September 5, 2022 • 25 mins
This week, we continue our discussion about women and the Partition. Neha is joined by feminist artist, Pritika Chowdhry, whose work with anti-memorials and counter-memories aim to pay tribute to those often erased from the National narrative.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Before this week's episode, I wanted to take a moment
to let y'all know about the devastating floods happening in
Pakistan right now, over thirty million people have been affected,
with the death toll around eleven hundred and rising with
every passing day. Entire buildings are being washed away, with
many people sustaining injuries. I encourage every listener to donate
(00:22):
any amount they can to help alleviate this disaster. You
can find a list of organizations to send funds to
linked in the show notes. Warning, the following episode contains
stories of rape and extreme violence. You know, slowly but
(00:49):
shortly from the nineties, it was entering my conscious, my
public and social conscious that practition of India was a
very big event, really shaped the Sudasian geopolitics and also people.
It lives in families, It lives in families, histories. I
(01:09):
was fully understanding my inheritance, like this is what I inherit,
you know, as an Indian woman, this is part of
my cultural and familial inheritance. Once we make the association
that the past isn't meant to stay in the past,
what can we do to make sure the memories and
experiences of people who came before us don't get lost
(01:32):
in the void. Last week, you heard some of the
ways women were weaponized during partition from Adula Waldron, a
survivor who wrote a novel to process her personal trauma.
From this week, we're going to focus on what we
can do now to acknowledge these women, to make sure
their experiences don't get lost no matter how much time
(01:55):
has passed. From I Heart Radio, I'm Nehasse and this
is Partition, a podcast that will take a closer look
into this often forgotten part of history. I can't quite
remember how I stumbled upon this artist's work. I think
I was just looking for people who were sharing stories
(02:16):
about partition in any capacity. Once I looked at her photos,
I immediately knew I wanted to talk to her and
find out more about her intricate and honest works about Partition.
I call myself a post colonial filminist artist that's Practico Jodrey.
(02:39):
I make art installations that are anti memorials to traumatic
geopolitical events, such as the partition of India, eleven and
so on. In these anti memorials, I tried to excavate
the counter memories of these events. The counter histories of
these events. Pertica as an artist, curator, and writer who
(03:05):
focuses on anti memorials and counter memory. Though I hadn't
heard these terms before, I immediately understood their meeting as
she explained them to me. In essence, there are the
crux of this podcast. So an anti memorial basically goes
against the grain in terms of traditional monuments, which are
(03:31):
you know, state sponsored monuments tend to be rather large,
breaking motor structures that glorify the nation state in some way.
Anti memorials do the almost opposite, so they are usually
smaller in scale, They are usually temporary, they are made
(03:53):
usually of fragile and precarious materials, and most of the
time they critique the nation state. There are, of course,
statues and other entities named after Jinna and Ahru in
Pakistan in India, and while there are still some statues
(04:14):
devoted to our colonizers, they are not well preserved and
many are in the process of being removed, a notion
similar to Confederate statues being removed in the United States.
Counter memories, similarly, are memories that center the experiences of
(04:34):
people that don't get to write history. So the national
version the nationalist hero version, so to speak, of a
traumatic event is usually quite different from what was experienced
on the ground by people that were at a disadvantage.
In the context of the tradition of India, these tend
(04:56):
to be women and the Muslim minority. These two also
don't get to write the history of the partition to
any great extent. They are usually very silenced. Their experiences
are not heard, they're definitely not centered. Coming to terms
(05:19):
with our past is essential. We must own up to
our history, no matter how despicable it. Maybe think about
reparations being made to the descendants of slaves. While no
amount of money can erase the wickedness of the past,
at the very least it offers some accountability. You've heard
me say time and time again that the great men
(05:42):
in history narrative is the one that gets the limelight
in most cases, and everyday people, especially women, get shafted.
The everyday people are the ones that lost their homes,
were separated from their relatives, attacked, and must truly live
with a sequences from these so called great men. This
(06:05):
is where the counter memory comes in. So counter memory
is an exercise, It's an individual act of resistance it's
a fu Coldian term to excavate intentionally these histories that
have been lost, that have been raised from nationalist narratives,
and then to center those. Pertica mentions that a counter
(06:29):
memory is a fu Codian term. The term was coined
by French philosopher Michelle Fuco. Counter memories hope to break
the cycle of sharing a sugar coated history and questioning
the power structure of information that is widely available to us. Essentially,
it is through counter memories where we get the so
(06:50):
called inconvenient truths, the truths we don't get in history books,
the truths that are vastly different from the fantasies they
are addressed up as. No matter how Indians and Pakistan,
he's fall into the timeline of events. We all have
a partition story. I asked Partika what hers was. I
(07:13):
am half Cynthia and half Bengali. Pretiica is referring to
two different regions. Sinth is a province in Pakistan where
I'm also from, and Bengal is a region on the
eastern side of India which you may remember was split
by Cyril Radcliffe in the height of the n partition riots.
(07:36):
My grandparents and their extended family migrated from Karagi to Delhi.
You know, our family doesn't talk about like I had
to really extract it out of my mother and Um,
she was initially quite resistant to talking about it because
she was like, well, what's the point of talking about
(07:57):
all this, you know, past traumas and things like that.
It's just better to just forget. Extract is the perfect
word to like in her recollection of getting information from
her mom to getting a procedure as unpleasant as getting
a tooth removed is flawless. The partition lives very much,
(08:19):
lives and functions as a force, as a ghost or
however you want to call it. In the current jew
politics of South Asia. That was what led me to
sort of question my mother about what exactly happened in
n What does she know? So she was only um
I believe, three years old at the time, so she
doesn't really remember, but she knew enough that she was
(08:42):
able to fill me in on quite a few details
over the course of several telephone calls, because I was
in the U S by then. Over the course of
those many international telephone calls, particle slowly and covered the
horror stories her family witness during Partition. I found out
that my grandfather's extended family, like his brothers and sisters
(09:06):
and them, they all migrated, but they migrated at slightly
different times and had sighted different all within August of nine,
but through different modes like you know, train or car
or whatever, they were able to manage. And my grandfather
was in a pre decent position in the Indian railways.
(09:28):
He was even able to get like an air ticket
for a part of that journey. But the entire family,
the extended family, was not that lucky. And they there
were one whole part of their family, like one of
his siblings, and their entire family was completely like killed
in the in the trains that you know, when they
(09:50):
were coming to India. Only one nephew of my grandfather
survived and he had like some sixteen stab wounds. Yea,
his other sibling sister, his hard daughter, one of her daughters,
was abducted and lost. They were never able to find her.
(10:41):
Bertica mostly found out about Partition through film and television,
and when she started pursuing her m f A, all
the pieces came together for her. When I came to
the US after a few years, you know, I went
back to school, I started doing the Grand program UM
and you Double Medicine UM and m f A, and
(11:03):
there I had the opportunity to attend a graduate seminar
on cultural memory, and there I finally found like a
framework to really examine and analyze cultural memory in all
its different nuances. So there is the hegemonic narratives, there
is the erased narratives. And that's where I started to
(11:26):
understand these uh concepts of counter memories, counter histories, subaltern
resistance to these anti memorials or you know, anti monuments
or however you know, people use site different terms here,
but this is where I started to kind of gain
a vocabulary to process and then to sort of understand
(11:49):
how I can make art about it. So in my
conversation with Pertica, switched gears to a more complicated and
disheartening to topic general sible rape is a concept I
have a hard time wrapping my head around. Rape in
general is a concept I have a hard time wrapping
(12:09):
my head around. Activists and researcher Wherehema Begham rights. United
Nations Security Council Resolution eight states that sexual violence is
a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, and still fear
in disperse and or forcibly relocate civilian members of a
(12:30):
community or an ethnic group. Throughout time, we have seen
sexual violence, especially in the form of rape, being used
to demoralize and destabilize entire communities, destroying the structure of
families and societies in spaces of conflict. We can assume
sexual violence is inevitable when village elders are raped in public,
(12:52):
sons are forced to rape their mother, or soldiers rape
women in a village with their brothers and husbands forced
to watch. These acts are strategic and efforts to annihilate
an entire community. The use of the word tactic is
just very upsetting. To think of rape as a strategy,
(13:16):
or to chalk it up to unnecessary evil of war
is as detestable as it is outrageous. So partition is
is a very complex thing. It's a very complex geopolitical event.
There are many aspects of it. You know. She created
her first partition related work in two thousand and seven
(13:38):
while in grad school. That one was called Queering Mother India.
So in that I wanted to understand how this construct
of Mother India had maybe enabled the perverse logic of
using rape as a weapon in communal rights, where you know,
(14:01):
the body of the women of a community can become
the symbolic battleground where if you, you know, violate the
women's bodies, you can inflict a very deep wound and
humiliation to the men of that community. So it's very
(14:24):
much a battle amongst men, but it gets played out
on the bodies of women. That's the perverse logic of
using rape as a weapon, especially in these patriarchal societies.
Punishing women was not a one off aspect of partition,
but one that has been perpetrated in other historical events
(14:46):
like Bosnia and Rwanta. But back to South Asia, culturally,
we really revere women too. I mean, we have gardesses
that we worship. So I could not quite understand this
complete contradiction of you know, on the one hand we
(15:08):
worshiped goddesses, but then on the other hand we violate
women's bodies brutally, you know. So that was the whole
idea of that anti memorial, where it comprised of, you know,
about a nine or ten foot tall woman that I
had made in ceramic in clay and it was fragmented,
so you know, her body was in fragments around the gallery,
(15:31):
and this is to sort of allude to how women's
bodies were dismembered, you know, as part of the symbolic
violence in the partition rights. Pertica shows the female body
as the mutilated and brutalized body of Mother India. When
outside the traditional depictions of Mother India as a serene,
(15:53):
demire maternal figure who reproduces the nation as expected of her,
the icon of Mother India itself becomes broken by communal
violence m H. As she discusses more of her installations,
(16:20):
Pretica mentioned many of them are named after books or
films that she was inspired by. So the second Anteme
memorial I titled it What the Body Remembers because you know,
as an interra textual citation to the novel. And in
that I focused only on the lower half of women's bodies.
(16:41):
And they are also twice web size, so it's just
the lower half of the female body, but each one
of them is about six ft top. Due to the
large nature of these pieces, she notes that the belly
and pubic areas are at eye level, making a statement
want can't easily ignore m and they are engaged in
(17:04):
schoolyard games like playing hop scotch or jump pro or
being on a swing, and then there's like a soundscape
in there where it's the sound of you know, an
old time steam engine sort of approaching and then leaving,
and that it is just placed on a loop, so
it's the sort of this ominous sound of a train
(17:25):
coming and then leaving. Unfortunately, the pieces and what the
Body remembers suffered irreparable damage while being transported, but photos
of the art can be seen on Partica's website. However,
she has a solution to bring them back to life
by recreating them as digital three D models and releasing
(17:48):
them as n f T s, a statement I never
thought I would say on this show. If you don't
know what an n f T is, I share you
I am the worst person to explain it. The next
one that I made after What the Body Remembers was
Silent Waters, which is an intratextual citation to a film
(18:09):
by Seba Summer in which she sort of narrates the
life story of a woman who was abducted and raped
and then eventually ended up marrying one of her rapists
as a form of survival, and of course those memories
hunt her but there's this sort of culture of silence
in the village where she lives, where nobody mentions it
(18:30):
and she doesn't mention it, and that her survival is
sort of conditional to that. But eventually one of her
brothers finds her because they never stopped looking for her.
He comes from India and he finds her, which then
breaks the silence of her abduction and rape. Campani came
out in two thousand three, and I'll discuss this film
(18:53):
further in a later episode. In this installation title Old
Silent Waters, I created a hundred and one feet and
these are also larger than life, so they are like
fifteen sixteen inches lunches, bigger than most human feet. They
are glazed black, dead black, and when I displayed them,
(19:17):
I filled them to different heights with salt water, so
during the exhibition, the water evaporates and leaves like a
crystalline residue of the salt in the feet. There's also
a soundscape in there where, um, you know, it's the
sound of running feet, rainfall, and then a body hitting water,
(19:42):
so like somebody may be jumped into a well. Some
of Parta's other installations that focus on partition include remembering
the crooked Line, which uses games as a motif. Like
in the body, remembers and displays separations of other countries
(20:04):
in broken column a series of hanging latex and silicon
casts printed with neutral colored bricks and stones, hanged dispersed
in a gallery. These casts represent the monuments to partition
that should exist in the affected countries, but they don't,
except for the monument representing the Liberation War. In this war,
(20:26):
Bengalis living in East Pakistan fought for their independence, eventually
emerging victorious as a new country, Bangladesh. This war was
one of the many traumatic and violent events that stemmed
from partition. It is a story that deserves its own time,
research and respect. It is my hope to share some
(20:46):
of those stories in the future and in memory, leaks,
traces and drips. Pritica uses dripping water to express the
regularity of communal riots. So what can we do now?
(21:08):
I asked Perteca this question, and I'll be the first
to admit it was pretty loaded. How do we pay
tribute to women affected by partition? How do we honor them?
Mm hmm, Yeah, that is a big question, you know,
because rape is still stigmatized, right rape is a stigma
(21:29):
that is still largely carried by women. Right. It's hard
to center these narratives of rape because again, remember the
victims of rape, right, their survival after the rape in
a lot of situations depends on their silence. Like it's
(21:51):
it's not of benefit to them to break their silence. Right,
So up until as a society, women carry the stigma
of rape, and women's silence about their rapes is what
is valued rather than the redressal of the wrong. I
think it would be very hard to reverse that trend,
(22:14):
you know, in any significant way. So I guess what
we can do people like you and me, you know,
creatives who are not directly impacted by the rapes, but
you know, as researchers and as creatives, we can research
it and preserve those memories and in a way in
different cultural artifacts you know, art, podcasts, books, storiography. You know, however,
(22:40):
we are able films. Retica's work has been on display
in a pleatora of museums around the world. As the
senior curator for the South Asian Institute of Chicago, She's
putting together a seventy five anniversary project where many of
her works will be showcased the exhibit. It is aptly
(23:00):
titled Unbearable Memories Unspeakable Histories. At the top of the episode,
you heard Prithicca say that Partition lives in families and
this history is something she inherits. I had shared many
of the same sentiments in an earlier episode. Partition is
a living and breathing thing. I too, believe it is
(23:24):
my legacy to share these stories and ensure they don't
get lost. Perhaps the most important aspect of Brithicca's work
is that it can be seen online, thus eliminating any barriers.
It doesn't matter what side of the border you belong to,
or whether Partition is a part of your story or not.
(23:45):
The accessibility of Prothicca's work allows everyone, no matter where
you are or who you are, to take the first
step towards learning about this history that would otherwise be forgotten.
In episode one, you heard me mention that there are
no partition memorials in either India or Pakistan. What is
(24:09):
being done to reserve this history? There are a number
of people and organizations recording and documenting survivor accounts, and
I was lucky enough to talk to some of them.
And discuss the task of collecting memories. I sort of
casually started recording story on a trip to Punjab in
(24:32):
two thousand nine. People thought it was insane, like really
strange what I was doing. People who had witnessed it
started to line up and it was like, Oh, there's
a need, like people want to tell the story until
next week. I'm Nejasis and this is Partition. Partition was
(24:59):
developed as a part of the Next Up initiative created
by Anna Hosnier, Joel Monique and Seni a median. Partition
is produced by Anna Hosnier, Tricia Mukerjee and Becker Ramos.
It is edited by Rory Gagan, with the original score
composed by Mark Hadley.
Before this week's episode, I wanted to take a moment
to let y'all know about the devastating floods happening in
Pakistan right now, over thirty million people have been affected,
with the death toll around eleven hundred and rising with
every passing day. Entire buildings are being washed away, with
many people sustaining injuries. I encourage every listener to donate
(00:22):
any amount they can to help alleviate this disaster. You
can find a list of organizations to send funds to
linked in the show notes. Warning, the following episode contains
stories of rape and extreme violence. You know, slowly but
(00:49):
shortly from the nineties, it was entering my conscious, my
public and social conscious that practition of India was a
very big event, really shaped the Sudasian geopolitics and also people.
It lives in families, It lives in families, histories. I
(01:09):
was fully understanding my inheritance, like this is what I inherit,
you know, as an Indian woman, this is part of
my cultural and familial inheritance. Once we make the association
that the past isn't meant to stay in the past,
what can we do to make sure the memories and
experiences of people who came before us don't get lost
(01:32):
in the void. Last week, you heard some of the
ways women were weaponized during partition from Adula Waldron, a
survivor who wrote a novel to process her personal trauma.
From this week, we're going to focus on what we
can do now to acknowledge these women, to make sure
their experiences don't get lost no matter how much time
(01:55):
has passed. From I Heart Radio, I'm Nehasse and this
is Partition, a podcast that will take a closer look
into this often forgotten part of history. I can't quite
remember how I stumbled upon this artist's work. I think
I was just looking for people who were sharing stories
(02:16):
about partition in any capacity. Once I looked at her photos,
I immediately knew I wanted to talk to her and
find out more about her intricate and honest works about Partition.
I call myself a post colonial filminist artist that's Practico Jodrey.
(02:39):
I make art installations that are anti memorials to traumatic
geopolitical events, such as the partition of India, eleven and
so on. In these anti memorials, I tried to excavate
the counter memories of these events. The counter histories of
these events. Pertica as an artist, curator, and writer who
(03:05):
focuses on anti memorials and counter memory. Though I hadn't
heard these terms before, I immediately understood their meeting as
she explained them to me. In essence, there are the
crux of this podcast. So an anti memorial basically goes
against the grain in terms of traditional monuments, which are
(03:31):
you know, state sponsored monuments tend to be rather large,
breaking motor structures that glorify the nation state in some way.
Anti memorials do the almost opposite, so they are usually
smaller in scale, They are usually temporary, they are made
(03:53):
usually of fragile and precarious materials, and most of the
time they critique the nation state. There are, of course,
statues and other entities named after Jinna and Ahru in
Pakistan in India, and while there are still some statues
(04:14):
devoted to our colonizers, they are not well preserved and
many are in the process of being removed, a notion
similar to Confederate statues being removed in the United States.
Counter memories, similarly, are memories that center the experiences of
(04:34):
people that don't get to write history. So the national
version the nationalist hero version, so to speak, of a
traumatic event is usually quite different from what was experienced
on the ground by people that were at a disadvantage.
In the context of the tradition of India, these tend
(04:56):
to be women and the Muslim minority. These two also
don't get to write the history of the partition to
any great extent. They are usually very silenced. Their experiences
are not heard, they're definitely not centered. Coming to terms
(05:19):
with our past is essential. We must own up to
our history, no matter how despicable it. Maybe think about
reparations being made to the descendants of slaves. While no
amount of money can erase the wickedness of the past,
at the very least it offers some accountability. You've heard
me say time and time again that the great men
(05:42):
in history narrative is the one that gets the limelight
in most cases, and everyday people, especially women, get shafted.
The everyday people are the ones that lost their homes,
were separated from their relatives, attacked, and must truly live
with a sequences from these so called great men. This
(06:05):
is where the counter memory comes in. So counter memory
is an exercise, It's an individual act of resistance it's
a fu Coldian term to excavate intentionally these histories that
have been lost, that have been raised from nationalist narratives,
and then to center those. Pertica mentions that a counter
(06:29):
memory is a fu Codian term. The term was coined
by French philosopher Michelle Fuco. Counter memories hope to break
the cycle of sharing a sugar coated history and questioning
the power structure of information that is widely available to us. Essentially,
it is through counter memories where we get the so
(06:50):
called inconvenient truths, the truths we don't get in history books,
the truths that are vastly different from the fantasies they
are addressed up as. No matter how Indians and Pakistan,
he's fall into the timeline of events. We all have
a partition story. I asked Partika what hers was. I
(07:13):
am half Cynthia and half Bengali. Pretiica is referring to
two different regions. Sinth is a province in Pakistan where
I'm also from, and Bengal is a region on the
eastern side of India which you may remember was split
by Cyril Radcliffe in the height of the n partition riots.
(07:36):
My grandparents and their extended family migrated from Karagi to Delhi.
You know, our family doesn't talk about like I had
to really extract it out of my mother and Um,
she was initially quite resistant to talking about it because
she was like, well, what's the point of talking about
(07:57):
all this, you know, past traumas and things like that.
It's just better to just forget. Extract is the perfect
word to like in her recollection of getting information from
her mom to getting a procedure as unpleasant as getting
a tooth removed is flawless. The partition lives very much,
(08:19):
lives and functions as a force, as a ghost or
however you want to call it. In the current jew
politics of South Asia. That was what led me to
sort of question my mother about what exactly happened in
n What does she know? So she was only um
I believe, three years old at the time, so she
doesn't really remember, but she knew enough that she was
(08:42):
able to fill me in on quite a few details
over the course of several telephone calls, because I was
in the U S by then. Over the course of
those many international telephone calls, particle slowly and covered the
horror stories her family witness during Partition. I found out
that my grandfather's extended family, like his brothers and sisters
(09:06):
and them, they all migrated, but they migrated at slightly
different times and had sighted different all within August of nine,
but through different modes like you know, train or car
or whatever, they were able to manage. And my grandfather
was in a pre decent position in the Indian railways.
(09:28):
He was even able to get like an air ticket
for a part of that journey. But the entire family,
the extended family, was not that lucky. And they there
were one whole part of their family, like one of
his siblings, and their entire family was completely like killed
in the in the trains that you know, when they
(09:50):
were coming to India. Only one nephew of my grandfather
survived and he had like some sixteen stab wounds. Yea,
his other sibling sister, his hard daughter, one of her daughters,
was abducted and lost. They were never able to find her.
(10:41):
Bertica mostly found out about Partition through film and television,
and when she started pursuing her m f A, all
the pieces came together for her. When I came to
the US after a few years, you know, I went
back to school, I started doing the Grand program UM
and you Double Medicine UM and m f A, and
(11:03):
there I had the opportunity to attend a graduate seminar
on cultural memory, and there I finally found like a
framework to really examine and analyze cultural memory in all
its different nuances. So there is the hegemonic narratives, there
is the erased narratives. And that's where I started to
(11:26):
understand these uh concepts of counter memories, counter histories, subaltern
resistance to these anti memorials or you know, anti monuments
or however you know, people use site different terms here,
but this is where I started to kind of gain
a vocabulary to process and then to sort of understand
(11:49):
how I can make art about it. So in my
conversation with Pertica, switched gears to a more complicated and
disheartening to topic general sible rape is a concept I
have a hard time wrapping my head around. Rape in
general is a concept I have a hard time wrapping
(12:09):
my head around. Activists and researcher Wherehema Begham rights. United
Nations Security Council Resolution eight states that sexual violence is
a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, and still fear
in disperse and or forcibly relocate civilian members of a
(12:30):
community or an ethnic group. Throughout time, we have seen
sexual violence, especially in the form of rape, being used
to demoralize and destabilize entire communities, destroying the structure of
families and societies in spaces of conflict. We can assume
sexual violence is inevitable when village elders are raped in public,
(12:52):
sons are forced to rape their mother, or soldiers rape
women in a village with their brothers and husbands forced
to watch. These acts are strategic and efforts to annihilate
an entire community. The use of the word tactic is
just very upsetting. To think of rape as a strategy,
(13:16):
or to chalk it up to unnecessary evil of war
is as detestable as it is outrageous. So partition is
is a very complex thing. It's a very complex geopolitical event.
There are many aspects of it. You know. She created
her first partition related work in two thousand and seven
(13:38):
while in grad school. That one was called Queering Mother India.
So in that I wanted to understand how this construct
of Mother India had maybe enabled the perverse logic of
using rape as a weapon in communal rights, where you know,
(14:01):
the body of the women of a community can become
the symbolic battleground where if you, you know, violate the
women's bodies, you can inflict a very deep wound and
humiliation to the men of that community. So it's very
(14:24):
much a battle amongst men, but it gets played out
on the bodies of women. That's the perverse logic of
using rape as a weapon, especially in these patriarchal societies.
Punishing women was not a one off aspect of partition,
but one that has been perpetrated in other historical events
(14:46):
like Bosnia and Rwanta. But back to South Asia, culturally,
we really revere women too. I mean, we have gardesses
that we worship. So I could not quite understand this
complete contradiction of you know, on the one hand we
(15:08):
worshiped goddesses, but then on the other hand we violate
women's bodies brutally, you know. So that was the whole
idea of that anti memorial, where it comprised of, you know,
about a nine or ten foot tall woman that I
had made in ceramic in clay and it was fragmented,
so you know, her body was in fragments around the gallery,
(15:31):
and this is to sort of allude to how women's
bodies were dismembered, you know, as part of the symbolic
violence in the partition rights. Pertica shows the female body
as the mutilated and brutalized body of Mother India. When
outside the traditional depictions of Mother India as a serene,
(15:53):
demire maternal figure who reproduces the nation as expected of her,
the icon of Mother India itself becomes broken by communal
violence m H. As she discusses more of her installations,
(16:20):
Pretica mentioned many of them are named after books or
films that she was inspired by. So the second Anteme
memorial I titled it What the Body Remembers because you know,
as an interra textual citation to the novel. And in
that I focused only on the lower half of women's bodies.
(16:41):
And they are also twice web size, so it's just
the lower half of the female body, but each one
of them is about six ft top. Due to the
large nature of these pieces, she notes that the belly
and pubic areas are at eye level, making a statement
want can't easily ignore m and they are engaged in
(17:04):
schoolyard games like playing hop scotch or jump pro or
being on a swing, and then there's like a soundscape
in there where it's the sound of you know, an
old time steam engine sort of approaching and then leaving,
and that it is just placed on a loop, so
it's the sort of this ominous sound of a train
(17:25):
coming and then leaving. Unfortunately, the pieces and what the
Body remembers suffered irreparable damage while being transported, but photos
of the art can be seen on Partica's website. However,
she has a solution to bring them back to life
by recreating them as digital three D models and releasing
(17:48):
them as n f T s, a statement I never
thought I would say on this show. If you don't
know what an n f T is, I share you
I am the worst person to explain it. The next
one that I made after What the Body Remembers was
Silent Waters, which is an intratextual citation to a film
(18:09):
by Seba Summer in which she sort of narrates the
life story of a woman who was abducted and raped
and then eventually ended up marrying one of her rapists
as a form of survival, and of course those memories
hunt her but there's this sort of culture of silence
in the village where she lives, where nobody mentions it
(18:30):
and she doesn't mention it, and that her survival is
sort of conditional to that. But eventually one of her
brothers finds her because they never stopped looking for her.
He comes from India and he finds her, which then
breaks the silence of her abduction and rape. Campani came
out in two thousand three, and I'll discuss this film
(18:53):
further in a later episode. In this installation title Old
Silent Waters, I created a hundred and one feet and
these are also larger than life, so they are like
fifteen sixteen inches lunches, bigger than most human feet. They
are glazed black, dead black, and when I displayed them,
(19:17):
I filled them to different heights with salt water, so
during the exhibition, the water evaporates and leaves like a
crystalline residue of the salt in the feet. There's also
a soundscape in there where, um, you know, it's the
sound of running feet, rainfall, and then a body hitting water,
(19:42):
so like somebody may be jumped into a well. Some
of Parta's other installations that focus on partition include remembering
the crooked Line, which uses games as a motif. Like
in the body, remembers and displays separations of other countries
(20:04):
in broken column a series of hanging latex and silicon
casts printed with neutral colored bricks and stones, hanged dispersed
in a gallery. These casts represent the monuments to partition
that should exist in the affected countries, but they don't,
except for the monument representing the Liberation War. In this war,
(20:26):
Bengalis living in East Pakistan fought for their independence, eventually
emerging victorious as a new country, Bangladesh. This war was
one of the many traumatic and violent events that stemmed
from partition. It is a story that deserves its own time,
research and respect. It is my hope to share some
(20:46):
of those stories in the future and in memory, leaks,
traces and drips. Pritica uses dripping water to express the
regularity of communal riots. So what can we do now?
(21:08):
I asked Perteca this question, and I'll be the first
to admit it was pretty loaded. How do we pay
tribute to women affected by partition? How do we honor them?
Mm hmm, Yeah, that is a big question, you know,
because rape is still stigmatized, right rape is a stigma
(21:29):
that is still largely carried by women. Right. It's hard
to center these narratives of rape because again, remember the
victims of rape, right, their survival after the rape in
a lot of situations depends on their silence. Like it's
(21:51):
it's not of benefit to them to break their silence. Right,
So up until as a society, women carry the stigma
of rape, and women's silence about their rapes is what
is valued rather than the redressal of the wrong. I
think it would be very hard to reverse that trend,
(22:14):
you know, in any significant way. So I guess what
we can do people like you and me, you know,
creatives who are not directly impacted by the rapes, but
you know, as researchers and as creatives, we can research
it and preserve those memories and in a way in
different cultural artifacts you know, art, podcasts, books, storiography. You know, however,
(22:40):
we are able films. Retica's work has been on display
in a pleatora of museums around the world. As the
senior curator for the South Asian Institute of Chicago, She's
putting together a seventy five anniversary project where many of
her works will be showcased the exhibit. It is aptly
(23:00):
titled Unbearable Memories Unspeakable Histories. At the top of the episode,
you heard Prithicca say that Partition lives in families and
this history is something she inherits. I had shared many
of the same sentiments in an earlier episode. Partition is
a living and breathing thing. I too, believe it is
(23:24):
my legacy to share these stories and ensure they don't
get lost. Perhaps the most important aspect of Brithicca's work
is that it can be seen online, thus eliminating any barriers.
It doesn't matter what side of the border you belong to,
or whether Partition is a part of your story or not.
(23:45):
The accessibility of Prothicca's work allows everyone, no matter where
you are or who you are, to take the first
step towards learning about this history that would otherwise be forgotten.
In episode one, you heard me mention that there are
no partition memorials in either India or Pakistan. What is
(24:09):
being done to reserve this history? There are a number
of people and organizations recording and documenting survivor accounts, and
I was lucky enough to talk to some of them.
And discuss the task of collecting memories. I sort of
casually started recording story on a trip to Punjab in
(24:32):
two thousand nine. People thought it was insane, like really
strange what I was doing. People who had witnessed it
started to line up and it was like, Oh, there's
a need, like people want to tell the story until
next week. I'm Nejasis and this is Partition. Partition was
(24:59):
developed as a part of the Next Up initiative created
by Anna Hosnier, Joel Monique and Seni a median. Partition
is produced by Anna Hosnier, Tricia Mukerjee and Becker Ramos.
It is edited by Rory Gagan, with the original score
composed by Mark Hadley.
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