Lifestyle changes drive consumer economies as inessentials appear to be indispensable. The paradox of industrial culture, therefore, is that while a car or cosmetics company booms, the primary producers of what’s essential — food crops — live precariously. This context makes Prasanta Sahu’s focus on food and its growers, in Emami’s online presentation, more than just refreshingly rooted. His tone of enquiry addresses a disconnect in society that exiles, in the consciousness of the urban elite, farmers-and labourers-to the Suburban Shadows.
A convenient socio-economic label — the farmer — promotes the anonymity of the primary producer as a being whose story is cloaked in impersonal statistics. His presence in the kitchen and at the dining table escapes unseeing eyes. Which is why the figure of the toiler is a flat silhouette in Sahu’s work, and sometimes a pale penumbra, shorn of substance. After all, if the limbs of the peasant are regarded as mere agricultural tools along with hoofed cattle, as the artist’s diary notes list, he will, inevitably, get dehumanized in the urban reckoning.
But the artist’s vegetables are invested with a photorealist life in ink and watercolour. Modelled and colourful, they preside over the paper as they do the consciousness of consumers. If they carry with them their umbilical links with the soil and the hands that tended them, this resonance is obliterated for most urbanites, symbolizing a rupture with the earth itself. What intrudes, instead, is the shopping trolley of malls: the vegetables could as well have sprouted there in a city child’s imagination.
His diagrams, paired with research details, consciously adopt the detached tone of the outsider. That resists the sanctimonious arrogance of presuming to speak for the disadvantaged. Even the weather whims of the Bay, that graduate from depressions to supercyclones, are reduced to a clinical diagram of oceanic currents that toss about man, animal and object as though they were featureless cutouts, no bleeding-heart emotions. Because emotion must remain the inviolable preserve of the authentic voice.
