Most of the crowds milling around the (now) well-kept premises of the British Raj-era jail were not probably even aware of the Bengal Biennale whose venues this time included Rabindranath Tagore’s fine arts’ steeped university town Shantiniketan besides historic places in Kolkata such as the Indian Museum, Victoria Memorial and St James’ Church. But the biennale had a perhaps unforeseen but welcome consequence of sparking unexpected interest.
The selfie-taking hordes who took grinning snapshots against the backdrop of the gallows that had snuffed out the lives of many revolutionary Bengalis also percolated into the adjacent areas to see photo installations by Aradhana Seth. They peered curiously at DAG’s exhibition of Kali depicted in art down the ages titled Reverence and Rebellion, and took in the evocative contemporary ode to indigo, that has shed its colonial-era taint, by Bappaditya Biswas and more.
Had the jail not been a biennale venue, many people may not have connected with art at all although the festival has a wide variety of locations. And had it not been for the biennale, we may never have made the effort to see Alipore Jail, much less step through a doorway signposted as ‘Gallows’. But not since I walked through Amritsar’s bullet-riddled Jallianwala Bagh and saw poignant memorabilia at the Partition Museum there and in Delhi have I felt so profoundly moved.
Eight decades after Independence, much of the emotional links to the freedom movement have lost their rawness and become mere chapters in history books to be debated ideologically. Organisations like the Anushilan Samiti and Abhinav Bharat-and the many young Indians who they inspired to take the revolutionary route to freedom-have been sidelined in textbooks by the predominance of the line that Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violence won India its independence. But the gallows, looming starkly against the setting sun at Alipore Jail, the plaques on the walls about the revolutionaries executed there and ‘condemned’ cells bordering the grim quadrangle gave me goose pimples. Many of the names enshrined there would be unfamiliar to today’s Indians, including Kanailal Dutta, Birendranath Dutta Gupta, Charu Chandra Bose and Dinesh Gupta. At least that gallows sign acquainted a new generation with those martyrs’ sacrifices.Art aficionados are used to installations triggering memory and emotion. That scaffold, the adjoining autopsy room and the diabolical British strategy of having cells for revolutionaries overlooking where their compatriots were executed is the most effective ‘installation’ I have ever seen to bring home the intensity and brutality of that forgotten phase of India’s freedom fight. The first Bengal Biennale truly made two diverse streams and people converge at Alipore Jail.
