At 22 and just out of Baroda's Maharaja Sayajirao University (MSU) with a Visual Arts degree, Mumbai-based artist Priyanka D'Souza has already exhibited at the Delhi's India Art Fair and Bikaner House, the Delhi Contemporary Art Week with Gallery Latitude 88 and the Mumbai Gallery Weekend with Priyasri Art Gallery. She's presented her works at Delhi's Khoj Initiative, bagged a Dara Shikoh fellowship that promotes creative conversations around Kashmir, and received a grant for a summer course in Austria with artist Aisha Khalid. This month, she's become the first participant at the Bandra-based What About Art residency. D'Souza addresses questions from the self to nationhood through the format of Persian and Mughal miniature paintings. Her works seem like a crash course in miniature paintings or taxonomy for their collage of hairline brushstrokes, jaali imagery, copper leaf, occasional faceless human figures adhering to the Islamic code, and almost always a vast portrayal of animals.
"Mughal miniatures, under Emperor Jahangir and Shah Jahan, were used as political metaphors during their reign to portray them as supreme and divine rulers. It's this 16th-century version of good political propoganda that fascinates me," says D'Souza, who counts the Shahnama, Hamzanama, the Aja'ib al-Makhluqat – a 13th-century Arabic manuscript, and the Internet as her current research aids.
For group-show, Dissenus at Bikaner House, she took Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee's poem, No Urdu In Dilli, Mian, and used the metaphor of a wall to comprehend why Urdu is 'otherised' in its own place of origin, using cement putty and wall scrapers on her Islamic pictorials. This constant gleaning from literature is evident. In one of her paintings, a fakir without hands gets an erection on the street and hopes a passerby will volunteer to help him masturbate. This visual narrative came from a line in Altaf Tyrewala's 100-page poem on Mumbai – Ministry of Hurt Sentiment that became her muse.
When the gunning down of Burhan Muzaffar Wani on July 8, 2016, and resultant insurgency interfered with her Dara Shikoh Fellowship, the frantic calls from the director to her staff stuck in Srinagar shook D'Souza greatly. She felt too far removed from the actual picture to work on it, but six months later, found herself responding to the situation. The result: her ongoing project – the Archive of Imagined Citizenship – about the natural history of a nameless village that is 100km south of the imaginary town of Schkupadale. "Kashmir to me just like this village, also seems imaginary, despite being widely reported about, as no one outside Kashmir is aware of the real picture."
Through 18 watercolor portraits of endangered birds and animals from J&K, she views the people of Kashmir as an endangered lot. These include the state animal – hangul, the tragopan (horned pheasant), markhor (screw horn goat) and lammergier (bearded vulture) that appear in Mughal paintings and lore, and even an outlawish Semnopithecus ajax (Kashmir gray langur). Part of this Schkupadale encyclopaedia has her Borgesian solution of 'How to Untaxonomise Your Being' that un-classifies you from the order of taxonomy by going from the sub-species of your being to the phylum, snubbing the colonial habit of divide, classify and rule.
A work-in-progress at the residency is a collaboration with a marine biologist for Delhi's Xstudios called The Bahmut is Dead: Long Live the Bahamut where Bahamut, taken from Edward William Lane's Islamic work on cosmography, is a giant fish that holds up the earth. It's on the 'whale fall' phenomenon – an inadequately researched area of the organisms that feed on the decaying carcass of a whale that sinks to the deep ocean. "In future, people will look at some of our science as utter nonsense," she mutters, while wondering how to make the painting "less flat" despite using copper leaf and ironed plastic in parts.
"I work well with small format upto A3 size as it's difficult to stretch my hand to complete larger works," says D'Souza, who in 2005, at age 9, contracted the Guillian Barre Syndrome (GBS) – a rare autoimmune syndrome that mostly middle-age men contract. It left her strapped onto a ventilator in the ICU for three months. Her first artwork she recalls, was after six months of the paralysis, when her parents fastened her hand to felt pens in the colour of her choice with rubber bands to ensure a talon-like grasp so that she could continue to draw with only a uni-directional arm movement. "I drew a beautiful flower vase and even managed to write 'grandma' in calligraphy," she says. Thirteen years later – after being confined to her house for five of these, weak motor nerves in her ankles causes her to often trip and so anti-deformity AFO (Ankle Foot Orthosis) footwear have become an extension of her feet. She can only half-open her fingers. The 'Eve's Apple', battle scar left by the ventilator, at the dip of her collarbones, is "my dimple in a unique place. It adds so much swag to my personality."
