Unlike politics, sensation does not promise or enact a future different than the present, it en-forces, impacts, a premonition of what might be directly on the body’s nerves, organs, muscles. The body is opened up now to other forces and becomings that it might also affirm in and as the future.

-        Elizabeth Grosz

When Nalini Malani was one year old, her family crossed the border from Karachi (now in Pakistan) to Calcutta. During this time – the 1947 Partition of India – millions of people flowed across this border in both directions amid rioting and unimaginable violence. This displacement has conditioned Malani’s diverse body of work. (Huyssen, 2010: 44.)

In confronting this history, Malani has been inspired by the work of Indian anthropologist Veena Das. Das articulates the problems of living in the wake of Partition – in particular the silence about the sexual violence done to women during this time. Das says ‘I want to reenter this scene of devastation to ask how one might inhabit such a world, one which has been made strange through the desolating experience of violence and loss.’ (Das, 2007: 39)

This is a problematic that Malani’s work as a whole takes up. Her video plays evoke and combine complex histories, while at the same time enveloping the viewer in an affective space that allows us to ‘re-enter’ scenes of devastation. As cultural commentator Andreas Huyssen has said, Malani’s ‘feminine gaze occupies a continuous and repetitive space of devastation.’(Huyssen , 2012: 52)

Her work is not about explaining away suffering, nor is it a straightforward attempt to heal a wound in the conventional sense of ‘getting past’ something. Theorist Ernst van Alphen has said that in his book The logic of sensation Gilles Deleuze ‘abducted’ the term ‘making sense’ (van Alphen, 2012: 65). Wrestling it away from its standard meaning of explaining or making coherent, ‘making sense’ here means making something sensate by appealing to and invoking sensory experience.

I, in turn, would like to borrow this concept and use it to understand the ways in which Malani deals with violence. Here I will examine two works that specifically invoke Partition and a more recent work that, while drawing on diverse histories and mythologies, is underpinned by the ramifications of this event. 

These works are immersive installations that layer images and sound. They are spaces that we can enter into, and the final work envelops the viewer in a network of colliding projections – a labyrinthine mix of rich and colourful images, text and sound.

While politically charged, they are not didactic or (in Malani’s words) sloganeering (Kurjaković and Jensen, 2012: 15). When asked by curator Johan Pijnappel if she believed that art could change society Malani said ‘Yes – but only if artists stick their necks out and work at creating new ambiences and environments’ (Malani, 2011: np). Clearly the idea of the submersive environment is part of her political strategy.

Malani’s works, or as Huyssen calls them – ‘image worlds’, evoke stories from across national and cultural boundaries. Huyssen notes that becoming a refugee at a young age has given Malani a cosmopolitan outlook that resists being bound to any local or national culture (Huyssen, 2010: 44). At the same time, she remains deeply engaged with her own heritage. This contradiction is at the core of her work. By persistently blurring the boundaries between cultures, histories and mythologies, Malani reminds us that they are not isolated from one another, but rather converge along political and historical lines.

Unity in Diversity

Malani’s installation/video play Unity in Diversity is one of the first works to specifically reference Partition. It was made in 2003, the year following brutal riots in Gujarat, and connects these two events by juxtaposing images and narratives from them both. It works against cultural forgetting by using art-historical references to remind us of the role that images have played in the long history of violence against women in the formation of India as a nation state.

This installation mimics a middle-class Indian living room, containing a video-play in a heavy gold frame, an armchair, a lamp and a series of photographs of Gandhi and Nehru (invoking the complex history of non-violence that shaped the Indian independence struggle). The video that is framed on the wall references the painting Galaxy of Musicians c1889. This painting, by the iconic 19th Century painter Raja Ravi Varma, shows eleven women that were intended to represent the ethnic diversity of India. From different corners of the land they play together in harmony.

Raja Ravi Varma often used the figure of the woman to embody the idea of the nation; his work formed part of a growing Indian nationalist movement in the late 19th century. You can see the idea of the woman embodying the nation at work in Galaxy of Musicians (Kedar Vishwanathan, 2012: np).

The gold-framed film in Unity in Diversity opens with a re-enactment of Varma’s painting. The woman in the image is startled by the sound of gunshots and a voice begins to read aloud from a letter – a text drawn from ‘Der Auftrag’ (the Task/the mission 1979) by late 20th Century Avant Garde play-write Heiner Müller. This voice speaks of the failure of a mission, and set against Varma’s painting which embodies an ideal of unity, it evokes and challenges and pitfalls of the modernist project of nation-building.

Unity in Diversity includes eyewitness accounts of destructive riots in Gujarat in 2002. These accounts are coupled with images of an abortion layered over Varma’s idyllic women – a visceral scene that indicates the sexual nature of the violence in Gujarat (Correspondence with Malani, 2012). There are many accounts of rape during the Gujarat riots that have been reported via organizations including Amnesty International.

I am personally very moved by this work. It begins softly and then it undoes the ideal that the title suggests. There is a purpose to the pain that this work triggers: we see the violence in contrast with the ideal, and question how the two might be connected. All the elements of the installation combine to implicate the viewer. It positions them within a space that, while seemingly domestic, points to a horrifying sequence of events. The space lulls us into a false sense of security only to shatter it.

Mother India: transactions in the construction of pain

Another immersive installation that confronts the same history, Mother India: transactions in the construction of pain is a video installation that addresses the suffering of women during and after the Partition using archival footage drawn from the Gandhi museum, photographs and projection. The images that it shows are colourful, evocative and layered with historical nuance. Malani has projected them onto women’s bodies, layered with a soundtrack that interweaves two voices. At thirteen meters across, it has five screens arranged in a semi-circular arc that the viewer can stand within. Physically overwhelming, this video play becomes a world that the viewer steps into – in fact the five screens comprising Mother India invite the viewer to do as Das has done: to re-enter a scene of devastation by standing within its representation.

While I will untangle some of these images and their relationship to the history of Partition and to Das’ argument, I also want to make the point that the work is multi-sensory and presents an emotional take on this history, rather than attempting to clearly or coherently describe it.

Mother India was inspired by Veena Das’ 1996 essay Language and the body: Transactions in the construction of pain. In her ongoing research Das articulated the sexual violence that was directed against women during the riots of the Partition – during which approximately 50 000 Muslim women and 33 000 Hindu and Sikh women were abducted. Das has said that these events were not publicly memorialized but rather shrouded in silence – which she links to the fact that the perpetrators were often absorbed back into the community.

In a closely related article, The figure of the abducted woman: the citizen as sexed, Das argues that in the riots of 1947 and subsequent repatriation, women’s bodies stood in for their nation (Das, 2007: 18-38). Das suggests that there is something deeply problematic about a project that deifies women as the embodiment of the nation, namely that in conflict, women’s role as the adored symbol of the nation as a whole is inverted: they embody the nation to those who wish to direct violence against.

Malani’s Mother India references several iterations of the woman as embodiment of the nation. These include the 1957 Hindi film Mother India, Hindu iconography, images of the family and women’s bellies adjacent to gaping toothy mouths. These images draw upon the history of Indian anti-colonialist nationalism, in which ‘the symbol of the woman became the contested site of modernity between the colonial government and the nationalist movement’. (Vishwanathan, 2010: np)

A cow bathed in blue light has a portion that opens up in its stomach. The cow's body has been linked to the female body, and scholars of Indian modernity have articulated the ways in which the Hindu sacred cow was described as mother cow, which became the figure of Mother India in the late 19th century. Malani has likened the opening in its stomach to septicaemia, and said that this image ‘has to do with the putrefaction of the secular nation-state due to Hindu fanaticism.’ (Malani in correspondence 2012) Condemning the violence done to minorities, Malani’s use of a viral disease hidden within the belly of the cow is potent. She further unpacks the ways in which Indian nationalism was conflated with religious identification.

I have previously written about a key image in this work that shows a woman with a map projected over her body - an image in which the map disrupts and dominates the woman’s body with each mark becoming a wound or scar on her skin. Malani’s use of projection implicitly references the way that nationalist ideals have been ‘projected’ onto women’s bodies – a material analogy for how women have been metaphorically inscribed with their national identities. The map is historically linked to notions of Mother India – one account of a discussion of Indian Nationalism from 1905 reads ‘Do you see this map? It is not a map, but the portrait of Bharat-matar (Mother India): its cities and mountains, rivers and jungles form her physical body.’(Ramaswamy, 2001: 97-114) 

Mother India closes with pictures of the destroyed landscape of Gujarat after riots in 2002. The imaging of these scenes play off and invert the metaphorical exchange between the body and the nation that is at the core of Das’ argument. Just as the body was used as a metaphor for national identities which are linked to places, the destroyed landscapes of Gujarat are here used as surrogates for the body: the violence done to the landscape and architecture imply, but do not show, violence inflicted upon women’s bodies.

Malani uses images of the landscape to represent violence against women. She does not show anything actually violent, and the absence and restraint of this particular violence in visual form tacitly acknowledges the problems inherent in depicting sexual assault. She avoids reiterating the intrusion that is part of this form of violence.

Instead Mother India draws on the images that have been bound up with this violence: that are emotive and evocative rather than historically precise or coherent. This work cannot make sense of the suffering that it concerns. Malani acknowledges this in the soundtrack of the work, in which a woman’s voice laments, ‘Looking for some sense where possibly there is none.’

Both Unity in Diversity and Mother India: transactions in the construction of pain address the Partition and the violence that has followed it. Specifically, they take this event and the 2002 riots in Gujarat as their 'historical markers'. But many of Malani’s works invoke histories, politics and mythologies from outside this chronology, bringing them into a powerful if bewildering intersection of worlds.

In search of vanished blood

Malani’s recent large-scale installation, In search of vanished blood 2012, folds together many different references. It consists of evocative and allegorical film sequences projected over one another on the walls of a subterranean room in Kassel for Documenta 13. A series of large hand-painted Mylar cylinders slowly rotate, casting shadows across the same walls. Suspended above the audience's heads, they seem like a mechanical storm cloud. This constellation of images and sound wraps around the walls, becoming its own world.

The soundtrack draws in the story of Cassandra (as reinterpreted by 20th century East German writer Christa Wolf, which reflects the relatively contemporary concerns of nuclear war, political hierarchies, self destruction). It also collages together Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine (1977), Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s last tape (1958) and Gayatri Spivek’s translation of Draupadi by Mahasweta Devi (Christov-Bakargiev, 2012: 10). This installation includes drawings derived from the Naxals website (communist guerillas active in many regions of India) and Malani has melded these images with drawings from Goya and other projections onto the bodies and faces of women. Diagrams of sign language spell out ‘m-u-r-d-e-r-d-e-m-o-c-r-a-c-y’.

The poem In search of vanished blood, by Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, anchors this work. This poem, from which the work takes its title, evokes the specter of Partition – as Malani says: ‘for me that particular poem In Search of Vanished Blood epitomizes the Partition in every possible way. And every time there have been sectarian problems and violence this poem completely comes to mind.’ (Kurjaković and Jensen, 2012: 17). Not wanting to simply stage a reading of Faiz's poem Malani instead projects it onto a head that has been wrapped in cloth:

This blood which has disappeared without leaving a trace

isn't part of written history: who will guide me to it?

This powerful image is at once beautiful and horrifying. Malani says that the wrapped head references a form of torture in which a cloth soaked in water is placed over the victim's mouth and nose. At the same time, the image resonates with (Western) art-history; specifically it reminds me of Magritte's surrealist image of lovers with their heads shrouded in cloth from 1927 – 28. It has been speculated that these paintings reference the apparent suicide of Magritte's mother, who was found drowned with the cloth of her dress wrapped around her head (National Gallery of Australia collection website)

As with Mother India, Malani's use of projection as a device is allegorical. While the projection of the map over the woman's body in Mother India spoke of the way that the idea of the nation had been 'projected' onto women's bodies, here it becomes murkier - swallowing the bodies of viewers in this ocean of images.

By folding together many images and blurring the boundaries between them, In search of vanished blood works against the belief that we cannot cross cultural boundaries. More than this, it wrestles with the idea that we cannot understand each other's suffering when it falls outside our own cultural and historical circumstances.

At the same time, Malani resists the opposite position that cultures and their histories are simply transparent to one another. Rather, in cross-cultural translation there are always layers of meaning, and degrees of understanding. As anthropologist Arjun Appudurai says, ‘Malani’s work is a bold answer to the conundrum of the global and the local.’(Appudurai, 2012: 6)

In search of vanished blood is a microcosm of our global condition: our simultaneous responsibility and inability to grasp this complex of violence. The work oscillates between understanding (contextualizing, explaining, enriching) and not understanding (being bewildered, overwhelmed). It acknowledges the shortfall - the possibility of failure at the heart of translation.

This tension between one's own experience and the broader world is played out in these three works: Unity in Diversity and Mother India both focus on the artist's own cultural context, picking apart the history that has underpinned Malani’s work - for as Huyssen has suggested it was the shadow of the Partition that began Malani's desire to move across cultural boundaries. In search of vanished blood enacts that desire, while paradoxically remaining tied to the difficult history of the Partition.

All three works call attention to extraordinary violence. They are marked by a real tension between the beauty of the works themselves and the difficulty of their political content. Both visually seductive and emotionally overpowering, they enter into the space that is left in the wake of violence, and ask us to do the same.

Cited references

Appudurai, Arjun. 2012. ‘Foreword: vanishing violence’ in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev et al. Nalini Malani: In search of vanished blood. 36 – 45

Arjun Appudurai in conversation with Nalini Malani about their collaboration for the dOCUMENTA (13) series 100 notes – 100 thoughts’ in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev et al.

Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn. 2012 ‘Introduction’ in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev et al. Nalini Malani: In search of vanished blood, 2012, p 10

Das, Veena. 2007. Life and words: violence and the descent into the ordinary, Berkeley: University of California Press. 39

Huyssen, Andreas. 2010. ‘Shadows and memories: Nalini Malani’ in Nalini Malani: Splitting the Other, exh. cat., Lausanne: Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts. 44

Huyssen, Andreas. 2012. ‘Shadow play as medium of memory’ in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev et al. Nalini Malani: In search of vanished blood, dOCUMENTA 13, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. 52

Malani, Nalini quoted in Kurjaković, Daniel and Jensen, Linda. 2012. ‘A conversation with Nalini Malani: quarries of blindness and shadows of hope’, in Torrent Summer. 15

Malani, Nalini quoted in Nalini Malani: Interview with Nalini Malani from the iCon India Catalogue produced for the Indian show at the 51 Venice Biennale, accessed from http://www.nalinimalani.com/texts/venice.htm on 8th November 2011, np

National Gallery of Australia, Les Amants [The lovers] 1928, accessed from: http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=148052&PICTAUS=TRUE in August 2012

K M Munshi quoted in Ramaswamy, Sumathi. 2001. ‘Maps and Mother Goddesses in Modern India ‘Imago Mundi , Vol. 53. 97-114

van Alphen, Ernst. 2012 ‘Making sense of affect’ in Anthony Bond (ed.) Francis Bacon: Five Decades, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales publishing. 65

Vishwanathan, Kedar. 2010. ‘Aesthetics, Nationalism, and the Image of Woman in Modern Indian Art’ in Ed. V. DeSousa, J.E. Henton, and G. Ramanathan CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 12.2 (2010) Thematic issue New Modernities and the "Third World." accessed from http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol12/iss2/4 in June 2012.