Benode Behari Mukherjee

Benode Behari Mukherjee was born in 1904 in Behala, south of Calcutta, with very poor sight: myopic in one eye and blind in the other. In 1919 he joined Kala Bhavana, the art school at Santiniketan, where he studied under Nandalal Bose and became a friend of the sculptor Ramkinkar Baij. He began teaching there in 1925. Among his students were K. G. Subramanyan, Somnath Hore and Satyajit Ray.

He was one of the first modern Indian artists to take up the mural. His largest, painted in 1947 on the walls of Hindi Bhavan at Santiniketan with his wife Leela, follows the lives of medieval Indian saints and was painted without cartoons. The scholar R. Siva Kumar counts it among the greatest achievements of contemporary Indian painting, and finds in it Giotto, the Japanese painter Tawaraya Sōtatsu, Ajanta and Mamallapuram at once.

That range runs through all his work. He spent some months in Japan in 1937 and 1938, studied Chinese and Japanese wash, borrowed the faceted planes of Cubism to solve problems of space, and kept looking at Mughal and Rajput painting.

In 1949 he left for Kathmandu to work at the Nepal Government Museum, and later started an art school in Mussoorie that money troubles closed. He returned to Kala Bhavana in 1958 and later became its principal. A cataract operation in 1956 failed and left him blind; he went on painting and making murals. Ray’s documentary about him, The Inner Eye, appeared in 1972. He received the Padma Vibhushan in 1974 and died in 1980.