Poems and plays, stories and songs, essays and articles – and names. At an open mic event on August 10-11 at Method Kala Ghoda, artists, speakers and others in Mumbai found comfort – and resistance – in the spoken word. The event was held marking 300 days of Israel’s military assault on Gaza after a Hamas attack on October 7.
“It was a place to express oneself. And show solidarity,” veteran stage actor Dolly Thakore said over the phone on Monday. “That is a very big thing.”
The gallery had posted stirring images of Thakore, draped in a white sari, a magnificent red bindi on her forehead, reading from a list of those killed in the war on Gaza since October.
She was among several others who attended the open mic at Method that weekend.
For the past month, the gallery has had on display “The Future Will Remember”, an exhibit by American artist Alexis Rose, made entirely of bricks. Carved delicately with names and data, these bricks stand like gravestones in an open field, some empty, warily leaving space for information to come.
In an artist statement, Rose sets the scene for her work amid a genocide in which the attempts of entire communities to document the violations committed upon them fall short. Their physical documentation, in historical texts, decades of research and cultural archives, are bombed to the ground, and their digital recordings through images, videos, and posts, experience their own kind of violent destruction through algorithms and censorship.
For Rose, the challenge in an environment determined to erase lies in finding creative and durable means of documentation that can carry weight in a disposable digital age. She goes back to basics.
“Bricks are some of our species earliest and longest surviving objects, and our oldest in fact, hand formed and sun-dried, have lived for 11,000 years in Palestine, in the neolithic UNESCO heritage site of Tel al-Sultan, in the occupied West Bank,” reads her 17-page booklet. The medium is the message.
Rose’s exhibit, and the gallery, in a sense, answer your middle school history teacher asking why her subject is important, albeit with even more questions: “How can we help the future to know, to remember, what to hold dear, what not to repeat, who to hold to account?”
Despite the arrest of Communist Party of India leader Annie Raja and economist-activist Jean Dreze, just days earlier on August 9 for participating in a march seeking a ceasefire in Gaza, the Kala Ghoda open mic proceeded valiantly, holding space for remembrance that could not be erased by bombs or the whims of social media giants.
In a contemporary format of oral tradition, participants collectively collated what they had borne witness to over the past 10 months.
Writer Raghu Karnad reflected on the use of the word “martyr” to describe the dead in Gaza and how as an atheist, he could still think about heaven or hell as part of this life: “It is a kind of heaven, though, to be alive... When I see the bombs throwing down the buildings of Gaza on top of its people, I don’t see people going to heaven – I see them being taken out of it. Heaven is what is lying under all that rubble.”
Vocalist Swanand Kirkire sang a heartbreaking rendition of his song O Ri Chirayya, dedicated to those killed and 10-year-old Mihail Karachiwala read out an autobiographical short story by a Palestinian child who went out to buy a loaf of bread during the war.
Others took the mic as well, connecting their personal histories to the violence in Gaza. Actor Meher Acharia-Dar recounted a speech by a Kashmiri Pandit woman who drew parallels between the struggles in her homeland to that of Palestine’s.
“We have become desensitised to consuming news and images of even large-scale violence,” she said. “They feel far removed from our own realities.” But she added: “When you read the name of a one-year-old out loud. It makes it real.”
I recall a similar feeling when reading from a list of those killed during a vigil on Mumbai’s Juhu beach back when the toll in Gaza was 12,000. It is now close to 40,000. But even back then, that number was incomprehensible.
It’s a wonder how many have watched these cruelties unfold with barely any communities to fall back upon. Posting on social media and boycotting corporations from one’s home is not only a passive but an isolating feat – one that leaves no real room for retrieving and retaining constructive knowledge about those affected by these crimes.
In contrast, physical spaces like the open mic at the gallery, though covering less ground than digital media, slowly yet meticulously foster a collective memory that resists a deliberately forgetful power.
Alexis Rose writes in an Instagram post about her exhibit, “So many martyrs scribbled their will on paper, or in a tweet, ‘I don’t want to be a number’.” In our gentle building of resilient libraries from auburn brick and stories, we assure them they are not.
Zara Flavia Dmello writes on media, entertainment, culture and politics. Her Instagram handle is @zara.on.sale.
