CHANDRA BHATTACHARJEE
ARTIST

Increasingly, I find myself chronicling inevitability. Santiniketan for me has become a distillate of that inevitability.

Because of its Tagorean overtone, Santiniketan has been spun into much more than just a holiday spot off Kolkata for weekenders. Tourists troop in and out dutifully paying homage a god that each feels free to own and interpret. Blessed with geographical beauty and then stewed with culture, then more ‘culture,’ Santiniketan has walked a long way, into the waiting embrace of inevitability. The great Rabindranath Tagore’s vision of a free-spirited utopia which rejected puerile rules, has also travelled a long way, rapidly warping, along with the land’s dusty pride. The change, the furthering away, is mirrored in the signposts that remain, the stunned epitaph-like vegetation, the grey concrete consuming the loose burnt sienna soil. The concrete cousins settle in. It will take a lifetime and more for me to absorb this siege, which is no longer slow, nor stealthy. The grind of this inevitability is what both fascinates and repels me.
Like others, I too have been visiting this town frequently over the past decades, mostly for art-related projects. This series of charcoal works started as sketches that I did when I stayed here for a length of time while shooting for a film project. They kept adding up across subsequent visits, and then I found myself composing with charcoal on large sheets of paper landscapes that have gestating for years. This is almost a continuation of my last solo project, Night Forest. I am aware that cities have to sprout where trees were king, that factories will harden forest floors like night follows day. But I can’t help wondering about a place that could have been left alone with its native dignity.