A tapestry inspired by Raza

India may have a rich heritage of hand-woven textiles. But tapestry, which purports to translate the works of contemporary Indian masters in textile terms, is rarely seen in art galleries in this city.

K2, the gallery on Lansdowne Terrace opening on Monday, may claim to have organised a unique exhibition of tapestry by a master weaver who was not named. The works translate the colourful paintings of the Paris-based master, Syed Haider Raza, into the language of weft-faced weaving. Design and colour dominate Raza’s works. In spite of having spent the better part of his life abroad, the geometric motifs and sizzling colours immediately identify Raza’s work as being that of an Indian artist.

The tapestries make no attempt at replicating the paintings of Raza born in 1922 at Babaria in Madhya Pradesh. The painter was brought up on the Quran as well as Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, and Hindu supremacists would be delighted to discover that the starting point of most of Raza’s paintings is the bindu, the seed, the creative energy.

According to the catalogue, which has some delightful typographical errors, each piece made of Australian blended wool was sent to Paris for his approval before the master put his signature on it.

The result is quite stunning. As in the Raza paintings, the colours dance on the white walls. Raza paintings cost crores. These come in lakhs. It is for the buyer to decide which.

A photograph by Ananda Pal

The Tebhaga movement, which had rocked the Bengal districts, particularly those in the north, between 1946 and 1948, was memorably documented by Somnath Hore in his diary, which included many drawings. Sixty lakh sharecroppers united by the Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha went up in arms demanding two-third share of crop from jotedars, the landholders in whose land they worked.

It was ruthlessly suppressed by the police, and subsequently 70 peasants lost their lives. One need not be a historian to discover the parallels between this farmers’ mass struggle and the current movement in Nandigram.

Boi-Chitra, in the College Street Coffee House building, has mounted an exhibition of photographs of the two movements. Whereas the Nandigram photographs are quite pedestrian, the documentation of Tebhaga is remarkable. These were taken by Ananda Pal of Chandernagore, who was a member of the undivided Communist Party and a photographer of Swadhinata, the party mouthpiece, between 1944 and 1948. Compelled to take up photography to earn his keep, Pal died in the later 1980s. He used a simple camera and 120 ASA film, mostly with eight exposures.

A work by Sharbani Roy

Heaps of negatives still exist but the identity of those images cannot be established. The black-and-white photographs show peasants, both men and women, armed with sticks and brooms, harvesting scenes with the red flag bearing the hammer and the sickle and the star fluttering in the background.

A phalanx of human beings marches through a field, policemen encircle a village, guns in hand. The images — some digitised — have faded with age, but they still remain a living human document.

Way back in 1972, Arab terrorists had created mayhem at the Olympic Games in Munich. Since then hooded faces with cut-out eyeholes have become identified with terrorism. But now we have evidence that the hooded head could also conceal the face of a victim of secret agencies such as the CIA, which abducts terrorist suspects and imprisons them interminably in secret jails.

Sharbani Roy’s mixed media work, which incorporates tapestry quite extensively, seems to deal with such paradoxes in her work on display at Akar Prakar. This young practitioner is among the five women artists — the others being Mini Sivakumar, Manjari Chakravarti, Chandrima Bhattacharyya, Pampa Panwar, Mahajabin Majumdar and Rima Kundu, from Santiniketan — exhibited here. Her other image of the huge pair of eyes with twin portraits of a woman in place of a nose is also rich with allusiveness.