Review by Peter Heehs of book on Abanindranath Tagore by Debashish Banerji
3
Left Coast Ekphrasis Peter Heehs engages with Debashish Bane rji's exploration of Abanindranath Tagore's enthusiasms and adventures, life and career. Debashish Banerji. The Alternate NatioIl of AbaniJJdranath Tagore. Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi . 2010. Rs. 995 . RECENT WORK ON THE BENGAL SCHOOL AND ITS FOUNDING artist, Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951), has been concerned with its relation to Indian nationalism. Did the school offer a real alternative to imported styles and methods, as Partha Mitter maintains in Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850-1922 (1994)? Or was it distinguished from Western modes more by ideology than in actuality, as argued by Tapati Guha-Thakurta in The Making of a New 'Indian ' Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal (1992)? Debashish Banerji, in his impressive new study The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore, finds room for a more complex view. He presents Abanindranath neither as nationalist hero nor Orientalist comprador but rather a free agent engaged in varied cultural exchange. Banerji, a University of California (Los Angeles)-trained academic, is a great- grandson of Abanindranath Tagore. Both facts are relevant to an understanding of his approach. At the knee of his maternal grandmother, he listened to fami ly anecdotes and absorbed something of the culture of old Kolkata. At UCLA, he mastered the elements of art history and was exposed to the pleasures and perils of French theory. When he chose to make his illustrious forbear the subject of his book, he was able to infuse the aridities of postmodernism with the clarity and warmth of personal narrative. Writers on art history and appreciation use narrative even when they claim to stand above mere subjectivity in a world of structural certainty. Ekphrasis, the verbal description of works of art, has been an essential part of art criticism since antiquity. It remains so today, although traditional standards of connoisseurship and formal analysis have been replaced, especially in Western universities, by semiotic and other sorts of criticism that treat the artwork as a 'text' to be deciphered. Steeped in the writings of Continental masters such as Bourdieu, Foucault and Heidegger, Banerji is no slouch when it comes to textual criticism, but he also has a keen artistic eye, and a certain laidbackness more characteristic of the 'Left Coast' (California) than the Left Bank of the Seine. When he brings this hybrid background to bear on Abanindranath's work, the results are often remarkable. In each of the five chapters that make up the body of his book, Banerji couples 24 ART India The Art News Magazine of India [September 2010 Volume XV Issue II ]
Transcript
Left Coast Ekphrasis Peter Heehs engages with Debashish Banerji's exploration of Abanindranath Tagore's enthusiasms and adventures, life and career.
Debashish Banerji. The Alternate NatioIl of AbaniJJdranath Tagore. Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi. 2010. Rs. 995 .
RECENT WORK ON THE BENGAL SCHOOL AND ITS FOUNDING artist, Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951), has been concerned with its relation to Indian nationalism. Did the school offer a real alternative to imported styles and methods, as Partha Mitter maintains in Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850-1922 (1994)? Or was it distinguished from Western modes more by ideology than in actuality, as argued by Tapati Guha-Thakurta in The Making of a New 'Indian ' Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal (1992)? Debashish Banerji, in his impressive new study The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore, finds room for a more complex view. He presents Abanindranath neither as nationalist hero nor Orientalist comprador but rather a free agent engaged in varied cultural exchange.
Banerji, a University of California (Los Angeles)-trained academic, is a greatgrandson of Abanindranath Tagore. Both facts are relevant to an understanding of his approach. At the knee of his maternal grandmother, he listened to family anecdotes and absorbed something of the culture of old Kolkata. At UCLA, he mastered the elements of art history and was exposed to the pleasures and perils of French theory. When he chose to make his illustrious forbear the subject of his book, he was able to infuse the aridities of postmodernism with the clarity and warmth of personal narrative.
Writers on art history and appreciation use narrative even when they claim to stand above mere subjectivity in a world of structural certainty. Ekphrasis, the verbal description of works of art, has been an essential part of art criticism since antiquity. It remains so today, although traditional standards of connoisseurship and formal analysis have been replaced, especially in Western universities, by semiotic and other sorts of criticism that treat the artwork as a 'text' to be deciphered. Steeped in the writings of Continental masters such as Bourdieu, Foucault and Heidegger, Banerji is no slouch when it comes to textual criticism, but he also has a keen artistic eye, and a certain laidbackness more characteristic of the 'Left Coast' (California) than the Left Bank of the Seine. When he brings this hybrid background to bear on Abanindranath's work, the results are often remarkable.
In each of the five chapters that make up the body of his book, Banerji couples
24 ART India The Art News Magazine of India [September 2010 Volume XV Issue II]
a particular group of paintings with a particular area of theoretical lore. In Chapter 1, he looks at the milieu in which Abanindranath came of age and, more broadly, at the reach of community and nation in a modernizing India. The Tagore family's status as "ourcaste" (Pirali) Brahmins "freed them ro pursue lifestyles and expressions of creative interpretation ... across sectarian borders." Banerji's visual focus in this chapter is Abanindranath's Krishna Lila paintings. He shows how the austere Bhabollasa "manages through this understatement ro suggest more than it says," giving his readers just enough help (by translating the pseudo-Persian Bengali script, for example) to let them arrive at their own appreciation of this work.
In Chapter 2, Banerji takes up the now familiar Orientalist-Nationalist debate, discussing Abanindranath's relationship with E.B. Havell and Okakura Kakuzo, but insisting that the artist's vision had other roots as well. This is evident in Abanindranath's choice of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as a subject for illustration during the ultra-nationalistic Swadeshi years.
Abanindranath Tagore. Building of the Taj. 1901. SOURCE: RABINDRA BHARATI SOCIETY, KOLKATA.
[Book Review]
Chapter 3 is headed 'Regional Subalternity' and consists of Banerji 's discussion of Abanindranath's use of popular motifs and practices, such as vernacular drama. The author's reading of Rati Vilap in the Actors of Bengal series is particularly satisfYing. His closely observed details of colour, form and bhava come together to bring this painting to life without the need of help from a Bakhtin or a Bhabha.
Banerji's skill as an interpreter of Abanindranath's paintings is displayed best in Chapter 4, which deals with the painter as narrator. Taking from the Arabian Nights the stories of two famous storytellers, Scheherazade and Sindbad the Sailor, Abanindranath made them the subjects of complex paintings of considerable beauty and significance. Leading us through the signs and suggestions of Sindbad's life, Banerji proves himself to be a talented storyteller himself - something that those who have attended his public presentations already know.
ART India The Art News Magazine of India ISeptember 2010 Volume XV Issue III 25
The last chapter of the book deals with works of minor interesc: Abanindranath's family portraits and the found-wood toys that he made during the last decade of his life. Banerji enlivens his account with oral history material provided by his mother, but does not situate the artist's late work biographically or historically. Readers are left to speculate that Abanindranath suffered some sort of artistic burn-out. Banerji, who would be in a good position to say something about this, doesn't go into the question very deeply. Was it a strictly personal decision, or was it, in some way, related to the declining fortunes of the Bengal School? After reigning throughout India during the '20s and early '30s, the school began to be seen as an established orthodoxy against which younger artists had to rebel. Paritosh Sen, who studied painting under Abanindranath's student D.P. Roy Chowdhury, became disiLlusioned befo re the end of the 1930s. A few years later, EN. Souza found nothing of interest in the Bengal
School's productions, and by the late 1950s, Anjolie Ela Menon was so turned off by the "sickly sweet bathos" of its landscapes that she no longer could look on the countryside of Bengal without revulsion. Such swings are, of course, normal parts of artistic evolution, and a more recent turn has brought Abanindranath and his school back into favour in some quarters. These developments lie beyond the scope of Banerji's book, but he certainly could provide some interesting commentary on them if he ever turned his mind in that direction.
Sage India should be congratulated not just for publishing Banerji's book but also for enriching it with thirry-fWo pages of full-colout plates. These make it possible for readers to follow the author's innovative readings in all their intricate detail.
26 ART India The Art News Magazine of India [September 2010 Volume XV Issue III
