Where the Flowers Still Grow

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=19574&date=2017-05-28&pageid=1

                                

   Postcards from Kashmir

I went to see ‘Where the Flowers Still Grow’ - a visually vocal landscape of Kashmir by Bharat Sikka, at Sunaparanta Centre for Arts. You see, I was born in Kashmir, and though i didn’t want to go, dreading what I would see, I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Yes, I found flowers in a couple of photographic templates but they were minute, on spiked stems, or had fallen  - discoloured, shrivelled and torn, carpeting the earth enmeshed with stones.

The exhibition is inspired by Mirza Waheed’s novel ‘The Collaborator’ which tells the story of a Kashmiri man struggling to understand the past and present, and the sense of self in the ensuing context.  Bharat Sikka visited Srinagar in 2013, and came upon the novel.  Thereafter, he went 3-4 times in the following years, observing, listening and recording a story in his camera.

The exhibition has an eerie feel with no cataloguing essay. Untitled frames hang silently, as if robbed of expression. There is nothing left to say.  In this situation, Bharat’s photographic canvases capture existential Kashmir, exposing remnants of the enveloping violence in the region. It’s an ode to autumn, definitely, but  devoid of any colour.

The first frame at the entrance itself introduces the visitor to the inherent inversion of Bharat’s sublime statement on the state of affairs. The eye comes to rest on the silhouette of a man attired in customary Kashmiri dress with a shawl draped around his upper frame, against a grey mist, his back turned to the viewer. Others show men silently mounted on horse backs, staring fixedly with deadpan expressions. In another, a man stands rooted in a field of spiked tree trunks, hemmed in by the pointed stalks, immovable and imprisoned. An ash-marked bloodied hand subverts portraiture, occupying centre stage in the line.  A Rembrandt shot focuses on a man’s face surrounded by darkness. He is asleep or has he shut his eyes against the light, feeling hopeless?

A deafening silence clothes the entire landscape. Besides the inhabitants, nature too stands a mute witness to the continuing carnage - tree trunks seems eaten away from inside, hollow and disintegrating - their piercing branches sans the green foliage. Conifers stand like sentinels marking the horizon. Sometimes when the grey and black uninterrupted terrain is punctured by a green hill and a waterfall, it appears more an aberration, alienated from the rot everywhere else.

A complete absence of women and children from the frames is marked and forceful, an intentional choice by the photographer. The omission drives the point hard that this is now a ruthless man’s territory - cruel and colourless, where noise of cannon roars loud with no space for sensitivity, nurturing, compassion, innocence, or any other relevant feminine construct.

The gallery space is further haunted by a melancholic musical strain which stems from an installation at the further end of the corridor. It has a Steve Reich quality to it, a persistent beating pulse superimposed by electronic music that takes the story forward. But the impetus doesn’t change anything much on the lighted screen, where thick black clouds loom, moving in pace with the music. Standing in the empty room looking at the screen, the feeling imperceptibly seeps in - the grinding noise of cannon fire in the background and darkness are here to stay. They have become parts of the landscape.

If you pause to meditate within this deprivation, the juxtapositions built by Bharat and further enhanced by curator Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi become voluble. A torn and overused yellow and red  packet of 32” S&W revolver cartridges graces a wall,  a bloodied head of a goat on curled spikes symbolically completes that picture . A dark alcove from a dilapidated house with a zero watt bulb glowing on its wall ,  looks out to frames of bright light.  These and many more pictures are contrasted with the following  - sari hanging on a clothes line in a room, a miniature heart with very hard to read minute lettering – ‘be my valentine’, a postage stamp in the corner of a blank page  with the lettering ‘27^th Pacific Area Travel Association Conference’. The larger than life size of war objects against diminishing motifs of the softer frames is self-explanatory. 

Bharat uses visual metaphors and metonymy to express his personal sightings in the valley of death. He amplifies the war rhetoric with symbols - a wooden cross with a white sack tied to it embeds   the carnage in a much larger historical context. A polished walnut Trojan Horse packs in a punch of conspiracy and betrayal. A double rainbow outlines the mouth of a devouring shark. An empty inverted maroon velvet-lined chest box, becomes a vociferous statement about looted treasure. Ubiquitous chalk-white boulders lining rivers and pathways have acquired a mosaic pattern that on a closer look reveals itself to be dried blood and excreta. A loud speaker mounted on a tripod spews out words which no one seems to hear.

The entire bricolage gives the landscape a museum-like quality, on which we gaze for hours, drawn by muted rage, its ugliness and dismembered power. The greys and blues, indicate a mood of suffering that’s intensified by the red and yellow of the raging forest fire in the background, or is it a burning pyre? Predatory birds appear and contradict the non-existent livestock.

Bharat conveys the final blow with the showcasing of postcards from Kashmir in a customary glass-cased window. Nostalgia hits hard, for instead of pictures of colourful ‘shikaras’  on Dal lake, brightly clad women in ‘phirens’, tall handsome men adorning Kashmiri topee, gardens full of gorgeous Chrysanthemums and Dahlia’s  – the postcards are a muted grey with silhouettes of grey scrawny trees lining the breath of the page. Every postcard is a replica of the one before it and they together complete the exhibit in the show window. The irony is further exacerbated by a set of colourful ribbons worn on a soldier’s uniform, with medals encoding – ‘Satyamave Jayate’ and the ‘25^th Independence Anniversary Celebration’.

That finally nails the story tier in the storyboard permanently. I can feel a heaviness pervade my senses, which isn’t going away anywhere, I know. I will be back to meditate again!