Introduction: Fragments of disappearance and survival
A leaf from Jahangirnama, now in the collection of the St Petersburg Museum, depicts an extraordinary artistic rendering of a dodo bird (Raphus cucullatus). This painting by Ustād Manṣūr is dated ~1615 CE and is one of the earliest and finest artistic representations of the bird before it went extinct (Welch 1996; Koch 2009). Manṣūr’s dodo appears at the centre of the leaf along a flock of birds. A soft undulation of lines and shades in yellow-ochre and black create a naturalistic picture of the bird; its beak and claws and the eye with the white dot appear in contrast to the rendering of the bulging body. Peter Mundy’s travelling diary reveals that two dodos were brought to Surat from Mauritius in 1633–1634 CE. There is no evidence of whether Manṣūr painted the dodo from a live model, from a stuffed dodo or from a picture. By 1680 CE, the dodo had become extinct and survived only as one of the impressions of an extensive exploitation of different kinds of bodies in the colonial trading enterprises. In 1755 CE, the last preserved physical dodo remnants perished. Many ornithologists consider Ustād Manṣūr’s dodo to be the most reliable and accurate image of the bird, probably painted from a live model because of its skillful and extraordinary naturalistic rendering. This rendition of the dodo was used to create a trustworthy impression of a dodo after its extinction in the late sixteenth century (Dissanayake 2004; Koch 2009). When I found a print of Manṣūr’s dodo in a Mauritian artist’s studio, it offered me a way to consider how the endurance of one individual artistic impression carried also another kind of survival, one of historical and epistemic dimensions that connects layered narratives of lives and afterlives.
More than a hundred years after the dodo’s extinction, millions of indentured labourers from the Indian subcontinent arrived in Mauritius, the former home of the dodos. Though dodos and the indentured labourers never met in Mauritius during their lifetime, today, iconic pictures of both dodos and indentured labourers are omnipresent in Mauritius’s landscape, imprinted on various multimodal materials such as tourist and education leaflets, souvenirs or trophies. The impression of dodos and the portraits of indentured labourers tangle different colonial afterlives — they can be understood as what I call indentations, impressions indented onto Mauritian history that simultaneously resonate with their erasure as well as their enduring presence. From this vantage point, the following reflections investigate the ways in which contemporary Mauritian art engages the material and embodied after/lives of indentured labour histories and how the artists working today, descendants of indentured labourers, explore a variety of visual, textual and sensorial materials in order to connect and counter the narratives of their indentured ancestors. I thus aim to contribute to the epistemological and methodological scope of studying visual and sensorial materials of indentured labour histories in Mauritius. I explore the methodological perspective of ‘connected histories’ (cf. Subrahmanyam 1997) which proposes tracing fragile threads that are both fragmentary and connective. Concerning the robust historical archive available around the indentured labour trade in the Indian Ocean world, this article aims instead to connect living visual and sensorial repositories. It also reflects upon my decade-long engagement with veteran artists and individuals who are descendants of indentured labourers and who were involved in building a new national identity following independence in Mauritius. 1
The first section of this article discusses how Mauritian artists who are the descendants of indentured plantation workers utilize materials such as colonial records or familial objects as well as sensorial experiences in executing their works and articulating their methods. I will focus in particular on the artistic practices of Dharmadeo Nirmal Hurry and Mala Chummun Ramyead. I argue that their artistic process can be understood as a deliberate and deeply embodied processing of their inherited indentured labour histories. In the later part of my reflections, I examine a mural installed by Hurry and Ramyead in the Renganaden Seeneevassen Building, a hub of government and corporate enterprises in Mauritius. I discuss how the mural can be understood as a visual critique of the stigmatization of the indentured plantation workers’ bodies; the mural subverts the colonial gaze that brutally framed and categorized indentured migrants’ bodies. By reading the mural as a collaborative communal project, it is possible to go beyond the spectacle-driven colonial gaze and instead recognize the ways the artists gave voice to the subaltern indentured ancestors and coeval communities. 2
On indentured inheritance: Impressions, materials and methods
Fragments and scraps of what must have formerly been metal objects come together and form the figure of a sculptural dodo bird (Figure 1). Conversely, a painting on a discarded packaging board shows a group of dodos on a boat (Figure 2). When discussing the making of these artworks, Dharmadeo Nirmal Hurry, the sculptor, connects the definition of ‘dodo’ in the English dictionary to how colonial recruiters perceived his indentured ancestors. In his work, Nirmal, a descendant of the Hurry family who came to Mauritius in 1854 from Bishambharpur village, 150 kilometres from today’s Patna in present-day India, deliberates the complex trajectories of his indentured origins. He articulates this origin by exploring materials that are scraps, have been scattered or have very little economic value. For Hurry, the dodos are fragments of the colonial archive, irrespective of their usage in Mauritius. 3 Having created umpteen dodos in his artistic career since the 2000s, both for the cultural industry and for participatory artistic practices, pushed him to think through forms and materials in the context of aesthetic repertoires and inheritances. The dodo bird’s visual remnants, including paintings such as Manṣūr’s, provided him with strategies to reconsider the sensorial and material impressions left behind by his ancestors.
Hurry claims a whole host of materials and spaces as inheritance: the photographs of his indentured ancestors (which he collected from the MGI Indian Immigration Archives); the remains of sugarcane factories in the L’esperance Trebuchet where his ancestors worked as indentured labourers; the sites he sees while going to work at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute (MGI); the cultivation processes of sugarcane crops and its remains in the post-cultivation era. All of them have entered into his artistic practice as both archival and sensory fragments of everyday life. He has created, for example, a sculptural mattress (2018), using agricultural waste and jute sacks (Figure 3). On the mattress, he wrote a chronicle on indentured plantation workers’ lives using cow dung and soil which released a distinct odour when the mattress was wet and then drying up. This Bhojpuri chronicle has similarities with the community lyrics (Geet Gawai) Hurry composed from stories he heard from elderly kin in his teens. He also stresses that these kinds of mattresses were actually used in his home — he intimately knows the feeling of resting on them. As such, the mattress enables Hurry to process oral, visual, textual and sensorial materials into sculpture. However, as I would argue, Hurry’s mattress also transcends the sculpture beyond its complex formalism — described by Rosalind Krauss as a manifestation of the ‘maker’s growing awareness that sculpture is a medium’ (1977: 5). Hurry’s schooling in institutions like the MGI (Mauritius), Jamia Millia Islamia University Delhi (India) and L’École des Beaux-Arts (France) made him not only aware of sculpture as a medium, but also of the potential processes of subversion as they were pushed forth by artists in the 1980s and 1990s. His sculptural installations tangle with the placemaking process of lives — his own as an artist with indentured origin and those of the indentured materialities he has inherited. Inspired by Hurry’s practice and drawing from the Warburgian framework of the afterlife, which postulates the continuity and survival of images as afterlife as opposed to extinction (Didi-Huberman 2003: 273), I want to foreground two aspects in connection with the artistic practice in contemporary Mauritius for the remainder of this text: first, the survival of indentured materials in the repositories of colonial records, familial belongings, oral narratives and sensorial embodiments; and second, the cognitive knowledges of indentured migrants that have travelled through generations.
Dharmadeo Nirmal Hurry’s sculptural installation with mattress using agricultural waste and jute sacks, Photo credit: author 2018.
Hurry repeatedly uses agricultural materials like sugarcane waste in his installations (Figure 4). For Hurry, these ‘plantation scraps’ are his inheritance. He grew up in a house with a sugarcane thatch that needed alteration after every cyclone, and together with his family he actively participated in these repair works. He heard stories of sugarcane leaves from the elders while repairing the sugarcane thatch (Hurry, interview with the author, 7 June 2018). Thus, transforming the knowledge of sugarcane plantations and their products and agricultural waste into a sculptural installation offers a way to establish a bodily connection with his indentured ancestral past. He asserts that the process of cutting, collecting and cleaning the sugarcane plants provokes him to imagine his ancestors’ indentured experiences. He says that there would be moments when he would remove the gloves and work on the sugarcane leaves with his bare hands to feel the sharp edges of the leaves and the images they evoked. Hurry’s earlier installation in 2002 depicts coloured hands made of clay holding jute ropes (Figure 5). Discussing this work, he has said that these hands registered the work that the indentured migrants did, and the work he does — which kept him bodily connected to his ancestors throughout the processing of these materials (Interview, 3 June 2016). The hands changing colours and textures (tan and burnt) register both as plantation workers’ and artist’s skills. Hurry’s revelation reminded me of an interview with Gaiutra Bahadur, the author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (2013) in the New York Times, in which she mentioned that she went to the plantation sites where her great-grandmother worked and walked through muddy sugarcane fields — how the spiky contours of sugarcane leaves, the purpling of the cane stems and the smell of burnt agricultural waste felt (Bearak: 2013). Here, it is pertinent to note both Hurry and Bahadur’s focus on sensorial bodily engagements in their artistic practices which resonate with the lived experiences of their ancestors. For them, both sensorial experience and cognitive knowledges are ways to think through the gaps in the submerged and suppressed narratives of indenture.
Dharmadeo Nirmal Hurry’s sculptural installation with sugarcane leaves, exhibited in the first Mauritius Biennale, Photo credit: Nirmal Hurry 2002.
Dharmadeo Nirmal Hurry’s sculptural installation with coloured hands made of clay holding jute ropes, Photo credit: Nirmal Hurry 2002.
Mala Chummun Ramyead, a veteran sculptor from Mauritius, recalls a wooden trunk with which her great-grandfather, Chemun, landed in Mauritius on 7 June 1859; for her, the trunk represents both the sensorial traces and the artisanal knowledges of her ancestor in a way that transcends mere memory. In the 1880s of post-Independent Mauritius, Ramyead, a young graduate from Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan, the art institute established by the poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, bagged the commission of a monument in Phooliyar, in commemoration of the first arrival of the indentured labourers in 1834. The commission drove her to explore colonial documents and community histories, and to inquire about the ‘stuff’ that frequently appears in familial stories — during this exploration, she found the wooden trunk in decaying condition in the storeroom of her ancestral house on Cassis Road in Port Louis. She spent hours reading this wooden trunk. There were no stories told by her great-grandfather about the trunk, except that he came to Mauritius with it; her nonagenarian mother’s memories of this box are incoherent. However, it was a sturdy trunk that remained in use even after the great-grandfather had passed. It was placed in the storeroom when its condition deteriorated to the point when it was beyond use. Even then, they could not discard it because it was the only ancestral possession that had remained with them. Nobody in the family or the neighbourhood had the artisanal skill to repair and restore it. Sending it away for repair was too expensive and beyond their means. Ramyead learnt about this box while trying to gather her family history from her mother and says that more than finding the box, its condition astonished her (Ramyead, interview with the author, 24 January 2014). Then she realized what it meant to be a sculptor and decided to repair the box herself. She carefully studied each part of the box and got a feel for the carpenter who made it and her great-grandfather to whom it belonged. Through the artistic process of repairing the box, the artist unpeels layers of the specific artisanal knowledges involved in making the wooden trunk. She had to examine the cracks on the box’s body inch by inch, corner to corner, to understand its joinery, bend, fix and finish; she had to understand the box to restore it. Working with one’s hands — touching, rubbing, and nailing — is an integral part of woodcarving. However, Ramyead’s experience of repairing the box was an entirely different feeling — she compares the trunk’s material conditions with scars on a body — touching them is like touching the impressions left behind by dried, healed wounds, rough textures next to soft; thickening black beside tender brown. Ramyead was trying to get a feel for both the artisan’s hands and for her great-grandfather, whose photograph in the MGI Indian Immigration Archives cannot carry the same familiarity and endurance. The space between colonial and familial repositories thus invites artistic intervention. The wooden body of the trunk created a bodily association between the artisan and her ancestors. Historical consciousness, artistic knowledge and ancestral affect are thus entangled with inherited and surviving visual and textual colonial documents.
When visiting Ramyead’s studio, I noticed a print of Ustād Manṣūr’s dodo painting and, knowing that she had never created dodo art, asked her about it: she explained that the print was a page of an old book in decaying condition which she came across in her college days; at that time, she knew very little about the artist and the painting’s history, just like she knew only little about her own family’s migration history (interview with Ramyead, conducted in June 2018). Both objects — the print of Manṣūr’s dodo study and Ramyead’s family wooden trunk, her artistic and familial inheritances — offered her a way to ponder questions of remembrance and survival and how embodied knowledges intersect with, become subsumed under, but also sometimes subvert the colonial archive.
Both Ramyead and Hurry have expressed their strong disapproval of marking and categorizing the indentured plantation workers as ‘coolies’ or ‘unskilled’ workers. They posit that the stereotypical characterization of ‘coolie’ made their families deliberately keep them away from their familial connectedness with the Indian subcontinent, Indian Ocean and Indian labour histories (interviews with Ramyead and Hurry, May and June 2018). The textual, visual and sensorial regimes of defining and limiting the ‘coolie’ have scarred their descendants’ epistemic thought process, despite their upliftment through wealth, education and governance. Both artists stress that indentured labourers had cultivated knowledge of soil, paddy, water and wood, which they invested in working in the sugarcane plantations and building their settlements. For these artists, then, making sculptures with these natural materials is not only part of their inherited artisanal knowledge but also a way to interrogate the histories that denied the development of shared cultivated epistemologies. I argue that the dismissal and interruption of the migrant indentured labourers’ epistemic powers were already apparent in the process of colonial labour recruitment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the core of the recruitment process were two objects: immigration tickets and a register book. These object-materials epitomize the difficult inheritance of servitude, struggle and survival. These object-materials registered the name, age, sex, marital and caste status, height and distinguishing marks, place of origin including district and village, the name of the ship which brought them to the island, the date of their arrival in the colony, the name of their first employer, and the date of their return to India or death (Allen 2021: n. pag.).
The immigration tickets and register books reflect the designs and decisions of the recruiting authority; as materializations of the cruel and dehumanizing violence of the indenture system they created a specific, narrow space, or indentation, for the labourers’ bodies to fit into — one that would optimize them for work on the plantation. In this narrow framing, there was no space for already-existing artisanal skills and knowledge. On 4 January 1836, John Gladstone Esq., in a letter to Messrs. Gillanders of Arbuthnot & Co. in Calcutta, gave an order for one hundred young, active and able-bodied coolies (Scoble 1840: 5; emphasis added). The record books and immigration tickets were designed to define and ultimately produce the ‘able body’ for the labourers after the abolition of slavery in the 1830s.
Many indentured labourers had artisanal skills that they used to build or create objects and belongings for themselves and for their households. 4 The recruited labourers’ names, castes and communities indicate their hereditary artisanal professions, ancestral apprenticeships and the craftsmanship they could produce. During the recruitment process, the medical inspection and physical verification (confirmed by a stamp on the forehead) 5 as well as the photos on the immigration tickets were ways to deny the embodied, epistemic knowledge of the migrant labourers and turn the ‘able’ body of the worker into a stamp impressed onto the colonial document of indenture. This ‘able’ body was a concern and criterion for the recruiter in their correspondence (Scoble 1840: 5); it was visualized as a prospective fungible, exploitable entity and was confirmed through verification and authentication at various stages of recruitment — from departing the home ports to the arrival at the plantations. Thus, the immigration ticket, register book and the photographs that would be pasted on the ticket and record book were material, textual and graphical impressions of the plantation — an integral part of the colonial archive. For these labourers’ descendants, then, these materials and methods live forth as both tangible and intangible inheritances.
A mural in the Renganaden Seeneevassen Building
A mural on the southwest wall of the atrium in the Renganaden Seeneevassen Building in Port Louis, popularly known as the National Pension Fund Building, looks mundane (Figure 6). This low-relief concrete mural shows people working, waiting and greeting others. No additional light or enhancing frame is added to this mural. It sits between a window and a staircase. Thus, whenever one takes the staircase, one glances at it. It is even visible from the thirteenth floor of the building. Hundreds of people pass it daily and seem to be at ease with it (Figure 7). People stand leaning against the mural, obliviously creating an embodied, sensory connection. The users of the building identify it as a landmark in the vast Renganaden Seeneevassen Building that houses ministries, organizations and companies. Many people do not distinguish it from the wall itself; in fact, it often goes unnoticed. It does not get visitors like other museums and heritage sites in Mauritius, such as the Aapravasi Ghat World Heritage Site. It is neither neglected nor protected in any significant way. When the wall paint fades away or chips off, the mural gets a fresh coat of paint along with the wall. In 1992, during the installation time, the wall was not painted by the artists; the paint coat on the mural today thus reflects the management’s own aesthetic choice. The mural’s presence is enhanced by the noises and voices of the daily workers and operations until all the offices close at the end of the day. I first noticed it at a Bhojpuri Geet Gawai performance in June 2018. For the remainder of my text, I read this mural along with embodied sculptures and colonial archival records to trace decolonial narratives of indentured labour in Mauritius today.
Mural, Renganaden Seeneevassen Building (1992), material: concrete, cast and mould; size: 5 × 2.5 metres, Photo credit: Nirmal Hurry, 2022.
View of the mural and a Bhojpuri Geet Gawai performance in the atrium of the Renganaden Seeneevassen Building, Photo credit: author 2018.
The mural is approximately two and a half metres long and five metres high, placed on a white wall. On the left you can see a mother in a sari holding an infant and her daughter in a frock; they stand next to two men in suits and ties, shaking hands; a man wearing a cap appears in front of them, facing a woman in a dress with a wristwatch on the left hand who is working on a computer, presumably an office worker. There is incised text on the computer screen, which is visible but not legible due to the layers of paint the mural received over the years. Behind them is a high-rise building. A man in a wheelchair appears in front of the mother and her children; his self-reliance is rendered by showing his hands on the wheels. A man wearing a hat and gloves is shown doing something with a tool at the right corner of the mural; the form of his hat is similar to that found in images of African workers that are widely printed on different kinds of articles in Mauritius, such as souvenirs and guidebooks. Behind the man with the hat and gloves and the woman working on the computer is a blurred scene of a sugarcane field and workers reaping the harvest. The sugarcane plantation as a distant and blurred site, behind the more clearly distinguishable figures in the forefront, suggests a journey to the past. The facial features of characters, such as eyes, noses, lips and ears, are profiled with bold engraved outlines. None of the human figures can be read as one specific personification; instead, they bear social and civil identities, like mother or worker. Elements like sari, suit and tie, dress, hat, wristwatch, wheelchair, computer or gloves act as visual markers of age, sex or profession. Above all, the mother, children, workers and even the person in the wheelchair portray diverse ‘enabled bodies’ embedded in a lively community. Two objects in particular — a wheel of the chair and a computer — draw our attention because they manifest the transcending histories, time, knowledge and skill. The layers of bold, engraved and curved lines suggest the form of a ship, steps like those of a ghat, a high-rise building and a sugarcane field. This mural can thus be read as a pictorial representation of the geo-body of Mauritius. 6
In 1992, Ramyead and Hurry secured the commission for the mural through Sita Seecharrun, art director and project leader of Artline Designers Ltd., which acted as an intermediary between the artists and the Ministry of Social Security. The project had a budget of two lakhs in Mauritian rupees. After 12 March 1992, when Mauritius constitutionally assented to be a republic, this newly constructed building was imagined as a space to house ministry offices and public and private sectors. The mural in the building was commissioned to be low maintenance, durable and to capture the aesthetics of the people, given the number of visitors it would receive every day. Ramyead and Hurry made the mural using the mould and cast method — they first created the relief in clay, then cast the mould in plaster, and finally cast the relief in concrete (Figures 8 and 9). The relief was then nailed to the wall; the nails appear as dots throughout the mural. They explain that the process involved is more than making an artwork (Ramyead and Hurry, interviews with the author, June 2018). The process was like countering the materiality of indentureship precisely when they nailed the mural on the wall. The process also demanded long hours on-site, which they had to devote after the teaching schedule at the MGI in Moka; this led them to share, discuss, agree and disagree — all this resonates in their work. Hurry was initially a student of Ramyead but became a colleague at the MGI. Mutual learning and collegiality were at the core of the process when they were executing the mural.
Making of the Mural by Mala Ramyead and Nirmal Hurry; Sita Seecharrun from Artline Designers Ltd is also seen in the photo, Photo credit: Mala Ramyead 1992.
Installation of the Mural by Mala Ramyead and Nirmal Hurry; Photo credit: Mala Ramyead 1992.
Creating the mural demanded intensive bodily engagement in order to ensure that each part resembled their vision. When work started, Ramyead had just delivered her first child a few months ago. She underscored that her experience was very different from her earlier experience of labour-intensive artistic work. She found herself relating to the mother figure, while Hurry found a connection with the man wearing the hat and gloves (Ramyead, interview with the author, 11 May 2019). As such, they ensured their right to perceive and receive the images in the mural as liked to their own embodied and experiential realities. Building the mural step by step was also a way to establish their right to construct the way the mural would be seen; they envisioned themselves and their communities in the newly formed republic of Mauritius. Thus, the mural is a visual indentation of democratic labourhood in the new republic. I further suggest that this mural can be understood as an embodiment of the colonial construct of the ‘able body’ of indentured labourers, the ‘geo-body’ of Mauritius, and the ‘enabled body’ of the newly born republic. The Renganaden Seeneevassen Building is situated next to the Old Prison building: a reminder of the punishment inflicted on labourers’ and convicts’ bodies in the colonial system. In contrast I would argue that the Renganaden Seeneevassen Building stands for emancipation and empowerment. While the Old Prison Building and Aapravasi Ghat 7 are inherited spaces, or indentations, that are used to reconstruct and preserve their difficult histories, the Renganaden Seeneevassen Building and the mural on the wall emerge shared, cultivated sites. Reflecting on the acceleration in economic success in the 1990s (Yao et al. 2005; Subramanian 2013), the mural can also be understood as a visual assertion of the cultivated space, soil and communities born out of historical struggle and indentured knowledge production.
After the mural was installed, it did not have any formal inauguration, nor did it receive any noteworthy mention in the news. While the mural has not been forgotten or ignored, it was also never commemorated in any distinctive way. This regular, mundane and ordinary engagement with the mural is very different from how, for example, the Aapravasi Ghat is dealt with, which functioned as the immigration depot for indentured labourers and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Nobody is allowed to lean against the walls housing the exhibitions at the Aapravasi Ghat. The viewer is asked to stand in front of the exhibited photos and the photos, which, in turn, become the sole subject of the viewer’s probing gazes, evoking certain colonial visual regimes of subject and objecthood. As I have emphasized above, during the colonial period, indentured labourers were photographed and painted, and their images were printed and reproduced on various articles such as postcards, magazines or newspapers; these media articles were then sold, collected and circulated as exotic images (Bahadur 2015). Anna Arabindan-Kesson speaks of building a photographic frame around the body of the Indian peasant (2018: 411). The indentured labourers and their children were framed for photography, wherein they were treated as objects to gaze upon, and these are poignant inheritances.
In contrast to these structured and ordered ways of seeing (and being perceived), the mural in the Renganaden Seeneevassen Building does not define or direct one’s gaze. You may see it standing at any corner of the foyer or floor in the building; you may lean against the mural wall and see or do other things. The figures in the mural are not subject to viewers’ gazes; their look, posture and gestures do not attract any special attention. Thus, the spectatorship constructed with and by the mural is fluid and flexible and resonates with the people and purposes of the building. The artists were of course highly aware of the historical visual stereotypes associated with images of indentured plantation workers. They rendered the human figures in the mural looking in various directions — left, right, down, and straight — on various levels of the mural. In this way, the mural does not allow viewers to settle down with any particular angle to focus on any particular figure or side; viewers have to shift their positions to get proximity. Thus the spectatorship of the mural counters the colonial gaze, which was one of the core actors in the stigmatization of the indentured coolie. In response, the mural manifests a counter-visualization by processing through and beyond historical visual regimes. The artists not only prioritized their own intimate and embodied story of indentured labour, they also put forth the sovereignty of an independent Mauritius that promised social security as a republican fundamental.
The visual and textual representations of indentured workers’ lives have an afterlife: they survive as impressions and reconstructions of the poetic and political matrix of the post-indentured period of Mauritius. The images of the indentured plantation workers in various forms, pressed onto and into immigration tickets, record books, picture postcards and travelogues, are explored in artistic practices that attend to the indentured workers as a vulnerable community while at the same time interrogating their stigmatization. Carter and Torabully aptly point out that ‘the stigma of the coolie was to haunt the overseas Indians for many years to come; in some respects, it haunts them still’ (2002: 61). We see the afterlife of this stigma in artistic productions and articulations; the stigma of indentured labourers survived in and through their belongings and photographs. Imogen Tyler (2020: 9) argues that stigma is a material practice of bodily marking and subordination. It is a ‘disabling force, a form of power that is inscribed in bodies, places and communities in ways that often leave profound and permanent scars’ (29). Ramyead compared the scar of stigmatization with the material texture of her ancestor’s trunk. Hurry’s sculptural installation with sheets, leather and pigments display blood-stained human limbs falling out of a suitcase; he calls it ‘our migration’ (Figure 10). While articulating the work, Hurry mentioned that lived experiences are more than historical facts; they flow like an ocean and are subsumed and submerged in the ocean. Hurry’s work posits a sharp visual introspection. The installation shows ‘able’ human limbs; limbs were at the centre of interest in the indentured labour workforce. However, it also resonates with the stigma embedded in the history of indentured labour. It is significant to reflect upon how historical facts unfold to give rise to historical consciousness. Several families informed me that there was a tendency to discard old familial stuff from the 1970s to 1990s when they felt they could replace the old stuff with brand-new items. Later, they realized that this was a deliberate attempt on their part to forget the familial articles associated with their indentured coolie days. Some also mentioned that while growing up, their families did not inform them of their indentured inheritance; this had a lasting impression on them. When they were eventually informed of their inheritance, they were unprepared and lacked the historical or emotional tools to process this information. The stigma resurfaced with the discovery and reading of profuse textual and visual records of colonial enterprises. The stigma thus survived just as these records survived. The mural in the Renganaden Seeneevassen Building can be understood, and experienced, as a visual epistemic resistance to the stigmatization that framed the indentured labourer pictorially, orally and textually.
Dharmadeo Nirmal Hurry’s installation with a suitcase and packaging materials, Photo credit: Krishna Luchoomun 2017.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2018: 132) has argued that artisanal knowledge is practical, empirical, vernacular and popular, with differences and diversity in features, and cannot be separated from other social practices. Artisanal knowledge is selected, resignified and even reinvented in the process of struggle mobilization. The simple mural in the Renganaden Seeneevassen Building is a rendering of social struggles and lives. It stands as a visual critique of the stigmatization of the indentured coolies. It defends both able and vulnerable bodies of the communities. The portrayal of children and the physically disabled man alongside the able-bodied workers in the offices, workshops and agricultural fields suggests an inclusive and representation of vulnerability, diverse ability and labour communities. Thus, the mural in the Renganaden Seeneevassen Building counters the gaze that in the past stigmatized bodies, vulnerability and mobility, subverting the colonial gaze.
Conclusion: Connecting fragments
The histories of colonial records of the indentured labour trade and the artisanal practices by indentured labourers are intimately entangled with the sensorial materials explored by Mauritian artists like Mala Chummun Ramyead and Dharmadeo Nirmal Hurry. For Ramyead, the ancestral trunk is not only a way to connect with her great-grandfather, who was an indentured labourer, but also with the artisan who crafted the piece. The object’s materiality and the way it feels on the skin/like skin becomes a passageway for connecting the familial and artisanal past. Similarly, Hurry, in his work, finds that using plantation materials evokes in him sensory echoes of his forebearers’ labour experiences. By exploring sugarcane and other agricultural waste, he is able to locate and inhabit the gap between the fragmented historical and submerged narratives. The sculptural repertoire created by Ramyead and Hurry can be thought of as physical, intimate and embodied impressions or indentations, created and stamped by an afterlife of indenture that emerges from the past to productively inform the contemporary artistic practices in Mauritius and to honour their difficult histories and survivals.