The “Calcutta Group” (1943-1953)

Dr. Sanjay Mallik

….. In the West, kings have long been dethroned and the reins of the State have passed into the hands of the common man. Today the artists no longer decorate the baroque palaces of kings or the interior of the chapels but work independently in their studios or decorate the communal buildings. The great French movements in art —Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, etc. — all evolved through this changed ideal in art. Such a movement is under way in our country too ….. ….. The guiding motto of our Group is best expressed in the slogan ‘Art should be international and inter-dependent”. In other words, our art cannot progress or develop if we always look back to our past glories and cling to our old traditions at all cost. The vast new world of art, rich and infinitely varied, created by Masters the world over in all ages, beckons us. From Egyptian and Asyrian arts to the works of Italian, Dutch, French masters — we have to study all of them deeply, develop our appreciation of them and take from them all that we could profitably, rynthesise with our requirements and traditions. This is all the more necessary because our art has stood still since the seventeenth century. But during the past three hundred years the world outside of India has made vast strides in art, has evolved epoch-making discoveries in forms and techniques.

It is absolutely necessary for us to close this hiatus by taking advantage of these developments in the Western world) Presumably published to accompany an exhibition, the above statement in the handbook/catalogue of the Calcutta Group does not credit the authorship of the note to any single person; although the publication is undated, internal evidence would argue that it could not have been composed prior to 1953. Despite a wide span of time from the Egyptian to the modern masters and despite the claims for an intended synthesis, implicit within the proclaimed ideal of the group is a preferential leaning towards the art of the West. The intention behind this preference is regenerative, the infusion of a lost vitality and new life into the dissipated vigour of the then contemporary Indian art, through the invention of a visual language suitably modern (equated in this instance with “international”) and therefore capable of being the vehicle for expression of the diverse nuances of transformed experience of a new time. The opinion that stagnancy has become the sole nature of the dominant art practices (the ‘Bengal school’ tradition as well as the academic art-school training), and the conviction in the West as an alternative and role model, has a pre-history in the context of the art-practice in Calcutta ever since the institutional introduction of the European academic mode through the art school curricula continued as a strong opinion in an ongoing polemic. Simultaneous to the significant transformations in institutional pedagogy brought about by the Havell-Abanindranath combine at the Government School of Art and Crafts, an equally strong and opposing opinion has continually provided the foil to the newly evolving indigenous-national trend.