Fever, Fever interrupts an episode of the ‘burning of the house of lac’ from the Mahabharata to explore the entanglements of assassination, sacrifice, and escape. Raqs revisits this tale of assassination and deceit through a 12th century Hoysala temple frieze, photographed by Dutch Indologist Gerard Foekema, and held in the Special Collections of the Kern Institute, Leiden University.

The parable features princes who substitute the bodies of their tribal subjects for their own in order to escape an assassination bid in a bitumen-fuelled inferno stoked by their cousins, who are also their rivals. It is a story of competing elites, a hydro-carbon fire-storm and the sacrifice of subaltern lives – something that feels like it was written only yesterday.

Time does not resolve conundrums, however distant they may appear. Fever, Fever asks what remains unresolved, what continues to simmer in stone, in memory, in men’s hearts.