Every age is both the best of times and the worst of times, depending on the chronicler. If you are anxious about where society is headed, the smug voices of power and privilege will proclaim there never was a more achchhe din before now. The seven artists who showed six works at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity in February feel, however, that these are Hollow Times with troubling episodes: the pandemic, rising bigotry, migrants’ woes and much else.
The search for its correlatives demanded thought and labour. Rabin Roy was perhaps a little simplistic in visualizing The Vehicle of History as a tunnel that ejects used human beings as garbage. But it recalled the mangled men spat out from the King’s chamber in Raktakarabi, and that, fortuitously, echoes Tagore’s chilling indictment of industrial civilization.
Srikanta Paul’s interminable line of charcoal figures, condemned to pass through life in a stupefied procession like robotic migrants, had no need for physical herding through a tunnel. Rajat Sen, however, had a more immediate focus: the blood-stained rotis of the migrants mowed down by a train last year, a monumental tragedy that was reduced to A Donkey’s Tale for an Establishment that treats unorganized labourers as meek beasts of burden. Suman Samajpati and Sourav Roy Chowdhury (Taxi) seem to know that the “ambiguities of democracy” lie in an imbalance between liberty and its limits but weren’t able to articulate this forcefully.
Rajiv Bhattacharjee’s motorized metal sculpture, rising from underneath, suggested an excavated site depicting places of worship of different faiths as a single complex on the same land. History, however, mercilessly demolishes myths of idyllic bonhomie: harmonious co-existence remains an elusive ideal that needs constant vigil and commitment. Pradip Das insightfully paraphrased a physics formula — pressure is equal to your resistance — to analyze the Diary of Time with an elaborate metal installation. That, interestingly, brought it close to Toynbee’s theory of civilizations: challenge and response.