Always Wanting to Break with Geography: Remembering Kanishka Raja (1969-2018) (original) (raw)

Reimagining Narratives and Cultural Boundaries: The Artistic Journey of Sanat Kumar Chatterjee

INTERANTIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH IN ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT

The borders of the cultural identity of an artist are often informed by his geographical sensibilities and an artist’s multiple displacements to different geographies make their way into his work. I would like to posit that multiple migrations by an artist create friction between the familiar and the unfamiliar resulting in a unique perspective of art. To explore the vast ocean of ideas and possibilities, one often tends to reduce the underlying gap between the existing cultures. Sanat Kumar Chatterjee, one of the important artists of Bengal School had a huge transactional artistic and cultural effect on Indian art and society. His transition in artistic styles while travelling around India formulates this research paper's basis. Keywords: Art, Artistic styles, Bengal School, Cultural Identity, Cultural affect, Sanat Kumar Chatterjee.

The Uncharted Legacy: Rathin Maitra and the Modern Art Movement in Bengal

THE UNCHARTED LEGACY: Rathin Maitra and the Modern Art Movement in Bengal, 2025

Abstract This article explores the life and contributions of Rathin Maitra, a pivotal yet under-recognised figure in the modern art movement in Bengal during the transformative years of the 1940s. Despite his significant role, Maitra's contributions have largely been overlooked due to the lack of archival materials and societal indifference towards contemporary art. Maitra was actively involved in the early years of the Calcutta Group and played a crucial role in the dialogue between the Calcutta Group and the Progressive Artists Group in Bombay. His work and influence extended beyond painting, as he was also a mentor to many students at the Government College of Arts and Crafts in Calcutta and served as the Joint Secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts in Calcutta. The article highlights Maitra's multifaceted life, his engagement with European modernism, and his efforts to promote Indian modernism. It also delves into the socio-political context of his time, including the Bengal famine, the Partition of India, and the influence of European ideas on Indian art. Through this exploration, the article aims to shed light on Maitra's legacy and his contributions to the modern art movement in Bengal. ******** Once, a documentary filmmaker invited me to view his latest film on the sculptor Ramkinkar. The programme was held at Nandan, Kolkata. I was not much surprised that sculptor Ramkinkar was doused in Rabindra Sangit, Sonajhuri forest, with background music, and plenty of elements that made it resemble a soap opera. A similar approach was taken earlier with documentaries made on artists Ganesh Pyne and Robin Mondal by other Bengali directors. Despite the popularity of cinema and literary culture, the reflection of contemporary art since the post-independence period is vague and non-serious in Bengal. They hardly reflect the tension of creative life or identify the crucial events of the time. Considering writing about a painter like Rathin Maitra, who avoided maintaining any specific focus and left few personal documents, while also not having their work preserved by art communities, this task presents a unique challenge. The primary inspiration behind this is that he was my mentor, and this article is an homage to his memory.

Artists' Moving Image: South Asian Trajectories

Nomenclatures, like skin, regulate porosity and flow; binding, giving shape, determining conditions of existence, exclusion and inclusion. This special issue of MIRAJ is bound by two layers of skin; one of region (South Asia) and the other of form or genre (artists' moving image). This double layering allows for the development of new critical frameworks, challenging settled narratives, not only in relation to artists' moving image in/from South Asia, but also, we hope, in the global framework of contemporary moving image art.

Indian Painters: A citadel of creativity

Menaka Magazine ,Marathi Journal , 2009

Drawing and picture painting are two of the oldest arts, but it is rather a peculiar experience that those who visit a drawing and painting exhibition, rarely show any will to understand the exhibits. We are normally unaware that it gives us a special joy, increases our maturity of thinking. The ability to understand the shot began to acquire importance while we see a film or a serial one the screen. But we are still indifferent to drawing and painting literacy. This article is an attempt to make readers a part of this tour de force of the process of the cameraman Nemai Ghosh, who has to his credit the photography of fifty two artists.

V , Number 1 , 2015 Themed Issue on “ Visual Culture in the Indian Subcontinent

2015

The softness of river line soil has softened our minds, which gave the opportunity for the ancient artists of this most fertile delta of the world, comprised of approximately 700 rivers, to draw coarse lines over muddy surface and to mold any shape by fingers, a hypothetical beginning of art in this land. After Pala consequence, synthesis of Islam and Hinduism in rural culture gave birth of Bengal’s own artistic language during medieval period, where art was something inherent, instinct and intuitive. Folk art was not; even still not iconoclastic but the study of nature is prior to there. Bengal art had been possible only for the thirst to acquire precise negotiation with the surrounding nature. This observation resulted in a metaphysical fancy and was relevant in all forms of art. It represents the emotion of our community, not of the individuals. Thus the artists are lost, in the womb of past but not their arts. Prominence of folk literature had shaped the art of Bengal. From Beng...

Foreword to Janeita Singh's book F. N. Souza, the Archetypal Artist (Neogi Books, 2024)

After a preparatory phase of nationalist modernism, where the assimilation of the past and the question of identities leading to the boundaries of a national subject was the cultural problematic, the decade of the 40s, with the imminent approach of independence, brought to prominence a modernism in closer contact with the West. That it arose in Bombay, on the West coast, neighboring Gujarat with its long maritime history of intimate relations with the people of West Asia, the Mediterranean and Europe, is thus no surprise. The arrival of Indian independence must be seen in the backdrop of larger world events, such as cultural modernism as a response to modernity and social dispersions as a result of World War II. Both may be seen at work in the presence of a number of European émigré Jews in Bombay at that time, particularly the trio, Walter Langhammer, Emanuel Schlesinger and Rudolf von Leyden, who seeded the artistic culture of the city with a taste for European modernism and patronized the development of an Indian modernism related to this. The Progressive Artist's Group, formed just after Independence, is a result of this new current. In keeping with its peripheral and hybrid cultural history, its founding members included the religious and ethnic minorities of India, an Indian Christian from Goa, two Muslims and a Dalit. They represented the expansive soul of India arising in the new nation, its continuing assimilation of "the outside" in a millenia-old process of engagement between monism and pluralism. It should be noted though that this spirit of expansion and adventure did not last long as a local presence in cultural politics, two of its founding members, Souza and Raza, leaving for London and Paris respectively in three years of its starting. It did not fare so well, either, in the majoritarian milieu of the rising nation, with Husain pushed to relinquish his Indian citizenship and ending his days in Doha. But whether in India or outside, the body of works produced by these artists is a testament to the psychic becoming of contemporary India.