(b Kuthuparamba, Feb 15, 1924). Indian painter, sculptor and writer. He began drawing before he was ten but under the influence of Gandhian ideology became a political activist. In 1942, during the Quit India Movement, he was arrested and imprisoned for six months. Banned from government colleges and disillusioned with politics, he went in 1944 to Shantiniketan in West Bengal to study art. There Nandalal Bose, Mukherjee family and Ramkinker Baij were his teachers; he assisted Mukherjee on the Hindi Bhavan mural (2.44×23.07 m, 1947) at Shantiniketan. He began teaching at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Baroda (now Vadodara) in 1951 and was closely associated with it until he returned to Shantiniketan in 1980. He also went to the Slade School of Fine Art, London, for a year (1955–6), worked in New York during 1966–7 and was Deputy Director of the All India Hand-loom Board from 1958 to 1960. Widely travelled and exhibited, he was awarded prizes at the São Paulo Biennale (...