Biman Das models the human figure in bronze with a classicist’s assurance — from the lithe, ascending women of his celebrated Nayika series, whose modern silhouettes carry echoes of India’s earliest sculpture and poetry, to commemorative monuments that stand in public squares from New Delhi to Kolkata and far beyond. Though bronze remains his principal medium, he moves with equal fluency between marble, stone, wood, and terracotta.
Born in 1943 in Tamluk, West Bengal, Das trained at the Government College of Art & Craft, Kolkata, completing his Diploma in Modelling and Sculpture in 1966 with first class and distinction, and followed it with a course in teachers’ training and art appreciation at Calcutta University. A National Cultural Scholarship (1967–69), a British Council scholarship (1973–74), a UGC grant under the Indo-Hungarian cultural exchange programme in Budapest (1993), and a Fulbright travel grant (1997) carried his study and practice abroad. He taught sculpture at the College of Art, New Delhi for a quarter of a century from 1969, returned to lead his alma mater in Kolkata as Principal from 1994 to 2002, and now serves as President of the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society, New Delhi, of which he was earlier vice president.
Das has held more than two dozen solo exhibitions across India and abroad, with showings in New Jersey, Cairo, and Budapest among them, and his work has travelled with major international surveys — the Biennale in Belgium (1974), Triennale India (1978), the Second Asian Art Show in Fukuoka (1986), the Bangladesh Biennale in Dhaka (1987), the Contemporary Asian Art Show in Seoul (1988), and the Festival of India in Moscow (1988). A retrospective of his work was presented at the Sahitya Kala Parishad, New Delhi, in 2005.
His public commissions place him among India’s foremost monument makers: a nine-foot bronze of hockey legend Dhyan Chand outside the National Stadium in New Delhi, a bronze of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar in Kolkata, a bust of President Giani Zail Singh at Rashtrapati Bhavan, and portrait busts of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru installed in countries from Singapore and Mauritius to Brazil, Venezuela, Spain, and Italy. His honours include the Lalit Kala Akademi Award (1972), the Birla Academy of Art and Culture Award (1980), the AIFACS Kala Vibhushan (2001), and the Padma Shri, conferred by the Government of India in 2014 for his services to the fine arts.