A World Asunder

कभी तूफ़ान आ जाए, कोई पुल टूट जाए तो

किसी लकड़ी के तख़्ते पर

गिलहरी, साँप, बकरी और चीता साथ होते हैं 

सुना है जंगलों का भी कोई दस्तूर होता है

From a poem by Zehra Nigah

This might not be common knowledge, but as per new scientific calculations, the axis of the earth has wobbled and shifted from its original [presumed] position. The movement of the earth’s axis seems like an apt metaphor for the off-kilter, topsy-turvy times in which we live. The dramatic changes taking place on the surface of the earth, the melting glaciers, the Sixth Mass Extinction, the scraping of the earth for elusive “rare earth materials”, may often feel like a linear descent with no end in sight. But perhaps it is exactly for these times that our moral compass must also shift, and de-center the privileged, human ontology for something which is … more than human. The law of the jungle, even.

‘Jangal ka dastur’ — co-existence as an ethic — is brought to the fore most remarkably in Buddhadev Mukherjee’s All drinking from the same pond. In this three-part series, Mukherjee goes beyond the easy predator-prey binary to bring us all to an iridescent pond where life forms of different orders prostrate themselves and submit equally. There are antelopes, there are carnivorous beasts, there are big cats and hominids, and of course, there are humans — sharing, living, surviving. The pond — elliptic in its naturally occurring shape — forces all life forms to gather around its smooth bend. The landscape does not elevate any one life form and the water is evenly distributed across the body. 

In Backbone Repair Centre, there appears at first glance to be construction underway. Mukherjee’s continued perusal of a world suspended in animation is realised here through images that float in aether, where the separation of sky and land is blurred — as is the concept of time separated by day or night. The working bodies are often bent, even as they are tasked with upholding a spine. Far from the equalising force of the Pond works, the Backbone series becomes a way to reflect not just on the omnipresence of labouring others that undergirds our everyday lives, but also of its omnitemporality.  Garlic sellers’ children could well reference the use of child labour in the harvesting of garlic — where they are often employed from loosening of the soil, to plucking the bulbs, to de-husking and splicing into individual cloves.  Amidst the overwhelming heap of garlic bulbs in Mukherjee’s painting, is seen a file of children in drab uniform tumbling downward in single file.

In his found photograph, Untitled (Buffalos),1988, artist David Wojnarowicz apportions part of a diorama at display in Washington DC, depicting a traditional Native American hunting method to communicate a sense of tragic end, a culture at odds with itself, and a critique of life-forms hierarchised for scarcely-known reasons. We see buffalos falling off a cliff — most certainly to their death. But in the imagery fragment that Wojnarowicz shares with his audience, the buffalos seem to be doing this of their own volition, exerting their own agency. What he leaves out is the violent brutality inflicted by human hunters that eventually led to the extinction of this majestic megafauna.

The children tumbling down the hill of garlic, or the other bodies in free-fall in Mukherjee's works, may not die the brutal death of Wojnarowicz’s buffalos. But their fall should not be seen as dissimilar to that of the buffalos — a world beyond 'Jangal ka dastur'.

Shatam Ray