The Boithak Khana project in Kolkata is all about digging interesting stories of not so popular homes in the city. Artists create objects and installations based on those tales. Chhatrapati Dutta shares details with Divya Kaushik
Historain Ramesh Chandra Majumdar was born in a poor family but it is said that his grandfather was a rich man with lavish tastes. It is believed that like many rich men in that era, he had a pond full of expensive liquor and a single lotus flower would float in the pond. Straws or pipes were connected to the pond and the people sitting around it had to pull the liquor hard to move the lotus floating in the pond. This is one of the rare stories that was told by Majumdar’s grandson to Chhatrapati Dutta, while he chatted with the former on the family history at his patriarchal home in Kolkata. The story has formed the base of an artwork. like this, there were various artworks placed in the house to narrate stories from the family history.
The Boithak Khana project is a unique idea conceptualised by Chhatrapati Dutta from Kolkata. The seeds of the project were sown when Dutta and a few like-minded people from the art fraternity were toying with the idea to set a space for the artists outside the gallery, the space that offers interaction opportunity with the public at large. They kept in mind that the artworks created should also speak volumes about the space they were created in. So they decided to hunt for old houses, which are aplenty in the city, but not the ones which are popular and well-known. “The city took shape with the emergence of British colonialism. Its subsequent rich history up to the present made Kolkata into a versatile metropole. Although the city got rid of its colonial skin, much of the past lingers. This past can be seen directly on the surfaces of Kolkata’s buildings, but many stories lie hidden beneath the surface. One of the ways of excavating the layers of Kolkata is to explore the existing lived-in spaces within the city, the households of old Kolkata that carry the past with them. This is what the Boithak Khana project sets out to do. Traditionally seen as a space for receiving guests, Boithak Khana serves as a space for interaction and entertainment,” informs Dutta.
He adds, “We went down to South Kolkata to hunt for the old houses from where we can get a lot of history. It was not an easy task to zero down on the house as the entire process required people of the house to participate. To convince them to share family stories has been a tough task. But then we found first house after a lot of running around and it was Chaudhari Badi. We completed the project in December last year and soon after that we were on a hunt for the second house. This time the house that we spotted happened to be the house of historian RC Majumdar. We reached out to the artists and invited them to participate in the project.”
These exhibitions aim to start a dialogue between the contemporary artworks and household artefacts. Therefore the artworks are not placed in the house as an exhibit but are arranged in such a fashion that they look like a part of the house. “By resounding the past, the joint imaginations reveal the burdens of history and shed light on the challenges of tomorrow. By placing the contemporary artworks in between the objects and walls, a range of questions are asked. Questions concerning the boundaries between work and leisure, between public and private space, colonial and contemporary injustice, class differences and changing gender roles are raised in the process,” shared Dutta.