Ten days after the terror attacks, the CSMVS holds a landmark exhibition in Mumbai. Works from the Victoria & Albert Museum, on "Indian life and landscapes" over three centuries, are on display.
It’s an ambitious project that had been first planned almost a decade ago. Now, the show finally opens in Mumbai, on December 8 — in the aftermath of the terror attacks.
More than 103 prints, paintings and drawings from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection in London will now be on view at the CSMVS in Mumbai, the erstwhile Prince of Wales Museum. The works, all done between 1670 and 1900, are primarily portraits and landscapes, featuring India through the course of almost three centuries, by European artists — both professionals and amateurs, including those who never quite set foot inside the country but drew purely from their imaginations and the accounts of travellers.
This is the first time that the V&A is collaborating with an Indian museum. But, apart from works from that collection, there are also 22 additional paintings from the CSMVS’s collection to be featured in this exhibition.
“The works are interesting both because they serve as a record as also because these are outsiders’ perceptions of India,” points out CSMVS director Sabyasachi Mukherjee. With European travellers increasingly coming to Mughal India, fascinated by tales of opulence and a unique culture, painting and drawing became the primary medium of keeping records.
Photography hadn’t yet developed in the 17th century and each time a traveller would be struck by something — a landscape, a monument or a temple, or even a particular face, he would pause and record it as an account of the fantastic life in “Hindoostan”.
Glimpses of the picturesque are all around: You can see portrayals of the common people and emperors and the landscape of the country — say, the unsullied Taj Mahal in its early years, the temples of Benares, the Narmada riverscape... But what this representation also affords is an insight into the history and development of art itself.
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Pheroza Godrej, associated with the show, points out how one can see the flat styles of the earlier centuries, say, of the stylised miniature paintings of courtly India, making way for three-dimensional portraits that became more rounded with the passing years. You can, for instance, “see how the robes of the Mughal emperors begin to look different from earlier representations”.
It was partly stories of Mughal magnificence that inspired artists to seek out the picturesque in India. Thomas and William Daniell’s sketches, for instance, the results of their travels across the land, have been long celebrated. The Daniells drew the Mughal forts at Agra, Fatehpur Sikri and Delhi, temples and gopuras of southern India, that resulted in their work Oriental Scenery (1795-1808). You can see some of the originals here. But there are other fascinating, lesser-known accounts too.
There is, for instance, the work of Dutch artist Willem Schellinks of Amsterdam who became fascinated by accounts of the Mughal empire published in journals by the early travellers (some of the artists featured actually painted only their impressions of India).
His oil painting, “Four Sons of Emperor Shah Jahan”, depicts a pageant with the emperor’s sons on stage being watched by the emperor and his daughter.
Ancestors, Akbar and Jahangir, appear above, seated together in the form of an apotheosis. While the composition’s Baroque setting is a Western concept, portrayals of the people have been inspired by Indian miniatures collected by Europeans. This intriguing and unusual painting of the Mughal dynasty by a Western artist is to form the first focal point of the exhibition, according to a statement.
Then, there is Balthazar Solvyns, the Flemish artist, who arrived in Calcutta in 1791. He lived among the locals for several years and drew their portraits, highlighting their sense of pride as expressed, for example, in his sensitive study of the hookah-burdar preparing the pipe for his master.
He etched 250 plates of the people, their ceremonies, modes of transport and so forth. A selection of his original drawings from the V&A will also be exhibited in Mumbai.
Among the most talented draughtsmen in India was George Chinnery. He was also a portrait painter but his heart was really in the Bengal countryside. The collection of his studies of village life also includes some rare, highly evocative landscape watercolours, painted on the spot.
The show is a result of an almost decade-long research into the subject by Pauline Rohatgi, a former curator with the British Library. She will also be releasing a book on the subject alongside the show.
That apart, activities including children’s activities, on-the-spot drawing events and discussions have also been planned. Regardless of our present, the show, as they say, must go on.