johannes Itten, a celebrated young artist settled in Vienna, where he taught art classes, lectured and painted, before joining Weimar’s new Bauhaus School in 1919. On 21 May 1917, Itten was invited by Josef Strzygowski to deliver a lecture entitled ‘On Composition’ at the Vienna Art History Institute.11 In all likelihood, Stella Kramrisch, as one of Strzygowski’s most prized students, attended this lecture, although no attendance list is available.12 But, Kramrisch and Itten may have also met outside

the university context. While in Vienna, Itten felt the gravitational pull of the Theosophical Society, with its esoteric teachings of cultural renewal from the East. He records frequent visits to the Theosophical bookshop, especially in 1918.13 Stella Kramrisch, on the other hand, was impressed by Leopold Schroeder’s Bhagavad Gita translation as well as Wassily Kandinsky’s admiring account of Theosophy in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Munich: Piper, 1912).14 There is some likelihood, then, that she may have met Itten between 1916 and 1919 in the social circle surrounding the Vienna Theosophical Society.15 After completing her dissertation in November 1919, Kramrisch left for Oxford University, accompanying her dissertation advisor, Strzygowski, on a visiting fellowship apparently funded by the British Relief Fund.16 That same year, Johannes Itten became a founding member of the Bauhaus and moved to Weimar.

Meanwhile, Rabindranath Tagore began his 14-month tour of Europe and the United States of America in May 1920, partly in order to win support from foreign academics and intellectuals for the new Visva-Bharati international university in Santiniketan.17 Kramrisch first met Rabindranath in June 1920, either during his visit to Oxford, or at the London home of his friend, William Rothenstein, Principal of the Royal Academy of Art and president of the London Indian Society.18 Kramrisch informed Rabindranath of her wish to study Indian sacred art up close.19 Calcutta’s Indian Museum housed the carved railings of the Bharhut Stupa, which she had studied for her dissertation. Rabindranath was greatly impressed by the young scholar, and encouraged her to join the new university at Santiniketan. Over the course of the next nine months, he followed the progress of her application for a travel visa to British India.20 The visa took time and required the intercession of Tagore’s friends in London, such as William Rothenstein.21 In 1921, Kramrisch enrolled in post-doctoral study at SOAS in London, while she also became a long-distance affiliate of the Tagore circle in Santiketan and Calcutta. She published an article based on her dissertation research in Rupam, a Tagorean art journal edited by O.C. Gangoly and patronized

by Abanindranath Tagore. From London she published a second article, in the Calcutta Review, on general features of the Indian art tradition.22 When Rabindranath visited Vienna in June 1921, he met with Josef Strzygowski. In fact, Strzygowksi believed that Kramrisch would go to Santiniketan to pave the way for his guest professorship the following year. 23 Artists in Santiniketan and Calcutta waited expectantly for Kramrisch’s arrival, and were initially most interested in her insights on the ‘modern movement in European art’. 24 After arriving in Santinketan, Kramrisch delivered lectures both on European artistic modernism, and on her specialty, Indian art history.25 Kramrisch argued in her European art lectures that in the movement from Impressionism to post-Impressionism, Cubism and Dadaism, European artists were searching for 35

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cultural renewal. European modern artists were breaking away from the naturalistic imitation of the outer world, and turning towards representations of abstract inner human experience.26 But if Kramrisch focused first on Europe, she spoke next about India. Her second set of lectures in India, beginning on 27 July 1922, carried the title, ‘The Expressiveness of Indian Art’.27 Here she insisted that Indian modern art had embarked on an experimental journey into the richness of indigenous traditions, while also fearlessly embracing influences from outside, from East Asia and Europe.28 She argued that Abanindranath Tagore and the Bengal School helped initiate Indian cultural renewal by rejecting the ‘naturalism’ of the colonial Government Art College, and by returning to the ‘abstraction’ of ancient Indian art traditions.29 So too, European modernists, mainly German and Austrian, increasingly rejected the ‘imitative approach’ of 19thcentury ‘Western art’, and found renewal in ‘pure’ abstraction.30 Both Indian and German modernists, then, were shedding old skins. Their creative endeavours were comparable: equal in aesthetic value, although different in form. According to Kramrisch’s view, modern artists from East and West could find common ground, and enrich each other through mutual exchange.

“The Indian outlook has a deep effect on modern Western spirituality, while at the same time the East accepts European civilization,” she wrote.31 Comparative interpretations informed most of Kramrisch’s essays in 1922 and 1923, and help explain her reason for organizing the Bauhaus exhibition in Calcutta.32 On 5 May 1922, Stella Kramrisch wrote a letter to Johannes Itten, whom she knew from the Viennese avant-garde milieu, regarding the possibility of holding an art show and sale of Bauhaus art in Kolkata. Itten had likely met Rabindranath Tagore one year before, on 7 May 1921, when Tagore visited Weimar and recited poetry at the National Theatre.33 As Partha Mitter shows, Itten recorded Tagore’s recital in his Bauhaus diary, although no definitive evidence of their meeting has yet surfaced.34 We recall at this stage that according to Kramrisch’s statement from 1985, she ‘suggested’ the idea of the exhibition to Abanindranath Tagore. Writing from the ‘Santiniketan International University’, and ‘on behalf of Abanindranath Tagore’, Kramrisch asked Itten for ‘some drawings, watercolours, lithographs or even wood carving… especially works by Mr. [Paul] Klee’.35 The show, she explained, would be part of an ‘international exhibition of living art’ to be held at the Indian Society of Oriental Art in Calcutta in late 1922.36 From the very beginning, Kramrisch made clear that she was requesting not only an exhibition, but also an art sale. “The selling prices will be set in rupees… after the completion of the exhibition, the unsold works will of course be immediately returned.”37 Johannes Itten swiftly gave his consent to Kramrisch’s request, and on 12 July 1922, Kramrisch wrote again in order to

make specific arrangements. She indicated that the selling price for original watercolours and drawings appearing at the show should range between 5 and 15, and that ‘student artwork is very much wanted’.38 Under separate cover she also sent 2 (or 13,000 Marks during the severe German inflation of mid-1922) to pay for the cost of insuring the artwork. Kramrisch asked that the artwork should be posted by mid-August, so that it would arrive in Calcutta by the middle of September.

Upon receiving Kramrisch’s letter, Itten began canvassing the Bauhaus masters for contributions to the travelling art sale. In early August, he wrote to Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gerhard Marcks, Oskar Schlemmer, Lothar Schreyar and Georg Muche.39 He also asked Wassily Kandinsky.40 All of these artists, except Schlemmer, contributed a set of their works for the Calcutta exhibition and art sale. Itten sent 60 of his own pieces, in addition to a selection of works by his students.41 In addition, there were 35 Feiningers, 3 Kandinskys, 9 Klees, 29 Marcks, 9 Muches, 7 Schreyars, two pieces by a Bauhaus student Sofie Korner, and eight by another student, Margit Tery-Adler.42 Each piece of art was marked with a price between 2 and 15. On 30 August 1922, four large packets containing 175 pieces of Bauhaus artwork were mailed to Calcutta by Itten’s secretary, Lotte Hirschfeld.43 The eagerness with which Johannes Itten responded to Kramrisch’s requests must be understood in the context of his enthusiasm for Eastern spirituality. For example, in Weimar, Itten organized a Mazdaznan society, which was a German school of Zoroastrian teaching.44 But the swift action on Itten’s part also suggests a degree of personal trust between him and Kramrisch that must have arisen from their acquaintance in the Strzygowski seminar, or perhaps in the extra-academic Viennese avant-garde milieu.

The works of the German Bauhaus were not brought to Calcutta in order to be fetishized as exceptional, but to be compared with contemporary Indian artwork. An article in Rupam from the early 1923 shows that the Bauhaus exhibition was ‘a section’ of the Fourteenth Annual Exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art on 23 December 1923.45 Bauhaus art was displayed alongside works of the Bengal School. Kramrisch, in her catalogue of the Bauhaus section, explained the intention to demonstrate, through images, how Indian artists ‘[framed] a form of expression from the Indian view of life’, while also ‘[formulating] a language for which it is difficult to derive ancestry either in the East or in the West’.46 The ‘Indian Cubism’ of Gaganendranath Tagore and the ‘spontaneity’ of Sunayani Devi provided Kramrisch with two of her favourite examples of how ‘expressiveness’ was ‘common to…

India and Europe’.47 But if Kramrisch adopted a comparative lens, so did Indian art critics. Abani Banerji, in a review of the Bauhaus exhibition in 1924, explained that just as modern European artists endeavoured to clear away ‘the cobwebs of anecdotic, literary

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secretary to Johannes Itten, Lotte Hirschfeld, wrote in a letter to the administration, “I unfortunately cannot recall whether any artwork was ever sold in Calcutta, and whether a check came in, since the different income and payable accounts were many...”50 But in the same letter, Hirschfeld said she did recall “receiving a check drawn on English money for Mr. Itten. I brought the check to his bank myself. Unfortunately, I cannot recall whether the check was for the Calcutta artwork or for something else…”51 Given the Bauhaus’ institutional disorganization from 1923 through 1925, we can hardly make a knee-jerk assessment that the artwork was lost at the Calcutta end.

Stella Kramrisch

association’, Indian artists, such as Gaganendranath, were ‘leaping forward to further experimentation’ in colour and form.48 In the April 1923 issue of the Visva-Bharati Quarterly, Stella Kramrisch wrote her own comprehensive review of the Bauhaus exhibition.

In this extended essay, she carries forward her argument by comparison, explaining that ‘certain qualities of pattern, of rhythm, of the relationship of part to part and of part to whole’ central to Indian sacred art, were now also important to European artists.

Only one painting from the Bauhaus exhibition, by Sofie Korner, was sold in the Calcutta sale. It was purchased by Rabindranath Tagore himself.49 Letter correspondence clearly shows that the art was repackaged and sent by mail to Weimar on 21 March 1923, along with the payment for the art piece. But, around the time that the art would have reached Weimar, Johannes Itten (1888–1967), the individual responsible for overseeing the return of the exhibition, was in the process of resigning his post and was absent from the School. Around this same time, Itten’s secretary, who was responsible for the logistics of the travelling exhibition, also left her job. The turnover in personnel was accompanied by a drastic financial crisis at the Bauhaus School in 1924 as the Thuringian state government cut funding. In early 1925, the School was forced to relocate to Dessau, where municipal funding was provided. When inquiries were finally initiated in 1925 into the whereabouts of the Bauhaus artwork sent from Calcutta in 1923, there was little institutional memory to draw upon and no authoritative records to consult. The erstwhile

The conclusion to the history of the Bauhaus exhibition in Calcutta might indeed be said to end with the disappearance of the artwork after March 1923. But there is another way to narrate the conclusion to this history. If we shift our attention from institutional nodes to cultural go-betweens, we can trace a web of connection that spreads through other exhibition halls and international art shows over the course of the decade. Central Europe was a focus of Rabindranath Tagore’s attention and travel itinerary in the decade after the First World War, during trips in 1921, 1926 and 1930.52 Tagorean institutions for the visual arts, such as the Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan and the Indian Society of Oriental Art in Calcutta, benefited from especially intense contacts with Central Europe in the 1920–1924 period, during the heightened period of German Expressionism. The Bauhaus exhibition of 1922–23 exemplified one moment in this intensive phase of Indian–German art internationalism. The exhibition of ‘Modern India Watercolours’ at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, in February 1923, provided another.

At almost the same time as the Bauhaus exhibition in Calcutta took place, a major exhibition of Bengal School artwork was shipped to Berlin for a showing at the prestigious Kronprinzenpalais, which served as an exhibition space for the Nationalgalerie in the inter-war period.53 While 175 pieces

by Bauhaus masters and students appeared on display in Calcutta in December 1922, 113 pieces of Indian modern art from Santiniketan and Calcutta greeted Berlin audiences from February to March 1923. An inspection of the exhibition list shows an extensive selection of pieces by masters of the Bengal School, including Gaganendranath, Abanindranath, Nandalal Bose, S.N. Dey, K.N. Mazumdar and Sunayani Devi,54 as well as 42 other artists. According to the list of artworks, ‘Rabendranath Tagore’ even painted one of the pieces, which carried the title ‘The Javanese Actress’.55 Benoy Kumar Sarkar’s catalogue records the name as ‘Nabendranath Tagore’. If we are correct in assuming Rabindranath was intended here, then his career as a painter and exhibitor began earlier than the date currently assumed.56 Partha Mitter has explored the long-standing interest of Tagore in Primitivist images, as well as the longer history of Tagore’s graphic art dating back to at least 1905.57 37

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Benoy Kumar Sarkar organized the Berlin exhibition. As a cultural go-between, he once taught at the Bengal National College in Calcutta, but now coordinated activities on behalf of the sizeable Indian diaspora in post-war Berlin through the offices of his Indo-European Trading Company.58 Sarkar was in close contact with O.C. Gangoly, editor of Rupam, over the course of 1922, and published a series of articles on ‘futurism’ and Indian modern art in that magazine. The Rupam editorials from 1922 and 1923 show that Gangoly frequently rehearsed Sarkar’s futuristic arguments about the need for Indian artists to free themselves from overdependence on tradition, and to harness the power of visva shakti (‘world force’). Like Kramrisch’s Bauhaus exhibition in Calcutta, Sarkar’s Bengal School exhibition in Berlin was the culmination of an intensive period of interpretation and argumentation about the meaning of Indian modern art. Sarkar published his book, Futurism of Young Asia, in 1922, along with the series of essays in Rupam.59 He even entered into a long-distance dispute with Stella Kramrisch over the role of tradition in Indian modernism.60 If Kramrisch praised Indian modernists for remaining rooted in tradition, Sarkar hailed Indian modernists for triumphantly abandoning concern for tradition.

In order to display his argument about the compatibility between Indian and European modern art, Sarkar won the support of Carl Becker, the Prussian Culture Minister in 1922. In the post-war years when German educational and scientific institutions were boycotted by the Western victors, Becker took up the project of extending German Kulturpolitik (‘cultural diplomacy’) to the wider world as a means of national uplift.61 Becker recommended Sarkar’s plan for a major exhibition of Indian modern art to the director of the National Museum, Ludwig Justi. Justi was known as a proponent of Expressionism, and as a daring and controversial curator. He opened the Kronprinzenpalais gallery in 1919 as the first state-run gallery for contemporary art in Germany.

Justi enthusiastically facilitated Sarkar’s effort to showcase the comparability between Indian and European ‘futurist’ strivings.

The ‘Modern Indian Watercolours’ exhibition appeared after the show of Lovis Corinth, and came right before that of Paul Klee in the 1923 events programme.62 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, in his exhibition catalogue, explained that ‘the new art movement in India [that] dates back to 1905’ had already reached English and French audiences before the war. And now, Germans too could finally have a glimpse. “A certain intellectual unity organically binds the whole modern world of art,” he concluded.63 Reviews of ‘Modern Indian Watercolours’ in the German press were collected, translated from German to English, and published in the July 1923 issue of Rupam, for the benefit of Calcutta audiences. European art critics knew India in its ancient, not its modern aspect. Thus, most reviews either extolled the ‘Romantic’, ‘Oriental’ spirituality in the Indian artworks, or criticized them for being too ‘lyrical and sweet’, or too rooted in ‘ancient dramas’.64

In other words, most reviewers emphasized the strict difference, instead of the comparability, between the Indian watercolours and European modern art. Only a review by Hermann Goetz, a young Berlin Indologist and specialist on Islamic art, and a friend of Stella Kramrisch, argued that the Indian works were different, but equal to the modern European specimens.65 In order to address the dearth of comparative perspectives on Indian artistic modernism among German audiences, Stella Kramrisch, in 1924, wrote interpretive essays about the Indian art exhibition in German art journals, Der Cicerone, and the Jahrbuch der Jungen Kunst.66 Kramrisch’s activity as a cultural go-between in Calcutta, like Benoy Kumar Sarkar’s in Berlin, focused on both, planning exhibitions and advancing interpretations that created avenues for international communication.

The decade of artistic internationalism connecting Tagorean institutions in Bengal with cultural institutions in Germany reached a celebrated culmination in 1930, when Rabindranath Tagore, by now a confident exhibitor of his own paintings, toured Europe with this artwork. Images and artistic exhibition became new and vital features of Rabindranath Tagore’s pursuit of international understanding. Whereas Tagore had long relied on the power of his words, he now counted increasingly on the impact of images to invite comparison and broach conversation with audiences abroad. Tagore first exhibited his artworks at the Galerie Pigalle in Paris before taking them to the Birmingham City Art Gallery in May 1930. In July, it was on to Berlin, where his show was held at the Ferdinand Moeller Gallery.67 Kathe Kollwitz attended, and Heinrich Lueders, chair of Indology at Berlin University, presided over the inauguration. 68 The show of Tagore’s art continued on to galleries in Dresden and Munich, and then on to Moscow.

Tagore’s artwork was widely reviewed in the German press. Some German critics celebrated the affinity between his paintings and those of ‘Klee, Nolde, Rohlfs and Kubin’, and pointed to the comparability between Indian creative forces and the ‘newest painting of Western Europe’.69 But others excoriated the German organizers for presenting a show of ‘dilettantish kitsch’; declaring it ‘unbelievable that an art gallery which has offered such service to the cause of German art should now put on such an exhibition!’ 70 For his part, Ludwig Justi, the director of the Berlin Museum, the individual who collaborated with Benoy Kumar Sarkar on the 1923 exhibition of modern Indian art, greatly admired Tagore’s paintings. He inquired with the Moeller Gallery about the possibility of obtaining specimens for the Nationalgalerie’s contemporary collection. After hearing word of Justi’s request, Tagore wrote to the museum director with news of his gift of five original watercolours.71 The art pieces remained in the collection

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of the Gallery until 1937, at which point they were blacklisted as ‘degenerate art’ by the Nazi regime. Alongside works by Macke, Dix, Beckmann, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Jawlenski, Braque and many other modern artists, the Tagore paintings were removed from the collection to make room for ‘German classics’, such as Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Riesengebirgslandschaft’, acquired from Oslo with much fanfare in December 1937.72 Over the course of the next two years, three Tagore paintings were returned to the artist, and two were traded at a Berlin art dealership for pieces of European art.73 Tagore, who passed away in 1941, lived long enough to see his project of artistic internationalism come to an ugly end. Many years later, in 1966, it was perhaps with a sense of poetic justice that Stella Kramrisch donated seven paintings by Rabindranath

Tagore to a different foreign museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art.74 After spending a prolific career writing on ancient and modern Indian art at Calcutta University, Kramrisch emigrated to the United States of America in 1950, becoming curator of Indian Art at the Philadelphia Museum in 1954. In an article of 1964 on Tagore’s artwork, published soon after the poet’s birth centenary, Kramrisch said that Expressionism was ‘alien yet familiar’ to Tagore. This produced the feeling of the ‘uncanny’ in his paintings, she wrote.75 The art internationalism of the 1920s, which Stella Kramrisch helped conceptualize, sought to create this same feeling of the alien-yet-familiar in both Indian and European audiences. Perhaps by eliciting that uncanny feeling, images have the power to spark international conversation and invite cultural comparison.

NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

Hans Wingler to Kunz, June 23 1967, Bauhaus Archive Berlin, File 114, 10833/1–9.

“Verschollene Bauhaus-Kunst”, Offenburger Tageblatt, September 7, 1978.

Partha Mitter, Triumph of Modernism, Reaktion, London, 2007; Ratan Parimoo, The Paintings of the Three Tagores, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, 1973; Parsanta Kumar Pal, Rabijibani vol. 8, Ananda, Kolkata, 1998; Ketaki Kushari Dyson and Sushoban Adhikari, Ranger Rabindranath, Ananda, Kolkata, 1997.

Lotte Hirschfeld to Johannes Itten, August 31, 1922, Thuringian Hauptstaatsarchiv (henceforth THA), Fiche 130, No. 57, p. 28.

P.K. Chatterjee to Johannes Itten, October 18, 1922, THA, Fiche 130, No. 57, p. 75.

Chatterjee to Hirschfeld, December 6, 1922, THA, Fiche 150, No. 57, p. 77; See the first review of the exhibition in Anon, “Fourteenth Annual Exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art”, Rupam, January–June 1923, no. 13–14, pp. 14–18.

See Rupam, ibid.; Stella Kramrisch, “The New Art in Europe”, VisvaBharati Quarterly, April 1923, p. 69.

Kramrisch to Beate Kruger, July 1 1985, Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art, Kramrisch Papers (henceforth PMA-Kram), Box 24, “Indian Society of Oriental Art” folder, uncatalogued file.

Kramrisch, “Untersuchungen zum Wesen frühbuddhistischen Bildnerei Indiens”. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Vienna, 1919.

Strzygowski argued that global art history emerged from the creative opposition between Northern and Southern races. See an overview of his approach, published in the art journal Stella Kramrisch founded with Abanindranath Tagore in 1933, the Journal of the Indian Society of Oriental Art (JISOA): Strzygowski, “India’s Position in the Art of Asia”, JISOA, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 7–17.

See Willy Rotzler, ed., Johannes Itten. Werke und Schriften, “Über Komponisten”, pg. 212, fn. 1.

Strzygowski graded Kramrisch’s dissertation as “Ausgezeichnet”. See PMA-Kram, Box 23, “Gutachtung”, uncatalogued.

Rotzler, ibid., Itten’s diary entry, p. 108.

Barbara Stoler Miller, “A Biographical Essay” in Exploring India’s Sacred Art: Selected Writings of Stella Kramrisch, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, p. 5. ibid., p. 6. Kramrisch kept a distant connection with the Theosophists

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

in India too. One of her first lectures in India was to the Theosophical Society on the subject of “The Significance of Indian Art”. See W.D.S. Brown, Indian Art and Art-Craft, Theosophical Publishing, Madras, 1922, pp. 1ff.

“Stella Kramrisch” File, Vienna University Archive, PH RA 4727.

Rabindranath Tagore, The Centre of Indian Culture, Society for the Promotion of National Education, Madras, 1919, p. 13. This text is an inauguration speech for Visva-Bharati.

This was on June 19 or 20, 1920. Dyson and Adhikari, Ranger Rabindranath, p. 401; Prasanta Kumar Pal, Rabijibani, volume 8, p. 17.

See Kramrisch to O.C. Gangoly, June 15, 1921, quoted in R.K. Das Gupta, “Philosopher of Indian Art”, Statesman, June 25, 1996.

Rothenstein to Tagore, Letter 143 dated April 23, 1921 in: Mary Lago ed., Imperfect Encounter: Letters of William Rothenstein and Rabindranath Tagore, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1972, p. 281.

See Rothenstein to Tagore, ibid., p. 281.

Kramrisch, “The Expressiveness of Indian Art”, The Calcutta Review, October 1922, pp. 1–46.

In the end, Strzygowski did not come to Santiniketan. Strzygowski to Rabindranath Tagore, April 4 1922, Visva-Bharati Archives, EC 387.

Panchanan Mondal, Bharatsilpi Nandalal, Radh Gabeshana, Santiniketan 1984, vol. 2, p. 121.

Binode Bihari Mukherji, “On Ramkinkar Babu”, Self-Portrait, Monchasha, Kolkata, p. 86; Soon after her arrival, she delivered a series of lectures in Santiniketan entitled “The Tendencies of Modern European Art”. See the announcement in Rupam, “Ourselves”, April 1922, no. 10, p. 69.

A summary of material from Kramrisch’s first lectures on European art appears in: Kramrisch, “Recent Movements in Western Art”, Indian Arts and Art-Crafts, W.D.S. Brown, ed., 1922, Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, pp. 70–78.

“The Expressiveness of Indian Art”, Calcutta Review, 1922, pp. 1–46.

“The Expressiveness of Indian Art”, Calcutta Review, p. 22.

Abanindranath published Sadanga: The Six Limbs of Painting, 1921, as a reconstruction of the ancient Indian aesthetic tradition. But his return to tradition was multi-faceted, also involving engagement with Mughal miniature painting and Japanese wash technique.

The subtlety of this argument receives masterful exposition in Partha 39

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Mitter, “Bauhaus in Kalkutta”, unpublished MS. 31. Kramrisch, “Indian Art and Europe”, Rupam, April 1922, no. 10, p. 69.

32. “The Expressiveness of Indian Art”, The Calcutta Review, vol. 5, October 1922, no.1–2, pp. 1–46; “The Aesthetics of Young India: A Rejoinder”, Rupam, April 1922, no. 10, pp. 66–67; “Indian Art and Europe”. Rupam, July 1922, no. 11, pp. 81–86; “An Indian Cubist”, Rupam, July 1922, no. 11, 107–9; “The Significance of Indian Art”, Indian Arts and Art-Crafts, W.D.S. Brown, ed., 1922; “Recent Movements in Western Art” in ibid.

33. Partha Mitter has completed an intensive study of Tagore’s activities and encounters in Weimar. See “Bauhaus in Kalkutta”, Unpublished MS. 34. Mitter, ibid., p. 6.

35. Kramrisch to Itten, May 5, 1922, THA Fiche 130, File 57, p. 1.

36. ibid.

37. Kramrisch to Itten, July 12, 1922, THA Fiche 130, File 57, p. 2 38. ibid.

39. See Itten’s letter to Klee, copied to Feininger, Marcks and Schlemmer.

Itten to Klee, August 7, 1922, THA Fiche 130, File 57, p. 5.

4o. Hirschfeld to Klee, August 23, 1922, THA Fiche 130, File 57, p. 5.

41. Lists No. II, VIII and IX, THA Fiche 130, File 57, pp. 35–58.

42. Lists No. I, III, IV, V, VI, VII, X, THA Fiche 130, File 57, pp. 35–58.

43. Hirschfeld to Itten, August 31, 1922, THA Fiche 130, File 57, p. 26.

44. Johannes Itten, “Autobiographisches Fragment”, Rotzler, ibid., p. 32.

45. Anon, “The Fourteenth Annual Exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art”, Rupam, Jan–June 1923, no. 13–14, p. 18.

46. ibid. contains an excerpt from the introductory note to the catalogue.

47. ibid., 18.

48. Quoted from the 1924 Modern Review by Ketaki Kushari Dyson et al. in Ranger Rabindranath, p. 401.

49. Chatterjee to Hirschfeld, March 21 1923, THA Fiche 130, File 57, p. 79.

50. Lotte Hirscheld Ackermann to Necker, May 11, 1925, THA Fiche 130, File 57, p. 83.

51. ibid.

52. Martin Kämpchen, Tagore and Germany: A Documentation, Max Mueller Bhavan, Kolkata, 1991.

53. See report from April 25, 1923, Zentralarchiv der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin (henceforth ZSMB), I/NG 603, p. 8. After Berlin it went on to exhibit at the Leipzig Art Association.

54. See the list of artwork sent, ZSMB, I/NG 603, pp. 16–12.

55. Tagore, as a rule, did not name his paintings. “Sonderausstellungen”, ZSMB, I/NG 603, 1923–24, p. 50. Item 50 is labeled: “Die javanische Schauspielerin”, by Mr. Rabendra Nath Tagore. Compare with Sarkar’s catalogue’s listing of “Nabendranath Tagore”. “Ausstellung Moderner Indischer Aquarelle in der Nationalgalerie”, Indo-European Trading Company, Berlin, pp. 1, 4.

56. Parimoo, Paitings of the Three Tagores, p. 111.

57. Partha Mitter, Triumph of Modernism, p. 71.

58. See Kris Manjapra, “The Mirrored World”, PhD Dissertation, Harvard, 2007, p. 131.

59. “The Aesthetics of Young India”, Rupam, January 1922, no. 9, pp. 8–23; “Social Philosophy in Aesthetics”, ibid., July–December, nos. 15–16, p. 88.

60. Both Kramrisch and a scholar with the pen name A ‘ gastya’ write critical rejoinders to Benoy Sarkar’s essay on ‘futurism’. Their essays appear in April, July and October issues of Rupam in 1922. Sarkar responds in his 1923 essay, “Social Philosophy in Aesthetics”, ibid.

61 Carl Becker, Gedanken zur Hochschulreform, Quelle & Meier, Leipzig, 1919.

62 For other exhibitions from 1923, see ZSMB, I/NG 603.

63 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, “Austellung Moderner Indischer Aquarelle in der Nationalgalerie”, op. cit. A copy of this catalogue is available under call number V-Ind wd 8 at the Ibero-American Institute of the Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.

64. Max Osborn, “The Indian Exhibition in Berlin”, Rupam, July and December 1923, nos. 15–16, p. 74–82.

65. Valentina Stache-Rosen, “Hermann Goetz” in German Indologists, Goethe Institut, New Delhi, 1981.

66. Kramrisch, “Indische Malerei der Gegenwart”, Der Cicerone vol. 16, 1924, pp. 954–62; Reprinted in Jahrbuch der jungen Kunst, vol. 4, 1924, pp. 234–42.

67. See “Mein Bilder”, Tagore’s introduction to the exhibition, dated 2 July 1930. ZSMB, File 1436 “Tagore, Rabindranath”.

68. See the article “Mit und Ohne Schleier”, Berlin Zeitung am Abend, October 14, 1981.

69. “Tagore als Maler” in Der Tag; “Ausstellung in der Galerie Moeller” by KZ; “Tagore als Maler” by WG. These clippings from 1930 are in File 1436 “Tagore, Rabindranath” at the ZSMB. 70. Review by Ferdinand Eckhardt, August 30, 1930 in ibid.

71. Tagore to Justi, August 15, 1930, ZSMB, File 1436, p. 1.

72. “Beschlagnahme 1937”, ZSMB, I/NG 863, p. 382.

73. Annegret Janda and Jörn Grabowski, Kunst in Deutschland 1905–1937, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin, pp. 202, 203.

74. Dale Mason, “Dwellers on the Threshold: Seven Works by Rabindranath Tagore in the Stella Kramrisch Collection”, Unpublished MS. 75. Stella Kramrisch, “Form Elements in the Visual Work of Rabindranath Tagore”, Lalit Kala Contemporary, no. 2 (December, 1964), p. 37.

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Tagore’s Sense of Rhythm William Radice

My pictures are my versification, in lines. If by chance they are entitled to claim recognition, it must primarily be for some rhythmic significance of form which is ultimate and not for any interpretation of an idea or a representation of a fact.1 In an article in Bengali on Rabindrasangeet (the Songs of Tagore), published in 1967, the great film director Satyajit Ray distinguished between Tagore the poet, Tagore the composer of songs, and Tagore the painter, according to his technical proficiency. As a poet—and indeed as a writer of fiction and drama—Tagore was an absolute virtuoso. He could do anything with language, could write in any number of verse-forms and metres, and invented many new forms of his own. As a singer and composer, Tagore was extremely accomplished too. His knowledge of India’s musical traditions, both classical and folk, was profound, and recordings that have survived show him to be a singer of great flexibility and subtlety. He was however somewhat impatient with rigid musical orthodoxy, adopting an innovative and creative approach in his use of raga and tala.

As a painter, Tagore was largely self-taught. He lacked academic training in draughtsmanship (though some early sketches that have been discovered show him to be more skilled in that area than was previously thought), and by his unique, expressionist style made a virtue of his technical limitations.2 I have no quarrel with Satyajit’s threefold analysis, but I feel it should be possible to find some unifying factor, some special characteristic or instinct that went beyond technique. Many scholars of Tagore have sought a unity in his universalist philosophy, in his humanism and international ideals. Others have pointed to his overall pursuit of harmony, his quest for purnata or ‘fullness’, a completeness of vision that would reconcile art and morality, science and religion. I have never felt quite comfortable with this approach, partly because his literary works, like any great works of literature, are full of complexity and contradiction. For every positive current, there is a darker undercurrent; joy is always mixed with sorrow, life with death.

There is also a problem with his paintings.

Many people have been puzzled by an apparent gulf between the paintings and his literary works. I myself, in my Selected Poems of Tagore, first published by Penguin in 1985, saw in the paintings an escape from the moral preoccupations that often burdened Tagore the writer and thinker. Much the same idea crops up in Flavia Arzeni’s recent book, An Eduction in Happiness: The Lessons of Hesse and Tagore, which presents Tagore and Hermann Hesse very much as thinkers whose idealistic philosophy can help our troubled world. She writes of the paintings: What is most surprising, apart from the sheer mass of the work, is that it went in a completely different, indeed radically opposed direction to that which he pursued in his literary work. In his poetry, as in his prose, Tagore always kept to the model of beauty and harmony which he himself advocated and which he expressed faithfully in both content and style. His painting seems to come from a different world, as if it were the product of someone else’s mind. His visual universe is dark, often anguished, his self-portraits cruel and grotesque, his figures disturbing, his landscapes crepuscular. Parallels could be drawn, with some justification, with certain styles of the European avant-garde, especially German expressionism.3 I no longer see this disjunction. I find, rather, that more and more points of contact with the paintings emerge, the more deeply one goes into his literary works. At the same time, I recognize the need for some unifying principle that goes beyond Tagore’s moral outlook. We need a principle that goes to the heart of his creativity, for whether in poetry, prose, songs or paintings, Tagore was always creative, and his works, however diverse, were the product of a unified creative impulse. He himself gave this impulse a name; he called it his jiban-debata, his ‘life-god’. But the jiban-debata is itself elusive of explanation. Is there some simpler principle, which may be mysterious but which we can all feel and recognize, even if we are reliant on translation?

I have for a long time felt that a unique sense of rhythm is what gives fundamental unity to all Tagore’s creative endeavours. In the Introduction to Selected Poems, I said that I hoped my translations, 41

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as well as being varied in form and metre, would have an overall quality of rhythm that would run through the entire book. I have said the same in the Introduction to my new translation of Gitanjali, Tagore’s most famous book. As a poet myself, I have tried to capture that rhythm by using my own creative instincts. I have not till now tried to analyse it, though I was certainly aware when I started translating Tagore’s poetry that I was introducing into English poetry many forms and metres that were new and which owed a lot to the rhythmic influence of the original.

I now feel ready to attempt some analysis of Tagore’s rhythmic distinctiveness, though what I will say in this article is extremely provisional and tentative. In order to do so, I started to read Tagore’s essays on rhythm and metre. There are a considerable number of them, gathered together in Chhanda (‘Metre’), first published by Visva-Bharati in 1936. Many of these essays are highly technical, as one would expect from a poetic virtuoso. But they also contain many general insights into metre and rhythm, which have implications for our understanding of Tagore’s work in all fields—literary, musical and artistic. In an essay called Chhander artha (‘The Meaning of Metre’), first published in the journal Sabuj-patra in 1916, Tagore discusses how words alone express meaning, but metre and rhythm express feelings that go

beyond the meaning of the words. He recalls the famous story of how the metre of the Ramayana was discovered by the poet Valmiki after he heard a bird in the forest piteously grieving for its mate that had just been killed by hunters. In order to express the pain and grief that the bird was suffering, a metre that became the metre of the whole Ramayana miraculously came to Valmiki’s mind. Tagore says that although metre ties down words, in another way it sets them free. It is like the tight strings on a sitar on which beautiful music can be played. Words on their own are like a bow, but when given new life and music by metre they are like arrows that can go straight to the heart. The metaphor of the arrow is like a lovely little poem in Tagore’s book Kanika (‘Particles’, 1899), which in my translation of Tagore’s collected ‘brief poems’ is as follows: Poetry and Prose ‘You’re heavy, Club,’ says the nimble dart.

That’s why you’re always so stiff and straight.

Do what I do: cut through debate!

Instead of head-clobbering, pierce the heart.4 In this essay and in all the essays in the book Chhanda, Tagore uses chhanda as the equivalent of the English word ‘metre’. As a frequent word in his poetry, however, chhanda can mean a more

Two pages from the Purabi manuscript, 1924 42

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general quality of rhythm. His essay on the meaning of metre uses a number of other words too: beg for ‘force’ or the energy that metre can convey; abeg for the passion and excitement that metre can raise in the mind of the reader; spandan for ‘pulse’, a regularity of beat similar to a heart-beat. He also makes a fascinating distinction between chal and chalan. These two words are used in his famous play Taser desh (‘Card Country’, 1933, rev.

1939). In the play, there is a contrast between the inhabitants of the Card Country, who are playing-cards, and the human beings who arrive on the island where the cards live, and quickly start to subvert their society and way of life. To the cards, the human characters are capable of chalan but not chal. In my translation of the play, published by Visva-Bharati in 2008, I translated chalan as ‘movements’ and chal as ‘moves’. In the essay, I would translate them the other way round, but maybe the distinction between the two is somewhat arbitrary.

In his analysis in this essay of how Bengali metre works, Tagore uses chalan for the metre of the separate ‘feet’ in a verse line, and chal for the rhythmic effect and impetus of the whole line. An appendix to the book Chhanda includes some interesting letters in English between Tagore and J.D. Anderson, a British scholar of Bengali based in Cambridge. The letters were exchanged in 1918, and they go into considerable technicalities. Anderson had evidently just read Tagore’s essay on the meaning of metre, and Tagore gives him a summary of his arguments. He writes: In my paper I have discussed about the short divisions and long divisions of a metre. The long divisions are the divisions generally represented by lines in the printed form. But the shorter divisions within those lines are more important for the rhythm. They are what the bars are in music, and can be measured by beats—the beats which, according to the rhythm of the particular metre, contain a particular quantity of sound-units.5 In his essay, Tagore distinguishes between three types of padakshep, the Bengali word he uses for ‘foot’ or ‘short division’ and which he says represents the chalan or ‘moves’ in the line.

The first type he calls samachalaner chhanda (‘evenly moving metre’), and has two matras or beats. The second type is called asamachalaner chhanda (‘unevenly moving metre’), and has three matras. The third type is called bishamachalaner chhanda (‘mixed-measure metre’), and alternates between two and three matras.

The technicalities of all this are of course hard to explain without knowledge of Bengali poetry and the Bengali language. There are, however, two points of fundamental interest that I want to extract from this essay, which I hope I can illustrate with examples from my own translations. The first concerns the role of the yuktakshar or ‘conjunct consonants’ in the Bengali script. The Bengali poetry of the pre-modern period (i.e. up to the early 19th century)

was nearly all written in a metre called payar, a regular pattern of two beats, forming a seven-foot line with a caesura after the fourth and seventh foot. (Tagore regards payar as having eight feet, counting the break after the seventh as an ‘empty’ foot.) The rhythm is trochaic: tum-tee tum-tee tum-tee etc. In this metre, combined or conjunct consonants are treated in exactly the same way as single consonants; they do not cause any hold-up or delay in the steady progress of the metre. When modern Bengali poetry began to develop in the mid-19th century, poets became much more aware of how conjunct consonants cause a slight hold-up, and therefore disrupt the progress of the line in a way that can be highly expressive. The great pioneering poet and dramatist Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824–1873) invented a form of Bengali blank verse in which the conjunct consonants play a vital role. The very first word of his masterpiece, Meghnadbadh kabya (‘The Poem of the Killing of Meghnad’, 1861) has a double ‘mm’ sound that immediately causes a captivating hold-up in the line, and which establishes that in every line thereafter conjunct consonants will have a crucial effect. The first three words of the line are sammukh samare pari (‘having fallen in open combat’), and it is essential to hold the double ‘mm’ as one would a double consonant in Italian.

Tagore did not like Madhusudan’s poetry in all its aspects, but he did acknowledge his contribution to Bengali metrics, and his essays in Chhanda contain several appreciative references to Madhusudan as a metrist, with quotations from his works.

There are plenty of poems by Tagore, particularly from the earlier part of his creative life, where he uses payar metre with its characteristic ignoring of the conjunct consonants. But when he started to create metres of his own, many of them influenced by folk-poetry, the conjunct consonants started to be given their full weight, and in his essay on the meaning of metre he is careful to say that a conjunct consonant counts as two matras (beats) and not as one.

The second point that I want to extract is that of the three types of metre that Tagore defines, the ‘mixed-measure metre’ seems to be the one that appealed to him most profoundly. His poems are full of ‘short divisions’ which alternate between two or three beats, just as the talas (rhythmic cycles) of Indian music are full of similarly mixed measures.

Looking back through the translations of Tagore’s poetry that I have done over the last three decades, I find that using my own poetic ear and somehow picking up distinctive features of Tagore’s Bengali verse, I have frequently created mixed measures in my English lines. I have also—and this is something that I have not realized consciously until very recently—often counted the combined consonants that occur very frequently in English as more ‘held’ or ‘stopped’ than they would be in normal pronunciation and in most kinds of English metre. For example, 43

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Rabindranath Tagore as Painter and Catalyst of Modern Indian Art R. Siva Kumar

Outside India, Rabindranath was discovered by a small group of writers and literary enthusiasts in 1912. After winning the Nobel Prize in 1913 he became, for a while, a meteor that lit up the world literary sky. The impact of his poems was immediate and deep while it lasted. But by the 1920s, his fame was already on the descent, and in 1930, when his paintings were first exhibited in Paris and then across Europe and America, though it created a few ripples it was not followed by the euphoria that followed the discovery of his poems.

But since the 1980s, with new translations appearing in English, German and Japanese, there have been signs of a revival of interest in Tagore. And, the new translators and critics are more sensitive to the richness and complexity of his original writings in Bengali than their predecessors, and show a better understanding and appreciation of the context in which they were undertaken.

Any attempt to understand Rabindranath as a painter should also include a similar effort to see him in his Indian context and in his entirety as a creative person.

In India his reputation has been more stable. He was a towering personality among his contemporaries, and today, 80 years after his death, he is still a big presence and is seen as one who had contributed to the transformation of its cultural horizons. As a poet, novelist, storywriter, essayist, memoirist, travel writer, playwright; and actor, singer and composer; writer of dance dramas; and as a painter, he left his stamp on many forms of art, and played a role in transforming their practice and ushering in modernism. Born into a family that was in the forefront of 19th-century cultural resurgence in Bengal, he took to the arts not through training, but through informal involvement in the activities of his elders. Rabindranath himself gives an account of how this came about. The year of his birth, he wrote, belonged “to a great epoch in Bengal, when the currents of three movements had met in the life our country”. One of these was the religious movement introduced by Raja Rammohan Roy, which “tried to reopen the channel of spiritual life which had been obstructed for many years by the sands and debris of creeds that were formal and materialistic, fixed in external practices lacking in spiritual significance”. His father, Debendranath Tagore, “was one of the

great leaders of that movement”. The second movement was the literary movement pioneered by Bankimchandra Chatterjee, which “lifted the dead weight of ponderous forms” from the Bengali language and aroused its “literature from her age-long sleep”. And, the third movement was “called the National”, it “was not fully political”, but gave voice to a “people trying to assert their own personality” and freed them from the humiliation heaped upon them by those who divided “the human world into good and bad according to the hemispheres to which they belong” and had generated in young Indians a “distrust of all things that had come to them as an inheritance from the past” and made them laugh at “old Indian pictures and other works of art… in imitation of the laughter of their European schoolmasters of that age of philistinism”.1 Members of Rabindranath’s family played an active role in all the three movements. Though this led to the family being ostracized for holding ‘heterodox opinions’ it also won its members what Rabindranath called ‘the freedom of the outcast’ and taught him from his young days “to seek guidance for my own self expression in my own inner standard of judgement”. It also taught him that, “No poet should borrow his medium ready-made from some shop of orthodox respectability. He should not only have his own seeds but prepare his own soil”. And, that a creative person should be able to transform the language he inherits through his own individual use and by the magic touch of life make it ‘a special vehicle of his own creation’.2 This came to him easily as a writer, musician and playwright, and in a short time he transformed the inherited foundations and became not only the frontrunner in the cultural efforts of his family, but also the leader of cultural resurgence in Bengal. Though painting did not come to him so readily, it remained on the horizon of his interests.

Painting found a place in the vocational interests of his elders.

His uncle, Girindranath Tagore, was a trained artist and drew portraits and landscapes in the Western style; his brother, Jyotirindranath, was an accomplished draftsman and did delicate pencil portraits of family members and of the political and cultural luminaries he came across. His nephews, Abanindranath Tagore and Gaganendranath Tagore, were leaders of the new movement

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in Indian art inspired by swadeshi, the first wave of nationalism.

Rabindranath who took to the other arts with enviable ease also aspired to be a painter and made several attempts on his own.

In Reminiscences, he writes about the afternoons spent (around 1885–86), ‘with a drawing-book trying to draw pictures’, but hurries to confess that this was, “by no means an arduous pursuit of the pictorial muse, but just toying with the desire to make pictures” and in these efforts, “the most important part is that which remains in the mind, and of which not a line gets drawn on the paper”.3 About 15 years later, he writes again in a similar vein to his scientist friend, Jagadish Chandra Bose, saying that he had been drawing of late, but there was little progress because, “I use the pencil rather less often than the rubber and have thus made myself quite an expert in erasure”. 4 Much as he desired to be an artist, Rabindranath soon realised that the language of art eluded him, and that he had failed to even master the prevalent language of representational art leave alone transform it and make it his own. This led him to give up the idea of painting, but it did not keep him away from taking an interest in art or nurturing the Indian art scene. Besides his personal interests, his stature as a public intellectual drew him into contemporary debates on art and culture in general. In retrospect, we can trace the beginnings of a long process that led him to discover himself as an artist, almost spontaneously, at the age of 63, to the stance he took in these debates on the national roots of culture. His position in these debates once again reflected certain personal and familial dispositions. Just as he experienced a confluence of the three important movements of the time in his family, he also recognised in the life of his family as ‘a confluence of three cultures—the Hindu, the Mohammedan and the British’.5 His father combined, with his religious quest inspired by the Upanishads, a love for Hafiz, and his family members combined their commitment to the cultivation of the Bengali language and native culture with a deep appreciation for English Literature. And Rabindranath, who had inherited all these strands, was a natural cosmopolitan even during the years of swadeshi nationalism.

This led him to value cross-cultural encounters more than cultural purism. While cultural insularity led to fossilization, encounters with other cultures and literatures, he argued, brought to one’s mental system a bifurcation that ‘was needful for all life growth’.6 Thus, though he encouraged the resurgence of Indian art, he did not fail to warn nationalist artists of the futility of moving away from a submission to Western academic art only to then submit themselves to ancient Indian traditions.7 He urged his nephews, who led the new art movement, and their followers, to steer clear of the historicism towards which the idea of cultural nationalism was leading them, and to make contact with Asian traditions at large, and, even more importantly, with life around them. It was a lesson he had learnt from his experience as a writer. The

Tagore in Osaka with Yokoyama Taikan, W. W. Pearson, Mukul Dey and other Japanese friends, 1916

initial years of the nationalist movement in art overlapped with Rabindranath’s first, and most important decade as a short story writer. He made this emergent literary genre both Indian and his own, by using it to communicate the experience of nature and life in rural Bengal, which he came to know intimately only when he was sent by his father to administer the family estates around Shelidaha. It was an experience that helped him to step out of the greenhouse of literary innovation and produce stories that carried the sap of life.

While he was still exercised about these issues, he travelled to Japan in 1916; and, in Japanese art and design he discovered a living example of almost everything he wanted to see in the Indian—art that reflected great sensitivity to nature and which was monumental in scope; design that added beauty to every aspect of life; and an aesthetic that was woven into the social fabric. From Japan he wrote letters to his artist nephews, recording his realisations and urging them to draw lessons from the living arts of Japan.8 Japanese art itself was not new to them, having come into direct contact with important painters like Taikan Yokayama and Hishida Shunso, from the circle of Okakura Kakuzo, at the turn of the century, and these contacts having contributed to the formation of their individual styles. But what Rabindranath was now urging them to do was to not make personal appropriations from Japanese art, but to develop a similar vision of art that was large and comprehensive in scope, and covered aspects of both functional and personal expression.

Sensing that a more personal involvement was required to realise these goals, he decided to set up an art programme at Santiniketan and invited Nandalal Bose, who was talented and responsive to his ideas, to take charge of it. He wanted the art school to go 55

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beyond imparting professional artistic skills to its students, and contribute to the quickening of the aesthetic sensibilities of the whole community. This also provided Rabindranath with a new framework for his own creativity. He now wrote plays that the students of his school could perform, wrote songs for the young and old to sing, and devised festivities that sensitised them to the different facets of nature and made them take notice of the march of seasons. This called for collaboration between different arts and encouraged the participation of the small community that grew around the school. It was an experiment in shaping a new culture more than a mere movement in the arts. And as part of it, besides music, theatre and art, dance entered his sphere of interests as a form of community and personal expression. The shaping of a culture through community participation involving variously talented people was a complex undertaking, but for Rabindranath this was also an unconscious effort to recreate on a larger social scale the creative symbiosis he had experienced in his family.

Rabindranath was constantly shifting and enlarging his focus, both in his personal life and institutional work. Even as he was urging Indian artists to imbibe inspiration from Japanese art and create a new Indian art that grew out of local experience rather than myths and history, and was larger in scale and impact, he was embarking on a critique of nationalism and its potential link with imperialism. This led him to see the building of bridges between cultures as both the opportunity and need of the modern period.

And by 1917 he was convinced that the meeting of cultures was the cure to the conflict of nations. He wanted Santiniketan to be part of that cure. Against the backdrop of World War I, he wrote to his son from America in 1917: I have it in mind to make Santiniketan the connecting thread between India and the world. I have to found a centre for the study of humanity there. The days of petty nationalism are numbered—let the first step towards universal union of man occur in the fields of Bolpur. I want to make that place somewhere beyond the limits of the nation and geography—the first flag of victorious humanism will be planted there. To rid the world of the suffocating coils of nationalism will be the task of my remaining years.9 The inclination to know and understand other cultures was innate to his personality, and contributed to his emergence as an artist. A world traveller and a creative artist with interest in crosscultural contacts, he looked at the art of the countries he travelled to. Sometimes he did this with greater purposefulness and selfawareness, as he did during his 1916 visit to Japan. But often he merely absorbed them, and without discussion or record allowed them to sink to the bottom of his awareness, from where they subliminally guided his thoughts and rose to the surface when required. Primitive and modern art that he saw during his many

travels abroad played such a role in his emergence as an artist. His first encounters with Primitive art should have happened when such expressions were seen as ethnographic objects and not as art. During his first visit to England in 1879, he stopped in Paris and paid a brief visit to the Universal Exposition, and in England itself he visited the British Museum, but he did not discuss these experiences. In 1890, during his second visit to England, he went to see the National Gallery; he was not greatly impressed and was unsure about his response, but he had no such qualms about a Carolus-Duran nude he saw in an exhibition of French art.10 However, his letters written from England in 1912 indicate a change in taste; it was not conventional realism that now appealed to him but the style of Rodin. And during the same trip, he probably saw the Armory Show at Chicago, which showcased the most daring deviations from traditional art by European avant-garde artists.

Given the nationalist and anti-colonial context of the period, these experiences did not fit into current cultural debates in India or into Rabindranath’s own interventions into it. But having established an art school at Santiniketan, and being committed to transform the school he had established in 1901 into an international university where cultures of the world could meet, by 1921 he was more ready to connect his involvement with Western art to the art programme at Santiniketan. Thus, during his next visit to Europe, we not only find him looking at modern Western art but also inviting Stella Kramrisch to be a resident art critic at Santiniketan and familiarize its artists and students with developments in Western art. And Kramrisch in turn played a role in bringing a Bauhaus exhibition to Calcutta in 1922.11 In the intervening years, his contact with Primitive art seems to have grown broader through his interest in anthropology. He owned a copy of Friedrich Ratzel’s History of Mankind (published in 1896), which contained a large number of engraved illustrations of Primitive artefacts, and Walter Lehmann’s The Art of Old Peru.

With his growing interest in modern art, he should also have become aware of the close link between the two, and noticed that Primitive and certain modern art objects shared similar linguistic principles and that they differed from those of Eastern and Western traditions of representation.12 With this recognition, he realised that images could be made using skills that were different from those required for Western and oriental kinds of representational painting, and that he too possessed some of these. Although he had given up the hope of becoming a representational artist in around 1900, Rabindranath continued to doodle in his manuscripts. He often turned struckout words into ornamental motifs, and sometimes linked the scratched-out words on the pages of his manuscripts into an artnouveau like arabesque. This continued without much change until the end of 1923. Then, almost all of a sudden, on the pages of the notebook he used during his tour of 1924, it proliferated and

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assumed more representational and expressive intent. Victoria Ocampo who spotted these during his stay in Argentina as her guest, was impressed and found artistic merit in them. “He played with erasures”, she wrote, “following them from verse to verse with his pen, making lines that suddenly jumped into life out of this play: prehistoric monsters, birds, faces appeared.”13 This marked a definitive stage in his development as an artist. Compared to his early doodles it is clear that these were not entirely spontaneous, but inspired by the examples of Primitive art he had been looking at. In these, the decorative is conjoined with the grotesque, and the fantastic, as in many traditions of non-Western art, gathered under the rubric of ‘Primitive art’.

These doodles of 1924, in what is known as the Purabi manuscript,14 mark the beginnings of Rabindranath’s artistic career. Rabindranath himself recognised such doodles as the beginnings of his art, and wrote: “The only training I had from my young days was the training in rhythm in thought, the rhythm in sound. I had come to know that rhythm gives reality to that which is desultory, which is insignificant in itself. And therefore, when the scratches in my manuscript cried, like sinners, for salvation, and assailed my eyes with the ugliness of their irrelevance, I often took more time in rescuing them into a merciful finality of rhythm than in carrying on what was my obvious task.”15 He also called this his ‘unconscious training in drawing’.16 And described the imagery that emerged as follows: …when the vagaries of the ostracized mistakes had their conversion into rhythmic inter-relationship, giving birth to unique forms and characters. Some assumed the temperate exaggeration of a probable animal that had unaccountably missed its chance of existence… Some lines showed anger, some placid benevolence, through some lines ran an essential laughter… These lines often expressed passions that were abstract, evolved characters that hung upon subtle suggestions.17 While switching from writing to giving finality to his doodles, he sometimes erased an entire page of writing and turned it into a page of drawing. This freed the image from the text and made it independent, but he did not take to doing independent paintings until 1928. And when he did, his initial paintings were akin to the doodles. What he said about the doodled images in the above lines is equally applicable to the animals, birds and figures in his early paintings. They exist half way between the real and the possible, the primeval and the surreal. While some of his imaginary creatures have an organic unity that suggests an anatomical probability, others have forms composed from decorative motifs as in Chinese ritual bronze vessels or ancient Peruvian carvings, and yet others have forms that break up into geometric units or bodies and are pure inventions with animation borrowed from real animals. He achieves this largely though the creation of composite forms and

cross-projections of movement or expression. Although gradually, perceived reality began to influence the formation of images, the spirit of cross-projection, of knowing things by inhabiting them, continued to inform his work.

Imagination and serendipity played a greater role than planned execution in the early works, and his innate sense of rhythm that structured the forms introduced an element of abstraction into his paintings. Commenting on it, he wrote: It is the element of unpredictability in art which seems to fascinate me strongly. The subject matter of a poem can be traced back to some dim thought in the mind.

Once it leaves the matted crown of Siva, the stream of poetry flows along its measured course—welldefined by its two banks. While painting, the process adopted by me is quite the reverse. First there is the hint of a line, then the line becomes a form. The more pronounced the form becomes the clearer becomes the picture to my conception. This creation of form is a source of wonder. If I were a finished artist I would probably have a preconceived idea to be made into a picture. This is no doubt a rewarding experience.

But it is greater fun when the mind is seized upon by

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something outside of it, some surprise element which gradually evolves into an understandable shape.18 But painting also opened him to the world of visual sensations and made him see the world anew.

When I had not yet taken to painting, out of this phenomenal world melodies would enter my ears and give and give rise to feelings and emotions which would make their aural impact on my mind. But when I turned to painting, I at once found my place in the grand cavalcade of the visual world. Trees and plants, men, beasts, everything became vividly real in their own distinct forms. The lines and colours began revealing to me the spirit of the concrete objects in nature. There was no more need for further elucidation of their raison d’etre once the artist discovered his role of a beholder—pure and simple.19 He wanted the viewers to approach his paintings as they approached nature and know them through empathy and sensibility. And so he refused to name his paintings, and to come between them and their viewers.

Each art form allowed Rabindranath to experience the world differently and he put them to different expressive uses. In writing, with its many genres, he moved from the evocative, to the descriptive, the discursive and the conversational. In his songs he oscillated between words and melody, between meaning and pure emotion or the inexpressible.20 In his paintings meanings did not exist separate from form; to him the painted image was more like nature than language and this gave it greater claim to permanence and a communicativeness that transcended cultures.

Comparing the relative permanence of the arts he wrote: All kinds of poetic works die with language… But there is no such hassle with nature. The Krishnachura gave us Krishnachura flowers yesterday, so it does today and so it will tomorrow. Every difficulty is with language. In a way paintings are much more enduring.

The difference between what is grasped by the eyes and what is grasped by language lies in this.21 Painting awakened him to the evocative power of forms in nature, and in his paintings too he wanted to express through the sensory aspects of forms. In this, he was in tune with the approach adopted by modern artists, who believed in the aesthetic autonomy of mediums. The most recurring form in his paintings was the human face; his interest in it remained constant but his approach to its rendering did not remain fixed. The earliest ones are more mask-like. Some of these remind us of Peruvian or Indonesian masks, but more often they reflect an effort to turn a seen face into a social or universal type. Without any reference to the body, of which the face is a part, they usually float on the page, and like actual masks they represent the face as a form complete

in itself. Yet within a short period, these faces begin to function as a formal synecdoche for the whole body. Etched into their lineaments are the signs of the absent body, and we can imagine them if we pay attention to the painterly materiality of these painted faces. As his repertoire of skills grew, the faces became more individualised, as in portraits. Shadows of people he had seen and known began to fall across his painted faces. But for Rabindranath, who believed that the self was always evolving, and who was ever unravelling his self, portraits did not mean likeness but something deeper and truer than likeness, more akin to what writers call ‘character’. And, amalgamating the social and individual, it is in this direction that his representations of the human face finally moves.

Discovering the human body was for Rabindranath a part of discovering nature afresh, through painting. Considering that he was to the world the white-bearded, long-robbed, seriousminded poet, his figures are surprisingly agile, light and sometimes acrobatically animated. That his involvement with dance took a definitive turn about the same time as he was beginning to paint, perhaps explains this. In 1927 while visiting Java, he was greatly impressed by their dances. The excitement he felt on encountering Javanese dance was similar to the excitement he had felt over 10 years ago on seeing Japanese art and design. In Java he felt that life expressed itself through dance. He wrote: Here, when their life seeks utterance, it sets them a-dance. Women dance, men dance. I have seen their plays, it is movement from the beginning to end— war, expression of love and even clowning is dance….

In this dance the tongue is silent, but they speak with their whole body through signs and gestures.22 This led him to write his own dance dramas, but it also left its mark on his paintings. In his paintings too, the tongue is silent and the figure speaks through movement and gesture.

Having committed to expressing himself through visual and sensuous means such as movement and gesture, Rabindranath kept narration as in literature, out of his paintings and instead imbued his figures with a ‘character, spirit, quality or—as the Bengalis put it—a bhab’23 that could be expressed formally. He gave expression to it in two different ways. He sometimes condensed the sensations, or the bhab, aroused by a figure, into a motif or a single iconic image. In such images the figure assumes a denser, non-anatomical decorative shape; undergoes an expressive metamorphosis, comparable to the transformation of a hand into a fist. The process remains the same even when there is more than one figure; the figures are then fused into a single motif and seen as constituting an individual biomorphic shape. And when a figure is seen in relation to an object, they are similarly amalgamated into a single entity, with the object assuming human overtones.

His principle theme in these works is emotion aroused by people and things; and he tries to give it visual expression through the

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Like these dramatic scenes, his landscapes too are soundless.

Devoid of human figures and with very few suggestions of human presence in them, to him landscape represents a one-toone intimate encounter with the world. There are echoes of an old habit, which bordered on the spiritual, in these pictures. In The Religion of Man, Rabindranath wrote: Almost every morning in the early hour of dusk, I would run out from by bed in a great hurry to greet the first pink flush of the world… The sky seemed to bring to me the call of a personal companionship, and all my heart—my whole body in fact used to drink in at a draught the overflowing light and peace of those silent hours.24 Only in these pictures, painted in his mature years, the scene and the twilight silence is not that of dawn but of dusk. With trees ominously silhouetted against iridescent skies or dense woodlands patiently mapped in dim evening light—those familiar with old Santiniketan and Tagore country will recognise experiential elements in these landscapes, but they are more archetypal than descriptive and, with enchanting pools of light and shadow, they draw us in rather than unfold. They are visions for contemplation rather than sights for prospecting.

Rabindranath and Victoria Ocampo, 1924

arrangement of pictorial elements. For Rabindranath, expression in painting was, as it was for Matisse and many other modern painters, primarily a function of composition.

He also sometimes transforms a group of figures into an engaging moment. In paintings conceived as a moment, he does not condense or fuse figures, but retains their discreteness and individuality; it revolves around turning the picture into a gestalt of gestures. Like other modernist painters, while trying to free painting from literature, he recognised that two or more figures brought together paved the way for a painting’s own kind of narration. A gestalt of gesturing figures move towards a theatrical moment rather than towards a story.

In literature, a story is told through characters built from events unfolding successively; in painting, charged moments are evoked through figures compositionally framed by the artist. In these paintings, where he explores the narrative and expressive potential of the body in movement and gesture, Rabindranath uses insights gained from theatre just as he brings a writer’s sense of character into his rendering of faces.

Dramatically pregnant as these moments are, their meanings are tantalisingly ambivalent; they lend themselves to partial unravelling when they are read experientially from within, but become intractable as soon as we try to read them according to some external code. Like some human drama watched through a glass wall, they are poignant moments wrapped in silence.

Art was for Rabindranath, self-expression, or more precisely, an expression of the artist’s personality. And, as we have noticed, even when he brought insights gained as a creative person in other arts to bear on his paintings, he did not allow these to infringe on its aesthetic autonomy. He wrote of his paintings, If by chance they are entitled to claim recognition, it must be primarily for some rhythmic significance of form which is ultimate and not for any interpretation of an idea or representation of a fact.25 In this he wanted his paintings to be unlike his writings, less burdened with meaning or at least with obvious meaning. As a writer, he was a master of his tools. Like a well armed and accomplished hunter, he gave chase to his ideas and pinned them down with great ease. He never felt fully at home with the language of painting; he fished for images like an ever nervous angler. But by his own admission, he was irresistibly drawn towards paintings. This led to him being seen as a Primitive and a naive artist, and to his art being seen as a remarkable outpouring of the unconscious, and, in contrast to his writing, very personal and hugely Expressionistic.

But this perhaps is not the whole picture. Though as a painter he was no virtuoso, and possessed limited representational skills, his graphic skills and rhythmic sense were commendable.

He was, by his own admission, an artist who found rather than one who created according to a predefined idea, but once the image surfaced, the richness of thinking and imagination, gained from creative work in other fields, took over and guided it to its expressive finality. Perhaps there is a late Tagore—both in 59

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CATALOGUE OF PAINTINGS

Berlin Amstelveen Paris Rome

New York Chicago

Seoul London

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Pen and ink on paper 23.5 x 21 cm c. 1929 NGMA, 1001

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Coloured ink on paper 17 x 23.5 cm c. 1932–33 Rabindra Bhavana, 00-2262-16

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Ink on paper 34 x 41.6 cm c. 1929–30 Rabindra Bhavana, 00-1898-16

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Ink on paper 45.4 x 68.7 cm c. 1929–30 Rabindra Bhavana, 00-1858-16

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Coloured ink on paper 50.4 x 69.1 cm c. 1929 Rabindra Bhavana, 00-1840-16

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Coloured ink on paper 43.2 x 67.8 cm December 1928 Rabindra Bhavana, 00-2023-16

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Coloured ink on paper 35.4 x 25.2 cm c. 1929–30 Kala Bhavana, 01-00039-001

Coloured ink on paper 55.3 x 37.5 cm c. 1929–30 Rabindra Bhavana, 00-1893-16

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Coloured ink and poster colour on paper 37.9 x 28.9 cm c. 1929–30 Rabindra Bhavana, 00-2202-16 75

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Coloured ink and poster colour on paper 35.6 x 25.3 cm c. 1930–31 Kala Bhavana, 01-00023-001

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Coloured ink and poster colour on paper 64.3 x 50.5 cm c. 1929–30 Rabindra Bhavana, 00-1844-16

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Coloured ink and poster colour on paper 23 x 31 cm 18 September 1930 Rabindra Bhavana, 00-2184-16

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MODERN & CONTEMPORARY ART

The Last Harvest

Paintings of Rabindranath Tagore Edited by R. Siva Kumar 240 pages, 235 colour illustrations 9 x 12” (229 x 304 mm), hc ISBN: 978-81-89995-61-4 (Mapin) ISBN: 978-1-935677-18-5 (Grantha) ₹2500 | $65 | £40 2012 • World rights