Chhatrapati Dutta’s stirring video, The Shrouded Live On (The Lockdown Works), is composed of a series of stark, taut and fragmented drawings inspired by the recent nightmare journey of millions of migrant workers as they made a heroic effort to trudge back home. The presentation (online from June 6) is by the Birla Academy of Art & Culture and the foreword is by Pranabranjan Ray. Dutta turns the reverse migration into an epic journey undertaken by countless workers, who are phantoms carrying their earthly possessions in bundles they balanced on their heads or carried on cycles and in vans. The maps of unknown roads and railway lines, indicative of the paths they laboured across at night and in the daytime heat, are traced on these bundles. Occasionally, he refers to real events such as the death of the hapless labourers on the train tracks.

The journey turns into a calvary for these defenceless workers as the government failed in its duty to deliver them. Dutta draws a parallel between the sufferings brought on by this reverse migration and the horrors of the exodus during the Partition. He uses archival photographs of unending waves of humanity on their way to the new-born Republic of India, juxtaposing them with his own drawings.

The mask and the covered face turn into symbols of the pandemic, looming large in the drawings. The policeman’s cap and his boots become a metaphor for State repression. Dutta mainly used charcoal and tea stains, occasionally using water colours, as in the carmine washes. The elegiac quality of the work is partly diminished by the swelling music and the voice-over of the text. The drawings are arresting on their own.