Debjani Banerjee review: is that a Henry hoover – or a Hindu deity?
Banerjee’s blend of British suburbia and ancient Bengali traditions is an imaginative portrayal of the artist’s dual heritage – and questions how we preserve culture today
The stories we are told shape the world in which we live. If your father had insisted you watch all 94 episodes of a television adaptation of the Mahabharatawhen it was screened on the BBC, as Debjani Banerjee’s did, it’s easy to imagine that your family’s Henry hoover might come to resemble Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu deity with a similarly long trunk. My own Irish mother meant that I was always hearing banshees at my bedroom window, as if she had brought them over to England with her. In a sense, she had. And so, Banerjee’s charming sculpture of a vacuum cleaner as the god of new beginnings, situated at the heart of this witty and moving exhibition, reflects an imagination shaped by 1980s British suburbia and an ancient Bengali literary tradition.
Sitting on a strip of garishly patterned carpet, Henry-Ganesha captures the double consciousness of anyone who grows up with more than one cultural inheritance. But the work also encapsulates a more general principle: that every generation must adapt the cultures they inherit to their own circumstances if those traditions are to survive. Banerjee’s collaborative art takes her Bengali heritage as a means through which to ask questions that will resonate with anyone living in Britain today: how do we preserve the cultures that bind us together when things are falling apart? How do we pass on knowledge to our children? What should we carry into a rapidly changing future, and what must we leave behind?
The diverse influences on the artist’s imagination are gathered together in the film that plays in a “music room” laid with divans and pillows. It collages together scenes from two TV adaptations of the Mahabharata; a photograph of the artist’s mother wearing a saree and holding a gloriously branded Pepsi can on a desolate British hillside (an image reproduced elsewhere as an incongruously technicolour textile); clips from a CBeebies cartoon featuring a charismatic wheel of cheese (named Cheese), that the artist watched every morning with her own daughter; and much else beside. Addressed at various points to Ganesha, the artist’s mother and the artist’s daughter, the film collapses ancient and modern, fantastical and banal, familiar and exotic (on which side of that divide an elephant-headed God and a block of cheese in a pigtail fall depends on where you are looking from).
Banerjee’s surreal juxtapositions do not banalise high culture, in the sense of bringing it down to the level of daytime television. Instead, they serve to re-enchant everyday life, bringing the Indian gods into a quintessentially British world of anthropomorphic vacuum cleaners and ghastly carpets. So it makes sense that the exhibition should contain twin shrines to the demoness Putana, who haunted the young Banerjee’s dreams after the mandatory Mahabharata sessions, and Cheese, who played a similarly formative role in the relationship between the artist and her young daughter. These collisions between the domestic and the mythological insist that culture is a communal experience, made valuable not by empty reverence for literary fictions but by the connections it forges between people.
This commitment to culture as community is most clearly expressed in the patchwork quilt that runs along the exhibition’s longest wall. Depicting five female characters from the Mahabharata, and embroidered with dangling sequins, shimmering silk, and waving feathers, it was created by the artist as part of a workshop with local residents during a previous exhibition in Glasgow. A testament to collective labour and communal creative expression, the work’s irreverent treatment of the mythological tradition offers another reminder that traditions are kept alive in the retelling. Cultures are preserved in museums only after they are dead; the living ones survive in the tales you tell your children, the pictures you make to decorate your living room, the television you watch with your family, the quilts you stitch with your neighbours.
In the music room, two songs play on a loop: one, soundtracking the film, was composed by the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore; the other invokes the mother goddess Kali. Both are sung by the artist’s sister, Mita Pujara, and they are the beating heart of the exhibition. In this respect, the show resembles the film by Satyajit Ray from which it takes its title. In its climactic scene, a dancer performs for the last person in a line of cultured landowners whose patronage made the flourishing of Bengali art possible. After the performance, he is spooked when all of the lamps in his music room blow out: he recognises the imminent end of his own life and the era of Bengali culture that it symbolises. But his servant runs to the window and pulls back the curtains to throw light into the room: it is daybreak, he says, and the sun will continue to rise. The scene is included in Banerjee’s film, alongside a clip of the artist dancing in her own music room.