1985
THE ETHNOGRAPHERS

In the summer of 1985, just after my post-graduation, I accompanied a group of students from the faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda on a research trip to village Naya in Midnapore District of West Bengal, to document the art and life of the pat painter Dukhashyam Chitrakar. Thirty years later, I found a set of mildewed negatives of the trip. The images were shocking. Here we were, young students from the city, posing like internal colonizers in 'native' settings, perfectly illustrating the great divide between the centre and the margins!
I wanted to use these 'found' images from 1985 to reflect on the complex feelings that I experienced looking at them today. From casual snapshots they took on a new meaning, resonating with my past work on colonial ethnography and bringing up memories of the undercurrents beneath our 'exotic' village stay. While we were enjoying the new experience of sleeping in mud huts, bathing in the village pond and going to the village fair - or the long night ride in bullock carts guarded by men with sticks and lanterns to take our sick friend to the nearest hospital- we had been uneasily aware that the folk artists possibly saw us as rich patrons, their co-operation mixed with watchfulness. We were travelling naively in Midnapore District which was at the time a liberated Naxal zone. The visual difference between us mimicked records of the old European colonial anthropological expeditions, and yet the photographs possessed the familiarity that we could have as 'insiders'.
The Ethnographers plays with multiple relays of visibility and invisibility as the figures emerge from the ghostly surface of the aluminium panel like wraiths. Do the black eye bands protect, empower, mask out or censor the ‘natives’? Do our bare faces make us more visible, or more vulnerable?
Pushpamala N. / August 2017