Labani Jangi's strokes of resistance

“I do not think I am a painter. I do not have the qualities of a painter. But I have stories. I try to write stories with my brush. I don’t claim my strokes are all perfect. It is only in the last two-three years that I am trying to study and understand the work of a lot of painters. Otherwise, I had no knowledge. I painted to tell a story. I feel happy when I can express the story. I paint as if I am writing a narrative.”

Labani is an artist, a painter from Dhubulia, in the very rural Nadia district of West Bengal. The village used to station an army camp, with an airfield, during World War II. The largely Muslim village lost a lot of its agricultural land when the British established that camp. Later, when Partition happened, many from the village moved to the other side of the border. “But we did not,” says Labani “as our elders did not want to. Our ancestors are buried in this land. This is where we want to live and die.”  That connection with the land, and all that happens in its name, has shaped the sensibility of this artist from her younger days.

Her encouragement for painting came from her father who took her to a tutor for a few years when she was a child. Her father is a first-generation learner, the only one among his 10 siblings. A lawyer who worked at the grassroot level, starting cooperatives for peasants and labourers, he did not make much money. “From whatever money he got he would buy me a book,” says Labani. “There used to be lot of children’s books from Moscow Press, Raduga Publishers, that made their way into our home through Bangla translations. I used to love the pictures in these books. That is where my earliest inspiration for illustration came from.” 

That early age training in painting which her father introduced her to did not last long. But the love for painting returned to Labani in 2016 when language began to abandon her.  The country was seeing a rise in mob lynching in the face of state indifference, a deliberate persecution of minorities, and the majoritarian denial of such hate crimes. Labani, then finishing her M.Phil. at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, was deeply troubled by the realities of this country, yet was unable to write about it.

“There was an intense feeling of unease,” she says. “I used to love writing till that time, and had written and published a few articles in Bangla. But suddenly language felt completely inadequate. I wanted to run away from everything then. That is when I started painting. I would paint the sea in all its moods, in water colours, on every little piece of paper I could find. One after the other, I did so many paintings of the sea at that time [2016-17]. To paint was my way of finding peace in an otherwise turbulent world.”

Labani remains a self-taught artist to this day.

In 2017 she enrolled into a doctoral programme at the Centre for Studies In Social Sciences, Calcutta, affiliated with Jadavpur University, after being awarded the prestigious UGC-Maulana Azad National Fellowship for Minority Students (2016–20). She continued with the work on migrant labour she had begun earlier, but this time getting deeper into their lived realities as part of her larger dissertation project, 'The lives and world of Bengali migrant labour'.

Labani had seen a lot of people from her village leave for Kerala in search of construction labour jobs, or to Mumbai to work in hotels. “My father’s brothers and members of their families, not women as much as men, still work as migrant labourers outside Bengal,” she says. The subject though close to her heart needed a lot of field work. “But just then the pandemic struck,” she recalls. “The worst hit were migrant workers. I did not feel like working on my research anymore then. How could I go and ask questions related to my academic work when they were struggling to reach home, to get healthcare, and for a place in the crematoria and burial grounds? It did not feel right to benefit from their situation. I could not finish the field work in time and so my PhD has dragged on.”  

Labani took to her brush again, this time to document the lives of migrant workers on the pages of the People’s Archives of Rural India (PARI). “Some of Sainath’s articles used to get published in the Bengali daily Ganashakti’s editorial pages. So, I was already familiar with P. Sainath’s work when Smita di got me to do a few illustrations for an article first and then a poem.” (Smita Khator is Chief Translations Editor of PARI). All through 2020 Labani Jangi was a Fellow at PARI where she painted the lives of the subjects of her thesis, as well as of farmers and rural women living out the pandemic and lockdowns.  

“My work with PARI focuses on both the systemic challenges, and the enduring spirit of rural life. By integrating these narratives into my art, I try to create visual expressions that resonate with the complexities of their lives. My illustrations are a medium through which I contribute to preserving and sharing the rich diversities of cultural and social realities in rural India.”

Labani is not associated with any political party, but sees her art as political. “I saw a lot of painters – and political posters – after coming to Jadavpur to study. And the kind of illustrations I make about all that happens around us has come from my exposure to these and of course from my own sensibilities.”  She draws inspiration from the daily realities of being a Muslim woman in a society where hatred is being normalised, and state-sponsored violence is often the harsh reality of the day.

“The world does not want to acknowledge us, our skills, our talents, our hard work,” Labani says. “Our identity plays a huge part in this erasure. This continues even today. The work, especially of a Muslim woman artist, does not even exist for a large number of people." Certainly not until she finds the right patron, if she is lucky. "One does not give it space or engage with it, not even to criticise. That is why I call it erasure. A process that manifests itself in the history of art, literature, and many other fields for that matter,” she adds. But Labani keeps trying by painting and putting her work on the walls of digital platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

And it is through Facebook that the Chitrabhasha Art Gallery in Chattogram got in touch with her and invited her to Bangladesh for her very first solo exhibition in December 2022, Bibir Dargahs.

The idea for the exhibition Bibir Dargahs came from her childhood, as well as from the present situation in Bangladesh, where she says, she once again sees the rise of conservative Islam. A Bibi ka dargah refers to dargahs memorialising women pirs (spiritual guides). “There used to be two dargahs for women in my village when I was growing up. We had cultural practices, beliefs in tying a thread for mannat [wish or vow]; we cooked together for a feast when our wishes were granted. There was a whole set of syncretic traditions around that place.

“But I also saw them disappear in front of my eyes. Then a maktab [library] comes up in their place later. Conservative Islamic people who do not believe in mazars [graves or tombs], or sufi dargahs  – their efforts are towards either breaking these down or building a mosque in its place. There are a few dargahs left now but all of them are for male pirs. There are no Bibi ka dargahs left, their names erased from our cultural memories.” 

But while the pattern of such destruction is widespread, there is also another parallel pattern that Labani points out. Something that stands against such calculated and violent erasing of memories. “When the time came for a show in Bangladesh, I thought about the destruction of mazars on one hand and the unbreakable resilience of women who fight for their lost land and rights even today. This resistance and resilience are the spirit of the mazar that survives even after the structures are destroyed. This is what I have tried to capture in this solo exhibition.” Long after that exhibition is over, she continues working on the theme.

Labani’s paintings have amplified the voices of people, given a second life to many a poem, and to articles, and books. “Artists or writers, we all are connected. I remember Keshav bhau [Inspired by Ambedkar: Salve's liberation song] telling me how I had painted the Shahir exactly the way he had imagined. And it is not surprising to me, because we share our imagination, our collective memories, the soul of our common stories, even when we are separated by our individual, social, cultural identities,” says Labani.

The bold colours, powerful strokes, and raw depiction of human lives in Labani’s paintings tell stories of resistance against cultural homogenisation, stories of collective remembrance, of identities and cultures, of building connections amidst fragmentation. “I guess I am driven by the urgency for a utopia. Envisioning a new society becomes imperative in response to the surrounding violence,” says Labani. “In a world where political discourse often aligns with destruction, my paintings speak a softer but equally potent language of protest and resilience.”

A language she learnt from her grandmother with whom she lived during the first 10 years of her life. “Mother found it difficult to take care of the two of us, brother and me,” says Labani. “The house was also small. So, she sent me to my nani’s [maternal grandmother's] house where she and khala [mother’s sister] took care of me for a decade. There used to be a pond near her house where we spent every single afternoon doing kantha [embroidery] work.” Her grandmother would weave complex stories in colourful needle work, using a simple running stitch. The art of telling complex stories in simple strokes may have come to Labani from her grandmother, but the space between despair and hope that she inhabits has been created by her mother.

“When I was young, I performed very poorly in my exams. I would get a zero in maths and even science sometimes,” she says. “And all that time I do not know why but ma continued to believe in me, even when baba had doubts. She would assure me that I would do well next time.  I wouldn’t have reached so far without her. Also, ma could never attend college even though she wanted to. She was married off. So, she lives her life through me. When I return from Kolkata she comes and sits next to me, eagerly absorbing the stories of a world outside her home. She sees that world through my eyes.”

But the world is a scary place, even the rapidly commercialising world of art. “I fear losing my emotional core. In the desire to become a big artist, I do not wish to be emotionally displaced, distanced from my people and from the values for which my art stands. I continue to struggle a lot, about money, about time, but my biggest struggle is to survive in this world without selling my soul to the market.”   

Cover image: Jayanti Buruda