Those eyes wide with wonder, the flowing locks draped over her shoulder and hands thrust out on either side. To the casual viewer it?s just another portrait of a lady, to fans of Ramkinkar Baij, it?s an immortal ode to a royal muse in the acclaimed artist?s life. Maharaj Kumari Binodini was to Ramkinkar Baij, in a sense, as important to his life as Beatrice was to Dante or Laura to Petrarch. Like a muse in the purest aspect, Binodini brought forth a distinct sensuality and passion in Baij?s work. A self-taught artist with no formal education, Baij hailed from a remote village in West Bengal. Santiniketan moulded him into a sophisticated artist, its environment adding fodder to his creative genius. Unlike the bhadraloks of his milieu, he did not cut a gentlemanly figure in his bush shirt and Chinese straw hat. He remained a ?son of the soil? and like his works, captured the ?life rhythm?. His life also continued to imbibe this very quality.
The National Gallery of Modern Art, which can rightly boast the largest collection of Ramkinkar Baij?s works, has been hosting a retrospective exhibition of this artist who is fondly remembered to be the foremost figure of modern Indian sculpture. First held in Delhi in the month of February, the exhibition has now moved to the NGMA in Bangalore. It will remain there till September 23 and then travel to Mumbai. Occupying a significant space in this enormous and varied oeuvre of Baij?s collection are his works of the princess from Manipur. NGMA has also managed to create the mood through some historical photographs of that period. They created that genre, to show us what went behind it.
Says professor Rajeev Lochan, the director of NGMA, ?Ramkinkar Baij was wrongly portrayed as a bohemian most of the time when he was just a man ahead of his times. He created something out of nothing. His work pulsates with life and passion, and this can be done only by someone who has experienced it, felt it. His works have a sensuous quality about them and this comes out in his works on Binodini. Sensuality, not in the physical sense, but of a different kind.?
More than a muse
Binodini was much more than just an artist?s inspiration. Emasi, royal mother, as she was also known to the people of Manipur, was a much loved princess from a long lineage of royalty. Before she became an important figure in the literary landscape of Manipuri language, she studied art at Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan under the guidance of Ramkinkar Baij and Nandalal Bose in the 1940s. It was there she became a source of inspiration to a genius who was born ahead of his times. A Ramachandran, a student of Ramkinkar at Kala Bhavana and one of India?s foremost artists, observes, ?Kinkarda (Baij was addressed as such in Santiniketan) had produced a large body of portraits both in sculpture and paintings, among which the most outstanding ones are those of Binodini. Kinkarda was very emotionally involved with Binodini, therefore, his works on her were personal when compared to his other ones? The Binodini episode in Kinkarda?s life remained untold, the many magnificent portraits he made of her speak eloquently of the special place she had occupied in his heart.?
Says Lochan, ?His works on Binodini were not only sensual but greatly experimental, as with all his works. People usually have the wrong notion that he arrived at something straight. There was, however, a series of experimentation. He had a great sense of spontaneity. Who can be spontaneous? Only someone who can imbibe it. His works are evocative, absolutely minimalistic and very expressive.?
A Ramachandran adds, ?The exquisite portrait of Binodini in oil is a high point of achievements in Indian portraiture. Referring to a contemporary photograph of Binodini, one can make out how Kinkarda moulded her image through heavy pigments, capturing her quintessential beauty? Her Mongoloid features and straight gaze into your eyes have been lovingly handled as if caressing her beautiful face. The watercolour portraits of Binodini are an equally brilliant representation of his dormant passion for her.?
Binodini was not just a prominent literary figure but also a proponent of Manipuri art and culture. Born in 1922 to the late Maharajah Sir Churachand Singh and Maharani Dhanamanjuri Devi, she was the youngest daughter of a progressive family. The first female graduate of Manipur, she was also a fierce critic of debauchery and injustice in a changing Manipuri society. In protest of the brutal rape and murder of Manorama Devi in 2004, she returned the Padma Shri bestowed upon her by the Indian government. An acclaimed scriptwriter, she? also brought accolades to Indian cinema when the film Imagi Ningthem received the Grand Prix at the Festival des Trois Continentes at Nantes in France in 1982.
Binodini was?given the Sahitya Akademi award for her novel Boro Saheb Ongbi Sanatombi. It is based on the true life story of a Manipuri princess named Sanatombi, who married a British political agent at the turn of the 20th century. This feisty princess knew that she could never marry Baij even though she loved and admired him. Her answer to this was ?No normal woman can marry such an eccentric genius!?
Baij has indomitably managed at times to capture the aggressive spirit and passion of Binodini while at other times he portrays a woman of flesh and blood, bereft of aggression, soft and real. The eternal romantic that he was, his most spectacular yet simple rendition of his adoration for the princess was an etching titled Comrade, a sketch of the artist and his muse walking side by side through a wooded area with his arm on Binodini?s shoulders. A shrouded figure of Baij in his Chinese straw hat shies away from the gaze of curious eyes while Binodini is half-clothed, her expressive eyes beckoning us. This is an etching which shows two artists at work, in tandem of their artistic pursuit.
Both these artists travelled their own paths since this ?imagined? encounter by Baij. The unconventional artist sculpted, painted, sketched and worked on ordinary jute cloth, with watercolour, oils, ink, cement and gravel as well as bronze, terracotta, and plaster of paris. He was not just an artist in an ordinary sense; he was a master of his art. The beautiful exotic muse became the people?s princess and created a niche for herself on her own terms. Yet their bond, though brief, was intense, tenacious and reverential.