Chandan Kumar Bhattacharya

Who is Chandan Kumar Bhattacharya?

Vattacharja Chandan, is a bilingual writer, poet, composer and mail artist. He was born in 1944 in the small town of Tamluk, which was the ancient Indian port of Tamralipta in West Bengal. Chandan came to Kolkata after finishing his high-school studies at Tamluk Hamilton High School. After graduating from Asutosh College, he obtained his master of arts degree in political science from the University of Calcutta. He hoped to become an experimental scientist like Jagadish Chandra Bose, Newton or Edison. Although Chandan did not accomplish this, he expresses his love of experimentation in art and literature.

In 1968 and for several years thereafter, he participated in poetry readings at the Saturday open-air MuktaMela fairs at the Kolkata Maidan grounds with other contemporary poets like Tushar Roy, Rabindra Bhattacharya, Bablu Roy Choudhury, Satya Ranjan Biswas, Pranab Basu Ray, Samar Bandyopadhyay and Abu Atahar; this taught him how to perform his poetry in later life. It was the launch-pad where he could mobilize his associates when, after editing a few hand-written magazines, he was trying to begin a new literary movement. At the MuktaMela he discovered Dilip Gupta, Ashis Deb and Shukla Mazumder, with whom he launched the Prakalpana Movement in Bengali literature with the countercultural magazine Swatotsar in 1969.