INDIAN ART
By DOUGLAS BARRETT
THE Exhibition of Indian Art opened at Burlington House under the auspices of the Royal Academy on November 29th. It is planned on the same scale as the pre-war Chinese and Persian Exhibitions. There are almost 1,500 exhibits, including sculpture, paintings, books, textiles, metal-work, crystals and jades. The artistic production of the whole of the sub-continent is represented, from its southern tip to the North-West Frontier Province, from the early civilisation of the Indus valley (third millennium me.) to the paintings of contemporary India. Both private and public collec- tions in the two Dominions of India and Pakistan and in England have given generously to the exhibition. There are also a few choice bronzes and paintings from France, Holland and America.
India is the last of the great oriental cultures to find appreciation in the West, and this tribute to the achievements of the Indian craftsman is long overdue. English public collections have made us fairly familiar with certain aspects of Indian art, especially with the so-called Gandhara sculpture and its dreary echoes of the work of the Roman provincial mason, and with certain sorts of mediaeval sculpture, especially that produced under the patronage of the Pala and Sena Dynasties in Bengal from the tenth to the twelfth centuries. Both have left the impression of a dull and stereotyped formula of image-making. Unfortunately, certain apologists of Indian art also have hinted that there is something mysterious and esoteric about it all, that an intimate knowledge of the Indian religious and philo- sophical systems is necessary for its true appreciation. The galleries of Burlington House, where the sculpture is presented simply and with dignity—the only concession to the " mystery of the East " is the occasional spotlight—dispel all this. These works, though bearing unmistakably the stamp of India from the earliest period (third century }Lc.) up to the present day, show an extraordinary diversity and variation.
Certain forms, though not many, are a little strange and un- familiar. Acquaintance with a few charming fables and Buddhist legends and the main incidents in the epics is perhaps helpful in dealing with subject matter. For the rest the appeal is simple and direct. To come upon the early sculpture for the first time is a wonderful experience. Many fine examples of this young, fresh and naturalist art have been brought to England, such as the pleasant assured little Rampurva bull. There are also some magnificent masterpieces. The so-called Yaksha from Patna, Egyptian in its monumentality, Assyrian in its brutal strength, transcending both in its Indian vitality, makes an overwhelming impression ; the Bharhut railings, too, with the simple formalism and natural rhythm of their ornament, with the two goddesses beautifully composed, and carved, with that straightforward sensuality which seem peculiar to Indian art. Of slightly later work• there are two figures which rank with the figure sculpture of any period or place—the second century headless Bodhisattva of extra- ordinary beauty and the seated Buddha from Bodhgaya (early fourth century) of archaic majesty, one of the first and certainly the finest image of the Buddha. The major works of the Gupta period (fourth to seventh century)—India's classical age in art, literature and music —are magnificently dull. One regrets the absence of the Sarnath Buddha—the great masterpiece of this period. But Gupta ornament, of which there are many fine examples in the exhibition, is to be enjoyed for its own sake. The centuries from A.D. goo to 1300 saw in Orissa and Bundelkhand the third great period of figure sculpture. It is in many ways the finest and is quite generously represented in the exhibition. All is now sophisticated and intricate, tender and intimate, and of a subtle eroticism.
Southern India is represented by a gallery of good bronzes— the centre Dancing Siva from Madras, the Madras Rama and the Boston Uma are of great beauty—and a slightly larger gallery of fussy stone-work chiefly from Mysore. The Mohammedan invasions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries removed the patronage necessary for the large-scale production of sculpture. But the ivory doors from the Ambavilas Palace, Mysore, and the little bronze Devi in Room V show that delightful work in miniature was still being produced in the eighteenth century. Mughal painting of the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries is already well known in England from the two large public collections in London. But an un- paralleled selection has been collected at Burlington House, showing the development of this tradition from the earliest sixteenth-century paintings in the Persian manner, the recruitment at the Mughal court of Indian artists and the native tradition, which in a genera- tion had created a new style in its own right, through the great period of Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, and on to the eighteenth cen- tury when good pictures continued to be painted. There are the superb large sixteenth-century Haniza-Nama pictures, delightful fable-illustrations, some dignified portraiture and not a few master- pieces, especially the Chenar Tree, lent by His Majesty's Govern- ment in the United Kingdom, and the Bodleian Library's Dying Man.
The sixteenth century also saw the rise of a much more exciting school—which is represented in any quantity lb; the first time in the exhibition—in the Dekkan, that strange meeting-place of Persian Shahs, Abyssinian ministers and Indian artists from the overthrown Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar. This school is found first at Bijapur under the dynasty of the Adil Shahs. Of this period (end of the sixteenth century) there are shown three manuscript pages of aston- ishing magnificence, a wonderful compound of Persian refinement and Indian luxuriousness, with a wealth of gold and dark greens and purples stippled on lighter fields of the same colours, a simple and effective devici. There is a handsome book of the same period lent by A. Chester Beatty. The seventeenth century produced a portrait art of extraordinary refinement and dignity. No Mughal portrait
• ever attained the height of the Bijapuri Noble, lent by His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom. The Deccani School retained its distinctive forms and colour right through the eighteenth century. The loveliest things produced in this later period are perhaps the little painted lacquered box in Gallery IX, and the Chester Beatty picture to match in Gallery XI.
From the painting of the Ajanta frescoes up to the formation of the Mughal style, little is known of Indian painting. There are some palm-leaf manuscripts from Bengal of the tenth to twelfth centuries and some attractive palm-leaf and paper manuscripts in gold, blue and green from Gujarat, where paper was first introduced into India about A.D. 1400. A fine collection of these highly elaborate illustra- tions to Jain scriptures are exhibited. It is interesting to see their connection with a set of illustrations of the Gita Govinda (Gallery VII) in a more popular style and with a set of illustrations to a love poem of the sixteenth century in the same gallery. Both sets are attractive ; the latter includes some very fine pictures indeed. Many of these artists went to the Mughal court—Gujaratis were popular there—and in the early seventeenth-century Mughal painting, itself largely Indian, invaded the smaller courts of the princes of Rajasthan, whose local artists produced a new and slightly less sophisticated version of the Mughal style. These Rajput " primitives " are often clumsy and ignorant copies of the imperial style, but most of those in Gallery VII are amongst the most beautiful pictures in the exhibi- tion. Numbers 479, 483, 487 and 488 in the-catalogue are especially noteworthy.
Towards the end of the seventeenth century the Hill state of Basholi produced a distinctive style in bold flat colours, which lasted until 1750. These fine designs in strong reds, yellows and purples, which are almost unrepresented in English public collections, are ex- hibited in Gallery VIII in quantity. So are the sweet and gentle Kangra school (end of the eighteenth century) and the even more suave and sophisticated style of Garhwal. The portraits of the eighteenth century in the Rajasthani plain are very good, especially those of Udaipur. Altogether there is a host of fine and interesting pictures, and at least a dozen or more masterpieces. The Kangra Unveiling of Draupadi, lent by Lady Rothenstein, the Basholi Krishna and Gopis, lent by J. C. French, the nineteenth-century Sikh portrait lent by Lady Rothenstein, all in Gallery VIII, are amongst the finest things in the exhibition. Noteworthy also is the withering cartoon of Hindu saints in the same gallery, a masterly caricature. Perhaps the best picture of all, however, is the mysterious Gopis in an Arbour, lent by the Asutosh Museum, Calcutta, in Gallery VII— a supreme masterpiece of nervous line, grke and delicacy.
Framing the sculpture and paintings is a wealth of textiles and work in metal, jades and precious stones. They are all attractive, but most memorable of all perhaps is the green and gold nineteenth- century Hyderabad carpet in Gallery VIII.
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