Art festival showcases Tebhaga movement & agrarian resistance
Times of India | 17 November 2024
12 Kolkata: Inspired by acts of resistance by artists, the fourth edition of DAG's ‘The City as a Museum' project will showcase an installation on the Tebhaga movement. The annual art and heritage festival, which started on Saturday, will concurrently present works from various archives, including material from the West Bengal State Archives, the DAG collection and photographs and oral narratives from scholar Kavita Punjabi's research on Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti.
The installation, along with other events, will be accessible till Nov 24.
Elaborating on the focus on the Tebhaga movement, Sumona Chakravarty, vice-president of Museums of DAG, which is organising the event, said, "This year's roster was inspired by acts of resistance or subversion by artists from the region. Their stories led to mass movements, like Tebhaga Andolan, as well as everyday acts of creativity, dissent and survival. The famine and the subsequent Tebhaga Andolan and in later years, the aftermath of Partition, inspired a new generation of artists toward socially responsive art, with new forms of expression and activism. We wanted to foreground a history that shaped the political landscape while also being a turning point for artistic practices in the region."
In artist Somnath Hore's ‘Tebhaga-r Diary', where he fastidiously documented the agrarian movement gaining momentum in the Rangpur district of undivided Bengal, lies a sketch of activist Mani Krishna Sen. In a similar portrait from the DAG collection, Hore rendered the portrait, and the wounded Sen appears vulnerable and gaunt. The sketches guided the organisers to the West Bengal State Archives, where colonial records chronicle a parallel narrative of the movement. Among numerous pages of evidence, a photograph of a younger Mani Krishna Sen emerged, concealed within police history sheets amid details of his dissident activities.
The installation will examine the intricate narratives of agrarian resistance in various Bengal districts in the 1940s, juxtaposing state-sanctioned surveillance reports from colonial archives with visual and oral testimonies of artists and activists. Presented at the Directorate of State Archives, the exhibition will showcase works by artists Hore and Chittaprosad and accounts of Kisan Sabha and Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti activists from across undivided Bengal, like Mani Krishna Sen, Abani Bagchi, Rani Mukherjee, Bimala Majhi and Ila Mitra.
The programme will feature an interactive discourse on the Tebhaga women's movement with Kavita Panjabi in conversation with Mahasweta Ray. This dialogue encompasses original recorded oral narratives, songs and accounts of Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti and Mahila Samiti activists. A discussion has also been planned, where Sanjoy Kumar Mallik will talk on how Hore and Chittaprosad's visual language was shaped during this time.