Artist Gulammohamed Sheikh remains intrigued by Benodebehari Mukherjee’s Life of the Medieval SaintsFor benodebehari mukherjee, the landscape served as an ideal trope: desolate, luxuriant or peopled. His Life of the Medieval Saints, executed on the walls of the Hindi Bhavan of Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan, is, by far, the largest mural of contemporary India painted in the fresco buono technique. I had heard about it in the late Fifties, during my student days at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, from my teachers including K.G. Subramanyan, who had assisted Benodebabu on the mural, and made it a point to visit Santiniketan to see it when I was in Kolkata for a seminar in 1961.Notwithstanding the height of the mural, painted eight feet above the ground, the vibrant imagery hoists the viewer up amidst the panorama. Made between December 1946 and April 1947, at the invitation of the head of the department Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, the work evolves around the images of five saints, mostly poets. As we read from the left, Ramanuja and Kabir figure on the south wall facing Surdas and Gobind Singh on the north, while Tulsidas with views of Benaras around him occupies the entire west wall. Selected verses of Kabir, Tulsidas and Surdas are inscribed on the upper end of the north wall. For me, the mural retains an internal intimacy that belies its epic dimensions. The low-key register of the earth colours and the technique integrates the pigments with the surface of the wall, creating a muted presence.When I saw a near facsimile of the mural at the NGMA, during a retrospective of the artist in 2007, I observed several new things about it. For instance, I found the representation of children of different ages in the epic mural adding a new dimension for interpretation.Were we to be inveigled into the lanes and bylanes of the mural, we might recall the experience of walking through a maze of streets in Calcutta or Benaras, with houses laid out in a bewildering array of open doors, windows, balconies and niches pulsating with living human presence. The mural seems to have been devised as a journey, with a series of journeymen in different guises guiding the viewer. Intriguingly, the figures that recur most often are those of mendicants. What does one read into renunciates guiding a journey into the samsara or world they are meant to have abandoned? They often seem to get absorbed in the crowd. Does this suggest a quality of dispassionate engagement, one aspect of the implicit objective of the mural? Additionally, it is important to iterate that the continuity of epic mural is maintained by gestures and movement of figures. The story emerges from corporeal rhythms, which defines a significant feature of the Indian pictorial and sculptural tradition. The impact of the mural was felt in many ways, indirectly or subtly in the way we devised figuration. Several artists of my generation found aspects of its human imagery deeply engaging.
