Stories of people who fought for the rights we enjoy now, cannot help but linger in the public imagination. These narratives get etched into the present through conscious archival, by people who dive into them to show the world what they are beyond a few fragmented memories. One such project was the exhibition ‘Maps of Memory: The Uma Chakravarti Collection’, by faculty members of the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), at the Bangalore International Centre (BIC).
Curated by Diya Deviah and Ammel Sharon, faculty members of NLSIU, the one-week long exhibition which culminated on April 6 unveiled an array of archival fragments like posters and films of historian, filmmaker and activist Uma Chakravarti, that offer a coming together of feminist and democratic histories from across South Asia. “We call it ‘Maps of Memory’ because, firstly it showcases her collection that comes from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India. Chakravarti was born in 1941, before the Indian nation-state came into existence. So, she sees herself as a South Asian with all these different intelligences. Secondly, the idea of maps is that they are visual and never linear – with forgotten roots that you can trace,” Sharon explains, reflecting on the concept.
The first notable display in the exhibition room was a wall of posters showcased in an unconventional way. “We didn’t want to do an exhibition where the posters look like discrete art objects. We wanted to show and help one appreciate the form of the posters. They are often cheaply made in a hurry and for particular purposes,” says Sharon. Out of over 120 posters collected from Chakravarti’s house, around 75 posters were showcased at BIC.
To name a few, the significant highlights of the exhibition were the Pakistani posters Chakravarti collected from the ’90s and early ’00s and a few posters she collected from Kamla Bhasin. “These were the posters she collected while teaching in Lahore, between the late 1990s and the 2000s. The Pakistani feminist posters are beautifully designed because several artists contributed to the posters themselves,” notes Sharon.
Reflecting on the unique poster collection of Chakravarti from the time Sri Lanka was undergoing a civil war, Sharon shares an interesting fact, saying, “These early posters had no details. And they didn’t have artists amongst them in the Women and Media Collective. So they borrowed images from Vimochana, [which was then] a newsletter from Bengaluru in the mid-’80s, and used them for feminist purposes.”
The exhibition also showcased Chakravarti’s documentaries, and documentaries with testimonials of people from riots across the region over decades. “When she started talking about her work as an educator, we thought that these were more than just posters and we wanted to make them available to the public,” says Deviah.
Looking forward to educating and engaging visitors by taking this exhibition across other cities, Deviah shares, “Typically a lot of us think about history as extending back right to some ancient or colonial time, but what’s interesting is that all of these materials give us a sense of a time that a lot of us can’t access; we may know about the ’60s and ’70s from stories from our parents or grandparents, but how do we access it visually, how do we access it with more information? We wanted to be able to give people access to that history.”