A very successful Delhi artist once wondered aloud to me why Bengal artists of the 1960s and 70s bothered to produce the grim images of hunger and poverty that few ever appreciated and which had even ...

Setting: pre-Independence Calcutta of the Forties. As a teenage bride, Parulrani Hazra would peep from behind the sliced bamboo curtains on the first floor of the 41-cottah Janbazar mansion she was ma...