Ramkinkar Baij (26 May 1906 – 2 August 1980) was a sculptor and painter. He was one of the pioneers of modern Indian sculpture and a key figure of contextual modernism. Baij was born in an economically modest family in the Bankura district of the modern state of West Bengal in India. The late 1930s and early 1940s saw his emergence as a modernist thematically well grounded in the local-present, in the best Santiniketan tradition, but also open to a full range of modernist linguistic innovations in art. Already an admirer of the working class, he was touched by the adverse impact natural calamities and political developments all through the forties had on their lives. And this led him to evolve as a committed artist with leftist leanings. The spectre of human suffering he saw around him led him to transform immediate facts into allegorical, symbolic and occasionally even didactic images. This gave a new thematic focus to his works, as well as an element of drama and expressive-immediacy to his execution. Ramkinkar Baij responded to the natural zest for life, and took a great interest in human figures, body language, and in the general human drama. Modern Western art and pre and post-classical Indian art were his main point of reference. He used local material advantageously, and worked combining the skills of a modeller and a carver. His paintings too take on expressionist dimensions like his sculptures, which are filled with force and vitality. Legacy of Ramkinkar Ramkinkar was singularly reticent and otherworldly as he was single-minded in his commitment to art and humanity. But this did not stop his work from being noticed and appreciated by sensitive artists and connoisseurs. He was invited to participate in the Salon des Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in 1950 and in the Salon de Mai 1951. And in the seventies national honours began to come his way one after the other. In 1970 the Government of India honoured him with the Padma Bhushan in 1976 he was made a fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi, in 1976 he was conferred the Desikottama by Visva Bharati, and in 1979 an honorary D.Litt by the Rabindra Bharati University. Some of his sculptures are preserved and displayed at locations including Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, Late Rani Chanda Collection & Academy of Fine Arts, Calcutta, H.K. Kejriwal Collection & Karnataka Chitrakala Parishat, Bangalore, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, Reserve Bank of India, New Delhi, Jane and Kito de Boer, Dubai, and the Delhi Art Gallery in New Delhi.

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