Shyamal Datta Roy

Calcutta, May 19: Artist Shyamal Datta Roy died after a prolonged illness in Calcutta on Thursday morning. He was 71.

Born on May 8, 1934, in Ranchi, Datta Roy had given the medium of watercolour a place of its own, where it did not have to play second fiddle to other “serious” mediums such as oil.

Although successful later in life, Datta Roy belonged to a generation of artists who had to struggle early in their career. This was long before the art market had grown in India, and people took it for granted that artists would live in penury.

Datta Roy was trained at the Government College of Art and Craft. Artists Arun Bose and Sanat Kar were his contemporaries.

If Gopal Ghosh was the first artist to deviate from the norm of using watercolour to paint landscapes and draw sketches and use the medium to create paintings, it was Datta Roy who had elevated watercolour to a plane where it began to be taken as seriously as any other medium.

This he achieved through his Broken Bowl series, which mirrored the despondency of the early seventies.

The image also reflected the deep sorrow and anguish of artists of Datta Roy’s generation and people in Calcutta.

His technical achievement was also quite remarkable for he gave watercolour a solidity and depth unsurpassed by any of his predecessors.

Thereafter, Datta Roy built up a corpus of work and images that came to be associated with him. His sympathies lying with the underdog, street performers with monkeys and the subaltern in general became the raw material of his art.

Because of their physicality and the social ethos they reflected, these skeletal beings never struck a maudlin note.

Datta Roy also seemed to have had a soft corner for the decaying stately homes of Calcutta. The ruins of these mansions and their forlorn, poverty-stricken inhabitants became symbols of the economic marginalisation of Bengal.

Another medium he had mastered was colour etching. It was through his prints that his Broken Bowl series first created an impact on art lovers all over the country.

Datta Roy leaves behind his wife and daughter.