Nandalal Bose

Biography

In 1930, when Mahatma Gandhi was arrested for protesting the British tax on salt, Nandalal Bose cut a linocut: a black figure on a white ground, a man with a staff in his hand striding forward. The print became the best-known image of the non-violence movement.

Bose was born on 3 December 1882 into a middle-class Bengali family at Haveli Kharagpur, in Munger district (now in the state of Bihar). The family’s roots were in Jejur, in Hooghly district in West Bengal. His father, Purna Chandra Bose, worked on the Darbhanga estate. His mother, Khetramoni Devi, made toys and dolls for her son. The boy modelled small figures and later helped decorate the pandals, the temporary pavilions, for the Puja festival.

In 1898, at fifteen, he came to Calcutta and entered the Central Collegiate School. In 1902 he passed his examinations and continued at the same institution; in June 1903 he married Sudhiradevi, the daughter of a family friend. His relatives would not allow him to study art. Moving from college to college changed nothing: in 1905 he enrolled at Presidency College to study commerce. After repeated failures he finally persuaded his family, and he was admitted to the Calcutta School of Art.

There he became a pupil of Abanindranath Tagore, the founder of the “Indian style” of painting. The strongest influence on the young artist was the murals of the Ajanta Caves. He joined an international circle of artists and writers who wanted to revive classical Indian culture; it included Okakura Kakuzō, William Rothenstein, Yokoyama Taikan, Christiana Herringham, Laurence Binyon, and the London sculptors Eric Gill and Jacob Epstein. Gaganendranath Tagore, Ananda Coomaraswamy and the critic Ordhendra Coomar Gangoly recognised his original manner. They also founded the Indian Society of Oriental Art, and Bose was the first recipient of a scholarship the society offered, established in 1907.

In 1921 he became head of Kala Bhavana, the art college of Tagore’s international university at Santiniketan. His students included Benode Behari Mukherjee, Ramkinkar Baij, Beohar Rammanohar Sinha, Kalpathi Ganapathi Subramanyan, Avittathur Ramachandran and Satyajit Ray. His easel works took up Indian mythology, women and village life: “Sati” (1907), “Siva Drinking World Poison”, “Parthasarthi”, “Tiller of the Soil”, “Pounding of Rice”.

For the 1938 Haripura session of the Indian National Congress, the party that led the independence movement, he made a set of seven posters at Gandhi’s request. Jawaharlal Nehru asked him to design the emblems of the state honours, among them the Bharat Ratna and the Padma Shri. Together with his pupil Rammanohar, Bose undertook the decoration of the original handwritten manuscript of the Constitution of India.

I find it telling how little he wrote about himself: in print there remain books on the theory and practice of the craft, “Drishti o srishti” (“Vision and the Creation”), “Shilpa Charcha”, “Rupavali” and “Pictures from the Life of Buddha”.

In 1954 he became the first artist elected a Fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi, India’s national academy of art, and received the Padma Vibhushan. In 1957 the University of Calcutta conferred an honorary D.Litt. on him, and Visva-Bharati University gave him the title “Deshikottama”. In 1965 the Asiatic Society of Bengal awarded him the Tagore Birth Centenary Medal. The National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi holds about seven thousand of his works, among them the 1930 linocut and the Haripura posters. In 1976 the Indian authorities included his works among those of nine artists whose output was declared an art treasure of the nation.

Nandalal Bose died on 16 April 1966 in Santiniketan.