IAS Turbulence: Signs of Fire, The Long Night, and Black Gold

by Vivan Sundaram

Vivan Sundaram, three drawings from the series ‘Signs of Fire’, 1984–1985. © Vivan Sundaram. Courtesy of the artist.

Even seeing only a quarter of the image I knew what it was. I think it was in 1983 that I saw in Germany an exhibition of Leonardo's Deluge series from the Queen’s collection. The series haunted me for many years. I have a house in Kasauli that overlooks Chandigarh, where the English planted pine trees. Every other dry season forest fires engulf the small cantonment town which, in 1984, came near to burning down my hundred-year-old house. The charred hillside brought forth the Signs of Fire series. It was also a historic summer as in the city of Amritsar, armed militants had occupied the premises of the Golden Temple. The Army flushed them out by killing both the militants and pilgrims. Eighty-three soldiers and approximately four hundred ninety-two civilians died. Then on 31 October 1984, Mrs Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards. My work 'In the Box' refers to the violence that took place in the aftermath.

The theme of 'Turbulence' appears in three of my other exhibitions: Long Night, 1989, drawings in charcoal, made after my visit to Auschwitz in 1989; Journeys, soft pastels; and finally, Black Gold, based on a large installation at the Kochi Muziris Biennale, 2012. Muziris is a port town in Kerala, which flourished from the second century BC to about the sixth century AD and traded with the Roman Empire. Black pepper was a major export from Kerala; later historians called it ‘black gold’. There is speculation that floods destroyed this early 'urban' settlement, whose remains were discovered only in 2004. My 20 x 60 foot installation, an imaginary urban ruin, was made of thousands of discarded pot sherds from the excavation. I then flooded it by pouring twenty kilos of peppercorns over it. There are many expressions in Wright's text which resonate with these images.