States » EastPosted at: Oct 26 2026 6:15PM


Bengal: Celebrated painter Jogen Chowdhury’s legacy lives on in Jhargram’s ‘Village of Dreams’

Jhargram, Oct 26 (UNI) Although celebrated painter Jogen Chowdhury never visited Jhargram’s Khwab Gaon, the hand-drawn logo he created for the tribal art initiative in 2018 remains its identity, reflecting his belief that great art could thrive beyond galleries and city studios.
With Chowdhury's passing, artists and cultural workers associated with Khwab Gaon — the "Village of Dreams" — remember a mentor who quietly nurtured their work from Kolkata, encouraging rural artists, helping mobilise funds and lending his name to an experiment that transformed a forest village into a living canvas.
Deep inside the forests of Jhargram, Lalbazar is home to the Lodha-Shabar community. The village was renamed Khwab Gaon by noted litterateur Shivaji Bandyopadhyay, and Chowdhury gave that dream its visual identity.
Sitting at his Charubasana — Jogen Chowdhury Centre for Arts — in south Kolkata, the artist drew the logo in black ink, weaving together the sun, moon, trees and hills around the Bengali words "Khwab Gaon". That emblem soon became inseparable from the initiative itself.
The journey began around 2018 under the Kolkata-based Chalachitra Academy, which envisioned art as a tool for social development and sustainable livelihoods in tribal villages.
"Khwab Gaon was never just about painting walls," said academy secretary Mrinal Mondal. "Jogen-da remained connected with our work, encouraged young artists and helped us whenever support was needed."
According to Mondal, Chowdhury also facilitated fundraising through the sale of Dokra artefacts produced at workshops in Kolkata, helping sustain activities in the villages despite never visiting Jhargram himself.
Today, Khwab Gaon is unlike an ordinary village. Almost every mud house doubles as an art installation.
Walls painted afresh every year bloom with colourful scenes of everyday life — grazing goats, tribal dances, farmers in orchards and children at play. Rural aspirations and artistic imagination merge across courtyards and pathways, turning the settlement into what visitors often describe as an open-air gallery.
Between 2018 and 2022, Lalbazar served as the initiative's principal studio. The movement later spread to neighbouring villages, including Uranshol, Gangadharpur and Konedoba in the Radhanagar area, where Lodha, Kora, Santhal and Kurmi communities live.
Uranshol, about six kilometres away, is now following the same model, aiming to become another Village of Dreams built around creative livelihoods.
Anjali Kisku, a local resident said, “The project created more than murals. Children began learning drawing through community workshops. Adults experimented with sculpture, while women took up quilting. Exhibition spaces were opened where local artefacts found buyers beyond the village.”
One craft that gained renewed momentum was Katumkutum, the distinctive art form popularised by Abanindranath Tagore, in which figures are fashioned from twigs, roots, leaves and pieces of wood gathered from the forest. The craft has since emerged as a source of income for several villagers.
The initiative also drew the support of eminent sculptor K S Radhakrishnan, whose engagement with tribal communities complemented its broader artistic vision.
For artists Sumi Kisku, Susmita Kisku, Sayan Ahir and Swastika Bhakta, Chowdhury's death is deeply personal. The logo he left behind is no longer merely the face of their organisation; it is the memory of a master artist who chose to stand beside a remote tribal village and its dream of making art a pathway to dignity and livelihood.
In Jhargram's Village of Dreams, Jogen Chowdhury's lines continue to outlive the artist — not inside a museum, but across walls that are repainted every year, carrying forward a dream he helped shape with a single drawing.
Notably, the legendary artist passed away on Sunday, October 25, 2026, at the age of 87 in a private hospital in Kolkata following a prolonged illness.
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