Karvat

I. Bistar/Beast

Bhasha Chakrabarti’s exhibition, Karvat, derives and extends from Ismat Chughtai’s short story, “Lihaaf”, where two women explore desire in the shadows, comfort, and/ or safety of the quilt. The protagonist of the story is Begum Jaan’s young, distant relative, at the threshold of adolescence herself, who witnesses and narrates the strange, recurrent, and seemingly violent phenomenon of the quilt rising, swirling and eventually falling flat, fatigued, in the dark of the night. The hisses, sighs, and rustling moans, with the bodies of Begum Jaan and her lover Rabbu finding states of alignment and friction, demonstrate an unrestricted desire made possible by the malleability of the lihaaf.

The quilt in “Lihaaf”, like in Chakrabarti’s practice over the years, becomes a cover for the bareness of bodies and a site of self-determination and pleasure. A quilter, before she was a painter, the artist, extends the carnality of Begum Jaan’s quilt. She approaches it as a landscape, cloud, or turbulent ocean, painted and sometimes collaged. The body—a face or limb—mostly hers and occasionally a lover’s, slips out from under the vastness of the cover. The body is not at rest, but stretched, curling or twisting in search of comfort. In Karvat/The Turn (Morning) and Karvat/The Turn (Night), used fabric is reappropriated to construct the quilt. The body continues to remain present in its trace through the worn, aged folds, possibly still holding the stench and sweat of its wearer. Under cover, Chakrabarti invariably presents a second, absent-present body, suggesting intimacy and companionship. This trace is of continued interest to Chakrabarti, who uses it as evidence of time and touch—a history of intimacy, if we may. In The Quilts That Changed My Life, she takes an imprint exposing the insides of four quilts that have been formative to her practice. The choice of monotypes is also suggestive of the imprint these textiles have had on the artist’s mind.

II. Intimacy, and a torrid tune

Chakrabarti lets the interior spaces, particularly the zenana of the Nawab’s house (Begum Jaan’s domain) spill into the exhibition space. Reimagined as a red room a? la Matisse, she loads this milieu with a diversity of references. The Venetian Red, for example, comes from hematite and was used across history from the primal 17,000-year-old cave paintings of Lascaux to the murals of Pompeii. Chakrabarti has been scouring mining waste to mill and extract her own pigments to paint bodies with literal landscape dust. It wouldn’t be a stretch to connect these impulses to the animalesque in Lascaux or scenes of unbounded pleasure in Pompeii or more

The lonely Begum Jaan is no different from the nayikas. In Todi Ragini, the heroine evokes both tenderness and sadness separated from her lover. Lost in a forest, her tunes attract a black buck even as the trees suggestively sway as music. In her interpretation in Ajaibghar (Todi), the time of the day remains suspended in a study of a blue sky with clouds, while two buck candle-stands are perched atop the drawer.In Ajaibghar (Hindol) the two arms of the nayika hold the ropes of a swing across an arrangement of two chairs, suggesting a solo flight. The swinging, is a rhythm unto itself. All these boxes open out to the sky at a time corresponding to the ragas, to suggest freedom with its possibilities. All these images also show the protagonist holding onto herself, another body, or an object—a fleshy grip that extends into a wanton desire.

III. A sky of seas/wave-scape

In Soft Firmament (Dawn) and (Dusk) respectively, Chakrabarti is seemingly at rest. Her face and limbs slip out of the vastness of the ruffled quilt—its folds containing a terrain of tumult.

What occurs when the expected verticality of the awake, aware body is placed in the horizontality of a bed aligned to the ground? When the body is thinking of the absent lover, is it still companionship? What happens when the body becomes the ground, spreading like a landscape, touched and turmoiled by weather, climate, and its own core, the heart?

And then there is the landscape of the sky, in mists and hazes, fog and cloud. Chakrabarti in the Antariksha series paints the sky with oil, on found tea towels. The towels become windows which we see through—to the in-between space between the realms of the earth and the heavens.

In Nephology I, II and III, she draws bedsheets on indigo grounded paper made from old linens—marking a subject onto its past life through silverpoint drawings as though it were both a revision and recollection. Titled as the study of clouds, it opens itself out to an exercise of watching and observing as personal experiences. In her juxtapositions of body, bed, cloud, sky, Chakrabarti allows for wonder to filter in from the expanse of the sky and seep out into the possibilities of intimacy in the bedroom.

IV. Body time/Of vigils and vagaries

Chakrabarti’s visual choreographies demand a closer look at the body and its field of movement to produce new structural affinities between sexuality and spatiality. Here, the metaphorical matures into the corporeal, turning suggestions or suggestiveness to hard evidence. In what may seem repetitive, are slight, unique variations that inevitably trick us into seeing new constellations of bodies and spaces.

As much as with the body in states of rest and restlessness, Chakrabarti is also concerned with the body in labour and time. She consistently produces raw materials for her making, through foraging, grinding, churning, piecing, and recalibrating. Each of these acts is concerned with attuning the body to mind and muscle memory. These processes allow for chance, room for error and imperfections, failures and surprises. The stress on making with the hand is to imprint with touch.

The traditional Japanese method of Kakishibu is employed to make the paper quilt titled Kaghazi Hai Pairahan. The dye made using persimmon juice is curative and in that sense produces a surface of healing and preservation. It is enmeshed with time in its processes of fermentation, and how it continues to deepen and mature over the years. These material gestures that we may not necessarily read in the works or even know of, continue to dwell within Chakrabarti’s practice. That this paper work, is made from pulping and layering Urdu, Hindi, and English translations of Chughtai’s “Lihaaf” marks a literal return to where it all started—like a beast beneath the quilt— present and in pleasure, under the surface, waiting to rise, swirl and swing, collapse maybe, but breathing.

Words Mario D’Souza
Date 30.10.2024