All The Shared Experiences Of The Lived World II
[This is the second and concluding part of the conversation between R. Sivakumar and Parvez Kabir on art practice and its history.] ————————————————————- 1. Shiv da, in our last conversation you have told us about the role Santiniketan has in defining your works and thought. Let’s begin this conversation with the opposite idea; on the role your 1997 NGMA curation, ‘Santiniketan: Making of a Contextual Modernism’ had in defining the place of Santiniketan in the history of Modern Indian Art. If I am not wrong, you are the first Art Historian to present Santiniketan as a movement rather than a school. What are the reasons for such a reading? R.S.K.: I had been looking at and studying the work of the Santiniketan masters and thinking about their approach to art since the early 80s. The more I looked at them the more it became clear that the practice of subsuming them under the Bengal School was misleading. This happened because early writers were guided by genealogies of apprenticeship rather than their styles, worldviews, and perspectives on art practice. Although this became clear to me early in my study, I did not put my thoughts together until I was asked to curate an exhibition for the NGMA. It was one of the several exhibitions they had planned to mark the 50th year of independence and one of the very few that actually was realised. It gave me a chance to put my reading to test by presenting it in the form of a curated exhibition rather than as an inadequately illustrated text. Luckily many of the interested viewers responded to it positively and many thought that they had overlooked Santiniketan’s contribution not having seen it in any strength. But it would not be entirely true to say I was the first to present Santiniketan practice as a separate art movement rather than as a sub-group within the Bengal School. Benodebehari and K.G.Subramanyan had at least implicitly argued for such a disjunction. May be I was the first to argue for such a disjunction more directly. Putting the works of the major Santiniketan artists together and presenting their work in fairly large numbers also should have helped the viewers in gaining a clear and comprehensive picture of their achievements and differences. More significantly, having put to rest the 40s and 50s attempt to dock onto internationalist modernism, it perhaps simply came at a time the Indian art scene was more prepared to respond to the kind of art the Santiniketan artists had produced and its underlying perceptions. I am not sure, however, if everyone noticed the distinction I drew between Santiniketan as an art movement and Santiniketan as a school very clearly. There was both a Santiketan movement and a Santiniketan school, but these are two different things. The movement was shaped by the practices of the masters, chiefly Nandalal, Benodebehari, Ramkinkar and Rabindranath. Their art practices were interrelated but did not stylistically converge. They were linked more by concerns and as participants in a discourse to which each contributed in a different manner. They themselves saw this very clearly but many who wrote about them did not. They either plumped for Nandalal and Benodebehari, or for Ramkinkar and Rabindranath; one pair representing a traditionalist position and the other a modernist position. I am not suggesting that there are no differences between them but that they saw themselves as co-authors of an art scene being essayed around shared issues, complementing each other and expanding their concerns and reach rather than at war with each other. Nandalal acknowledged Benodebehari and Ramkinkar as artists of the first order among his students; they in turn saw him as a seminal mentor. Rabindranath too valued Nandalal’s evaluation of his work and declared when his paintings were well received in the West that the art of Santiniketan was getting recognized. Their regard for each other should not be mistaken as mere courtesy shown towards each other as denizens of a civilized community. They were at least as clever as those of us who see them as divided into conservatives and moderns and were not blind to the differences between them. They saw each other as necessary fellow travellers who collectively enriched the scene, and believed that a tradition is built upon differential evolution rather on unmitigated sameness. A movement always allows more latitude than a school. The Renaissance allowed Giotto and Cimabue, Masaccio and Fra Angelico, Botticelli and Piero della Francesca, and Leonardo, and Michelangelo and Raphael and Titian to co-exist and define a trajectory guided by a community of shared but variable values. A school on the other hand lasts only as long as similarities count more than shifts. One is founded on ideas and is held together by evolution; the other by the specificities of studio practices and beaks down as soon as these change. Thus the schools of Perugino and early Raphael, Giorgione and early Titian lasted only as long as Raphael and Titian upheld the studio practices of their masters. A movement is based on engagement with ideas or issues; a school is based on the perpetuation of a style. Santiniketan like the Renaissance was a movement with schools within it. But unlike in the Renaissance the issues that exercised them were not primarily aesthetic or limited to the issue of art language though these were very important. They were more exercised about the relation of art to cultural antecedents and of art to its time and place, to its historical and ecological location. While in the Renaissance the artists subsumed their other interests to issues of language in Santiniketan it was the opposite. This perhaps had much to do with the different historical contexts within which they evolved. Nandalal was the leader of both a movement and a school. And how the two interweaved is something that waits to be studied. And in that sense the larger history of Santiniketan remains to be