A thinning canal, infested with snakes, insects and predatory plants, polluted by growing piles of waste, and winding its way through a poor, peri-urban neighbourhood seems like an unlikely subject for an art project. Yet, it is one such location at Khudiram Pally, Sarsuna, on the outskirts of Kolkata, that has become the site of an exciting initiative by the artist collective, Chander Haat, awarded the inaugural 2024 Vivan Sundaram Grant for Installation Art by the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation, New Delhi. Working with site-specific public installations, performances and local awareness drives, the group’s proposal, titled Jadu Ghar: Floating Stories, aims to take forward the vision they mounted with the Story of the Canal project in 2021. Marrying art with activism, they hope to address concerns around ecological degradation, migration, communal tension, loss of livelihood, habitat and traditional systems of knowledge that plague the lives of the region’s various communities.
Both these projects are reflective of the larger ethos with which the artist collective was founded more than a decade back and has organized art programmes, workshops, residencies and exhibitions in the interim years. The collective is the brainchild of educator Tarun Dey, who worked closely with Bengali theatre maverick, Badal Sircar, in the 1980s, and built trust and interest among children and young adults in the working-class localities of Sarsuna through school art classes, plays, magazines and small fairs. Forming an association with a range of individuals, including the five who have remained a part of the collective -- Bhabatosh Sutar, Mallika Das Sutar, Pradip Das, Nirmal Malick, Pintu Sikdar and Anjan Das -- Dey wished to set up a space where artists could live and work together, while enjoying the freedom to pursue their own independent practices. Moving beyond mere group shows and the white cube spaces of galleries, the collective functioned under the name of Sarsuna Environmental Art, till they consolidated their infrastructure between 2012-2014 and took on the name of Chander Haat (meaning both a place of wish fulfilment and a gathering of stars), following the success of an event they hosted with that title.
Growing up in the very neighbourhood where they built their current homes and studios, the collective has come to be known for their area-specific, collaborative community-based art practices. This suburban zone is inhabited by a mixed population of migrants, largely from Bihar and Bangladesh and of lower caste, who have come and settled in various phases since the 1970s, to escape persecution or in search of jobs. Most of them currently work as tailors, small-time shop-keepers, phuchkawalas, rickshaw-pullers and servants. As descendants of these families, some members of the collective struggled early in life or managed to secure themselves an art college training and degree with the support of elders like Dey. In more recent times, figures like Bhabatosh Sutar and Pradip Das have earned more reputation and money through their work with Durga Puja art. But even amidst this new-found fame, the artists are clear that whether it be their installation works with Puja, or outside of it, they want to keep telling stories of their roots and their people. This has fed into past projects like Sarsuna Theke Jana: Derives from the Metropolis, revolving around a mapping of the aesthetics, culture and biodiversity of the suburbs; Porshi/The Neighbour, that encouraged art to travel into the homes of locals and got them to interact more deeply with one another and foreign visitors; The Language of Space, which reimagined cities and housing built with eco-friendly, cost-effective traditional mediums like bamboo; and Chaash Baash (Farming), which educated people on how to set up mini kitchen gardens and survive on native plants and vegetables, especially during the 2020 Covid-enforced lockdown, which dried up most of their jobs.
Many of these concepts and models have inspired the latest work the collective has undertaken around the canal. The Kalagachi Canal was once a clear water channel that irrigated agricultural plots in Sarsuna. As more farmlands made way for human habitation, the canal was converted into a sewage drain to service the rest of the city. In the last few years, with more of its banks being concretized into roads (which the government sees as the surest way to please the residents and ensure ‘development’ and ‘progress’), the canal has grown narrower. Its waters have become choked with garbage, and are prone to flooding in the monsoon months. Instead of improving conditions for residents, this has only added to hygiene and safety problems, while killing the natural ecosystem of the waters, including their fish, flora and fauna.
Chander Haat decided to intervene in this space, beginning with a basic cleanliness drive in and around the canal, and then conceiving of other ways to educate the locals about salvaging the valuable parts of their immediate environment, which are also closely tied with many of their customs and sources of sustenance. Using easily available tin, bamboo and mosquito nets, traditional shakos (bridges across waterways) were built to connect to a makeshift macha (tower) with a stage in the middle of the canal. Here, in the winter of 2021, performances were held by locals, who sang ballads from the Ramayana and the Manasha Mangal Kavya, along with kirtans and songs dedicated to Shiva. The idea behind this and a set of shared community meals was to generate cross-cultural exchanges, that helped the different groups living in that area rise above existing prejudices and get to know each other better. Along with this, the banks were beautified with colourful tree stumps and nature poems, while plastic and other discarded items retrieved from the waters was repurposed into installation art pieces. There were also informative game boards to inform locals about the vegetation and animals that played a useful role in their lives and habitats.
The Jadu Ghar project hopes to continue this work while adding new elements. Debunking the idea of classical historical artefacts in colonial museums, the artists hope to create a space with found objects and art exhibits that reflect subaltern histories and stories of the region’s living ecology. These will be housed in a cubic structure erected with sustainable materials near the canal, inside which there will also be displays made of jute, crafted by local women, and ones that focus on the protection of different kinds of snakes found in the waters, that are typically the first to be killed by the human population. As with past projects, the group plans to involve environmentalists and experts of geology and geography. A platform will be constructed next to the Jadu Ghar, to bring back performances, while amicrophone-shaped extension behind the house will be used to share these songs along with important environmental messages intended for the nearby communities. The latter will serve as a welcome alternative to the mikes and speakers used almost every evening by politicians in the area to blare out fiery communal speeches. Videos and programmes will also engage with discussions around foraged foods, water management, traditional architecture and human-animal encounters.
Even as the collective draws their main source of inspiration from their immediate locality and neighbours, they are also aware of and in conversation with other artist-intellectuals in India and abroad, who work in the field of environmental art. These include Nobina Gupta’s Disappearing Dialogues project, based out of the nearby East Kolkata Wetlands, as well as the Indonesian group Labtek Apung, which manages river labs in Jakarta, and activists looking to save waterways in cityscapes ranging from Kochi to Venice. Chander Haat is also mindful that their art should have a direct impact on the environment it chooses to represent, instead of remaining restricted to aesthetic visuals and discourses around the subject. Much like the floating stories of Jadu Ghar, they dream of building more projects that are both rooted in but can also adapt to the shifting character of lands, seasons and people’s lives. Furthermore, they imagine afterlives for these works, extending them to round-the-year educational and welfare enterprises for locals who have come to love and respect them, along with publications, video documentation and photographs that enable their creations to travel among national and international art circuits.