Paula Sengupta’s installations beautifully convey the migrant experience.
As a child, Paula Sengupta would listen intently to stories narrated by her mother and grandparents about Bangladesh, the land of their birth. In her current exhibition, Rivers of Blood at Chemould Prescott Road, each and every installation piece strives to evoke that sense of nostalgia as well as the pain her parents felt when they were displaced during the partition. Sengupta says, “I always wanted to visit the country my mother often talked about. But my father never showed any desire to go back.”
One day in 2008, Sengupta, also an academic, got the opportunity to travel to Bangladesh for a four-day work-related trip. The trip struck a chord, and she soon returned, this time accompanied by her mother. “It was like turning the pages of a book and seeing everything come alive in front of me,” she recollects.
The impressions that Sengupta jotted down as diary notes eventually took form as her latest collection. In the installation titled Cox’s Bazaar, Sengupta has beautifully laid out a dining table with menus of popular seafood dishes prepared in Bangladesh. Nearby stands a cabinet stacked with recipe books, an amalgam of recipes collected from her mother and mother-in-law, as well as some of her own. “They’re a reflection of the transition of a culture over a period of time,” she states.
The title installation piece is that of a Bangladeshi army uniform decorated with stripes and badges. Across the uniform, a red streak is visible, symbolic of a sacrificial river. The shirt also features a Chalta, a tree which stood near her father’s house in Bangladesh.
Incidentally, a visit to her father’s ancestral home in Cumilla village made Sengupta realise why her father was never keen to return. Cumilla is very close to the border of the Indian state of Tripura and was witness to one of the worst riots during the partition. “When I went there, I could clearly see the barbed wires that separated the two countries. The angst of the partition is probably what made it difficult for my father to return,” reflects Sengupta.
Rivers of Blood is an ongoing exhibition till September 10 at Chemould Prescott Road, Fort. The gallery is open from 11am till 7pm (Sundays closed).
Call 2200 0211/12/13
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