Family portraits
Ashim Purkayastha’s latest works focus on the violent history of the North-east.
Absence, in Ashim Purkayastha’s recent works at the Vadehra Art Gallery in Okhla, Delhi (until January 9), is a marker of presence that has been removed through violence.
The “watermark” — there and not there — thus becomes for Purkayastha an objective correlative of this absent-present in a series of pencil-on-watercolours titled “Drawing with Unknown Watermark”. It is a palimpsest of loss, of the bloody history of the artist’s Bengali settler community in Assam, which has, for the past four decades at least, been the victim of a series of killings, bombings, kidnappings by indigenous tribes.
Painted on both sides and fixed between clear-glass panels placed at right angles to the gallery walls — the innovative mounting a device to show the workings on the reverse —they depict “random people that I saw on the streets”, says the artist.
Among them are old, emaciated women, their hands raised as if during a body search. “I have grown up seeing these military barricades along the roadsides, with queues of people lined up, their hands raised to show that they weren’t carrying weapons. They would not even spare the very old, or women,” says Purkayastha.
It was an all-pervading atmosphere of suspicion, of imperceptible violence that was a formative influence on Purkayastha’s consciousness, lending his art a political subversiveness. Think back to his earlier body of work where he played around with the iconography on revenue stamps and currency notes, especially that of Mahatma Gandhi, whom he portrayed without his spectacles to show up his lack of historical foresight. Indeed, as Gayatri Sinha pointed out in her review of a 2005 solo at Delhi’s Sridharini Gallery, Purkayastha is one of the few Indian artists whose works have been consistently, “doggedly political”.
Purkayastha’s present work is, however, less subversive. While the fractious politics of the North-east continue to be the context in which he places his art, the human drama of displacement seems to engage him more, especially in “Family-Families”, a series of black-and-white photographs of families affected by the insurgency.
Over a four-year period from 2005, Purkayastha got families affected by the insurgency to pose for him — once with their faces exposed, and once wearing black masks, the kind that executioners use to cover the faces of convicts before they are shot or hung. “These are my neighbours,” Purkayastha explains, “who were caught between the state and the rebels, and whose lives changed forever.” Seen side by side on the gallery walls, the double imagery becomes a powerful, even eerie, statement of the conflict over “their identity and their lack of it”.
“Protest”, a large, 66”x270” triptych in acrylic, is a no less searing, though far more painterly evocation of the tragedy of the North-east. A expanse of textured brown canvas, with striations to evoke mangled, dessicated skin, the three panels seem to encompass the entire region’s troubled history — the nude protests by Manipuri women, burnt tyres and vehicles — and the skeleton of an animal. “The skeleton of animals they’d hunted and eaten was kept as a prize.” There’s life in death, after all, as much as there’s death in life.