Jogen Chowdhury, who passed away recently after a long fight with cancer, was a preeminent painter of his generation, a teacher and an institution builder. He was born in 1939 into a zamindar family in Faridpur, now in Bangladesh. Forced to flee to Calcutta after Partition, the family was displaced and broken, and he fell from an existence of rural comfort to a penurious life in a refugee colony. It was traumatic, but inspired by the communists, of whom his brother was one, it led him to social and political activities as well as poetry rather than despair.