Facsimile of published article

A new exhibition on the visual history of Calcutta opens a large window to the heterotopia of its
glorious past and forces us to stand by it in awe, writes Sayandeb Chowdhury

One only has to open one’s eyes to understand the daily life of the one who runs from his dwelling to the station, near or far away, to the packed underground train, the office or the factory, to return the same way in the evening and come home to recuperate enough to start again the next day.” 

The above is a quote from French Marxist Philosopher Henri Lefebre’s Right to The City (Le Droit à la Ville), which social theorist David Harvey, in a recent critique, has defined as “far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city”.

Right to change ourselves by changing the city. Is that the key to 21st-century urbanity? If yes, then the least we can do towards attainment of that position is that we do not allocate forgetfulness. 20th-century historians and sociologists have repeatedly written about the City as a locus of intellectual and philosophical thinking. The City for them lends itself to the production and contestation of urban space, as a site of visual interactivity, to the territoriality of meaning-making, the fascination with walls and borders, the production and consumption associated with everyday life and of course a constant abandonment and reclamation of what they call one’s right to the city. But more than anything else it’s the city’s collective memory that acts as the best bulwark against forgetfulness. This memory can be tangible and intangible, lost and recovered, ephemeral or eternal. If forgetfulness is the worst enemy of one’s right to the city then the ontology of memory-making, what is more commonly called preservation, is central to battling the loss of it.

And that is why the event under review is of seminal importance. Those who care to battle forgetfulness in the city of Calcutta would be delighted that one institution in the city, under the watchful eye of distinguished academics have been able to preserve a significant part of the city’s visual memory by gradually building up what is now one of the most resourceful digital archives anywhere in India. The Centre for Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSS) had recently opened part of its memory chest (officially called Hiteshranjan Sanyal Memorial Collection) for the public at the Seagull Resource Centre. The exhibition was called The City in The Archive: Calcutta’s Visual Histories.

The catalogue introduces the exhibition thus: “(Here) Calcutta features not just as a subject of representation, but equally as a site from which issued the range of cultural products – illustrated books and journals; popular paintings and print pictures; posters and hoardings; cover designs, advertisements and commercial art, modern art, cinema and theatre and not least of all, changing forms of photography, amateur and professional, art and documentary – that has come to the institution’s archives. Linked to each of these genres are several versatile careers of the city’s printmakers, illustrators, designers, painters and photographers. Together they lay out a large canvas of public and popular visual cultures that were distinctive of 20th century Calcutta.”

What we get to see in the exhibition is a sampling from the CSSS archive’s huge collection, which the exhibition’s curator and noted art historian Prof Tapati Guhathakurta, who is also in charge of the archive, estimates to be anywhere between 10,000 to 15000. So the exhibition in no way quenches the thirst of the curious but augments it manifold. But what we saw was simply astonishing.

The exhibition could perhaps best be described as a kind of short flight through a Heterotopia of dancing images – densely coloured, multi-layered, era-defining, time-defying; and unforgettably, intensely, profoundly about Calcutta.

“The archive started with the expressed intention to microfilm old periodicals and journals, cultural products which for lack of any climate-controlled preservation mechanism and due to a general apathy to buttress an archival ethic, were sure to be lost forever. This began in 1993. But soon we at CSSS realised that we have been trying to preserve only a rather tiny part of our cultural heritage, most of which is in dire need of preservation and archiving. But of course funding, manpower and space are critical to such an initiative and we did not have enough of either. Couple of IAF (India Foundation for the Arts) grants sustained us initially but by the end-90s we were looking at a rather large project”, informed Prof Guhathakurta.

Later, the archive, which was wholly set up and ran due to the initiative and footwork of a few individuals, was glad to receive an invaluable cultural bequest from the family members of individuals, artists, photographers, painters and anybody whose career was intrinsically and organically linked to the ever-expanding, multitudinous, visual idiom of the city.

It is this volume of visual expressions that the CSSS archivists found themselves face to face with as the archive grew. “We never intended to become a museum initially. We simply did not have space to keep original stuff. What we did was to digitize them and return them to the source. Though now, over the years, we do have some original material with us. And thanks to a Small Museum Grant of Rs 3 crore that we have recently received from the Ministry of Culture at the centre, we are now in a position to set up a museum at the CSSS’s original home – the residence of historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar at Lake Terrace. There we hope to show, through both permanent display and monthly rotation, much more from our collection.” This piece of information was enough to make the day for anyone even remotely connected to or interested in the city’s past.

“Another interesting thing we realized during the process of archiving is that 19th and early 20th-century cultural heritage of Calcutta has found value not only among private collectors but also institutions like British India, India Office Library etc. But it’s mid to late-20th century materials that are seriously endangered and hence our archiving has lately collected a lot of stuff from this period. Calcutta once had a few barefoot collectors like RP Gupta, Siddhartha Ghosh, Parimal Ray who have done invaluable work in preserving popular and public culture material — posters, booklets, cards, signboards, book covers, photographs— stuff that many of us tend to look at with a degree of condescending abandon. Then, Professor Gautam Bhadra started collecting advertisement material and commercial art from the mid-19th century onwards. My fascination has for years been popular prints and calendar art. All this came together to embolden our archive with one of the most generous collections of popular and public material”, added Prof Guhathakurta. No wonder this exhibition too is dominated by the 20th century rather than the 19th. Incidentally, the Media Lab in Jadavpur University is doing some useful work in preserving moving and aural material. The School of Cultural Texts and Records in the same university has now built an enviable collection of original manuscripts, documents, texts. “If a network can be built together, then between us we can say to have collected a substantial body of archived material, much of it around and about Calcutta of the last two centuries,” Prof Guhathakurta concluded.

The exhibition is divided into four thematic sections: Under the first — Print Productions and Graphic design we see the evolution of the art of Bengali book and journals as “key area to studying the history of print and design” – from the covers of the iconic Bengali periodicals like Ekshan, Probashi and Bharatbarsha to covers of children’s books, chromolithographs of calendar art from as early as the 1890s, to advertisements of goods of daily use, woodcuts, photo-engraving, half and three-tone colour blocks, silk-screen and then, offset. Art and technology join hands to show how each informs the other in popular commercial art and book covers and how visual imagery, bolstered by new technologies, react to the demands of popular taste, commercial demand and market ethic.

Here we see some path-breaking covers and work by Preo-Gopal Das, OC Ganguly, Khaled Chaudhuri and of course, three generations of the awesomely talented Rays: Upendrakishore, Sukumar and Satyajit, the last having worked both for advertising as well as having created some of the best book covers in Bengali, especially for Signet Press. Some rare material concerns hand-drawn prints and signboards of matchbox labels, cigarettes, radio, the Indian Railways, edible oil and even public interest advertising. Satyajit Ray’s work, of course, extends to posters for his films. 

The second section, Portraits and Personalities consist of another rare collection of early studio photo-portraiture, portrait paintings, Kalighat painting, calendar chromolithographs and in individual capacity the works of Jamini Ray, Gobardhan Ash, Hemen Majumdar, Atul Bose, Abanindranath’s Masks etc. a significant part material here is from Siddhartha Ghosh’s awesome collection of photos from the early studio and cabinet photography. “The beginning of academic life study in the city is coterminous with the emergence of new conventions of photographic portraiture in European and Indian-owned studios — where elaborate furniture props and background settings were blended with choreographed postures and costumes.

From the 1860s, Calcutta was host to the country’s first photographic societies and studios, many of which were run by Bengali practitioners – the first of these was the Bengali Photographers, started by Nilmadhab De in 1862. It is at this studio that Ramakrishna Paramahansa had come to be photographed on 10th December 1881, the catalogue states.

These studios catered to an increasingly burgeoning section of urban gentry, baboos and their ilk, especially on important occasions – childbirth, marriage, voyages abroad etc. Here special mention must be made of Ahmed Ali and Parimal Goswami, the latter being a photographer of repute and probably has the largest repertoire of portraits of public figures in early 20th century Calcutta.

If the first two are fascinating, the third section – Leisure, Consumption and Entertainment – is full of charm. Here we get a glimpse into the lost world of aristocratic life in Calcutta, their ubiquitous consumption habits like tea, imported condensed milk, chocolates, bread, leisure destinations like restaurants and theatres, visual literature of travel, gastronomic signposts, publicity literature of objects of pleasure and self-improvement like record-covers, booklets, gramophones, ceiling fans, toiletries like shampoo, snow, hair oil, perfume, cars and tyres, even adverts for sweetshops — Ganguram, Nabakrishna Guin, Bhim Nag. This section also branches out to cover the life of actors on Bengali stage, posters of early Bengali cinema, the visual material associated with the evolution of radio, cinema and even the tours of dancer/performer Uday Shankar.

The last section, Urban Sites and Spaces engage with the city more directly in it having under its purview city photography from early 20th century (Ahmed Ali, Ranajit Sinha, Dilip Banerjee); works of socially committed chroniclers, mostly from the collection at Chitrabani; maps and cartographical visuals on Calcutta; European paintings of early days of the city; evolution of various city-specific and city-induced professions — typists, hawkers, sellers of bric-and-brac, landmark events; and of course the city’s glorious heritage architecture.

None of the sections, as the catalogue categorically states, is even near to being exhaustive and the last is indeed only a limited sampling of the huge photographic representation that the city has, throughout the 20th century, been at the centre of. But then, this is an institutional archive and it still has to depend on collections handed over to them and not whatever they chance upon.

The City in The Archive: Calcutta’s Visual Histories is in one word mesmerising. And it would be an honour for the city and its wonderful collectors if those who “come home to recuperate enough to start again the next day”— the city’s million denizens — take an active interest in it and learn how better they can negotiate their right of and to the city.

The city they call Calcutta.