Jamini Roy
Jamini Roy (born April 11, 1887, Beliatore, India—died April 24, 1972, Calcutta [now Kolkata]) was one of the best-known Indian artists of the 20th century. He developed a linear, decorative, colorful art style rooted in Bengali folk traditions, rejecting the European academic style’s emphasis on formalism and realism to create a visual vocabulary that championed indigenous iconography and techniques. Roy’s subject matter included rural life in Bengal, the mythological tales of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the figure of Christ, and portraits of nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi and poet-playwright Rabindranath Tagore.
Early life
Roy was born into a family of landowners in Beliatore village in Bengal’s Bankura district, known for its traditional art forms, especially terra-cotta crafts and folk paintings. His early interest in art was shaped by his exposure to local artisans and tribal life and culture.
At the age of 16 he joined the Government School of Art (now Government College of Art and Craft) in Calcutta (now Kolkata), where he trained in the realist European academic style of painting and interacted with several prominent artists, including Abanindranath Tagore, who spearheaded the nationalist-revivalist Bengal School of Art movement. As a student, Roy took a keen interest in the works of Post-Impressionist painters, including Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, whose influence is evident in Roy’s early work.
An influential Indian art movement of the 20th century, the Bengal School of Art originated in colonial Calcutta as a reaction to European formalism and academic realism promoted by the British in India. Led by Abanindranath Tagore and Ernest Binfield Havell, the movement encouraged artists to draw inspiration from and revive Mughal and Rajput miniatures, the murals of the Ajanta Caves, and other precolonial art forms of the subcontinent. Grounded in swadeshi (“of our own country”) ideals, the movement aimed to forge an independent national aesthetic.
Although Rabindranath Tagore was initially a proponent of the movement and Jamini Roy briefly experimented with its style, they eventually broke away from the Bengal school’s narrow and essentialist view of Indian art and history, which increasingly sought to anchor an idealized Indian identity in outmoded artistic heritage of the past.
Professional career
Moving away from European aesthetics
After graduating from the Government School of Art, Roy worked mainly in oil, painting commissioned portraits and landscapes in the Western classical and Post-Impressionist styles, which brought him popularity and money. By the early 1920s, however, he had shifted away from painting commissioned portraits in the European academic style, perhaps influenced by a wave of nationalism across the country, which included calls from leaders such as Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda to revitalize rural and traditional art forms. Also inspired by Rabindranath Tagore’s championing of indigenous art forms to reflect contemporary reality, Roy eschewed the revivalist thrust of the Bengal school and espoused folk themes and methods.
Early experiments with Kalighat paintings
In the first half of the 1920s Roy briefly experimented with oil paintings that featured soft, translucent washes and finely rendered figures, focusing on the lives of the Santhal (also called Santal) tribe, particularly women, a recurring theme in many of his works. In the mid-1920s he was drawn toward the formal simplicity and confident flowing line work of the pattachitras (scroll paintings) sold in the bazaars near Calcutta’s Kalighat temple and the folk art-inspired paintings of Sunayani Devi, one of India’s first Modernist women artists. He embraced many of the Kalighat pattachitras’ stylistic motifs, including minimalist backgrounds, an economy of colors, and bold central figures with large almond-shaped eyes, producing monochromatic works focused on expressive brushwork. He also borrowed some of the form’s traditional themes, such as mythological scenes centered on the Hindu god Krishna and playful depictions of cats stealing prawns or crayfish. While elements of the Kalighat style remained in Roy’s work, he rejected the urban affectations that he believed had crept into the form.
He started with a different style,
He travelled, so he found his roots.
His rage became a quiet smile
Prolific in its proper fruits.
A people painted what it saw
With eyes of supple innocence.
An urban artist found the law
To make its spirit sing and dance.
Mature folk-inspired style
In the 1930s Roy developed a distinct style rooted in pattachitra of rural Bengal, the terra-cotta relief of his own village, and folk toys. Forgoing oil paints, he began creating works characterized by simple shapes, flat perspective, thick outlines, and a vibrant but limited palette of flat organic tempera colors made from rocks, seeds, and minerals. He also began painting on traditional materials such as handmade paper, woven mats, and cloth. Choosing not to date much of his work, Roy painted a range of recurring themes in his newfound style, including Santhal drummers and archers, Baul singers (religious folk musicians), animals, and religious iconography. Images of women featured prominently in artworks such as Three Pujarins, Bride and Two Companions, and his Mother and Child series. In 1946 he depicted the story of the Hindu epic Ramayana in 17 interconnected paintings, considered his crowning achievement.
In the 1940s he produced a series on the figure of Christ cast in the native primitivistic style he had developed. As the Indian Independence Movement neared its zenith at the time, he painted a remarkable portrait of Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore in the Post-Impressionist style. Roy’s popularity among the Bengali middle class and Europeans reached its peak during the decade, and his paintings were displayed at exhibitions in London and New York.
Seeing himself as a patua (folk scroll painter) rather than an urban artist, Roy spurned the elitism of high art, reproducing many of his artworks with the help of his family and apprentices. He churned out a vast number of paintings that were sold cheaply—a practice that, though steeped in patua tradition, seemed to some critics financially motivated and repetitive.
Awards and recognition
Roy was awarded the Viceroy’s gold medal in 1935 for excellence in art and the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian honor, in 1954. His works were declared national art treasures in 1976 under the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act (1972), making him one of only a handful of Indian artists whose works cannot be exported out of the country.
The restriction is not applicable to works exported before the ban, and Roy’s art is exhibited in museums, institutions, and art galleries across the world, including at the National Gallery of Modern Art and the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.