​Amitava is a story teller of a rare kind. He mines everyday life for those nuggets of insight that will lead him to his pencils and canvases to sketch out a unique tale in colors. The force of human actions and their non-linear outcomes give birth to the array of images that bloom upon his palette. The existential dilemmas that ordinary people confront is the fuel that lights his artistic flame and keeps it burning through the seasons, posing questions and triggering meditations. The paradox and polarities that populate the human mind is what he seeks to uncover and expose, not to berate or mock but to look and learn. He harnesses the delicate interplay between the natural and the artificial, the organic and synthetic to make up wholes that exceed and become more than their parts.

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Amitava was born in New Delhi in 1947 as a new nation emerged trailing a painful history that burnt itself into the psyches of a whole generation. Graduating from the Delhi College of Art in 1972, Amitava works with watercolors, oils and pastels depending on the subject and the emotion he seeks to convey. His earliest works have been observed to express a gentleness that perhaps reflected his own resigned and dormant spirit.  As he progressed to canvasses the light shone brighter and the strokes got bolder. He was beginning to see man as both creator and destroyer who embodied the potential for good and evil equally. The inner life with its myriad motivations and actions that were at cross purposes with themselves was what preoccupied his work, distilling, in the process, a semi abstract style of expression that gained a reputation and an appreciative audience. 

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He has had numerous successful shows in India and abroad and was bestowed the Lalit Kala Akademi award in 1976. Amitava is a co-founder of the New Group, an artist collective, in his hometown Delhi.