Among the Santiniketan artists, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Ramkinkar Baij stand out for their experimental range. Benode Behari joined Santiniketan in 1917 and was among the first students of Kala Bhavana from 1919; he resisted received wisdom, avoiding mythological and historical themes with the same independence that kept him from the nationalist mainstream. His sympathies lay with nature, particularly as he had observed it on his travels through Bihar, Bengal and Nepal. His paintings, with their broad, flat brushstrokes and quick calligraphic line, present an objective art built from a selective, interpretive view of reality; his treatment of nature is neither idealised nor sentimental, a vision shaped by his deep interest in Far Eastern painting. Among the Santiniketan artists, he went furthest in absorbing the principles of Far Eastern calligraphic painting, which suited his contemplative, analytical mind.
His own writing is a useful guide to his development. His work holds a tension between nature and tradition, and between decoration and firm structural drawing, in a state of delicate balance: he felt the need to learn from the past while believing in the need for progress. After losing his eyesight following a botched operation, he continued to paint, made collages and kept experimenting; this determination influenced later generations. His work also departed from convention in its treatment of faces — swarthy, elongated, with large noses and thick lips — a departure from both the oval-faced women of the Bengal School and the idealised figures of the academic painter Ravi Varma.
By present-day measures, Ramkinkar Baij is seen as a modernist who made a distinct contribution to both sculpture and painting, and is widely recognised as one of India’s most significant sculptors. In painting, he was among the first to show post-cubist features, and to demonstrate an understanding of their underlying logic. He is often argued to represent a break from the wider Santiniketan approach, largely because of the emphasis he placed on the human figure and, in particular, on Santhal subjects: where Benode Behari and Nandalal Bose treated rural life as part of a larger vision of rural nature, Ramkinkar focused on the human figure itself. His work forms an open-ended record of his daily encounters with the world around him.
Ramkinkar is in many ways a transitional figure, moving between romantic idealisation and a socially engaged art, both continuing and departing from the Santiniketan approach. Eclectic in his sources, he drew on early Indian sculpture, Cubist painting, and Expressionist watercolours and landscapes, bringing an emotional response to his subjects together with a readiness to experiment with material and form. Both Benode Behari and Ramkinkar worked, in their different ways, outside and beyond the Santiniketan school, and their art stands as an expression of a distinctly Indian modernity.
Vinayak Pasricha