Finding Fonseca: An Unknown Genius Emerges By Vivek Menezes vmin...@gmail.com
Histories of [Modernism] have been written, until very recently, by scholars with little or no knowledge of culture provinces other than their own, resulting in a situation where the dots of apparently discrete geographical regions are not adequately connected by lines of influence. --Rupert Richard Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) p1 Acclaimed by the novelist and scholar Amitav Ghosh as "that rare thing, an art historian who is equally well informed about the traditions of West and East", Rupert Arrowsmith was talking specifically about the "distorted view of modernism as essentially a European invention" when he wrote his landmark first book, from which the epigraph to this essay is taken. He could just as easily have been talking about the dominant scholarship on Indian art, where the 'Bengal Renaissance' has been perversely, unconscionably enshrined as the Indian modernist surge of record, despite copious evidence of similar, competing, often parallel animations in different states and regions of the country all through the 18th and 19th century: Travancore, Baroda, French India. But easily the most conspicuous case shunned by heedlessly nationalistic canon-makers is that of Goa and the Portuguese Estado da India, where the westernization of India was first initiated in 1510. Most Indians -- even scholars of repute -- don't seem to realize that Goa was among the first pockets of Western civilization and culture established in the non-Western world. The 16th century in Goa was a super-charged period of change and disruption -- the capital city almost immediately became the richest in the world, larger than contemporary Paris and London combined. The two largest churches in Asia were completed in those years, as well as the largest convent in the continent (they are all still the largest). Technology, ideas, food and people from across the Americas, Asia, Africa and Europe flooded unstoppably into the subcontinent. Though the Iberian heyday dwindled nearly as quickly as it had erupted, in the words of the great polymathic scholar Jose Pereira, "the Westernization of India... was completed, with more resources and greater prudence, in the 18th century, by the British in Bengal in the east. Westernization in Goa remained confined to its tiny territory; Westernization in Bengal spilled over its periphery and spread over much of South Asia." [Jose Pereira, Angelo da Fonseca (1902-1967): His Place in India's Modern Art, unpublished essay, 2011] Still, due to a set of unusual deals, and vagaries of fate, the Western project in Goa continued long after the Portuguese lost all ability to project significant power in Asia. One main compromise was made with native elites -- converts to Catholicism, as well as Hindus and Muslims -- who became the first Indians (indeed the first non-Westerners anywhere) to adopt European-style political institutions (like the parliamentary republic), Western scientific practice (occidental medicine spread across Asia from Goa), as well as cultural expression in Western genres (the first Indian novels were written in Goa, not Bengal). While the now-syncretic culture of Goa remained intact, the 19th century saw the rise of a mightier force just a few hundred kilometers north. This was Bombay, itself once a Portuguese territory, now rapidly advancing as urbs prima in Indis under British dominance. Eager to seize opportunity and seek adventure, Goans migrated to this new centre of Westernization in droves. They sought advancement in the new colonial educational institutions in disproportionate numbers. Of the eight natives first accepted to Grant Medical College, four were Goans (including Bhau Daji Lad). And by 1870, the director of the JJ School of Art was already boasting about the uncanny facility of his 'Goanese' (sic) students. Many of the stories of the Goans who studied and worked in the Bombay art world are relatively well known. These figures include the first Indian faculty member of the JJ School, Antonio Trindade, the Berlin-trained master portraitist Antonio da Cruz, and the seminal members of the Progressive Artists Movement, Francis Newton Souza and Vasudeo Gaitonde. But there was another, still nearly anonymous genius whose work additionally tantalizingly connects and bridges the modernist movements on India's east and west coasts. Simply unbelievably, a man who toiled in near-obscurity throughout the 20th century is only now steadily finding his place as one of India's greatest and most crucial artists. This is the remarkable trajectory of Angelo da Fonseca. * To be sure, da Fonseca was never actually unknown to me. His wife, Ivy da Fonseca, was my beloved kindergarten teacher in Poona. I learned to read and write under her warm and generous tutelage. I also knew that her husband, who died a year before I was born in 1968, had been an artist who was known for painting sari-clad Madonnas. Two sombre examples were mounted high on the walls of my grandfather, W.X. Mascarenhas's apartment in Colaba. My other grandfather, Armando Menezes, also had a watercolour by Fonseca on his wall in Dharwar. But the fact is I never paid attention to any of these. They were just subtly Indianized versions of the holy pictures that were unremarkably ubiquitous in Catholic India -- no big deal to a child growing up after post-Vatican II reformation in the 1970s. It was only later that I learned these paintings were specifically chosen because they were relatively uncontroversial images, depicted by a man who had become very controversial indeed within the Indian Church. My grandparents had sympathized and supported da Fonseca at various times, but when it came to buying his art they were very cautious, as were all the other Goans in whose houses I occasionally saw his paintings. Unlike -- for instance -- Francis Newton Souza, whose ambitious seamstress mother supported him throughout his early years of artistic struggle (rich with incident, including being expelled from school and courting arrest for obscenity for his very first show), Angelo da Fonseca's difficulties as an artist started with his own family, then extended to his entire community, including the Church authorities of his day, as well as the art world of India. He was to remain paradoxically too Hindu for the Catholics, too Catholic for the Hindus, too Indian for the West and too Western for the Indians. The Fonsecas come from Santo Estevao, a still-gorgeous island in the river Mandovi that was one of the earliest Portuguese conquests. His father was one of the richest men in the Estado da India, very close to the colonial leadership, and a major landowner. A story often recounted by Ivy da Fonseca tells of the artist's parents losing several children during childbirth. Then, one of their Hindu tenants (mundkars) advised them to pay tribute to Shantadurga, the uniquely Goan goddess revered by petitioners of all religious backgrounds even today. The da Fonsecas were immediately blessed with seven children, each of whom survived. The youngest was Angelo. The artist apparently used this story to explain his lifelong defiance of orthodoxy, and of other people's expectations. All Goan families of means in the 19th and early 20th century sent their children outside the territory to study. Angelo was first dispatched to boarding schools in Belgaum and Poona, then to Grant Medical College in Bombay, where he was quickly identified as a prodigy in anatomical drawing. But then, he decided he'd like to study art instead, and here is where the problems started. Instead of following his brother, who excelled at the JJ School in Bombay, the young Goan decided on another path altogether. He later wrote, "I wanted to become a shishya of the best Indian artists in the twenties of this century. Accordingly, I went to Santiniketan." Angelo da Fonseca Indo-Christian art in Painting and Statuary, a Historical Retrospect (Indica, The Indian Historical Research Institute Silver Jubilee Commemoration Volume, Bombay, St. Xavier’s College, 1953, pp. 138-153.) In Bengal, the young Goan immediately became a favourite of Nandalal Bose and the Tagores. In his archive (now housed in Goa's Xavier Centre of Historical Research) are works by Bose, Gaganendranath Tagore and Abanindranath Tagore inscribed to da Fonseca, and two amazing portraits of Rabindranath Tagore similarly signed in Bengali and English. Especially intriguing is a fine 1930 mixed-media portrait of Abanindranath by da Fonseca, on which the Santiniketan legend has written: "You have now mastered the password in art, Open Sesame. Go forth and seek your treasure!" Few students of the time could have been awarded more significant blessings; but in many ways, that was also the most public highlight of da Fonseca's career. Though he continued to paint -- increasingly masterfully and uniquely -- right until his death from meningitis in 1967, very few works were ever sold (except relatively simple paintings of the kind that hung on my grandparents' walls). Worse, the artist was very soon driven into a hermit-like exile that lasted his whole life. Controversies erupted immediately after his return to Goa, where he furiously began painting indigenist religious scenes in the pan-Indian revivalist style he'd absorbed so closely in Bengal. His Madonnas wore saris, his infant Jesus looked like baby Krishna, his angels were indistinguishable from apsaras, and familiar icons were rendered like Mughal miniatures. This baffled and infuriated the Church authorities, whose aesthetics had by now descended to what Jose Pereira has identified as "Saint-Sulpice art", named after the Parisian church, where "the most characteristic features... were mass-produced, plaster-cast and terracotta statues, with saccharine and mindless expressions, probably intended to represent religious ecstasy." [Jose Pereira, Angelo da Fonseca (1902-1967): His Place in India’s Modern Art unpublished essay, 2011] Under pressure from the priests, da Fonseca's family asked him to leave. >From Goa, the artist eventually found his way to Poona, and a permanent home at the Christa Prema Seva Sangha, an austere Anglican ashram for Indophile foreigners, including C. F. Andrews and Verrier Elwin. Gandhi stayed there on trips to Poona and Veer Savarkar was a frequent visitor (he traded a snuff-box for one of Angelo's paintings). Even after his marriage to Ivy, a much younger teacher, in 1951, da Fonseca remained custodian of the ashram, bicycling there daily to tend the garden, and paint in a monastic cell next to another used as a studio by his constant companion, the Goan poet and writer Bakibab Borkar. Though he painted in isolation and sold very little (which is to posterity's benefit because most of the oeuvre was saved by Ivy, and now exists intact in Goa), it is now possible to see that his ambition remained unfettered. There is a suite of hundreds of wash paintings intended to take on Michelangelo directly, to form a comprehensive Indian Christian iconography in the neo-Bengal style. There is another collection of more intimate experiments: fluent sketches of fellow ashramites, superb oil paintings of Poona and his wife Ivy, some clearly in the vein of his favourite Amrita Sher-Gil. And there are many paintings of Goa, some made with colours mixed with red mud from home. Perhaps the most remarkable of these works is a huge, wall-sized mural painted in the St. Patrick's Cathedral, where he attended Mass every Sunday. It depicts the arrival of St. Francis Xavier -- popularly known as Goencho Saib -- and, characteristically, is radically different from any other known image of the 'Apostle of the East'. Every other depiction of Xavier in India shows him with a crucifix raised menacingly high, a faceless, dark-skinned native cowering at his feet. But Fonseca's Goan-red-mud mural shows the Basque Jesuit facing an expansive crowd of Indians, including children and many women, and men bearing staffs. Some view him quizzically and with interest, others are clearly ambivalent about the newcomer. There is no triumphalism evident. Indians and Xavier are looking at each other eye-to-eye. This was always the essence of da Fonseca's message, and the broader lesson of both his art and Goa's hard-won, singular culture and identity. It is that East can meet West without declaring winners and losers, Christianity can unequivocally be an Indian religion, a Goan Catholic can be an exemplar of the Bengal School without contradiction, and the first Indian novel can be written in Portuguese. The problem is that 20th century scholarship -- all over the world, but especially in India -- has strenuously resisted these evident truths, and instead has been dominated by shallow nationalistic reductionism. Rupert Arrowsmith describes "comparable movements in other parts of the globe characterized as imitative of 'advanced' art and literature in Europe, or -- paradoxically -- as reactionary and propagandist. The possibility of multi-directional, transnational exchange in aesthetic concepts, art-historical knowledge, and literary and artistic technique is thus discounted, played down, or at best acknowledged in tentative and misleading ways." Rupert Richard Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) p1 Again, he was talking about conventional attitudes within the European cultural establishment towards the 'non-West'. But his point is perhaps even truer when it comes to prevailing attitudes within the Indian art establishment towards what it heedlessly and ahistorically regards as the peripheral or marginal regions in the subcontinent. There are signs of change occurring finally, however, and the most outstanding deserving beneficiary is undoubtedly the Goan disciple of Abanindranath Tagore. There is now real hope that Angelo da Fonseca's time might have finally come. *