PLAY
PLAY is a textile work that shows children playing on a street in the neighbourhood of Chitpur, with the beautiful, crumbling architecture of the old Jorabagan police station in the background. The Banyan tree’s roots have grown over and through the building, and a majestic Mango tree in the foreground dapples the building on a sunny day. It is a mundane, everyday moment yet it is surreally beautiful. Most of the younger inhabitants of this neighbourhood are not aware of the rich history this beautiful building has. For them, this densely forested ruin is not noteworthy – it just exists in the background as they go about their days. Children, especially innocent of this building’s significance, play naturally in and around it.
– Suhasini Kejriwal | February, 2020
Play, Installation view at Nature Morte, New Delhi, 2020
Photo courtesy: Vivian Sarky
“On the seashore of endless worlds children meet...
They build their houses with sand…
With withered leaves they weave their boats…
On the seashore of endless worlds children meet...”
– Rabindranath Tagore
Image of the Duff College, Chitpur, Kolkata. Photo by: Suhasini Kejriwal
Duff College, Kolkata | Sketch by Suhasini Kejriwal
A plant in front of the Duff College | Sketch by Suhasini Kejriwal
Play, Acrylic paint and Kantha embroidery on fabric, 108 in x 114 in, 2020, Detail
Play, Acrylic paint and Kantha embroidery on fabric, 108 in x 114 in, 2020
Since 2015, it has been my privilege to engage with Chitpur in Kolkata and Chor Bazar in Mumbai in several capacities – flaneur, photographer, artist, witness and even collaborator – to create an archive of a few thousand images. I used this archive to make rich, layered, embroidered photo composites that echo the quiet but extraordinary beauty of the daily lives of the people who live and work here.
On my first walk in Chitpur, I saw exquisite, old buildings laced with dainty balconies and decrypt walls emboldened by lurid Jatra theatre posters. As time went by, instead of just responding to the surreal beauty of the streets, I began to notice the interactions among people and their environments, their work, their leisure, their children and the animals that lived with them, and the daily rhythm of their lives and its chaos and calm.
PLAY is a textile work that shows children playing on a street in the neighbourhood of Chitpur, with the beautiful, crumbling architecture of the old Jorabagan police station in the background. The Banyan tree’s roots have grown over and through the building, and a majestic Mango tree in the foreground dapples the building on a sunny day. It is a mundane, everyday moment yet it is surreally beautiful. The history of the building is equally interesting – from being an educational establishment of repute, known as Duff College during British times, it went on to become a police station in 1920, where freedom fighters were supposedly interrogated. It remained a police station until it was finally abandoned in 1985. In fact, a smaller building on the other side of the premises houses the current Jorabagan police station. Parts of this abandoned building finally collapsed in 2020, a couple of years after I had photographed it for my work. Yet, most of the younger inhabitants of this neighbourhood are not aware of the rich history this beautiful building has. For them, this densely forested ruin is not noteworthy – it just exists in the background as they go about their days. Children, especially innocent of this building’s significance, play naturally in and around it.
The text on the top and bottom of the artwork are taken from a well-known poem by Chitpur’s most famous resident, the celebrated poet and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore.
“On the seashore of endless worlds children meet ...
They build their houses with sand …
With withered leaves they weave their boats …
On the seashore of endless worlds children meet ...”
The poem echoes both the innocence of the children playing on the road as well as the experience of the passage of time, as recorded in the history of the building and the growth of the trees on the building.
Just as the Banyan tree’s roots have grown over and through the building, layering it with vegetation, the work is also layered with different contexts of history, poetry and culture. The trees, roots, plants and children in the foreground are painted and embroidered with the kantha stitch on the painted background that includes the building. In fact, the embroidery echoes the growth process of living beings. The kantha stitch is a kind of running stitch that I chose both for its simplicity and humility, as well as for its unique context in domestic Bengali heritage. The kantha stitch was used by Bengali women of all classes to make “Kantha” quilts. Upper-class women made richly embroidered quilts in their leisure, while working-class women made modest utilitarian coverlets by stitching old saris together. These quilts were passed down in learning and dowry from mother to daughter. Although this art form almost disappeared in the early 19th century, it was revived in the 1940s by Pratima Devi Tagore, the daughter-in-law of Rabindranath Tagore.
In a sense, a quilt is a repository of memories: of the makers, of the collaboration between them and of the process of making the artwork. Like the kantha quilt, my textile work has been embroidered together by my mother and myself, along with some help from my assistant and his sister. In that sense, it not only contains the image of children playing in front of the Jorabagan Police station, but is also layered by the collaboration between my mother and I, and between us and the other people who helped construct and complete the work.
Finally, the artwork also contains within it a small homage to the wonderful American artist Faith Ringgold, famous for her story-quilts. She inspired me to look at textile and quilt-making as fine arts, when I studied with her as a freshman in San Diego, many years ago. Incidentally, she also made her first quilt with her mother.
RESOURCES:
https://www.telegraphindia.com/culture/heritage/a-doff-to-duff/cid/1798216
http://double-dolphin.blogspot.com/2016/01/duff-college-jorabagan-thana-calcutta-kolkata.htm
Image of the Duff College, Chitpur, Kolkata. Photo by: Suhasini Kejriwal
Duff College, Kolkata | Sketch by Suhasini Kejriwal
Play, Acrylic paint and Kantha embroidery on fabric, 108 in x 114 in, 2020, Detail
Play, Acrylic paint and Kantha embroidery on fabric, 108 in x 114 in, 2020, Detail
WALKING: Poetry of daily life
A city is also a shared space and lends itself naturally to engagement and collaboration with others. In that sense, walking in the city allows me to operate in several capacities at once – as flaneur, photographer, artist, witness, and even collaborator.
– Suhasini Kejriwal | January, 2018
Eden II, Acrylic paint on canvas, 132 x 90 in, 2011, Detail
A city is also a shared space and lends itself naturally to engagement and collaboration with others. In that sense, walking in the city allows me to operate in several capacities at once – as flaneur, photographer, artist, witness, and even collaborator.
Walking, like thinking, has a certain pace and rhythm which is deeply personal and uniquely individual. For me, it is an aesthetic act, and it helps me to think and see. My camera or phone is usually with me when I walk, enabling my creative process to unfold at my own pace, registering and capturing “residue”, “texture”, “accidents and encounters and unexpected openings”
– Lauren Elkin, Flaneuse.
Walking allows me to immerse myself in my environment one step at a time, so that it slowly seeps into me.
Rebecca Solnit, in her famous book Wanderlust, says: “Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,’ for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities.”
A city is also a shared space and lends itself naturally to engagement and collaboration with others. In that sense, walking in the city allows me to operate in several capacities at once – as flaneur, photographer, artist, witness, and even collaborator.
The experience of walking in an Indian city is rich, complex, and challenging, all at once. Nowhere can this be seen and felt more keenly than in the slow, chaotic throb of its streets. The typical Indian street, with its sheer density of people, cars, food, merchandise, and rubbish, is mind-boggling. All boundaries are blurred here: those between private and public, sacred and profane, man and animal. People buy, sell, eat, sleep, cook, bathe, urinate, and defecate on the street. One must literally weave and dodge one’s way in order to survive the jungle-like obstacle courses of our streets. Earlier, this world seemed familiar and normal (as it does to most of us). It held no fascination for me and was, as it were, invisible.
After being away for almost seven years, when I came back to India, I started seeing our streets in a new light. Suddenly, things became visible, fascinating, and sometimes disturbing. I began to notice stark contrasts and profusions everywhere: the pile of rubbish near a pyramid of fruits, the public urinal near a street shrine, and the person whose hand I nearly stepped on while navigating the streets. The lack of space and order in the streets generates a claustrophobia that is overwhelming.
Yet, despite all odds, human beings, animals, and even trees and plants continue to thrive, and the city continues to expand. In and around the ruins of old, derelict buildings, new structures spring up with remarkable alacrity; gleaming new cars share roads with outdated models; and the youth easily outnumber the old.
The new constantly rubs against the old – be it buildings, cars, people, traditions, or even aesthetics. This lends the city a rich, ambivalent beauty that is uniquely its own. Over a period of four years, I have walked many streets, lanes and by-lanes, and have built a large archive of several thousand photographs and sketches of people, animals, buildings, trees, traffic, fruit and vegetable markets, and rubbish heaps.
In the beginning, I was merely taking pictures and sketching details that caught my eye but, eventually, large drawings began to emerge out of my photographs and sketches. The dense, complex imagery and the vastness of scale were breathtaking; it is this very sense of wonder that I have tried to explore in my large, black-and-white paintings.
Initially, I remained detached from, but aesthetically attuned to, the streets. But as time went by, what fascinated me was the poetry of the everyday in these picturesque, historic neighbourhoods.
For instance, my first walk in the old neighbourhood of Chor Bazar in Mumbai was like a stroll on a theatre set decked with old buildings, bizarre antiques and exquisite furniture strewn on cramped, lived roads. On narrower lanes, the live set had props like hanging tires and piles of automobile junk amidst endless antique car carcasses that enlivened these lived spaces. In Chitpur, Kolkata beautiful and crumbling buildings were laced with dainty balconies, and decrypt walls were emboldened by lurid Jatra theatre posters.
Trawling these fascinating arenas of street theatrics over the next four years helped me build my extensive collection of photos and drawings.
Instead of just responding to the surreal beauty of the streets, I became aware of my role as an artist and witness. For instance, I observed the dramatic changes that were reshaping Chor Bazar due to its extreme redevelopment. I began to notice the interactions among people and their environments, their work, their leisure, their children and the animals that lived with them, and the daily rhythm of their lives and its chaos and calm.
The richness of the experience of walking, witnessing, photographing and drawing the neighbourhoods is echoed in the layering of images to create complex composites. This visual complexity involves a slowing down in the way an image is made and processed. What is captured is not only visual detail but also the passage of time, recorded in the many layers of the composites. The visual memory of my time spent in these neighborhoods is presented not as a set of fleeting aesthetic impressions but as a deeper emotional and psychological response.
So, the beauty of this exploration has led to the expansion of my detached vision as flaneur and artist to a more empathetic role as witness and collaborator.