Page 35 - Art and Crafts of Bangladesh

32 ART AND CRAFTS

rule. The only exception was ‘Maheshwarpasha School of Fine Arts’ in Khulna which
was established by the Kolkata-trained painter Shashibhushan Paul and of which
mention has been made earlier. However, despite Shashibhushan’s commendable
efforts his school could make little impact on the artistic atmosphere of East Bengal.
Whereas Kolkata was the center of political and cultural activities of the whole of
India, the nearby town Dhaka or any other city of East Bengal did not bear testimony
of any institutional art activity. Dhaka at that time was a small township and all the
enterprising Bengalis chose Kolkata as their working place. Despite the existence of a
very lively and colorful folk art, there was no effort for institutional art education in
this region in the colonial period. If some endeavors existed at all, there are not enough
and dependable records to substantiate them. Nevertheless, a good number of students
from East Bengal would go to Kolkata to study at the art school there and some of
them could have arranged shows in their respective regions and could also have taught
art to apprentices. Consequently, it is possible that some exhibitions of trained art and
some art training could have taken place in colonial East Bengal, even if we do not
have convincing information of them.
Many of the English artists of the Company Period toured extensively in East Bengal
and some of them made drawings and paintings of Dhaka, Chittagong and other
areas. Well-known artists like George Chinnery and Sir Charles D’Oyly painted
many scenes of Dhaka. The rest, however, were unknown or amateur artists. The
Bangladesh National Museum has preserved 39 paintings in watercolor on Eid and
Muharram procession done in the early nineteenth century by an artist named Alam
Musabbir (?). The artistic rendering indicates that the painter could be a descendant
of the Murshidabad school of art and from this an assumption may be made that a
feeble branch of Company Art could have reached Dhaka. However, without any
further examples we can not be certain about it. When an art school was established
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in Kolkata, those who pursued artistic fame, irrespective of Hindus and Muslims,
thronged to that institution and stayed back there in the hope of a livelihood and
fame. After the independence and partition of the subcontinent in 1947 the Bengali
Muslim artists in Kolkata migrated to East Pakistan and initiated institutional art
education here.

Translated by Abul Mansur, Professor, Department of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong