Note on the Exhibition

by Prof. R. Siva Kumar

Benodebehari Mukherjee was born in Calcutta into a modest middle-class family on 7th February 1904. Sickly, blind in one eye and heavily myopic in the other, and deprived of regular schooling and same-age friends, he grew up as a lonely child in rural surroundings where his literarily inclined doctor brother Banabehari Mukhopadhyay was posted. This led him to develop an abiding love for nature and a deep interest in books and reading.

At 13, he was sent to Rabindranath Tagore's school in Santiniketan, where the educational system was informal enough to accommodate a boy with special needs like him. Rabindranath's use of nature and the arts as vital educational tools nurtured Benodebehari's artistic urge. When Kala Bhavana, the art school at Santiniketan, was established in 1919, he became one of its first students. In Kala Bhavana, he was mentored by Nandalal Bose, the foremost art educator of his times, and he later became, along with Ramkinkar Baij, one of Nandalal's most eminent colleagues.

Benodebehari demonstrated a remarkable individuality of vision from the beginning. He also believed that one's personality was formed early in life. Although his boyhood and youth coincided with the nationalist movement, he stayed away from it; indeed, from all forms of human drama and focused almost exclusively on nature. In Santiniketan, he lived the life of an introspective recluse deeply involved in his work.

However, Nandalal's liberal approach to teaching, exposure to East Asian painting, the ubiquitous presence of nature, and Santiniketan's intellectual atmosphere helped him to mature as an artist. It made him a painter of nature and a pathbreaker in a period dominated by history painting. Using the East Asian format of handscrolls, he transformed landscape painting, usually conceived as scenes of natural beauty detached from the continuity of nature, into a comprehensive engagement with a specific place, Santiniketan.

The present exhibition examines this aspect of his career by presenting Scenes from Santiniketan, Benodebehari's earliest, longest and most comprehensive representation of the local landscape. It further places this important early scroll within the larger context of his intimate engagement with nature as manifested in early Santiniketan through other handscrolls and a mural. This phase of his work continued into the early 1940s.

After this, he shifted from the representation of nature to the representation of figures and the human world. This phase of his work is best represented by two murals, the first depicting life on the campus and the second, painted when India was on the cusp of independence, and ostensibly dealing with the life of the medieval Bhakti saints, is a meditation on the history and destiny of India. Running across three walls and about 80 feet long, it is a work of epic vision, extraordinary intellectual power, and his magnum opus.

In 1948, after India became independent, Benodebehari left Santiniketan after 31 long years to take up the curator's post at the National Museum of Nepal. As Indian artists were beginning to seek a place in the international world of modern art, he stepped back, as it were, into a more medieval space. But this distancing once again helped him to think independently. The two years he spent in Nepal helped him to rethink his views on several fundamental issues—the relation between art and craft, hybridity in visual languages, and the possibility of creating meaningful passages between traditional and modern painting.

After returning to India, Benodebehari travelled to Banaras, and Banasthali in Rajasthan to explore the possibilities of setting up a centre to put his thoughts into practice. At the end of 1951, he settled in Mussoorie and started his Centre for Training in Arts and Crafts in 1952, but it was short-lived. In 1954, he was invited to reorganise the Patna Art College. He accepted the invitation partly because of a desire to see if his ideas could breathe new life into a stagnating institution and partly because he wanted to save himself from financial difficulties. While in Patna, his vision deteriorated, and he became blind after a failed surgery in April 1957. After spending short periods at Dehradun, where his wife worked in a school, and at Banasthali, he finally returned to Santiniketan in 1958, where he stayed till the beginning of 1973.

Blindness did not deter Benodebehari from remaining creative. During this period, besides teaching Art History at Kala Bhavana, he did paper cuts, drawings, prints and even a mural with some assistance from others. A writer on art since the 1940s, he now wrote some remarkable texts, including a history of modern art education in India, two autobiographical pieces and a few longer meditations on art, literature and their values in different cultures.

The 1970s finally brought him recognition as an artist and writer. Satyajit Ray made The Inner Eye—the famous documentary on Benodebehari's work, in 1972; he was conferred with Padma Vibhushan in 1974; the Deshikottama (D.Litt. Honoris causa) by Visva Bharati in 1977; and Rabindra Puraskar, a coveted award for literature in 1980. He left Santiniketan for good in 1973 and moved first to Dehradun and then to Delhi, where his sculptor daughter, Mrinalini Mukherjee, had settled. He died in Delhi on 19th November 1980.

By then, this intensely thoughtful and self-effacingly reticent artist was recognised as a symbol of indomitable spirit and a modern artist to be reckoned with. More importantly, a new generation of Indian artists revisiting the tradition of figuration and narration in Indian art and its affinities in world art recognised him as an exceptional predecessor. And with it, he was born once again posthumously.