‘WHAT GOOD WERE EYES TO ME?’ - TRYING NOT TO FORGET

‘All will be remembered’ (Sab yaad rakkha jayega), by Aamir Aziz was perhaps one of the most poignant lines to come out of protests that had engulfed India in the months of 2019-20. And yet the question might well be asked – why remember? Who does it benefit to remember? And behind it all, is remembering a possible weapon for future justice? Or a curse upon those who cannot afford to forget?

The refusal – or inability – to forget the horrors of times past is a particular cross that Madhusudhanan bears. He draws, paints and films as an eyewitness of political time, and most of all perhaps, producing a gaze on time on behalf of those who are unable to forget. As Frantz Fanon shows – ‘What? While I was forgetting, forgiving, and wanting only to love, my message was flung back in my face like a slap’ – forgetting is a privilege not available to all. The inability to forget forces, as Fanon shows in Black God White Masks, paranoid worldviews of seeing extreme meaning everywhere around us, twisted into nightmarish extremes, of violence perpetrated, of the cover-up of normalcy, like the stain or smear that will not be erased.

The current exhibition, The Shape of the Sky: A Rectangle, continues several themes we have known from Madhusudhanan’s earlier work, from the charcoal works The Marx Archive: The Logic of Disappearance to his films. Extreme offscreen memories of horror and trauma, of totalitarian leadership, of the instruments of violent action, appear in everyday images like bombs on matchbox labels. He repeatedly works with a horizon – a kind of horizontal line beath which lie the cadavers of time, while above come the projections of trauma. The story told by the light in the sea, for example, creates on top an image of a body being swallowed by the shark, while beneath the surface are to be found fossils and shipwrecks. Watercolours from the Book of War series show skeletons beneath dreamlike/nightmarish image-projections above. Objects on the matchbox labels – the swans, the dog-and-gramophone, the train, the jeep – become sinister, for everything has meaning, everything carries potential danger.

Paranoia in the Fanon sense takes us to Negritude and to the idea of the colonized experience as a psycho-pathology of the everyday. Fanon quotes Freud at one point in Black God, White Masks as pointing out how, even when trauma has been seemingly ‘expelled from the consciousness and the memory of the patient’ and succeeded thereby in preventing ‘a great mass of suffering’, there is nevertheless the resurfacing of repression that is ‘on watch constantly for an opportunity to make itself known and it soon comes back into consciousness, but in a disguise that makes it impossible to recognize’.

As the sky gets reduced to a rectangle – a specifically cinematic thing to do (Madhusudhanan is as much a filmmaker as he is an artist) – it also spatializes time, specifically temporal memory. Extreme close-ups have in his earlier work produced space literally as a function of times past. Razor, Blood and Other Tales (2007), for example, is a short fiction work in which a barber, presumably a former political activist, shaves a man who was once a police officer and slowly runs a razor down his throat. In the fiction film Bioscope (2008) – whose images are directly invoked in the oil paintings in the current exhibition (Archaeology of Cinema 4/5) – the projector shows the great films of history but projects disease into his home.

There is the recurring element of the nightmares of childhood - That’s where my childhood was produces a domesticated space above a gigantic shark – that also evoke Fanon’s ‘past happenings of the bygone days of… childhood (that) will be brought up out of the depths of… memory; old legends… reinterpreted in the light of a borrowed estheticism and of a conception of the world which was discovered under other skies’. Under these skies lies fire, again a direct consequence of trauma, in the three-channel video work I am in the Dark/You are the Fire. Both childhood and fear of fire come together repeatedly in Madhusudhan’s work, captured for example in the magic of the mesmerizing theyyam performance, and the wide-eyed traumatizing gaze of the child-eyewitness.

Both fire and childhood trauma invoke two names who remain, it appears, key fellow travellers in this journey to deal with remembrance: both filmmakers, filmmakers Ritwik Ghatak and John Abraham. Ghatak is directly invoked in his own childhood film Subarnarekha, in the large fibreglass-and-wood work When We left our village you said we were going to our new home. Is it here?, where too the objects of terrifying and sinister ordinariness populate the work. And, it seems, Abraham more indirectly, when fire suffuses the stunning conclusion of Abraham’s film Donkey in a Brahmin Village that ends with the entire village catching fire. Both Ghatak and Abraham are fellow eyewitnesses to history who too had tried not to forget. 

- Ashish Rajadhyaksha
 

ASHISH RAJADHYAKSHA 

Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a film historian, and an occasional art curator. He is the author of the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (with Paul Willemen, 1994/1999), Indian Cinema from the Time of Celluolid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (2009), John-Ghatak-Tarkovsky: Citizens, Filmmakers, Hackers (2023) and other books.