Promised land

Harakumar Gupta, a performer of leto folk songs, is an animated man, given to sudden bursts of exuberance. In his 60s, Gupta arrived as a teenager in Kharia village, about 50km from Santiniketan, in West Bengal’s Birbhum district, a decade after Patel Nagar Minerals and Industries Ltd and an open-cast china clay mine was established there in 1955.

At Kharia, as the dust cloud from the china clay factory gathers like a giant halo behind him, Gupta bursts into impassioned singing. As a performer of leto songs, often defined by their rustic wit, satire and ribaldry, Gupta’s art emerges from ground realities. In one of the songs, he reflects on the situation at Kharia where the land is pure gold, (its offerings) travel to distant places, and get the factory owner a prize from the President. If there is any sarcasm in the lyrics, it’s for the listener to interpret.

A little over two years ago, it was a chance meeting with Gupta that left Sanchayan Ghosh—a Santiniketan-based artist and associate professor in the painting department at Visva Bharati University’s Kala Bhavan—pondering over the site-specific, community-based artistic possibilities at Kharia.

It’s a village that was dominated by upper-caste Hindus before the advent of the privately-owned china clay industry under the “Nehruvian model” in 1955 forced many to give up their land for a project of national importance, says Ghosh, 45. While the influx of migrants, especially those belonging to the Scheduled Castes, changed the demography, the open-cast mine permanently altered the topography of what used to be arable land. Even while the china clay found use in industries outside Bengal, civic apathy is all too evident in Kharia 60 years later.

“Though the factory and the mine continue to operate, the project couldn’t usher in the promised industrialization or development,” says Ghosh, as we walk past the segregated quarters of a migrant, Scheduled Caste, factory-worker community. There is garbage everywhere, open drains fester with accumulated waste, the path is broken and slushy from the heavy truck traffic carrying clay from the gigantic mine to the factory, and villagers relieve themselves in the open. According to the 2011 census report, a staggering 42% of Kharia’s population of 1,655 is illiterate.

Ghosh’s two-year-long research and exploration resulted in two observations.

These hand-moulded guls form part of Notes From A Vanishing Land, Ghosh’s exhibition at Kolkata’s Experimenter gallery. Part of an ongoing project, the guls occupy the base of his display. Above it, panels show the gradations of the soil once it has gone through rounds of processing at the china clay factory. If the top panel represents the near-pristine state of the soil before it is mined, the final panel has the embossed soil in an advanced stage of post-processing disintegration.

While the guls—each carrying the finger-pressed pattern of the maker—attest to the entrepreneurial comeback of the villagers, who have found new china clay applications, the flaky and dissolving texture in the final gradation panel could well be a metaphor on industrialization that left a society and an environment fragmented. “The inevitability of industrialization is not reflected in the community. There is also no thought on the future of the landscape,” says Ghosh.

Ghosh’s other critical observation is on Gupta’s role. As a dying performance art form, leto is traditionally patronized by the lower-caste, tribal and Muslim communities. Yet, to earn a living, Gupta, an upper-caste Hindu, could overcome rigid social barriers to emerge as a performer, bringing together castes and communities under the spell of his improvised poetry and singing.

This ability to glue together the different communities in Kharia—deeply segregated and socially opposed to each other since the work-seeking settler population began arriving in the mid-1950s—is something Ghosh aspires for. As an artist, he is indifferent to an “end product” unless it carries “memories of the entire process”. For Ghosh, the Kharia project will come to a natural fruition if he can facilitate the creation of a community centre. “A common physical space where every brick will come from people’s participation,” says Ghosh.

Ghosh, a well-regarded set designer-art director in Kolkata’s theatre circuit, was inspired by the late Badal Sircar, the pioneering Kolkata-based exponent of Third Theatre in India. Ghosh’s dialogic and inter-disciplinary approach is best seen in Doosra—The Other Maze, a site-specific participatory installation that he created for London’s Frieze Art Fair in 2010.

Ghosh used shola flowers from Bengal to design a maze-like English rose garden, representative of the complex and conflicting routes of world migration history. Audience members were allowed to carry home a single shola flower at the end of their viewing. “When I returned after a 20-minute break, most of the 7,000 flowers had been taken away,” laughs Ghosh.

For Ghosh, who has worked on eight community-based art projects and around 16 site-specific installations/performances so far, issues of land are often central to his creation. Land is the most contested entity, layered with ideas of power, conflict and ownership. “Yet the elementary notion of land is organic. Can land be taken back to its geographical notion? An artistic process must reveal the complexities and conflicts over land and see it as a whole,” he says.

Acting as a bridge between various stakeholders and power centres in Kharia is Gupta. As a leto performer-actor, Gupta had, some time ago, decided to act dead for a day. With a white sheet placed over him, volunteers carried his body around Kharia village on a charpoy. Women cried, villagers touched his feet, and some poured alcohol into his mouth. In the commiseration across the caste and class divide, art, even if momentarily, filled the gap.

Immateriality In Residue, including Ghosh’s Notes From A Vanishing Land, is on till 26 December, 11am-7pm (Sundays closed), at Experimenter, 2/1 Hindustan Road, Kolkata.