No Singular Self

Sudarshan Shetty's work questions the singularity of identity

- Snigdhendu Bhattacharya

APON Chinile Jeno Khuda Chena Jay” (knowing oneself is knowing the Almighty), says the 19th century Bengali Baul-fa-kiri 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.

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.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.