Episode 1: Nandalal Bose

Transcript

<Clip of Prime Minister Modi’s Mann Ki Baat Program dated January 28, 2024>: 

“Bharat ka samvidhan itne gahan manthan ke baad bana hai ki use jeevant dastavez kaha jata hai. Isi samvidhan ki mool prati ke teesre adhyaya me Bharat ke nagarikon ke moolbhoot adhikaron ka varnan kiya gaya hai.”

Host: That was Prime Minister Narendra Modi, addressing the country in an episode of his monthly radio programme Mann Ki Baat in January 2024, soon after he inaugurated the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya.  

<Clip of Modi’s Mann Ki Baat continues>: 

“Aur yeh bahut dilchasp hai ki tesre adhyay ke prarambh me hamare samvidhan nirmataon ne Bhagvan Ram, Mata Sita aur Lakshmanji ke chitron ko sthan diya tha. Prabhu Ram ka shashan hamare samvidhan nirmataon ke liye bhi prerna ka shrodd tha.”

[English Translation : “The Constitution of India has come into being after such intense brainstorming that it is called a living document. In part three of the original copy of this very Constitution, the fundamental rights of the citizens of India have been described and it is note-worthy that at the beginning of part three, the makers of our Constitution had allotted due space to the pictures of Bhagwan Ram, Mata Sita and Lakshmanji. The rule of Prabhu Ram was also a source of inspiration for the makers of our Constitution…”] 

Host: There’s really no evidence that the Constitution makers were inspired by Ram Rajya, as he says. But this part is true: the page on the fundamental rights chapter does depict Ram, Sita and Lakshman returning to Ayodhya after exile. That’s not the only illustration. Here’s former minister and senior BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad talking about some of the others, in a recent lecture. 

<Clip of union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad> 

“The first is on citizenship and the first is Vedic life in India…. Then you have the Directive Principles of State Policy and the sketch is Lord Krishna updesh about Gita in Mahabharata. On finance, property contracts and suits is the image of Lord Nataraja…”

Host: There are also drawings of Akbar, Tipu Sultan, the Rani of Jhansi, Buddha and Mahavira in other chapters. The Constitution has deep symbolic value as a visual artefact. When we think of the Constitution today, we often think of BR Ambedkar in a blue suit and round glasses, holding the book in his hand. Or we imagine a thick tome with three Ashokan lions on it. We rarely think of the images inside that book. 

But there are, in fact, 22 such illustrations. This is the story of how they came to be in the Constitution. And of Nandalal Bose, the man who led the project of illustrating it. Bose was one of the pioneers of Indian modernism in art, and the chosen artist of both Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi. He lived and worked through a period of great national ferment, and his body of work is closely tied with the freedom struggle and independence. 

In this episode, we’ll try to understand what the nation’s founders hoped to achieve by juxtaposing complex legal articles with episodes from our history and epics. We’ll try to unpack the threads connecting art to nation-building. And we’ll examine how visual culture can reflect a nation’s aspirations. This is Friend of the Court season 3, a podcast that explores our legal and constitutional history. And I am your host Raghu Karnad. 

<INTRO MUSIC>

Host: Bengal at the start of the 20th century was a hotbed of cultural and political activity. Led by people like Rabindranath Tagore and the scientist Jagdish Chandra Bose, a new class of Bengali intelligentsia was pushing the boundaries of science, literature and art. Rabindranath’s nephew Abanindranath, a well-established painter, was fed up with how Indian artists were relying on western artistic idioms and techniques. He wanted to push modern art in a new direction, one that drew more on Indian traditions — and away from stiff oil paintings and realist depictions of human figures.

Until now, artists like Raja Ravi Varma had incorporated significant elements of western art into their practice. For instance, Varma depicted Hindu mythological characters or royal and upper-class figures in oil paintings, in the style of western portraiture.

Abanindranath wanted to draw on more local idioms such as folk traditions, Mughal and Rajput miniatures, as well as other non-western cultures. It was a pioneering new approach, and it blended eclectic influences and helped create what we know today as the Bengal School of Art.  

Siva Kumar: The inspiration for the Bengal School came from nature. Abanindranath was very interested in Mughal painting, I mean he was fascinated by that. 

Host: This is Siva Kumar. He is a retired teacher, curator and critic, and is considered the authority on Nandalal Bose, the man at the heart of this episode.

Siva Kumar: Well, I teach art history at Santiniketan. I have been teaching here for over 40 years. Now I’m just retired. So I have been teaching art history at Santiniketan. And I have been living here since 1974. So I’m a resident of this place. 

Host: Kumar is an expert on early Indian modernism, especially the Santiniketan artists. Speaking to us from the university town, in a simple white shirt, white beard and spectacles in a room surrounded by books, Kumar wears his erudition lightly. 

Siva Kumar: Now, theoretically, of course, they were saying they’re reviving Indian painting. But it included his experience of European watercolours, his exposure to Japanese painting. So basically the style of Abanindranath is a confluence of all these. European watercolour painting, Mughal miniatures and his exposure to Japanese painting. So all this comes together and it is this style that his students take and take it forward. 

Host: Nandalal Bose was one of those students who readily took to Abanindranath’s vision. Bose was born in 1882 in the Bengal Presidency. He was artistic from a young age, but his parents put him through a more traditional education. 

Siva Kumar: He was born into a Bengali family, but his father was working at the court of Darbhanga. So he spent a lot of his early life in what is now Bihar. I mean, there’s a place called Kharagpur and that is where he spent a lot of his early life. Then he came to Kolkata and he was not very keen in pursuing his formal education, but very much interested in art. So at that point, he leaves that and goes into art training, works under Abanindranath Tagore, and then becomes a part of that whole movement, which we call Bengal School. 

Host: Bose first trained under Abanindranath Tagore at the Government College of Art in Calcutta. He was deeply influenced by the murals in the Ajanta caves, which he visited as a young assistant on an early sketching expedition in 1909, and the temple art of South India he saw on another study tour. The work of Japanese and Chinese artists also left an impression on him; particularly their monochromatic aesthetic, ink drawings, woodwork and linocuts. From his early years, he drew from myths and epics. One of his most famous works from this period is called “Sati” named after Shiva’s consort. The painting shows a saree-clad Sati in prayer against an ombre grey-orange background. It carries all the hallmarks of Bose’s works: her Chinese appearance, the use of earth tones and the “wash” technique which produces a semi-transparent layer of colour. As his association with Abanindranath continued through the 1910s—  

Siva Kumar: He is noticed by Rabindranath. And encouraged to come to Santiniketan and then be part of the art programme that he started here. So he came up to Santiniketan. 

Host: Rabindranath Tagore founded a university at Santiniketan, then a small village about 150 km west of Kolkata.

<Satyajit Ray narrates a documentary on Rabindranath Tagore>

“Rabindranath had been worrying about the education of his children and he decided to start an experimental educational institution in Santiniketan. It was to be a school but not like the schools that had been the nightmare of his own childhood. It was to be like the forest hermitages of classical India but to bring it into being was not an easy task for one thing it cost money…”

Host: That is from a documentary about Rabindranath Tagore made by another Bengali great, Satyajit Ray. 

<Documentary by Ray continues>

“Rabindranath gave the school at Santiniketan a new status and a new name “yatra vishwam bhavati eka niram”, where the world becomes a single nest. This was the motto of the Vishwa Bharati.”

Host: Rabindranath envisioned Vishwa Bharati as a new kind of global university which would draw on eastern and western ideas. By now, the Swadeshi movement, centred on self-rule and economic self-sufficiency was in full swing. Artists like those of the Bengal School were finding a new visual idiom and identity to match this political spirit. Rabindranath also thought that artists should engage with their immediate environment and local communities. 

Siva Kumar: He was drawn to the larger figures, the more energetic kind of drawing that he saw in Ajanta. So in a sense, Nandalal was actually tuned to respond to Rabindranath. Having again grown up in rural Bihar in his early life, he responded to Rabindranath’s ideas in many ways. He was interested in doing larger works. He was interested in public art. 

Host: Rabindranath’s own nephew Abanindranath was reluctant to leave Calcutta. Nandalal Bose was not. He arrived at the university’s newly-formed Kala Bhavan, the art school.

Siva Kumar: And Nandalal Bose was the person who kind of headed this institution when it was founded in 1919. And till 1951 he headed this institute. So that’s his association with this place. So in a sense, it is his ideas that shaped this institute.

Host: Inspired by Rabindranath, Bose began to focus on nature and community life. Bose also revived the Indian tradition of wall paintings, and drew on folk art, such as the Kalighat style, which used bright colours and thick lines. He continued experimenting with different materials and methods, and developed a teaching programme that encouraged students to do the same. 

<beat>

He was also starting to grow more overtly political.

<Clip of Gandhi’s arrival to India from South Africa>

“Bombay, 9th of January 1915.  After two decades in South Africa, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned home to the soil and sand of India. Jawaharlal Nehru said, “His coming was like a beam of light that pierced the darkness. [sloganeering]”

Host: In the early 1920s, the national movement was being revived by a lawyer who had returned from South Africa: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Bose was impressed by Gandhi and his philosophy of nonviolent civil disobedience. Gandhi had even visited Santiniketan a few times at Rabindranath Tagore’s invitation.

Siva Kumar: And Nandalal of course started seeing the kind of activity that Gandhi was doing and he became much more interested in that. So simultaneously Rabindranath and Gandhi, they were very close friends, but they differed in their attitudes to nationalism, especially the agitation of the kind of nationalism that Gandhi was leading. He was not very comfortable with the idea of non-cooperation. The idea of taking children out of schools was not a great idea. He was not interested in burning things as a part of agitation and so on. So they had their differences of opinion, but remained great friends till the end. 

Host: In letters and in public writings, Gandhi and Tagore engaged and challenged each other’s views on the national movement. Tagore, who had a more internationalist outlook, differed from Gandhi’s more cultural nationalist tendencies. Though he was sceptical of Gandhi’s approach, Tagore did not prevent his colleagues from participating in his struggle. 

Siva Kumar: And Nandalal was one person who was close to both these, who kind of gave shape to the ideas of both these men in different ways. So he straddled between them very well and quite easily. I mean, it was not a very easy task, but he did that. So he was completely involved. So he became engaged in many things. And the first time, of course, politically is when the Dandi March happens.

<Clip from the Dandi March> 

“The great march for liberty began. Gandhi started on his 241 mile long trek from the ashram to Dandi, a village on the sea coast, along with his chosen band of 78 ashram inmates, symbols of national determination with a strong resolve and undaunted look.”

Host: In 1930, Gandhi led a march to protest the government’s tax on salt. They marched for 24 days. This was the beginning of the Civil Disobedience movement. You might have seen an iconic black-and-white linocut image of Gandhi from this historic moment. He is in profile; barefoot, with muscled calves, his right foot forward, a stick in his right hand, his back slightly hunched. He is wearing his dhoti up to his knees and a cloth around his shoulders. That image was made by Nandalal Bose. 

Siva Kumar: The print became very important because in a sense, it became an image that is very easily reproducible, which can be transmitted. And it’s very simple because Gandhi’s act was also very simple, just walking a few, I mean, 100 kilometres, picking up salt on the seashore. I mean, it’s an extremely simple act in a way. And that’s the most famous image that we see, of Gandhi walking with a stick. Now, that brought in a sense, I mean, Nandalal’s artistic genius and Gandhian image together. And Gandhi might have also noticed this because this was an image which immediately, I mean, got the attention. It was reproduced. It was used in all kinds of ways. Nationalists used it. 

Host: Gandhi himself did not believe in art for its own sake. He was austere, more concerned with religion and philosophy rather than cinema and literature. But Bose’s work stirred his interest, the way he drew scenes from the lives of ordinary folk—peasants, craftsmen, labourers; people who toiled away without much representation in the public sphere, let alone in the sphere of high culture. Perhaps this is what appealed to Gandhi; art that acknowledged and embraced common people and their labours.

In 1936, Gandhi asked Bose to organise an arts and crafts exhibition for the annual Congress session in Lucknow. The Congress met every year in a different location where it took stock of the movement and planned its next moves. Bose’s exhibition was the first of its kind to be held alongside the annual session. In his opening remarks, Gandhi praised Nandalal Bose, as Siva Kumar recounted in this 2019 lecture: 

<Clip of talk by Prof. R. Siva Kumar delivered in 2019 in Kolkata>

“There are the simply but exquisitely decorated walls done by Nandalal Bose, the eminent men and artists from Santiniketan and his co-workers who have tried to best represent the villagers craft in simple artistic symbols and when you go inside the art gallery on which Nanda Babu has lavished his labours for weeks you will feel as I did like spending three hours together. And then he goes on to say this will be not an entertainment but there is so much to learn from this experience and it is going to be an educative one.”

Host: Gandhi had always idealised and upheld village life and the village economy as integral to the national project. By bringing village arts and crafts into an important political meeting, he was showcasing this philosophy in practice. After the Lucknow session, Bose’s work regularly appeared at Congress sessions. In 1937, he went on to create art for the session in Faizpur in present-day Uttar Pradesh. Their collaboration would reach its highest point in 1938 at the Haripura session. 

<Clip from the Haripura session of Congress>

“The 51st session of the Congress met on the bank of the river Tapati at Haripura, in rural surroundings under the stewardship of Subhash Chandra Bose, the youngest president, in February 1938….”

Host: This time, Gandhi’s brief to Nandalal Bose was simple: build an exhibition around the Congress session, which captured an essence of India and its people. Nandalal Bose travelled around the small hamlet in Gujarat, observing rural scenes. He used local material and labour for the final exhibition. The 400-odd works eventually came to be known as the Haripura posters. Executed on hand-made paper, with pigments created from stone and earth, they include a woman churning butter, another woman pounding rice, another bathing her child. Bose deployed pastel shades and earthy tones; the lines were thick and bold; the figures standing out against lighter backdrops. 

There’s a photo of Gandhi and Bose together from Haripura in 1938: Bose, in a moustache and spectacles, wrapped up in a shawl, points to one of the paintings as Gandhi looks on attentively. Gandhi was effusive in his praise for “Nanda Babu”. He was impressed by the artist’s ability to grasp the brief and, in his words, “give it a concrete shape.” The works created a vision of rural harmony, a visible rejection of colonial urbanism and affirmed the dignity of common people. Many of these are now part of the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi. 

By the 1940s, Bose was already an internationally renowned artist, but his association with Gandhi raised him to the status of a national icon. 

<beat>

Now he was on the cusp of another historic commission. 

<Clip of Nehru moving the motion to draw up a Constitution for India>

“Mr. President. Sir, I beg to move: “This Constituent Assembly declares its firm and solemn resolve to proclaim India as an Independent Sovereign Republic and to draw up for her future governance a Constitution…”

Host: The work of drafting a Constitution for a soon-to-be-independent country began in December 1946. Nearly 300 elected representatives came together to debate and decide the values and vision for the new nation. By November 1949, their work was done. The document would come into force two months later on 26 January 1950. The Indian Constitution was unprecedented in many ways. It laid down a liberal government for a largely illiberal society. It gave all Indians equal privileges and rights. It was also the longest Constitution ever written. And it was about to get one more distinction. 

Naman Ahuja: There are two copies of the original Constitution of India which lie in Parliament in helium filled cases, an English and a Hindi one. They are highly revered and protected in a completely secure condition so that they can be protected and maintained. The Constitution of India is an exquisite document. It’s a large folio which is hand painted and it has got calligraphy hand painted onto its pages. The calligraphy was done by Prem Bihari Narayan Raizada and the paintings were all masterminded by Nandalal Bose and his many students who worked with him on the project at Santiniketan.

Host: This is Naman Ahuja. 

Naman Ahuja: I’m a professor of art history at JNU. I also edit one of India’s oldest journals on art history and visual culture, which is called Marg. I haven’t opened the case with the original and flicked through the paintings of the original and studied those —that I haven’t yet done… But I have worked with the original etchings and facsimiles that were produced of this.  And so we used one of the first impressions of the Constitution to display in an exhibition called India and the World.

Host: Ahuja co-curated this exhibition featuring collections from the British Museum, the National Museum in Delhi and the Chatrapati Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya in Mumbai. It told the history of India through about 200 different objects. The Constitution was one of them. The process of writing the Constitution and the debates that led to it have been well documented in academia, popular culture and books. But there is very little record of how the Constitution came to be illustrated. Bose himself left no public writing on the subject, and neither did the students or family members who worked with him. His obituary in the Times of India did not even mention his work on the Constitution. 

Siva Kumar: What we know is that it was decided that the Constitution will be handwritten and they were looking for people who would be considered for that… And then there were probably, this is my guess, there were people who were interested in contributing decorative aspects too… The chairperson of the Constituent Assembly, Rajendra Prasad (sic). It is in his letters and correspondence that we see that they are thinking about Nandalal. I mean, narrowed down on him because they knew him from his work with Gandhi and Tagore and so on. 

Host: We asked Naman Ahuja if Bose was a surprise choice. 

Naman Ahuja: I think it was an understandable choice on the part of the powers that be to have selected him over the other contenders. A case, a valid case could have been made to go down the road of being completely modern and taken somebody from the Progressive Artists’ Group or who went on to form the Progressive Artists Group—

Host (interjects): A young group of Bombay-based artists formed in 1947 including future greats F. N. Souza, S. H. Raza, and M. F. Husain who sought to move away from the Bengal School of Art and its revivalist nationalism towards a more avant garde style —

Naman Ahuja: It could have been valid to have taken artists who were coming out of Delhi and Lahore or coming out of Baroda and Bombay or coming out of any other part of South Asia. Even within Bengal, there could have been other artists who could have been selected. But I think the choice of Nandalal who had been a pedagogue for so many years, who had been closely allied with the thinking and working of both Tagore and Gandhi and was Gandhi’s preferred artist and chosen artist for so many projects. He had been involved in the nation-building process and messaging, the importance of public messaging and how you shape public messaging through your visual language. The opportunities that he had already got in his career previously in shaping that I think lent him a certain credibility where his work would have been used. He was ready for the job as it were. 

Host: Bose was not given a brief, according to Siva Kumar. It appears that the drawing and the writing were completely different projects, out of sync with one another. According to records of the Parliament secretariat, Bose was approached to do the illustrations only as late as October 1949, that is, three years after debates had begun in the Constituent Assembly. In his letter to Bose, the president of the Assembly, Rajendra Prasad, emphasised that the effort would be treasured not just  as a political and intellectual achievement, but also an artistic one. 

Bose’s work began in December 1949, or just a month before the Constitution was adopted. He selected a group from among his students and family members, and directed who should do which panel. 

<Clip from “A Brush with the Constitution”, a documentary by Akashvani AIR>

Bani Patel: “We were all excited. Yes, I feel very happy and a little proud also that my grandfather chose me to do this great work. Jawaharlal Nehru gave the work to my grandfather. For this contribution he gave this work to the students and teachers of Shantiniketan, Kala Bhavan. I made five pages.”

Host: That was Bani Patel, one of Bose’s granddaughters and at 21, the youngest member on the team. Neither Patel nor any of the artists is alive today. You just heard a clip of Patel from an AIR documentary. 

The Hindi and English calligraphy work was commissioned from two different people. The drawing and calligraphy went on simultaneously. As far as we know, neither Bose nor any of his collaborators attended any of the Constituent Assembly debates. All we know is that he was told to decorate the founding document of the Indian republic and as with his earlier assignments for Gandhi, he brought his own vision to it. 

Siva Kumar: And there was no kind of imposition in what he should be doing. The programme was his own kind of thing. So he got a few artists, a number of them belonging to his own family like his son and daughters and also a few of these old students from Santiniketan. And then they worked as a team and did this work. 

Host: Nandalal Bose and his team beautified the founding document with a dazzling array of illustrations and designs. An intricate filigree pattern stretches over the cover page. In the middle is a pillar mounted with Asiatic lions in gold foil facing in three different directions. This design, which was made by Dinanath Bhargava, one of Nandalal Bose’s students, was eventually adopted as the national emblem. In this clip from the AIR documentary Bhargava’s wife, Prabha, tells us more. 

<Clip from “A Brush with the Constitution”>

Prabha Bhargava (Hindi): “He used to go to the Calcutta zoo. Six months he kept going between Calcutta and Shantiniketan to study the lions. There is one male, one female and one child. There are three lions, each was studied. The shape of each is different.”

“The pillar is of Sarnath. The Sarnath statue which is from the Ashokan time. He gave it a new form.”

Host: Inside, the  pages are set in  golden patterned borders. There are 22 illustrations, one for every chapter. The lines are bold, but the colours and shading are muted. Only a few images have rich colours. Bani Patel again. 

<Clip from “A Brush with the Constitution”>

Bani: “The papers were specially made. They called it parchment paper, thick and beautiful, So on that we did brush work with black dynastic and gold leaf, we had to prepare the gold colors from gold leaf.”

Host: The first illustration is the humped bull seal from Harappa, the Indus Valley settlement, with the undeciphered inscription above it. It appears at the top of the first page of the part describing the Indian union and its provinces. The next chapter, which deals with citizenship, opens with an image of a Vedic gurukul. The Directive Principles chapter contains a scene from the Mahabharata. Here, Krishna is having his famous talk with Arjuna, just before the start of the war, the men are dressed for battle, seated in a chariot drawn by four horses. A cross-legged Mahavira opens the chapter titled part six. One of the only images coloured in blue and red, Mahavira is seen deep in penance surrounded by foliage and an onlooking peacock. Portraits of Shivaji and Guru Gobind Singh appear in side by side panels in the chapter on elections. Both men are calm, and regal, bearded and dressed in flowing attire, with weapons in their hands. Ahuja tells us more: 

Naman Ahuja: And then it also pays attention to Indian mythology and extols certain figures or selects for inclusion, I should say, rather than extolling, selects for inclusion certain figures who are widely regarded as legitimising forces within India. And so you will have paintings of Arjun bowing his head in front of Krishna. You will have Ram, Sita and Lakshman moving forward. You will have Akbar holding council as the great learned king. There is a powerful figure of the Rani of Jhansi. So there are these kinds of characters that are there. You look at them and you realise this is indeed the selection of the cast of characters that were extremely important to give India national pride in the 1920s to the 1960s. These were the benchmarks for what was regarded as being Indian history, the great episodes of Indian history, the great characters of Indian history.

Host: The records of the Parliament secretariat suggest only very mundane exchanges between Nandalal Bose and the president’s office. Discussions on borders, and space, technical things like margins and measurements. Bose appears not to have communicated which figures he would be placing in the actual document. 

Naman Ahuja: Why did these episodes and these characters make the cut for inclusion? And what might there have been that did not make the cut? I find it quite curious, for instance, looking through all the paintings as to why there aren’t more women in the paintings, in the illustrations. Why are there so many men in the paintings? Why are there not as many women in the paintings?

Host: The document raises so many questions. Why open the fundamental rights chapter with an image of Ram? What does the chapter on the president and the vice president have to do with the enlightenment of the Buddha? Why pair a scene from Akbar’s court with the section on states and the union? Here’s one possible answer: 

Siva Kumar: It’s a chronological thing. It has nothing to do with the chapters. It is an independent aspect. But to me, I feel that he was trying to inscribe our entire history into the Constitution, or at least serve as a backdrop to it. I mean, in a way that allows us to see the Constitution as a culmination of a long history rather than just a breakaway kind of thing. That is probably what he had in mind, because that was also the idea that as nationalists, these artists wanted to do. I mean, not to just completely break away from our past, but to build upon it and build upon it without being insular to the rest of the world. 

Host: Siva Kumar has taken a granular look at the few available notes from the entire exercise. These offer tantalising clues on some of the roads not taken. For instance, a tentative plan to include images of national leaders such as Nehru  and Patel was dropped. However, Gandhi and Subhash Chandra Bose are featured in three chapters. One note shows that “Portraits of Akbar and Shahjahan with Mughal architecture” was on the cards, but eventually only an image of Akbar and three men that Siva Kumar just describes as his architects was used. An illustration called “scenes from Alexander’s invasion” was crossed out. Images of mountains, desert and ocean that did not feature in the original list were added later. 

<Clip of talk Prof. R. Siva Kumar in 2019 at Calcutta>

“So in a sense this I mean bringing these natural elements at the end of the thing that land the I mean the mountains the deserts the sea in a sense is an acknowledgment or way of invoking Tagore, who is absent from his whole thing. If you remember that is one of the central elements in many of his poetry.”

Host: The individual drawings may not tell us much, but together they tell a story.  

Siva Kumar: What Nandalal does is that he doesn’t want to be just disconnected. He wants it to be a new point in a long history. So he inscribes our past into the future that we were envisioning. I mean, this was something that if you think about the nationalists in a way, they were all looking back to an India while they were all planning for a future India. I mean, Gandhi was doing it in a way, Tagore was doing that in a way. Even Nehru in a sense, his Discovery of India is a looking back at the history of India while they’re all planning the future of India. So look at it, see what can be taken from that India and what can be shaped in the form of a new India. So you can always, there’ll be elements that you can salvage from your past, which will be useful. 

Host: Nandalal Bose was clearly determined to not just mine the past but also bring in a broad range of styles. His idea of diversity was also stylistic diversity. Naman Ahuja explains: 

Naman Ahuja: The different styles include bits of Rajput painting traditions, sometimes very graphically rendered outlines of what would be in the sculptural traditions of India. Sometimes you see borders and patterns which are derived out of and inspiration of Mughal art. Then there is a lot of use of isolated motifs as decorative ornament, which have come out of Gupta period painting and workmanship that you see on the borders of temples or you see surrounding on the ceilings of Ajanta, for instance. So you get line drawings that have come in. So you do see an inspiration that comes in from a diverse range of Indian art styles.

Host: By January 17, 1950 – or a week before the Constitution would come into effect – only 100 pages had been calligraphed. And only 15 had completed border work. A note from the Constituent Assembly secretary rued that only half of the work would be completed by January 26.

There was also the pressing question of money. Before the project began there was no formal agreement on how much the artists and calligraphers were to be paid. As of January 1950, it appears that only Rs 700 had been advanced to Bose for the materials. Bose eventually only asked for the cost of materials to be covered and honorariums to be paid to his team, on the basis of a rate card per page. It came to Rs 18,000 to Rs 20,000 in total. He emphasised that this work was done by the group out of “patriotic zeal” and “artistic interest”.  The calligrapher Prem Bihari Raizada was to be paid separately, though according to some accounts he never accepted any payment. 

<Clip from “A Brush with the Constitution”>

“This is All India Radio. The news read by Roshan Menon. The President Dr Rajendra Prasad received a beautifully finished handwritten copy of the Indian constitution from Mr Prem Bihari Narayan Raizada, a Rampur calligraphist, yesterday. Completed in five months, the 251-page calligraphed copy is written on 17 by 23 inch parchment sheets which are supposed to last a thousand years…”

Host: In late 1950, once all the decorative work was completed, a thousand copies of the Constitution were printed. The total cost: Just under Rs 70,000. They had the signatures of every member of the Assembly at the end; and on special request the signature of Raizada and the name of his grandfather on the last page.

Siva Kumar: Of the members, a couple of signatures that overshot the area which was demarcated for them. And in the final Constitution, you can see the boundary, the borders are changed to accommodate that. So which means that the signatures took place first. 

Host: Naman Ahuja urges us to view the project of decorating the founding document against a wider backdrop. As India was emerging from colonial rule, it had to create for itself not just a new political future, but a new way of imagining itself visually. So far, colonial iconography had dominated government imagery. Whether on currency notes, or stamps, public portraits or official seals. 

Naman Ahuja: What should be the symbol that will epitomise the democracy, the Republic of India? What would be the visual language? Because when you are ruled by a country like Britain, Britain had its crown and its Britannic lion and it had its currency notes and postage stamps with the head of their monarch that was used across and became the visual language of India, right, and of all their colonies. 

Host: He goes on to say there were several options for symbols of monarchs or deities, even political parties. But — 

Naman Ahuja: In 1947, with Partition, it had become extremely important to try and find a visual language that was going to be inclusive and not divisive. And choosing motifs and symbols that were going to be located in one religion was not going to be acceptable to all. So there was a larger quest that was on, on finding a visual vocabulary for India that was going to replace the colonial vocabulary.

Host: Bose was in his sixties when he finished the work on the Constitution. In 1951, he retired as the head of the department at Santiniketan, but continued to live and work there. He received the nation’s second-highest civilian honour, the Padma Vibhushan, in 1954. And in 1976, the central government recognised his work as a national art treasure under the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act of 1972. Nine artists in total have been given this recognition, including Bose’s mentor Abanindranath Tagore, Raja Ravi Varma and Amrita Sher-gil. 

When Bose died, in April 1966, at the age of 83, he left a massive body of work, as many as 7,000 paintings. These include paintings depicting scenes from the Mahabharata, Sati, Saraswati and Shiva drinking poison, often considered amongst his finest pieces. Much of his work lies with the NGMA in Delhi. In 2008, museums in the US held perhaps the first major international Bose retrospective. That placed Bose against the wider national movement of the first half of the 20th century and underscored how modernism flourished outside the west. 

In 2013, many works from the private collection of his grandson Supratik Bose were placed on sale by the auction house Christie’s. The collection included some of the Haripura posters and rough sketches of his linocut of Gandhi. The total sale price went up to nearly three million US dollars. 

Host: As with any work of art, whether literature, or films or paintings, the artist’s control over its interpretation is limited beyond a point. How does a work come to be framed long after the artist is dead? Bose may never have intended for certain meanings to be attributed to his works, and yet, that is inevitable. 

Naman Ahuja: The illustrations of the Constitution of India have been brought up as a matter in court, one in the Court of Justice, Harinath Tilhari, I think, who delivered a judgment that the illustrations contained in the Constitution must be seen as an expression of our secularism and the history of our culture, a history in which there is no negation of any community or any religious group. And I think that was as far back as 1993, 1992 or 1993 when that particular judgment came. 

Host: Ahuja is referring to one of the cases related to the Ayodhya dispute. The judgement upheld the right of Hindus to worship at the spot where they believed Ram was born. It said Indian secularism meant the state treated all religions equally and it would be unfair to Hindus to deprive them of this right. In addition, the judgement said that Ram could be regarded as a “constitutional entity” since he made an appearance in the Constitution. 

But experts have warned against reading too much legal or jurisprudential meaning into these works. Which brings us back to the image that the prime minister highlighted after inaugurating the Ram Mandir in January last year.

Siva Kumar: I don’t think that, I mean, you can’t take one image out of a sequence… As I said, maybe something that the present government would not like to see, Tipu right there. I mean, somebody whom they hate is there. I mean, Nandalal puts all that. So, I mean, to me, it is history. And of course, you’re free to interpret it in any way you want. But if you take the whole of it together, then you see a different pattern. You see a chronology. You may not agree with that chronology fully because history is constantly changing. But that’s how people understood it at that time. 

Host: From his early years, Bose subscribed to the cosmopolitan worldview of Tagore. Though he included Hindu images and figures in a secular and forward-looking document, he did not intend for the project to convey Hindu supremacy. 

Siva Kumar: Nandalal probably was a believing Hindu. But he was responsive and there were students from every part of India, from every religion, who worked with him. And some of his assistants, close people, were not Hindu. So they were working with a broader perspective and that I think was the perspective of most nationalists. I mean, irrespective of their personal beliefs. 

Host: In this season, we have looked at India’s Constitutional history through a new prism – through diverse figures whose own worldviews helped shape the national project and our Constitutional culture. Nandalal Bose has a unique legacy in this regard. His artistic philosophy – which carried the deep imprint of Tagore – and his works became a visual language for the national dream, appearing in the annual Congress sessions and eventually, illustrating the pages of the Constitution itself. 

Those illustrations don’t affect our lives the way the text of the Constitution does. But they lend an emotional and symbolic power to the founding document. When the Constitution was adopted, it was supposed to herald a new beginning, which did away with the worst excesses of our feudal and colonial past. By evoking India’s epics and history, however, Bose reminded us that we didn’t emerge from a vacuum in 1947. India was not a blank slate, but what Nehru called “an ancient palimpsest” – whose traditions which we would have to embrace, in full, as a guide to our new freedom.

Corrections and Clarifications:

This episode states that a thousand copies of the Constitution were printed after the decoration was completed in 1950. While it is true that the copies were printed, Nandalal Bose continued to work on the art work for another 4 years [see: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/constitution-1st-edition-auctioned-for-record-rs-48-lakh/articleshow/112151201.cms]. We regret the error.