Despairing anger provokes protest. When grief deepens anger, the colour of protest could, aptly, be black and white. As Guernica was. And the protest that must contend with erasure — of memory, history, of a community’s way of life — calls for a black that’s sooty and stubborn, easy to rub and yet resisting complete eclipse, leaving a dying refrain in its wake. Like the black of charcoal that South African artist William Kentridge has made peculiarly his own.

This is the black in which Prabhakar Pachpute chooses to tell his story. A story in which the medium, charcoal, is a kind of protagonist because it’s about coal and the mines situated in the Vidharba region of Maharashtra. But it is, in fact, a universal story. For it’s a paradigm for a historical process that’s deemed progress. Pachpute, who might have become a miner were it not for his art, has seen how the farming community to which he belonged lost its land to coal mine owners, and consequently, their own way of life as they had to switch to digging for coal in the entrails of the earth they once tilled.

Which is why the image of a windscreen wiper recurs in the animation the artist has made. For his story is about that erasure. About the fluid process of continuous change that history is.

It’s in collaboration with Clarke House Initiative that Pachpute’s solo show, The Land Eaters, is being presented till November 16 by Experimenter Gallery, which has turned its disadvantage — a single source of natural light reflected through a door at the end of a passage — into a dark site for disturbing images. The installation that confronts the visitor on the facing wall as he enters is deeply unsettling, but is actually the sign of hope to be viewed last. Because the story begins with Earth Work of Hadasti, a stop-motion animation — the kind Kentridge made famous — which recounts how a small village, Chandrapur in eastern Maharashtra, gets wiped off the map as mine owners and managers —the land eaters, that is — take over the area, and villagers are forced to migrate.

A lone owl is witness to the transformation of the natural and human landscape: the virgin land that’s transformed into a village, the blasts that rip into the earth and send village homes skittering away, the tunnels that furrow underground to reach veins of coal, the barren dustbowl it turns into once it’s stripped of its wealth and abandoned.

Through numerous charcoal images — 700 to be exact — that had to be, each of them, drawn and clicked, rubbed, drawn and clicked again, the narrative of change emerges. And because the drawings are summary and artless, no overheated emotion loads it with sighs. Rather, it’s a quaint cartoon about a process that may appear grim, heart-rending or merely thought to be, with a blasé shrug, inevitable.

In Sasti Underground No. 3, the artist takes the viewer to the claustrophobic netherworld of torch-lit tunnels where each descent is fraught with uncertainty and anxiety, and the black is an oppressive, fearful presence, almost a material thing. Pachpute generally portrays figures with a kind of breezy accuracy, but uses a Chaplinesque metaphor to identify miners with pickaxes for heads and managers with wipers. This portrayal is also reserved for an installation with a life-size fibreglass figure which bends over with its head between its knees and its home on its back, while a single channel projection focuses on eyes that move about frantically to the sound of light hammer blows, searching… The search could be at different levels: the observer’s for answers, the victim’s for a home, or the fighter’s for ultimate redemption.

And that’s what The Heroes of Saptarang seeks to show: the hope of redemption.

Searching for a visual correlative that would lend immediacy to the struggle of the local heroes —the seven activists spearheading the struggle to pull down the mining establishment and retrieve farmland — stimulated an installation spread over a wide corner and part of the gallery floor that combines drawing with sculpture. The drawing offers a dissected view of the underground, with trees dotting the land above, as seven miniature figures, four of them in clay, mime the action of pulling down a mighty coal-laden canopy with ropes drawn on the wall. With a well-thought-out scheme of LED lights that magnify their shadows against the reflected glow on the wall, what emerges is a powerful theatrical dénouement that appears to turn an episode into an epic.