Women in Hemen Mazumdar’s Imagination
“There is a perfect balance between the divine and earthly dimension in Hemen Mazumdar’s works, which emerges from a very personal poetic vision that creates a new and singular aesthetic”. C. Corni
This artwork by Hemen Mazumdar (1894–1948), titled Smriti (Secret Memory) was awarded the Gold Medal in 1921 by the Bombay Art Society in their annual exhibition. Portraits of Indian women soaked in their attire are trademark images of the artist Hemen Mazumdar and hold a particular sentimental value to his admirers. His depictions of Indian themes in a traditionally Western style of painting — similar to William Turner and Jan Vermeer — shows the artist’s skillful interpretation of classicism while paying homage to his own culture, almost romantically so. The women he so expertly renders wait for their lovers to arrive, dramatically drenched in their colorful: in this case, innocent white saris. This particular work expresses the longing desire of the figure as she clenches the sari to her breast, bowing her head almost prayer-like in meditation of her lover’s return.
Mazumdar created a genre of painting Bengali beauties that captured the imagination of the contemporary Bengali public because of the novelty of their intimacy and their immediacy. They were not impersonal figures learned from art schools but palpable, breathing, real women. The history of the female figure in Indian art is long and complex, with the erotic quotient ranging from semi- draped apsaras (celestial maidens), yakshis (folk deities) and goddesses in Indian temple sculptures to frank scenes of copulation and other sexual activities. These frank scenes were in keeping with the general spirit of the ancient period as also reflected in the great fifth- century author Kalidasa’s Sanskrit poems and plays. A different outlook emerged after the end of the Hindu and Buddhist periods. Under the impact of Muslim cultures, ‘respectable’ women no longer appeared unveiled in public. Peasant women had no such constraints, nor did respectable Nair women of Kerala who did not hesitate to go bare-breasted as late as the twentieth century. Equally, in the era of the Turkish-Afghan Sultanates down to the Mughal Empire, the nude was less prevalent in miniature painting, except in the case of miniatures from Rajasthan and Pahari (Hill) states of the Punjab: you are offered a glimpse of beautiful slender aristocratic nāyikas taking their bath or being dressed aided by female attendants, with their coy breasts slightly exposed. Things changed dramatically during the British Raj. In the nineteenth century, Christian missionaries campaigned against what they considered the immoral aspects of Hinduism, the sexual depravity of gods such as Krishna and the phallic worship of the Shiva linga. Under the impact of Victorian evangelism, western- educated Indians developed a more puritanical attitude towards dress and comportment, as blouse and petticoat became de rigueur for women’s attire. A new ambivalence sprang up with regard to the representation of the body in art. The English disapproved of Hindu erotic temple sculptures, and yet worshipped the nude in Victorian academic art, which stood for moral purity and artistic summit. The rulers imposed a new concept of modesty, as to how much body could be exposed without outraging decency. And yet, in no culture was artistic nudity more ubiquitous than the Victorian. The most famous academic painter of India, Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906) created a new concept of feminine beauty but seldom ventured into the realm of the artistic nude. The Bengal School of painting led by Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951) rejected figure drawing as part of colonial academic tradition, though there were occasionally tantalising glimpses of the bare female torso in Oriental art created by him and his disciples. The subject of a rustic maiden returning home in a wet sari after her daily ablutions gave the artist scope to represent the model’s fleshy figure visible through her wet cloth. For all its clever suggestion of an arrested movement, the work was carefully realised in the studio. The poetic spectacle of a fair maiden with her sari, wet and dripping, wound round her in picturesque folds and the transparent wet cloth discovering here and there the suggestive flesh-tints of her well- proportioned figure, caught in the imagination of the artist during one of his holiday sojourns in his native village in East Bengal. He began his study the same day, we are told, though it took him several months’ labour with his models at his Calcutta studio before he could perfect his technique.
In socially conservative Bengal in the 1920s, it is hard to gauge people’s true feelings about Mazumdar. Widely diffused in Bengali journals, his readership could not but have taken a guilty pleasure in beholding his paintings. Classical nudes, occurring on the same pages since the early 20th century, did not hold the same shocked fascination because of their cultural distance. Then there were the Bengal School’s mannered, voluptuous two-dimensional semi nudes. The disturbing power of Mazumdar’s women to lay in their palpability and immediacy: his subject an everyday village scene of a young woman returning home after her daily bath. For the puritanical urban middle class, the convincing image of a respectable housewife this portrayed furnished simultaneously discomfort and frisson. A contemporary critic put it well: at a time when women were behind purdah, it was daring to represent someone from a respectable middle-class, someone unapproachable in real life. Thus the beholder experienced the illicit thrill of spying on a ‘respectable’ housewife, the proverbial girl next door. The artist’s tantalising silence about the identity of the model heightened the mystery surrounding her. It is this ambiguity that made such a powerful appeal to the Bengali middle class.
Excerpt taken from: Hemendranath and the Vexed Question of the Wet Sari Effect by Partha Mitter from CORNI, C. and KUMAR, N., 2019. Hemen Mazumdar: The last romantic.
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