A Transnational Socialist Solidarity: Chittaprosad’s Prague Connection

The Indian artist Chittaprosad Bhattacharya (1915–1978) is best known for his visual reportages on the Bengal famine in 1943–1944. As a member of the Communist Party of India (CPI), Chittaprosad’s historic documents of the famine, in the form of sketches, texts and linocuts, were produced in line with the party’s demand for revolutionary popular art to mobilize the masses by means of posters as well as journalistic and documentary-style reports. Many of these works were published in the communist journals People’s War and People’s Age. This is how they circulated among intellectuals and a general readership. Chittaprosad can be situated within a socially responsive practice that is distinctive for one line of development characteristic of his native Bengal, notably represented by artists such as Zainul Abedin (1914–1976) and Somnath Hore (1921–2006). While these artists have produced compelling images in response to political crisis, the Bengal famine, and peasant rebellions, Chittaprosad’s recognition and fame gained in pre-partition India—unlike that of Abedin and Hore—was not carried into the post-partition era. His dissociation from the CPI in 1948, along with the general atmosphere in postcolonial India, with its concerns for signatures of national-modern art, left little room for a former party artist. This, I will argue, instigated him to build on a network beyond the national frame. The group of individuals from Prague that became aware of and interested in Chittaprosad around that time actively supported his career from this point on. This is how his work increasingly circulated within a transnational network that was marked by solidarity with a socialist outlook and paired with a curiosity for traditional and folk arts. These very personal connections exceeded his lifetime, and most of the documents, book illustrations, poems, and artworks related to this have not yet been studied or published.