Life of Medieval Saints

On the walls of a hall in Hindi Bhavan, Shantiniketan, the renowned Modern Indian artist Benode Bihari Mukherjee painted a fresco running nearly twenty three metres, in the year between 1946 and 1947. The saints depicted move through the work in a sequence - Ramanuja, Tulsidas, Kabir, Surdas, Guru Gobind Singh, each rendered in a spare economy of line that keeps the figures bound to one another through a kind of rhythmic thread, not unlike the weave of a textile. That resemblance carries weight given how many of the saints depicted were themselves tied to weaving and craft traditions.Mukherjee worked without preparatory sketches, and by this point in his life his eyesight had deteriorated badly. What emerged instead came from touch, from memory, from an instinct for form built over years under Nandalal Bose’s guidance rather than anything drawn from direct observation in the moment. The figures read less as individual likenesses and more as embodiments, ordinary occupations turned into vehicles for spiritual liberation. Underneath the formal choices sits a clear cultural argument. Through his choice of placing saints belonging to Bhakti and Sufi lineages within the same visual surface, Mukherjee aimed towards showing a shared devotional ethos that goes beyond religious boundaries, one built on personal faith and social reform rather than doctrine.