Santhal Family in Landscape
| Support Type: | Paper |
| Paint Type: | Watercolor |
| Current Location: | National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi, India / Permanent Institutional & Private Collections |
| Location History: | 1938–1950s: Created at Santiniketan, West Bengal, during Ramkinkar Baij’s tenure as professor and head of sculpture at Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati University.Late 20th Century: Retained within the artist's studio estate before being acquired into the permanent national collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi, alongside select works in private Indian modern art collections. |
Set against the rolling Birbhum countryside, Ramkinkar Baij connects his four human figures directly to the ground they stand on. He pairs quick ink brushwork with thin watercolor washes on coarse paper, creating an image that feels half-finished sketch and half movement. On the left, a worker leans low toward the dirt, drawn with one quick, dark curve that marks the spine down through the legs. Two smaller figures—likely children—stand together in the middle, outlined with light ink and soft touches of brown and grey wash over their torsos. Over on the right, a taller figure stands upright in the foreground, viewed from below so their frame cuts cleanly against the horizon. Across the top half of the sheet, horizontal bands of yellow ochre, dull green, and dark blue run together wet-on-wet to suggest rising ground beneath a heavy sky. Baij skips setting up a neat background; the wet color forming the hills bleeds straight into the outlines of the figures. While teaching at Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan, Baij constantly drew the local Santhal community. He moved away from both the quiet revivalist style of the Bengal School and formal Western academic realism, bringing an aggressive, raw modernism into mid-century Indian art. His focus stayed on the daily working life of rural Bengal, informed by the energy of European expressionism. Everything in the sketch ties back to Baij's interest in motion (gati). The contrast between heavy ink marks and pale watercolor washes makes the work look done in a single sitting. Instead of acting as simple folk subjects, the family carries a sense of physical grit and quiet independence, turning an ordinary moment in the field into a study of endurance.