Dialogue may not be on the political cards, but artists from India and Pakistan have brought forth a collective memory project, Separations Geography, transcending not just distance but also time
Writer Onaiza Drabu has overlaid archival images from Lahore and some from Kashmir to recreate the Lahore in her head. The accompanying text tries to sketch the sound, food and mood of the city she has never visited
It is 10 PM some 12,243 km away in Vancouver, when the weekday sun is still up and bright here in Mumbai. Filmmaker Fahad Naveed is talking to us about a city he has decrypted in his imagination, a city he has never set foot in, a city he may never be allowed to visit—Mumbai.
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Naveed’s rendezvous with the Maximum city has been through glitch, pirated Bollywood movies that he watched growing up in the ’90s in Karachi. Is that the real Mumbai, he asks?
In Srinagar, Onaiza Drabu repeats the Punjabi saying: Jis Lahore nahi dekhya, O jameya nai (the one who hasn’t seen Lahore, cannot be said to have been born) on loop. She reimagines Lahore, a physically unfamiliar city, referencing postcards, photographs, literature and poetry. Together, Drabu and Naveed create Duur-Paas. A week after Union Home Minister Amit Shah said, “I have a clear mandate. I don’t want to talk to Pakistan” in a public rally in Baramulla, the cross-border artistic collaborative between India-based Daak Vaak and Pakistan-based Mandarjazail Collective released Separations Geography. The art project takes its cue from Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali’s poem, By the Waters of the Sind, which explores partition and personal loss. Drabu and Naveed’s Duur-Paas is one of the projects within Separations Geography.
“There is a memory of Lahore,” Drabu tells mid-day over the telephone, “an image of it in my head, even though I have never visited the city. This recollection is based on what I have read in books and poems, seen in art and while talking to friends with some connection to the city. I asked friends and family for archival material, took cues from literature and history, did some calligraphy and put photographs all together as a blur of images, which is also how I have Lahore in my mind... like a blur.”
Pakistani filmmaker Fahad Naveed captures a glitchy image of Mumbai from his Bollywood memories. The artworks are part of a seven-work collective project, Separations Geography, by 12 Indo-Pak artists
Twelve artists from either side of the border have put together seven collaborative projects for Separations Geography, which started taking shape in 2018-19. It was originally envisioned as a physical exhibition to open simultaneously in Karachi and Delhi, but with COVID-19 disrupting the world and its plans, it went online. The website will be live till August 2023, after which it could become a publication.
Inside the project, you’ll also find Lafzi Muamma—a word puzzle—crafted by Richi Bhatia and Hira Khan as a memoir for the digital era. Chasing Conversations, a collaborative quest by Mahvash Masood and Numair Abbasi, records a travelogue not of a physical journey, but a temporal one across borders and lost memories. The Bed by Veera Rustomji explores the many ideas around the piece of furniture through distance and displacement, while Shahzaib Arif Shaikh and Nusaiba Khan in Remember, Remember, built a thesaurus of memory and sensory experiences. Shanzay Subzwari and Abhishek Thapar document their non-verbal meeting across the India-Pakistan border in scribbles, photos, sketches and mail trails. Her Pandaan by Affan Baghpati explores the many versions and stories of pandaan (an ornate box holding betel leaves, nuts and implements of paan-making) across Karachi, Lucknow, Allahabad and Canada.
Fahad Naveed and Onaiza Drabu
“Growing up,” says Naveed, “all our heroes were from Bollywood. You would go to a local barber’s shop and Shah Rukh Khan’s photos would be all over. When Tere Naam released, all the boys in Pakistan copied Salman Khan’s middle-parting hairstyle. We flirted in filmi style. All things good and bad came from there. Even with the distance, we shared a culture.” He is currently in Vancouver pursuing a PhD, and is also one of the curators and editors of the project, along with Drabu, Hira Khan and Pracha Jha. “Then came the ban and actors on either side were not allowed to participate with each other creatively,” he adds. “We realised the space for collaboration is shrinking and we need to bring it back. There is no commercial angle to our project. Getting together India and Pakistan on any platform is anyway a political act.”
Drabu says that now that the project is out there, they might also co-ordinate exchange of postcards across the border, organise an artist meet-and-greet or help people in the two nations become digital penpals. “We did a poll to see if people would be interested in getting on a Zoom call with the artists, and there was much enthusiasm. That will be our next step,” she says.
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