Partners in High Places
Photos of rural Bengal and ruins are a well-worn theme, but Sarker Protick’s work again makes it new
Jaimin Rajani’s talent lifts his debut album, but so do his collaborators
In 2020, after several years of writing songs, Jaimin Rajani finally felt ready to put something out. The Kolkata-based singer-songwriter began putting together tracks and working with co-producer Subharaj Ghosh to transform the scratch demos, recorded on his phone with just a voice and acoustic guitar, into full-band arrangements, honing those strippeddown songs into something grander. Thus, his 14-song album, Cutting Loose, was born—a thoughtful and emotive release that stands out as a mature debut. It’s also an album that boasts a series of Indian indie music heavyweights popping up as unexpected collaborators, including, among others, the powerhouse frontman of Indian Ocean, Rahul Ram. “I didn’t want to put out a half-baked attempt.” Each element of the record—which rests in a reflective, intimate space, driven by his voice and the guitar—was painstakingly worked on by Rajani, everything from the sonic approach to the selection of the songs.
It’s an intricately crafted record, with hopeful refrains and a
stream-of-consciousness lyricism lending it purpose and forward motion—in ‘I’m Going Solo’, he sings, “I’m going solo/ solo is the way to go” with an understated defiance, over the plucked strings of a guitar and a faint harmonica in the distance—and Rajani seems to favour warmth over flash for the most part. He mentions that Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Mark Knopfler have been influential voices. In addition to Rahul Ram,
Cutting Loose is elevated by several other big names such as Rohan Ganguli (Supersonics), Abhay Sharma on the sax, bassist Ralph Pais and Susmit Bose. Rajani says Bose, who has done backing vocals here, is a friend and mentored him through the making of Cutting Loose.
“The others, I just reached out to them. I said, ‘Give it a listen, if you think it’s worthy of your contribution, then add your bits.’ They didn’t go by my credentials, that I’m a debut artist ... They just went by the aesthetics. They liked what they heard,” he says.
Rajani was clear from the beginning that he wanted to bring seasoned musicians into the album. And while their quality was no doubt the primary reason, Rajani acknowledges that their name lends credence to Cutting Loose as well. “It’s very hard to sell an album when I’m not an established singersongwriter already. It has to be done; it has to be a complete package. People are looking for familiarity,” he says. Ultimately, though, Cutting Loose is Rajani’s own creative vision imprinted onto the music. He describes his songwriting and composition process as existing in an altered state of mind. The act of creation itself, he feels, is honest, intuitive self-expression—“I don’t think at all,” he says. “The process is that there is no process.” ■
The ruins of a temple stand on a tiny island of earth in the middle of shallow-flooded paddy fields, like the wreck of some ancient rocket that failed to take off many centuries ago. Its pointed top pokes up into the misty winter morning and two of its four side spires are missing, like engines that might have fallen off. The recently irrigated fields are covered in a sheet of water in which the structure is reflected among the tufts of freshly planted rice. The contrast of old brickwork and the evidence of ongoing human activity asserts itself only after you have looked at the image for a while, as if two layers of time are peeling off each other in a decomposing palimpsest. There are other images of ruins in this series (titled Jhirno) that work similarly—ordinary and straightforward at first glance, but which then hook you into a longer engagement and meditation.
In terms of photographic images, rural Bengal and ruins are an old and well-worn visual pairing, but something in the way Sarker Protick frames and presents these images makes them quietly new and unsettling. The ghosts of David McCutchion as well as those of Bernd and Hilla Becher wander through these pictures, but without ever staying too long; Protick clearly shares some of McCutchion’s emotional connection to Bengal’s old masonry as he does the precise, held-in stillness of the Bechers’ gaze, but here, in the compositions and sequencing, a very different kind of looking emerges—the
slow examination of the traces of a messy, sub-tropical riverine past by a native situated in an over-kinetic, chaotic, deltaic present.
This same sense of understatement, arrived at after much filtering and distillation, is also to be found in the other group of photographs on display—Mr and Mrs Das—where Protick documents the last days of two of his grandparents who spent their lives working for the Baptist Church in East Pakistan/ Bangladesh. Images of the ailing couple are sparsely distributed among images of their flat and medical paraphernalia, and are all the more powerful for not being ubiquitous. A switchboard, a still ceiling fan, a picture of Christ with a 3D crown of small, shiny balloons, the corner of a stairway, a pile of books echoing the pile of rotting volumes in the Jhirno series are all somehow imbued with love; unlike the photographs of the ruins and landscape, these are in colour, but only barely so. At first, you are reminded of old, hand-tinted photos, but then you see the chromatic signature that only digital working can produce and, again, you find yourself walking on the liminal alkhet (as the raised earth boundaries between fields are called in Bangla) between different segments of time.
Do go and see these photos and the video work by Sarker Protick. Shrine Empire Gallery is to be lauded for presenting such a strong new ‘voice’, so to speak, from the churn of exciting photography being produced in Bangladesh. In these fraught and divided times, work such as this transcends national borders and happily reminds us of our larger identity as subcontinentals. ■