| Description | The story of Shekkhopir-deshe Durbhikkho is based on academic sources and research which were discussed with the artists before they began composing the narrative poem and pattern for the scroll. The conversations about the famine in England in the 1590s took place over several days at Naya. Dukhushyam Chitrakar then composed a poem and set it to music. The painting began with a pencilled outline of the entire story. Colours were prepared and the panels painted collectively by the chitrakar community over a number of days.
This story is about one of the worst famines in the history of Renaissance England. In the latter part of the sixteenth century, England faced repeated food shortages. The most serious dearths occurred in 1555-1557, 1586-1588, and 1594-1598. It was a time of gathering crisis; not only did crops fail, but the population increased, prices rose, and war and diseases broke out. The 1590s were especially dismal. The wheat harvest failed for four consecutive years from 1594-1597, and food prices were driven up. England saw increased levels of vagrancy, destitution, and food riots, especially in the north and west where markets were less accessible. Anonymous parish register entries show that bodies of the displaced rural poor, who were mostly drifting south and east, were found under hedges, in barns, and on the roadside. The old, the very young, and the marginalised died of starvation or from eating inferior food. This was also, perhaps paradoxically, a time when literary endeavours flourished, and William Shakespeare wrote some of his best plays, many of which engage with questions of food insecurity in his environment. The patachitrakars of Naya constructed their own narratives based on the historical information and literary texts at their disposal. The patachitrakars met this challenge by making bold experiments with adapting their painting style to represent historically renowned figures like Queen Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare. Their story is narrated with a focus on the persona of "Shekkhopir" - drawing on a nineteenth-century colloquial Bengali appropriation of "Shakespeare". This enables Dukhushyam to further appropriate the English playwright as a fellow "pir" or wandering poet-philosopher, thus drawing him into a poetic tradition to which Dukhushyam himself belongs.
In the conversations, the timeline of the famines in England (between 1550-1600) and the context for Shakespeare’s plays were discussed. Dukhushyam was interested in the contrast between the famine in Bengal, which was a result of drought, and the one in England, which was caused by excessive rain. Ayesha explained the topography and layout of England, the difference in climate and living conditions between the northern and southern regions, the structure of the parish and its administrative framework. Much of the discussion focussed on the reign of Queen Elizabeth, as her fast dwindling power and increasing ill-health, along with the threat of war posed challenges to an already fraught Britain in the 1590s. During this time, the scientist Hugh Platt experimented with agriculture and crop production in the hopes of finding solutions and alternatives to combat crop failure, recording his finds in notebooks. Shakespeare wrote satirical plays about the government’s corruption and ineptitude during this time of crisis, creating the character Falstaff to embody social and political failures which exacerbated the famine. There were intervals of several days between the conversations as the patachitrakars needed time to digest and reflect on this history which was unfamiliar to them. Dukhushyam Chitrakar was most interested in literary and performative culture in this context, and most conversations between him and Ayesha Mukherjee focused on the literary outputs, particularly Henry IV, part 1 and 2, the records kept by Platt in his notebooks, and contemporary writers’ works on the famine at the time. Ayesha translated excerpts from these into Bengali to make the texts as directly accessible to Dukhushyam as possible. In his comments and reinterpretations, Dukhushyam likened the monstrous figure of Falstaff with Shani in Hindu mythology who is considered inauspicious and thought to bring misfortune and loss. Several prints of the portraits of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare, an early modern map of England, archived photographs of performances of Shakespeare's Henry IV, and paintings and images of the character of Falstaff were provided and discussed with Dukhushyam, along with the translated summary of the research notes containing key historical information. Based on this he composed the first draft of the poem. Further discussions followed: Sujit and Dukhushyam talked about how to improve upon the poem’s rhyme scheme and musical variations. The painters would need to consider adaptive possibilities of the form and styles of painting. The historian Wendy Singer's expertise on Indian oral narratives also helped the project team find a way to translate British history into an Indian narrative form. The final version of the poem was thus reached and, subsequently, set to a tune.
[This information was taken from the project website at https://faminetales.exeter.ac.uk in 2024] |