A child refugee turned artist: Anil Karanjai

JUNE 27, ON THIS DAY

Born on this day, 27 June 1940, in East Bengal, Anil Karanjai was an Indian artist trained in Banaras under two of India’s great classical masters: Karnaman Singh of Bhartiya Kala Kendra, an exponent of famous Bengal School and a Nepali by origin and Sharada Prasad of Bharat Kala Bhavan (Banaras Hindu University) who was the last court painter to the Maharaja of Banaras. He learnt the use of water colours from a local artist, Ambika Prasad Dubey. Anil along with his family had moved from Rangpur to Banaras during the partition of India in 1947.

At a very young age he showed the promise of a budding artist and used to spend long hours playing with clay to make toys and arrows. He was never a celebrity among India’s elite art circles and their patrons. He hated to woo them and continued to paint in his own style till the end of his life, defying market demands. In 1962, with Karunanidhan Mukhopadhyay, he co-founded United Artists which was well known for its anti-establishment role- a veritable extension of the ‘Hungry Generation’ movement of Bengal’s cultural avant-garde. He created numerous drawings for Hungryalist publications along with various posters and poems.

By the age of thirty he had carved a niche for himself as a capable painter and Marxist-Leninist activist in the realm of culture. Anil became the recipient of a National award in 1972, but unlike many artists who cease to evolve when commended and honoured, he continued to refine his techniques and to expand his range of styles and subjects. His early paintings were done in a surrealist mode. He also painted portraits that bared the souls of individuals in a stark unromantic manner. In his latter paintings he was almost obsessed with landscapes. His landscapes are in all sizes – from huge canvasses in oil colours to miniatures in pastel.

Anil was as deeply sensitive to beauty as to life’s pain and cruelties. Underneath his depiction and rediscovery of beauty there was always a painter with a social conscience who hated the fast increasing ugliness arising from the overall process of inhuman desensitization and stench of injustice. In his own words ‘the artist is the conscience-keeper of society\’ – the visionary sorcerer whose responsibility it is to exorcise evil by whatever means is available to his knowledge and wisdom. In the same statement Anil also says ‘Art never brings revolution but a true artist, being a conscientiousness person must always side with the forces of change’. He passed away on March 18 2001.

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