HANDMADE ARTIST BOOKS WEEK: SOUMYA SANKAR BOSE

© Soumya Sankar Bose, artist ebook “A Discreet Exit Through Darkness Things We Lost Last Night”

I used to be captivated by the title of Soumya Sankar Bose‘s photobook Where the Birds Never Sing when it was shortlisted for the 2020 Paris Photo-Aperture PhotoBook Award. The work resonated deeply with me, as it revisits the tragic Marichjhapi massacre in the Sundarbans with remarkable sensitivity. I was particularly struck by how seamlessly the design elements are interwoven with the narrative, evoking a profound sense of loss and a somber atmosphere. This initial encounter also led me to explore more of Soumya’s work, additional deepening my appreciation of his apply. His philosophy as an artist and bookmaker is rooted in the concept that images is not only about recording actuality, but in addition about reconstructing forgotten histories, feelings, and marginalized voices. For him, books are intimate, private objects that readers return to over time, making them highly effective instruments for remembrance and storytelling.

I’m honored to have the chance to interview Soumya about his work and his books.

© Soumya Sankar Bose, Bose’s Grandmother, picture taken by Bose’s Grandfather, 1965

Tell us about your rising up. What made you select images as a medium to precise your self and books as a kind to symbolize it? How did ‘Pathshala’ form your journey as a lens-based artist?

I grew up in a small city in India referred to as Midnapore, near the Bay of Bengal. I can’t pinpoint once I started photographing, however I’ve lengthy carried a worry of time passing, chronophobia, a way of time slipping away, or extra carefully, a worry of dropping time. That nervousness formed my apply. I started to archive no matter felt fragile or liable to disappearance: my household, our roots on each my dad and mom’ sides, our tradition, and on a regular basis practices.

Over time, this private impulse expanded right into a broader concern with rural and regional oral histories that stay largely absent from official Indian archives. I proceed to construct my very own archive, one which holds each an intimate perspective and a regional one that’s hardly ever represented.

Books turned central to this course of. The archives I create typically exist solely inside my work, and the ebook felt like essentially the most sturdy method to maintain and flow into them. This started with my first venture on jatra. Many jatra artists, a people theatre kind in India that started to vanish after the Nineteen Eighties with the rise of tv and media, had no images of themselves, some not even on-line, regardless of having been broadly recognized within the Sixties and 70s. The ebook turned, in lots of instances, the one archive of their lives and labour. I labored on this venture for 4 to 5 years, tracing and discovering these artists lengthy after they’d light from public reminiscence. It was then that I realised how tough it’s to create an archive with out additionally making a ebook.

Pathshala performed an important position in shaping my apply. Before that, I considered literature and cinema as my major creative references. At Pathshala, I encountered images and visible apply as severe and significant varieties. The neighborhood there fostered sustained dialogue, viewing, discussing, and critiquing one another’s work. Because folks in Dhaka and Kolkata share a language and cultural floor, these conversations felt steady, as if we have been rising older collectively by our practices. In that sense, Pathshala nonetheless lives on in the best way I believe and work.

© Soumya Sankar Bose, artist ebook “A Discreet Exit Through Darkness Things We Lost Last Night”

© Soumya Sankar Bose, artist ebook “A Discreet Exit Through Darkness Things We Lost Last Night”

Your work tends to return out of your private expertise of social and political points. In your course of, when does your work take a particular type of the ebook? How do you steadiness the connection between the narrative and the type of the ebook?

More than private expertise, my work is rooted in regional histories that lack an present visible archive. This absence is the place my tasks start. As the world strikes more and more from textual content to picture, many individuals now encounter historical past primarily by visuals. Events that stay undocumented visually, such because the Marichjhapi bloodbath, the world round jatra artists, or my mom’s disappearance in Midnapore in 1969 when she was 9, threat slipping out of public reminiscence altogether. These gaps form the urgency of my apply.

The ebook comes on the remaining stage of every venture, once I really feel there’s nothing extra so as to add. Before that, I often spend at the very least three to 4 years on a venture. The first yr goes into analysis, the subsequent two into manufacturing, adopted by exhibitions. Only after the exhibitions do I start to consider how the work would possibly take the type of a ebook.

The type of every ebook evolves alongside my understanding of each the venture and the medium. Across my three books, Let’s Sing an Old Song, Where the Birds Never Sing, and A Discreet Exit Through Darkness, the construction and materials language shift repeatedly. This is partly as a result of I work on just one venture at a time, permitting a deep and sustained engagement with its content material. The ebook is just not an afterthought. It grows out of the logic of the work itself.

In Let’s Sing an Old Song, the slim, folded format emerged from the lives of the jatra artists. Whenever I visited them, they confirmed me their belongings saved in small bins, folded tightly as a result of constraints of restricted dwelling house. Their images and newspaper clippings have been creased and layered from years of cautious protecting. The ebook mirrors this situation. Multiple parts are gathered and folded right into a single field.

For the Marichjhapi venture, we labored with authentic paperwork belonging to individuals who died or went lacking. The ebook was conceived virtually as an object rising from a coffin, with every web page devoted to a life misplaced on 31 January 1979.

The ebook on my mom is structured round two parallel narratives. It has two factors of entry somewhat than a linear starting and finish. One chapter unfolds from my grandfather’s perspective and the opposite from my mom’s perspective, and each are equally vital. The reader can start from both aspect.
It is a steady means of balancing the narrative and the shape, one thing I’ve discovered by the method of constructing books.

© Soumya Sankar Bose, artist ebook “Where the Birds Never Sing”

© Soumya Sankar Bose, artist ebook “Let’s Sing an Old Song”

© Soumya Sankar Bose, artist ebook “A Discreet Exit Through Darkness Things We Lost Last Night”

You do in depth analysis and mix archival materials, oral histories, metaphoric and staged images masterfully to reconstruct the previous in your books. Can you inform us about your analysis for the work ‘Where the Birds Never Sing’ and ‘Let’s Sing an outdated Song’?

The venture Where the Birds Never Sing centres on the bloodbath that passed off in Marichjhapi, an island within the Sundarban delta, in 1979. The occasion is rooted in an extended historical past of displacement. After Partition, many refugees from East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, have been relocated to camps in central India. Despite this, they continued to see West Bengal as residence. When a brand new authorities got here to energy in 1977, many tried to return to Bengal. They have been instructed they weren’t welcome. Tensions escalated right into a violent confrontation, and 1000’s have been killed in a single night time.

The incident was fastidiously suppressed. It was barely reported in newspapers, and no formal archive exists. What stays is carried by oral histories. My work started by tracing this buried historical past. I first contacted students who had researched the occasion after which started the sluggish means of finding survivors. I travelled to distant areas of central India corresponding to Mana Camp and Dandakaranya, in addition to to totally different elements of the Sundarbans. This took practically three years. During this time, I recorded testimonies from those that had lived by the violence.

I later returned to Marichjhapi and, on the alternative island, organised an exhibition there with the survivors. The supplies have been offered in Bengali and formed by collective dialogue. Later on, I started to consider the ebook, which ultimately turned one other means of carrying these histories ahead.
The analysis part was crucial to the venture. There have been no contact particulars, no dependable information, and little infrastructure. Many folks had solely primary telephones, and sometimes there was no method to attain them remotely. I began this venture practically forty years after the incident, so I needed to journey repeatedly and ask for instructions from one village to the subsequent to seek out them.

This technique grew out of the expertise I discovered from my earlier venture on jatra, Let’s Sing an Old Song, which I started after coming back from Pathshala. With my uncle’s assist, I travelled from place to put in quest of former performers. Often all I had was a reputation. I’d ask villagers in the event that they recognised it. If they didn’t, I’d ask about native decorators who provided bamboo constructions, microphones, and stage supplies. These employees typically knew the performers and will level me in the direction of them. Once I discovered a couple of artists, they helped me find others.

This sluggish, itinerant type of analysis shapes all my tasks. Finding folks, constructing belief, and tracing scattered histories takes time. The manufacturing grows out of extended analysis on a specific topic.

© Soumya Sankar Bose, lacking folks from artist ebook “Where the Birds Never Sing”

© Soumya Sankar Bose, artist ebook “Let’s Sing an Old Song”. Rabin Kumar Majhi and Anukul Ghosh posing for a portrait as a newlywed couple. Pathra, India.

© Soumya Sankar Bose, artist ebook “Let’s Sing an Old Song”.

‘Where the Birds Never Sing’ had a profound impression once I got here to learn about it. You are one of many few who empowered the forgotten historical past of Post-partition and the marginalized voice of the Marichjhapi bloodbath in West Bengal. It can be inspiring to know the journey that took you within the path of exploring Marichjhapi as your topic. What was your inspiration remodeling this narrative into the artist book-form?

I’ll start from the place I left off within the earlier response. My father’s household migrated from what’s now Bangladesh to India across the 40s, when discussions round Partition had already begun. They settled right here and have lived in India for the previous seventy years. As I grew older, I attempted to know why so many of those household histories felt fragmented or misplaced. Much of this private historical past of Partition is just not effectively documented.
I spotted that households from decrease middle-class backgrounds typically settled outdoors Kolkata as a result of they may not afford to stay within the metropolis. Many moved to small cities like Midnapore or relied on authorities preparations in refugee camps. In the lengthy battle to rebuild their lives over a long time, connections to their previous have been slowly severed. This absence turned the place to begin of my work. Since I didn’t inherit a household archive, I felt the necessity to construct one, not just for myself but in addition for others who had crossed over from Bangladesh and whose histories remained undocumented.

I started by trying to find survivors who had migrated from throughout the border. Over time, we spoke at size, and I recorded their tales. In the ebook, their names are fastidiously listed, and on one web page there’s a minimize out marking those that went lacking. The visible archive of the Marichjhapi bloodbath doesn’t exist anyplace, it was largely destroyed by the state authorities.

Besides that, there are vital paperwork which the ebook additionally contains, corresponding to refugee eligibility certificates. When folks crossed into the newly fashioned nation, they didn’t carry passports. Instead, they have been issued paperwork stating that they might not declare housing in Bengal and would work underneath authorities preparations with out demanding rights. Many signed these papers or left thumb impressions with out totally understanding what they agreed to. Including these paperwork was vital to me, as they reveal the political situations underneath which survival was negotiated.

Alongside photos, I’ve included interview excerpts and analysis supplies. Apart from Let’s Sing an Old Song, textual content performs an important position in my different two books. Research additionally turns into a part of the ebook itself. These books mix picture, textual content, and archival materials.

We typically think about archives as institutional areas. This archive didn’t exist inside any establishment. I needed to construct it slowly by transferring from one residence to a different, gathering fragments of private histories and assembling them throughout the ebook. Only after I had gathered a considerable physique of fabric did I start to consider how one can maintain it collectively as a single work.

An exhibition is all the time non permanent. A ebook continues to journey. It strikes from one reader to a different and carries these histories ahead. This ebook ‘Where the Birds Never Sing’ was printed in two editions, one in Bengali and one in English.

© Soumya Sankar Bose, artist ebook “Where the Birds Never Sing”

© Soumya Sankar Bose, artist ebook “Where the Birds Never Sing”

© Soumya Sankar Bose, Rabin Biswas, Malkangiri, Marijhapi Survivor, 2019. “Where the Birds Never Sing”

© Soumya Sankar Bose, Bakul Majhi, Marijhapi Survivor, Rashpur, 2019. “Where the Birds Never Sing”

© Soumya Sankar Bose, artist ebook “Where the Birds Never Sing”

Tell us about ‘Things We Lost Last Night & A Discreet Exit Through Darkness’. This is deeply private for you and your loved ones. When you began the primary chapter of the collection, how did you comprehend the transformation and evolution by time? At what level did you propose to include the movie?

I started this venture through the Covid interval, once I was spending prolonged time with my household. The incident on the heart of the work passed off in 1969 in Midnapore, ten years earlier than the Marichjhapi bloodbath and twenty years earlier than I used to be born. My mom was 9 years outdated when she went lacking.
What makes this venture significantly fragile is that only a few individuals who knew elements of the story are nonetheless alive. My grandmother is the one surviving witness from that era. My grandfather died whereas trying to find his daughter, and my aunt, my mom’s elder sister, handed away in 1995. There is not any formal document of the incident.

The ebook and the movie will not be solely about my mom’s disappearance. They hint the parallel histories unfolding on the similar time. The Naxalbari motion in West Bengal and the 1971 Liberation War kind the broader political and social background through the years she remained lacking. The work additionally attends to what it meant to stay by these occasions in a small city. While incidents in Kolkata are sometimes documented, what occurred in locations like Midnapore hardly ever enters any archive. Newspapers ignored such tales, and native experiences have been simply erased. Bringing these fragments collectively turned central to the work.

My grandmother is now over ninety. I felt an urgency to doc what she remembered whereas she was nonetheless alive, in order that she might see the ebook and the movie in her lifetime. This sense of time operating out formed the start of the venture. I began by imagining how my grandfather looked for his daughter. From this got here A Discreet Exit Through Darkness.

The venture unfolds throughout textual content, images, sound, and transferring photos, together with a VR movie. The first chapter, which takes the type of the VR movie, follows my grandfather’s perspective and reaches additional again to the Nineteen Forties, together with the Noakhali violence that formed his formative years. The second half, Things We Lost Last Night, is the ebook, together with a three-channel movie, and approaches the story from my mom’s perspective after her return. She has no reminiscence of the interval when she went lacking. Her understanding of these years is formed by what others later instructed her and by the best way she was handled by relations, companions, and people round her.

These two narratives don’t try to reconstruct precisely what occurred in 1969. Like the work on Marichjhapi, this venture is anxious much less with factual reconstruction than with what stays in reminiscence, how tales are instructed, and the way occasions proceed to form lives lengthy after they’ve handed. It can also be about what might be reimagined when archives don’t exist.

Without telephones, the web, or dependable newspapers, it’s exhausting to reconstruct these days. What we are able to do as a substitute is think about, and that act of imagining lies on the heart of this work.

© Soumya Sankar Bose, “A Discreet Exit Through Darkness Things We Lost Last Night”

© Soumya Sankar Bose, “A Discreet Exit Through Darkness Things We Lost Last Night”

© Soumya Sankar Bose, “A Discreet Exit Through Darkness Things We Lost Last Night”

What is inspiring you now? What’s subsequent in your journey?

That is a tough query to reply, as a result of inspiration involves me from many instructions. It can come from folks’s lives, conversations and interviews, books, household albums, flea market photographs, and movies, sounds, and even new applied sciences. It is just not one thing I can find in a single supply or outline by one time period.

At current, I’m growing a brand new venture that started a couple of years in the past. While travelling from Howrah to Koraput throughout my analysis on the Marichjhapi bloodbath, I discovered a diary underneath a prepare seat by probability, once I bent down to avoid wasting a butterfly mendacity there with an injured wing. From that second, I felt drawn to work with this materials.

The diary features virtually like an off-the-cuff archive of dying. It information the lives and deaths of many individuals who died underneath totally different circumstances, together with suicide and terminal sickness. The notes really feel like fragments of analysis. They might belong to a author, an instructional, a poet, or another person totally. I nonetheless have no idea who wrote it or for what objective.

I’m making an attempt to learn and decode the diary by photos and visible constructions, permitting the fabric to information the type of the work. The venture grows out of an ongoing means of interpretation and response. The work continues to be in progress and can possible take one other yr to finish. Part of it’s at present being ready for exhibition in Kolkata at Experimenter. The venture is titled We Need to Talk in Whispers.

© Soumya Sankar Bose, Marichjhapi Island (Now), Sundarbans, October 2018 from “Where the Birds Never Sing”

© Soumya Sankar Bose, “A Discreet Exit Through Darkness Things We Lost Last Night”

© Soumya Sankar Bose, “A Discreet Exit Through Darkness Things We Lost Last Night”

© Soumya Sankar Bose, “A Discreet Exit Through Darkness Things We Lost Last Night”

© Soumya Sankar Bose, “A Discreet Exit Through Darkness Things We Lost Last Night”

Artist books by Soumya Sankar Bose

A Discreet Exit Through Darkness | Things We Lost Last Night (July 2025)

A Discreet Exit Through Darkness visits a household thriller spanning 5 a long time: the disappearance of Soumya Sankar Bose’s mom in 1969 and her unexplained return years later. The ebook unfolds by two interwoven views his grandfather’s diary, documenting a determined search throughout submit partition Bengal formed by political unrest, rumors, and fading beliefs, and his mom’s fragmented, unsure recollections. Drawing on archival analysis and Bose’s personal reconstructions, the grandfather’s account reveals not solely information however the emotional toll of looking in a time of worry and uncertainty.

The second narrative, Things We Lost Last Night, follows Bose and his mom as they revisit doable websites of her absence, navigating reminiscence loss, face blindness, and
tales that blur actuality and fantasy.Together, the two strands replicate on inter-generational trauma, the imprint of historic violence on personal lives, and the fragile,
shifting nature of reminiscence.

Where the Birds Never Sing (August 2020)

Where the Birds Never Sing examines the 1979 Marichjhapi bloodbath, when Bengali refugees within the Sundarbans have been forcibly evicted and 1000’s died from police violence, hunger, and illness.The work situates the violence throughout the longer historical past of post-Partition displacement, tracing how lower-caste refugees have been repeatedly uprooted, promised resettlement, after which betrayed by the state. It recounts the lethal police crackdown on 31 January 1979 and the next eviction drive, whose dying toll stays unsure however is broadly estimated within the 1000’s. The ebook hyperlinks this suppressed historical past to modern realities in India, together with ongoing caste oppression and present-day debates round citizenship and belonging. Through oral histories, site-specific analysis, and a cautious mixing of reality and reconstruction, Bose reanimates a virtually erased chapter of collective reminiscence and provides kind to a number of survivor views.

Lets Sing an Old Song (September 2021)

Soumya Sankar Bose started photographing artists who are actually unemployed however have been as soon as gigantic figures of the Jatra, a people theatre kind in India. This work is predicated primarily on the Jatra artists, characters performed by them and the psychology that drives them to be part of this people cult kind. Dating again to sixteenth century, the Jatra is a well-known people theatre type of united Bengal (Bangladesh and West Bengal), using dialogue, monologue, songs and instrumental music to inform tales. Jatra pala ,because the performs are referred to as ,are enacted on picket levels with none obstacles between the actors and the viewers, facilitating direct communication. The plots differ from India mythology and historic incident to one thing extra modern and based mostly on social points. The partition of India had a significant impression on Jatra as artistes within the newly fashioned East-Pakistan (later Bangladesh), a Muslim majority nation, discontinued to enact Hindu non secular folktales corresponding to Krishna lila, Devi Thakurani, kongso bodh, kaliadaman and so forth. On the opposite aspect of the border, artistes in west bengal stopped enjoying Muslim characters corresponding to Siraj-ud-dullah,Shah jahan, Akbar and so forth. The introduction of cinema and TV within the 60s and 70s blew a lethal blow to the theatre artwork kind. In 2013, over 600 Jatra corporations make use of over 2,00,000 folks however their state of affairs has come to forcing them to typically supply free performances.

Soumya Sankar Bose (b. 1990) is an artist who reconstructs archival supplies and oral histories by images, movie, various archives, and artist books. His apply combines long run analysis with shut engagement with communities, together with his circle of relatives historical past. Through layered narratives, he explores subaltern experiences and fragile recollections in submit Partition Bengal, specializing in lives that exist on the edges of official historical past but endure with quiet resilience. Bose lives and works in Kolkata, India.

Bose was awarded the Magnum Foundation’s Social Justice Fellowship in 2017 for Full Moon on a Dark Night. In 2023, he was named Hello! India’s Emerging Artist of the Year and acquired the Louis Roederer Discovery Public Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles for A Discreet Exit Through Darkness. He served as Artistic Chair for the 2024 to 2025 interval at The Beaux Arts Nantes Saint Nazaire, Le Lieu Unique, the City of Nantes, and the Institut d’études avancées in Nantes, France. His work has been supported by the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (Amol Vadehra Art Grant), The Agroecology Fund, Murthy Nayak Foundation Photobook Grant, Henry Luce Foundation, The Kemmler Foundation, and the India Foundation for the Arts.

Bose’s prints are held in collections together with Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; Royal Ontario Museum, Ontario; Les Rencontres d’Arles, Arles; and Duncan Aviation, USA. His books are held within the collections of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Tate Modern, London; The Cleveland Museum of Art (Ingalls Library); Cincinnati Art Museum; Syracuse University (Bird Library); Stanford University Libraries; Tufts University (Tisch Library); and Peabody Essex Museum (Phillips Library).

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