Indian Masters

The curatorial essay

This collection stages a single argument across eight rooms of Indian art history: how a nation's visual imagination was built, then deliberately broken, then rebuilt on its own terms. It opens, in effect, twice with Raja Ravi Varma — Damayanti and the Hamsa, Galaxy of Musicians, and Hamsa Damayanti give him three works to the moderns' five, and that imbalance is the point. Varma (1848–1906), trained under the Dutch portraitist Theodore Jensen at the Travancore court, was the first Indian painter to fuse European academic naturalism with Hindu epic subject matter at scale — and then, through his own Ravi Varma Fine Art Lithographic Press, to mass-reproduce that fusion as oleographs that reached villages no oil painting ever could. Before you can understand what the Progressive Artists' Group rebelled against in 1947, you have to stand in front of the thing they were rebelling against: an idiom so persuasive it became, for two generations, the default face of Indian mythology and even nationhood. Damayanti and the Hamsa gives the mythic register — the swan as messenger between mortal queen and absent king, itihasa rendered in the soft modelling of a European salon canvas. Galaxy of Musicians works the other register Varma perfected: ethnographic tableau, women from across the subcontinent's regions united in a single frame of music, an early and still-startling image of a plural nation imagining itself as one. Hamsa Damayanti closes his sequence not as a third mythological scene but as a demonstration of reach: the same swan-and-queen composition, now circulated through the press as popular print — proof that Varma's real innovation was distribution, not just style. Then the room breaks. M.F. Husain's Untitled (1978) arrives as the exact rupture point — a founding member of the Progressive Artists' Group formed explicitly to discard both colonial academicism and the genteel Bengal School nationalism in favour of raw line, folk memory, and cubist fracture. S.H. Raza's Bindu follows as a third path neither Varma's illusionism nor Husain's expressionist figure could offer: total withdrawal from the figure into a single seed-point, drawing on Tantric cosmology to argue that abstraction, not narrative, could still be authentically Indian. Tyeb Mehta's The Rickshaw Puller sits close to the Progressives' founding generation and brings the collection's social conscience — the diagonal device that would define his later work already visible here, splitting the canvas the way Partition split the country it depicts. Amrita Sher-Gil's Two Women, though painted in 1939–40, a full decade before the PAG's manifesto, is placed near the close deliberately: she precedes and outflanks the men usually credited with inventing Indian modernism, and her two women in quiet, unresolved intimacy rhyme pointedly against Varma's queen and swan at the collection's start — two women without a myth to dignify them, which was itself the argument. Painting 1969, working in the meditative non-objective vein V.S. Gaitonde made his signature — his canvases are, almost without exception, simply titled Painting and a year — closes the sequence at the furthest possible distance from where it began: no figure, no myth, no message, only surface, colour and silence. Read start to finish, the collection is not a survey. It is an argument about what had to be dismantled, and what remained worth keeping, for India to paint itself on its own terms.

Historical context

Indian art's twentieth century runs through three collisions. First, the colonial academy: institutions like Bombay's Sir J.J. School of Art trained Indian painters in European technique while princely courts, like Varma's Travancore, patronised artists who could paint royal portraits in the Western manner — producing, in Varma, a painter equipped to render Hindu epics with an illusionism no local tradition had attempted, and equipped, through lithography, to sell that vision at a price ordinary households could afford. That mass circulation made Varma's gods — and his nation — visible everywhere from railway calendars to household shrines, for better or worse setting the visual terms his successors would spend decades arguing with. Second, 1947: the same year as independence, artists in Bombay — Husain among the founders — formed the Progressive Artists' Group, explicitly rejecting both colonial academicism and the softer, revivalist nationalism of the Bengal School, reaching instead toward Cubism, German Expressionism, and Indian folk and temple sculpture simultaneously. Tyeb Mehta worked in close orbit of this circle; the trauma of Partition, which he witnessed directly, marks his work's characteristic fractures. Third, the search for an Indian abstraction: Raza left for Paris in 1950 and spent decades reconciling École de Paris training with a specifically Indian metaphysical vocabulary, arriving at the bindu in the late 1970s; Gaitonde pursued a parallel, quieter non-objective practice from Bombay itself. Amrita Sher-Gil, working a decade before any of this, trained in Paris and then returned to India in 1934, is now read as the necessary bridge — the first modern Indian painter to turn a European painterly education toward Indian subjects with psychological candour rather than either illustration or ideology. Together these movements, once dismissed or under-priced, now anchor the record-breaking upper end of the global auction market for modern art.

Why this collection

Eight works, one hundred years, a single unbroken argument. This is the room where India's visual imagination is made and then remade — Raja Ravi Varma first, teaching a subcontinent to see its gods and itself in oil and mass print, then the rupture: Husain, Raza, Mehta, Sher-Gil, Gaitonde, each one dismantling a different piece of what Varma built and replacing it with something unmistakably their own. These are not eight unrelated masterworks hung together because they are famous. They are the coordinates of a century-long argument about what an Indian painting is allowed to be — and every one of them now anchors record prices at the auction houses that decide such things. Own the argument, not just the image.