A DOYEN OF INDIAN PAINTING
The Bengal Renaissance occurred during the nineteenth and
early twentieth century in undivided India, an India which was then under the
British rule. During this time, Bengal had witnessed a great intellectual
awakening by way of trying to abolish prevalent social orthodoxies. It was a
quest of the spirit as well as of the mind to seek newer frontiers. In the
arts, an avant-garde movement came into existence and was named the ‘Bengal
School of Painting’. Abanindranath Tagore, nephew of the poet and Nobel
Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, along with his disciples, led this movement which
was later supported by British arts administrators like E.B.Havell, who had
been the principal of the Government College of Art, Calcutta since 1896.
Asit Kumar Haldar ( 1890- 1964) can rightly be regarded as
the doyen of the ‘Bengal School of Art’ . Haldar was born at Jorasanko ( the
ancestral home of the Tagores) and he shared a lineage with the Tagores because
Haldar’s maternal grandmother was the sister of Rabindranath Tagore. The
Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata along with the Allahabad Museum, Lucknow , had
put together a month-long exhibition of samples from the master’s oeuvre at the
Portrait Gallery of the Hall. Entitled “Orientalism Revisited : The Creative World of Asit Kumar Haldar” ,
the show was curated by Rajesh Purohit, Director, Allahabad Museum. It would be
worthwhile to add a note here : in 1909, Haldar along with fellow students of
Abanindranath Tagore like Nandalal Bose, was invited by Lady Christina
Herringham, a British expert on mural technique to copy the cave paintings at
Ajanta. So from 1909-11, Haldar had been at the Ajanta Caves , documenting
paintings and sculptures described to be ‘the finest surviving examples of
Indian art, particularly painting’. His sole and sincere objectives in this
ambitious project were to bring ‘cave art’ to a wider Indian audience.
The idea of narrating a story through images, ( the Ajanta
Cave paintings are masterpieces of Buddhist religious art with figures of the
Buddha and depictions of the Jataka tales) proved to be a revelation to the
artist residing in Haldar and this later had influenced his own distinctive
style. The primary emphasis of the Bengal School of Painting lay on traditional
intricate detailed work, and a preponderance of literary and mythological
themes. These had a profound impact on Haldar’s style of painting and the
latter drew extensively on poetic metaphors and allegories. Haldar was himself
a budding poet throughout his lifetime. He had translated Kalidasa’s Meghadoota ( “Cloud Messenger”) and Ritusamhara ( “Cycle of the Seasons”)
into Bengali, his vernacular, from the ancient Sanskrit language. The
exhibition under review had iconic examples of the aesthetic vision of the
artist residing within the personage called Asit Kumar Haldar.
There were as many as thirty works on display at the
exhibition. These were diverse in themes, in structures , in techniques as well
as in moods. Many of the works were done in water colour, some using both
pencil and water colour. Poster colour on paper were also used to depict the
artist’s vision. There was a work where the Hindu emperor Chandragupta Maurya
is depicted , where he meets the Greek ambassador Megasthenes. The painting is
elaborate and is a detailed work. Those were the days when giving titles to
one’s work hadn’t become prevalent . Even it were so, the titles have been lost
to Time. Hence art historians have later added ‘titles’ wherever appropriate
and have , thereby, catalogued them according to their dates of composition. There
were a few ‘symbolic ‘ paintings , the forerunner of modern abstract Indian
art, where two or more subjects are juxtaposed against each other and the
viewer has to decipher the link between the them.
As one prepared to depart the exhibition, one got struck by
the portrait of Asit Kumar Haldar done by another stalwart of the Bengal
School, Lalit Mohan Sen, done with tempera on board. It showed a pensive artist
, holding his quill . Through the show , the viewer realised the endeavour of
the artist to balance physical attributes in magnitude with the subject matter.
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