Madras: Between Tradition & Modernity (Art from the 19th and 20th centuries)

What is the role of art in understanding the past, and why is the written record alone not enough? We are surrounded by art, and we are surrounded by history. For a long time, though, the past was told largely through written records, and in Madras, those of colonial administrators. Art asks a different question: not only what was written down, but what people chose to make, to be seen in, and to keep. It fills many silences in the record, though artworks can be read in more than one way.

Most people in Madras appear in the written record only briefly, and rarely in their own words. Their worship, work and leisure survive instead in photographs, portraits, paintings, and painted figures.

Photographs of dancers hold a gesture, a moment of a performer's art. They are not simple records. Someone chose where to stand, when to release the shutter, and what to leave out, while the dancer's discipline gave the image its form.

Portraits tell a related story. Around Fort St George, Chepauk, and Santhome, European residents and travelling artists lived alongside Indian communities. The portrait of Helena Oakeley and the work of George Chinnery show how European families pictured life in India. Indian artists painted Indian sitters from their own training and conventions, not seen from outside. Together they show one city pictured in more than one way, and how much depended on who held the brush.

Some of the finest art was made for the shrine and the home. To a foreigner golu doll may be just a painted figure; to a family, golu doll handed down from their grandmother, standing on the same step every Navaratri. That personal history is rarely found in colonial records, yet it is evidence all the same. 

Art history has long favoured painting over craft, the gallery over the home, the signed work over the anonymous. This exhibition sets that aside: each work is evidence, though the memories people attach to it help us read what it cannot say alone.

Look around you. The art in your own home is history too. The Ashvita's Foundation invites you to bring yours forward, so together we can read Madras through the art its people have made and kept.