Before they called it 'anti-national'

On August 24, the West Bengal Chief Minister posted a video on X where, among several other pieces, was also featured a mural of Comrade Chittoprosad that I had painted back when I was a student of Jadavpur University.

A few days later, they began whitewashing graffiti and murals from the walls after the Chief Minister called some of the campus artwork - anti-national. Among the works removed were political slogans, portraits and murals that had occupied the university walls. What exactly survives on those walls now is a very different question from what was there when I was a student.

But before those walls became something to be cleaned up, policed or argued over, they were simply walls.

And for me, they became something else entirely.

I joined Jadavpur University in 2019 and, like many of my batchmates, spent most of my early college years under the COVID lockdowns. So when our campus did reopen in 2022, I was a kid returning to campus, supercharged with energy and with only two years of campus life left. FETSU Sanskriti was just around the corner too. And that is the time when the whole campus decks up with Christmas lights.

I had the idea of cleaning the whole union room and painting the streets with slogans. This finally led to me and a bunch of classmates from the CSE department getting together to paint a mural of Alan Turing.

We chose Alan Turing for two obvious reasons — he’s a hero in the realm of computer science, and he’s gay.

We thought this would be a healthy presence in the engineering side of the campus, which is primarily male-dominated and hence sometimes a breeding ground for unhealthy gender politics. We wanted the next generation joining our department to see that the realm of computer science is not only placements and tech bros — another avenue exists, one which is proudly gay and one which uses the power of an algorithm to end wars, not to bomb kids.

This was fast followed by another mural, which we did at Blue Earth Machine — which is said to be the breeding ground for anti-national activities back in the British era, when the lab would be used to manufacture firearms for the Swadeshi freedom fighters.

I was just learning about MN Roy then. Turns out he’s not only the founder of the Communist Party of India, but also the Communist Party of Mexico — and he’s a JU alumnus. What was even more interesting is how he is underrepresented and not talked about within the discussion of Indian communists.

There was not one cool picture of him.

So I wanted to make a hero out of him in a very Guevara-esque, two-tone image.

Both of these pieces were super well received on campus. It was a beautiful experience when I was painting on a Sunday and the guards came and helped me in the process of painting the mural.

We realised murals could also recover people from historical amnesia. We wanted to continue this mission of filling the campus with such eye-candy pieces — a kind of polar opposite to the electric boxes painted by the government, which represented only the State-approved version of our history.

We did pieces of Kalpana Dutta and Ila Mitra — who, naturally, being women, do not receive the same level of “aura points” as men do within the left-wing circuits. I myself was discovering these underdogs of history, so I felt the urge of making heroes out of them.

And by now, this had become a ritual of sorts for me — carry buckets of paint to campus early in the morning, sketch and paint on walls, skip classes.

It was right at this juncture that I discovered Chittoprosad, and he hit me like a truck.

I was madly in love with his works, often nothing but brush strokes of blacks and whites, or linocut and woodcuts. Never loud, yet they speak everything.

And what fascinated me was how he did not care in the world for what any art school thought of him. His politics of doing good for the world was all that mattered.

This is something which struck a chord with me.

The world of graffiti looked super enticing to me back then, but I was an engineering student, with zero formal training in the arts. Yet I saw the world surrounded with suffering and pain, and I wanted to do something about it, or at least try.

I realised that at the end of the day, an engineer’s job is to find solutions to problems, and Comrade Chittoprosad had shown me the way.

I just had to paint a mural of him, and I chose one of the busiest and biggest walls for this.

It was nothing but the face of Chittoprosad — three-tone in grey, smoking a pipe, surrounded by cuts in red from his own works, directly lifted.

Overnight, it became an even more popular spot and, very soon, the go-to selfie spot on campus.

So when my friends shared the X post by our Chief Minister, where the Chittoprosad mural was also tagged as deranged, sociopathic, anti-national, it saddened me a bit.

But it also made me re-think that everything which me and my friends did on the campus was only from feelings of love for this world and for the people around us.

What is the reason to hate any of this?

What was curious to me was how the video focuses more on the kissing couple to the left of Chittoprosad’s face — a piece, again, directly lifted from one of Chittoprosad’s cuts.

Is this what concerns them?

Is this what they call deranged?

Love?

I am yet to understand.

But I do understand this: with everything happening around us, I think we all need a little bit of love in our lives, and we need to hold on to that love.