Biography
Artist, critic, activist, and ideologue Jagdish Swaminathan was one of the most influential figures of 20th century Indian art. He was a provocative figure consistently questioning and pushing the boundaries of the establishment. One of 11 children, he was born to a Tamil Brahmin family in 1928. His father was a private secretary to the Commerce Member of the Viceregal Council in colonial India. In 1942, when Swaminathan finished school, Mahatma Gandhi launched the Quit India movement, demanding the end of British rule. Civil disobedience was in the air. Swaminathan enrolled in a pre-medical course at Delhi’s Hindu College in 1943. Still, barely a few weeks later, he ran away to Calcutta, devastated by the Bengal Famine, a war-time catastrophe engineered by the British colonial regime.
Seeing people starving to death in Calcutta’s streets, Swaminathan – who was all of 15 years old – was radicalised by revolutionary ideas. He returned to Delhi and joined the Congress Socialist Party (CSP), the left wing of the Indian National Congress. The CSP activists Ram Manohar Lohia, Edathatta Narayanan, and Aruna Asaf Ali introduced Swaminathan to Marxist thought. Swaminathan wrote in his Auto-Bio Notes that his political and literary socialisation in the CSP was marked by “non-communist (even anti-Communist) literature.” In the same memoir, he wrote that he had “pre-knowledge of the crimes against the freedom of man perpetrated by the Soviet regime” (Kalidas 2012, 18). Some intellectuals and revolutionaries he read then were Max Eastman, Harold Laski, Rosa Luxemburg, Ignazio Silone, and Arthur Koestler. Among these were figures who were critical of the murderously authoritarian turn of Stalinism and what they correctly read as the betrayal of the ideals of Communism.
When India attained freedom in 1947, the CSP broke away from the Congress to establish itself as the Socialist Party of India. But Swaminathan disagreed with the Socialist Party of India’s founder, Jaya Prakash Narayan, who wanted to convert it from a cadre-based organisation to an association with open mass membership (Kalidas 2012, 18). Drawn to the hope of revolutionary change, he joined the Communist Party of India (CPI) in 1948 and worked in its Youth Front. Unfortunately, under B. T. Ranadive’s leadership, the CPI was engaged in what retrospectively came to be known as ‘Left adventurism’. Swaminathan was concerned that Ranadive’s advocacy of a bloody revolution would ruin the party. In 1956, when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary, Swaminathan could no longer tolerate this Stalinist affront. It brought home to him everything that was wrong with such an authoritarian politics of “lies and slander,” and he decided to leave the party (Kalidas 2012, 22).
He married a year before the Soviet invasion of Hungary and in 1955, while on honeymoon in Madhya Pradesh, he had already begun to sketch trees and faces. An early encounter with India's Adivasi or Indigenous communities, especially with a Korku traditional healer, and his shamanic spells left a lasting impression on his art practice. On his return to Delhi, he took evening classes in painting at the Delhi Polytechnic. While he was dazzled by his teacher Sailoz Mukherjee’s hard-drinking, bohemian persona, he was also drawn to the older artist’s ability to respond to nature in an ‘uninhibited’ manner, one that “refuses to accept the dominance of man over nature” (Kalidas 2012, 25). Swaminathan’s insight into Mukherjee’s art reveals his position in the Nehruvian modernity of post-independence India, where traditional forms of living in consonance with nature, which the forces of colonialism had already wrecked, were being further eroded by dams and heavy industries, enthusiastically called the new temples of progress.
Due to India’s Non-Alignment policy during the Cold War era, Swaminathan received a fellowship to learn printmaking in Warsaw in 1958. He returned home without completing the course. By 1960, he had his first major showing, albeit in a three-person show, which brought him good reviews. Between the late 1950s and 1960s, Swaminathan contributed art reviews to leftist magazines like Link and its sister publications, Patriot and Hindi Patriot. His sketches and illustrations for magazine covers from the late 1950s bear the influence of Picasso and Swaminathan’s contemporary, the Indian artist Ram Kumar. Swaminathan had cited Kumar's melancholy Sad Town series in one of his Untitled sketches dated 13 August 1957. Particularly intriguing is the very faint scribble in the margin – “the dead weight of centuries” (Kalidas 2012, 52). This invokes Marx’s caveat that “the tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” from his famous essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. This could be interpreted as Swaminathan’s disquiet at the persistent influence, on several of his peers, of earlier schools or movements within international or Indian modernism, as he felt the urgent need to arrive at a breakthrough.
A few years later, this disquiet fed into his manifesto for Group 1890 in 1963, which rapped the earlier schools of Indian modernism on their knuckles — “the vulgar naturalism of Raja Ravi Varma and the pastoral idealism of the Bengal School,” as well as the “hybrid mannerisms” resulting from the “imposition” of a European aesthetic on “classical, miniature and folk styles” (Kalidas 2012, 70). Instead of art that sang of the human condition or represented social conditions, he argued: “Art is neither conformity to reality nor a flight from it.” He asserted that “[art] is reality itself, a whole new world of experience….” (Kalidas 2012, 71). Group 1890 was an all-male collective of 12 artists, including Jeram Patel, Jyoti Bhatt, Gulammohammed Sheikh, and Swaminathan. Their first and only show was inaugurated by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru at Rabindra Bhavan in Delhi in 1963 and introduced by the poet Octavio Paz, the Mexican ambassador to India then.
Paz not only supported Group 1890, but he also encouraged Swaminathan to start a journal for critical discourse. Appropriately named Contra to signal its polemical stance to artists and critics alike, the journal was short-lived. As Geeta Kapur argues in Signatures of Dissent, “Contra was not only oppositional but like Swami himself: contrary” (Kapur 2001, 78). A space for showing off his radical attitude as “the foster-child of the surrealist-anarchist tradition” (Kapur 2001, 79).
1966 marked a significant breakthrough in Swaminathan’s painting. As the artist’s son, the art critic S. Kalidas points out, at that moment, Swaminathan had abandoned the “pre-historic cave-painting inspired bison horns” and the “neo-Tantric phase with sperms and serpents of 1963-1964.” In the catalogue text accompanying his March-April 1966 exhibition, Colour Geometry of Space, Swaminathan explored the mystical and magical dimensions behind the manifestation of geometric forms in colour. Space was not activated through analysis but was revealed through colour, with the forms opening new windows onto the horizon of the avyaktam or ‘unmanifested’ (Kalidas 2012, 80). To make this series, Swaminathan immersed himself in a study of Pahari miniature painting and tantric art, as well as the wisdom of the Upanishads.
In 1968, Swaminathan was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship. This allowed him to research The Significance of the Traditional Numen to Contemporary Art. He had adopted the concept of the numinous image, pulsating with an inexplicable divine energy, from the scholar-curator Philip Rawson. He focused on the art forms that Adivasi and pastoral communities practised in three areas — Kinnaur in Himachal Pradesh, Bastar in Madhya Pradesh, and Kutch in Gujarat. His thesis was that “the anthropomorphic imagination functioning in our miniature painting, the psychedelic use of colour in Tantric painting and the geometric use of space in all of our traditional painting have one end in view: not to represent reality or even analyse it, but to create that para-natural image, which inspires man to contend with reality.” Significantly, this thesis was articulated in a 1967 reflection titled The New Promise, which Swaminathan composed in response to points raised by the influential American critic and champion of abstract expressionism, Clement Greenberg, during his visit to India that year (Kalidas 2012, 108). Swaminathan carried these insights concerning the ‘para-natural image’ into his next series, stunning metaphysical landscapes titled Bird-Tree-Mountain that he continued to paint well into the mid-1980s. In the last years of his life, he intriguingly returned to the cave paintings and Adivasi wall paintings that had inspired him three decades previously.
