The modern period in Indian art coincides with the prologue to agitation for India's Independence. In the visual arts the rise of national sentiment precipitated the search for a quintessentially Indian artistic expression. Jamini Roy pulled himself away from the prevailing styles of the day in search of a pictorial idiom radically different from contemporary solutions, yet which had an indigenous basis. He did this by harnessing his aesthetic concerns to the folk arts of Bengal.
Alignment with the visual culture of the rural masses provided a site for locating identity, thus tying the urban environment of the art world with that of rural Bengal and fulfilling the contemporary demand for a united image of Indian tradition. This book attempts to consider the total (visual and psychological) effect of Jamini Roy's paintings, drawing out the implications of "picturing" the poor in the vision of a spiritual pre-industrial India, much as was used by Gandhi in his formulation of an Indian utopian vision.
The book explores the transformation of Bengal folk art in the paintings of Jamini Roy and considers how the folk idiom met his did for aesthetic independence. If Jamini Roy defined himself by forging a new trajectory of modern art in India, one is required to ask: what is modern about his art and what is Indian about it? The questions of self-definition and identity thus form a continuous theme throughout this work.
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