Soft-spoken and reticent, Debnath Basu’s calm visage doesn’t betray the rambunctious nature of his art. Viewers may find his current exhibition titled In Waiting… at the Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Kolkata, intriguing and perhaps even abstruse. Through images executed with the precision of anatomical drawings, often accompanied by a selection of text underlines the seriousness with which he deals with the whimsicality of his ideas.
A total of 28 works of various sizes are on display at this exhibition curated by Uma Ray. Most of them are exhibited on the walls, while some others are laid out on a round table for viewers to observe. Viewers can turn the pages of a book he collaborated on with Vadodarabased artists Indrapramit Roy and Anandajit Ray. A series created by using the embossed intaglio process tells the wistful story of the white woollen Gandhi cap. Note, Basu’s work needs patience to be comprehended.
For the 64-year-old artist, who was trained at Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata under noted printmaker Pinaki Baura (1954-2021), the world exists in layers of grey, from the deepest charcoal to a steely sheen. This vision manifests through the application of graphite powder on paper. Within the depths of grey, this industrial product occasionally sparkles. It is difficult to “read” his work, though. It could constitute scraps from his earlier work that he destroyed in a fit of frustration, or even pages of legal documents—in particular, his challenge to a university authority for “unjustifiably” sacking him. Basu had joined Rabindra Bharati University as a visiting professor. His teacher Pinaki Barua decided to leave RBU and join Visva Bharati. Basu was interviewed for the post and he joined. Over a year later, Basu was entitled to fill in Barua’s post, going by precedent. But he was denied the post. So he went to court against RBU. Till now the case hasn’t been closed.
Basu says the grey miasma that pervades his work “originated from his home town Howrah” where dust mingles with smoke from the remnants of innumerable industrial units to cast a pall. “Although it is Kolkata’s twin city with only the Hooghly separating them, their overall characters are different. Howrah, once known as ‘Coolie town’, has always been neglected,” Basu laments.
He draws inspiration from poet Jibanananda Das, and the satirical fiction of Nabarun Bhattacharya and Tarapada Roy, as well as the works of Akhteruzzaman Elias and Saadat Hasan Manto. Anand Patwardhan’s documentary Reason (2018) on hyper-nationalism and the murder of rationalists such as Gauri Lankesh made a “tremendous impact” on him. Stenciled images of the rationalists’ portraits appear in Writing on the Wall. In Myself as Colonel and Reclining Colonel and Kaalpurush done with graphite pencil, Basu portrays Nabarun Bhattacharya’s subaltern protagonist—a lanky young insurgent with the Doomsday machine on his mind. As in his other works, these large drawings have a strong graphic quality. In Liberty, Equality and Fraternity headless humans jostle with each other. In The Mocking Face and the New Solar System, the sun revolves around the earth upsetting the accepted heliocentric model of the solar system. This is in keeping with the eccentric ideas of Howrah’s KC Paul, the self-proclaimed astronomer and graffitist. Barbed Toba Tek Singh is the huge drawing of the silhouette of a figure created entirely with concertina wire, a bitter indictment of the insanity that was the Partition.
Curator Uma Ray says, “I wonder what inspired the artist who lived in isolation to create, destroy and rework old works over and over again. His is a determined effort to write and erase. His use of ambigram makes it even more captivating.” Basu is a silent but critical observer of the inescapable absurdities of our lives.