A work by Debashish Manna; (below) a painting by Arun Bain

Gallery Rasa in New Alipore is not even a year old, and yet within a short period time it has held some well-curated exhibitions, all non-profit shows. This time it has chosen to exhibit the works of Debashish Manna, who, used to live in abject poverty.

The images are simple (some may say simplistic) and straightforward — of human beings, doll-like women and forests and flowers. They are mostly drawn against a dark background of brown, black or indigo with striking greens, ochre and shocking pink as well.

Against the dark background the lighter shades look fluorescent. So some of the works look quite striking. However, it seems that the artist has a long way to go before he evolves a signature of his own. His work looks too derivative.

Like a diver

Full four fathoms deep my father lies… Arun Bain, trained at Baroda, dives deep into his consciousness to glean images of urbanscapes in a sub-aqueous haze. The image of the diver recurs in most of his canvases and often we see the world as presented by Bain through the diver’s eyes.

One encounters relics of ancient civilisations under water such as sundials, ornamental motifs, castles, columns and shells, but alongside them he squarely places a mode of transport that has become synonymous with the chaos and tumult in modern Indian cities — the ubiquitous autorickshaw.

The artist thereby tries to connect several layers of history and times. While this idea is fine, often he uses obviously “Indian” motifs such as the lotus and Krishna with a flute which have become too hackneyed for words. His fibreglass figures with hieroglyphs similar to the ones on his canvases do not contribute much either, although these are skilfully made.

Most of the canvases on show at Galerie 88 are large mixed media works, but often they remind us of the paintings of some of his more successful contemporaries. Some of his smaller works are delicately painted and without the sentimentality of some of his larger works.

Chandernagore sack

The Victoria Memorial Hall is not the ideal place for delivering lectures. Its acoustics are so faulty that guests find it impossible to catch the pearls of wisdom cast before them by speakers, some of whom are given to forgetting themselves and perorate without surcease.

This longwindedness came to the fore once again when P.T. Nair, the barefoot historian of Calcutta, delivered a lecture at this venue on how the English sacked the French city of Chandernagore on Friday, which happened to be the 250th anniversary of the attack. Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi was present on the occasion.

According to Nair, although he has written several books on the history of Calcutta, this was his first attempt at writing about Chandernagore. At that time, the French settlement was a thriving city with 2000 brick houses, whereas Calcutta had nothing but the fort in Dalhousie Square to boast of.