More than 50 years ago. Nandalal Bose on one of those quiet Santiniketan avenues. Short, dark, withdrawn. Walks slowly. Speaks softly as if he sucks his words in. But has a bright glint in his eyes, through which peeps a watchful mind. Has a crown of curly black hair. Internally restless. Has with him a stack of blank cards, an ink slab and brush. To make small sketches in monochrome. Record things, recall old images, invent the new.

For Nandalal Bose this was a compulsive exercise. Like writing a diary or telling a rosary. He spoke little but when he did he had many amusing anecdotes to recount, many insightful things to say. They made you think. Leonard Elmhirst who travelled with him and Rabindranath Tagore to China said to be in Bose's company was an education in itself.

Seen together with the Tagores, Abanindranath and Rabindranath -- one a remarkable painter and writer and his guru, the other his lifelong mentor, associate and renowned poet -- Bose should have seemed nondescript. But those who knew Bose found him equally unforgettable, including the Tagores. Abanindranath saw in him his artistic heir. Rabindranath wanted to get him as an associate in his Santiniketan experiment so badly that he risked confrontations with Abanindranath and Lord Ronaldshay. He said that rarely did one come across in one person such a union of intelligence, sympathy, skill, experience and insight.

It was while he was studying art in Calcutta that he met Abanindranath. Later Rabindranath took him to Santiniketan. The Tagores left it to Bose to work out a cogent agenda in the field of art and try them out in practice.

Without going into the dialectics of modernism or post-modernism, Bose addressed the same questions in a home-spun way. His focus was on the awakening of the creative potentials of each individual. And since they were bound to differ, you were sure to have different levels and categories of arts. Some that lay close to the process of fabrication and function. Some that lay close to the process of self-expression. Some in between. But in all this no individual was alone. He operated within an existing culture or reacted to it. All this was implicit in the ideas he outlined in his scanty writings and the activities he encouraged, selling round the notion of an artist-artisan who could hold himself out at various levels of practice. In an insidious way, it influenced our present notions on art. Bose was to a certain extent sidelined in his own time as a sectarian idol, a prominent leader of the nationalist backlash against colonial disinformation and condescension. That he was one is beyond question. But he was not a defensive polemist. His concern was to uncover the source streams of India's creative genius to make its encounter with the the world robust and fruitful. He built a valid conceptual base for a new Indian art with the conviction that you have to know yourself if you have to know the world.

K.G. Subramanyan is a painter and teaches Indian art history at Santiniketan.