Jamini Roy :
A New Assessment of His Art, Life and Times

Sandip Sarkar

Jamini Roy is perhaps India’s greatest contribution to International art during the first half of the 20th century. However, during the first quarter of the second half, in fact, till his death in 1972, he produced very important work. He influenced his younger contemporaries-particularly the artists of the Calcutta Group, the Bombay Progressive Artist Group and the Madras Group of Artists led by K.C.S. Pannicker. At the turn of this century, his work seems to be gathering new and deeper significance. From the 1930’s to about several years after the Second World War, his name and works remained unknown among at least a significant section of the global community of art connoisseurs. After that time, his fame spread widely. There were exhibitions in a few Western art capitals. Serious journals like The Studio, Newsweek and BBC’s The listener and Larousse Encyclopedia of Modern Art (New York 1961) among others, carried stories and articles on his work. It is to be remembered that Calcutta became the nerve centre of the Eastern theatre during World War II. Young British and American intellectuals, temporarily in their uniforms, crowded his atelier, to and from the Burma front. They looked at his paintings. Roy priced his works reasonably and these soldiers and air men found them affordable. They bought and took them home at the end of the war.