…To our land,/ and it is the one surrounded with torn hills, / the ambush of a new past…
Palestinian poet-in-exile Mahmoud Darwish’s impassioned exhortation (translated by Fady Joudah) about the affective power of geography invokes visions uncannily close to our own cartographic reality of the frontier. Just as the serene 19th century images of Kashmir devoid of people demonstrate a form of representational violence by visualising absence, so too do the images of its abandoned streets during the curfew today. In times of atrocity, a lot becomes or is made invisible, but it is time now, as Darwish suggests at the end, to make visible all that lies outside the frame. It is time for a ‘close-up’ view.
If we ask what our tangible link to a people’s history or identity is, we may well consider self-representational means — found images, everyday objects — the unseen archives that periodically ebb to the surface as evidence and memory markers. ‘Location’ through these objects is inflected with the contours of interpersonal exchanges that map the arc of our lives. Darwish speaks of a surging inner voice, a reconstituted archive of humanity, which relays the universal dilemma of a refugee and the grammar of displacement.
As we commemorate World Photography Day tomorrow, the words of Henri Cartier-Bresson create a focal point for this piece: “Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should?”
It has now been a hundred years since the demeaning imperial Rowlatt Act (1919) was enforced, which regarded independent opinions and free thought as ‘anarchist’ and ‘revolutionary’ — regulations and positions that are still in use to prevent comment and opinion today. The threat of state reprimand has again grown alarmingly strong in our times. To illustrate these offences, we must locate analogies that can work across the ages, and generate a visual thesaurus of organised actions against autocracy. They could include those elided images of the moments that galvanised into the Civil Disobedience and other anti-colonial movements, which earmark the times of socio-ideological shifts or breaches.
The very need for activist narratives today shows us how a counter-dialogue can be mounted against the anger, insecurity and banter of unchecked regimes. Only these can counter-balance the surfeit of propaganda spreading through manipulated or curtailed images today. The visual need of the hour is to induce new memories through, what socio-cultural analyst and author Gayatri Gopinath calls, “quotidian forms of non-conformity” so that the present can be reoriented as a benefactor of lived experiences and not a rejecter of lived atrocity.
Student protest march in Myanmar, 1988.
The Civil Disobedience and Non-Cooperation Movement must, therefore, proliferate further through images of the intensification of women’s participation at the time, which also sought to resist patriarchy and the other unilateral narratives of nationalism that tried to ‘annex’ the moment.
Dynamic sites
We must now pursue these lost images by excavating popular witness records. Such images will show that there can never be a flattening of history. An extraordinary archive from the time that presents another critical sub-national and micro-political moment has been carefully preserved by Savitri Sawhney, concerning her father, a leader of the Ghadar Party, Pandurang Khankhoje. Through her part-autobiography ( I Shall Never Ask for Pardon , 2008) and well-preserved archive, we can trace the life of an extraordinary man who sought to energise the Ghadar movement in the U.S. in the early 20th century, striving from the bottom up and eventually taking up agronomy, in order to invent a genetic form of corn that would resolve the starvation problems of the world. His innovations came in the aftermath of several planned and foiled armed assaults against the British from various regional quarters (including leading an army of 5,000 from the northwest frontier). He eventually made his home in Mexico, where modernist Italian photographer (and activist for the Comintern), Tina Modotti, captured his life.
Such first-hand interactions with images actually ‘perform’ new histories in order to present dynamic sites of time and memory. Though kaleidoscoped in social irony today, given all that may be considered ‘anti-national’ by the state, they show us that domestic spaces and disciplinary content can intersect and become trans-national, volunteering other socio-political worlds which inform our own.
To arrive at a renewed image of our globalised activist culture, we must therefore heed resistance imagery from across the world in post-colonial times: The Philippines in 1986; Myanmar in 1988; Tibet and China, 1989; Nepal and Bangladesh over the last many decades; the Palestinian Intifada, 1987 on; Australia’s indigenous community uprisings, 1788 onwards; the 1968 Paris student uprising; the Occupy movements, including South Korea’s Gwangju uprising of 1980; women’s liberation movements; the queer movements; the anti-apartheid movements; anti-gentrification movements of the 1970s, counter globalisation movements against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund... the list goes on.
An image from Uzma Mohsin’s ‘Songkeepers’ series (2018).
These and other underground activities that destabilise the heteronormative strain and seek to parenthesise the nation must be encouraged and an alternative model adopted. To conclude, let’s look at the recent photographic works of Uzma Mohsin from Delhi, which straddle crucial political terrains and social predicaments in present-day South Asia. The interwoven, stratified nature of her cross-hatched images reveal an absorbed engagement with personal, official and humanist elements around the imagery of protest. They interrogate whether the archival document is limited to history or to the present.
Uzma’s project started with an RTI for the release of affidavits and other documents relating to organising a protest, and went on to explore adversity, censorship, atomisation and trampled civil rights in a time of digital personhood, information-induced insurgencies, and political sensationalism. Ranging from pleas and petitions for Dalit rights, land and labour laws to disappearances and citizenship claims, her tableaux present, in their very ethics of disclosure, a diagram of protests everywhere.
The stern gaze of the vigilant citizen makes us look beyond the procedural, as we are all witness and bear witness to one another. It makes us question the provincialism of state apparatus in executing laws, and, now, even changing them at will, while ignoring the basic tenets of sovereignty, as we frantically seek a new vista, a different horizon.
…and our land, in its bloodied night,/ is a jewel that glimmers for the far upon the far,/ and illuminates what’s outside it...
The writer is Curator, Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, and Founding Editor, PIX.
