The Babu and the Virus: Bhaskar Chitrakar

Overview:  Writing in The Wire (26 April 2020), Ritika Ganguly reports on the South Asian artist Bhaskar Chitrakar based in South Kolkata, who has created a five part series of paintings, engaging with COVID-19 through the centuries old local art form known as Kalighat pata.



Pamela Allara:  Indian artist Bhaskar Chitrakar is a Kalighat painter, who uses this traditional art form to explore contemporary Bengali life. Emerging in Calcutta in the 19th century, the Kalighat painters were so named because they created their works, often depicting the goddess Kali, near the Kalighat Temple. Initially the kalighat paintings (pata) were sold to Hindu pilgrims, but later they depicted secular, everyday life and were marketed as souvenirs to tourists as well as pilgrims.
Here is a You Tube about the tradition of Kalighat painting and its transformations. It includes a quick view of the five part series discussed below.

Bhaskar is descended from a long line of patua (cloth painters), and his most recent series of five paintings on paper, as described by anthropologist Ritika Ganguly in the accompanying article from The Wire, depict the coronavirus pandemic in a deliberately humorous fashion. His familiar cast of characters: the babu, (a middle class clerk), his wife (bibi), their tanpura playing musical cat, and a curious black dog, each play different roles in a drama designed to provide some respite from unrelenting anxiety and sorrow via a moment of light-hearted entertainment.

 In the first painting, the babu and his wife, seated across from each other in traditional garments, attempt to offer one another a token of their love, a rose. However, standing between them, also elegantly garbed, is the interloper, coronavirus. Babu and bibi are wearing protective masks, which render their facial expressions unreadable. Love in the time of coronavirus has been reduced to an empty gesture.

In the second of the series, the virus has taken over the babu’s chair, which in every culture constitutes an enormous insult. Three crows attempt to come to the rescue with a vaccine,

but clearly their attempted cure is for the birds, as in the third painting the virus has grown to twice its original size and has forced the babu to flee in fear.

Kali dispells the virus. Bhaskar Chitrakar

In the fourth work, the human protagonist has vanished, and the imperturbable feline, now surrounded by scattered viruses, sticks out her tongue at the largest, while she protectively wraps her paw around her tanpura.  However courageous her gesture, the cat cannot scare the virus away.




Such power is only available to Kali herself, whose fearsome profile, emitting a deadly ray of  light, at last causes it to flee.

Traditional stories, in contemporary form, are a comfort, and these paintings, whose delightful details provide endless edification, not only provide some solace, but also the opportunity for commonality with a culture with which many may be unfamiliar. Secluded in Calcutta (Kolkata), Bhaskar Chitrakar has sent a gift to a world in isolation.

Ellen Schattschneider: I am struck by the imagery of eyes in this wonderful series.  As Diane Eck famously observes in Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, the act of painting an eye in votive images in South Asia opens up a transformative gaze, a powerful exchange of energy between divinity and worshiper.  These visual exchanges can at times be life-sustaining, and at times dangerous, especially  in the case of the painted eyes of demons. Ultimately, through the act of looking at a sacred painting that depicts the triumph of a sacred being over a demon, the devotee is enlivened and enriched.

So too in Bhaskar Chitrakar's series. In the initial image, the married couple's mutual gaze is interrupted by the virus. The demonic virus has a terrifying eye, and at first seems unstoppable. Then Kali comes to the rescue. As a Shakti Devi, one of the goddess of power, Kali possesses a third eye, placed on her forehead, concentrating her infinite wisdom and intuition. The one eyed bandit demon virus has no chance in the face of Kali's ocular magnificence. The eyes have it!