Photography and the mutability of the land in Akshay Mahajan’s "People of Clay"

In Akshay Mahajan’s ongoing photo-based project People of Clay, the plasticity of clay in the riverine region of Goalpara in western Assam, India becomes a metaphor for visualizing the land in a manner that undermines the fixity of landscapes contained by territorial borders. Mahajan renders visible the multiple chronotopes that characterize the region’s oral and craft narratives of being and belonging, through staged images of figures in masquerade on the riverbank and in rice fields enacting the relationship between humans, animals, the water, and the divine. The photo-performances accompany images of public monuments, street graffiti, crafted figurines, political posters, and the aftermath of violence, and images from the colonial ethnographic archive, demonstrating the entanglement of myth, public memory, and history in the artist’s narration of the land. Through a combination of artifice, excavation, and encounter, the artist’s photographic assemblages enact a spatially and temporally plural understanding of land and belonging that challenges the post-partition reality of its halted contiguities with regions that fall within Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and India.

This presentation explores Akshay Mahajan’s People of Clay by situating it within his broader photographic work on Assam. Through a focus on the artist’s use of the assemblage and its evocation of the spatial and temporal forms of the folk, it demonstrates that Mahajan’s work highlights the contingencies that characterize the construction of the human and its continuities with the non-human, constituting an eco-critical spatial imaginary that pushes against the post-partition idea of territoriality that characterizes dominant narratives of northeast India.