BIC Streams: A Singular Journey

The career and life of polymath artist-designer Riten Mozumdar (1927-2006).

Ushmita Sahu in conversation with Mortimer Chatterjee.

Riten Mozumdar (1927 – 2006) was one of the most significant artist-designers of the Indian Modernist Design Renaissance in the decades immediately following Independence. Responding to the socio-economic and cultural upheaval sweeping through the country, Mozumdar approached design as a complex nation-building idiom with a dedicated focus on modernisation as well as revivalism. Mozumdar’s oeuvre is marked with inventiveness, variety and deference for both historical perspectives as well as for newer icons of style and techniques. Between the 1950s and 1980s, his celebrated and influential praxis heralded a new brand of aesthetics. Mozumdar’s body of work displayed a diversity of range and materials exemplifying a rare mastery over mediums and techniques. Riten Mazumdar passed away in 2006 leaving behind an illustrious career spanning five decades. In his lifetime, Mozumdar had worked and exhibited prolifically both nationally and internationally, yet today his immense legacy remains largely forgotten. The talk will focus on this pioneering polymath’s narrative which has, with time, been pushed to the margins of documented history.