Behind the Great Traditions of Art, there often stands a Little Tradition, distinguished by its unique history of the inner eye. The eye of Great Art has to reckon with this indigenous, and often anonymous, eye of the past in order to create something rich and strange. The vernal exoticism of Paul Gauguin’s We Greet Thee, Mary, for instance, would have been impossible without the magic of Tahitian tribal life. The enchantment of Henri Rousseau’s The Dream lies in his ingenious depiction of oriental wilderness. Similarly, the iconography of Kalighat patashilpa informs the distinctive style of Jamini Roy.

Kalighat and Jamini Roy, which concluded on June 30 at the Chitrakoot Art Gallery, featured paintings and drawings by Roy alongside several works by the migrant patuas working in the Kalighat area between 1840 and 1930. The idea behind this exhibition was commendable, although an ambitious project like this makes little sense without proper curation. The irony is deepened by the fact that a show premised on notions of historical continuity could do away with a temporal frame of reference in a blasé manner by not mentioning dates or titles.

The selection of Kalighat patas, with their alternating human and divine characters, was visually arresting. The babu-bibi couples — engaged in amorous and combative exchanges — appear regularly. The voluptuous, curvaceous women are sometimes left alone, absorbed in their toilette (picture right). Every human form remains visually similar — rotund and shapely — but is differentiated into characters by adding finer touches to their bodies: quarrelling wenches, courtesans dallying with lascivious men, feisty goddesses. The pathos in these images is conveyed by their anthropomorphism. Kali stands upon a supine, slightly bored Shiva, her eyes looking weary, lined by dark circles.

There is a story embedded in each of these situations, and shaped by the expressive eyes. Every stare carries with it the burden of a history of emotions: anger, lust, indolence, pining, narcissism and pity. As one moves into the world of Jamini Roy, this story of the eye becomes a formal challenge, not a means of capturing a range of human emotions, as in the Kalighat paintings. His tempera (picture left) depicting a woman continues the rotundity of the figures in Kalighat patas, the strokes retain the elegance and gracefulness of the patua tradition. However, the real sophistication of Roy’s style comes out in the unfinishedness of the figure. The contours are left unbound, and the spindly eye becomes the most original moment in the figure. This allusion to folk traditions, while retaining the essence of European High Modernism, becomes the mark of Roy’s “modern primitivism” (Mulk Raj Anand’s phrase).

In the colour paintings, the style shifts palpably, the effect being similar to a change of key in a musical composition. There is a curious interplay between the luminous hues and the forms that are defined by them. A woman emerges, as if out of the shadows, with her child peeping out of her veil, each harmoniously fused with the other. The portrait of baby Krishna with a cow conveys a startlingly different sensibility altogether (the combination somehow reminds one of the story of baby tuckoo and his moocow in the opening of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). There is comical wonder in the large, glittering eyes of the cow overlooking the crawling Nandgopal, drawn endearingly: so like a lifeless doll, and at the same time, all too human in its demand for affection.

Roy’s puppet-like figures, just as Rilke found out about the wax dolls of Lotte Pritzel, “answers us with silence”. The conical, shapely eyes of Roy’s figures are cast down in an inward stare, giving the impression of blank impassivity. The effect of these stark and beautiful eyes is chillingly Rilkean: “It was facing the doll, as it stared at us, that we experienced for the first time that emptiness of feeling, that heart-pause, in which we should perish.”

The rest of the paintings — some of them are just rough drafts, pen- and-ink sketches and preambles for many of his best-known works — reveal the versatility of Roy’s genius. The panel depicting scenes from the Bible, drawn like a comic-strip, shows the process which went into the creation of Roy’s famous images of the ‘subaltern Christ’. It was not just folk art and rustic life that fed into these uncanny visions; some unforgettable moments of art history were also condensed into Roy’s Christ. Gauguin’s The Yellow Christ leaves its unmistakable mark on some of these versions.

Finally, there were some beautiful landscapes and portraits in oil (including a haunting, eyeless profile of Tagore), closer to Impressionism (Degas, van Gogh and Renoir) than to Roy’s signature style. However, coming abruptly at the end of a thematically-structured exhibition, these made little sense on their own.