Devi Prasad-potter, educationist, peace-activist, photographer, painter-graduated in 1944 from Kala Bhavan, Rabindranath Tagore's art school in Santiniketan, where he had the good fortune of being a student of the three master artists, Nandalal Bose, Benodebehari Mukherjee and Ramkinkar Vaij.
He worked with Mahatma Gandhi and participated in various non-violent social reform movements, including the Quit India movement and Vinoba Bhave's Gramdan movement, both before and after Independence. In 1944 he joined Gandhi's ashram, Sevagram, where he worked on child art and education and edited Nayee Talim till 1962. He was Secretary General and, later, Chairman of the War Resisters International from 1962 to 1975.
Devi Prasad has published widely on peace, child education, Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi. He has authored the history of the War Resisters International, practical manuals for potters in the Indian environment, and translations of several seminal works in English, Hindi and Bengali. He is a pioneer of studio pottery in India, and was awarded the Lalit Kala Ratna by the Lalit Kala Akademi in 2007.
Starting from humble origins, Ramkinkar Vaij became one of the most significant Indian sculptors of the twentieth century. Not only was he a great artist, but there was something extraordinarily magnetic and exhilarating about him, flowing out of a personality saturated with an intense love of life and an insatiable passion for work.
Ramkinkar, as he is generally known, made his home and found his creative flowering in Santiniketan, the pioneering university founded by Rabindranath Tagore. There are few people outside the Santiniketan art scene who are truly familiar with his work, and fewer still who have even a glimmer of his unique personality. Unlike most artists, he was completely indifferent to publicity, self-promotion and awards. This was a trait shared by all three of Santiniketan's great artistic personalities of the time: Nandalal Bose, Principal of the Art Department, Benodebehari Mukherjee, painter and intellectual, and Ramkinkar himself. They were tuned to the same note, working quietly, shunning publicity and disdaining the limelight. Tagore, that greatest of masters, had bent all his efforts to nurture the creativity of any one of his colleagues who showed the slightest promise. He knew that creativity could develop only in an atmosphere of freedom and encouragement, and took special care to foster such an atmosphere in Santiniketan from its very inception in 1901. Ramkinkar became an integral part of that atmosphere.
Along with Gaganendranath Tagore and Amrita Sher-Gil, Ramkinkar was amongst the earliest of modern artists in India to create his own place in the art world. He grew out of the Bengal Renaissance School of painting, started by artists like Rabindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose. But he soon outgrew it to become the first sculptor in India to do genuine abstract work.
Surprisingly, very little written material exists on the life and work of Ramkinkar Vaij. In this study, I have tried to provide the reader with what I could gather from friends, to supplement the sparse published material available, and my own acquaintance with the personality of the master and his work in sculpture. I have not touched on his work as one of the greatest painters of modern India, if not one of the most significant artists of twentieth-century India. Nor have I discussed the other creative activities in which Ramkinkar frequently engaged himself-for instance, the theatrical productions in which he excelled. I have also not tried to write a comprehensive biography of the artist. To give some idea of the major events of his life, I have included a chronology of his career towards the end of this book.
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