JOIN USIt is still not unusual for family elders to recount tales of how they or their parents crossed the border during the traumatic times of Partition, carrying the children on their shoulders, to reach a safer land.
Sheba Remy Kharbanda who was raised in the United Kingdom by her mother, away from her father, went through a similar experience.
“After my father’s retirement from the Indian Police Service and during an extensive road trip through his home state of Himachal Pradesh, during which we were huddled inside a jeep for hours at a time, my father poured out his life story,” says Kharbanda who filmed the whole narrative along with her partner William Charles.
Her work is now presented inside a white tent pitched at India Habitat Centre, as a video art installation – ‘Five Rivers: A Portrait of Partition’.
Peeping inside the tent one can see images of an elderly man Amrik Singh, Punjabi/Afghani Sikh sharing stories of Peshawar and the Northwest Frontier, how his father died at a young age, and how at the age of nine he left Afghanistan for India in the wake of Partition.
The story is like any other but its projection inside a tent is unusual. It provides a different experience to the viewers who sit under the open sky and listen to incidents that are somewhere still alive in our memories.
The decision to showcase the art installation inside a ‘tent’ has another story behind it. “One day as I was listening to the interview with my father, he said something
that really stuck in my mind -- his recollections upon arriving at a refugee camp in Patiala. All he saw were tents and tents and tents. I had seen a piece of work by an Afghani-American artist who had used a UN medical tent as both the location of her art and a
symbol of the current state of affairs in her homeland and it resonated deeply,”
says Kharbanda.
Her image and idea of a tent as a temporary structure also comes across as a space in which people commune for all kinds of work for this project. Though mainstream Hindi filmmakers have also captured such stories in their works but the impact of a documentary is immense.
The video has a sequence of interviews, landscapes and historical documentation interspersed with a soundtrack of contemporary Punjabi and Urdu poetry that infuses the right mood to the images.
But by rewinding her father’s journey, Kharbanda too gets conscious of her own.
“It’s inherent to human nature to struggle with these questions. Charlie and I are not alone in this regard.”
Just like many others who view this art installation every evening.
The installation is set up at The Atrium, India Habitat Centre, on till November 21 from 5.30 pm onwards.