Nilima Sheikh. Another Chronicle of Loss. Tempera on Sanganer paper. 198 cms x 59 cms. 2009

There is idyll, there is danger and there is reverie...

Kaushik Bhaumik is moved by Nilima Sheikh's new works on Kashmir that re-visit a landscape of aching loss and evoke scarred histories of a violent present.

THERE IS A MOMENT IN NEGARA, Clifford Geertz's study of Balinese polity, where the writer imagines the entire materiality of Balinese life and power relationships unravel with the opening of sluice gates down the mountainsides of the island. For it was around this central ritual of life that all else revolved, all material movements were possible, kingdoms built and destroyed and all fantasies of heaven and earth motivated - these could then find their way into the arts and culture of the Balinese. The unleashing of the fertile powers of the earth made everything possible in the imagination and hence doable in the course of history. Nilima Sheikh's show Drawing Trails, from April 17th to May 30th, at Gallery Espace, Delhi, consisting of works on paper, continues with her masterful project on Kashmir, consisting of series after series of cascading imagery that have, by now, added up to nothing short of a psycho-material history of the entire land. They are the sum of Sheikh's feelings and memories about the diverse landscapes of her beloved Kashmir, now ravaged by war and strife.

The provocation for such a monumental summation of Kashmir's contemporary history, best summed up in the stunning digital mural that visitors see as they enter the gallery, a blown-up version of her earlier Traffic on the India China Highway, is the pain felt by the artist at what has been happening in the valley for the past two decades and more, a provocation that forces one to revisit the site in all its nooks and crannies, looking for the worst and for some corner of the land left untouched by violence. Like we do in a failed relationship, revisiting our mental geographies again and again to find where we went wrong, where we failed the circumstance, where the neglect lay. And, of course, we have all failed Kashmir, failed to uphold the fair land and its beauty, its life force and its coherence and above all, the basic dignity that humans deserve. Our best hasn't been enough.

Sheikh's pieces in this show consist of meditations on the return to a domicile in the aftermath of violence, when one's domicile in the largest sense of a landscape of lived intimacy has been desecrated. However, this is not presented simply in representations of viscerally felt horror. Instead, Sheikh takes us on a journey starting from scenes of normalcy to scenes of violation, destruction and beyond. Skin, mountainside and scenery are all deeply gashed with the wounds of war and pillage. Upturned soil everywhere, graves being dug for those who have been killed in Just a few return from dust, disguised as roses; snapshots of dignified and quiet mourning through anger or sensory disorientation at the sudden visitation of terror in Route 1 and My Hometown; dilapidated habitation in the powerful Return; and skies filled with uncanny figures of foreboding in Another Chronicle of Loss. Terror crashes the sensory bulwark of life and reality as we had constructed it. A painting like What happened that day 1 blurs the distinction between sky, space and ground - mythic figures, their wings clipped, spiral down only to be etched in hard rock. The hard fall for motifs of mythic imagination threatens to inter them in the rocks, their final fall in history. And after we have been through this landscape of destruction, anger, terror, pain and sorrow, when we finally arrive at reverie, a new dawn breaks through the fatigue occasioned by the continuous perception of violence. Here, life is sustained somewhere within us and, hopefully, within those who live in Kashmir too. Through the haze in the magnificent On two yards he rowed me into the sunset, Kashmir returns (as the boat does) as a land with a potential for a future. There is idyll, there is danger and then there is reverie...and the faint perception of a new idyll. Landscapes are gripped by terror, squeezed to the point of cracking up and then given up so that calm may return slowly and restore the land to functionality.