This July, the comfortable lives and Facebook walls of common Bengali readers doubling as social media intellectuals were rocked by the release of the Anandabazar Patrika Sharadiya 1431 issue—specifically, its cover design. Traditionally, the cover of this issue features a depiction of the goddess Durga, but this cover had made a difference. Painted almost entirely in blue, with specks of warm yellow-greens and reds, the painting was something no one could give a name to. Debates sprang on whether it was an abstract portrait of Durga, or something else entirely. Derisive comments were not few, and analyses—each wilder than the next—were many.
Yet this moment of infamy is perhaps only a minute smudge of dirt in Ganesh Haloi’s vast world of blue—and many, many other colours.
Much has already been written and discussed about Haloi’s mammoth body of paintings spanning over a six decade-long career, and recent exhibitions include “The Architectonics of Form: Scrolls by Ganesh Haloi” (2022, Akar Prakar, Kolkata) and “Re-citations: Rhymes About Land, Water and Sky” (2024, Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata). Haloi’s work refuses to be categorised into any distinct school, and I, too, as a common viewer do not know how to place them, other than through the sensations they evoke. What has always struck me the deepest is the way he captures space—both the space of the canvas, and the symbolic space of art.
Born in 1936 in Mymensingh, Bangladesh, Haloi moved to Calcutta after the Partition. As has been often noted, this personal history of displacement and the quest for a homeland haunts Haloi’s works. His art, with a deep connection with history (one of his most remarkable accomplishments are his reproductions of the Ajanta Cave paintings), became a negotiation between natural landscape and inner mindscapes. This negotiation, ultimately, was grounded in a quest for reclaiming one’s own land. “I try to paint a land that is my own,” Haloi has stated, “My land. With my rules.” For Haloi, the process of painting is an ever-ongoing method of composing, and thereby claiming, this land. During the 70s and 80s in particular, Haloi’s paintings reflected landscapes called forth from memories, and given the form of imagined abstractions.
In re-collecting and re-composing such landscapes, Haloi breaks down geographical borders, crafting borderless territories. Yet, other borders emerge—borders simply as they are, empty, without territories. In both his etchings in Chinese ink and gouache artworks, Haloi frequently employs immaculate straight lines, geometrical shapes and patterns, that make fragments out of the canvas, but do not really divide.
Figure 1: The cover design of the Anandabazar Patrika Sharadiya 1431 issue, by Ganesh Haloi.
If anything, they serve to amplify the expanse of space—the empty land. His oil paintings, and water colours, on the other hand, produce blurry, porous artscapes. His painting of Subarnarekha (1974) depicts the land and water almost blending together in an amorphous, cloud-like surface.
The river comes to us as fluid beyond the limits of reality, as if from the moonlit scene of some dream.
One of his most simple and delightful ways of breaking borders is, for me, through his illustrations in the children’s book Cholte Cholte (While Walking). Dually serving as an entertainer for kids and Haloi’s unique primer for the young, the book features the siblings Pintoo and Parul. In one page, the children stand outside a panel, observing a tree. The very next shows Pintoo literally climbing in through the panel wall with ease, and in the third, the two children are shown hanging around the panel wall.
Figure 2: Ganesh Haloi, Subarnarekha, 1974. Image Courtesy Jesal Thacker, “The Quantum of Colour”
In this book, Haloi combines his artistic grammar (composed of geometric shapes and lines) with familiar scenes of nature.
In his diary, Haloi wrote, “Black is my faith, Blue is the wideness, Green is the field, Red is my seed, White is the wildness, Yellow is the sunshine...” Haloi perceives the artist as a composite of these colours led on a quest for a destiny that is yet unknown. The wide unknown—be it the land, water or sky, features significantly in Haloi’s paintings. The following paintings are, for me, remarkable instances where Haloi uses both colours and lines to offer an unusual sense of depth and connection, breaking down the sense of separation that borders bring. In the former,
Figure 3: Untitled artwork by Ganesh Haloi. Image Courtesy “Re-citations: rhymes about land, water and sky Six Decades of Painting” Exhibition.
the river, the sky, and crop fields are depicted within adjacent, clearly demarcated shapes—almost symmetrically. Yet, a closer look reveals the spillage: even within the tight square, the fields of green spill into each other and the river; a swath of blue appears amidst the green; ghostly shadows of boats emerge in the water, and the brilliant blue surface—whether a sky or a waterbody— asymmetrically reflects a grazing cow. A guise play of boundaries and symmetries is also presented in the other image,
a striking abstraction in blue. Defying the logic of depth, the shade of blue deepens from left to right, and a school of fishes plays in the deep. A trail of white presents a sail with its asymmetrical reflections, and the bright vermilion of the shore in the corner cuts through the blue. Once again, the image suggests clear separations, but “the blue is wideness”, and spreads across all, immersing us in the unpartable body of water.
It is across this water that Ganesh Haloi came from one shore to another. And across this impenetrable deep blue of wideness, across lands which refuse to conform to geographies, Ganesh Haloi’s quest for his own land continues.
References:
“‘The Quantum of Colour’: Works of Ganesh Haloi,” by Jesal Thacker, November 2016. Accessed from Academia.edu.
Ganesh Haloi: A Rhythm Surfaces in the Mind, edited by Natasha Ginwala and Jesal Thacker. Published by Akar Prakar & Mapin Publishing, November 2022.
“Ganesh Haloi, Re-citations: rhymes about land, water and sky Six Decades of Painting,” by ACF, February 2024.
AUTHOR PROFILE
Sohini Sengupta has completed her postgraduation in English literature from Presidency University. She has a passion for studying urban writing and children’s literature, and dabbles with translation works and archiving. Beyond literature, she enjoys all things associated with art, photography and nature. The everyday and its various representations is a subject of particular fascination for her.