Even after the loss of his eyesight, Indian artist Benode Behari Mukherjee continued to inspire generations of creativity

His calling to paint what he saw around him chiselled Mukherjee’s interest in Japanese art. In 1937, while he was on the teaching staff at Kala Bhavana, he self-funded a six-month trip to Japan (“because that’s the longest trip he could afford,” notes Siva Kumar). There, he studied the works of artists like Tawaraya Sōtatsu and Toba Sōjō in the collections of museums and galleries across the country, and their sharp brushwork stirred his interest in the calligraphic method of painting, which relied on its intuitive mark-marking process. “The others who were interested in Far-Eastern art were only looking at the stylistic elements and trying to emulate them, while Benode Behari was intrigued by the structural aspects that underscored these traditions,” says Siva Kumar.

When he returned to Shantiniketan, Mukherjee’s learnings from Japan unfolded in a fresco he painted on the ceiling of a dormitory in Kala Bhavana. By then, Bose had introduced mural-making as an integral part of student-life at Shantiniketan, which presented an opportunity for teachers and students to collaborate, work in lockstep, and exchange ideas and techniques freely. Along with his peers, Mukherjee painted the entire ceiling, at the centre of which were four buffaloes, half submerged in a pond, perhaps to cool off from the intense summer heat. Around it, he packed a panorama of rural life in Bengal, that gradually unfurls as the eye moves from one edge of the mural to the other. “This mural, his first amongst many, reflected his “multiple focus” approach, which he derived from diverse traditions, including Japanese scrolls,” says Siva Kumar.

A few years later, in the 1940s, he created a mural that would come to be known as the magnum opus of his career. Painted across three walls of the central hall in Hindi Bhavan at Shantiniketan, the fresco drew on the lives of the saints and mystics of medieval India. Mukherjee was now at the height of his power, and his incredible confidence and mastery of his craft revealed itself in the expansive composition, and in the fact that the entire painting was done directly on the wall, without the help of an initial sketch or framework.

A few years later in 1957, after a failed cataract surgery, Mukherjee lost his sight forever. “A lesser man might have crumbled under the impact of the tragedy,” says Mukherjee’s student, mentee, and Oscar-winning filmmaker Satyajit Ray in his 1972 documentary, The Inner Eye. “But Benode Behari went on to prove that even for a visual artist, loss of sight need not mean the end of creation; that there was an inner eye, an inner vision, born of long experience and deep devotion which the artist could call upon to come to his aide, to guide his fingers.” Only months after the surgery, Mukherjee returned to Shantiniketan to resume his position as a teacher, and it is here that his meandering practice took a definitive turn towards tactile sculptures and collages.

“There must have been despair, but he doesn’t allow you to see it,” says Siva Kumar. “Instead, he used this set back as a launching pad into something else, which was as innovative and powerful as what he had lost.” Mukherjee’s boundless creativity now morphed into abstract, inventive and playful collages – made with cut-outs of bright, gleaming coloured papers, strings and scraps of newspaper – that at times, echoed Matisse’s late shift in direction. Small and intimate in size, the paper-cuts unfurled snatches of his memories – a Santhal lady in a saree with a basket of fruits on her lap, a kettle, knife and some tomatoes on a shelf, a dog tied to a post. He worked closely with assistants and friends – like the artist Pushpa Kaushik, who was the first to help him with the collages — to draw the elements and arrange the layout. In a stylistic signature, Mukherjee cut out numbers in both Latin and the Bengali-Assamese script to record the date of the artwork, often placing the digits in a corner (cleverly held in a photo frame), or on the subject itself. “It is challenging to communicate the nuances of colour, so he worked with standardised coloured papers which he had seen and could remember. It is this limitation that lends the brightness to these works.”

His indomitable spirit touched the lives of many of his students, like filmmaker and graphic designer Ray – who returned to Shantiniketan to film his documentary about his mentor – and designer Riten Mozumdar, who travelled to Nepal to train in indigenous craft techniques on the recommendation of Mukherjee. His quiet influence is felt in Ray’s film posters, and in Mozumdar’s geometric, abstract designs for FabIndia.

But a legacy as profound as Mukherjee’s isn’t constrained by the definitions of time and space. “There’s much to learn from his oeuvre. When I observed his artworks, I could see the human hand along with the spirit of playfulness and was drawn to the simplicity and directness of his forms,” says Pune-based illustrator Debangshu Moulik, who first discovered Mukherjee’s work through Ray’s documentary, The Inner Eye. “His work has had a lasting influence on me and the way I view my surroundings; it taught me a lot about the importance of seeing, observing and documenting the time that I live in.” Moulik too is an avid people-watcher; his work often brims with doughy-necked characters caught in the unnoticed moments of mundane, everyday life.

For Mumbai-based visual artist Sameer Kulavoor, the pull towards Mukherjee’s work hinged on the artist’s compositional skills. “Composition often directs the emotion, or inversely, is often driven by the emotion. His use of negative space, and the way he holds back from filling every inch of space with motifs or elements, was an interesting aspect to study,” notes Kulavoor. “He also teaches us to be open to different ways of image-making. That’s something I try to imbibe in my practice as well. As a younger artist, sometimes these shifts happen in your medium and techniques, and you might not have any control over it. To see someone like Benode Behari Mukherjee with his range of work is very comforting. To study his work is to realise that these shifts and this evolution is part of the process, and one should embrace it.”

The seamless fluidity of his nature as an artist unleashed the polymath in Mukherjee, who, through the dips and swells of his life, had struggled with his eyesight, but never his vision. He once wrote, “Blindness is a new feeling, a new experience, a new state of being.” It was this brilliance of his spirit that far eclipsed any darkness that might have touched his life.