folk in modern art
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Folk in Modern ArtTRANSCRIPT
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The Folk in Modern Art Author(s): SUNEET CHOPRA Source: India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Monsoon 1990), pp. 63-81Published by: India International CentreStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23002163Accessed: 04-01-2016 16:10 UTC
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The Tree of Knowledge: by Meera Mukherjee
Photo
credit:
Sharat
Kumar
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The Ear Cleaner: by Nandalal Bose
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SUNEET CHOPRA
The Folk in Modern Art
When
we witnessed a motley collection of tradi tional bards, mountebanks, bear-trainers and
hand-clapping eunuchs parading as "Indian cul
ture" in Washington, Moscow, Paris and other
capitals of the world during the "festive" years of Mr Rajiv Gandhi, we had come a long way from the days of that
other Mr Gandhi. He who had coaxed and cajoled artists like
Nandalal Bose, architects like Mharte and Gulati, and connoisseurs
of the folk arts like Mukul Dey to come together, and direct their
creative energy towards serving the village people, and accelerating the success of the national movement. Whereas the Mahatma had
tried to inspire the most advanced creative people of his time to seek
out their roots in rural India, and to find inspiration in the national
movement that gripped the country, the latter-day approach has
brought rural India to the pavements of the world for people to gape
open-mouthed at the "wonders of modernisation" and to amuse the
faded consumers of coca-cola culture.
Mahatma Gandhi's vision was quite the reverse. He did not wish
to titillate the world's glitterati. He wanted to modernize India from
the grass-roots upwards, and he sought the raw material for this
from our vast rural land-mass. In March 1936, when he proposed an
exhibition on rural crafts to be held along with the Lucknow Con
gress session, he wrote:
We must see that we don't turn an exhibition into a museum. Muse
ums of ancient things which have disappeared from our economic life
have their use and place, but not in our programme which concen
trates on industries and crafts which are capable of being revived.1
The first exhibition of folk art and rural industry was mounted at
the Lucknow session of the Congress, with Nandalal Bose and the
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Birth
of
Chaitanya:
by
Nandalal
Bose
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SUNEET CHOPRA / 67
architect Mharte taking on the main burden of work. Gandhi, who
remained largely behind the scenes at this Congress, took a special interest in the exhibition and inaugurated it on 28 March. He
congratulated the artists for:
The simply but exquisitely decorated walls done by Nandalal Bose, the eminent artist from Santiniketan and his co-workers, who have
tried to represent all the villagers and crafts in simple artistic symbols. And when you go inside the art gallery, on which Babu Nandalal Bose
has lavished his labours for several weeks, you will feel, as I did, like
spending hours there together.2
A few days later, on April 12, he again called on people to visit the
exhibition, commenting that it is "not a spectacular show, but a kind
of fairyland. But our tastes have been so debased that the miracles
happening before our eyes appear like so much dust or clay and
trifles coming from abroad become exquisite pieces of art."3
During the winter of the Faizpur session of the Congress Gandhi
wanted the exhibition of folk arts and crafts to be the chief attraction.
When Nandalal Bose was hesitant, saying, "I am merely a painter and I know little of architecture and, therefore, am not competent,"4 Gandhi overruled his objections. When we examine his instructions
for those constructing the venue of the Faizpur, and later, the
Haripura Congress, he states that while the stress was on what was
available in the rural areas, it was not to be an excuse for reproducing backwardness. In fact, he specifically called for the .electrification of
the venue, even though he knew that the villagers would not be able
to get electrification for quite some time afterwards. He appealed for
an innovative approach to our folk tradition; and in this his choice of
Nandalal Bose was most appropriate. This is borne out by a student of his, Bon Behari Ghosh, who
worked as chief artist in the Calico mills of Ambalal Sarabhai in
Ahmedabad at the time of the Faizpur Congress, and who had
helped Nandalal Bose with the exhibition there.
Nandalal started with works in the pat (Bengal folk) idiom but after
that he emerged from its influence. He broke with its conventions and
retained only its structure. In this he was very different from Jamini
Roy. Take his masterpiece, The Birth of Chaitanya: the treatment of the
house, the simplified trees, the contrasts, the use of dabs of colour—
they are all reminiscent of pat, but it is pat with his own innova
tions.5
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The Vegetable Cutter: by Nandalal Bose
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SUNEET CHOPRA / 69
Here then, we have the synthesis of folk and modern are that was
to develop over the decades. The treatment of the hut and the trees
is that of the Bengal pat, while the general architectural scheme, of
the walled courtyard and a balcony-like window remind one of the
Rajasthani schools of miniature painting. The rough and ready
pointilliste treatment of the sky and other spaces, on the ground, on
the walls, and even drapes worn by female figures return us to the
pat styles of Kalighat and Orissa.
Bon Behari Ghosh describes the process:
The Japanese artist Okakura used to explain our approach by taking three match-sticks and putting them together as a triangle. Its three
corners represented tradition, the perception of nature and original
ity. They were all together and none could be stressed any more than
the others.6
Nandalal takes up each stress and explains its effect on the
creative process: "Art, solely and wholly dependent on tradition,
becomes stiff." Here we see a break from the past, where both
tradition and patronage had prevented art from becoming innova
tive and original. Then, he recommends "a thorough knowledge of
anatomical construction, form and bodily proportions ... but not in
the European 'academic' way." He calls for the comprehension of
"the totality by way of a detailed analysis," stating that "the mind is
the artist and not the eye" and that "art is creation. It is not an
imitation of nature."7 He felt imitation drained art of its purpose and
meaning. As regards originality as an end in itself, he thought of it
as superficial without its links with tradition and perception of the
reality around one.
As Bon Behari Ghosh, his student, puts it forcefully, "With origi
nality as the only aim of art, it tends to lose its seriousness and
becomes either gimmickry or a form of lunacy. Originality is only relative to tradition and perceived reality."8 So we see that early on
in the development of modern Indian art, the folk element is essen
tial as a part of tradition; it is not the only element nor even the
dominant one. Certainly the revival of folk art as it existed before
was not envisaged.
However, it is to his training in folk-art that Nandalal Bose
ascribes his most successful and innovative work—the Haripura
posters. In terms of the use of these images as wall-decorations, the
restriction of material used, including colour, to locally available
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70 / India International Centre Quarterly
raw materials like lamp-black, ochre and chalk, and the use of bold
strokes to highlight forms and figures he makes a radical departure from the practice in art-studios and colleges of his time. He remarks:
I had once done some practice in Kalighat Pata—it was after all not a
waste of time. I reaped its fruits at Haripura Congress. What I drew
there was just a playful extension of the Kalighat Pata.9
He is, however, being modest. If one looks at the panel entitled
Cutting the Vegetables, one can see in it already a blend of the Kalighat tradition with that of Jain manuscripts (like the three-quarters face
that gives it its three dimensionality). This becomes a precursor of
the linear art of later artists like Bendre, as well as the choice of a
commonplace rural figure as the subject-matter of art. Today, when
the Haripura "posters" are over fifty years old, these things might not appear to be unusual. But half a century ago, they were definitely a radical break with the past—not only because of their technical and
formal qualities, but also because they led to developments that
were even more far-reaching in artists like Ram Kinkar Baij. He
joined Nandalal Bose at Santiniketan and sold his first work outside
Bengal from the exhibition which his teacher had organised at the
Lucknow session of the Congress. Ram Kinkar Baij's entry into the art world adds a new dimension
in the relationship of folk-art to modern Indian art. So far it had been
educated upper and middle-class Indians who had turned to folk
art, either as a reflection of changing tastes in the west, or of the stress
on village crafts and self-reliance that gripped the national move
ment from the Swadeshi period onwards.
Speaking of Mukul Dey, the Principal of the Government School
of Art at Calcutta and the critic Ajit Ghose, Mildred Archer recounts
how Bengalis were among the first to appreciate the fact that:
Modern painters such as Picasso, Braque, Matisse and Leger had
reacted against delicacy and refinement. They had ignored perspec tive, used colour for its own sake or for symbolic purposes and had
freely distorted and modified the human form. They had aimed at
intense simplifications and had abandoned the natural in favour of the
abstract or the geometric. Their work was seen to carry with it great
prestige and to have created a revolution in European artistic circles.
At the same time it was clear that these artists had been deeply influenced and fortified by the example of primitive art—in particu lar by that of Negro sculpture. Primitive and popular art were at last
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SUNEET CHOPRA / 71
interest for they appeared to possess many of the qualities admired in
the work of modern painters. Popular painting in Bengal seemed in
this respect no different from Negro sculpture and it was in a mood of
excited patriotism that certain Bengali writers, critics and painters
began to re-appraise Kalighat painting and at the same time to seek
out and collect another and distinctive form of village painting—the
scrolls made by the patuas of rural Bengal.10
While
it may be true that this shift of interest in the West
may have lent a certain credibility to a movement devel
oping inside the country, for a number of reasons it is
difficult to agree that the act movement in India was the same as that
in the West. The essential difference lies in the fact that here were
artists in search of their own roots, which had not dried up. For one thing there was never any wholesale rejection of the
figurative in India as there was in the West, for, photographic
representation was a relative rarity in Indian art. Folk forms, though
they had lost much of their vigour, were much alive. So they did not
need to be rediscovered, except in the case of a narrow English educated elite. Also, as we saw in the case of Nandalal Bose, folk
forms were only one element on which the developing Indian artist
of the modern sort relied, from a whole gamut of "tradition"
including the paintings of Ajanta and Bagh, the sculptures of Ellora
and the many schools of miniature painting. Finally, Mukul Dey returned to India in 1923, when the Gandhian movement was
already in full swing, with its stress on self-reliance and rediscovery of the village by the urban middle classes.
In fact, an account by Bon Behari Ghosh of how Ram Kinkar Baij came to Santiniketan (and whose room-mate he was from 1928 to
1931) is illustrative of this trend:
He came to Santiniketan in 1925. He was of a barber (Nai) family and
his parents served the local Bhadralok in Bankura. Ram Kinkar spent his childhood among the craftsfolk and was attracted to the potters, one of whom let him paint toys, and later even images, for him. Then
came the 1921 movement, and Ram Kinkar was active in it. The
Principal of a local college, Anil Baran Ray, was its leader. His
supporters had got Ram Kinkar to make posters for the movement.
Their quality and sharpness brought him to Baran Ray's notice and he
recommended him to Ramananda Chatterjee, editor of the Pravasi,
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Santhal Family: Drawing by Nandalal Bose
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SUNSET CHOPRA / 73
who then sent him on to Shantiniketan with a letter of introduction.
We find here, then, a far broader basis for the intermingling of the
folk and modern elements in Indian art than any elite process of
enlightenment could provide. With the emergence of Ram Kinkar
Baij as a full-fledged artist in the mid-thirties, we begin to perceive the organic development of a child of craftsmen into the mainstream
of modern art. With this, the relationship between the folk and
modern idiom undergoes a change which could only occur in India
in this manner—a change that is very different from the metamor
phosis that modernism in Europe has experienced. Ram Kinkar's teacher, Nandalal Bose, recognized this, and he has
left us artistic evidence of it. There is a sketch of his, dated 4 July 1944,
entitled Ram Kinkar's Statue, showing his masterpiece in rough
concrete, Santhal Family, which Ram Kinkar made in 1938 at
Santiniketan. The aspect that Bose highlights is art in its natural
environment—a Santhal family passes by the statue, with the husband
carrying the children in baskets, his wife carrying the household
effects on her shoulder, and a dog at their feet. Nandalal sketched it
in his natural environment, with the Santhals walking by. The
figures resemble the ritual deities fashioned by Santhals out of
branches of trees, often following their contours, but there the
resemblance ends. The figures are monumental, celebrating a people
forging ahead to a larger-than-life future. They are modern, not
icons in static poses, but a group whose interrelated forms vibrate
with life like ripples in a pool of water. And the medium too, direct
concrete, belongs to the modern world. The figures reflect a powerful zest for life, which has been described by a number of critics, who
stress its spontaneity and see in it "a style and a body of work that
is essentially individualistic, based and rooted in his own personality and environment." This, however, is a superficial analysis.
The joy of life in the work of Nandalal, Benode Bihari or of Ram
Kinkar is not joy in the abstract, like the mask of a Greek drama,
meaningless without the actor behind it. It is the concrete joy of
participating in a movement of self-liberation of a people. In the case
of Ram Kinkar, we see the depth of this joy expressed by one of the
oppressed. In fact, the failure to understand that the participation of
artists like Nandalal and Ram Kinkar in the national movement was
the social and historical context in which their joyous and spontane ous creations emerge is probably one of the major reasons why
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He who Saw: Bronze by Meera Mukherjee
Photo
credit:
Sharat
Kumar
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SUNEET CHOPRA / 75
monumental works of such intensity are rare, now for joy in the
abstract or from self-gratification can never be compared with the
intense joy of a huge country in the process of liberating itself.
While
the artistic expression of post-independence could
never again achieve the holism of the artist expression of
the national movement, a number of trends emerge. These return to folk idiom for a far more specific and limited purpose which may lack the heady days of the late thirties and early forties,
but they are imbued with different qualities that give them rele
vance.
Take the work of Meera Mukherjee, starting with the bronze He
Who Saw. In terms of size this monumental figure of a tribal youth reminds one of the work of Ram Kinkar but the similarity is super ficial. The urban sculptor has to integrate herself with her subject
using the ancient technique of the tribal artisans, in this case the
Gharuas of Bastar. But that in itself does not make her work notewor
thy or even distinguish it from the craftsmen. It is the attitude of the
giant youth, with one arm behind the head, that links him with a
tradition going back to the Mohenjodaro dancing girl. Here, just as
in Nandalal Bose's Birth of Chaitanya, there is a blend of the folk and
classical that places this sculpture in a far broader framework of
artistic tradition than the average work of the Gharua craftsmen. In
1965-66, when she cast her statue of the tribal figure, Meera Mukher
jee was treading the same path as Ram Kinkar—but from the
opposite side, as it were.
This process, begun in the sixties, culminated in a work Andolan
(struggle) whose originality reminds one of Ram Kinkar's creations
of the late thirties and early forties.12 The visual image which domi
nates the sculpture is a tree, sacred to the tribals whose techniques she has ingrained in herself, a proper symbol for a hallowed institu
tion. And the students, another sacred element, tongues of fire,
devour it. Here we see a reflection of how institutions, hallowed and
sacred, at one stage of social development, are devoured by the
forces of the future. Such concepts of the transitory nature of our
institutions and the forces of change transforming them are unhear
dof in the world of craftsman. When they began to inhabit the world
of timeless images, then indeed, new art is born. If in Ram Kinkar Baij
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76 / India International Centre Quarterly
of five decades ago we see the awakening of modernity in a rural
artisan youth, then in Meera Mukherjee we see the sharing of a
common grievance against society. This sculpture reminds me of
something the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz told me about the nature of his
verse: that it was to give voice to those without a voice. So, Meera
Mukherjee's sculpture speaks the language of the oppressed and
down-trodden; but what she says is something the traditional
craftsman cannot say, and there lies its originality. Folk art serves as
a language in her work; while for Ram Kinkar Baij it was a figure of
speech. We have come a long way from the thirties, forties and fifties.
In the Indian context today, the variations however have vastly increased the field of the possible relation between folk and modern
art. We find, for example, in the canvases of Francis Newton Souza,
folk symbols starings at us from works that are a profound negation of the context of folk art. Take his canvas of 1984, Tivo Men and
Pregnant Women. The figure of the woman is obviously modelled on
the clay figurines of the mother-goddess used as ritual objects in the
prehistoric past and in village India today. Indeed, if one compares the figure of the pregnant woman with that of Prakriti/Yoni, also of
the same year, one realises that the folk figurines were the prototype for both of these.
In Souza's work, however, they serve another function. They
highlight the disjunction between the values he stresses and those
enshrined in our traditional art. The female figure with two residual
men cannot but strike one as a powerful antithesis of the traditional
representation of Vishnu with his two consorts. Consequently, it is
a challenge to the doctrine of male supremacy so deeply ingrained in the traditional hindu life-style. This view point is brought out
even more forcefully in his reply, in 1985, to the question of Jamshed
J. Bhabha: "Does Christianity mean something to you?" Obviously
trying to negate any attempt to burden his many portrayals of Christ
with a religious aura, he firmly states: "Religion is prejudice and
prejudice is a misjudgement induced by malice and ignorance."13 As
distinct from ritual, which tries to create a disjunction between the
human worshippers in their day-to-day existence and the ritual
object and its sacred context, Souza uses the symbols and structures
of the sacred to highlight the profane. Here, the forms of folk art
serve as the very antithesis of their role in traditional life. They are,
in the work of Souza, distinctly and self-consciously modern. In fact,
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SUNEET CHOPRA / 77
Souza's iconoclasm has a rare force which few have been able to
equal. A similar trend, only far more evasive and less self-conscious, is
discernible in the work of another Bombay artist, Bhupen Khakhar,
whose work was described to me by the poet Asad Zaidi as "urban
folk". The raw material of his paintings are the images of small town
in India. For example, in his canvas The Deity, the figure of the god is recognizably that of the Nathdwara paintings, as is the colour
scheme. The curtain in front of the deity reminds one of those in
Persian or Mughal miniatures, and the figures seem to have walked
out of Kalighat paintings. But it would be a great mistake to reduce
the totality of the effect to disparate origins of each of these images. Here, folk forms function in relation to contemporary trends, as a
contrast and a starting point for a journey that folk art never
envisaged. Khakhar himself describes the myriad possibilities that
he can realise at any one time, a range no folk artist can possibly boast
of.
In the room, there's the curtain. The curtain moves because of the
wind. There are folds in the curtain, and where the folds come forth
clearly, they are of 'life colour'. How can one paint the curtain? If the
curtain were painted with great care and precision it would look like
a Persian or Mughal miniature. If painted with spontaneity it would
remind one of Matisse. .. If the colour of the curtain is dark I would
paint it in a dark light, and the inside left-out white portion would look
like a Kalighat painting. But if it is painted like a stone then it would
remind one of Leger... I see the pattern of the cloth, one is reminded
of Grandma Mase or Henri Rousseau. The curtain moves like a cloud.
It reminds me of Gericault's painting 'Rafts in the Ocean' or a Renoir
woman running with her clothes like a fish in the ocean. In my
painting, the curtain occupies only one-tenth of the whole...14
Other artists, like K.G. Subramanyan have taken up the narrative
tradition of the pats; but here too, the resemblance is purely formal.
The pats deal with epics having a ritual content, with origin myths and with rites of passage. On the other hand, in his "narrative"
paintings, Subramanyan mocks the rituals of middle class life, as in
his Reverie of an Army Officer's Wife. Here, the folk narrative is but one
aspect of a complex language incorporating
the talk of the street, the village wag's dialogue with its puns and turns
of phrase, the story-teller's narrative, the folk song and ballad, to the
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Spaceman: Acrylic by Narinder Pal Singh
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SUNEET CHOPRA / 79
compositions of a sophisticated poet with its areas of clarity and
mystery and the loaded enunciations of a philosopher; its life content
and richness depends on a simultaneous presence of various levels of
expression, their continual intersection saving the higher levels from
a mere linguistic virtuosity and the lower from crassness.15
Here, the linguistic metaphor used by Subramanyan reflects the
same situation described by Bhupen Khakhar. The folk is merely one
level of a multi-layered discourse that covers a modern canvas.
All these approaches explore the folk images, use them as points of reference, but go beyond them to more sophisticated levels
involving a knowledge of the place of a particular discourse in the
history of art, a comprehension of society, philosophy, and a famili
arity with the global concerns of modern art. Obviously, such a
synthesis is not easy to achieve; all too often, forays into the folk
idiom result in unimaginative and repetitive "airport art". Such
works are distinct from those with a genuinely modern perspective, as street language is from The West Side Story'.
Of course, changing times too have contributed to this new,
selective synthesis of the folk element in modern Indian art. The
national movement and its institutions have lost much of their
glitter, and less pervasive but equally engrossing social movements
have taken their place. There is woman's art, using the language of
the nursery as in the work of Madhavi Parekh. Or equally feminine
concerns presented in the manner of a chamba rumal as in the work
of Arpita Singh, both using a language that was traditionally used by women.
Modern art, however, with its iconoclasm and irreverence, is no
respecter of tradition. We find a young artist, Narendra Pal Singh of
Nawada in Bihar, who uses the language traditionally restricted to
women's wall-paintings and applique work. Not only is his perspec tive very different—but his choice of themes too has no parallel in
the annals of folk art. He is not given to georgics like the earlier
artists, Bendre, Rawal or Chavda. He depicts women cooped up in
darkness, grinding corn; or a young man and woman reaching out
to each other across the colourful but well-defined divisions of rural
society; or a rural youth, not herding cattle or resting under a tree,
but breaking out of the strait-jacket of patriarchal authoritarianism.
Narendra Pal Singh's most powerful metaphor, however, is that
of the Spaceman: ironically, in this case, a scare-crow in a field. His
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80 / India International Centre Quarterly
irony reminds one of the same emotion expressed in the works of
other artists who have integrated the folk tradition in their paintings, like K.G. Subramanyan and Jogen Chaudhuri. He integrates this
with the metaphor of the space-flight —so much a part of the twenty first century scenario that was being touted by trendy political ad
vertisers—but he deflates it quitely by giving us the image of a scare
crow flying in an air-balloon. The image reflects both the urge of the
rural young to free themselves of an oppressive environment, and at
the same time, their physical incapacity to do so.
Here we find folk art serving a new purpose. It is the full-throated
cry of our rural masses to be liberated from the fake-paradise which
the artists of the past had thrust on them. Their aggression is
reflected in bright colours that characterize the warning systems of
nature, be it in male birds or poisonous plants; and their ingenuity in breaking the age-old barriers which insult the art of the oppressed
by making it the vehicle of general discontent and the desire for a
better world. Yet, while he expresses his discontent and anger
against social limitations, oppression and backwardness, he also
expresses his joy in being able to transmit concepts unthinkable for
the traditional folk. It is this joy that brings an irrepressible buoyance to his work.
Today, when we look back at the last five decades or so of modern
Indian art, it is evident that the broadbased liberating passion that
gripped a whole people is no longer there; but many different
streams of emancipatory struggles have taken its place. It is in
finding a proper language to voice these concerns that our multiple
regional folk-traditions have played a powerful role, and found
themselves a new lease of life in our present-day culture. In a sense,
they are admirably suited to this purpose, being so varied that each
artist can find his own mode of expression, while liberating these
languages from their local restraints. So, while the folk-idiom pro vides our modern artist with plenty of raw material for originality, he in turn gives it a universality which it never possessed in its
traditional confines.
References
1. Tendulkar, D.G. Mahatma, Vol. IV, 1952, p. 68.
2. Tendulkar, op. cit., pp. 82-83.
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SUNEET CHOPRA / 81
3. Tendulkar, op. cit., p. 84.
4. Tendulkar, op. cit., p. 133 seg.
5. Interview with the artist.
6. Interview.
7. Bose, Nandalal, Catalogue to the Exhibition.
8. Interview.
9. Bose, Nandalal, Catalogue to the Exhibition.
10. Archer, Mildred, Indian Popular Painting in the India Office Library, 1978, p. 2.
11. Interview.
12. Sen, Geeti, "The Image and the Imagination", IIC Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 1,1986,
p. 78.
13. Interview in East-West Visual Arts Encounter, Marg Publications, 1987, p. 32.
14. Interview in op. cit., p. 115.
15. Subramanyan, K.G., The Living Tradition: Perspectives on Modern Indian Art, 1987,
p. 69.
Illustrations
1. Nandalal Bose
2. Nandalal Bose
3. Nandalal Bose
4. Nandalal Bose
5. Meera Mukherjee 6. Narendra Pal Singh
(Catalogue), Ear Cleaner, Haripura Panel.
(Catalogue), Birth of Chaitanya.
(Catalogue), Vegetable Cutter, Haripura Panel
(Catalogue), Raw Kinkar's Statue
He who saw.
Spaceman
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