Say what you will, but this is the only city in India which publicly acknowledges art and culture in any way," says a friend visiting from Delhi. We have just passed a road sign proclaiming 'Calcutta as the City of Satyajit Ray', right after which comes a bus stop decorated with a mosaic portrait of Rabindranath Tagore and tile renditions of three of his iconic paintings. Having spent the past 30-odd years disparaging what I’ve seen as the slow-motion collapse of the city’s great cultural traditions and practices, I now realise that, unlike other Indian cities, Kolkata has at least maintained some notion, some self-definition of being a place where the arts matter.
Across the road from the massive South City Mall, with its glass and concrete façade, is a typical south Kolkata para (neighbourhood) with three- or four-storey houses jostling for space, small kirana shops and a tea stall. Here, an arch indicates that we have reached Charubasona -- Jogen Chowdhury Centre for the Arts.
The centre is housed in a four-storeyed, unpretentious building -- a small-scale space for anyone interested in research or ancillary work in a clean, unfussy sanctuary. The top floor and terrace are given over to a conference hall and meeting area, the third has offices, a small reference library, restoration studio and guest rooms; the second and first floors have the galleries with Chowdhury’s own works, while the ground floor has one meant for temporary exhibitions.
"You know, it’s a great pity. We have so many significant artists from Bengal, yet you can’t find any major collections of their work here. There are some paintings of Rabindranath, but we have pitifully little, especially of artists from my generation," says Chowdhury. At 80, Jogen babu is sprightly and erect but clearly aware of time in a matter-of-fact, unsentimental way. "A lot of my work has gone outside Bengal but for the paintings that I still have, I thought why not have a place where people can come and see them?" he adds.
As you walk through the galleries that showcase his artistic development in a chronological sequence, you encounter a graph that is unique to Chowdhury, but also reveals a larger one shared by artists of his generation. The drawings by a teenage Chowdhury, botanical sketches and village views, show a great facility; the charcoals and watercolours from his student days at Kala Bhavan, Shantiniketan, reveal a close relation to the sinuous lines of Nandalal Bose, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Gopal Ghose; the movement from the idyllic rural to the city reeling from famine and partition is, again, familiar; the strong lines depicting refugees at Sealdah station sit right next to the sketches of Zainul Abedin, Chittaprosad, Somnath Hore and other contemporaries. The dry pastel drawings of Chowdhury’s close family show control and clear, acknowledged debts to Edgar Degas and Kathe Kollwitz. The paper is cheap newsprint -- all that he could afford then -- but the forms are rich with skill and tactility. "No one was buying my work then, so I could hold on to these. Now they are too precious to me and I would never sell them," says Chowdhury.
In the 1960s, the forms become more rounded and distorted, the grotesque and acidically humorous enter the frames. And then comes the scholarship to Paris which leads, as with many other artists of that generation, to a concurrent opening of the eyes and stiffening of the hand. He says: "During those first days in Paris, I had no idea what to do. I could no longer paint as I had, but neither could I suddenly start painting like others around me."
For Chowdhury, the Paris trip worked like an embryo. He returned to India, took up various jobs, including at the iconic Weavers’ Service Centre, and, by the early 1970s, the singular visual language we now associate with him had started to emerge. As you explore his life through images, you also come across some gems that go beyond the art and the biographical -- a drawing of his teenage sister (now a well-known poet), the girl in shorts sitting in a garden chair eating from a bowl could have been drawn today, not in the early 1950s; two drawings from the mid-1960’s London, profiles of a legendary face, signed in blue ballpoint, "Thank you for a lovely evening. Jimi Hendrix"; a small sculpturally rendered head of a politician, all too familiar even now.
The ground floor gallery currently displays a series of exquisite early 19th century woodcut prints of scenes from the Mahabharata. You are taken to a time well before the modernism Chowdhury inhabits and get an indication that this space has the potential to show different kinds of work concurrently. Kolkata may take its cultural past for granted, but for a future of dynamic engagement with the arts, small-scale spaces like these, which invite curiosity, engagement and passion, are clearly to be welcomed.