All The Shared Experiences Of The Lived World
[R. Siva Kumar is one of the most revered living historians of Modern Indian Art. A singular authority on the Santiniketan School and its tradition, Siva Kumar is also widely known for his works on living masters like K.G.Subramanyan, A.Ramachandran, K.S. Radhakrishnan and Jogen Chowdhury. Parvez Kabir was one of the finest young art historians of contemporary India and a former student of Siva Kumar–here, in conversation with him on his life and work. This is one of Kabir’s rare and unpublished conversations before he breathed his last this October in rather tragic circumstances. HUG publishes the first of the two-part interview.] ——————————————— Parvez Kabir: Shiv da, it is indeed an honour to be able to interview you on your works. Please allow me to begin with the commonest of all questions. When and how did you decide to do Art History? R. Siva kumar: I decided to do art history only at the end of my second year at Kala Bhavana, which is to say at the end of the foundation course when we were required to choose an area of specialization. Like others in my class I had come to Santiniketan with the idea of studying painting and not art history. I was drawn to painting while I was at school and had wanted to become a professional painter. So it was more by accident or force of circumstance rather than design that I opted for art history when the time came to choose. And how did this happen? During my first two years at Kala Bhavana I did enough to be seen as a stubborn and intractable student by most of my teachers. Paradoxically this happened because I was bent on charting an individual course and not because of any attempt to offend or revolt per se. But by the end of the second year my reputation was such I feared losing my seat. Having joined the art college against the advice of my mother who believed I was inviting starvation upon my self by seeking to be an artist I was eager to keep my seat in Kala Bhavana. And I thought the only way to ensure this was to take shelter under art history since my teachers there were generally more accommodative and convinced about the seriousness of my interest in art. However, my efforts to become an artist did not end with this. I actually tried to do my masters in painting at Baroda. But this did not materialize. Prof, Ratan Parimoo who was the dean then was more interested in seeing me join the art history department. My itch to paint subsided gradually only after I became a fulltime teacher of art history. P.K: You studied in Santiniketan in the late seventies. How was the academic situation back in those days? We know that Kala Bhavana always valued the study of Art History, but it rather conceived the subject as a supplement to the practice of Art. Was the department specializedenough in your student days? What kind of a scholarship did it initiate you in? R.S.K: Yes, that is right it began that way. Rabindranath wanted artists to be informed so that they would not be merely skilled professionals but artists capable of making informed choices as creative men with theoretical moorings. So while art was discussed and an art historian like Stella Kramrisch was invited to deliver lectures, art history did not become a separate discipline until much later. Even when we were students it was more or less the same, although there was a department by then and the teaching of art history was more formalized than in the early days. In my year there were two students, the other being Anil Singh my classmate from Manipur who did not, however, enroll for masters. And before us the Department had only three students. So the department was still very loosely organized and was still in a very nascent state. It was not specialized by present day standards, but this had its advantages. It didn’t initiate us into anything much except the very basics, and we were not taken on a high-powered conducted tour through art historical scholarship but left free to ramble and explore. P.K: Was it more beneficial as a matter of irony? It is sometimes said that certain students are better helped if they are left on their own. R.S.K: I at least benefited from the situation; because it gave me time to access Visva Bharati’s many libraries and other informal sources of knowledge it offered. Santiniketan was then home to several scholars and its informal milieu allowed one to take benefit of their presence. There were scholars like Sisir Kumar Ghose, Asin Das Gupta, Kalidas Bhattacharya and Anjan Shukla on the campus and it was not difficult to rub shoulders with them if one wanted. Visiting scholars also came from outside, either to participate in symposiums or to deliver lectures. That among them were Susanne Langer, Max Black, Richard Wollheim, P.F. Strawson, J. P. Mohanty, Amartya Sen, A.L. Basham, Shambu Mitra, Richard Gombrich, K.N. Raj, D.C. Sirkar, Kamleshwar Bhattacharya, Sarasai Kumar Saraswati, and Richard Soloman etc. would give you a sense of the range and quality of the intellectual stimulus that was on offer. May be this was small compared the fare on offer in large urban centres today but being a small community the interaction was often more intimate. And combined with the slow pace of life it gave one time to ruminate and internalize. Interactions with a few fellow students from other departments and young staff members of the university supplemented and amplified these exposures further. My teachers were thankfully liberal and as I mentioned they allowed us a fair amount of intellectual freewheeling. This allowed me to take some interest in related fields like literature, philosophy and psychology. P.K: It is quite curious to see a certain similarity between your scholarship and Kala Bhavana’s original pedagogic aims. We know that Kala Bhavana always pursued an all-round