Location

     There are divergent assumptions about how printmaking (and before that, printing) began in India: there are some who believe that the first instance of printing occurred in Calcutta, whereas more informed researchers are of the opinion that the first few printed books came, in fact, from Goa.

Suranjan Basu. Angutha Chhaap
(series of ten works). Woodcut. 2001.

There is a historico-aesthetic aspect of printmaking that may be worth considering, which is that print-making, at large, has been closely associated with the proliferation of popular cultural artefacts, thanks to enabling industrial/technological innovations.

Among the first few books to be printed was, of course, the Bible. This was followed by popular printed literature, gazettes, illustrated books, and almanacs. Folk art and printmaking also seem to have had an interestingly involved relationship. The interactions between distinct practices and their influences on each other force us to redefine the parameters of looking at printmaking today. Walter Benjamin proposed that the reproducibility of a work of art erodes its 'aura' or its quality of uniqueness. This insight does demand contextual reflection, as far as the history of prints in India is concerned. Printmaking as a contemporary medium has also borne witness to the development of the nationalist aesthetic in art. Printed illustrations, caricatures, and political cartoons have served as a means to scrutinize and spoof contemporary social anomalies. One can see this clearly in Gaganendranath Tagore's works. That printmaking could allow for an intermingling of disciplinary sensibilities, is probably one of the most significant reasons why it survived as an expressive medium.

Suranjan Basu. Angutha Chhaap
(series of ten works). Woodcut. 2001.

It would be misleading to look at printmakers from Bengal as a homogenous collective of artists who work with the same aesthetic tools. When Santiniketan had just been founded and India was still under colonial rule, a shift of locale probably implied an ideological stance. Since the '70s, however, printmaking in Bengal, thematically speaking, has been progressively dissociating itself from older sensibilities, which, it would appear, have fallen out of pace with contemporary values. The extent of Bengal's engagement with printmaking, and through printmaking with different aspects of modernism, cannot be exaggerated though.

Printmaking has often been looked upon as a medium that is heavily 'technique-dependent', especially when it comes to it being taught in institutions. Not only has printmaking laid itself open to be employed in counter-cultural art initiatives, but it has also served as an inspiration to artists to deviate from regular modernist protocols. Interestingly enough, as a medium, printmaking has involved materials and techniques which approximate industrial processes at a smaller, more personal scale.

Parag Roy. The Wise Bird.
Coloured etching. 2003.

In course of time, printmaking has opened itself out to experimentation: this has involved changes in the formal as well as the metaphorical aesthetic vocabularies of printmakers. Somnath Hore's works, especially those made in the '60s and '70s dealt explicitly with the translation of cultural memories. When Hore scooped out the soft surface of a zinc plate, or scratched lines into the soft ground of a metal plate, leaving it to erode in an acid bath, these acts translated the trauma of the Tebhaga rebellion in Bengal in material terms. The installation of the metaphor as central to the aesthetic experience can be seen as an important modernist manoeuvre.

Printmakers who studied at Santiniketan in the '70s and the early '80s (like Nirmalendu Das, Lina Ghosh, Pinaki Barua, Shukla Sen, Praloy Chakrabarty, and the late Suranjan Basu) also had a similar approach to printmaking. There were many others, settled elsewhere (those who had studied under Hore in Delhi and Baroda, for instance), who tried to prove equal to the challenge posed by the need for such acts of 'translation'.

Jayanta Naskar. The End of Relation.
Etching. 2004.

This need to use material to 'enact' a metaphor has been particularly significant to those interested in bringing a specific ideological slant to specific art/istic practices. Siddhartha Ghosh, for example, has developed the narrative mode to create a well-observed local universe in his work. The more 'public' nature of printmaking can be seen in the works exhibited by members of the Realist Group, in the late '80s. Many printmakers have developed their individual signature styles over the years. Lina Ghosh's works, for instance, have carried vivid memoryscapes: she has revisited her Santiniketan days through her prints.

If printmaking were to be looked at only as a graphic medium with no consideration given to metaphoric acts, or to the process of constructing a hum-anist narrative, the surface of the plate can well be viewed as the artist's own tabula rasa. We can see many examples of this approach to printmaking from the two main art-centres in Bengal (Kolkata and Santiniketan) in works by artists like Sanat Kar, Lalu Prasad Shaw, Pinaki Barua, and later, Atanu Bhattacharya.