The Road to Bolpur: Migration and Mourning in Arpan Mukherjee’s “Impermanence”

 

Arpan Mukherjee’s deep exploration of rural-urban migration from Adityapur to Bolpur through photographs, video installation and sound recordings in his ongoing exhibition Impermanence, on view at Cymroza Art Gallery, Mumbai from 14 February–15 March 2025, is a poignant visual document of the changes in social structures in rural Bengal in post-independent India. 

Tracing the path he himself traversed with his parents in the 1980s, the 8-kilometre road between Adityapur and Bolpur in Birbhum district of West Bengal becomes an in-between space, a site for the affective experience of displacement that marked Mukherjee’s own experience as well as those of the former residents of Adityapur. If, in Mukherjee’s images, the desolate road from Adityapur to Bolpur speaks of an absence worn heavy with time, for those who still live in the village, the road becomes a symbol of an overdetermined future—the city harkens, the village, their home, is always already in the past. 

In his seminal text Footloose Labour: Working in India’s Informal Economy (1996), the sociologist Jan Breman asked what happened to workers who were pushed out of agriculture following changes between high-caste landowners and low-caste agricultural workers in rural Gujarat. Breman notes how the hegemonic logic of an economic dualism between village and town corresponded to a binary between agriculture and industry, which, combined with changes in the social dynamics of the agrarian village economy, resulted in a transition of labour from field to factory. What followed was a massive displacement of people, now become the “precariat.”

Mukherjee’s photographs are a moving account of the subjective experience of the process of this displacement in Bengal, a record of absence, from the perspective of the village. He notes:

“I had this romantic idea of documenting the empty courtyards of what were once joint families. I myself grew up in a joint family in the village. Now when I go back, the courtyards are filled with grass. But I cannot be nostalgic about it. There are other things that need to be considered—environment, agricultural economy, oppressed classes and the difference between first- and second-generation learners which is increasing day by day. These are all linked to the idea of India, if one believes in the nation.”

An evocative exposition of agrarian distress and revolutionary failures that underscores unfreedom without naming it, in IR36 (2024), Mukherjee tells the quiet story of large-scale displacement and loss of cultural life from Adityapur. Stitching together photographs of barren landscapes, Mukherjee’s 1 hour, 7-minute video installation consists of more than 100 stills accompanied by sound recordings of interviews he conducted with former residents—a visual and aural document of the process of decay. 

This is mirrored perhaps in the degeneration already inscribed within the images as a result of Mukherjee’s use of nineteenth-century photographic techniques, in this case, wet plate collodion on glass. In this process, a glass plate is coated with a solution of collodion and sensitised with silver nitrate solution to make it light-sensitive. This wet plate is then placed in a camera and exposed to light, and the image needs to be developed quickly within fifteen minutes before the collodion dries, often requiring a portable darkroom. Chemically unstable and sensitive to humidity and temperature, the collodion wet plate is prone to decomposition and discolouration. While making the images that are part of IR36, Mukherjee says that excessive heat reacted with the thick glass plates he used, exposing the areas that would otherwise have been exposed by light. "One sees the signatures of this heat in the form of the white haze," he explains, as seen in the images above and below.

Usually considered rejects, Mukherjee's editorial-artistic decision to include these images in the final work is not only a reminder of decay as both accidental and inherent in nature but also pushes us to ask, can what arises from nature be anything but beautiful? What are the implications for the exclusion of processes that already exist in and interact with nature? Who creates the standards for how things ought to be and to what end?

In fact, by employing the very processes used by the imperial regime to catalogue, standardise and conquer, Mukherjee’s slow, arduous and intimate process acts as a subversive gesture of the colonial logic of domination and of capitalist modernity’s emphasis on fixing "value" and increasing "productivity" through the control of nature. Mukherjee’s handmade photographs then are stubborn protests that serve as evocative documents of resistance against the very meaning of progress and development that has spurred large-scale processes of rural-urban migration across the “developing world.” 

Marked by the near absence of people, the video contains barely three photographs with humans in them, symbolic of what has become an imperative of migration from the village. Those who remain are then already inscribed in absence; they are left behind, late, or on their way, in the unsaid but scripted hierarchy that now characterises the relation between village and city. Interspersed within long sequences of empty courtyards, unused ponds and uncultivated fields, the individuals, when they appear, become ephemeral figures, hidden from view, out-of-joint with place and time, as if waiting for their moment of departure. 

Viewing the video while listening to the sound recordings of Mukherjee’s intimate conversations with village residents—those who left and the rare ones that stayed—these images take on the form of poignant postcards of real and anticipatory loss. In his painful inquiry about the absence of what was once a strong village community, he plays a chord of ache for the loss of the indigenous, vernacular and folk traditions that envelope much of “Third World” development trajectories. 

In the sound recordings, we hear five interconnected stories that bring alive Adityapur’s past life, exposing the disconnection between what once was a culturally rich and transformative community and the barren lands we see through Mukherjee’s lens. Sakkhi Gopal Saha, one of the erstwhile secretaries of Pragati Sangha, a post-independence club in Adityapur, recalls the club’s significance in the cultural, infrastructural and financial development of the village through activities such as water management, road maintenance and the organisation of secular festivals. Further, profits from centres founded for producing Khejur Gur (date palm jaggery) and Tal Gur (palm jaggery) were used to pay teachers at the night school that was established with the support of Visva-Bharati University.

Sakkhibabu’s account helps us imagine life in the village as it once was, but his is also a story of helplessness and dreams unfulfilled. Even as he regrets his inability to establish a hospital in Adityapur, he recounts how changes in the physical character of Adityapur, for instance, the conversion of the playground—once part of the riverbed of the Kopai River—into a site for brick factories, spurred the migration of many youth for whom sports offered career opportunities. 

Similarly, Srikumar Chattopadhyay, the present secretary of the club, mourns his inability to protect the playground. Painting a vivid portrait of the village in the 1960s and 70s, he recounts how the construction of a road in 1968 led to deforestation and transformed the landscape. Yet, he has chosen to stay in Adityapur and continue his efforts to revive the social life of the village community.

Prasanta Acharya, a celebrated performer of jatra—a form of popular folk theatre—who was influential in transforming performances from its focus on the mythical to include historical, political and social themes, highlights jatra’s importance in awareness-building, public education and as a unifying force within the village. 

Purabika Mukherjee, a singer of Rabindra Sangeet and primary school teacher at a government school, was involved in the construction of night schools for labourers in the village, and highlights the role of an evolving educational landscape in the push toward migration. She explains how the rise of the Left Front government in 1977 led to intensive projects aimed at supporting first-generation learners and integrating marginalised communities into mainstream education. However, as children from Scheduled Caste and Adivasi communities started attending school, upper-class families began sending their children to private schools and/or moved to cities to pursue “respectable” professions such as teaching or clerical jobs. With a gradual exit of second- and third-generation learners from government schools, these schools were attended primarily by children from marginalised communities, leading to de facto segregation. With fewer opportunities for interactions between children and adults across class structures, the social fabric of the village began weakening. 

Muktipada Mukherjee, a writer, authored short stories and plays that were instrumental in the generation of cultural knowledge for youth. Along with Purabika Mukherjee, he describes the changing social dynamics through the lens of caste, class and gender. Recalling an evocative memory, he reminisces about the green fields along the road to Bolpur. There was only one harvesting season before the Green Revolution in the 1960s, he says, and the paddy plants grew as tall as humans.

After its 1977 victory, the Left Front government put in place its three-pronged agrarian programme to consolidate its position amongst Bengal’s peasantry, who had little security of tenure and were often subjected to debt bondage. In addition to land redistribution and the strengthening of panchayats or village councils, Operation Barga, Arpan Mukherjee explains, registered the rights of bargadars or sharecroppers. Previously, they had cultivated the land in exchange for a share of the crop they harvested, but were now given a right to a portion of the land. While the ratio of this proportion depended on the percentage of inputs received from the landowner, the landowner became dependent on the bargadar’s permission to be able to sell the land, and the bargadar became more independent. “The oppressed class got a voice,” Mukherjee notes.

Gradually, the educated landowners started shifting to the city in professional jobs. No longer dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods, they stopped investing in agricultural production, with severe consequences for paddy cultivation. While bargadars now had a share of ownership, Mukherjee says, they did not have capital for agriculture. With the withdrawal of the landowning elite’s investments, they were forced to take out loans, leading to increasing indebtedness. Meanwhile, land gradually began to remain uncultivated. Instead, from the 1990s onwards, both bargadars and landowners became brokers in the sale of cultivable land in Adityapur as a means of partaking in the lucrative trade of real estate around Santiniketan, which was developing into a tourist attraction.

When I ask Mukherjee why he chose to call this work “IR36,” he explains that IR36 is a hybrid breed of paddy developed during the 1980s. Its benefits are manifold: it is less attacked by pests; because it is a shorter species, there is decreased exposure to vulnerabilities of rain and post-rain conditions; it takes a shorter time to ripen—only 100 days—and can be cultivated two to three times a year, in the spring and summer, making it more lucrative for farmers. Elaborating on how farmers began to cultivate only this variety of paddy, Mukherjee mourns the gradual eradication of the vernacular species of paddy to the extent that they became unavailable. 

“I thought the IR seed plays a similar role,” he notes. Just as the social dynamics of the village were altered owing to migration to the city, resulting in cultural loss, in the same way, the use of IR36 led to the vanishing of indigenous genes of paddy and agricultural knowledge systems. "However, a few educated farmers collected the seeds of vernacular varieties and tried to keep them alive,” he explains. One might say that Mukherjee is on a similar quest. 

Mukherjee’s lyrical note to the native is not an obituary, nor is it a defence of an ossified preservation of the past. Rather, his interest in learning about the failures of rural construction—an integral part of Rabindranath Tagore’s philosophy and holistic approach to development—arises from a view toward the future, to imagine renewed possibilities. Marked by a focus on localised, community-driven processes in villages, the project of rural construction was given life in the establishment of Sriniketan in 1922, as a wing of Visva-Bharati University, in close proximity to Santiniketan. It stressed on a harmonious—rather than hierarchical—relationship between the rural and urban, and was geared toward the development of villages as centres of culture and self-reliance rather than as sites of extraction of resources for the nation. The emphasis on schools, culture and cooperation within the village was then very much part of both the cultural milieu in Adityapur, within which Mukherjee was raised as a child, and the Santiniketan ethos, in which he is fully immersed.

Rooted in Bengal, Mukherjee's story of the evolving landscape of Adityapur is also the story of the changing rural economy across postcolonial India. In fact, it is the transformations in social structures in India's rural spaces post-independence that is his primary concern, because, he says, this is his experience. In reminding us that the road to Bolpur is also the road from elsewhere, he urges us to ask: Where did we come from? Where are we going? Subtle in Mukherjee’s thoughtful and tender practice then is a penchant toward the contemplative and mystical, apparent in the other series in the show, Gola Vora Dhan (gum biochromate prints, 2015-24), Journey to the Himalaya (gold-toned salt prints, 2022) and The Dew Drops (carbon and chlorophyll prints, 2019-25). Believer in the notion of cyclical time, he reflects on the role of memory in transforming loss into renewal, which I shall explore in the second part of this essay.

To learn more about Arpan Mukherjee’s practice, revisit Anisha Baid’s curated album from the artist’s series Fairer People = Beautiful People = Powerful People (2013–18) and also watch a walkthrough of the exhibition Unsealed Chamber: The Transient Image (2021) with its scenographer Sukanya Baskar.

All images are stills from IR36 (2024), exhibited as part of Impermanence (2025) by Arpan Mukherjee. Video Projection with Images of Wet Plate Collodion on Glass. Images courtesy of the artist.