The unique trait of Nandalal Bose’s oeuvre was the two distinct personas that existed- the official Nandalal and the more personal one. A pre-eminent artist of the Bengal school, revered Mastermoshai at Santiniketan, celebrated as India's national icon and artist laureate, sought after by none other than Mahatma Gandhi and later Jawaharlal Nehru, he maintained a steady, parallel stream of informal works - diverse, playful and unencumbered with stylistic straitjacketing of formal tropes. It is common knowledge that a different Nandalal emerged after his move to Santiniketan on Rabindranath Tagore’s invitation. It is not as if he abandoned his earlier persona overnight but the emergence of a markedly new spirit, deeply coloured by the local landscape and the Santhals were unmistakable. Rather than a clean chronological breakdown, these two personas ran parallel, allowing him to shift gears at will.
Tempera works like The Young and Old Shabari or the rhythmically walking group of Santhal women in The New Clouds set against a row of palmyra tals and numerous other tempera and ink works done mostly post 1930s with its fresh colours, rapid brushing and a deliberate avoidance of hard edges and overt stylisation feels like a far cry from his Ajanta-derived wash paintings such as Shiva Drinking Poison or Jatugriha Daha. His ability to pivot between styles is perfectly illustrated by his two iterations of Natir Puja, both painted in 1943, first at the Cheena Bhavana in Santiniketan and the latter at Kirti Mandir in Baroda. While the earlier Cheena Bhavana version was painted with rags dipped in paint and devoid of definitive outlines, making it beautifully informal and impressionistic, it contrasts sharply with the version at Kirti Mandir, which is much more formal and tightly outlined and manifestly conforming to what one might call the formal Nandalalesque manner of rendering.
A definitive part of this informal Nandalal are the copious amounts of postcards—sent to his family, students and friends. Most often the images were inscribed with his abbreviated signature in Bangla followed by date and place. The verso had brief notes or just a salutation and greetings. The postcards in this show sent over two decades (1930–1952), are mostly accessed from the family of his daughter Gauri Bhanja.
Nandalal carried blank postcards with him wherever he went so that he could sketch at any moment, and sometimes used these as references for his works. During his travels he would make use of these to sketch various aspects of local environs. The rapidity of their execution, the choice of monochrome, and his desire to capture his immediate surroundings, gave them an enduring charm, where the image itself was often the core message. These postcards epitomize the ever-observant Nandalal and his mastery of being economical within a restricted scale of 3.5 x 5.5 inches. While most of the cards in this show were dispatched from Santiniketan, some document his travels to places like Kharagpur (his birthplace in Bihar), Khurja, Gopalpur-on-Sea and Baroda.
The earliest postcard dated 1930 with two strange-looking stones and a flowering tree had a tiny inscription on the bottom right that mentions ‘To Chitranibha’, who was then a young student at Santiniketan. The two girls on a makeshift swing seen mid-motion in another encapsulates the dynamism of the moment. The abbreviated pencil drawing of A Camel by a Tree (1940) sent from Khurja then in the United Provinces gave the recipient a glimpse of his surroundings in a major center of traditional pottery.
The pen drawing of a crocodile was executed in Baroda, where Nandalal was completing the last of his four historic murals at Kirti Mandir in November 1946, commissioned by Maharaja Sayajirao III – Baroda’s Vishwamitri river is known for harboring crocodiles. The sighting of them sunning themselves on the riverbank is a common occurrence even now. It is likely that he was rather amused to see crocodiles in an urban setting and made a quick sketch with the note in Bangla that translates as: "a large crocodile lying in wait." The text on the back of this card is somewhat long, enquiring about the communal situation in Calcutta while noting with relief that Baroda remained peaceful. In August 1946 Calcutta witnessed one of the biggest blood baths caused by communal conflagration that spread to Bihar and Noakhali on the eve of partition and independence the following year. The Gopalpur works are from October - November 1947. There are several other works from this trip in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi.
The toiling or resting figures of the Nuliya fisher folks with their peaked caps against the backdrop of the sea and the catamarans done with minimal suggestive lines in pen and brush were something obviously close to his heart. He had great regard for working people and their specialized skills. One might also recall that Nandalal abhorred western-style life drawing classes with posed models in artificial studio settings – he believed one could learn much more about human anatomy by observing how people move in their natural surroundings.
The undated pencil drawing of the happy-looking elephant represents an animal approached with extreme sensitivity and finesse in Indian art through the ages is here rendered lovingly in more detail and with an eye for volume associated with the animal while the linear Hippopotamus done rapidly in pen and ink is rather quirky and comical. The brush drawing of the squirrel, also done in Baroda, shows his lyrical control of the brush in the far eastern manner. There are other works in the set that are first rendered in pencil and then worked on with pen, where a certain afterthought is evident.
Sometime in 1952, while demonstrating the principles of composition to students, he used torn shapes of brown paper. A student saved the scraps, pasted them onto a clean sheet, and brought them to his class the next day. This sparked a series of works where Nandalal utilised bits of waste paper to fashion humorous human and animal characters, often with a short inscription. Tearing the shapes by hand created soft and fuzzy edges—unlike sharp scissor cuts— allowing less control and more play. He called these 'hela-phelar kaaj' (literally, trivial works), often adding a word or two or a line of dialogue within quotation marks to define the characters. The two works from this set in the show are from 1954. One is titled Ananda Mela possibly referring to the annual fair of the Patha-Bhavan school students before the Puja holidays in Santiniketan, the other mentions ‘for Nibha’, an abbreviated form of Chitranibha, to whom the card was given. Chitranibha, after studying under Nandalal from 1928 to 1935 was appointed to teach at Kala-Bhavan for a brief period, becoming the first woman teacher of the institution.
The sole oil painting in the exhibition, a medium rarely associated with the artist, featuring a man wearing a headband, is a rather curious example of Nandalal’s insatiable curiosity and ability to adapt to mediums. Sometimes, as in this instance, it was done away from the public gaze. He famously avoided oil painting, viewing the medium as outside his pedagogic parameters that embraced Indian and eastern techniques as opposed to the art school practices of the day. With the exception of Ramkinkar Baij, oil painting was virtually non-existent among Santiniketan artists of that era. This unique piece, however, was to demonstrate the principles of applying oil techniques according to the family of Chitranibha Chowdhury, from whose family the work has been accessed.
A certain creative restlessness was part of Nandalal’s nature that never allowed him to reach a destination and call it a day. He would start afresh. This small body of his minor works is enough to convince one that despite his public persona of a flag bearer of the Bengal school, as an artist in his private moments, he was not encumbered with what Tagore called “the deadwood of habit” and tried to renew himself over and over again. Nandalal had an insatiable appetite for looking at the world around him and conveying it with a sense of wonder, mediated through his sense of rhythm, with the most economic of means. Each drawing was a result of an unrepeatable visual encounter and imbued with a freshness that is the hallmark of a great artist.