houseHOLD

One day Akansha Rastogi called me for a visit at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) and expressed her wish to call some performance artists asking to use the museum space for a series of performances. She somehow felt my ongoing project "Disposable House" would be a better idea to start up with. The spatial experience inside the museum is amazing that could easily provoke a performer like me. Akansha named the series  "Inhabiting the Museum" and I agreed to take up the starting venture and the process started. 

Throughout the year i have been initiating multiple projects in collaboration with other artists in various parts of the country. So i took the opportunity to explore this new space. Here is a set of questions that instantly popped up in my mind, like, why the 'disposable house' should come inside a museum? Leave the "Disposable House" theme, why a performance inside a museum? 

On a very personal note: I never could fully enjoy a museum. I never have completed seeing a museum from A to Z. Walking across a museum space makes me exhausted, makes me bored and tired. Here i remember the way Ramkinkar Baij called the museum a dead space: "...You only told to move out the post-graduate hostel from the Black House and to make it a museum.  What the use of it? Instead of lying as a dead museum, the stream of life is flowing there. That's good. After all life is important." (Mahashay Ami Chakkhik Rupokar Matro, collection of Ramkinkar Baij's writings and interviews, edited by Sandipan Bhattacharya, Published by Manchasha, 2002, page 59).

Before going to the details of the process or the experience let me put a bit more about the anticipating thoughts. We call a museum "Jadu-ghar" (that is magic-house) in Assamese. That means Museum is a house. Again, while saying museum, we recall a process of museumization.

The 'house' in an individual's memory is always in a process of museumization: we 'memorize' the house/home, we associate value to it, we mythify it.

Formally speaking, my first ambiguity was which manner to take up the venture, in a more theatrical way (what I always prefer) or to go for a precise visual based 'performance-art' way? As a first step i tentatively fixed a name for it "houseHOLD", "house" in small letters and "HOLD" with all Capitals. this HOLD contains three interpretations: firstly, household in literal sense. I'm using household in multiple references from Sufi and Deha-tatwa Fakiri songs, in the way the medieval saints-poets define the inner self as household. Simultaneously the actor's body as the house to dwell the art. secondly, HOLD as in literal sense, to hold, to grasp something. Thirdly, hold referring time to hold. The museum holds a time. This last interpretation connects very much with the note that Akansha Rastogi prepared: ‘Inhabiting the Museum – a series of performances’ invites artists to negotiate with the different times that co-exist in a museum space: the performer’s time, the viewer’s time, the artworks’ time and the museum’s own notion of time. To perhaps create situations of extended duration within the museum space, to be the catalyst or the subject of that spent/mapped/fatigued duration.

Noteworthy is that, this "Museum" resides inside a Mall "Southcourt Mall" Saket, Delhi. It is a very interesting thing to observe that the notion of time defined by a "Mall" and defined by a "Museum" is utterly oppositional. The Mall is existent only on the contemporaneity and temporality of time. Whereas the museum tries to surpass the temporal momentariness of time. For the Mall, time is ephemeral. Contrarily, the museum tries to deal with some timelessness. This is one more interesting thing for what i was fascinated with this particular space. 

However, I took up the project as another venture of my Disposable Theatre for some reason, to disturb the sophisticated and overpowering space of the MUSEUM. There are highly attributed and costly art works on the floor and on the walls, including 7 crore Bharati Kher and 16 crore Razas. My presence in the space with my ephemeral and temporal, and low cost (almost "no cost") practices along with lesser sophistication would really create some disturbances. I worked with zero remuneration. The budget I made was not approved. I got no advance from the initiators or the authorities (but I had to give advance to all my workers). In fact, the fact is, up-to this moment of starting writing this note, when the performance was over days back, I am getting no phone calls, no SMS, no hope of money. I think this is a good gesture. I know i should not talk this way, once I wrote money is needed in some other place, and in return I got a lesson of MORALITY: why we should not bother about money and should put ourselves into struggle only. Anyways, things just happen. art happens. Just like, shit happens.

***

Now let us enter the space.

You are a visitor/spectator/ participator/ audience/ reader/ listener/ receiver/ bystander.

Step 01:

Interactive Activity: Potato Stamp

You come to KNMA for the performance "houseHOLD" a Disposable Theatre Performance. Before the entrance you got a stamp on your waist: an engraved print made by a Potato cut. This is a gesture that you see while entering a Pub or dance bar, but here you are getting with a Potato, a very much household thing, something from the everyday ordinariness. 

Step 02:

Installation/ Interactive activity : "Take Home" or "Wish Fulfillment Houses"

Just entering the reception room of KNMA, you see a huge number of house-structured packaging boxes. Some gift items, in shape of Homes/houses, with multiple notes, references, and visuals and you are asked to put your wish in one of them. This are Take Home houses, you can take one house to your home as a gift at the end of the performance. These are also "Wish Fulfillment Houses". You got to put your wish in them, as if that is the ritual by which your wish would be fulfilled. (note that in various parts of the country such ritualistic practices are available, where you have to tie up a thread on a temple or a holy stone or on a tree trunk expecting a process of wish-fulfillment.) Interestingly, at the end of the performance you will be carrying a House with a wish, not necessarily your own wish but someone else's perhaps. That means, you put your wish to some house, but you will be carrying some other house, where some other person put his or her wish. Thus it is an interactive activity, a process where the art goes person to person, home to home. A connection is made from the museum space to the PUBLIC SPHERE.  

Step 03:

Video Installation

http://www.youtube.com/user/kankhowa?feature=mhee#p/u/4/ynRwjdbyZy8 

http://www.youtube.com/user/kankhowa?feature=mhee#p/u/7/xhqiPtw5464

http://vimeo.com/33798510 

Now you very obviously encounter two video monitors displaying three videos on the wall of the reception cabin. Video one: an animation done with the song "Little Boxes" by Pete Seeger that goes very much with my ongoing House project. Video two: "Storied House", a wall-painted stop motion animation film in the old city of Ahmedabad, project initiated by Mahan Jyoti Dutta. (note that: I was presenting another proposal of wall-animation to FICA as a public art project, and in my first interview with FICA's  Vivan Sundaram as a jury I was suggested to take up the wall animation thing). Video three: "Ancient Stone", a docu-fiction, again by Mahan Jyoti Dutta as a diploma project of National Institute of Design where the daily activities of an elephant in the city was documented. This film captures some everyday nuances with shifting stuffs, people's reaction to the elephant in the city, and the crisis of the elephant in front of the modern day transportation vehicles.

Step 04:

Here are very nonsense activities going on to increase the interactions between the actors and the spectators.

Step 05:

Spatial Installation - Kankhowa's House

Sound Installation - Purvaranga.

Anandalahari or Khamak, a traditional instrument used by Bauls and Fakirs of Bengal is being played by Sandip Samaddar (Pantu) to start up a ritual beginning. Bhumit Taunk, Nobel Singha and Manideep Paul three contemporary musicians collaborate the music in a fusion, and create a soundscape to energize the entire space.

Step 06:

Spatial Installation - in search of the private space within the cityscape

Simultaneously the spotlight is on an installation of three tin trunks and some card board boxes, they resembles an urban cityscape. As the Purvaranga concert starts, three women actors drag three boxes, caress them for a while. Then they open the boxes and pull out cloths and other household stuffs and go in. Now you got to see the painted bottoms of the boxes, some very interior moments. (painters: Anuradha Upadhyaya, Daina Mahapatra, Samudra Kajal Saikia). Its is a self complete journey from the outer view of cityscape to the interior of an individual.

Step 07:

Atithi-Varan/ Avyarthana

Anuradha Upadhyaya, an actor offers a rose to the audience, not from a flower vase but from a pressure cooker, a gift to welcome the 'atithi', household guests.

Step 08:

Griha-pravesh

Pantu is sitting in front of a HOUSE structure blocking the entry gate. I asked him to open the space for all. He says, "my house is locked and the key of it is being grasped by some 'other..." then he starts singing, it is a song from Lalon Fakir. he enters the space, we follow him to the museum.

Step 09:

Household soundscape

An orchestration, rather a soundscape with sounds made with some household objects like utensils, water drums, food containers, buckets and so on, goes on inside to develop your curiosity. A curtain raiser event. It is a visual installation as well as a sound installation with ordinary household objects inside the very museum interior.

Step 10:

Spatial Installation - The Tent House

Here you see a tent house, a roadside tent-house made up with the real estate advertisements of buying, selling and renting houses.

Step 11:

The Subjective actors: House arrest 

Five actors playing beats on buckets define the acting space and sits on the buckets to make a physical presence. All actors, one by one, introduce and speak up for the self with own subjective identity. The theatrical part starts with the recital of the text:

The roof of Kankhowa’s house leaks

Thousands of eyes from the evening sky

Keep staring at me

I cannot go out

I cannot stay in

a choreograph goes on in the background, where 4 women actors are haunted by some reminiscences and memories. Then the Actor sings a Baul song (if i could call him in a proper way/ won't be he staying so far away/ I got no response/ even after calling so desperately/ I do realize now, I couldn't call him in a proper way).

Step 12:

I am an actor

A gypsy concert is being played in background.

the actor pulls out a slip of paper and recites:

I am an actor. Very limited my abilities are.

It’s been a long time I left home for my studies,

I know a lot of you share the same story.

But as an actor I dwell in this particular body.

This body of mine is my house.

Wherever I go, I carry this house with me.

Or, say, this mobile house brings me within it.

I cannot get out of this house.

If I do, I’m no more an actor.

Sometimes I feel neither can I enter in this house of mine.

You might laugh at my words,

But these things have always disturbed me.

If acting is an art, I transform this very body to an art object,

and present it in front of you.

My dear audience, look, please look at me,

even now I am doing the same thing.

Right now I cannot go out of this space even if I wish to,

I cannot go and take a nap,

I cannot go out for some tea.

Step 13:

Spatial Installation - The Magic Almirah, Property and the Thief

There is an almirah, with a lot of cloths messed up on the floor. Two actors try to clean up the room as guests are there in front of them. But the almirah has an opening on the back of it. As a result, whatever they put in the almirah, they fall back. Thus it is a never ending process. The messed up household never get cleaned up actually.

Gradually there develops some funny and nonsense activities regarding thief and household. A hyper theatrical moment with hyper physical acting.

Step 14:

Buy me. Purchase me.

Sometimes I wish if I were a barber

And give you a hair cut

And if I could make some money out of it.

I am an actor with limited abilities.

I know very little things, very little things I can do

I cannot fly kites,

I cannot drive,

I cannot play a dotara,

I love you so much without even knowing you

I don’t know how much I will love you after I see you.  I hardly can assume

I don’t know how to write a poem.

It would have been better if I were a farmer.

Or a retailer of garments.

To sale my goods and make money.

Buy me. Purchase me. I am for sale. I am a commodity.

It would have been better if I were a painter.

I would have painted and made money.

But I am just an actor. A performer.

I turn my body to an work. I don't make art. This body of mine is an object of art.

Buy me, I want to make some money.

Buy me.

Purchase me.

I don’t have a house that I can sell and make money.

I cannot rent a house to dwell in.

I carry a house, my body, all the time.

the actor recites. other actors come and attach advertisements, and house-as-property promotional statements to the actor's body. thus the body of the actor gets restricted.

Step 15:

Displacement

Now here is a time to move from the space. The actors push the almirah to a different space, singing:

is sehar mein rehne ko bhi jagah nahin jami nahin

ghar basa ne ki umeedon ki bhi dekhon koyi kami nahin

na ashiyana na ashikana

yah baat kuch jami nahin

haya re haya haya re haya....

There is no space, no land to live in this city

But there is no dearth of wishes to build a house.

no roof over your head, no love,

i just could not get this thing.

Step 16:

There is an elephant in the House

Pushing the household, now you cross a space where the big life-size elephant, entitled as "The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own" by Bharati Kher is lying. Today the elephant is inside a mosquito net. The elephant is exhausted, and lying on ground which always reminded me of the household woman. Again while using the mosquito nets i remembered an Assamese riddle: Gharar bhitorot ghar, tate somay dhorphorai mor. (there is a house inside the house, be inside and die, what is it? answer: a mosquito net).

The video there displayed in the reception counter "Ancient Stone" also somehow can engage a spectator. Other than that we see a connection of house construction and elephant.

See this poem for our further engagements:

Elephants and House

Step 17:

I exit in, I enter out

A mirror act happens, with a tension between the physical self and the conceptual self, between the image and the object. Spatially speaking, this event happens in front of a Raza painting, with sharp shadows on it. A recital in blues goes in background that connects the labyrinth of multiple selves as celebrated the medieval sufi saints.

There is somebody else dwelling inside my house.

Neither I can see nor can I touch, beyond of my knowledge.

Though I hardly know his name, I can feel his grief.

We stay in the same house, but we are far apart.

No postman ever came, in search of him.

The telephone never rang for him.

I mostly buy vegetables for him as well

When I do it for me, I care for him.

.

I cannot lock my house while going out

Since he never comes out of the house.

He never sleeps properly like someone suffering from asthma.

Because of him I too wake up many times during the night.

The moment I play the ektaara, you pick up the percussion

But who's there to  play the false notes, I can't guess.

You prepare the color and I paint the canvas with passion

But who is there to make it a mess?[1]

I go in and come out all the time

Looking for him,

I go in and come out, go in and come out.

And a time comes when I don’t know, if I am inside or outside.

I exit in, I enter out.

Step 18:

the Actor: the Mirror: the interior

Do you remember, you shot a seagull?

song: Majh nisha mor endhar ghorot, by Parvati Prasad Baruah, popularized by Bhupen Hazarika

Sahiba Vij, the actor takes on the actor's Preparation. She compiles three characters from Macbeth's Lady Macbeth, Anton Chekov's Nina from Seagull and Savitri from Mohan Rakesh's Adhe Adhure, and explores the pain and pleasure,  agony and ecstasy of the actorship. It was a striking moment when she puts her lower garments down, and gets very personal on the way.

I am an actor. Before and after being an actor, I am a spectator.

I see, I can see,

It is important that I should see.

I have to see other people looking at me.

Therefore, if I am an actor,

there are many spectators inside me, They share the house with me.

That is why I am confused, how many people live in my house.

I lose myself in my own house.

My house is so full of people that I cannot enter my own house. 

I remember Lalon Fakir. I remember Kabir.

Step 19:

There is a house inside the house

Here is a half done structure with electric wiring pipes. You can join and unjoin the structure, again a public interactive activity. While reciting the text the actors remove their make ups and gets back to their selves.

Text recital:

Dear,

Amongst the crowd I do search for you.

There is a house inside the house.

And there is a house in the house that is again inside the house.

And there is a house in the house that is inside the house of that house.

And there is a house inside the house of that house which is inside the house of that house which is again inside the house of another house….

And then another house inside the…

I don’t know which house you live in. where do you inhabit.

I enter a house looking for you and you enter another house,

I enter another house and you go inside a different one.

Thus I spend my days.

It’s been a long time I’m neither inside the house, nor outside actually

I don’t know how many houses are there inside my house.

I don’t even know who built this house.

I just know that you are there somewhere

You are there.

With a constant stare.

Now here is a congregational space provided where you can participate in the activity, or got a space to just roam around. A music jamming started with no defined time limit.

Again, as proposed by the strategies of the Disposable Theatre, there is no Curtain Call. There is no end. Theatre does not end. Cannot be concluded. theatre is a process. A continuum of experience.

***

About the Disposable Theatre:

The Disposable Theatre takes place only once in a life time and it disposes all its possibilities at once. The text could be repeated but the form and the execution pattern changes according to the time-and-space. In one sense, the concerns around time-and-space anticipated The Disposable Theatre and it always privilege the performance over the text. By doing that the Disposable Theatre makes a critique on the contemporary cultural practices.

The basic concerns of the Disposable Theatre of Kankhowa are:

• The Disposable Theatre of KanKhowa is rooted into some discomfort with the ongoing practices and some disciplinary queries. Where the spaces are constantly shifting in a rapid manner due to globalization and cross-culturalism, as a practitioner of theatre-arts we are bound to think about - what would be appropriate/suitable language for theatre.

• The Disposable Theatre explores the scope and limitations of the interdisciplinary practices. The Disposable Theatre works in the Interface of the institutional space and the larger public domain, the Interface of the public and the private, the Individual and collective, the interface of the conventional and the radical, the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘alternative’, the ‘local’ and the ‘multicultural’, and definitely in the Interface of theory and praxis.

• Working with the interfaces Disposable Theatre undergoes a constant shift in its works. The proposal for a Disposable Theatre is by and for him, who shifts space.

• The Disposable Theatre rejects the notion of a “product” to deliver from a creator’s side to the spectator’s side since it constitutes a give-and-take power relationship.

• An actor of Disposable Theatre simply rejects to enact. S/he waits for something to happen at a particular time and space. Actors of Disposable Theatre mostly prefer to confront, not with an imposed ego, mannerist method-acting or masculine showmanship, but with the ordinariness of our ‘everyday’.

• The Disposable Theatre problematizes the narcissistic disorder is commonly seen in the actor’s training in the mainstream national theatre. In Disposable Theatre actors are put in a more inward journey, from the self to the inner self.

• The Disposable Theatre can take place anywhere, inside an academic institution, an art gallery, a market place, a village fair, a national auditorium and so on.

• You cannot “do” Disposable Theatre; it “happens” or “takes place”. What you can do is initiation. The Disposable Theatre happens in a relationship of the performer and the spectator, and hence it can be repeated neither in the same space, nor in any other space. The Disposable Theatre is always site specific. Truly ephemeral. The performing space determines the nature of the performance, and hence, there is no pre-determined acting method. Actors are ready to confront with their own identity.

• Spectators in The Disposable Theatre are not asked to switch off their mobile phones, neither are they restricted to any definitive seat-arrangement. Spectators in The Disposable Theatre are always free to move around, take a physical position, and have a perspective, from where s/he can have a look.

• The spectators are free to move around, speak out, receive a mobile call, and take a yawn or hiccup. Audience as a constantly moving crowd remains the most organic part of the happening.

• The performance and the circumstance turns to the text, as the performance gets over, the text are collapsed. Everything is disposed, only a memory remains in the Disposable Theatre.

• Disposable Theatre adopts a theory of no resistance. KanKhowa resists nothing.

• The process of Disposable Theatre starts at the moment you think of doing it. …

• Essentially the arts of performance and theatre need a process, a continuum of exchanging experience. The creator-author-artist-centered modernist discourses maintained a hegemony which so far exiled the spectator from its location.

• Only the DISPOSABLE THEATRE, a theatre that takes place in between the ordinary everyday and the phenomenal one, a theatre that is built up with the “body of the spectator” instead of the “actor” can claim itself a theatre of our times.

Some of the earlier performances that comes under the Disposable Theatre Project:

·         GHAR KATHA: Chapter One, a site specific installation-cum-performance project, at the 75^th anniversary of Baroda Amateur Dramatic Club, 28^th Aug 2010, Manjalpur, Baroda.

·         The Chairs: The Private and the Public, in the national level seminar on “Religion and the Visual Arts: Representations and Contestations”, 2^nd and 3^rd March, 2008, Kalabhavana, organized by the Department of History of Art, Kalabhavan, Viswabharati, after presenting a paper “City of God: The Performer in Exile, the Spectator in Exile”.

·         RAVANA KATHA, a site specific DISPOSABLE theatre project, during the National Level Seminar on Cultural Practices and the Discourses on the “Minor”, held in the Department of Art History and Aesthetics, M S University of Baroda, Feb 2007.

·         OPHELIA, a site specific installation-cum-performance project, during the National level workshop on Gender and Sexuality in the Disciplinary Paradigms, organized by the Department of Art History and Aesthetics, M S University of Baroda, Jan 9-11, 2007 Ophelia, was first planned in December 2003 and staged in a national campus theatre festival, organized by Abhivyakti, New Delhi in February 2004 and then in Kalabhavana, Santiniketana in 11^th March, 2004. On the basis of the same text, with another text from Mahashweta devi alternative theatre director Parnab Mukherjee experienced “Ophelia and O” connecting the women all over the world referring Steven Bercoff’s “The Secret Love Life of Ophelia” as a sub-text.

·         The Missing Pages, an installation-cum-DISPOSABLE THEATRE project during the international seminar on “The Tourist Audience: Redefining the audience and Performers in Traditional Dance and Drama” in Kathmandu, Nepal, 26-28^th December 2008. Also presenting "Proposal for a Disposable Theatre" in the seminar on "The Tourist Audience: Redefining the audience and Performers in Traditional Dance and Drama" in Kathmandu, Nepal, 26-28th December 2008.

·         Karengar Ligiri: Defining spaces into spaces, a site-specific architectural installation performance on Jyoti Prasad Agarwala's Birth centenary celebration in Rabindra Bhavana, Guwahati, 26^th Oct 2003, based on the mostly celebrated play by Agarwala.

·         THE CLOTH NARRATIVE, A workshop based site-specific theatre-venture (12^th Aug 2007) with theatrical forms and installation programs at the campus of Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU. This project was a part of the student’s protest around the events after 9^th May 2007. Before this, another series of performances were designed and experienced as a mark of protest named as Fafundi for several times in the campus and in Prof C C Mehta Auditorium

·         SABSE KHATARNAAK, Gadri Babeya Di Mela, Jalandhar, 31^st Oct 2010. An open air performance based on Pash’s poetry and Maxim Gorky’s story “The Burning heart of Danko”.

Some links to track Kankhowa:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/50951558@N00/

http://kankhowa.blogspot.com/2010/05/just-like-that-performative.html

http://kankhowa.ning.com/

About KANKHOWA: Born to Disturb

Initiator and Promoter: Samudra Kajal Saikia

Kankhowa is a non-registered informal group of art practitioners compiling people from various artistic disciplines. It includes art-historians, writers, media-activists, actors, musicians, painters and so on.  Kankhowa mostly works in the interfaces of various disciplines and explores multiple possibilities with contemporary experimental theatrical practices. The “Born to Disturb” wing of Kankhowa is much more upfront performance venture that operates mostly with the direct communication of the performer and spectator in a live-art-form. This venture is known as The Disposable Theatre and it is grounded on the criticisms against the modern Indian Nationalist Cultural practices.

---

[1] a traditional Baul song of Bengal

House Talk: Santhosh Sakhinala in conversation with Tanmay Santra

House Talk

Santhosh Sakhinala in conversation with Tanmay Santra

Hyderabad,      April - September, 2011

(In course of the time we encountered Tanmay Santra's paintings and drawings which extensively uses the 'imagery of House' in his works. Santhosh K Sakhinala generates a conversation with the artist particularly for our ongoing project-Blog "Disposable House".)

Santhosh: 
Tanmayda, I got the opportunity to see your work transforming through time. I feel there is a shift from the intimate, domestic nature of pictorial space to an open and arid type; may be a kind of move from home to outside. How do you see it?

Tanmay:  
Yes, my painterly practice over the past few years has changed after I moved to Hyderabad from Santiniketan.

During student days at Kala Bhavan, through my works I attempted to articulate certain sensibilities with the help of objects and events that surrounded me. Gradually some other elements, related to my life, started coming into my work. Around that time ‘home’ and ‘journey’ became two major concerns in my work.

In 2007 I moved from Santiniketan (West Bengal) to Hyderabad and joined Sarojini Naidu School of Arts & Communication as a Lecturer. I encountered a different kind of environment, culture and life style. I would look at countless vistas of wide barren land and rocks around my new home whenever I stepped out. I started roaming around to discover new places. Sometimes I got lost on the way, sometimes I also got lost between my past and my present. I saw lands get fragmented and compound walls being made. Experiences of seeing ‘This plot is not for sale’ or ‘This land belongs to...’ on the walls or boards became very familiar to me.

Initially I did some sketches and photographed several sites. Gradually these overwhelming construction projects which dominate the pulse of the new city arrested my attention. I began showing them in my paintings. Instead of showing physical activities like labourers engaged in construction works, I showed them in extreme solitude. I think it helped me unfold some other stories about how I look at my surroundings and life.

SS: 
How do you understand the concept and experience of home?

TS: 
Home is a small word, but it is a strong one; stronger than the walls or the beams of a house, for me. Of course, primarily home means a physical space to stay in but conceptually it crosses that boundary. It actually may be a mental or psychic space where an individual lives. It should be a space where you really can grow and people understand you.

I have numerous experiences of my relocation and displacement. This reminds me of a real incident which I heard from my mother and sisters. I still try to imagine the moment when my parents and the family had to leave my father’s ancestral house just before my birth. I heard from my sisters, who witnessed the moment, that after some arguments and agitation regarding the house and common property, they faced difficulties to stay there and decided to leave the house. The incident took a shape in my imagination which still haunts me. It seems to be a metaphor of displacement! Isn’t it?

I grew up in two-three places in Midnapore district, West Bengal. After my school days I moved to Kolkata where I stayed with my elder brother. There I encountered the reality of a cosmopolitan city which has a high percentage of migrant population and cultural diversity. After some time one of our sisters joined us. Next year my father passed away and my mother came to live with us. This became a home then. I lived there in south Kolkata for a decade. This place and its adjacent localities are the ‘colonies’ of displaced Bengalis who moved here from the East Bengal (now Bangladesh) after partition. I could sense how they feel about their homeland where there is no possibility of return. Though I am not a migrant in that sense, yet my mind, more or less, began being permeated by a very personal sense of loss or dispossession regarding home. It is still very difficult to talk about this situation.

I visited my old home for two times in last ten years. There are reasons and logic behind it, among which few things are not even clear to me. I sense that the bittersweet memories regarding my home may have transformed into a feeling of loss in my mind. And I imagine, if I go there, I would see those things from a distance as if that is not my home.

I am not sure whether I am able to convey all these layers of experiences and facts through my works. But you may see this as backdrop to read them.

SS: 
You stayed in Santiniketan for some time, studying and then working. Can you share your experience and association with the place?

TS: 
Life in Santiniketan is different from any other place in the world. It is a place designed and created by a poet-artist-thinker. I do not know whether there is any other example like that across the world. I was privileged to be associated with this place in many ways. This provided me many things.

I grew up in parts of rural Bengal, and lived for a decade in Kolkata, then came to Santiniketan. Being in Santiniketan was totally a different experience for me since it is a place which is neither urban and nor totally rural. I liked the place for many reasons. May be one of them was its semi-urban-semi-rural nature. Next thing would be of course its homely environment. Homely in the sense that it is a small town and everybody knows each other. If you walk away from the centre you see the village life there. Despite all its homely characteristics, it is ironical that when I wanted to rent a house, it was like any other place. I had both very bad and good experiences while staying in several rented houses there. Sometimes I joke that there are people of only two kinds in the world--- house-owners and tenants!

Anyway, when I was studying at the Art College in Kolkata, my idea of home began to change, and it took a more clear shape during my stay in Santiniketan. I have also been influenced by Salil-da’s concept of ‘home’, as he innovates constantly the possibilities of intimate and rich ways of living space. His ‘home’ has been far from a typical home or a typical artist’s studio; rather it is a unique mixture of theatricality, museum-like and artist’s studio-like space with a bed and a refrigerator. This is about artist Salil Sahani who lives and works in Santiniketan. And I think it can be a critique of how most of us generally ignore this aspect in our life. You know, I do not mean here that a well designed house makes a good home; but for me these experiences have opened up my perception about living space.            

                                                                                                       

SS: 
Let us make the Home public. You know, home is also related with the issues of class, region, geography, nation and other socio-political factors. Can you reflect on these issues, and are you trying also to address these issues through your work because, in the present historical condition house/Home is increasingly associated with the economics, money and status to a considerable extent. It is also becoming a mode of exploitation of various things like labour, land, resources etc. 

TS:
Initially I started working with the idea of home and some survival memories which are depicted through my personal and experiential perspectives. Again it may touch upon other wider contexts too. I think while I am talking about my personal understanding and experiences of ‘home’, I am also talking about power, money and politics indirectly. My experiences lead me to look outside, and I sensed how experiences of an individual become public. The present narrative is more or less autobiographical. But my intention is also to address many other related issues like inequalities in the distribution of property or land, social and personal aggressions etc. But I am not a social reformer or social activist in the general sense of the term. What I like is to transform some of these experiences into visual imagery, sometimes in a documentary mode, to evoke certain meanings and sensibilities.

SS: 
Very true. The experiences that we believe personal and particular, definitely involve certain level of universality. Is there any artist that you share a commonality in terms of your ideas and work, both in India and outside? Many artists have been engaged with the ideas of displacement, migration, alienation and urbanity which are inevitable in our condition of modernity.

TS:
Yes, many artists had dealt and have been dealing with these issues in our country and   outside. I share a kind of commonality in terms of their ideas and works. For me life and works of Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Dorothea Lange and Frida Kahlo are very significant. In contemporary India, Zarina Hashmi, Subodh Gupta, Nataraj Sharma, Veer Munshi, Dilip Mitra, Alok Bal, Paula Sengupta, Archana Hande, Jagannath Panda, Sovan Kumar, Gigi Scaria among many others have been dealing with these issues in their work. Moreover, when I see or read some of the films or books which reflect these issues, I see a similarity with my engagement.  In many of his films Ritwik Ghatak addressed the condition of refugee-hood and ‘home’ so poignantly that it moves me.

SS: 
Another aspect intriguing about your work is the language of representation. It works with a particular kind of realism, which is selective and a collage of synoptic events or moments that are captured and put together. Again, your paintings also appear to have not involved expressionistic or emotional tendencies. They appear as austere pictorial calculations of certain sensibilities. Could you please tell us about these aspects?

TS: 
Yes, you see a kind of realism as a language of representation where my approach to painting is very minimal and simplistic. And you may find my fascination towards abstraction in the language of visual representation.

A kind of silence dominates the picture plane and you see almost nobody in the represented space.  Yet it may evoke a mood in the viewer to imagine its past and future (of land, of site). I find various aspects of drama behind it, the human drama! When I look at a construction site, grandiose, or even a simple walled plot, I imagine its past and the people who once will come to live there. And it refers to the basic needs and desire of common man. All these related perspectives and sensibilities are there while I am observing, nurturing or transforming these experiences into my visual imagery.

These images of urban spaces are related to human beings, yet human presence is less emphasized. Perhaps I wanted to show this void, through which a kind of melancholic aspect can be conveyed. They also encode a sense of alienation and distance.

SS:
After your Kolkata and Santiniketan-phase, you have been staying and working in Hyderabad for some time now. How do you see this place, which provides a home for you now?

TS: 
Though there are lots of differences between cultural environment and political scenario of these two places, I find similarities in many things. To certain extent, people here are not very different from the place where I am from. The city and the people seemed to me very lively and interesting. I like to see people; I like their courage, struggle --- the overall drama! I am interested in seeing people, their day-to-day life. Of course negotiating with certain things as a tenant, I live in an extended part of the city which is growing very fast. I am here amidst the small, as well as the vast overwhelming mega-projects of construction-works. Gradually I am getting known to people around me and overcoming my anxiety of being an outsider.

SS: 
It seems evident that your experiences of displacement and concept of home are reflected in your art practice. How does this affect your life style or day-to-day life now?

TS: 
Yes, it affects my life style. For example, I am still very hesitant to buy a wardrobe or any other heavy furniture for my house. We are four in the family; yet, we live with only two metal trunks and three travel bags! I want very simple living and try avoiding any kind of luxury. I dislike being dominated by the household goods in the living space. And that reduces the anxiety of relocation too. I have been living in this colony called Gulmohar Park for nearly four years, and more than half a year in this house, the present one. I don’t know exactly how long we will stay here. You may have heard this popular saying, ‘Dhane-dhane-pe likha hai khane-valon ka naam’(It is written over every rice grain that who will eat it); I say, ‘Ghar-ghar-pe likha hai rahene-valon ka naam’ (It is written over every house that who will stay there)!

For how long are we going to make love in secret?

GUPUTE GUPUTE...

a song by Bhupen Hazarika

as Translated by

Syeda Senim Zahan

For how long are we going to make love in secret?

Let us sprinkle the colours of our love across the sky.

Come my love, let us show the world and its customs

Our two hearts as large as the sea.

How can youth be stained?

How can light be stopped?

Do the waves ever neglect the sea?

Your eyes

Your bosom

Your each look is beautiful.

Every touch is melting.

Open the windows

Open the doors of this locked house

O my love!

We don’t need to show discipline

Or propriety any more.

Can you bind love by rules?

Does a storm have any boundary?

Can you cover the dawn

With a garland of shame?

KANKHOWA'S NOTE:

Eroticism and sexuality appear in Dr. Bhupen Hazarika’s multiple Assamese songs. In fact nobody dared to deal with eroticism and sexuality in Assamese cultural practices ever after or before Bhupen Hazarika. The song “Gupute Gupute” starts with a dramatic orchestration and the orchestration gives a sense of conflict-within throughout the song. Many followers of Dr. Hazarika sang the song in course of time. But nobody ever could attain the sense of directness of sexuality either in the texture of their voices or in the background scoring.  

Dr. Bhupen Hazarika establishes the modernist iconography of the “ARTIST” in Assamese cultural practice. The Iconography later on accepted by the middle class Assamese society very well. The nationalism and the slogan of “Unity in Diversity” were so widely populated that the subjectivity of the artist obscured in the later phase.

We heard the song again and again, but we could not understand the meaning when he says to open up the doors and windows of the locked house. Neither could we understand the way he spoke so. Perhaps, as Kankhowa believs, he was speaking of DISPOSING the house…

painting by Anuradha Upadhyay