Photograph © Sharbendu De
Photograph © Sharbendu De
Photograph © Sharbendu De
Photograph © Sharbendu De
Photograph © Sharbendu De
Photograph © Sharbendu De
Photograph © Sharbendu De
Photograph © Sharbendu De
Photograph © Sharbendu De
Photograph © Sharbendu De
Photograph © Sharbendu De
Photograph © Sharbendu De
Photograph © Sharbendu De
In Lisu folklore, a flood had swept away orphan siblings Lecha and Secha's village in the mountainous forests. Sole survivors, they traveled for years in search of others. Eventually, they asked for God's permission and became man and wife. The lore is apposite for the indigenous Lisu tribe living in the intractable forests of Namdapha National Park (NNP) on the Indo-Myanmar border of Arunachal Pradesh, India. In 1983, the Indian government converted 1985 sq. km. of the Lisus' native land into NNP without consulting them, and declared them to be 'poachers and encroachers,' setting off decades of marginalization. The State uses the pretext of wildlife conservation in an attempt to attempt evict them.
A largely administered terrain, they live without roads, electricity, schools, doctors, hospitals, phone network, or most modern amenities. They live so deep in the forests that it takes them 3-6 days to trek 120-157 km on foot, wading through knee-deep mud, to reach the nearest town. The price of essentials like salt, costing Rs 20 a kilo, inflates manifold between Rs 80-150. Here life is expensive, and death is cheap. Their children die without treatment; those who survive grow up without education. Abandoned and forgotten, they were alone then, and now.
This magnanimous but unforgiving landscape allows no room for delusions of control over life. When it rains, storms follow and continue for days; trees fall, huts are swept away, leeches and other microorganisms take over. Thunder and lightning kill people, but the outside world never finds out. Wild mushrooms feed on the decayed trees, and new life follows. Despite the adversities, the Lisus cohabit symbiotically with nature – reveling in its mysteries as a self- sufficient community. They treat their sick, build each other's home, pray, celebrate, and mourn together. Abandoning the forest they call 'home' is inconceivable. Prof. A.K. Ramanujan wrote in Folktales of India, '… self-sufficient village communities are magical entities.'
How does cohabiting with nature influence us? What lessons do this way of life offer mankind far removed from nature? If the colonial-anthropological representational or documentary approach has divided us, instead of bridging the society, then what alternatives do we have today? I search for these answers by exploring the relationship between humans and nature, using intersections between symbolism and mythology. I intend to evoke feelings that portray their state of mind and emotions over communicating facts.
In popular culture, ducks are believed to bear mythical qualities that connect the heaven and Earth. I noticed flocks of waddling ducks swimming in streams and at times taking short flights but always returning home by sunset, symbolizing the Lisus' desire to find a place where myth and the modern can cohabit without forsaking their home. The forest, horses, television, winter fog, darkness etc, serve as portent metaphors in evoking feelings of waiting, love, loss, and magic.
Thus, I opted for poetic aesthetics to find a vocabulary that communicates feelings over facts instead of resorting to 'spectacle.' I attempt to evoke an aura of their mythical world, reference archetypal interconnections between man, animal and nature, and borrow from romanticism and dream symbolism. I eschewed colonial-anthropological representational approaches, and embraced poetic aesthetics to portray their identity by evoking an aura of their mythical world.
Note 1: This project is supported by an Art Research Grant (2017) from the India Foundation for the Arts (funded by Titan Company Limited) and Lucie Foundation's Photo Made Scholarship 2018. It was also shortlisted for Lucie Foundation's Emerging Artist of the Year 2018, and won the Feature Shoot 2018 Emerging Photographer of the Year Award.
Note 2: I started working on Imagined Homeland in 2013. Each mise-en-scène was created on location and not in post-production. I have worked with live animals (none were hurt), created sets, designed the props which often included trekking through the forests to find context-appropriate materials, as well as identify locations, artificially introduced fog for visual and aesthetic consistency to match the reality of the landscape, made sketches which were shown to the team, and finally directed to execution.
20 November
