Harvesting Images: Field Notes with Dharmendra Prasad
Based in Guwahati, Assam, Dharmendra Prasad is an artist with a practice that spans the mediums of installation, video, painting, photography and performance. An inter-disciplinary practitioner, he institutes new vocabularies around representations of agrarian practices, rural memory and indigenous knowledge systems. Attempting to visualise and study ecologies of the field through the interrelationship of human and non-human perspectives, he outlines his practice as an accumulation of meaning towards a fluid pedagogy of care, culture and artistic creation. Prasad continually returns to the idea of the harvest as a site. It offers a philosophical launchpad of sorts to a practice that incorporates commentaries on poverty, caste, gender, education and inequality.
Portrait of Lala. Lala is the second son of Dharmendra's friend, Dhanji Chauhan who is a farmer and a construction worker. He met with an accident during a caste-related conflict that was later recounted to the artist by the elders in the village. Lala also became a very important participant in the Carebiosphere (2019–Ongoing) workshops in the village. (Nadaon, Buxar, 2019.)
In unveiling what he calls a “post-studio situation” in the field, Prasad angles his artistic practice towards the dynamism of lived situations, ecological happenings and libraries of un-learning. Layering histories of a colonial past with a postcolonial present, his practice brings forth the everydayness of relationships within agro-political and environmental discourses today. What has emerged out of such a multidisciplinary practice is the omnipresent form of the field note—copious in number, a subsidiary element that forms a sturdy foundation for his detailed installations with hay and harvest material—that manifests as initial pre-emptive sketches, discards, ephemera, and interestingly, the photograph.
The Last Potter of Nadaon Village. Indra Dev Prasad from Nadaon village is a close relation of Prasad's. The artist visits regularly to observe his work with clay on the manual wheel. Indra is the last potter in Nadaon working with this method as his sons are now in government jobs. His job involves providing material for construction and for rituals around Diwali, Chath Puja, marriages and death. (Nadaon, Buxar, 2019.)
As a documentary medium that records, the photograph in Prasad’s works is present in an evidentiary capacity. As an accompaniment, it acts as a spotlight: highlighting a detail, an object or an intention. The photograph is present but not acknowledged—often because of how it is woven seamlessly into an oeuvre that incorporates multiple mediums and modes of engagement. Prasad maps his field visits through complex visibilities that are further enacted through his framing. These become reference points—as residual elements of the field, windows to lived realities and as evidence of real fields, places and people—branching out into more graspable tangents. While Prasad reiterates that there is an endlessness to the construction of the agrarian, the photographic assumes what he calls “….an agro-temporal extension” of material culture. In other words, as material culture in the agrarian field, the photograph produces time as a combination of tradition, need, performance and modernity.
Threshing of the Mustard Crop. It is difficult to take photographs of women in the village despite their central role in various agrarian processes. The artist managed to take this photograph because of the relationship he shares with this family. The two women in the photograph are Prasad's aunts and they responded with great shyness to the act of being photographed. (Nadaon, Buxar, 2019.)
Back to the Land. (Mahadah Village, Buxar, 2014. Clay, Harvest Waste, Ropes, Bicycle, Mud.)
What liberates Prasad’s thinking—around the photograph as a field note—is the notion that the image does not have the ability to contain the idea of the agrarian in its entirety. The field resists capture through any particular medium; making the photograph a fragmented or minimalist representation of a much more conflicted, complex reality. Amid such redefinition, the nature of the photographic acquires a seasonality of sorts—extending into processes of assimilation and revisitation that are non-hierarchical and equally ephemeral.
House of Dinesh Nat. The Nat caste was traditionally nomadic in nature and the community would carry all their necessities with them on buffaloes. They would come to Nadaon and stay in the village for a week or ten days, building temporary structures for themselves. As time passed and government policies changed, their nomadic lives turned sedentary. They bought land in Nadaon to make a permanent settlement. Dinesh Nat is a young bird-hunter who also works as a farm labourer. He built this hut and used sarees, lungis and other textiles to ensure privacy for himself. The women of the Nat community are incredible tattoo artists, travelling between villages to make a living by tattooing. (Nadaon, Buxar, 2019.)
The photograph in the agrarian field builds evidence of the passage of time and the development and disruption of what Prasad terms a “Stage of technology.” This indicates towards the very subtle yet explicit presence of a psyche defined by the roles of the performing apparatuses in the field—whether a threshing machine or a camera. Photography sprouts as a crop in the field site: the patient fruit of an unconscious investment of toil, time and care. Prasad's field notes feed into the vastness of the expanse around him. Here, the photograph exists as an unconscious insertion, a grain in the archival inclinations of the field. The act of photographing is a constant toil of making and letting go, that changes with the seasons and shifts with the weather.
Gahraur and Clay Objects for Fire. Gahraur is the name of a sculptural form given to the heap of cow dung cakes made painstakingly in winter. These are used to cook food and as fuel for households in the Bhojpur region. Prasad took this photograph while visiting his friend Dhanji Chauhan's house in Nadaon. The clay objects (chulha, borsi and darba) are made by Chauhan’s wife, while his children helped with the making of the gahraur. Women and children often play key roles in ensuring such work is completed. (Nadaon, Buxar, 2020.)
Prasad foregrounds the possibilities ensconced within the act of making photographs with a small format camera. Through its portability, the apparatus becomes a tool as well as a companion. The photograph itself becomes an appendage to his re-visualisation of the agrarian. Working in the field, Prasad realised that the inconspicuous nature of his chosen device allowed him to remain unaware of how seamlessly integrated the medium can be in documenting the mundane. The photograph as field note does not overwhelm; acting instead as a supplement, bolstering and magnifying the vocabularies built by the artist. While the camera does interject via its physicality and economy, the swathes of the field continue to surprise. Prasad sees the photograph as performative; connecting the body and the field, and existing outside demarcations of centre and the periphery. In his pursuit of the intangible—the mobilities of care and cycles of cohabitation—the photograph in the field works towards framing the mundanity of the agrarian as discursive and riotous.
All works by Dharmendra Prasad. Images courtesy of the artist.
To read more about other agrarian discourses, click here and here.
