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Kolkata Chromosomes

Kolkata Chromosomes

India’s oldest underground railway network, the Kolkata Metro, has just entered middle age. Two art museum experts, Shreeja Sen and Ankan Kazi, have curated a walking tour to explore the artworks that adorn its 40-year-old walls; a linear experience from station to station through history, ideology and mythology. The walls are veritable canvases that capture the city’s contentious, vibrant history through the decades. While most artists prefer to tackle existential or social themes to carve out relevant identities, Bengal is getting political: take Chittoprasad for example.

The metro artworks adorning eight stations along the North-South corridor – Kalighat, Jatin Das Park, Netaji Bhavan, Rabindra Sadan, Maidan, Park Street and Esplanade – created between 1984 and 1986 are a testament to the politically turbulent decade in the country as a whole, and Bengal in particular. It was a perfect hybrid of public life and art, commissioned by the state in a bid to make the metro attractive. It probably inspired murals in other metros. This year, the service launched the country’s first underwater metro link, with a 16.6 km tunnel running under the Hooghly River, connecting Phoolbagan in the east to Howrah in the west.

The fear of disruption caused by the development of the metro was described by the intelligentsia of the time. “Poets like Annadashankar Ray, for example, picked up on the cultural associations of ‘pataal’ in Indian mythology and sounded alarm at the thought of humans descending into a dark underworld, supposedly teeming with mythical beasts,” Sen said. The metaphor is hopefully not applicable to the underground railway network.

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The state government then collaborated with the Soviets to build the metro. “The ideological basis for creating the Moscow metro system was in stark contrast to that of the West, such as Paris or London. Instead of a functional, cost-efficient means of urban transport, the Moscow metro is a lavish, miniature museum for the working class,” says Kazi. Needless to say, the Soviet metro became the fundamental source of inspiration for the Kolkata metro.

The mosaic routes are cosmopolitan. At Netaji Bhavan, the pillars are painted with multi-coloured mosaic tiles; at Rabindra Sadan, the outer walls of the gates bear replicas of Tagore’s 1987 work by Sukhen Ganguli. They mark the bard’s 125th birth anniversary. “Many artists from Kolkata are trained not only in mural painting but also in mosaic making, which has become popular since the 1960s,” says Kazi. Moreover, mosaic itself is one of the oldest art forms, favoured by Roman and Byzantine artists, as well as Jamini Roy from Bengal. Roy’s son, Amiya, an artist, was commissioned by the Kolkata Metro apparatchiks to do the mosaic mural at Rabindra Sadan.

The station on Park Street, one of Kolkata’s oldest commercial districts, features mosaic art depicting bullock carts and buses to show the evolution of the city’s transport system. For Kalighat, the mural above the stairs leading to the platform from gates 3 and 4 is an example of bazaar art reminiscent of the Kalighat art that the great Nandadulal Mukherjee had worked on.

Inside Jatin Das Park station, the walls are clad in white tiles that mimic the London Underground and are eccentrically inspired by public toilets; the space creates an illusion of vastness. In keeping with the spirit of the Maidan district, dotted with parks and playgrounds, the station there features sports-themed murals.

Then there’s Esplanade, a vibrant cross-section of Central Kolkata, where a fibreglass mural donated to the city by modernist Anjolie Ela Menon, hailing from the city’s Sovabazar Rajbari, adorns the station’s staircase. “The theme of the paintings, journey, executed in Menon’s signature style, couldn’t be more fitting for the bustling station in the heart of the city,” says Sen.

Over the years, until 2023, the walls of Kolkata’s metro stations have continued to act as canvases for artists young and old, offering travellers a glimpse of the city and the changing landscape of Bengal. It’s a lesson in history for a city clinging to its past while slowly trudging towards an uncertain, crumbling future. The colours of mosaics and murals make the journey worthwhile.

Story by Arshia