An Artist’s Camera: Lalit Mohan Sen as a Photographer
A versatile artist, consummate teacher, and a well-known cultural figure throughout his career, Lalit Mohan Sen (1898-1954) was a leading Indian artist who lived and worked at the peak of the Gandhian era.
Born in Shantipur, West Bengal, into a family associated with the place’s famous handloom tradition, Lalit Mohan Sen moved to Lucknow when young and spent most of his life there. He studied art at the Government School of Arts and Crafts, Lucknow (1917) and later at the Royal College of Art, London (1925). Originally a pu pil of Nathanial Heard and Sir William Rothenstein, he excelled in academic realism, portrait and landscape. Still, his works show inspiration from classical Indian art, the country’s rich craft and decorative traditions and the new nationalist paintings of Abanindranath and his disciples. The renowned art historian Laurence Binyon commissioned him to copy the Bagh Cave paintings, and his mastery of the Indian Style is visible in his two large-scale murals on the Mughal emperor, Akbar and Buddha’s life in India House, London, in 1930. A fellow traveller of Indian nationalism, Lalit Mohan Sen was deeply sympathetic to India’s political struggle against the British Raj, which is evident in his series of Gandhi’s portraits in woodcut. However, as an artist with a broad and open outlook, he avoided the oppositional spirit of anti-colonial nationalism. He did not view the new Indian art and Western realism – two dominant trends operative in the Indian art scene of the time – as antagonistic but as two distinctive paths of creative expression.
Lalit Mohan Sen worked in many styles and mediums, which gives his oeuvre extraordinary diversity. We witness him wrestling with what it means to be a modern artist while remaining sceptical about modernism’s desire for stylistic singularity and hierarchy of values. As an artist and pedagogue who taught at his alma mater, Lucknow Art School, for almost three decades and later became its Principal in 1945, he placed equal emphasis on the revered disciplines like painting and commercial/functional art like graphic and applied art, focusing as much on creative self-expression as on art’s communicative potentiality.
Sen, an avid traveller, always carried his sketchbooks and camera. Although the selection on display is primarily from the vast collection of photographs taken during the last decade of his life, the earliest picture in our archive is from 1922, when he was touring Kashmir. He
became a member of the R oyal Photographic Society of Great Britain as a student in London and showed his lifelong passion for creative photography. His photographs, mostly monochromatic images and often used as the reference for his paintings, drawings or graphic prints, show his extensive experimentation with photographic mediums, using various kinds of paper and techniques, such as Bromoil, to create stunning visual effects. Of many themes he explored, those photographs of the Indigenous people and places, mainly the Jaunsar-Bawar in the Garhwal regions of Uttarakhand, hold the central place in his oeuvre. They show his ethnographic interests – he was a member of the Ethnographic and Folk Culture Society, UP – and, more intensively, his love for human faces and humanity. The
Indigenous women do not appear in his photographs merely as a tribe or a category but as persons full of expression – smiling. He had a darkroom in the Lucknow Art School, where he developed his photographs from the negatives. Besides being a fine photographer, he
played a crucial role in establishing the photographic culture in India through fairs, the establishment of the photographic society, such as the UP Ameture Photographic Association (c. 1933), and publication. Unlike his paintings, drawings and prints, his photographs, probably due to their unavailability in the public domain during his lifetime and after, have not received scholarly attention. The never-before-seen pictures in the show offer a glimpse into his intense and varied photographic practice.
- Arkaprava Bose
