Modern Indian art is the beneficiary of multiple inheritances, and it carries diverse aesthetic tendencies within it. It stages a series of transitions and intersections: nourished by the languages of modernism emanating from Europe, it has also adapted the philosophy and methods of Indic traditions of art-making. Indian art today is not automatically enriched by its position at the intersection of these traditions; it results from specific, often difficult choices made by the artist. The art of Ramananda Bandyopadhyay is no exception. Stimulated by the visual environment and expressive culture in which he lives, his art is composed of the spectacles and performances of everyday life.
The artist's work offers a glimpse of the main directions of post-colonial Indian art, the choices adopted and refined by artists working in the developing cultural and political context of India since 1947, when the country won 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 varied reality. They offer a considerable range of sensuous and intellectual stimuli, with an interplay of polarities at various levels: 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 embodied by academic training and attention to art-historical lineage, responsiveness embodied by his dialogue with the world and his adaptation of materials and narratives from art history.
Living in a crowded city is often a study in contradictions: one absorbs its energy, thrives on its creative output and lives through a myriad of experiences, yet its claustrophobic spaces and polluted environment work on the senses just as its social hypocrisies and corrupt practices weigh on the mind. It is from these conditions that Ramananda Bandyopadhyay’s art offers an escape. In the quiet of his studio, he retreats into another world, an idyllic one, familiar from his childhood in the village. It is a world of myth and magic, of tranquil home surroundings, conjured from fragmented memories of a way of life now gone: 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 he returns to and recreates in his paintings.
Ramananda Bandyopadhyay's art is known for its exploration of human emotion. Over his long career, his fascination with his natural surroundings has shaped his sensibilities as much as anything else. Reflective of his wide-ranging imagination, he explores nature and its motifs, drawing on folklore, the ancient Indian epics, the everyday life of rural Bengal and the landscape around him, to understand a person's place in the cycle of life and to mark the transformative power of nature. Many of his paintings, perhaps unconsciously, are about conversation: his figures whisper gossip and speculation into willing and unwilling ears, be it a person or a bird. He appears to ask whether humans and animals share their responses to the environment and to one another's presence. His art is a product of observation, of life lived around him. As an artist who delights in the play of form and colour, he invests his paintings with dignity, love and affection. Ramananda is known for a highly individual style of painting. Unlike many artists of his generation who gravitated towards the styles in vogue in Europe, he was drawn to the range of subjects and techniques found in traditional Indian art.
Born in 1936 in Birbhum, Ramananda enjoyed a free and easy childhood. As a boy, his mother allowed him to scribble and draw on the walls of their home. His family were followers of Ramkrishna and Rabindranath Tagore, and his introduction to allegory and religious symbolism grew out of childhood memories, becoming a lasting engagement with myth. His parents encouraged him to take up painting at Santiniketan, an early initiation that proved pivotal. His preference for Indian art over Western modernism was shaped by the ideology of the Bengal Revivalists at the start of the 20th century. Led by Abanindranath Tagore, they turned away from the naturalistic mode of representation taught at the Schools of Art in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, established under British rule, and aligned their styles instead with the conventions of Indian art, such as flat rendering and the delineation of form. At Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan — the institution established by Rabindranath Tagore — Ramananda's perceptions were sharpened by exposure to a wide variety of artistic expression, studied under Nandalal Bose.
As a teacher, Nandalal Bose worked among his students rather than above them. Abanindranath's leading student, chosen by Rabindranath to head Kala Bhavan in 1919, Nandalal's own art developed beyond his guru's ideals. He turned to homespun values that marked a shift from Abanindranath's historicism and Rabindranath's later, darker evocations, and these values were carried further by his students, among them Benode Behari Mukherjee, Ramkinker Baij and Ramananda Bandyopadhyay. Nandalal Bose's art has a lightness and transparency that comes from an engagement not with the human condition but with the natural world, and from his inclination to bring order and rhythm to images drawn from the environment. As a teacher, he showed his students how to give a painting's subjects generosity and grace. On close inspection, Nandalal Bose's influence is evident in Ramananda's art, in its elegance of form and compositional structure. On holidays, Ramananda accompanied his teacher on sketch tours to villages, which opened his eyes to the diversity of the Indian landscape. He learnt how earth pigments were made, which led him to use only a handful of earth pigments throughout his career and to set aside oil and acrylic paints. Having stayed on beyond his four-year course at Santiniketan, Ramananda had the opportunity to serve his teacher in many ways — from oiling him and helping him bathe and dress as Nandalal aged, to singing at dawn outside his house on his birthday and sharing sweets with fellow students. These memories remain dear to him.
Among the artist's wide-ranging body of work are depictions of women from everyday life. She is shown sometimes seated alone with a bird or two for company, sometimes with her husband or with other women from the family or village, gossiping. In other paintings she is engaged in the ordinary task of combing her hair, working through the knots of her thick tresses. In many paintings the woman appears as mother — cooking for her child, holding and adoring him, or putting him to sleep — or as a young woman looking shyly away from her lover. These are tender moments the artist captures with care. He recalls seeing a Santhal woman at Durgapur bus station one day, covering herself; on closer inspection he saw she was breastfeeding an abandoned puppy. Moments like this have stayed with him and often become the starting point for paintings in which animals and birds hold a prominent place.
Ramananda's paintings depict women in various forms: as a Hindu goddess embodying the sacred feminine, as a folk deity presiding over her devotees, or as an ordinary woman engaged in everyday activities. Women are at the centre of his practice, and often symbolise the continuum of life as they take on different roles across it. In several paintings he portrays women as goddesses from the Hindu pantheon, associated with inner strength and prosperity. In his own way, Ramananda treats the figure as a departure from portraiture, a way into subversion and transformation. At the heart of his practice, drawing is his most direct and intimate response to the world. For him, ink, graphite and pastel hold endless possibilities: he tries to distil the essence of a subject and capture a moment frozen in time, where his figures take on an emblematic, sensuous quality. A meditative silence pervades his work, carrying elliptical narratives. Brooding men and pensive women appear as a study in silent conversation, in tones that shift from priestly to libertine to trance-like. Through the expanse of his colour fields, he creates space and defines the contour of the figure. The stillness of his figures is deceptive, for they are capable of speaking in many voices. In this, Ramananda Bandyopadhyay shows how the modern Indian artist has negotiated between necessity and freedom in the realisation of his forms.
- Vinayak Pasricha