When asked to think about the word ‘home’, what comes to your mind? A sense of belonging? A particular place? A feeling of calm, of happiness, or the complete opposite – chaos, insecurity or abandonment? In this piece, I explore how some of my curatorial projects have referenced ideas of home, and touch upon artworks that resonate with a sense of belonging, evoking different facets of the evolving space we call home. I also reflect on some of my own experiences as a South Indian living in England, and how this links to a wider political picture of colonialism and diaspora. During my residency at The Art House in Wakefield I was reminded how pockets of this city have played an important role in shaping my own sense of cultural identity, which in turn have informed my curatorial practice and thinking.
My earliest memories of home have always been rooted in a dual experience of cultures: East and West, Indian and British, Tamilian and Northern. This duality manifested itself in my family’s home furnishings, our clothes and our food. Fabrics, trinkets, flowers, sweet and spicy aromas and the sound of different languages have shaped my understanding of who I am.
In the exhibition at the Whitworth, Beyond Faith: Muslim Women Artists Today, Usarae Gul captured this duality of East and West in her vibrant paintings of the neon streets of Rusholme in Manchester known as the ‘Curry Mile’. Gul recalls her experiences of visiting these areas at night in her paintings, exhibited alongside personal items such as embroidered slippers from Pakistan and brightly coloured printed and woven textiles from the Gallery’s collection. The combination of textures, shapes and colours evoked those childhood memories of wonder, excitement and cultural pride while simultaneously conveying stories of migration.
Closer to my own home in Barnsley, our nearest version of Manchester’s Curry Mile was Bradford, which we visited from time to time. However, the food my mother cooked at home relied on ingredients that could only be sourced in Wakefield at a little corner shop known as Abdul’s, tucked away at the end of a row of redbrick back-to-back terraced houses in the suburb of Agbrigg. I revisited this area during my residency, and while Abdul’s is no longer there, the faint outline of the shopfront can still be made out. In the 1980s this was the only place we could reliably and consistently source ingredients such as daniya (coriander), ginger, garlic, green chillies, jeera (cumin) and mutton. My father would invariably pop into Abdul’s on his way home from work and over time they became great friends. Abdul would sort out our family with anything we needed from homemade batch samosas to the latest Hindi movie songs, all of which came in handy for the numerous parties my parents had at the weekends. During these times the house would come alive with chatter, music, biryani, whisky and cigarette smoke, shiny saris, and the chaos of children playing. Our home was on show and our best fine bone china would be brought out.
The food we choose to cook and eat is an integral part of our cultural identity. Apart from the basic functions of nutrition and energy, food involves a series of social interactions, sometimes even rituals. Lighting a Christmas pudding, gathering and singing around a birthday cake and even drinking tea involves a series of carefully orchestrated performances. Yet underlying the pleasure and satisfaction of consumption lies the hidden back-breaking reality of harvesting, farming and labour. In the aftermath of empires, commodity circulation and the exploitation of land and people, our daily access to tea and coffee has come at a high price, something most of us take for granted.
Lahore-based artist Risham Syed explored the tensions of colonialism and tea in the exhibition Beyond Borders at Manchester Art Gallery in 2017. Her quilt installation titled ‘Kaal Pakhan (Blackbirding)’, 2013, incorporated winter scenes in Lahore with an image of a blackbird taken from a Time Life issue on the British Empire, birds whose loud screams were used to capture escaping slaves (a practice known as blackbirding). Alongside the quilt, Syed displayed a gilded rose pink porcelain tea set from the Gallery collection, an Enfield rifle, nineteenth-century botanical drawings and a map from the Marketing Board of the British Empire. Collectively these objects exposed the dark underbelly of imperial trade and consumption between Britain and India.
Beyond Borders was part of a larger project aptly called ‘The New North and South’, bringing together arts organisations which included the Manchester partnership of museums and galleries, The Tetley in Leeds, the Lahore Biennial, the India Art Fair, the Kochi-Muziris Biennial and the Dhaka Art Summit, across the North of England and South Asia for a whole year of programming. For Beyond Borders, artists Yasmin Jahan Nupur (from Dhaka), Cona (an artist-led organisation founded by Shreyas Karle and Hemali Bhuta in Mumbai), and Raisa Kabir also explored the contested journeys of cotton and silk. They responded through their own textile works, archival objects and works by other artists such as Monica Correa and Nelly Sethna (and those connected to the Indian Weavers Service Centre) alongside a selection of textiles from the Whitworth’s collection.
As part of Beyond Borders, Yasmin Jahan Nupur gave a two-day durational performance titled ‘A tailor sewing a dress for Tipu Sultan’, where she performed as a tailor cutting and sewing a robe by hand using jamdani muslin (an exquisitely fine method of cotton weaving using an extra-weft patterning technique). Since then, Nupur has continued to use her body as a site for the contested histories of muslin, performing ‘Let me get you a nice cup of tea’ at Frieze London (2019), Dhaka Art Summit (2020) and at Tate Modern (2022). In it she wears a jamdani muslin sari and invites members of the public to sit with her and converse about the politics of tea while serving them home-grown tea from Chittagong, Bangladesh, in a fine china, laid on an embroidered lace tablecloth from the British Indian Empire.
In 2021, I curated an exhibition of art textiles at Bikaner House in Delhi, titled Rehang, related to the idea of the home and its displacement. Bikaner House, once a royal palace, offered a perfect contrast to places around the world where homes have been ravaged by war, destruction or occupation. In this grand place, I showed artists who had been inspired to create from wreckage and displacement, whose work documented, mapped and paid testament to those left behind. The debris and aftershock of bomb blasts were starting points for the Sri Lankan-based artist, Chathuri Nissansala, who reveals the absurdity of political factions and the continuous fight for land rights and ancestral homes. Using found statuary, on which she weaved and draped intricate webs of beads, Nissansala memorialised the spoils of war and the souls of the departed. The erasure of people and their rights was also captured in the works of the Bangladeshi-based artist Ashfika Rahma. In her project Redeem (Oraon/ ওরাঁও), produced in collaboration with the Oraon community, a continuously displaced indigenous community in Bangladesh, the artist was able to portray the plight of losing their land, community and identity through a sensitive mixed media work of photography, woven matting embellished with sari borders, interlacing the pain and dignity associated with the land they once occupied.
For many people around the world, home may no longer be a physical site they can connect with or visit… It is no longer a place of nurturing where they feel safe and cared for.
For many people around the world, home may no longer be a physical site they can connect with or visit. When trauma engulfs minds and bodies, our association with home can be reduced to feelings of fear and deep loneliness. It is no longer a place of nurturing where we feel safe and cared for. We never forget these experiences, we just learn to live with them. 2022 marked seventy-five years of Partition and Indian Independence. In 1947, while Britain was recovering from the ravages of war, the Indian subcontinent was being deliberately dismantled, resulting in widespread atrocities, massacres, displacement and untold brutality. Some too awful to be put into words, there are many eyewitness accounts and personal experiences that remain locked and unspoken in the memories of our ancestors.
Yet as South Asians who have emigrated to Britain, those events have been carried by the journeys of families who chose to leave the Indian subcontinent to make a new life over here, hoping to grow, prosper and begin again. My culture is therefore partly grown from a condensed version of my parents’ cultures. Each South Asian has a different story to tell, depending on where, when and why they ‘settled’. While there are differences between and within all the diaspora, our collective journeys to the here and now – seventy-five years on – can in some way be traced back to Partition and Independence.
These events were marked in August 2022 in a small pop-up exhibition titled Voices that I curated at The Portico in Manchester, this time with a group of South Asian diaspora women artists: Sunaina Bhalla, Asmaa Mahmud Hashmi, Suman Gujral and Madhu Manipatruni. Known as ‘the Didijis’ (a respectful term commonly used in Hindi to address an elder sister or lady), the group came together during the pandemic to provide a much needed supportive space to share and discuss experiences and cultural barriers negotiated by South Asian women in their own homes and families, as well as in the arts and heritage sectors. The Portico offered the Didijis an opportunity to be present and visible in what was once a colonial gentleman’s library, built in the heartland of the British cotton industry, in a city that directly profited from crops grown on the subcontinent.
As part of Voices, three of the artists directly linked their individual practices to publications in The Portico’s collection that looked at the subcontinent through a colonial lens. Sunaina Bhalla (and Indian-born artist now based in Singapore) was drawn to a Victorian publication on the social life of the British in India and their curious and sometimes fearful relationship with Indian food. Using the written account of G.F. Atkinson Curry and Rice on Forty Plates, or the ingredients of social life at ‘our station’ in India, Bhalla made connections to the power of herbs and spices traditionally used in Ayurvedic medicine, burning and suspending them in resin cubes to mirror the colonial curiosity and fear.
Suman Gujral was particularly drawn to Edward Baines’ History of the cotton manufacture in Great Britain: with a notice of its early history in the East and in all the quarters of the globe, published in 1835 by Fisher and Jackson. The opening page of the publication reveals a proud portrait of Richard Arkwright, the industrialist and inventor of the water-powered spinning frame that led to the mass production of strong yarn and reduced the need to spin cotton by hand. His posture and plump figure speak to the tremendous wealth he accumulated and the ‘pomp’ and ‘glory’ of the cotton industry. Drawing on the economic histories of mechanical power, hand spun cotton and Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Gujral used red stitch on pierced paper to retrace these lines of erasure.
Madhu Manipatruni delved into the remarkable cross-dressing adventures of Hannah Snell in John Timbs’ English Eccentrics and Eccentricities, published in 1866 by Richard Bentley. Based on the true story of a young woman who fell for the charms of a deceitful and scandalous Dutch military man, she disguised herself as a man and voyaged across the oceans, joining the military and enlisted in ‘defending’ the Coromandel coast. Only revealing her true identity to two trusted women along the way, Hannah had to withstand the jealousy and suspicions of her fellow male companions, tolerating their mockery and lashings and treating her own bullet wounds. Manipatruni was deeply fascinated by Snell’s story and her part in the English-French trade wars that took place in South India in the eighteenth century, capturing her image in kantha (straight stitch) work.
In my work as a curator, I have always been drawn to textiles in all its forms, not only in artworks but also in furnishing and dress. From birth to death, our bodies are engaged in a reciprocal, quotidian exchange with cloth that forms and shapes our identities. To dress is to undertake a process of adornment, building layers over our skin, not only in the form of clothing but also makeup, jewellery and hairstyles (and, for some, temporary or permanent tattoos), providing a boundary of physical and perhaps even spiritual protection between the naked body and the world we inhabit. Across South Asia our identities are spoken through and with cloth, our outward appearance creating its own sense of belonging, of home. The dressed body isolates and expands our physical presence, regulates and releases conventional codes of behaviour. And yet there are hidden voids between our skin and clothing that can be deconstructed into further histories and ways of thinking.
Most recently these ideas were explored in an exhibition I curated for the Crafts Council Gallery titled Cotton: Labour, Land and Body (on until March 2023). As we all own something made from cotton, whether it is a t-shirt, a pair of socks or bed sheets, cotton is an ideal starting point to think about contested spaces of land and body. A humble plant that has been skilfully cultivated from seed to yarn and crafted into garments for thousands of years, cotton’s popularity supports a steadily expanding global trade and consumption that is possibly on the verge of collapse. Its fluffy fibres have built empires and caused enslavement, poverty and death. While communities have been created in the histories of cotton they have also been displaced and erased. And yet cotton remains one of the most profitable crops in the world.
Cotton features artists Raisa Kabir, Brigid McLeer, Bharti Parmar and Reetu Sattar, who collectively and individually explore the impact of cotton production on labour, land and the body. Taking the audience on a journey through Gandhi’s campaign to end British rule, championing the boycott of imported cloth with punched khadi paper (handmade from cotton rag), to coded Bangla script and job titles of production-line workers captured in handwoven and jacquard textiles, the exhibition highlights the traditions of cotton manufacturing in Blackburn and Burnley in Lancashire and their transnational links. Artworks are displayed alongside museum colonial archives, to draw out and underline the darker sides of cotton exploitation, including the exhaustion of labourers and the haunting memories of tragedies in garment factories.
In locating people across different times, spaces and cultures, the artists Cotton draw out multi-generational connections to South Asia and the mills of Lancashire. As in other curatorial project, I have tried to combine fragments of individual and collective cultural experience in order to create links between South Asia and voices of diaspora. Textiles provoke us to think through, under and over complex layers, opening up new spheres of contemplation, networks of connections and starting points for further dialogue. Returning to the question of home, of belonging, I think for me it will always will be deeply embedded in experiences of fabrics and food. For me these are essential ingredients of my evolving cultural identity and what a home is built around. Yet homes, just like exhibitions, are temporary sites. They can be deconstructed and reconstructed anywhere in the world.
Uthra Rajgopal is an Independent Curator. Formerly at The Whitworth and the Victoria & Albert Museum, she has developed a specialist interest in fibre arts and South Asian textiles.
This exploration was supported by Arts Council England and The Art House Wakefield, and grew out of a writing residency programme exploring themes around home and belonging. As part of her residency Rajgopal recieved mentoring from award-winning cultural producer, freelance journalist and leadership coach Annalisa Toccara.
Featured content
Published 09.01.2023 by Lara Eggleton in Explorations
2,739 words