Songs of the Soil by Mapin Publishing

SONGS OF THE SOIL

MODERNIST MELODY

ART OF MANOJ DUTTA

Manasij Majumdar

First published in India in 2020 by Sanchit Art Publications (a division of Sanchit Art) in association with Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd

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for Samita

FOREWORD

One day in 1965, when I was at Dhakuria Sahid Nagar, a young boy came to our house to meet me. He introduced himself as Manoj Dutta. He was full of eager enthusiasm and exploratory curiosity. He showed me a few photographs of his paintings. I found them well-executed and was surprised to know that he had no formal training in art. I felt that the boy had enough talent to be an artist.

Time has proved that I was not wrong in my expectation. Today, Manoj has established himself as one of the most eminent artists of Bengal and has exhibited his works not only in India but also in various international exhibitions in Japan, South Korea, Holland, USA, Dubai, Dhaka, Italy, China and other places. He has participated in a number of national exhibitions of high repute and has received numerous awards.

It is amazing that Manoj has had no institutional training in fine art. However, he has overcome all obstacles through his indomitable will to pursue a career in the art of painting. He is a hardworking and intelligent person, who finally did become a ‘self-made’ artist. I have nothing but praise for Manoj; he is a role model for any aspiring young person who wants to pursue a career based on their inner compulsion.

As an artist, Manoj is a product of his cultural environment. I must say he has tried to understand the visual images of his own land and culture, and cultivated new and personal imageries of simple objects—people, flowers, flowers in a vase, and many other everyday mundane things we see around us. He executes them skilfully, with artistic grace and a style of his own, in aesthetically charming colours. My favourites are quite a few of his work, all examples of simple, spontaneous and imaginative executions. I am sure art-loving folks who appreciate the works of Manoj will love to read this book.

I will mention once again that Manoj is an artist of great determination—that is what has made him successful. I am happy that Sanchit Art Gallery has published this book of artworks by Manoj Dutta, written by the eminent art writer and scholar, Shri Manasij Majumdar. I congratulate Manoj and wish him all the best.

Jogen Chowdhury November 25, 2019

PREFACE

Should personal likes and dislikes prejudice an art critic’s evaluation of an artist’s works? A very senior artist and art-writer has observed that it invariably does. He has spoken disapprovingly of the art critic’s personal preferences while discussing, in general, the practice of art criticism as seen in India.

Manoj Dutta has been one of my favourite artists since the early eighties. And despite my regular appreciative exposure to a wide range of contemporary avant-garde art in India and abroad, I have not stopped liking Manoj Dutta’s paintings and drawings, his pastels and temperas, which look spontaneously home-grown yet modernist all at once.

Let us reframe the question raised above: Can a critic’s critical preferences and personal likes ever be poles apart? To put it more simply, can a critic or connoisseur personally dislike a work of art that they critically judge a masterpiece? T.S. Eliot said, “Poetry communicates before it is understood.” Similarly, the evaluative response to any artwork happens before the viewer—if they are a critic—can explain why they like or dislike it. The process of evaluation does not happen the other way round.

Such evaluation is primarily personal and may, therefore, vary from individual to individual. Where the critic is concerned, this response is educated and well-informed, backed by an acquired taste and extensive artwatching experience. Nevertheless, the first impression is instinctual and rarely fails to touch an evaluative chord in the individual.

I have written books on artists such as Sakti Burman, Bikash Bhattacharjee and Sunil Das. In each case, my personal impressions of their art, unfolding through phases over the decades since I started watching their works in group or solo shows, were very much positive. But I discovered only later what those positive impressions had meant while writing the books.

There is a special reason why I raise this contentious issue of personal like and dislike as against the supposedly clinically pure critical judgement projected as the ideal stuff of art-writing. When I first came to know Manoj Dutta, he was a struggling painter in his early twenties, yet I was already considerably impressed by those of his works I had seen till then. I didn’t know that he was a school drop-out, nor did I care to know whether he had any academic training in painting. I admired his paintings and drawings. Impressed by his single-minded dedication to art, I was sure that he would be an artist of reputation in due course.

Moreover, I was also impressed by the fact that the simplicity of his art stemmed straight from his innate simplicity. Though he befriended me—at the time an established art critic writing for the Ananda Bazar group publications—I don’t remember having written a single line on him on any occasion. Most probably because I had never reviewed any show that featured his works and he had never held a solo show in Kolkata at that point

of time. Much later, I contributed a short piece for a folder, modestly printed, when he had his first solo show in Delhi. By that time, he had become—to my great happiness—quite well-known in the art circuit of Kolkata and beyond. Gradually, his works travelled far and wide, even abroad. They were admired and collected by art lovers in India and by foreigners who, I suppose, appreciated in his art a lucid unalloyed expression of something very much native to the Indian soil.

Manoj Dutta’s art delights, entertains, intrigues, stimulates and creates visual impact—often without any cerebral mediation. Not that one cannot equally appreciate contemporary art, which is often intricately contrived and always cerebrally engaging. However, I would like to highlight that one doesn’t have to dislike art in its traditional mould to appreciate works embodying values and concepts dismissively reactive to tradition. Manoj Dutta is traditional in the sense that he conceives his imagery primarily in terms of visual meaning formation.

Every work of art is an artefact—either intangible, like a poem; or tangible, like a piece of sculpture. The quality of a work’s artefactuality depends on the quality of the artist’s creative handling of skill, conceptual framework, subject, medium and everything else that go into its making, each according to its specific need.

This is what I have kept in view while writing this book on the art of Manoj Dutta. I have found his simplicity neither contrived nor straightway simple. Moreover, what he cherishes about his art is its Indianness, its being rooted in native traditions, and indeed, his works often look inalienably Indian. That does not mean, of course, he is doing Indian art with recycled values of traditional art. And though what he does is not folk painting, he owes a great deal to the art of local folk traditions.

Unfortunately, I could not cover every aspect of Manoj Dutta’s art. When in the mood, he is a prolific painter, producing works in tempera, pastel and pen-and-ink, displaying a wide range of diversity in idea, execution and stylistic format, most of which are now in mostly unapproachable private collections, scattered all over India and abroad. I have explored only the major trends of his art as evident in his works till date—available in the accessible collections in Kolkata and Delhi, kept in the artist’s possession, or preserved in good photographic images.

The first name in my acknowledgements is Mr Sunil Joshan of Sanchit Art, without whose interest this book wouldn’t have been possible. The other two names are, of course, Manoj Dutta and his wife, Krishna Dutta, for having reposed their faith in my critical sensibility and judgement. Lastly, a special thank you to Ms Sandhya Sen for having done a thorough editorial checking of my text.

Manasij Majumdar

In the Schools of World and Nature

Manoj Dutta belongs to the generation of artists who launched their creative career around the late 1970s. The new trends of Bengal art that had emerged in the works of the artists of the sixties continued to grow from strength to strength through the seventies and eighties. Many of the sixties’ artists became well-known within India and had a major influence on the artists of the following decades. While the senior artists had no consciously set agenda, they generally avoided two pitfalls noticed in the practice of earlier generations. First, they neither consciously sought any aggressive modernist ‘disorientation’ of their art, nor contrived an Indian look for their modernism. Second, they took world art as their heritage and freely drew upon both indigenous and western resources to forge their

personal idiom. Many of them revitalised figurative idiom with fresh formal and expressional content, which was often rooted in their oblique personal response to the realities of their times.

The upcoming artists of the seventies and after were very close to this tenor of art practice, and Manoj was no exception. Yet, Manoj stands apart from the rest of the major names of his generation because of certain basic features exclusive to his art. His unmediated, non-intellectual approach marks his art—both in concept and practice—with a remarkable simplicity that verges on the naïve. This simplicity is neither studied nor derivative. Despite his passionate admiration for folk and tribal art—of which he has at home a sizeable collection, picked up and preserved with love and care—Manoj

Teenage Painter

does not make folk art or recycle any art form of folk tradition. His artistic idiom is forged under the pressure of a true modernist impulse, that of expressing the artist’s inmost individual identity.

However, the identity in Manoj’s art is not a conscious stylistic construct; its transparent simplicity seeks and finds an expression that comes spontaneously to his brush. This has been possible because of another important fact about his becoming an artist—the second major reason, one might say, why, he stands out among his contemporaries on the Bengal art scene. Manoj is not academically trained, and this has placed him under the category of artists called “self-taught, a label that has stuck to him as a stigma—rather than as a distinction—to diverse disadvantages. This chapter will gradually reveal why Manoj, even though he is a self-taught artist, does not exactly fit into the category. His lack of any formal training has earned him the privilege of expressing himself freely, unhindered by any set notions of style and technique.

Manoj was born in 1956 in East Pakistan into a large joint family that owned extensive landed property in Mymensingh, one of the most prosperous and culturally advanced districts of undivided Bengal. After the Partition, despite the mass exodus of the Hindu minority, they stayed back a few more years, as many other land-owning families did, expecting some income to proceed from the sales of their properties. Ultimately, they were forced to leave in 1957, due to the growing threat to both life and property.

In the big, strange city of Calcutta, they were treated as refugees. They rented rooms in a tenement

neighbourhood for the extended family of 16, headed by Manoj’s father, the sole earning member as an employee of the Indian Railways. Later, the family moved to a modest dwelling in Santoshpur, a little further east of Jadavpur. Manoj’s father built this house on a piece of land received from the government under the Refugee Rehabilitation Scheme. The neighbourhood, then located in the midst of unspoilt rural greens, was still inhabited by simple village folks but was fast becoming a part of Calcutta’s eastern-most suburbia.

As a little boy, Manoj could breathe free, away from the congested city centre. Plenty of open spaces, ponds and lake-like large waterbodies, trees and shrubberies kept him outdoors, leisurely rambling around most of his waking hours every day. He loved to watch rural people from peddlers to potters and from tramps to tradesmen—go about their work. Manoj enjoyed himself best out of doors exploring life and nature. However, this enjoyment could only be at the expense of his pursuit of studies, which would require him to stay shut at home or school, allowing him a very small pittance of free time. Manoj’s parents were increasingly worried that their school-going son—the eldest in the family— might drop out of school. They spared no efforts to ensure his regular attendance at school, so that he would at least be able to earn his daily bread when he grew up.

Manoj’s first impulse to draw and paint came from his fascinating experience of watching the works of village patuas (folk painters) and makers of clay images. Not long after, he began to display his talent for drawing and sketching, most of which he did during his daily strolls around the local

Fig. 1.1

Bird

Early Watercolour, 3"x 6", 1971

Fig. 1.2

Tagore Potrait

Early Watercolour II, 4"x 6", 1969

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 1.2

landscape. But talent for art is a poor excuse for a boy’s neglect of school studies! He couldn’t impress his parents, received no word of encouragement from the family and chose to be a loner and a rebel in his pursuit of art, stubbornly resisting all efforts of his elders to send him back to school.

Finally, when Manoj was a big boy of nine, his father, in a last ditch effort, engaged a local tutor to coach him so that, in due time, he could take the “School Leaving Examination” as a private candidate. But after a few days of drudgery at the tutor’s home, Manoj began to dodge tuition and would spend the time visiting his favourite haunts with his sketchbook. His tutor ultimately persuaded his father to accept the fact—even though unpleasant—that his son could not fit the format of formal schooling. The tutor advised him to give his son free rein to do what he liked most— drawing and painting. Manoj’s father grudgingly gave in, or rather, he gave up all hopes and stopped bothering himself with his eldest son’s education. Yet neither his parents nor anybody in the family could envisage a career for him in painting. And they were right too! Because if they did, they would have had to plan for Manoj a course of formal training in an art college, for which he was not eligible since he did not have the minimum school education to qualify for it.

Manoj now enjoyed a wonderful feeling of release, and he went on drawing and sketching with fresh vigour and excitement. He had, however, neither care nor concern for what the future had in store; what career, what calling he was growing up to attempt. He had no understanding of what being a painter entailed; nor did he know with any certainty

that he wanted to be an artist. He had seen the village patuas make scroll paintings in gorgeous primary colours and the clay modellers sculpt in clay brightly painted fascinating images of gods and goddesses. And in Manoj’s boyish perception, they painted or sculpted just for the love of the art, not for a living.

Manoj began to think seriously about art, and of becoming an artist, only much later, in 1964, when he met an art-loving gentleman in his neighbourhood, who appreciated his talent and wanted him to visit art exhibitions. One day, this new acquaintance took him to a massive show that was on at the Academy of Fine Arts (AFA). Incidentally, it was AFA’s “All India Annual” and Manoj encountered, for the first time in life, what appeared to him a grand panoramic spectacle of art. Each gallery unfolded to his innocent eyes an outstanding display of contemporary Indian art in its wide-ranging diversity of styles and themes. His guide, the gentleman who had taken him along enthusiastically explained the stylistic and technical features of the major exhibits. Manoj attentively followed him, whether or not he could take in much of what was being said. They finally zeroed in on a painting that had won the Governor’s Award. It was a gouache by Ganesh Haloi, which embodied, Manoj was told, the “essence of modernism”.

That day, Manoj returned home triumphantly, with a rich harvest of ideas and an experience of art, and what he believed to have grasped of modern art. At home he proudly announced to an unconcerned audience that he was now well-versed in modern art. Only his mother, who was secretly proud of her son’s talent, responded: “What on earth is that?”

Fig. 1.3

Potrait Copy

Pencil on Paper, 9.5"x 6.7", 1970

Fig. 1.4

Potrait Copy

Pencil on Paper, 9.5"x 6.7", 1971

Figs 1.5 and 1.6

Ajanta Copy

Tempera on Board, 18"x 15.7", 1971

Fig. 1.5

Fig. 1.6

Fig. 1.3

Fig. 1.4

Art of Manoj Datta

After a couple of visits to art shows at AFA and other galleries, Manoj became familiar with the names of the leading artists of the day and of some of the old masters. From among them, he picked up a few as his favourites and thought he would have liked to watch them at work. In fact, he was now gradually coming to understand what it meant to be a regular artist. He aspired to become one. But he didn’t know what one had to do to become a full-fledged painter. He realised he still had to learn quite a few things about art and art-making.

In his quest for someone who might help him, Manoj kept a keen watch on the people in and around his locality to single out anyone who had the look and body language of an artist. One day, on the platform of Jadavpur Railway station, Manoj chanced upon a young man who was carrying in his hand what looked like a large sketchbook. Manoj straightaway walked up to him and asked, “Excuse me sir, are you a painter?” And for sure, the young man—Ashis Mandal—was a final year student at Calcutta’s Government College of Art and Craft. Mandal took an instant interest in Manoj when he learnt that the innocent-looking boy wanted to be an artist. He gave the boy his home address, inviting him to have a look at his works.

speciosa) in his garden and mounted on a flower vase. Manoj scored high in the assessment of his would-be mentor. But for further proof of his talent, during subsequent visits, Manoj had to copy a Da Vinci portrait of Jesus, a landscape by another old master and an Indian miniature painting. Mandal handed to Manoj a list of art materials he would need to start practising. Such things, however, were beyond the means of a poor boy who had no support from his parents, having fallen from their grace, who would never encourage his wild goose chase at the cost of his studies. But Manoj didn’t lose hope; he continued practising with ordinary pen, pencil and exercise books that he had saved from his school days.

As Member of the Society of Contemporary Artists,

The next day, Manoj visited Mandal’s house, which also doubled as a studio, to see his works and watch him paint. Manoj asked for guidance in his modest pursuit of art, probably expecting nothing more than a few tips on how to paint and draw. Mandal, however, suggested that Manoj sit a test just to check how good he was at drawing. He set for the boy artist to draw a large, green leaf, freshly plucked from a Chalta tree (elephant apple/Dillenia

Mandal ran an art school from home, where he taught the young boys and girls of the locality. Manoj occasionally attended these sessions, though he couldn’t afford to pay any tuition fees. It soon became clear to him that the art teacher was more attentive to his paying students and found less time for guiding Manoj. Manoj felt discouraged and no longer bothered to attend the classes. But he kept going to his mentor and often accompanied him on his outdoor sketching and painting trips to the countryside. There he keenly watched the artist at work and picked up what he thought to be the basics of drawing and painting from nature. Often, he went home and drew from memory the same scene that Mandal did outdoors, but he would lend to it something extra from his imagination. He transformed the day scene into what it was likely to look at night.

Not that Manoj received from Ashis Mandal any regular training in matters such as technique or

Facing page

Top left

With BR Paneswar, Ganesh Haloi and Bikash Batterjee

Top right

Artist with Ganesh Pyne

Bottom

1983

medium. Nevertheless, Manoj maintains that he has always considered Mandal his only mentor. A ten-year-old boy wishing to be a painter could not have made much headway all by himself, especially when his passion didn’t get the nod of his parents. By a stroke of good luck, he met the senior art student in his neighbourhood and he got from him what he needed most—not only a concrete idea of what makes an artist but also moral support for his choice, made so early in life, of a career in art. Then there was Mandal’s generous gesture of allowing Manoj to accompany him during his sketching and painting sessions. What Manoj valued most, however, was his mentor’s comments on art in general and on any artwork by Manoj.

Once Manoj did a landscape showing a village pond in high summer, when small waterbodies dried up, baring the bottom mire. Mandal was very much impressed by the tyro’s confident execution, but he asked the artist why he hadn’t captured the slushy smell of the dried-up pond. The artist was flabbergasted. How could he get into his picture the smell of the pond? Should he rub on it a bit of the mire? Manoj was, however, excited to hear what his mentor said by way of explaining his comments and took it as a most precious piece of advice for himself and as the essence of what makes a good painting. He said that an artist, while doing a landscape, should not only focus his gaze on the visual details but also take in the feel of the total ambience, which consists not only of what “you see but also what you hear, smell and touch”. Unless the view in the picture evokes this feel of totality, the landscape might look dull and onedimensional. Manoj, the boy he was at the time, could not grasp its full import but this much he

understood: an artist had to feel deeply about the subject he was going to paint or draw.

Manoj kept up his art practice with zest and energy, and now he mostly painted nature-scapes in pastel, watercolour and mixed-media. He regularly showed his mentor the works for critical feedback. Mandal was a student of the Indian Art section at the art college, so he wanted Manoj to pick up a few tips on the Indian style of painting. Manoj learnt bits of the wash technique from him. But he was most keen on learning how to draw and paint from nature as any general art college student. He had already started doing academic-style watercolours and studied objects and form directly from nature. Once, he got hold of a dove and kept it tied in his room until he could finish making a pencil and a watercolour sketch.

Gradually, Manoj came to know some other important people, who admired his single-minded pursuit of a creative life in art. They not only appreciated his paintings and drawings but also provided him with diverse practical suggestions to further his career. One of them was Sitesh Roy, a senior artist who painted in tempera, with values inherited from both the Bengal School and Jamini Roy. His art, soaked in the aesthetic of native tradition, rhymed well with Manoj’s love and taste, acquired since he was a mere child, for objects and images fashioned out of inexpensive materials by the village patuas and potters. It was Roy who inspired him to explore the medium of tempera, in which Manoj painted all his major works in later life. He started now to try out the new medium by preparing the paint at home—a mix of dry pigment powder, often procured from Roy, and ordinary

gum or egg-white as binder, in measured dilution with water. Through trials and errors, Manoj learnt the right measure of binder dilution and, by regular practice, near-mastered the technique of using tempera to the satisfaction of his creative need.

By this time, “Manoj’s family was now not just unsupportive but completely indifferent to his budding career in art. His parents’ attitude hardened to what they considered his wilful defiance of his elders’ idea of a career for him. They didn’t consider art a useful preoccupation and had absolutely no trust in what they thought to be his senseless dabbling in art. One day, in a fit of terrible disgust, his mother tore up to pieces a tempera by him, on which he had worked all through the previous night. This ought not to have happened in their house, for there was a very successful professional commercial artist in the extended family. He was an uncle on Manoj’s mother’s side, the husband of a sister of his mother. The gentleman, however, displayed little interest, until much later, in an untrained talent.

Manoj, still in his teens, did receive indulgence from some senior people of the art world. This is in a way, a fair recognition of the making of an artist in him by knowledgeable people. Sitesh Roy, who had already been a great support for him, introduced him to some of his artist friends and admirers. One of them was Dwarikanath Chattopadhyaya, a grandson of Gaganendranath Tagore, a great name in the history of Modern Indian art. Dwarikanath was associated with the Society of Oriental Art (SOA), founded in 1907 by his granduncle Abanindranath Tagore. During the first four decades of the last century, it was the leading

Top Artist with Guru

Bottom left

Artist's potrait made by his Guru

Bottom right

Guru's Work

Bottom

“Manoj’s family was now not just unsupportive but completely indifferent to his budding career in art. His parents’ attitude hardened to what they considered his wilful defiance of his elders’ idea of a career for him. They didn’t consider art a useful preoccupation and had absolutely no trust in what they thought to be his senseless dabbling in art. One day, in a fit of terrible disgust, his mother tore up to pieces a tempera by him, on which he had worked all through the previous night. This ought not to have happened in their house, for there was a very successful professional commercial artist in the extended family. He was an uncle on Manoj’s mother’s side, the husband of a sister of his mother. The gentleman, however, displayed little interest, until much later, in an untrained talent."

institution of nationalist art in India. Artists from all over India practising art in Indian/Bengal School style aspired to participate in the SOA’s prestigious annual show. However, after 1947, with the decline in the vogue of Nationalist art, the Society began to lose its earlier lustre. Nevertheless, it was very much a presence in Calcutta’s art world, since many artists of Santiniketan and the Bengal School, including some iconic figures, were still alive and active through the fifties and sixties. Dwarikanath watched with keen interest Manoj’s steady progress and his growing skill in handling different media—particularly pastel and tempera— as well as his power to draw freely any subject in any medium.

In 1969, Manoj got a break when both Dwarikanath and Sitesh Roy asked him to send his work for the SOA’s annual show. This was his first opportunity to publicly showcase his artworks and a dream fulfilled most unexpectedly for an artist not yet out of his teens. Manoj submitted only one painting;

he could not afford to more of them framed, at the princely sum of Rs. 20 each.

This one painting Manoj did for the Society of Oriental Art’s all India annual show, hung along with the works by artists far senior to him, was an imaginary hill-scape in mixed media of pastel and watercolour. The painting stood out in its colour scheme. Done entirely in shades of red of diverse tonal intensity, it attracted not only critical notice but also engaged the average viewer who knew that red, pure red, in any artist’s palette was generally to be handled with great caution. The picture received a positive mention in a review of the show broadcasted from the Calcutta station of All India Radio. From now on, Manoj was to be a regular participant in the SOA annual, and in 1971, he went on to join a group show with other two artists including Sitesh Roy, in the Indumati Auditorium at Jadavpur University campus, mounted by the university students on the occasion of Saraswati Puja.

Facing page

Top left

Father, Manindranath Dutta

Top right Mother, Chitra Dutta

left

Artist, Manoj Dutta

right

Wife, Krishna

At 15, Manoj had already come to realise the hard facts about art—that making a career in art is very expensive and that art does not sell. Now that he was showcasing his works, participating in group shows, he needed money to spend on art materials and on framing his pictures for public display. Moreover, he had to commute by bus or train to visit people and places in and around Calcutta. He managed to get by on whatever gift money he received occasionally from his elders, especially from his maternal uncles, who were well-placed in life.

In 1970, Manoj readily accepted the offer of a part-time job at a firm ostensibly named Contour Advertising. It was really just a shop that painted billboards on commission from different advertising agencies. Here, Manoj was paid Rs. 40 each month for assisting the sign-painter. This was paltry money and the job was boring too, for he was to fill in with paint large letters outlined by his senior or cover blank billboards with coats of paint. But the job gave him some confidence and a sense of stability in his uncertain career pursuit. He worked here until 1973, when he joined a proper advertising agency, Creative Workshop, in Park Street. The gentleman who introduced him to the Park Street establishment used to get billboards for his client companies painted at Manoj’s previous workplace. He took a liking to Manoj and asked him to join the company if he would like to make a career as an artist in an advertising agency. Manoj was employed in the new firm to work as a helping hand to a trained commercial artist. Here, too, the job was not fulltime, but he was paid double the amount he earned at the billboard-painter’s.

The seventies were a chequered decade of political violence unleashed by the Naxalites, a breakaway group of Marxists who dreamt of a speedy socialist revolution, to be brought about by eliminating the existing bourgeois democratic state and its agents, including members of the “revisionist” Communist party, whom they had branded as “class enemies”. This revolutionary terrorism was counterchecked by what may be called “state terrorism”, carried out ruthlessly by the police. There were brutalities galore on either side. Young boys were jailed or killed on mere suspicion, just as young “revolutionaries” butchered suspected spies and class enemies in a frenzied savagery.

Manoj got involved with the Naxalites even before he fully realised what it was all about. The rebel activists found a large following among young people in the city and its suburbs. Manoj’s local friends, his playmates since childhood, had become enthusiastic participants in the terrorist activities, fascinated by the adventurous nature of the underground movement and by the promise of a speedy revolutionary solution to all the plaguing problems of hunger, unemployment and poverty. Manoj’s father, and his well-wishers in the neighbourhood, grew very much concerned about this boy of bare 15. To keep him away from the Naxalites, a neighbour, urged by his father, helped Manoj get admission in the Indian Art College, where the teen artist met two major Bengal artists, Suhas Roy and Bikash Bhattacharjee. But Manoj had a congenital distaste for any course of systematic pursuit. So he couldn’t continue for more than a month. With all his friends in Naxalite folds, he was willy-nilly drawn to the rebels. Manoj was picked up by the rebel leaders

Art Camp hosted by Max Mueller Bhavan (MMB), Calcutta. Here, he came to know a large number of young artists from all over India, many of whom later acquired country-wide recognition. He also met the famed artist Sunil Das, who was the organiser of the camp on behalf of MMB.

Meanwhile, a significant change had taken place in the attitude of Manoj’s parents and family elders to what they had always considered his wasteful obsession with art. It was perhaps because Manoj was by now not only doing a job but also selling his paintings, however paltry the sums he earned.

They now took serious interest in Manoj’s future as an artist but were as indifferent to his art as ever. In addition to painting and drawing, Manoj also fashioned various craft objects out of cheap indigenous materials, such as bamboo sticks, straws and dried empty gourds. These were often trashed during seasonal house cleanings. Once, the family members seated a distinguished guest on a carpet hurriedly spread on a painting which Manoj was doing at the time. Yet gradually, they began to entertain the idea that Manoj could make a living out of what they had earlier thought an entirely useless pursuit.

The Times of India, Hudco Art Camp

The Telegraph

One important point of reference in matters of art in the family was Manoj’s uncle Biren Dey, the artist in the family. Dey was a fine draughtsman and a master watercolourist in the traditional British academic style. He had made it big as a commercial artist and held a top executive position in a reputed advertising firm. He had a poor opinion of Manoj’s art works. When Manoj’s mother consulted Dey by the end of 1974, to know if her son had a future in art, he advised him to train in, and practise, commercial art. Dey offered to guide him at his home. For some time, Manoj spent an hour or so at Dey’s house every morning, taking lessons in lettering and layout.

But his trying a different tack didn’t clash with Manoj’s creative engagement with art. Since 1973, Manoj had been regularly showing his works at the All India Annual Exhibition hosted by Birla Academy. In 1975, Ramlal Dhar, his friend since the 1973 art fair, convinced Manoj to enrol at Calcutta’s Government College of Art and Craft as a casual student and even paid one year’s fees in advance out of his own pocket. Manoj was admitted on condition that he would clear the School Final Examination and submit the certificate before the final exam at the art college. On his first day at the college, he had to choose one of the three courses offered: Fine Art, Indian Art and Commercial

The Economic Times

Art. The principal, Satyen Ghosal, checked the works—drawings, paintings and pastels— Manoj had submitted along with his application. After the interview, Ghoshal took him to the art teachers in the teachers’ lounge and said, rather admiringly—addressing the three young teachers, Isha Mohammad, Ganesh Haloi and Ashes Mitra— that this boy was already a “trained painter” and had nothing much to learn as a Fine Art student. Manoj then chose to join the Commercial Art course. After a month’s attendance, however, he lost interest in commercial art and would often stray into the Indian Art classes and loved to watch students working in the Indian style. When a USIS-

sponsored workshop in relief printing was held at the college, the renowned print-maker Carol Summers came from the United States to conduct the workshop as the Chief Guide and instructor. Manoj participated in the workshop and worked with a fairly large linoleum piece, and his print was appreciated by Summers. At the Government Art College too Manoj couldn’t stand the scholastic discipline for long. He stopped going to college after some time and eventually stopped attending.

Through all these eventful years, he hadn’t given up his part time job at the Park Street ad agency, though he had absented himself occasionally.

Certificate for participating in International Biennale in Pusa, South Korea

Manasij Majumdar taught English in a college under Calcutta University as a reader, and writes on art and literature in Bengali and English. He has been a regular art critic for The Telegraph, Business Standard, and the Bengali weekly Desh between 1986 and 1999. He is the author of several books, including Dreamers on the Ark, a study of the art of Sakti Burman, Close to the Event on the art of Bikash Bhattacharjee, Art Moves, on the works by Sunil Das, Imprint of a Soul on prints and paintings of Amitabh Bannerji, among others, and has contributed to Paritosh Sen: In Retrospect (Mapin, 2002).

MODERN & CONTEMPORARY ART

Songs of the Soil: Modernist Melody

The Art of Manoj Dutta Manasij Majumdar

196 pages, 262 illustrations and 26 photographs

10.25 x 12.5” (260 x 318 mm), hc-plc

ISBN: 978-93-85360-76-3 (Mapin)

ISBN: 978-81-926373-4-1 (Sanchit Art)

₹4500 | $75 | £55

Spring 2020 • World rights

Published in association with Sanchit Art Gallery, New Delhi

other titles of interest

Modern Indian Painting

Jane & Kito de Boer Collection

Edited by Rob Dean and Giles Tillotson

Lightning by M.F. Husain

Edited by Marguerite Charugundla

Bindu

Space and Time in Raza’s Vision

Geeti Sen

www.mapinpub.com www.sanchitart.in

Printed in India