In 1949, Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III, ruler of the erstwhile princely state of Baroda (now Vadodara) in Gujarat, founded a unique institution. The Maharaja Sayajirao University, or MS University (MSU) as it is commonly known, was free from the baggage of the past. Unlike Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan, West Bengal, or the JJ School of Art in Mumbai, MSU had a relatively clean slate to build its curricula, faculty and legacy. As Ashish Anand, the CEO and MD of DAG, writes in a new volume, Freedom to Form: Baroda Modern, which accompanies a show at the Delhi wing of the gallery, “Baroda had no colonial art school to inherit or dismantle. What it enjoyed instead was a remarkable inheritance of forward-looking patronage” under its ruler.

Starting from 1950, when the faculty of fine arts (FFA) was established by Hansa Mehta, MSU has produced some of India’s best-known artists, including Jyoti Bhatt, Himmat Shah, Laxma Goud, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Rekha Rodwittiya and Mrinalini Mukherjee, among others. This august parade was led by the stellar faculty, who laid the foundations of originality and rigour at MSU—painter N.S. Bendre and sculptor Sankho Chaudhuri, who were the first to be appointed by Mehta, joined shortly after by the polymath, K.G. Subramanyan.

The exhibition at DAG (till 6 October) not only draws attention to the culture of excellence and innovation that prevailed at MSU, in large part encouraged by Sayajirao Gaekwad and his prime minister T. Madhavarao, but also challenges Eurocentric views of art history. In the first essay in the book, scholar Priya Maholay-Jaradi provokes the reader to question the assumptions that have become long entrenched in academia. Should “we locate modern art strictly in contexts that engaged international modernism through 1920-80?” she asks. “Or can the modern predate this periodisation, and its conventional sites and practices?”

The question is pertinent for more reasons than one in the case of MSU. In 1890, Sayajirao and Madhavarao established Kalabhavan, the Baroda state’s polytechnic, where drawing, bleaching, dyeing, calico painting and carpentry were part of the curriculum, far ahead of their time.

In 1894, the powers that be were instrumental in sending Luhar Kushal to Geneva to study watchmaking, which was added to the offerings in 1897. But even before the formal adoption of these fields of study, the state’s artisans “borrowed freely from their companion traditions,” explains Maholay-Jaradi, “to mix classical, courtly and folk idioms, alongside the rural and the urban, and the sacred and the secular.”

The result was often startling. Apart from introducing glimpses of “modern furniture, tea sets and social habits” in their work, these locals would take liberties to depict the soldiers of Ravana, from the Ramayana, dressed in “firangi-style uniforms, complete with accessories such as rifles,” she adds.

Art and adventure

This strain of audaciousness was carried over into MSU by Bendre, Chaudhuri and, later, by Subramanyan, who adopted avant-garde styles of teaching by doing, rather than focusing on a fixed or bookish curriculum. Of these three stalwarts, the last was the most adventurous, ever ready to innovate, his mind and hand shaped in a similar, free-wheeling tradition of art at Santiniketan by Nandalal Bose, Ramkinkar Baij and Benode Bihari Mukherjee. Kathleen L. Wyma points out in her essay the extent to which Subramanyan, who was called Manida by all and sundry, shaped the sensibilities of some of the brightest and finest artists of the next generation.

Among the latter was Mrinalini Mukherjee, who started out as a painter in the footsteps of her illustrious father, Benode Bihari, before shifting her attention to sculpture, using materials like hemp and jute. It was Manida’s active encouragement, to look deep into the wellsprings of local Indian traditions, that made her seek out new forms of expression instead of remaining trapped inside the idiom of European modernism.

Yet, for all his insistence on accessing the riches closer home, Subramanyan also expressly forbade his students not to “raid the folk-art larder for its symbols and motifs and make use of them without much meaning or sensibility.” His other star pupil, Bhatt, would take this advice to heart as he went on to carve his own path as a painter, printmaker, photographer and faculty at MSU.

Tempering Subramanyan’s iconoclasm was Bendre’s focus on European modernism and, later, Jeram Patel’s advocacy for experimentation. In the decades to come, MSU became not only a hub for artistic talent but also a site for some of the most radical thinking in art history. Vivan Sundaram, an alumnus of MSU, would diffuse the boundaries between art-making and art history in his cerebral and engaging multimodal practice. His wife, the critic and curator, Geeta Kapur, would make a name for herself as one of the foremost commentators on modern art in independent India.

It was Kapur, for instance, who illuminated some of the central debates and dichotomies that were part of MSU’s early intellectual ferment. Acting as an interface between Subramanyan’s vocal support for figuration over the abstract expressionism practised by artists like Patel, she wrote, “... figuration was not a retreat into tradition but a means of reclaiming personal and mythic narratives restoring symbolic depth to contemporary art.” Artists like Bhatt, who were the inheritors of this legacy forged on the smithy of tradition and modernity, would go on to give new forms to this wisdom.

As Kanupriya Sharma explains in her essay, “Bhatt has often pointed to the Pithoro paintings of the Chota Udepur region of Gujarat, where a lakharo (scribe) does not just paint a painting but writes one,” as one of his inspirations. Like the scroll paintings of Bengal, works like these combined the art of storytelling with imagery, requiring a level of cognitive processing that went beyond looking. “This is what he tried to emulate in some of his own work,” Sharma adds, “that asks to be read, not just seen, especially in prints where script and slogans appear as visual elements in their own right.”

In the star-studded galaxy of names that passed through the portals of MSU, Gulammohammed Sheikh’s remains especially luminous, for the sheer efflorescence of his creativity—as a painter, writer, teacher and public figure. At 89, he is a living legend, a witness to key moments of 20th and 21st century Indian history as well as a repository of knowledge that has all but faded from the landscape of contemporary art.

The volume, fittingly, devotes a chapter each to the legacies of Subramanyan, Bhatt and Sheikh (one wishes Bhupen Khakhar had received similar attention), with an interview with Sheikh, conducted by critic and curator Gayatri Sinha, added as a bonus. If the conversation revisits Sheikh’s origins and emergence as an artist, especially via his fateful encounter with Ravishankar Raval who became a patron and mentor to him, it also reminds the reader of the continuing greatness and often tragic relevance of his art.

Last year, the Kiran Nadar Museum for Modern Art in Delhi organised an unforgettable retrospective of Sheikh’s long and august career, where the mastery of his idiom melded with the razor-sharp intellect that runs through his thought and writing. The dazzling polyphony in his style, vastness of his knowledge of the world, and eclectic reading came together to give form to Sheikh’s very own visual language. In his private mythology, boundaries between time, place and people are dissolved, as Biblical characters coexist with Indian heroes, and prophets share the canvas with the poor. It is an act of rebellion that belongs uniquely to those who straddle this world and the one beyond, of imagination.

“Even though I cannot change the world, I can change its maps and borders in my works,” Sheikh said to Sinha. “Through this, I keep building and rebuilding the world.” The great and iconic teachers who nurtured his talent would have been immensely proud.

In 1949, Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III, ruler of the erstwhile princely state of Baroda (now Vadodara) in Gujarat, founded a unique institution. The Maharaja Sayajirao University, or MS University (MSU) as it is commonly known, was free from the baggage of the past. Unlike Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan, West Bengal, or the JJ School of Art in Mumbai, MSU had a relatively clean slate to build its curricula, faculty and legacy. As Ashish Anand, the CEO and MD of DAG, writes in a new volume, Freedom to Form: Baroda Modern, which accompanies a show at the Delhi wing of the gallery, “Baroda had no colonial art school to inherit or dismantle. What it enjoyed instead was a remarkable inheritance of forward-looking patronage” under its ruler.

Starting from 1950, when the faculty of fine arts (FFA) was established by Hansa Mehta, MSU has produced some of India’s best-known artists, including Jyoti Bhatt, Himmat Shah, Laxma Goud, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Rekha Rodwittiya and Mrinalini Mukherjee, among others. This august parade was led by the stellar faculty, who laid the foundations of originality and rigour at MSU—painter N.S. Bendre and sculptor Sankho Chaudhuri, who were the first to be appointed by Mehta, joined shortly after by the polymath, K.G. Subramanyan.

The exhibition at DAG (till 6 October) not only draws attention to the culture of excellence and innovation that prevailed at MSU, in large part encouraged by Sayajirao Gaekwad and his prime minister T. Madhavarao, but also challenges Eurocentric views of art history. In the first essay in the book, scholar Priya Maholay-Jaradi provokes the reader to question the assumptions that have become long entrenched in academia. Should “we locate modern art strictly in contexts that engaged international modernism through 1920-80?” she asks. “Or can the modern predate this periodisation, and its conventional sites and practices?”

The question is pertinent for more reasons than one in the case of MSU. In 1890, Sayajirao and Madhavarao established Kalabhavan, the Baroda state’s polytechnic, where drawing, bleaching, dyeing, calico painting and carpentry were part of the curriculum, far ahead of their time.

In 1894, the powers that be were instrumental in sending Luhar Kushal to Geneva to study watchmaking, which was added to the offerings in 1897. But even before the formal adoption of these fields of study, the state’s artisans “borrowed freely from their companion traditions,” explains Maholay-Jaradi, “to mix classical, courtly and folk idioms, alongside the rural and the urban, and the sacred and the secular.”

The result was often startling. Apart from introducing glimpses of “modern furniture, tea sets and social habits” in their work, these locals would take liberties to depict the soldiers of Ravana, from the Ramayana, dressed in “firangi-style uniforms, complete with accessories such as rifles,” she adds.

Art and adventure

This strain of audaciousness was carried over into MSU by Bendre, Chaudhuri and, later, by Subramanyan, who adopted avant-garde styles of teaching by doing, rather than focusing on a fixed or bookish curriculum. Of these three stalwarts, the last was the most adventurous, ever ready to innovate, his mind and hand shaped in a similar, free-wheeling tradition of art at Santiniketan by Nandalal Bose, Ramkinkar Baij and Benode Bihari Mukherjee. Kathleen L. Wyma points out in her essay the extent to which Subramanyan, who was called Manida by all and sundry, shaped the sensibilities of some of the brightest and finest artists of the next generation.

Among the latter was Mrinalini Mukherjee, who started out as a painter in the footsteps of her illustrious father, Benode Bihari, before shifting her attention to sculpture, using materials like hemp and jute. It was Manida’s active encouragement, to look deep into the wellsprings of local Indian traditions, that made her seek out new forms of expression instead of remaining trapped inside the idiom of European modernism.

Yet, for all his insistence on accessing the riches closer home, Subramanyan also expressly forbade his students not to “raid the folk-art larder for its symbols and motifs and make use of them without much meaning or sensibility.” His other star pupil, Bhatt, would take this advice to heart as he went on to carve his own path as a painter, printmaker, photographer and faculty at MSU.

Tempering Subramanyan’s iconoclasm was Bendre’s focus on European modernism and, later, Jeram Patel’s advocacy for experimentation. In the decades to come, MSU became not only a hub for artistic talent but also a site for some of the most radical thinking in art history. Vivan Sundaram, an alumnus of MSU, would diffuse the boundaries between art-making and art history in his cerebral and engaging multimodal practice. His wife, the critic and curator, Geeta Kapur, would make a name for herself as one of the foremost commentators on modern art in independent India.

It was Kapur, for instance, who illuminated some of the central debates and dichotomies that were part of MSU’s early intellectual ferment. Acting as an interface between Subramanyan’s vocal support for figuration over the abstract expressionism practised by artists like Patel, she wrote, “... figuration was not a retreat into tradition but a means of reclaiming personal and mythic narratives restoring symbolic depth to contemporary art.” Artists like Bhatt, who were the inheritors of this legacy forged on the smithy of tradition and modernity, would go on to give new forms to this wisdom.

As Kanupriya Sharma explains in her essay, “Bhatt has often pointed to the Pithoro paintings of the Chota Udepur region of Gujarat, where a lakharo (scribe) does not just paint a painting but writes one,” as one of his inspirations. Like the scroll paintings of Bengal, works like these combined the art of storytelling with imagery, requiring a level of cognitive processing that went beyond looking. “This is what he tried to emulate in some of his own work,” Sharma adds, “that asks to be read, not just seen, especially in prints where script and slogans appear as visual elements in their own right.”

In the star-studded galaxy of names that passed through the portals of MSU, Gulammohammed Sheikh’s remains especially luminous, for the sheer efflorescence of his creativity—as a painter, writer, teacher and public figure. At 89, he is a living legend, a witness to key moments of 20th and 21st century Indian history as well as a repository of knowledge that has all but faded from the landscape of contemporary art.

The volume, fittingly, devotes a chapter each to the legacies of Subramanyan, Bhatt and Sheikh (one wishes Bhupen Khakhar had received similar attention), with an interview with Sheikh, conducted by critic and curator Gayatri Sinha, added as a bonus. If the conversation revisits Sheikh’s origins and emergence as an artist, especially via his fateful encounter with Ravishankar Raval who became a patron and mentor to him, it also reminds the reader of the continuing greatness and often tragic relevance of his art.

Last year, the Kiran Nadar Museum for Modern Art in Delhi organised an unforgettable retrospective of Sheikh’s long and august career, where the mastery of his idiom melded with the razor-sharp intellect that runs through his thought and writing. The dazzling polyphony in his style, vastness of his knowledge of the world, and eclectic reading came together to give form to Sheikh’s very own visual language. In his private mythology, boundaries between time, place and people are dissolved, as Biblical characters coexist with Indian heroes, and prophets share the canvas with the poor. It is an act of rebellion that belongs uniquely to those who straddle this world and the one beyond, of imagination.

“Even though I cannot change the world, I can change its maps and borders in my works,” Sheikh said to Sinha. “Through this, I keep building and rebuilding the world.” The great and iconic teachers who nurtured his talent would have been immensely proud.