In the Krittivasi Ramayan, Krittibas Ojha’s fifteenth-century Bengali retelling of the Ramayana, a father is understood to give his child its bones. Follow that logic to its end and a baby born to two widowed queens would arrive without any, which is exactly what happens, and the epic greets the boy with reverence. Some five centuries on, the artist Debashish Paul has found a way to give that boneless child a body: cloth, stitched with women from Phulia, the West Bengal village where he grew up and where the poem was composed.
Ojha’s retelling became one of premodern Bengal’s most widely read books, yet this episode appears nowhere in the older Sanskrit epics. Its manuscripts survive in their thousands, overwhelmingly in Bengal, though empire carried some to London, into the collections of the British Library and SOAS. The boy’s name, Bhagiratha, is a pun on the two bhagas, or vulvas, he was born from. The scholar Ruth Vanita reads the passage as one of the rare early accounts of two women conceiving a child.
Paul, born in 1994, brings the story to A Birth of a Boneless Child, his first solo exhibition in London, at Ginny on Frederick in Clerkenwell, where it opened on 6 November and runs until 16 December. For him the myth carries a history lesson. Queer life belonged to South Asian culture long before colonial rule criminalised it, and the vocabulary of deviance arrived with the Victorians. Bonelessness becomes his figure for the queer body: people are often asked to bend and fit the narrow spaces made for them, and a body without fixed structure can take whatever form it likes.
The sculptures are made with women from his village, worked in kantha, the running stitch of rural Bengal, and embellished with hand embroidery and beads. Their forms evoke female reproductive organs, imagined as vessels of fertility and transformation, and as the beginnings of families that grow beyond inherited ideas of kinship. “I first learned my queerness from these women,” Paul says, remembering their gestures and their craft, and also the pain and restrictions that shaped their lives.
Anyone who sews will recognise the logic of the thread here. A needle passes in and out, joining fragments. A stitch can hurt and a stitch can mend, and Paul keeps both possibilities in view while asking how gender gets sewn into us and whether it might be unpicked and stitched again differently.
Represented by Emami Art, Paul is currently a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, whose Open Days follow later in November. He showed at the Coventry Biennial last year and at Photo London this year. Anyone who has ever unpicked a seam to let a garment find its shape will understand the invitation.
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Further Information:
Debashish Paul: A Birth of a Boneless Child, runs until 16 December at Ginny on Frederick in Clerkenwell, London.
Debashish Paul is represented by Emami Art
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Image Credits:
Debashish Paul, A Birth of a Boneless Child. All images courtesy of the Ginny on Frederick Gallery, London.