How the West was wowed

The photograph (first left) shows a tall, thin, middle-aged European woman, in a calf-length coat and hat, smiling into the camera through thick glasses. Her left hand holds the right palm of a dark-skinned boy in knee-length shorts, a coat draped over his left arm. His face is in profile as he looks to his left, and his forehead is creased. Behind them appears to be a building occupied by doctors, going by the painted boards behind. The caption reads: "Alice Boner is looking after Ravi Shankar; Zurich, Switzerland, 1931."

"This was on his first trip to Europe with brother Uday Shankar's ballet company. He'd been ill and she'd taken him to see a doctor," says Johannes Beltz, deputy director of Museum Reitberg in Zurich, who has co-curated the exhibition on Alice Boner that opened last week at the National Museum in Delhi, of which this photograph is part.

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Eighty-five years on, the photograph is a window to history, a rare peek into the life of a great man as a young boy. It's also evidence of an important encounter that shaped how classical Indian dance, music, sculpture and painting, were viewed in the West and the way they developed within India.

This was Boner's encounter with Uday Shankar, and through him, with India – records of which make up the bulk of the National Museum show, which includes her own sketches, paintings and sculptures. There are also three ancient stone idols, representative of the reputedly vast collection that this Swiss heiress (her uncle was Charles EL Brown, one of the 'Bs' in ABB, the Swiss multinational) amassed, and which she donated before she died in 1981 to four institutions – Indian Museum, Kolkata; Ethnographic Museum, Zurich; Bharatiya Kala Bhavan at Banaras Hindu University; and Museum Reitberg, which has 588 Indian miniature paintings and 130 sculptures, masks and other objects.

Association with Shankar

Boner, says Beltz, met Shankar senior in Europe sometime in the 1920s and became an admirer of his "Hindu ballet".

"She helped start his career in Europe and the US," he says. "She was his patron, his manager, and being an artist herself, also designed the posters and costumes of the ballet's performances." It was Boner whose patronage allowed Uday Shankar to consider having live music to accompany his ballets. And it is to look for musicians that Shankar, accompanied by Boner, travelled to India in 1935. And so Boner came for the first time to India and visited Varanasi, the city she was to make her home for most of the next four decades of her life and where her ashes were immersed (in the Ganga).

This journey that took them to Ustad Allauddin Khan in Maihar, who accompanied them to Europe, was one of the first encounters of the West with Indian classical dance. At this time, Ravi Shankar came into contact with Allauddin Khan, leading to his decision, some years later, to study the sitar under the latter's tutelage, a decision Boner had a hand in.

While Boner fell apart with Uday Shankar in the late 1930s, she supported other performing arts and artists such as Shanta Rao and Zohra Sehgal.

Among the few, like Stella Kramsrich and Ananda Coomaraswamy, who analysed Indian sculpture and painting for their "form", she tried to understand the iconographic systems in a scientific manner and the geometric principles behind their composition. The West, until then, looked at Indian art as some strange evocations of half-man, half-beasts.

Boner never gave up her Western ways. In all the images of the exhibition, Boner remains as she appears in that 1931 photograph – in skirts or dresses, whether on the terrace of her home in Benaras, or under a pillar at the Ellora caves.

She was ever the outsider, looking in.