Mukul Dey - A Brief Profile
by Satyasri Ukil

Mukul Dey and his two Russian co-passengers on Japanese liner 'Canada Maru' from Yokohama to Seattle in the USA, dated 10th September, 1916.

Indian painter-engraver Mukul Chandra Dey (1895-1989) — better known as Mukul Dey — was an important personality of his time. A student of Rabindranath Tagore's Santiniketan School during the early years of 20th century (c. 1906-1912) — he left his mark as a pioneer of drypoint-etching in India.

An extremely sensitive artist… maybe temperamental at times — he had chosen an essentially Western medium to depict his subjects of Indian life and legends from a common man's viewpoint. The river scenes of Bengal, the baul singers, the bazaars of Calcutta or the life of Santhal villages in Birbhum… all had attracted his attention and he recorded his vision with deep feeling and a rare sureness of hand.

Mukul Dey is also remembered for his superbly executed portraits of the rich and the famous… the Tagores, Albert Einstein, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Sven Hedin, the Tatas and many many more. Coming from a family background which had seen much difficult times, he had to learn his skills well for his survival and support. He states in My Reminiscences, "In 1918, I realised a long cherished dream by visiting the Ajanta Caves. I at once made up my mind to copy the frescos but as I had no money, I had to travel to various cities of southwestern India drawing portraits of rich men and selling my work for a few rupees only."

Not only as an important practicising artist, Mukul Dey deserves to be remembered as an art-collector as well. Forever passionately in love with the various forms of folk arts and crafts and the works of his contemporary Neo-Bengal School artists — he was an intrepid collector and promoter of their creations. During his tenure as the first Indian principal of Government School of Arts and Crafts, Calcutta (1928-1943); Mukul Dey had organised at least two most important exhibitions at the school premises.

Original brush and ink drawing depicting Japanese artist Shokin Katsuta. This postcard was drawn and written by Mukul Dey and was sent to Gagonendranath Tagore at the latter's Jorasanko residence, Calcutta.

Whereas at a particular point of time, most of us educated Indians had forgotten to appreciate our rich cultural heritage, it was left to the likes of Mukul Dey who had their orientations in Japan and Europe to promote their fellow Indian artists.

Having interacted deeply with such Japanese and European masters as — Yokoyama Taikan, Shimomura Kanzan, Kampo Arai, Yashiro Yukio, Stanislav Szukalski, James Blanding Sloan, Roi Partridge, Muirhead Bone, Frank Short, Henry Tonks and George Clausen — had widened his horizons enough to appreciate the genius of Jamini Roy and thus sponsor his first ever solo exhibition in Sept-Oct 1929 at Calcutta. Similarly, much before the Western art world took any cognizance of Rabindranath Tagore as an artist, Mukul Dey had wanted to put up his show as early as 1928. However, as Tagore himself was more keen to get recognistion from the cultural arena of Paris and Berlin first, this particular exhibition had to wait till the beginning of 1932.

Mukul, our grandfather had a strange attachment to papers and images… something he would never destroy. For years together, he went on adding to his mind boggling repository of visual and textual information.

Positively, he had a sense of history… a penchant for our recorded cultural history. This was decidely a civilised attribute for which most of us Indians were never very well known in the past. Quite contrary to the general Indian trait of ahistoricity, here was a modern Indian artist who tried to do his best to keep and preserve those tiny little fragments of our cultural fabric.

Artist Mukul Dey amid his pile of papers. "Chitralekha", Santiniketan, India 1983.

At his residence "Chitralekha", day after day and all alone, he used to sit amidst his pile of papers… looking at them, sifting and occasionally filing away. Sketches and drawings, old photographs, original correspondences, period newspaper clippings, exhibition and collection catalogues and hordes of most rare lantern slides depicting various stages and development of our traditional Indian art.

Mukul Dey had never lost his hope. He was hopeful to his very last that some day someone from his immediate society would lend him a hand to preserve his collection in a musuem or a gallery… A dream he could never fulfill in his life.

His priceless collection got fragmented and scattered all over Europe, Asia and the USA. For example, a major part of his 451 strong Kalighat pata painting collection was acquired by W G Archer for the Victoria and Albert Museum way back in the 1930s. Similarly, his masterpiece copies of Ajanta, Bagh, Sigiriya and Sittanavasal frescoes went to British Musuem and Japan respectively. Most of what remained in India had decayed and degenerated with the passage of time… as, in the meanwhile, most of us educated Indians have been much too busy imbibing the doctrines of Post-Modernism imported wholesale from abroad. Dey passed away in 1989.

It was only in his absence that we rediscovered that all that he left behind DO NOT tell his story alone. Instead, these fragile papers are capable of taking a researcher on a rare trip to a fascinating period of our cultural history which is yet to be fully explored and interpreted. This is extremely important because these informations deal with our immediate past… a past which is not at all remote and therefore still capable of influencing our present in a positive way. And, as they say, those who don't learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

Mukul Dey throughout his life was in search of those essentially positive, tangible and virile qualities of our traditional Indian art and culture which seldom loses its flavour and relevance over the passage of time.. and he wanted for an inter-cultural cross-fertilisation of ideas to infuse enriched aesthetics into our everyday existence. As Mukul Dey emphasized in his January 22, 1932 speech at Rotary Club, Calcutta: "There are in India at present three types of thought — one would have everything European bodily transplanted into India; another would have nothing to do with anything that savoured of Europe, the third was not afraid to engraft the best from foreign sources for the enrichment of the indigenous stock."

In the process of his life long quest, he was one among many firm believers in our pan-Asian cultural identity … and, who forever hoped for a culturally united Asia.

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