Satyajit Ray’s Documentary Inner Eye Is A Vivid Take on Benod Behari Mukherjee’s Life

Satyajit Ray’s 1972 short documentary film, Inner Eye is an ode to Benod Behari Mukherjee, a blind artist and a teacher from Viswa Bharati University in Santiniketan. Benod Behari was born on 7 February, 1904, into a well-educated family in Behala in West Bengal. Belonging to an academically-inclined family, Benod Behari was exposed to various kinds of books from a very early age. However, due to his poor eyesight, his reading was hugely impaired. At the age of 15, he was permitted by a leading eye specialist of Kolkata to take up painting, and was thus sent to Santiniketan for further studies in an art faculty, Kala Bhavan. He eventually became a teaching staff member at Santiniketan in 1925.

Binod Behari earliest surviving sketches show landscapes.

The documentary begins by showcasing a process by which a wall (measuring 5 feet by 60 feet) belonging to a newly developed building in Santiniketan would be decorated by 20 murals designed by Benode Behari Mukherjee. While the narrator (Satyajit Ray) describes Mukherjee’s family, Mukherjee himself explains the process of making murals. It is mentioned that he was a student of Nandalal Bose, another acclaimed painter from Santiniketan. Mukerjee’s first few paintings showed an influence of Nandalal bose, but his later ones reflected a marked individuality. The documentary shows the painting of a bridge by Benod Behari Bose, which had no precedent to Indian painting. The narrator describes the painter as someone with “a deeply introspective and analytical turn of mind, aware of tradition, responsive to his environment, and with sympathies extending beyond the limits of oriental art.”

The documentary then features Mukherjee’s visit to Japan in 1937, where he imbibed different aspects of Japanese art through studying the works of notable Japanese artists like Tawaraya Sōtatsu and Toba Sōjō, and their telling use of the Japanese brush.

The entire process of Mukherjee painting a fresco on the ceiling of the new dormitory of Kala Bhavan is shown. A painstaking process involving the use of earth colours and a higly controlled technique, fresco painting was first taken up by Nandalal and his students. Binod had been familiar with an Egyptian fresco which showed a pond surrounded by trees. Binod too put a pond in the middle of his composition, but around the pond, he painted the rural life of Santiniketan. A second fresco came two years later in the building known as China Bhavan, which displays life at the Santiniketan campus.

The documentary also talks about some paintings and sketches Mukherjee created after a short trip to Benares. In the words of the narrator, “He succeeded in stripping his subjects of all the superficial trappings and catching the essence beneath.” He is also claimed to have designed some distinctive book covers depicting calligraphy. Mukherjee himself then explains another fresco done at the Hindu Bhavana in Santiniketan covering three walls of the central hall. Binod had read extensively about the lives of saints before attempting to create those frescoes depicting the saints and mystiques of medieval India. Done on the wall without the help of any preliminary tracing, it has set a precedent for fresco painting in India.

Covering Mukherjee’s tenure at the National Museum of Kathmandu as curator, and his Nepalese frescoes at Banasthali Vidyapith, Rajasthan, the film also highlights his own school at Mussoorie.

Mukherjee felt that the conventional distinction between fine arts and handicrafts was not a valid one, and that teaching methods today should be modified by taking this into account. He put this realisation in his own school which he started in Mussoorie in 1953. When he didn’t teach, he painted mountain scapes.

These were his last paintings after which he lost his eyesight forever in a cataract operation. However, he proved that the loss of sight need not mean the end of creation. He owes his artistic debt to an inner eye which he called upon to guide his fingers.

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