Buried tales

Projected on to the wall is a piece of old documentary footage of wounded Indian soldiers from the First World War recuperating at the Royal Pavilion,a grand structure in the south coast of England,built along Mughal architectural lines. The video,manipulated by Adrus to be set at a slow pace,shows a royal visit to the pavilion to meet with some of the over one million Indian

soldiers who served under the British during the War—a fragment of history largely forgotten. Among holy-text holding rihaads suspended from the ceiling,visuals of the arches and gardens of Shah Jehan Mosque are superimposed upon this footage to tell the tale of the burial of the dead Indian soldiers. The installation uses memory,history and landscape to raise questions that find resonance in disturbances (or ‘clash of civilisations’ as they are known now) around the world even today.

Being shown for the first time in India,Adrus is curious to see how his five-year-old work-in-progress will be received. Reviews of the show frequently speak of the melancholia and nostalgia it evokes. “But this work is more of a tribute or a memorial to my father who served in the Kenyan Army during the Second World War,” he clarifies. Adrus’s own story is one of migration,and lost and found identities. His parents left coastal Gujarat in the 1930s to settle in Kenya,later moving to Switzerland and then the UK.

Structures like the mosque in Woking speak of historic connections between the east and the west and also subvert notions of the ‘pure’ countryside in British landscape painting. Adrus was also part of the British Black Artists

Movement of the 1980s where a group of artists of Caribbean,Asian and African origins came together to tell stories of oppression and migration. “I didn’t want my work to be didactic,it’s meant more to be meditative,” he says as he reveals that the footage of the royal visit was ironically used as recruitment propaganda by the Imperial army,even on their own countrymen. “But it’s easy to fast-forward to the present and connect it to contemporary situations. I deliberately didn’t want to do that,” says the artist.

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