CHANDRA BHATTACHARJEE
ARTIST

I keep revisiting Santiniketan. I’m drawn to its terrain. It’s an old university town, perhaps India’s only one, a familiar place which gives me a sense of homecoming. I am a habitual documenter, and over the years, in between my projects here, I would be scribbling on my sketchpad or on bits of paper. What I saw around me, and kept seeing, spread a slow panic in me.
Belying its petite size, Santiniketan strides world history as a cultural giant, still stoking the curiosity of 21st century contemporaries. Favoured by Nature, nurtured by Rabindranath Tagore, the impossible ideal marinated over aeons in the wisdom of Ramkinkar Baij, Benode Behari Mukherjee and other great minds. Their presence is everywhere but their legacy has taken a life of its own, at times sliding into an abyss of popular embrace, their intent often rendered unrecognisable, sadly absurd.
But these thoughts did not really consciously play on my mind when I started my sketchpad drawings — they were personal notes to self which no one else was ever going to see. This purported invisibility was liberating, I wasn’t bound to genre or expectation. I could excavate myself, be direct, my only filter was my own response, which was raw and hurting, indignant even, contrary to my ‘mild’ persona. I also felt free to repeat myself endlessly in my drawings, with only the smallest variations in them. These variations were visible only to me, but I could see them in blown-up detail, adding up, cell by cell. By repeating to myself both the (diminishing) natural and (swelling) unnatural markers strewn across the Santinikentani landscape I perhaps came close to meditating on them. As I kept returning, the sense of a make-believe world magnified, the hum of the ‘unreasonable silence of the world’ grew louder.
The journey from the private diary to a public showing of larger works on paper was driven by my friend Prashant Tulsyan, who quietly insisted that I should share my experience with a wider audience. He said it was a common pain, uncommonly felt.
I have been exploring similar themes in a wider context in my general studio or outdoors practice. I do not remember ever defining boundaries in my paintings — even my earlier human figures exist in amorphous spaces. I am more invested in interior lives and responses to what seems unstoppable. These paintings are different from my usual practice only insofar as they are site-specific, the underlying leitmotif remains the same.
My association with Santiniketan, located in the West Bengal’s Birbhum district, goes back more than four decades. The place was my incubator. As a determined young artist, I would do my life studies in its dry and dusty fields, feeling a kinship with the locals, the Santhals, who generously let me into their spaces. The spaces have shrunk, the natural erosion that gave Santiniketan its signature beauty has turned on itself, spitting out her native humans and animals, wild plants and soil. The unreasonable silence is deafening.