Lokaja Bodh: Sense/s of the Social, with Quamrul Hassan and Burhanuddin Khan Jahangir

This article explores the question of artistic taste via the art practice of Quamrul Hassan – one of first generation of artists who moved to Dhaka after independence and partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, becoming a formative figure in the making of art institutions and artistic publics in East Pakistan (Bangladesh after 1971). Foregrounding writing on Hassan by the art critic and patron of sociological art criticism in East Pakistan/Bangladesh, Burhanuddin Khan Jahangir, the article develops the concept of artistic taste via a set of overlapping vocabularies of the social, including among others, the recurring and ambivalent ideas of the public, the people, the folk, and in Hassan’s case, the rural. Drawing attention in particular, to what Jahangir called Hassan’s lokaja bodh – translatable as ‘sense of the folk’, the article argues that in Hassan’s practice, the question of taste can be read as the artist’s efforts to cultivate ‘sense/s of the social’ within artistic form – beyond registers of representation. In the shadow of decolonization, such articulations of taste carried entanglements of aesthetic and political values by developing a larger public around art.