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Journalism of Courage
The frontispiece of Vinay Lal’s book, Insurgency and the Artist: The Art of the Freedom Struggle in India, is a perfect illustration of how art created during India’s independence movement (and until the assassination of Gandhi on January 30, 1948) shaped the ways in which we look back on those decades and the men and women who drove its events.
It is an undated, unattributed collage from Rajasthan (made roughly in 1946-47), which depicts Subhas Chandra Bose offering his head on a platter to a Durga-like figure, presumably meant to represent Bharat Mata. In one corner of the work appears Lord Krishna, his right hand raised in a gesture of benediction, while on the horizon Netaji himself appears again, twice — once as a ghostly manifestation, holding up the Tricolour; in the other, depicted in a rare, relaxed position, as if watching the scene from up in heaven.
In the river of blood flowing from his decapitated body on Earth — still in an upright, kneeling position and clad in his usual uniform — are Bhagat Singh, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and other heroes of the freedom struggle. Britain appears as a fire-breathing dragon at Bharat Mata’s feet, opposite a globe that shows a golden India, standing on a garlanded pedestal.
There is little that is subtle about the work — not the glorification of anti-colonial violence and the role it played in securing India’s freedom, nor the deification of freedom fighters, and certainly not the identification of the nation with iconography connected to one religion. Lal traces the hold that these — and a host of other — ideas about the freedom struggle and the nation have on the Indian mind in the 21st century all the way back to the early 20th century.
Poor-quality albeit vivid “bazaar art” — prints, handbills, calendars, advertisements, pamphlets — produced by workshops and probably displayed in homes and shops might well have played a key role, as did the prints, sketches and paintings by artists such as Nandalal Bose, Chittaprosad, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Zainul Abedin.
Particular insights into currently dominant “ideas of India” can be found in the chapter ‘Tilak, Militancy, and Martial Pasts’, which lays out how artists such as M V Dhurandhar helped construct a certain kind of nationalist imagination which traced a history of valorous resistance to “foreign” subjugation back to figures such as Shivaji, Rana Pratap, and Prithviraj Chauhan.
The volume holds a rich representation of material — much of it undated and unsigned — that may have been considered too crude in content and execution for scholarly examination before, but which offer substantial insights into how the ordinary Indian might have thought about the icons and acts of resistance, what constitutes the Indian nation, and what constitutes the “political” fight against the British.
These are, Lal writes, not mere representations of the freedom struggle, but images that might even have helped “make” the nation.
Title | Insurgency and the Artist: The Art of the Freedom Struggle in India
Author: Vinay Lal
Publisher: Roli Books
Pages: 260
