brusque distortions testified to the great excitement still engendered by
Krishna's name.[124] At Kalighat near Calcutta, a special type of
water-colour picture was mass-produced for sale to pilgrims and although
the stock subjects included almost every Hindu god, many incidents from
Krishna's life were boldly portrayed.[125] The style with its curving
sumptuous forms is more a clue to general Bengali interests than to any
special attitudes to Krishna, but the pictures, strangely parallel in
style to the work of the modern artist Fernand Léger, have a robust gaiety
and bounding vigour, not inappropriate to the Krishna theme. The third
type of painting is the work of professional village minstrels known as
_jadupatuas_. As a means of livelihood, _jadupatuas_ travel from village
to village in West Bengal, entertaining the people by singing ballads and
illustrating their songs with long painted scrolls. As each ballad
proceeds, the scroll is slowly unwound, one scene leading to another until
the whole is concluded. Among the ballads thus intoned, the romance of
Krishna is among the most common and the style of painting with its crude
exuberance suggests the strength of popular devotion.[126]

There remains one last form of painting. During the twentieth century, the
modern movement in Indian art has produced at least four major
artists--Rabindranath Tagore, Amrita Sher-Gil, Jamini Roy and George Keyt.
Of these four, the first two did not illustrate the Krishna theme. Jamini
Roy, on the other hand, has often painted Krishna as flute-player and
dancer.[127] It would be unrealistic to suggest that these pictures spring
from a lively sense of Krishna as God--Jamini Roy has, in fact, resorted
to themes of Christ with equal, if not greater, frequency but has shown no
signs of becoming a Christian. It is rather that in painting these
pictures, he has treated Krishna as a symbol of rural vitality, a figure
whose boisterous career among the cowherds is an exact reflection of his
own attitudes and enthusiasms. To Jamini Roy, the Bengali village with its