The Indigo Revolt or the nil vidroh was a peasant movement and a subsequent uprising of the indigo farmers against the British indigo planters, originated in a village of Nadia in Bengal in 1859 and was led by the Biswas Brothers. The scar left of the revolt was so deep that not a seed was ever sown in the soil of Bengal after that.
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David Davidar is a pioneer of modern English language publishing in India, who has not only published many of the finest Indian writers in English, but also opened the doors to the publication of literature in other Indian languages in English translation on an industrial scale. What is his relationship with books from Bengal?
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Emotionally intense experience that Ghatak’s films are they are also a reflection on consciousness, nature, and human destiny. They invite us to make connections with cultural pasts and political landscapes, and open up a space for thinking the history of the present. Cinema rarely affords us this adventure of ideation.
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I’m no longer in Jatra because the Jatra no longer has any use for me. Now I perform two or three shows a year at Sitaramdas Onkarnath Thakur’s ashram, where it is against the custom for women to perform. He has written some good plays. There, I do the direction, supervise the stage, mike, lighting arrangements the setting of the mikes, everyone’s makeup, do my own makeup and then play the main part. I really have to slog. But still, being in the midst of my work makes me happy.
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A River Inside, Manisha Parekh's latest show in Mumbai at the Jhaveri Contemporary gallery, was rooted in the line in its various forms. It showed off various shapes and forms, most notable being the layered perforated stories she created with handmade paper.
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Visiting the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and the India Art Fair 2019, I noticed a growing interest in using handmade paper as an artistic means of expression among the exhibiting Indian artists. Here I’m not talking about artists buying handmade paper to draw and paint on, but artists who use pulp, their own produced paper or manipulate pulp and paper in untraditional ways as an artistic statement.
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Can a painting be ‘heard’? When one encounters the works of the artist Gopi Gajwani, it is not difficult to experience the whispering strokes of charcoal and paint. The confidant vibrancy conveys the assuredness of their being, yet there is a sense of contradicting fragility, a layer of calm and subtle seduction.
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This issue of TAKE on Art tries to re-explore the history and the contemporary situations in Bengal in order to regenerate an alternate form of history-writing. Situating the narrative within the framework of a number of iconic images that define art in Bengal, spanning across different historical periods, the idea is to delineate a history in parts to create a whole through a visual narrative.
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In this age of the internet, we have a group of artists presented as ‘Neti-netizens’. Curated by Girish Shahane at Gallery Threshold, these ‘Vanguards’ bring forth a legacy that produces meditative imagery, which differs refreshingly from the populist present-day avant-garde expression.
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Kansara seems obsessed with his family. He records and rerecords conversations around the dining table; his grandparents sleeping and moaning and reminiscing, projecting videos previously recorded, onto wall spaces and then re-recording them.
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