Jamini Roy
— by Jyotirmoy Datta
(Reading Time: 4 min Approx)
When one looks at the images by some of the early European masters such the Daniels or Solvyns, great though they were, there are little errors that an Indian eye tries not to notice: the wrong way the sari is worn by the ‘Hindoo’ women, or the coconut trees that look like thin and long elephant trunks cut off at the top with fronds that resemble octopuses.
Those images seem to fortify the myth that even at the highest level of art the East is East, and the West is West and the twain shall never meet. But not by what used to be regarded as mere craftsmanship – the catalogs of Indian flora and fauna by the “Company artists”. There are few equals in accuracy of form or coloration in the entire range of such draughtsman ship, from America to Europe, as in the work of these humble art mistris. Whether it’s in the delineation of the dhatura or the raktajaba, sometimes the Calcutta or Patna artist outshone the Veronese, Florentine, or Roman draughtsman of the Renascence in expressing the slippery pistil of the jaba, the Stardust of its pollen, the scientific exactitude of one another, and the inviting spread of those trumpet like petals and then after the inevitable minutes of silence one is bound to arrive at the conclusion that East may be East & West may be West, but it is the same waves, clouds, hills, birds, bamboos, daffodils, bees everywhere and thank the East India Company for proving this before the invention of colour photography.
What Jamini Roy did was to look at the west without any complex at all.
Europeans were never too handsomely treated by an Indian artist before. Remember the comic sahibs in Kalighat pats? On the Angrezi Shikaris to Rajput paintings? Jamini Roy’s Europeans are not giggly objects; they are tall, strong – and handsome.
In the period when Jamini Roy was struggling to eke out a living in Calcutta as a portraitist in the academic style, he indulged in copying works of Western masters. Courted by poet Rabindranath Tagore, not noticed by Mahatma Gandhi, he took his own measure of everything, the Vaishnavas, the Vedantists, the Buddhists; the Christians; the entire caravan of humanity.
