India has lost one of the defining voices of its modern painting. Jogen Chowdhury died at a hospital in Kolkata on 25 October at the age of 87, after more than a year of treatment for a rare blood cancer. He had been admitted on 16 October with an infection and was placed on ventilation as his condition worsened.

Born in 1939 in Faridpur, in what is now Bangladesh, Chowdhury moved to Kolkata after Partition and trained at the Government College of Art and Craft there between 1955 and 1960. A French government scholarship then took him to Paris, where he studied at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts and in William Hayter's Atelier 17 from 1965 to 1967. It was after his return that his mature manner took shape.

His reputation rested above all on line. Working chiefly in ink, watercolour and pastel, with occasional oils, he built figures from dense cross-hatching, a mesh of intersecting strokes that gave his men, women, gods and political personalities an unsettled, almost trembling presence. Drawing on the bold outlines of Kalighat painting and on Bengali visual tradition, he turned that inheritance toward contemporary subjects, from domestic interiors to public life, and his work entered collections including the Centre Pompidou and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Beyond the studio, Chowdhury spent fifteen years, from 1972 to 1987, as Keeper of Art at Rashtrapati Bhavan, overseeing the presidential collection, before teaching at Santiniketan and mentoring younger artists. He later entered parliament, serving in the Rajya Sabha for the Trinamool Congress from 2014 to 2020, where he raised issues affecting artists, including taxation on artworks. Tributes from political leaders and fellow painters have described a body of work that will remain a treasure for Bengal and for India, and a personal loss for the many younger artists he encouraged.