Page 66 - Eye of the beholder

ZAINUL ABEDIN[1914-1976]: THE SOCIALIST REALIST
He is an artist who developed his personalized visual language to paint and sketch reality that he observed and witnessed around him. Zainul Abedin a Bangladeshi artist is considered among one of the modernist pioneers of Bengal who in the early decade of 1940s moved beyond the sentimental lyricism of the Bengal School to create a powerful visual vocabulary that poignantly communicated and evoked empathy among the viewers with his art. His pen and ink drawings that documented the man made famine of 1943 with its suffering, struggles, poverty and death in a graphic manner had his expressive lines carrying the burden of his emotions and sentiments. He had recorded these tragic scenes with documentary style objectivity and artistic power the likes of which were unknown untill then. The Bengal famine had taken three million lives and during the Second World War, its colonized subject had supported the western efforts leading to the diversion of food resources and drain on the economy with thousands of native troops joining the allied forces.
Having graduated from Calcutta School of Arts and with a secure teaching job at the institution, he decided to give it up in order to record the horrors and shocking reality that famine had brought upon the humanity. With a sketch book and pen and ink as his basic art materials he set forth to have it represented through his quick sketches the unholy reality. A sensitive and keenly observant artist, he made rapid sketches with a few synoptic lines to capture the essence of the starving, dead and dying forms that had cluttered the streets of Calcutta as poverty stricken villagers migrated from rural areas to find sustenance in the urban city.
His drawings had the potential power to move the viewer, as it was cryptic and rendered with brevity. The pen and ink sketch work in the Sadhu’s collection and titled “The Figure of the Boy” has the rendering of the starving young child in desperate need of food, scavenging the bin in the street with equally hungry crows surrounding him. His intense self absorption sorting out remnants of food from other rubbish that he is unaware of the crows watching him closely and waiting to receive some morsels which he would discard. The work’s expressive character is the result of the young child almost skin over bones form and the sketchy lines to contextualize the urban environment. It is indeed a moving portrait of penury and starvation. A similar pen and ink sketch from the same collection and titled “Mother with Baby” reveals the same poignancy, particular the way she holds her child close to her equally starved body and with the formers arms around her seeking protection and security. Perhaps these scenes had become a ubiquity when the famine had ravaged the land. But their evocative power and poignant rendering even today moves the viewer.
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