Wembley became a battleground for the rival schools of Bengal and Bombay. Havell penned a scathing attack in Indian Art and Letters on the
‘schoolboyish’ work of the Bombay students. They, he complained in Rupam, filled nearly half the gallery, the remaining space being divided between Bengal and the Punjab. However,
in spite of the unsympathetic atmosphere in which they are placed, a few of the exhibits of the Bengali artists stand out from the rest and dominate the whole Gallery as the work of artists who have some-thing to tell which is worth telling, who are sure of themselves and of their art – artists who have ‘arrived’.70
Solomon visited London in 1924 ostensibly to attend the empire spectacle but also to win over the India Society, the redoubt of orientalism which had a ‘casting vote’ in the decision on the New Delhi murals. On 23 194
October he addressed the Society, countering Lord Ronaldshay who had recently reminded the Society of the importance of the Bengal School.
Solomon concentrated on two of Bombay’s claims: they were the first to discover Ajanta and they had a systematic training in sculpture, both of which qualified them for their ‘alternative’ mural project. In addition, Solomon’s Royal Academy experience of figure study reinforced the exist-ing Indian talent for decorative murals, correctexist-ing the tendency to ‘over-spiritualize’. Offering economic reasons for the present artistic stagnation in Bombay, he demanded that Bombay be made the ‘spokesman for Indian artists’, in India’s artistic revival.71
A conference on future government art policy centring on state patronage, organized by the India Society, was held at Wembley on Monday, 2 June 1924. Recently ennobled Lord Lloyd and Solomon dom-inated the conference from the start, since the orientalists and their well-wishers had been unprepared for the onslaught planned by the duo. Only Rothenstein raised a lone voice of protest.72 Chairing the meeting, Sir Francis Younghusband addressed the need to pay attention to the artistic development of India in a tone of benign paternalism. As the chief speak-er, Lloyd began by re-affirming his faith ‘in the Indian artist and in the value on his mission to the world’, in a tacit acknowledgement of the ori-entalist contribution.73 Since the meeting was organized by the India Society, he felt he needed to make this diplomatic gesture towards the Bengal School. Art schools in India, Lloyd reminded his audience, occu-pied ‘a very unique position, because in that country there exist no salons, or academies, or rather Art Control apart from these institutions’. Lloyd was simply reaffirming the propaganda value of art institutions for the colonial government, a cornerstone of imperial art policy since the 1850s.
Despite recent eclecticism, he admitted, the Bengal School had retained its oriental (though not always Indian) flavour, as well as its immediately recognizable conventions. Lloyd then proceeded to expatiate on Bombay’s unique position by invoking Mhatre’s famous work. Except for Calcutta, no other art school practised the fine arts. Not only was the city close to Ajanta but it enjoyed active public patronage, and had a fund of unex-pended energy which could be usefully applied to awaken ‘Indian artistic sense’. He readily accepted that Bombay had lost its artistic purpose for a while and took the credit for encouraging ‘Solomon to start murals with stipends and strong life study’ because the murals would compensate for the lack of public art galleries. Lloyd’s talk received the endorsement of the Indian commissioner on the Wembley committee, who was also keen to see Bengal’s monopoly ended.74
Following Lloyd’s ‘temperate’ yet persuasive presentation of Bombay’s case, Solomon introduced his favourite refrain, the success of naturalism at the school: ‘some of the drawings and paintings of the undraped figure compare favourably with some of the best art schools in the West, consid-ering it has been such a short time’.75Was he causing the ‘de-orientation’
of the student body? Solomon reassured his audience: ‘No – there is no fear of that. They are being taught to copy not Europe but nature, and Nature cannot be a faulty teacher.’76It is worth pondering that until the 1950s, nature was considered by art critics to be a neutral domain that needed to be reproduced faithfully in art, a notion of the unbiased ‘inno-cent’ eye that has been seriously questioned in the post-war years.77
The high point of the session was the passing of the Prix de Delhi res-olution proposed by Lloyd and seconded by Solomon, an idea that had originated with Lloyd’s friend Lutyens, as we have seen. The prize was conceived along the lines of the French Prix de Rome, the successful can-didates spending three to four years at a central postgraduate institution, a kind of tropical Villa Medici. These trained students could then be utilized for decorating the public buildings of the new capital. A second resolution was passed aiming to prevent Indian art from being confined to one school, which implied Bengal though it was not mentioned by name. O. C.
Gangoly described the Prix de Delhi resolution in Rupam as grossly inad-equate, demanding a complete revamping of art education (perhaps wish-ing to see a more thoroughgowish-ing orientalism in art schools). Dismisswish-ing Solomon’s claim that Bombay enjoyed an enlightened public patronage, Gangoly repeated his idée fixe of inviting the government to assume the role of an enlightened patron ‘in the absence of a cultured public in India’.78
At Wembley, Solomon had the satisfaction of ensuring the success of his proposals. Let us now retrace our steps to the events that led to the Prix de Delhi. In 1916, Lutyens, we may recall, had presented a memorandum on the decoration of his buildings by Indian artists to the New Delhi Committee, accompanied by a note on craftsmanship by Baker. When Solomon took up his position in India in 1918, the debates surrounding New Delhi were quite intense given the advanced state of its construction.
Lutyens had already visited art schools in India to examine their fitness to embellish his buildings. In 1921, Solomon approached Lutyens to consider the students of the Bombay art school for the Delhi murals. Dhurandhar took the students to Delhi, where they were invited to lunch by the great man. The students were then asked to draw from a piece of Hindu sculp-ture, kept in an octagonal cabinet in his bungalow. Lutyens’s purpose was to test their competence to carry out the decoration of his buildings.79
Meanwhile Lutyens was having second thoughts about the Indian contribution. On 30 March 1922, he presented a Joint Memorandum with Baker to the New Delhi Committee, elaborating the idea of the Prix de Delhi. It was this that Lloyd had unveiled at Wembley. Significantly, Baker had added a dissenting note in the Memorandum that it did not embody his view of what was essential and of immediate significance. Not only was Baker keen on the Gesamtkunstwerk principles popular in Britain at the time, but he regarded Indian participation in decoration as vital to his buildings. The 1922 Memorandum thus amounted to a com-196
promise solution in response to the wishes of the New Delhi Committee.
Subsequently, in deference to Lutyens, plans for the mural decoration of the Viceroy’s Residence, which was to be Lutyens’s main architectural endeavour, were dropped. Only the Viceroy’s Council Room would dis-play a map in oils showing the full extent of the empire.80 Why did Lutyens change his mind? This had partly to do with his own aesthetic preference even in his English domestic buildings since he discouraged any contribution of painters and sculptors except under the strictest supervision. He had also accepted the New Delhi commission on condi-tion that his architecture followed a severe Neo-classical style.81
More intriguingly, Lutyens began to display a growing anxiety about the Indian artists’ ability to decorate his buildings. Indeed, his own out-look was one of the reasons for Baker’s eventual rift with him. During their travels through India, Lutyens and Baker paid a visit to the Tagores, the ‘ideal community of culture’. This left a more noticeable mark on Baker, who quotes Rabindranath’s poems movingly in his memoirs. India hardly touched, let alone moved, Sir Edwin perching on his lofty heights.
The architect’s unhappy conjugal life, exacerbated by Emily’s infatuation with the adolescent Indian ‘messiah’ Krishnamurti, may have had some-thing to do with his insensitivity. Lutyens’s feelings are captured in a let-ter, probably not meant to be sent, mocking what he saw as the preten-sions of an Indian artist (perhaps Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin) who wished to be employed in New Delhi:
My Dear Michael, (May I drop the Angelo?) I thank you so much for your letter. The only remark I can make is what a pity it is you cannot design, draw, or observe.82
Indeed, the only Indian artist he ever showed warmth towards was the academic painter Atul Bose, who was invited to sketch his likeness. Baker was ultimately responsible for the decorative experiments in seven rooms of the Imperial Secretariat, representing Indian history and mythology.
From his school days Baker had been open ‘to the influences of foreign ideas and methods’.83 As he confides in his memoirs, ‘content in art, national and human sentiment, and their expression in architecture, seem to me to be of the greatest importance’.84 To bring out the peculiarly
‘Indian’ character of the Raj, he delved into Mughal history and Hindu epics with enthusiasm. A firm believer in craftsmanship and the ‘mar-riage of the arts’, in 1912 he had stated what was to be the architect’s credo in New Delhi, ‘he [the architect] must so fire the imagination of the painters, sculptors, and craftsmen of the Empire, that they may, interfus-ing their arts with his, together raise a permanent record of the history, learning, and romance of India’.85
To return to Bombay, Solomon was fully aware of the economic ben-efits of the New Delhi murals for his students. On 27 February 1923
Lloyd in his speech to the school fully supported Solomon’s economic argument:
But the greatest opportunity of all is the one which your Principal has mentioned at length in his report. And let me assure you at once that I have supported and shall continue to support as strongly as possible your desire to be admitted to a part in the decoration of New Delhi.86
By further suggesting at the Wembley conference in 1924 that those responsible for planning the capital would not wish to thwart the revival of Indian art, he implied that support for Bombay was tantamount to guaranteeing Indian artistic revival. He also informed the conference that Sir Phiroze Sethna, a member of the Indian Council of State from the Bombay Presidency, had already pledged his support at a Council meet-ing in 1922.87
Following Wembley, the India Society held discussions on the Delhi murals and the Prix de Delhi resolution, the topics that were also debat-ed in the Council of State for India. Speaking at the India Society, Lord Birkenhead, Secretary of State for India, lent his support to the Wembley resolutions, but felt the need to limit the damage caused to the oriental-ists. After stressing the non-political nature of the Society, he reminded his audience of the contribution the Tagores had made to Indian cul-ture.88 The lecture was widely reported in the Indian press, prompting the Bombay Chronicle to read a sinister motive in Birkenhead’s talk. On 13 December 1924 it accused the government of arrogance in refusing to lis-ten to Indian opinion (read Bombay opinion) on the mural issue. If its intentions were truly serious, the paper declared, it would heed the sug-gestions made by Lord Lloyd at Wembley.89Solomon, who had taken the Bombay public into his confidence before his departure for the Empire Festival, drummed up support for the Wembley resolutions on his return.
He addressed the nationalist Art Society of India and the Bombay Architectural Association in order to publicize the Wembley resolutions.
Announcing his Wembley success, he declared that the art school’s unfair neglect had at last been rectified by the publicity received at the Empire Exhibition. He painted an optimistic picture of the vast undecorated wall spaces in India waiting to be filled with nationalist murals.90
On Wednesday, 28 January 1925, the Council of State for India con-sidered the resolution of Haroon Jaffer, the honourable member from the Bombay Presidency, to appoint a committee in order to implement Lloyd’s Wembley proposals. These, Jaffer claimed, would promote art throughout the empire, which would also have commercial implications.
India was undergoing an artistic renaissance, even though a national art was yet to emerge, and the Raj should provide cultural stability by cen-tralizing artistic enterprises. The call for a central authority to oversee 198