Recently I came across a website that advances art education for the blind
Recently I came across a website that advances art education for the blind (https://www.artbeyondsight.org/). To lay people, this might sound like a paradox, but the organisation attempts through its numerous programmes, "to give those who cannot see equal access to the world's visual culture and the opportunity to experience the life-enhancing power of art."
In India, such resources for the blind or visually impaired are even today non-existent. A hundred years ago, even basic educational resources for the blind were not commonly available. Binodebehari Mukherjee was born in 1904 and faced an uncertain future; a childhood illness had left him blind in one eye and with severely impaired vision in the other. Despite his disability, Binodebehari keenly observed the smallest details of life's passing panorama. In his autobiography, Chitrakar: the artist, translated from the Bengali by his student K G Subramaniam (Seagull, Kolkata, 2006), Binodebehari tells us how he watched the shoemaker make shoes, hammering them into shape on his three-armed anvil and securing the sole with nails, or how he watched the peddlers and the office-going babus. At the age of twelve he was sent to Tagore's school at Santiniketan. It was here that Binodebehari's artistic talents were discovered. Soon he joined the newly-opened Kala Bhavan where he could devote all his energies to art.
Binodebehari writes engagingly about Tagore's way of assessing the students. Nandalal Bose, the principal of Kala Bhavan, once hinted to Tagore that perhaps this boy's disability would hamper his progress in the field. Tagore's answer was as wise as it was insightful: "If he works with interest, let him be. Don't worry about his future. Let each find his own way out."
Benodebehari spent many years teaching at Kala Bhavan and developed his own distinctive style. He undertook large-scale murals along with Ramkinkar Baij and his students. His magnum opus remains 'The Life of the Medieval Saints' which he undertook on three walls of Hindi Bhavan. Benodebehari's autobiography delightfully combines humour with brutal frankness. Mentioning the conservatism that swept through Santiniketan after Rabindranath's death, Benodebehari tells us, "Within this conservative atmosphere I married one of my students." His wife, Leela, an artist in her own right, often worked with him. Throughout his life, Binodebehari remained eager to learn.
He visited Japan in 1937 in order to understand the spirit of Japanese painting. In 1949 he took up the position of curator at the Government Museum in Nepal. There he learnt wood and stone carving from the artisan Kulasundar Shilakarmi. In 1957 after he underwent a cataract surgery, complications that set in soon afterwards left him totally blind. As he movingly recollects "I could feel the heat of the sun, but I could not see its light." But his story does not end there. He retrained himself to experience the visual through the tactile and continued to draw, make wax sculptures and colourful paper cuts. It was this remarkable resilience that Satyajit Ray captured in his film on Benodebehari, tellingly titled 'The Inner Eye'. Ray's fond tribute to his teacher (for Benodebehari had taught Ray at Santiniketan), stands testimony to the art of seeing without sight.u00a0
Many years ago while teaching a course on 'Film and Literature' I was agitated beyond words when a blind student decided to opt for the course. I gently dissuaded him from taking the course for obvious reasons. Now as I read Benodebehari and recall Ray's film, I wish I had risen to the challenge of having a blind student in a class that had such a strong visual component. That exercise might have taught me to also see differently.
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