Nakhoda Mosque

Ramendranath Chakravorty was trained in etching, aquatint and drypoint from the famous printmaker Muirhead Bone, known for his work as a war artist in both the First and the Second World Wars. In 1943, he became the Principal at the Government School of Art, Calcutta and introduced graphic art into the curriculum of the school. Chakravorty’s prints display a confluence of artistic traditions—from the Santiniketan School, especially the woodcut prints of Nandalal Bose, and European idioms like pointillism and Impressionism. In this image, we see a crowded Nakhoda Masjid in the Chitpur area of North Kolkata, Bengal. Though the subject of the image is the masjid, we see a mass of pedestrians in the foreground and a row of buildings on both sides and just a portion of the masjid in the background. Even while documenting a monument, the artist seems to be more interested in capturing the life around it to convey a physical sense of navigating one’s way to the masjid through the narrow lanes of Chitpur.