How modern artists brought Indian sculpture down from gods and kings to everyday life
For thousands of years in India, if you carved a figure out of stone or cast it in bronze, it was almost always one of two kinds of person: a god, or a king.
Sculpture lived up high. It stood on temple walls and royal pedestals, made of the finest and most expensive materials, following strict old rules. Then, less than a hundred years ago, a handful of Indian artists did something quietly revolutionary. They brought sculpture down to the ground and pointed it at ordinary people, humble materials, and everyday life. This is the story of how modern Indian sculpture climbed down from the pedestal.
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Two cages to escape
The artists who wanted to make something new had to break out of not one tradition, but two.
The first was very old. For centuries, Indian sculpture was mostly sacred. It followed fixed rules laid down in ancient texts, and its job was to show gods and goddesses in their proper, perfect forms. Then the British added a second cage. Their art schools taught what was called “academic realism,” which mostly meant making stiff, lifelike statues of British viceroys and Indian maharajas.
Both traditions, old and new, pointed the same way: upward, at the powerful. To make sculpture about anything else, an artist had to escape them both.
The man who gave a poor family the dignity of a god
The great escape began with a poor, largely self-taught artist named Ramkinkar Baij, working at Rabindranath Tagore’s school at Santiniketan.
Baij could not afford marble or bronze, and he did not want them anyway. Instead he used what lay around him in the red earth of Bengal: ordinary cement and rough laterite pebbles. In 1938 he finished a work called Santhal Family. It shows a tribal mother, father, child and their dog, walking to a new home with their few belongings on their shoulders. It is widely called India’s first modern public sculpture.
To see why it mattered, you have to see what he had done.
Baij gave a poor, ordinary tribal family the grandeur and dignity that Indian sculpture had, for thousands of years, saved only for gods and kings.
He put them up on the scale of heroes, made of humble cement, out in the open air where anyone could see them. Today he is called the father of modern Indian sculpture. Another of his great works, Mill Call, shows workers rushing to answer the siren of a factory. His subject was not heaven. It was the hard, moving, everyday life of the people around him.
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A country looking for its own shape
After India won its freedom in 1947, its artists were asking a big question: what should a modern, independent India look like?
Some looked outward. A circle of artists known as the Calcutta Group, formed in 1943, brought bold new Western ideas like abstraction into Indian art, bending the human body into clean, simple shapes in wood and welded metal instead of copying it exactly.
Others looked inward, to India’s own village crafts. Meera Mukherjee travelled and learned the ancient tribal way of casting bronze called Dhokra, a lost-wax method that folk metalworkers had used for centuries, and she used that old village skill to make grand modern sculptures. The newest art, she showed, could grow straight out of the oldest crafts.
The women who changed what a sculpture could be
Some of the boldest breaks of all came from women, who overturned the very idea of what a sculpture had to be made of.
Mrinalini Mukherjee gave up clay and stone completely. She knotted and wove thick ropes of dyed hemp and jute into towering forms that seemed almost alive, half ancient goddess and half strange flowering plant. Piloo Pochkhanawala welded together scrap and industrial metal into rugged, powerful shapes. Between them, they proved a simple, freeing idea: a sculpture no longer had to be carved from stone. It could be rope, or rust, or almost anything a human hand could shape.
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The everyday things become giants
When India opened up its economy in the 1990s, its sculptors stepped onto the world stage, and they carried the most ordinary Indian things with them.
Subodh Gupta gathers thousands of shining stainless-steel tiffin boxes and thalis, the plain dishes found in almost every Indian kitchen, and stacks them into enormous glittering skulls and clouds, asking sharp questions about wealth, hunger and modern life. Bharti Kher covers whole objects, even a life-sized elephant, in thousands of bindis, the small dots that Indian women wear on their foreheads, turning something familiar into a question about women’s lives. Ravinder Reddy makes huge, brightly painted heads of everyday Indian women who gaze out with wide, calm eyes, as grand and still as any temple deity.
And Anish Kapoor, born in India and now one of the most famous sculptors alive, made his name partly with mounds of pure, glowing colour, an idea that came to him from the heaps of bright spice and kumkum powder piled up in Indian markets.
From the temple to the street
Step back and look at the whole journey, and one thing stands out clearly. Indian sculpture did not become modern by copying the West. It became modern by looking harder at itself.
It looked at its own poor and its labourers, at its village crafts, at its kitchen dishes and forehead dots and market spices, and it decided that all of this was worthy of art. The gods still stand quietly in the temples, as they always have. But now, beside them, a cement family walks forever down a Santiniketan road, a mountain of steel tiffins shines under gallery lights, and the ordinary, daily life of India has at last been lifted up onto the pedestal too.
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If you think you have remembered everything about this topic take this QUIZ
Results
#1. Who is widely considered the “Father of Modern Indian Sculpture” and created India’s first public modernist sculpture, Santhal Family?
#2. Which unconventional, cheap local materials were used to create the Santhal Family sculpture in 1938?
#3. D.P. Roy Choudhury moved away from royal portraiture to depict the struggles of the common man in which famous bronze sculpture?
#4. Which female sculptor famously abandoned clay and stone to create monumental, organic forms using woven hemp and dyed jute?
#5. Subodh Gupta critiques consumerism and urbanization by creating massive installations out of which everyday items?
#6. Bharti Kher transforms traditional symbols into commentaries on gender and identity by covering objects (like fiberglass elephants) with thousands of what?
#7. Ravinder Reddy’s work merges Pop Art aesthetics with ancient South Indian temple carvings to create what type of sculptures?
#8. The globally famous contemporary sculptor Sir Anish Kapoor drew early inspiration from which colorful aspect of Indian markets?
Who is considered the father of Modern Indian Sculpture?
Ramkinkar Baij, who revolutionized the medium by using concrete and gravel at Santiniketan.
What is famous about Subodh Gupta’s sculptures?
He is globally renowned for creating massive installations using everyday stainless steel kitchen utensils (like thalis and tiffins).
Which artist famously used hemp and jute to create sculptures?
Mrinalini Mukherjee, who used traditional knotting techniques to create monumental fiber art.
How did D.P. Roy Choudhury contribute to Indian sculpture?
He bridged the gap between colonial academic realism and modernism, creating iconic public monuments like the Triumph of Labour.
What material does Bharti Kher frequently use in her sculptural installations?
She uses thousands of Bindis (traditional forehead dots) applied to the surfaces of objects and fiberglass animals.
Sources and references
- Wikipedia (“Santhal Family”) and the National Gallery of Modern Art — Ramkinkar Baij’s Santhal Family (1938) made of cement and laterite mortar at Santiniketan, depicting a Santhal family migrating to a new life, and widely regarded as India’s first public modernist sculpture.
- The Wire and DAG (on Ramkinkar Baij) — Baij’s rejection of costly marble and bronze in favour of cheap cement and local laterite pebbles, his works Santhal Family and Mill Call as studies of people in motion, and his standing as a pioneer of modern Indian sculpture.
- The Wire and DAG (on Ramkinkar Baij) — Baij’s rejection of costly marble and bronze in favour of cheap cement and local laterite pebbles, his works Santhal Family and Mill Call as studies of people in motion, and his standing as a pioneer of modern Indian sculpture.
- Tate and the Metropolitan Museum of Art — Subodh Gupta’s stainless-steel-utensil installations as commentaries on consumerism, and Mrinalini Mukherjee’s monumental woven hemp and jute forms.
- Original Curious Indian article (“Contemporary Indian Sculpture”) — D.P. Roy Choudhury and Triumph of Labour, the Calcutta Group of 1943, Meera Mukherjee’s Dhokra-based bronzes, Piloo Pochkhanawala’s scrap-metal work, Bharti Kher’s bindi works, Ravinder Reddy’s fibreglass heads, and Anish Kapoor’s pigment works inspired by Indian markets.
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