At the recently held Arts at Play workshop conducted by city-based arts and culture organisation Junoon in association with Nahar International School, graphic artist Orijit Sen is in the process of delivering a talk to the participants. “How many of you draw?” he asks, and predictably a number of hands shoot up with enthusiasm. Bearded and long-haired, with a slight stoop in his back, Sen resembles a storyteller of yore. And he might as well be one, as he holds every single attendee’s attention, regaling the audience with historical anecdotes. His point of reference was the vivid images from a mural depicting yesteryear Punjab, and from his own unpublished comic featuring CP Mazumdar, a flying monkey-cap-donning protagonist.
Then and now
For as long as he remembers, Sen has done only one thing. “I’ve never known a time when I wasn’t being an artist,” he says, thankful for never having lost his connection with art. It was 1980 when Sen started pursuing art seriously, during a time when the words ‘graphic art’ were as good as Greek. Enrolling at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, he knew he was set for challenging and difficult, but also exciting, times ahead. “There was nobody out there, waiting to give us jobs; we had to create our own,” he says. Subsequently, he was among a set of pioneers who paved the way for graphic art in the country. “[My contemporaries and I] felt a sense of responsibility, as creators of a new space, to set trends and bars for what measures as good work.”A decade later, in 1990, Sen founded People Tree, a New Delhi-based clothes and book store that’s still thriving. Collaborating with traditional craftsmen and weavers from all over India, the artist presented patrons with contemporary design sensibilities.
“India has a wealth of craftsmen that is slowly diminishing, with mass production pulling it down.” So the shop retailed T-shirts and stationery featuring Indian traditional design such as block prints. Today, the brand has weathered over 25 years of large-scale expansion, capital influxes and investment. “We always wanted to remain a sustainable business that did not have to grow in size to continue.”While developing People Tree, Sen simultaneously worked on India’s first graphic novel, River of Stories, which was published in 1994. Based on the Narmada Bachao Andolan that gripped the nation in the ’90s, the book did not fare as well as expected. “It is certainly disappointing, when two years’ worth of your work goes by without much recognition,” says the artist. However, River of Stories paved the dynamics of Indian graphic art to come and Sen still receives appreciation for his efforts. “I wanted a nuclear explosion, but it turned out to be more of an underground explosion, unfolding till today,” he jokes.
Work is worship
A lot of the 53-year-old graphic artist’s ideas stem from his socio-political understanding of his milieu. But to incorporate these perceptions into his art has not been a conscious decision. It is a default thought mechanism. “As human beings, we all occupy spaces that have been fought for. The least we can do is to preserve and enlarge them, by giving them our voice, and that is what I am doing in my own way.”For instance, he collaborated on the 2015 production, Freedom Jatha presented by Delhi-based theatre group Jana Natya Manch (Janam) and Palestinian theatre group The Freedom Theatre. Sen designed the campaign’s logo and posters, and also went to Palestine to paint murals with the locals. He still delivers talks on the Palestinian struggle for freedom.
Then there’s his piece Go Playces, which is currently being exhibited at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Spanning across four interconnected rooms of the Aspinwall House in Fort Kochi, the interactive installation documents BT Road in Punjab, the old market in Mapusa, Goa, and localities around the Charminar in Hyderabad.The installation is akin to a game that allows the audience to touch and play with it. The idea for Go Playces emerged from a conversation between Sen and his daughter, who works at a gallery. “She was very irked about constantly having to shoo people away from the exhibits and asking them to not touch them. That got me thinking, and I set about making something that does just the opposite.”
Looking forward
Two decades after River of Stories was released, the artist has distinct views on the future of his form. Applauding his contemporary Sarnath Bannejee’s efforts at bringing the graphic novel closer to mainstream publishing through his novel Corridor in 2000, Sen feels that there is much more scope in the medium today. He believes that the advent of the internet, too, has vastly contributed in increasing the knowledge and interest of youngsters’ in the medium. However, there still remains a lot left to do. “There is a lot of interesting work coming up now, but it is still not in the mainstream of things. Somebody still has to come up with a super bestseller to achieve that space.”
The writer is an intern at The Hindu
