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Ancient Greek historians generally knew a thing or two. Take Herodotus — whose words seem to have struck a chord in a man across centuries and continents. “Very few things happen at the right time,” says the father of history in artist Shuvaprasanna’s brochure for an ambitious art complex. “Most don’t happen at all.”
Can’t say that’s true for Shuvaprasanna, though. Things have been happening — and rather rapidly at that. One: he is out on the streets, advocating change. Two: he is thick with an unlikely comrade in arms, Mamata Banerjee. Three: he is working on a series of art exhibitions and a retrospective. And four: he is happy merging art with politics.
“My best friend Gunter Grass has always told me that as a writer, poet, sculptor or painter, we can’t be ignorant. We have to be aware of our society and work for it,” says the 63-year-old painter. “I draw, but not just because I can adorn someone’s drawing room. There is a message in my work.”
So his house in Salt Lake — where we are chatting on a particularly balmy day, as flowers in his front garden paint a riotous rainbow — is the platform where the message is etched. Not just in his works of art, but in a series of meetings that take place there, with prominent citizens planning out their next move to oust the Left Front government of West Bengal.
It’s difficult to imagine Shuvaprasanna Bhattacharya (the artist goes only by his first name) as an avowed supporter of Mamata Banerjee. The lady is loud, the gentleman is soft. She is outspoken, he measures his words. She is a street fighter, he likes his art to speak for him. But she consults him, and he admires her.
“We talk almost every day. She calls me Shuvada. She is a typical Bengali and calls her seniors dada, even though she scolds them sometimes, as a sister would an elder brother. Some people resent that. But everybody can’t be a Mamata.”
Many in the Communist Party of India (Marxist) would heave a sigh of relief at that. Banerjee and her supporters have pushed the Left Front into a corner, and Shuvaprasanna, for one, is counting the days to its ouster. On the eve of the third anniversary of the Nandigram killing, which snowballed into a people’s movement against the government, the artist is certain that change is on its way.
“The CPI(M) is more dangerous than the Shiv Sena. We know the Sena — they are crazy, they are blunt but they are open. These people play a different communal game. If you are not with the CPI(M), you have no right to live in this country,” he says.
The breaking point for him, he stresses, was the violence in Nandigram and Singur — which witnessed widespread protests over government acquisition of farmers’ land. “On television, we saw the guns in Nandigram. We saw the peasants in Singur. I saw a peasant mother trying to save her son from a gunshot — and getting shot. Fourteen bodies fell. After all this, because I am a painter I have to paint in an ivory tower? I have to keep quiet? That’s when I said no.”
This was the time when Shuvaprasanna was coming closer to Banerjee. The Trinamul leader and amateur artist had asked him to have a look at her paintings. She wanted to know which of her works — mostly in acrylic, and of flowers and landscapes — he thought were worth exhibiting.
“So I went, I saw, and I was amazed. She has not been taught, but she has a passion. After a day’s hard work, she paints at 2am,” says Shuvaprasanna. “I selected some paintings and organised an exhibition. They were sold out.”
Banerjee spent the money she made on farmers. The artist tried to convince her to keep a quarter of the earnings for later use. “This time I may have paid for your frames, but I may not be able to do that again,” he told her. “She made about Rs 11 lakh and didn’t keep a paisa for herself. I reprimanded her, and she said: ‘Shuvada, I’ll manage.’ ”
Shuvaprasanna was speaking from experience — having slowly climbed the ladder of success. The only artist in a family of doctors, he says he had to wage “tremendous” struggle. “I did illustration work for newspapers and magazines — and was paid Rs 15 or Rs 25. Then I started a group for exhibitions. That was the beginning.”
His love of art, of course, had taken root much earlier. At the age of five, he used to stand on a chair and draw portraits of patients who’d consult his doctor father at their Calcutta home. “My father thought the only noble profession was medicine. I ended up joining an art college.”
Among the first public figures to recognise his work was film director Mrinal Sen. A painting in a series that he drew in the late Sixties and Seventies — underlining the political violence that enveloped the era — shook Sen. “He looked at Mute Silence and said to me, ‘It seems as if you have drawn this from my idea.’ I said, ‘No, this is my own thought.’ He wanted to borrow the painting for a film that he was shooting.”
Shuvaprasanna tried to sell the painting to Sen — it cost all of Rs 1,200 — but Sen was broke too. He promised to return it — and carried it away wrapped up in cloth in a taxi, to return it after a week. “He used it in his film Calcutta 71,” Shuvaprasanna recalls. Later, it was Sen who helped the artist when he received his first invitation to exhibit in the West, by organising his travel.
That was when the artist was a callow youth. Today, he is everybody’s Shuvada — especially to those who are critics of the Left. He doesn’t see art as a prerogative or product of the Left. “This philosophy is very good within coffee houses. But in practice it is cruel. There is no place now for the communist of leisure.”
The artist says he has been publicly attacked by Left leaders — some of whom have scornfully referred to him as the dariwala shilpi — or the bearded painter. “I have got ugly letters and have been slandered in the media. I am just surprised they haven’t killed me yet. But bullies are not brave,” he says.
Shuvaprasanna says he tries to ignore the tirade against him, and spends his time — from dawn till the afternoon — painting at home for a 2011 retrospective and two one-man shows. He keeps busy with his Arts Acre Foundation — which is setting up a 125,000-square-foot art complex on the outskirts of Calcutta, for which he has spent Rs 5 crore from his savings so far. Their pet Labrador keeps him company.
The house rings with poetry — the grilles are lines from verses in king-sized Bengali letters — and music. Daughter Jonaki, who studied communication design in Pune, sings well. Shuvaprasanna used to play the violin and piano once, but doesn’t anymore. The piano rests in one corner of his drawing room, lit up with paintings of his and of his artist wife, Shipra. “We cry, we laugh; we are happy, we are sad — all through music and poetry. I can’t step out of that.”
He paints, chairs a railways committee for passenger amenities (which plans to start a television channel and a journal) and holds the occasional meeting with Banerjee. “Mamata Banerjee is unbelievably courageous, unbelievably honest and an unbelievable visionary and a ground worker. I don’t think you can compare her popularity with anyone in Asia. Suu Kyi, Jayalalitha, Mayawati, or whoever — they all had men behind them. Not Mamata.”
According to him, the perks of power may have changed her colleagues — “not all of the Mahatma’s followers were like the Mahatma” — but she has stayed the way she was. “Her state ministers are in these huge bungalows — you should see some of them. But in her house, rats go scurrying.” She dresses the way she always did. They went together to an industrialist’s daughter’s wedding the other day, and Shuvaprasanna noticed that Banerjee was wrapped in her standard Bengal cotton sari, with a thread breaking out of its border.
The artist understands that, for he himself is comfortable in casual clothes. He was twice turned out of a city club for turning up in a kurta and trousers. The other day, he had his revenge. On being felicitated by the same club, he landed up in a fatua (vest), a lungi and Vidyasagari shoes (curled in front, open at the back). “They couldn’t turn me out because I was being awarded. I needed some courage for that. I have never worn these clothes out of the house. But I wanted to, because it was a protest,” he says.
The idea, he says, is to give people a jolt. “A nudge can bring you happiness, or it can give you sorrow. But without that, nothing blossoms.”
Herodotus thought otherwise — but a little nudge here and there can change history. The artist is ready for that. His elbows are out — along with his easel and his Vidyasagari shoes.
