Tribute: Indian art history BN Goswamy was witty, and an authority on Pahari paintings

BN Goswamy at the Jaipur Literature Fest (Photo via X / @DalrympleWill)

One of India’s greatest art historians and critics, BN Goswamy, passed away on Friday morning in Chandigarh. Author of over 25 books on art, history and culture, Goswamy, 90, was considered the world’s foremost scholar of Indian miniature paintings. His notable works include Nainsukh of Guler: A Great Indian Painter from a Small Hill-State (1999), Essence of Indian Art (1986), The Spirit of Indian Painting: Close Encounters with 100 Great Works 1100-1900 (2014) and most recently, The Indian Cat: Stories, Paintings, Poetry, and Proverbs (2023).

The most important strand of his work involves the Pahari paintings of the early-17th to mid-19th centuries. These are largely miniature paintings from the lower Himalayan hill kingdoms and the plains of Punjab, covering kingdoms like Nurpur, Kangra, Guler and so on. In his 1968 essay, "Pahar Painting: The Family as the Basis of Style", Goswamy demonstrated how the Pahari artists differed from the Mughal court artists in one very important aspect—even though the Mughal court would sometimes have both father and son working for the same benefactor, the style would not be guided or decided by the family. However, in the case of Pahari art, as Goswamy demonstrated, one can clearly trace the elements of a ‘familial’ style among painters from various centres.

Tracing these artistic genealogies, Goswamy was also able to highlight mini-patterns and divergences. For example, let’s say you have a family or a clan of artists from Guler, led by one master artist (like Nainsukh). But as the clan grows, there are cousins and nephews and entire branches of the family tree that decide to try their luck elsewhere. Perhaps their own kingdom had an insufficient number of economic opportunities. Perhaps they heard that the king of a neighbouring kingdom was extremely generous when it came to rewarding artists. These economy-led migrations result in different familial styles interacting with each other, with the resulting changes seen in artworks across the next 5-6 decades, across generations.

Goswamy’s research becomes even more impressive when you consider that very little of medieval Pahari art survives in situ. Unlike, say, Rajasthani miniature paintings, there are no palaces or havelis today where Pahari art survives in its intended venue and is displayed in a manner befitting its stature. As Goswamy said in an interview with Ananya Vajpeyi once, Pahari art isn’t a “living tradition” in that sense and therefore presented a greater challenge for the scholar and the archivist.

Goswamy’s scholarship was every bit as thorough and enlightening about other Indian artistic traditions as well. In his 2006 book I See No Stranger: Early Sikh Art and Devotion, he outlined how core Sikh beliefs — accepting a singular, indivisible God, rejecting excessive rituals, superstition, inequality and societal oppression — are manifested in Sikh devotional art from the 16th through to the 19th century, whether it’s in paintings, textile work, or metal sculptures. That Goswamy was able to be so versatile and all-encompassing in his practice was down to his solid grasp of Indian philosophy, especially the concept of the rasa which he believed was crucial to a holistic understanding of this country and its cultural/artistic traditions.

In his book The Essence of Indian Art (1968), Goswamy wrote about rasa and what the term meant to him in great detail. Apart from the word’s primary and secondary meanings (the juice/sap of a plant, the essence or most important part of something), Goswamy said that for the philosopher, these two meanings led up to what he called the term’s “tertiary meaning”; which is to say a sense of heightened delight.

“In its final and subtlest sense, however (…) rasa comes to signify a state of heightened delight, in the sense of ananda, the kind of bliss that can be experienced only by the spirit. As later writers such as Vishwanatha, fourteenth century author of the Sahitya Darpana, a celebrated work on poetics, say: rasa is an experience akin to ultimate reality, 'twin brother to the tasting of Brahma'. In Vishwanatha, the very definition of poetry involves invoking the word rasa. His dictum is often quoted: 'Poetry is a sentence the soul of which is rasa.'”

Last month, Aleph had published his latest work, a whimsical and delightful book called The Indian Cat: Stories, Paintings, Poetry and Proverbs. A wide-ranging, multidisciplinary work that involved both art scholarship and literary criticism, this book traced instances of feline symbolism in Indian art, literature and culture-at-large. Goswamy wrote, “Great poets like Mir and Ghalib loved their cats to distraction; the poet Jibanananda Das saw himself in a cat that went here and there, following the Sun; Vikram Seth saw her as full of mischief and cleverness but no evil. In fact, on a daily basis, the feline is ‘addressed’ almost with affection.”

A regular at the Jaipur Literature Festival down the years, Goswamy had an unusually sweet and gentle voice, and an unhurried, dignified manner of public speaking. Those of us who had the good fortune of interacting with him at these gatherings remember his wit and wisdom, as well as his remarkable patience and generosity with his time. May he rest in peace.