“THE UNBEARABLE HEAVINESS OF THE DIVINE OR HOW THE GODDESS TRAMPLES EVERYDAY”
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V. Divakar
This writing is about a few images from the continuing documentation artwork of a young artist Birendar Yadav. He was born in Ballia district, in a predominantly rural province of Uttar Pradesh, India. He comes from a family of coal miners, with his father working as a blacksmith at the coal-mines in his province. He was the first to step out from his family and pursue formal higher education. He did his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi and masters from Delhi College of art. After completing his Masters, he stayed back in Delhi and continued his work. He has done numerous group shows and had his solo show at the Clark House, Mumbai. He received the art reach award, Pro-Helvetia artist residency grant and Darling foundry residency. His works are being showcased in many galleries and are part of prestigious collections.
Birender Yadav's art practice, however, stems from a different idea of art which is rooted in his personal experience. His works always came from an understanding that art which, however consumed has a larger role to play other than satisfying the demands of the aesthetic market. He has been engaged right from his student days with the workers at a brick kiln near his village in Varanasi. In a time when most artists jump from one tragedy to another or churn out artworks according to issue the funding body asks for, he has silently struggled to learn, understand and work with the people there. Unlike many of the
artists who sell and thrive on tragedies of others, Birender hasn't till now "sold his subjects" to gain money or the cultural capital usually accumulated by these tragedy artists. With meager support from a foundation initially which has stopped now, he has been continuously working with the brick kiln workers, managers and the owners. The labourers of his subjects are the one in unorganized rural sector where they have no records of their own.
These are a few from the hundreds of images and hours of video footage he has documented with the workers there. These images are documentary evidence of their hard labour, life, leisure, play, suffering, exploitation, relations, differences, beliefs, food, community, hopes and their history. After initially visiting many sites, he chose this site. The peculiarity or the irony of the specific site is its name (Durga Brickworks?), though it's common usage to give a deity's name for any Hindu owned organisation. Like any other site, the labourers do their hard labour of preparing clay from the assigned land, making sized cakes, baking, drying and loading the finished bricks. The working hours extend anytime according to the job given, the labour is paid only after the end of the finished work. Till then they are given token coins which they safely keep or carry around everywhere they go. They live in small shelters which are built near the brick manufacturing sites. The bricks of these shelters are even sold when the work gets over at the site. Entire families are involved in the work and majority migrates from other parts of the region, state and country. Often the work is exactly what we call as the bonded labour. Their terms of reference are different than the established conventions of the bonded labour.
The set of photographs are of women carrying bricks like their daily activity. Birender just had done a small adjustment to make the bricks visible for the photographs. This small adjustment brings out the comic irony of the everyday bricks they carry over their head. The intervention of the artist comes at this juncture to just make legible what is visible to the naked eye. The women carry the bricks, with one brick visibly showing what is written in it. It mentions the company which makes the bricks. Each brick weighs around 3 kgs. Each woman carries about 10 bricks and men 20 bricks and children 5 bricks. Their head load wages are paid according to the number of bricks they carry.
The history of the representation of the goddess Durga in India is always shown as a malevolent goddess trampling and killing the asur with all her might. The image of Durga has always been used to symbolise victory over the evil. Recently the image of the goddess in all avatars was even shown as bruised and battered to talk about the various excesses/violence happening over the women's body. This year’s Durga puja also witnessed the Durga as a migrant mother carrying her children.
The iconography of Durga and its popular manifestations has been a treasure trove for the academicians and intellectuals to display their knowledge of the shastras or their ever-observant public eye. At one hand the iconographic debates of the goddess and its variants have filled the art historical archives with regular updating of which style represented which lineage or which hand represented what or which mudra represented what, who gave how much money for making the temple and sculpture etc.
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And these debates will go on to eternity with each new thesis entering the archives. On the other hand, social media savvy intellectuals keep updating the world with their newfound version of their ‘protected ignorance’*by creating another set of discourse on public/popular aesthetics. The useless knowledge churned out as popular aesthetics is nothing but the investment of the caste and cultural elites in protecting their ignorance and trying to be as contemporary as possible. Their negative aesthetics, without questioning the very claim of whose gods they are and how these gods come into existence, gloss over to the post-modern conditions of simultaneous elite & popular patterns of veneration. They even claim that the goddess image is so democratic and copyleft that anyone could plagiarise without any copyright issues even if their reference is from legends like Ramkinkar or Bikash Bhattacharya or whoever. Without even thinking what an image represents actually for whom, the same brahminical discourse of benevolence is refurbished with every new issue and tragedy the people face.
What does the image tell?
The Durga in the set of photos by Birender throws all her divine settings and has entered the brick which as the goddess is always possible. But she is here a very heavy and an idle brick which seemingly transforms as a crown over the heads of the workers. The brick crown should weigh around 30kgs for women, 60kgs for men and 15kgs for children. The workers are paid according to the weight they carry per day per load. The hefty goddess is though sold in the market, here in the kilns she stands or sits or tramples on the head of these workers whole day, months and years longer till the labourer dies or leaves the job. Even after one labourer vacates her position, someone else would fill the ritual of carrying the goddesses burden till the time the urban greed for new housing/settlements is not over. The divine bricks would be transported to any construction site of a mall, toilet, apartment, police station, jail, hospital, or even the newly coming up detention camps.
How one sees the Durga on the head of the workers defines our position. Are we seeing the divine in the brick, or are we seeing the belief of the workers like any other believer going through pains to achieve something, is it a good photograph or is it a realistic document of the everyday trampling of the dispossessed in the name of the divine? Is the goddess just another name of exploitation and oppression?
Like the themes in the Puja Pandals keep changing, the cheerleading liberals will cheer every new tragedy that unfolds and invent a new hero, might be an artist, activist or anyone whom they had to align with to prove their 'protected ignorance' beyond doubt or guilt. Meanwhile, the workers would also carry the divine burden of the vulgar discourse of these representatives apart from being trampled every day by the goddess herself.
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V.Divakar
Art critic & Curator
Baroda
(I would like to thank Prof.Y.S.Alone for his suggestions)
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*I have used the Prof.Alone’s conception of Protected ignorance from the text ‘Language, Representation, and Protected Ignorance’. (If the objective of rationality is to kill ignorance then it becomes righteous rationality and if the objective of rationality is not to kill ignorance then it becomes unrighteous rationality which becomes ‘protected ignorance’)
Images courtesy
Google.com
Photographs from the artist