Growing up in Naihati, a small town by the Hooghly about 50km from Kolkata, Nabendu Sengupta was fortunate enough to participate in an unusual experiment with art for children.
Eminent artists Gautam Chowdhury and Arunima Chowdhury had opened a place there called Bihan where children were taught no rules. Instead they were asked to draw on their own what they felt like.
“The first day I was just taken to out into the open and left to myself,” smiles Sengupta, now 53 and a reputable enamel and ceramic artist in the city. He is a lively, friendly man who laughs readily, loves conversations and is much liked by all.
Being left to oneself was slightly terrifying, but exhilarating. “I learnt my first important lessons,” says Sengupta. Among other things he became convinced that art, whatever shape it takes, is about life. And it is an expression of yourself. “Ichchhe moto kaaj korbo.” Work as you please. Which, of course, is a tough choice. Freedom is a hard thing to live.
Sengupta’s works surround us at Aranya, a shop in Dakshinapan in south Kolkata, where we are meeting. The store is known for its eccentric and delightful collection of handmade objects, jewellery and textiles. Sengupta’s art, which is everywhere — in the windows, shelves, on the floor, or in the little space that is now reserved for ceramic, enamel and wood objects — is quite breathtaking. His works are also eccentric and delightful, or dark, but they have a life of their own, whether in the form of a large-beaked terracotta bird gazing contemplatively or a beautiful, dark, “fishy” lady on a ceramic plate or even a little twisted ceramic shape, which he is using as an ashtray as he is talking to me. Sharp beaks and creatures abound.
Here one must mention Sengupta’s owls, the most contemplative of creatures, who are in high demand, though the artist suggests that he is a little tired of them. Much of his work is done with Chandani Basu, proprietor, Aranya.
One tends to connect his full-bodied, sometimes buoyant, often odd creatures, to an eccentric modernism that is peculiar to the Bengali imagination. Sengupta seems to read your mind. He points at a ceramic panel of four intertwined cats made by him. “If you look at these cats, you will know they have been made in Calcutta. They could not have been made anywhere else,” he says. “Art is about life — and about a particular time and place. They will be there in art.”
But you have to learn how to manage time and space, in another sense. Which is the second lesson he learnt, from another kind of art.
Sengupta studied history at Vidyasagar College in the city and did his masters in history at Jadavpur University. As a student in the city he became involved with Salil Bandyopadhyay’s theatre group Theatron, where he designed publicity materials and banners and acted as well.
From Bandyopadhyay, who imagined “rediscovering the old as modernity” and took up old plays, Sengupta learnt the craft of theatre and the wisdom of “gati, jati”. Pace and pause. Attention has to be paid to what fills up time and space and what is to be kept out, on stage and within a frame, not to mention in one’s life.
Yet when he sits down to work, what happens is something unknown to himself, says Sengupta. “A proverb in Bengali says Bhabiya korio kaaj, koriya bhabiyo na’ (Think before you do something, not the other way around), but I have always done it the other way around. The shape that emerges happens,” he says. Everything happens in the theatre of the mind. The process itself, not only the materiality of the art or its final form, he suggests, is a vital, physical thing, embodied, even if abstract. Perhaps that is why he is drawn to his mediums: ceramic, enamel or terracotta, basically clay, vital, tactile, earthy; to the process, which can need firing; and to the making of shapes that can be held in hand.
He is very fond of enamel, which was cast as a poor man’s choice after the advent of steel and even communalised as a ‘Muslim’ material, says Sengupta. Enamel, however, is an excellent material for utensils and versatile as a medium for art, he says, as it is a bit unpredictable. Artists like K.G. Subramanyan liked to use it.
But finally, through it all, the artist is expressing himself. “Painting is just another way of keeping a diary,” Sengupta quotes Picasso. The writer writes himself in his work, the painter paints himself into his. Not that Sengupta elevates his own work in any way. He questions why he should be interviewed for this column till his colleague Basu sternly tells him not to be
absurd.
His life, in the way it has unfolded, has mirrored his work. Quite early Sengupta had decided he would never take up a job and would not tailor his work according to the demands of the market: “Ichchhe moto kaaj korbo.” This took him to many places, but not always easy.
At first he had tried to run a terracotta unit, making usual products like pottery and jewellery and took them to festivals and stores, but it did not work out, even if he got recognition. One of his old terracotta relief works adorns Kalighat Booster Pumping Station.
He began to work on his own. Other than at Aranya, now his works are kept at a friend’s house. That way, he still can work the way he wants to. He thinks that he took big risks in his life, he laughs and warns that the results may not always be pretty.
A few of his major pieces are installed in the houses of several well-known personalities. He lives in Garia with his family, his wife and son.
But he has arrived where he has because of his friends, he claims, who are everything to him. He mentions Basu again. He does not have a studio of his own, and does not want one. He mentions artist and friend Tamal Bhattacharya’s studio in Baruipur, where he works the most.
Two other work projects have been life-giving.
One was a terracotta workshop he conducted with underprivileged children for an organisation called Charu Chetana in Kasba, run by Asit Pal. “Since globalisation our children, who belong to middle class families, lead lives that are vastly different from our childhoods. But teaching the children at the workshop, I felt some of the joy I had felt at Bihan,” says Sengupta.
The other is his work with the inmates of Pavlov and Lumbini Park mental health institutions in Kolkata, conceived by the city-based mental health rights NGO Anjali. Under his care, the inmates have drawn, painted, made little sculptures with M-Seal about their lives, or anything they have wanted to.
Some of them are astounding, beautiful, heartbreaking pieces. They tell stories that will never be put into words. Art is the most profound, human expression of the self.