My initial foray into Chittaprosad, I must mention right at the onset, is not through the trajectory of art history. I have no formal training in art history either. More than a disclaimer, I use this to stress that Chittaprosad’s oeuvre did not reveal itself to me primarily as “artistic”. My interest in Chittaprosad, very predictably though, was kindled by ideas of refugeehood in connection to the 1943 Bengal famine. I am primarily a scholar of mobility, migration, exile et cetera, and, in this context, back in 2012-’14, when I was consulting the archives for my first monograph – now published as The Vagabond in the South Asian Imagination (Ray, 2021) – what startled me was the fact that the colonial administration ascribed a peculiar “vagabondly” characteristic upon the refugees. Distressed by the indignation associated with the expression “refugee” (and relatedly, refugee shelters), many refugees, in fact, fled the welfarist shelters/homes. They would, instead, identify themselves as udbastu (uprooted) or bastuhara (dispossessed) in the vernacular, preferring to relinquish relief at the shelters and go out begging into the streets.
Many of these poignant narratives are now documented in the Nanavati Papers (1944-’45) and also discussed by J Mukherjee (2015), among others. These fleeing refugees were an enigma for the colonial administration. Unable to make sense of their “absurd” mobility, the colonial administration indiscriminately labelled them as “vagabonds” – a catch-all practically deployed to contain any itinerants they sought to sedentarise. For me, personally, Chittaprosad remains, first and foremost, a chronicler of such vagabonds: those displaced, uprooted, exiled by the famine.
Here, I posit Chittaprosad as a chronicler rather than an artist. Indeed, I acknowledge Chittaprosad’s artistic genius and his status as a pioneering figure of Indian modern art. Yet, I set up a dichotomy, only provisionally but provocatively, between the chronicler and the artist, in order to tease out the element of iconoclasm that Chittaprosad’s “famine sketches” – a shorthand for his visual rendering of the famine – embodied in the face of colonial denial, secrecy, and censorship concerning the famine vis-à-vis prevailing artistic conventions. We must remind ourselves, in this context, that since the famine broke out, the colonial administration, for about a year, had completely disavowed it, passing it off as “food scarcity”.
The Famine inquiry Commission, constituted belatedly in 1944, would, in fact, record the testimonies of one hundred and thirty witnesses on camera to be able to “hear, weigh and judge the evidence in a calm and dispassionate atmosphere” [italics mine]. But would go on to ban Hungry Bengal, a collection of Chittaprosad’s eye-witness accounts of the famine comprising visual and narrative depictions that were originally commissioned by the Communist Party of India and subsequently serially published in the party’s weekly journal, Janayuddha/People’s War. We must turn to the trope of passion/affect in the face of the complete abdication of moral responsibility not only on the part of the colonial government but also the contemporary art networks, if we are to make sense of Chittaprosad’s iconoclasm.
In my earlier writings, I have argued that the affective language of the famine sketches must be weighed against, on the one hand, the dispassionate colonial gaze of “distant viewing”, and on the other hand, of the complete evasion of any reference to the famine by the contemporary scene. In retrospect, one cannot help being startled at the glaring absence of any, even passing, representation of the famine – an event otherwise so foundational – in the dominant forms of contemporary paintings. The Ravi Varma-style “salon paintings” in Bengal or the “nativist” Bengal School paintings, for instance – notwithstanding their nationalist ethos – in this case, seem to have appropriated the (self-)censorial language endorsed by the imperial policies, when it came to engaging with the famine.
Weaponised against this censorial attitude, Chittaprosad’s famine drawings must be credited to have practically invented a language appropriate for speaking of an otherwise “unspeakable event” that is, the famine and the resultant experiences of refugeehood, which were, according to many scholarly accounts, contrived by the British imperial policies. Among other things, such traumatic experiences challenge the discursive limits of representation. Both the colonial administration and the bourgeoisie art world maintained certain reservations about their depiction. Thinking in these terms, the famine drawings function as an important vector between experiences of refugeehood, institutional censorship, the grammar of representation and the ethics of spectatorship.
It is necessary for me to add that, in delineating Chittaprosad’s famine drawings as iconoclastic, I am speaking principally as a scholar of mobility; and I must insist that readers note the subtitle of Chittaprosad’s Hungry Bengal: “a Tour through Midnapur District” [italics mine]. Of significance here is to consider how, in this context, Chittaprosad himself embodied the “travelling artist” – a figure that stands in contrast to the imagery of the salon painter – working from outside of the studio set-up and making his sketches and journal entries always on the move.
Implied in the subtitle, the volume, more than an artistic repository, was meant to be a chronicle of Chittaprosad’s eye-witness accounts of the famine that could have only been gathered by a travelling artist that he embodied. Even before they were included in Hungry Bengal, when they appeared serially in Janayuddha, the sketches were conceived not as artworks for exhibit per se but, prima facie, documentation of the famine. To begin with, they were conceived as printed artifacts to accompany written texts: Chittaprosad’s impromptu notes on the famine scenes. This particular form of documenting the famine, what I have emphatically referred to as chronicling, clearly draws on the affordances – precisely, the flexibility and circulatory potential – of the print ephemera.
Art historical discourses often privilege images over written texts. In art histories, written texts are often relegated to the status of “paratext”, when they accompany “main” visuals. In this connection, it would be amiss not to observe the form(at) and specific logi(sti)cs of circulation of the cultural production of the famine drawings that make ingenious use of intermediality toward forging interactive and dialogic relations between different modes of expression and mediation: painting and documenting; the visual and the textual; the print and the ephemeral.
More than the content of the pensive images themselves, I am, therefore, particularly intrigued by the ways in which the specific format in question helps us see anew the fresh possibilities of Chittaprosad’s treatment of the refugees, all the more remarkable in the face of colonial disavowal and bourgeoisie apathy: how it brings together a mobile artist, the refugees as his mobile subjects, and his mobile medium in synchrony; and as importantly, evokes and responds to specific elements or structures of intermediality, while exposing the discursive limits of so-called “dispassionate” imperialist (photo-)documentation. For this, to me, Chittaprosad is, to borrow Baudelaire’s famous epithet, “not precisely an artist, but rather a man [sic.] of the world” and his famine sketches everlastingly iconic.
This is an essay from the publication accompanying the fourth edition of DAG’s ICONIC Masterpieces of Indian Modern Art that is on display at Art Mumbai from November 14-17.
