Shiraz Bayjoo, an artist who was born in the Mauritian capital Port Louis and has called London home for over two decades, unpacks histories of colonialism with a rare tenderness that seeks accountability without being overwhelmed by rage. With his training as a student at the University of Arts Institute, Cardiff, and as a young artist-in-residence working with charities for the homeless, he developed a visual language and a research-based practice championing the marginalised.

Whether he is grinding pigments for paintings or rummaging through colonial records in dusty archives, there is a strong awareness of the movements and interconnectedness of people, flora and fauna, languages and seasons. He is keen to speak of the violence of the past in a manner that helps us understand, not sensationalise, and walk together in the direction of healing.

“I will not show images of people being killed. That would amount to reproducing the reductionism of the colonial lens. I prefer to focus on the strength we derive from nature,” he says, while taking me on a walkthrough of Avan Lapli (Before the Rain), his first show in India at Jhaveri Contemporary, on view from September 12 - October 19, 2024.

He speaks in great depth about the political and spiritual sensibilities that inform his work, while he watches me squeal in delight as I marvel at the beauty of the kanga cloths “designed in Mombasa, printed in Maharashtra and worn in Madagascar”. They affirm his argument that the Indian Ocean “could never be owned by Europe” thanks to the links between the people and cultures who have lived and moved on these waters and along the coastline.

I want to push back against patriarchal readings and colonial interpretations. – Shiraz Bayjoo

Chintan Girish Modi: Your artist bio describes you as “a Mauritian artist living in London”. It talks about who you are and where you live. Do you sense some tension between the two?

Shiraz Bayjoo: I guess this description helps people understand why my focus is so specific to the Indian Ocean. I am a child of the Indian Ocean. I have so much to say about the complexities in this region yet it is difficult to be a contemporary artist based in Mauritius. The reasons are partly economic and partly political. [Mauritius] is an island, 1500 miles away from any major landmass. Living in London continues to make sense. It was the heart of the old empire and is also at the edge of contemporary decolonising language. The latter is not something that we can attribute to the British. What I mean to say is that London is at the crossroads not only of money but also ideas. So many academics, thinkers [and] writers continue to come [here]!

Chintan: Your engagement with colonialism is multi-layered. It would be unfair to think that being anti-colonial is only a political stance for you. There is a spiritual strain running through your entire body of work. It feels like a homage to your ancestors. Before you make new work, are there rituals that help you connect with them?

Shiraz: It means a lot to me that you see this in my work. I remember sitting in my grandmother’s home in Port Louis, Mauritius. It is a colonial house. In the 19th century, as the malaria epidemic swept through Mauritius as it did through all South Asian ports, the Europeans were fearful. They did not understand where malaria came from. But they knew it had something to do with living in low-lying areas. They started to move out and go to hill stations as they sensed that moving higher up would reduce their chances of falling sick. Post-abolition, the empty houses started to be broken up into smaller dwellings for former slaves, newly freed Afro-Mauritians and families of indentured labourers. The dynamics of the port city changed. New communities started to form and cement. Full of emotion, I sat in my grandmother’s home and asked myself: How do I tell this great untellable story?

Some of my ancestors came from India. Others came from Persia, Madagascar and East Africa. Those who came from the north all came through India. They did not go directly to Mauritius. I found ticket records that show they went through Pondicherry. Also, Bombay in the 19th century was a huge melting pot of multiple religious sects. Many people came through there.

I will not dictate to other artists what they must do and how they must go ahead but I cannot explore the dynamics of colonisation in my work and then also take this kind of money. – Shiraz Bayjoo

Chintan: May I nudge you back to that bit about the rituals informing your practice?

Shiraz: Well, there are many. The more important ones have to do with how I work with archival materials. Once I find something of interest, let’s say a photograph or a map, I take a copy of it. In the liberating of those images, I am always struck by how access is controlled and permission denied when so much of that material was stolen in the first place. Speaking of photographs, where was the permission of the sitter? Many were in such extreme poverty that they had to take whatever money was offered. I sit with these thoughts and feelings before I start working with these images and getting work out to an audience. When these images sit in my studio and when I am looking through these materials, I spend a long time figuring out whether I should work on something at all. Such is the level of respect that one must have. These are not portraits of anybody, right? They were people with love, loss, tragedy and joy. They were deemed as not important enough to be written about. Yet they are here sitting with us because they are ghosts not laid to rest. When I sit with the images quietly, it almost feels like asking for permission to work with them. That’s my ritual.

Chintan: Let’s talk about your work Four Sisters, which is part of your new show Avan Lapli at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai. We see four women in this archival photograph printed on voile fabric. Two are seated on the floor. One seems to be on a chair. Another is standing in the image. Their gaze is direct and unblinking, almost accusatory. Do you call these women sisters because they were born to the same set of parents, or are you referring to their intimate bond as a kind of sisterhood?

Shiraz: I do not know if they were related by blood but the way they stand together in this image makes me think of them as sisters. When I look at traumatic photographs of indentured labourers in Mauritius, I often think about how people must have survived the plantations, what strategies they must have used and how they must have created agency in an environment that was so hostile to their bodies and spirits. Research shows that the bonds of women held communities together and colonisers felt threatened by their networks.

Even today, mining companies in Latin America kill matriarchal heads when they want a well-knit village system to collapse. In my work, I want to push back against patriarchal readings and colonial interpretations. The decolonial feminism of Françoise Vergès has informed my thinking. As a feminist political scientist, she is deeply committed to fighting imperialism, colonialism and racism—all of which attack and disempower women’s bodies.

Chintan: Nature is often framed as female through the coloniser’s gaze, isn’t it? Do you see a link between how the trope of conquest plays out in relation to nature and women?

Shiraz: Yes, it is! The plunder of nature and the normalisation of violence against women go hand in hand. Violence against women was prevalent on plantations. That is an unspoken part of the trauma in Creole identities. Historian Megan Vaughan’s book Creating the Creole Island (2005), which looks at slavery in 18th-century Mauritius, was a fantastic resource in my research journey. When I find women’s portraits in colonial archives, I wonder how they were treated and whether their consent was sought. The process of decolonisation involves recognising that the women enslaved under colonial rule were deemed as unworthy. The act of seeing them and bringing back their memories becomes an act of pushing back against erasure.

Chintan: Showing Four Sisters in a room overlooking the Gateway of India seems like an inspired choice. How does it feel to place it here? What resonances does it evoke beyond this exhibition, in terms of your ongoing engagement with colonialism?

Shiraz: The balcony attached to the room has been a welcoming place for such reflections. Gazing at the Gateway of India and the Arabian Sea, I have been fascinated by what makes a particular work resonate. Sometimes, it is just the making of the work and the research that went into it. Sometimes, it is also the placing of the work in an exhibition and the unexpected connections that can happen both for an artist and also the viewers who enter that space.

It has been very special to present this work here upon the water next to the gate that the British built for King George V to receive India as a gift almost and also the gate that the last battalion of soldiers leaving the British empire in India walked back through. Oh, the dishonour of losing India, as if India was a thing to hold in your hands! But that’s how the British treated it. I know that it’s technically the Arabian Sea and not the Indian Ocean that I have spent so many years researching and making works about. But the Arabian Sea, with the history of trade and travel across it, also evokes the sights and sounds of our interconnectedness in Asia and Africa. So much has been taken from us but life continues. We are not over. We are not finished. How we wish to take ourselves forward collectively as people depends on us. We need to think about the past but we don’t need to live as victims.

Chintan: What are the ethical dilemmas that you face while working in the arts industry, which has benefited from the slave trade and continues to benefit from the arms trade? Would you refuse to participate in a group show, festival, residency or fellowship if you were aware that the money on offer was linked to genocide and war?

Shiraz: I can talk about this openly. There are organisations like the Outset Contemporary Art Fund in the UK, which have very direct connections to the arms trade and occupation. A lot of artists, including me, refuse to work with them for this reason. However, I have worked with museums on a commission and later discovered that they were funded by Outset. Now this is where it starts to get complicated. You can refuse a direct relationship with certain types of organisations because of how they are funded. But sometimes, you are working with smaller arts agencies, smaller museums and smaller galleries; their money might come from these bigger organisations that are complicit in occupation, violence and human rights abuses. This is problematic and it must change. What is happening in Palestine at the moment is a wake-up call for a lot of people. Many of us had been on to this for a long time but some brilliant artists have messaged me saying, “I can’t understand how I didn’t see this before. Now I have to rethink my practice and how it is being supported.”

I will not dictate to other artists what they must do and how they must go ahead but I cannot explore the dynamics of colonisation in my work and then also take this kind of money. Additionally, there is also the question of how one works with the material one finds in archives. How can one use it and present it without recreating the colonial gaze? How does one work with the information about where it came from? How does one resist the framing? So I am in this continuous dilemma, thinking about how to build this knowledge and perspective into the work itself.