MASTER OF ARTS

Since the dawn of the 20th century, pedagogues and curators have sought novel ways of presenting the history of Indian art on Indian terms, through Indian ways. This forms one major context in which we must position Prof BN Goswamy’s work. There are several pieces of writing that would fit in this category, but none more than the pioneering exhibition, ‘Essence of Indian Art’ (1986). The word ‘essence’ was a translation by him of ‘rasa’. The exhibition was held in France and the US, as part of the international Festival of India. In the book that accompanied the exhibition, Goswamy used an Indian method of looking at Indian art, which was based on a rather complex understanding of all that went into making up the rasa of an artwork.

This complexity lay in the fact that you had to first know how to literally see a painting or a manuscript, a mural or a sculpture. Where should you sit, or how far should you stand apart from the work, how you shift and tilt a painting as you pause at various points through its composition brought to attention profound understandings of the social dimensions of the differences between private privilege and public effect of art.

Prof Goswamy grouped sculptures and paintings — dating all the way from 2000 BC to the 19th century — as per their evoked ‘essence’, a profoundly important Indian approach to phenomenology.

By valorising the experience of art, he shared ways of reading or, shall I say, listening to paintings. At the same time, his research on the economic and political history of a region and the period in which a painting was made provided a contextualisation to the rasik that was a true sharing of what we now know of as a theoretical method of creating a ‘period eye’.

I recall there were those specialists who walked out of his lectures, disappointed that he was not delivering enough substance in his work — and yet, perhaps it takes learnings of a different kind, in the field of literature and performance history, to see that couched in the cadence and lilt of ensnaring romanticism and poetic writing and lecturing lay a level of taiyyari that was so substantial that I should like to refer to it as nothing short of shapeshifting for our discipline. His personal life was no less dramatic and yet one could only deduce an iron fist had to have been couched in a proverbial velvet glove to handle all that he did.

By the 1970s, studies and approaches located in the Sanskritic traditions were critiqued as being upper-caste and elitist and were seen as another form of social exclusion. And yet, excluding the Sanskritic was not possible. It would also be foolish. How would art history and Indian culture deal with this vexing problem? Each language group needed its own lifetime of learning and scholarship would have to proceed collaboratively. And here, his long and exceptional collaborations with Anna Dallapiccola and Eberhard Fischer were to prove the most fruitful. He put together three major projects with Dallapiccola, who was, in many senses, perhaps his first mentee and intellectual collaborator. She was based in Heidelberg and with their rich history of Indology, the various parallel traditions were precisely the questions that the great stronghold of Sanskrit needed to address.

Fischer was grounded in anthropology. It was here that he began to find a different kind of collaboration — one which further broke down the barrier between the folk and classical. And they went on, over years of fruitful conversations, to build a most formidable collection of Pahari (and other forms of Indian) painting at the Rietberg Museum in Zurich. Fischer would assist Goswamy in his vision for the book on ‘Pahari Masters’ (1992), which was his second great intervention in the field of Indian art which led, eventually, to his landmark poetic opus: ‘Nainsukh of Guler: A Great Indian Painter from Small Hill State’ (1997).

Similar theoretical pushes were also picked up in the field of history through the framework of Subaltern Studies. The art historical manifestation of this in India was a novel turn of examining Indian art not through typologies of style and place, but through the oeuvre of individual carpenters, glass blowers, iron-mongers, stonemasons and even artists. Rather than focus on the maharajas or thikanas that patronised paintings and lent their name to the schools of painting, it was Goswamy who first published a radical, and long form essay, as an entire issue of Marg in 1968 that was called ‘Family as the Basis of Style’. This forced a reckoning of Indian art through artists’ families or gharanas, or through the oeuvre of the guilds that they belonged to. He turned the nameless artist-craftsman who we were given previously to understand was impelled to work out of a sense of religious bhakti (or feudal fear), into a person with agency and thus made an unprecedented intervention in history, by giving a biography to those who may not be royals or even upper-caste. This approach led to other publications: ‘Manaku’, and ‘Masters of Indian Painting’.

Several scholars thus were emboldened to work on the oeuvre of other painters — Mughal, Deccani, Pahari, Rajasthani and in Uttaranchal — and he maintained a correspondence with most of them.

Another aspect of Goswamy’s work was in the field of India’s craft traditions — his contextualisation of the rich documentation of historic costumes in the Collection of the Calico Museum (Ahmedabad, 1993) that had been done by Kalyan Krishna and Rahul Jain. This became a landmark study for all practising designers and teachers at NIFT and NID who needed references for traditional Indian “ethnic wear”.

His greatest collaborator all his life had of course been his wife, Prof Karuna Goswamy. Karunaji was his student, to whom he passed the enormous mantle of his personal life and its responsibilities, and with whom he learnt to see the paintings of Kashmir and Garhwal, and with whom he co-authored a most prophetic last book — a pilgrims’ text to the fantastical sites of one’s imagination to god’s realm called the ‘Kedar Kalpa’. It was to be their last project together, and published a few months after she passed away in 2020.

I must acknowledge the decades in which he maintained a fortnightly column in The Tribune. For a scholar to maintain a dialogue with the public requires a very different discipline. It is a practice and a space for a formal interface to observe the responses to his ideas that came in via the letters to the editor, and directly to him. It comprises a rich breadth of interests and engagement through which he shows us all what a well-read and engaged citizen can do for making his public thoughtful through his contributions.

Prof Goswamy may have been clear about the debts he owed to his forbears, but few of his contemporaries and students have managed to quite understand what the weight his interventions as a scholar have been not just in art history, but across the social sciences — in history, anthropology, performance studies and in critical theory.

— The writer is an art curator, editor of ‘Marg’, and professor of Indian Art and Architecture at JNU