Ashoknagar in North 24-Parganas is 32 kilometres from the India-Bangladesh border. This is where Vinayak Bhattacharya grew up in the 1960s. He has seen Habra Urban Colony, a settlement of refugees from East Pakistan metamorphose. Following Partition, the Congress government — led by chief minister Bidhan Chandra Roy — developed this erstwhile British Royal Air Force base known as Baigachi airfield into a planned municipal city. Bhattacharya says, “As a child, I roamed around the abandoned hangars, and the factories and mills founded here to generate employment for the rehabilitated refugees. And I often wondered what life was like on the other side of the border.”
Now an assistant professor in the department of painting at the College of Art & Design, Burdwan, Bhattacharya made frequent trips to the border till recently. He has visited various checkposts near Basirhat, Gede-Banpur and Jangipur and will tell you that the border is “a brutal legacy of Partition that has kept alive a tradition of violence, trauma and anxiety”.
Security guards and criminals alike regarded Bhattacharya with suspicion whenever he frequented the border areas to take photographs, make sketches.
On more than one occasion, he had been detained for questioning. The standard line: “This is not a place for a gentleman, a professor like you. Why don’t you travel to the beautiful mountains, oceans and forests instead?”
As Bhattacharya puts it, “There is a palpable fear in these borderlands, in the pristine paddy fields, in the streams and the rivulets.” A school dropout once told Bhattacharya nonchalantly that people like him couldn’t afford to waste time in classrooms because most of them turned bootleggers and were invariably shot or maimed, long before they made it to adulthood.
To convey the brutality of the border through his art, Bhattacharya uses craft knives to carve out his sketches onto masonite or engineered wood boards. Then he rolls black ink selectively on the boards and takes prints on art-grade rice paper. He says, “To capture the gloom and fear, I use black.” He continues, “Man built the border. Clouds, rivers, birds and animals don’t care for such boundaries.”