Who won’t sing the praises of one’s own land of birth? That’s
the first symptom of a human being becoming numb in brain. One could be liberal
in all the possible ways but the moment he or she sings the praises of the land
of his or her birth then the person becomes a bit limited in his liberal views
on the world and its beings of all kinds. In the colonial era it was the prerequisite
of all people to fight for the freedom of their human rights and the only way
to do that to gain freedom for the place of their birth which they identified
as their nation. Had it been a finished project, the fights for human rights in
all the freed countries including India and Bangladesh wouldn’t have continued
even today. If we do not have our fundamental rights then isn’t it an absurdity
that we sing praises for the same country that curbs our basic human rights?
These are not the words of sedition but these are the thoughts that occur in my
mind when I look at the installations of Shilpa Gupta currently on in Delhi’s
Vadehra Art Gallery.
There is not a single poet in the world, especially during
the anti-colonial struggles, who hadn’t sung the praises of their land of
birth. Most of them say that their country is their mother, she is an ascetic
and she yields everything for her children who are her subjects too. Each
person holds a ‘golden god’s land’ in his nostalgic memory. Funnily enough, we
all carry a ‘devil’s land’ too in our minds. We put our country against the
devil country while the devil country does the same to us. So let’s say there
is god’s country and devil’s country. I would like to add that there is human
country too. Unfortunately human countries are the countries which are marked
as no-man’s land. What an irony it is. Shilpa Gupta’s untitled installations,
which have already travelled the important international exhibitions, present
this irony in most subtle (which is characteristic of most of the works of
Shilpa Gupta) yet powerful way. At the outset itself, let me take this
opportunity to say that if you have missed the show, you have missed a very
good show. Take it from me for I am not your soothsayer.
(Installation by Shilpa Gupta)
The story unfurls at the Indo-Bangladesh border. There is a
Coochbihar pocket and a Rangpur pocket. Based on the dominant populations in
these respective places, they were taken by India and Bangladesh based on an
agreement. In the dominant narrative of the partition of 1947 that happened at
the rich north western front of India which had resulted into the making of
India and Pakistan and also in the narrative of the present day Bangladesh that
became a part of the west Pakistan with an absolutely abandoned geographical
location from the center of power in Islamabad (or in that case Lahore or
Karachi) and a forced name like East Pakistan until it was freed by the efforts
of India’s military operation with this lofty name Mukti Bahini in 1971, mostly
the narrative of the latter has been going unnoticed. Partition stories always
pitch the pain on the north western side of India rather than poor eastern
side. For a long time, Bangladesh was under the benevolence of India’s power
until the politics in that country took an obvious religious turn. Who got
caught in between were the populations of different religions but caught in
different countries.
One fine morning you get up from your bed and someone tells
you that you are in a different country. In a recorded statement from one of the
‘chitmahals or enclaves’ where human beings who are denied of any kind of
citizenship have been living constantly putting up different physical guises
and assuming different religious identities in order to survive. A work that
shows the blurred names of people or children is presented to us by Shilpa
Gupta as a possible enrollment list in a school in such a locality. The more
you train your eyes to read the names the more they get blurred. A powerful visual
representation of a predicament in which the human beings find it extremely difficult
to have a fixed identity, this works tell us that even a wind in the night
could shift the unseen borderlines and they could be in a different place.
Shilpa says that it all depends on where exactly one stands in a given time. You
could be a Hindu in a Muslim country and vice versa without your own knowledge
or approval. This need to adjust continuously with the changing vagaries of the
border police or militia or rather the governments has given rise to a new
human race, which is neither nomadic nor settled. What name could we give to
them? Refugees? If so refugees to where?
(Installation by Shilpa Gupta)
Today the world is facing a huge refugee crisis. We have
seen powerful images of dead bodies and vessels filled with human creatures
looking for a life elsewhere and an anxiety surging in their thoughts about
their impeding deaths by water. We have seen the images of people spending in
boats without any basic facilities and imagine, continue to do so for a long
time till the intervention of the United Nations and its coaxing of reluctant
nations into host countries. The refugee problem is an outcome of the greed of
the human kind that promotes war for economic profits. Whether you agree with
it or not capitalism is something that maintains war not peace. It has to sell
its weapons and wars should be kept on. If there is war, after a period, the
peace loving people will leave their ‘beloved’ lands behind and more
importantly their ‘dignities’ behind and seek refuge elsewhere. But in Bangladesh
we see people who are not ever refugees. They cannot just move. She tells us
the story of a person who has been picked from New Delhi where he was working
and dropped in some enclave in Bangladesh. He had to bribe his way back.
Shilpa Gupta’s works do not speak in voluminous images or
texts. They are minimal and suggestive. They just gently touch you and you feel
the sharpness of that touch; you will have a love and hate relationship with
that touch. It is exactly like an old beggar touching you gently for arms. You
just hate it, but the human suffering behind that fractional contact between
two skins takes you to a different plane of human existence. You may not give a
few coins to him but he will remain in your mind for a long time; and the
touch? Use the perfumes of all Arabia you will be able to wash the feel of that
touch away. Shilpa’s works impart that feeling. The long yarn extracted from the
Jamuni sari from Kolkata, as long as the 2800 kilometer fencing at the
Indo-Bangla border is laid down in the vitrine as a gentle reminder of the dismembering
of human beauty and making yarns out of it in order to create borders between
people who are neither gods nor demons. One of the most powerful installations
here is a search light in full strength on in a tiny dark room and the moment
you enter the light blinds you for a few minutes and you grope in your utter
incomprehension about the ‘place and space’ until you get back your normal
vision and see a little video clip of a boat wandering the blue water of the Bay
of Bengal.
(Installation by Shilpa Gupta)
Shilpa’s works are not just the works inspired by the
Indo-Bangla border issues. Though the starting point was that, they transcend
their ‘thing-ness’ and ‘locational specificity’ slowly and become universal
metaphors of human beings who are without identities and even a name to qualify
them. Even Shilpa does not have a name for them. Even religions perhaps would
not accept them for the religions need people who have basic means of
sustenance and enough brain space to fight for illusionary causes like which
one came first; my religion or your religion? Here in such border there are
people who are left to fend off for themselves as religions know that they have
to fight a different war for survival so they are not interested to speak about
Allah or Ram. This is perhaps the same story as in Gaza strip. When we go
through the history of Palestine and Israel, and the strife which has been on
since the mythical times we understand that now neither Judaism nor Islam is
interested in the ongoing fight. Isn’t so absurd that you start a war to assert
your religion and slowly it becomes a diplomatic game so that people could
still fight just to live on and the countries could negotiate peace and war on
alternative seasons depending on the international arms trade. Has Islam or
Judaism won in Palestine so far?
One should go through the graphic novels of Joe Sacco
(Palestine, Footnote in Gaza, and Journalism) or those of Nicholas Wild (the
Kabul Disco series) to understand the human predicament in such war zones where
people do not real identities but some sort of cards so that they could get on
with their daily business without getting caught by the authorities. What
Shilpa Gupta does in her series of installations (we should understand that she
has been fascinated by the border issues ever since she started her mature art
career and most of the works both digital interactive types and physical
sculptural objects have this notion of border as the point of departure) which
have been done over a period of five years is akin to what Joe Sacco and
Nicholas Wild have been doing in Palestine and Afghanistan. Both Sacco and Wild
in their graphic novels speak of the parallel trades during the times of
strife. People adopt different ways to survive and also to make profit. Human
suffering is one area where profit lies; look at our entertainment industry.
And look at our television serials and the tear jerkers and comedies. They all
serve the purpose of selling consumer goods via creating desire.
(Installation by Shilpa Gupta)
Unlike television serials, in these real locations of profit
making within the human suffering, there are diversified ways that defy human
logic and even the intelligence of an efficient detective. One person speaks
(as presented by Shilpa in a minimal text and gold like metal piece as small as
a ball pen cap) of how he smuggles gold from Mumbai to Dhaka. He just gets into
the train with a tatkal ticket, sleep for three days and lands up in Bangladesh
with his booty. And the catchphrase is this: I get the best sleep of my life.
There is exhilaration, danger, suspense and death defying greed to make money
and also the perennial instinct to survive, all rolled into one in that
statement. Cattle smuggling is a punishable offence in India; eating beef could
even land you in jail. But it is a trade in Bangladesh. So there is a strong
business of cattle trade between India and Bangladesh still. The irony is the erstwhile
robbers of cattle have become the ‘traders’ in it and they just need to tell
the authorities that they happened to see this livestock wandering at the
border which is ‘flexible’ at times. An installation is created by broken China
(porcelain). It says that 59% of animal bone ash is added to the clay to get
strength and translucency to the Bangladesh porcelain). Also there is a series
of drawing made by cough syrup, which is banned in India and legal in
Bangladesh. Borders are very strong and fenced but they are porous when it
comes to human avarice; gun trotting army men and well-armed guerrillas are not
different in this matter. Passport-less human beings keep playing the game of
survival with them.
In another installation, which though does not speak of
borders directly Shilpa asks the viewer to take part in the act of
understanding the borders/walls that have been there but we generally give no
attention. Shilpa, in one of her earlier digital installations had captured the
souls/shadows of the viewers on the wall even after they moved away from the
possible locations of the cameras. Titled ‘Speaking Wall’, this work is
interactive in the sense with a small green strip for a screen on a wall in a
darkroom with a brick layered narrow path to the screen from a yellow line that
marks the ‘territory’. One has to walk over it and wear the headphone and the
screen start showing what Shilpa speaks to you over the headphone. “I have been
here. But you never saw me. One step back. One step back . ….March forward.”
Slowly you forget the surrounding and start responding to the ‘polite command
of the wall’. May be a fence too talks to you like that. May be all the walls
talk to you like that; provided you ever decide to hark on what the walls have
to say. Shilpa Gupta becomes the wall here. Whether you want to hear or not,
she speaks and speaks good.
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