Nandalal Bose

Nandalal Bose was born in 1882 at Haveli Kharagpur, in what is now Bihar, and moved to Calcutta for school in 1898. He enrolled at Presidency College to study commerce in 1905, then talked his family into letting him go to the School of Art instead. There he became a pupil of Abanindranath Tagore.

The Tagore circle and the murals at Ajanta shaped him early. Sati (1907) and Siva Drinking World Poison belong to that first phase of mythological painting. In 1921 he became principal of Kala Bhavana, the art school of Rabindranath Tagore’s university at Santiniketan.

Two jobs brought his work to people who never entered a gallery. In 1930 he cut a black-and-white linocut of Gandhi walking with a staff, made when Gandhi was arrested over the salt tax. In 1938, at Gandhi’s request, he painted a set of seven posters for the Haripura session of the Indian National Congress. After Independence, Nehru asked him to sketch the emblems for national awards including the Bharat Ratna and the Padma Shri, and with his pupil Beohar Rammanohar Sinha he decorated the manuscript of the Constitution.

In 1954 he became the first artist elected a Fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi. He died at Santiniketan in 1966. In 1976 the government named his work among the national art treasures. The National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi holds about 7,000 of his works.