Just a few months back I left New Delhi for Bangkok and arrived in Thailand with black spots dancing before my eyes. I had suffered a torn retina, and within hours was undergoing laser eye surgery at Bangkok Christian Hospital. The surgery was both painless and effective, but it did leave my right eye completely blind for what seemed interminable minutes (a normal aftereffect of a laser eye operation). I sat with one blind eye (I had never known such blindness!) in the surgeons office. He matter-of-factly told me that even though the retina had been fixed the black spots might remain for years. Maybe permanently.
I'll be the first to admit that the fear was overwhelming. Suddenly I had perhaps become an artist and an art lover with severely impaired eyesight. I grasped at straws...such as Beethoven's composing his heavenly Ninth Symphony while completely deaf...but soon one realizes that such stories, though romantic and awe-inspiring, become horrific nightmares when applied to oneself.
Thankfully, the surgeon's prognosis was wrong. My eyesight returned to almost normal after just three weeks.
Which brings us to BB (as he is often affectionately called), or Benode Behari, or Benodebehari, depending on which of the variant spellings one chooses to think "correct" (in Bengali, it is বিনোদ বিহারী মুখার্জি). Benode Behari Mukherjee suffered from severely impaired eyesight his entire life. He was born in 1904, blind in one eye. As he grew he needed to wear thick glasses due to extreme myopia in the other. In spite of this, Binode took up art as his vocation and pursued it with a passion. He was a keen observer of life, light, colour and form, and, as every student of Indian art history knows, went on to become one of India's most legendary artists. It is Benode Behari's small sketches, watercolours, and scrolls that I dearly love, but it his large murals (Life of the Medieval Saints, Birbhum Landscape, and even the lesser Life on Campus) executed while teaching at Rabindranath Tagore's Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, that stand as monuments of early Indian modernism.
With advancing age Benode Behari's eyesight grew progressively worse. It was at the age of 53, after a botched eye operation, that the artist succumbed to complete blindness. Yet even within the abyss of sightlessness Binode Behari remained a visionary. Remarkably, he continued to produce. Assisted by his students, he selected coloured papers with which to make abstract collages, and even created one last mural at the Kala Bhavana campus, composed of large ceramic tiles, on the outer wall of the painting studio. Among the many human figures this mural contains, one in particular stands out: a lean and healthy young man balancing two clay pots that dangle from ropes attached to a length of bamboo stretched across his shoulder.
The lithograph above is titled Curd Seller, and was made in 1971. It is an uneditioned work, and exactly how many were produced is in question (I have seen at least one other print of this same lithograph on display at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi). Binode made this image, as he made many, after the onset of his blindness. As he had become completely unable to see, he scribbled from pure memory...feeling an image the way he used to see it, moving his hand with an instinctual grace that miraculously created flowing line and delicate imagery.
One can imagine "BB" setting his hand upon the litho stone and "feeling" the curves and lines of this young man's figure with a masterly-grasped litho crayon. In ways this litho almost seems a preparation for the similar figure created in tiles in the last mural of 1972. But the curd seller depicted in this print has much more energy. He strides forward with assurance, his head held high. One can sense the sway of his dangling pots and the bounce of his bamboo pole. BB loved the common man. This curd seller is no victim. He is a self-assured and smart young man.
Benode Behari Mukherjee was not only a great artist, he was a triumphant humanistic spirit. Like many today I mourn the disrepair and neglect the masterworks of his Santiniketan murals have fallen into. Their lack of proper preservation and ongoing decay now stand as testimonies not only to a great artist, but also to the myopia of politicians and cultural administrators who are blind to the immeasurable worth of this national treasure.
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