The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
A River Rams Into It
The human stories unfolding in the endangered island of Majuli in Assam were the highlight of an art exhibition about the Northeast
THE STATISTICS get lost in the pages of newspapers — Majuli in Assam, the world’s largest river island, is shrinking rapidly and faces a real threat of disappearing. An arts showcase, titled “Arteast”, at the India International Centre (IIC) in Delhi attempted to reveal the human stories and the searing narratives of displacement in the ecological tragedy.
“The inhabitants are psychologically immune to the threat posed by the Brahmaputra now,” says Monica Banerjee, Director, National Foundation of India, which organised the exhibition in collaboration with IIC, Outstories and the Sasakahwa Tea Foundation. A depiction of a familiar sight in the river island was an installation titled, Majuli: Hope and Homelessness, which used the fountain adjacent to the IIC lawns to convey the sense of a drowning home. Various artefacts, made of bamboo and clay, float in the basin of the fountain. A charpoy rested against a wall, a feeble effort to ensure a dry bed for the night.
Another striking offering of the exhibition was Parashar Baruah’s film, Majuli: Land Between Two Rivers. The protagonist of the film is Kanhai, a boatmaker and single father of two. The camera captures his efforts to shield himself and his children from the raging Bramaputra that repeatedly threatens to swallow much of the little that Kanhai owns. The boatmaker waits two weeks for the wrathful waves to abate so that his daughter can appear for her Class X boards. His son has dropped out of school because Kanhai could not afford an education for him. Finally, on the first day of his daughter’s exam, the family decides to demolish their house and move inland to find temporary relief. “Arteast” also included performances and installations created by maskmakers of the region. “These masks are mostly of Ravana and Garuda, the neo-vaisnavite population’s totem, and are made with beaten clay and cow dung. The raasleela is one of the few forms of entertainment available to the people of Majuli. The masks bear a resemblance to mythological characters and folk stories are enacted using these. In this sense, the maskmakers of the region are also actors,” said Kishalay Bhattacharjee, the curator of Arteast. A display of pots, made without wheels, used to store milk and rice, and sometimes even fermented beer, highlighted another dying art, as the craftsmen of Majuli look elsewhere for livelihood.