D Pranabranjan Ray Although some politically over-enthusiastic historians of culture would like to hold that the Kalighat patas of nineteenth-century Calcutta had political content, it would be better to treat the worldly concerns of the patuas of Kalighat as social criticism from a subaltern, conservative point of view. The domains of the social and the political are not coterminous. The cartoons with social and politically critical content published in the Punch-inspired Bengali journal Basantaka, were much too referential, ephemeral 67 and crude to be regarded as objects of art. Gaganendranath Tagore (1867-1938) was perhaps the earliest Indian painter in whose lithographs, done between 1917 and 1923, we find social criticism informed by an awareness of the social-pathological states of dominated societies. And Gaganendranath Tagore's lithographs were strong, self-contained expressions. The few celebratory paintings that Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951) was inspired to paint by the spirit of swadeshi were not overtly political. They were informed neither by an anxiety to hold on to a power position nor by an anguished protest of the powerless. And what is political without a reference to power? By the same token, the cultural-nationalistic implications of the paintings of Nandalal Bose and Jamini Roy, although undoubtedly inspired by Gandhian ideas, were political only in an extended sense. What the swadeshi movement was tothe literature and music of Bengal, the Bengal famine of 1943 was to the visual arts. Even if it was a short-lived stimulus, the famine proved that a contemporary social event of the political-economic situation as such could be a very significant input in authentic artistic creation. Irrespective of whether a painter was an academic, representational, descriptive painter like Atui Bose, or a romantic humanist like Zainul Abedin, or a "primitive rebel' of a modern sculptor like Ramkinker Baij, the images of the starved, dying, naked and dead peasants in the works of each of them stood out as symbols of justice denied to humanity. Not surprisingly, forty years after the occurrence, studying the Bengal famine of 1943 as part of his study of the phenomenon of poverty. Professor Amartya Sen made his remarkable contribution to the theory of justice. The painters and sculptors we have just mentioned, along with litterateurs like Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay, responded to the human predicament resulting from the famine as individual human beings, without being motivated by any particular ideology or by a commitment to the articulated policy of any organized political association. However, Chittaprosad, a competent amateur painter, and Somnath Hore, an undergraduate student of science, were out there trudging through the famine-stricken villages of Chittagong and Midnapore districts at the bidding of the undivided Communist Party of India. They were to sketch the famine scenes for publication in Janayuddha (Bengali) and People's War (English), the two weeklies of the CPI. Bijon Bhattacharya's path-breaking play on the famine, Nabanna, too was a case of subsump-tion of a partinost (to use an apt Russian term) world-view. This indeed was a very new kind of input in the political content of art. Enthused by the success of the ventures, the Number 22