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Asit Kumar Haldar

Asit K. Haldar (1890—1964) was a major artist who worked across both the Bengal School as well as the Santiniketan environments, due to his affinity with the Tagore family. He is probably best remembered for his delicate wash paintings and illustrations of sacred literary texts, even though he made a large body of abstract works and ventured into cartooning and caricature as well. Although we hear more about the Hindu revivalism of the period he lived through, which informed nascent attitudes of Indian nationalism, ‘Persophilia’ (as Hamid Dabashi would put it) occupied another pan-subcontinental cultural complex whereby older political and emotional contexts of Persian resistance to Arab conquest was transmuted into an allegory of Indian colonial resistance in the face of political overlordship by a foreign rule. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was presented by its translators like Edward FitzGerald as such a document of resistance by Persians against the orthodoxies of Sufism and Arab spiritual hegemony, even though scholars have argued against such essentialization since.