Jamini Roy is India’s most beloved rebel.

He was indoctrinated into the British style - making oil portraits, sketching nudes and yawning a lot - when he first started making art. But by the time the 1920s rolled around, Roy threw caution to the wind and started painting in the style of his own culture. Stick it to the man, Jamini!

After almost 20 years of painting in the super boring academic style, something inside Jamini Roy snapped and he started looking for tribal and folk art for inspiration outside of all of the white people who were commissioning him to paint their portrait. He turned to Kalighat painting, a type of art made outside the Kalighat Kali Temple in Kolkata, India intended as offerings to be brought inside the temple. These paintings were of Hindu gods, God, and mythological scenes but also expanded to subjects of daily life. Needless to say, these scratched Roy’s itch a lot better than British portraiture.

And though this was way more Jamini’s jam, he did bring a little British influence to Kalighat painting which caught on among the other Kalighat painters. It became a sort of British-Indian hybrid painting that the tourists just ate up. And Jamini, for his brilliance, earned the Padma Bhushan Award in 1955 - the third-highest award for civilians in India. Perhaps even cooler than that though, on April 11, 2017 Roy was the subject of Google India’s search engine’s Google Doodle in honor of what would have been the artist’s 130th birthday. That's how you can tell he made it to the big time.