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In a career spanning four decades, Amitava’s location as an artist has determined the authority that he brings to his practice. As an artist studying and working in the 1960s, Amitava Das experienced a decade of fragmented locii. The ’60s, the period of his education at the College of Art, was the decade of wars, fiscal difficulty and an uncertain polity in the wake of the death of Jawaharlal Nehru. Further, as a second generation pravasi (non-residing Indian) Bengali, the roiling political violence of West Bengal’s Naxal movement came to him through the filter of poetry, film and art—much as he would have received the existential writing of Camus, Genet and Rilke. Through the 1960s and ’70s, small groups of artists and filmmakers in different pockets in India had a heightened response: the state of the nation found an uncanny echo in the language of modernism, of the artist’s isolation and purity even within a state of uncertainty.

The city was consolidated over the course of the eighteenth century, and its access to global trade routes helped it grow over the following centuries as well, leading some to describe it as the 'door of the East with its Face to the West'. How did European artists view this growing city?

A well-known poet and essayist, Prayag Shukla is also one the foremost writers on art in Hindi. He has authored monographs on artists like J. Swaminathan, M. F. Husain and Ambadas, expanding upon these artists’ relationships with local institutions and contexts of art-making in India since the 1960s.