POSTER BOYS

The lesser-known Benegals who elevated hand-painted film promotion material to high art

- BY ASHA GANGOLI

In India, ‘Benegal’ has always been a name to reckon with, belonging to such illustrious personalities as the Benegal brothers (Sanjiva Rao, Sir Narsing Rau, Sir Rama Rau and Shiva Rao), Air Commodore Ramesh Benegal and filmmaker Shyam Benegal.

But there was a family of Benegals from Calcutta—Balkrishna, Sudarshan and Arvind, fine artists all—who, though they were famous within the city, were virtually unknown outside. It is time they were brought out from the shadows.

It all started with the B.B. Benegal Studio, founded in a nondescript two-room flat in Calcutta in 1930 by Balkrishna Bhawanishankar Benegal, a Konkani-speaking Mangalorean Saraswat. He was born in Udupi in 1905 and won his first gold medal for painting at his Mangalore school. Rabindranath Tagore’s visit to Mangalore in 1922 inspired the young Balkrishna to move to Calcutta after school to join the Government School of Art and Craft. Seeing his sample work, the English principal Percy Brown admitted him to the third year straightaway, and he completed his five-year degree in fine art in just three, by the end of which he had won several gold medals.

Noted publisher and printer Chintamani Ghosh, whose Indian Press in Allahabad had first printed Rabindranath’s works, including the Nobel-winning Gitanjali, spotted Balkrishna’s work early at an exhibition at the GSA. As soon as he passed out of art school, Chintamani invited him to Allahabad to work as resident chief illustrator with the Indian Press.

Chintamani died in 1928, and two years later, Balkrishna left Allahabad for Mangalore, where he got married and returned to Calcutta. He found work as a poster artist for Hindi movies, which brought him into close contact with the celebrities of the time like Begum Akhtar, Devika Rani, Sabita Devi, V. Shantaram and K.L. Saigal. His work was soon in demand. He shifted to a two-room flat on Dharamtalla Street in central Calcutta and set up his studio in one of the rooms.