SOCIAL SCIENTIST free" and non-critical. This attitude led to a debate with many Marxists artists like Gopal Halder who believed that realism was only the starting point of progressiveness, "socialist realism" being the ultimate goal. Halder frankly and enthusiastically expressed this opinion to Prodosh Dasgupta who vociferously retaliated by saying that socialist realism had never been the Group's concern. However, this attitude was not always found in the works of all the members of the Group. Prodosh Dasgupta himself created "Slavery" in the mid-forties which shows a man breaking his chains. Here the realist mode is used to create a metaphor for the struggle against social exploitation. At times, other artists of the Group were directly involved in political activities of the times. Nirode Majumdar decorated the pandal for the Kishan Sabha conference at Netrakona in 1941. He made sketches of the Conference gathering, one of which was published in Janayuddha the Bengali organ of the Communist Party of India. Rathin Maitra was also a member of IPTA's art sub-committee. However, neither Maitra nor Majumdar were political activities themselves. It was a sense of political commitment, on the other hand, that pushed Chittaprasad, Somnath Hore, Zainul Abedin and Moni Roy towards realism. They were either members of the CPI or close associates. They drew posters that documented the Bengal famine of the forties. Some of these works appeared in the English and the Bengali organs of the CPI and the posters were used for political propaganda or sold to raise funds for the famine-stricken people. Painstaking formal experiments and personal creative endeavours were set aside willingly to fulfill a political purpose. One of the sites in which a reflection of these debates can be found is in the representation of women in the works of artists of the forties. Emerging out of the series of reforms in the late nineteenth century some women began to establish their claim on education in the 1930s. Three female post-graduate students and two female PhD scholars2 stood as witness to the long struggle that established the equal right to access formal and institutional higher education in place of the earlier kind of education for women suggested by the 19th century reformers which was to help women become better wives and mothers. Early twentieth century nationalist movements inspired women to transform themselves from the objects of change to the agents of change in the socio-political sphere. Simultaneously, rural poverty increased the number of female workers and ultimately during the Bengal famine, some peasant women were pushed into prostitution. The number of women participants in trade union movements of