Of Echoes And Silent Rupture: Prabir Purkayastha

Uma Nair

Many times a forbidden space tells its story with the porches and columns speaking of the architectural history and motifs and patterns dictating the artistic and ancestral tales. Uma Nair reads one such tale through Prabir Purkayastha’s works.

Prabir Purkayastha’s magnum opus of black and white splendor is bound to draw cynosure when it opens at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York this summer. Stories in Stone is about the multiple echoes that reside in Calcutta’s urban elite communities of the past. It is about the history of the great Anglo Dutch architectural mansions that were replete with magnificent spaces, courtyards, gardens and the pomp and splendor of the ostentatious merchants. Prabir has been spending the months over the past six years scouring and probing these abandoned, ghostly precincts.But one look at theseimages is enough to tell us that stories live silently and evocatively within the ramparts of these stones that live to tell their tales. In more ways than one these are living spaces. Whether he captures the exterior in all its glory or the interior , we see that room decor gained significance as a transient and ephemeral layer, permitted to be garish and upstart, if not outrageous at times. Styles prevalent between the Georgian and Victorian eras in England (1714-1901) were the common preferences, with large imports of expensive, custom-made objects to lend exclusivity, reflected in surface articulation, furniture, art and artifacts.

Prabir zooms in on the key spaces and areas that can be grouped into four categories, through which an overall picture can be constructed to understand the design paradigms of this typology. Its correlation to the other socio-cultural developments and factors prevalent at the time aid to establish the mansion as a compelling symbol of 19th-century Calcutta. This is a documentation for posterity. Between facades and courtyards and the Thakurdalan Prabir presents journeys within spaces. Within a structure defined by strict symmetry, colonnaded balconies, and entrance porches, the variations seen in motifs, patterns, and ornamentation depended on the period of the building. Social undercurrents also influenced architectural details. The elite, preferring greater “physical containment”, often enclosed upper verandahs by partially operable screens to retain visual opacity as a “permeable interface” with the street. Uncanny how some images recall what Rabindranath Tagore wrote in his memoirs, “To leave the house was forbidden to us; we had to get the glimpses of nature from beyond barriers. Like a prisoner in a cell, I would spend the day peering through the closed Venetian shutters, gazing out at this scene as on a picture in a book.” Prabir also unravels the beauty and grace of the articulation of the Courtyards- these images are actually an attempt to achieve visible monumentality, upon entry, through the use of the Ionic or Doric orders. Inter-columnation in the surrounding colonnade creates a heavy formality while the use of wooden louvered screens and cast-iron railings on the upper levels provided a more delicate touch.