The Kalighat Temple in Kolkata is the epicentre of the city's obsession with the goddess, Kali. It's a sprawling compound with a crematorium right next door, behind which a little rivulet of the Hooghly is littered with religious by-products that are part and parcel of a person's death. But things were a lot more sanitised back in the 1920s. That's when a young man, educated at the Government College of Art, was walking past the temple when he came across some paintings that adhered to the traditional patachitra style, in which mythological stories are depicted on a piece of cloth that you scroll down to reveal different panels. His name was Jamini Roy. Till then, the artist had dealt mainly with the western impressionist form that his teacher, the revered Abanindranath Tagore, had taught him. Of late, however, he'd been feeling a creative vacuum. But seeing the colourful pata paintings on display at Kalighat stirred a revelation in Roy. He decided to shift his focus to this folk art form from Bengal, and with that, the course of Indian art history underwent a seismic shift.

Jamini Roy