Card Player

It was Dharmanarayan Dasgupta’s search for a pictorial form that made him flirt with disparate art styles that were offshoots of traditional Indian art mingled with modern western art. Dasgupta used the trope of the babu and bibi of the Kalighat patuas to create a modern lexicon of characters to depict social issues of the day. In the case of Card Player, the woman, her one severed hand holding the ‘Joker’ card, seems resigned to her fate, even as she floats in air, defying gravity.