Subscribe Now that we are talking about things old and (not quite) forgotten, I’d like to tell you a story about an Indian painter, and not an ordinary one at that, for he was aspiring to do something new and difficult. More extraordinary was the fact that he was trying to do something beautiful in troubled times. Maniklal Banerjee was, to begin with, an ordinary village boy at Barisal. He was born in pre-independence India, in 1917, at a swampy but beautifully green place that now falls within Bangladesh. His father, a big man with a sweet humor and knowledge of worldly things almost as large as his moon-shaped belly, allowed his son to go after his heart’s desire: to study art. Father of Maniklal Banerjee, Jintendranath Bandyopadhyay, as painted by son. So, our young man quickly acquired his degrees from the Govt. Art College, Calcutta, and went on to win the first Indian Govt. Scholarship of art. This was a big deal for a new nation striving t...
A blog on nostalgic memories and the smell of the earth