Artist-Researcher
NL - IND
01. The Criminal Tribes
02. (Dis)Locating Design Globalisms
03. Footprints of the Celestial Dancers
04. Living Knowledges of the Endangered
05. Vessel of the Daivas
Bio
Artist-Researcher
NL - IND
01. The Criminal Tribes
02. (Dis)Locating Design Globalisms
03. Footprints of the Celestial Dancers
04. Living Knowledges of the Endangered
05. Vessel of the Daivas
Bio
THE CRIMINAL TRIBES:
RE-MEMBERING THE DISPOSSESSED
2024
Loam, Wood, Silver, Audio-Visual
BFI National Archives
V&A Archives
Wereldmuseum Leiden
RE-MEMBERING THE DISPOSSESSED
2024
Loam, Wood, Silver, Audio-Visual
BFI National Archives
V&A Archives
Wereldmuseum Leiden
The Criminal Tribes is an artistic research project that resurfaces a tragic yet largely forgotten chapter of British imperialism in South Asia. Taking form as a multimedia installation, the project departs from an excerpt of a campaign film commissioned by the Salvation Army in 1925, highlighting their missionary work in India, Burma and Ceylon.
The excerpt depicts a Salvation Army officer coercing a Bhil adivasi woman to renounce her traditional jewellery in her conversion to Christianity. The project examines this historic moment of extraction against the backdrop of the draconian ‘Criminal Tribes Act’ of 1871, which classified hundreds of nomadic communities as “hereditary criminals” with an innate disposition to criminal behaviour. The Act paved way for the colonial government to execute large-scale social engineering operations that included mass religious conversions, the forced “settling” of nomadic tribes, exploitative labour regimes and military coercion.
The woman’s severed ornaments, now housed in museums and collections in the west - emblematic of the extractive reach of empire, are made protagonists and narrators of this imperial legacy. They are identified, traced, and re-appropriated, given new form in earth and silver. Through these gestures of re-appropriation the project brings into critical dialogue the West’s enduring hegemony over historical representation, and the aesthetics of memory and truth.
The excerpt depicts a Salvation Army officer coercing a Bhil adivasi woman to renounce her traditional jewellery in her conversion to Christianity. The project examines this historic moment of extraction against the backdrop of the draconian ‘Criminal Tribes Act’ of 1871, which classified hundreds of nomadic communities as “hereditary criminals” with an innate disposition to criminal behaviour. The Act paved way for the colonial government to execute large-scale social engineering operations that included mass religious conversions, the forced “settling” of nomadic tribes, exploitative labour regimes and military coercion.
The woman’s severed ornaments, now housed in museums and collections in the west - emblematic of the extractive reach of empire, are made protagonists and narrators of this imperial legacy. They are identified, traced, and re-appropriated, given new form in earth and silver. Through these gestures of re-appropriation the project brings into critical dialogue the West’s enduring hegemony over historical representation, and the aesthetics of memory and truth.