A text written by Debjani from waking each morning whilst on residency at CCA in December 2022.
That floats on high o’er vales and hills
I spend a long time thinking about making this piece, for you and about you.
Ever since I found this image of you.
It was encased in an album on your shelf full of photographs from a time before.
I have been wondering – what are you thinking, looking out into the hills?
The imagined sepia tone made me think it was the late 1960s and because you are sitting in the countryside I assumed you were in Wales where you first lived with Baba.
I think about what that time was like - from Kolkata to the village of Fleur de Lis with an almost stranger.
I imagine this is the hillside you told me about, the one you would go to cry at when you felt alone.
When I first show you this picture, you can't remember much about it.
A few months later I send it to you on Whatsapp and ask,
‘Tell me something you can remember about this photograph ma?’
You leave me a voice note…..
Where I am sitting I couldn’t tell you
I wore that sweater to a lot of places.
Instead of imagining I should have taken the photo out and looked at the back of it, where I would have seen it was printed in 1977.
I should also have looked at the photograph above it, which shows you and Didi eating a cream bun together.
It was your first holiday, the three of you in Devon, not Wales.
This prompts another memory - forgetting the pushchair.
Baba was annoyed as it meant you had to carry Didi everywhere with you.
And you said, ‘at least I didn’t forget the child.’
Working across mixed-media textiles, clay, and space-making, Debjani Banerjee invites us into her contemporary Jalsaghar (translating from Bengali to ‘music room’ in English). The Jalsaghar is a space of concerted watching, listening, feeling, relaxing, dreaming, imagining. For the artist, music, dance, and their performance in such spaces have played a pivotal role in her life. Here, Debjani is our host — creator of the sculptures we sit alongside and upon the floor; curator of the ambience and resonances that fill the gallery, reverberating into the textile works that narrate the space. Come, sit – with the works, words and songs, with the emotions and memories they stir.
In her Jalsaghar, Banerjee presents reworked visions, sensations, and songs readily familiar to Bengalis and Desis accustomed with the Savarna culture of Eastern India, inter-dreamed through visions ungrounding diasporic domesticities in the UK. Works, especially those in clay such as Putna and Mudra (both 2023), embody and express deeply rooted emotions born out of stories and dreams. Visions of snakes seep from domestic objects such as Henry the Hoover, chores becoming fears becoming deep meditations, wafting from the hookah pipe, pleasures curling tinged with venom. Lighting and textiles brim with the bold colours of Indian fabrics, shimmering in the bling of self-embellishment, diffracting light in the blend of details. We hear Mita Pujara, the artist’s sister, perform Tagore songs of longing and other traditional Indian songs, atop the playful electronics of Kavi Pujara, her partner.
These feelings are subtended by the logics of gender and patriarchy in its formations of Savarna South Asian / Bengali culture. Banerjee’s work diffracts the personal and familial through the political, to reveal and revel in this light.
Across the works of Jalsaghar, Banerjee brings into focus narratives of women in her life and in key cultural representations around South Asians produced or presented in Britain primarily in the 1980s and early 1990s. The works include images of powerful, creative, life-giving and life-destroying figures, from family members to goddesses, immortalised in images of Hindu deities and the mythical epic poem of the Mahabharata. Yet these narratives, shifting between mythical epics and familial stories, are not necessarily wedded to telling factual truths. They’re knowingly refracted through the prism of memory and mis/recollection, amplifying the affective impact and reading of goddess figures, or family members. The ‘truth’ in the story is less significant than its telling, or the telling of its telling.
‘In this world my dear’ can be found on CCA Annex, in it — Banerjee discusses interspersing her own interpretation upon a photograph from a family album, transporting her mother back to the isolated Welsh landscape of her life in the 1960s, recently married and relocated from Kolkata, India. The artist foregrounds her empathetic connection with her mother, fizzing with the possibility of refabricating a relationship across time. Yet, Debjani’s aesthetic practice provides a creative spin on the ‘reality’ or ‘fact’ of the photograph that inspired it, a spin on what Gayatri Gopinath would describe as one of the “minor histories” – those that are “personal, familial, collective, regional”, “stand[ing] outside of official nation-centred narratives”, that diasporic artists “excavate and memorialise” through archival practices.1 Banerjee’s melancholia bubbles as she envisions her mother reciting lines of William Wordsworth, in the manner that she would recite those of Rabindranath Tagore. It emphasises the personal in the transformation of belonging, practising across Bengali and British cultures, experiencing emotions characteristic of both.
If nostalgia occupies a dominant position in the role of memory of the South Asian diaspora, reproduced and ascribed through stereotypes of narratives, then, it frames our gaze and our understandings as looking backwards towards stories or time - of migration from an origin, of struggle, isolation or belonging. It offers up the muted colours of analogue mediums, grainy, factory-processed 35mm camera film,2 the means of their times of capturing and storing culture and the everyday.3 For the second generation, sometimes the ‘difficult’ second generation,4 born into and raised amid these media, our creative expressions are by no means contained or determined by their limits.5
In the quilt, that floats o’er vales and hills (2024), Debjani reworks the aforementioned photograph, presenting a vision of a brown woman sitting drinking a can of Pepsi framed in a landscape animated with green, grey, brown and red tones at the golden hour. The woman’s clothes are themselves made with orange, pink and yellow fabrics with dense floral patterning; she wears a cardigan, and her black hair is formed of another shapely piece. The lime green fabric that constitutes part of the hill behind her back, made of sari fabric, could itself be a wild continuance of her sari in the wind, as the figurative flows into the surreal. The quilt itself echoes the Indian kantha tradition of quilting, here marked by the use of a multiplicity of fabrics and the white horizontal running stitches.
Banerjee threads for us narratives of figures who are often framed as merely mothers (of Gods, or sons, or of children in general), centring their emotions and pleasures, powers and allures. Debjani sits us with these feelings and their potential to skew and challenge patriarchal expectations of women. South Asian artists involved in the Black Arts Movement in the UK in the ‘80s, including Sutapa Biswas and Nina Edge, attest that aesthetic practices are key for countering and forging alternatives to the patriarchal expectations of women. These aesthetic practices do not exist without the support of brown and black feminist community organising; aesthetics playing a critical role in the expansion of political consciousness in our communities. Goddesses and other deities provide mythic narratives and powerful iconography, connecting teaching, witnessing and learning lessons, alternate agency and possibilities to the work of intervening into the social order — undermining it or leaving it in peril.6 The patriarchal and casteist order — at present animated with a Hindutva ethnonationalism in India and in the diaspora — is upheld through gendered expectations and caste divisions, maintained via emotional manipulation, gaslighting and various forms of abuse, including violence.
Through forging a space of deep – even cinematic – emotionality within a gallery setting, Banerjee turns the homosocial, patriarchal setting of the Jalsaghar (perhaps most familiar from Satyajit Ray’s 1958 film of the same name) upon its head, recentring subcultural narratives for those who are easily and often consigned to margins of the plot. This is a reorientation of the affective priorities of such a space – from performance as spectacle to entertain (or service) men, as cultural or literal capital for a family (ala Ray’s film), towards the centring of expression out of play, need, possibility, or the imaginary. Affect through the aesthetic, create vibrations of belonging, here holding us in the room together. Sometimes you must stop talking (bok bok bok) to hear what the women of the second generation have to say, experienced and seen.
In her Mahabharata textile piece, spanning 12 metres, Banerjee presents to us – running left to right – the figures of Satayvati (in a sari of two tones of blue), Kunti (decorated with jewellery over her eye), Gandhari (covering her eyes with a blindfold, two gloved hands bejewelled; her 101 babies born from a pot of ghee), Draupadi (draped in an orange sari, protected by the blue hand of Krishna to the left), Banyan roots mixing with dreadlocks (symbolising the forest of Draupadi and the Pandava’s exile), Hidimbi (a rakshasi hiding in the forest), completed with smaller figures of Shikhandi (Draupadi’s trans brother warrior, with bow and arrow), Arjuna and Krishna (riding in the chariot), and six naga snakes (dancing and writhing up from water). The figures are adorned with, or watched upon by, cinematic eyes or bodies and printed on silk. Their eyes and bodies are drawn from the era-defining representations of the Mahabharata — including the five-and-a-half-hour film directed by Peter Brook (Channel 4, 1989-90, in English) and the 94 episode television series by B.R. Chopra (1988-90, in Hindi)— alongside works by Satyajit Ray. This reuse (and reappropriation) through collage appears to be encouraging us to look with the eyes of the women, to witness their struggles and the harms enacted against them in their human forms.
Draupadi stands at the centre of Banerjee’s tapestry, pictured in an act of resistance and self-survival. The polyandrous wife of the five Pandava Brothers, in the scene depicting Draupadi has been dragged to Court of the Kauravas in the moment of her loss of freedom, as the last possession lost by Yudhisthira in a game of dice with the Kauravas. Yudhisthira had already lost all of his wealth, land, cattle, enslaved people, clothing, siblings and his own liberty in a game of dice rigged against him.
In her own defence, she argues that she herself could not be waged in a bet after Yudhisthira had waged and lost his own liberty, when she was thus no longer his to wage. In the court of Kauravas, the defence does not stand in this court — seemingly rigged against her like the game of dice, as the court claims that the ownership of her and her body, complete with further sexual harassment from Duryodhana. In resistance to her new enslavement to the Kauravas, facing disrobing in court, while menstruating, Draupadi prays to Krishna for protection and divine intervention. In the event, her orange sari extends into an infinite textile, forever being unwrapped to maintain what is left of her modesty. Draupadi responds by lambasting the court and the familial onlookers of both sides of the epic battle between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. She emphasises the shame in permitting such an act of sexual harassment and gendered harm to have occurred in their witness, while no-one present (beyond the divine) would intervene.
The significance of resistance and intervention – of challenging the familial, patriarchal, gendered, material and caste-based systems that allow for gendered violence to be enacted directly in public – continues to speak volumes in the contemporary. Such interventions in the everyday have been active in the responses of abolitionist feminists here, in the UK, such as the organising that has occurred in responses to the killings by the police of Sarah Everard and (in prison) of Sarah Reed. At the time of writing in August 2024 – alongside an extra-legal xenophobic fascist resurgence in the UK — Kolkata and Eastern India is galvanized by a grassroots feminist movement, Reclaim the Night / Reclaim the Rights, following the rape and murder of a 31-year-old woman doctor while she was at work at the R.G. Kar hospital on 9th August 2024, in an event that has highlighted institutional failures and been beset by misinformation and cover-ups, including from the Police.7 Animated by grief and grievances, where women, queer and trans people are not even safe from gender-based violence while at work, the movement is currently calling for the resignation of West Bengal’s Chief Minister; highlighting how existing hate crime protections for gender-based violence are ineffective for preventing femicide; and has emphasised the need for different structures and practices of safety for women, queer and trans people. This is even more pronounced for people from lower castes.
While the political present glistens with rage, sweat and torches burning up the darkness of Kolkata’s streets, Banerjee’s work speaks to this contemporary through raising the timeliness of seemingly timeless stories. Jalsaghar holds space for the complex emotions and dreams that emerge from her meditations journeying into the sur/real, from deep set fears where mythical figures are encountered in the real, from the trials faced by goddesses who become women that become goddesses.
There is nonetheless space for pleasure — for the glamour of the living, to be adorned and appliquéd across garments as fabrics become art and art finds it form from fashion; for dreaming upon the hookah pipe, for reclining in the vibrancy of colour and sound. Esē basõ, śuẏē paṛa [এসে বসো, শুয়ে পড়], dream with your senses open.
Nat Raha
August — September 2024.