Untitled (Boitorini Series)

If one has kept a keen eye on the goings-on of the twentieth century in Bengal, this work by Nirode Mazumdar will come as an epitome for the state of the great cauldron that was Calcutta then (and continues to be so). In the late 1960s-’70s, the city was grappling with the Naxalite insurgency, and a comparison with the mythological river Boitorini—after which Mazumdar painted an entire series—seemed inevitable. In Hindu mythology, it is a river of judgement deciding the fate of the dead. The labyrinthine whirl of floating people in a sea of confusion is a pithy comment on the deeds, or misdeeds, done on earth.