Muhanned Cader
Moored
Island Seeker
You can only be there for a few hours. Muhanned Cader knew this when he took the notoriously nausea-inducing ferry to Delft Island that day. But he was grateful to have made the journey at all. In 2012 the boat service to Delft, one of 30 small islands off the coast of Sri Lanka, had only just become available to civilians. Like much of the North and North-East of Sri Lanka, Delft had been under army and naval control during the war (1983-2009). Even now, three years into peacetime, routes from South to North were scarce. Delft had become further alienated as it had been totally cut-off from the mainland. As one recent visitor said, the distance between Jaffna and Delft is more than just physical. Although it was officially renamed Neduntheevu, Delft is the only islet in the Palk Strait to be referred to by its colonial name. It remains an island unto its own.
Once the sea-sickness and claustrophobia wears off, voyagers to Delft say they feel like they're walking onto the shores of another world. Past the shallow waters and blanched beaches lies a largely uninhabited landscape; a flat and arid terrain covered in dry grass, aloe vera plants and palmyrah trees, separated by collapsing walls and aged forts made from coral reef and limestone. Further into the island rest the layered remains of explorers and empires—ruins of a Chola dynasty temple, stupa-like structures marked with 1000-year old Brahmi script, Baobab trees planted by Arab merchants big enough to take shelter in, and most dreamlike of all, hundreds of wild ponies left over by waves of Portuguese and Dutch colonists. The sense of enchantment one feels is heightened by the fact that you can't stay for too long. The boat sets off again in three hours.
Tethered to the Land
Having grown up in the South of Sri Lanka, Cader had been exploring the North and its islands with his peers. Poet P. Ahilan and fellow artist and teacher T. Shanaathanan. Shanaathanan had invited Cader to teach at the Ramanathan Academy in the northern city of Jaffna as part of the former's experimental Bauhaus-type art program. The war had just ended, but used to years of curfew in Jaffna, people still stayed home after dark. In the evenings Shanaathanan and Cader would cook and listen to music together. Cader would then make collages capturing the essence of his surroundings late into the night. By day, the artist would mark his journeys from Jaffna Hostel to Ramanathan Academy in a series of GPS drawings, as well as take photographs of the coastal vistas and mini-islands he visited. Based on these very photographs, Cader's formative month in the North is recorded in a series of seascapes he painted upon his return.
Even if you look closely for clues, you can never be sure where each of his images is from. It does not matter. This is an adventurer's itinerary. What we do know is that we are always close to the sea and that the horizon is our guiding line. Through Cader's Untitled (2012) paintings, we are taken to different coastlines devoid of humans— whether rocky, sandy or grassy—and asked to hone in. The secret lies in the curious curvature of the frame. Cader's paintings are shaped like islands, portholes or fragments. The viewer is tethered to the land, gazing into the depths of the ocean. The seascapes are raw and instinctual, powerful and personal. They stay with you long after you've seen them. In 2017, five years after Cader made these initial paintings, he returned to the one image that haunted him the most—a small boat against the rocks in Delft.
Moored at Sea
Moored (2017) is a textured and measured rendering of a solitary fishing boat sitting motionless in the shallow sea. We cannot tell whether the vessel has been anchored, if it is about to arrive or if it is about to leave. What we can see is that, for now, the boat remains steady. The image is drawn in charcoal, in a larger scale than the 2012 seascapes. While the Untitled paintings capture vivid and varied observations, Moored wrangles with a deeper memory. Cader says that he remembers feeling like an explorer that dream-like day in Delft, but that he also witnessed the realities on the ground. He saw that the few Hindu and Christian Tamil people who lived there, mainly fisherman, were leading a remote and rural life and had little access to resources. The tourism industry and property developers were looking to change all this in due course. With Moored, Cader wanted to transfix the moment as it was.
The title also alludes to a secondary meaning for Cader, who is still identified in Sri Lanka today as a 'Ceylon Moor.' Though the word comes from the Latin Maurus, and in Roman times referred to those from Mauretania in Northern Africa, 'Moor' was used as a derogatory, catch-all term by Portuguese colonists to describe all Muslims in Sri Lanka. The term was, and is, misleading, signalling that Muslims are newer immigrants. In actuality, the regular rhythm of the monsoon winds, ideal position between Africa and China, and advances in boat technology meant that Arab and Persian sailors frequented Sri Lanka even before the advent of Islam. From the 7th century on, the expansion of Islam brought scientists, philosophers, traders and pilgrims from all across the Indian ocean to Sri Lanka. Some waited till the next wind to leave—but many stayed, married and built lives, mooring themselves indelibly in its history.
Boat People
Epic stories from 1001 nights and Ibn Battuta's travels, Kufic inscriptions and Sufi shrines along the coasts, as well as the hybrid languages of Arabic-Tamil and Sri Lankan Malay—all serve as vital reminders of the plural histories of Muslims in Sri Lanka. Today, the island's Islamic community consists of multiple ethnicities, but is largely divided into the categories of 'Moor' (descendants of Arabs and South Indians) or 'Malay' (originating from Dutch Java), alongside smaller groups of Bohras and Memons. Though the process of classifying and othering peoples in Sri Lanka began with Portuguese, Dutch and British colonisation, for the most part relations between Muslims and their fellow inhabitants remained peaceful through the centuries. This changed in many ways in the 1980s during a war based on ethnicity, identity and belonging. Origin stories are always controversial, but at this time they were used as triggers for political contestation and wide-scale violence.
In 1983, tension between Sri Lanka's two main ethnic groups (divided into the majority Sinhala-speaking Buddhists and minority Tamil-speaking Hindus) escalated into full-blown riots, leading to the beginning of a 26-year civil war. Though they were largely Tamil-speaking, the island's Muslim population did not necessarily identify as ethnically Tamil, and found themselves caught in the cross-fire. For some, part of the effort to de-link and distinguish the Muslim community from other Tamils included an emphasis on their different, i.e., Arabised roots. In the post-war years, this history of othering and self-othering was taken up by right-wing nationalist Buddhist groups to justify that Muslims were indeed foreigners and therefore did not belong in Sri Lanka. The Tamil word for 'boat people,' kallathoni, or Sinhala word hambaya, long used as slurs for Ceylon Moors, took on a more sinister tone in this climate.
Borderless Water
Given this backdrop, it is not surprising that Cader ruminated on this image of a lone boat and returned to it half a decade later. While drawing Moored, the phrase 'boat people' came to his mind time and again. During his travels in the North, Cader's feelings of alienation had met with his Tamil peers' own sense of estrangement. 2012 was still an era of military surveillance and media censorship. The vestiges of a violent war could still be seen throughout Jaffna. Though not overt, the politics of the time become present in Cader's sharp-edged shapes, some of which resemble broken-down walls or bombed-out buildings. By 2017, when he drew Moored, the anti-Muslim movement had already led to several riots and boycotts, and the erasure of minority histories had been widely normalized in Sri Lanka. In its suspension and stillness, Moored asks us not where we're from, but where we are now, and where we might want to go.
Abstract in their aesthetic, Cader's landscapes, nightscapes and seascapes often point us to key political moments and critical junctures in Sri Lanka's history. What many of them also have in common is their inclusion of the Indian ocean; whether painted by the coastal cities of Jaffna, Yala or Galle. Cader grew up by the sea. It was the view he woke up to in his grandfather's house in Galle Fort. His is one of few families still living in the Fort (built by Portuguese colonists in the 16th century and fortified by the Dutch in the 17th century) that can trace a long lineage back to the area. This is not the artist's chief concern, however. To him, history is full of fantasy, and art is full of secrets steering us to multiple truths. Truths such as: all life on our planet came from the sea. And truths such as: all islanders arrive by boat.
Tropical Moor
In 2022, against the backdrop of another pivotal crisis in the island's history, Cader decided to set off on a fresh set of road trips around his beloved island. This time, the artist was not alone in his nomadic pursuits; hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans had taken to exploring the country during and after the pandemic. (The subsequent economic fallout, Aragalaya protests in Galle Face Green and state of emergency imposed by the government would later conversely restrict access and movement for many.) Cader, always keen to capture and chart his own present, rather follow one that's prescribed, took photographs of his travels wherever he would go. Over the next year or so, in Karachi, Colombo and Galle, the artist would work from these diaristic notations, often paining in sets and drawing upon his recollections as well his images—just as he did with Moored and the simultaneous series Boat Ride (2017).
Much of the imagery in the resultant paintings, such as in the Riverscapes (2023) and Island in the Sky (2023) series, has been deliberately abstracted so that it cannot be pinned down to one location; pieces of places float in the ether, untethered and adrift. Cader pushes this play with positive and negative space further in Sky (2023) and Night Sky (2023) by taking certain shapes, flipping them and repeating them, to create patterns. Some seem to want to exceed the confines of a rectangular frame, while others could be folded back in to a square to make a complete image. When asked about these works, Cader, always tongue-in-cheek, says that they're "Moorish patterns" because he sees himself as a "tropical Moor." There is humour and poignancy in these words, as someone seeking to find their place and culture on an island that is so plural in nature. His images, drawn from a mixture of techniques and traditions, ask us to look for these unlimited possibilities.
Text by Jyoti Dhar, 2024
Press release courtesy Jhaveri Contemporary.
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