Important Notice

Jamini Roy was among the pioneering modern Indian artists who were compelled to respond to a call for “rootedness” in art. By the beginning of the 20th century, Abanindranath Tagore began propagating a movement to urge artists to explore indigenous art forms and root themselves in the tradition of Mughal and Rajput painting traditions—India’s lost past. The revivalist Bengal School had begun to gain importance due to his efforts and an almost... Jamini Roy was among the pioneering modern Indian artists who were compelled to respond to a call for “rootedness” in art. By the beginning of the 20th century, Abanindranath Tagore began propagating a movement to urge artists to explore indigenous art forms and root themselves in the tradition of Mughal and Rajput painting traditions—India’s lost past. The revivalist Bengal School had begun to gain importance due to his efforts and an almost unanimous desire by other nationalists to reject western influence. This had a profound impact on Roy in the 1920s, and he came in contact with other artists who wished to create art rooted in “Asianness”.

However Roy soon broke away, realising his need to seek out his own artistic style. He initially expressed an enthusiasm for Kalighat painting, but this was soon replaced with a love for the village patua, or scroll painting. The pat painting depicts heroic tales and legends in highly simplistic pictures, and Roy romanticised the style of the pat through his depictions.

In Roy’s oeuvre, women feature as a leitmotif. This work depicts a gopinee, or village girl. “Jamini Roy’s images of Bengali women, at once voluptuous and demure, displaying the alta-painted hands and feet of domestic duty, have become the most iconic of Roys. With their graceful gestures, they came, in troubled times, to represent familiarity. This inimitable image of the Bengali woman became a universal icon for Calcutta’s middle classes and it was this iconography that fed the nostalgia of the Bengali bhadralok.” (Sona Datta, Urban Patua: The Art of Jamini Roy, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2010, p26)

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