A genius' quest for rediscovering art

When an artist, well settled in a particular genre and earning comfortably out of it, decides to travel along an entirely variant direction and succeeds in creating a highly individual artistic idiom, such a departure becomes a moment of history. And like all historical moments, it has its antecedents and preconditions, much of which is subsumed within the discourse of the artist's conscious choice. But consciousness is many-layered, vulnerable to different modes of suggestivities, and configured in complex manners by the negotiations of both the individual and the community: it is thus essential that we try to understand the factors, both individual and social, that led up to Jamini Roy's decisive turn towards the rural and the folk.

We have already observed how this turn was hardly a 'sudden repudiation' as suggested by Archer, but was preceded by a gradual process of disillusionment with the way academic realism was poised to capture the external resemblance of its subject. Reality hardly resides only in the externals, nor does the shape of feelings obediently fall in line with the accurate representation of what is merely seen by the eyes, and this had been an issue most modernist painters had negotiated with in their search for distinct visual languages. In a sense, Jamini Roy's quest was similar to that of Abanindranath and the Orientalists in the way both turned away from naturalism and focused on Indian roots. We must recognise that both the Bengal school artists and Jamini Roy had been a part of the contemporary nationalist imperative in 'dislodging modern art from its western context, in the continuous assertion of cultural difference, and in the ceaseless search for Indian authenticity.' While one concentrated on the revival of ancient myths, narratives and models of earlier art (like the Ajanta murals) which had almost no connection with the culture of Bengal, Roy turned towards the living folk traditions in the villages of Bengal that he had known intimately in his childhood. Whereas Abanindranath and his followers of the Bengal school were 'reviving' long-dead traditions buried in the past, Roy was connecting to the folk idiom which was not only kept alive by transmission across generations, but had still been an intrinsic part of life as it was lived in the village community. The point of nationalism that came to be associated with the search for 'Indianness' in art and a need for affirmation of an indigenous identity in every sphere of one's existence, in fact created the space for alternate modernisms with its insistence to hark back to the roots.

This possibly led on to the question of the regional face of folk culture—the immediate roots—against which the 'Indian' themes of the Bengal school seemed remote and unsubstantial, bearing little familiarity with the masses. Having said this, it is also important to underline the fact that for all the differences Roy had with them, the opposition of the Orientalists to Academic realism, as also their insistence on capturing the 'spirit' of a painting, had ushered in a discursive environment with fruitful debates and discussions that was extremely conducive for Roy to map out his own course. Conducive, too, was the contemporary cultural–political environment for such a renewal of emphasis on the folk. In the 1920s, the research on folklore got an additional impetus with the publication of Abanindranath Tagore's Banglar Brata, (translated in French as L'Alponaou les Decorations Rituelles au Bengale, it was published in Paris at around the same time), which discussed in detail the tradition of alpana in Bengal. Ballads of Bengal were collected by Dineshchandra Sen and Jasimuddin on behalf of the University of Calcutta, while Gurusaday Dutta, a District Magistrate, collected specimens of folk art from all around Bengal (which later constituted the impressive collection of the Gurusaday Museum of Folk Art in Kolkata) in a bid to revive the folk art tradition. Besides, Gaganendranath Tagore too had several varieties of pats in his collection, apart from specimens of folk toys, and that quintessentially Bengali embroidered quilt, kantha. Jamini Roy must have seen this collection while painting Debendranath Tagore's portrait at their ancestral home at Jorasanko, along with Sunayani Devi's folk-themed paintings. Though he had already been familiar with the likes of such art, the honour and care with which these were collected and preserved in a culturally rich, high-brow urban home may have reinforced his interest in their abiding artistic value. In this context it would be worthwhile to note that around the world, rediscovering the expressive power of such cultures has almost always occurred at 'moments of political transformation in territorial histories', and had been used as a tool for firming and defining identities.

And then in the 1920s, there was the pervasive influence of Gandhi who succeeded in connecting the village masses with the nationalist resistance against the British rule. This was, in a sense, an empowerment of the rural people who had hitherto stayed at a distance from the waves of political dissent the crest of which was ridden by a predominantly high-brow, city-based leadership. This, connected with his emphasis on the development of rural economy and cottage industry, naturally brought about a renewed social interest in the cultural value of folk art. It is difficult to say whether Roy had been aware how closely aligned his (and his father's) thoughts about the rural order were with Gandhi's vision, especially those related to rural interdependence and a self-sufficient, sustainable economy. But it can be assumed with certainty that these watershed moments of history must have subconsciously justified the direction he was poised to explore. It would also be interesting to note that the year 1921, when Roy undertook the journey around the villages of Bengal to collect specimens of folk art like pats, folk toys and terracotta reliefs, was also the year of culmination of Gandhi's Satyagraha, which as well involved the mobilisation of the rural masses. What may have begun as an Abanindranath-inspired quest for the roots was given substance and purpose by the Gandhian

ideals. In fact, 'through the twenties both Abanindranath and Gandhiji remained with him, in his work.' Nandalal Bose's engagement with rural life and various folk-art forms also involved a decentering of art from its high-brow pedestal into the space of everyday, common life, and sited the national in the regional.

Rabindranath Tagore, with his rural reconstruction programmes at his ancestral zamindari at Shilaidaha and Patisar, and later, at Sriniketan (in which he was ably assisted by Leonard Elmhirst), must have been a potent influence as well, as were the views Tagore expressed in Palligram, Panchabhut and even Kalantar. Roy had a deep respect for him, and for his paintings for their inherent strength and rhythm, and the two had met on several occasions. That he was deeply affected by Tagore's views is borne out by the underlines and comments he added to Tagore's famous essay, 'Tapoban' which appeared in a 1316 volume of Prabasi. One of the sections he marked was:

'If India compels herself into subservience to European ideals, the result would be a distorted India rather than a true Europe…one has to firmly understand that to imitate and to follow cannot define the relationship between two races—it should be one of mutual give-and-take. If India cannot become pure India, then she will have no place in the world apart from laboring at someone else's market; this will result not only in the departure of self-respect, but also a loss of joy in her own existence.'

In this Roy possibly found the clear corroboration of his own growing impatience with Western academism; it was conceptually supportive, too, of his search for an indigenous identity in art. He writes in the margins of the page: 'Today I got to see the feelings of my mind in a written form—I had arrived at this realization eight months back—18 Jaistha, 1330.' The year would then be 1922/23, which coincides neatly with the period when he had just finished

his tour of the Bengal villages, after having collected folk art and artifacts and also having received lessons in their trade from practicing folk artists. A few years later, in 1929, he was to show to the public his first experiments with folk art.

This journey of Roy's to collect folk art can actually be seen as an aesthetic revisit to the folk forms he had been familiar with, from his very birth to early teens, in his native village at Beliatore. Folk art usually remains so deeply ingrained in rural life that it becomes a matter of habituality: it is a part of rituals, of entertainment, even day-to-day essential requirements, and thus their intrinsic artistic value is hardly noticed separately by those who are generously surrounded by their ubiquity. The figure of the artisan, who in fact can be considered as the combination of craftsman and artist, hardly ever considered art as an end in itself, but rather as something that added value to functional products. If we try to apply the standards of artistic appreciation we are familiar with now, there was indeed a kind of aesthetic invisibility about these. A general awakening of interest in folk art, typically in urban centres, led usually by urban intellectuals, brought about a change in the perception of value in folk art. If we consider the matter closely, it is really about how relocation mediates with the perception of significance: a pat by an anonymous patua, a kaantha sewn by a female elder of the family, wooden figurines or toys made by a carver in huge numbers to be sold to children in fairs acquire special, focused significance once they are shifted out of context and are moved to urban centres of appreciation, be it the Gurusaday museum, Gaganendranath's home or Jamini Roy's studio. And this is specifically the point that is so fascinating in Jamini Roy's engagement with the folk. It clearly has two distinctive layers: the first is the reminiscence of his younger days of being habitually surrounded by both material and non-material forms of folk culture integrally rooted to lived life, and the second is a considerably evolved engagement with these as 'art', as opposed to simply good-looking, useful, entertaining things that used to be taken for granted in an earlier period, when the delight in these remained untranslated along aesthetic lines. The latter attitude could not possibly have come about without the mediation of the intervening years and his close engagement with urban modernity. Thus he was, at the same time, an insider and an outsider to the folk idiom, both rural and urban, negotiating between a nostalgic subjectivity and an objective search for significant form. In a way, Roy was journeying between selves, between distinct modes of relationship: these coalesced in his work, recombined and grew, just as human relationships grow and transform.

As has been mentioned before, Jamini Roy had been drawn by the features of both simplicity and simplification inherent in folk culture, especially in folk art. In a way, thus, his quest was idealist and formalist at the same time. He was attracted by the extreme accessibility which could address and thus unite the entire community, through the use of familiar sets of cultural reference common to all. This could also be seen as the power of the simple, the accessible and the anonymous, which was tuned to hold together the basic pattern of common rural lifestyle in all its simplicity, unencumbered by excesses. But the chief point that attracted him was the formal simplification inherent in folk art, especially in the pats and the toys—a feature that simplified the lineaments of the subjects down to the bare essentials, throwing to the winds any concerns about verisimilitude

while preserving the basics of recognisability. This feature of moving away from mere surface resemblance while presenting the essence in an abstracted form is the very basis of folk art, and of folk artists who were untrained in evolved academic techniques and followed the age-old conventions which had become almost formulaic. Jamini Roy marvelled at the way the ancient pat artists could discover what he felt was 'the final truth in art'7 , though he did maintain that this gradually became a repetitive convention, and ultimately an artistic habit of the patuas. Roy believed that for the earliest folk artists, the depiction of the purity of form was a conscious choice. They did not try to imitate nature, ever, but wanted to communicate 'the feeling and the vision of a mind reacting to the universals of nature.'

(Excerpted with permission from Anuradha Ghosh's 'Jamini Roy'; published by Niyogi Books)