Abstract
The Indian artist Chittaprosad Bhattacharya (1915–1978) is best known for his visual reportages on the Bengal famine in 1943–1944. As a member of the Communist Party of India (CPI), Chittaprosad’s historic documents of the famine, in the form of sketches, texts and linocuts, were produced in line with the party’s demand for revolutionary popular art to mobilize the masses by means of posters as well as journalistic and documentary-style reports. Many of these works were published in the communist journals People’s War and People’s Age. This is how they circulated among intellectuals and a general readership. Chittaprosad can be situated within a socially responsive practice that is distinctive for one line of development characteristic of his native Bengal, notably represented by artists such as Zainul Abedin (1914–1976) and Somnath Hore (1921–2006). While these artists have produced compelling images in response to political crisis, the Bengal famine, and peasant rebellions, Chittaprosad’s recognition and fame gained in pre-partition India—unlike that of Abedin and Hore—was not carried into the post-partition era. His dissociation from the CPI in 1948, along with the general atmosphere in postcolonial India, with its concerns for signatures of national-modern art, left little room for a former party artist. This, I will argue, instigated him to build on a network beyond the national frame. The group of individuals from Prague that became aware of and interested in Chittaprosad around that time actively supported his career from this point on. This is how his work increasingly circulated within a transnational network that was marked by solidarity with a socialist outlook and paired with a curiosity for traditional and folk arts. These very personal connections exceeded his lifetime, and most of the documents, book illustrations, poems, and artworks related to this have not yet been studied or published.
Highlights
The Indian artist Chittaprosad Bhattacharya (1915–1978) is best known for his visual reportages on the Bengal famine in 1943–1944
In an effort to connect with the topic of this journal, it will elucidate to what extent the circulation and the reception in Czechoslovakia of the works and ideals of the artist Chittaprosad reverberated on his artistic subjectivity in relation to frameworks such as socially committed art, independence and freedom, modernism, and folk traditions
By gathering the multiple threads of histories that seem to have created an alternative space for Chittaprosad, I will investigate how this network and the connections with certain political and cultural geographies of the post-World War II era enabled a geography of aesthetic and emotional solidarity for the artist, and how—without Chittaprosad’s ever having left India—this dialogical field contributed to what Andreas Huyssen has called “alternative geographies of modernism” between the decolonizing and the communist world of the late 1940s up to the late 1970s
Summary
The Indian artist Chittaprosad Bhattacharya (1915–1978) is best known for his visual reportages on the Bengal famine in 1943–1944. As a member of the Communist Party of India (CPI), Chittaprosad’s historic documents of the famine, in the form of sketches, texts and linocuts, were produced in line with the party’s demand for revolutionary popular art to mobilize the masses by means of posters as well as journalistic and documentary-style reports. Many of these works were published in the communist journals People’s War and People’s Age. Many of these works were published in the communist journals People’s War and People’s Age This is how they circulated among intellectuals and a general readership. Communism among writers, artists, and intellectuals went into decline, and Chittaprosad distanced himself from the party in 1948.15 Disillusioned, he went into self-imposed isolation on the outskirts of Bombay, and probably will have welcomed the interest that came to him from Prague
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