Indore – Borderless

Ratnottma Sengupta revisits an exhibition full 25 years later

Images from exhibits at Anadi . Provided by Ratnottama Sengupta

On November 1 of 1956 was born a state in Central India called Madhya Pradesh. And 44 years later, on exactly the same day of November 1, in the year 2000 it was remapped. A new state — Chhattisgarh — was carved out of the land that had been home to the oldest Indians: the men and women who had peopled the caves at Bagh and Bhimbetka.

Standing at the threshold of that new beginning, I had curated an exhibition titled Anadi – that which has no beginning and, therefore, no end. The exhibition card was designed by M F Husain who came on the inaugural day in Delhi. The next day was graced by the presence of Madhavrao Scindia, scion of the royal family that continues to throw up political leaders. I was fortunate to have friends like collectors Anand Agarwal and H K Kejriwal, bureaucrats Bhaskar Ghose and Sarayu Doshi, art lovers like poet Gulzar and artists like Yusuf Arakkal. Happily, then, the exhibition travelled to Birla Academy in Kolkata to Chitrakala Parishath in Bangalore to the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai. And with it travelled a batch of youngsters who were soon to be among the most sought after names in Indian Contemporary Art.

What made that exhibition so special? The card? The multi-venue display? The star viewers? The exhilarating combination of tribal paintings, figurative sculpture, and abstract images? Twenty five years later, I will look back to find an answer.

At the intersection of two millennia I was amazed to note there was no rupture in continuity. Anadi offered a fresh look at a continuum that lives on beyond the geopolitical redefinition, because it began at a time when Chhattisgarh was not Madhya Pradesh, nor the Central Province of the Raj. Bhopal, Indore, Raipur, Jagdalpur, Sanchi, Vidisha, Malwa… these cities had no chief minister back then, nor a Prime Minister. Why, there were no Begums nor a Buddha. No Baj Bahadur loved a Roopmati nor did Kalidasa send a Cloud as Messenger. It was a time when the intrepid fingers that harnessed stones and hunted hides also painted rocks to sing of life. In the process – around 10,000 BCE – they crafted the rockbed of Indian Art at Bhimbetka, the UNESCO World Heritage Site mere miles away from Bhopal.

Bare lines that captured with only a twist and a turn the vigor of hunting and the verve of dancing, rock art is that elusive genre which is narrative, figurative and abstract – all at one go. And that is a characteristic common to the tribal stream of art which flourishes in the state from a forgotten past. There is a story in every figure painted by Bhuri Bai or Sukho Korwa. She paints a cart and tells you of the festival day when on its wheels it goes round habitats, collecting all the bimari and driving illness out of the village. He paints a bird that pounces on a snake which devours a rat, recounting the lifecycle that sustains ecological balance. But where is the third dimension? Where’s the likeness to the world of five senses? We see no effort here to evoke either. Instead, there is a stylization which is unique to the region that is home to the Bhil, Gond, Sahariya, Baiga, Saur and other tribes. A stylisation that abstracts the essence of the physical reality they celebrate through colour and line.

Dots and crosses, circles and squares all come into play as the vivacious blues and reds, yellows and greens acquire life. A line is not simply a straight line or curve: that would be an unappetising repetition. The quest for variety and individuality finds Kala Bai, Lado, Sumaru break up the lines into an intricate arrangement of countless motifs. When the subject is the same, as too the colour, it’s the dots and crosses, dashes and stars that give the work the imprint of individuality. In the process, these artists who work in a community and send off their creations to markets in distant cities, have worked out a way of ‘patenting’ artistic property. Tradition did not require them to ever sign off a work with their names. In the age of copyright awareness and intellectual property rights, they might put their signatures on the canvas – but the unmistakable imprint of the artists lie in the manner of their assembling the familiar patterns.

That, make no mistake, is the sign of a master, be he in the tribal mould or a modernist. For corroboration, we have only to look at a painting by Maqbool Fida Hussain, N S Bendre or Syed Haider Raza. Madhuri or Mahabharat, Gandhi or Indira, M F Husain constantly painted figures. Eminent and easily recognised ones at that. And yet, they lived not in the details of their features but in the lines and colours that spelt ‘Husain’ to seasoned viewers. Likewise Bendre’s forms had little concern for photographic realism. In Raza’s case, it is the arrangement of colourful geometrical bindus (circles) and squares alone that speaks of the artist. So, regardless of whether or not there is a ‘McBull’ or ‘Bendre’ inked on the canvas, we readily identify these masters who, incidentally, all came from this same state of Madhya Pradesh.

Note one more thing about these names. Each of them had set new watersheds for Indian contemporary art. All of them had opened up new avenues for artists who came after them. Bendre, the first to head the art education at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, gave not just one more centre for mastering the brush. He gave shape to an institution which still assimilates the best of the home and the universe, giving the MSU artists a rare acceptability in India and in the West. Raza, who lived in Paris for years and years, did not sever his umbilical cord with this soil, yet carved a niche for Indianness in the Mecca of contemporary art. And Husain? The life as too the art of this ‘Picasso from Indore’ had become a legend in his own lifetime. Who else but MF could raise the high water mark at auctions, again at again, at home and abroad? Who but him could open up the markets for Indian artists, including those who preceded him like Jamini Roy?

Talking of the masters who opened vistas, especially in the context of Madhya Pradesh, one comes to J Swaminanthan who facilitated a two-way transaction. While holding the reins of Roopankar Museum in Bhopal, he assimilated tribal art to such an extent that he could understand it, explain it, talk about it, write about it and paint after them, using their earth colours, and the bareness of their lines. At the same time, the outsider who became an insider gave, through Bharat Bhavan, all of Madhya Pradesh a new standing in the realm of contemporary art. Artists from all over the country would congregate in Bhopal with their art, exhibit it, discuss it threadbare in seminars, impart it to those keen to learn. Small wonder, the state boasts a host of artists like Akhilesh and Anwar, Seema Ghuraiya and Manish Pushkale, Yogendra and Vivek Tembe, Jaya Vivek and Jangarh Shyam. Artists who steal the attention of the world today.

This breed, which was born with the emergence of the state, came of age in artistic terms as the province consolidated its presence on the marquee. And an overwhelming number of them express themselves in just lines and colours. They care not for things like market – which seems to have an insatiable appetite for figurative art. Nor for the narrative tradition of the forefathers who painted on rocks. These neo-masters are all distilling forms, extracting experiences, working out their own equations with abstraction.

But, come to think of it, isn’t this exactly what the original artists of this land – and every other land on earth – set out to do when they picked up the sharpened tool that was millennia away from the paint brush?

Ratnottama Sengupta, formerly Arts Editor of The Times of India, teaches mass communication and film appreciation, curates film festivals and art exhibitions, and translates and writes books. She has been a member of CBFC, served on the National Film Awards jury and has herself won a National Award.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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A review of Anuradha Kumar’s Wanderers, Adventurers, Missionaries: Early Americans in India (Speaking Tiger Books) and an interview with the author

Migrants and wanderers — what could be the differences between them? Perhaps, we can try to comprehend the nuances. Seemingly, wanderers flit from place to place — sometimes, assimilating bits of each of these cultures into their blood — often returning to their own point of origin. Migrants move countries and set up home in the country they opt to call home as did the family the famous Indian actor, Tom Alter (1950-2017).

Anuradha Kumar’s Wanderers, Adventurers, Missionaries: Early Americans in India captures the lives and adventures of thirty such individuals or families — including the Alter family — that opted to explore the country from which the author herself wandered into Singapore and US. Born in India, Kumar now lives in New Jersey and writes. Awarded twice by the Commonwealth Foundation for her writing, she has eight novels to her credit. Why would she do a whole range of essays on wanderers and migrants from US to India? Is this book her attempt to build bridges between diverse cultures and seemingly diverse histories?

As Kumar contends in her succinct introduction, America and India in the 1700s were similar adventures for colonisers. In the Empire Podcast, William Dalrymple and Anita Anand do point out that the British East India company was impacted in the stance it had to colonisers in the Sub-continent after their experience of the American Revolution. And America and India were both British colonies. They also were favourites of colonisers from other European cultures. Just as India was the melting pot of diverse communities from many parts of the world — even mentioned by Marco Polo (1254-1324) in The Kingdom of India — America in the post-Christopher Columbus era (1451-1546) provided a similar experience for those who looked for a future different from what they had inherited. The first one Kumar listed is Nathaniel Higginson (1652-1708), a second-generation migrant from United Kingdom, who wandered in around the same time as British administrator Job Charnock (1630-1693) who dreamt Calcutta after landing near Sutanuti[1].

Kumar has bunched a number of biographies together in each chapter, highlighting the commonality of dates and ventures. The earliest ones, including Higginson, fall under ‘Fortune Seekers From New England’. The most interesting of these is Fedrick Tudor (1783-1864), the ice trader. Kumar writes: “In Calcutta, Dwarkanath Tagore, merchant and patron of the arts (Rabindranath Tagore’s grandfather), expressed an interest to involve himself in ice shipping, but Tudor’s monopoly stayed for some decades more. Tagore was part of the committee in Calcutta along with Kurbulai Mohammad, scion of a well-established landed family in Bengal, to regulate ice supply.”

Also associated with the Tagore family, was later immigrant Gertrude Emerson Sen (1890-1982, married to Boshi Sen). She tells us, “Tagore wrote Foreword to Gertrude Emerson’s Voiceless India, set in a remote Indian village and published in 1930. Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore called Emerson’s efforts, ‘authentic’.” She has moved on to quote Tagore: “The author did not choose the comfortable method of picking up information from behind lavish bureaucratic hospitality, under a revolving electric fan, and in an atmosphere of ready-made social opinions…She boldly took in on herself unaided to enter a region of our life, all but unexplored by Western tourists, which had one great advantage, in spite of its difficulties, that it offered no other path to the writer, but that of sharing the life of the people.’” Kumar writes of an Afro-American scholar, called Merze Tate who came about 1950-51 and was also fascinated by Santiniketan as were some others.

Another name that stuck out was Sam Higginbottom, who she described as “the Farmer Missionary” for he was exactly that and started an agricultural university in Allahabad. Around the same time as Tagore started Sriniketan (1922), Higginbottom was working on agricultural reforms in a different part of India. In fact, Uma Dasgupta mentions in A History of Sriniketan: Rabindranath Tagore’s Pioneering work in Rural Reconstruction that Lord Elimhurst, who helped set up the project, informed Tagore that “another Englishman” was doing work along similar lines. Though as Kumar has pointed out, Higginbottom was a British immigrant to US — an early American — and returned to Florida in 1944.

There is always the grey area where it’s difficult to tie down immigrants or wanderers to geographies. One such interesting case Kumar dwells on would be that of Nilla Cram Cook, who embraced Hinduism, becoming in-the process, ‘Nilla Nagini Devi’, as soon as she reached Kashmir with her young son, Sirius. She shuttled between Greece, America and India and embraced the arts, lived in Gandhi’s Wardha ashram and corresponding with him, went on protests and lived like a local. Her life mapped in India almost a hundred years ago, reads like that of a free spirit. At a point she was deported living in an abject state and without slippers. Kumar tells us: “Her work according to Sandra Mackey combined ‘remarkable cross-cultural experimentation’ and ‘dazzling entrepreneurship.’”

The author has written of artists, writers, salesmen, traders (there’s a founder/buyer of Tiffany’s), actors, Theosophists, linguists fascinated with Sanskrit, cyclists — one loved the Grand Trunk Road, yet another couple hated it — even a photographer and an indentured Afro-American labourer. Some are missionaries. Under ‘The Medical Missionaries: The Women’s Condition’, she has written of the founders of Vellore Hospital and the first Asian hospital for women and children. Some of them lived through the Revolt of 1857; some through India’s Independence Movement and with varied responses to the historical events they met with.

Kumar has dedicated the book to, “…all the wanderers in my family who left in search of new homes and forgot to write their stories…” Is this an attempt to record the lives of people as yet unrecorded or less recorded? For missing from her essays are famous names like Louis Fischer, Webb Miller — who were better known journalists associated with Gandhi and spent time with him. But there are names like Satyanand Stokes and Earl and Achsah Brewster, who also met Gandhi. Let’s ask the author to tell us more about her book.

What made you think of doing this book? How much time did you devote to it?

These initially began as essays for Scroll; short pieces about 1500-1600 words long. And the beginnings were very organic. I wrote about Edwin Lord Weeks sometime in 2015. But the later pieces, most of them, were part of a series.

I guess I am intrigued by people who cross borders, make new lives for themselves in different lands, and my editors—at Scroll and Speaking Tiger Books—were really very encouraging.

After I’d finished a series of pieces on early South Asians in America, I wanted to look at those who had made the journey in reverse, i.e., early Americans in India, and so the series came about, formally, from December 2021 onward. I began with Thomas Stevens, the adventuring cyclist and moved onto Gertrude Emerson Sen, and then the others. So, for about two years I read and looked up accounts, old newspapers, writings, everything I possibly could; I guess that must mean a considerable amount of research work. Which is always the best thing about a project like this, if I might put it that way.

What kind of research work? Did you read all the books these wanderers had written?

Yes, in effect I did. The books are really old, by which I mean, for example, Bartolomew Burges’ account of his travels in ‘Indostan’ written in the 1780s have been digitized and relatively easy to access. I found several books on Internet Archive, or via the interlibrary loan system that connects libraries in the US (public and university). I looked up old newspapers, old magazine articles – loc.gov, archive.org, newspapers.com, newspaperarchive.com, hathitrust.org and various other sites that preserve such old writings.

You do have a fiction on Mark Twain in India. But in this book, you do not have very well-known names like that of Twain. Why?

Not Twain, but I guess some of the others were well-known, many in their own lifetime. Satyanand Stokes’ name is an easily recognisable still especially in India, and equally familiar is Ida Scudder of the Vellore Medical College, and maybe a few others like Gertrude Sen, and Clara Swain too. I made a deliberate choice of selecting those who had spent a reasonable amount of time in India, at least a year (as in the case of Francis Marion Crawford, the writer, or a few months like the actor, Daniel Bandmann), and not those who were just visiting like Mark Twain or passing through. This made the whole endeavour very interesting. When one has spent some years in a foreign land, like our early Americans in India, one arguably comes to have a different, totally unique perspective. These early Americans who stayed on for a bit were more ‘accommodating’ and more perceptive about a few things, rather than supercilious and cursory.

And it helped that they left behind some written record. John Parker Boyd, the soldier who served the Nizam as well as Holkar in Indore in the early 1800s, left behind a couple of letters of complaint (when he didn’t get his promised reward from the East India Company) and even this sufficed to try and build a complete life.

How do these people thematically link up with each other? Do their lives run into each other at any point?

Yes, I placed them in categories thanks to an invaluable suggestion by Dr Ramachandra Guha, the historian. I’d emailed him and this advice helped give some shape to the book, else there would have been just chapters following each other. And their lives did overlap; several of them, especially from the 1860s onward, did work in the same field, though apart from the medical missionaries, I don’t think they ever met each other – distances were far harder to traverse then, I guess.

What is the purpose of your book? Would it have been a response to some book or event?

I was, and am, interested in people who leave the comforts of home to seek a new life elsewhere, even if only for some years. Travelling, some decades ago, was fraught with risk and uncertainty. I admire all those who did it, whether it was for the love of adventure, or a sense of mission. I wanted to get into their shoes and see how they felt and saw the world then.

Is this because you are a migrant yourself? How do you explain the dedication in your book?

I thought of my father, and his cousins, all of whom grew up in what was once undivided Bengal. Then it became East Pakistan one day and then Bangladesh. Suddenly, borders became lines they could never cross, and they found new borders everywhere, new divisions, and new homes to settle down in. They were forced to learn anew, to always look ahead, and understand the world differently.

When I read these accounts by early travellers, I sort of understood the sense of dislocation, desperation, and sheer determination my father, his cousins felt; maybe all those who leave their homes behind, unsure and uncertain, feel the same way.

You have done a number of non-fiction for children. And also, historical fiction as Aditi Kay. This is a non-fiction for adults or all age groups? Do you feel there is a difference between writing for kids and adults?

I’d think this is a book for someone who has a sense of history, of historical movements, and change, and time periods. A reader with this understanding will, I hope, appreciate this book.

About the latter half of your question, yes of course there is a difference. But a good reader enters the world the writer is creating, freely and fearlessly, and I am not sure if age decides that.

You have written both fiction and non-fiction. Which genre is more to your taste? Elaborate.

I love anything to do with history. Anything that involves research, digging into things, finding out about lives unfairly and unnecessarily forgotten. The past still speaks to us in many ways, and I like finding out these lost voices.

What is your next project? Do you have an upcoming book? Do give us a bit of a brief curtain raiser.

The second in the Maya Barton-Henry Baker series. In this one, Maya has more of a lead role than Henry. It’s set in Bombay in the winter of 1897, and the plague is making things scary and dangerous. In this time bicycles begin mysteriously vanishing… and this is only half the mystery!

We’ll look forward to reading a revival of the characters fromThe Kidnapping of Mark Twain: A Bombay Mystery. Thanks for your time and your wonderful books.

[1] Now part of Kolkata (Calcutta post 2001 ruling)

Click here to read an excerpt from Wanderers, Adventurers, Missionaries: Early Americans in India

(This review and online interview is by Mitali Chakravarty)

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International