D. P. Roy Choudhury

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Devi Prasad Roy Choudhury filled his spare hours with wrestling, flute playing, hunting and short stories, squeezed around a career in bronze and paint. Born on the 15th of June 1899, he came to be rated by many as one of the major figures of Indian modern art. Two of his bronze compositions, the Triumph of Labour and the Martyrs' Memorial, still stand in public places. Cast decades apart, both share a theme of struggle and sacrifice. What took a boy from a family estate to sculpting the faces of governors, freedom fighters and a prime minister's request? And why, despite decades of major commissions, did he treat his own studio like a temple no visitor could casually walk into?

• 2. Early Life and Training

  ›

  Tejhat, a village in Rangpur within the undivided Bengal of British India, gave Roy Choudhury his start. The area now lies in Bangladesh, and he studied entirely from home rather than at a school. His first art lessons came from Abanindranath Tagore, the well-known Bengali painter, who guided his earliest brushwork. An Italian painter named Boeiss then taught him life-drawing and portraiture in the western style, a discipline distinct from Tagore's approach. Sculpture entered his training under Hiranmoy Roy Choudhury, who pushed him to build his figures rather than carve them. That method shaped his later monumental work.

  His grandfather, the head of the family and a zamindar, disinherited him once his devotion to art caused a rift between them. Cut off from family support, he took work as a scene painter for a theatre in North Kolkata. He also taught art at a boys' school in the city. He also spent time teaching at Santiniketan, where one of his students was Ramkinkar Baij. That stretch of teaching came before an appointment that would soon put him in charge of an entire art school himself.

• 3. Building the Madras School

  ›

  In 1929, Roy Choudhury joined the Madras School of Art as a superintendent. That made him one of the first Indians to head an institution the British had run themselves. He took the post only on the condition that he could keep accepting private commissions on the side. Over his three decades there, from 1929 to 1957, he pushed students from South India, who had produced only conventional work, toward real creative expression. That shift changed how people saw the school, moving its reputation away from being just an industrial arts centre. The British government recognized his service with an MBE in 1937. That honour arrived partway through a tenure running until 1957, years during which he kept working far beyond the classroom walls.

• 4. A Sacred Studio

  ›

  Two studios anchored his working life, one at his home and one inside the school. Both stayed busy from early morning until late evening, mostly on large-scale sculpture. He never once opened either space for a public exhibition during his lifetime. Roy Choudhury explained the choice in his own words: "I consider my modest studio as a sort of old, sacred temple devoted to the cause of art. I worship the objects I create. I can never think of them being carried now and then for public view. Those who are real lovers of art are welcome to my studio. Don't the devotees pay a visit to the dilapidated temple in a village?"

  When the Lalit Kala Akademi was founded in 1954, he became its founder chairman. The following year, he served as president of the UNESCO Art Seminar held in Tokyo. In 1956, he presided over the Nikhil Bharat Bangiya Sahitya Sammilani in Chennai. He also wrote Bengali short stories that appeared in the Bengali magazines of his day.

• 5. Two Brushes, Two Eras

  ›

  Under Tagore's guidance, Roy Choudhury's earliest paintings echoed his teacher's own style, built from flowing lines in a wash technique with flat tones. Mythological subjects filled most of that early work. Once he had absorbed western art techniques, he began producing pieces in the western academic style instead. Later in life, he turned toward ordinary people, spending time among the poorer classes and drawing directly from life rather than from posed models. He also painted a number of genre scenes and landscapes, along with animal studies drawn from his own hunting trips.

  He worked across tempera, oil, watercolor and pastel. In the 1930s, western art critics ranked him among the finest portrait painters in the world for his oil work. Several of his Chennai paintings carry titles that survive today, among them After the Storm, done in the Japanese wash technique. Others include Nirvana, Bridge, The Palace Doll, Durga Puja Procession, Abhisarika and Pujarini. One of them, Green and Gold, crossed an ocean to hang at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Yet for all his range with a brush, a different tool would come to define his most lasting public legacy.

• 6. Casting Power

  ›

  Casting, not carving, became Roy Choudhury's real specialty, and he built his public sculptures in an impressionistic style despite his skill with a paintbrush. Critics have linked his approach to the French sculptor Auguste Rodin.

  In his early years in Kolkata, he sculpted the busts of Sir J. C. Bose, Percy Brown and Mrs. Brown.

  Once he settled in Chennai, his reputation for high professional standards brought a steady stream of commissions. Most were portrait busts of British nobility from that era. Sitters included C. V. Kumaraswami Sastri, the Chief Justice of the Madras High Court, plus governors Lord Erskine, G. T. Boag and George Stanley. Also among his sitters were C. P. Ramaswami Iyer, C. R. Reddy and C. Abdul Hakim.

  Working from photographs alone, he produced portraits of Annie Besant, Asutosh Mukherjee, Surendranath Banerjee, Mahatma Gandhi and Motilal Nehru. These counted among his most monumental works.

  In his later sculptures, Roy Choudhury drew inspiration from the world around him, much as he had in his paintings. One of his first multi-figure reliefs was the Travancore Temple Entry Proclamation, completed in the 1930s. It depicted the moment low caste people were allowed into Hindu temples in Travancore. He also created moving images of the Bengal famine of 1943, including one showing a mother beside her starving infant. Independence in 1947 turned his attention toward monuments that would carry that same social commitment into a new nation's story.

• 7. Monuments of a Nation

  ›

  On the 1st of May 1923, Malayapuram Singaravelu founded the Labour Kisan Party of Hindustan in Madras to protect the rights of working people. He staged the founding ceremony on May Day itself, marking the first time India observed International Workers' Day. Roy Choudhury's sculpture, the Triumph of Labour, stands at Marina Beach near the spot where Singaravelu held those first Labour Day gatherings. Four bronze figures strain together to move a heavy boulder, caught at the point where their effort finally pays off. A matching version of the same composition stands outside the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.

  Outside the Patna Secretariat stands the Martyrs' Memorial, a life-sized group of seven young men. They died in the Quit India Movement trying to raise the national flag on that building. Roy Choudhury gave each figure a distinct, defiant posture, building a sense of collective resolve across the whole composition. The government commissioned the piece after independence, and Rajendra Prasad unveiled it in October 1956.

  Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru personally entrusted Roy Choudhury with Gyarah Murti, a monumental sculpture based on the Dandi March. It stands at the junction of Sardar Patel Marg and Teen Murti Marg in New Delhi. The finished work runs 29 meters along the surface and stands 4 meters high, built from eleven separate figures. It was installed in 1982, after Roy Choudhury had already died, and its image later appeared on India's 500 rupee currency note.

  Rhythm, After the Bath, The Last Stroke, Victims of Hunger from 1952 and When Winter Comes from 1955 round out his list of public bronzes. He also cast a statue of Mahatma Gandhi at Marina Beach in Chennai and a plaster of paris piece called God of Destruction.

  Museums across India now hold his work. These include the Government Museum in Chennai, the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi and Srichitralayam at Jaganmohan Palace. Two more, the Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad and the Travancore Art Gallery in Kerala, round out the list. His art also appears in books such as Indian Masters Volume I, The Two Great Indian Artists and Art and Aesthetics of Deviprasad.

  In 1958, the Government of India gave him the Padma Bhushan, the third highest Indian civilian honour. In 1962, he received the Lalit Kala Akademi Fellowship. Six years later, in 1968, Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata awarded him a D.Litt. That string of institutional recognition ran alongside a home life that looked nothing like the formality of an honours ceremony.

• 8. A Private Man

  ›

  "I can never be all manners and no man even to please my wife," Roy Choudhury once said. His growing wealth had placed him comfortably among high society. He had married Charulata, and the couple had one son, Bhaskar. Bhaskar grew up to work as a folk dancer, actor, choreographer, author and painter in his own right. Their temperaments clashed more than they matched. Charulata was a sophisticated woman who preferred formal conduct, and his unconventional behaviour sometimes embarrassed her.

  Their house in Madras rose two storeys, with the drawing room and bedrooms set on the first floor. That drawing room was enormous, its floor polished a deep red and scattered with Persian rugs alongside a couple of tiger heads he had shot. His own paintings hung at eye level against off-white walls. One corner held Babuji, a portrait sculpture of his father that ranked among his finest work. Under a north-facing window sat a low chowki draped in red and blue Bokhara cloth, holding a pair of tablas, a tanpura and a harmonium. Roy Choudhury had no formal training in Hindustani classical music, yet he could follow even its most intricate ragas.

  As a young man, Roy Choudhury had learned wrestling from a wrestler, and the skill stayed with him for life. When students at the Madras School of Art asked him to teach them, he agreed. An akhada, a wrestling pit, was dug under a neem tree behind his studio at the school. He covered its costs entirely himself. Roy Choudhury himself was a formidable wrestler. Under his tutelage, the students grew more disciplined, picking up the sport's finer points along with its value for fitness.

  Roy Choudhury died on the 15th of October 1975 in Madras, at the age of seventy-six. Kolkata hosted his first solo exhibition in 1993. Further shows followed at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture in Kolkata and the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai. More exhibitions came at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi and the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi. In 1959, the Triumph of Labour appeared on an Indian postage stamp marking the 40th anniversary of the International Labour Organization. The Martyrs' Memorial followed in 1967, printed on a stamp for the silver jubilee of the Quit India Movement. Those two stamps carried his bronzes past any studio wall, reaching more people than a single exhibition ever could.