Lyrical vistas

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A painting by KH Ara

The latest show The Indian Landscape: The Changing Horizon at the Delhi Art Gallery, presents as it does an overview of landscape painting over the 19th and 20th centuries, evokes a profound sense of loss. Loss of the idyllic, loss of symbiotic relationship between man and nature and most importantly, the loss of the sensibility that celebrated beauty in art.

This is amply demonstrated in the serenity of a sleepy temple town on the banks of a river by Ambika Dhurandar or the stark but monumental studies of the Himalayas by Devyani and Kanwal Krishan.
Indian landscape painting whether inspired by the far Eastern art seen in works of the Shantiniketan artists such as Nandlal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee or the abstract cityscapes of Ram Kumar and Bakre have an inherent lyricism, perhaps attributable to the pastoral literary and oral tradition embedded in the cultural matrix. Whether peopled or solitary, there is a strong presence of human agency in most of Indian landscapes, through ruins, buildings, farms or just reverberations emanating from the painting.
It has been maintained in most historical accounts and essays written on Indian art that landscape painting was introduced by the Europeans, like the Daniel Duo, Hodges and Cheney. However, any study of Mughal and Pahari miniatures reveals the detailed delineation of nature in works, not merely as a backdrop or a setting for a narrative but as a revelation of natural beauty of God’s creative abilities. Through the show, one can understand the various genres that influenced Indian landscape painters ranging from Orientalism, Romantic Naturalism, Metaphorical Representation to the Abstract.
Given the diversity of topographical features and ever- changing cultural landscapes one would have assumed that Indian art should have a deep and abiding tradition of landscape painting, but modernism that disdained the natural and the beautiful came too early, leading to the marginalisation if not the demise of landscape art.
— Dr Seema Bawa is an art historian,
curator and critic