The Tagores of Jorasanko were one of the most creative families of all time. Within it, Gaganendranath Tagore (1867-1938), Abanindrannath Tagore (1871-1951) and Sunayani Devi (1875-1962) formed a trio of artist-siblings. Abanindranath is widely recognized as the father of the nationalist movement in modern Indian Art, the Bengal School. Gaganendranath, the eldest of them, turned to art after his brother established himself as the leader of the new school. He is seen as the first Indian painter who assimilated lessons from Western modern art. And Sunayani Devi, their younger sister, who followed her brothers, was the first woman painter of the modern period. She drew on Bengal's folk and popular painting traditions and charted a career independent from her brothers and as original as theirs. The present exhibition brings together some of their representative works.
Abanindranath Tagore
At the height of the Swadeshi movement, the Bharat Mata established Abanindranath Tagore as the leader of the nationalist movement in Art. Its nationalism was thematic and straightforward. It presented an imagined nation, in opposition to colonial India, that was benevolent and ensured the material and spiritual well-being of Indians. It was conceived as a popular icon embodying the nationalist fervour of the time, and its appeal was direct.
The Arabian Nights series, with over forty intricate paintings all done in 1930, on the other hand, marks his highest achievement as an artist and the long distance he travelled as an artist from his nationalist beginnings. They also mark the culmination of Abanindranath’s long engagement with literary texts. He began his artistic career with illustrations of contemporary literary texts like Swpnaprayan and Chitragada where the image was subservient to the text. He then moved to paintings based on indigenous literary texts like the literary classics of Kalidasa and Bengali Vaishnava lyrics and, from thereon, to the Orientalist translation of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. With each shift, the text-image relationship changed subtly until the images became parallel texts in the Arabian Nights paintings, which had to be mapped against the original literary text and its many translations.
Abanindranath further complicates these paintings in two notable ways. One, by incorporating the relevant stories narrated in a hybrid patois into the paintings done in a highly skilled manner, he brings two distinct cultural registers face to face and destabilizes meaning. This is further complicated by employing contrasting styles within the same painting to distinguish the sensibilities of the characters involved. Two, by wilfully deviating from the source text, he creates a flaneur’s view of colonial Calcutta and uses it to reclaim the power of self- representation for the Indian artist. If colonialism took away the power of self-narration from the colonial subject, by aligning/identifying himself with Sheherazade, the disempowered narrator of the Arabian Nights who tames and transforms the ruthless king through the power of narration, Abanindranath reclaims for himself and his colonized fellow citizens a similar freedom through the subversive power of narration.
From this perspective, the Arabian Nights paintings represent a subtler, more intellectually sophisticated form of nationalism, married with a very modernist understanding of style in painting. In these paintings, which he rightfully claimed to carry “all my life’s experience”, Abanindranath can be seen at his imaginative, technical, conceptual and intellectual best as an artist.
Gaganendranath Tagore
Gaganendranath Tagore had two sides to his personality; one was gregarious and outward- looking, and the other was meditative and inward-gazing. His representations of Jorasanko and life around it, Calcutta and its surroundings, distant village scenes, portraits of family members, friends and acquaintances, and his cartoons belong to the first group. The Chaitanya Series (1912-13), the Cubist paintings (1921-26), and the paintings in black and white that followed belong to the latter.
He painted the Chaitanya Series soon after his mother’s death as an adoring son’s homage to his pious mother, who was a devout Vaishnava. The series tells the story of the saint’s life, conjoined with his mother’s devotion and Gaganedranath’s inner loneliness after her death. The inward turn that began with the Chaitanya Series is secularized and carried forward in the Cubist and later paintings. Although Gaganendranath accepted the appellation “the first Indian Cubist,” his works were not cubists in the strict sense. They were prismatic inner visions, part conjured by the mind and part created by transforming the perceived world by drawing on his early experiments with photography, his study of the play of light and shade in architecture, his engagement with modern stage design, and his experience of looking at his surroundings through a teleidoscope that broke the outer world into a kaleidoscopic picture. He certainly was familiar with Cubist paintings and possibly with the work of Franz Marc, August Macke and Robert Delaunay, who employed fragmentation of forms that resembled cubist facets not for representation but for expression. If anything, Gaganendranath’s cubist works are closer to the latter and invoke a theatre of the inner world that probes the dark mysteries of life and conjures visions of a world that is mysterious and cannot be thoroughly prised open by our shared knowledge of the world. Like all mysteries, they are alternately alluring and unsettling.
Unlike the Chaitanya Series, Gaganendranath’s cubist works are non-narrative and lead us to his last works in black and white, which are even more enigmatic, mute, private, and inscrutable. While the cubist paintings revolved around the visible world, its fragmentation and inner meaning, the last works transport us into a totally private world through which we are allowed to wander, but like aliens in a foreign land without knowledge of its language. With his viewers denied the power to decode it, the artist inhabits it in a dream that is alluring and frightening simultaneously.
Sunayani Devi
Sunayani Devi, the younger sister of Gaganendranath and Abanindranath, was one of the first women painters in modern India. Like Gaganendranath, she was largely self-taught and began painting around the same time as him. And her career, like that of her brothers, tapered off in the mid-1940s following the death of her husband.
Although, like most women artists of her time, she had to balance her artistic work with domestic chores and did not develop her interest in art into a professional career, she exhibited her paintings in the annual exhibitions of the Indian Society of Oriental and occasionally in exhibitions outside India. Working at a time when women’s lives were confined to the inner quarters of their houses and shaped by the routines of domesticity, painting was for her both a sanctuary and a space of freedom.
Though encouraged by her brothers and her husband, Sunayani Devi’s developed a different and unique artistic trajectory from her brothers. She was aware of the work of her brothers and the different directions in which they were steering modern art, but she chose not to follow them. She developed her unique approach by marrying certain technical aspects of their work, such as the wash technique with subjects reflecting the intimate domestic world of mothers and children and the religious iconography of traditional folk and popular art she was familiar with. In this, in a certain way, she anticipated Jamini Roy, who would later develop a modern style based on folk painting.
The intermingling of the domestic and feminine imagery with religious subject matter gave the former a strange serenity and the later an intimacy not usual to either. Her paintings have been variously described as ‘naïve’ and ‘primitive’ but also as reflecting a natural “simplicity and spontaneity”. These were qualities that were favoured by modern artists worldwide and were read as signs of artistic freedom. She has been quoted as saying that her work often sprang from her dreams. And according to those who have seen her work, she usually began with a wash of colour and then guided it towards an image she read into it. This method reminds us of Rabindranath’s description of his process as a painter. But her imagery – unlike Rabindranath’s, which moves from the rhythmic to grotesque – is always gentle and, as Amina Kar has insightfully observed, has the “vitality and grace of fragile plants.”