Sunil Sharma writes

Breaking Barriers the Kiriti Sengupta Way

Creative minds are known disruptors. Picasso did that in the year 1937. Joyce, in the year 1921. T. S. Eliot, in the year 1917. Their works disrupted traditional modes of cognition, reception and recording realities in aesthetic terms for a discerning audience open to innovation, freshness and bold experimentation. The avant garde is always challenging -- and beautiful! And carries the danger of being incorporated into the mainstream by a swamp called market. Most innovations-turned-cult artifacts have faced such a banality of the literary bazaar of the culture industry. But some survived.

Incorporation vs. Breaking Out.

Often, artists of high caliber defy such reification on the basis of their transcendental vision and freshness that never stales -- they can easily afford to be both local and global at the same time. Every age has got such thinkers that redefine boundaries and borders through their experimental works in every field. Artists are no exception to this rule of genius. They are with us and with others of tomorrow. Art has got the strange ability to belong to here-and-now to the tomorrow tentatively glimpsed on the reddening distant horizon. The Bard is both Elizabethan and futuristic in odd simultaneity. Writers! The interrogators. The disruptors breaking down the old narratives and ushering in newer ones of comprehending the universe through various media -- collages; murals; pastiches; montage; reportage; nouveau roman; anti-novel; slam; micro poetry; and what not.

In India, a similar watershed moment was witnessed in the year 2013. The Kolkata-based Kiriti Sengupta -- a successful dental surgeon with tapering fingers and soulful eyes of an artist/singer -- whose debut as a poet inaugurated a new kind of writing that balances between belle-letters and profound meditations, in a single breath; the seamless and gentle oscillations -- linguistic, emotive, psychological, philosophical, mundane -- triggered by a word, memory, event or thing; the  young talent coming incognito and then becoming a new sensation in a staid place. In 2013, The Unheard I announced the arrival of an impatient writer about to engage work as a demolition man by breaking stereotypes and sweeping away existing barriers via his multi-layered works hard to classify. The 64-page slim book made Sengupta famous and his mellifluous voice heard across the English-speaking world in a few fast months. Since then, his rise has been meteoric; tone critical; gaze restless; style, iconoclastic. Be it wine or earthen flute or water or pen, every element/item/object leads to reflection and perhaps -- salvation.

An engaged reader, thinker, critic, Kiriti, like Sartre and Camus, wants to critique the customs, rites and traditions in a post-enlightenment society. A daring task not performed by many of his well-informed and well-heeled tribe -- in this age of post-truth and Brexit. A polyglot and a dentist combine together in the latest avatar to take out the molars that hurt or are decayed in a professional manner and provide relief from pain. His scientific mind questions dogmas; his poetic heart seeks truths eternal, embedded in nature and heritage; his sensitive soul seeks out novel epistemologies to better understand the complexities of a post-modern, post-industrial, post-rational world where media and other institutions of state and democracy are suspect for being anti-99 percents and manipulate truth and distort news and revamp cleverly -- the credibility of a political class bent on closing borders, mental and physical, for power.

Salvation!

Difficult to get in such an apocalyptic world of video games; violence and volatility; hyper-reality; surrealism and a simulated-reality manufactured for media-obsessed viewers thirsting for more. Salvations are accessible through serious art. Kiriti as an artist attempts such an alternative pathway that provides inner illumination and healing -- and subtle transformations by a blend of reflection, poetry, prose and meditation via renewed syntax and words. It is a holistic experience -- reading Kiriti.

This collection of high-grade articles on Kiriti Sengupta, the outlier, maps out various contours of his varied, multi-tonal and innovative canvases. Each invited writer interprets Kiriti in a unique manner and appraises his wide universe for his global fans expertly for future research on the maverick. His writings resist nomenclature -- like the radicals listed above. They flow with the vastness of the Ganga and contain everything within its broad banks in its long journey to the sea --  individuals fusing with the collective; finite with the infinite; guys with the cosmos. The anthology has got critical essays, memoirs and reviews. It hopes to showcase an outsider to the literary world eager for new voices in a mass market. Kiriti Sengupta and his many interpreters lend that freshness only through this singular platform merging all the types of such scholarly venture in a single thread.

He is the new spring!