PAINTING IN THE COLONIAL PERIOD
During the colonial period the Indian painting had lost its originality when more and more of painters started following the European influences, known as Company style, in order to please their European colonizers. It was at this time that the name of Raja Ravi Varma soared high into the sky that went on eulogizing the Indian tradition of art. Soon he was considered the most eclectic painter during the colonial period for his innovative art, which comprised a fusion of Indian traditions with the European academic art. He gave the Indian epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata, a new direction by making the paintings of the epic figures such as Sita, Draupadi in a new avatar. He followed the Indian tradition of drawing sari-clad women even in South India, where sari was not the order of the day. In the words of Almona Bhatia, an organizer of art galleries, "The paintings of women are just wonderful: His Mohini, his Damyanti, his Shakuntala and so many others. He paints a woman as the seductress and temptress. What more can one ask for?”
The paintings of Indian women by Raja Ravi are revolutionary not only for their content but also for the social consciousness they generated among the Indian painters during the British rule. The Indian women clad in gold bordered saris equipped with ornate jewelry inspired great painters such as “M.F. Hussain, Satish Gujral, Laxman Shreshtha, Deepak Shinde, S.H. Raza etc.” it was his paintings that launched a feministic phase in India that had been fettered in the colonial chains for centuries.
The paintings of Indian women by Raja Ravi are innumerable, but they can be broadly divided into three parts, namely, “‘Puranic,' ‘Religious,' and ‘Scenes from Hindu Classical Drama'. The most famous of his Puranic paintings include Damyanti and Swan, Sita’s abduction by Ravana, Sita’s departure into the recesses of the earth, Menaka and Radha. Even though some of his women are nude, his paintings do not amount to eroticism.
DAMAYANTHI’S SECRET LOVE
One of the most celebrated paintings that shot Raja Ravi into limelight is that of the “secret love of Damyanti”, an important character from Mahabharata. Raja Ravi portrays Damyanti as a lovelorn woman in a very emotional state of mind. He depicts her with a magic swan that works as an envoy between her and her lover Nal. Damyanti is clad in a sari and is decked with the ornaments that befitted her culture and society. A look at her face is enough to know of her plight, and the trust she invests in the swan.
GODDESS SARASWAT
One of the most influential religious paintings of Raja Ravi Varma is the painting of the goddess of learning, Saraswati. He shows the goddess in a white sari, which is a symbol of knowledge and purity. He adorns her with simple ornaments only unlike other paintings of women who are heavily adorned with gems and jewels. His message is simple-knowledge must precede materialism. His painting is revolutionary for he gave an anthropomorphic touch to the goddess, who was drawn only symbolically and crudely earlier.
Post Colonial Period
With the British conquest of India, traditional art came to be affected by Victorian art concepts. The early revival of modern Indian art is traceable to Raja Ravi Varma. He introduced the technique of oil painting as well as western composition and perspective. His work was representational, almost illustrative, with Rubens like plump females representing females and goddesses. His technique was later supplemented by the wash technique, which was made use of in full by painters like Souza. In 1947 when India became independent it became easier for artists to travel abroad to become better acquainted with different artistic tendencies, to the extent that western 20th century art began to dominate work of many artists in India. Soon Indian artists began rejecting the dominance of the subject to concentrate on colour, shape, texture and rhythm. It is this time that marks the rise of Souza.
Postcolonial period is notable in India as it gave the artists to blend Indian art with the Western art. And the most remarkable painter of the postcolonial era is undoubtedly Souza, born in the Portuguese colony of Goa in 1924. He grew into an orthodox Roman Catholic family, and was lucky enough to observe different cultures at the same place-the Hindu, the Portuguese and the Catholic Christian. At a tender age his art was drawn to the difference between the teachings of two polar cultures-the erotic Indian art and the repressive dictates of the church. Souza called this duality “sin and sensuality.” No doubt under these circumstances Souza started painting both the cultures-from the baby figure of Christ, the body of Madonna, the head of John the Baptist to the sensual and statuesque nudes of Indian women, which would soon transcend to those of the nude women as drawn by Matisse and Picasso.
However apart the two painters might have been, both began from the same soil and with the same technique. Both used Paints made from leaves, flowers, tree bark and soil, and made innovations with their techniques. They felt a penchant for the Indian classical art, and did their best to revive this ancient art, which was being forgotten under the colonial rule. The painters showed a great propensity toward painting the women but in different ways. Raja Ravi Varma painted most of the women from Indian classics such as Kalidasa, Ramayana and Mahabharata. Souza drew his work on the sculptures of Mathura and Khajurao, and found a live specimen to give vent to his erotic and passionate sensualities. Both of them are revolutionary in that they used both the Indian and European art to give expression to their innate feelings.
The main striking difference in their art comes when we look at the female bodies. Although the bodies are a treasure of beauty for both of them, Souza draws their bodies nude. What is it that ked Souza toward drawing nude Indian and foreign women. In the views of most of the critics Souza developed this penchant while he saw his mother bathing naked. This view gives Souza an opportunity to expose the curves and contours of the feminine body from a tender age.
Souza, a prolific painter, writer, poet and even philosopher is better known by the epithet ‘Souzaesque.” In his own words, “"Renaissance painters painted men and women, making them look like angels. I paint for angels to show them what men and women really look like." And no doubt Souza surpasses the Renaissance painter when we find a unique expression on the faces of his nude women.
At the beginning of his career, he was inspired very much by South Indian bronzes and the relief carvings on the Khajurao temple, especially the female sculptures. This was the turning point in his life that drew his brush toward nude women. In the words of a critic, Geeta kapur “one of the major themes of Souza’s oeuvre is the woman. The aggressive sensuality in the handling of the female figure corresponds in the early years to his frankly borrowed expressionist idiom and there is obvious relationship of these women to Rouault’s early paintings of aging prostitutes and charwomen of the Paris slums.
Souza was one of the first painters in the postcolonial era to fight for modernity in his work. And for his passion to lead the battle his made nudity and eroticism his main weapons. One of his first works included embracing couples painted on the lines of the pictures from the famous Khajurao temples and sculptures at Mathura. These famous sculptures inspired him to paint the buxom sensuous female form aided by his keen observation of the female figure and expressions.
One of his paintings shows his obsession with the sculpture of Mathura and Khajurao. The three girls are the voluptuous, big-breasted Yakshis from Mathura of the Kusana period, except that every touch of grace has been eliminated and they look less than courtesans. In many of his paintings he heightens the sexual imagery to produce a painting, which was too bold and unusual at that time. By making them appear less of courtesans Souza gives importance to female sexuality in a world where women have to repress their emotions.
Raja Ravi Varma also painted semi nude women but his women are women in love with an earnest expression on their faces. Souza’s women are drawn more on the sexual and the erotic sentiment. Ravi Varma paint women whose facial expression is a mirror of the inner state of the woman’s mind but Souza’s women are obscure.
SOUZA painted the reclining nude in sheer red pigment. The figure of the reclining nude is hardly discernible but she does have both her arms behind her head. In 1966 Souza painted several nudes while producing a large series of black paintings. Souza’s work sometimes echoes the works of the greatest painters of the world such as Rembrandt. His drawing titled “Woman bathing in a stream” might be a model in the guise of an Old Testament heroine such as Susanna who was spied upon by men while she was bathing. The painting shows not only his attraction toward Biblical connection but also to more youthful penchant for ogling at his mother whilst bathing. In the eyes of the critics such nude paintings are a mirror to Souza’s innate feelings and his uninhibited sexual appetite. It is for his pleasure that his women disrobe and recline.
Some of his paintings involving women are also didactic in nature. On the lines of Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Souza’s adaptation “Young Ladies” concerned a similar theme. He wrote, “in order to appreciate this incredible hub of New York city which includes 42nd street, one has to be either a sophisticate or a degenerate.” In Souza’s opinion the 42nd street area was an underworld community of pimps, prostitutes, hustlers and gangsters, where the pimps gave you a flash by flashing the skirt of a woman in a second in such a way that it would knock your eyeballs from their sockets.
Since he grew in India, it is apparent that Souza had a fixation with the image of an Indian woman with a mirror. These pencil drawings are remarkable in that he shows the plain nude without any seductive features and a largely expressionless face and yet gives the impression of a classical drawing of a bygone era. Even though he was living in London his painting of the nude Indian woman is a strong proof that his mind was still obsessed with images from the classical era in Indian art.
The nude women captivated Souza, be she his mother, wife or mistress. He made many oil paintings of Liselotte Kristian, his mistress in London. He made a watercolor portrait of hers with pastel shades while she was pregnant. He originally kept this portrait for himself to cherish it.
Souza’s chemical paintings and drawings involve painting over pages torn from colour magazines, catalogues, printed photographs and newspapers. He used a chemical to blur and brush over colour photographs in glossy magazines and then drew over the partly bleached out picture. These chemically altered works frequently involved sexual imagery. Souza also made a collage and in the top of which he wrote” Erotic art USA.” Many of his drawings such as “Seated girl” and “Lovers” are considered highly erotic. In the seated girl he draws an attractive young girl. Her sex is exposed and one of her hands rests behind her head. Her posture shows the contours of her body throwing a connotation that she is a call girl. Her eyes passively staring at the client show her submissiveness to him. In the words of a critic Terence Mullaly, “the sinister twist to Souza’s imagination tends to express itself either in excessive violence, or distastefully in pornography.” But in Souza’s words, “my paintings are not the product of love or anger. They are simply a product of my libido.”
In his other drawings such as “Woman Bathing” and “Nude” Souza experimented with figurative work in nuances of grey. He does not look inclined to drawing attractive ladies here. Instead his canvas is covered by fleshy nudes with pregnant belies, short legs. May be he draws our attention again to the stout bodies in Indian sculptures. They grey paintings evoke a question-what made Souza draw in grey?. The answer is simple. In the fifth and sixth decades of the 20th century it was feared that the world was heading to a nuclear war. In the wake f the nuclear was Souza said, “It is all wrong and will end in ashes. That’s why my painting is in grey.” More than erotic or beautiful his drawings are experiments in placing the structure of such figures within a bold painting.
In his drawing “Madonna and Child” he gives the Biblical theme a new twist. He draws it in in an impasto style and the bare bosomed Madonna looks unattractive. On a deeper look this drawing shows that other than the title there s nothing religious about this painting. It appears that Souza does not pay reverence to Christian deities. He not only casts Madonna nude and crude but also makes the baby Christ look very plain.
Bibliography
Book: Raja Ravi Varma: Painter of Colonial Indian by Rupika Chawla, Pub: Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad, March 2010.
Max Muller http://bharatjanani.com/glory-thy-name-is-india-–-the-mother-of-the-world/
by
sc_rahulgrah (student)
