Breaking The Glass Ceiling

Debjani Das

Interview by C. VanWinkle
February 14, 2024

Would you please begin by telling me about the prompt you responded to?

It was a photograph of Barbie in a glass jar. It had a number of miniature figurines standing around, watching from outside. They were quite short compared to Barbie. There was no formal title, so it’s was just the large Barbie in a big jar. That was the prompt.

What did it mean to you? What was your first impression?

The first impression for me was women’s beauty. It was a beautiful woman but confined to a glass jar. That's the initial feeling I had looking at it. She’s impeccable, she's perfect. Every feature, her hair, her pristine white clothes, everything; as if she is the epitome of fashion and beauty. But more than focusing on her, I was not comfortable with the her depiction  as an exhibition, with a number of  people  just watching her beauty. I got my response straight away and knew what I needed to do. I had to break the jar. 

Of course! How did you get started? Can you walk me through your process?

I did some studies. I scribbled some notes. Initially, I started drawing more of a cartoon character, like Wonder Woman breaking the glass. My focus was to represent it as if she was a symbol of a modern woman who still is in a box, the barriers, the shackles, in the form of this jar, and she is able to break it. But how do I show that? At first, I was breaking the bottle from the middle, so I have a picture where it’s cracked and the top part is falling down, but I didn't quite like that. I still think the boxes are there. It has not fallen apart yet.

At the moment, I am learning an art style called “Alpona”. It was famous stream of art in the undivided Bengal of past century. Women used it in their houses for worshipping, to beautify an area where they were going to put the God on an altar. Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel laureate and social reformer from Bengal, and his institution, Shantiniketan, subsequently elevated Alpona to a modern style art. Tagore, Nandalaal Basu, and a few other visionaries from that renaissance age made it more contemporary. The art is now used in interior design, or for important meetings or inauguration days. 

I started looking into that to come up with the study that formed the first cut. Rather than going in the cartoonist way, I decided I wanted to create my own signature. I needed to go to my roots and see whether I can design Wonder Woman in Alpona. That’s where I looked for inspiration.

It's gorgeous. I never realized before that what the world has been missing is an Indian Wonder Woman.

There are number of them in the world at the moment.  Indira Nooyi (former CEO of Pepsi), Leena Nair (global CEO of Chanel), Priyanka Chopra, to name a few.  Indian women are going places. But this is my Wonder Woman in Indian art form. 

Literally breaking a glass ceiling.

After doing the first study, I realized I needed to make her larger. If you look at the photo, Barbie is quite small compared to the jar and the people are really small. In my piece, she's mighty and she’s filling up the whole jar. She's thrusting up, she's jumping on her feet and breaking the glass, which has a lot in common with my own career. I am a software engineer/architect in a very male-dominated space. When I came to the UK from India, I was coding. My jar was huge and I was small. Around me it was mostly men, so I had to break many boxes to reach where I am now. Coming from an Indian culture, I had to make accommodations to fit in. I had to learn to understand football jokes, because people in the UK are crazy about football. [laughs] It was breaking a box already just being a woman who writes software code. So there’s a box of the male/female disparity, and the Indian/non-Indian box.

Right now, I do solution architecture and I’ve led a team of 40 people. So in a way I’ve had to break many conventional barriers. Many of them were invisible, but I had to break them to come to this position. So that also represents that women on a day-to-day are breaking those shields very silently to reach their dreams or to become that mighty wonder that they want to be, in any field. 

Ahh, knowing that about your background, it’s no surprise that your instinct was to have this woman punch her way out of there.

Somebody else might have interpreted it in a completely different way, but that was my thought. 

I think that it's so important and I’m glad it's personal. I don’t know Alpona artwork. What materials did you use to make this?

It's a black art paper. The pencil drawing was first and then it's plain white poster color with a 00 brush. For this style, I  had to imagine that these are drawn by people in the village for worship. Most of the paintings were originally done with rice paste, so the predominant color is always white, and they paint with their hands. Because in the villages they use other vegetarian colors, the colors are muted. I cannot make fluorescent colors or flashy red, green, or blue. I have to tone down the color. They would be using kaolin in the villages, which gives a muted white color, or materials from the quarry such as iron zinc oxide, so very dull reds, burnt sienna, or yellow ochre. These are the colors we need to use parallel to white. 

If you look at the trousers she’s wearing, they are ornamented with blue, but I have toned down the blue with a bit of black and white so it would look muted. Even the red that I used for her scarf is burnt sienna with a bit of black, so it’s not bright red. That’s the Alpona style. The predominant color is the white lines, and you fill it out with, at most, four muted colors. Not more than that.

How does this piece relate to the rest of your work? Do you use this style often?

I’ve been learning Alpona art this past year from Mr. Sudhi Ranjan Mukherjee. He is a professor at Bishva Bharati University in India, set up by Rabindranath Tagore. I finished the junior batch first and then I joined the senior batch. For the last year, I’ve been learning this style as an artform, but I used to do it in my childhood, too. I’d do it at home or in my father's office, whenever there would be any particular worshipping. We’re Hindu who do idol-worship, and for special occasions I would also decorate the floor with this art. I did that a lot growing up, but now I’m learning it more as a contemporary art form and representing an idea with those intricate scrolls. There are definitive scrolls we use; you could say they are the building blocks. If you look at the pattern on her trousers, those scrolls are individual items, and you need to learn to build the blocks on top of it. 

Since my childhood, I have painted a lot in the Indo-British styles of watercolor. I've done many paintings of flora and fauna, lots of greetings, black cards, scenery of snow and the winter lands in the UK. They're really pretty and very classically British, with a very limited color palette and understated work. You paint very loosely and leave it to your viewer’s imagination. But for the last year I’ve been occupied with this particular art style.

I see. I appreciate that you were so excited to participate in Bait/Switch again. Is this an escape for you?

This is a very pleasant, very liberating experience for me, and I am supremely thankful to Bait/Switch for giving me the opportunity. It's a platform where I can very constructively express myself. I feel so well supported, meaning that when I submitted my piece, it was accepted the first time. Last time I did this, Lu told me that there is never bad art because art is a creation. That was so liberating for me because of the nature of the work that I’m coming from. The software field is very critical because they have rigid rules. Things are binary. It’s zero or it’s one. If you’re coding, it’s either wrong or right. So it’s logical, and boundary- and box-based work. You have best practices and you have boundaries, whereas in this particular experience, there's no boundary. There's no bad art. You express yourself in whatever medium you want. When I was working on my first Bait/Switch piece, I asked Lu, “What colors should I use? What materials should I use?” They said, “Do whatever you want,” and that was very liberating. Basically, go ahead and explore your world.

Expressing yourself constructively in a safe place is so liberating, and I get to show my work and my thought process to thousands of people. We’re in the age of social media where people are counting likes and views. I’m reaching out to a lot of people, and maybe in one corner of world, some girl is coding too, expressing her ideas, and making some difference. That's very comforting. 

That’s beautiful. And you’re so free to do what you want, you even made something very different from what you made last time. That piece was colorful and bright and joyous, and this piece is much heavier, intense and dark. How did these experiences compare?

In my previous piece, to draw an analogy with music, I did a mix on a classical art form. You know, you have a sitar or a guitar or a tabla piece, but it’s mixed with some electronic equipment or with different styles, with the base of a classical Raga. I mixed a lot of loud colors and styles, but this new piece represents that art form correctly. Alpona is normally done on a muted or dark background because that was the color of the hut walls, the mud houses in the villages. And as I mentioned, the palette would be only four colors. So compared to the last piece, this one is more restricted in terms of materials, but you’re still liberated to express whatever you want to celebrate using Alpona art. The more you learn, the more wonders you can create with a limited palette. 

I’m learning so much from this conversation! Now that you are a two-time Bait/Switch contributor, what is your advice for a new person getting their prompt today?

Do a couple of studies, maybe two or three, before going into the final piece. It would help you to look into different perspectives, a different color chart, different things that you have thought of, if time permits. I prepared three studies before coming to this final. So that’s one thing. 

The second thing is to take somebody else's viewpoint. Normally you don't want to because you don't want anybody else's ideas to influence your thought process. But if you want to, you could get maybe a family member’s perspective. What did they think of the prompt that would give you a different perspective? Last time, my prompt was poetry and I just read it myself 20 times. But after my piece was published, my very British neighbours read the poem and found a different angle. They were thinking that the piece should have been more on a school background. It made sense, but I didn’t think of that before I did the piece. So if you want to and if time permits, taking suggestions or clues from somebody else could also be a good idea. 

Call Number: Y120VA | Y122VA.daBre

A software lead by profession, a mixed media artist by addiction Debjani Das is from Great Britain of Indian Origin, who is passionate about South Asian folk painting style named Alpana. She lives in the UK and works in Data and Analytics division of a renowned local Bank. She is proficient in glass paintings, water colour techniques, acrylics on textiles and she finds no division or boundaries but limitless opportunities in the realm of Art and Craft in comparison to all other sectors of life.