Can an Exhibition Memorialize the 1947 Partition of the Indian Subcontinent?
Sreshta Rit Premnath. Citizen/Denizen. 2022. Acrylic, gel and LED. Photography by Daniella Baptista. Courtesy of Art Jameel
An outdoor game, a newly designed syllabus, an exit sign, and a T-shirt with barbed wire print. These are just a handful of the creative material forms on display in an ongoing exhibition seeking to memorialize the 1947 Partition of the Indian Subcontinent into the sovereign nation states of India and Pakistan. Bold and richly interpretive, Proposals for a Memorial to Partition presents a generous offering of alternative, previously unseen ways of remembering a monumental historical event in which nearly 15 million people were displaced and between one and two million killed. The arbitrary, brutal division of citizens of the same blood left a legacy so unrelenting that our collective attempts at remembrance have been few and far between. Proposals steps up to partially fill in the lacuna of the 75 years past.
Running at Dubai’s Jameel Arts Centre until 19 February 2023 and curated by Murtaza Vali, Proposals amplifies suppressed, lesser-known voices of Partition. In a post-independence South Asia that tends to define itself by way of geopolitical territories and majoritarianism, the effects of Partition on marginalized communities—women, refugees and migrants, religious and caste-based minorities, and indigenous peoples—have been largely hidden from public view. The exhibition provides a free space for them to share their perspectives, underscoring their individualized accounts against hegemonic state-centric narratives.
Consider 100 hand-drawn maps of my country, an artwork by Shilpa Gupta featuring numerous impressions of India’s political map superimposed onto a plain white background. Each simplistic tracing, drawn in blue ink by randomized members of the public, is unique, creating a chaotic and indiscernible outline. The work’s flawed yet whimsical representation of geographical boundaries suggests that the idea of the nation state is itself a nebulous one, so much so that ordinary citizens fail to grasp the reality of borders beyond a hazily-remembered image and its constructed fiction. Gupta creates similar reproductions of Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan, and North-South Korea that also have been ravaged by imperialism and subsequent conflict. These three “muddled maps” gesture at the arbitrary, unfounded bases on which borders and territories are defined. Many pieces in Proposals embody this subversive mode of gazing at history and nation-states.
Shilpa Gupta. 100 hand-drawn maps of my country in Mumbai; Cuenca; Delme; Gwangju, Seoul, Cheorwon: Tel Aviv and Jerusalem; Montreal and different parts of Italy. 2008–ongoing. Carbon tracings on paper. Courtesy of the author, artist, and Jameel Arts Centre
In the absence of a large-scale memorial honoring the Partition (which even if present, Vali believes, would be biased and severely lacking), Proposals allows for over 20 pluralistic “memorials” by artists from across the subcontinent and its global diaspora to converge within the same space. Where ambitious state-funded monuments embody narrowly-defined nationalisms, this innovative project resists communal links and is firmly based in a multicultural South Asian diasporic site. While Indo-Pak relations remain tense and fraught, this exhibition uses short stories, intimate conversations, and performative poetry to center the humanity shared on both sides of the border.
For Vali, who is from Sharjah and Brooklyn, this project has been a long time in the making. Exploring how art can be channeled to process shared societal trauma led him to curate six proposals in 2011 for a book titled Manual for Treason, published by the Sharjah Art Foundation. Eleven years later, inspired by the first set of artworks, Proposals pushes the boundaries of what can constitute a commemoration of the long-drawn-out events of 1947 and their aftermath. Things that seem inconceivable today, such as cross-border interaction and coexistence, are brought to life through the myriad proposals, forcing a reconsideration of the deep-rooted status quo in the subcontinent.
Vali’s definition of “memorial” is intentionally ambiguous, meant to give free reign to artists to reflect shared South Asian memory and subjectivity. In his brief to participating artists, he outlines:
“A proposal presents limitless potential and endless possibility. It is preliminary, speculative, tentative, a suggestion, something put forth, and this exploratory nature of the proposal is key.”
Perhaps fittingly, Vali’s call for contributions has itself been reimagined into a work of art, one of the many “proposals” that comprise the exhibition. Shreyas Karle, a Goa-based artist, places three printed copies of the brief adjacent to each other on a wooden table, each with slightly different fonts, layouts, and background colors. As the artwork’s description indicates, the arrangement emphasizes the differing subjective implications that a formal treaty carries for different parties.
Spatially, Proposals spans two large partitioned areas connected by a hallway which also houses artworks. The exhibition adopts a modern, minimalist design, with works mostly occupying the walls and margins of each space. In contrast to the elevated ceilings and expanses of wooden flooring, the majority of pieces give off a rather humble visual appearance with respect to their size and framing—a feature that silently underscores the tragic gravity of the events being remembered.
Walking through the show is an interactive, immersive experience. Memorials of different media, including numerous mixed and multimedia works, are juxtaposed throughout, leaving the viewer to continually assimilate varying approaches to the Partition. Audiences shift between different vantage points to internalize the past, be it themes of belonging and absence, urbanism and environmentalism, education, childhood and family, bureaucracy, or violence. With no apparent order of installation and viewing, each proposal maintains an identity of its own, yet simultaneously converses with the one next to it.
Proposals for a Memorial to Partition. Installation views. Photography by Daniella Baptista. Courtesy of Art Jameel
Additionally, several installations are embedded into the gallery space, making them harder to spot but substantially more unsettling in their eventual message. Three seemingly ordinary exit signs are positioned high up at different locations, where they blend smoothly into the background. Designed by Brooklyn-based artist Sreshta Rit Premnath, these signs highlight similar-sounding but contrasting word pairs on each side (Nation/Notion, Patriot/Rioter, Citizen/Denizen), subtly revealing the endless duality of association and alienation in the modern nations of South Asia.
Motion-sensor triggered audio devices on the walls play a jumbled mix of sound and speech recordings as viewers move through the show. The audio series, entitled You are Now and created by collaborative art studio CAMP, draws its samples from the first-ever Partition Museum in Amritsar in an attempt to reinterpret and critique institutional depictions of the Partition.
Sreshta Rit Premnath. Nation/Notion and Citizen/Denizen. 2022. Acrylic, gel and LED. Photography by Daniella Baptista. Courtesy of the artist and Art Jameel
Proposals stands out for its inclusive and delocalized representation of Partition experiences. Many proposals do not make mentions of particular cities, states, or countries in their subject. Others like Gupta’s series of maps, even if they do, aim to debunk the need for boundaries at all.
In his photographic work A Way to Play, Aziz Hazara introduces a simple game that is often played by people waiting to cross the arbitrary border erected between present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan during the colonial era. Contributing a second proposal, Gupta assembles a tabletop monument with multicolored blocks of wood and figurines of children among them; in doing so, she deconstructs and reassembles elements of different national flags, effectively poking at the concept of “playing with borders”. And in her two-part video series Mangoes and Mothers Lands, Bani Abidi takes on the double role of an Indian and a Pakistani woman to call out the relentless narcissism of minor differences that play out among South Asians. These works use elemental symbols—shared across borders—to appeal to a sense of universality, thus challenging and rejecting the constructed separations imposed by modern nation states.
Aziz Hazara. A Way to Play. 2022. Photographic print on tracing paper. Courtesy of Jameel Arts Centre
Shilpa Gupta. Untitled. 2022. Pinewood. Photography by Daniella Baptista. Courtesy of Art Jameel
Some proposals adopt a more direct, hard-hitting tone, suggesting specific actions. The Forest Curriculum, an artist collective focused on the forested lands of South and Southeast Asia, designed a neon green patterned T-shirt in opposition to the heavily barbed borderlines between Northeast India and Bangladesh. Describing the intense vigilantism that has taken hold in India’s easternmost region, they proclaim in a detailed fact sheet laid out on green paper:
“The only monument we believe in is complete and permanent demilitarization.”
The Forest Curriculum fully dismisses the notion of “speculative monuments”, asserting that any such constructs are meaningless until systemic reform is enacted toward the enfranchisement of the nation’s indigenous inhabitants and forest dwellers. In this way, their work positions itself almost antithetically to the entire exhibition’s motive—and yet, the notion of the proposal leaves room for even such an anti-proposal to exist in the space, thereby enriching the show’s makeup. “What will we do with all this bloody barbed wire?”, which is the title of the work, also condemns the rise in hate crimes against minorities—often centered on cow protectionist claims—backed by India’s current Hindu nationalist regime. Proposals like that of The Forest Curriculum boldly call out colonial-era policies that continue to persist in present-day nation states, through repressive government legislation and zealous right-wing propaganda. Century-long British annexation of Adivasi homelands has manifested post-independence as indiscriminate military encroachment, leaving little to no scope for the emancipation of Adivasi communities.
Abhijan Toto, Fileona Dkhar and Pujita Guha for the Forest Curriculum. “What will we do with all this bloody barbed wire?”. 2022. Text and prints on garments. Courtesy of Jameel Arts Centre
Given its wide-ranging scope, the collection could have included more works that point to the violent effects of 1947 conflicts on women, as well as the intergenerational trauma that women have specifically had to bear. Reflections on the horrific crimes committed en masse against women during Partition, including abductions, rapes, murders, and forcible religious conversions, have been conveniently swept under the carpet since independence, amid the fiery masculinist project of nation-building. Additionally, the historical marginalization of female voices in Partition studies has eclipsed the nuanced role assumed by women in shaping the identity and national consciousness of the newly formed countries. While over half of the exhibition’s participating artists are women, their proposals do not directly address the harshly gendered Partition experience—the heinous use of women as instruments of war and communal hate remains absent.
As the Partition generation and their descendants gradually age, it becomes increasingly essential to record their lived experiences. If the numerous wars have shown us anything, it is that Partition has only sowed the seeds of the rising animosity and aggressive sectarianism plaguing South Asian nations today. Rigorously documenting the events of history and the poignant anecdotes of those who lived through it would open our eyes to the futility of our past divisions, paving the way towards progressively inclusive nationalisms and unity.
We need ever more proposals, memorials, stories, and accounts that help us grapple with our past as we emerge into the future. Online video interviews from the crowdsourced 1947 Partition Archive, virtual reality experiences by Project Dastaan, audio testimonies from the Partition Voices BBC series by journalist Kavita Puri, ongoing art installations from the Partition Anti-Memorial Project by artist Pritika Chowdhry, and tales of everyday objects from Remnants of Partition by oral historian Aanchal Malhotra are just a sample of the uniquely dedicated efforts at archiving Partition histories in recent memory. Perhaps Proposals could evolve into a larger, more accessible, and all-encompassing project—one that grows and continues indefinitely.
Proposals for a Memorial to Partition runs until 19 February 2023.
Arundhati Kalyan is a PhD student and hobby writer currently based in the UK. As an overseas Indian who grew up in Dubai, UAE, she writes on art, music, film, and culture from a South Asian diasporic perspective. Her work has previously been published in Kajal Magazine, Brown Girl Magazine, Film Companion, and Inquiries Journal. She holds a BA from Columbia University, New York. Follow her on IG @arundhatikalyan