By Luke McCusker, 08/06/2019. It was raining as Professor Sivakumar walked me to his house in Shantiniketan. We sat on hardwood furniture in a clean, airy room and he shared his ideas about contextual modernism. Sivakumar, a professor at Shantiniketan and a preeminent scholar of Indian modernism, developed the term “contextual modernism” for an exhibition of Shantiniketan works in the 1990s. His exhibition brought the works of Nadalal Bose, Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, and others of the Bengali and Shantiniketan Schools back into the Indian consciousness, and back to the attention of the world. In his study of these figures, Professor Sivakumar has concluded that a particular variety of modernism influenced Indian culture in the first half of the 20th century. It was not merely the modernism of Europe and the United States transplanted in South Asia. For Sivakumar, contextual modernism means a movement in the humanities that is influenced by contact with other cultures but that remains deeply rooted in the particular histories of a people and a place. The work of Bose and Tagore was this way.
For Tagore, though, his work was never merely formal. It always emerged from a political concern. Early in his career as a writer, he leaned toward Indian nationalism. In the arts of his time, this nationalism meant a return to indigenous and historical themes and modes of working. After several years, he concluded that nationalism could not solve India’s problems. He turned his attention toward education.
The school Tagore founded at Shantiniketan, and the art department he recruited Bose to facilitate, was not a conventional university. It did not teach students how to make paintings for profit. It suggested a total way of being. Influenced by his travels in Japan, Tagore hopes to develop a total aesthetic culture in India. Over time, this came to include agriculture and care for the earth as an essential element. Tagore dreamed that at Shantiniketan students could learn to re-present their understanding of their national identity and, ultimately, their human identity, and this re-presentation could take the form of a sustainable and sustaining community.
Tagore was in regular correspondence with Gandhi during his years at Shantiniketan. Though the two critiqued each other’s projects, it was in the spirit of friendship and service to one another. When he passed away, Tagore left the Kala Bhavan at Shantiniketan under Gandhi’s care. There was no one he felt he could entrust it to with as much confidence.
As we drank an evening cha, Professor Sivakumar explained that Shantiniketan is no longer what it once was. The school was taken over by the state after Gandhi’s death and India’s independence. Now it is an ordinary university. The outdoor classes and a few informalities in the art department are the last academic vestiges of Tagore’s presence at the Kala Bhavan.
In the morning, Professor Dasgupta and I sat in his front room talking about Shantiniketan. He was born in the small village. When he was ten years old, he met Nandalal Bose. And he worked at the university for several years, teaching printmaking. But he left. He confirmed what Sivakumar said the night before: the Kala Bhavan is not what it once was.
Though they agree about the condition of the school at Shantiniketan, Sivakumar and Dasgupta have very different ideas about modernism. Professor Dasgupta rejected any application of the term to India. The academy today, he says, cannot imagine any meaningful art or literature existing outside their paradigm of premodern, modern, and postmodern. But India, and Indian art, do not belong in any of these categories. Indian art is not even anti-modern. It is something else entirely: not modern. He does not believe the academy makes room for this other category, but he recommended a couple books for further study. One of them is Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj.
I did not go to Shantiniketan looking for direct connections to Heidegger or Shankara, but for a direct introduction to a modernist alternative to the violence perpetrated by the modern West–of which Heidegger was a conspicuous supporter, in his politics if not overtly in his philosophy. I left with new questions and resources to pursue. Professor Sivakumar sees a way to redeem the violence of modernity through contextualization. Professor Dasgupta believes modernism cannot be redeemed, but there is an alternative world outside the modern, premodern, and postmodern. I am eager to engage deeply with their recommended texts.
I am stopped in Varanasi for three days as I make my way back to Delhi for my flight home.
