D Jyotindra Jain subsequent murder of Elokeshi by her husband and the long trial that followed, is another example to show that the patuas were not, as would be made out by Nandalal Bose, uncreative and unoriginal and could only copy the pictures done by their forefathers. Due to the missionary zeal for their respective 'traditionalist'/'modernist' approaches to Indian art, both Dutt and Bosc missed out on the fact that no valid artistic 55 traditions, including the Bengali ones, either flourished in complete isolation maintaining primordial purity, or came to maturity by obtaining training in 'different artistic styles and idioms7. The spirit of innovation was, as a matter of fact, rather deep-rooted in the folk artists of Bengal. It led to continuous growth and enrichment of their mediums of expression ^^ and to the incorporation of new and extraneous influences. It was this freedom and vitality that inspired the patuas to invent new pictorial devices for a narrative rendering of the Tarkeshwar murder case, or more recently of Indira Gandhi's assassination, just as it had encouraged the village women to embroider images of colonial Calcutta such as British soldiers, sahibs and memsahibs, the 'Universal Medial Hall', British currency notes or railway trains in the quilted kanthas, and prompted the potters of Krishnanagar to mould lifelike figures of typical characters from everyday life such as fishermen, hauls, washermen or European soldiers — all charged with the newly learnt realism of the 'Company School'. Unfortunately, Gurusaday Dutt took little cognition of these very lively and spirited developments. Let us leave aside Gurusaday Dutt's ideological position for a while and examine his writings on 'Indus Civilization Forms and Motifs in Bengal Culture', 'Cottage Architecture', Wood Sculpture', 'The Indigenous Paintings of Bengal', 'Basic Dolls and Number 22