topics: |  autobiography | india | art

The rise of mediocrity

A very brief reminiscence of KGS' days at Shantiniketan, particularly
valuable for his insights on the process by which innovation dies out as a
result of institutionalization.  I found this particularly interesting
from the perspectives of an IIT Professor in the 2000s, watching the process
of this institution being increasingly bureaucratized with a resulting
ingress of mediocrity.

The text was dictated to Swati Ghosh, (unacknowledged in authorship) in a
series of three interviews.  The language is simple, sometimes undignified,
but the story is quite clear.

The story begins when Kala Bhavana is 25 years old, when Nandalal Bose ruled
the roost.  In 1942, as an Economics student at Presidency College Madras,
KGS had gotten involved in the Quit India movement, and was jailed for six
months, where he met Gopala Reddy, a graduate from Shantiniketan.  Banned
from normal colleges, his brother eventually wrote seeking admission on his
behalf to Nandalal Bose.

Thus at the age of 20, KGS travels N of Madras for the first time, and lands
in Shantiniketan.  He talks about his early days, his interactions with
Mastermosai (NB) and how his art thinking evolved as a mix of East and West.

Institutionalization stifles innovation

KGS emerges as a rebel, doing assignments, but in his own way, and
frequently getting poor grades.  At one point, he had been working on a
mural project with Binodeda, and some teachers wanted him to be not given
his Diploma.  Personally he felt the piece of paper was far less important
than his experience in directly working with Binode Behari Mukherjee.

In particular, he is disparaging about many of the other teachers (the
silent majority). He notes how the creativity of the early days was stifled
when trends, such as Batik and Alpona, were institutionalized.  This was in
contrast to Mastermosai, who was more flexible, something that he had
inherited from Abanindranath.  Many of the others however, would stagnate
at some level of innovation, though Ram Kinkar Baij (Kinkarda) and Binode
Bihari Mukerjee (Binodeda) are often mentioned as brilliant exceptions.

Reading this, I wonder if the process of institutionalizing, building
systems that can be reliably repeated, is by itself a detriment to creative
growth?  Every system faces this tradeoff, a balance between the demands of
management and the untutored processes of creativity. 

Beyond the Kala Bhavana, he provides glimpses of Abanindranath (VC, now
aged, still a fabulous storyteller with the children); Prabhat
Mukhopadhyay, Mahatma Gandhi's visit (just before his assassination).  The
atmosphere is live with music (esraj, sitar, vocals; rabindra sangeet is
somewhat in the background), everyone is reading fervidly, there is a
tension between those eager to experiment and chart new ways and those who
are settling in to familiar paths... on the whole though, there is a clear
sense of intellectualism; even in decay, it seems so much more lively than
what IIT is today.  - AM Nov 2008

Nandalal Bose: Artist-Artisan

by K.G.Subramanyan in India Today

    He focused on the different levels of individual creativity and created a new
    conceptual base for Indian art

More than 50 years ago. Nandalal Bose on one of those quiet Santiniketan
avenues. Short, dark, withdrawn. Walks slowly. Speaks softly as if he sucks
his words in. But has a bright glint in his eyes, through which peeps a
watchful mind. Has a crown of curly black hair. Internally restless. Has with
him a stack of blank cards, an ink slab and brush. To make small sketches in
monochrome. Record things, recall old images, invent the new.

For Nandalal Bose this was a compulsive exercise. Like writing a diary or
telling a rosary. He spoke little but when he did he had many amusing
anecdotes to recount, many insightful things to say. They made you
think. Leonard Elmhirst who travelled with him and Rabindranath Tagore to
China said to be in Bose's company was an education in itself.

Seen together with the Tagores, Abanindranath and Rabindranath -- one a
remarkable painter and writer and his guru, the other his lifelong mentor,
associate and renowned poet -- Bose should have seemed nondescript. But those
who knew Bose found him equally unforgettable, including the
Tagores. Abanindranath saw in him his artistic heir. Rabindranath wanted to
get him as an associate in his Santiniketan experiment so badly that he
risked confrontations with Abanindranath and Lord Ronaldshay. He said that
rarely did one come across in one person such a union of intelligence,
sympathy, skill, experience and insight.

It was while he was studying art in Calcutta that he met Abanindranath. Later
Rabindranath took him to Santiniketan. The Tagores left it to Bose to work
out a cogent agenda in the field of art and try them out in practice.

Without going into the dialectics of modernism or post-modernism, Bose
addressed the same questions in a home-spun way. His focus was on the
awakening of the creative potentials of each individual. And since they were
bound to differ, you were sure to have different levels and categories of
arts. Some that lay close to the process of fabrication and function. Some
that lay close to the process of self-expression. Some in between. But in all
this no individual was alone. He operated within an existing culture or
reacted to it. 

All this was implicit in the ideas he outlined in his scanty writings and
the activities he encouraged, selling round the notion of an artist-artisan
who could hold himself out at various levels of practice. In an insidious
way, it influenced our present notions on art. Bose was to a certain extent
sidelined in his own time as a sectarian idol, a prominent leader of the
nationalist backlash against colonial disinformation and
condescension. That he was one is beyond question. But he was not a
defensive polemist. His concern was to uncover the source streams of
India's creative genius to make its encounter with the the world robust and
fruitful. He built a valid conceptual base for a new Indian art with the
conviction that you have to know yourself if you have to know the world.

K.G. Subramanyan is a painter and teaches Indian art history at Santiniketan.