Abstract
Disciplinary paradigms are often shaped and guided by powerfully established facts and understanding. The celebrated notion of objectivity leads us to follow this paradigmatic thought without questioning the processes of its foundation. This chapter is a reminder that art historians and anthropologists of art are parts of the very art worlds that they seek to study. It is through the contextualization of experiments and experiences of an Indian artist, namely Jamini Roy, this chapter has tried to present a local art world engulfed with the possibilities of having a more local vocabulary of art evolving through the collective myths of a region. Art need not be separated from culture. It should be studied through a holistic approach beyond the boundaries of dominance, hierarchy, and power.
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Notes
- 1.
As the term itself indicates, ‘primitive’ means something that is not derived from something else (primary or basic). Primitivism celebrates the attributes of primitive art, for example, flatness in color and form, simplicity, and symbolic representation. Here, in the case of the Indian art, it has been seen as a movement to find the universality of Indian art through indigenous people and their culture. Artists have picked up particular characteristics of the so-called primitive art suitable to their quest, for example, Jamini Roy focused primarily on ‘purity’ and ‘simplicity’.
- 2.
Here ‘folk’ art refers to indigenous Indian art forms.
- 3.
Patuasare traditional painters from rural Bengal who do scroll paintings based on traditional legends and chant ballads related to the subject of the painting (Dutt 1990: 48).
- 4.
Formalism is the concept in arts that believes that the artistic value of any artwork is determined by its form. The focus here is given to its shape, color, texture, and so on.
- 5.
The idea of timelessness is attached to primitive artworks. Since these societies do not have written historical records on the artworks they produce, these artworks are seen as circulating myths without any time dimension attached to them.
- 6.
- 7.
Sunayani Devi belonged to the Tagore family and started painting at the age of 30. Her paintings were inspired by Bengali pat paintings, which drew their subjects from Indian mythology.
- 8.
Scholars like Fraser equated ‘folk’ with the popular. But others like Jain and Banerjee distinguish the two. According to Fraser, folk or popular art is usually a ‘provincial’ style of a minority or peasant group. Jain on the other hand sees Kalighat style as the outcome of transformation of folk into popular genre. Banerjee also traces the similarity between the two in terms of a common contact between audience and performer and says that popular art is individualized art, ‘the art of known performer’ (Fraser 1962: 13–14; Sinha 2003: 9; Banerjee 1998: 2).
- 9.
Illusionism is a technique of using pictorial methods in order to deceive the eye.
- 10.
Jyotindra Jain (1999) says that some of the paintings in this style were painted by kumhar and sutradhar artists. Kumhar is a sub-caste in traditional Hindu social system. They are primarily dependent on pottery as a source of livelihood. Similarly, Sutradhar is another Hindu sub-caste involved in carpentry.
- 11.
These paintings depict a murder that took place on May 27, 1873. A young Brahmin, Nabin Chandra Banerji murdered his wife Elokeshi because she had an illicit relation with the priest of a temple. Kalighat genre contains a series of paintings based on the causes and consequences of this event (Knizkova 1975; Guha-Thakurta 1992: 0–7).
- 12.
Laxmi Bai was the Queen of Jhansi, situated in North India. Kalighat paintings selected her among some of the heroic characters of India. She is often depicted well clad in her traditional attire, holding up high an uncovered sword in her hand, while sitting on the horse.
- 13.
Babu is a term used in Hindi in place of the suffix Mr. specifically used for bureaucrats or people in power. Similarly Bibi is a term used in place of Ms./Mrs.
- 14.
For example, a cat shown eating rat or lobster is a symbol of a tapasvi (saint) who was pseudo-ascetic and hypocrite, taken from a legend in Mahabharata (Knizkova 1975).
- 15.
Hana Knizkova’s book, The Drawings of the Kalighat Style: Secular Themes (1975), is the revised version of the PhD theses submitted by Knizkova on the ‘subjects’ of Kalighat paintings in 1968 on the basis of Kalighat patas found at a number of selected museums around the world.
- 16.
Rhythm is a continuance, a flow, or a feeling of movement achieved by the repetition or regulated visual units.
- 17.
According to Jain (1999), the reason for the absence of any background in Kalighat paintings was their relationship with clay modeling and impact of miniature paintings, where minimal signs were used for depiction (e.g., a green line on the base and blue line on the upper side of the painting were used to show exterior). Knizkova looks at it as the part of their project of ignoring any secondary information.
- 18.
Primitive art does not have a historical frame of reference. Therefore, it becomes difficult to compare one piece of primitive art with another. The feature of timelessness was also an inspiration for many primitivists. Errington labeled primitive art according to its purpose of creation (i.e., not made for market) and explains that it is viewed as an ‘other’, opposed to modern, civilized forms of art in today’s culture (Fraser 1962: 12; Errington 1998: 137, 147).
- 19.
Roy was a proponent of formalism at a time when the dominant fashion was toward realism. Formalism is a concept that determines the value of any artwork on the basis of its form—the way it is made, its visual aspects, and its medium. Formalism emphasizes on compositional elements, for example, line, texture, color, shape, and so on.
- 20.
Krishna is a Hindu mythical character believed to be a reincarnation of Lord Vishnu. Balram was his elder brother. The two found a place in Roy’s paintings.
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Jyoti (2019). Toward Blurring the Boundaries in Anthropology: Reading Jamini Roy Today. In: Perera, S., Pathak, D.N. (eds) Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_7
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