Fantasy, fun and satire these are the three elements of the paintings of Dharmanarayan Dasgupta (1939 – 1997) through which he used to posit a social critique. His images are figurative but they defy the environment of apparent reality. Even they negate the force of gravity. The men and women, the protagonists of his paintings, can easily walk or fly in the air, can enter a closed room defying the barrier of the wall, the hutments, trees and other elements of nature can rhythmically move in the air. He thus created a very soothing and sonorous world of dream. But this apparent grotesque pleasantness gradually yields towards a pathetic and melancholic void extracting and analyzing the uncanny contours of reality showing how our existence lacks the firm base and deep root, how we live in an amorphous world without any force of bondage, without any gravitational integrity. Through apparent melodious fantasy the paintings of Dharmanarayan build up a grave social critique unmasking the socio-psychological void inherent in our existence.

Dasgupta was born in 1939 in a small town named Dharmanagar at Tripura. It was in the base of a hill called Unokoti. The landscape was beautiful. Their family was however original inhabitant of a village in the district of Kumilla at East Bengal, now in Bangladesh. His father Satyabhushan Dasgupta worked in the office of the King of Tripura. He had to move in the different parts of the province. The beauty of the landscape fascinated Dharmanarayan during his childhood. He did his schooling at Agartala. Since his childhood he felt an inclination towards artistic creativity. After completing Intermediate course from a college at Agartala he went to Santiniketan and got admitted in Kala-Bhavana in 1957. In his own word, “the half educated village boy of Tripura got a new life at Santiniketan.” The cultural and natural environment of Santiniketan, the association with artists and teachers, especially Binodebehari and Ramkinkar opened up a new world of creativity to him. He completed the course in 1961.