Company School and Nationalism

Summary

Central Argument

The lecture presents Partha Mitter’s three books—Much Maligned Monsters (1977), Art and Nationalism in Colonial India (1994), and The Triumph of Modernism (2007)—as parts of one long inquiry: Who has the authority to judge Indian art, and what standards are used to judge it?

Mitter’s argument is that artistic standards are not neutral or universal. They are shaped by institutions, colonial power, political movements, and control over markets and criticism. Across the history discussed, Indian artists and thinkers repeatedly challenged who got to define art as competent, authentic, or modern.

The Historical Arc

1. European naturalism becomes the yardstick

   • European observers often judged Indian art by Greco-European ideals of anatomical proportion, realistic perspective, and a single viewpoint.
   • Indian conventions—such as multiple arms, enlarged eyes, flattened space, or figures shown from several viewpoints—were consequently described as errors or grotesque distortions rather than deliberate artistic choices.
   • Even sympathetic European commentators, including William Jones, generally assessed Indian art through European aesthetic standards.
   • This established the background against which later colonial art practices developed.

2. Company School painting serves colonial documentation

   • From the late eighteenth century, British administrators, naturalists, and other patrons commissioned Indian artists to make detailed images of plants, animals, buildings, people, clothing, and customs.
   • These works supplied the visual accuracy demanded by scientific cataloguing, administration, and ethnographic classification.
   • Artists such as Shaikh Muhammad Amir, Sitaram, Bhavani Das, and Ghulam Ali Khan brought considerable skill to the work. Their style combined the precision of Indian miniature traditions with European watercolor modeling and perspective.
   • The lecture contrasts this documentary purpose with earlier rasa-oriented painting: the goal was increasingly to record and classify rather than to shape a viewer’s experience of emotion or aesthetic meaning.

3. Raja Ravi Varma as a transitional figure

   • Ravi Varma used European oil-painting techniques and academic realism to depict Hindu myths and epics.
   • His work combined naturalistic representation, Indian mythological subjects, and broad popular appeal. His widely distributed oleographs helped bring this imagery to a large audience.
   • Tapati Guha-Thakurta interprets his paintings as a form of resacralization: European academic techniques were used to give Indian mythological subjects new visual force.
   • She also draws attention to the gendered effects of this imagery. Female figures helped construct a national iconography, but were also presented through forms of male-oriented viewing.
   • Ravi Varma’s synthesis unsettled the coming Bengal School, which argued that Indian art should reject academic naturalism rather than combine it with Indian subject matter.

4. The Bengal School rejects naturalism and constructs an alternative

   • E. B. Havell, superintendent of the Government School of Art in Calcutta from 1896, challenged a curriculum he saw as dominated by English provincial art-school traditions. He promoted Indian decorative traditions and introduced Indian works, including Mughal miniatures and Ajanta reproductions, into the school’s collections.
   • Abanindranath Tagore developed a style that moved away from academic realism. His encounter with Japanese painters Yokoyama Taikan and Hishida Shunsō introduced him to the wash technique, which softened outlines and favored atmosphere and suggestive feeling over precise optical detail.
   • Abanindranath’s Bharat Mata (c. 1905), first conceived as Banga Mata, depicts a four-armed female figure offering food, clothing, learning, and spiritual strength. Its interpretation as Mother India helped make it a nationalist image.
   • Havell, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Sister Nivedita helped frame the movement through writing and publications. They promoted a contrast between spiritual, intuitive Indian art and materialistic, mechanical Western art.
   • The lecture stresses that this nationalism did not simply recover an untouched, timeless tradition. It actively constructed an idea of authentic Indian art for a particular political moment.
   • The Bengal School’s success also produced a limitation: its techniques and themes became a recognizable institutional style. Even Nandalal Bose later sought to move beyond the increasingly formulaic wash approach.

5. Interwar modernism claims international art on Indian terms

   • Mitter’s account of modernism begins around 1922, when new international art became more visible in Calcutta. Artists of the following decades drew on movements such as Cubism and Expressionism without treating them simply as European models to imitate—or as styles to reject.
   • “Picasso-man syndrome” describes a double standard: European artists’ borrowing from non-European art is praised as innovation, while similar choices by colonial or postcolonial artists are dismissed as imitation.
   • Virtual cosmopolitanism describes participation in international debates through journals, reproductions, translated writing, and the circulation of images, even without frequent travel abroad.
   • Periphery refers not simply to geographical distance but to institutional power: who controls museums, markets, and critical judgment.
   • Cosmopolitan primitivism describes Indian modernists’ use of folk, village, and craft traditions. In this account, the turn to popular forms could be a deliberate critique of colonial and capitalist modernity, not a retreat from modern art.
   • Gaganendranath Tagore’s Cubist-influenced works and Jamini Roy’s deliberate turn toward Bengali folk painting illustrate different forms of modernist agency. Amrita Sher-Gil combined European training with subjects drawn from Indian life; other artists, including K. K. Hebbar and D. P. Roy Chowdhury, also worked across inherited and international vocabularies.
   • Geeta Kapur’s challenge to a Europe-centred timeline reinforces the point: Indian modernism should be understood through its own historical and political conditions, not as a late or derivative version of a Parisian sequence.

After Independence: The Same Question Across Art, Cinema, and Photography

The lecture extends its central question—who controls representation and the standards used to judge it—beyond painting.

• Post-independence art: The Progressive Artists’ Group, founded in Bombay in 1947, rejected both the Bengal School’s increasingly formulaic revivalism and colonial academic naturalism. Its members claimed an international modernist vocabulary as their own. Later regional movements offered different answers: artists in Baroda drew on folk and popular sources; K. C. S. Paniker established the Cholamandal Artists’ Village; and groups in Delhi revisited debates over what an Indian modern art might be.
• Later contemporary art: The Radical Painters and Sculptors Association criticized the art world’s growing absorption into the market. Artists including Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malani, and Navjot Altaf moved into installation and video. Liberalization brought Indian artists such as Subodh Gupta, Atul Dodiya, and Bharti Kher into international galleries and auction houses. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale is presented as an example of Indian institutions and curators helping shape global art discussions, rather than merely responding to them.
• Cinema: Indian filmmaking began soon after the Lumière brothers’ screenings in Bombay. Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra (1913) used Indian mythological material in an imported medium. The arrival of sound with Alam Ara (1931) was followed by influential studios and regional film industries. Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and Mrinal Sen helped establish a parallel cinema tradition distinct from commercial mainstream filmmaking. As with painting, cinema became a contested site for defining national representation.
• Photography: Photography was quickly used by colonial authorities for classification, including in the People of India survey. Samuel Bourne’s landscapes and the Bourne & Shepherd studio also reflect the influence of imported photographic conventions. Indian practitioners later used photography for their own patrons and purposes: Lala Deen Dayal photographed princely and elite life, while Homai Vyarawalla and Kulwan Roy contributed to the visual record of the independence movement and the new nation.

Main Lesson

The lecture’s recurring lesson is to ask not only what an image represents, but who made it, who commissioned or circulated it, and whose standards determine its value. “Authentic Indian” and “derivative Western” are not neutral categories: they have histories and are shaped by power. That question applies across painting, photography, cinema, and contemporary visual culture.

Speakers and Sources Featured

Speaker: One lecturer, whose name is not stated in the subtitles. The transcript appears to refer to Partha Mitter as the central scholar.

Scholars, critics, and writers discussed: Partha Mitter; Tapati Guha-Thakurta; Geeta Kapur; E. B. Havell; Ananda Coomaraswamy; Sister Nivedita; William Jones; Okakura Kakuzō.

Artists and photographers discussed: Shaikh Muhammad Amir; Bhavani Das; Sitaram; Ghulam Ali Khan; Raja Ravi Varma; Abanindranath Tagore; Gaganendranath Tagore; Nandalal Bose; Jamini Roy; Amrita Sher-Gil; K. K. Hebbar; D. P. Roy Chowdhury; Francis Newton Souza; M. F. Husain; S. H. Raza; K. H. Ara; S. K. Bakre; H. A. Gade; K. G. Subramanyan; Bhupen Khakhar; Gulammohammed Sheikh; K. C. S. Paniker; K. P. Krishnakumar; Vivan Sundaram; Nalini Malani; Navjot Altaf; Subodh Gupta; Atul Dodiya; Bharti Kher; Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatavdekar (Save Dada); Dadasaheb Phalke; Satyajit Ray; Ritwik Ghatak; Mrinal Sen; Samuel Bourne; Lala Deen Dayal; Homai Vyarawalla; Kulwan Roy.

Other named figures, groups, and institutions: Yokoyama Taikan; Hishida Shunsō; the Lumière brothers; the Progressive Artists’ Group; the Radical Painters and Sculptors Association; the Cholamandal Artists’ Village; Shilpi Chakra; Group 1890; the Film and Television Institute of India; the Prabhat Film Company; New Theatres; Bombay Talkies; the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

Works and publications referred to: Much Maligned Monsters; Art and Nationalism in Colonial India; The Triumph of Modernism; “Decentering Modernism”; “When Was Modernism in Indian Art?”; Bharat Mata; the Impy and Fraser albums; Raja Harishchandra; Alam Ara; Pather Panchali; and the People of India photographic survey.