Kalpana's Warriors, an exhibition of photographs by the acclaimed Bangladeshi lensman Shahidul Alam showing at Gallery Art and Aesthetic, is a caution against such forgetting.
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| Abducted Kalpana Chakma |
Shahidul Alam, the man who captures thoughts. And when celebrated the Bangladeshi
photographer says, “I am media savvy, technologically savvy and articulate…I am a powerhouse,” you not only feel the energy behind the photos that highlight the plight of people who lost their lives in crossfire, extra judicial killings or to the wrath of nature but also how an artist can stretch the boundaries of a medium to make his point.
Kalpana Chakma, an indigenous and women rights activist was abducted from her home in
Rangamati on 12 June, 1996. Kalindi Kumar Chakma, Kalpana’s brother, filed a First
Information Report (FIR) where he reported that Kalpana was abducted by Lieutenant
Ferdous (from Kojoichori Army camp in Rangamati), along with two Village Defence Police
(VDP) members – Nurul Haque and Salah Ahmed. The military has categorically denied
their involvement. A police officer carried out an investigation where he failed to name any
suspects, due to what it said was ‘insufficient evidence’.
Later, an inquiry commission was set up by the Government. The commission submitted its
report but found no involvement of the military or the VDP in the abduction. It failed to
identify any suspects.
The commission interviewed 94 people and submitted a 40-page report to the Ministry Of
Home Affairs in 1997 and concluded, ‘Kalpana Chakma has willingly or unwilling been
abducted but it was not possible for us to identify the abductor for lack of witnesses and
evidence and there remains no grounds to recommend that legal action should be taken
against anyone’.
In 2010, a Rangamati court ordered the reinvestigation of Kalpana Chakma’s case following
her brother Kalindi Kumar Chakma’s rejection of the CID report. The CID report also failed
to identify anyone involved in the abduction. The case is now being investigated by the
police superintendent of Rangamti who has expressed her unwillingness to investigate the
case.
There have been many news reports in the last 17 years in the media about Kalpana
Chakma’s abduction. The International Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission wrote about the
abduction of Kalpana Chakma in their report ‘Life is not Ours’. Amnesty International
Urgent Action issued a statement about Kalpana Chakma in 1996. Human Rights Watch in
its 2009 report ‘Ignoring Executions and Torture: Impunity for Bangladesh's Security
Forces’ mentions Kalpana Chakma’s case under “Key Cases of Impunity the New
Government Should Address”.
The abductors of Kalpana Chakma are still free. The state has failed to give justice for
Kalpana Chakma.
For how long will we continue to let put up with this impunity that the state provides to
perpetrators of such violence?
"Material and process come together with political and aesthetic purpose in a photo exhibition by Bangladeshi lensman Shahidul Alam," notes Gargi Gupta
Kalpana has probably not lived to tell her tale. At any rate, no one knows what happened to her since June 12, 1996, the day this young political activist from the Chittagong Hill Tracts in the southeast reaches of Bangladesh bordering Myanmar was picked up from her home by Bangladeshi military and police personnel. Eighteen years on, she remains missing.
Kalpana Chakma's is not an unfamiliar tale — the modern histories of many countries are full of instances of human rights abuse by the military. Abductions or forced disappearances, torture and rape, summary killings, wanton destruction of property are regular occurrences where armed forces have been given a free reign to put down insurgencies or separatists — think Kashmir, Naxal-affected or several parts of northeast India. In the case of Kalpana, she was leader of the Hill Women's Federation, an organisation of the indigenous communities (the Chakmas being the largest of them) of Chittagong who've been fighting for political autonomy from Bangladesh.
The Chakmas' struggle is a long-standing one that reached a head post the 1970s, after the construction of a dam and reservoir on the Karnafuli river submerged 254 square miles, including the palace of the Chakma king.
Most such abuses go unreported, but even those that do come out to the outside world, are forgotten soon after they have created a splash of anger and condemnation.
Kalpana's Warriors, an exhibition of photographs by the acclaimed Bangladeshi lensman Shahidul Alam showing at Gallery Art and Aesthetic, is a caution against such forgetting. The way the show has been mounted, you could even call it a shrine - a shrine to the memory of a brave woman whose mysterious, tragic fate has been all but forgotten to the majority of her countrymen. As with a temple, the gallery is a mostly dark space, lit by candles placed in terracotta plates hanging in front of large blow-ups of the faces of unknown, unnamed men and women printed on straw mats - the madurs that are so much a part of the daily lives of the Chakmas. These are Kalpana's "warriors", the activists who've carried forward her fight and are standing up for their rights and against state repression.
Kalpana's Warriors is part of a public awareness campaign initiated in 2010 by Alam, who is a human rights activist as much as he is Bangladesh's best known contemporary photographer, called "No More", which focuses on issues and events – the floods and cyclones that hit Bangladesh regularly or extra-judicial killings and garment factory deaths – that the government would like to sweep under the carpet.
Kalpana's disappearance, of course, has been a longer term engagement with Alam. Kalpana's Warriors is his third show on the subject, all of them inaugurated on June 12, the anniversary of her abduction.
The first of these, Searching for Kalpana Chakma - A Photo Forensic Study, in 2013 was a moving installation comprising images of various things associated with Kalpana – a segment of the bark of the tree where she was standing blindfolded before being separated from her brothers, a fragment of a newkameez she had stitched for her trip to attend the fourth women's conference in Beijing; her ribbon found in the bamboo slat next to her bed; a segment of her shoe; the palm of her brother Kalindi, who remembers how the torch light reflected from his hand lit up the abductors' faces. These are magnified images, the kind you see through a microscope in a forensic laboratory, beautifully coloured and printed – so that a sham reprisal of the methods used by modern police forces to uncover long-standing mysteries – except that the investigation never happened in Kalpana's case.
What's noticeable in Searching for Kalpana Chakma as well as with the current Kalpana's Warriors show is how material and process come together with political and aesthetic purpose. And it's not just the use of the straw mat as photographic medium. The physical process itself incorporated the politics. "The fire that had been used to raze pahari homes, also needed to be represented, so a laser beam was used to burn the straw, etching with flames, the images of rebellion," explains Alam.
It's an extraordinary tribute to an extraordinary woman.
Related search:
1. https://www.amnesty.org.uk/blogs/campaigns/kalpana-chakma-%E2%80%93-lost-not-forgotten-bangladesh
2. http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-metroplus/on-kalpanas-trail/article8189817.ece
