Category Art

The original Constitution of India was handwritten by Prem Behari Narain Raizada in a flowing italic style with beautiful calligraphy. The Constitution was published in Dehradun and photolithographed by the Survey of India.

The original copies of the Indian Constitution were written in Hindi and English. Each member of the Constituent Assembly that drafted the Constitution, signed two copies of the constitution, one in Hindi and the other in English.

There are a total of 117,369 words in the English version of the Constitution of India which contains 444 articles in 22 parts, 12 schedules and 115 amendments.

With so much of writing, the Indian Constitution is the longest of any sovereign country in the world. In its current form, it has a Preamble, 22 parts with 448 articles, 12 schedules, 5 appendices and 115 amendments. Both the versions of the Constitution, Hindi and English, were handwritten. It is the longest handwritten constitution of any country on earth.

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The original Constitution of India, adopted on 26 January 1950, was not a printed document. It was entirely handcrafted by the artists of Shantiniketan under the guidance of Acharya Nandalal Bose, with the calligraphy texts done by Prem Behari Narain Raizada in Delhi. This document is now preserved in a special helium-filled case in the library of the Parliament of India. In many ways, the original handcrafted Constitution represents one of the triumphs of Shantiniketan and Kala Bhavan.

At the beginning of each part of the Constitution, Nandalal Bose has depicted a phase or scene from India’s national experience and history. The artwork and illustrations (22 in all), rendered largely in the miniature style, represent vignettes from the different periods of the history of the Indian subcontinent, ranging from Mohenjodaro in the Indus Valley, the Vedic period, the Gupta and Maurya empires and the Mughal era to the national freedom movement. By doing so, Nandalal Bose has taken us through a veritable pictorial journey across 4000 years of rich history, tradition and culture of the Indian subcontinent.

The Vedic period is represented by a scene of gurukula (forest hermitage school) and the epic period by images from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Then there are depictions of the lives of the Buddha and Mahavira, followed by scenes from the courts of Ashoka and Vikramaditya. There is a beautiful line drawing of the Nataraja from the Chola bronze tradition.

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Internationally-acclaimed Gond artist Bhajju Shyam has also been honoured with a Padma Shri. Mr. Shyam is famous for depicting Europe in his Gond paintings. Born in a poor tribal family, he worked as a night watchman and electrician to support family before becoming a professional artist. His The London Jungle Book sold 30,000 copies and has been published in five foreign languages.

Kerala’s medical messiah for the terminally ill, M R Rajagopal, is among the awardees. Rajagopal has specialised in pain relief care for neo natal cases.

Maharashtra’s Murlikant Petkar, India’s first para- Olympic gold medalist, who lost his arm in 1965 Indo-Pak war, is another winner.

Tamil Nadu’s Rajagopalan Vasudevan, known as the plastic road-maker of India, developed a patented and innovative method to reuse plastic waste to construct roads, has also been given the Padma Shri.

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She was young and super talented but we lost her when she is just 28 due to unknown reasons. Late artist Amrita Sher Gil was about to attend her first solo show in Lahore but went into a coma and left her legacy behind which went onto becoming world famous! Born in 1913 in Budapest, Hungary, her paintings are known worldwide. Often called India’s Frida Kahlo for aesthetically blending traditional and Western art forms, Amrita was one of the most famous painters of India.

Her artwork may have mostly depicted Western style and culture during the initial stages of her career, but she gradually rediscovered herself by depicting Indian subjects using traditional methods. She even travelled to different parts of India, France and Turkey, which inspired her techniques. 

Her works in India, which were after her wedding, Amrita’s paintings had a tremendous impact on Indian art. Many of her works were influenced by the works of Rabindranath Tagore and Abanindranath Tagore. Some of the best works of her time include ‘Siesta’, ‘Village Scene’ and ‘In the Ladies’ Enclosure’, which represented the poor state of the unprivileged and women in the country. In 1941, she moved to Lahore (before independence), where art was being appreciated at that time. There she came up with ‘The Bride’, ‘Tahitian’, ‘Red Brick House’ and ‘Hill Scene’.

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The transportive work of Vincent van Gogh has transposed us through the limits of time and into an era where Impressionist paintings were a statement to be made. While the artist himself may be of post-impressionism, he manages to capture the open composition of the movement perfectly.

Through his swirling brush strokes, the artist would convey his feelings and his state of mind. His belief that there was a power behind nature made him try to capture it through his work. Therefore, he strove to become a painter of rural life and nature.

Van Gogh always aimed to stay within the “guise of reality” which gave his paintings an abstract form. However, he later wrote that at times he might have taken it too far, reality having been set as a background character and being heavily overshadowed by the protagonist: symbolism.

Each artistic development Van Gogh had gone through has been owed to his living across different places in Europe. He took to immersing himself in the local culture and activity, he judged and studied the lighting and implemented in his various paintings. His evolution had been slow, and he was acutely aware of his painterly limitations, yet he kept his individual outlook throughout each work.

He might have been pushed to move often as a coping mechanism when faced with the realities of his current situation, however, it also contributed to his development of his technical skill. Whenever he painted a portrait, he wanted them to endure through the passage of time and would use colors to capture the emotions of each person rather than aim for realism.

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Cubism is an artistic movement, created by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, which employs geometric shapes in depictions of human and other forms. Over time, the geometric touches grew so intense that they sometimes overtook the represented forms, creating a more pure level of visual abstraction. Though the movement’s most potent era was in the early 20th Century, the ideas and techniques of Cubism influenced many creative disciplines and continue to inform experimental work.

Picasso attended the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, where his father taught, at 13 years of age. In 1897, Picasso began his studies at Madrid’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, which was Spain’s top art academy at the time. Picasso attended only briefly, preferring to roam the art exhibits at the Prado, studying paintings of Rembrandt, El Greco, Francisco Goya, and Diego Veláquez.

During this nascent period of Picasso’s life, he painted portraits, such as his sister Lola’s First Communion. As the 19th century drew to a close, elements of Symbolism and his own interpretation of Modernism began to be apparent in his stylized landscapes.

In 1900, Picasso first went to Paris, the center of the European art scene. He shared lodgings with Max Jacob, a poet and journalist who took the artist under his wing. The two lived in abject poverty, sometimes reduced to burning the artist’s paintings to stay warm.

Before long, Picasso relocated to Madrid and lived there for the first part of 1901. He partnered with his friend Francisco Asis Soler on a literary magazine called “Young Art,” illustrating articles and creating cartoons sympathetic to the poor. By the time the first issue came out, the developing artist had begun to sign his artworks “Picasso,” rather than his customary “Pablo Ruiz y Picasso.”

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