In 2007, the Republic of India celebrated the 60th anniversary of Independence, proclaimed on August 15, 1947. During the anniversary celebrations, India remembered the heroes of the national liberation movement, in which literally the entire society participated, and, of course, the creative intelligentsia. Many artists entered a new era, reflecting, each in his own way, both the vision of events and the images of their contemporaries. With their creativity - open, truthful, sincere-they tried to be in tune with the mass anti-colonial impulse that swept the country. This could only be achieved by relying on the traditions of one's own national culture.

Already in the 1920s, the restoration of many art forms that were on the verge of extinction during the years of colonial dependence began. In India, there were pockets of revival of traditional arts and crafts everywhere, despite the direct rejection of the colonial administration, which considered this art barbaric. The same attitude was applied to traditional Indian forms of theater, music, and dance.

In Bihar, Brahmin women painted the walls of houses and inner rooms with images of the most revered gods and heroes, and the plot of the heroic epic "Ramayana" was interpreted in a modern way: the demon king turned into a collective image of an aggressive European colonizer. Meera Mukherjee, a sculptor, learned metal sculpture techniques from the Bas-Tara tribe. The arsenal of centuries-old tribal culture was part of the circulation of modern art. In the south of India, a temple dance was performed on the stage, which soon conquered the world audience. The famous Kathakali pantomime theater was being restored from oblivion.

Each master was an individual, but there was something that united all of them, becoming the main component of their work - what was called "Indianness".

The hero of our essay, the original Indian artist Jamini Roy (1887-1972), also belongs to the galaxy of artists who began to create at the turn of the XIX - XX centuries.

He was born in Bengal, near Bankura. This city played a special role in its formation. At the age of 16, J. R. R. Tolkien Roy entered the government art school, where he studied European drawing and painting. For many years, he practiced the European style of painting, but at the age of 34, he broke with academism and became close to the Bengali Renaissance School, which was created in Shantiniketan by the Tagore family - Rabindranath and his nephews, the artists Obenindranath and Gogonendranath-and became, in fact, a center for training artistic personnel for the development of national culture in a new historical era. an epoch. This era opened up broad horizons for young artists like J. Roy. His favorite teachers were Obenindranath Tagore and Nondalal Boshu, innovators in the technique of painting and drawing, who drew on the richest traditions of Indian art for thousands of years.

Bankura - the birthplace of the artist-was the center of folk art craft.

Folk craftsmen worked there - they made cloth prints, bedspreads made of colorful scraps of cloth depicting various episodes from the life of Krishna the Kantha cowherd, ceramics of all kinds, painted wooden, cloth and clay dolls, embossed leather, shell products, horns, and painted splint pictures. Once there, a person plunged into a magical world of colors and images. This is what became the world of the artist, determined the whole meaning of his creative existence. In this storehouse of folk art craft, J. R. R. Tolkien is a great artist. Roy drew inspiration. (See illustrations on page 3 of the cover.)

His work was never a mechanical repetition of folk crafts, he placed his accents, enhanced the dynamics, color scheme, rhythm of repetition, hyperbolized facial features (eyes, for example, brought out of the facial oval). His ornament was never fragmented, did not distract attention, the master introduced it sparingly, so as not to destroy the integrity of the image. And the clear outline of the figures comes from the wall paintings of Ajanta, from the clear silhouette of Indian classical sculpture, from the miniature of the XV century. Mewar, and finally, from the popular Patua artists who still sell their works for a song at the famous Kali Temple in Calcutta.

J. Roy writes more often with tempera in an open color with an effectively selected background. He is inspired by women's images in bright national clothes. In the composition "Three Pujarinis" (a group of women goes to the temple, bringing offerings to the gods), the indigo sari on the first of them occupies the entire space of the vertical canvas.

On graphic canvases, he often draws seated women (usually profile drawings), tracing an energetic wide contour line around their powerful thighs, torsos, arms, heavy knots of hair on the back of the head, eyes in the full profile of the head. In their, one might say, unmarried complexion, they are somewhat reminiscent of Michelangelo's Sibyls. His graphics are interesting with the technique of stroke with colored ink and the rhythm of the figures of the repeated motif, which has a frieze character (warriors with bows in their hands, chariots with riders).

J. Roy has been called a "neo-primitivist", and this is quite acceptable. There were some who didn't accept his style, but there weren't many of them. He had his own followers in the person of such famous masters as the Ceylonese J. R. R. Tolkien. Kate, Sheila Auden, Srinivasulu, Gautam Vaghela and others, they made up the "Jamini Roy circle". Unknown masters began to work in his manner, drawing" in the style " of J. R. R. Tolkien. Swarming beautiful post and souvenir cards.

This was an artist with his own refined style, true to his creative position. "All his life, the artist resolutely rejected the lush unreality of academic "realism", which is not characterized by either direct perception or intimate symbolism of forms. Already in the early period of his work, the artist sought to simplify colors and forms, defended the independence of his artistic vision of the world, tirelessly improving his palette, " wrote about J. P. Morgan. Roe Biren De in the magazine " India "(1972, N 4).

They created a lot. All the paintings of this original artist are in private collections in the country or abroad. The art of Jamini Roy is decorative, as, in fact, almost all the art of India from ancient times to the present day. But this decorativism is of the highest aesthetic quality.

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