The three colonial art schools of India established by the mid-19^th century at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay have been pivotal in rooting the tradition of European naturalism in the country rupturing the native art practices.^[1] To understand the fractures or shifts in visual arts in the pre-colonial and decolonising art of Maharashtra one was required to scour several sources. The data collection in this direction almost makes the researchers’ suffer a prison sentence due to the lack of archiving habits of the artists and the administrators of the past. The arrival of the Drushyakala Khand by Hindusthan Prakashan Sanstha (Saptahik Vivek) in 2013 produced in Marathi presented a plethora of 300 odd biographies of painters, sculptors, and applied arts professionals along with insight into two centuries of visual art from c. 1760 to c. 1960.

It is an art-historical gift to the Marathi artworld through immense efforts by editors Suhas Bahulkar and Deepak Ghare with contributions from several artist-writers. A mammoth feat accomplished of creating the encyclopaedia that ran for several years. In May 2015, the work to translate it into English began with the support of the Pundoles financially and presided over by a team of art historians and artists like Pheroza Godrej, Dr Sudhir Patwardhan, and Dilip Ranade in different capacities. The outcome is now presented to us in the form of a thick volume of about 900 pages richly packed with 321 colour plates and 1200 odd black and white illustrative images annotating the thoroughly written texts.

Titled as Encyclopaedia- Visual Art of Maharashtra: Artists of the Bombay School and Art Institutions (Late 18^th to Early 21^st century) the catalogue clearly states its scope and is free of jargons. The historically selected areas classified in the encyclopaedia choose to highlight a concept of Bombay School and its oeuvre and discount other possibilities. A difficult yet pertinent take by the editors to envelope an entire discourse of creative practices under one umbrella term- The Bombay School (BS). The encyclopaedia attempts an overview of regional visual arts on the lines of the chronological narrative survey of World Art, The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich, a seminal text, and an accessible introduction to the visual arts. However, the encyclopaedia focuses on anthological entries on individual artists and some landmark institutional contributions to the field. An art enthusiast is fairly exposed to the building blocks of visual arts of Maharashtra.

One of the longest prefaces (75 pages) I have come across, covers a usual chronology of prehistoric art forms with an emphasis on the diverse records from Maharashtra. The editors contextualise the thematic of BS to be as vast as the Maratha ‘empire’, or the scale of Bombay province under the Raj till formation of the state in 1960, thus engulfing wide yet ambiguous boundaries geographically^[2]. It is claimed that the BS was informally established^[3] with the reputation gained after the commissions carried out by the alumna of Sir J. J. School of Art (JJ) of decorating the building facades of several iconic buildings in the fort area. The fort walls were demolished in 1862 under the Governor of Bombay Sir Bartle Frere to develop Mumbai on the lines of London. We can see the mural works executed by the JJ alumna on pillar-capitals or niches of iconic buildings like Rajabai tower, Bombay High Court, Crawford market including the building of JJ itself. 

The period covered under the encyclopaedia is determined as 1760 to 1960. c. 1760 coincides with the beginning European Industrial revolution in Britain and the year 1960 with the formation of the state of Maharashtra on linguistic basis. The first wave of Industrial revolution may have little to do with the visual arts of Maharashtra of the period but sets a stage for irreversible changes both in Europe and consequentially in the colonised regions with effects visible in 19^th century India.

The documentation method of the project was primarily to collate biographies of the artists of repute based on a comprehensive list prepared with strong connections to Maharashtra. The list was finalised after inputs by experts from Mumbai, Pune, Nashik, Kolhapur, Solapur, and Nagpur. Regionally a set of artists, art-critics and art-educators were appointed to document and write biographies. Based on the scope of contribution by the artists the article lengths are categorised. The contributors were provided with guidelines and model biographies so a standard could be followed. Authenticity of information is a crucial aspect of biographical entries. The task of identifying the right name and its right spelling was a challenging one as Indian names have unique phonetic sounds in different regions. To maintain a standard, complete names and popular names of the enlisted artists are included. Especially women artists where identification becomes difficult due to differences in their maiden names and family name after marriage; effort to include the record is made. As a general fact, we barely find data archived as a corpus and maintained of significant movements or artists from the field of visual arts. The apathy towards meticulous archiving work in common spheres and lack of institutional vision in pursuing such a task even locally has affected an analytical understanding of the visual arts of Maharashtra of 19^th century besides fragmentary records found through biographical books or nostalgia based literary works of institutional history. The editor Suhas Bahulkar has been accumulating such information bits either through books, magazines, newspaper articles and oral sources for the past several years, which enabled him to sail through the data collection phase.  

The current English volume is composed mainly of two sections dedicated to 1. Painters and Sculptors, 2. Applied Artists. Several of the enlisted artists have different roles of writers, art-educators, critics, illustrators etc. other than being artists. Baburao Sadwelkar, Madhav Satwalekar are two examples of such mixed careers as artists and art-administrators. A third section is earmarked to institutions that have played a central role in BS viz., JJ, the two colonial art societies of The Bombay Art Society and The Art Society of India as well as Artist’s Centre. The sectioning allows the reader to easily manoeuvre through the volume with clear alphabetical marking on each page of the first two divisions to search for individual entries or arbitrary discovery too. The institutional role under BS has been richly emphasised but narrowed to the artists from or related to these four institutions discounting other cultural organisations. The crafts department of the JJ remains side-lined here. Similarly, other members of the visual art community viz. art historians, and critics too refrained from the project owing to the lengthiness of the volume.

With administrative shifts in the academia in early 20^th century, promotion of a hybrid style painting foots in with combo-pack of Nude studies and Mural Class^[4] that allegedly led to a revivalist motto. Later the exposure to western art-based movements under Charles Gerrard appear to have initiated the avant-garde in art of Maharashtra. With this new phase and the agency of the Bombay Art Society and Art Society of India the BS has a new centre with partial departure from academia. The Institute of Applied Arts that started in 1935 provided a parallel entry into the mainstream professional/commercial application of art. The section on Applied Artists in the volume and their contributions creates a descriptive timeline of the professional interactions through advertisements beginning with calendar art, book cover illustrations, caricatures, cartoons, ad-campaigns, and multimedia advertising. One can see how the authors (editors) envision the scope of Bombay School not limited to the academia or the city limits but expanded it to dynamic exchanges nationally and internationally. Cumulatively, the term Bombay School is being determined as a rubric of multiple unrelated practices originated or channelised through the JJ academia; the city as economic, political, and industrial centre for consumer culture as well as the film industry, extended to the state of Maharashtra.

The biographies of distinguished artists are descriptive and comprehensive with jargon-free language and have been chosen on five criteria based on the origins and contribution to the discourse of art in Maharashtra. Perhaps the biography format allows to highlight on the many meritorious artists, who otherwise have remained unknown and their work untranslated into the mainstream art historical discourse.  Several enlisted names are in fact new revelations even to the artist community. The anthological literature in general attempts to capture the demography, heritage, education, nature of professional practice, contribution to the field, and aesthetic appreciation of the artists’ works with supplementary achromatic slides. Certain trivia along the biographies allow us to construct a mind-map of the contemporary exchanges ex. Raghunath Dhopeshwarkar was part of the commission of a large mural painted at the Imperial Secretariat, New Delhi; and also, amongst the selected artists to paint murals in the Metro Cinema Hall, Fort an Art Deco building in Mumbai by Metro Goldwyn Meyer^[5].

However, the preface that sets the ground for the exercise of the entire volume carries in translation the typical circumlocutions common to the construct of literary Marathi. Further, the editors maintain a rhythm of sorts where a set of information keeps repeating in back-and-forth manner either as descriptive examples or as sub-titular contents probably in accordance with flow of the description that is explanatory rather than chronological. This allows us to reiterate the historical significance of such instances but fall short to create a clear perception of timelines and sequencing of events in chronology. In terms of the timeline, though the 75-page outline has well defined period breaks, a graphical timeline as a standard practice of history books would have proved a ready reckoner for the vast yet diverse history. 

The section of colour plates curated by Suhas Bahulkar is a meritorious act that provides a comprehensive insight to the pictorial length of Mumbai’s art-world of the past two centuries. Collating such a loaded volume has its own compelling merits and limitations of finding apt and sufficient data through written records, oral annotations, published or unpublished material, newspaper titbits, correspondences stored away from easy notice where an archivist thrives patiently to put the puzzle together. The entire team behind the encyclopaedia has performed the act of putting the jigsaw visual art map of Maharashtra alias Bombay School together in an objective yet engaging manner unlike the academic history archives. This gargantuan record now provides scope for researchers to access the corpus to establish art historical and analytical perspective of the regions’ celebrated yet romanticised past and present it with nuances. Though the translation into English was a relatively easier task, the foundational efforts in collating data for the original Marathi volume has been altogether different, especially when it began from scratch. The translation into a globally accessible language has given an opportunity for the English speaking or non-Marathi speaking art community to explore and engage with the enlisted artists. 

As the only cumulative record of the visual arts of the state, the publishers are urged to formulate a digital repository for enhanced access to all art enthusiasts and researchers. This would allow scope for an ongoing archive that can be updated and include a wider set of practices of individuals.