Sanjib Mondal’s art, a counter-practice to socio-historical criminality of the larger habitat of his belonging, manifests itself in varied forms of expression. A proficient young painter and printmaker, Sanjib, trained in Santiniketan’s Kala Bhavana, is uniquelyfocussed on making art in his own norm, within the crisis of an art practitioner’s material survival.Sanjibmakes images in the spirit of various contextual deliverances of material realities of hislife-conditions. Once as a student producing large scale experimental woodcut prints, Sanjib has gradually chosen to work with charcoal on paper, as a central medium for the fundamental design of his images, on a comparatively reduced scale. Sanjib’s use of charcoal as a medium comes from his historical consciousness of experiential belonging within the phenomenology of caste-society which is devoid of any focus of light of history. A life-world, lit by their own light of struggle for human dignity and material survival confronting endemic Brahmanic hegemony, appears in its ignored fragments in Sanjib’s images. Throughout the years, Sanjib have evolved into a sincere, efficient artist-worker, who has dedicated himself to make this world of political visuals, in an aim of unburdening himself from a greater structural burden. In this development, he has created a complex visual world, where regular realities of Sanjib’s social world of broken men, women and even children, are converted into pictorial testimonies. Sanjib’s works freezes a psychological world of idle moments, which refuses to change even though the change seeking subjects are constantly trying to surpass them. These are from the spaces, inhabited by the tribe of what DrB. R.Ambedkar called broken men, or Frantz Fanon called the wretched of the earth. While conscious exercises of resistance emerged from this historical conditions, which proactively changed the future dimensions of the people by interrogatingand challenging the very historical determinants of brokenness and leaving behind a revolutionary legacy of creative resistance. Sanjib’s works should be seen in the evolutionary spirit of that legacy which prioritises the representation of his people’s voice, breaking over the neutrality of discourses, including art.

Sanjib’s images projects a state of being where isolation and ineptitude is a historical normative. A strange sense of loneliness consumes the spaces, which one might read as minimalist. But this minimal is not limited to pictorial mannerism in its essence, but it is the existential reality, denied access to social-material commons,a crisis of caste-society. This pensive loneliness, an utter blankness, vacuum of being is also a manifestation of absence of any recorded form of being. Nonparticipation in literary symbolism and thus, non- availability of history keeps the spaces blank, away from any grand narrative to be formed and cultivated. But it is the minor narrative, or also a narrative of minor social beings, that Sanjib creates, or rather cornicles in the drawings, as if they are selected, edified pages of his mental sketchbook.

Charcoal appears in this space as aninstrument in the battlefield of dynamic doodles, depictions, overlaying and erasure of line, shapes and texture, where Sanjib’s own spaces of familiarity are constructed. Its temporal, shifting impressions, colourlessness, smudgy, loose ends indicate representation of the marginalised environments of the people who are the very mainstream force of material-cultural production of the society. In historical absence of discursive light and loss of identity in the course of subjected brahmanical memocide, Sanjib’s marginalised environments are unable to form a known, concrete and complete image. It is continuously built through an artistic process of trial and error, in simultaneity with its socially evolving process in the face of historical betrayal. The size of the paper, many impressions of charcoal and frequent conceptual appearance of elements of alien glitter, are closely linked with the environment of the cramped mud-huts, Sanjib’s home and neighbourhood, on the margins of Rampurhat town in Western Bengal, where these works are physically produced. A clear corporeal extension of the artistlived conditions, leaves significant spontaneous traces in the charcoal drawings, which unlike the artificiality of being intentionally kept, in some cases they are beyond spontaneous and is not being taken into account. At the same time, the artist in Sanjib has tried to kept out these traces with incorporation of standard and formal stance, with marking efforts. It is these efforts that we encounter, these efforts of presenting himself into the persona of artist, for the consumption of the usual cultured viewer’s world, a miniscule world which balances itself on the back of many such worlds of broken men, women and children of Sanjib. It is this anxiety of presentation and acceptance, his instinctive everyday becomes conscious, pressurised and elements of presentation takes over his mental-pictorial spaces. However, the immense potential of resistance in Sanjib, performs his role here, destabilizes the presentable into subversive, parodic language, troubling the very core of presentability in this context.

An intimate sense and concern for the community, the people and organic empathy from within, a sense of fraternity brings itself at the centre of Sanjib’s frames. The fraternity spoke, cared for each-other though since there’s no historical and dignified visual idiom, representative of self-respect, available yet, this fraternity thus remain out of site, bringing a great sense of historical emptiness to the frames. The people that are conversing in his images, sometimesinclude the commanding owner of the spaces depicted, who also remain invisible since his visibility is in the ownership of the representational space itself. But we also don’t see the subaltern who are talking, and their presence is only in the words of hope and symbols of struggle, that they articulate. The spaces, however coarse or unsophisticated, are spaces of transaction, means of which are clearly owned by imposing voices, which keeps appearing within the conversation of the fraternity, cutting them off, looks after the order and leaves. Sanjib’s concerns connects the larger structural signifier, moving beyond the minor representation to address the conditions that make up to survival in his world. A through reflection of aspiration of the people, within the death grasp of brahmanicalsocio-economic oppression, covers an ample space of concern in Sanjib’s works. In most cases, these words of aspiration, are spoken through the youngest members of the society, the children, whose aspiration for progressive mobility would define the future prospects of the very community and society. These children, not privileged with the social promise of a protected childhood, are intensely critical and fearlessly expressive. The unafraid but mindful doodles on the walls of mud-hut, or the intimate colloquial chit-chatat work, or the obvious but incomplete sticker quotes that mocks the exclusive licence of elite upper caste consumerist society’s to right to life, commodity, resources and guarantees their active participation in building and expanding state institutions. Within this tempestuous pictorial frame, in one series of charcoal drawing, Sanjib incorporates a shining red dot, a literal reference of art world success and consumerism, adding another layer to its socio-cultural complexity. The duality of the genius artist individual and a social being who is denied of individuality for the sake of communal racial caste identity, plays out in their own terms in Sanjib’s practice.

Here we connect to another very important aspect that Sanjib’s practice resonate throughout his body of work, is the precise, imperative critique of the nation-state project. Sanjib’s images deeply subversive in exposing the normalization of brutal everyday existence in caste-society by nation state under its fabricated grand promises of social, political and economic equality. “Equality”, as just a weighty jargon, floating upside down, decontextualized in glowing cut-outs of cheap gold metallic paper, appears with a starkly contrasting tension on the charcoaled dark surfaces of his images. We also see the formal fonts, standard text formats, the glitter of gold or snappy image supplements, all proposing their fake presence on a constructed surface, politicised, ridiculed, mocked, minimized/maximised, broken/distorted with engagements through charcoal. Sanjib as an artist wears a temporal white mask but it is so truthfully translucent and its codes are so much violated that the black skin behind it triumphs over, tearing the white mask of its fake sanity. The white mask is replicated over and again, in its unapologetic surficial arrogance but it works as a defeating force from inside, within its own logic of presentability.

In another series, Sanjib superimposes the dates from state holidays on the friable corners of moribund home, mud-house interiors that he inhabits every day. The commentary seems simplistic but is deeply penetrating, with the calendar sheets pasted on the top right corner of the frames in a flashy placement, on the backdrops of the doomed architectures depicted in lesser marks of charcoal. These dates are of national and international significance, of cultural and religious value, which are holidays in the households, schools, universities, govt. offices, newspaper agencies either to reflect on their significance or to enjoy a break from regular monotony of systematized public life. A very interesting combination of Gandhi Jayanti, May Day witha scandalous presence of Ambedkar Jayanti, unfolds a deep critique by equating these days under the same frame of exploitation of labour and denial of self-expression within the nation-state project. Seen from the context of post-colonial Bengal, the artificial integument of secular, casteless and even progressive society, with the upper caste hegemony in all social and institutional aspects life, this idiosyncratic comparison bound to happen. The contradiction lies in the meaninglessness of these dates to the subaltern within the failed project of nation, not in the ideological separation of thee dates. More importantly, with the use of Dr Ambedkar’s birthday, this becomes a vital critique, in one hand of the appropriation of Ambedkar within the nation-state’s remembered legacy and on the other, it points out to the irrelevance or rather intentional out-casting of Ambedkarite political developments in Bengal.

Sanjib’s larger body of works can be seen as prominent political antithesis of much celebrated visual normative of cultural history of nation, which partly stands on the shoulders of upper caste Bengali icons. His various series of works in charcoal can be located as an endeavour to delineate subalternist history in an alternative, non-elite language, which bears its torch in the discipline of visual arts responding from the region of Bengal. In this mission, Sanjib is continuously engaged with historical concerns, while engaging with his time and reality through multiple facets, resulting in manifold unresolved and provocative manifestations, keeping the fire of art and resistance alive.