Art as rebellion: a Chittaprosad retrospective

July 26, 2014 12:53 am | Updated 12:53 am IST - MUMBAI:

One of the artist's works. Photo; Vivek Bendre

One of the artist's works. Photo; Vivek Bendre

The year was 1943 and over three million lives had been lost in what is one of the greatest man-made disasters to strike India — the Bengal famine. It affected the vast area that includes present-day West Bengal, Bihar, Odisha and Bangladesh.

Artist Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, whose life was spent in painstakingly depicting human suffering and deprivation in the face of capitalist policies, travelled in Midnapore and Bikrampur on foot to sketch the human cost of the crisis.

Seventy-one years later, his bold communication of a social truth in a world trying to suppress it is being celebrated at Mumbai’s Delhi Art Gallery in the show ‘Chittaprosad, A Retrospective’ from July 14 to August 12.

The dark black and white sketches of potbellied children and impoverished families accompanied by detailed text, throw up an image of fingers flipping through pages of a graphic novel.

Illustrations of the famine were published in several left-leaning newspapers and culminated in a book titled Hungry Bengal . In the book, the artist speaks of “bodies that yesterday fight for freedom and today are being literally eaten by dogs and vultures.” Five thousand copies of the book were published and all but one were subsequently destroyed by the British government. The one remaining copy, which was preserved by the family in a bank vault, was recently republished and is now part of the show in Mumbai.

“Bhattacharya’s art which was a social and political commentary did not get its due. Although he was a quintessential artist admired by many, not a single solo show of his works was held during his lifetime,” says Kishore Singh, head of Exhibitions and Publications at the gallery.

“Chittaprosad found it possible to articulate himself in a pictorial language that did not tend to be overly didactic, doctrinal or dogmatic. It is his humanist inclination which is a matter of consequence in his entire oeuvre, whether he articulates a political or a personal agenda,” said art historian Sanjoy Kumar Mallik who has researched the artist, who was an active member of the Communist Party.

And so, while his colourful posters and drawings are reminiscent of propaganda in the Soviet Union, the linocuts and scraper board illustrations he made for children recording a beatific phase of plenitude stand alongside the occasional landscapes he painted.

Mr. Bhattacharya had always been in control of the political language in his art. In a letter to his friend in June 1953, he wrote: “No one knows it better than me that I am not a genius like van Gogh. And precisely because I am not, my heart and life lies in the country’s revolutionary struggles. I am dying because nobody seems to have any need of me.”

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