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Lot Essay
Jamini Roy was born in 1887 in Beliatore, a village in the Bankura district of West Bengal, a region rich with folk art traditions. At the age of sixteen, he travelled to Calcutta, where he studied European painting at the Government School of Art, and unsurprisingly, the landscapes and portraits from the earliest period of his career had a distinctly Impressionistic feel. In the 1920s, however, the artist turned away from his formal Western training and began to look back towards the art of his village and to Kalighat and other Bengali folk paintings for inspiration. Discovering that he was far more drawn to the bright color palette and bold lines of bazaar pata paintings, Roy developed a unique visual style that reinterpreted local traditions through a modernist lens.
However, “Roy’s artistic evolution was not strictly linear – neither in stylistic inspiration nor in thematic choices. Onto the Kalighat Santal women and alipana [sic] abstractions, Roy appended themes from Hindu myth, particularly of Krishna and the Ramayana. While Calcutta celebrated Shivite deities [...] rural Bengal was heavily Vaishnavite represented by a plethora of Krishna and Rama images, the human avatars of Vishnu.” Works like the present lot, which are based on episodes from epics like the Ramayana, are thus “a syncretic amalgam of various artistic traditions. The figures derive from Bengal patas; the strong outline, occasionally doubled, goes back to Roy’s Kalighat period [...] and carefully enclosed areas of color a well as dots and dashes of detail closely resemble patas from the adjoining state of Orissa” (M. Sirhandi, Jamini Roy, Bengali Artist of Modern India, Gainsville, 1997, p. 7).
Always seeking to learn more about art, particularly about the indigenous art forms of India other than those he grew up with, Roy’s studio in Calcutta soon became a bustling salon where scholars and collectors, both local and international, came to discuss art. This led both to an unusually diverse, global collector base for the artist, and opportunities to engage and collaborate with various talented artisans across the country. One such collaboration was with a group of weavers and embroiderers in Kashmir, who created a set of textiles based on Roy’s paintings under the artist’s close supervision.
The present lot, from this unique series of works, illustrates one of the most compelling episodes from the Ramayana – the abduction of Sita or Sita Haran. During the thirteenth year of Ram, Sita and Lakshman’s exile in the forest, Sita saw a beautiful golden deer run past their hut. Mystified by the animal’s beauty, she asked Ram to find it for her. Upon her insistence, Ram ventured deep into the forest leaving his brother Lakshman to protect Sita. After some time, Sita heard Ram call for help, and, concerned for the safety of her husband, sent Lakshman to help him. Unbeknownst to them, the deer was actually the demon Marich who had been sent to the forest by Ravan, King of Lanka, as the opening act of his plot to kidnap Sita, and the cry for help was part of its trick. Before leaving Sita to valiantly rescue his brother, Lakshman drew a powerful protective line or lakshman rekha, at the threshold of the hut. As long as Sita stayed within the hut, she would be safe from intruders. This was the moment Ravan was waiting for. Sita had been left unattended and there was nothing in his way except a line on the ground. Disguised as a mendicant asking for alms, Ravan approached the hut and persuaded Sita to cross the lakshman rekha and put some food in his bowl. As soon as she crossed, Ravan revealed himself and abducted her, prompting the long battle which drives the action of the epic.
In the present lot, Roy depicts Ravan as a mendicant with his bowl approaching Sita as she sits in the hut behind the three bold lines of the lakshman rekha. The figures engage the viewer with their direct gazes, characteristic of Roy’s Kalighat inspired idiom, and the scene is bordered with the alpona like patterns, typical of his work. The stage-like setting promotes the sense of anticipation that the characters inspire, with Sita still occupying the interior space of the hut and Ravan waiting outside surrounded by various species of flora and fauna. The bird perched on the hut, however, foreshadows the action to come as a likely reference to the vulture Jatayu, who sacrificed his life trying to free Sita from Ravan’s clutches as he whisked her away.
This large yet intricate textile was acquired from the artist’s studio by one of his frequent visitors, the American photographer Ewing Krainin, a few years after it was created. Krainin, whose work has been exhibited at institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, New York, spent a lot of time travelling across India in the 1940s and 50s, documenting its people and places, and shooting covers for magazines like Holiday. After retiring the following decade, Krainin moved to Hawai’i and opened an eponymous gallery in Waikiki that showed the work of several Indian artists including Roy, B. Vithal and B. Prabha. Unseen in public since the 1960s, the present lot adds a new dimension to the scholarship on Jamini Roy and the profoundly syncretic nature of his practice.
However, “Roy’s artistic evolution was not strictly linear – neither in stylistic inspiration nor in thematic choices. Onto the Kalighat Santal women and alipana [sic] abstractions, Roy appended themes from Hindu myth, particularly of Krishna and the Ramayana. While Calcutta celebrated Shivite deities [...] rural Bengal was heavily Vaishnavite represented by a plethora of Krishna and Rama images, the human avatars of Vishnu.” Works like the present lot, which are based on episodes from epics like the Ramayana, are thus “a syncretic amalgam of various artistic traditions. The figures derive from Bengal patas; the strong outline, occasionally doubled, goes back to Roy’s Kalighat period [...] and carefully enclosed areas of color a well as dots and dashes of detail closely resemble patas from the adjoining state of Orissa” (M. Sirhandi, Jamini Roy, Bengali Artist of Modern India, Gainsville, 1997, p. 7).
Always seeking to learn more about art, particularly about the indigenous art forms of India other than those he grew up with, Roy’s studio in Calcutta soon became a bustling salon where scholars and collectors, both local and international, came to discuss art. This led both to an unusually diverse, global collector base for the artist, and opportunities to engage and collaborate with various talented artisans across the country. One such collaboration was with a group of weavers and embroiderers in Kashmir, who created a set of textiles based on Roy’s paintings under the artist’s close supervision.
The present lot, from this unique series of works, illustrates one of the most compelling episodes from the Ramayana – the abduction of Sita or Sita Haran. During the thirteenth year of Ram, Sita and Lakshman’s exile in the forest, Sita saw a beautiful golden deer run past their hut. Mystified by the animal’s beauty, she asked Ram to find it for her. Upon her insistence, Ram ventured deep into the forest leaving his brother Lakshman to protect Sita. After some time, Sita heard Ram call for help, and, concerned for the safety of her husband, sent Lakshman to help him. Unbeknownst to them, the deer was actually the demon Marich who had been sent to the forest by Ravan, King of Lanka, as the opening act of his plot to kidnap Sita, and the cry for help was part of its trick. Before leaving Sita to valiantly rescue his brother, Lakshman drew a powerful protective line or lakshman rekha, at the threshold of the hut. As long as Sita stayed within the hut, she would be safe from intruders. This was the moment Ravan was waiting for. Sita had been left unattended and there was nothing in his way except a line on the ground. Disguised as a mendicant asking for alms, Ravan approached the hut and persuaded Sita to cross the lakshman rekha and put some food in his bowl. As soon as she crossed, Ravan revealed himself and abducted her, prompting the long battle which drives the action of the epic.
In the present lot, Roy depicts Ravan as a mendicant with his bowl approaching Sita as she sits in the hut behind the three bold lines of the lakshman rekha. The figures engage the viewer with their direct gazes, characteristic of Roy’s Kalighat inspired idiom, and the scene is bordered with the alpona like patterns, typical of his work. The stage-like setting promotes the sense of anticipation that the characters inspire, with Sita still occupying the interior space of the hut and Ravan waiting outside surrounded by various species of flora and fauna. The bird perched on the hut, however, foreshadows the action to come as a likely reference to the vulture Jatayu, who sacrificed his life trying to free Sita from Ravan’s clutches as he whisked her away.
This large yet intricate textile was acquired from the artist’s studio by one of his frequent visitors, the American photographer Ewing Krainin, a few years after it was created. Krainin, whose work has been exhibited at institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, New York, spent a lot of time travelling across India in the 1940s and 50s, documenting its people and places, and shooting covers for magazines like Holiday. After retiring the following decade, Krainin moved to Hawai’i and opened an eponymous gallery in Waikiki that showed the work of several Indian artists including Roy, B. Vithal and B. Prabha. Unseen in public since the 1960s, the present lot adds a new dimension to the scholarship on Jamini Roy and the profoundly syncretic nature of his practice.