The success of our contemporary art in the global art market is based on a long and consistent period of gestation, infinite variety and skills that have been destroyed in many countries of the world, which we have managed to preserve. This has stood us in good stead over the years and has provided us with excellent leverage in a privileged sphere of consumption.
How did we get there? To an extent our ?backwardness? saved us. As the colonial powers refused to gift us with the tools of mass production on a large enough scale, our skills in handcrafted production survived while they did not in Europe and the US. The only countries able to compete with us are China, and to a lesser extent, Japan. So it is good handcrafted art that is paying us dividends.
Secondly, it is not just good handcrafted art. It has a sense of contemporaneity as well. This incubated in our long struggle against colonial rule. There was a period of imitation as in the case of Ravi Varma, Bamapada Banerjee and others. But it did not work. Then there was the period of rejection in which we witnessed a return to the pre-colonial roots of our miniature painting led by artists like Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Asit Haldar and others.
But that too did not work, so a new hybrid art evolved that drew a number of different trends towards it, ranging from East Asian calligraphic art to folk art and even elements of our own symbolic and non-figurative art. The important thing was that this art reflected the spirit of unity in diversity that our national movement did.
We were spared the narrow sectarian developments that drained the vibrancy out of the powerful artistic expression that was snuffed but by Hitler’s closure of the Bauhaus in 1934 and later by various degrees of formalism that led to an emasculated realism (the photo-realists) or a moribund abstractionism, both of which forced Euro-American art to either becoming a mere concern with structures or to a post-modernism of the “anything is art” sort. We were spared this and our contemporary art developed its original flavour.
It is to the credit of independent India that we kept institutions like Santiniketan alive and developed others like Baroda and Cholamandal. Today, it is that robust development of independent art institutions that is paying dividends.
We have succeeded in blending skilled crafting with a variety of influences that only a confident outward-looking tradition of a national liberation movement could sustain with a high level of originality. This is paying off now.
Indian contemporary art refuses to be pinned down by attempts to analyse it in terms of Euro-American trends that may be look-alike but have a very different content and history of development.
It is unfortunate that a number of our young artists are being led astray by fads and foibles of the West, but the resilience of our contemporary art traditions lies in their variety and originality, so it will put them to sleep. Far more artists are forging ahead like Sohan Qadri, Atul Dodiya, Paresh Maity, Arpana Caur, T Vaikuntam, Atul Sinha, Pramod Ganapatye, Om Pal Sansanwal, Ratna Bali Kant, Yati Jaiswal and many more. They will survive the copycats of this generation.