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Regular-article-logo Wednesday, 16 July 2025

Telling strokes

VISUAL ARTS - Soumitra Das

TT Bureau Published 14.05.16, 12:00 AM

When Ranen Ayan Dutt was in form as an artist in Calcutta's leading advertising agencies, and was responsible for launching memorable campaigns for the hair oil, Jabakusum, Tata Steel and Wills Made for Each Other, he created the image of the ideal middle-class Bengali woman in a sari, shapely and desirable, yet never overtly sexy, a woman who had time for leisure and was prone to daydreaming. Calcutta, in those relatively unhurried days, deserved the sobriquet of Cultural Capital of India, and Bengalis were still proud of their identity, Westernization notwithstanding.

Dutt's women were the Bengali It Girl, the kind that Satyajit Ray depicted in his trilogy based on contemporary Calcutta. They were sophisticated, well turned out, and were quintessentially Bengali. The advertisements are in newspaper archives, but we saw these women once again at Galerie 88's exhibition, Ranen Ayan Dutt: A Periscopic Journey Through Seven Decades, that is on till today.

Dutt was exceptionally skilled as an artist, and he wielded both pen and ink and brush with equal adroitness. This is clear from his watercolours like Amma (1946), Trafalgar Square (1962), oils like Hillola (1956), Siesta (1994) (picture), Pensive (2016) and the drawings he did for the Shalimar series (1978-83) and the Shaw Wallace series (1980). This was commercial art at its best, as Dutt had a tremendous ability to conjure up any period of Indian history and myriad myths with detailed drawings of the characters involved, their clothes and milieu, such as Shivaji, sahibs and their mems in tea gardens along with the coolies, and the drama of battlefields, be it Porus confronting Alexander, or Krishna and Arjun in the chariot at Kurukshetra.

The last two pictures - coloured pen-and-ink drawings - had a cinematic quality about them as Dutt brought to life the surge of kinetic energy through the charging horses, and the phalanxes of soldiers ready to make mincemeat of one another. Both drawings are 21.5"x10" and they afford a panoramic view of the battlefields where the soldiers turn into a seething mass of humanity, rendered with the apparently tangled mass of lines that emerged from Dutt's pen.

Having received a rigorous academic training, Dutt enjoyed evoking typical Calcutta scenes as well, like the terraces of old buildings where people still fly kites, and the banks of a river with boats anchored near a quay. Way back in the 1940s, Dutt had painted the portrait of an old woman ( Amma) and he modelled her face with a few telling strokes of his brush. Years later, when Dutt was painting his young women lolling in their beds, his dexterity and feel for atmosphere came to the fore once again. His age notwithstanding, Ranen Ayan Dutt's virtuosity remains undiminished.

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