Trapped in time and space

A recent visit to Parliament House after a gap of several years served as a reminder of the tradition in liberal arts that we have lost entirely. Soon after Independence, even as the country struggled with issues of development, Lok Sabha speaker G V Mavlankar constituted a committee to appoint artists to create 125 panels on Parliament's ground floor depicting episodes from India's past (on a budget of Rs 3 lakh). Sixty years on, half those panels remain incomplete, but here's a roll-call of some of the artists and artist supervisors who have contributed in no small measure to that task: KCS Panicker, Indra Dugar, S Dhanapal, Sarada Ukil, Gopal Deuskar, Indu Rakshit, K K Hebbar, Ganesh Haloi, Sir Sobha Singh, Bimal Das Gupta, S N Ghosal, Suhas Roy, N S Bendre, Biswanath Mukerji.

There are others, and no doubt there would have been strict directives on the treatment and content of the murals which are largely in the manner of the art of Ajanta and Ellora and its revivalist discipline under the Bengal School - however dull and uninspiring some of it may appear. An earlier instance has a more interesting palette. India House in London, designed, like Parliament House, by Sir Herbert Baker, seemed to have heeded the advice of Sir William Rothenstein, principal of the Royal College of Art, London, that Indian artists be invited to paint the high vaulted ceilings and dome of the building. Four artists, all linked to the Bengal School's Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore, and Nandalal Bose - this was the 1930s - were selected and sent on a tour of Europe before being assigned the task. The artists? Lalit Mohan Sen, Ranada Charan Ukil, Dhirendra Krishna Deb Barman, Sudhanshu Sekhar Choudhury, coincidentally all art teachers in their later avatar, have left behind a strong legacy and their stamp in London.

The point of all this is three things that beg consideration. First, what happened in the years since that we've moved all art and its discourse from the public space? Can you think of any public building in the last half-century that uses art? Hotels and airports in the private sector aside, Kolkata's spanking new public sector airport's nod in this direction is travel poster photographs of India's attractions. In 2013, surely we can do better.

My second point is about the nature of art chosen in our public buildings. When the murals for India House, London, were cherry-picked, the influence of the Bengal School was at its peak. By the '50s and '60s, its effete sentimentalism had been completely obliterated by the strident voice of Western modernism and the Bombay Progressives. But, trapped in the romantic nostalgia of the past, policymakers (and patrons) refused to recognise the rise of modernism, consigning it, therefore, to the restrictive, intimidating world of galleries.

Its rise impaired, this brings me to my third point - the loss of a contemporary appetite in popular art as a result of mediocre representations of revivalism as 'Indian' art. If most Indians feel disconnected with contemporary art, it is because they have not had the opportunity to see it in spaces of power, and no Indian leadership has come out in support of the art of a young generation. We've seen the hunger among India's public in the numbers that visit the art fairs in New Delhi and Mumbai and at the Kochi Biennale, but it's time Rashtrapati Bhawan and 7, Race Course Road came out of the closet to embrace the language of a young generation in a country that boasts of the world's youngest population demographic. Pranabda, can you lead by example with a Subodh Gupta installation in those vast corridors of India's First Home? Can the Governors in the state capitals?

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated