Page 71 - Eye of the beholder

JAMINI ROY [1887-1972]: PRIMITIVE LANGUAGE REDEFINED
The name of Jamini Roy remains the most significant in the development of modern Indian art, with his compulsive modernist vision of folk art that made him memorable artist of the late colonial era. He was known as the father of folk art renaissance in India who gave an alternative modern Indian identity. In the 1920s the definition of nationhood had shifted from pan India to the local and Jamini Roy’s works were a dynamic and radical expression of the local that was in opposition to the historicism of pan Indian Bengal art movement.
By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the political and cultural climate in Bengal had become charged. As a sensitive, intelligent young man, Jamini Roy responded to the spirit of his time. The message of return to the village struck a strong chord in his conscious, and marked a turning point not only in his professional career but in the development of modernity at this critical juncture. Rejecting the pale, decorative and anatomically unrealistic style of Bengal School that by the 1920s had become sterile and anemic, and finding his quasi realistic Post-Impressionist style mimetic of European modernism, he was searching for his individual visual language that would be soul satisfying artistically. In discovering the rural and folk culture of the district of Bankura, he interfaced with its arts and craft forms that created for Indian modernism a singular trajectory of what has been termed ‘Indian Primitivism’. In the process he became a self confessed pilgrim of pure form throughout his life.
This was made possible by his discovery in 1923, of an essay written by Rabindranath Tagore ‘Tapoban’ (Message of the Forest) in which the words that captured his imagination were, “But there’s this wondrous thing in India, that the fountainhead of the civilization is not in the city, but in the forest.” Equally Gaganendranath Tagore, who invited Jamini Roy to copy a portrait in Tagore’s household proved to be seminal in his shift towards rural culture. Gaganendranath Tagore was an avid collector of Bengali folk objects as scrolls, quilts, dolls and figurines. Jamini Roy immediately made a connection with these art forms that appeared to him as an ‘inspirational storehouse of forms.’ The naive-folk paintings of Sunayani Devi (Gaganendranath sister) also perhaps may have made an impact on his sensibility, bringing back childhood memories of folk artisans in his native village Beliatore, which he later revisited as part of his artistic pilgrimage. These exposures led to the artist finding his voice and in the spirit of a true rebel he marginalized colours from his pictorial space.
He was born at Beliatore, a village in the Bankura district, which had a rich tradition of terracotta sculptures and folk art and he lived here for a number of years. This isolated, idyllic backdrop contributed in Jamini Roy’s search of the life in art. As a child his first encounter with the Santhals left a permanent impression on him. He received his formal training at the Government Art College in Calcutta, where he got rigorous instructions in the European mode of art. He soon became dissatisfied with the limitation of expression and his search for alternative artistic forms began. Roy’s reputation as one of the best portrait painters and his brief but fascinating post-impressionist period did not prevent this search. He found support of his personal views in the paintings of Rabindranath Tagore. And although he belonged to the circle of academic artists’ hostile to Abanindranath Tagore, he remained close to his guru.
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