Generation Gap

‘‘It’s more difficult to talk about Partition because the role of perpetrators and victims was a reversible one. It’s impossible to ‘blame’ any one side,’’ says artist Nalini Malani, 57, whose parents left Sindh for Pune after 1947 and who, like her mother, kept silent for years. Until she responded to the threat of nuclear war between India and Pakistan in 1999 with her installation ‘Remembering Toba Tek Singh’.

Black and white archival images of confused people and animals running for their life. A winking soldier comparing the mushroom cloud of Hiroshima to a woman’s figure. Digitally manipulated images of babies being born only to retreat into their mother’s womb.

Taking Saadat Hassan Manto’s classic story about Bhushan Singh, a refugee, as take-off point, Malani’s shocking visuals told a story many would rather not hear.

The installation was shown in Delhi and Mumbai and six years later she’s considering recreating the work, ‘‘because this is something one continues to revisit.’’

Some artists have not been directly touched by Partition but feel the need to speak up nevertheless. Forty-year-old Atul Dodiya’s ‘Gandhi’ series from the ‘50 Years of Independence’ show and his ‘An Artist of Non-violence’ exhibition directly address the issue.

‘‘In my watercolour ‘A Painful Resolution’, I have five political giants—Nehru, Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad and Gandhi—standing at a historic moment of Hindu-Muslim harmony,’’ says Dodiya, referring to this moment as the lull before a storm.

‘‘The violence that followed still comes like a jolt, even to artists of my generation.’’

While Dodiya engages with the subject, other artists cite many reasons for steering clear of it. For Mumbai-based Bose Krishnamachari, who is in his mid-forties, Partition would have been more relevant if he belonged to an earlier generation of artists.

‘‘I am not emotionally untouched by the issue, but it does not figure in my works because I don’t think art can change politics,’’ he says.

Baiju Parthan, Krishnamachari’s contemporary, says he has avoided the subject because of its overtly nationalistic or political nature.

‘‘I don’t do heavily ideological work because it becomes propagandist,’’ he says. ‘‘Besides, I think it also depends where one is geographically located. Since I come from southern India, I don’t know how far it would be relevant if I respond to it.’’

However, with the blurring of lines and improvement in Indo-Pak ties, a younger generation of artists such as Shilpa Gupta, 25, Tejal Shah, 23, and Hema Upadhyay, 30, show a willingness to cross the border—artistically, personally and geographically.

Gupta undertook a cross-border exchange of poster art with Pakistani artist Huma Mulji titled ‘Aar Paar’, which started in 1999 and had a show in 2004—the third in the series. Posters from Pakistan were put up at strategic points in Mumbai and the same was done across the border with the Indian posters.

Shah, a video artist, based her current digital film on the experience of travelling in a train along the Indo-Pak border. Upadhyay recently visited Pakistan for a residency program. ‘‘(The border) is just a line in our heads,’’ she says. ‘‘When I went to Pakistan, I found that things weren’t all that different. We just tend to become victims of so many stereotypes.’’

It’s a relief that things have improved where Indo-Pak relations are concerned, but ‘‘Partition is not something one should be silenced about,’’ says Malani, ‘‘since revisiting is a reminder that one should never want another carnage.”