Born in 1933 in Calcutta, Amal Ghosh studied painting at the Government College of Art and Craft there, before moving to London in 1958 to undertake postgraduate studies at Central School of Art and Design. Curiously, but not untypically at the time, his art education in India was almost entirely Eurocentric; “Calcutta Art College was modelled in philosophy and practice on the Slade School of Fine Art In London,” Ghosh later observed. It was only after leaving India to study at Central in London that he had the time and encouragement of tutors to think about Indian visual culture and art history.
There is a productive paradox here from which to begin to approach Ghosh’s work. He had to leave India to encounter its visual history. The result is a body of work where ambiguity and the interweaving of Western Modernism and Indian art history is subtle and profound. His paintings of watchful figures caught somehow between the present and the past anticipate something the theorist Homi Bhabha would articulate some three decades later in his writing on migration and cultural translation. For Bhabha the distinction between “past and present” or “archaic and modern” were inadequate to describe the new cultural forms produced through migration. Ghosh’s paintings occupy precisely this more radically unstable terrain.
Whilst the teaching of art and art history in postcolonial India had been re-shaped by the experience of colonialism under the British, it is necessary to note that Modernist Art as an entire enterprise had already been previously profoundly altered through the encounter with non-Western cultures; a phenomenon later termed Primitivism. In London, Ghosh drew both on the teaching culture at Central with its strong Bauhaus inheritance, but also crucially engaged with Ajanta cave paintings in Maharashtra, India, that date from the 2nd century BCE. These remarkable works depict illusionistic episodes of the Buddha’s life, but arguably they place greater emphasis on the inner emotional hinterlands of its subjects rather than the actions they are performing. Ghosh would describe the resulting paintings as “a fusion of collective and individual consciousness which encompass a coming together of European experiences and influences with my fundamental feelings, life and experience of India.”
By the late 1970s and early 1980s Ghosh was in touch with other diasporic Indian artists in the UK, such as Balraj Khanna and Ibrahim Wagh and together they, along with other artists and writers, formed the Indian Arts Council incorporating what had been known as the Indian Artists United Kingdom network. The Council acquired funding for a gallery and opened The Horizon Gallery in London in early 1987 as a space to primarily show artists with a South Asian background. The gallery ran until 1991, and whilst overlooked by art historians since then, it was an important space in exhibiting artists with a South Asian cultural heritage whose work was less congruent with the more politicised output of what was termed ‘Black Art’ through the 1980s.
Ghosh’s paintings from the 1980s and 1990s show a consistent intertwining of the languages of Western Modernism with Indian art history and visual culture. Human figures are depicted in shallow pictorial space sometimes contorted, but almost always facing the viewer as if quietly observing them. They are seen often in the company of animals or mythological figures recalling Indian cave and temple art. Titles are deliberately allusive; a number are titled ‘Allegory’. The art historian Tania Guha, writing about the group show ‘Transition of Riches’ (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, 1993) described the paintings as “unspoken, emotionally charged dramas that resonate with the promise of narrative, but remain hermetically sealed.” She went on to note a crucial point: “In light of the debate centred on Picasso’s appropriation of African masks, Ghosh’s re-appropriation of African iconography via Western art raises interesting questions about the use and mis-use of iconography borrowed from ‘other’ cultures” (Third Text, Volume 7, Issue 25, 1993)
It was a question that was not adequately answered at the time. Horizon Gallery closed down in 1991 after its funding dried up, as did much of the exhibiting opportunities for the artists who had shown there. On a wider level, few could get to grips with the questions Guha alluded to. William Rubin’s exhibition ‘”Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” at MoMA, New York in 1984 kickstarted debates about the influence of non-western artefacts and objects on the development of Modernist art and the role colonial history played in that; the writer Hal Foster memorably suggested Modernism might better be understood as “an artistic coup founded on military conquest”.
The debate was largely played out in academic journals and large-scale exhibitions; Jean Hubert-Martin’s ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989 was a riposte to Rubin but suffered in turn from critiques of its exoticising the non-western artists in the show, who seemed to have been chosen in order to perform otherness. And of course, the debate was largely played out by white male critics, curators and museum directors loudly stating their positions. This would change as the debate shifted towards articulations on a new concept; globalisation, and that shift would be seen in exhibitions such as documenta xi(2002). That shift though left the debate about the circularity within postcoloniality untouched; what was at stake for Indian-born artists such as Ghosh who haunted the language of Modernism but from its other side?
In retrospect a more nuanced treatment of this debate would have been to consider the work of artists like Ghosh. As Guha noted, these were paintings with an inner circularity; referencing artists such as Picasso and Matisse whose breakthroughs were indebted to non-western masks, artefacts and art, whilst also rooted in a long history of Indian art history, but one that somewhat paradoxically Ghosh only began to explore once he had left Calcutta for London.
Perhaps it was this circularity that made the paintings so peculiarly indecipherable to audiences at the end of the last century; the idea of ‘synthesis’ that characterises thinking at that point about painters whose cultural origins were outside the West is not adequate to describe Ghosh’s works. Bhabha’s suggestion that through cultural translation ‘return’ becomes ‘reinscription or redescription’ offers a more useful model. Ghosh does not simply return to Ajanta; he encounters it from elsewhere, after Calcutta, after migration and through a Modernism whose own history was already entangled with the non-Western cultures from which it had borrowed. Behind the stillness of the scenes that Ghosh depicts is a subtle, radical instability; between past and present, between subject and source, between Modernism and Ajanta. Ghosh’s frontal, hieratic figures, sometimes hovering or disembodied with their strange watchfulness somehow belong simultaneously to the surface of his paintings and to a different pictorial order.
Ghosh passed away in 2022, and like many from his generation who showed at Horizon Gallery, his works were somewhat overlooked in the last decades of his life despite some museum acquisitions. It is however arguable that it is only relatively recently that we can start to approach Ghosh’s remarkable and idiosyncratic oeuvre. One thing has become clear in recent years; the idea that cultures might exist as discrete entities between which artists move home, borrow from or to use a more nuanced theoretical term, translate between, now seems clunky. The strange figures who inhabit Ghosh’s paintings do not seem particularly interested in resolving where they might belong; after all Ghosh had to travel from Calcutta to London to find his way to Ajanta. Instead perhaps they are witnesses to the peculiarities of the journeys and migrations that have characterised the world since the middle of the last century; and to the unevenness inherent in those journeys. They are witnesses to cultural histories that circulate but which can never quite return to the place they set out from.
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