Kaghazi Hai Pairahan
Bhasha Chakrabarti’s 2024 exhibition, Karvat, derives and extends from Ismat Chughtai’s short story, “Lihaaf,” where two women explore desire in the shadows, comfort, and/or safety of the quilt. The protagonist of the story is Begum Jaan’s young, distant relative, at the threshold of adolescence herself, who witnesses and narrates the strange, recurrent, and seemingly violent phenomenon of the quilt rising, swirling and eventually falling flat, fatigued, in the dark of the night. The hisses, sighs, and rustling moans, with the bodies of Begum Jaan and her lover Rabbu finding states of alignment and friction, demonstrate an unrestricted desire made possible by the malleability of the lihaaf.
2024
Pages from Ismat Chughtai's “Lihaaf” and Kaghazi Hai Pairahan, wheat paste, fermented persimmon tannins, oil on canvas
Quilt: 168 x 120 inches; Painting: 10 x 10 x 1 inches
“Chakrabarti’s visual choreographies demand a closer look at the body and its field of movement to produce new structural affinities between sexuality and spatiality. Here, the metaphorical matures into the corporeal, turning suggestions or suggestiveness to hard evidence. In what may seem repetitive, are slight, unique variations that inevitably trick us into seeing new constellations of bodies and spaces.
As much as with the body in states of rest and restlessness, Chakrabarti is also concerned with the body in labour and time. She consistently produces raw materials for her making, through foraging, grinding, churning, piecing, and recalibrating. Each of these acts is concerned with attuning the body to mind and muscle memory. These processes allow for chance, room for error and imperfections, failures and surprises. The stress on making with the hand is to imprint with touch.
The traditional Japanese method of Kakishibu is employed to make the paper quilt titled Kaghazi Hai Pairahan. The dye made using persimmon juice is curative and in that sense produces a surface of healing and preservation. It is enmeshed with time in its processes of fermentation, and how it continues to deepen and mature over the years. These material gestures that we may not necessarily read in the works or even know of, continue to dwell within Chakrabarti’s practice. That this paper work, is made from pulping and layering Urdu, Hindi, and English translations of Chughtai’s “Lihaaf” marks a literal return to where it all started — like a beast beneath the quilt — present and in pleasure, under the surface, waiting to rise, swirl and swing, collapse maybe, but breathing.”
-- excerpt from کروٹ | करवट | Karvat (2024) exhibition text by Mario D’Souza
