An intimate sense and concern for the community, the people and organic empathy from within, a sense of fraternity brings itself at the centre of Sanjib’s frames. The fraternity spoke, cared for each-other though since there’s no historical and dignified visual idiom, representative of self-respect, available yet, this fraternity thus remains out of sight, bringing a great sense of historical emptiness to the frames. The people that are conversing in his images, sometimes include the commanding owner of the spaces depicted, who also remain invisible since his visibility is in the ownership of the representational space itself.

But we also don’t see the subaltern who is talking, and their presence is only in the words of hope and symbols of struggle that they articulate. The spaces, however coarse or unsophisticated, are spaces of transaction, means of which are clearly owned by imposing voices, which keeps appearing within the conversation of the fraternity, cutting them off, looks after the order and leaves. Sanjib’s concerns connect the larger structural signifier, moving beyond the minor representation to address the conditions that makeup survival in his world. A thorough reflection of aspiration of the people, within the death grasp of Brahmanical socio-economic oppression, covers an ample space of concern in Sanjib’s works.

In most cases, these words of aspiration are spoken through the youngest members of the society, the children, whose aspiration for progressive mobility would define the future prospects of the very community and society. These children, not privileged with the social promise of a protected childhood, are intensely critical and fearlessly expressive. The unafraid but mindful doodles on the walls of mud-hut, or the intimate colloquial chit-chat at work, or the obvious but incomplete sticker quotes that mock the exclusive licence of elite upper-caste consumerist societies to right to life, commodity, resources and guarantees their active participation in building and expanding state institutions.

Pinak Banik