A striking piece at an ongoing show on artist Shanu Lahiri (1928-2013) at Gallerie 88, Kolkata, features a map of one of the city’s major thoroughfares, Rashbehari Avenue, drawn out as a fishbone dropped by a bird. Delightfully bringing together Shanu’s fascination for urban landscapes and other-than-human worlds, the sketch was prepared to accompany a lecture she dedicated to the late Bengali writer Buddhadev Bose on his birth anniversary in August 2011. Geography and memories intertwine as Shanu returns to the neighbourhood where Bose lived, which also had her own family home (Sidli House) and the residences of various other friends and well-known intellectuals, like Utpal Dutta, Satyajit Ray, Ali Akbar Khan, Sachin Dev Burman, Shambhu Saha, Bishnu Dey and Navaneeta Dev Sen. As Shanu locates herself within this larger cultural cosmos of early 20th-century Bengal, we are urged to probe the ways in which her artistic practice was influenced by and came to shape the region and the nation’s tryst with modernism.
Shanu’s notes and autobiographies -- Smritir Collage (2001) and Jibon Jokhon Joubon (2005) -- paint a vivid picture of her growing up years in a multi-talented family amidst an atmosphere of everyday creativity. Her parents, Prafulla Chandra and Renukamoyee Mazumdar, were avid readers and keenly tuned into the worlds of radio, theatre and cinema. Her eldest brothers, Kamalkumar and Nirode, learnt French and Sanskrit, were inclined towards art and writing, and briefly brought out their own magazine Ushnish in the late 1930s. Her oldest sister, Bani, a Seraikela Chau dancer, travelled to Europe in the 1940s, and later trained in Santiniketan and at Uday Shankar’s school in Almora in the 1950s, while her second oldest sister, Gita, pursued a course in Hindustani vocals at Marris College of Music, Lucknow. The siblings would pool in their talents to stage a major theatrical production every Bengali New Year for their relatives, friends and acquaintances.
Shanu’s interests and talents emerged at these crossroads of public and private worlds, in an era when the Bengali middle-class came to be defined by their search for a strong regional and national identity with a liberal, cosmopolitan outlook. Their social lives were shaped by the impact of independence and the post-partition years, the cultural and educational projects initiated by the Tagore family in Jorashanko and Santiniketan, as well as experiments with new waves of modernism, emerging through international exposure, and resulting in new ideas and aesthetics expressed in publications, productions and exhibitions generated via networks of friendship, salons and informal patronage. Shanu would be a close witness to these latter forces, when her brother, Nirode, got involved in the formation of the Calcutta Group in 1942, which included other painters like Rathin Maitra, Shubho Tagore, Prodosh Dasgupta, Gopal Ghose and Paritosh Sen, who rebelled against the soft, oriental touches of the Bengal School to engage with more hard-hitting political themes and strokes.
Following in Nirode’s footsteps, Shanu went to art college in Calcutta in 1947 and travelled to France on scholarship from 1956 to 1958. She was among the first generation of women students at the Government College of Art and Craft. Even as the curriculum still prioritized academic realism and Indian style painting, there was a gradual embracing of colours and forms from European contemporary art, under the mentorship of teachers like Ramendranath Chakraborty, Zainul Abedin and Basanta Ganguly. The rise of venues like the Academy of Fine Arts, Chowringhee, and Artistry House, Park Street, provided new spaces for displaying, viewing and selling art, and Lahiri tasted success with figurative works and nature studies she presented in exhibitions while in college, earning praise from Lady Ranu Mukherjee and critic O.C Ganguly. During the Paris years, as she studied painting at the Academie Julian and Art Appreciation at the Louvre, she produced less and spent more time educating herself in the art of Renoir, Monet, Seurat, Van Gogh and Picasso. There was a crisis in creativity when she returned to India, when she felt overwhelmed by all that she had seen and learnt and thought she had nothing new to offer. But in 1963, while in Asansol, she suddenly saw an image in The Statesman of her senior Karuna Shaha painting, which inspired her to take up the brush again. From then onwards, she remained prolific till the end of her life with a style that drew on elements from Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism and Cubism, but blended these with motifs from Indian folk traditions and popular culture, like patachitra, puppetry, dolls and prints. Moving with her husband, son and daughter to Assam in 1964 and then returning to Kolkata in 1971, she largely dedicated her time to local projects, with occasional chances to show in other Indian cities or abroad.
The variety of works she produced, especially from the 1970s to the 2000s, have only recently gained new attention through three retrospective exhibitions presented on the artist in Kolkata. While the Art Frequencies show (2023) highlighted her large oil canvases, the Bengal Biennale exhibition (2024) brought in her large scrolls as well as smaller series of works (the latter taking off from mythology and history, such the Ramayana and the Elokeshi-Mahanta case). It also threw light on her public art endeavours, a focus shared by the Gallerie 88 show, titled Anonymous? (2025). The latest displays foreground Shanu’s skills with the collage form and paintings and drawings across different surfaces, ranging from wood and ceramic to calendars and newspapers. The human body is captured without objectification or exoticization, amidst daily work and leisure. Quick pen and ink sketches render portraits across the pages of manuals. The human comes to mingle with architectural structures and city layouts, and with the world of animals, who take on their own personalities, especially evident in a special series on cats. Common to this material and thematic diversity are the artist’s bold lines and strokes, bright colours and a playfulness and humour that dominates her vision. While her compositions remain rooted in everyday urban, rural and natural spheres, it is interesting to note that they rarely reflect the politics and distresses of society, focusing instead on joy as their driving force.
Shanu’s creative output has often been seen in tandem with those of her better-known brothers, even though their styles and subjects varied. Nirode Mazumdar in particular played an important role in her career, recommending books, films and paintings, helping her get into art college, providing support in Paris, and occasional feedback on her art. Later on, Shanu would work with him closely on the Bakulbagan Durga Puja project in the early 1980s,andtakeforwardtheThakurmar Jhuli series he started. Some of Shanu’s work also emerged from other important circles she was part of. Carrying forward the legacy of the Mazumdar household, her husband (Bhugla Lahiri) and she would often host salons at their homes. Included in these gatherings were musicians like Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Aamir Khan, Nikhil Banerjee and Shishirkona Dhar Choudhury, whose insights helped Shanu develop her famous Ragamala series.
This keen understanding of collectives and the importance of collaborative practice eventually shaped the greatest part of Shanu’s legacy -- her role as public artist, educator and activist, which came to dominate the second half of her career. By the 1960s and ’70s, she had already produced large-scale works for the Burnpur Club in Asansol and for the Army Camp in Guwahati, and a Calcutta mural on the 1971 Indo-Pak War. Later, she embarked on projects to clean up the public walls of Calcutta, replacing slogans of hate and violence with images of harmony. She worked with the students of La Martiniere for Girls to paint murals in front of the school as a part of Love Kolkata (1984), and followed this up with a mural for Phillips at Justice Chandra Madhab Lane in 1985, and other wall art at Bhawanipur, Fort William and Lake Town in the 1990s. In 1987, she was also commissioned to create a 30-feet statue called Parama on the Bypass, which she modelled in the form of Bengal’s clay dolls, adding niches for birds to gather. Even though these public artworks have disappeared, images of them and her work with groups in painting and installing them foreground the physical command and mental confidence with which she took on large-scale projects and supervised teams, not allowing age to come in her way.
These initiatives also became a means by which she provided creative opportunities and livelihoods to younger generations of artists and students, many of whom she taught at Rabindra Bharati. As their professor, she created a stir when she got them to copy and reinterpret Rabindranath’s works and encouraged them to participate in workshops outside the university.
She was keen to break away from the hierarchies of the art market. A key instance of this was The Anonymous show she organized in 1996, which put on sale 21 unnamed works by artists from India and abroad, with the understanding that each painting would be identified and signed by an artist only after it was bought.
She also thought about the larger art fraternity when convincing the Calcutta Municipal Development Authority to create a special exhibition for the city’s artists in the Assembly Grounds in the 1970s, where she presented her works with the likes of Chintamani Kar and Satyen Ghoshal. In 1983, she founded one of the earliest Indian female artists collectives called The Group with Karuna Shaha, Meera Mukherjee, Santosh Rohatgi and Shyamasree Basu.
Shanu was a feminist even before the term and movement gained traction in India. The inspiration she received from her family, along with her individual sense of determination, self-worth and social commitment shaped her quietly radical spirit. Her politics was more lived rather than merely represented, and she nurtured an atmosphere of care, no matter if it was working with jail inmates or streetchildren, bonding with children and animals, or generously feeding all who visited her home with recipes that eventually made it to the book Tabled. Her art then must be celebrated for the various forms it took on well beyond the canvas and studio.
Even though her paintings travelled to museums and exhibitions in other parts of India, and she even got a chance to show her works at the Dominion Art Gallery, Montreal, attracting the attention of dealer and critic Max Stern, her life and legacy remained largely centred in Bengal. It is with the discovery of the archives she put together, documenting her own works, along with those of her siblings, friends and acquaintances, that there has been renewed interest in her life and practice. A feminist reclaiming of Indian art history and scholarship should give her due credit, along with other early women artists, like Kamala Dasgupta, Leela Mukherjee and Amina Ahmed Kar, whose achievements remain overshadowed by their male partners and associates.
The author would like to thank Damayanti Lahiri, Nobina Gupta and Ayana Bhattacharya for the inputs and help provided.