1906–1980 · Jugipara, Bankura, Bengal Presidency (now West Bengal)
Ramkinkar Baij
The sculptor of Santiniketan, whose Santhal Family of 1938, modelled in cement and laterite, still stands on the campus. It gave tribal peasants the presence that public sculpture had kept for gods and rulers.
Ramkinkar Baij was born in 1906 in Jugipara, in the town of Bankura, Bengal. In 1925 he joined Kala Bhavana, the art school at Santiniketan, and stayed. He went on to teach there and to head its sculpture department.
From the early 1930s he filled the campus with sculpture. The best known, Santhal Family (1938), is a Santhal family on the move. He modelled the figures in cement and laterite mortar, and it stands on the Santiniketan campus. There is no king, god or patron in it, only people walking. Mill Call, Sujata and Lady with Dog belong with it among his best-known works.
When a grander commission came, the pair of figures called Yaksha and Yakshi for the Reserve Bank of India in New Delhi, begun around 1954 by his own estimate, he carved them in Shivalik sandstone from the Baijnath area of the Kangra valley.
He also painted, and made a portrait bust of Rabindranath Tagore. The original concrete casting, dated 1940, is at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi; a bronze version stands at Balatonfüred in Hungary.
He received the Padma Bhushan in 1970 and was made a Fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi and Desikottama of Visva-Bharati in 1976. He died in Calcutta in 1980.
Notable works
- Santhal Family1938
- Rabindranath Tagore (bust, concrete)1940
- Yaksha and Yakshi1954Reserve Bank of India, New Delhi
- Mill Call
- Sujata