For a four-day spectacle, Kolkata’s clay is stroked into human form. On the clay figure made, limbs, lips, breasts and eyes appear. An intimacy is established between the Malakars [the craftsmen who make the idols] and the idol— and she gets a name. Dugga, Durga, Ma Durga.
But she is not introduced or put before prying eyes straight away. She is dressed in silk, gets a head of hair, Kabuki eyes, a posture, and then put on a pedestal. After four carnivalesque days, she is carted away to the river, returning staid Kolkata to itself.
And this is how her story ends each time, every year. However, it is her beginning— the phase of becoming Durga—that many storytellers or documentarians have found fascinating. Naveen Kishore, photographer and publisher, has been interested in the way it ends as well.
Kishore’s photographs of over 20 years ago are on view at Waypoint and Chatterjee & Lal, Kolkata, in an exhibition titled ‘The Green Room of the Goddess’ Arrivals and Departures’, till October 31. At that time, he was a theatre professional; as part of his daily practice he wrote a piece of ‘text’.
Street Theatre
Time spilled through cupped hands Hands, sands, whose ‘ands. she hadn’t any. nor feet. straw stumps. twisted. out of gangamattied thighs… “The 20 silver prints were created in an analogue age over 20 years ago, like this prose poem. I wouldn’t be able to say which came before,” he says. “I was moving around Kumartuli [the city’s potters’ quarters] trying to be unobtrusive. And I witnessed an elastic dynamic piece of drama being enacted.
Whether the actors are skin and bones or mud and clay is not the thing. It is what unfolds, that matters.” Kishore was struck by the sense of intimacy with which the sculpting artisan handled his material clay, mud, wood, paint and cloth. The photograph where the artist’s hand and the deity’s hand touch show how Kishore’s eyes lingered on the act of creation with equal sensuousness.
Around 10 years before he started Seagull, a publishing house focused on avant-garde of world literature, Kishore had begun a professional life in the theatre, as a light designer. “In the theatre I learnt how to create the ‘dark’ by persuading shadows out of the lighting,” he says. Many of the photographs, indeed, seem to have been birthed in the dark. For instance, a shot of a clay hand raised in a half-lit artist’s workshop and the photograph of the narrow shadows of autumn creating a third shadowy figure as two idols stand side by side in the sun.
The idea was also to document the grand transformation of the city at a moment of theatre. Durga’s grand reception followed by a grand sacrifice and a denouement the photograph of the goddess prepped up for an unveiling, that of her sitting amid debris with the paint peeling off her face, and the early-morning photographs the next day where crows shit on her finery and street children scavenge for what can be resold, express the various stages in the ‘life’ of a clay goddess to whom Kolkata and many cities in the East respond to as a woman. The waiting for her arrival does, indeed, recall scenes of waiting in the greatest of epics. Of Ayodhya’s wait for Ram in the Ramayana. Of the wait for Aeneas to set things right in Rome in the Aeneid.
Backstage View
These photographs, says Kishore, do not depict Durga in her Goddess avatar. “I was interested in the process, the shaping of the clay-woman to the eventual goddess This is why I called the series of photographs The Greenroom of the Goddess as she is not yet anointed as such. Also, the reason why I shot the process of her becoming a Goddess from the backstage,” he adds. The series is also marked by a lack of 1narrative; There seems to have been no attempt to line them up in a manner to build a story.
“Nothing is deliberate. Everything was swift and intuitively done. What I left out in the picture was not planned. Intuition guides the choices of what remains in the picture. Also, the stories hidden outside the frame are hinted at by the stories my eye instinctively selected and decided to keep. What you are
seeing is exactly what I saw then,” he says.