Panjeri Artists' Union: A collective that speaks in one voice

In January this year, the Coir Godown at the Aspinwall House, Kochi, turned into a site of performative memory as two artists—Samapti Mondal and Bhaskar Hazarika—walked around with a funeral bed on their head. After setting the wooden structure down, Samapti and Bhaskar, both members of the Panjeri Artists’ Union (PAU), started sorting out a mesh of entangled blue and red threads, while sharing experiences of living together amid linguistic tensions and identity politics. A symbol of caste-based religiosity, the bed became both an object and stage, and the body turned into a site for labour as well as remembrance.

Performance has emerged as a powerful medium for the Bengal-based PAU in articulating thoughts about urgent issues such as caste, marginalisation and political resistance to more personal themes of care. The lived experiences of the various members coalesce in different durational performances such as Try to Remember. The union, formed on 21 February 2022, comprises 14 practitioners from realms such as visual art, design, literature, film and academia. Deriving its name from a traditional navigational tool used by boatmen to sail across Bengal’s riverways, the PAU is deeply embedded in the very communities its members hail from. The collective, in a short span, has carved a niche for itself for collaborative socially-impactful art.

“Performativity is not the only thing that would define us as a union—it is one form of practice that we use to express ourselves. Our work lies at the intersection of multiple modes of practice,” says one of the members, Pinak Banik, a researcher, artist, and educator exploring the intersections of artistic labor, postcolonial theory, visual culture, and social justice. As a result, their work manifests itself as exhibitions, workshops, discussions, zines, conceptual texts, visual essays and archival explorations.

At the Serendipity Arts Festival 2023, for instance, the PAU showcased a multidisciplinary project as part of the exhibition, Turning: On Field and Work, curated by Vidya Shivadas. Using sculpture, textile, poetry and video, the members evoked the experience of living and working in Jessore Road, Kolkata. Personal memories met the long history of migration and belonging that marked this vital stretch.Last year, as part of the Birla Academy of Art and Culture’s 58th annual celebrations, the PAU engaged with sculptures housed within the museum. The project, Inventories of Circumambulation, was based on research and engagement with fractured histories around the Partition and the resulting famine and displacement. At times, silent conversations were held with sculptures and statues, and at other times texts were read out and songs performed in response to the site.

The word ‘collaboration’ comes up time and time again during conversations with the various members. And perhaps, therein lies the reason why performance is at the heart of everything that the union does. “Performativity is rooted in the local cultural practices of Bengal. It is important for cultural workers such as ourselves to engage with people rather than inhabit a passive space,” says multidisciplinary artist Anupam Roy.

Different vocabularies come together to add unique flavours to the performances—take, for instance, the contribution of rapper-lyricist Saptak Mistri, lens-based practitioner Shubhankar Sengupta, and poet Suvankar Gain. The union has seen three phases of activations over the years—the first one featured a durational performance by Asish Dhali, which set the tone for PAU’s future engagements. Titled Response to Everyday Segregation, it saw the artist mechanically stamping papers, creating a satirical and scathing commentary on systemic social segregation. The second phase witnessed performances by PAU collaborators, Taufiz Riaz and Mallika Das Sutar, along with a performative reading session by Vibin George, while the third set of activations carried forth the union’s critical engagement with the medium. It featured the likes of Aravind Chedayan Hekh, represented by Rahul Juneja and Anurag Singraur.

The purpose of the performative element in their work is not to elevate a spectacle. Rather, it is seen as a relational tool, a prompt for conversation and connection.

Bhaskar and Samapti, for instance, have tried to create connections between shared intercultural histories from Assam and Bengal respectively. In Try to Remember, they negotiated with memories of each other’s families and knowledge systems. The performance was generated on the basis of their lived experiences. “Sampati’s father used to work in a factory in Durgapur, which was shut down. I grew up in a place in Assam which was immersed in extreme identity politics. We both have different experiences of marginalised life, of being overlooked and unseen,” elaborates Bhaskar. “Working with entangled thread was also symbolic. My mother is a weaver. Material carries memory. It also shows the entangling of personal and social experiences.”

Over a video call, members such as Pinak, Bhaskar and Anupam share that the process is often more significant than the resulting work. The projects themselves change shape and morph as collaborators join in. The concerns of the individuals manifest themselves in different ways as part of the overall working of the PAU. There are no strict boundaries between personal and collective practices— sometimes intersecting and and at other times running parallel. For Pinak, for instance, linguistic tensions and the complexity of translation are constant fields of inquiry. He feels deeply-impacted by “a spate of violence against Bengali-speaking people across India”. A recent event that added to this turmoil was the one that took place in Palakkad, Kerala, last year when a migrant labour from Chhattisgarh was beaten up and killed by a group of local residents. To Pinak, this brought “the very violent act of translation itself” to the foreground, and along with the negotiation between the power structures of languages.

Together with another member, Labani Jangi, he responded to the event by writing a fictional piece of conversation between the oppressor and the oppressed. This took on the shape of the Manifesto Translation Lab, in which Pinak used the text to move between Malayalam and Bengali. His artist statement read: Translation becomes a site of rupture…and imagined exchanges collide: between victim and oppressor, hunger and apathy, the untranslated persecuted human reduced to accusation and bare existence, and the voices of the tyrannical mob. “Today, people across the country believe that some sort of homogenous Bengali is spoken in the state. However, different regions in Bengal have different dialects, which change within short geographical distances. Often a noticeable hierarchy exists between urban and rural dialects. For instance, Labani is from Nadia, where a different vocabulary and form of expression is used,” he says.

Labani, a research scholar and cultural practitioner, looks beyond linguistics to draw from her daily realities as a Muslim woman in India. She focuses on identity formation and invisibilisation of subaltern voices. In 2025, the young academic gave a talk, A Language of Resistance, at the Museum of Art and Photography, Bengaluru, exploring three series of works inspired by different sources: a poem by Palestinian poet Tawfiq Ziad, the poem Chambal Ek Nadi by poet and filmmaker Naresh Saxena, and the legend of Hijrat. “Panjeri’s roots lie in villages and towns along the border. Most of us hail from marginalised communities. Since childhood, Bengali Muslims have faced the tag of ‘Bangladeshi’. That stereotyping has only grown over the years,” she says. “We want to foreground different kinds of identities.”

Bhaskar leads several of PAU’s durational performances. He hails from a family of bhauna performers in Assam—a traditional theatrical form rooted in Naaamdharma, a reformist Vaishnavite sect founded in the 15th century by Srimanta Sankardeva. It was based on an alternate reading of the epics and featured non-Brahmanical voices shaped by caste histories. Earlier this year, Bhaskar, together with bhauna performers from Ghahigaon, Assam, conceptualised Sutaputra Bodh Naat. “The performers, known as Bhakats (devotees), belonging to the Kaibartta community, self-organised as a Naamdharma society under the Eksharan Bhagawati Samaj in 1973. Bhauna here is approached not only as theatre, but as a relational space where devotion, caste, performing art, and collective memory intersect,” states the artist note.

While growing up, Bhaskar had distanced himself from the ritualistic aspects of the form. However, while being a part of the PAU, he has been focusing on recontextualising such practices, which themselves are anti-Brahmanical manifestations of religious rituals. For Sutaputra Bodh Naat, he studied a 15th century-bhauna, imbibing technical knowledge from traditional performers. With the performers from Ghahigaon, he also worked on Dhemali to focus on the ceremonial pre-ritual of bhauna, where the gayan-bayan pairs animated the space at Aspinwall, Fort Kochi, with kohl, taal and footwork. “I wrote a small script, and the performers made it their own. It was a really interesting process,” he says.

For the PAU, the viewer is not seen as a separate entity. The members believe that problems arise when a line is drawn between the performer and the audience. According to Anupam, when the collective works out of a space for months at a stretch, engaging in research and conversations with the communities there, people inevitably become a part of the process. He recalls a project conducted sometime back in Lalgola, Murshidabad, centred around Bhaskar’s experiences of the Brahmaputra. These memories acquired a new context in the setting by the river Padma, which acts as a border between India and Bangladesh.

The performance was followed by long conversations, extending for hours, in the high school common area with students, parents and other residents of the villages sharing their stories—of the river as a border, nurturer, harbinger of change as human intervention transforms ecosystems, not always for the better. “That day I realised that performance can also propose a space for this kind of intense exchange of lived experiences,” says Anupam. For Bhaskar, these conversations are important. “We need to move away from the romantic notions of the river. Often important stories get suppressed due to such romanticisation. For us at Panjeri, performance makes room for so many ways of discussing ideas that capture the political imagination of people,” he says.