Hemendranath Mazumdar, known as Hemen Mazumdar, was born in 1894 in Mymensingh, East Bengal, then part of undivided Bengal. He came from a wealthy landowning family and left school and home to study art in Calcutta. Academic art, introduced under British rule, was challenged by the nationalist Bengal School of painting, led by Abanindranath Tagore and his disciples, who dominated the art scene in the first decade of the twentieth century. In the early 1920s, Indian art was divided three ways: the orientalists of the Bengal School, the academic artists, and avant-garde artists such as Rabindranath Tagore, Amrita Sher-Gil and Jamini Roy. Around 1915, academic artists had been in retreat across India because of the Bengal School's rise. A new generation of naturalists in Bengal — Hemendranath Mazumdar, Atul Bose, Bhabani Chandra Laha and Jogen Seal — reasserted the importance of figurative art. All four were highly accomplished draughtsmen.
Mazumdar enrolled at the Calcutta art school against his father's wishes, then fell out with the authorities there and moved to the privately owned Jubilee Academy. Disillusioned with both schools, he taught himself figure drawing from books obtained in England — reproductions that shaped a generation of colonial-era artists working without access to the originals. He and a group of fellow academic artists set up a circle to answer the Bengal School's dominance. In 1920 the group published an illustrated journal, Indian Academy of Art, to reach the Bengali public, organise exhibitions of academic artists from across the country, and counter the Bengal School's own journal, Rupam. Modestly priced but elegantly produced, Indian Academy of Art covered a wide range of topics, though its underlying purpose was to publicise the work of Mazumdar, Bose and Jamini Roy.
Barred from exhibiting in Calcutta, Bengal's academic artists had to send their work to exhibitions outside the province, which was beyond reach for most of them. Mazumdar's career as a professional painter took off around 1924. He produced a series of subjects centred on women engaged in leisurely activities such as bathing or daydreaming. His particular strength was the back view of the female subject, which let him render the folds of youthful flesh with a hint of muscle and bone beneath. None of these women were adolescent; they were mature and presumably married. Mazumdar's reputation rests chiefly on his paintings of women in la drapé mouillé, the wet-drape technique, rarely shown fully unclothed, with a single item of clothing accentuating the figure rather than concealing it. He was also known for capturing translucent flesh tones through a wet sari.
Around 1926, Mazumdar had his first financial success when a commercial firm bought the reproduction rights to one of his paintings for its annual calendar. By the early 1940s he was known as a painter of partially clothed women, and his large oils in this vein drew the attention of the Maharajas of Cooch Behar, Kotah, Bikaner, Patiala, Kashmir and Mayurbhanj. The Maharaja of Patiala, Sir Bhupinder Singh; the Maharaja of Cooch Behar, Sir Jitendra Narayan; and the Maharaja of Bikaner, Sir Ganga Singh, were his most consistent patrons. Patiala engaged him as court artist for five years, a commission that funded the studio he built in Calcutta.
Mazumdar created a template and a genre of Bengali women that captured the public imagination through its intimacy and immediacy. These were not the impersonal figures taught in art schools but palpable, breathing women. The subject of a rustic woman returning home in a wet sari after bathing let him render the model's figure through her wet clothes. Despite its suggestion of an arrested moment, each work was carefully staged in his Calcutta studio, and Mazumdar used photographs to help fix the pose. He thus invented a new genre of figure painting in India, built on sensuous flesh tones and the soft quality of skin under a semi-transparent garment. The nineteenth-century painter Raja Ravi Varma had treated the same subject earlier, but it was Mazumdar's version that was widely known and imitated — his best-known imitator was Thakur Singh of Punjab.
Mazumdar focused on the sexual appeal of Bengal's lighter-skinned elite women, and wrote verses on some of his paintings celebrating them. It is difficult now to gauge how socially conservative 1920s Bengal actually felt about his art. Widely circulated in Bengali journals, the paintings offered readers a guilty pleasure that classical nudes — a fixture of the same pages since the early twentieth century — did not, because those nudes felt culturally distant. The Bengal School's own mannered, two-dimensional semi-nudes carried a similar distance. Mazumdar's women disturbed precisely because they felt palpable and immediate: an everyday scene of a young woman returning home after her bath. To the puritanical urban middle class, the convincing image of a respectable housewife produced both discomfort and a frisson.
A contemporary critic observed that, at a time when women lived behind purdah, it was daring to represent someone unapproachable in real life. The viewer experienced the thrill of glimpsing a "respectable" housewife, the proverbial girl next door. The artist's silence about the model's identity heightened the mystery around her, and it was this ambiguity that gave the work such a strong appeal to the Bengali middle class.
The female figure in Mazumdar's paintings carries the symbolism of the eternal feminine. Women were his central source of inspiration, rendered in both earthly and sacred registers — a form of eternal Shakti, the force from which everything originates. He gave them an almost sculptural weight, close to the solidity of a Doric column.
Vinayak Pasricha.