Remembering Benodebehari Mukherjee

Benodebehari Mukherjee

Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art is all set for the mega Benodebehari Mukherjee Retrospective. Slated to take place by the last week of December 2006, this exhibition is curated by art historian R.Sivakumar and painter Gulam Mohammad Sheikh. JohnyML speaks to curator R.Sivakumar about the project. Excerpts

JohnyML: When did you start Benodebehari Mukherjee retrospective project?
R.Sivakumar: We began to work on this project in 2004.  Prof. Gulam Mohammad Sheikh was invited by the NGMA to curate this birth centenary retrospective exhibition and he in turn asked me to be his co-curator.  And after preliminary discussions we began our curatorial work around September 2004.

JML: How did you and Gulam Mohammad Sheikh go about curating this project?
RS: Although we had both studied his work in our individual capacities earlier we did not have a ready archives on which we could draw on.  And since Benodebehari is not a well documented artist our first effort was to undertake an extensive documentation of his works.  This included travelling and documenting works in several collections, locating individual works of which we found reference to, and gathering all the information we could.  From this we moved on to make a selection of his work that can be considered comprehensive from different perspectives.

JML: What were the impediments in getting the works?  Or was it a smooth walk?
RS: Generally the collectors were all generous and forthcoming.  But we had to face impediments on other grounds.  Firstly when you deal with an artist like Benodebehari who was very reticent, did not always date his work, and kept few records reconstructing his life and oeuvre cannot be easy.  And that only a few of his close associates are alive today made it more daunting.  Although we have been generally successful in overcoming these impediments we should have been happier if we could locate a few more works from his early years.  The other major problem that any curator undertaking such a project faces in this country is the paucity of funds.  Such retrospectives and large historical shows may be very important for energising our art discourse but providing for these is not a part of our national culture or priorities.  So we were forced to look beyond Government funding, especially for the publications.  But here again we were lucky to find generous private support.  With art-prices going up it is not difficult to foresee that realising such projects will become even more difficult in the future unless the funding policies change radically.

JML: You have done several retrospective projects.  How do you access the task of a curator when he/she does a retrospective project?
RS: A retrospective by definition has a historical dimension built into it.  But there is also a personal side to every retrospective.  The curator is always present in it as the critical reader who brings in this historical perspective irrespectively of whether he chooses to place himself in the foreground or work more imperceptibly from the background.  How one goes about it will depend on a number of things.  Given the lack of art historical documentation of the oeuvres of even our most important artists retrospectives in India should naturally become an occasion for providing such a perspective.  For instance the only publication on Benodebehari that precedes this exhibition is the tiny monograph published by Lalit Kala Akademi decades ago. Now compare this with the rich art historical discourse against which the MOMA retrospectives of Picasso or Matisse took place. 

JML: From technicalities let us come to the particulars.  Where do you locate Benodebehari Mukherjee today?
RS: He was an innovator in his time, a harbinger of significant changes. But the Indian art scene has also changed a great deal in the last few decades, so he is more prone to be seen today as an old master of modern Indian art rather than as a guiding angel by artists today.  But as an artist who has made a stupendous contribution to the art of his time we can be sure that these differences rather than wiping him out will turn him, by virtue of those very differences, into an interrogative presence on the thought-horizon of every thinking artist.  That I suppose is the challenge every great artist offers to those who come after him.

JML: I think that the Bengal School artists had a post modern attitude as they were vehemently working on environmental issues along with their oriental leanings. Benodebehari Mukherjee’s works have a special affinity for environment.  Comment please.
RS: I am not sure if we can use the term post modern except in a very loose manner here.  However, we can definitely say that like post modern artists Santiniketan artists too, especially Nandalal, Benodebehari and Ramkinkar, did not subscribe to the idea of a linear modernism that was an integral part modernist discourse on art.  But they saw themselves primarily as modern artists moving away from the historicist kind of painting, that ruled the roost and sought to link back to the indigenous art tradition under the banner of nationalism, towards an art that connected up with everyday reality and local environment.  This separates them from the Bengal School.  They not only grew out of the Bengal School but also out grew it.  I believe this difference is significant.  While the Bengal School stuck to historicist themes and a style they designated national the Santiniketan masters were more eclectic and stressed on bringing a sense of place or locational experience into their work.  And for Benodebehari the sense of identity certainly came from a sense of belonging to a place rather than from inheriting a history.

JML: How do you explain the artistic philosophy and vision of Benodebehari Mukherjee?
RS: Significantly although he lived in the nationalist period and among artists who were exercised about nationalist issues he did not do any nationalist art.  Partly because he was not temperamentally inclined, and partly because as an artist he was more concerned with an artist’s ultimates.  In a broad way he was a thinker, a sadhak, who carried out his enquiry through the medium of art.  But he was also an artist who was sceptical of dogmas and believed that an artist has to safe guard his personal freedom at all cost and give voice to his experiential realisations under patronage and duress.

JML: In sculpture we see a lot of artists carrying on the tradition of the tradition of Ramkinkar Baij, who was a contemporary of Benodebehari Mukherjee.  But we do not see so many artists following the lines of B.B. Mukherjee.  Why is it so?
RS: Ramkinkar was a more colourful personality, his modernism and social commitments were more noticeable and more accessible at least at a superficial level.  Benodebehari on the other hand was more of a recluse; his art is also very ascetic, like an alap it opens up slowly and demands your total participation.  It is not seductive; there is no bravura, only a quiet precision. I suppose that explains why he has few imitators and fewer followers.  But all the same he was a highly influential teacher and left a mark on his students’ thinking if not on their styles. 

JML: Could you please tell me something more about the life of this legendary man?
RS: He was born into a middle class Bengali family, as the youngest among six brothers and two sisters.  Although he was born blind in one eye and severely myopic in the other and pronounced unfit for regular education he imbibed an intellectual and creative aptitude from his brothers who shared between them different kinds of talents.  These circumstances led him to Santiniketan and finally to study art, where he came close to Nandalal and was for many years his closest associate and assistant.  As a teacher he complemented Nandalal’s innovativeness with an intellectual rigour and encouraged his students to develop an analytical mind.

The personalities of Rabindranath and Nandalal and the stark rural landscape of Santiniketan influenced him deeply.  The programmes Rabindranath and Nandalal initiated to bring art into the life of the community nurtured his talent as a muralist.  Perhaps nowhere else at that time in India a fuller realisation of such a talent might have been possible.  Santiniketan also provided him with an ambiance that suited his reclusive temperament.

But in 1948 when he had just completed the mural on the life of the medieval saints, his magnum opus, he left Santiniketan to take up the curator’s job at the government museum in Kathmandu.  Though this move was prompted by the feeling that post-Tagore Santiniketan was losing its openness, his interactions with Newari craftsman convinced him of the soundness of Nandalal’s approach to the art-craft question.  Returning to India in 1950 he tried to set up a training centre to promote an integrated teaching programme.  Unfortunately the centre did not last long and in 1957 following an eye operation he became completely blind.

Blindness did not, however, put an end to his creative life.  He began to do papercuts and sculptures, and even went on to do a mural.  In 1958 he returned to Santiniketan and began to teach art history.  During these years he also began to write more seriously.  Some of these including two of biographical pieces were collected in a book and it won him literary awards.  Translated by K.G. Subramanyan it is now available in English for any one interested in his life and ideas. 

JML: What is the scope of this retrospective? What are you aiming as curators?
RS: As curators our aim has been to make a comprehensive presentation of his work and personality.  Here comprehensive means several things; firstly it means inclusion of representative examples from all periods, works in different medium, and so on.  It also means presenting not only major works but also, where ever possible, the drawings and studies related to them so that one gets an insight into his work methods and can see how he arrived at the final image.  And of course it also means presenting his murals in reproductions, some of them almost in actual size so as give a sense of scale and location.  We hope that the exhibition together with the catalogue and other publications will bring his work to wider notice and more importantly encourage a more informed and critical engagement with it.

JML: You mentioned once that there would be a lot of art merchandise produced during the exhibition.  Will it help in proliferating the artistic vision?
RS: As curators we are focusing on the publications that will accompany the show.  These include besides a comprehensive catalogue of over 350 pages, special publications on two of his major works – the mural on the life of the medieval saints and a scroll depicting the stark landscape of early Santiniketan – a book on his flower paintings and a more affordable book on his work at large.  Besides this there will be postcards and posters and perhaps other things that can more properly called art merchandise.  Taken together we hope it will make his work familiar to viewers at different levels.

JML: Do you have plans to take this show to the southern parts of the country?      
RS: Unfortunately we do not foresee this show travelling south beyond Bombay and east beyond Calcutta at this moment. 

JML: Please assess this project as a curator?
RS: Isn’t it better we leave that to the viewers?