 "Chittaprosad, drawings, paintings, bengal famine")
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.”
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
