‘The Big Book of Indian Art’ — an encyclopaedic look at more than 300 Indian artists

The first time I heard of Bina Sarkar Ellias was in 2017, while writing an article on her daughter Yuki Ellias’ play. I was introduced to International Gallerie, a global arts and ideas journal that Bina, a poet and curator, founded in 1997. She continues to edit, design and publish it herself.

Her new work, The Big Book of Indian Art: An Illustrated History of Indian Art from Its Origins to the Present Day (Aleph Book Company), though is very different in its concept. It’s a 688-page encyclopaedic look at more than 300 Indian artists. While it devotes 22 pages to art from 20,000 BC till 1854 — when, after the Great Exhibition in London, the School of Industrial Art was set up by the British in Kolkata to help train Indian artists to learn craft skills — the story, as it were, really starts from 1896 when art historian E.B. Havell and artist Abanindranath Tagore introduced Oriental art and founded the Bengal School of Art.

From there, the book is divided into eight sections, six of which cover artists who were part of a landmark art movement or a school of Indian art. The Bombay School, for instance, looks at seven artists, including Pestonji Bomanji, M.V. Dhurandhar, and S. Haldankar. While the Calcutta Group, Chennai’s Progressive Painters’ Association and Cholamandal Artists’ Village, the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group, and the Baroda Group look at around nine artists each.

“The intent was to reach out to the larger public, including the uninitiated; to open doors to a galaxy of experience that would nudge them to appreciate the visual arts,” Bina says. “I do believe that art and culture humanises. In this fractured world, I hope to foster unity in diversity. Therefore, this book is inclusive. It’s connecting with those outside the sanctum of the art community.

Bina Sarkar Ellias
| Photo Credit:
Rafeeq Ellias

Research across 45 years

The book is a visual encyclopedia of the artists of India. Each entry is accompanied by an artwork, its provenance, and details of the artists, including their birth and background, style, awards and exhibitions. You can see Bina’s style in many of the entries, her voice emerging like a football forward waiting for a chance to share some personal details and unknown facts about the artists.

For example, Indian-American artist and printmaker Zarina Hashmi’s favourite work, Letters from Home (2004), is based on letters from her sister. Or that painter Sunil Das won a National Award while still an undergraduate. It took her more than two years to write the book, and the immaculate notes at the end reveal that many of the details come from conversations she had had with the artists. She has kept hand-written notes in her old diaries from her approximately 45 years of engagement with exceptional artists, many of whom are no more.

 Jamini Roy, Boating, 1920 (oil on canvas)

“I’m not an art historian or an academic, and my vocabulary is devoid of art theory. My love for art and literature is organic… a compulsive fascination since I was a grade four student,” she says. “Art history studies, by and large, are inclined towards not just historical documentation and iconographic readings, but also interpretations with a certain stylistic analysis, which many lay people cannot comprehend. My joy is in knowing that the book offers a rudimentary education to people outside the art community. It’s been especially gratifying that readers have been reaching out to express their joy.”

A sizeable portion is ‘The Art Landscape Post Independence’, which contains entries about 200-odd contemporary painters, sculptors, illustrators, printmakers, multimedia artists, lithographers, and muralists. The names include some of India’s best-known contemporary artists, from Atul Dodiya and Subodh Gupta, to Jayasri Burman, Rekha Rodwittiya, and Ranbir Kaleka. It’s a joy to be introduced to artists such as Theodore Matiano Mesquita, who helped found the Goan Art Forum, and Ganesh Gohain, a sculptor who has been collected internationally. I didn’t know Indrapramit Roy has illustrated for Tara Books, or that British-Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor moved to Israel in 1971 to live in a kibbutz.

Shanti Dave, Untitled, 1977 (colour woodcut on paper pasted on cloth)

Where are the traditional artists?

The Big Book of Indian Art also acts as a corrective by including a large number of women artists, especially modernists such as Madhvi Parekh, whose work shows an intuitive connection to her surroundings, vocalist Shobha Broota, who infuses rhythm into her abstract works, and the late Gogi Saroj Pal, who brought life to her folk-style narratives. But as a writer, I could debate the exclusion of certain artists such as Shilo Shiv Suleman, Rithika Merchant and Pritika Chowdhry, for example. Suleman’s Fearless Collective with its 400-odd artists, uses art to protest against gender violence across the world; Chowdry creates anti-memorials to traumatic geopolitical events, such as partitions and terrorist attacks; and Merchant explores comparative mythology as well as science and speculative fiction. Each is an example of what Indian artists are doing worldwide.

Equally, I miss contemporary indigenous and traditional artists. For instance, besides folk art, murals and street art have gathered momentum. But Bina says that it’s impossible to include every art form.

S.L. Haldankar, Divine Flame, early 20th century (watercolour on paper)

There is a notes section at the very end that gives a bibliography so detailed that it’s probably worth buying the book, just to get an idea of published books, articles and catalogue on each artist. The index of artists can, in a pinch, also stand in for the table of contents, which is missing at the beginning of the book. One downside is the absence of artist portraits. The other is the poor quality of publishing, which does not do justice to the luxuriousness of the concept. The paper and the reproduction quality of the photographs are quite low.

Bina’s research on the over 300 artists is painstaking and thorough. Now, I’ll wait for her work on contemporary traditional artists, if and when she decides to write it.

The writer is an expert on South Asian art and culture.