Calcutta Heritage Collective's exhibition on built heritage across the world

Governor of West Bengal, Keshri Nath Tripathi, attended the inauguration.

Also present were Calcutta Heritage Collective Cause Ambassadors - Usha Uthup, Bickram Ghosh, Shuvaprasanna Bhattacharya, guests like Jawhar Sircar, GM Kapur along with Calcutta Heritage Collective Members - Rajiv Soni, Mukul Agarwal, Sandip Nowlakha, Manish Chakravarti, Swarup Dutta, Iftekhar Ahsan, Paramita Saha, Anthony Khatchaturian, Hemant Bangur, Deepanjan Gosh, Anjum Katyal, Ayan Chattopadhyay, Munish Jhajharia and others.

Calcutta Heritage Collective is a voluntary initiative aimed to build awareness about Kolkata's built heritage through a broad range of activities, such as helping with conservation and restoration, creative re-use of properties and spreading awareness.

Calcutta Heritage Collective hosted this event in association with Emami.

The photographs were a curated collection from Kounteya Sinha's extensive photographic journey across the world in the past six years.

The photos span 25 different cities –from Kolkata to Barcelona, Mexico city to Budapest, London to Vilnius.

“Architecture is actually a gigantic repository of human life and death and everything in between. Kolkata – what was once the British Empire’s second most important city is unparalleled across the globe when it comes to its built heritage. Most people never enter these buildings thinking them to be abandoned and hence letting them rot and die.  The Collective and I intend to bring Kolkata’s good people to actually see such marvels and feel that pain of losing them forever,” Sinha said.

Most of the works are in the form of Sinha’s favourite medium of story-telling – black and white.

Apart from Sinha's photographic excellence, what was spectacular about this exhibition was the venue.

A 200-year old building in central Kolkata, belonging to Emami Foundation, was a fitting background to  Sinha's 2018 summer repertoire show.

This mansion, on Muktaram Babu Street, with gigantic pillars, cast-iron railings, French style windows, masterfully worked cornices, earlier owned by the Mullick family (of Marble Palace fame), spoke volumes of Kolkata's built heritage.

Sinha and the Collective chose it as their venue because they wanted to tell the world that these buildings are of great architectural value and need to be restored and preserved.

Governor Tripathi said, "History forms the essence of who we are today. We need to protect this identity. A city is known not only by how it moves forward into the future but also how beautifully it strikes a balance between the past and the present. All over the world we see an attempt to maintain it's inheritance, any society which does not take pride in it's heritage becomes psychologically dead very soon."

Sinha said, “What were once icons and masterpieces of the human hand, today, mostly languish in anonymity and neglect. Buildings that have been witness to history and bonhomie, clamour and celebratory clinking, have now been reduced to mere rubbles – patiently whiling away its last few days - before it makes place for some hideous monstrosity called a modern day sky scarper”.

Artist Shuvaprasanna in conversation with IBNS said, “I have seen how the Germans had rebuilt a church after it was absolutely demolished during the World War II. So it is about how the whole community reacts to the need of conservation.”

Sinha also reminded the audience, "A city is known by what it keeps. Britain does it fabulously and so do the French. Portugal decided to gallop ahead into modernity by staunchly holding on to its past while Spain’s sensational marvels made from brick and mortar will ravage your heart. We intend to do the same in Kolkata - revitalise communities to dedicate themselves to protect what is old, what is fabulous, what is spectacular – and understand that a building isn’t immobile or dead but a tangible museum of memories and tales.”

It will not be out of place here to mention that Sinha travelled to 11 countries of Europe to study the lives of the Indian diaspora and record the lives of Indians who made that continent home.

Sinha returned with an extraordinary narrative in the form of photographs and interviews, an achievement that caught the attention of none other than Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who used Sinha's photographs in his address to the nation to showcase the lives of Indian diaspora.

 

(Reporting by Sourajit Choudhury)