What do you expect of a child who has lost his father at the age of six and left to grow up lonely and neglected? For starters, you can expect growing bitterness and disillusionment. What do you expect of a young boy whose childhood is spent in a decaying neighbourhood, chequered with poverty and stagnation? The last thing you expect of him is to pick up a paintbrush to get himself heard.
When that young boy turns into a man and his mundane existence is streaked with mindless violence all around, the first colours you expect his brush to pick up are shades of red. The expected, though, rarely happens in life and art. For that we should be thankful to Bikash Bhattacharjee, the artist who was deeply humane all his life, while the world all around him least expected him to be so.
Bikash Bhattacharjee was born on June 21, 1940 in the dinghy depths of North Calcutta under the lull of a violent political storm. The year 1946 saw the demise of his father, and the violent Hindu - Muslim riots that led to the partition of Bengal and the independence of India. The exodus of Hindus from the newly born Muslim state Pakistan to Calcutta followed. On his way to Town School, he used to watch the great unwashed masses flood over the railway stations. When he was not witnessing humanity being stampeded, he watched it dying a hundred little deaths everyday in his neighbourhood.
In the bylanes of North Calcutta, as the feudal wealth waned and joint families crumbled, the marble nudes in the erstwhile palace gardens were assaulted by the undergrowth. The rundown houses lay cheek-by-jowl while their residents grew increasingly resigned with their cramped existence. The random walks of young Bikash in the shadowy, snaking bylanes between these houses, sometimes led him to the sight of the earthen Durga idol being created in a decaying palace. But most of the times it brought him back to where he started from.
One of these directionless strolls once led him to the second place in a sit-and-draw competition. He missed the first place by just a mark. Lucky for us. Suddenly the obstacles around him seemed to fall apart like cardboard cutouts and he started digging his way up to the light with two bare hands, paintbrushes and pencils.
And then there was light. It first came as a faint glimmer at the end of the tunnel. Encouraged by his mother and fuelled by his passion to come first, he joined Indian College of Art & Draftsmanship, Calcutta in 1958 to pursue Fine Art, ignoring the pressure to join Commercial Art.
Then just like the wide-eyed Apu in Pather Panchali, he did his best to start flying and the light eventually got closer to him. The light soon became blinding, when in the second year, he started leaving his teachers speechless and his classmates chattering. His exceptional prowess was already showing. The deep sense of insecurity that was being built inside him since childhood was channelled into hunger for excellence. His extraordinary talents and dogged dedication caught the eye of two individuals, who would in turn become his biggest champions.
Katayun Saklat was his classmate who turned out to be a friend for life. To prove the cliche of the woman behind the great man right once again, Katayun Saklat, fondly known as 'Katie-di', made sure Bikash-da never fell short of the basic creature comforts and bare necessities of an artist, on his path to greatness. She welcomed him to use her home at Central Calcutta as his studio space because he had none of his own. She was ready with her enthusiasm, criticism and inspiration whenever needed. She was instrumental to hosting his very first exhibition in Jamshedpur. And her Parsi connections ensured his Mumbai debut in Kekoo Gandhi's gallery above Jehangir Art Gallery - a milestone in his artistic career. However, it will be wrong to think of her as just an awe-struck admirer. An acclaimed artist, gallery owner and art connoisseur in her own right, she shared no artistic influences with Bikash-da, only a life-long friendship.
While Katie-di took charge of nourishing the human side of Bikash Bhattacharjee, Arun Basu, his teacher in college, took up honing his artistic side. Impressed by what he saw, he started taking special classes at Katayun's residence where Katayun, Bikash and some other rising stars were regulars. But only Bikash imbibed Arun's teaching most successfully. Indirect painting, a rare and difficult method of oil painting (favoured by masters like El Greco, Van Eyck and Rembrandt), where the bottom layers partially show through the top layers, lending a breathtaking luminosity to the colours, was one of Arun's contributions to Bikash's repertoire. Though the relationship started as a teacher-student one at first, the age difference between them was only six years, so they continued to be contemporaries and admirers of each other in the years to come.
As they say, talent is as abundant as common salt. But the relentless dedication with which Bikash Bhattacharjee sharpened his talent was, is and will continue to be rare. He whipped his already remarkable talent to breathtaking, envy-inducing excellence by sheer practice. He was a master of almost all media - oil, crayon, watercolour, gouache, pastel, and charcoal but he shone the brightest in oils and pastels. In fact, the only way to make him stop painting was to stand in the way of the light falling on his canvas.
And the results were showing. Even before he graduated from the art school in 1963, his paintings were part of the collections of The Senate Hall in Calcutta, Lalit Kala Akademi and Ministry of Education in Delhi. In 1968, he participated in the Paris Biennale and exhibited in Yugoslavia, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. And last but not the least, the Governor's residence in Calcutta was asking the rate of his painting per square feet.
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