The Artist and the Artisan: Dichotomies of the Colonial Period in India (c. 1850–1900)

“…it is now a virtual truism that art is ideological, political, and served Imperial purposes.”

— Jeffrey Auerbach, Art and Empire

Introduction

As a practitioner of graphic design, who has also studied and documented crafts practices in India, I have had occasion to think about the divisions that have been created between the arts, crafts and design. There is evidence — from carvings on ancient Buddhist stupas, and Jain and Hindu temples, to the murals in the Ajanta Caves; in Mughal and Pahari miniature paintings — of a past where ateliers of artists produced what we know today as the ancient and medieval art of the subcontinent. Those ateliers may have consisted of a master artist and a team of painters, calligraphers, sculptors and others; in the case of the Mughal emperor Akbar’s atelier, there was even a bureaucracy to manage these teams for the production of art (Seyller 799). Why and when did the dichotomy between the artist and the artisan transpire in India? Do the arts and crafts not have more in common than the differences that have created these categories, and separate schools and curricula, for their study? Why did art get splintered into the fine arts and the decorative arts in India? The rural artist would be labelled an artisan — one who would consistently be excluded from the mainstream discourse on art, and only periodically placed under the spotlight by urban collaborators, curators or patrons. What role did urbanisation and the city play in this process? In this paper I pursue the story of the making of this dichotomy of the artist and the artisan through these questions, and by studying the discourse and events that led up to it in the early twentieth century, with a focus on how these changes unfolded in Bengal. My interest lies in tracking what may have led to the marginalisation of the artisan and I argue that both the Industrial Revolution in Britain, as well as the colonial intervention of introducing Western Academic art education in India, led to the fragmentation of art practice in India.

The Artist, the Artisan or Craftsman, and the Designer in India

At the outset it will be useful to define the separate identities created for the artist, the artisan or craftsman, and the designer. My premise is that prior to the Industrial Revolution in Britain and the subsequent introduction of colonial art education in India, India had a syncretic tradition of art-making that did not make these particular distinctions among those who were involved in the production of art and architecture. Men of art could “design, build and carve”. They entered no universities, yet their ancestors built the Taj Mahal (Havell qtd. in Coomaraswamy 109–110). However, for the sake of clarity, as they have been referred to as craftsmen or artisans in most of the studies cited in this paper, I shall retain these terms and trace why it was that they were so labelled. The urban elite and those who could afford an art education in the academies set up by the British in Madras, Calcutta, Bombay and Lahore in the nineteenth century were exalted to the position of artists. The ones who were excluded from this education system and conducted their practice in their regional styles continued to be known as artisans or craftspeople. Did the emergence of the art academies cause this? To this day we have elite academy-educated ‘artists’ and ‘craftspersons’ trained in the traditional hereditary manner. Today we also find various categories of artisans and many levels of craftsmanship, as well as designers who have joined hands with them to create “new objects for new markets” (Ranjan & Ranjan 20). While painters and sculptors from art academies grew to be ‘fine artists’ or ‘commercial artists’ (which is yet another fracture though it will not be addressed in this paper), regional practitioners were labelled ‘craftsmen’. These craftsmen produced utility products as well as sacred objects and objects of ritual use (Ranjan & Ranjan 20). Post-Independence India saw the emergence of a national institution for design education that was meant to bring together the artist and the artisan but that story too is not within the scope of this paper.

The Indian Craftsman: Education, Organisation and Patronage

For centuries in India, knowledge had been handed down from father to son, or from master to apprentice in the guru-shishya tradition. In the case of Indian art, this tradition more or less ceased in the cities with the introduction of colonial art schools. Why these schools were introduced is a story I will trace in this study but it might be noteworthy to point out here, as a point of comparison, that no such educational intervention occurred in the sphere of Indian music, in which even today, India largely retains the guru-shishya style of education. This system is not without its faults but it is not within the scope of this paper to discuss these.

The guru-shishya system of learning could not have been more different from the educational system that was introduced in India by the British. It could be said that the two systems embodied the differences between East and West, if one were to use those reductive binaries in the context of culture. Nothing could offer a greater contrast to a technical education in an academy than a youth’s upbringing in his teacher’s workshop. India had a hereditary fixity of social roles of people under the caste system — the craftsman was the disciple of his father. Through service and personal attendance on his master, he received lessons not only in technique but about life itself, which gave to the pupil “both culture and metaphysics, more essential to art than technique…” (Coomaraswamy 84).

Craftsmen were organised in villages of the same occupational caste headed by an elder or master craftsman. His patrons would be urban merchants or people from the neighbouring villages (Coomaraswamy 50–51). The great mercantile cities of India had organised guilds that drew skilled immigrants from the villages. These guilds were headed by Mahajans and Seths and craftsmen could be guild members. The guilds commanded great influence, and regulated labour and competition among their members. They spent the revenues drawn from membership fees and fines on charity (Coomaraswamy 8–13). There are suggestions of the existence of such guilds in literature as old as the Ramayana, Harivamsa and Mahavamsa, and in the inscriptions of Tanjore. They were recognised in these texts as being an important part of political and industrial life of the region (Coomaraswamy 19).

Then there were the king’s craftsmen. These doyens engaged in royal service often received the personal attention of rulers like Akbar who were well known for their love of the arts. These craftsmen were paid not only in wages for their art but also in kind, in the form of rations, presents and land grants (Coomaraswamy 93). Craftsmen who built temples were especially richly rewarded. They held secure positions that were passed on to their sons upon their death. In his book The Industrial Arts of India, Sir George Birdwood wrote that the Indian craftsman had “leisure for thought, and even for dreaming, and his economic position made him secure against oppression or want. He had no need to accumulate wealth…” “He knows nothing of the desperate struggle for existence which oppresses the life and crushes the very soul of the English working man. He has his assured place, inherited from father to son…” (qtd. in Coomaraswamy 91–92).

In the writings of Coomaraswamy and Birdwood, one can discern a breathless romanticising of the Hindu hereditary system and the life of the Indian craftsman. They bestow upon it an aura of burnished perfection that may not have been well considered. However, Birdwood’s dread of the threat of industrialisation in India had an ominous prescience. He lamented that the introduction of machinery in India would inevitably destroy the principles of its traditional art just as it had in England (Coomaraswamy 101). The art educator E.B. Havell decried the British assumption that Indian artisans would be helped by joining competitive export markets. He clearly listed his vision of the ills of an industrialised Indian society as an era of congested cities with unhealthy working conditions, struggles between capital and labour, inequity of wealth distribution and social unrest (Havell 27–28).

The erasure of the ateliers of craftspersons of pre-colonial India, the creation of the persona of the academy-educated Indian artist and the marginalisation of the rural craftsperson may have eventually been brought about by industrialisation in Britain and their introduction of machinery in India as Birdwood foresaw. But the origins of this story may lie much farther in the past with the racial and cultural stereotyping of the Orient in Europe’s literature and historical studies, and the representations of non-Western societies in which the art of the Orient was viewed as grotesque even while its excellent quality of craftsmanship was appreciated.

Fig. 1: Govardhan, c.1603–1605. A painting from the Mughal era showing Emperor Akbar receiving the second volume of his biography, the Akbarnama, from its author, Abu’l-Fazl ibn Mubarak, Agra. Source: Chester Beatty Digital Collections.

Western Views of Indian Art

In his book Orientalism, Edward Said writes, “The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” (Said 1). Even though the Greeks had their own pantheon of grotesquerie — satyrs, sirens, centaurs and so on — the popular medieval text, Marvels of the East, containing supernatural fiction about the Indian subcontinent, captured the imagination of Western travellers of that period. They excitedly and naïvely set out for India in search of the monsters and fantastic creatures described in these stories (Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters 6). The descriptions of many-armed monsters and other zoomorphic forms that went against what was considered natural and rational bore a resemblance to representations of Indian Hindu gods. They also fitted easily into ideas of the Antichrist and the imagery of Hell, where Satan and his demons were composite creatures with diabolical features borrowed from other traditions. These monster stereotypes persisted over centuries as a veritable tradition in travel literature and influenced nineteenth-century descriptions of Indian gods as ‘monstrous’, despite the West’s greatly increased familiarity with the society and culture of the subcontinent by that time (Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters 7, 9).

Europe’s East was a land “ripe for exploits and exploitation” (Thompson qtd. in Auerbach 579) and after the East India Company, a British trading establishment, seized control of large parts of the Indian subcontinent in the eighteenth-century, it started an extensive project to reconstruct India’s past, ostensibly to better understand the society they were ruling, but also undeniably to build an imperialist mindset and justify the colonial project in the metropole. But for all the information they succeeded in collecting and classifying, they nevertheless approached their material through a Victorian aesthetic framework, entirely overlooking the symbolism that Indian art was steeped in (Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters xv). Western art critics did not begin to appreciate Indian painting and drawing until the beginning of the twentieth century, and hostile views of Eastern taste circulated among theorists who continued to uphold Greek forms as the ideal (Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters 225).

John Ruskin was an art critic who had encountered Indian art fairly early in his life. His attitudes towards art were possibly shaped by his deeply religious, Victorian upbringing because he attached a moral role to art. His writing tended to be about what he did not like rather than what he liked — a personal rather than historical writing. Though he was not an evangelist, he did see himself as a reformer in art. He was a major critic of Victorian materialism and industrialism with an eye on reviving values of the medieval past. He felt that only a moral society could produce superior art. Nevertheless, he never doubted European superiority and viewed India as a primitive place that could only produce great ornamental art that did not involve the intellect (Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters 238–240). ‘High art’ such as painting and sculpture required growth of the mind, which according to him was not possible in the heat of tropical India where inhabitants could “not become learned, nor produce any noble art, only a savage or grotesque form of it” (Ruskin qtd, in Mitter 240). Ruskin famously compared examples of Greek and Indian art and found the latter lacking in its study of nature. To him it was the artist’s moral duty to represent a natural fact, as that was his notion of truth (Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters 245–246). The Greeks who had studied the human form intimately represented to him artists who put truth before pleasure. He extrapolates quite extravagantly: “You will find that art whose end is pleasure only is pre-eminently the gift of cruel and savage nations, cruel in temper, savage in habits and conception…” (qtd. in Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters 247).

The pioneering scholar of ancient Indian architecture, James Fergusson, was also convinced that Indian art was “written in decay” (qtd. in Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters xv) after a golden period of the minimalistic sophistication of Buddhist art. Fergusson, who claimed to see with an ‘innocent eye’, failed to sight the Indian love of rich and complex symbology.

With such conceptions of ‘high art’ and ‘decorative art’, the British would go on to classify and study the excellent quality of Indian ‘craftsmanship’ and apply that knowledge to their own decorative arts in order to improve the quality of their industrial products, all the while viewing Indian ‘art’ as lacking in intellectual conception and aesthetic refinement.

Indian Decorative Elements in Victorian Design

In his book, On the Culture and Commerce of Cotton in India published in 1851, J. Forbes Royle wrote of India as one of the nations which “earliest practiced the arts and cultivated the sciences which characterise civilisation” (qtd. in Auerbach 572). However, this view was oriented only towards selling Indian-made goods and designs to British manufacturers and conversely, to advance British trade interests in the Empire (Auerbach 572). India was the biggest exporter of its textiles between 1600 and 1800 CE and Indian chintz had already changed European tastes (Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters 221). The exceptional quality of Indian craftsmanship was admired by the Victorians as they were witnessing a loss of knowledge in handicraft production in Britain due to technological advances, large-scale industrialization and mass production. In his essay “The Revival of Handicraft”, William Morris wrote an exasperated account of his difficulties in finding a well-balanced walking stick — one that had a heavy-end that would swing out during a walk. He wrote drolly that it had become “a fashion to pare away all walking-sticks to the shape of attenuated carrots”. Noticeable in such writing of this period was a growing awareness and consternation about the stylistic confusion in industrial craftsmanship and the need for reformation in the industrial arts of Britain.

Henry Cole and Owen Jones were two leading figures of the reformation movement, which looked for inspiration in the decorative elements in the arts of India. Owen Jones wrote The Grammar of Ornament in 1856, in which he contrasted Indian craftsmen with their European counterparts as a people faithful to their cultural values while the latter had “no guiding principles in design, and still less of unity in its application” (qtd. in Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters 229). Birdwood had found that in India, everything down to the cheapest toy or earthen vessel was hand-wrought and was “therefore more or less a work of art…” (qtd. in Mitter, Indian Art 163). A parliamentary committee was formed in Britain to address reforms in industrial design and it was decided that it was necessary to set up state-funded schools of design there. Henry Cole was designated the head of the new Department of Practical Art in the Board of Trade and his ideas on education were established in these schools which emulated Eastern, and especially Indian, design (Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters 224). It was also decided that the new schools of Practical Art would provide only vocational training for the industry.

It is from this time of attempts to marry art and mass production that an early split between the fine and practical arts can be observed. It would be pertinent to pause here to note that in the historical texts and material I am citing, the Indian ‘artist’ was firmly dubbed the Indian ‘craftsman’ and the ‘art’ of India had by the mid-nineteenth century been reduced to the ‘decorative’ arts or ‘design and ornamentation’ to suit the purposes of a relocation of the very reason for art production. In pre-colonial India, art and architecture had been produced at the intersections between religion, philosophy and literature. Painting had seen the form of cave and temple murals, religious scrolls and palm-leaf documents, and manuscripts and portfolios, while sculpture appeared as part of temple and cave architecture, and objects of worship (Guha-Thakurta 53). The patrons of art had been royalty or the wealthy classes, which desired to consolidate their legacy. In India, after centuries of an economy of the agricultural and the handmade, when quite suddenly with the arrival of the British the production of objects moved away from the human hand to machines, art production found a new raison d’etre and different patrons.

Henry Cole was also the chief architect of the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was organized in Britain with the objective of displaying objects of design from all over the world for comparison and improvement of industrial design. A wealth of Indian design and craftsmanship was on display here and this event set off a slew of other such exhibitions.

The Great Exhibitions

Beginning with medieval travelogues, which contained descriptions of the faraway East as the exotic ‘other’, the Orient had more or less been invented by the Western imagination. Systematically, over centuries, the ground was prepared for Europe’s “positional superiority” as it set itself off against the Orient and secured a cultural hegemony (Said 3,7). This was done through several means, notably through grand public exhibitions that familiarised the people of Britain with their colonies. These were useful for garnering public approval of the colonial enterprise and acquiring the national will to be in the colonies (Kanoria). The exhibitions were also political and diplomatic exercises intended to bolster trade relations with other nations; a number of such national and international exhibitions were organised in Europe during the nineteenth century (Heinonen 15). The Great Exhibition of Works of Industry of All Nations of 1851 and the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 were two such spectacles that were held in London, the administrative heart of the British Empire.

Figs. 2 (top) & 3 (below): Messrs. Nash, Haghe and Roberts, 1854. Dickinson’s Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, from the originals painted for Prince Albert, London. Source: British Library.

In the Great Exhibition of 1851 which was held at the Crystal Palace — a prefabricated pavilion in London’s Hyde Park — Britain’s exhibits occupied the maximum space while India’s ‘oriental splendour’ and ‘economic profitability’ were displayed over 24,000 square feet with exhibits of raw materials, crafts, richly ornamented clothes and fabric, and the famed Ivory Throne and Koh-i-noor (Heinonen 48). The Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue, which was published as a guide to the exhibition, mentioned that the exhibition would encourage Britain in the industrial arts, in which it was already superior to its rival imperialistic nations, while also creating an awareness of the spheres in which it was deficient (xxvi). The exhibition was a great success and it laid the ground for the development of new institutions such as art academies and museums, as well as several other exhibitions.

Positioned as a ‘tour’ of the Empire, the exhibition of 1886 in South Kensington was called the Colonial and Indian exhibition. By this time, the control of India had passed from the hands of the East India Company to the Crown and the following year was to be Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. This exhibition was meant to impress the British public by showcasing the Empire’s benevolence towards its colonies. The British saw themselves as custodians of Indian civilisation and the stage was set with life-size models of ‘natives’ in their ‘timeless’ village settings as well as ‘live exhibits’ and performances (Qureshi 240). Comparisons were made between India’s traditional and contemporary crafts, which by exalting the former and deprecating the latter, cast the British in the role of ‘saviour’. This paternalistic construction was extended to the field of education, since the Empire felt a moral obligation to introduce the arts of the civilised world to what it saw as the backward masses of India.

Victorian Academic Art Education in India and Indian Art of the Raj

With the decline of the Mughal Empire in India, the artists employed by the elaborate ateliers lost their courtly patronage (Seyller 799). As the British juggernaut hurtled ahead, the times were characterised by a “dialectic between colonialism and nationalism and the construction of cultural difference in a rapid globalisation of culture” (Mitter, Indian Art 171).

Education was one of several ways of reinforcing and sustaining the power exercised by colonisers over their colonies. In 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote his “Minute on Education”, one of a series of several propagandist articles on the formation of British educational policy in India. He advocated an English-language education for Indian students enrolled in Government colleges and universities that not only required them to study a foreign language but to also receive instruction in all subjects in it. These students would then earn the distinction of being ‘learned natives’ (Cutts 824). They would form a class of clerks for the rulers; they would have British tastes, morals and intellect, and would serve as a bridge between the people and the government (Viswanathan qtd. in Kantawala 211).

In the 1850s, in another stage of Empire-building, the British introduced Western Academic art education in India for a number of reasons. As they moved towards a benevolent despotism, the Raj felt the urge to inculcate ‘good taste’ in the natives and, according to the methods of the school set up in South Kensington by Henry Cole, wanted to teach art not just for art’s sake but to improve standards of decorative ornamentation in industrial design which was the need of the hour in England. The colonialists had a keen interest in preserving and developing the traditional arts of India, especially after the success of the Great Exhibition of 1851 which had demonstrated Indian “ingenuity, albeit often erroneously directed” (qtd. in Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850–1922 31).

Four centres of British trade — Madras, Calcutta, Bombay and Lahore — were chosen, from an economic perspective of British self-interest, as the locations for establishing art schools. Here, goods would be produced using Indian labour and Indian techniques but students would be taught by the British and to cater to the British (Kantawala 212). Predictably, these urban art centres failed to attract indigenous craftsmen who were not only unable to afford this education but also unable to make use of English books of instruction. Consequently, the art schools became spaces for the wealthy, urban elite (Kantawala 218), creating a divide between Indian art-school-graduate artists and sons-of-the-soil craftsmen.

The introduction of European Academic naturalism transformed all aspects of art practice in India including patronage and style. Courtly patronage was replaced by the East India Company which employed artists for its various projects of documentation of natural history and ethnographic classification (Mitter, Indian Art 171–172) as well as all manner of social, cultural and administrative mappings in order to thoroughly visually possess the colonised, and perhaps to know them better than they knew themselves (Kanoria). Company Paintings, an umbrella term for European-style paintings made by Indian artists for their European patrons, became popular as demand rose for visual mementos of ‘exotic’ India for the curious eyes of the people of England (Archer 864). Displaced miniature painters from the courts of Murshidabad, Lucknow and Patna adjusted to Western demands and were reduced to ‘bazaar’ painters who would produce pictures on demand (Guha-Thakurta 15). The ‘native’ painters were exposed to European styles and they adapted to Western naturalist techniques for their new patrons while their works remained “anonymous documents of the varied British interests in India” (Ibid 16).

Figs. 4 (top) & 5 (below): Mazhar Ali Khan, 1846. A Company-style panorama of Delhi from the top of the Lahore Gate in the Red Fort, Delhi. Source: British Library.

A new Indian art emerged as a result of changing styles, techniques and taste which were entangled in complex and shifting relationships between artists, patrons and the public. Several varieties of painting and printmaking emerged as a result of Western influences and industrial techniques (Guha-Thakurta 2, 5). In Calcutta, a hub was formed in the vicinity of the Kalighat temples consisting of migrant village scroll painters or patuas, wood and metal engravers, and oil painters of mythologies. These groups operated near small Bengali printing presses at Bat-tala and formed the core of the flux in techniques and styles.

While the establishment in Calcutta cultivated ‘high art’ which reflected Western influences, the Kalighat patuas worked within the sphere of local tastes and their highly popular paintings, characterised by bold lines and bright colours, were positioned as inherently Indian, the art form of the natives (Guha-Thakurta 18). The rural patuas adapted to the exigencies of the city and, setting aside their traditional media and forms of religious and mythological scrolls, adapted their content, format and materials to cater to the new urban market. Reflecting their own social and moral dislocation, they made paintings on contemporary social themes, creating satirical works that mocked Calcutta’s westernised society. In order to create inexpensive work, they shifted from scrolls to single-frame images, used paper instead of cloth and replaced gouache and tempera with watercolours (Ibid 19). Socially, these painters stuck rigidly to their hierarchies; stylistically, they continued to work in a non-naturalistic, two-dimensional style. Their patrons were the common people of the city who quite possibly felt as alienated as these painters by Calcutta’s beau monde. Till the early twentieth century, these paintings were viewed as ‘bazaar art’ that were produced mostly anonymously by these ‘artisans’. They grew to be collectors’ items in the early twentieth century, long after the living tradition had waned (Ibid 23). Patuas never attained the status of artists.

Meanwhile, printing technology enabled mass production of prints and some of these painters turned to lithography in order to produce even cheaper and more simplified images. The Bat-tala presses, which mirrored Kalighat paintings with their ribald publications of Bengali literature, produced wood-cuts and metal-engraved variations of the paintings (Guha-Thakurta 25). Many of these Bat-tala engravers, who came from traditional artisan groups like ironsmiths, silversmiths and goldsmiths, were initially employed by British-owned presses. As the demand was for cheap, mechanically reproduced books that used cheap paper, the Bat-tala prints were fairly crude and signified the social position and commercial prospects of the artisans who produced them (Ibid 31). These engravers discarded their caste affiliations, formed an artisan community of printmakers and competed closely with the Kalighat patuas. However, soon, with improved technology, as oleographs and lithographs produced by graduates of the Calcutta School of Art flooded the popular art market, the academically trained ‘artists’ also moved into the indigenous sphere of prints and publications, creating new hierarchies within urban commercial art (Ibid 35). Paradoxically, these ‘gentlemen artists’ who emulated the West mostly found only inferior jobs as draughtsmen and engravers, leading them inexorably to join the more lucrative market of popular art (Ibid 46). They were unable to cross the line between European and Indian artists even as British art education attempted to ‘remedy’ the deficiencies in Indian art (Ibid 48).

As local tastes changed, traditional art declined and the Indian elite started collecting Western art by European artists working in India. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the tastes of the Indian elite had already become fairly Victorian. Art schools, exhibitions and writing on art had created an art-aware society and, through mechanical reproduction methods, ideas of Victorian academic naturalism had been disseminated (Mitter, Modern Indian Painting 22). Academic ‘artists’ who painted commissioned portraits in oil alongside landscapes and history paintings which, especially, were considered high art, formed the “clearest line of distinction that cordoned off the world of ‘high’ art” (Guha-Thakurta 35). Not to be left behind, ‘bazaar’ art too adapted to new tastes. Anonymous paintings of life-like gods were created by artisan-painters using a mix of decorative iconography and Academic naturalism. Artisan presses also entered this market by creating chromolithographs of religious pictures for the mass market (Ibid 35–38).

It is possible that when the School of Art was set up in Calcutta in 1854, artisans and printmakers had availed of the facilities and trained to gain new skills in Academic realism (Guha-Thakurta 42). However, as the urban English-educated classes dominated the art school, students from artisan backgrounds returned to producing religious and mythological works, never attaining the respectability of artists. Even in the perceptions of wealthy Indian collectors, works by these artisans were objects of devotion that were to be tucked away in the household prayer room. They were not ‘works of art’ (Ibid 43). With the rise of the Academy-educated ‘gentlemen artists’, the artist-artisan divide was firmly entrenched in Indian society.

Fig. 6: Anonymous, c. 1865. A Kalighat painting showing the goddess Parvati with the infant Ganesha in her arms. The painting was produced for pilgrims worshipping at the Kalighat temple, Kolkata. Source: British Library.

Conclusion

The reformist art teacher E.B. Havell wrote a scathing indictment of British policies on art education in India in his “Essays on Indian Art” which was published in 1915. It was his view that Europeans barely understood Indian art. No European, he stated, would be able to appreciate Indian art unless he dropped the “ignorant condescension” with which he viewed that which he did not understand (Havell 1). He recognized the self-interest that had spurred the British to establish art education in India, which caused “ruinous loss” with a degeneration of artistic understanding in India as well as the replacement of handicrafts with mechanisation (Havell 68). India, he wrote, “has had no share in the marked artistic revival which has been progressing in Europe for the last fifty years, though her traditional art knowledge is being continually exploited in every direction for the benefit of European art and manufacture” (Havell 68).

In India today, almost seventy-five years into our independence from British rule, we have both the old order as well as the relatively new — villages and crafts communities continue to exist alongside vast cities and industries. Artists who practise their regional styles of painting, singing, decorating homes, crafting everyday objects such as clothes, baskets and utensils, not only exist alongside but compete with industrially made products from India as well as imports. Much like in the nineteenth century, India still has a unique place in the world as a country with a wealth of traditional hand skills, where ancient knowledge has been retained for generations. Indian handmade objects — cashmere to kundan; hand-painted or printed textiles to papier-mache — are objects of luxury in the West because knowledge and hand skills such as these are to be found nowhere else today. Yet these Indian arts are in danger of disappearing with the current generation of practitioners and even today the Indian artisan, who is well versed with regional folklore as well as the epics, remains excluded from the realm of formal education and the world of ‘high art’. The Indian elite ‘invests’ in art sold at galleries while artisanal products are still to be found in crafts ‘bazaars’ where craftsmen are often seen lowering the price of their wares in order to make sales. In the process of westernisation, art practice in India changed vitally and the effects of this change remain manifest. “Haste and haggling have now almost destroyed the possibility of art, and until they are again eliminated from the craftsman’s work it will not be possible to have again such work as he once gave to his fellows. In other words, society must either decide to do without art, as it mostly does decide at the present day, or else it must make up its mind to pay for art and endow its craftsmen. You cannot both have art and exploit it” (Coomaraswamy 25–26). The handicrafts of India hold the promise of rich experiences — of sensitivity, quality and refinement; of sustainable employment and consumption — a value system that India might benefit from by introducing to its formal education system.

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Qureshi, Sadiah. Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Images cited:

Fig. 1: https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/artistic-patronage-of-akbar-the-great/

Figs. 2 & 3: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/dickinsons-comprehensive-pictures-of-the-great-exhibition-of-1851

Figs. 4 & 5: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/a-panorama-of-delhi

Fig. 6: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/ganesh-janani

This article was first written by Rukminee Guha Thakurta towards the fulfilment of the Indian Aesthetics Diploma at Jnanapravaha, Mumbai, in May 2021.