ART EXHIBITION COMMEMORATING
WORLD WAR I CENTENARY

On Sunday evening (3 January 2016), strolled over to Pepper House, Fort Kochi to view an art Exhibition named ‘digging deep, crossing far’ curated by Berlin based artists Elke Falat and Julia Tieke. Commemorating the centenary of World War I, it was jointly organised by the Goethe Institut and Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

With the entry of Great Britain into the First World War (1914-1918), the entire Empire got involved in the European theatre of operations thus making it a truly global war. Alongside British and French colonial troops fought Australians and New Zealanders, Canadians and South Africans. Indians too had joined in the hope of autonomy and self-government. In British India over a million colonial soldiers were recruited to fight, of whom 60,000 were killed. Other than the historical narrative, little was explored of the war and its consequences. Moreover, the sepoy held a very ambivalent and contradictory position within Indian society.

New perspectives on WW I have emerged recently. When the Halfmoon Camp (Halbmondlager prisoner-of-war camps) near Berlin, Germany, which housed tens of thousands of ‘colonial soldiers’ was opened up for ‘research’ purposes, anthropological and racially oriented ethnological and linguistic studies were carried out on the prisoners from ‘around the world’. The Phonographic Commission founded in 1915 by the linguist Wilhelm Doegen travelled to the many POW camps in Germany to record as many languages as possible. The material now reposes in the Lautarchiv (Archive of recorded voices of Prisoners of War) of the Humbodlt University, Berlin. A chronological collection of over 6,000 letters from the Front compiled by David Omissi sheds new light on the psyche and mental state of the soldiers.

Of the four artists whose works were featured there Ayisha Abraham in “Boots/Pyramid (1991) “explored her grandfather’s role in the British Army during World War I in Mesopotamia. By deconstructing an army group photograph featuring him, and presenting it in fragments she examines the shattered identity of her grandfather, who by reversing his first and last name had given himself  a Christian surname – an act which ensured better treatment and higher social status within the army and a privileged position in the group photograph.

Surekha’s installation “Black Pepper & Red Pepper” (2015) looked at how Indian Military troops (with special reference to the Madras Sappers and the Mysore Imperial Army) were depicted in the media, trying to make meaning out of this “history of fragments”. She also looks into the interaction between red and black pepper, code words used for British and Indian soldiers.

Saranath  Banerjee’s installation “the reduced history of the first world war” (2015) consisting of precise black- and -white drawings of Indian sepoys from the war, was supplemented with brief information is “about the hundreds of thousands of books that have not been written about the Indian soldiers’ experience in the war” (Banerjee)