Sanjay Bhattacharya the artist? Yes all
of us know him. Sanjay Bhattacharya the
poet? Intriguing!!Bengali poetry that fl its
and forms the clouds of fantasy, that when
recited by the artist himself brings back
memories of the famed Uttam Kumar
reciting lines in eulogic elegance on the
sets of a Satyajit Ray fi lm. Sanjay’s book of
poems and his explorations into the world
of drawings unveiled at Dhoomimal in
Delhi and what a showcasing it was. Of a
lean and lithe world-pregnant with sighs
and languid in its clean lines and abstracted
domains-a very diff erent kind of Sanjay
Bhattacharya who is known for his realist
strokes and Daliesque dalliances.
Titles have suggestions of ironies and
instincts of paradoxical patterns. In the air
is a sense of arrival, the triumphant serenity/
angst of a society whose values and canons,
based on stories of migration sadness,
arcadian green lawns of dreams and the
plains of disappointment all morph into
one, fathers with struggles, and mothers
in bonds, have become, by some divine
dispensation, a case for the mortal living
through the immortal. Th is mood of selfcelebration
appeared in the pastoral poems
that Sanjay fashions of the many periods of
society and its web of confl icts and desires:
no demure blouses, cunningly tucked
folds of a woman’s skin into saris, most of
Sanjay’s women are in the altogether—and
at the height of the contour the Bengali
script fl ows in sinuous curves like the
graceful fl ow of a river—all strewn with
the lexicon blossoms of the script in the
maidenly tints of powerful drawings that
swell and surge in monochromatic hues of
sienna of charcoal of a beaten earthy red soil
and pouring rain. Up and down the East
Coast, in that Bengali provincial period
before the invasion of international brands,
before “Love Stories” had graven words
into the national consciousness, Sanjay
creates worlds within voids and voids
within worlds. Until, of course, the sense of
fatalism and secret diabolicism meets and
the person in question is swept them off to
become a backdrop of the hidden scream.
I SAW AND RECOGNISED YOU
No one heard a scream,
there was no bloodbath anywhere,
but I saw and recognized you
when, removing your mask,
you were looking at your face
secretly, in a secret mirror.
Even so, I survive.
Hand in hand,
Some termite nibbles away the fl esh
Within my chest by day and by night!