An Exhibition on the Tebhaga Movement

A key highlight this year was our pop-up exhibition at the Directorate of State Archives on the Tebhaga Movement of 1946. This display of artworks and archival materials sought to explore the dialogue between testimonies of artists-activists like Chittaprosad and Somnath Hore consisting of artistic reportage, diary entries and official records like confiscated newsprints, history sheets, representing the state’s surveillance of a growing agrarian movement—constituting the ‘prose of counter-insurgency’ that Ranajit Guha famously identified.

The exhibition was open throughout our one-week festival and hosted multiple sessions to activate and enrich the narratives foregrounded by the display and to generate additional perspectives. Archival materials were sourced mostly from DAG’s archives around Somnath Hore’s sketches featured in his Tebhaga Diary and contributions by Chittoprosad in newspapers like ‘People’s War’. Alongside this, the Ganashakti and CSSSC archives in Kolkata and P. C. Joshi Archives in New Delhi further helped us incorporate supporting materials to present a rounded discourse about the ‘Tebhaga Movement’. 

From Mappa to Manchitra

How do we make our way in the city? Do we have a mental image of the route we have to take? What kind of aids do we make use of when we do not know the way? Do these aids—maps, directories, limericks—reshape the way in which we imagine the city? These were questions that were explored as participants congregated for the ‘Mappa to Manchitra’ event.

While colonial administrators mapped the city according to their needs and power relations, towards the end of the nineteenth century new vernacular maps were emerging that highlighted different prerogatives for spatial mapping by the local inhabitants who inhabited those spaces. Some of these were published by the iconic press run by P. M. Bagchi, whose street directories inspired us to find sources that were already writing back to the Empire. Through a walk around the neighbourhood of the P. M. Bagchi press, taking in the various ways in which the directory’s descriptions of street-names and iconic residences were drawn from local knowledge-systems, we eventually moved on to a discussion and presentation on the evolving modes of cartography—revealing a parallel set of methods and processes that were always present as silent interlocutors of dominant practices.

The White Other

For The White 'Other’ we traced the stories of those living outside the remit of the society of Company-sanctioned Europeans enjoying the opportunities and treasures of Empire. Anchored around the figure of Baltazard Solvyns, a European marine painter who had travelled to South Asia without such legal permits, the programme recounted stories of marignalisation that white Europeans frequently faced during their stays in the colonies. By 1791, when Solvyns arrived in India, artists such as Tilly Kettle, John Zoffany, William Hodges, and the Daniells, had already established themselves in India. However, they had official sanction to live in India in the form of a Company permit. This would prove to be crucial determinant of their chances at success or failure. Stories were told of European artists who never found the success they were looking for and were subsequently forgotten about. But it was suggested that Solvyns' lack of wealthy patronage and his limited residential access to 'White Town' gave him leave to access parts of the city unfrequented by Europeans. He created a visual record of all the various ethnic groups he came across in Calcutta and their way of life, which is valued as one of the first visual ethnographic records of the people of Calcutta by a European.