ph dream No Singular Self: Sudarshan Shetty’s 'One Life Many' Explores Identity

Infinite Possibilities: Images and objects featured in Sudarshan Shetty’s installation One Life Many on display at Kolkata’s Academy of Fine Arts as part of the Bengal Biennale | Photo: Sandipan Chatterjee Infinite Possibilities: Images and objects featured in Sudarshan Shetty’s installation One Life Many on display at Kolkata’s Academy of Fine Arts as part of the Bengal Biennale | Photo: Sandipan Chatterjee

Apon Chinile Jeno Khuda Chena Jay’’ (knowing oneself is knowing the Almighty)ph dream, says the 19th century BengaliBaul-fakiri composer Hassan Raja. But how does one know oneself?

‘‘Who am I?’’ is a question that has troubled thinkers since, as the cliched usage goes, time immemorial. Some realised that there was no single answer. In one, live many. Within each of us, we live with others. No one has an identity singular and absolute, as the Self is multiple and changing. The Self is made of Others. I include You. Some are aware, some are not.

Images and objects featured in Sudarshan Shetty’s installation One Life Many on display at Kolkata’s Academy of Fine Arts as part of the Bengal Biennale | Photo: Sandipan Chatterjee Images and objects featured in Sudarshan Shetty’s installation One Life Many on display at Kolkata’s Academy of Fine Arts as part of the Bengal Biennale | Photo: Sandipan Chatterjee

Sudarshan Shetty’s installation, One Life Many, rekindles that question. In a dimly lit room, the spotlights are on two white, skinned animal carcasses—made of marble dust and polyester resin—hanging side by side, upside down, as they do in meat shops, only here dripping bronze-coloured blood. Three wooden replicas of film projectors from a bygone era face the carcasses. A few yards away, a bronze human skeleton on all fours, rocks on what appears to be the base of a rocking chair. In another corner, a ceiling fan hangs, almost touching the ground. The fan looks dead.

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The carcasses, the skeleton, the fan and the obsolete film projectors—the room smells of death and the past.

In the next room, a film of about 30 minutes plays on loop. It has no story as such. In it, characters transform, and so do the stories as they are retold. The folktale about the chicken and the fox changes. The contemporary story of a man taking dogs out for a walk on desolate streets, cold and foggy, when people were there but buried in their own graves, gets new layers when a woman tells it later. History repeats itself; well, almost; but never exactly. Stories are never retold the same way.

Rekindling an Eternal Question: Sudarshan Shetty’s One Life Many muses about the multiple forces that shape us | Photo: Sandipan Chatterjee Rekindling an Eternal Question: Sudarshan Shetty’s One Life Many muses about the multiple forces that shape us | Photo: Sandipan Chatterjee

How are the movie and the objects linked? How do they interact? Identities develop not only from lived experiences but also from their interactions with the built-in memory we are born with. Our individual experiences and our collective past shape us. How do they shape Shetty’s show?

Shetty’s work, on display at Kolkata’s Academy of Fine Arts as part of the Bengal Biennale, makes no attempt to draw any universal connection. Perceptions are personal. To each, their own. As we know, words do not have a definite, singular meaning; their meanings are determined by the words, punctuation, symbols and space they are placed next to. Can the same be said of objects?

The film blurs the borders between dream, delusion and desire. Multiple aspects remind the audience that what they are experiencing is not real—for example, the wooden replicas of the projectors or the woman in the film who is singing Indian classical music in the middle of a market—the most unusual place for any classical vocalist to be performing.

If the film has any central theme, it is the old story of the man who takes a dip in the ocean and surfaces as a woman, who then lives a full life, before taking a dip in the ocean and emereging as the original man. He resumes from where he had vanished.

“The exhibition resists linearity, much like the myth it reimagines,” says a note on the work at the venue, calling it a ‘‘space where boundaries collapse and meanings keep shifting...It invites us to consider the intersections where identities shift, objects and narratives converge, and where the fixed dissolves into the fluid.”

The note describes the work as not a narrative in the conventional sense but a ‘‘constellation of images and objects, each connected like cross-currents in a stream.’’ It ‘‘unfolds as an introspection on change, identity and the fluid interplay between reality and illusion,’’ says the note,

There isn’t much novelty in what the work says. The novelty is in the approach—the language. By putting the viewer in the middle of a puzzle, the work triggers age-old questions like the nature of reality and its relation to illusion, highlights the multiplicity of selfhood, and discusses the dissolving distinctions between the past and the present, the eternal and the ephemeral. It searches for the connections between dreams, myths and desires in developing one’s perception of reality.

Shetty says he rejects the ‘Western’ canon of giving definitive answers. Instead, he returns to Indian, or South Asian, thoughts. Shetty remembers being deeply influenced at a young age by Indian classical vocalist Pandit Kumar Gandharva’s renditions of some bhajans, especially the 12th century Hindu Yogi Gorakhnath’s verse, ‘‘Shoonya Gadh Shahar, Shahar Ghar Bastee, Kaun Sota Kaun Jaage Hai” (The fort and the city are empty/ the city, homes and slums/who’s asleep and who’s awake?).

Shetty was intrigued by the puzzle. If the fort, the homes, the slums and the city are all empty, where is the question of anyone staying awake? One of Gandharva’s comments during an interview—“We are individually multiple”—remains etched in his consciousness.

The Kolkata exhibition was originally conceived in one room, with the objects surrounding the film screen. However, issues related to logistics resulted in the film being screened in the next room. Shetty does not think it made any major difference. “The objects are in any case referential. They interact with the video in their own ways, in ways that viewers perceive them,” he says.

“The work is not pointing at any definitive singular idea—it aims to open the viewers up to possibilities,” Shetty explains. One Life Many, in his words, ‘‘recalls wisdom that evolved over centuries...Everything can be looked at in a way that it’s real and not at the same time, and both are inclusive, they don’t oppose each other.”

In times wrought by the narrowness of human perception of identity, the pitched battles over the politics of memory and the shrinking space for critical thinking, these are some necessary reminders of what our forefathers had already discussed, in different times, avatars and languages: we need to look beyondph dream, beneath and between appearances.