How the Madras Movement redefined modern Indian art

J. Sultan Ali's 'Muria Maiden' (1967; oil on canvas; 33 x 38 inches) J Sultan Ali (1920-90) moved from Delhi to Cholamandal Artists' Village near Chennai in 1969. (Image courtesy DAG)

What is modern Indian art? Artists and critics have engaged with this question since the turn of the 20th century. From the Bengal School to Maharaj Sayajirao University of Baroda and from the Bombay Progressives to the Madras Movement, artists have sought to define and redefine an Indian aesthetic and vocabulary—often responding to Western forms, techniques and ideas brought in by European colonizers. The youngest of these schools—the Madras Movement—is at another inflection point, both in terms of awareness around its principal architects, ideas and practitioners, and in terms of the prices their works command.

Sample this: In June 2014, SaffronArt auctioned a 1989 painting by Madras Movement abstractionist K.M. Adimoolam titled 'Blues & Greens of Andaman' (oil on canvas; 33.5 x 43.5 inches) for Rs 3 lakh. Ten years on, in June 2024, art auctioneer AstaGuru got a winning bid of "INR 24,64,477, four times over its estimate of 4-6 lakhs" for the same work.

Adimoolam trained in advanced painting at the Government College of Fine Arts in the mid-1960s—an important point in the history of the Madras Movement, which grew from the college, its then artist-principal KCS Paniker and students.

To be sure, works by modern Indian artists from M.F. Husain and S.H. Raza to Tyeb Mehta and Krishen Khanna fetch much higher prices in international auctions. In late 2023, Amrita Shergil's 'The Storyteller' went for Rs 61.8 crore in an auction. The same year, an S.H. Raza work was auctioned for more than Rs 51 crore and a V.S. Gaitonde abstract got a winning bid of Rs 42 crore at an international auction.

Sunny Chandiramani, senior vice-president—client relations at AstaGuru Auction House, says: "While the Progressive Artists' Group may have a more prominent place in the general narrative of Indian art history, the importance and stature of the Madras Movement and its artists continue to grow, both in terms of price and buyer interest."

"The record for the highest price for Adimoolam’s work was achieved in an AstaGuru auction in October 2023. Titled 'Mystical Land', it was acquired for INR 24,45,354," adds Chandiramani.

The Madras Movement, its artist and their Cholamandal Artists Village are the focus of an ongoing exhibition titled 'Madras Modern: Regionalism and Identity', at the private modern art gallery DAG in Delhi.

Who built the Cholamandal Artists' Village, and why

Artist S.G. Vasudev remembers the time nearly 60 years ago, when Chennai-based Government College of Fine Arts Principal K.C.S. Paniker asked students what they intended to do after graduation. "It was 1963-64," Vasudev says over the phone from Bengaluru where he has lived since the 1980s.

To the students' response that they would look for teaching and design jobs, Vasudev recalls Paniker saying: "Job is not a good thing for artists."

A well-known artist himself, Paniker felt a job would take his students' focus away from their art practice at a time when they had an important task on hand: engaging with questions of what modern Indian art is, and what it should and should not draw upon.

"Panikar's ideology was that it (Indian art) should look Indian," says artist R.B. Bhaskaran over phone. Bhaskaran would later break away from this view, believing that "being Indian", whatever one produced was Indian art.

Untitled (1976) by Madras Movement pioneer KCS Panikar; oil on canvas, 63.5 x 52 inches. (Image courtesy DAG)

His rebuttal to Paniker's so-called Nativism in art and his Cats and Couple series would come a couple of decades later. In the mid-1960s, though, Bhaskaran joined fellow students and teachers in practicing Indian arts and crafts, including batik, in a way that favoured regional influences. The faculty and students started to hold exhibitions and to retail the artefacts they made.

"Most students took inspiration from the Ramayan and Mahabharat. I took inspiration from symbols in Indian temples, like the trishul and linga (in the Life Cycle and Evolution series about procreation and life)," Bhaskaran recalls.

Alphonso Arul Doss was interested in capturing light. An untitled oil-on-canvas work from 1970 (22 x 22 inches) by the Madras Movement great. (Image courtesy DAG)

Within a couple of years after Paniker had asked students that critical question about 'life after art college', in 1966, Paniker and a bunch of his students - including SG Vasudev and RB Bhaskaran - had established the Cholamandal Artists' Village. The funding came from an art show the students put together.

"The show was sold out... We bought 10 acres of land - not in one go, but over the years," says Vasudev, adding that the idea was to develop a place where artists could work and live with their families.

Cholamandal Artists' Village founder-artist RB Bhaskaran's untitled oil and encaustic on canvas work from 1973. (Image courtesy DAG)

Madras Movement

While the Government College of Fine Arts was opened in 1851, the Madras Movement took root over a century later—in the mid-1960s.

The college was originally devoted to training artisans in regional crafts and design that were in demand in Europe at the time. The focus on crafts remained strong even after the college got its first artist principal in D.P. Roy Chowdhury in the 1930s. By the time K.C.S. Paniker took over as principal of the art college in the 1950s, the question of what modern Indian art should be, became the lodestone guiding the practice of graduating artists.

R.B. Bhaskaran explains that during the 1950s, art schools and artists around the country—in Baroda, Delhi College of Art, Calcutta (Santiniketan), Chennai—were focused on a national effort to establish an identity for modern Indian art. The Madras Art School, too, contributed to this narrative.

'Young girl', by L. Munuswamy. Oil on cardboard, 1961, 30 x 25.2 inches. (Image courtesy DAG)

DAG Senior Vice-president Kishore Singh says: "Across the 20th century, different schools of modernism took shape around the country. From the Bengal School in the early 1900s to Santiniketan and the expressionists, the Progressives in Bombay in 1947 and Madras Art in the 1960s... Baroda too formed its own school, but Madras was the absolute last... Each of these addressed the issue (of what is Indian art) from the point of view of regionalism... The southern voice had not been very strong. And artists like K.G. Subramanyam and A. Ramachandran had moved to Delhi or Baroda (etc). Madras Art Movement brought to the limelight the rigour and discipline that the Government School encouraged, drawing from local histories, architecture, folklore... that rose under K.C.S. Paniker... the movement is not stultified or limited to a certain time—its longevity is carried on in the works of artists trained in that pedagogy."

In articles about the Madras Movement, the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s are often hailed as a period of great and important activity on the south Indian art scene. But the fervour of the early years of the movement was bound to wear off at some point.

Dark Mirror (triptych) by C. Douglas. The 2005 acrylic and mixed media on paper stuck on canvas work is a massive 59.2 x 131.4 inches. (Image courtesy DAG)

S.G. Vasudev recalls a 1960s interview in which Paniker was asked if the Madras Movement and the experimental artists village would last. Fifty-eight years on, both are at a cusp.

Of course, founder artists like Vasudev and Bhaskaran are carrying on the tradition, and there are younger artists in the fold too—think C. Douglas and K. Muralidharan. But things are changing, too. Some founder artists have died or moved away, and their cottages have been sold or rented out—sometimes to non-artists.

Once the largest self-funded artist commune in India, the Cholamandal village and Madras art have also been criticized lately for being a bit stuck in the past. But the very existence of the village continues to tell an important story of modern Indian art.

K Ramanujam, Untitled (Dream), ink and watercolour on paper laid on card; 10.5 x 11.5 inches. (Image courtesy DAG)

Art and craft

Why haven't we been able to replicate the Cholamandal Artists' Village experiment elsewhere in the country? S.G. Vasudev says there are at least two reasons: One, it is still unusual for artists to raise funds rather than wait for grants. Second, the Madras Movement emerged with artists who trained at the same school—with its rather interesting approach to instruction where students of advanced painting could attend workshops on batik or woodwork or metal work or leather work and other such combinations.

"One advantage that Madras art (college) had was that there was no teaching but learning by seeing others working. There were no defences (or barriers), you could walk into any section," recalls Vasudev.

This approach to art seeped into the artist village as well. "There was a small theatre next to my cottage (at Cholamandal)," says S.G. Vasudev, "we would invite theatre people to perform there... not only art, there was also dance, music, poetry... I listen to music a lot while painting."

Sometime around 1968, Vasudev also became great friends with the Kannada playwright Girish Karnad. It was through Karnad that he met A.K. Ramanujan whose book of poetry he later designed the cover for. "Ramanujan was a walking encyclopaedia; he had an answer for everything," he recalls.

When Vasudev did a collection of works inspired by Ramanujan's poetry after the latter had died in Chicago in July 1993, Girish Karnad was among those who came to read Ramanujan's poems at the launch of the exhibition.

Regional letters, images, motifs and crafts—Panikar had encouraged their use in art. He had also encouraged students to acquire as much technical knowhow and as many skills as they could master. Perhaps it is because of this training that Bhaskaran went on to study printmaking, lithography, ceramics and fresco technique as well.

It is hard to overstate how significant this meshing of art and craft, and of the realms of ideas and techniques is, when most European schools insisted on a clear distinction between artists and artisans.

DP Roy Chowdhury's Sentinel, oil and sand on Masonite board, 20.5 x 12.5 inches. (Image courtesy DAG)

Madras Modern

Madras Modern at the DAG in central Delhi revisits the Madras Art Movement and its biggest proponents, from D.P. Roy Chowdhury and K.C.S. Paniker to J. Sultan Ali, K Sreenivasulu, M. Reddeppa Naidu, A.P. Santhanaraj and Alphonso Arul Doss, R.B. Bhaskaran, SG Vasudev, K. Ramanujam, A.P. Paneerselvam and K. Muralidharan, among others.

The Madras Movement took root in the 1960s at the Government School of Art and Craft and Cholamandal Art Village, but remained less represented in exhibitions and auctions for decades. This started to change dramatically at the turn of the 21st century—and in the last decade or so, we've seen retrospectives of artists from K.C.S. Paniker to S.G. Vasudev. We've also seen documentaries made on the Cholamandal Artists' Village, the artists who built it, those who emerged from it and their decades-long movement to redefine Indian art with regional influences given pride of place.

Indeed, as you walk through the Delhi exhibition, you see influences from south Indian temples, architecture, tribal art and scripture in both paintings and sculpture.

From the totemic creatures and bright colours of J. Sultan Ali's canvases to L. Munuswamy's playful abstractions. From the words, symbols and diagrams of R.M. Palaniappan's astrophysics and maths-inspired prints to K. Sreenivasulu's Jamini Roy-esque figures. From Alphonso Arul Doss's experiments with light to S.G. Vasudev's Maithuna series. From K. Ramanujam's fantastical beings and exotic architecture to D. Venkatapathy's engagement with folk art and the epics. But the show begins exactly where the Madras Movement did: with D.P. Roy Chowdhury's 'Sentinel' (gouache, gravel, adhesive on board; 20 x 12.2 inches) standing guard and K.C.S. Paniker's Untitled oil-on-canvas (1976; 63.5 x 52 inches) depicting an Indian child holding a doll in one hand and the string for a toy in the other.

Madras Modern: Regionalism and Identity is on at DAG Delhi till July 6.

Government College of Fine Arts started out as the Madras School of Art in 1851 and was renamed Government School of Industrial Arts in 1852, Government School of Art and Crafts in 1962 and finally Government College of Fine Arts. Throughout this article, it is referred to as the Government College of Fine Arts to avoid confusion.