New York-based filmmaker Sheba Remy Kharbanda and photographer William Charles ‘Chuck’ Moss’ video installation shares memories, pain and suffering of those who witnessed the Partition and were forced to migrate from India. They share details with Divya Kaushik
Images float on the walls of the white tent erected temporarily. The tent houses within, many memories and incidents of the past. Visitors are welcome to share those memories, pain and sufferings of displacement. The tent is actually a video installation by New York-based filmmaker and metaphysician Sheba Remy Kharbanda and photographer and cinematographer William Charles ‘Chuck’ Moss. The installation that will be placed at The Atrium, India Habitat Center, from November 14 to 21 illustrates the narrative of Amrik Singh, a Punjabi/Afghani Sikh who at the age of nine left his home in India in the months preceding the Partition of India in 1947. Clearly visible on the white textile of the tent, from both inside and outside, the structure are sequences of interviews, landscapes and historical documentation. Soundtrack of contemporary Punjabi and Urdu poetry plays in the background.
The installation is titled Five Rivers: A Portrait of Partition. Sheba explains, “Five rivers is a translation of the word Punjab. Punjab is both the geographic as well as metaphysical setting for the story behind the piece. The story is my father’s personal recollections of his migration from Northwest Frontier to India in the wake of Partition.” Sheba shares an interesting account of why they chose the tent for their video installation. She adds, “I think the tent chose us. We had been working with a New York-based artist who has a background in installation and we began exploring video art. As filmmakers we had collaborated with him in the past. He created this wonderful installation involving video projection to tell the story of democracy in his native Hungary. But it didn’t make as much sense for this piece. One day as I was listening to the interview of my father, which my partner and I conducted with him on a trip to India in 2005, which is the narrative that underpins the entire piece, he said something about his recollections upon arriving at a refugee camp in Patiala. All he saw were tents. That image and the idea of tents speak not just literally about the experience of being made homeless but also the transient nature of identity and the fleeting nature of memory. I had a vision in my mind of what kind of tent would work best and I just started looking for it on the Internet. Eventually I found a great supplier in Jodhpur who shipped a tent to me in Brooklyn.”
The art piece takes people on a journey to explore themes of identity, memory and displacement. The story that forms the piece is grounded in the reality of Partition. It narrates the impact that it had on the people who witnessed it and on the subcontinent. “The device we use is the one of remembrance. The story that is told is based upon personal memory and the focus of the memories in question is upon who one is and where one has come from and the fact that one cannot go back to that former home,” shares Sheba who feels that video installation, as a medium, has offered her an extension of video and film’s storytelling capacity, “an ability to expand into a non-linear format.”
Sheba, who studied law and politics at the University of london, has read and researched a lot on the issues of Partition. She launched the Vilayati Tarti/Foreign land Project in 2005. It is a documentary film and online oral history archive that chronicles the stories of elder women from the Punjab, who, in the decades following the Partition of India, left for England in search of work and a new home. She says, “I actually didn’t hear or learn much about Partition until I was an adult. Only my mother talked about it. Having been educated in the UK, we learned much more about the history of the European continent. And though I knew facts about the event, no one in my family really talked about the experience of enduring that defining event in our history. It was when I moved to the US that I realised my want to understand my heritage. In the wake of September 11, I found myself in New York working in human rights research, in an environment where my brethren were being targeted just because of our heritage. It was a very discombobulating time. I would answer telephone calls from people who had been detained in immigration sweeps that targeted people from the Subcontinent and the Middle East. Everyone had one thing in common — they had always thought of the US as their home and didn’t understand how they were now the outsider or the enemy. This experience was the motivation to learn more about my own heritage. I learnt that both my grandparents were displaced by Partition and that it was directly due to leaving their homelands that I was born and raised in london. I began an oral history project in 2005 focussed on interviewing women of my grandmother’s generation who were similarly displaced by the Partition and who came to West london like my mother’s family in the 1960s to create life anew. The project was motivated in no small part by wanting to know about my late grandmother’s experience. She died eight years after leaving India, always wishing she could have returned. What I came to understand was just how upending that event (Partition) was. So many of the women I interviewed wished they could have gone ‘back’ but that place they had left behind no longer made sense to them anymore.”
Sheba and William run Callejero Films, a Brooklyn-based video production company. She informs, “We service all kinds of video provision companies from industrial to commercials, documentaries and short stories. My partner William Moss is a DP who has helped define the look of a couple of television shows in the US and has shot a number of great award-nominees and award-winning documentary films.”