Adwait 

As the Moon Splits​: Wahida Ahmed

 

Curated by: Adwait Singh

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Exhibition dates: 25 August – 25 September 2023
Exhibit320, New Delhi

There is a theological tradition, as old as philosophy itself, that’s known for its negative deductions of the divine. Deriving from Greek roots, the term ‘apophatic’ signals knowledge gleaned through denial, or negation. God is not this, nor that—is how an apophatic theologian would approach his quandary, not unlike a sculptor chipping away at a marble block to wrest the form. The present body of work by Wahida Ahmed traces, and troubles recent constructions of identity in her native Assam that can be described as apophatic in their negative renderings of regionality through abjection. It does so by employing jacquard—a weaving technique comprising a chain of punch cards that automates patterning—as a medium, metaphor, and lens for scrutinising the socio-cultural fabric of the state. 

 

Jacquard in the form of mekhela sador, or the red-on-white gamosa has come to symbolise the Assamese cultural identity like few other things. To date, the lurching clacks issuing in tandem with the tug, swing, and pedal of jacquard looms predominate the sonic landscapes around Guwahati. During a visit to one such village called Sualkuchi, around four years ago, the artist fell in with a pile of discarded punch cards, prompting reflections about punch-outs whose very elimination secures the weave. A materialist affinity began unfolding as this dross, twice removed from the final garment, came to correspond to her own existential position. Over time, these salvaged dots, like dregs in a cup, started revealing patterns, agencies, and exclusions shaping the Assamese society at large.   

 

Expulsions have long governed the matrix of Assamese identity, stretching at least as far back as the Partition that saw a large influx of refugees from what was then East Pakistan. Consequently, the Immigration (Expulsion from Assam) Act of 1950 was passed by the Indian parliament and the first National Register of Citizens (NRC) prepared for its execution in 1951. Despite these provisions, the migration continued illegally on account of poor border enforcement and a lack of political will to stem it. In 1979, a group of student leaders, alarmed by unexplained inflation of electorates in certain pockets of the state, broke out in fierce protest. Their demands for detention, deportation, and disenfranchisement of illegal immigrants gathered into a mass movement that would last for 6 years, ending only with the signing of the Assam Accord in 1985. 

 

When the final draft of NRC was published in 2019, it failed to account for a little over 19 lakh applicants (almost equally divided between Hindus and Muslims), leaving them to appeal before a Foreigners’ Tribunal, or face detention. While the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) of 2019 offers a glimmer of hope in the form of expedited citizenship to non-muslims excluded from the NRC, it leaves Muslims in precarious stead. Notwithstanding the overt protests greeting CAA in Assam, the ethnic nature of the age-old anti-foreigner crusade in the state has been gradually giving ground to the countrywide phenomenon of Hindutva.

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Over the recent years, the state has emerged as a nursery of sorts for testing, naturalising, and disseminating a politics of predestination that packages the safety of the elect in terms of damnation of the rest. Its manifestations range from Foreigners Tribunals to detention centres that have started spreading well beyond Assam. Earlier this year, the Matia Transit Camp became operational as the largest detention centre in the country with a capacity to hold 3000 inmates. Located 125 kilometres west of Guwahati, the place has already become synonymous with the nearby ‘ghost mountain’ which, as the legend goes, was a preserve of the dead that no one was allowed to cross. ‘An ancient ghost mountain crowned with a storm’—the haunting words by the celebrated poet Nilmani Phookan have come to adumbrate the faces of the living-dead at places like Matia whose fates hang in limbo.[1] Like its followers, the moon rising over the exhibition horizon has been banished to the shadows. The artistic libration that ostends its dark side to the audience, then, stitches together a vision unclouded by prejudice. 

 

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The moon recurs as a hieroglyph in the visual poem that is When the Moon Split. The work is inspired by a children’s game joon bai o’ where the moon is called upon for various things—from a needle to an elephant—that a child desires. The split moon motif, derived from a 16th-century Persian book of prophecies known as the Falnameh, recounts an episode from the 54th surah of Quran dedicated to the moon. The severing of the moon—a miracle demanded by the pagan Meccans—was used by some later Muslims to convince others of the prophethood of Muhammad.

 

The Hour (of Judgment) is nigh, and the Moon is cleft asunder. But if they see a Sign, they turn away, and say, "This is (but) transient magic." 

                                                                   — Quran 54:1-2

 

Moreover, these Quranic verses figured prominently in mediaeval debates about the inviolability of heavenly bodies. On one side of the debate were Muslim philosophers who believed that heavenly bodies, unlike terrestrial bodies composed of air, water, earth, and fire, were eternal and inviolate. On the other side were Muslim theologians who, believing in the God-ordained atomic constitution of all bodies, held that the heavens could be pierced. The moon that doubles up here as a tupula (bundle) of hunted hopes, appears to be miscarrying in Where the Light Doesn’t Fall. The pool of punch-outs gathered below, like a char (island) deposited by an overcarrying river, furnishing proof of its porosity. In the suite of drawings titled Floating Address, these errant motes have been constellated sandcastle-like, into the jittery impressions of transient shelters that dot the chars. Escaping out of a grainy existence, joon bai o’ becomes a supplication for solidity and wholeness. 

 

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The ‘Miya’ or Na-Asamiya (neo-Assamese) people are the descendants of migrants from what was then the Bengal Province, who originally came to settle and cultivate the wastelands around Brahmaputra from 1757 onwards, at the behest of the colonial authorities. The Persian honorific ‘miya’ has come to denote a broad pejorative capturing all Bengali Muslims who migrated to Lower Assam at various points. Their historical zoning around the river has earned them epithets like ‘Charua Musalman’, literally meaning char-dwelling Muslim. ‘Noi-poria’ or ‘Nadial’ is another term from common parlance that conjures a riparian existence. It represents indigenous communities like the Sonowal Kacharis, the Mishing, and the Tai-Ahoms situated along the Brahmaputra’s banks and its Upper Assam tributaries.  Transience is second nature to life in Assam, whose turbulent and temperamental waterways allow for only the fuzziest notions of possession. Not infrequently, the address inhabited by the river-dwellers is reclaimed by the waters, existing only on paper. The river, while being an undeniable force governing the course of Noi-poria lives, does not hold a monopoly over displacement in Assam. 

 

The work titled When an Elephant Turns Red extends the imagery of fluvial devastation to the attrition piled by human agents. It derives its symbology from Hastividyarnava, the 18th-century Assamese manuscript commissioned by King Siva Sangha and his queen consort Ambika. A pachydermic encyclopaedia of sorts, the manuscript contains a section detailing omens attached to different types of elephants. Incidentally, a red elephant that betokened ill-fortune in Hastividyarnava, continues to herald ruin in the present context given the frequency with which these gentle giants are roped into the enterprise of razing riverine settlements. Surficially, one could say, the Mughal architectural idioms that the illustrators Dilbar and Dosai drew upon for the manuscript are a far cry from the Noi-poria colonies they symbolise in When an Elephant Turns Red. And yet, the Mughal architecture of Hastividyarnava belie the identity of their Ahom patrons in a manner comparable to how the makeshift shelters of char chaporis belie the deep entanglements that their inhabitants share with the land.

 

Various attempts by past governments to assimilate the Na-Asamiya into the fold of Assamese polity have been met with fiery resistance, culminating in the Assam Movement (1979-85). Its bloodiest chapter perhaps, was the Nellie Massacre of 1983. Fuelled by Indira Gandhi’s decision to grant the franchise to four million Bangladeshi immigrants, the pogrom claimed over 1600 Na-Asamiya lives. The massacre bleeds back in the form of a memory of a red sweater that the artist—a young girl at the time—couldn’t wear to a cousin’s wedding on account of the riots. The Snow Moon with a Red Scar re-members this red as a stain blooming across the blue-green checks of the incriminatory lungi, or the blue-green fields of 14 villages in Central Assam on the fateful morning of 18 February 1983. Subsequent attempts by the artist to collect testimonies from the survivors have been brought up short by amnesia—forced, or feigned—a fact recalled by Nilmani Phookan’s words inscribed at the bottom left—‘there’s no one left here.’[2] Similarly, the doctored coordinates of Nellie at the top right mimic the traumatic tamperings in the wake of the Assam Accord when all charges were officially dropped. 

 

Eminent Marxist historian, revolutionary, and poet, Amalendu Guha has noted ‘that between 1971 and 1991, the influx of immigrants whether from Bangladesh and Nepal, or from Bihar has virtually stopped: in fact, the number of people moving out of Assam is more than the number of people entering it.’[3] Many, however, choose to disregard the fact, blaming communities like the Char Chaporis for abetting and harbouring illegal immigrants. Scapegoats in a political game, the char chapori residents thus find themselves subjected to harassment, vandalism, and violence on a regular basis.

 

The NRC and the CAA have not only doomed the fates of the Na-Asamiya but have paved the way for discrimination against Assamese Muslims in general. Women of the char-chaporis are especially susceptible to these laws on account of the difficulties of furnishing a paternal link in a context where a vast number of them remain illiterate and are married before attaining the legal age. The documentary Walking on Moving Sand conveys their plight through the horrifying testimony of Momiron Nessa who was separated from her family, unjustly detained in Kokrajhar for 10 years, and tricked into an abortion. Caught between an unpredictable river and a punishing bureaucracy, Momiron Nessa’s story explicates how the two agencies collude over the carnage of Na-Asamiya lives in Assam. 

 

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​In the melee of identities connoting post-Independence Assamese politics, names become charged entities. The NRC and the CAA have only served to enhance the power vested in names, as socio-religious markers, to damn or save.  The works in the Namsimha series illustrate this politics through the metaphor of the guardian lions posted at the entrance of namghars (prayer houses associated with Ekasarana Dharma) that emblematise the supremacy of the name. Propagated by the 15th-16th-century Bhakti saint, Srimanta Sankardev, Eksarana Dharma is a reformist neo-Vaishnavite faith that favours nam-kirtans over Vedic ritualism, communal intermingling over segregation on the basis of varna. The power of the name, to invoke divinity, or forge a community, was also affirmed by the 17th-century Sufi saint Hazrat Shah Miran, popularly known as Ajan Pir, who moved from Baghdad to settle near present-day Sibsagar in Upper Assam. Deeply inspired by the borgeets (devotional songs) of Sankardeva, the 160 or so zikirs composed by Ajan Pir, are similarly characterised by the repetition of the divine name. The moulding of Islamic teachings to the local narratives, language, music, and modes of worship contributed immensely to the popularity of these zikirs which were sung by both Hindus and Muslims with equal ardour. 

 

In sharp contrast to the current atmosphere of religious polarisations, Deegh Bani harkens back to a time that saw a delicious melding of Sufi and Bhakti currents in Assam. The raslila motifs interspersed with whirling dervishes, recall a milieu of cultural crossovers, inter-faith celebrations, and syncretic practices that radiated from a sprinkling of namghars, and Sufi shrines across Assam. Qaida similarly alludes to the heterogeneity that has historically governed the Assamese cultural tapestry, in its depiction of ambiguous figures that appear, at first glance, to be offering namaz. However, a closer look at their source of inspiration, the Brindavani Bastra (c. 1680)—a large historical drape woven under the guidance of Sankardev—reveals these figures to be absorbed in nam-kirtan. The enclosing mihrab represents the site where the artist had her first exposure to art. As a young girl, she would routinely venture into the mosque and be fascinated by the arabesques covering the niche that points to the Kaaba. Around the same time, the artist began acquiring the words to the state anthem, marking her indoctrination into Assamese nationalism. The opening words of the anthem that overhang the mihrab have been defamiliarized through Arabic translation. Consequently, they have been rendered as unyielding as the unintelligible Arabic ornamenting the hashiya (margin), that the artist was taught to read and write without comprehension. 

 

In Wandering Walls, the leitmotif of mihrab—a regular feature in Assamese manuscripts for designating narrative action, and not an uncommon presence in the architecture of namghars—has been used to convey the evanescence of migrant lives. Paradoxically, the pointillism here has a stabilising effect on the innervated arches. The darnings in between appear to index the fraying condition of the red-on-white drape, emblematic of Assamese society. Whereas, the enclosed paisley pattern, marking a departure from the grid, nods to its migrant history—from the Persian originations of ‘boteh’ to its dissemination in the form of Kashmiri shawls, and mass-replication by Scottish looms based in Paisley before being introduced as the ‘magar’ in mekhela sador and gamosa. The trees emblazoned across the water-damaged carpet depicted in A Mirror of the Sun, similarly underscore an amalgamation of Assamese and Islamic cultures. The reference is to a tree-worshipping ritual performed by the predominantly-Muslim char-chapori community during Kati Bihu celebrations. On Gasshi Rati, a young boy makes a feint of cutting a barren tree in a bid to induce fruiting, while his friends intercede on the tree’s behalf:

 

Don’t cut the tree, don’t cut the tree, my lord

Surely, surely it will bear fruit this time

In the famine of Kati

We won’t cut more trees

We will sell its fruits

And clear the year’s debts.[4]

 

The residents then light a lamp, praying for a bumper harvest the following year. By invoking migrant and syncretic influences that are inextricably enmeshed in the Assamese cultural identity, the artist seems to illustrate the impossibility of expunging particular threads without unravelling the weave itself. 

 

The melange of cultures in Assam is not only evinced by the visuals depicted by the artist but is replicated in the processual layering of the work itself. For instance, the background in Ashes Do Not Float and Namsimha is composed by smearing a mixture of soils and ashes (corresponding to Islamic and Hindu burials respectively) collected (among other places) from the shrines dedicated to Sankardev in Batadrava and Ajan Pir in Saraguri Chapari that the artist grew up around. The background literally resisted markings, surrendering finally to the multiple applications of rice paper. The seemingly benign act of plastering the canvass with rice paper—commonly used for  preserving fabrics—acquires an ambivalent hue when considered alongside an oft-repeated surah from her childhood:

 

Those who are bent on denying the truth of our messages, we shall, in time, cause to endure fire: (and) every time their skins are burnt off, we shall replace them with new skins, so that they may taste suffering [in full] verily. 

                                        — Quran 4:56

 

The Promethean fate promised by these words finds multiple echoes in Assam today where various attempts at preserving the regional identity have only served to maim it beyond recognition. The unifying missives of Sankardev and Ajan Pir appear entirely out of place in a reality distorted with communal  hatred. The artistic tinkering with their padas (verses), conversely, brings a rare clarity of perspective to bear upon the present, affording one a measure of how far one has strayed. Take, for example, the words arrayed across Ashes Do Not Float confirming the presence of disparity in one’s mind. Or, the elided quotations of Namsimha that recant the hegemony of the name as the lions are erased from/into the background. The rhetoric of cultural protectionism is also questioned by Qawwamun, pregnant with the dual connotation of ‘protector’ and ‘ruler.’ The lone female rebel at the bottom left punctuates the long patriarchal line that debars women from mosques and graveyards in Assam. The rebellion continues through the (de)figuration of the frontispiece of qaida (primer) from which the artist acquired her alphabet as well as the format of the current work. The apostate, appraised in the light of authority  irradiated by ‘qawwamun,’ transpires as a champion for the marginalised who refuse the mould of cultural conformity.   

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We gratefully acknowledge the invaluable contributions of Namir Al-Nuaimi, Rachel Claire Hill, Deepak Anand, Tauseef Ahmed, Nayan Kalita, Naina Sarin, Dr. Sabrina Iqbal Sircar to the show. 

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[1]  From a poem titled ‘Tumar Mrityur Juiye Xaani Thoi Gol’ in Nilmani Phookanor, Xampurna Kabita, published by Saumitra Jogee on behalf of Aank Baak in 2006. See page 107. 

[2] From a poem titled ‘Kunu Nai Eyat’ in Nilmani Phookanor, Xampurna Kabita, published by Saumitra Jogee on behalf of Aank Baak in 2006. See page 211. 

[3] See Amalendu Guha’s ‘Brahmaputro Upatakyar Asomiya Samajot Bahiragata: Ek Drishtipat’ in Char Chaporir Jibon Charyya: A Collection of Articles in Assamese, edited by Ismail Hossain and published by Nutan Sahitya Parisad in 2000.

[4] See Md Shalim Muktadir Hussain’s article ‘When a Muslim Worships a Tree: Syncretic Islam of the Char Chaporis of Assam’ on Sahapedia dated 27 November 2019. https://www.sahapedia.org/when-muslim-worships-tree-syncretic-islam-char-chaporis-assam

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