Mumbai artist Parag Tandel is fighting back.
As a member of the Koli, an Indigenous community, that has inhabited the coastal waters of Mumbai for centuries, Tandel deplores the urban sprawl that has displaced his people. The growing city has encroached upon their traditional fishing grounds and many Koli houses perched on the shore have been demolished to make way for high rises. Pollution and climate change have also pushed their livelihood, the Bombay duck, not a duck but a fish, northward to colder waters endangering the species and the sustainable Koli way of life. Tandel is resentful.
Primarily a sculptor, Tandel’s interdisciplinary practice favours natural materials such as river clay or the hollowed-out bark of a jambool tree which he has used to create stylized sailing vessels. Another material is multicolored yarn which he has employed -wrapped around various armatures that suggest traps or nets. Tandel’s pieces either reference the creatures that live in the sea or the business of extracting them. They’re playful and organic and dare I say it with no pun intended- fluid.
Even his two-dimensional drawings in ink, charcoal or graphite are joyful interpretations of life under the sea. There is lot is going on in these piece- playfulness, energy, a lament for a disappearing lifestyle and the legacy of colonialism which disconnects the Koli from their history, their language, their landscape, and their ways of interacting with each other.
They’re beautiful pieces, aesthetically pleasing and a delight to the eye but Tandel the sculptor has gone one step further. Five years ago, Tandel the activist co-founded the Tandel Fund of Archives with Kadambari Koli-Tandel as a way of keeping Koli’s concerns alive. Case in point, he helped organize the ‘Journey of the Bombay Duck’ last summer, a multi-media, multi-sensory public event designed to celebrate not just the local fish but all marine life and the lifestyle it supports. The Tandel Fund of Archives was a local collaborator for the travelling exhibition Critical Zones In Search of a Common Ground co-produced by the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and Goethe Institute / Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai.
‘Journey of the Bombay Duck’ celebrates the remembrance of the loss of the iconic symbol of Mumbai, the Bombay duck, and the oral knowledge that revolves around it. This collaborative project took place in the framework of the travelling exhibition Critical Zones In Search of a Common Ground and now journeys onward. It grew out of a discussion between three artists and their respective practices of archiving sustainable food practices centering on indigenous and peasant food cultures and exploring community resilience and resistance in changing climates.
For centuries, Kolis, the indigenous fisherfolk of Seven Islands, have lived in more than 250 villages around the shores of Mumbai megalopolis. The city has now outgrown these biophilic indigenous villages, endangering also the fish Bombay duck which forms part of the daily diet of Kolis. The catch is now scarce, as the shore is getting appropriated and polluted due to the city’s waste policies.
During the artist’s research on the depleting habitat of Bombay duck along the shores of Mumbai, they collected evidence, data, first-hand testimonies, recipes and songs from fishermen, Koli households of Colaba and women of Koliwada.
Performing a collective mummification of Bombay duck in the CSMVS Natural History gallery operated as a metaphor to store and save a form of sustainable knowledge system. It complicates the modern definitions of science and speculates on indigenous food practices as a community science that encodes biological (and biophilic) knowledge.
Whether the performance or the artworks will mitigate the erosion of the Koli lifestyle remains to be seen but Tandel, who calls himself an archivist rather than an activist, although in reality he’s both, vows his culture won’t be forgotten. There’s much to learn from the Kolis he says as he predicts food wars in the next ten years because of climate change. He says it is important to follow long-term sustainable food practices.
“You don’t have to collect new knowledge for that,” he says, “you have to spread knowledge to give back. Bombay people need to understand the Koli’s experience. Ocean is the philosophy that we have to follow, and that knowledge is self-sustaining.”
Check out the Performance video below:
Journey of Bombay Duck Performance Video
Parag regularly shares his artworks, studio action, narrations and latest exhibition information through his Instagram profile. His partner Kadambari Tandel works alongside in their mission of creating awarenees and preserving the Koli culture and tradition through Tandel Fund of Archives.
Performance Images and Video Courtesy: Parag Tandel, Kadambari Koli-Tandel, and Stéphane Verlet Bottéro. Co-produced by Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai and ZKM | Karlsruhe
Artwork Images Copyrights: Tarq
