ANGELO DA FONSECA (1902-1967): HIS PLACE IN INDIA'S MODERN ART
The divide between India's east and west has been crucial in the formation of its modern art, as it has been critical in its Westernization: Westernization and modernity go together. The Westernization of India was initiated, in the 16th century, by the Portuguese in Goa on its west coast, in a burst of superhuman energy, and was completed, with more resources and greater prudence, in the 18th century, by the British in Bengal in the east. Westernization in Goa remained confined to its tiny territory; Westernization in Bengal spilled over its periphery and spread over much of South Asia. Angelo da Fonseca stands in the middle of this east-west divide, and bridges it. Aided by the Portuguese and their European colleagues, the natives of Goa became the first non-Westerners to adopt Western civilization (1510): they were followed by Mexicans (1519), Colombians (1525) and Peruvians (1532) in America. Western civilization stands out from the others by its greater curiosity and openness, its propensity to criticize its own postulates and established norms, and its restless desire to experiment in new things. Today all the lands of Asia and Africa have become Westernized, and have availed themselves of European technology, political systems, literary genres and forms of music, architecture and the visual arts. First among non-Westerners, Goans adopted Western political institutions, like the parliamentary republic, independent nationhood (predicated on cultural identity), anti-colonial insurgence, and political party. They took over scientific disciplines, like botany, medicine, linguistics, and history, as they were practiced in the West. They pioneered in writing in Western languages, and in Western literary genres. They embraced Western music, Western architecture, religious and domestic, and painting. Architecture in Goa reached heights of excellence, but not painting. From the start and for long Goan painters remained fixated on the works of the Flemish Renaissance. (One of these Goans, shaped by the Portuguese impact, was Angelo da Fonseca. Though Westernized, he yearned to go back to his oriental past.) As noted, Bengal was Westernized, successfully, by the British. As Bengal waxed, Goa waned; in the 19th cent. It reached the nadir of its fortunes. Yet all was not lost for India's west. To the north of Goa was a group of islands - under Portuguese rule but transferred to the British - known as Bombay. This group developed into a metropolis that boasted being the first city in India: urbs prima in Indis. It embodied the Westernization that had been initiated in Goa earlier and was its mighty new avatar. By the 19th century the Bombay-Bengal dichotomy had been fixed, and was to condition the rise of modern Indian art. Then another dichotomy surfaced. Indigenous Indian painting had been decorative and flat, executed with water-based mediums: the Western impact had introduced three-dimensional realism (also known as academic illusionism) executed in oils. (Realism in oils was considered as typical of the West and a sign of its superiority, but Western self-criticism, adept at critiquing its own established norms, was to question this and to seek to reverse it.) While both tendencies, realist and indigenist, affected both Bombay and Bengal, Bombay inclined to the former and Bengal to the latter. Bombay's preference for realism was reflected in Angelo da Fonseca's Goan contemporary, Angela Trindade (1909-1980). In the battle between the two (good) "angels," Angelo and Angela (which could never have taken place in heaven) the illusionist angel was outmatched by the indigenist one. Reacting to the imposition of illusionism in the art schools the indigenist (or orientalist) revival - the movement to create a nationalistic art not imitative of Europe but continuous with India's past - was begun under Western mentors. In 1819 the murals of Ajanta, a cluster of 5th century Buddhist rock-cut monasteries in the Deccan, hidden in the jungle for centuries, were re-discovered by a British army officer. Ajanta soon became a model for all Indian artists to imitate. At about the same time, there was a return to mediums, like tempera, current in Europe before the prevalence of oil, in the Tempera Revival championed by Joseph Southall (1861-1944) and Christiana Herringham (1852-1829), a muralist who came to India to study the murals of Ajanta. E. B. Havell (1861-1934), director of the Government School of Art in Calcutta, encouraged Indian students to develop a truly Indian art inspired by the creations of the past. One of Havell's students was Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1966), the archpriest of orientalism, and the founder of the orientalizing Bengal School. A leading member of the School was Nandalal Bose (1882-1966), pupil of Abanindranath and teacher of Angelo da Fonseca. Fonseca, avid indigenist, who belonged to the area of Bombay's influence (as did the realist Angela Trindade) crossed over to the more nationalistic Bengal and became the disciple of Nandalal, so assuring Bengal's victory; Angela continued unperturbed in her academic ways, immured in Bombay's realist fortress. In Nandalal the Bengal school reached its climax; through his intervention in the contest between Bombay and Bengal, Bengal was victorious. The weapon that assured his success was an eclectic vocabulary - a conflation of forms and techniques from every source in the subcontinent, beginning with the fifth century murals of Ajanta, and continuing with the palm-leaf and paper manuscripts and the cloth paintings of Tibet, Nepal, Orissa, Rajasthan and Bengal, even the murals of Sigiriya in Ceylon: nothing "indigenous" or "oriental" was excluded, not even Persian and Mughal and Chinese and Japanese paintings. Only European realism was taboo. This panoply arrayed against the West suited Fonseca admirably in his efforts to create a wholly indigenist Christian iconography. This iconography was the one dimension lacking to Nandalal's indigenist universalism, and it was the dimension that Fonseca provided. Christian iconography in the 19th century was influenced by what is known as the "Saint-Sulpice art," after a Parisian church of that name. The most characteristic features of this art were mass-produced, plaster-cast and terracotta statues, with saccharine and mindless expressions, probably intended to represent religious ecstasy. Pain and suffering were excluded, at least from the saints and Virgins. They were invariably healthy and sexless. However, Christian iconography of any kind had little interest for Fonseca's largely Hindu audience, and so was evidently fatal to his reputation. There were of course Hindu painters, like Jaimini Roy (1887-1974), who occasionally treated Christian subjects, but they were, as he said, "remote from his own life" and that he depicted them "to show that the human and the divine could be combined only through symbols." Roy was not interested in the more arcane aspects of the Christian icon; his Christian subjects were iconically simple: the Last Supper and the ever popular Madonna and Child. The Madonna, with or without Child, was Fonseca's favorite theme. With the Child she was pictured on a mat, on a sofa, enthroned, with lamp and chalice, with two lamps, and three vases... presumably symbols of the Trinity and of Christ's two natures, divine and human. Without the Child she was portrayed as the Immaculate Conception (preserved from sin, standing on a globe and trampling on Satan); in her childhood, accompanying her mother Anne to the Temple for her consecration; at the moment of her Annunciation, when the Angel Gabriel announced to her that she was chosen to be mother of the Savior; and as Co-Redemptrix, at the foot of the Cross, co-operating with Christ in the salvation of mankind. All subjects which would have baffled Hindu spectators. They would, however, have been likely amused by the picture of Mary playing the sitar, the long-necked Indian lute with movable frets. (They would have been intrigued by Fonseca's genre paintings of Goan life, like that of a girl returning from the well.) From the time of the Enlightenment, Western painters had generally lost interest in iconography, and had immersed themselves in styles and movements with definite formal objectives, like Impressionism and Cubism; Indian painters followed their example, but continued to be engrossed in their own rich mythology: the pictorially inexhaustible stories of Rama and Krishna, of Shiva and Parvati, of the Mahabharata wars - themes for which Fonseca displayed little or no curiosity. Without them one could not expect to be endeared to an Indian audience. Today, however, the content of a painting is considered less important than the manner in which it is presented, and in the aesthetic theories that back such a presentation. Originating in the primal hub of Westernization, Goa, and resisting the allure of its Westernizing successor Bombay, the center of illusionist painting, Fonseca, attracted by the universalizing indigenism of the Bengal School, though himself of the Bombay area of influence, capitulated to the style of that School and added his own contribution of an Indianized Christian iconography. In other words, Fonseca's originality of indigenist form, derived from his teacher Nandalal, combined with his own original indigenist Christian iconography, mark him as an all-India figure straddling the two schools, Bombay and Bengal.
