Untitled

Anybody familiar with the socio-political climate of Calcutta in the Sixties and Seventies would have little trouble understanding the genesis of this disturbing imagery in Bijan Chowdhury’s Untitled work. The distraught, skeletal bodies, piled up on one another are a stark commentary on the violence unleashed by the Naxalite movement that had begun in 1967, turning an entire generation of young men to violent revolt that also claimed many lives, depriving several families of their future—the story best articulated in Jhumpa Lahiri’s fictional work on the subject, titled The Lowland.