Jogen Chowdhury, who died this morning after battling cancer for over a year, was one of a small group of important painters from Bengal who came onto the Indian art scene in the 1960s. He had carved out a distinct niche for himself. Born into a landed family in pre-Partition East Bengal, he experienced a great reversal of fortune and became a post-Partition refugee in Calcutta. This early experience left a deep mark on him and profoundly shaped his art and personality.

Trained at the government art college in Calcutta and later travelling to Paris on a scholarship, he saw the pre-modern academic and modern art practices up close. But he chose to tread a path of his own. Back in India and working at the Weavers Service Centre in Madras, he developed a personal idiom, drawing on his early memories of the embroidery ( kantha ) and ritual floor graphics ( alpona ) practised by women in the villages in Bengal.…