If modern Indian art has been the fortunate beneficiary of multiple inheritances, it is also the active vehicle of diverse aesthetic tendencies. As such, it stages a series of transitions and intersections: while it has been nourished by the languages of modernism emanating from the grand centres of Europe, it has also sought to adapt the philosophy and pictorial methodologies of the Indic traditions of art-making. Far from being automatically empowered by their cultural location at the intersection of several civilisational domains and artistic lineages, Indian art today is a result of specific and at times difficult choices made by the artist. And the art of Ramananda Bandyopadhyay is no exception. Stimulated by the visual environment and expressive culture in which he lives in, his art is composed by the spectacles and performances of everyday life.

The artist's art affords us a glimpse of the main directions of post-colonial Indian art, the choices that have been adopted and refined by the artist working in the developing cultural and political context of India since 1947, when the country won its independence from the British Empire. Far from feeding into a generic, instantly recognisable ‘Indian’ art, the distinctive styles and perspectives of Ramananda Bandyopadhyay bear testimony to a kaleidoscopic reality. They offer a considerable range of sensuous and intellectual stimuli where we see an interplay of polarities at various levels, steering between the figurative impulse and the abstractionist desire; between the figure as an entity and the figure as icon; between social commentary and magical fiction. This charts a course between discipline and responsiveness: discipline as embodied by academic training convention and an attention to art-historical lineage; and responsiveness as embodied by his dialogue with the world, the adaption of materials and narratives of art history.

Living in a crowded city, one is often caught up in a world of contradictions-while one absorbs the high energy, thrives in its creative output and lives through a myriad of experiences, its claustrophobic spaces and polluted environment carry out an onslaught on the senses just as its social hypocrisies and corrupt practices benumb the mind. It is from these conundrums that Ramananda Bandyopadhyay’s art offers an escape. In the quiet seclusion of his studio, the artist retreats into another world, an idyllic one, familiar to his childhood days spent in the village. It is a world of myth and magic, of tranquil home environs. It is world conjured up from fragmented memories of a forgotten way of life, of fables and folk tales, village deities and religious rituals, colourful festivals and fairs- when life was slower and had a certain grace. It is a world that is remembered fondly, revisited and recreated by the artist in his paintings.

Ramananda Bandyopadhyay’s art is primarily known for its striking explorations of deep human emotions. Throughout his long and eventful life, his strong fascination with his natural surroundings and the natural world at large played an equally important role in shaping his sensibilities. Reflective of his wide-ranging imagination and sensibility, the artist explores nature and its motifs, drawing heavily from folklore to the ancient Indian epics, the everyday life of the rural folk and the landscape around him in order to understand man’s place in the cosmic cycle of life and to celebrate the beauty of the elements as well as the transformative power of nature. Many of his paintings, perhaps unconsciously, are about conversations. His protagonists whisper gossip and speculation into willing and unwilling ears-be it a person or a bird. He appears to ask, do humans and animals share their responses to the environment and to one another’s presence? His art is a product of observation, an observation of life lived around himself. As a sensitive artist who delights in the play of form and colour, he invests his paintings with the qualities of dignity, love and affection. As a celebrated artist, Ramananda is known for his highly individualistic style of painting. Unlike many other artists of his generation who gravitated towards the styles that were in vogue in Europe, he was fascinated by the plethora of subjects and techniques employed in traditional Indian art.

Born in 1936 in Birbhum, the young Ramananda enjoyed total freedom from his parents. In his house, he told me that his loving mother gave him the permission to scribble and draw on the walls. As ardent followers of Ramkrishna and Rabindranath Tagore, Ramananda’s introduction to allegory and religious symbolism stems from his childhood memories and this engagement with myth served as his instrument of engagement. His parents encouraged him to take up painting at Santiniketan. This early initiation into the arts proved pivotal for the young boy.  His appreciation for Indian art instead of Western modernism was sparked by the ideology espoused by the Bengal Revivalists at the beginning of the 20th century. Led by Abanindranath Tagore, they had turned away from the naturalistic mode of representation taught at the Schools of Art in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay which were established by the British Colonial system, who preferred instead to align their styles with the conventions prevalent in Indian Art such as the flat rendering and delineation of forms. At Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan, the institution established by Rabindranath Tagore-Ramananda found his perceptions being sharpened by the exposure he received to a wide variety of artistic expressions studied under the dynamic and stimulating Nandalal Bose.

As a teacher, Nandalal Bose was always among his students and never above them. As Abanindranath’s leading student whom Rabindranath chose to head Kala Bhavan in 1919, Nandalal’s art developed beyond the ideals of his guru. Nandalal reverted to homespun values in art that marked a shift from the historicism of Abanindranath or the later dark enigmatic evocations of Rabindranath. It is these values that he communicated and which were further developed by his students like Benode Behari Mukherjee, Ramkinker Baij and Ramananda Bandyopadhyay. In Nandalal Bose’s art, there is a lightness and transparency borne of a heady engagement not with the human condition but with the natural world. It lies perhaps in his inclination to restore order and a certain aesthetic rhythmic play to images drawn from the environment. As a teacher, Nandalal showed his students how to confer innate generosity and grace to the subjects of a painting. On close inspection, we find in Ramananda’s art the influence of Nandalal Bose through the elegance of form and compositional structure. On holidays he accompanied his teacher on sketch tours to different villages. These tours opened the young artist’s eyes to the diversity of the Indian landscape. He learnt how earth pigments were made and this would inspire him to use only a handful of earth pigments during his lifetime and abandon oil or acrylic paints. Having stayed beyond his four year course at Santiniketan, Ramananda Bandyopadhyay had the opportunity to serve his teacher and mentor in many ways. From oiling his body to giving him a bath and putting on his clothes when Nandalal had advanced in age to singing songs at dawn with fellow students on his birthday outside his house and sharing sweets, all these memories still hold dear to the artist.

Included in the artist’s vast repertoire are depictions of women from our mundane world. She is shown sometimes seated alone with a bird or two as her companions. Sometimes she is with her husband or fellow women from the family or village gossiping. In other paintings, she is engaged in the ordinary task of combing her hair, tugging at the knots of her thick lustrous tresses. In many paintings we find the woman in the role of the mother-cooking for her child, holding and adoring him or simply putting him to sleep. Or as a maiden looking shyly away from her lover. These are tender moments the artist captures with tremendous sensitivity. He recalls seeing a Santhal woman at Durgapur bus station one day covering herself. On close inspection, to his amazement he saw the woman breastfeeding an abandoned puppy. These moments have moved him greatly and often become the nucleus of many paintings where animals and birds find a prominent position in his oeuvre.

Ramananda’s paintings celebrate the woman in her various forms-as a Hindu goddess who is the embodiment of the sacred feminine or as a folk deity who presides over the affairs of her devotees, or an ordinary woman engaged in everyday activities. They are at the centre of his artistic practice and often they symbolize the seamless continuum of life as they don various roles throughout their lives. In several paintings the artist portrays women as goddesses from the Hindu pantheon who represent the divine in the physical. They are associated with inner strength, prosperity and illustriousness. In his own way, Ramananda treats the figure as a departure from portraiture, a pretext to launch expeditions into the territories of subversion and transformation.  At the heart of his artistic practice, for Ramananda Bandyopadhyay drawing is his most direct and intimate response to the world. For him ink, graphite and pastel are full of endless possibilities where he tries to distil the essence of the subject and capture the life force of a moment frozen in time where his figuration becomes iconic and sensuousness. A meditative silence pervades with elliptical narratives. Brooding men, at times pensive women appear as a portrait of silent conversation assuming various tones: some priestly, others libertine, yet others stirring from trance. Through the expanse of his colour fields, he creates space and defines the contour of the figure. The overall silence of his dramatis personae is deceptive, for they are perfectly capable of speaking in many voices. In so doing, Ramananda Bandyopadhyay exemplifies the manner in which the modern Indian artist has negotiated between the realms of necessity and freedom, in the realisation of his forms.

- Vinayak Pasricha