Crossing the Border III

The 1970s was a decade when Bengal had to revisit the issue of the political border—for the third time in the twentieth century—when the country of Bangladesh was created from the erstwhile Bengal province of Pakistan, after a war in 1971. The monumental event unleashed a new wave of displacement, which saw refugees spilling into the Indian side of the border and Calcutta bore the brunt of it. Rabin Mondal, who had already matured his individuated syntax of expressing the ills of the society through his primitivist figuration style, responded with several works giving a grim depiction of the displaced people, of which this work is an example.