Scenes of agony & ecstasy

This is a remarkable effort to document works of art that illustrate how artists responded to the freedom struggle.

In 1923, ‘picture merchant’ Shyam Sundar Lal set up his shop and publishing venture at the Chowk in Kanpur. He published, among others, "a disproportionately large number" of images of armed revolutionaries produced by artists such as Prabhu Dayal and Roop Kishore Kapur. Driven by nationalist sentiments, he was aware of the risks of disseminating such ‘seditious’ material.

If Sundar Lal is introduced to the reader in the very first chapter of Vinay Lal’s ‘Insurgency and the Artist: Art of the Freedom Struggle in India’ so is the city of Kanpur (then called Cawnpore) as a historically important centre in the context of the freedom struggle. Kanpur, interestingly, was also a preeminent centre of nationalist printmaking.

Coming back to Sundar Lal, his shop was raided by policemen on 13 April 1940. The ensuing trial in June 1940 found him guilty of violating certain sections of the Indian Penal Code concerning the publication of seditious material.

Speaking images

Images published by Sundar Lal feature extensively in Vinay Lal’s elegantly produced book. A scholarly meditation, the primary focus of the book is to understand ‘how artists in India responded to the anti-colonial movement.’ For his study, the Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) chose to look at the art produced during the course of the freedom struggle and a few months beyond, culminating in the assassination of Gandhi on 30 January 1948.

Given the general dearth of methodical archiving in the country, it would have been a difficult task for the author to locate works of art that illustrated the response of artists to the freedom struggle. Lal fears that much of the artwork capturing key events like the Jallianwala Bagh massacre might have been simply lost.

Despite such challenges, Vinay Lal’s commendable research, discoveries, conjectures, and ideations make for interesting reading. The soul of the book, however, lies in the carefully-curated set of images driving the essential narrative of the treatise. “The ambitions of this work, in short, are rather straightforward,” writes Lal. “They are to bring together in a single volume some of the most insightful artwork — largely nationalist prints, but occasionally oil paintings, woodcuts, watercolours, cartoons, and pencil, pen, and brush sketches — which point to how artists in India responded to the freedom struggle and indeed helped in shaping it and imagining the nation.” The images do speak and speak well.

Torture and tyranny

The book has 200-plus images of popular prints, pamphlets, calendars, newspaper cartoons, collages, sketches, watercolours, oils, lithographs, and an occasional photograph. The author, being an archivist as well, more than a third of the images come from his personal collection.

The frontispiece of the book sets the tone with an un-dated freedom collage from Rajasthan. It depicts Subhas Chandra Bose in full military uniform offering his head on a platter to Bharat Mata. The book has more ‘head offering’ images. In one picture, Bhagat Singh offers his own head on a platter to the enthroned Bharat Mata; and in another, Jawaharlal Nehru offers activist Jatin Das’ head to the Mata.

While other heroes of the freedom struggle get featured by artists (sometimes repeatedly), it is Mahatma Gandhi who towers over them all. Vinay Lal traces the many contours of Gandhi’s long and eventful journey and explains how his acts and thoughts caught the artist’s imagination during and after his lifetime.

There are scores of other fascinating images portraying scenes of agony and ecstasy; revolts and retribution; torture and tyranny; shame and surrender; death and cremation. Many artists seem to have given free rein to their imagination by bringing their heroes and gods on the same page.

Striking images

Among the most striking images in the book are Nandalal Bose’s iconic Bapuji’s Dandi March (1930); Chittoprasad Bhattacharya’s drawings conveying horrors of poverty, starvation and famine; Prabhu Dayal’s 1930 print showing Gandhiji fighting the British with his charkha and Nehru flying in the sky and carrying a mountain (like Hanuman); and Lal Bahadur’s cartoon ‘Opposition to the Age of Consent Bill’ (1891) with its group of protesters lead by Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Roop Kishore’s poignant lithograph (1931) pays homage to Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi who died while trying to quell a riot between Hindus and Muslims. One cannot miss Paritosh Sen’s painting of clustered refugees; Gopal Ghose’s raging colour of Calcutta riots (1946); Somnath Hore’s masterly 1950 wood engraving ‘Night Meeting’; and Krishen Khanna’s silent mourners clutching papers carrying news of Gandhiji’s death. In a humorous pen and ink drawing, Chittoprasad pitches Maulana Azad against Jinnah on the issue of the Partition.

History and contemporary reality often make for strange and even ironic bedfellows. Vinay Lal says Sundar Lal’s 100-year-old venture exists to this day in Kanpur but in a new avatar. “They don’t deal with prints; it is like a stationery shop.”