All My Teachers
Indrapramit Roy (Baroda)
In matters of art, like everything else, the people whom I can call my teachers make a rather long list. I have been most fortunate in having a formal art education spanning a decade but it actually started much before that. When I look back I realise that there were a great many people who had contributed in big and small ways and all of them taught me something or the other.
To begin with I grew up in a household that always nurtured my interest in the arts. Both my parents were always supportive. My father, Kumar Roy was in theatre and he was a firm believer that theatre is an amalgamation of many art forms and visual art is an important component of it. My mother (Lata Roy) was no less supportive. It was also fortuitous that I grew up surrounded by books. Some books were about art but even the other kind of books will often have illustrations and of course the cover page! My earliest memories of art are also some great illustrations that enriched children’s literature in Bengal for much of 20th Century.
My father’s passion was theatre and naturally I was exposed to good theatre at an early age. I would often accompany him to Academy of Fine Arts, where Bohurupee productions were staged on Sundays. Before the play I would freely roam in the galleries and take in the exhibitions. In its heyday the Annual exhibition of Academy was a major attraction. I still remember a retrospective exhibition of artist Nikhil Biswas. I was not older than seven or eight years and it moved me greatly.
I was even younger when my father used to work in the clerical section of the Calcutta Sessions Court and Ratan-da was a lowly peon in the department. He was very good with his hands. I was barely four years old and Ratan-da dropped by to help me construct a Santa Clause before Christmas. The sledge was to be drawn by the rocking horse I had. To transform it into Rudolf all that was required was to add some antlers but then he showed me something that had me awe struck. After completing the face of santa he added two specs of white on the dark pupil that suddenly made it come alive. That was my first exposure to what adding a highlight can do to the eye!
Throughout my childhood on the morning of my birthdays two gift-wrapped packets waited for me, one from my parents and the other from an uncle of mine (actor Debatosh Ghosh). One would be an art material like Reeves watercolour kit or a box of Guitar or M-Grambcher pastels and the other invariably a hardbound fat drawing book from G. C. Laha. These materials accompanied me during our annual tour in the puja holidays to some part of India and will have records of sea beaches, jungles, cityscapes, mountain-scapes, rock cut temples, forts or whatever we chose to visit that particular year. Sometimes Baba joined me in those pages and he was quite accomplished at drawing.
Some years later when Baba was teaching at the Drama Department of Rabindra Bharati University he had a colleague called Rabi Pal, who used to work in the Set Design Department. He was interested in seeing my drawing book. While sharing some works I casually mentioned how I was finding it difficult to draw some buildings. He very palfully showed me how when two parallel lines are receding from you they usually meet at an invisible point. My first exposure to the rules of perspective and the vanishing point! It was like magic and I distinctly remember the excitement with which I applied that rule to solve the problem I was having with drawing the building!
There was another person, a theatre enthusiast and occasional set designer whom I would meet only in the precincts of Academy of Fine Arts. He was an avid sketcher and would sketch even during the performance of plays. Dipen Sen was his name and he was responsible for teaching me how to use a conte crayon and the variety of marks one could make with such a simple tool.
The school I went to, Patha Bhavan, Kolkata was an alternative school with lots of emphasis on matters cultural. I was blessed with two superb art teachers there; Sumitra Narayan and Gautam Chowdhury. Both of them were my guardian angels. Sumitra-di was a student of Nandalal Bose in Santiniketan and happened to be the sister of the noted film director Shyam Benegal. She was an excellent teacher of craft and design. She taught us batik, bandhni, applique, crocheting and a bit of weaving. Gautam-da took care of the drawing painting some sculpting and printmaking. He is a reputed artist and still an active practitioner. Both of them taught us a bit of Art history as well in High school. It was actually quite an amazing array of things that we got to do. Some other teachers like Dipankar-da (Sarkar) or our founding Principal Uma-di (educationist Uma Shehanabis) were all quite encouraging and supportive. When we were in middle school something called work-education replaced art classes by Government diktat. Students were to be encouraged to learn something that can help them earn a living lest they find themselves without a job was the avowed idea but it soon degenerated into meaningless activities in most schools. Undaunted our school continued to have art classes. The result was I scored poorly in the subject in Secondary examination but learnt a great deal that stood me in good stead later.
After my 12th I joined Santinikatan and that opened a whole new chapter. I had never seen rural Bengal from such close quarters before. Such proximity to nature was a learning experience in itself. We were a fairly cosmopolitan bunch, students from many parts of the country and also from Nigeria and Japan were in our class. We had to work in all the departments in the foundational two years. That made it possible to learn a bit of sculpture from established names such as Sarbari Roychowdhury and Sushen Ghosh. There were very senior teachers like Nanigopal Ghosh, Sukhomoy Mitra and Salim Munshi who taught us design, studying from nature and tempera painting. In Art History we had R. Siva Kumar in the young lot and Kanchan Chakraborty, Jayanta Chakraborty, Arun Pal and Janak Jhankar Narzery amongst the seniors. Kanchan-da despite being a senior teacher taught us the greenhorns with great gusto and passion. His classes where he compared and analysed the different aesthetic approaches of Indian and Greco Roman art was an eye-opener. He took us around to see the murals of Santiniketan in Patha Bhavan office, Cheena Bhavan and Hindi Bhavan. The most fascinating classes were Sivakumar’s. In the senior years he taught us Renaissance art in great depth. These would often continue well past the designated time as Siva-da would delve into minute details that most would probably consider superfluous in an under graduate class. I still recall his class on Michelangelo where he talked about the fiery preacher Savonarola, who was burnt at stake later as a heretic. It was all to make us understand the time and the context in which Michelangelo worked in. Arun-da’s Far Eastern Art classes were also quite informative about a totally different kind of aesthetics. The idea of a Wen-Jen (artist-scholar) in Japanese art struck a chord that I remember.
When time came to choose a department I chose Printmaking. It was mostly because by then I had seen Sanat Kar in action! Sanat-da was a ball of energy and enthusiasm. He was the father figure in the department and his sincerity and commitment was infectious. He would puff at his cigarette holding it in his fist and spend hours helping us out with our prints. He also insisted that we do life drawings. In the afternoon he would take a short break to walk back to his quarter for lunch but before we could finish our’s he would be back for the Method & Materials class. To do all this walking in the summer heat of Santiniketan required considerable grit. In our fourth year Nirmalendu Das joined the department as the youngest teacher. Nirmal-da was the only one with a Doctoral degree and a fellow teacher would jokingly address him as Doctor-babu. He was much interested in discussions about the politics of imagery and would often encourage us to talk or write and that was a breath of fresh air when you are immersed in technique.
The big daddy of all teachers was undoubtedly K.G.Subramanyan or Mani-da. He was already a legend and we were in awe. Mani-da was a bit distant in the early years but then Dipak (Bhattacharjee) was the first among us who mustered the courage to go to him with a bunch of his works. That experience changed his manner of painting for good and opened the door for us. It was rare not to be affected by Mani-da’s sharp wit and sardonic humour. His manner of going through a pile of work and pulling out the significant works for analysis was quite a sight! The first floor room of the building that he later painted all over was quite a pilgrimage once every two months or so. His occasional lectures were another expose to his depth of knowledge and erudition. Not that you understood everything but even a little bit would open new modes of thinking. By the time I finished my Bachelors I was somewhat acquainted with the seminal ideas he brought to art and pedagogy through his writings in Moving Focus and Living Traditions. My next destination was The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. I was quite set in my mind that I wanted to join the Masters course in Painting there. I had some knowledge about Jyoti Bhatt, Gulam Sheikh, Bhupen Khakkar et al and some fuzzy ideas about how Baroda operated. Nirmal-da had studied there, Sanat-da visited Baroda and of course Mani-da came from there. When I joined Baroda I realised Sheikh-Bhai would be on a sabbatical for a whole year and we would be left to our own devices for the greater part of the year. This proved to be a boon in disguise, as I needed time to adjust to the shift in discipline and the new place. I was again fortunate that Rekha Rodwittiya taught us briefly and in the short period of a month she managed to instil a sense of purpose and direction. Rekha was a formidable teacher, just returned from Royal College of Art armed with great enthusiasm, a great command over language and a strict sense of discipline to boot. I never much cared for strict regimes myself but when you are at a loose end it helps to refocus. Nasreen Mohamedi and Jyoti Bhatt will pop in from time to time and you learnt by looking at their examples. They were as different from each other as one could imagine both in their teaching and their art yet there existed a great deal of mutual respect.
Next year Sheikh-bhai was back and our regular classes started. Many do not know that Gulam Sheikh taught Art history for many years before joining the Painting department. To learn history of painting from a practicing painter was an opportunity of a lifetime. His knowledge and passion are legendary and we got a taste of that in his classes. He will effortlessly travel from early Renaissance to Persian to Indian miniature to Japanese Art showing visuals, explaining societal compulsions and moving into poetry. Those were virtuoso performances that will often have students from other departments joining in. I still remember an impromptu trip to Ajanta with him. In cave no. 1 he asked us to imagine how a monk would walk in with a lamp in the dark cave interior. The lamp in his hand could only light a portion of the wall and how he was required to walk along moving the lamp to light up small sections of the murals to take in the unfolding narrative. The narrative seen part by part would be a close equivalent of cinema in a pre-cinematic age! For a moment all the electric lights in the cave disappeared and I was transported to 6th Century AD. I had a very similar experience in Ellora where our art history Professor Deepak Kannal pointed out the fascinating human drama played out by the divinities and enthralled us. But that happened years later when I had already started teaching and taken my students for a study tour to Ellora. Going back to my MA years, Art Historian Ratan Parimoo-Sir’s classes were very thorough and meticulous but what remained with me was his insistence on correct pronunciation of names of artists. That helped me greatly while I was traveling in Europe.
After Baroda I spent a year at Kanoria Centre for Arts in Ahmedabad on a fellowship. The generous Inlaks scholarship gave me the opportunity to go to the Royal College of Art in London the following year. London itself was a learning experience; add to that my extensive travels in the Continent during the long summer breaks and two short stints in Paris and Berlin on exchange programmes. Much of the art I was looking at in the books and much contemporary stuff that I had no prior knowledge of were there for my delectation! I already had made an acquaintance with the influential teacher and artist Peter De Francia of RCA. He was retired by then but I would often visit him on weekends to share my works and have a hot meal. His critiques were scalpel-sharp but he was also a very caring soul. It was he who made itineraries of important sites to visit in France, Germany or Italy. Those were priceless.
Prof. Paul Huxley was the Chair (Head) in the Painting department during my time there. He was quite a well-known hard-edged abstractionist in UK. I will end this rather long list with a story of our first meeting and what I learnt from it.
The introductory meeting with us freshers was held at the department followed by a party. After the party got over I heard some tinkling noises coming from the washroom. I was curious and stepped in to find Paul (that’s how we were to address him, no ‘Sir’, no frills) washing the wine glasses. He told me matter-of-factly that those glasses were hired and people were going to come to fetch them soon. It was as simple as that. Although for me it was a life’s lesson. All the hierarchies we build are dispensable and there is no shame in any honest work. Art is not just about art it is about life and my numerous teachers have helped me in realising this great lesson. I will always remain indebted to them. Now that I am teaching for the last twenty-five years I realise that I learn something from my students almost on a daily basis, either from them directly or while preparing for a class and that learning never stops really.
28 August 2020,
Baroda.