Anil Karanjai

The group established the first art gallery of Benaras in a rundown teashop, Paradise Cafe, frequented by some of this vibrant city's most colourful characters.

Anil became friends with the Beat Generation's famous poet Allen Ginsberg and his partner Peter Orlovsky during their sojourn in India.

In the early 1970s, Anil Karanjai made a huge impact in Indian art circles with his technical maturity and his dreamlike, often nightmarish, angry imagery.

This would become much more pronounced in many of his later works in which landscape would become the predominant motif and in which the human presence is subtly suggested, often by a pathway or steps leading to a mysterious destination.

As a politico-cultural activist he would always remain committed, and he would maintain a relationship with the leading (হাংরি আন্দোলন) Hungry generation writers, Malay Roy Choudhury, Subimal Basak, Samir Roychoudhury, Tridib Mitra and others of that era.

But it was not merely his subject matter that earned him neglect and even opprobrium among the powerful groups that decide upon the worldly success or failure of artists.

In this, Anil drew from his immense knowledge of Indian classical music, particularly with regard to the raga, whereby a composition conveys the mood or feeling of a particular season or time.

In art, its equivalent is called rasa, literally sap or essence, an aesthetic approach that Anil understood to be timeless and universal and which he sought to interpret in his paintings.

As he asserted on many occasions, including in the same film: “The role of today’s artist is to heal the wounds inflicted by our society.” Throughout his career, Anil had worked in a variety of media, particularly in oils which he revered highly.

Nightmarish by Anil Saari, Link, 26 January 1973 Anil Karanjai: Painting Moods of India by Ross Beatty, Jr., Washington Review of the Arts, Vol.3, No.2, Summer 1977 Star Debut by Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, Debonair, March 1978 Karanjai's works show freshness and dynamism, The Times of India, 9 March 1978 Untitled piece by Anil Karanjai published in ART TODAY, New Delhi and Calcutta, March 1982 Forgotten Genre of Landscapes by Santo Datta, Indian Express, 24 October 1985 Paintings of Disquiet by Partha Pratim Chatterjee, The Economic Times, 27 October 1985 The Door of Kusma by Juliet Reynolds, Now Magazine, December 1985 Not At The Mercy of Fashion by Keshav Malik, The Times of India, September 1990 Karanjai Retrospective: A free flow of linear energy by K.B.

2, September 2001 The Master of Mood by Aruna Bhowmick, The Statesman, New Delhi, 28 March 2002 HAOWA 49 (Bengali periodical), special issue on Anil Karanjai, edited by Samir Roychoudhury Hungry generation poet, short story writer, and philosopher, January 2004.

After Independence, the Search for Self by Benjamin Genocchio, The New York Times, 13 November 2009 Romance of Landscapes by Partha Chatterjee, Frontline, Volume 28 – Issue 09, 23 April–May.