Essay:
Jamini Roy’s Art: Modernity, Politics and Reception
By Debmalya Das
Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India

“Although it is with Matisse that his [Jamini Roy’s] nature of art can be compared, from one perspective, the
diversified richness of his development finds parallel only in Picasso…” (Bishnu Dey)

“Jamini Roy’s neo-folk painting had no valid lore to back itself with, its intentions were apparently confined to
aesthetic parallelism. So it never rose to any degree of authenticity; it never had the earthiness and verve (or the sly
humour) of its close prototypes, whether those of Kalighat or Puri; its linear and formal conventions—the almondshaped
eyes, the dead pan looks, the phlegmatic lines were terribly formulaistic.” (K.G.Subramanyan)

Jamini Roy’s re-imagination of the folk art, his appropriation of pictorial idioms from other cultures and his “strategic” mode of producing paintings are the issues of seminal
importance in the perception of modernity in Indian art. This paper seeks to probe into the diverse responses to the artist, thereby problematizing the notions of modernity, tradition, and the validation of the marginal folk culture in a colonial reality.

The critical reception of Jamini Roy (1887-1972) and his art oscillates between two extreme poles of profound admiration and wholesome disregard, as is apparent from the above quotes. The first group of critics sought to canonize Roy as an artist, who, all through his life, painstakingly tried to define the notion of modernity in the scenario of Indian art from an entirely new dimension, while the later group adhered to their critique of Roy’s formalistic
infertility, stressing his insignificance as an Indian artist of the twentieth century.

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Image:
Mother and Child
Jamini Roy