Benode Behari Mukherjee a pioneering artist of India, flourishing from Tagore’s experimental school for children since he was unable to pursue formal education owing to his blindness in one eye and myopia in the other. He experimented with various mediums like watercolour(utilised in most of his artworks), tempura as well as collage when he dappled into abstraction. He travelled to Nepal in 1948, as curator of the Nepal Government Museum, Kathmandu, here, he was familiarised with the artisans and craftspeople of the region who influenced his own art and practices. Thus, producing a series of paintings on Nepal with the themes and landscapes of the culture and terrain. This practice of travels was later continued as well- he travelled to Rajasthan, and to teach at the Art School of Patna, where he once again had the opportunity to engage with the craftsmen and artisans. This is another painting from the Nepal series, where the artist depicts a scene from the temples of Nepal, a priest ringing the temple bell while exiting the temple door. The colours of the painting are the similar colours utilised in the entire series, light washes of blue and oranges with the outlines with black pigment. These are the ordinary life observed by Mukherjee in the Nepal series.
Ritual Gesture and Sacred Space
The painting presents devotion as a relationship between bodily gesture and inhabited space. A woman stands within an architectural opening, extending one hand towards a suspended bell while carrying a small basket in the other. Her action organizes the composition, joining the stillness of the doorway to the movement and anticipated resonance of the bell.
Dark contours establish the figure with economical precision. Curving lines articulate the sleeves, jewellery, and folds of her garment, while restrained washes of ochre, green, and red soften the surrounding structure. The visible ground participates in the image’s tonal unity, giving flesh, fabric, and architecture a shared atmosphere without dissolving their individual forms. Small irregularities in contour keep the surface animated.
Spatially, the upright posts and rectangular panels compress the setting around the woman. This enclosure directs attention towards her face and extended arm. The bell occupies the upper left, balancing the basket below and establishing a diagonal across the figure. Repeated curves connect the bell’s ornamentation with the garment’s decorative markings, integrating ritual objects into the composition’s linear rhythm.
The image also invites a consideration of sound. Although the bell remains silent for the viewer, the hand approaching its clapper suggests an imminent acoustic event. Painting thereby implies a duration beyond the depicted instant. The threshold acquires symbolic force through this suspended action, becoming a site where an everyday movement may assume devotional significance.
A gendered reading begins with the woman’s active relation to these objects. She gives the scene its direction through deliberate movement, while her composed expression resists any simple account of inward feeling. The painting’s interpretive strength lies in this balance between legible action and psychological reserve. Its economy of means allows a modest encounter with a bell to sustain reflection on attention, ritual, and the body’s participation in sacred space.
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By: Najmus Saqib Mahboobi
The work is significant in the context of Mukherjee’s artistic practice, which combined close observation with an individualised approach to form and space. His experience at Santiniketan and his engagement with different artistic traditions contributed to his distinctive position in Indian modernism. The painting thus demonstrates how architectural subjects could become a means of exploring line, structure and visual rhythm.
