Take enough time to properly scan the lean, intense faces of the very young men staring hungrily out of this iconic 1949 photograph from the old Bombay Art Society art gallery on Rampart Row in Kala Ghoda. From left to right they’re a very motley crew even by contemporary Mumbai standards: the Sulaymani Bohra former signboard painter MF Husain, their rebellious Goan Catholic ringleader Francis Newton Souza, who had been booted from Sir JJ School of Art, and Sadanand Bakre, also Konkani (from a Brahmin family) who had recently starred at the same college. There is the Dalit savant Krishnaji Howlaji Ara, son of a chauffeur who had himself worked as a houseboy before his talents were discovered, and Sayed Haidar Raza, who was raised in a Shia family in the forests of Madhya Pradesh, and studied in Nagpur along with Hari Ambadas Gade, another Brahmin who also came to the city from Central India.
Imagine the reaction even today, to an assemblage of outsiders exactly like this, who might dare to crown themselves the present and future of Indian art, while copiously disparaging the reigning cognoscenti, as well as esteemed forbears such as the Bengal School. This self-named Progressive Artists Group especially hated the scene in their home city, where Souza said “the JJ School of Art turned out an awful number of bad artists year after year and the Bombay Art Society showed awful crap in its Annual Exhibitions which comprised the amateur efforts of some memsahibs pampered by British imperialism”. He instigated this eccentric cohort precisely because “it is easier for a mob to carry out a lynching; and in this case, we found it necessary to lynch the kind of art inculcated by the JJ School of Art and exhibited in the Bombay Art Society.” Many years later, Husain would tell Yashodhara Dalmia—her 2001 *The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives* is still the best book on the subject—that “some of the professors at the JJ School used to tell the students ‘Don’t mix with these fellows. They are destroying Indian art.” Nonetheless, even as Souza and Raza emigrated (ironically, it is the genuinely *deshbhakt* Husain who never wanted to leave India, before being cruelly hounded into exile in 2006) another set of questing artists continued to meet in their wake in 1950s Bombay: Vasudeo Gaitonde, Tyeb Mehta, Krishen Khanna, Ram Kumar, Akbar Padamsee, and several others. Dalmia describes these as “banquet years” enriched by important critics and patrons like Raj and Romesh Thapar, Mulk Raj Anand (who started *Marg* in 1949), the path-breaking theatre director and frequent collector Ebrahim Alkazi, nuclear scientist Homi Bhabha—whose TIFR bought several masterpieces—and the hugely significant European Jewish refugees and cultural catalysts Rudolf von Leyden, Walter Langhammer and Emmanuel Schlesinger. Looking back from our 2025 vantage, we can see that seminal, wildly cosmopolitan artistic-intellectual moment dissipated in just two decades, and it is a matter of record that almost all of those involved (again Husain is an exception) would wind up struggling to make a living from art. Indian *bien pensants* of the second half of the 20th century found them far too heterodox, and right until the first international auctions brought in NRI eyes and money in the cusp of the new millennium, desi hierarchies of taste preferred to look away from Bombay altogether. Just how quickly all that turned around is vividly apparent in the listings for the Christie’s auction of Modern + Contemporary South Asian art in New York next month. The last one, held in March earlier this year, smashed up the marketplace paradigms, when Husain’s untitled 1954 painting sold (reportedly to Kiran Nadar) for 13.7 million dollars. This time around, all six highlights listed by name in the auction house’s own overview are from the Progressives, with pre-sale estimates of between two and three million dollars for an untitled 1984 abstract painting by Gaitonde, and up to two million for Tyeb Mehta’s 1994 *Trussed Bull*. Make no mistake, these big numbers have never been matched by adequate respect or scholarship—or even proper recognition in their home city—but this is history speaking in hard currency. Posthumously, improbably, these determined Bombay boys made it in the end.
