By: Kavita Chowdhury
With her long thick plait swaying behind her, Mungli Hemrom (23) proudly shows art enthusiasts and visitors the murals in her neighbourhood Pearson Palli. The quiet rural hamlet in Shantiniketan, 180 km from Kolkata, in the Birbhum district of West Bengal, is home to Santals, an ethnic group of tribal people native to the region. Standing out amid the tall date palms are bright white symbol-like letters painted on the outer walls of mud huts.
These, as Hemrom explains, are a part of the nearly forgotten Santali script, Ol Chiki. The innovative work titled, I Am Ol Chiki, was created as part of the just-concluded inaugural edition of the Bengal Biennale, a celebration of art spread across 20 venues in Kolkata and Shantiniketan that saw the participation of over 100 artists, performers, scholars, curators and cultural practitioners.
Interspersed among the Ol Chiki alphabets and numerals are contemporary emoticons—smileys, sad faces and even a QR code. Hemrom, along with several other Santali girls of the village, assisted artist Mithu Sen to paint these striking murals within the homesteads of the community.
A first-generation learner, Hemrom has worked hard to pursue a Master’s degree in Education. She candidly admits that this is probably the first time she has been proud of her tribal identity. “Before this I had only been exposed to and studied in the Bengali language. Throughout my life, we have been advised to erase our unique tribal identity to blend in with the mainstream,” says Hemrom. Naturally, the unexpected public response surprised her. A beaming Hemrom adds, “As a Santali, to find my language and culture, being hailed and recognised by so many people, has been very empowering.”
Although the Santali language is still widely spoken, the script is largely out of use. Inspired by the experience, Hemrom, who aims to be a college professor, has resolved to teach Ol Chiki to children in the village and even pen a few poems in the language herself. Through Sen’s work, the Bengal Biennale managed to not just spark a revival for the Santali script but also inspire younger generations to reclaim their lost Santali identity.
Significantly, the aim of the Bengal Biennale was to be a platform for artistic engagement with local communities. In doing so, the Biennale gave expression to the unheard stories and voices of women.
In another artwork, in Shantiniketan’s Subhash Pally, a three-storeyed house completely draped in embroidered bedspreads or kanthas becomes an autobiographical outlet for local women and housewives in the area. Conceptualised by the local artists’ collective GABAA, in the work titled Kanthar Ghor, nearly 100 women “wrote” their jiboni (life stories) using the kantha stitch. Intrinsic to Bengal, the kantha is a commonly used domestic item made from used sarees and the stitch is also known as kantha.
Sixty-five-year-old grandmother Maya Bhengra, who generally makes kanthas for her family, says the kantha she stitched for the Biennale is “special” since it enabled her to nostalgically revisit her childhood memories and embroider it in Bengali—about her carefree days of escaping from school and swimming in the Laal Bandh canal. The portly woman with a broad smile says, “I felt so proud and happy when my daughter, seeing my embroidered kantha displayed on this house, was proudly telling people, this is my mother’s work.”
Trying to express succinctly what it really meant to be exhibiting their work in such a large-scale public display, Moushumi Laha (44), a housewife explains, “Aamra jara sansare thaki, aamader proshonsha korar keu neyi (All of us who stay confined to our homes doing all the housework, there is no recognition and no praise for our tireless labour).”
It took her over a month to stitch the kantha—that too only after finishing her household chores at night.
Laha says it was personally an empowering journey for her as she revealed through her embroidery her “childhood guilt” in public for the first time—of how as a 10-year-old schoolgirl for fear of being reprimanded for losing an expensive umbrella, she pushed the blame onto an innocent household help who loved her like his child.
Interestingly, the Kanthar Ghor project has given these nondescript home makers a new sense of self-worth and identity. In fact, the public recognition and interest that the work has generated have inspired other women in surrounding villages. An enthused Laha says, she and her co-workers are now exploring options of how to take their kantha-inspired work to a larger audience.
The Biennale has not just helped amplify women’s voices but also enabled them to express their trauma and unheard stories. Crocheted dolls in school uniforms with tear-stained faces, a baby doll crouching under a bed—are integral elements of young artist Sweety Chakma’s work, Becoming Sophie: Weaving Reality from Dreams. An intensely autobiographical work, the doll is representative of the artist as a ten-year-old and the childhood trauma she experienced in a broken home, abandoned by her parents and how she adulted early in order to survive.
Becoming Sophie, thereby, is also representative of the unvoiced screams and traumas of countless girls within patriarchal families.
Originally from Arunachal Pradesh, Chakma subsequently studied Art at Vishwa Bharati University. She says, “Life is all about choices. And even as a child, I wanted to carve out my own identity, create my own dream life which was far removed from the traumatic life that I found myself in.” Chakma escaped from the hostel she was sent away to, and took on a new name—Sophie. Interestingly, Sophie is her alter ego. Two crocheted dolls—an adult and child connected through a long red umbilical cord—are indicative of the adult Sophie comforting the traumatised child in hindsight.
The work, for which Chakma crocheted 22 dolls, was displayed in the midst of the village community in Dharmarajtola in Shantiniketan. Expressing her unspoken traumatic memories through crocheted dolls, woodcut prints and drawings, Chakma confesses, proved to be cathartic.
A confident Chakma now has taken over the responsibility of educating and guiding young girl cousins in her family. Flashing a small, the petite built Chakma says of herself, “This Sophie is now a positive icon.”
From being diffident to taking a step forward in their journey to empowerment—women from disparate backgrounds appear to have harnessed the Bengal Biennale to reclaim their identity through art.
Kavita Chowdhury is an independent journalist based in Kolkata, writing on arts, gender, politics & development.
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