Photograph © Karthik Subramanian
Photograph © Karthik Subramanian
Photograph © Karthik Subramanian
Photograph © Karthik Subramanian
Photograph © Karthik Subramanian
Photograph © Karthik Subramanian
Photograph © Karthik Subramanian
Photograph © Karthik Subramanian
Photograph © Karthik Subramanian
Photograph © Karthik Subramanian
Photograph © Karthik Subramanian
Sundarban is a vast stretch of mangrove forests spread across an archipelago of islands in the Gangetic delta in India and Bangladesh. Inhabited by over four million people and nearly six hundred Royal Bengal tigers, Sundarban is arguably the site with the highest frequency of human-animal encounters in the world.
In this landscape, intersected by a network of waterways, the boundaries dividing the human settlements and the tiger-inhabited forests are ambiguous. The physical boundaries are constantly shaped and re-shaped by the tidal waves, governed as they are by the laws of nature and time.
This project aims to explore the idea of boundaries between humans and nature in the Sundarban - a place where boundaries seem only like conceptual mirages.
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At the time of our 1:1 Interview with Karthik, he was asked these questions about Mohona.
PSA: Memory seems to play an important role in all of your projects. What role does it play in your project Mohona?
KS: Memory is a slippery substance, becoming more slippery when we try to grasp. To talk about it is even trickier. There is a certain kind of death or loss associated with every memory, but it is at the end that the beginning becomes important. The islands of the Sundarbans came to life at the end of the journey of three long rivers. It is the end of the river's journey that got me thinking about the beginning - that lingering memory of when everything began for me, for us. I see memory as that mechanism that frees one from time so we can recreate ourselves again and again, always alive, always present. This is an undercurrent of this work, giving a slippery feeling of the ground moving constantly under our feet, but always allowing space to think about the beginnings.
PSA: Having already spent a couple of months working on the Sundarbans and getting that work published, what prompted you to revisit the place and rework this project for another three-to-four years?
KS: The images that I made during my first couple of months were for my final MA thesis. I had made images with an immediacy to publish. The urgency to publish even before I made sense of the place didn't feel right. Since I had no such experience before, I succumbed to the idea that my photos would bring immediate positive changes to the place. I was quick to realize I hadn't questioned my position as an outsider going to a new place to bring back photographs of complex social issues of that region.
Spending a lot of time in the middle of nature and its harshness, allowing myself to move to the rhythm of the place shattered many of my fundamental beliefs. My unstable position as a photographer and as a human got pulled down. I had to build everything from scratch, and I had to unlearn a lot of what I was taught at school and rebuild my own position. A position that is built entirely upon honesty. In the next many years, I kept going back to Sundarbans searching for answers to why I wanted to photograph and what I wanted out of it.
PSA: Can you tell us why you made the choices you did regarding form - still image, moving image, images dissolving and projection - in your project Mohona?
KS: For a while now, I don't exactly know since when, maybe even since the development of human consciousness, we have started forming boundaries away from the rest of the natural world. In the last few decades, especially, the boundaries between the human and the natural are becoming clearer and being drawn more sharply. In all the places I have been, Sundarbans has been the only place where boundaries are undefined and unsettled.
Mohona, in Bengali, refers to the confluence of the rivers or of a river and the sea. The several islands of the Sundarbans are born out of such a confluence, where the tides constantly change the physical boundaries of the islands twice every day. The land and the water; the sweet water of the river and the salty water of the sea; the human settlement and the forest mix with one another inseparably into a constantly changing amalgamation, just like how the still and the moving images mix with the sound into an organism where each one is negotiating with the other to assert their rights. There is an inherent tension at such shifting boundaries that allows for creation to take place.
20 November
