Nafas II

THE SHADOW

CAME AND

STOOD

Arushi Vats

 

In beholding the works of Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai,one is seized by the notion that we are being invited to partake in acts of knowing and unknowing; we are entering a room reverberating with echoes of voices familiar and distant; and are being asked to understand that this arrangement is intentional, it narrates a story that has been told before, but has often passed unheard. Would we be vigilant to this telling?

In the series Nafas: Isolation Diaries, which is the record of a year in the artist’s life, we are presented with an archive of lived time. More critically however, we are introduced to the figure of the artist as an archivist. Nafas functions as a diary of embodied thought, and a purposefully assembled archive of incidents and ideas. Through couplets and fragments drafted by the artist, embedded in the work or nestled in its title, we can discern the breadth of her reading and her literary disposition which assembles with care and devotion references to a striking array of poets, writers, and philosophers. The importance of the artist as archivist in feminist practice is highlighted powerfully by Kate Eichhorn, who notes that even as ideas of what constitutes an archive are being vigorously challenged, the role of the archivist has not received similar scrutiny, such that ‘“archiving women” appeared to have less to do with women archiving than with women being archived.’ Eichhorn is interested in knowing what possibilities emerge from a position where women were to not be fundamentally constituted as subjects of the archives, but as its makers—as creative and critical agents discerning their genealogies and trajectories of being? Such a position allows the archive to be reconstituted from its framing as an enclosure to be trespassed to an ongoing ‘site and practice integral to knowledge making, cultural production, and activism’; it further displaces the archive from a settled or centralised set of records to ephemeral and dispersed interventions. This reading of the archive is generative and generational, it anticipates acts of not only the revision and resuscitation of the archive’s silences, but its fundamental reconstitution in the hands of unruly, non-hegemonic bodies. Eichhorn’s reading of feminist archiving as a source of affect and order is a practice of kin-making, of identifying those who have contributed

to the creation of the vocabularies that affirm the resistances of the present. It asserts that the work of remaking history is never, quite simply, finished, and for Eichhorn, ‘being in time and history differently is integral to fostering not only new forms of political alliances, including those that appear to defy temporal

constraints, but also new narratives about feminist history and feminist futures.’ Like a torch, this effort passes from the fist of one generation to the next so

that its light may illuminate new horizons. Can Nafas be read as such an act of archive-building?

The series began as an effort to address a void, to contain its gradual expanse into every corner of life. Initiated in the shadow of a viral contagion whose blatant disregard for barriers among bodies and land only strengthened the ascendancy of surveillance, social control and hyper-nationalism across the world, the project was a timely enquiry into the nature of the self in conditions of separation and absence. The perennial cycle of the nayika (heroine) who anticipates her lover in the barahmasa tradition of illustrated manuscripts is a vivid reference to the myriad textures of disrupted love, to the tempestuous period of waiting amidst the sounds and scents of a garden. Yet, as the months passed, so altered the inclinations of our nayika, troubled by the turbulent unfolding of the world, even as seasons continued to turn with gentle familiarity, following the Barthesian ‘perpetual calendar’ of amorous discourse. And it is apt to read earlier parts of Nafas as guided by absence, the ‘scenography of waiting’. But in this suite of works, the harsh, flush months of the summer lead to the stoic coolness of winter, and in this span, there are perceptible shifts in the making of the series.

As the distillation and encroachment of global politics into the conduct of daily life became more acute and evident in March 2020, Nafas fiercely reclaimed the

terrain of the personal—the notebook, the diary, the letters that must remain unsent. This terrain is isolated yet encumbered with history, inscribing the passage of private hours alongside the march of the calendar. In utilising these forms of addressal to the beloved or the other, which can only persist as echoes within the self, Arshi was reviving a potent site of feminist action. Autobiographical orientations are often taken to imply a disjunction between the public and the personal, an assumption readily undone by a feminist position which is witness to the radical politics of living against dominance. Meredith Benjamin’s study of textual imprints and new forms of writing crafted by feminist writers and activists of ‘70s and ‘80s such as Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde identifies the methodology of citational invocation and the format of diaries and letters as crucial to developing a feminist public based on ‘intimacy and emotional exchange.’ Benjamin quotes a letter written by Rich to Lorde, which exults this mode of recording as multi-directional, ‘And I feel so strongly that we need to do this more, put our lives on paper for each other...’ Nafas develops this aspect of writing as an act which may be performed in the first instance for the survival of oneself, but extends as sustenance for

another mind, and ultimately, serves as a source for the nourishment of ever-growing, immaterially-bound communities.

One recalls particularly the notebooks of Nasreen Mohamedi, the foremost disciple of light—and absence. An oft-remembered line in Mohamedi’s notebook reads ‘The shadow came and stood in its place like yesterday’, which Arshi quotes in our conversation on light and shadows, resplendent in works such as August 23, Ek saaye se shikayat (Complaint to a Shadow); November 21, Ret ke zarro mein chipi ek tanha Parchaai (A Lone Shadow Hidden in Grains of Sand); and October 17, 101 Syaah Raatein (101 Black Nights). Arshi informs me that the months spent in Afghanistan, reunited with her husband, was a period of isolation, and the days were filled by studying the movement of light through the day into the twilight hour upon the peak of Mount Asamai, seen from the eyes of a window and depicted with delicate progression in August 19, Kuch-e Kharabat aur Koh-e Asamai se Shikayat (Kuch-e Kharabat and Complaint to Koh-e-Asamai).

In the monograph on Mohamedi, Geeta Kapur describes evacuation as a strategy of making visible through acts of negation. In Arshi’s abiding commitment to geometric, constant forms, a similar gesture of negation is performed. Across the months traced by Nafas, the silhouette recurs as motif—the wooden slate or takhti, a surface for inscription. In this new suite of works, the takhti is disassembled in instances, in others it is replaced by the grid of a logbook. These works are devoted, above all, to mark-making, to the construction of lines and their architectural essence. The more figural impulses are restrained in these works, the eye must wander far to find a bleeding heart, an abandoned chair, or a solitary woman. In its place is abundance: a flower vase with blooms stooping in early moments of wilt; a ripe pomegranate, plucked as it were from the nayika’s garden. Nafas, the series, is made entirely on Manjarpat cloth, with natural pigments prepared by Arshi. The pigment arrives through a dialogue with the residues of her mother’s garden and flowers from Najibabad; the traces of elemental departures, of wind and rain, all disperse their shadows upon the cloth, from the application of Multani paste on Manjarpat, to its time in the sun, to the gradations which the pigment will depict with the passage of time. In this suite of works, Arshi works with techniques of papier-mâché and punches holes into the fabric in the latticed form of roshandaans to conjure a certain slant of light, to introduce depth to the field of cloth; ‘I make dimensions out of solitude,’ wrote Mohamedi. To Mohamedi’s evacuation, which Kapur situates along two distinct traditions of high modernism and utopic abstraction, Arshi introduces the epistemology of Sufism, the particle as being and non-being, the Khudi or Ego which seeks the sublimation of love, and the constant talaash (search) for the self.

In the kinship of methodologies, it is crucial to consider Lala Rukh’s decade long Heiroglyphics series as forebearer to Arshi’s practice. Rukh’s minimal marks on paper forging techniques of calligraphy with drawing, is described by Natasha Ginwala as producing a ‘sonic grammar’, inspired by Urdu poetry and Hindustani music in citational and productive modes. As one encounters a lyric from Faiz Ahmad Faiz or the structure of musical notations, Ginwala points to the element of riyaaz as foundational to classical music and to creative works which are notational. Just as riyaaz is essential and indelible in the fabric of daily life, as it threads the passage of each day into the tapestry of the musician’s repertoire and defers the notion of mastery for the rigour of discipline, so are acts of notetaking, in forms such as diaries and notebooks, where possibilities of evidencing a feminist consciousness can be found. Such sites of writing are fragmentary, associational and hybrid, punctuated by gaps, they reject linearity as a principle of hierarchy and compulsion, and bring the disorder of daily life, the fluidity of the stream-of-consciousness to page. As if in a jugalbandi across the artificial boundaries of nations and time, to Rukh’s Heiroglyphics V: Qat-jhaptaal (2008), Arshi brings September 4, Rooh ka wazan aur Raag Jaunpuri (The Weight of the Soul and Raga Jaunpuri) and September 7, Raag Bhimpalasi Ustad Mallikarjun Mansur ki zubani (Raga Bhimpalasi and the voice of Ustad Mallikarjun Mansur). When Ginwala writes that she is tempted to hold up Rukh’s works to her ears, I am struck by a similar impulse—to fill my senses with the same melodies that Arshi has etched on Manjarpat.

The paintings in Nafas are lyrical and sonorous. In Nafas II, Arshi’s works are accompanied by the musical notes composed by her husband, Waheedullah—his intervention punctuates the progression of months as the book unfolds. The anguish of awaiting the lover’s arrival has been quelled; the heart now grazes at the

field of communal belonging, a horizon that can only be remembered not seen. The ruled lines that mark the surface of Arshi’s July 4, Behiss Lakeerein (Ignorant Lines) carry the outlines of palms, urging the viewer to imagine the quietly powerful act of placing one’s hand on the page, of claiming the uncertainty of its blankness. We are reminded of the rise of an oppressive documentary regime in India, where ‘identity papers’ often become the currency of existence and fingerprints of callused palms cannot be read by algorithms.

Yet, in July 4, Behiss Lakeerein the sentiment remains personal, entangled—can the page best be left empty? When words condemn the person, can silence liberate? Is it then possible to read citation also as subterfuge, compellingly explored in works such as August 28, Nuqte ki khamoshi (The Silence of the Dot) and July 17, Lakeerein Khamosh hi rahen toh achcha hai! (It’s Better if the Lines Stay Silent!)? In assembling a dense constellation of poets, artists, and philosophers across time, is Arshi concealing the act of speaking in her own lafz? Another echo from Mohamedi’s notebooks erupts: ‘I feel the need to simplify.’ While words and

meanings diverge inevitably and irrevocably in the lovers’ discourse, Arshi’s works and lyrics here hint at another rupture—of a coherent public.

In July 22, Hazaar Baatein aur Dhundhla Sach (A Thousand Issues and One Hazy Truth), the miasmic state of the world is reflected in the smudged script, with letters disintegrating in the soak of tears. In July 16, Abr ki Likhawat (The Writing of the Clouds), the message from the heavens is unclear, reason and faith are both lost in the cacophony of hate. As the potential of speaking across the ambit of propaganda recedes to an impossibility, one must reconsider the communicative limits of language, and turn to that which could never be within language—grief. In two works drenched with pathos, the breakdown of a secular republic in India and the loss of the once celebrated if never actualised spirit of utopia, is relayed through mourning for that which has irredeemably passed. In October 10, Sabz o Bhagwa rang ka Siyaah Daaman (The Black Lap of Saffron and Green), Arshi laments the impossibility of a green flower blooming on the terracotta earth; the colours betray the precarity of living amidst majoritarian fervour.

How to give form to that which is beyond the order of language, beyond its terror and beauty? Arshi lets language slip through her fingers when confronted with the unspeakable, such that it may remain intact in its untranslatability. As the year closes we see the fading of letters on the cloth until we reach December and they vanish entirely. All that remains is December 1, Khamosh Nafas aur Akhiri be Alfaz khat (Silent Self and  the Last Empty Letter).

 

Bibliography

Eichhorn, Kate. The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013.

Barthes, Roland. A lover’s discourse: Fragments. Macmillan, 1978.

Benjamin, Meredith A., “Genres of Feminist Lives: Autobiography, Archives, and Community, 1970-1983”.

CUNY Academic Works, 2016.

Kapur, Geeta. “Elegy for an Unclaimed Beloved: Nasreen Mohamedi 1937–1990” in Nasreen Mohamedi: Lines Among Lines. New York: The Drawing Center’s Drawing Papers 52, 2005.

Ginwala, Natasha. Lala Rukh: Introduction. Documenta 14. https://www.documenta14.de/en/south/902_lala_

rukh_introduction_by_natasha_ginwala