Description:

My family migrated to West Bengal in 1947 when, against the bloody backdrop of Partition, India and Pakistan were born as two separate nations. Consequently, in 1971, a third nation was born after yet another bloody battle of liberation – Bangladesh, at one time known as East Pakistan.

My parents (and I realised mine) ancestral homes lie in what is today Bangladesh – my father’s in the village of Batisha, perilously close to the border with Tripura; my mother’s in the village of Kalia, near the Benapole border with Kolkata.

In January 2008, I first crossed the border to Bangladesh, experiencing an odd sense of alienation and belonging all at once, and an irrepressible desire to return. I returned the same year, traversing this incredibly beautiful and troubled nation from Chittagong to Benapole, as the summer turned to monsoon and the magnificent rivers rose in spate even as I crossed them.

Rivers of Blood is the visual rendering of a diary that I wrote documenting my travels through Bangladesh. It is the story of countless families displaced by the Partition, the burden of which we continue to bear even today.

To render this diary, I appropriated the nakshi kantha, a quilting tradition from Bangladesh, where the kantha or quilt tends to become the narrative field. Traditionally embroidered by women on found fabric, nakshi kanthas act as deeply relevant social and cultural signifiers, emerging as a strong political voice in an era of turbulence. I initially simulated the nakshi kantha in the drawing and etching mediums, but later turned to embroidering on found Colonial textiles myself, juxtaposing the run stitch of nakshi kantha with Colonial forms of embroidery. Thus material and medium emerge as strong signifiers in this entire body of work.

Here, I use the sewing needle as a potent drawing tool, pricking the remnants of my Colonial inheritance to build a multi-layered narrative field. As in the nakshi kantha, the garment, here used as a symbol of identity, becomes the narrative field for the layered tales, the histories, and the displaced dreams that are carried across borders in single lifetimes. The overtly colonial chintz background, the stem, chain and cross stitches, the lace and appliqué, jostle for space here with the indigenous kantha, each becoming a metaphor for the burden of history borne by a partitioned people, even 75 years after a country has been declared “independent”. (Paula Sengupta)