Beautiful Zameen exhibition text Jhani Randhawa, 2023
CONTENTS
Exhibition text
Addendum: historical context
Poesie / Phulkari
Works referenced and consulted
EXHIBITION TEXT
Observing with the precision of a documentarian, Jagdeep Raina renders figures and landscapes that linger somewhere between the “real” and the uncanny. Sometimes figures and the landscapes they are situated within blur, entangled, together. There are portraits within likenesses within images; there are entreaties stitched in English and Gurmukhi script; there are enlarged fragments of borders with an asemic poetry of their own; there are fragments of borders sewn into tapestries whose own asymmetric edges leave one with the sensation that, despite the acute distillation, something is lingering just out of frame. Something is within the material itself, tugging.
In Raina’s works on paper, such as “Those old roads” (2022), “Say hello when you see me,” (2022), and the monumental graphite work “I Will Love You Forever” (2022), a bestiary of pre-figural, elusive dream forms become harbingers of a transformed environment. Impressions of birds knock against their silence, tightly closed lips form a barrier around a village courtyard. Grammars of indigo, Punjab fog rolling in. Objects float like apparitions into view, undefined as if rubbed smooth by the rough edges of memory; in counterpoint, tools like the charkha spinning wheel and the ghara and the yoke and the tandoor are salvaged from soft erasure. Iconic, mysterious, and sudden, these forms interrupt our viewing. They trouble what can be known, what can be represented. Perhaps most provocatively, Raina’s forms trouble what can be bordered or delimited, particularly in the long “event” of the exhibition’s central catalyst: the Green Revolution.
Perspective is simultaneously planar, oblong, delicate, bloated. Gorgeously gnarled disembodied hands clutch photographs of individuals who hold the viewer’s gaze. Scale and proportion are strained, stretched, compressed. The dead and immortal are juxtaposed with symbolic elements of cleansing and renewal (fire, ether and most frequently water in the form of rivers or vessels). Sometimes these figures are water-bearers themselves, reanimated as spirits and skeletons. Meanwhile, layered strands of thread construct a verdant field, doing the work of un-droughting the toxified landscape.
The images reflect a desire for collective thriving and abundance. Through lush hues and a sumptuous, frenetic materiality that evokes Raina’s physicality in producing the works themselves, the images in Beautiful Zameen celebrate the lives and labors of the human and nonhuman that contribute to the biodiversity of the Punjab. Yet they also resist an agrarian nostalgia, making space for the intertwining realities of socioeconomic strain and environmental degradation.
When Raina’s figures appear as iterations, facsimiles from photographs, oral histories, and other archival materials, they also shed their names. Through an assertive application of chiaroscuro and shadow, faces emerge lithic, almost mask-like, mythic. Even so, this does not produce the effect that the artists’ subjects exist timelessly outside history or a process of development, as was the effect of much orientalist, modern colonial landscape painting. Instead, from Raina’s chiseled figures, we sense the material reality of their transliterated lives. Raina’s subjects, like the artist, like us, are warped by the inheritances of the 20th century—the industrial-agricultural complex that is unified with the weapons and war industrial complex and the World Bank/IMF funding schemes, droughts and famines, the fall-out of xenonationalism and religious identitarianism. Under these pressures, bodies in Raina’s pieces are simultaneously gaunt and puffy with sleeplessness, with inconsistent nourishment, with intergenerational chemical poisoning. Through them, we feel the melancholic restlessness of a community bearing the spiritual weight of hope’s delusion.
Yet from a lamp-black field, from a divan, from the sun-filled courtyard, the subjects reimagined in Beautiful Zameen each are effected by and contribute to the course of human and ecological events. As subjects of the everyday, they maintain the capacity to once again be generative collaborators with the soil, with one another. And so, Raina’s approach to form, portraiture and landscape, to the borders between documentary and fiction, opens a compelling third space. Completed in the wake of the yearlong farmer protests—the largest and longest workers’ strike on record—that originated in the Punjab, Raina’s work allies with the farm workers to resist past, present, and future erasures of collective sorrow and collective action.
In Beautiful Zameen, we do not find condescension toward a lack or a project of wholeness, but rather, there is an earnest call for curiosity and deeply considered care in the face of devastation. As Veena Das elucidates, “[u]nlike a sketch that may be executed on a different scale from the final picture one draws, or that may lack all the details of the picture but still contain the imagination of the whole, the fragment marks the impossibility of such an imagination. Instead, fragments allude to a particular way of inhabiting the world, say, in a gesture of mourning” (p. 5, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent Into the Ordinary, University of California Press, 2007).
Delicate detailing effected by and juxtaposed with “rough” and urgent linework in Raina’s collection draws us close. Likewise, this intimacy is at work across the individuated pieces’ scales and dimensions. We are held by a promise of these pieces’ softness and commitment; they become epics, revealing the accumulation of hours, days, weeks in attuned labor, performed both by the artist and his subjects. As viewers, we find ourselves walking arm in arm through the fragments and trophic layers of an evocative land.
Amid all of this, we emerge, no longer distanced witnesses, but as active participants in the landscape. With Raina, with these image, we become bridges; we become mirrors; we navigate a turbulence of intertwining desires, diasporas and histories, projects of visibility, labor, the collision of narratives of “tradition” and “authenticity” with movements toward wider, hybrid social ethics.
Even Raina’s poetic inscriptions seem to bloat, constricted by traditional rhyming form. But in sticking with the tension that this creates, Raina arrives at what could be the heart of Beautiful Zameen: that the center can no longer hold. That accelerated cycles of historical extraction, and the violence that ensues, are socially unsustainable.
Apprehended, we are asked: What do you recognize? Where is the limit? Will you meet me there?
We are promised: I will always love you.
ADDENDUM:HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Experimentally implemented by Iowa-born agronomist Norman Borlaug and his Mexico-based colleagues during World War II, what came to be known as the Green Revolution was an agriculture-and-food-production technology transfer from U.S. agricultural loci in the Great Plains regions and California to rural regions in the Global South. Through this technology transfer, the combination of genetically modified wheat and rice seeds, industrial chemical fertilizer-pesticides, as well as modern irrigation systems and farming equipment, increased crop yields dramatically between the 1940s and mid-1960s. In addition to Norman Borlaug’s scientific goals, he put forth a “practical humanitarian” intention: as his Nobel Peace Prize profile states, he sough to arrange “to put the new cereal strains into extensive production in order to feed the hungry people of the world – and thus providing, as he says, ‘a temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation,’ a breathing space in which to deal with the ‘Population Monster’ and the subsequent environmental and social ills that too often lead to conflict between men and between nations.”
Borlaug’s use of the word “Monster” to describe a geopolitical trend of population growth in recently independent former colonies in Africa, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia invites pause. The metaphorical reference to militarized methodology in these locations further invites consideration of the deeper historical context from which the project to “feed the hungry people of the world” emerged.
Preceding the Green Revolution, European wars were fought in the theatres of their colonial land grabs; slavery was replaced in the U.S. and U.K. with Jim Crow laws and indentured labor; hundreds of thousands of lives were lost and communities destroyed over the course of the First World War, during which time small and large-scale farmers in the United States were incentivized to “win the war with wheat”; the confluence of drought, speculative homesteading, and new industrial farming practices in the American plains produced the Dust Bowl, what is still considered the most severe environmental crisis in the country to date; the Jewish population in Europe was systematically slaughtered and the atomic bomb was dropped on population centers in Japan; colonies were fighting successfully for self-rule and independence which often catalyzed unprecedented mass migrations and thousands more lives claimed to communal killings. Weather events and global climate patterns such as ENSO cycles were changing, often increasing in intensity, contributing to boom and bust periods of drought and monsoon or winter storms.
Throughout the late Victorian period into the mid-20th century, famine (among humans, livestock, and local wildlife) was not uncommon. As Michael Watts argues in his history of the “silent violence” of drought-famine in colonial Nigeria: ‘Climate risk…is not given by nature but…by ‘negotiated settlement’ since each society has institutional, social, and technical means for coping with risk…Famines [thus] are social crises that represent the failures of particular economic and political systems’” (Late Victorian Holocausts, 304). An 1878 study published in the Journal of the Statistical Society “that contrasted thirty-one serious famines [in India] in the 120 years of British rule against only seventeen recorded famines in the entire previous two millennia” (Late Victorian Holocausts, 304), despite the narrative of India’s ‘timeless hunger’ so enshrined in the West’s imagination.
Surfacing from these entangled events was hunger. Then came the Green Revolution. The high-yield results of the agricultural techniques and experiments were heralded as a societal miracle, and were statistically linked to increased food security, decreased poverty, and decreased violence. However, researchers like Godriver Wanga-Odhiambo, Prabhu Pingali, Mike Davis, and Michael Watts have made the compelling claim that rural communities and farm laborers who lived and worked in them became more pregnable to natural disaster after 1850 as their local economies were violently incorporated into the world market.
Throughout the project of agricultural tech transfer, scientists, scholars, journalists, and local farmers recognized the ecological and socioeconomic consequences of deploying military-grade chemicals into the soil, air, and water systems. In the United States, the social and environmental effects of these processes were illustrated early in their implementation through iconic treatises such as Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), and in ethnographic fiction such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Sanora Babb’s recovered manuscript Whose Names Are Unknown (2004).
Meanwhile, as peasant studies scholar Raj Patel illuminates in his 2013 essay “The Long Green Revolution,” the processes of “state reconfiguration, capitalist accumulation, concentration of power, disenfranchisement, agricultural investment and innovation—which only came to be called ‘the Green Revolution’ two years before it is said to have ended—both predate the standard history and continued long after 1970.” This is clear when we consider, for example, the exponential increase in cases of “valley fever” caused by inhaling microscopic C. immitis spores of a fungus that dwells in Bakersfield soils, lifted into the atmosphere in dust storms that rival those of the Dust Bowl, or the devastation of farmer and farm worker suicides in India, also on the rise for decades.
In research tracing the testing ground of Green Revolution-era policies and comparing them to the contemporary moment, scholar Prabhu L. Pingali has illustrated that not every farming region or community member within the distinct farming regions received technological boosts, which dramatically increased disparities in production and wealth. Pingali attributes the disparity to multiple tiers of socioeconomic structures and land-use policy. For example, in his article “Green Revolution: Impacts, Limits, and the Path Ahead” (2012), Pingali cites “inequitable land distribution with insecure ownership and tenancy rights; poorly developed input, credit, and output markets; policies that discriminated against smallholders, such as subsidies for mechanization or crop and scale bias in research and extension; and slow growth in the nonfarm economy that was unable to absorb the rising numbers of rural unemployed or underused people.” Pingali also locates gender as a central factor in determining the benefits of the Green Revolution, noting that “[w]omen farmers and female-headed households are found to have gained proportionally less than their male counterparts across crops and continents…Cross-country empirical evidence shows that women farmers are no less efficient than their male counterparts when using the same productive assets; however, women consistently face barriers to accessing productive resources and technologies.” Finally, Pingali shares that increased water consumption, soil degradation, and chemical runoff produced measurably significant environmental damage and a slowdown in yield growth that has been observed since the mid-1980s.
The “long” Green Revolution’s effects in India, and specifically in the Punjab, has been central to works by artists and community leaders such as Sirjaut Kaur Dhariwal, Pardeep Singh Rai, Gurleen Kaur, Simranpreet Anand, Mustafa Saifuddin, Jagdeep Raina, and Satinder Chohan, whose Green Revolution archive Raina responds to throughout the works in the exhibition Beautiful Zameen.
The ecological and economic effects of the Green Revolution, referred to as “Hari Kranthi” by farmers in Punjab, coalesced with the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic. Between 2015 and 2020, farmer suicides in the region had increased by more than twelve times, and by the time of pandemic lockdown in 2020, India had the one of the highest suicide rates in the world, with deaths consistently concentrating in farmer and farm laborer communities. Karan Deep Singh’s article, “‘The Lockdown Killed My Father,’” published by The New York Times in autumn 2020, saliently links the intertwining impacts of government policies driven by an interest in capital and GDP, rather than sustainable safety, care, and support, meanwhile illuminating tragic patterns of farmers ingesting fatal quantities of the very pesticides that destroyed their local biomes and groundwater, or in some cases setting setting their farms on fire when unable to sell their harvests during the most restrictive months of the pandemic.
Thousands have been pushed to the limits of what is possible and have taken their own lives. And in 2020, hundreds of thousands mobilized across India in solidarity with protests started in the Punjab against governmental policies that would further disenfranchise agricultural workers through exposure to a monopoly of corporate buyers. Seven months into the strike, the Trolley Times, a journalist collective published an open letter to the Indian government. I’ve included an excerpt that I believe elucidates the central catalysts of the movement:
“In the past seven months, what we witnessed and experienced first hand reminds us of the Emergency period 46 years ago. Today, it is not just the farmers’ movement that is facing repression, but the movements of workers, youth & students, women, minority communities, dalits as well as Adivasis. As in the time of the Emergency back then, many true patriots have been put into prisons. Draconian laws like UAPA are being misused against ones who are resisting the authoritarian regime. Media is shrouded in fear and favouritism. Judiciary’s freedom is under attack. Human rights are being violated routinely. Without declaring an Emergency, democracy is being throttled every day. In this context, as the main custodian of our constitutional framework, there is a great responsibility on you, President Sir.”
For twelve months, the national farmers’ strike protested local and national government policies that de-incentivized thriving ecologies and communities. The largest labor strike in the world made international headlines, and galvanized labor movements and diasporic communities beyond India.
The body of work that connects workers and labor rights, environmental sustainability, health and well-being is decades if not centuries-deep and ongoing; we need only look to individuals such as Aldo Leopold, George Washington Carver, Edward Abbey, Chico Mendes, Larry Itliong, Philip Vera Cruz, César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, Winona LaDuke, Vandana Shiva, Roma Malick and Ashok Chowdhury, Pardeep Singh Rai, and Wangari Maathai as indicators of a robust community deeply invested in a thriving local social ecology that inevitably braids together with the international.
With all this in mind, the last lines of Sonora Babb’s novel Whose Names Are Unknown, composed in the 1930s between the High Plains in the United States and FSA camps in California’s Central Valley, call us in, summon us together:
“It was as if these men and all the men they knew had been standing alone in the wide valleys, dwarfed beneath the western sky, and over to the east the dark Sierra Madres bristled with hidden guns, and over to the west, farther than they could see beyond the fields, the ocean made an end. South to north the valleys curved in a long green flowering bowl, filled with food enough for a nation, while hunger gnawed these workers' bodies and drained their minds. An old belief fell away like a withered leaf. Their dreams thudded down like the over-ripe pears they had walked on, too long waiting on the stem. One thing was left, as clear and perfect as a drop of rain—the desperate need to stand together as one man. They would rise and fall and, in their falling, rise again.”
POESIE / PHULKARI
In 2019, I met Jagdeep Raina on an organic farm in Reedsburg, Wisconsin. We were both there as work-trade artists, farming in exchange for room, board, and studio space. I was there to continue writing hybrid lyric essays centering inventories of tangled intimacies emerging from Kenyan-Punjabi immigrant family nodes in the Punjab, Kenya, U.K., and the American South; Jagdeep was embroidering tapestries that centered the effects on women’s labor in the aftermath of Partition, and scenes of local diasporic history among Punjabi and Kashmiri communities. Our friendship blossomed instantaneously. A year later, in 2020, I was working with Jagdeep to secure grant funding for a digital archive of Satinder Chohan’s research on the Green Revolution. We did not receive the grant funding. At the time, the covid pandemic was still a relatively new phenomenon, and despite lockdown, our elders were dying. Massive wildfires and environmental catastrophes were abundant. The farmer and farm workers protests were underway in the Punjab. Jagdeep and I spoke and emailed frequently during this time; we shared poetry, readings, imagery. There is, for me, a direct line between our practices: Phulkari translates to “floral work” or “flower craft,” and poesie/poetry has its roots in the Greek “gathered flowers” or “garland of flowers.” Toward this resonance, I’d like to include here two poems I wrote and revised in part in response to Jagdeep’s tapestry “Moon garden birds (Beautiful Zameen)” (2020), which were later published in my book, Time Regime (Gaudy Boy, 2022).
Poems included below:
INSIDE DADIJI’s HANDS (Time Regime, p. 4–5)
ASKS THETIS (Time Regime, p. 42–43)
Inside Dadiji’s Hands
music for Walter
Benjamin who wrote, “History cannot be sought in the riverbed
of a process of development.”
It is miraculously some day, some day, some day
in geologic time
the scratch of water along an embankment.
The air is alive where I am, boundary layers of a wound.
My lover drives a vehicle through sudden fog, approaching
the sea. We are coagulating in the night, accosted by fire.
There is the negative pyramid approximated by elm branchs
torn away by bovine teeth, and sodden
with summer rain—a canister of liquid ignition.
This is a ritual where something is aided in its diminishing.
In one way of looking at it, I stitched a blessing into your finger
seeking to subtilize your ache. Make it surge,
visible and glowing sharp—
Together, we’re seeking ruins in our ancestral language to clot
around us, the physical bearing of history. There is contrapuntal.
I dance inside what I was never meant to inherit
becoming hot, caked in ash and sweat—
to offer these sounds back to the generations of birds disappeared
in toxic fields, sprouting rice. We see our own throats swollen
red.
Ruins, these materials the water
I can’t imagine the sound.
Sometimes I am deliberately working to remain unreachable, recognizing
that I will be crossing a bridge until there's no skin left on my feet.
Asks Thetis
Shoved together in the dust that floods your longing
is a compound where I live in retainer, share ideas
and shed pigment with blood-handed dogs and mosquitoes,
black ants, occasional doves—
Go on, I bloom, from a decimation which proceeded our collision.
We listen.
There is the space, the glottal tone, the failed crop
called a border which shrugs off a force pummeling
down from mountains to the north, rising up from the soil—
Collision cut-out from stars and other vapors, other bigmen:
I was dipped into a corroding bowl, where I was marked
illegible and illiterate,
ill tyrant dothead, prole polylover.
All our lands tugged at, even our dreams and unbecomings.
Correct me malaise, said me dripping ritual. Under adhak
moon witnessing its dais bend into the room waiting
for a seasonal wetness to catch—or I was suddenly you,
or cornherd, or You, cactusmask,
cakeboy, what, dormis, moon—
In silence the goshawk surveys, threads caught in its gullet
while fibers of my longing quiver like worms in a wound.
Why, endless, and?
It is a shame I run at the mirror
with my head turned away, agent
unleashed on the circuits.
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AN ACCOMPANYING READER
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