The Afterlife of Silence- Still Lifes of Jogen Chowdhury

The Afterlife of Silence is the first-ever comprehensive book on the still life of one of India's leading modern painters. The book takes a close look at the essentials of the European tradition of still life painting and argues that Jogen Chowdhury's works, while sharing certain common concerns of the tradition also differ significantly from it, and are firmly rooted in his indigenous situatedness. It explores how, in his still life, unregarded, everyday objects are irradiated with new life and unique relational possibilities. It also examines how his still life oscillate between life and death, between stillness and animation, a movement that conceptually underpins the cycle of nature and lived life, and how moments of silence and stillness acquire afterlives with trails of significations that often go beyond the context of particular artworks.

Anuradha Ghosh (b.1969) is Associate Professor in English at Dinabandhu Andrews College, Kolkata. A student of Presidency College, she began her career as a journalist with Business Standard and Ananda Bazar Patrika, before joining her present position in 1996.

Her publications include Kothay Kothay Jai (1993), a co-authored volume of Bangla poems; Bonbungalowr Nijer Jibon (2010), a volume of Bangla poems; Myths, Skyborne (2012), a collection of her English translation of Tariq Sujat's poetry; and Memory Unfolds (2009), a monograph on the artist Samindranath Majumdar. Her co-authored volume The Great Journey of Shapes: Collages of Nandalal Bose (2015) is the first-ever close analysis of the collages of the celebrated artist. Her latest book was Hemendranath Mazumdar (2016). She has spoken and written extensively on art and aesthetics and cultural studies.

**Contents and Sample Pages**