Absence and Presence: Places and personalities where a communist can still dream by Swapan Nayak

The Communist Party of India was founded in Kanpur on 26 December 1925. To mark its centenary, Kolkata photographer Swapan Nayak travelled across eleven states: West Bengal, Tripura, Bihar, Odisha, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Maharashtra and Punjab. He went looking for the people and places where the communist dream is still alive.

The project began in 2022 with a personal portrait. Nayak photographed Comrade Ajit Basu, the 91-year-old former principal of his village secondary school in West Bengal and a pioneer of Bengal’s Teachers’ Movement. From there, Absence and Presence grew into a pan-Indian record built around three threads:

• Living testimonies. Intimate black-and-white portraits of senior CPI pioneers, including:
  • Chalasani Jagannadha Rao, a veteran of the Telangana armed struggle
  • Nalluri Venkateswarlu, who revived Praja Natya Mandali, the Andhra Pradesh unit of IPTA
  • trade unionist and former MLA Manam Anjaneyulu
  • Karuna Sengupta of the National Federation of Indian Women
  • lifelong cadre Monishi Mohan Nandi
• Tangible and intangible remnants. Party offices and their interiors, old journals, statues and memorials. These include the Lenin statue in Vijayawada, the memorial to Chandra Rajeswar Rao, and Bhupesh Bhavan in Kolkata.
• Pan-India exploration. The landscapes, faces and everyday traces of a movement that has shaped the country’s political conscience.

Each portrait has a short biography alongside it. An introductory history traces the CPI from the anti-colonial struggle through the post-Independence decades. Nayak writes as both an insider and an observer: his own early link to communism shaped his practice as an artist. The book is a photobook, a historical archive and a meditation on what endures. It is dedicated to the Indian communist activists whose sacrifices and belief in a just society continue to inspire generations.

Published with the support of K.S. Radhakrishnan and the Musui Art Foundation, Santiniketan.