Jamini Roy

Biography

In 1929, opening a Calcutta exhibition of Jamini Roy’s work organised by the printmaker Mukul Dey, Alfred Watson, editor of “The Statesman”, said that the artist’s early pieces, mostly small copies of European paintings, had been the exercises of a pupil “never quite at ease with his models”. What he praised was something else: the attempt to find a language of his own and leave a foreign tradition behind.

By then Roy was forty-two, and the attempt had been going on for some eight years.

He was born on 11 April 1887 in the village of Beliatore in the Bankura district of Bengal, into a moderately prosperous Kayastha family. At sixteen he was sent to the Government School of Art in Calcutta, where the vice-principal was Abanindranath Tagore, founder of the Bengal School. Teaching there followed the European academic routine: the nude, oils, portraiture, and in portraiture the young man did well. He took his diploma in 1908. He earned his living as he could: drawing advertisements for shopkeepers, colouring cheap prints, working in a textile-painting workshop and a theatre wardrobe. Then he became a portrait painter for hire.

Two things turned him: the school’s principal, Ernest Havell, with his call to learn from one’s own culture rather than from Europe, and a lecture by Rabindranath Tagore. Around 1918 he began painting village and tribal life in watercolour, sometimes in oils, and between 1921 and 1924 went through a first period of experiment, starting from the Santhal dance. His model was the Kalighat pat, the bazaar painting sold at the Kali temple in Calcutta with its sweeping brushstroke, bought as a talisman. He soon decided that the city pat was no longer the real thing and went to learn from the village patuas. That is how his manner formed: no chiaroscuro, local colour, a sparing, firm line, a frontal eye on a face turned in profile. He made his own paints: lamp black, earth and mineral pigments, tempera with an organic binder, chalk and plant juices instead of factory dyes. He worked a great deal; some twenty thousand works are attributed to him, and that figure, to my mind, cannot be checked. He called himself a patua and held that the ordinary middle-class townsman ought to be art’s patron, though his buyers were mostly the rich.

The first exhibition of his new work was held in 1938 on British India Street in Calcutta. In the 1940s his chief buyers were the Bengali middle class and the Europeans living in the city; in 1946 he was shown in London, in 1953 in New York. As early as 1934 he had received the Viceroy’s gold medal at an all-India exhibition; in the mid-1950s came the Padma Bhushan, and in 1956 he became the second Fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi, the national academy of art. The “Ramayana” of 1946 he painted for Sarada Charan Das on seventeen canvases of 106 by 76 centimetres, in the Kalighat pat technique, with earth, chalk powder and vegetable colours; the story runs from the sage Valmiki to Sita’s trial by fire and returns to the sage’s hermitage. The whole series, with eight more large canvases, remained in the Das house in Calcutta. Among his subjects are Santhal dances, offerings, the gopi milkmaids, cats with their catch: “Dual Cats with One Crayfish” of 1968 is painted in tempera on card in a restrained, almost formal palette.

He lived and worked almost all his life in Calcutta, in the house he built in Ballygunge. Jamini Roy died on 24 April 1972 in Calcutta. In 1976 the Archaeological Survey of India named him among the nine masters whose works are declared art treasures of the country.