About us
Founded in 2012, Chalchitra Academy is a unique registered non-profit cultural organization (Reg. no. S/1L ON 98305 of 2012-2013), with the vision to revive and nurture the dying art forms from rural Bengal. It brings in traditional artists, contemporary artists and professionals and amateurs from all walks of society on a common platform to create art as never before. Our vision is to create awareness on traditional and dying forms of arts, and help and empower marginalized societies, especially in Bengal. We conduct group workshops, sessions with artists and talk shows to disseminate traditional forms of artistic knowledge. We organize several outreach programmes to inspire people about their own cultural roots. Our mission is to inculcate a sense of aesthetics into the minds and hearts of our people especially the younger generation, who are the future keepers and torchbearers of our rich cultural heritage. We also work closely with several village communities, imparting vocational trainings and making them economically self reliant and confident. We at Chalchitra Academy believe in equal opportunity for all and green sustenance. We also collaborate with artists from around the world to bring them closer to the traditional artists of Bengal.
There is true and false realization, there is realization which seeks to impress the vital essence of the subject and there is realization which bases its success upon its power to present a deceptive illusion.” — R. G. Hatton
What is art? Is it a journey of lines or the lines of a journey? Is this journey independent from its travellers or are the journeymen forever doomed to be apprentices of their own craft? These are some of the questions that have perpetually begotten a vortex inside the confines of what society defines to be “art”. And from the passionate strands of this vorticism came forth an idea, or rather a dream, in the early years of this new millennium. That dream was Chalchitra Academy and the dreamer was Mrinal Mandal, an artist and a veritable visionary. Just as the word “chalchitra” evokes the expanse of a diorama so does that dream invoke and encompass an endeavour of workshops, exhibitions, seminars and endless discursivities where three hitherto separate yarns shall be weaved as one. The first being the practitioners of traditional and folk art-forms, innately organic in heart, the second being the experts of contemporary visual art-forms of the cityscape, ever so plastic in soul, and the third being the wider spectrum of the general populace, i.e. the untrained, the enthusiasts, the energetic quanta of novelty, the true backbone of all degrees and modicums of public discourse.
“…it is necessary to have consummate technique in order to hide what one knows” — Rodin
To understand exactly how and why the unknown patuās of Bishnupur and Medinipur could cast their magic before even Paul Gauguin could etch the same with his first impressions on the plains of Tahiti would be to unravel the journey of Chalchitra Academy. Trained in the doctrines and aesthetics of modernist and contemporary western visual arts from the Government College of Art and Craft, the lines that Mrinal Mandal’s life etched turned simultaneously inwards and out into a spiritual awakening, a saṃvega so as to say, when in the year 2000 on the verge of his Masters Dissertation Prof. Pradip Bhattacharya pointed him to the fact for art to honest, for art to be immanent, that which is urban and implicitly alien needs sorely to be infused with the organic inheritance of our histories and traditions. From thence onwards this journey has always stood upon an intimate understanding of the utter simplicity of hues, textures and forms with which all folk-artists imbibe art inwards and outwards from and into the cradles of nature. Away from the cogs of urban alienation, the voyage of the Mrinal and his friend, the designer Jayati Bannerjee, took them away from the boundaries of the western and inherently Eurocentric fine-art of the cityscape and into the worlds of pat, dokra, terracotta, shellac, wood and stone carving, shola, shells, Bratakathā Ālpanā and myriads of lineages of dolls, scrolls, votives, ornaments and masks. As much as the young artists had learned, their awakening made it as important to unlearn their own lineations and alienations to relearn for once and forever how the lokāyata takes her leisurely steps through the blood and sweat of centuries and millennia, how does society merge with its own heart of humility, how does sparks of innovation transform poetically into the infinite repetitions of tradition, how the specters of Harappa and Bronze-age Rārh slowly merge with the Tepā and Hengul statuettes of present-day rural Bengal, how the four thousand years old forges of Pandu Rajar Dhibi cast and mould our very own narratives, and how the knowledge of ages gone by metamorphs into the cosmic yet utterly simple wisdom of the bhumija. Thus a voyage deep into the roots and branches of the lokaja was urgently necessary before they could even dream of organizing workshops and seminars to impregnate our disjointed urban nightmare with dreams of the vibrant, rustic and pensive macrocosm. And it is this very journey through the remote hinterlands and heartlands of rural, suburban and forgotten Bengal, through Nayagram, Bikna, Pingla, Majilpur, etc. that Chalchitra Academy had been forged from and also pledges to posit as its prologue and epilogue.
“Art is not a pleasure trip, it is a battle, a mill that grinds” — Millets here.
Is there any real difference between art and craft? Is there any difference between an artist and an artisan? If yes, then is it the same as the difference existing between the economics of production and that of appreciation? In the 21st century is art shaped solely by the differences and similarities between appreciation and consumption? From and urban perspective it’s indeed easy to overlook the fact that the process through which a piece of art is created is as much a piece of art as the end product itself. Easier yet it is to casually unsee that very process as a biological product of eons of tireless historicity. With the passing of the age of sāmantatantra or Indian feudalism came the demise of personal and structural patronage of traditional art. Appreciation got subsumed into consumption. Whereas urban “fine” art found its sustenance through the various galleries who successfully began to bridge between the artists and their appreciators and consumers, no such bridge was formed for the sake of the “non-fine” artists drowning in the sheer malignancy of poverty. And they are increasingly being tagged and relegated, more than ever before as “primitive”, “unpolished” or “quaint” at best. Thus, for Chalchitra Academy it is one of our most sacred of duties to work around all forms of social obstacles and make traditional art as much appreciated and economically sustainable as its urban and westernized counterpart. Bengal in her forgotten fringes, vales and hamlets houses a frighteningly vast and lyrically poignant array of varied artistic traditions and traditional folk art-forms whose roots lay some four thousand years ago in the hoary mysteries of the unnamed Æneolithic civilization of Rārh, and whose branches know not the endless firmaments as their limit.
“গভীর রাতে চাঁদের আলো চুপি চুপি খেলতে এসে দেখে খেলাঘরে ভাঙা পুতুলের ছড়াছড়ি, ঘুমে অচেতন খোকা খুকি তারা” wrote Abanindranath Tagore in his essay “Khelar Putul”, but little did he know how terribly these words shall prove to be prophetic in metaphorically describing the ignorance, arrogance and apathy of the 21st century urbanocentric Bengali populace. Therefore it is akin to an oath for us to alleviate ourselves, our inheritance and our art from this pestilence of indifference. We have made it our mission to inculcate a non-dogmatic sense of the episteme and aesthetics into the minds and hearts of the current generation at a formative age; and as it is our goal to enable and empower our children in developing an innately sympathetic artistic sense and an appreciation of traditional art and culture, we wish to spread our wings beyond the stereotypical boundaries of galleries and seminar halls for a wholesome outreach and an in-depth remedy of our societal regression.
Such is the human condition, to have been eternally doomed in the machinations of the binary, to have been eternally blessed with the curse of exclusivity. We are inherently too weak to realize the trans-duality of being and becoming nothingness, to realize the voraciously inclusive nature of all that there is, was and will be. To properly appreciate the lokaja, bhumija, antaja and the lokāyata, to critically unravel the infinitesimal infinities imbibed inside the annals of traditional art, to fall haplessly in love with the so-called “primitive” is to subvert the connotations of whatever is held to be “fine” and “folk” inside the realms of art, nay existence. It is indeed necessary to address the multiple registers of memory and non-conformity, because history might be what we remember, but historiosophy is that which remembers us and it is inside that very paradigm of causal timelessness where the lokayata resides. As one begins to comprehend how and why ādivāsi art-forms deliberately eschew the artifice of European renaissance’s illusory notion of perspective one cannot help but agree with Jagadish Swaminathan when he said in his essay “Art and Adivasi” that ādivāsi art is “not so much concerned with the image of reality as with the reality of image” and while it is of paramount academic and societal importance to study the intricacies of their mythopoesy, it is equally important to note that “to assign to myth or art the sole role of significance by other means of known or knowable facts, is to deny the meaning of the means itself; because in art as in myth the movement is not towards the matrix of origin but in the opposite direction of the possibilities of redemption from it.” An important case-study to note here would be the fact that the mode and quotient of syncretism being discussed herein have had a long history of its own. Precedences galore, especially in the medieval annals of Bengal. As an example one might cite the case of the terracotta horses and elephants of Panchmura, Hamirpur and Sonamukhi. There the ancient aesthetics, stylistics and techniques of Neolithic to Bronze-age pre-Indo-Aryan animism and totemism crossed the intermediate membrane of āgamic Tantra and shramanic Vajrayān to finally meet the dhrupadi set of aesthetics and stylistics and, perhaps even more importantly, the urban patronage of the Malla kings and their sāmantas of the Mallabhum kingdom, resulting in a visually mesmerizing and curiously brilliant set of aesthetics, preserved outside time itself as a perpetual ode to the posterity.
“সেকাল ছেড়ে কোনো শিল্প নেই ইটা ঠিক, কিন্তু একাল ছেড়েও কোনো শিল্প থাকতে পারে না বেঁচে”— Abanindranath Tagore
Just like Buddhism so effortlessly adapted the painted scrolls and zoomorphism of the Austro-asiatic and Dravidian people like the Jodu Patuās, Santals and Kols to beautifully portray the fables of the Jātaka and the idea of pratītyasamutpāda, i.e. the interdependent origination of all phenomenon through the simultaneous existence of the present, past and the future symbolized in the folded progression of the scrolls, and the animistic rejection of all binaries as symbolized in the totemic figurines and votive statuettes, so does Chalchitra Academy wish to adapt the definitive into the suggestive and the innocence of the blank canvasses of an honest enthusiast to strive for a holistic progression of art. Just like Meera Mukherjee found her own salvation in the Bastar through the forged threads of dokra, just like Picasso doused his thirst through the indigenous art of Africa and Iberia, just as Rabindranath Tagore searched for his sahajiyā amongst the rural chapters of Rārh, just as J. Swaminathan found his own amongst the Gond artists of Madhya Pradesh, so does Chalchitra Academy wish for art as a whole to reach her own salvation in the 21st century through the realization of the fact that art and the artist are concurrently antiquarian, futuristic and an eternal stasis of time. Thus, instead of reiterating the age-old dialectic of the contemporary and the traditional it’s our mission to dissolve the brahminical and elitist socio-economic stratifications and redefine the popular psychology through the bridged confluence of the definitive and the suggestive by replacing the decadent strands of appropriation and misappropriation with rediscovered hues, mediums, elements, textures and contours of the lokāyata, lokaja, deshaja, bhumija and antaja. Any and all notions of perspective need to be less optical and more spiritual, it needs to transform into the political from being haplessly relegated as the metaphysical. What the urban artists need are the tools and technique of the lokaja, what the lokaja artists need are the economic vistas, innovative elements and widened opportunities from the urban environment of art and commerce, and what they both require are the tranquil freshness and open canvases that only the untrained and enthusiastic dreamers wield. What this age of rehabilitation requires is a playfulness of the medium where singularity is released instead of being captured, where history is anticipated through an acceptance of historicity and the tumultuous poise of historiosophy. Thus, in lieu of never-ending journeys and personal sacrifices what we, Chalchitra Academy, pledge for and strive to do is not try to blindly search for answers of artifice but create working platforms of holistic and organic syncretism, explore the hitherto untouched shades and shapes of the lokāyata, and try to question the questions ever burning inside the heartless hearts of being and becoming.