Before Nightfall, a 1981–82 triptych by Nilima Sheikh, imagines a scene unfolding at twilight on the campus of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, a city in the Indian state of Gujarat (fig. 1).1The name of the city was officially changed to Vadodara in 1974. Since the university was founded prior to then and continues to be called “The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda,” I have chosen to refer to the city as Baroda. The image conjures an otherworldly landscape, with the local flora and fauna painted as swirling forms and sweeping swaths of color. Nestled on the left is the Residency Bungalow, the faculty housing that served as Sheikh’s home for nearly two decades. The open structure of the house reflects the familial nature of the community in Baroda. Artists frequently dropped by each other’s homes simply to chat, conversations in the studio often continued over the dinner table, and students addressed their teachers as bhai or ben (“brother” or “sister” in the local language, Gujarati).
Sheikh is one of several Baroda artists whose work has been categorized in art historical scholarship as “narrative-figuration,” a term first associated with the Baroda school in the early 1980s.2The term “narrative-figuration” became associated with the Baroda school following British curator Timothy Hyman’s 1979 touring exhibition Narrative Paintings. This connection was further reinforced by Geeta Kapur’s essay in the 1981 exhibition catalogue Place for People; see Kapur, “Partisan Views about the Human Figure,” in Place for People, exh. cat. (Jehangir Art Gallery, 1981), n.p, https://cdn.aaa.org.hk/_source/digital_collection/windows/elaine.lin/2fb2fbba-deee-4206-844d-49368a103dc6.pdf.
More recently, it has appeared in texts such as Parul Dave Mukherji, “The Making of the Baroda School: When People Become Public,” in 20th-Century Indian Art: Modern, Post-Independence, Contemporary, ed. Partha Mitter, Parul Dave Mukherji, and Rakhee Balaram (Thames and Hudson, 2022), 274–97. This designation refers to a distinct mode of figuration adopted by artists like Bhupen Khakhar, Gulammohammed Sheikh, and Vivan Sundaram, who created paintings grounded in sociopolitical critique, images of everyday life, and narratives embedded in local settings (figs. 2, 3). However, this formalist grouping excludes their contemporaries, artists such as Nasreen Mohamedi and Jeram Patel, who were working at the same time but in a decisively abstract idiom. It also reflects a tendency in the art historical discipline to classify artists by singular stylistic affinities. Against this, I challenge the idea that a stylistic label can easily be applied to the Baroda artists and argue that writing a narrative of this school demands a closer look at the collaborations, dialogues, and influences across generations of artists who taught, worked, and lived alongside each other.
During my interviews with artists from Baroda, I expected them to describe their classroom pedagogy or to discuss the development of their visual language. Instead, our conversations turned to anecdotes about gatherings in their homes, jokes about cooking or dancing together, and memories of the “homey” atmosphere on campus. Their words, when read alongside candid archival photographs, portraits of them and their friends, and artworks depicting their shared residential spaces, paint an image of the home as an alternative site of artistic and pedagogical practices, one that was as central to their experience as the classroom and studio.3See, for example, figures 2 and 3. The subject of these artworks by Bhupen Khakhar and Gulammohammed Sheikh, respectively, is the Residency Bungalow, the faculty housing that they shared with fellow artists Krishna Chhatpar and Jeram Patel for several years. This is the same house that is depicted in Nilima Sheikh’s Before Nightfall (see fig. 1) By examining these visualizations of social spaces and the dialogues taking place within them, I recontextualize their artistic practices through a lens of community and camaraderie. I propose that this framework has implications beyond a study of the Faculty of Fine Arts in that it allows us to understand postcolonial modernity more broadly as having developed through collective efforts and informal networks of exchange rather than through the stylistic innovations of individual artists.
The Faculty of Fine Arts, founded in 1950, was the first art school established in an independent India. Over the years, the Faculty incubated generations of Indian modernists, many of whom first trained as students and later returned to teach in the same departments in which they themselves had studied. Echoing the artists’ descriptions of a “homey” campus, the college began out of a single residential bungalow called Pushpa Baug (fig. 4). This house provided a bright and open space for the art school, with a veranda and balcony on the first floor, rooms that were used for lecture halls and studio spaces, and a guesthouse that was converted into a pottery studio. In the span of a few years, the campus grew around this central space to include half a dozen buildings housing multiple departments, including painting, printmaking, and sculpture.
As a witness to these early years, ceramist Ira Chaudhuri described an extemporaneous development of the institution, when both teachers and the administration were navigating what was, at the time, uncharted territory in the newly independent nation-state. Practicing artists were invited from across the country to set up individual departments within the school. As new positions continued to be filled and young families began moving to Baroda, it became increasingly difficult to find accommodation. It was suggested that apartments in one building be combined, so that new faculty members and their families could live together in a common residence. This ad hoc development of the school resulted in an atmosphere where artists like Ira and her husband, sculptor Sankho Chaudhuri, became local guardians for many young students arriving in Baroda, and their houses, gathering places for the growing community. Students recall that they could drop by their teachers’ homes and studios anytime, a precedent likely set by the Chaudhuris. Ira ben explained this with nonchalance, “We just never closed the front door [of our house]. It was always open. People came in and out.”4When I reference a direct conversation with an artist, I have chosen to address them with the honorific used by their students or peers. In conversation with Ira Chaudhuri, New Delhi, May 14, 2024. Despite the Chaudhuris’ meager salaries during these early years and their frequent difficulties in making ends meet, they made their home a refuge for any student seeking a meal, a loan, or a place to stay.
The shared space of community that was inevitably created in these artists’ homes can best be described as an adda, a term translated by linguist Sunitikumar Chattopadhyay as a “place for careless talk with boon companions.”5Sunitikumar Chattopadhyay, “Hostel Life in Calcutta” (1913), appended to his Jiban katha [Bengali] (Jijnasha, 1979), 210; cited in Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Adda: A History of Sociality,” in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000), 180. Conversations in an adda were often long, meandering, and informal. The same could be said of the conversations taking place in Baroda. Nilima Sheikh describes the gatherings at her friends’ homes as fundamental to her time at the school. Yet, when I inquired whether these discussions included pedagogical discourse or feedback on her work, she was quick to say that her peers never taught her anything in that sense. Instead, these get-togethers included “random discussions. Hanging around the college canteen. Staying late in the studio to chitchat.”6In conversation with Nilima Sheikh, Baroda, January 11, 2024. These informal hangouts both within and outside of the institutional spaces allowed for a fluid or unconscious mode of pedagogical instruction and a sharing of ideas beyond the constraints of the classroom or studio.
The recruiting of teachers from schools around the country resulted in a confluence of diverse pedagogical lineages in Baroda. Sankho Chaudhuri and K. G. Subramanyan, for example, introduced ideas and methods from their alma mater Santiniketan, a colonial-era school founded in 1901 by the writer and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore. Santiniketan was modelled after the tapovans, or forest hermitage schools of India, where teachers and students lived together as a community. Tagore’s founding vision emphasized a linking of art and the environment, villages, and folk traditions that surrounded them, and he insisted that artists move out of their studios and into public spaces. Responding directly to the existing models of art education, the Santiniketan faculty integrated community-based practices into their teaching as an ideological and anticolonial tool against the rigid pedagogy of the art schools established by the British government.7The British government established art schools in four major urban centers: the Madras School of Arts (1850), the School of Industrial Art in Calcutta (1854), the Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay (1857), and the Mayo School of Industrial Art in Lahore (1875). The primary purpose of these schools was to train artisans and improve the craftsmanship and production of manufactured goods, leaving little scope for creative autonomy and experimentation. See Sonal Khullar, “Colonial Art Schools in India,” in Mitter, Mukherjee, and Balram, 20th-Century Indian Art, 23.
In contrast, the Faculty was established in the decades immediately following independence and developed its collective practices as a specifically postcolonial proposition, one fostered by artists seeking like-minded collaborators and, for many, a community different than those they came from. Since its early years, the Faculty had attracted students from both neighboring rural regions in Gujarat and urban metropolises across India. As a result of this heterogeneity, artists moving to Baroda experienced freedoms unlike any in their hometowns. Bhupen Khakhar, for example, noted that he came to Baroda because it would have been impossible for him to stay in Bombay and paint: “My family members would not allow me. . . . At the back of my mind, it also must be my gay attitude.”8Bhupen Khakhar, interview “Interview with Timothy Hyman,” 1995, Bhupen Khakhar Collection, https://bhupenkhakharcollection.com/interview-with-timothy-hyman/; quoted in Nada Raza, “A Man Labelled Bhupen Khakhar Branded as Painter,” in Bhupen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All, ed. Chris Dercon and Nada Raza, exh. cat. (Tate Publications, 2016), 14. Similarly, as a young girl arriving from Delhi, Nilima Sheikh recalls being surprised that she was allowed to stay out and work in the studios until late into the night.9In conversation with Nilima Sheikh, Baroda, January 11, 2024. Gulammohammed Sheikh, who had moved from a smaller town in Gujarat, was made to reckon with an unfamiliar kind of cosmopolitanism: “It was a new experience for me altogether. To meet so many people in the liberal environment that the university provided—it was almost like an extended family.”10In conversation with Gulammohammed Sheikh, Baroda, January 16, 2023. The addas, which enabled artists to retreat into a cosmopolitan bubble on campus in an otherwise provincial town, thereby came to symbolize a mode of sociality that was unique to Baroda’s local context.11For more, see Chaitanya Sambrani, “Art in Baroda: Provincial Location, Cosmopolitan Aspiration,” in Baroda: A Cosmopolitan Provenance in Transition, ed. Priya Maholay-Jaradi (Marg Foundation, 2015), 120–31. At the same time, as my interviews with the artists revealed, it also led to moments of exclusion, marginality, and difference, despite the close-knit community. I thus argue that this period was entrenched in contradictions and simultaneities—a reflection of the complicated postcolonial climate in which the school emerged.
At the crux of this narrative is also the seemingly anomalous location of Baroda, a small town removed from urban centers such as Bombay or Delhi, which had previously been the primary loci of modernist movements and art schools in India. In many ways, it was this provincial location that encouraged the sense of camaraderie and interdependence among peers. The lack of a commercial gallery system and established collectors or patrons of art eliminated a sense of competition among friends or a desire to cater to the art market. With limited opportunities to exhibit works in Baroda, students would travel together to Bombay—carrying rolled-up canvases on the train, collectively renting out gallery spaces, and installing their works there themselves. Much like the ad hoc trajectory of the institution, the artists’ entry into the art market relied on self-driven labor and collaboration among peers.
In my conversations with art critic Geeta Kapur, she was particular about using the word “bohemianism” to describe the atmosphere in Baroda from the 1960s onward.12In conversation with Geeta Kapur, New Delhi, May 7, 2024. Kapur’s presence in Baroda—as one of the first critics to write about its practices—was influential. As the partner of the artist Vivan Sundaram and a close friend of several other Baroda artists, she was uniquely positioned as a witness to both their artistic trajectories and their lived experiences. Reflecting upon her memories from the time, she spoke to me of the kinds of informal and deliberately sparse conditions in which they existed. Over the years, several artists came to inhabit the same residences, often due to the lack of alternative housing, to financial hardship, or through the provision of university accommodations. Artists rarely worked in their home-studios alone and, in fact, would leave their doors open so that friends could come and go as they wished.
Kapur’s description poetically echoes the title of Sundaram’s 1981 painting People Come and Go, which is set in Paramanand, the bungalow that the artist Bhupen Khakhar built for himself in the middle-class Baroda neighborhood of Chikuwadi (fig. 5). Khakar named the house after his father and the Sanskrit word for “supreme happiness,” foreshadowing the revelry that he hosted there in the years to come. While the house had a separate studio, Khakhar preferred to work in the room pictured above, where he could be surrounded by friends, who dropped in at all hours and engaged him in conversation while he painted. Sundaram hints at Paramanand being a place where the community convened by depicting a welcome mat strategically placed at the bottom of the stairs and showing the door to the house left ajar. Khakhar appears to be in the middle of his painting process, examining a canvas propped up against a wall. British painter Howard Hodgkin, a close friend of the Baroda artists, is shown seated behind him at leisure, with his arms outstretched and his legs casually crossed. The otherwise tranquil setting is interrupted by “glitches” in the composition—a spectral figure of Vallabhai, Khakhar’s lover at the time, floats next to him; Khakhar’s body is painted in translucent hues as if fading into the background; and the picture planes intersect one another, like where a wall panel overlaps Hodgkin’s arm. These idiosyncrasies, combined with the dreamlike pointillist light that floods the room, indicate that Sundaram was not just painting from memory but rather creating a vision of memory—a reminiscence of camaraderie and intimate friendships.
I began my research on Baroda with the awareness that the crux of my argument relied on something intangible—unrecorded conversations, veiled social relations, and ordinary moments of companionship. And although some of this narrative could be gleaned from archival materials and conversations with artists, this research would likely have remained within the realm of the speculative were it not visualized through Jyoti Bhatt’s collection of nearly 1,500 photographs of the campus and the community taken between 1956 and 1999. Much like the formation of the community in Baroda, the development of Bhatt’s photographic practice was by happenstance. Since many students were not able to afford to have their work professionally photographed, Bhatt offered to shoot it for a small sum—in essence, for the price of the necessary film—which allowed him to learn new techniques at little cost. Studying the photographs in his archive chronologically, however, reveals a branching out of his subject matter from documentation of artworks to portraits of friends and contemporaries. Otherwise unassuming photographs of artists in their studios or posing with their work are filled with glimpses of conviviality, playfulness, and collaboration.
In one photograph from 1970, three students are seated on top of a canvas laid out on the floor, simultaneously drawing different sections of a collaborative artwork (fig. 6). In another, from 1975, more than a dozen students are spread out on a porch, sharing a meal from an array of lunch boxes set between them (fig. 7). In a third, three students sit huddled together, poring over a single book (fig. 8). Lastly, a group shot from 1974 sums up friendships in the studio; amid art supplies, canvases, and frames, we see students holding hands, leaning on one another, and mid-laughter as if caught sharing a joke (fig. 9).
As a witness to and participant in the formation of this community, Bhatt had untethered access to these candid moments, allowing him to capture the complex undertows of friendship and camaraderie on campus. And yet, despite my place as an outsider to this community, artists spoke to me with the same sense of kinship and familiarity that I describe here. My interviews, which primarily took place in their homes, were replete with nostalgic stories, complicated reflections on the past, and above all, an openness to sharing. Like Jyoti bhai said in response to my request to meet: “ઘર ખુલ્લું છે. ગમે ત્યારેઆવો (The doors of my house are always open. Come anytime you like).”
- 1The name of the city was officially changed to Vadodara in 1974. Since the university was founded prior to then and continues to be called “The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda,” I have chosen to refer to the city as Baroda.
- 2The term “narrative-figuration” became associated with the Baroda school following British curator Timothy Hyman’s 1979 touring exhibition Narrative Paintings. This connection was further reinforced by Geeta Kapur’s essay in the 1981 exhibition catalogue Place for People; see Kapur, “Partisan Views about the Human Figure,” in Place for People, exh. cat. (Jehangir Art Gallery, 1981), n.p, https://cdn.aaa.org.hk/_source/digital_collection/windows/elaine.lin/2fb2fbba-deee-4206-844d-49368a103dc6.pdf.
More recently, it has appeared in texts such as Parul Dave Mukherji, “The Making of the Baroda School: When People Become Public,” in 20th-Century Indian Art: Modern, Post-Independence, Contemporary, ed. Partha Mitter, Parul Dave Mukherji, and Rakhee Balaram (Thames and Hudson, 2022), 274–97. - 3See, for example, figures 2 and 3. The subject of these artworks by Bhupen Khakhar and Gulammohammed Sheikh, respectively, is the Residency Bungalow, the faculty housing that they shared with fellow artists Krishna Chhatpar and Jeram Patel for several years. This is the same house that is depicted in Nilima Sheikh’s Before Nightfall (see fig. 1)
- 4When I reference a direct conversation with an artist, I have chosen to address them with the honorific used by their students or peers. In conversation with Ira Chaudhuri, New Delhi, May 14, 2024.
- 5Sunitikumar Chattopadhyay, “Hostel Life in Calcutta” (1913), appended to his Jiban katha [Bengali] (Jijnasha, 1979), 210; cited in Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Adda: A History of Sociality,” in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000), 180.
- 6In conversation with Nilima Sheikh, Baroda, January 11, 2024.
- 7The British government established art schools in four major urban centers: the Madras School of Arts (1850), the School of Industrial Art in Calcutta (1854), the Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay (1857), and the Mayo School of Industrial Art in Lahore (1875). The primary purpose of these schools was to train artisans and improve the craftsmanship and production of manufactured goods, leaving little scope for creative autonomy and experimentation. See Sonal Khullar, “Colonial Art Schools in India,” in Mitter, Mukherjee, and Balram, 20th-Century Indian Art, 23.
- 8Bhupen Khakhar, interview “Interview with Timothy Hyman,” 1995, Bhupen Khakhar Collection, https://bhupenkhakharcollection.com/interview-with-timothy-hyman/; quoted in Nada Raza, “A Man Labelled Bhupen Khakhar Branded as Painter,” in Bhupen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All, ed. Chris Dercon and Nada Raza, exh. cat. (Tate Publications, 2016), 14.
- 9In conversation with Nilima Sheikh, Baroda, January 11, 2024.
- 10In conversation with Gulammohammed Sheikh, Baroda, January 16, 2023.
- 11For more, see Chaitanya Sambrani, “Art in Baroda: Provincial Location, Cosmopolitan Aspiration,” in Baroda: A Cosmopolitan Provenance in Transition, ed. Priya Maholay-Jaradi (Marg Foundation, 2015), 120–31.
- 12In conversation with Geeta Kapur, New Delhi, May 7, 2024.
