Revisiting the Lost Art of Hand-writing Bangla at Victoria Memorial Hall

Victoria Memorial Hall, as part of its Activity Club program, organised a Bengali Calligraphy workshop on 26 July 2023 in its Conference Hall. It was conducted by Calligrapher Jugal Chandra Kundu, who inspired participants from various schools across the city to learn the art of penning Bengali letters. This was a follow-up session from the lecture titled “From Calligraphy to Movable Type - A Little-Known Journey of Bengali Artists” that was delivered by Indrajit Chaudhuri, Tagore National Scholar for Cultural Research at Victoria Memorial Hall on 24 July 2023. Chaudhuri touched upon the original development of the Bengali script from Kharosthi and Brahmi to Siddhamatrika to the current modern font type used for printing.

“Our idea is to engage students with the patterns of Bengali writings and showcase the timeline of how that has evolved. In this workshop we wanted to introduce the ‘abc’ of the Bengali alphabet among the students to create awareness about the intricacies of lettering them,” shared Sagnik Bhattacharya, coordinator of the Activity Club. The workshop had rigorous rounds of practising each Bengali letter, emphasising the arcs and strokes of joining them. In the process, students learned to stylise the letters and get a sense of the origins of the alphabet. A number of participants also learned to write Bengali for the first time on the day of the workshop. The moderator made sincere efforts to ensure that the students not only learned how to outline the letters but also how to put them together into words.

“The current trend is that people are barely writing in Bangla while there are a few who choose to rather type it out. Thereby, gradually the art of styling alphabets may erode someday as people have almost forgotten to write by hand. Having said that, we thought it is important to inform the students about the growth of Bengali calligraphy with an added session of its application. The workshop is also a revelation for the students coming from Hindi-speaking backgrounds,” said Mr Raju Raman, Programme Consultant at Victoria Memorial Hall.

The sessions of both days highlighted the many dialogues, discussions and history encapsulating the syllabic elements of the language, Bengali. Some students scoured their existing knowledge of writing it while some learnt it afresh. This experience, as aimed, has ensured a step ahead towards maintaining the traverse of the language.