Goan Modernism
By Vivek Menezes
THE study of Modernism is in total upheaval all over the world. In the
past decade, the subject has become particularly fraught with
controversy and debate. A new generation of scholars has begun to
contest even the most basic assumptions that underlie the way modernism
has been framed, studied and discussed to this point. It's now becoming
increasingly clear that we are going to see an entirely new approach and
understanding of the subject replace the inadequate definitions of the past.
All this has implications for Indian art's understanding of its own
history, and particularly for Goa. As the old hierarchies are being
shaken up, our remarkable, unquestionably great legacy of modern art is
becoming recognized for its global and historical significance.
The prevailing problem has been that - right until the present day -
modernism has been treated as a walled-off European invention, a set of
very specific cultural reactions against realism and tradition that took
place in Western Europe and the United States in concert with, and as a
result of, the far-reaching social and cultural changes that took place
roughly between 1850 and the middle of the 20th century. The core
sentiment of the movement might best be boiled down to Ezra Pound's
famous exhortation, 'Make it new!' Thus, the artists and writers
celebrated as exemplars of modernism consistently embraced disruption,
discontinuity, and even dissonance, as crucial aesthetic values and choices.
The issues created by the unabashed, indeed aggressive Eurocentrism of
almost all scholarship and writing on modernism has been economically
described by Rupert Richard Arrowsmith, the brilliant young art
historian, in Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African and Pacific Art
and the London Avant-Garde (OUP, 2010), a slim, volume of acute,
terrifically researched essays that has levelled a devastating blow
against many of the basic assumptions that bedevil contemporary
understanding of the subject.
He writes, '[H]istories of the period have been written, until very
recently, by scholars with little or no knowledge of culture provinces
other than their own, resulting in a situation where the dots of
apparently discrete geographical regions are not adequately connected by
lines of influence. In the western part of the Eurasian continent, and
in the United States, this situation has led to a distorted view of
modernism as essentially a European invention, with comparable movements
on other parts of the globe characterized as imitative of 'advanced' art
and literature in Europe, or - paradoxically - as reactionary and
propagandist. The possibility of multi-directional, transnational
exchange in aesthetic concepts, art-historical knowledge, and literary
and artistic technique is thus discounted, played down, or at best
acknowledged in tentative and misleading ways.'
A former Buddhist monk who has spent years in Asia, Arrowsmith has
quickly become an unpopular, even 'controversial' art historian in the
academies of the West, because he has carefully connected previously
unperceived dots to reveal the utter bankruptcy of generations of
Eurocentric scholarship. Step-by-step, with startling insight, he has
demonstrated how art and aesthetics from around the world had a
profound, and ultimately crucial role in the development of many
acknowledged modernist masterpieces. It is a claim that would have
seemed hysterically audacious just a decade ago. But the evidence has
been carefully marshalled, and no honest observer can deny the obvious.
While art history has long acknowledged that Picasso's monumental
modernist icon 'Les Demoiselles D'Avignon' contains images copied from
African masks (among other things), Arrowsmith's findings now demand
that textbooks be revised to reflect that Jacob Epstein's most important
sculptures were almost entirely derived from his favourites in the
Indian, Assyrian and African collections of the British Museum, and that
Ezra Pound's pioneering modernist breakthroughs are actually 'adapted
Japanese conventions, Korean imagery and Korean aesthetics' gleaned from
the library of the same institution. There are many other examples in
the same vein.
Very recently, Arrowsmith spent a couple of weeks in Goa and Mumbai,
which will soon feature at the centre of his next book, which is being
built around a conclusion that I believe will set the agenda for coming
generations of scholarship. He writes that it is now obvious that,
'Modernism actually evolved simultaneously, and with equivalent
historical impact, in cities from one end of the Eurasian continent to
the other.'
It is a sentiment that finds an echo in the startled, but creditably
open-minded reaction of the influential art critic of the New York
Times, Holland Cotter, after he first encountered the work of Nandalal
Bose in a groundbreaking retrospective held in Philadelphia in 2008.
Cotter did not mince his words when he wrote, '[E]very Museum of Modern
Art in the United States and Europe should be required, in the spirit of
truth in advertising, to change its name to Museum of Western Modernism
until it has earned the right to do otherwise.'
But even as the global narrative of Modernism is being questioned,
challenged and corrected on a vast and fundamental scale, we face a very
similar problem right here in India, where the so-called Bengal
Renaissance has become enshrined at the centre of an utterly flawed
narrative of Indian modernism, which has nonetheless become cherished
gospel in Indian art history since 1947.
Thus we have Partha Mitter's supposedly authoritative, much-feted
landmark book on the topic, The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists
and the Avant Garde, premised on grand proclamations like '[G]lobal
modernity as such arrived in India with the consolidation of the British
Empire in the 19th century,' and claims like it was Bombay and Calcutta
which were 'the two cosmopolitan cities in India….which acted as the
locus of colonial encounters'. In this, as happens depressingly often
whenever India is presumed to be spoken about as a single entity, the
West coast of India is left conspicuously absent from the reckoning. The
history and culture of the ancient entrepots of the Konkan and Malabar
coasts somehow remain an inconvenient truth.
In fact it should be entirely obvious to Mitter - indeed to any
open-minded reader of history - that the first truly global city in
India was actually in Goa, and that same city was also the locus of the
most culturally significant colonial encounter in Indian history. 50
long years after Goa largely willingly joined the Indian Union, after
five long decades of stellar Goan contribution to the rest of the
country, it is frankly shameful that these simple historical facts are
consistently ignored and glossed over by even the worthiest luminaries
of the Indian intelligentsia.
So we must reprise; at the turn of the 16th century, Goa was arguably
the richest few square kilometres in the world, the first European
colony in Asia, and the greatest trading crossroads between East and
West that the world had ever seen.
The Portuguese then dominated the entire arc of the Indian ocean, from
Malacca to Lanka to Aden. As a result of this unprecedented dominance,
the riverside port now called Old Goa mushroomed rapidly, and became the
locus of extraordinary exchange. The first printing press in Asia
started functioning in Goa. The first printed grammar of any Indian
language is in Konkani. The first public library in Asia, and the first
medical college in the continent were there too - Occidental medicine
was introduced across the continent all the way to Japan by doctors from
Goa.
It is important to note that Old Goa was not only the centre of power
for the entire Portuguese maritime empire, but also the administrative
centre of the entire Asian archdiocese of the Catholic Church in the era
of its greatest expansion in the continent. Monks, priests and nuns from
across Europe and Asia congregated in Old Goa. To suit this status, the
largest churches in Asia were built in Goa then - Se Cathedral and
Santana de Talaulim, as well as the largest convent in the continent,
Sta. Monica. These buildings still remain the largest in the continent,
even four centuries later, and it is also illustrative to note that they
are also still larger than any built in Portugal itself in that era.
Very soon, Goa became connected to Brazil and other parts of South
America by regular ship's circuit, opening up a transfer of ideas, flora
and fauna that completely rewrote the culture and society of the
subcontinent - chillies, potatoes, corn, guavas, chickoos and myriad
other food and plant products entered India for the first time. The diet
of the subcontinent would change permanently as a result - can anyone
imagine Indian food without chillies today?
Even more disruptively (and unlike the British), the Portuguese
conquistadores were motivated by religious zeal almost as much as the
lure of vast profits. Thus, the first coerced mass conversions to
Christianity in Asian history also took place in Goa. And as the
Portuguese writ extended beyond the port city to Bardez and Salcete (aka
Velhas Conquistas), so did the church; the choice to convert essentially
delivered at the point of a sword.
To become Catholic was to enjoy considerable advantages over Hindu
subjects of the Estado da India, but it also meant the brutally complete
severing of all ties to the original family and community mores. New
Brahmin converts were made to ritually eat beef, for example, in order
to make them permanently profane to their families. The result is that
the Goan was globalized, placed away from tradition, and in contact with
the whole world, in a manner that simply didn't happen anywhere else in
India for at least another 100 years.
Thus, everything that Partha Mitter claims happened first in Bombay and
Calcutta - thus creating a 'climate for modernism' - actually took place
in Goa long before the British even showed up in India. It's only
suitable irony that it was Thomas Stephens (1549-1619), the English
Jesuit who wrote that first printed grammar, whose letters home about
the astounding fortunes to be made in Goa first drew the attention of
the group of London businessmen, who eventually established The East
India Company.
It is of course true that Goa did not last long at the centre of the
Indian Ocean trade routes, and it took only a century for the Portuguese
to become reduced to irrelevance by the Dutch and the British.
Certainly, by the time that Calcutta and Bombay were starting to emerge
as international ports, Goa's trading heyday had long since faded. Its
economy slumped to stagnation, and the main export had long since become
human resources. From the 18th century on, already self-confident moving
between and dealing with both East and West, Goans fanned out across the
subcontinent to find work in the British and Portuguese colonial
possessions in the subcontinent, the Gulf and East Africa.
When Bombay, Karachi, Rangoon and Nairobi were built, quite often it was
Goans who did the building and administering. Their prosperity abroad
fuelled a new assertiveness at home. Thus, even as Calcutta and Bombay
were still to come into their own, Goan culture was experiencing its own
renaissance - a newly self-confident, confluential and unique
architecture, cuisine, music and literature flowered into being.
Consistently misunderstood and mislabelled, this cultural expression of
the Goans draws on myriad sources, but is much more than the sum of its
parts. It could only have emerged after a culture had experienced and
absorbed myriad eastern and western culture, aesthetics, manners and
mores over a long period of time. It is simply true that these
conditions occurred in Goa before any other part of the subcontinent. It
is time Indian historians acknowledge this is actually where the
modernist impulse in India emerges to daylight for the first time.
In his widely influential book, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, the
historian Peter Gay lays down two general rules to define the actions
and motivations of modernists. They are, 'first, the lure of heresy that
impelled their actions as they confronted conventional sensibilities;
and second, a commitment to a principled self-scrutiny.' These are
unconventional guidelines, but they ring true. Extrapolated to Indian
art history, we can certainly see that the Bengal Renaissance soundly
qualifies. But then, so does the art, literature, and music of Goa,
whose development occurred earlier.
In attempting to correct the record, it is not my intention to denigrate
the very real breakthroughs that occurred in Calcutta and Shantiniketan.
And in fact, the debate about which modernism came first isn't terribly
interesting compared to the more fundamental question of significance,
of what Indian art merits recognition for its global significance in the
history of modernism.
One thing is clear: there is no doubt that Indian art history became
unconscionably skewed after 1947 to privilege Bengal, probably for
vague, misguidedly nationalistic reasons. Previously, indeed right into
the 20th century, no artist or observer of the times had any doubt that
the 'Bombay School' offered at least an equal counterpoint to Calcutta
and Shantiniketan. But there is another part of this story which is
considerably less known. That is, even in the Bombay School, it was
Goans who led the way.
'There used to be a healthy feud between Bombay and Calcutta Art
Schools. Each school was rejecting the other as 'western' and at the
same time proclaiming itself Indian. Actually both followed the European
as well as Indian traditions and techniques.' - P.T. Reddy
After 1850, Bombay boomed rapidly into a great metropolis on the back of
the opium trade with China. It was an age of great philanthropy by the
newly-minted opium millionaires. This is when the Sir JJ School of Art
came into being, intended to become the foremost art college in India.
As with all European-derived education in India in general, Goans were
disproportionately represented right from the beginning. While precise
numbers are unavailable, it is illustrative to note that four out of the
eight students who comprised the first class of graduates from Grant
Medical College (which also came into being at the same time after a
gift from Jeejebhoy) were Goans, including Bhau Daji Lad, now hailed as
a pioneer of modern Bombay. Certainly, by 1870, the director of the JJ
School was already proudly boasting about the facility of his 'Goanese'
students.
Still decades before Shantiniketan's art school gained prominence, the
best 'native' JJ School artists now began to paint their own realities
with ever-increasing fluency and mastery. The exemplar was Antonio
Xavier Trindade, a migrant from Goa who had moved swiftly from tinting
photographs for Raja Deen Dayal to studying at the art school, and then
became the JJ's first Indian faculty member. Known for his superb,
intimate portraits of the high and mighty, Trindade constantly
experimented on the side with more impressionistic techniques and
unconventional subjects. If this is not Indian modernism (I think it is)
it must at least be acknowledged as its first impulse in India. Thus the
narrative arc of Indian modernism has to start with Trindade.
Perhaps more important than Trindade himself is the case of Angelo da
Fonseca, a spectacularly talented aristocratic Goan who, fired by
nationalism, left the Grant Medical College to become an artist in 1929.
He rejected JJ as being too colonial, and instead headed across
Shantiniketan to learn from the Tagores and Nandalal Bose. He was a
prized student, and left Bengal with great acclaim and a lot of hope. It
was his intention to create an Indian iconography for the Catholic
Church, firmly grounded in native realities. But these innovations -
Madonnas in saris, Infant Jesuses which look like Bal Krishna - were met
with severe opprobrium in Goa - and he was consistently rejected by his
family and community even in Poona (where he fled) where he finally
died, almost completely unknown, in 1967.
But looked at in the light of 2011, we see that Fonseca is the sole
bridge figure between Bombay realism and Shantiniketan revivalism. In
solitude in his studio at the Christa Prema Seva Sangha, he kept working
away at both religious and secular paintings that now seem the very
definition of high modernism in Indian art. What is more, his oeuvre
today also seems clearly the high point of Shantiniketan's own artistic
legacy.
Can it be that an almost entirely unknown artist is actually the
centrepiece of Indian modernism's global significance? Rupert Arrowsmith
certainly seems to think so. After viewing a large part of the Fonseca
archive - currently indifferently maintained at the Xavier Centre for
Historical Research in Goa - he wrote that Fonseca is 'a modernist
artist of international standing', 'a forgotten Indian genius' who
blended 'Christian motifs with iconography and technical conventions
derived from Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic art.'
In an epistolary exchange with the renowned author Amitav Ghosh (who
lives in Goa part-time), now excerpted on Ghosh's blog, Arrowsmith
writes that, 'There are some world class masterpieces there (no
exaggeration), and their references to various world cultures combined
with a measure of newly fashionable-again academic technique makes this
exactly the right time for them. Frankly I'm amazed that so little work
has bee done on them.' The young art historian is convinced that Fonseca
deserves to be talked about as one of the globally significant modernist
painters, and is hard at work to ensure that this happens. From being
left outside even Indian art history (Fonseca gets no mention in Partha
Mitter's book, in fact the great canon-maker of Indian modernism had
never heard of the artist until very recently) now we are going to see
the Goan story positioned exactly where it belongs - at the very centre
of a new understanding of modernism as it actually occurred around the
world.
For when we come to the 1940s and what is universally acknowledged as
the great modernist awakening, the Goan fingerprints become indelible
and impossible to deny. For everyone acknowledges that the most
significant movement in modern Indian art came about because of yet
another migrant from Goa to Bombay, the ebullient, irrepressible Francis
Newton Souza.
'Today we paint with absolute freedom for content and techniques almost
anarchic; save that we are governed by one or two sound elemental and
eternal laws, of aesthetic order, plastic coordination and colour
composition. We have no pretensions of making vapid revivals of any
school or movement in art. We have studied the various schools of
painting and sculpture to arrive at a vigorous synthesis.' - Francis
Newton Souza, 1948
We might engage in lasting debate about where and when modernism first
started to make itself apparent in India, but there can be no doubt at
all that The Progressive Artist's Movement is its high point. The sheer
guts in the above declaration becomes apparent when you realize just who
this motley crew of hungry-eyed, largely impoverished artists were who
were dismissing both the JJ School and Shantiniketan as tired, effete,
and pointlessly backward-looking. Souza, the ringleader and chief talent
scout, was the son of a seamstress. Ara's father was a driver; he
himself washed cars to make a living. Husain often slept on the streets,
a signboard painter.
The bold, exhilarating paintings produced by these unlikely
revolutionaries completely changed the trajectory of Indian art forever.
Those impoverished misfits are now the most feted modern Indian artists.
As Souza later said, they made themselves into great artists by sheer
dint of ambition, their startling originality 'evolved over the years of
its own volition; out of our own balls and brains.' By the 1960s, the
Goan was a sensation in London and Paris, the first Indian artist to
make it big in the galleries of the West.
Once again, this part of Indian history is familiar - there are several
decent books on the Progressive Artist's Movement and its significance.
But what has never attempted - cue Rupert Arrowsmith - is a connecting
of the dots between Souza and Vasudeo Gaitonde and Laxman Pai (Goan
friends who became associated with the Progressives), then back into
time via da Cruz (the Goan migrant to Bombay who became Gandhi's
favourite painter) and Chimulkar (another prodigiously talented JJ
School artist from Goa) to Angelo da Fonseca to Trindade.
There are also readily apparent connections to be made to Joseph
Furtado, the Goan migrant to Bombay who is credited with the first
'chutnified' Indian English prose and poems, to Lucasinho Ribeiro, the
Goan migrant to Bombay who invented Tiatr, the first European-style
revues performed in an Indian language, and then eventually to the Goan
musicians who 'invented the Sound of Bollywood.' As recounted by
cultural historian Naresh Fernandes, many of the songs that have come to
define modern Indian culture were written and arranged by Goans, then
performed by largely Goan orchestras and combos, with the 'playback
singing' very often also provided by Goans like the sisters, Asha
Bhonsle and Lata Mangeshkar.
All of this adds up to a considerable case. In short, many of us believe
the evidence shows that Goa was the first crucible in India which
exhibited the climate for modernism to emerge in the subcontinent. We
see an early modernist impulse steadily come to fruition in the
explosion of native Latinate art and aesthetics that occurred all
through the second half of the 19th century. Then, with the rise of
Bombay - significantly shaped and influenced by Goan migrants - we see
unmistakable, unquestionable modernism itself, more often than not
shaped by Goans like Trindade and Fonseca.
What is more, this Goa-Bombay modernism has a global significance which
is still very far from being properly understood or recognized. As the
prevailing global narratives on the subject are being entirely rewritten
by a new generation of art historians, we have an opportunity and also
the responsibility to ensure that Goan art finds its rightful place once
and for all. (ENDS)
=======================================================
First published in the February 2012 edition of the Seminar magazine -
http://www.india-seminar.com
The February 2012 edition of this magazine was guest edited by Sunil
Khilnani and Constantino Xavier
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