Akar Prakar’s exhibition, Crafting Visions: The Art of Gauri Bhanja, was a rare exhibition of one of the first women artist-designers to emerge from Santiniketan. Curated by Debdutta Gupta, it afforded viewers the opportunity to see not only Bhanja’s highly decorative and stylised work but also her beautiful landscapes and depictions of the indigenes who lived there.
K.G. Subramanyan wrote about Gauri Bhanja: “In an intimate conversation with Kanai Samanta Acharya, Nandalal Bose mentions that he was often astonished by his daughter Gauri’s genius for design. He says. ‘Gauri is more adept than me at decoration; design, colour, line and rhythm flow out of her effortlessly…’” He had added that “spontaneity” was her forte, both where her florid and her unadorned works were concerned. Those languid, tendril-like and curlicued lines that luxuriate across almost every micrometre of Bhanja’s work give the impression she had a horror of empty space.
Gauri Bhanja (1907-1998), like her illustrious father, was born in Kharagpur. At Santiniketan, Nandalal Bose was the mentor and art teacher of both Bhanja and her younger sister, Yamuna Sen. In 1927, Gauri married Santosh Kumar Bhanja (Chowdhury), a lawyer, and spent a few years in Chennai, where she contributed to art education before returning to Santiniketan.
By the 1930s, both sisters were teaching indigenous arts and crafts at Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati, and her name is documented in the university’s 1942 faculty list. She gave lessons in kantha embroidery, mural and wax-resist batik, which she is credited with having introduced at the university. She had a part to play in the illumination of the Constitution of India, too, under Nandalal Bose.
Gauri Bhanja’s flower studies remind one of similar paintings by Chitranibha Chowdhury, another of Nandalal Bose’s disciples. Her Tara, Rhythm of the Sea and Kurma Avatar in batik stand out for their ornate excesses. However, Kopai and The Singing Slopes are outstanding for their sensitive rendering of terrain. Putul Khela is a picture of innocence. Gauri Bhanja’s self-portrait is true to self.