Chaired by Heather McKnight
Sanskriti Chattopadhyay: Exploring Subaltern Time: Constructing the Decolonial
Abstract for individual papers or for panel themes (3000 characters max.) For Matilda Mroz cinema provides the ideal domain to engage with temporal flow. But what happens when one aims to delineate, define and deploy a strategy for constructing a decolonial, artisanal, craft-led cinematic image? If decolonial image is rooted in the reclaiming of other worldviews, ancestral memories and ways of being in the world, then what role may ‘time’ play there - as a tool, method, and structural element, and how do we engage with it?
To explore these questions this proposal seeks to take a deep dive into one of India’s most unusual filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (A River Called Titas, 1973). Centred around the fishermen ‘Malo’ or ‘Mallabarman’ community, separated from the mainstream society by the caste-class-economy boundaries, this film not only tells a story of the community but curiously embeds in its body the worldview and cosmology of time as experienced by this community. In doing so, Ghatak draws a parallel between the visual culture of a community and the ritualised, ancestrally received, community-led perception of time. This proposal seeks to study, analyse, and fathom this relationship.
Bruce Kapferer’s exploration of the Deleuzean time-image and cinema’s relationship with ritual, Agamben’s gestural, and Mroz’s temporal flow would be the primary theoretical triad for this proposal. A special focus will be given on the form of ‘epic melodrama’ (which in many ways threads the Muti-faceted cinematic temporality of the Global South).
Bio: A doctoral staff at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, HDK-Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, Sanskriti Chattopadhyay has degrees in Film Direction and Screenplay Writing from Film and Television Institute of India, and masters’ in Literary and Cultural Studies from English and Foreign Language University, India. She is the recipient of the Adlerbertska stipendier 2022 and the Adlerbertska Scholarship for Research 2022. Her video art has been curated in various festivals, like - VAICA festival for contemporary video artists, 12th international Documentary and Short Film Festival of India. She has received the PIFF Special Award (2019). She has received video art grants from India Foundation for Arts and Kolkata Center for Creativity. She has been a part of various artistic research projects like – ‘Globe Playhouse’ (2020) and “Transmedia Storytelling: Camilla Plastic Ocean Plan” (2019) at Film University Babelsberg, Konrad Wolf (2020), Artistic Research project of BRICS in collaboration with WITS Film and Television and Valand Film Programme, India Chapter (2018). She was also invited to Vision Splendid Outback Film Festival and Filmmaking Bootcamp in Winton, Australia (2019). Her contact detail is – sanskriti.chattopadhyay@gu.se; sanskritichattopadhyay222@gmail.com.
Arash Dehghani: Photographic temporality: crafting the meta-narrative of petroleum landscape
Petroleum history’s imagined linearity from the perspective of global energy denigrates the profound onto-epistemological transformation brought about by oil in what is now known as the petroleum landscape. The material presence of oil in the lives of the people, changing social structures, worldviews, and even deaths around the extraction of oil are buried under the grand narratives of global energy politics. Using Azoulay’s theory of multiple co-existing temporalities as a stepping stone, this proposal would use photography to deconstruct the trajectory of petro-modernity in Iran, whose other side hides the persistence of colonial violence, long after the departure of colonial power. This proposal challenges the term 'suspended temporality’, meaningful in the rise of nation-state where that ‘present’ served as a catalyst to reach a future that was a restructuration of the imaginary of 'Persian Empire'. Therefore, the influence of the colonial temporality did not simply impose its notion of time and history through explicit violence but implicitly supported the formation of this ‘suspended temporality’ echoing the Persianized nation-state’s historical anxiety to revive its forgotten past glory. This proposal seeks to reactivate the ‘taken’ and ‘untaken’ photographs as bodies with multiple temporalities that continue generating questions to provide a nuanced understanding of the relationship between colonial time, energy politics, marginalisation, and visual representation in Iranian petroleum history.
Bio: An artist-researcher, Arash Dehghani is currently completing his PhD studies in Arts Plastiques at the Université de Lille, France. The focus of his artistic research is the archives and histories of marginality in Iran. His scholarship includes essays and introductions to two books that he edited as well, Archive and Photography, Akskhaneh Press, Tehran (2020) and Visibility and Photography, Akskhaneh Press, Tehran (2021). He is the recepient of multiple international grants and fellowships. Some of these are Adlerbertska Hospitiestiftelsen, Sweden; Barrande Fellowship, Czech Republic; lnterreg project TRANSUNIV grant, Belgium; Bourses de mobilité internationale de recherche of Fondation I-SITE ULNE, France.
Srideep Mukherjee: Revisiting Political Temporality through Vernacular Theatre in India
The noted historian Ramachandra Guha recently observed that post decolonisation in 1947, history writing in India made way for political scientists to examine the evolution of the new democracy, and for anthropologists to delve into social formations of caste in the post-colony phase. In Indian academia, the Social Sciences have therefore maintained disciplinary demarcations with reference to timelines, insofar as their respective ambits are concerned. Having completed seventy five years of independence in 2022, we are now told that India has stepped into its Amrit Kaal (a term from Vedic astrology considered auspicious for new ventures) as we commence the run up to the final twenty-five years of a century of national independence. In reality however, one observes the unfolding of an electoral autocracy that redefines nationalism by making subversive meanings of the canonised pedagogy of classifying Indian history into Ancient, Medieval and Modern periods; with the last culminating in 1947. The absence of a living tradition of history beyond independence, as Guha laments, has in effect led to the rise of a political temporality that challenges both a syncretic past and the continuum of cultural assimilation, which in unison have always formed the idea of India. The turn towards this political temporality was evident since the 1990s which decidedly mark a transition from post-colony to the neo-colonial by a set of paradoxical incidents. On the one hand the economy opened up to liberalisation, and on the other, the nation remained mute spectator to the vanquishing of the iconic Babri mosque at Ayodhya by right wing activists. While the former catapulted India on its globalising mission, the latter was perceived as a pyrrhic victory of right wing majoritarian rule over centuries of shared syncretic history. This paper is an attempt to debunk this political temporality manifest in the rise of extreme right-wing politics through two vernacular plays of the time, Girish Karnad’s Tale Danda (Death by Beheading, 1990, Kannada) and Utpal Dutt’s JanatarAphim (Opium of the Masses, 1991, Bengali). Using literary exegesis, I propose to analyse how the confounding gyre of history creates cleavages in the body politic of the nation, and thereby the very idea of India.
Bio: Srideep Mukherjee is Associate Professor of English at Netaji Subhas Open University, Kolkata, India. He holds a Ph. D. in postcolonial Indian drama from Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. His areas of interest include Nation and Narration, Cultural Studies, and South Asian Literature.