INSIDE BANGLADESH'S PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY

The circumstances of Bangladesh's independence have kept its relationships with India and Pakistan complicated. They now feed into its current status as a nation in turmoil. Bangladeshi artist and author Naeem Mohaiemen says that his country's struggle to reclaim its self-image continues through photography, its much-talked-of art form.

PHOTOGRAPHY may not fix the traumas of Partition but it has been a prism the subcontinent's artists have looked through to understand brokenness as idea, an art object, and a nightmare. Among the three nations birthed by Partition, Bangladesh's birth has been the most complicated. Considering it experienced freedom and fracture twice, its self-image is tied to the dispossession and violence of 1947, when India split into two. And this, in turn, is often seen and judged together with 1971, when it separated from Pakistan. "Bengal's once-twinned peoples no longer share a common set of memory references as to what constitutes conjuncture-this process starts with which photographs are preserved as singular event memories," says Naeem Mohaiemen, artist, author, and assistant professor, Columbia University, who recently gave a thought-provoking talk in Delhi at the IIC.

At the talk, introduced by Rahaab Allana, curator/publisher at the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, Mohaiemen also read from his upcoming book Bengal Photography's Reality Quest (in Bengali), published by Nokta (Dhaka). It will be available in India through Offset (Delhi) and Atlas Enterprise (Kolkata) by February. Excerpts: from a conversation with the author:

What got you interested in photography and its study to understand your nation's history vis-à-vis India before and during Partition, and also with Pakistan?