Important Notice

Hemendranath Majumdar’s artistic development happened at a time when the Bengal School’s Orientalist ideology, defined by Abanindranath Tagore, was beginning to lose its urgency and relevance for the emerging modernists of the 1920s and ’30s. For Majumdar, who hailed from Calcutta, naturalism was marked by a focus on immediacy and on quotidian narratives—a stark difference from the previous generation’s fixedness on historicism and grand... Hemendranath Majumdar’s artistic development happened at a time when the Bengal School’s Orientalist ideology, defined by Abanindranath Tagore, was beginning to lose its urgency and relevance for the emerging modernists of the 1920s and ’30s. For Majumdar, who hailed from Calcutta, naturalism was marked by a focus on immediacy and on quotidian narratives—a stark difference from the previous generation’s fixedness on historicism and grand narratives.

Majumdar’s audacity to paint in European academic realism garnered the attention of the Maharajas of Jaipur, Kashmir, Bikaner, Patiala, Cooch Bihar and other princely states. He was commissioned as a state artist for five years by Sir Bhupindranath Singh, the Maharaja of Patiala between 1891 and 1938.

Majumdar’s signature “drenched-sari” women first appeared in the painting Palli Pran (The Soul of the Village), which was shown at the first exhibition of the Society of Fine Arts in 1921 and declared a huge success. The current work is from the same year, and draws on the romanticism of the freshly-bathed village girl returning home or on her way to work, pitcher balanced on her waist. Majumdar’s command over light and shadow is remarkable. A thin shaft of light emanating from the distance only partially lights the girl’s face, shrouding her in mystery, while a second source, far more diffused, highlights the contours of her shoulder and the pitcher. His preference for “figures à dos”, of the cloth clinging to the girl’s curvaceous form, evokes a sense of latent eroticism.

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