Between 1954 and 1957, František Salaba worked as an assistant to the trade commissioner of Czechoslovakia in Bombay. Chittaprosad (who went by his first name in his professional life) and Salaba met at a rehearsal of the Little Ballet Troupe in Bombay. The Little Ballet Troupe was founded by Shanti and Gul Bardhan. Chittaprosad had designed costumes for some of their plays. The artist had a passion for puppets and stages. During the time that he worked for the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), which was formed in 1942 as part of the “cultural left”, Chittaprosad designed panels for IPTA’s performances that toured all over India with the aim of reaching the “people”. He also worked with a group of Rajasthani village puppeteers.
Salaba, while in Bombay, organised an exhibition of Czech toys and puppets of which Chittaprosad famously became very fond. Subsequently, Salaba gifted him some puppets and showed the artist how to animate them. Chittaprosad made the marionettes’ heads from empty coconut shells and Salaba then delivered a whole stage to his home in Bombay Andheri. This is how Chittaprosad founded Khelaghar, the puppet theatre through which he performed for the children of his immediate and impoverished neighborhood. In the life of the artist Chittaprosad, the Khelaghar period was a happy and promising one.
As a member of the Communist Party in India (CPI), Chittaprosad became quite popular during the Bengal famine of 1943 and 1944 by reporting and illustrating the tragedy for the CPI’s official organ, People’s War and People’s Age. After that, he lived in dire poverty, neglected and almost forgotten by India’s art world. His Czechoslovak connection therefore offered him an opportunity to stay connected internationally and to be acknowledged.
Although Chittaprosad was invited to travel to Czechoslovakia several times, he never did. While his work was shown at a number of solo exhibitions in Prague, Bratislava, Litomerice, and Brno, the artist’s engagement with this faraway socialist country can at best be called an “imaginative geography” (Wille, 2019). The puppet theatre and his Czech contacts – many of whom visited him regularly in Bombay Andheri – helped him establish a temporary territory where he could perform for those that he thought deserved it most – the slum children of his immediate neighbourhood.