“Hemendranath, quite the master of academic naturalism, succeeded in capturing the sheer palpability of flesh and the illusion of actual physical presence.”
(“A Story of Her Own: Representing Women”, Anuradha Ghosh, Hemendranath Mazumdar, Kolkata: Rajya Charukala Parshad, 2016, p. 52)

Hemendranath Mazumdar’s untitled oil on canvas is a notable painting of Hemendranath’s wet-saree genre, though subtly different from his usual... “Hemendranath, quite the master of academic naturalism, succeeded in capturing the sheer palpability of flesh and the illusion of actual physical presence.”
(“A Story of Her Own: Representing Women”, Anuradha Ghosh, Hemendranath Mazumdar, Kolkata: Rajya Charukala Parshad, 2016, p. 52)

Hemendranath Mazumdar’s untitled oil on canvas is a notable painting of Hemendranath’s wet-saree genre, though subtly different from his usual female figures in wet raiment that we are so familiar with. In most of such paintings the face of the woman (wherever visible) has a downward tilt, with eyes that are either averted or downcast. This attitude and posture perfectly complement the fable of virtuous bashfulness that he creates around his semi-nude figures, incorporating a sociocultural dimension within his portrayal of the Bengali bhadramahila. The woman in this particular painting, however, has an obliquely frontal gaze. She steps out of a waterbody after having finished her bath, and appears to be looking at a point slightly upward- not directly at the viewer- but both her posture and demeanor suggest that she is happily absorbed in the beauty of the moment, and her solitary joy is not infringed upon by the awareness of any possible onlooker/s, thus she is free of self- surveillance. Another version of this work has been titled Tanmoy (The Lost Heart). Both the Bengali title (Tanmoy) and its English counterpart (The Lost Heart) were chosen by the artist himself. Considering the titles closely, it becomes clear that the English title is not the exact translation of the Bengali-”Tanmoy” would be best translated as “The Engrossed”, in the literal sense-thus it would be logical to assume that he was attempting to connect the moment with a narrative of love that colours not only the elements of nature surrounding the woman, but also enlivens her with a visible joie de vivre. In a sense, both the titles are fused in a semantic singularity, as she is indeed engrossed-not only in the beauty of surrounding nature, but also in her own thoughts, brimming with love. It is the losing of her heart that remains the strongest underpinning of the proposed narrative. And it is precisely this point that connects this work to the predilection that we observe in many of Hemendranath’s paintings-that of framing the central solitary woman within a narrative dominated by an absent male-defined by absence, as it were.

“Many of his paintings give the viewers a very real sense of closeness to the painted subject, which, in its turn, empowers the eye to usurp the sensation of touch. It is this tactile experience, of warmth, smoothness, modulations of flesh - communicated visually - that frequently gives his women the illusion of life.”
(“A Story of Her Own: Representing Women”, Anuradha Ghosh, Hemendranath Mazumdar, Kolkata: Rajya Charukala Parshad, 2016, p. 52)

Hemendranath’s answer to what he thought was the Bengal School’s chief shortcoming-avoiding contemporaneity, addressing imagined communities, in a sense-was to root his paintings to the here and now, to his known land, its observed culture and customs. Even when he uses landscape as a backdrop for his solitary, female figures (as in this painting) his intent of place-making is clear and unwavering: he roots his paintings-almost without exception-to his own land, Bengal, and all the features it is known by, both physical and emotional. His landscapes, to a considerable extent, engage in the art of “place-making”- encoding markers relating to the identity of a particular region, both the topographically real and the perceived, a negotiation, as it were, between the text and context. In this particular painting, however, there is another added dimension: the locational evocation and the portrayal of the woman seem to connect to an extra-textual narrative frame, one that was well-known to the educated middle-class of Bengal in his times. It contains clear echoes of a passage in Krishnakanter Will, an 1878 novel of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, and the description of the character named Rohini in the novel (that Hemendranath was much taken by the novel is borne out by the fact that he has another work called Rohini which closely follows the narrative of the novel) . In fact, in his book Chhobir Choshma (edited by Ujjwal Kumar Majumdar) he directly mentions Rohini, while on the context of answering allegations about the “Western”-ness of his paintings:

“…if one of our own artists paints Rohini by the lakeside carrying a vessel full of water, and if his proficient brush can produce the illusion of life in the painting, what are we to call the artwork- Eastern, or Western? Rohini in her black-bordered sari, the end of which covers her head, anklet on feet and water-vessel poised against her waist has hardly any knowledge about the West. Notwithstanding this, if the proponents of ‘Indian Art’ decide to transport her across the oceans, there is really no remedy.”

We can clearly identify how this excerpt perfectly describes the woman in our work. She clearly fits not only the artist’s account, but also the way Bankimchandra himself describes Rohini in the novel. Since this is a work of which other variations exist (we have a black-and-white print of another version of the painting which was published in Volume IV of The Art of Mr H Mazumdar, published by the artist himself, circa 1928-and another version is in watercolour, printed in Hemendranath Mazumdar, a monograph published by Rajya Charukala Parshad, Government of West Bengal), it would be judicious to compare the subtle differences in detail and the new narratival lines that these open up. In this particular painting we observe a variant element which is notable and worth further decoding. Here the woman wears sankha-pola-red and white bangles, the unquestioned markers of a married woman.

I had also come across a photograph of a woman (with the name “Malati” written at the bottom of the photograph, in the artist’s elder brother Jatindranath’s handwriting) while going through the family album of the Mazumdars. The face seemed instantly familiar: it was only later that I realized that it has a recognizable similarity to the characters of some well-known paintings of Hemendranath, especially this particular painting. Malati was a distant relative of Hemendranath, a cousin of one of his maternal uncles. Her wavy hair-especially the style in which she wears it, also the short forehead, and the structure of the face- seems to reappear, with minor variations, in many of Hemendranath’s paintings. Notwithstanding the underline of speculation, I am strongly tempted to connect Malati to some of the artist’s most known works, emboldened, I might add, by Samindranath Majumdar’s conviction (in Chitrashilpi Hemendranath o tar Chhobir Nayika) that she had most definitely been one of Hemendranath’s models.
— Dr. Anuradha Ghosh

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