The Storm

The Storm is an oil painting on canvas, measuring about 60.7 × 86.4 cm in a wide landscape format. Baij signed it in Bengali at the lower right, a personal mark that ties the work to its Santiniketan setting (Sotheby’s catalogue entry). The title points to a dramatic moment of weather, and the horizontal canvas gives that moment room to open up. Baij is best known today for his sculpture, yet he painted throughout his career, and the paintings deserve to be read as a body of work in their own right. In 1925 he arrived at Santiniketan from Bankura, where his family had little money. From then on, his art grew out of the people, materials and landscape that surrounded him. He used raw materials from the surrounding Santhal villages and asked local Santhals to model for him (Varma, 2022). A recent study of his murals makes a similar point: he merged his works with the local textures, people and landscapes of their setting (ShodhKosh, 2025). Seen this way, a stormy sky over open Birbhum country is a natural subject. This is my reading, not a documented fact. The title suggests he was recording the weather of the place where he lived and worked. The painting also belongs to a wider argument about what “modern” means in India. R. Siva Kumar placed Baij alongside Tagore, Nandalal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee as one of the artists who chose neither internationalist modernism nor historicist indigenousness. This is the idea of “contextual modernism”. Santhosh (2012) goes further and argues that Baij’s work deliberately revolted against mainstream, national modernism. Read this way, Baij borrowed from European modernism but rooted his work in the people and land around him. Baij himself described his attraction to Santhal life in terms of “vigour and rhythm” (quoted in Varma, 2022). A storm gives a painter that same energy in the weather. The Bengali signature, in place of a Western-style monogram, is a small sign of the same local grounding.