In her art, Jayasri Burman shows how India’s old stories still speak to the present
Women occupy the centre as bearers of memory, tenderness and transformation.
Black News 
In the studio where Jayasri Burman works, the women enter already carrying what the stories have asked of them. They move forward with long dark hair that frames each face differently yet remains recognisable, and with a gaze that looks past the viewer into a time that has not finished speaking. For decades Burman has painted them not as illustrations of finished tales but as agents that still answer the present.
Born in Kolkata in 1960, the second daughter of the founder of the footwear giant Khadim, Burman grew up in a prosperity that never accounted for the pull of the epics her mother and aunts recited while the city prepared for Durga.
Her uncle Sakti Burman lived between India and France. Viewers still look for his hand in hers. She has never denied the kinship, yet nothing was simply inherited. Her first marriage, which had been arranged, lasted 17 years. Leaving it, she has said, felt like a bird released from a cage. Paresh Maity became her companion. In a household of painters, they complete what the other leaves open.
Jayasri Burman’s training ran through Kala Bhavan in Santiniketan, the Government College of Art and Craft in Kolkata, and a printmaking studio in Paris. What...
