Ramkinkar Baij was an Indian sculptor and painter, one of the pioneers of modern Indian sculpture and a key figure of Contextual Modernism. Baij was born in an economically modest family in the Bankura district of the modern state of West Bengal in India. While in his mid-teens Ramkinkar used to paint portraits of Indian freedom fighters involved in the Non-Cooperation Movement against the British rulers of India. At the age of 16 he got noticed by the renowned journalist Ramananda Chatterjee.
Four years later Ramkinkar joined the Visva-Bharati University at Santiniketan as a student of fine arts. After obtaining a diploma from the university he went on to head the sculpture department. Ramkinkar's renowned sculptor disciples include Prabhas Sen, Shankho Chowdhury, Avtar Singh Panwar, Madan Bhatnagar, Dharmani, Balbir Singh Katt, Rajul Dharial and Susan Ghose As a young boy, he grew up watching local craftsmen and image-makers at work; and making small clay figures and paintings with whatever came his way.
The Santal Family made in 1938, Santiniketan
This led him in 1925, on the advice of Ramananda Chatterjee the nationalist publisher and apologist for the new Indian art movement, to mark his way to Kala Bhavana, the art school at Santiniketan. At Santiniketan, under the guidance of Nandalal Bose and encouraged by its liberating intellectual environment, shaped by Rabindranath Tagore, his artistic skills and intellectual horizons acquired new depth and complexity.
Soon after completing his studies at Kala Bhavana he became a member of its faculty, and along with Nandalal and Benode Behari Mukherjee played a decisive role in making Santiniketan the most important centre for modern art in pre-Independence India. Beginning in early thirties he began to fill the campus with sculptures, one after the other, which were innovative in subject matter and personal in style.
His first magnum opus in this genre was the Santal Family done in 1938. In this larger than life sculpture he represented the tribal peasants of the region, giving the figures iconic presence and dignified grace that was so far limited to the images of Gods and Rulers. The use of cement and laterite mortar to model the figures, and the use of a personal style in which modern western and Indian pre-classical sculptural values were brought together was equally radical.
With this seminal work Ramkinkar established himself as undoubted modern Indian sculptor. Ritwik Ghatak wisely made a documentary on Baij named 'Ramkinkar' (1975) where he featured him as a political icon. In 2012 the Sculptor K.S. Radhakrishnan curated a grand retrospective Of Ramkinkar's at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi. Ramkinkar Baij (book), by the eminent Art Historian professor R. Siva Kumar is believed to be the most comprehensive one on Ramkinkar Baij.