Looking back at the multitudes reflected in Sakti Burman’s extraordinary oeuvre

Curated by the poet Ranjit Hoskote, a new retrospective of the acclaimed artist Sakti Burman is currently on view at Mumbai’s National Gallery of Modern Art. Displayed here are around 275 works by the artist, spanning six decades, writes Bhumika Popli.

ous sources of cultural meaning. In such a situation, the artist cannot be pinned down to a specific, narrowly regional definition of selfhood. The artist’s imagination is a receiving and transmitting station, and signals come to it from every quarter; the artist’s project is to sift through these, in order to process the code into fresh and ever-renewed manifestations of his understanding of his life world.”

Burman was born in Calcutta in 1935, and spent his childhood in Bidyakut (now in Bangladesh) and in Dibrugarh. He has had a strong kinship with Bengali culture. In 1993, Burman produced a number of lithograph illustrations for the leading French publisher Éditions Gallimard to alongside a French translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali,. This book was translated by the legendary writer André Gide, who, like Tagore, was a Nobel laureate.

The exhibition contains 275 works by the artist, ranging from the 1950s to the present day. Shivaprasad Khened, Director, NGMA, said: “On the 70th anniversary of India’s Independence, it is a privilege and honour for the NGMA Mumbai to be hosting an exhibition of an artist who was witness to India’s Independence. This exhibition, In the Presence of Another Sky: Sakti Burman, A Retrospective, is a tribute to all those who were witness to India’s historic Independence and to the most unfortunate trauma that followed during the partition of the country into two nations, when millions of migrants crossed the divided nations of India and East Pakistan.” The show is on view till 26 November at NGMA, Mumbai