The Big Book of Indian Art: An Illustrated History of Indian Art from Its Origins to the Present Day
By Bina Sarkar Ellias
Aleph Book Company, 815 pages, Rs 2,499

If there was one blockbuster publication this year, it was this book. It is the most comprehensive book yet published on modern Indian art. It traces the history of Indian art from its origins to the present day, and features the work of more than 300 Indian artists—painters, sculptors, illustrators, printmakers, multi-media artists, lithographers, and muralists.

“As all good things in life must be a shared experience, I hope much of my exhilaration in learning filters through these pages,” writes Bina Sarkar Ellias, a poet, writer, art curator and founder-editor-designer-publisher of International Gallerie, a bi-annual award-winning global arts and ideas journal since 1997.

Inspired by scholar and art critic Ananda Coomaraswamy’s vision of a democratic arts space, she sees this work as “a book intended more for art enthusiasts than art scholars, academics, and historians. This book is for those who appreciate art but are intimidated by a certain vocabulary designated by and for academics; as I’ve observed, it leaves the lay person tangled in a web of concepts and innuendoes more numbing in comprehension than quantum physics.”

The book begins in modern times, with eight sections: ‘The Bengal School’, ‘The Bombay School’, ‘The Calcutta Group’, ‘The Progressive Painters’ Association in Chennai and the Cholamandal Artists’ Village’, ‘The Progressive Artists Group of Bombay’, ‘The Baroda Group’, ‘Artistic Footprints: Indian Icons’, and ‘The Art Landscape Post Independence’. An epilogue rounds it off with ‘The 1980s’.

Each section deals with a landmark art movement or school of Indian art, and 2-3-page entry on each of the prominent artists in it.

‘The Bengal School’ includes noted artists of the period—among others Rabindranath Tagore, Gaganendranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, and Jamini Roy. ‘The Bombay School’ features the works of artists such as Pestonji Bomanji, Mahadev V. Dhurandhar, Antonio Xavier Trindade, and M. F. Pithawalla. ‘The Calcutta Group’ profiles artists like Gobardhan Ash, Sunil Madhav Sen, Prodosh Das Gupta, Gopal Ghose, and Rathin Maitra. ‘The Progressive Painters’ Association in Chennai and the Cholamandal Artists’ Village’ includes the works of K. C. S. Paniker, J. Sultan Ali, K. V. Haridasan, M. Senathipathi, and P. Gopinath.

The artists who feature in ‘The Progressive Artists Group of Bombay’ include F. N. Souza, K. H. Ara, M. F. Husain, Sadanand Bakre, and S. H. Raza. Among the artists featured in ‘The Baroda Group’ are N. S. Bendre, Jeram Patel, Bhupen Khakhar, Gulammohammed Sheikh, and Jyotsna Bhatt. The penultimate section in the book ‘Artistic Footprints: Indian Icons’ showcases artists such as B. C. Sanyal, Amrita Sher-Gil, Somnath Hore, Jehangir Sabavala, V. S. Gaitonde, K. G. Subramanyan, Ram Kumar, Krishen Khanna, Tyeb Mehta, J. Swaminathan, Himmat Shah, A. Ramachandran, Paramjit Singh, Ganesh Pyne, Jogen Chowdhury, Manu Parekh, Anjolie Ela Menon, Jatin Das, Manjit Bawa, and Thota Vaikuntam.

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Meanwhile, “from its origins” in the sub-title should be read a little charitably, as much of the history is covered in the introduction. Covered in brief here are: Pre-Mauryan Sculpture (642-320 BC), Upanishads, Buddhist, and Jain periods, the Gupta period (320–600 CE), Early Medieval (700–800), Medieval Sculpture (900–1200), the Cholas (850–1250) and Jain paintings (700–1500) from the south, Mughal painting (1500–1700), Rajput painting (Mid-sixteenth–early nineteenth century), Kangra painting (1750), Sikh painting (1750–1850), the emergence of the nineteenth century with the company style, Patna School (1750-1870), Calcutta School (1700–1800), Mughal Delhi (1800), Kalighat Pats (1850), Maithil or Madhubani paintings, Madras school (1850) and the beginning of nineteenth century Modern Indian Art.

While paucity of space would be the reason for forcing these topics to be clubbed together in the introduction, they can form a full, complementary volume by themselves.