Chronicler of distress from another time

Mumbai-based Chittaprosad reported on the Bengal famine after he was asked by the Communist Party of India for their journal, People's War

What would Chittaprosad have made of the current crisis and the failure, at so many levels, of the state to offer relief to millions of the worst affected? Touring Bengal in 1943-44, he saw diseases fell entire populations of villages as famine ravaged the countryside. There was, as now, neither work nor food apart from miserly doles hardly sufficient to keep body and soul together. The rich hoarded supplies and held on to their wealth; the poor simply wasted away — an invisible people whose disappearance was unremarkable and unremarked.
 
An artist at the start of his career — he was but 28 years old at the time — the Mumbai-based Chittaprosad was asked by the Communist Party of India to report on the Bengal famine for their journal, People’s War (renamed People’s Age after Independence). His travels uncovered the scourge of official apathy and his drawings of its victims became a visual travelogue that exposed the chinks in the government’s functioning.
 
His journeys, from village to village, took him to orphanages and relief camps, from hospitals to shanty camps. He gathered stories of appalling circumstances, writing them down on the reverse side of his drawings, rarely editorialising, but always respectfully honest. Such as the superintendent of an orphanage telling him about a child’s mother “who is a private prostitute now and her child is in the orphanage, and many a child’s relatives are beggars and starving”. He saw land labourers reduced to penury and working as coolies unable to provide for their mother “who was regularly starving before she came in the hospital”. A drawing of an emaciated figure is made more incisive with his testy commentary: “Having sold off what little land he possessed during the famine he had come down to the streets. His wife begs for survival.” Unlike today, he hoped the city would provide relief: “Perhaps I could manage something if I stay back at the city, there’s so many affluent families here, so many factories around.”

Chittaprosad uncovered the scourge of official apathy through his drawings

Reporters and photographers testify to their hopelessness, leaving them torn between the necessity to document reportage and their inability to do something meaningful about it. Chittaprosad’s reprieve lay in the dignity he accorded the dead, the dying and the barely living, meticulously recording their names as well as their antecedents — the names of family members, of their village, caste, profession, a list of their diseases and ailments and relief or medical care availed of (if any). The heart-wrenching misery impacted Chittaprosad’s practice to such an extent, he was never able to become a participant in the art market.
 
Chittaprosad chose to stay away from the deliberately political, heaping neither scorn nor commendation for state efforts, acting as a mere chronicler. If his drawings were excoriating, he did not exaggerate them, just as he meticulously recorded state doles — the rations, medicines, clothes and blankets distributed, the inoculations and vaccinations, the attempt to create jobs whenever and wherever possible. Yet, neutrality was not always possible given the vast discrepancy between the wealthiest and the poorest.
 
He reserved such ire for Shyama Prasad Mukherjee’s new house in Hooghly which he drew complete with its granaries. The worthy Dr Mukherjee is one of the builders of modern Bengal who championed the cause of education and culture. He was also vocal about the Bengal Governor’s inability to manage the distribution of funds to those for whom it was intended. Yet, in a scathing indictment in People’s War titled “The Riches Piled Here: An Insult to Hungry Thousands Around — Painful Sights in Shyamaprosad’s Hooghly Home-Village”, Chittaprosad asks: “Has this man who has given lacs to save Bengal kept the light burning in his own village? — this is what most people would like to know.” History does have a way of repeating itself.
 
Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated