Chowdhry told indianexpress.com that women’s experiences of sexual violence, honour killings, honour suicides, and ostracisation from families and communities are “virtually erased from nationalist accounts of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh”
The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre is one of the most significant events in the history of the sub-continent. Many people, including women and children, lost their lives on April 13, 1919, the day of Baisakhi when General Reginald Edward Dyer ordered soldiers to open fire on the gathering — camping in Jallianwala Bagh’s open ground — without any warning, a report in the Indian Express says
“Yet, there are not many records of the event from the women’s perspectives,” expressed Pritika Chowdhry, an Indian artist, who is paying homage to women’s narratives of traumatic events like the Jallianwala Bagh, India’s Partition through her exhition — Broken Column: The Monuments of Forgetting, on display at Women Made Gallery in United States’ Chicago.
Ahead of April 13, 2022 — the 102nd anniversary of Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, and India’s 76th Independence Day — Chowdhry emphasised that her goal is not to “speak for the women” but let her experiential art installations “invite viewers to bear witness, holding space for mourning, remembrance, and repair”.
“During Partition in 1947, India was split along religious lines, and 20 million people were displaced: Hindus traversed the border to India and Muslims to Pakistan.
Two million people died in violent Partition riots and, less-known, over 3,00,000 Muslim, Sikh, Bengali, and Hindu women were raped. Likewise, women were the erased victims in the Partition of Pakistan when Bangladesh was formed in 1971.
So, when a memory is unbearable, how do you memorialise it?” stressed the artist who has a Masters in Fine Arts (MFA) in Studio Art and an Masters in Arts (MA) in Visual Culture and Gender Studies from UW-Madison, and has taught at Macalester College and College of Visual Arts in St Paul, Minnesota, United States.
Ahead of April 13, 2022 — the 102nd anniversary of Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, and India’s 76th Independence Day — Chowdhry emphasised that her goal is not to “speak for the women” but let her experiential art installations “invite viewers to bear witness, holding space for mourning, remembrance, and repair”.
As part of the exhibition, Chowdhry has created latex casts of the Jallianwallan Bagh memorial in Punjab, India; the Minar-e-Pakistan memorial in Lahore, Pakistan; and the Martyred Intellectuals monument in Rayer Bazar, Dhaka, Bangladesh. “I bring these three monuments together to illustrate what is excluded in the formation of collective memories about the Partition of India,” she said
Citing that in the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, nearly 2,00,000 – 4,00,000 women were raped, she told indianexpress.com that women’s experiences of sexual violence, honour killings, honour suicides, and ostracisation from their families and communities are “virtually erased from nationalist accounts of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh”.
“As a post-colonial feminist artist, I create anti-memorials that center these counter-memories and counter-histories (the widespread sexual violence) of the Independence movements in the three countries,” described Chowdhry.
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