Soumya Sankar Bose

Soumya Sankar Bose is an independent photographer with a Post Graduate diploma in Photography from Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Soumya was a participant at the Angkor Photo Workshop, 2016, and he is the recipient of the TFA-Tasveer Emerging Photographer of the Year Award, 2015 and Magnum Foundation’s Photography and Social Justice Fellowship, 2017. His work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals in New York, Texas, Kathmandu Dhaka, Delhi, Mumbai, Goa and Kolkata. His works have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Huffington Post, BBC Online, Better Photography, The Caravan, Wired, Platform, Gallery Carte Blanche, F-Stop Magazine and Scroll.in among others. Soumya received two grants from IFA; the first to artistically represent the private lives of veteran Jatra artists through photographs, and the second to take that photo-exhibition back to the villages where Jatra artists live and generate conversations around the form. For this project Soumya focuses on a rather controversial episode in the history of West Bengal – the massacres of Marichjhapi, 1979.

Refugees from former East Pakistan who came to India during the partition were settled in arid parts of present day Chhattisgarh, especially Dandakaranya in Bastar district, by the Indian Government in 1961. The local and tribal population who had been living there for a long time objected to this programme and this started escalating into conflicts with the refugees. The land the refugees were allotted were harsh and inhabitable. Having come from the fertile delta of the Ganges the conditions were alien to them. Most of the refugees knew only Bengali and the local conflicts made life even more difficult for them. They formed civil rights groups and started protesting this situation, petitioning for relocation to parts of West Bengal where conditions were favourable. The Left parties, who were at that time in opposition in Bengal, supported their cause and allegedly promised to settle them in parts of Sundarbans. After the Left Front came to power in West Bengal in 1977, the refugees inspired by the earlier promise, arrived en mass and settled down in Marichjhapi, an uninhabited island on the eastern boundary of the Indian Sunderbans. Estimates suggest anywhere between 30,000 and 40,000 people came to the island and started living.

In the course of the following months they built homes, schools, markets, basic medical facilities and cultivated the land. There were teachers, engineers and economists among them who helped with large scale planning of resources in the island. In a few months the community was on its way to become self-sustainable. The Left government however changed its mind and considered them a burden on the new government. It alleged that the refugees were illegally encroaching on Reserve Forest Land. The leaders started negotiation with the refugees but couldn’t reach an amicable solution. On January 24, 1979 section 144 of Indian Criminal Procedure Code was imposed on the area, the police obstructed any in or outbound traffic to the island cutting off supply of food, water and other commodities. Reporters were not allowed to enter the area. On the night of January 31, police opened fire on the inhabitants. Their settlements were also set ablaze. Some people could escape, but others perished in the island. All documents of this massacre has since been systematically destroyed, police reports suggest only one person died that night and some are missing. Since press was not allowed to enter the area for a few days following that night, no formal documentation of the incident was possible. There are stray reports of bodies being thrown in the sea and wild animals dragging away corpses in the following days. People who could escape and are now settled in various parts of the country including Dandakaranya region have difficult memories and restrain from speaking. Some amount of research work has been published on the subject including some newspaper reportage, while writers like Amitav Ghosh and Manoranjan Byapari have mentioned the incident in their work. However, almost no artistic response to the subject is available, except a documentary film that was made by Tushar Bhattacharya.

This massacre at Marichjhapi is what Soumya will work with. He as a photographer works in the zone between the real and the speculative. This incident provides him with a unique opportunity to create a body of photos that attempts to imagine a visual understanding of what might have happened that night. He is going to interview many of the eyewitnesses or their families and people who have worked on the incident over a period of time. He will also access old reports, legal documents, scholarly and literary works, personal and official letters from their collections and if possible government and newspaper archives. He will visit Marichjhapi, Dandakaranya and other such erstwhile Refugee camps and settlements. Through these interactions he hopes to create a series of photographs of real people, places and some artistic recreations of events of the night. He wishes this to be not a historical documentation, rather creative speculations to make people aware of the incident that have been systematically erased from public memory. He aims to publish a book with the photographs, which will also have archival material and three essays by a journalist, an anthropologist and a filmmaker who have worked on the subject, to provide context.

There is significant risk involved in this project and Soumya is aware of it. While this work hopes to open up discussions among the public about Marichjhapi and the role of the Left, this could lead to further polarisations in political debates with possibilities of appropriations. Also, from previous experiences of showing his work, Soumya is not unfamiliar to the nature of questions that he will face in relation to authenticity and representation of reality. He has always chosen subjects that raise multiple questions about our understanding of the real and historical. His style allows him to push the boundaries of documentary and constructed photography. Especially when data is scarce on a period in history, this opens up possibilities of new imaginations, awareness and interpretation among the audience. This is why IFA feels it is worthwhile to support this project. His budget is realistic given the scope and possibility of the project. A photo-book with three essays will be the outcome of the project. The Grantee's deliverables to IFA with the final report will be final draft of the book, photographs and audio-video interviews of eye witnesses, and staged images.