The poll circus: A display at the exhibition

Ballot buttons of the land/ Who’ll be dealt the strongest hand?/Saffron, red, tri-coloured bands/Which party’s wish is your command?

Surely, it’s the biggest blah of all? With the stage vast and the cast comic — not to speak of the decibel duelling that keeps dipping below the belt — the vile wiles of Indian votecraft promise serial entertainment in the days ahead. At public cost, of course.

To help you savour the flavour of the farce, CIMA has packaged with humour black and hype baroque a multi-media art assault that would do Dada proud. No, not the petty party bully of your para, but Dadaism. The tradition of subverting tradition. This Dadaism is designed to debunk political dadagiri. And the extravagant circus that is the election process.

But the ballot remains as baffling as La Giaconda’s smile till the last of the numbers is counted. Whatever be the prediction of specialists, nobody knows for sure for whom the polls toll and which way the kissa of the kursi may unfold. Therefore, the candidates must moan, with the languishing lover’s desperate longing: to whom do you belong, oh vote? Or, as the CIMA show is titled, Vote Tumi Kar?

The tone of youthful banter, of blasé iconoclasm, is the combined effort of several artists, including Jogen Chowdhury, Hiran Mitra, Abhijit Gupta, Ashoke Mullick, Shyamal Roy and others. And along with mainstream art expressions like painting, sketches and sculpture, there are a number of installations, mostly collaborative, demanding a winking complicity from viewers.

The door marked ‘In’ leads you into a claustrophobic space curtained in black, a dimly lit underworld dump that approximates low-life locales, strewn with crumpled heaps of old newspapers, tubs and things. All around are pungent caricatures, including those of the participants, drawn by Suman Chaudhury.

You step out onto the passage beyond and the theme of the show screams at you from all sides. Here’s an ambience that seeks to mock the chaos and cacophony of the polls. As a video rolls out a montage of images, Bangla band music invoking the urban ethos is interspersed with raucous refrains demanding votes: Vote deen, vote deen!

Along the passage to your right is the wall site www.ki.com with beggars sketched on it — strong cartoon figures — who stare at feel-good faces. On the opposite wall Samir Aich has hung earthen pots depicting the different moods of voters, while the graffiti says cast votes, buy votes.

Sculptor Bimal Kundu tells the tale with a pithy image packed with punch and titled Abokshay (Decadence): a chair of weathered wood sits on a platform, with a disembodied leg from the knee down fixed to it. Another work that’s catchy for its brevity is Parthapratim Deb’s model of a wind-up gramophone with a record that parodies a song from Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne: the vote king has granted boons. The idea of a stuck record that drones out the same line at every election couldn’t have been put more baldly.

One section of the show, mounted by Rabindra Bharati students, is called Museum for its hilarious display of inventive election ‘relics’. Like a battered metal box labelled ‘ballot-proof bullet box’. Or the model of a giant index finger that has been bruised red through erosion: the result of merciless scrubbing to wipe off the indelible ink mark so that the fake voter can vote again. And again.

But how does he get to different booths in time? The answer lies in another item: Goopy and Bagha’s magic slippers which only require a clap, and, hey presto, he’s inside the nth booth. While a series of lively posters lampoon the many faces of politicians, a glass case in the middle is said to contain Manusher Shutki: the remains of the first voters on earth, shrivelled and sun-baked like dried fish.

The installation by Sourav Basu and others deifies the vote with religious metaphors. Fruits and vegetables, ballot boxes that bear a resemblance to contribution boxes at temples, cleavers of goddess Kali poised for sacrificial rites, stale garlands, blinking lights, yards of twine, mantra-empowered, by the way, make up a sumptuous offering to unpredictable poll gods.

Manas Acharya and Sumitro Basak are similarly inspired to fall back on tradition, the late-medie-val literary tradition of Bengal, in their ballot ballad called Vote Mangal Kavya. They mine the myth of the churning of the seas by demons and gods; what is thrown up in this new avatar of the epic is the hydra-headed serpent of scams. Sohini Dhar’s Balloter Voticulture nurtures corruption seeds, temptation twigs and fooling fantasy.

The last exhibit is a wall-to-wall installation of bamboo scaffolding with the word baansh (bamboo) written repeatedly in bold letters. As though to hammer out the message that the polls are a living example of the Bengali colloquialism, baansh deya. Which could loosely translate as putting a spoke in your wheel. Out of sheer spite. So what can the voter do? What else but await the final poll-ution?