Getting ready for meals

Getting ready for meals, 1970, by Mukul Chandra Dey (1895-1989). Watercolour on paper, a small sheet of twenty-seven by thirty-seven centimetres now in the Gallery of Modern Art, Kerala Museum, Kochi, a quiet domestic scene ends a life that began fifty-five years earlier, and several hundred miles further north, in a boy's arrival at Santiniketan. Dey arrived at the forest school of Rabindranath Tagore aged eleven; for one more child marked down for a curriculum based on open air and direct observation rather than the memorised abstractions of the colonial classroom, it was there, immediately taught by Abanindranath Tagore, that he began to focus on exactly this kind of thing: not gods and kings, but the textures of everyday Bengali life, patiently noted and therefore worth putting down. His drawings were showing up in Calcutta's monthly magazines in 1911, and by 1913 the Indian Society of Oriental Art was sending his work, alongside that of other students of Abanindranath Tagore, to London and Paris. From the beginning, his subject was the life that surrounded him, and he depicted it without artifice. That native tendency towards close-up observation was overlaid, a few years later, by entirely new craft. W. W. Pearson handed the young Dey a few copper plates, a steel needle, and a brief lesson, and the picture was sent to London to be printed; in 1916 Dey was taken by Tagore himself to study in Japan, first under Yokoyama Taikan and then under Kanzan Shimomura in Yokohama; and by 1920 he was in London proper, working in the studio of Muirhead Bone and studying under Frank Short at the Slade – the first Indian artist to have crossed the world specifically to learn a printmaking technique. The discipline of drypoint, refined by decades of careful observation, did not contradict the rest of Santiniketan's way of working, but worked with it, and he returned to India as its pioneer, spending the next two decades using this borrowed European technique, incised line by incised line, to record what a contemporary wrote of simply "hundreds of Indian lives and people." The eye that would eventually produce the small watercolour of a woman preparing a meal was formed in Bengal, tested abroad in a foreign medium, and returned entirely unaltered in its loyalties. By 1970 Dey was seventy-five, retired from the Calcutta principalship to which he had dedicated the previous fifteen years, and established permanently at Santiniketan, where he would spend his remaining two decades, in an environment where the art mattered more to Ramkinkar Baij and Benode Behari Mukherjee than to the Bengal School in whose mould he himself had trained – an old master at the end of his career, working, for the time being at least, in complete independence of his own institution's faculty. It is at that late, solitary stage that this watercolour was created. A woman is seated directly on the ground, cross-legged as women in Bengali kitchens traditionally are, with a wide blade raised low and held close to the ground by an apparently fixed curve not in the hand but braced beneath the foot: the oldest and least glamorous of all the implements in a Bengali kitchen, if it is the tool that it appears to be. There is nothing here of the exotic, no staged merrymaking: only the grounded-seated posture of a body labouring at a task it has known all its life, in warm, quiet colours whose technical mastery Dey had spent his career gradually trusting. The discipline of the long years of drypoint – watch first, record the hand only after the eye has understood – remains in evidence in the economy of the scene, even finally transcribed in wash and paper rather than needle and copper.