Celebrating the legacy of five Indian artists in their centenary year

In 1926, as the masters of surrealism and cubism (Salvador Dali, Alberto Giacometti and Rene Magritte, among others) were beginning to leave their mark in the world of art, a generation of artists was born in India who, in their quiet but distinctive ways, would claim their place in the history of modern art.

None of them formally joined the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay (now Mumbai), which remains the most visible and venerated collective to this day, with each member scaling immense heights of success. Yet, these less-remembered artists redefined the course of Indian modernism with their unique idiom, deep intellectual grounding, and startlingly fresh approaches, without necessarily taking recourse to sensationalism.

Last year, artist Satish Gujral entered his centenary year. He remains a much-lauded figure in the annals of Indian modernity, especially for his dexterity with diverse media and materials. This year marks the 100th birth anniversary of several other artists, who deserve to be celebrated no less seriously.

In their lifetime, most of these artists were introverted and reclusive, choosing to focus on making art than pandering to the commercial machinery that determined its success. They lived unconventionally, defying patriarchal norms and the status quo, but did not let any aura of daring define their identity.

Take, for example, Inderjeet Singh (1926-2023), better known as Imroz, who was a poet and artist, widely remembered for being writer Amrita Pritam’s partner. Their 40-year-long relationship was movingly captured by Uma Trilok in Amrita-Imroz: A Love Story in 2006. In 2019, a selection of their letters was published, revealing the depth of their affection and the odds they had to survive. While Imroz divided his talent between writing poetry and painting portraits, the other five artists who share the same birth year with him devoted their lives to mostly making art in a variety of formats and media.

REBA HORE (1926-2006)

Born to a family from Jessore (in modern-day Bangladesh), Reba Hore lived through some of the defining moments of pre-independence India, including the devastating Bengal famine, communal riots, and the rise of the Communist Party. These experiences brought her in contact with her future husband, the artist Somnath Hore (1921-2006), whose depictions of the Tebhaga movement, among other works like Wounds, made his name.

Somnath’s renown as well the domestic responsibilities partly occluded Reba’s career, but she compulsively drew, painted and, in her later years, made terracotta sculptures after exposure to toxic pigments had made her sick. In the winter of her life, a facsimile edition of her Bhanga Payer Diary (The Diary of the Broken Foot) was published in the early 2000s, which gave the wider world a taste of her multifaceted genius: her easy adoption of pastel and felt pens, innate sense of colour, and habit of breaking into light-hearted verse. Humans, animals and the natural environs of Santiniketan in West Bengal (where the Hores settled in 1967) filled her life and art. Even as she was incapacitated by poor health, her mind travelled to places far beyond her sick room.

LAXMAN PAI (1926-2023)

Although he was closely associated with the Progressive Artists’ Group, Laxman Pai did not have any formal affiliation with the radical movement. But that didn’t save his job at the J.J. School of Art in Bombay in the 1940s. After spending his boyhood colouring black-and-white photographs at his uncle Ramnath Mauzo’s studio in Margao, Goa, Pai had moved to the big city to study art. He completed his education in 1947 from the J.J. School and got a job at his alma mater. Soon after, the management took umbrage to his friendship with F.N. Souza, whose nude paintings had upset Morarji Desai, then chief minister of the Bombay Presidency. When Pai refused to denounce his friend, he was demoted. He quit in anger, wrote to another friend, S.H. Raza, who arranged for him to travel to Paris, where Raza was living.

Pai remained in Paris until the mid-1960s, very much a part of the avant-garde artistic elite of the mid-20th century, and had several solo shows in London and Paris. During the 1950s, the Chinese painter Zao Wou-ki was also working in the French capital, mixing Western abstraction with traditional Chinese brushwork. Inspired by Wou-ki’s style, Pai began drawing on multiple cultural sources. At DAG’s booth at the India Art Fair, you can see his painting of a standing female nude against an abstract backdrop, signalling a blending of idioms, recalling “Egyptian art and Jain miniatures”, as the curatorial note puts it. Pai returned to India in the late-1970s, joined Goa College of Art as the principal, and lived in his home state till his death.

BIREN DE (1926-2011)

Biren De is a curious figure in the history of Indian art. Like his contemporary Raza, he went through an early phase of figurative painting in the realist mode before transitioning to abstraction. Inspired by mandala art, De’s work has been described as “neo-Tantrism” though the artist himself maintained that he was an agnostic. “I don’t talk about these (tantric) things,” he said in an interview, “but I do know about energy.” Like Raza, De was drawn to the bindu, the locus where all energy is concentrated and emanates from. A colourist par excellence, he used the lotus, sun, wheel, and seeds in his work as recurring symbols of resurgence and motion. You can see his work at DAG’s booth, including the painting (above) of a man weighing fish. It harks back to the time when De was gradually transitioning from a realist style to abstraction, opting for a cubist mode in the interim.

R.N. PASRICHA (1926-95)

Amritsar-born R.N. Pasricha grew up in Delhi, studied science, and trained as a typist to earn a living. But his career path shifted when he came under the tutelage of artist Abani Sen. As a boy, Pasricha had been interested in painting but didn’t have the means or opportunity to receive formal training. Under Sen’s guidance, he mastered the nuances of watercolour, which became his chosen medium for most of his life. Working largely as a landscape artist, Pasricha was influenced by the Himalayan paintings of artist and writer Nicholas Roerich, but forged his unique relationship with colour and perspective over the years. He travelled all over the north Indian hills, trekking and navigating arduous routes, all for the pleasure he got from plein air painting. It is widely noted that Pasricha’s name was entered into the Limca Book of Records for painting more mountain scenes than any other artist in India, but that is hardly a fair measure of the exquisite and expressive possibilities of his work.

Y.G. SRIMATI (1926-2007)

A polymath who danced, played the veena and painted with equal facility, Y.G Srimati led a relatively private life between Madras (now Chennai) and New York, where she moved in her 30s. As a young woman, she became a devotee of M.K. Gandhi, and sang at his public gatherings, while also honing her hand at painting, mostly following the styles of the doyens of the Bengal School, like Nandalal Bose. Srimati’s first solo was held in Madras in 1952, where she showed paintings of Hindu deities and characters drawn from mythologies, her style influenced by the murals at Ajanta and Ellora. Paintings like Parashuram with the Battle Axe (1946) and the set of 15 works she made for a special edition of the Bhagvad Gita in the 1960s stood out of her large oeuvre. In spite of her preference for water colour, Srimati was able to tease depth and texture out of her work. So impressed was the Indologist Stella Kramrisch by her representation of Vishwarupa describing the cosmology to Vishnu that she wanted to buy the work, though the artist refused to part with it.

Like Reba Hore, Srimati stayed away from the public eye for much of her life, making a living out of teaching and lecturing. In 2016, on the initiative of her partner, the fellow artist Michael Pellettier, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, held a posthumous exhibition of her work, celebrating her rich but mostly unknown legacy. In a penny-drop moment, An Artist of Her Time: Y.G. Srimati and the Indian Style also revealed the extent to which public attitudes to art had regressed since Srimati’s youth. Long before artist M.F. Husain was hounded out of his homeland by an irate Hindu mob for depicting the Goddess Saraswati in nude, Srimati, an upper-caste Hindu woman, had done a similar painting in the 1940s, which had hung in the living room of her New York apartment for years, appreciated by visitors, and later by the viewers who went to see her show, where it was also featured prominently.