India’s oldest underground rail network—the Kolkata Metro—just entered middle age. Two expert art museum professionals, Shreeja Sen and Ankan Kazi, have curated a walk to explore the artworks that adorn the 40-year-old walls; a linear station by station experience through history, ideology and mythology. The walls are veritable canvasses, recording the city’s contentious, vibrant history through decades. While most artists prefer addressing existential or social themes to acquire relevant identities, Bengal goes political: take, for example, Chittoprasad.
The Metro artworks that adorn eight stations along the North-South corridor—Kalighat, Jatin Das Park, Netaji Bhavan, Rabindra Sadan, Maidan, Park Street and Esplanade—created between 1984-86, are a testament to the politically turbulent decade in the country at large, and Bengal in particular. It formed the perfect intersection between public life and art, commissioned by the state, in a bid to make the metro rail an attractive proposition. It probably inspired murals in other metros. This year, the service launched the country’s first underwater metro connection, with a 16.6-km-long tunnel running underneath the Hooghly river, linking Phoolbagan in the east to Howrah in the west.
Apprehensions surrounding the disruptions caused by the metro rail’s development were written about by the intelligentsia of the time. “Poets like Annadashankar Ray, for instance, picked up the cultural associations of ‘pataal’ in Indian mythology and sounded alarmist at the thought of people descending into a dark netherworld, supposedly teeming with mythical beasts,” Sen says. The metaphor hopefully doesn’t apply to the subterranean rail network.
The state government then collaborated with the Soviets, to build the metro. “The ideological basis for making the metro system in Moscow contrasted sharply with the West’s, such as in Paris or London. Instead of being a functional, cost-efficient means of urban transportation, the Moscow metro is a lavish, miniature museum for the working classes,” says Kazi. Needless to say, the Soviet metro became Kolkata Metro’s foundational inspiration.
The routes boasting mosaics are cosmopolitan. At Netaji Bhavan, the pillars are colour-blocked by multicoloured mosaic tiles; at Rabindra Sadan, the outer walls of the gates carry replicas by Sukhen Ganguli of Tagore’s work in 1987. They mark the bard’s 125th birth anniversary. “Many Kolkata-based artists were trained not only in mural-making but also making mosaics, which has taken off since the 1960s,” says Kazi. Moreover, mosaic itself is one of the oldest forms of art that was favoured by Roman and Byzantine artists, and also Bengal’s Jamini Roy. Roy’s son, Amiya, an artist, was commissioned by the Kolkata Metro’s apparatchiks to make the mosaic mural at Rabindra Sadan.
The station at Park Street—one of Kolkata’s oldest commercial districts—bears mosaic art depicting bullock carts and buses to show the evolution of the city’s transport system; for Kalighat, the mural above the staircase to the platform leading from gates 3 and 4, represents bazaar art reminiscent of the Kalighat pat, which the great Nandadulal Mukherjee had worked on.
Inside the Jatin Das Park station, the walls are clad in white tiles mimicking the London Underground and were eccentrically inspired by public lavatories; the space gives an illusion of expansiveness. In keeping with the spirit of the Maidan neighbourhood dotted with parks and playgrounds, the station there has sports-themed murals.
Then comes Esplanade, a buzzing cross-section in Central Kolkata, where a fibre-glass mural gifted to the city by modernist Anjolie Ela Menon—who hails from the Sovabazar Rajbari in the city—graces the head of its station’s staircase. “The paintings’ theme—journey—done in Menon’s signature style couldn’t be any better suited to the bustling station at the heart of the city,” Sen says.
Through the years, right up till 2023, the walls of the Kolkata metro stations have continued to act as canvases for artists young and old, providing glimpses of the city and Bengal’s changing landscape to travellers. It is a lesson in history for a city that has held on to its past defiantly, while slowly trudging towards an uncertain decrepit future. The colours of mosaics and murals makes the journey worthwhile.