Estioned at the end of days
Saraswati Must Fall
enough land to stick a needle in.' ”
In Not Even a Needle’s-width of Land, one sees an army clad in gold on one side and another in black on the other. The legacy of old South Africa, Thumbiran says, is dressed in gold because of resources and land theft, and there’s the vierkleur. As with all the pieces, Thumbiran locates himself on both sides of the discussion and, in so doing, adds another level to the dispute depicted.
“My identity is so flimsy, it could collapse with the right piece of information. I can be everything and nothing at the same time … The group represented in the work is the ‘other' in conversations about land. Within the Indian community, upper-class Indians are gonna end up taking the white guys’ side, more often than not. Whereas, if you come to Lenz, you know we'll be like, ‘The land must come back, even if it's not to us. The land has to go back to someone of colour’. And you know, it speaks to that clash within our own community."
Saraswati Must Fall also addresses the intra-indian conflicts of class, as well as interracial tension. “‘Should we go [to Fees Must Fall protests], will we fit in? Will we be chased away and be told to fokof?’ These are questions a lot of Indian kids asked themselves. The truth is Indian people just wouldn’t participate. It comes down to the disparaging of a minority, as well as feeling like, ‘Shit, do we belong here?' because the movement itself was mostly black, and the truth is we get called out on our behaviour a lot.”
Honourable Ravan
In this piece Thumbiran mixes absurd imagery — one avatar of him has a lobster claw for a hand — and textspeak to take a Fees Must Fall protest scene and bioengineer it into something slightly different. His initial motivation for the piece was seeing books burn, and then feeling that that was culturally and ethically not something he felt good about, even though he supported the call for free education. Religion, in this case, is conflated with race — and being a minority boxed into the category of “Indian” means the two are still largely seen as interchangeable —although often that is not the case.
Honourable Ravan, one of the larger antagonists in South Africa’s version of Kaliyug, is a piece that addresses political dystopia and the various manifestations of this in South Africa’s political parties and corporate sector. But, instead of merely pointing fingers, Thumbiran inserts himself into his characters.
“In Ravan, you see me as the avatars of Ravan, questioning, ‘Would I do the same?’ It’s easy to be the hero but the truth is someone is the antagonist. We’re really still stuck in that laarnie complex … During apartheid, it was white people’s corruption and it's still white people running the economy, but in the media, we only see people of colour making nonsense."
This idea is taken further in Mareech Distract Those Masses, which speaks of issues of censorship, distraction and the uncritical consumption of media.
The ideas in Thumbiran’s MA work are dense, and often I wondered whether taking Hinduism as a canon helped to rupture the binaries of race and (un)belonging, or whether it reinscribed those limitations in thought. Ideas about land ownership are more complicated than a white side and a black side, although that is how these debates often present themselves. The patriarchal overtones of Hinduism are assumed as part of the narrative and are built on, such as in The Disrobing of Justice, or Ahilya, which replace the sexual and gender violence themes in these stories with interrogations of race.
But, as Thumbiran notes, he’s a young artist just trying to figure things out from his perspective, which prioritises the politics of big men — in contemporary South Africa and in Hindu mythology. There’s a vulnerability in figuring out who you are, and in Kaliyu-topia, we’re privy to lopsided questions and a deep anxiety about displacement and the future. “It comes back to this question: What the fuck am I? Why am I here and why don’t I belong?”
The exhibition is on at UJ, where Thumbiran now lectures in new media studies, until March 29