Exhibition: Lumen at BALTIC

The complex linked history of Britain and India means different things to different people. Sutapa Biswas, whose powerful new film is showing at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, tells DAVID WHETSTONE what it has meant to her and her family

At the far end of BALTIC’s big Level 3 gallery, the poetic and visually striking new film by Sutapa Biswas is drawing visitors like moths in the darkened space.

Called Lumen, after the name given in physics to a unit of light, it is being premiered as the highlight of an exhibition reflecting the artist’s successful career.

The film invites a range of responses. It is full of atmosphere and mystery, of beauty and faded beauty, but there’s restrained anger in the narrative.

Colourful recent shots of India, with bobbing boats and banyan trees, is juxtaposed with flickering footage from the days of the British Raj.

In scenes reminiscent of Jeeves and Wooster, pale-skinned folk play croquet and chat beside a gramophone player. Meanwhile their Indian servants water the lawns.

What made these British people comfortable 100 years ago makes less comfortable viewing today, especially under the steady gaze of Lumen’s narrator.

The young Indian woman, played by actress Natasha Patel who delivers Sutapa’s monologue with great passion, speaks for the countless Indians who produced jute, cotton, silk, spices, tea, sugar and other goods to enrich their colonial masters.

That woman is based on Sutapa’s mother whose story inspired Lumen.

Speaking at BALTIC, Sutapa Biswas explains how she came to make her most ambitious piece of work so far.

A petite figure with a fund of stories and a ready smile, she says the seed was sown when two galleries, BALTIC and Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, expressed a desire to work with her.

“They said, ‘Is there something that you’ve wanted to make forever but have never had the opportunity? If so, we would support you’.

“I knew I wanted to tell my mother’s story because it struck me that in history painting, for example, we get to hear the male narrative and the grand narratives of history.

“But I’ve always been interested in the quieter feminine spaces – the stories you don’t see in the National Gallery, for example.

“I wanted to talk about the impact for my mother and grandmother in having to leave India at a particular moment in history when they didn’t have a choice.”

Like millions of others, her parents and grandmother were forced to leave home during the chaotic partition of India which came with independence in 1947.

Moving to India from what had been designated East Pakistan and would become Bangladesh, “they were displaced by the drawing up of borders and traumatised”.

Things didn’t improve after independence. Her idealistic Marxist father, who had supported the independence movement, aroused suspicion and was “more or less under house arrest”.

By now an academic and an expert in the science of crops and soil, he opposed government policies such as its so-called ‘green revolution’ which advocated chemical fertilisers.

A scene in the film recalls the time he saw a figure approaching the house and didn’t know whether it was the postman carrying a pardon or a policeman come to arrest him.

“He said he had never felt so afraid in all his life,” says Sutapa.

In the film, of course, this is related by the character based on her mother whose fear must have been every bit as acute.

Eventually Sutapa’s father came to Britain where he had a cousin.

It could have been the United States but he had turned down a scholarship to study at Chicago University (funded, ironically, by the American government), bowing to family pressure. Race riots had broken out and they feared he would get involved and be shot.

So Sutapa, born in India in 1962, arrived in Britain as a baby and grew up and was educated here.

It must have been a shock for her mother and grandmother but she says the English education forced on them in India meant they knew Shakespeare and Wordsworth better than their London neighbours.

Sutapa’s father, who died in 2000, wanted her to be a poet. Instead she became the first student of South Asian heritage on the fine art course at Leeds University.

There – a chip off the old block, perhaps – she took issue with her lecturers over some of the contextual “absences” in their teaching.

What about the bodies in the water in Turner’s gut-wrenching painting The Slave Ship? What of the black girl with the flowers in Manet’s famous Olympia?

“I challenged them,” she smiles. “But in a nice way.”

One of them, Griselda Pollock, a leading figure in feminist art theory, subsequently called her “one of the most brilliant fine art students” to graduate from Leeds.

“I count my blessings that she got it,” says Sutapa, now renowned for countering a Eurocentric approach to the study of art.

Having decided to make Lumen, she started gathering material and was helped by winning a Yale University scholarship enabling her to delve into the “massive” archive relating to the British Raj held at the Yale Center for British Art.

There she sifted through drawings, paintings, travelogues, photos, books and correspondence.

In particular, she alighted on the work of James Forbes, a writer and amateur artist who travelled to Bombay in 1765 to make his fortune, which he did by documenting the country and recording products that could be sold by the British East India Company, which controlled India before the British Crown took over in 1858.

Sutapa, who included some Forbes watercolours in Lumen, says his work inspired a taxed production system whereby Indians became increasingly impoverished as the East India Company grew richer.

I wonder how the Raj footage recently acquired by the Bristol Archive made her feel.

“It’s hard,” she says. “I think if you’re a humane human being it’s hard not to feel the injustice of empire and to feel angered by the violence of empire.”

And she adds that while most people know that Africans were forced into slavery, there were also slave markets in India. “It was called the slave trade of the Indian Ocean World.”

Lumen was never meant to be a documentary. Its creator explains: “It’s a semi-fictional narrative which is poetic for a reason. As an artist, I think that art and poetry play an important role in allowing people to engage with the complexity of history and its impact.”

Sutapa Biswas didn’t return to India until 1986, after graduating. It must have been a strange experience.

“It was quite extraordinary,” she recalls. “I felt both at home and… (she laughs) I felt like I was finally average height. I am quite short.

“I think people thought I was being employed as an interpreter because I spoke such good English.”

The first works of art she made in response to the visit are the first you see at BALTIC, four hand-printed photographs under the heading Synapse I which her old university recently acquired for its art collection.

Beyond it are earlier films and beautiful watercolours of exotic birds, arranged like a feathered flock on one wall but inspired, it turns out, by stuffed museum specimens.

Sutapa’s mother still lives in London. Her father, though he never gave up his Indian passport, had to wait 14 years before relatives considered it safe for him to return for a visit.

Tyneside is not entirely unknown territory for Sutapa. She says she has relatives in Newcastle and has visited to see exhibitions. In the late 1980s she contributed to a group show at the Laing Art Gallery.

This BALTIC exhibition, which will run alongside one opening at Kettle’s Yard in the autumn, is a mark of how far she has come. It really is worth seeing.

Lumen is on Level 3 at BALTIC, the BxNU Gallery, until March 20, 2022. Find details at baltic.art

@DavidJWhetstone