Miss Ferns and the hidden history of Indian Modernist art

More than 100 years after being drawn by Antonio Xavier Trindade – the masterly portraitist and early Indian faculty member of the Sir JJ School of Art in colonial Bombay – an elegant and consequential nude has debuted into public view.

The 1913 artwork (four others by the same artist are emerging concurrently) is another insistent reminder about an important modernist trajectory in Indian art history, which has been suppressed due to deep-seated – now institutionalised – biases about nationalism and authenticity.

This is an extraordinary legacy hidden in plain sight in Fontainhas, the centrepiece Latinate neighborhood of Panjim, the capital of India’s smallest state. The five “new” artworks are a previously unseen part of the 144-artwork corpus of The Trindade Collection, on permanent display in the headquarters of the Indian delegation of Lisbon-based non-profit Fundação Oriente.

The Rembrandt of the East

Antonio Xavier was born in 1870 on the border of the Portuguese Estado da India and British India (his father was a customs official), but the Trindade family is rooted in Assonora in Bardez, the same modestly proportioned taluka where his world-renowned successors Francis Newton Souza (Saligao) and Vasudeo Gaitonde (Uccassaim) also have deep ancestral connections.

Trindade was meant to be a lawyer, but showed artistic...

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