The New Nation - Internet Edition

Staff Reporter

Paritosh Sen, a Bangladesh-born Indian artist, died after a short illness in Kolkata on October 24. He was 90..

The artist was admitted to hospital with respiratory problems last month and had been on a life support system.

His autobiographical book 'Zindabahar', named after the Zindabahar Lane of the Capital City Dhaka, where he once resided, depicted the life of the then Bangladesh.

Paritosh Sen was born in Dhaka, in Bangladesh, in 1918 in a noted Kabiraj family. The world of nature, colour, movement fascinated him from his childhood as is clear from his collection of autobiographical vignettes, Zindabahar Lane, named after his Dhaka address. After completing school, Sen ran away from home to join the Madras Art School headed by Devi Prosad Roy Chowdhury.

In the early '60s, he went to England and France. He was commissioned by the French government to design Bengali typography based on the script of Rabindranath Tagore.

During his stay in Baltimore in USA he used the English translation of a piece from Zindabahar Lane called. A Tree in My Village and made a folio-sized publication from it. It was a stimulating experiment where he wrote and illustrated the piece in ink on sensitised paper which acted as a negative and thereby escaped the use of negative film.