| NEW AGE NEW YEAR SPECIAL 2006 |
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Kanak Chanpa Chakma
Brushstrokes of brilliance
Sitting at the window of her house in Rangamati, right by the river, a young Kanak Chanpa Chakma would often stare in fascination at the bustle of the nearby bazaar. ‘The tanchangya tribe would be dressed in their best attire for these market days. They would bring in their produce from the valley and exchange them with goods brought in through the river,’ recalls Kanak. Those days would remain with her throughout her life, and the valley by the river, would become omnipresent in her work, a regular setting for her paintings. ‘Our house was on a two acre land, and you had all the trees you could have including coconut trees and date palms. In many ways, I feel, my passion for art is an effort to relive those days, to bring back all that is gone,’ says Kanak. The passion may have come easy for Kanak, but making it as a painter, in a profession dominated by men, and a nation dominated by Bengalis, was not. ‘I would hear such things as ‘look around the world, there are no women painters’. They don’t have the temperament. Most female painters like us have to face this everyday, but for me, being tribal, I had to fight even the female painters to stand my ground,’ says Kanak. And fight, she did. Making her name as a painter who portrayed the the aboriginal culture of the Chittagong Hill Tracts through bold colours. Since the early 1990’s, Kanak won the national award in 2002, the ‘Basundhara Group Award’ at the 15th National Art Exhibition. In 2003, she won a diploma award at the 2nd International Tashkent Biennale in Uzbekistan. She has had solo exhibitions in Japan and USA and has participated in group shows in Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Australia, France, Japan and Canada, England. Last year alone, she participated in four shows in Japan, two in South Korea and one in Paris. ‘I end up going abroad at least twice a year,’ she says. One of the busiest painters in the country, currently, she has become the face of Bangladesh for many circles abroad, an ambassador for her country and her peoples. Among the tribal people, and not just the chakmas, she has become a role model of sorts. ‘I get random calls from tribal people, people I have never met who want to use me as reference while applying for a job. I am happy to help them in whatever way I can,’ says Kanak. However, she has refrained from making her work a political platform to advertise the plight of tribal people. ‘I never subscribe to a negative outlook in my work and have refrained from allowing political goals to colour it. I simply project the life I grew up in,’ she says. It was not that simple though, when she started. Kanak had developed a passion for drawing from her early childhood, filling the walls of her house with pencil and crayon drawings. ‘I would ask my father to draw things for me, and though he had no great skills he never refused me. I would copy them later,’ she recalls. But her mother was none-too-happy about her interests. ‘Tribal women from a very early age learn cooking as well as handloom. I would refuse to learn but my mother forced me to. Looking back I realise that those forceful weaving lessons taught me a lot of things about colour combination and I am also thankful to my mother for teaching me our traditions which I now proudly flaunt to my friends,’ says Kanak. For her, the moment of truth came as early as when she was in class six, when she participated in a national competition organised by UNICEF. She had handed in her work and won the second prize without even coming to Dhaka for the actual competition. ‘The news reached our school in Rangamati and having heard it our headmaster announced a holiday that day after the first two periods,’ recalls Kanak. ‘I had won local competitions before, had sent in my work for Shishu Academy competitions by post, and had read about Zainul Abedin and Quamrul Hassan in books. That day, I realised I wanted to become a painter,’ she says. After she completed her matriculation examinations in 1978, Kanak’s parents decided to send her to Dhaka to the Institute of Fine Arts, in spite of discouragement from neighbours. ‘Art is an expensive medium. In those days, for my parents to dare to send their daughter to Dhaka and spend so much money was a great thing. I arrived in Dhaka for the first time in my life with my father, after completing my exams,’ remembers Kanak. ‘And my father had his faith in me throughout. Even during college when I went home for holidays I would work with my brushes and then rush off somewhere with my friends. If you leave a brush with colour without cleaning it, it gets destroyed. I do not know how my father knew this, but every time, almost invariably, he would clean my stuff and keep the brushes upturned so that they would be okay.’ Chakma finished her Masters in 1986 and married fellow painter Khalid Mahmood Mithu the same year. In 1994, she was awarded a fellowship from the Penn State University in USA. Around the same time, she was named amongst the top ten leading women personalities in Bangladesh at the Ananya Awards, run by the women’s magazine of the same name. That award helped establish her name as one of the leading artists in the country. ‘Nowadays I spend most of my time working on exhibitions,’ she says. How does it feel to be a tribal woman out in the big bad, often insidious, world of art? ‘In Thailand they try to speak to me in Thai, while at international airports, while my husband and others are held back for hours because of increased security nowadays, I am simply let off. In Nepal, the police stopped our embassy vehicle at every stop wondering what a local was doing in a diplomatic vehicle,’ she laughs. For the future, Chakma holds no great ambitions. ‘I simply hope that people judge my work in the right context. And my dream is to do what I am doing, paint as long as I live and only stop when I die.’ Interview: Mubin S Khan / Photo: GMB Akash |
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Muhammad Zafar Iqbal
ACTING EDITOR: NURUL KABIR
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