India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 15 :: No. 25 :: Dec. 05 - 18, 1998

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Stills of India

An exhibition in Vancouver distils the essence of sociologist Hari Sharma's photography and poetry which capture the everyday struggles of the Indian masses.

MANORANJAN MOHANTY

APHOTOGRAPHIC exhibition on India, in many ways unique, was organised from October 3 to November 29 in Vancouver, Canada. It presented neither the mystic India nor the touristic India; nor did it show the modern metropolis or the many splendoured beauty of nature. The exhibition was all about the everyday life of ordinary people: children, women and men at home, at work and at leisure. It depicted the dignified struggle of the common people of India.

Fifty-two photographs by Hari Sharma, who teaches sociology at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, were on display. The photographer had also written verses to accompany many of his images.

Hari Sharma left India more than 35 years ago but has visited the country regularly. He has exhibited his work many times, published albums of his photographs and poems and contributed to art and literary magazines as well as social science journals. As an ardent scholar-activist in the United States, Hari Sharma was one of a group of scholars that questioned the complicity of established American scholarship with U.S. policies in Asia, which included the political-economic-military embargo of the People's Republic of China and the imperialist war of aggression in Indochina. He was a member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) and has been on the editorial board of the CCAS' Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars from the beginning of its publication. He also founded and presided over the Indian People's Association in North America (IPANA) and the Non-Resident Indians for Secularism and Democracy (NRISAD). Hari Sharma has undertaken important work among overseas Indians for many years through these organisations.

Hari Sharma was ordered out of the U.S. in 1968 for his active opposition to the Vietnam war. He then moved to Canada but his Indian passport was impounded in 1976 by the Indira Gandhi Government when he opposed the Emergency. On occasion, he was denied entry into India when he wanted to visit the country subsequently, holding a Canadian passport. Hari Sharma has played a leadership role in the formation of the Canadian Farm Workers' Movement and the Organisation to Fight Racism in British Columbia.

THE exhibition, titled "Like the Mighty Ganges, Life Continues to Flow", was sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University as a part its "Legacies Project: Reflections on the 20th Century through the Arts" within the broader theme of "Millennialism and Apocalyptic Vision". Hari Sharma wrote a long verse (180 lines) for the project called "The New Millennium: Not Everything will Change; Not Everyone will Notice", which was also the sub-title of the exhibition.

In a way, the verse says it all. It says that calendars are artificial and life will go on on an everyday basis. "On the first of the month, of the year, of the century, of the millennium, at the break of the dawn a bird will yawn. It will have to fly out, hop, poke, dig; to eat, to feed;" "Women with tearful eyes and puffed-up cheeks would be blowing into wet wood." "An old woman will be collecting her bamboo pack to walk miles on the railway tracks, because there are pieces of unburnt coal to collect." These are among the many poetic images of everyday life, which provide the overall framework for the photographic images in the show.

The effect of the images, powerful as they are, get further augmented by the poems. Hari Sharma said at the opening ceremony: "Still photography, by definition, stills the piece of reality it captures in a split-second. Plucks away a slice and freezes it. But it is a slice from a universe in which nothing is naturally still, frozen, stationary, quiescent; or random, unconnected. The 'still' photograph is therefore more than a slice, more than a split-second. Contained in it are elements of the universe of which it is a part. Suspended in it is the flow of history. The words I write, which often read like "poems", are meant to establish the link between the particularised elements and the ever-dynamic larger universe. The sociologist in me, and especially my study of India's political economy over the years, have helped a lot to see the connection. The view-finder in my camera, I may say, is a sociologised one."

The sociologist-poet behind the view-finder has done a remarkable job, on two counts. First, in terms of what he has seen, captured and frozen for others to see. How many people in Delhi have crossed the bridge over the filthy drain south of the Oberoi Intercontinental Hotel, by the CGO (Central Government Officers') complex? In the photograph "Life Under the Bridge", he takes us down below the bridge, where children play, women catch lice from each other's heads, pigs roam and life is lived amidst excreta and scavenged rags and rubbish turned into commodities.

There are three images of the river Ganga flowing through the Bihar countryside. They do not show steps, ghats, flowers, pandals or temples, but only the river and the daily life of the people around it - women taking their everyday bath and fishermen in their boats...

The photograph titled "Taj Mahal" forces us to look for the monument beyond the marsh and the dry bed of the river Yamuna. In the foreground, women sift and pound red chillies by the roadside. The photograph titled "Oblivious" shows people sleeping on the sidewalks of Calcutta. Practically every frame makes us take another look at things we take for granted.

"To Settle Scores". Purulia district, West Bengal.

The poems add a sociological dimension to the images. "Slices of life suspended in time and space" become reflections of the political economy, of social structures and of history. One photograph shows a charming little girl looking at the camera. Oily hair, sparkling eyes and teeth, a row of beads over bare shoulders and a bashful look. In normal course this would be a beautiful portrait of a beautiful girl. Hari Sharma wants to keep observers more informed. She is an orphan from Kilvenmani village in Tamil Nadu. In 1968, landlords raided and burnt down the hamlet. Forty-four persons were roasted alive, and they included the girl's parents. Sharma was there a year later. In his words: "The razed homes rise again/ survivors looking after each other/ an orphan of class war smiles/ the teeth, the beads, the eyes, the face, everything shines."

There are two images of the Maurya-Sheraton Hotel in New Delhi when it was under construction. In one photograph, a huge billboard in the front announces: "A great welcome is building up". In the other, taken at the back of the site, is a little child by a muddy pond and tents where migrant workers live. The images and the accompanying poem "Five More Stars" bring into sharp focus the huge class divide that characterises India. Hari Sharma writes: "From Rajasthan and Bihar/ Telangana and Malabar/ they come/ to put five more stars in the sky/ to lie under the canvas/ with a million stars in the eyes."

A poignant poem titled "The Wheels" accompanies the image of a boy hammering away at an automobile wheel on the sidewalks of Chennai. This young worker, an all-too-familiar sight in urban India, challenges society as a whole, saying that no one, not even history, can move as fast as he does. While everyone journeys through the discrete units of time, minute by minute, he skips whole epochs of his life, such as his childhood. Hari Sharma writes: "The books, the slates, the kites, the fights, the marbles, the smiles, the butterflies, the cuddles of mama and the strokes of papa. I skipped all of it." The poem ends with a pertinent question: "I fix your wheels, who has fixed mine?" In the section titled "Skipping Epochs" there are nine other images of children at work from the villages and cities of India; children who should be at school, in playgrounds and in nurseries are burdened by labour.

"Blossom in the Dust" forces the viewer to look beyond the torn sari and the tired feet of a little peasant girl from Orissa. Seeing the softness in her eyes and the ribbon on her hair, Hari Sharma asks: "Is it the desert which defines the flower or the flower which defines the desert?" He shows that poverty does not rob people of their dignity or self-respect.

In Cuttack district, Orissa.

All the photographs do not have poems accompanying them. But the captions convey their essence and establish their link with the wider universe. One picture shows an old woman weaving a palm-leaf mat in a village in Kerala. She is the epitome of peace and serenity. The title of the photograph is "Not Done Yet"; it shows the permanence of work, everyday work.

"Together into Tomorrow" is the image of four boys, with arms round each other, walking from a shaded area towards sunny brightness. There is a firmness about their posture, and one of them points his arm at the horizon. The photographer emphasises the need for solidarity while aiming for the distant goal. He imparts both a sense of the long journey ahead and the joy of togetherness.

The exhibition reflected four decades of Hari Sharma's work, since 1958. There were no dates on the images. Hari Sharma said: "The date did not matter. Any of the photographs could have been taken anytime during these 40 years. Such has been the everyday life of everyday people. And judging by the way things are going, it may still be so years from now." The show was far from a depiction of stagnant life. On the contrary, it showed the dynamic and continuous course of struggle.

The images showed India in a raw, basic and elemental sense: that of the masses engaged in myriad struggles for survival and for dignity. The geographical spread of the selected images is varied. There are photographs from the Kashmir Valley in the north and from Kerala in the south, from the northern tip of West Bengal in the east to the villages of Gujarat in the west. Most of the images are of villages; some are from the urban centres of Delhi, Calcutta, Mumbai, Chennai, Pune, Bangalore, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, Darjeeling, Agra, Patna, Simla and Dhanbad. The display was divided into distinct themes : the Mighty Ganges and the Flow of Life; Land and the Landless; the Divide; Dignity, Labour; Skipping the Epochs and Tomorrow. Each theme occupied a separate wall or a section of a wall.

Twelve photographs in the "Land and the Landless" section, images of rural India, depicted the most oppressed and poor and yet a significantly large segment of India's people. There were images from Purulia, Vadodara, Madurai, Thanjavur, Chaibasa and Jehanabad districts and from Naxalbari in West Bengal. There are images of the homes of landless and casteless peasants that were ransacked by the police. A photograph of a family of landless peasants, titled "Landless", and the poem that accompanies it highlight the importance of the question of land ownership and the failure of land reforms in the country. The image "To Settle Scores" shows peasant women and men marching together through a paddy field with a flag showing the hammer and sickle. The reflection of the processionists in the shallow waters of the field enhances the effect of the theme - "scores that have yet to be settled" as the struggle continues.

In Calcutta.

The exhibition was a wonderful display of India, an artful expression of sociology and political economy. Liane Davison, the Curator of the gallery, said: "Sharma's images express not objectivity, exactly, but rather emotional connection. They ache for understanding, empathy and love for a place and its people." That is very true. For those of us living in India, these images should serve as the mirror of the real India we are a part of.

Dr. Jerald Zaslove wrote in the exhibition catalogue : "In this exhibition Hari Sharma is the dispassionate sociologist-as-author who sees in the cultural background of his subjects a future in their capacity to think about their complex lives... The photographs are embedded in a poetic sociology that bears witness to caste, feudalism and slavery, which are visible in the present. Through the poetry each image is also deeply involved in an inner dialogue with the subjects' own awareness of being photographed. The subjects' apparent distance from a culture of photography is overcome through the voice of the poetic texts."

Manoranjan Mohanty is the Head of the Department of Political Science, Delhi University.