(Ranjan) (b Baliatore, April 15, 1887; d Calcutta, April 24, 1972). Indian painter. Born into a family of small landowners in rural Bengal, he studied at the Government School of Art in Calcutta (1906–14). He began his career as an academic portrait painter but gave this up to paint first in an ‘Oriental’ style, as in Mother and Child (New Delhi, N.G. Mod. A.), influenced by the prevalent indigenist movement, and later in a Post-Impressionist manner (e.g. Landscape with Three Boats; New Delhi, N.G. Mod. A.). Rural and tribal subject-matter figured predominantly in these paintings. Around 1925 he became convinced that the folk tradition alone could liberate the modern Indian artist, and consequently he began to collect and study its local examples, the pat (Bengal folk painting) in particular. After starting with the urbanized Kalighat version of the pat, painted on individual sheets, he moved on to the original source, the rural narrative scroll, adopting its traditional materials, techniques and representational conventions (...