‘Footfalls echo in the memory’: Displaced Durgas and Migrant Forms
Subha Mukherji in Kolkata, October 2021 [The author is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture, University of Cambridge] Durga Puja is one of the biggest Hindu festivals of India, an annual event most widely and exuberantly celebrated in and around Kolkata. On display at the popular Barisha Club ‘pandal’ (pavilion for the installation of idols for religious festivals) in Kolkata through the second week of October was a Durga and her entourage: named ‘Bhaager Ma’, ‘the mother of divisions’ – or perhaps ‘the mother, parcelled out’. Durga the Mother Goddess is depicted as a disoriented, terrified refugee, sitting with her four children, clutching on to her last belongings, in the limbo of a detention centre marked by a cage located in a no-man’s land between the borders of India and Bangladesh. Behind her, a grey screen plays a video showing a muddy patch quivering with footprints hastily left by stealthy feet, big and small, as they fall at night. The footage is uncannily similar to the footfalls visible on YouTube since the BBC published its report of 12 October on Afghan refugees frantically fleeing the Taliban across the Iran-Turkey border, leaving marks on the rough ground as they ‘[sneaked] across’ in desperate hurry (Orla Guerin), while Turkey tightened controls. The similarity is an artistic accident but an existential continuum, signalling an emergent phenomenon of what I will call ‘migrant forms’: forms that respond to the imaginative and ethical demands of the unknowable reality of mass displacement, in a way that governments, institutions and public discourse have calamitously failed to do. Rintu Das, the artist who conceived the refugee Durga, has been playing with the idea for a long time, and has had a team of three clay artists working on it since long before the BBC footage was aired. But the co-appearance of the idol and the news clip in the same week signals a terrible convergence: the barbed wires and walls rising around the world, the governments which are excluding people, whether citizens or aliens, Fascist demagogues who are whipping up majoritarian hatred, are distinct in particulars but identical in essence. Artistic representations of a whole new kind are registering this, speaking across borders in an expressive medium that sometimes goes beyond their makers’ intentional agency, inducing a dialogue that only ‘tribes’ of artworks can do. And as the anthropologist Alfred Gell intuited, artworks do have a way of forming tribes. Just such an ecology is surfacing spontaneously across Kolkata. Bhabatosh Sutar and Dinesh Poddar, makers of this year’s Puja at Naktala Udayan Sangha, frame the pandal with an ominously empty train stuck on a border with bags and baggages spilling out, and signposts marking the distance to various cities-turned-checkpoints in Bangladesh. The Dum Dum Park Puja is themed around the country-wide, ongoing peasants’ protest against the Farm Bills of August 2020, but weaves in a symbol from the women’s protest at Shaheen Bagh in March 2020 against the Government’s CAA and NRC bills: the placing of shoes on the protest site to stand in for them as Covid surged. The heap of sandals strewn across the pandal was predictably denounced by the Hindutva brigade as blasphemous. This year’s refugee Durga counterpoints the muddy feet in the background – played to a soundtrack of guard dogs howling and panicked human cacophony – with exquisite prints of the Goddess’s feet in the long foreground, dyed crimson in the traditionally auspicious red foot-paint called ‘aalta’, leading up to what might have been the altar. This is how we tend to envision Gods visiting mortals, as Durga visits the earth – her parental home – every October, when Kolkata turns into a giant festival site. Except that the raised platform, here, is the barbed cage, and the Goddess has a disarmingly human face. It is a face caught in the headlights sinisterly focused on a border marked with ‘Crossing Prohibited’, but is also in the shadow – the near shadow of the CAA and NRC, and the longer shadow of the Bengal partition. ‘Footfalls echo in the memory’. Artworks like these take their place at once in the global, accretive, conversation, and, more consciously, in dialogue with a more local past: traditions of representation, events of history, and their own formal legacies. The CAA is the Citizenship Amendment Act enacted by the Indian Government in December 2019; its twin proposal, the NRC, is the National Register of Citizens. Packaged as positive legislation, the CAA amends the citizenship act to accept ‘illegal’ migrants who came to India after India’s independence, up until 2014, fleeing from religious persecution in their home states in neighbouring Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, but conspicuously excludes Muslims – the largest majority in those countries – alongside other Indic-origin religious minorities like the Rohingyas. The NRC originally applied only in Assam (as of 1951), a state largely shaped by migration, but was suddenly reactivated and updated in 2019. These coupled measures were designed to identify ‘citizens’ and exclude ‘illegal’ immigrants on the basis of documents going back to 1971. In Assam, out of 32.9 million applicants for inclusion in the Registry, 1.9 millions reportedly got left out. While primarily targeted at Muslims who have lived in India for years, including those born here, this count included many Hindus too, whose ancestry went back to Pakistan or Afghanistan or Bangladesh. Fear is in the air. Das tells me that his neighbours, a Hindu couple originally from Bangladesh, are haunted by a generalised sense of terror and a radical insecurity. The wife keeps asking the husband, ‘Bhola, when they take me to the camp, what will you do? And the kids?’ Amidst the proliferation of obscurantist Acts and Bills, the precise targets of these new rules are not distinguishable to all. Anyone who has had to leave one of these neighbouring countries for India, and anyone who has been in India as a member of a long-settled religious minority, is susceptible to this miasma of despair. There are many families