‘Visva-Bharati is like a vessel which is carrying the cargo of my life’s best treasure.’ So wrote the Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore in a 1940 letter to Mahatma Gandhi, referring to the learning centre he had founded in Santiniketan, West Bengal, two decades earlier. Visitors to Kala Bhavana, the art college of what is now a formalised university, may feel as though that vessel has been unlocked, revealing a trove of artistic riches. The campus is full of murals and sculptures by such celebrated artists as Nandalal Bose, Benode Behari Mukherjee, Ramkinkar Baij and Somnath Hore, all of whom studied or taught at the college. Among these gems of Indian Modernism, two bold murals by KG Subramanyan, at once sumptuous and stark, draw the eye.
Kala Bhavana was established in 1919, the same year as the Bauhaus. And like the school in Germany, it brought far-reaching artistic and educational shifts in India, growing out of Tagore’s desire to see art turn away from the historicist moorings and miniaturist sensibilities of the nationalist art movement (led by his nephews Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore) towards something grander in scale, something that responded to the local environment without being culturally insular. For Tagore, the first person from outside Europe to win the Nobel prize for literature, Santiniketan was simultaneously an educational experiment and a modern secular community-building project. He wanted its artists to play a critical role in both.
Nandalal Bose, a muralist who was Abanindranath’s most accomplished student, was picked by Tagore to run the art school. He put the bard’s ideas into practice by erasing the division between art and craft, encouraging drawing from reality, rather than posed models, and making murals, with teachers and students working side by side, part of the curriculum. Among these students were Benode Behari Mukherjee and Ramkinkar Baij, both pioneers in modern Indian art who went on to teach alongside Nandalal. Of their students, KG Subramanyan was perhaps the most versatile of all, embracing mediums from painting to poetry, toy design to tapestry. Like his mentors, he saw each art form as offering its own creative possibilities and fulfilling a distinct social purpose. Murals allowed him to work outside the gallery system, to produce public art and reach a broader audience. They were always created without remuneration.
Subramanyan’s interest in mural painting was sparked as a student when he assisted Benode with his 25-metre fresco the Life of the Medieval Saints, a veritable pageant of Indian life across centuries that combines the rhythmic flow of the gigantic relief at Mahabalipuram with the gentle and earthy humanity of Giotto. After completing his studies, Subramanyan joined the fine-arts faculty in Baroda, where he remained for 30 years, during which time he became one of India’s most prominent muralists. Among his works from this period is the King of the Dark Chamber (1963). Composed of 13,000 fired and glazed terracotta tiles, it was created to commemorate the centenary of Tagore’s birth and indeed takes its name from one of his plays.
In 1980, Subramanyan returned to Kala Bhavana to take up the position of professor of painting, and created several important murals between 1988 and 2012, including the two at Kala Bhavana. The first of these, in stark black and white, wraps around an asymmetrical building that now houses the design department, covering more than 185 square metres of wall space. Brushed directly on to the façade with no preliminary layout, the present iteration was completed in just one month at the end of 2009, replacing an earlier version that had faded over time. Painted with lamp black mixed with poly-synthetic resin, it is meant to be transient, like most folk murals of India, driving home Subramanyan’s belief that sustaining creativity in the community is more critical than preserving individual works of art.
He conjured a shrewd interweave of varied motifs for the mural: sturdy palms and hanging laburnums, a menagerie of animals alongside mythical beings such as Garuda, Buraq and the hamsa bird. Human figures who look like they’ve stepped from the campus into the artwork occupy the same space as gods, demigods and demons. Some groupings are narrative, others allegorical, like Hanuman in flight, laden with a mountain of life-saving herbs. Some motifs are minimal and evocative like a haiku, others, such as Durga’s battle with Mahishasura, are expansive and dramatic, with near-baroque levels of exuberance. With no predetermined order, Subramanyan invites viewers to collate and create their own stories.
The second mural was made during the winter of 2010–2011. Urged by colleagues to do something more permanent, Subramanyan opted for hand-painted stoneware tiles. The low hexagonal building chosen for this work was once Nandalal’s studio and today houses part of the art-history department. In keeping with the master’s Gandhian leanings and commitment to rural arts and crafts, Subramanyan invoked the seasonal murals that many Indian communities daub over their cow-dung-washed mud walls. Both murals are painted in white over darker grounds, but unlike the monochromatic design on the adjacent building, this piece has no narrative, nor any demonstration of prodigious graphic skill. Instead, it is a subtle inter-play of mostly geometric motifs. Underlying this, however, is a keen sense of design, bringing a touch of the sublime to what appears mundane. The work is a homage to Nandalal, short quotations from his writings being inscribed into the tiles. Like the buildings of the Islamic world, covered with decorative motifs in low relief, it is designed to come alive with shifts in ambient light. Where one mural is florid, the other is quiet, demanding slow immersion. This difference is not surprising; Subramanyan placed purpose and message above self-expression, speaking in many registers, languages and styles depending on the work in question. In the first, he wanted to enliven the campus; in the second, he was offering tribute to a mentor.
Subramanyan died in 2016 aged 92, but Tagore would be gratified that his vision of art – open to the world, rooted in nature, integrated with everyday life – lives on in his murals. In 1951, ten years after Tagore’s death, Visva-Bharati was declared an Institute of National Importance, and in 2023 Santiniketan was designated a Unesco World Heritage Site. In his letter to Gandhi, the poet/philosopher continued: ‘I hope Visva-Bharati may claim special care from my countrymen for its preservation.’ Hopefully Unesco’s intervention will help protect these works and his legacy.
A version of this article appeared in the September 2025 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
