16/05/2026
CSSSC welcomes you to staff seminar by Dr Trina Nileena Banerjee on 21st May 2026, 3PM at our main campus in Patuli.
All are welcome.
Title: A Hungry Bengal: Chittaprosad, Nabanna and the Idea of a ‘People’s Art’
Venue: Seminar Room 2, CSSSC Main Campus (Baishnabghata-Patuli)
Abstract: A sense of immediacy and urgency characterises Chittaprosad’s drawings from the famine of 1943-1944 in Bengal. In Hungry Bengal (1943), the printed version of Chittaprosad’s collection of paintings and notes from his November 1943 journeys through Midnapore, we get a sense of an artist running against time to capture what he can of the depth and magnitude of the misery he has witnessed. In this sense, Chittaprosad’s paintings from this era are visual reportage produced in print, an urgent recording of immediate reality, meant for a wide array of readers and spectators, who were kept oblivious of the harsh reality and extent of the ongoing famine by the mainstream media. This essay examines the relationship of Chittaprosad’s Hungry Bengal with the performance of the Indian People’s Theatre Association’s landmark production Nabanna (1944) a year later. I aim to unravel the interface between the visual and the performative in the work of bearing witness, the implications of reporting through art on an ongoing crisis of unprecedented proportions, the aesthetic temporalities it unleashes in contemporary print cultures and in drama, how the ‘people’ are imagined in such a project and what it makes of the artist when the urgency has passed.
