The art of war: How artists have chronicled India's conflicts

Indian Express

23-05-2025

'Make Art, Not War,' wrote contemporary artist Subodh Gupta on Instagram earlier this month. Amid escalating tensions between India and Pakistan, Gupta here suggested 'art' — and its aesthetic qualities — as an alternative to 'peace'. But beauty is not all that art is about.
A work of art captures the period of time in which it was made better than almost any other medium, says Kishore Singh, Head, Exhibitions and Publications, DAG. 'Art is able to offer perspectives that reflect social and political issues as well as the artist's own thinking,' he told The Indian Express.
And because art is subjective, the viewers' sensibilities are as important as those of the artist.
'This allows for diverse commentaries to emerge, thereby offering alternative perspectives based on one's own lived experiences — an indulgence not available through any other medium. Without this documentation and its ability to absorb the multipolarities offered by art, society would be in danger of becoming a unipolar world,' Singh says.
Responding to war has been no different for Indian artists. Their visual evocations of the tragedy and triumph of India's wars have created a corpus of artworks that now serve as indispensable documentation. Here's a brief history.
The birth of a nation
India was born in 1947 not as one nation but two. The Partition resulted in the largest exodus in history, displacing as many as 20 million people, and communal violence triggered in its wake left as many as 2 million people dead. This was an event as devastating as any war.
Satish Gujral poignantly captured the loss of life and the idea of home in his Partition series. His figurative works in predominantly sombre shades of black, grey and occasional browns narrated the anguish and despair of those, including himself, forced to leave everything behind. Wrapped in tornado-esque swirls, his figures spoke of the storm that hit their lives.
Gujral began the series nearly a decade after the Partition. He drew from memory but the scars were deep enough to inspire a body of work 'devoted to the idea of violence, loss, and migration in the face of uncertainty and death,' according to Singh.
In the 2007 documentary on the Partition titled The Day India Burned, Gujral had said, 'This experience sunk in me so deep that after Partition when I began to paint without any conscious effort, this human suffering, this brutality of man to man, became my theme.'
Many artistic iterations of conflict revolve around the idea of loss, an emotion captured all too well by Tyeb Mehta in his paintings Falling Bird (2004) and Trussed Bull (1956), the latter being the second most expensive Indian artwork ever sold.
'He did not directly paint his experience of war but depicted it as a loss of power and humanity, expressing its grotesqueness and exposing vulnerabilities,' Singh says.
Soon after Partition, India and Pakistan went to war over Kashmir. This war, which began in 1947 and lasted till the end of 1948, would be the first of many fights the two countries would have over the years.
The sequence of events — the establishment of the piquet on the Bodh Kulan Ganj cliffs, the unfolding of the battle in the Gurais Valley, the subsequent developments in Uri, and the final battle in Zoji La — was recreated in a series of drawings by documentary filmmaker Serbjeet Singh, better known for his paintings of the Himalayas.
These paintings were commissioned by the military itself. 'He was tasked with documenting the first Kashmir war of 1948 and the role of the Indian Army in it by General K S Thimaya as a means of recording history,' DAG's Kishore Singh says. A set of 47 drawings by Serbjeet Singh titled Kashmir War went under the hammer in 2018 at a Bonhams auction.
Decade of two wars
Serbjeet Singh's services were sought once again, this time by then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to document the India-China war of 1962.
Singh was reportedly asked to draw a landscape of the North East Frontier Agency (renamed Arunachal pradesh in 1972) to understand where the Indian army had faltered. Many of Singh's drawings continue to be displayed at the headquarters of the Indian Army in New Delhi.
But it was with the 1965 India-Pakistan war that the significance of art as a medium of documentation received unprecedented state support. Under the Army's 'witness programme', four members of the Bombay Progressive Art Movement — MF Husain, Ram Kumar, Krishen Khanna and Tyeb Mehta — were invited to the war zone in the immediate aftermath of the conflict.
Husain reportedly made quick drawings of what he saw, a few of which were auctioned by Pundole's in 2019.
'To both heal the emotional trauma and to create a visual record, Husain made several drawings of the destruction he witnessed, and recreated visuals of battle stories as recounted by the soldiers. As a token of appreciation for the jawans, he offered to draw portraits of anyone willing to sit for him. Several obliged, and the artist recollects giving away scores of drawings to his models and also brought a few back for himself,' notes the auction house website.
In a previous interview to The Indian Express, Khanna had confessed to painting a distressing image of a soldier who was blown apart inside a tank. When no one bought it, he gave the work to his son.
Mehta, on the other hand, recreated the Dograi Battle on canvas. 'Tyeb once showed me the slide of a painting he had done after this visit,' recalls art historian, critic and curator R Sivakumar. 'Most artists are more humanists than jingoists, and that makes them good interlocutors in times of peace but bad soldiers for the nation in times of war.'
Liberation & loss
The largest body of anti-war paintings emerged from the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, with artists such as Bikash Bhattacharjee, Ganesh Pyne, Somnath Hore, Nikhil Biswas, Nirode Majumdar and Rabin Mondal creating 'unusually bleak paintings, prints and sculptures' as a form of 'societal indictment'.
In his familiar primitivist style, Mondal, for instance, addressed the large-scale displacement caused by the war in his Crossing the Border series. 'It continues to impact us just as strongly as in the 1970s, reflecting the futility, but also the dangers, of borders that separate countries and their people,' DAG's Singh says.
The tragedy of what had unfolded in Bengal inspired artists around the subcontinent. Gulammohammed Sheikh ditched his otherwise vibrant palette to depict the horrors of the violence in a rather grim etching titled Riots (1971). Equally poignant was Bhupen Khakar's Muktibahini Soldier with a Gun painted in 1972 and executed in his quintessential figurative style.
K G Subramanyan's terracotta reliefs bring the perpetrators of violence and their victims into sharp juxtaposition. 'That through the deft manipulation of clay, he gave sensuous embodiment to the aggressor's inhumanity and the victim's vulnerability, makes these works powerfully expressive,' says Sivakumar, recalling how the artist said that such works 'come about only when an outside event is perceived as an assault on one's being'.
Like with darkness, there is light; in despair there is hope. Chittaprosad's Bangladesh War (1971) epitomises this sentiment.
'It celebrates the creation of Bangladesh, replacing the invading Pakistani army with the forces of the Mukti Bahini. The country is represented in the form of a woman bestowing the boons of education, prosperity and wisdom on her citizens. It is a moving homage to the creation of a new identity and must be the most poignant visual tribute — a hymn really — to the birth of a new nation ever painted by any artist,' Singh says.
Scars that stay
The thing about war is that its effects are felt long after the guns go silent. The trauma of violence passed on through generations forms the subject of the practices of many contemporary Indian artists, who may not have witnessed war first-hand or were too young to process the severity of the losses.
In her There was a Home series, Prajakta Potnis superimposes found pieces of wall with peeled wall colour, alluding to the debris of houses in the aftermath of war. This series, which she began in 2024, serves today as a grim reminder of the homes lost in Kashmir in the recent India-Pakistan clashes.
The prolonged effects of war are also captured with nuance by artist Baptist Coelho in his series Bandages-Bullets. He uses the seemingly contrasting objects — both symbols of war — to make a comment on perception. 'In 2015, during my exhibition in Leh, a little girl, upon seeing gauze bandages in an artwork, remarked that they looked like cartridges,' the artist recalls. 'Her words revealed how trauma and conflict shape perception, turning symbols of healing into markers of destruction.'