There could have been no better time to set afloat such an art work. Nor more ironic. At a time when nationalism has become a tug o' war issue, artist Vivan Sundaram has dived into the annals of history and plucked out a conveniently forgotten nationalist moment: the Bombay naval mutiny of 1946. In collaboration with film historian and cultural theorist Ashish Rajadhyaksha, he has created something that is tethered to history but also, quite literally, open to interpretation.
The Royal Indian Navy Mutiny was an uprising of sailors against British rule.
"Meanings of Failed Action: Insurrection 1946" will be exhibited at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya in Mumbai this month.
It is not the first time that Sundaram has approached a history project. There was the 1998 Victoria Memorial History Project that addressed an entire period from the mid-19th century to Partition. In "Meanings", however, he has focused on a moment and turned up the volume on experience.
Central to Sundaram's exhibition is the installation of a giant ship - 10 feet high, 40 feet long and 12 feet wide. "It is not just a piece of art; it can also be read as a piece of architecture," he says.
Visitors can enter the womb of the vessel and thereafter, for a little less than an hour, an audio track mixed by sound artiste David Chapman plays out.
The track is at times delicate and at times visceral in its mode of address with strong sounds played at a volume that physically vibrates the ship, Chapman tells The Telegraph in an email from London. He also mentions the archival sounds it includes. One such is a recording of B.C. Dutt from Bengal, a protagonist of the mutiny. Another is of Roshan Horabin, an Indian woman who witnessed the unrest.
While Sundaram picked the theme and worked on the larger structure, Rajadhyaksha did the research with film historian Valentina Vitali. "It took off in November 2015 with the Mumbai libra-ries. In 2016, I spent time at the University of Chicago library. The next stop was England - the Imperial War Museum, the British Library, the South Asian Studies Library at Cambridge... There was the P.C. Joshi archives in JNU, the Maharashtra State Archives..." At the end of it, he had 5,000 pages of material.
All of this was curated and channelised to create different elements. The old newspaper cuttings took the form of a mural, there is a website in the offing, and an audio script.
Audiences here who are used to an ambulatory museum experience will most likely enjoy the touch of theatre in "Meanings". And perhaps the performative return will help them re-view events with an open mind.
Calcuttans can find out for themselves as Sundaram plans to bring "Meanings" to the Victoria Memorial's Durbar Hall sometime in the future.
