International studio (35.1908)

The New Indian School of Painting

Jahan, having shut up his father in his palace at
Agra, and defeated the forces of Dara Shikoh, the
heir-apparent, took the latter prisoner and caused
him to be murdered. While Aurangzib is lounging
on a marble bench in the Agra Palace, the head of
Dara is brought to him. Throwing down his
rosary and the Quran which he had been reading,
Aurangzib removes the cloth from the bloody
trophy with the tip of his sword and examines the
head nonchalantly, only to make sure that he has
not been imposed upon, and that his most formid-
able rival has at last been removed.
In this very original composition Mr. Tagore
shows a great advance in technical skill and no loss
of that fine sense of expression which characterised
his early work. The story is told with great
dramatic feeling. The artist makes us feel the
curiously complicated character of Aurangzib; his
cruelty, suspiciousness, and hypocrisy, combined
with religious fanaticism and inflexibility of purpose.
We may miss the show of asceticism which he
assumed for state occasions, but evidently Mr.
Tagore wishes to show Aurangzib as the man, not
the monarch, and here, unattended and faced with
the ghastly proof of his chief opponent’s death,
there was no need for acting. The artist’s fine
sense of colour and beautiful feeling for line are
both well exemplified in this work.
In the symbolical figure of Bharat Mata (p. 108),
Mr. Tagore makes a bold attempt to bring back into
modern art the ideal type of divinity created by
the old Buddhist and Hindu masters. He has
not succeeded fully in giving his conception of
Mother India that wonderful abstraction and sense
of the divine which illuminated the masterpieces of
Indian idealism in the pre-Mogul epoch; but there
is nevertheless a great charm and spirituality in the
figure of the gracious goddess bringing down to her
children the four heavenly gifts of Faith, Learning,
Food, and Clothing. I hope that Mr. Tagore may
find occasion for further flights into the higher
regions of allegorical art. Some time ago he began
to prepare at my suggestion a remarkable series of
designs in fulfilment of a project for the decoration
in fresco of the new Calcutta Art Gallery, now in
course of erection; a scheme which I sincerely
hope may be carried out, as it would undoubtedly
help to develop still further the great artistic power
which Mr. Tagore possesses.
The illustration entitled The Dtw&ll (p. in) is
from an earlier work of Mr. Tagore, purchased about
five years ago for the Calcutta Art Gallery. The
subject is suggested by that most beautiful of
Indian festivals, the Feast of Lamps, in the month

of October, when every Hindu woman, as the
shades of evening fall, goes down to the Ganges, or
to the village tank, bearing her votive lamp in
honour of the Goddess of Fortune. The Music
Party (p. 112) is a recent example of Mr. Tagore’s
graceful composition.
Raja Vikram and the Vampire is a remaik-
able work by one of Mr. Tagore’s most promising
pupils, Mr. Nanda Lai Bose. It illustrates one of
the weird legends connected with the history of
the great Hindu King, Vikramaditya, the Indian
King Arthur. Three men, so runs the story, were
born in the city of Ujjain at the same hour : the first
was Vikrama, born in the King’s palace; the second,,
an oilman’s son; and the third, a jogi or anchorite,
who became a devotee of the great goddess Kali,
and offered to her human sacrifices. This jogi
first killed the oilman’s son and, plotting the
destruction of the King, had the corpse hung from
a tree in the cemetery. Then he begged Vikrama
to go there on a dark night and fetch it for him so
that he might perform a sacrifice for the goddess;
his intention being that Vikrama himself should be
the victim. The body was possessed by a Baital,
or Vampire, which while it was being carried by
Vikrama tells him twenty-five tales, “ Baital-pancha-
vimsati.” After each tale the Vampire slips back
to the cemetery and Vikrama has to return and
fetch him down again from the tree. When the
last tale is being told the Vampire reveals the real
purpose of the jogi, and Vikrama, by making the
latter the victim instead of himself, gains the merit
of the sacrifice to Kali and bseofiies': King of the
World.
This must be-considered a very, remarkable work
for a young student of twenty-two years, who has
not yet finished his academic career. There is
unusual power in the figure of the doughty warrior-
king, stooping with the gruesome burden on his
back, while he listens to the tale which the Vampire
whispers in his ear: the uncanny atmosphere of
the cemetery is felt in the broadly treated back-
ground with its suggestion of “ horrid shapes and
shrieks and sights unholy” creeping out of the
darkness.
The next plate, The Flight of Lakshman Sen, re-
produces an extremely able work by another of
Mr. Tagore’s pupils, Mr. Surendra Nath Ganguly,
representing the escape of the last King of Bengal
from his palace after his defeat by the Pathans.
The figure of the decrepit old king, crawling down
his palace stairs and about to enter the barge which
is waiting for him, is admirably expressive, and
makes, together with the architectural structure and
IIS