EMPIRE LINES

Dr. Sonal Khullar sounds out how the Long Partition shapes Indian and Pakistani identities, through Bani Abidi’s 2016 audio installation, Memorial to Lost Words.

Memorial to Lost Words has been seen and heard across Edinburgh, Berlin, Sharjah, and Chicago. But its installation at Lahore Museum in Pakistan, as part of the city’s inaugural Lahore Biennale in 2018, marked a kind of homecoming. Bani Abidi’s eight-channel soundscape recalls over a million Indian soldiers who served in the British Indian Army during World War I, through Punjabi music, an oversized statue of Queen Victoria, and the English-translated letters of those who never returned home. A counter-monument, it remembers ordinary civilians and soldiers, rather than the generals and rulers celebrated by architects like Edward Lutyens. It also exposes the lingering imperial legacies of literature, like Rudyard Kiping’s Kim and the Zam-Zammah, and how museum collections, like people, were partitioned between post-colonial India and Pakistan.

Part of EMPIRE LINES’ Partition Season, marking the 75 year anniversary of the Partition of British India in August 1947, which led to the formation of India and Pakistan. Listen to the other episode with Dr. Nalini Iyer.

PRESENTER: Dr. Sonal Khullar, W. Norman Brown Associate Professor of South Asian Studies in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Worldly Affiliations (2015) and completing a book manuscript The Art of Dislocation on conflict, collaboration, and contemporary art from South Asia.

ART: Memorial to Lost Words at the Lahore Museum, Bani Abidi (2016/2018)

IMAGE: ‘Memorial to Lost Words’.

SOUNDS: Bani Abidi, Saad Sultan, Ali Aftab Saeed, Harsakhian.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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