Benode Behari Mukherjee

Benode Behari Mukherjee (1904-1980), known as the ‘father of Indian murals’, was born in Kolkata, West Bengal. One of the earliest artists in modern India to take up murals as a mode of artistic expression, his notable work is the fresco Medieval Saints at Shantiniketan’s Hindi Bhavan. Despite having impaired vision in one eye and blind in the other, he continued to paint murals throughout his life. 

In 1925, he joined Kala Bhava as a member of the teaching faculty and later became its principal. Some of his notable students include Jahar Dasgupta, Ramananda Bandopadhyay, K.G. Subramanyan, Beohar Sinha Rammanohar, Somnath Hore, who was a sculptor and worked with prints, designer Riten Majumdar and filmmaker Satyajit Ray.  In 1949, he began curating at the Nepal Government Museum in Kathmandu after leaving Kala Bhavan.

A contextual modernist, Mukherjee is primarily known for his grand murals. He travelled extensively and was the first Indian painter to tour Japan, where he studied calligraphy.

His works show a marked influence of far-eastern traditions especially the Tosa School of Painting. His career was multi-phased with works in diverse mediums such as watercolours, silk, block printing on textile, using Chinese inks on paper and tempera on materials like wood etchings, lithographs and his paper collages. Detached from the political spectrum,

Mukherjee was a keen observer of nature, owing to his lonely childhood resulting from a lack of regular education. His early works are heavily inspired by the native beauty found in the

surroundings of Shantiniketan, especially the Sal forest of Surul and the banks of the Kopai River.

At a later stage in his life, Mukherjee turned completely blind, followed by an unsuccessful eye cataract operation in 1956. His artistic journey has been captured by Satyajit Ray in a 1972 film titled, The Inner Eye.