Who said that the art of Haren Das (1921-1993), printmaker par excellence, was confined to evoking facile idylls of Bengal village life? So varied was his oeuvre that it is impossible to pigeonhole the artist who was born in East Dinajpur district, now in Bangladesh. Debovasha celebrated his centenary recently by holding a huge exhibition of 115 of his works, some previously unseen. It was probably his first solo show. It included his iconic etching of a plume of water gushing out of a pump in which a boy bathes two buffaloes.

Blessed with the eye of a humanist, his works bring to vivid life vignettes of rural life, craftspeople at work, festivities, the harsh lives of labourers in cities, drifters and vagabonds, all bearing the hallmark of his mastery over his craft, draughtsmanship and the magic of chiaroscuro. His innovative use of negative space imparted a dream-like quality to his works. Das grew up in extreme poverty, but moved to Calcutta to be trained at the Government School of Art where he became a teacher later in life. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who were depicting the horrors of the famine or were already experimenting in the Modernist mode, Das was content with conjuring up the village life he had witnessed in his childhood without idealizing or romanticizing it.

Without breaking away from the academic realism taught in art school, Das, with great tenderness, took viewers through the shimmering ponds and waterways, shadowy groves and shrines and fields that nudged the horizon long before they were touched by industrialization. Even when he showed smokestacks of factories, they were relegated to the furthest reaches of fields, almost removed from view. With great dexterity, Das also depicted the beaches of Puri dominated by the dark looming figures of fishermen.