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OCCUPY.FALL |
| I had a great time talking to Inder Salim, a poet, sculptor and a performance artist from New Delhi. We met a few times and spoke over the phone several times. Indeed, it was an invigorating experience to hear Inder for a simple reason that he performed even as he just talked! We met for the first time when I was working with the India Foundation for the Arts in Bangalore. That time, Inder was agog over his plans for the much talked Art Carvan, a series of performances and allied activities across Kolkata, Ranchi, Patna, Lucknow, Dehradun, Shimla, Srinagar and New Delhi.
Next time when I saw Inder performing, it was an extension of his animated talk that he had with me. It was enthralling to see Inder provoke audiences on issues of contemporary politics in India through his performance. The performance I saw was focused on Kashmir, his land of birth. I, along with Anuja Ghosalkar, Mohit Kaycee and our friends from Rafiki saw Inder Salim performing at the monthly forum of the Maraa - a media and arts collective. The forum 'Pause: In Times of Conflict in Bangalore' enabled public dialogue on the role of creative practices in the times of conflict.
While we were looking forward to see the performance, the trail of events prior to Inder's performance had been shocking. As planned, the Maraa artists were to read from Mirza Waheed's debut novel, 'The Collaborator', a fictional portrayal of Kashmir. Then, a short film, 'Hopscotch' by Kashmiri director Sajad Malick was to be screened. This was to be followed with a discussion. However, unfortunately, the entire event was cancelled because of a threat from Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena, a little known fundamentalist outfit in Bangalore. Bangalore based artists' community condemned the Sena act and finally, Inder Salim's 30 minutes piece, OCCUPY.FALL was co-organised by Rafiki, Alternative Law Forum and Sangama.
OCCUPY.FALL is a simple but a gripping performance act and is primarily focused on the Kashmir politics. In the performance, Inder began to walk slowly wearing a white burkha that hid his face. A dry leaf stuck to his forehead. He carried the Jammu and Kashmir State map with pierced pins on it, emphasising the State borders. Using a vaddolaga (a mode of introducing a character on stage from the Yakshagana performance tradition in Karnataka), Inder introduced the political map to his audience. Apparently, there was nothing special about the map as we had seen such maps several times in our school or with a map-seller on a busy road. Slowly, as Inder removed the burkha, we saw his eyes highlighted by mascara and cheeks tinted with rouge. More fun began as Inder invited the audience members, seated informally around him in a circle, to write a word on the map to express their association with Kashmir. Everyone wrote on the map with a marker and Inder covered it with white powder. With no words left, silence fraught with 'meanings' of Kashmir prevailed.
Instead of stretching the hushed ambience further, Inder blew white powder. After the storm-like dust (suggestive of political whirls) settled, all the words were visible on the map. With one more daring political act, Inder moved to the audience to give their words back to them with the burkha still clad. Everyone was thrilled to see their own words with a fresh view in the context of other words. At the moment, one had a feeling that this was it. However, the next 'character' came about with her own perspective only to cover and write another word, thus participating in an exciting activity to ''construct a removal'' (Nick Kaye, ''Site Specific Art, Performance, Place and Documentation, Routledge, 2000).
In the participatory act, Inder's performance let audiences realise the space in practice. The realisation was not in a particular order of events but it had its own logic. Individual members from the audience assigned their own meanings and the physicality of the site was offered in its transitive sense, and not in a settled order since everyone had a perspective.
Inder's artistic practice is known as conceptual or performance art, little practiced or known outside major cities in India. When Inder, also a photographer and a poet, began focusing on his performance art in the late 90s, he was alone. As a performance artist, Inder found it vital to reflect upon the relationships between art and its relevance to the world he lived in. For instance, Inder spoke of having a big question in his mind while crossing the Yamuna, ''the dead river'' on the way to his office at Connaught Place in New Delhi.
He writes in his article in Open Magazine, ''Though I had done some performances in galleries, I was faced with a kind of void. Art-wise, I was unemployed.'' Inder stunned many while exploring his relationship with the Yamuna through his performance. During the performance, he chopped off the little finger of his left hand and threw it into the Yamuna. Inder says, ''They call me crazy. But I call it art...The pain was extreme, blinding out memory. I escaped some of it with local anaesthesia. When I returned home, there was an ugly stump on my left hand. But my heart was full of something beautiful. It took a few weeks of treatment before the hand healed. But the heart was whole, almost whole. How alone I was, grappling with the truth of my own body, my being.'' Importantly, he further reflects, ''I think I managed to construct a small metaphysical bridge for transporting that part of my being...I guess I gave birth to a personal relationship with the dead river. I saw how the stinking dead murky water of a river is, in fact, an extension of our own pulse.''*
This experience and experiment with the body allowed Inder to explore his world around through performance art or harkat, as he calls it. It gave him freedom to experiment with the material objects lying around, and with his own body. Significantly, it was not only about the physicality but also about the concept that underlined his being and becoming. Later, he joined a residency at the Delhi based SARAI and received a wider platform to carry out his work. With rigour and commitment, Inder has been trying to reach out to larger audiences outside cities with his work, Harkat-e-Sarai in collaboration with Sarai, New Delhi.
In a way, performance art is not new to India. One can call Mahatma Gandhi's Salt March a performance art. But, if we look at performance art in the context of the new generation of artists who practice it, today's young artists are taking risks of combining genres and defying disciplinary boundaries. Sometimes, they display a sharp political sensibility. Rather than rely on the traditional spaces of proscenium theatre or conventionally known venues, performance artists try out newer possibilities within the environment around them. A public garden, the sideway of a busy road, multiple expressions of digital media, etc. become sites and vocabularies to create new points of context-sensitive references to politics, personal concerns and historical debates. As a result, interestingly, these artists have been able to explore alternative spaces, fresh content and innovative styles.
A performance artist like Inder also interests me for another reason. His work enables me to look beyond the practice of playwriting as a fixed entity in the traditional context of the playwright-centric and proscenium type theatre making. For Inder, there is no 'text' or pre-written speech. He has a concept and he works on it in creating a discourse(s) for the performance. Chance, uncertainty and fluidity are part of his performance vocabulary and they in turn, open up new vistas of representing the world around him.
*The Open Magazine article written by Inder Salim can be found at http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/true-life/blood-in-the-river
Ashutosh Potdar is a playwright, translator and a critic writing in Marathi and English. Some of his plays are ANANDBHOG MALL, PULAKHALACHA MARUTI and F 1/105. He teaches at FLAME, Pune.
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