Set in the long, dark nights of Sundarbans, a delta formed by the Brahmaputra, Meghna, and Padma rivers in the Bay of Bengal, Pranay Dutta's Neti dwells on time, tide and terror through an invocation of the more-than-natural. Under mystical ghost lights and the moon, as the waters eat the land, spirits, gods, beasts, and saints bear witness. The scene is still, except for the boats that swing, the beast that lurks, glimmering dust that rises in the night breeze and the mist that lingers above water. In this milieu, without a sound, the sea creeps in, taking one man-made barrier at a time. Sometimes, it is not so quiet. The thunderous charge of storms takes many nights' worth of land in an instant. The edges must be reclaimed daily and barriers lost must be replaced with new ones—bags of sands and belongings, rocks and old garments. In some parts, the tiger widows1 plant the Sundari mangroves to hold land.
Dutta draws from a range of histories and hearsay, from material collected over the years—on family trips and recent research visits with his father—trailing fisherfolk, musicians, mendicants, activists, and tour guides. Separated from the 'mainland' through the imaginary Dampier-Hodges2 line, the delta is also 'in-between', suspended and no man's at the same time. The Sundarbans are many, depending on who is leading you, so there was a need to find narrative threads. This is where two mythological figures with a diversity of legends—the Bonbibi and the Dakkhin Rai—become a narrative device for Neti. The legend of the former states that she arrived with the Sufi saints in the 19th century, to liberate the islands from the terror of the latter. The fact that these two converge in a version where Bonbibi with her brother Shah Jangli came from Mecca to the Sundarbans to fight the tiger-demon, Dakkhin Rai, at the instructions of God, becomes a narrative departure for Dutta. Neti is set in its aftermath.
In Dutta's work extinctions are predicted in phases. We may mistake them to be cyclical, but they are incremental, each more disastrous than the last. A cycle holds the promise of regeneration of some sort, but here we see only loss, without recuperation. It is not that this land has not seen extinctions before.The Javan rhinoceros once roamed these swamps and marshes. Here once a city built by the Chand Sadagar merchant community also stood. Raja Basanta Rai built a refuge here while escaping the Mughals which was eventually destroyed by dacoits, Portuguese pirates, and salt smugglers. Here also lie the ruins of Canning, a port town on the river Malta, envisioned to replace Kolkata as a hub by the British but ravaged by a cyclone in 1867.
The people of Sundarbans had over millennia developed a code of living with nature: to take only as much as is necessary and to barter wherever possible. But the cyclones still raged, and floods took homes and lands away. Enchanted fishermen are led into deep seas and honey and wood collectors would disappear in the dark, shaded canopy of dense forests. It isn't hard to see the effects of water and submergence in these works—stubs of trees, water polished barks, and cliff-like broken edges of land.
In the strange, eerie sublime, Dutta reminds us that the ecological crisis is also a loss of codes and stories, rituals and song. He thus locates power not in the political terrain of climate, extraction, and economy, but in the everyday life of care, nourishment, and interdependence. He moves away from the visible, leading us to what once was and now rests in its watery grave. Debris churns in the force of the tide. Could this detritus be the oil and gas that they drill for someday?
Dutta's primary mediums remain photography and drawing, which converge to produce complex, layered imagery.Through a process of elimination and composition, parts of landscapes and drawings are stitched into one image.These are then imported into the 3D software Blender, usually used to create video games and animations. Dutta challenges the coldness of the images translated by the software with a play of light and shadows. An old folk song is reduced to a hum amongst other score elements produced for the piece. Landscape is ultimately treated cinematically and remains the protagonist.
Dutta is also interested in the process of excavation and layering. In the large works, delicate ink strokes are used to produce a textural depth to the landscapes on paper. These scenes reference early illustration and poster traditions of the East as well as film storyboards, colonial landscape studies, and botanical drawings. The layering also provides a deliberate density to the image—a sense of fullness or a landscape collapsing onto itself. There is also a diorama-like approach to these visuals. Dutta thinks of the image in layers so there is a foreground, a middle and a background, illuminated dramatically like a theatre set. They seem familiar, but unreal, like they belong to the future. Dutta leaves clues of habitation and in some cases intrusion in the form of barricades and shells for architecture.
In comparison to these, there is a silence to the drawings on paper—images are distilled to a momentary focus. The shadows of an islet glisten on the water, fog and clouds engulf a lush tree, and divine light filters through a dense mesh of branches and leaves. Dutta attempts to think and conceive these compositions as islands, solitary and unto themselves. But they are not devoid of hope; light finds a way in.
Archipelago of Storms and Spirits signals a collision of two ecosystems—one of nature and one beyond—and within these, life and stories find home, at least temporarily. A lot remains unresolved in these islands and the search for closure is endless. This is the thing about swamps and shifting terrains, digging pasts is an impossible exercise. The sinking is a climate catastrophe to be reckoned with collectively, but there is also surrendering to time and tide that is necessary.They both don't end tragically, hopefully.
1Widows of men killed by the Bengal tiger in Sundarbans.
2Dampier-Hodges line serves as the boundary of the Sundarbans and marks it off from the non-Sundarbans parts of the districts of north and South 24 Parganas. William Dampier, the Sundarbans Commissioner, and Lieutenant Hodges, the Surveyor for the Sundarbans, defined and surveyed the line of dense forests in 1829–1830.
Courtesy Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai. Text: Mario D'Souza, 2024.
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