Trail of Blood
Dipanwita Saha
On 16th August 1946, as India headed towards partition, Calcutta witnessed the biggest Hindu-Muslim riot, which led to a massacre of more than 4000 people causing the Great Calcutta Killings. It marked an apex point amid the series of mass-scale communal violence during that period, determining India's fate and giving birth to the extremism of religious identity. Additionally, it altered the demographic pattern.
1946’s Calcutta Killing is very much an object of living memories which are handed down from one generation to another within the families. Saha's work is an archive of untold stories of forgotten history. This is a tribute to those who have gone through the pain of the partition of this country and are still living with the aftermath.
Trail of Blood by Dipanwita Saha reflects on the polarisation creeping into Indian society on the basis of religion. It is an attempt to visualise those collective memories of the city and its residents. And often these memories are a bridge between the personal, the political and the recollective past of the nation.
Biography
Saha is an independent photographer based in Kolkata, India. Since graduating in Engineering before beginning her practice in photography, Saha's work has been published in online magazines, exhibited in the Indian Photo Festival, Khoj Gallery and featured at the Angkor photo festival.
Coming from a refugee family, she has grown up with stories of brutality, hatred, friendship and culture. She wanted to narrate those stories to the world using photography, an interest that stemmed from her father. Using personal and subjective modalities in her documentary practice, Saha explores the complexities of societal frameworks and the dynamics of political institutions in contemporary India. Her primary areas of interest are history, cultural narratives and socio-political changes. Recently Saha has been working on an oral archive of the pre-independence era of India and how it changes the culture of a city. As part of her image-making practice, Saha deploys personal voices, metaphorical exploration, and abstraction to unravel narratives of people, places, and their histories.