Ruchir Joshi

3 weeks ago | frontline.thehindu.com | Ruchir Joshi |Meena Kandasamy |Vaishna Roy |Anjum Hasan

There is a great deal afoot in the Calcutta of the early 1940s, not least imminent invasion by the Japanese army, but Kedar Lahiri, a young novice painter from the uppermost Bengali crust, stays out of politics. He is taken up with the challenge of bringing his canvases to life. Tricky because the city’s human fecundity, its ever-shifting light, its brilliant foliage—“He’s tired of green…. Cascades of green that defeat the eye with their variety”—render the painter supremely irrelevant.