The Phantom Lady Strikes Again
There were some people who were crucial cultural players who seem
have slipped out of the country’s cultural memory. The Phantom Lady rediscovers
the critic and connoisseur Govindraj Venkatachalam .
'BEAUTY IS MY ADVENTURE'
ON THE LOST CRITIC G.VENKATACHALAM
Ram Rahman, while on a conversation on dance in Facebook, urged me
to write a column on the important art critic Venkatachalam who it seems the
world has forgotten. (I had always been wary of Facebook, thinking of it as a
repository for dog, cat and baby lovers or for various kinds of self-
indulgence and self-promotion, but it seems that it can also urge you to
write.) G. Venkatachalam – “Venka” to many - was an important early critic,
connoisseur, nationalist and Theosophist from Bangalore who was a patron and
godfather to many artists. He is credited with discovering the genius of M.S.
Subbulakshmi, who he met when she came as a sixteen year old to record in a
studio in the city, and whom he immediately proclaimed as an immense talent.
There is an essay on him in a 1947 book Eminent Indians by the
Sinhalese political journalist D.B. Dhanapala, where he writes, “ He is of
great consequence for he belongs to a category of people who have made the
colourblind see: Ananda Coomaraswamy, E B Havell, James Cousins, O C Ganguly,
Percy Brown, NC Mehta, Stella Kramrisch. I am not quite clear where exactly in
this list Venkatachalam’s place is; but he has done as much as anyone of these
in making India art-conscious.” He talks about him as a great popularizer of
art, “ While we learned the finer points and the more intricate philosophy of
Indian art from men like Coomaraswamy and Havell we also learned to love Indian
art as something connected intimately with us from Venkatachalam. He gave us
the personal details of the artists, created them into human beings of flesh
and blood…he infused ease into aesthetics, personality into painters; and
friendliness into frescoes.”
Venkatachalam belongs to a quaint world of cultural clubs, drawing
rooms and “At Homes”, where “Beauty” was sought and ideas like “soul”,
“essence” and “inspiration” were intensely discussed. He is one of the
cosmopolitan modernists of the pre-independence world, travelling all over
India to give talks with “lantern slides” and representing Indian culture
internationally. It is a bohemian, free wheeling world where nationalists and
people from the arts travelled widely and knew each other intimately. In fact,
Venkatachalam was so well known in Ceylon that Dhanapala makes a plea that he
should be appointed cultural ambassador in Colombo.
When I was a student in Bangalore in the 1970s Balan Nambiar once
took me to see a collection of Bengal School paintings housed in the
Theosophical Society building in Ulsoor. There were many paintings of important
artists hung in a large, gloomy hall, many of them damaged and ill kept. He
told me it was Venkatachalam’s collection and that most of them were gifts.
There seemed to be nobody in charge looking after them. The collection seems to
have disappeared since, and like “Venka”, is lost to the art world, unknown.
S.G. Vasudev who was a protégé of Venkatachalam, said he first met
him in 1959 when Venka saw his youthful paintings and urged him to join the
College of Arts in Madras, convincing Vasudev’s reluctant parents and
recommending him to the principal K.C.S. Paniker. He is not sure whether Venka
was a theosophist (he was close to Annie Besant, though in his book Fragrant
Memories he praises the philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti), but said he used to
stay in the Theosophical Society whenever he came to Bangalore or Madras.
Perhaps with his peripatetic bachelor life, Venka had no fixed home.
Venkatachalam introduced Vasudev in the 1960s to painters like Husain and
Satish Gujral, when they were largely unknown in the South and said he was
collecting works to build up a permanent gallery of modern art named after Fred
Harvey to be housed in the Theosophical Society in Bangalore. He was also
collecting the works of KK Hebbar, Ara and KCS Paniker and of young artists
like Vasudev, Viswanadhan and Rani Nanjappa. Vasudev remembers seeing a
portrait bust of Venka done by Debiprasad Roychaudhury.
Venkatachalam is said to have had a genius for making friends. A
close friend was “Kidi” Seshappa who brought out a political magazine called
Kidi (“Spark” in Kannada) in the 1950s. Kidi Seshappa was exposed to art
through Venkatachalam who persuaded him to take an exhibition of Indian art to
Europe in the late ‘60s. Vasudev says that he was supposed to go along with the
exhibition and help set it up in various countries, but finally it was
Viswanadhan who went along with Seshappa and who historically remained behind
to make his career in Paris.
Out of sixteen books written by him, I have one in my collection
called Fragrant Memories published in 1941 by the Hosali Press in Bangalore and
described as a book on “Modern poets, Painters, Dancers and Musicians”. The
book is autobiographical and ranges from his meetings with Rabindranath Tagore
in Mysore and Santiniketan to encounters with painters like Abanindranath and
Gaganendranath, K Venkatappa , Sarada Ukil, Chughtai and George Keyt, musicians
like MS, dancers Balasaraswati, Rukmini Devi, Shanta Rao, Uday Shankar and
Ramgopal , critic Kanhaiyalal Vakil and Japanese writer Yone Noguchi ( father
of Isamu Noguchi), philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, politicians from Nehru to
Mirza Ismail; and in Shanghai, the Communist and Mao supporter Agnes Smedley.
Even the politicians he likes are aesthetes. Venka is a man of the Indian
Rennaissance, influenced by the ideas of Ananda Coomarswamy and Havell and a
strong supporter of the Bengal school of art. In an amusing chapter on meeting
Kanhaiyalal Vakil in Bombay, he describes the hot arguments they have on Bengal
versus Bombay art and finally concludes that both were in fact fighting for the
same cause.
Dhanapala writes about his art criticism as if he were a method
actor: “Venkatachalam has a mind that is so plastic that it can fit itself into
the crannies and crevices of other minds, making them his own. He is sensitive
to a high degree to the intentions of the artists… like a great actor living
the role he has to act, he gets under the skin of the artist… if he wishes to
draw our attention to the Persian glories of Chugtai’s work he travels all the
way to Lahore, has Mughulai dinners with him, sees him at work and play, before
he makes an estimate of his work ”.
Venkatachalam describes himself as a dilettante and a born
vagabond, tramping the streets of various cities in India “ discussing men and
matters, art and artists”. For a dilettante, he is rather cultivated and
knowledgeable about the arts, quoting Roger Fry and Clive Campbell often. He is
impatient of traditional and conventional teaching and supports the freshness
of invention, admiring rebelliousness, stubbornness, modesty, and austerity in
his subjects. In his writing too he is suspicious of pedantry, “ Scholarship, I
have always held, is a positive hindrance to art appreciation. You soon get
lost in the archeology of it and the beauty, the simple direct beauty of a
thing escapes you…”
Sukanya Rahman writes an amazing story about her grandmother
Ragini Devi in her book Dancing in the Family. An American who trained herself
to be an “Indian” dancer, Ragini falls in love with the poet Harindranath
Chattopadyay and pregnant, leaves her husband Ramlal Bajpai in New York to come
to India. Her daughter Indrani Rahman is born prematurely on the ship and she
is stranded penniless in Pondicherry, unable to enter British India as her
husband is a nationalist on the run from the police. On learning of her sorry
state, Venka comes to her rescue along with Harindranath’s wife Kamaladevi and
Annie Besant, looking after her and later taking her to meet Vallathol at the
Kerala Kalamandalam. That is how she becomes the first woman to be trained in
Kathakali and soon begins her travels with Gopinath popularizing the form
across India. He was also instrumental in shaping Indrani's career, starting
with her first performance at the Theosophical Society in Bangalore in 1949,
after her training with U.S. Krishna Rao.
A bachelor himself, Venka is described as living an “enviable
roving, rolling, carefree, bachelor life with the whole of India as his horizon
… in Bombay for a month, in Calcutta for two, in Mysore for six and in Madras
for a week ”, travelling widely in “Japan, Java, China, Korea and Ceylon
carrying the gospel of Indian art”. The last time Sukanya Rahman met him, she
says, he had a pretty young lady draped on his arm.
It is the norm today to describe a certain kind of liberal, modern
milieu in India of the 1950s and ‘60s as Nehruvian; when in fact it was a
continuation of the exciting, open, intellectual world that existed before
independence. G. Venkatachalam’s writings open up a fascinating history of the
burgeoning cultural scene being fashioned at the time (though he was a player
post-independence too, being part of the Lalit Kala Akademi and cultural
bodies), and of the unconventional friendships and relationships which shaped
them.
I have always envied the film world its “film buffs”: those
tireless enthusiasts who so love films and filmmakers; and it seems that here
is a man who is the original Indian “art buff”- who takes such pleasure in art
and artists - that we so lack.
Pushpamala N.
August 2014
