Bengali trio’s art trails to independence era

Hyderabad: Print making in Bengal in the pre and post-independence era had significant political and social overtones wherein artists who practiced graphics tried to engage with a larger public through their art.

The endeavor was to get out of salon and galleries and get into news and print media or produce art for wider circulation that could not only aesthetically articulate an artist’s preoccupations but also act as a medium of agit -prop. This is well brought out in the exhibition, Three Masters of Print at Indus Gallery which focuses on Bengali artists.

Haren Das was born in 1921 in Dinajpur and studied and taught at the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Kolkata. His special interests lay in public art such as mural painting and graphic arts such as woodcuts, lithography and etchings. He once told an art writer, “ an artist visualizes the phenomenal world around him in the receptacle of his mind and expresses it in color and form, but an artist who is obsessed with woodcuts sees life through a special point of view and must work with light and shade, composing them into a picture and adapting his medium to the presentation.”

His own prints show a preoccupation with a rural Bengali landscape of yore, a world that was disappearing in his own time, leading to an alienation between man and nature, the city and the village. The angst of this vanishing world finds reflection through the romantic landscape in Das’ works.  

Somnath Hore was another doyen who, as a teacher, influenced countless artists at Kolkata and later at Vishva Bharati. Though born in 1921 (in the village of Barama in Chittagong, now in Bangladesh) his works have a remarkably contemporary sensibility all through. He was part of the Communist movement from an early age, and his prints on the Bengal Famine are a stark indictment on the then British government’s handling of the immense human crisis. His prints as well as canvases, in his later works show a distinct turn towards abstraction.

Perhaps the hardest hitting and radical of all artistic productions were those by Chittaprosad who used woodcuts and linocuts to represent the exploitation of peasants and labourers during the Telangana commune and Bengal famine.