Invoking transcripts of letters and diaries, close readings of medical records and official dispatches, extracts from novels and poetry, accounts of dreams and nightmares, fragments of archival film & photography and spectral snatches of voices captured in hundred year old sound recordings, in this immersive installation, Not Yet At Ease (2018) which premiered at FirstSite, Colchester as part of the 1914-18 Now Commissions. It foregrounds the experiences and testimonies of the soldiers and workers from the Indian Subcontinent who saw action in the First World War.

The work features a labyrinth of works that straddles the maze of the trenches in the battlefields as well as the padded halls of hospital cells where deeply disturbed soldiers were kept while being treated. Within this labyrinth, voices, images, poetry, officialese and reportage jostle for attention, echoing a the great war, in all its trauma and masquerade. Not Yet At Ease mines rich archival resources and invents a dreamscape to build a lyrical and imaginative layer of reflection. It discovers and highlights the official discomfiture with what was taken to be an ‘excess of poetry’ (read as signs of ‘mental disquietude’) in the soldier’s accounts. This is an early admission and evasion of the psychological distress produced by war to assert that the ‘unease’ generated by the first world war has not yet ceased.

The bold blue colour that forms the ground of Nerves is inspired by the Hospital Blues uniform worn by convalescing soldiers in British military hospitals in the early twentieth century. This intense colour field is overlaid with drawings that invoke drawings of nerves and nerve endings as they were understood in 1916. The text fragments are phrases and expressions such as ‘a bag of nerves’, ‘a battle of nerves’, ‘a war of nerves’, ‘nerves of steel’ even as they discard the crucial word ‘nerve’. This gesture creates an abstract, almost codex-like pattern that viewers can decipher, and acts as an analogue for the frayed consciousnesses produced by shell-shock on the battlefield.

Performers of an Indian concert party at the Royal Ordnance Corps theatre, Baghdad, ca.1917 is a posed group photograph of a troupe of Indian soldiers and non combatants near Baghdad, in the Mesopotamia theatre. It is possible that this is a photograph taken during a celebration of a religious holiday. Some of the performers, including the female impersonators, have their faces whitened with flour. A note on the reverse of the original photograph states that the performance lasted from 8pm until 3.30am. Musical accompaniment being provided by tom-tom drums and the small box organ seen on the left of the photograph. In Group Photo, this image has been animated to suggest the appearance and disappearance of colour in the faces and costumes of the performers, and also in the painted backdrop that they are pictured against. This is in keeping with the tradition of hand-colouring of photographs that was a very common feature of photographic practice in India at the time. The colours are indicative of the desire for liveliness in a difficult and drab terrain, and the vivid colours in the landscape are suggestive of the aesthetic of the ‘painted backdrop’ that was common both to folk theatre and to popular photography at the time. 

These tropes suggest the ways in which many of the Indian soldiers and ‘followers’ made the conditions of war time ‘bearable’ and lived through very difficult conditions with courage, sensitivity and a sign that they had not forgotten what made life beautiful. This attitude is evident in the letters they wrote home, some of which have also made their way into the narrative of our work. 

In Lalu’s Nightmare, one of the seated figures from ‘The Group Photo’ has been isolated with an animated shadow behind him. The shadow suggests a multi-armed divinity which draws its inspiration from the reading of a fragment of the War Trilogy, a set of novels about Indian soldiers in the First World War by the acclaimed novelist, Mulk Raj Anand. In the novel, Anand describes a dream experienced by his protagonist, Lalu, an Indian soldier stationed in France in which he sees Kali, the Goddess of the Cremation Ground in Hindu mythology. 

The First World War produced the greatest number of amputated limbs, especially when soldiers lost arms and legs as a result of stepping on mines. These bodies without limbs, and limbs without bodies, became ‘phantoms’ for each other, especially when recovering soldiers continued to complain of aches and itches in the limbs that were no longer attached to their bodies, producing a neurological (and in some senses, spiritual and phenomenological) puzzle that would fox scientists and doctors for a long time. 

Ghost Floating Legs is an exercise in the invocation of these phantom limbs and their absent presence on the skin and soul of time.