First Published in The Brooklyn Rail, 2024
Baaraan Ijlal completed her graduate degree in literature from Bhopal, the former princely state in the center of India, that prides itself on a hundred-year unbroken rule by the Begums or reigning queens of Bhopal, and on the rich cultural ethos that they generated. Ijlal’s artistic journey took a decisive turn in 2014, when she began, as she says, to “obsessively” photograph old homes in the old Bhopal area that were facing demolition. In the same year Narendra Modi came to power with a resounding victory, signaling the rise of the right wing in India, and what he was to later proclaim as the rise of “New India.” His transformation of the nation began with the renaming of roads, changed from Muslim to Hindu historical figures, and swiftly snowballed into demolitions, redesigning, and repurposing the public sphere.
This double obliteration of the past is at the core of the different iterations of Ijlal’s painting Iqbal Maidan (2021) from the series “Hostile Witness.” Between 2014 and 2019, she visited sites in the cities of Bhopal, Varanasi, Kolkata, Lucknow and Mumbai in preparation of this series. So detailed is the carnivalesque world of figures and the grand backdrop and pastiche of styles, recalling the Hindu, Muslim and colonial influences on Bhopal, that the painting has taken years to complete.
Behind the façade of the richly worked architectural structure, however, is a complex embedded history. Qudsia Begum (1881-1891), first of the four Begums of Bhopal, made Bhopal into one of the most refined centers of Indian culture. The building that we see, Gohar Mahal, commissioned by Qudsia Begum in 1820, boasted the elaborately laid-out Khirniwala Bagh, or orchard, as a centerpiece in the rich complex of royal buildings and courtyards of the old city. The garden witnessed Qudsia Begum holding court under the Khirni trees to make her administration more accessible to the larger public. Now transformed into a cricket ground, it currently bears the name of the poet Iqbal, who visited Bhopal between 1931 and 1936. In 2022, however, Iqbal Maidan came under scrutiny by the local BJP right-wing government, which proposed that it should bear a Hindu and not a Muslim name. (The poet Iqbal migrated to Pakistan before Partition, and after his death was declared the national poet of Pakistan.)
In peeling back the layers of history, Ijlal’s focus is on the maidan (or ground) as a site for protest. She says, “Because the maidan was a witness to all that took place since the last century it tells the story of erasures, displacement and people standing up for their rights.” In telescoping the maidan’s history through a moving stream of figures, Ijlal collapses slices of its past into a living, dynamic fragment. In the moving mass we can see the spirit of John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” Flemish painting, and colonial Indian miniature painting. Figures in black, signifying mourning, appear to walk alongside an emission of gas that snakes across the vast ground. This recalls the 1984 poisonous gas leak from the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal in which about 20,000 people lost their lives, caught unawares as they slept, while many more were permanently disfigured. Ijlal, who was eight at the time of this tragedy, saw protests, and over her growing years witnessed the condition of the sick in the city. Barbed wire, which like the poisonous gas traverses the painting, marks periods of unrest, when the ground becomes a temporary police cantonment. From the time when Qudsia Begum held court in the Khirniwala orchard, to the present when a single surviving tree is emblematic of the past, the ground has been witness to the churn of history, from feudal and colonial times to the present.
Ijlal draws the term “Hostile Witness” from legalese, raising several questions through the ordered chaos of her work. One question is whether historic urban spaces can be integrated into the growth of a contemporary city, or whether there are palpable fault lines from the making of a royal orchard into a flat cricket ground. Another question concerns the ability of the public sphere to serve as witness to a catastrophe that remains largely undocumented. The revisitation of sites of trauma-compulsory displacement and migration, accompanied by small acts of survival-passes into the visual teleology of a public installation, rendering different phases of unbelonging. Ijlal adds touches that bring the nineteenth century structure squarely into the present. Adorning the crest at the top of the building, which may once have borne the arms of the royal house of Bhopal, she introduces a family of four riding a scooter. This mimics an advertisement for the popular two-wheeler Bajaj, which offers freedom for an aspiring middle-class Indian family. Seen here in the context of a once-grand mansion that faces an uncertain future, the promises of the nation appear puny and small.