The Line of Control in Conversation with Jogen Chowdhury – Rajesh Punj

How does Jogen meditate on the surface of things, in a way that human skin, the skin of a vegetable and fruit, and the surface of a stone, rock or a pebble, that there is some kind of unifying substance that extends across all of these forms.


For an enduring period of his life eminent Indian artist Jogen Chowdhury has been spirited by the company of others, watching over and then willing himself to record by rendering in pen and ink the very ordinary and anonymous faces and figures that litter the streets of a city, like animal carcases out to rot. Such is the lack of consideration and care for the individual in a country polluted by its population. In Chowdhury’s lifetime the fallout and fatalities of the subcontinent’s political unrest, and of the unceremonious movement of individuals as immigrations, residents becoming refugees, is buried deep in the artist’s psyche, as the people of poverty and political instability are the cradle of his work. What we flee from is where Chowdhury is likely located, for his greater understanding of humanity. To have stopped and knelt down to their level, to succumb to the plight of thousands of displaced people, was for the artist to feel something of their situation.


Impregnated in his works is evidence of the isolation and abandon of a whole swath of people caught up in the upheaval of populations who were suddenly wrong for their identity. Noticeable East Pakistan, originally carved up by the English India and Pakistan, that was further contested in the early nineteen-seventies between Pakistani governmental forces, and the Bangladeshi Liberation War. For Chowdhury the collateral damage was all too plain to see, with, as he explains, his closest railway station being taken over as a makeshift shelter for many of the destitute and deprived. Remarkably the tenderness and texture of the innocent as Chowdhury saw them, bears testament to one man’s intention to acknowledge the world as less giving and more unforgiving. That as with the conflict in Kashmir demonstrates the uneasy relevance Chowdhury’s work has for us today, as it has to those rooted to the railway station, without papers or a passage back home. And in spite of his celebration of contemporary art, citing the significance of artists like Yves Klein and Damien Hirst, Chowdhury’s consideration for the human being, in a whole range of mediums, appears fundamentally more important than the material driven art of the new age.

The line of control that originally divided up India, the contest for control of East Pakistan, becoming Bangladesh, and the charcoal and pencil line that Chowdhury has always employed to render people real, epitomises the torment and tension that hangs over even the simplest of his works, like an impossible odour. His drawings, lithographs and prints all appear to draw breath from the people he has encountered and come to know in his life, who are of the earth and return to the earth. And he sees it as fitting to concentrate on the every day, in an epoch when our value of one another has been corrupted.

The curator works in a way that is intended to best represent an artist as an exhibition, which may differ from the artist’s original intention, and that tension and the intention of the artist will always be there.We will never entirely know of what fills an artist’s mind when making a word. That is impossible to capture.