Untitled

Nandalal Bose is one of the most significant Indian artists from the twentieth century, associated with the contextual modernism that was developed in Santiniketan, Bengal, where Rabindranath Tagore had established a university. Bose designed several postcards throughout his life that worked in the intimate register of personal diaries. So secure did he become with this habit that he even cut out his sketching papers into postcard sizes that he carried around with him. The subject-matter varied, although the animal world inspired a substantial number of them; not only did they charm and fascinate Bose, but they also held hidden messages for him about the simplicity and truths of life. In several postcards, he added a note— as can be seen in this work—which could be a cryptic line or aphorism, intended for the recipient. In this image, he writes ‘An old caged lion, with barely any claws or teeth,’ evoking a certain poignance in the scene, in which we can see an old, emaciated lion sitting with a small piece of bone in an extremely confined cage. Rough lines, made with pencil, crowd the pictorial space to convey the suffocating proportions of the cage and a simple sketch of a lion becomes charged with the affective force of the artist’s empathy towards the animal world.