Drawing from the picture postcards tradition, Tarun Bhartiya’s Unaddressed Postcards from Khasi-Jaintia Hills (2021) is a rich tapestry of texts and images. The juxtaposition of black and white images works on the trope of timelessness, a colonial construction of tribes as people without/outside of time, residing in a so-called mythical times and yet every text-image is a palimpsest —the present is always present as a way to see the sepia tinted past in a better light. To comment on Unaddressed postcards as a whole is difficult as the array of visuals is astounding. The images juxtapose many layers of encounters and intimacies — Gwalia, Khasi, India that are framed through the genre of picture postcards.
A photograph titled “Praying Before Baptism Khasi Hills, 2015” is juxtaposed with “The Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Religion Ordinance, 2020.” The image of the mother and child flanked by devouts whose eyes are pray-fully closed when placed with an ordinance that threatens the intimacy of the act recalls the Pietà. Photographs of colonial maps, photographs of missionaries with the natives as porters speak of the act of locating and fixing one into a cartographic practice and the relationship of labour. The heaven-like aerial view of Pandua described as a place where the first Khasi was baptised with the continuing text of the U.P. ordinance makes for a disturbing placement. One of the most stark being the barely concealed violence of the text “It shall come into force at one” underneath the photograph of a man cradling in the head with one hand sitting outside a church service of a church described as “one of the oldest church in the Khasi hills established by the Welsh missionaries.” What is it to be a community of believers, what is it to be rendered without one by the stroke of a law? What repetitions of violence and loss are revealed or concealed echoes through these sets of postcards.
The postcards do not mask the missionary project of conversion, of conquering souls for Jesus, the reducing of people and their way of life as exhibits. However, the images do not reduce the narrative to a singular one. We watch the softening faces in piety, the cruel edges of the nation state as felt by religious (and other minorities), and the call to witness this encounter, to keep this history seared in one’s memory.
Bhartiya’s use of black and white photographs that suggest timelessness is a clever ruse. The crux of the matter is the present. The texts serve as constant reminders of what it means to be a minority in India. The anti conversion law assumes that people convert to other religions for freebies. In the photographs, the rituals of Hynñiewtrep are happily nestled next to photographs of children praying or dozing off in a church. Mission exhibitions, anti conversion texts, old faith in new times, rosary beads, graffiti speak of the encounter of “faith, colonialism and history.” With wry humour in place that emerges in instances such as “What the bible says about coronavirus” the book leaves me with an impression of despondency. Thomas Jones’s words “I would be a partaker of the sins of the oppressors and totally unworthy of the name of the benefactor of the suffering Kassias as well as inconsistent with my professions as a Missionary of Gospel” with the image of the keepers of his grave resonates as a form of testimony. The last two images — pictures of Jesus in a framing shop with a “For sale” sign and “Caste Hindu icon on Tribal Monoliths” is not a forewarning of the times to come but a sign of the present.
