A melodious tune guides visitors to the Jalsaghar exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow. Drawing inspiration from the same name as Satyajit Ray's 1958 Bengali film, artist Debjani Banerjee reimagines the concept of a traditional Bengali music room. This evocative space—a dimly lit pink-hued room furnished with a reflective dance floor, cushions and bolsters, a hookah pipe with a ceramic chillum, lengths of wooden shoe racks and partition panels, is bathed in the glow of a pink neon sign that reads Jalsaghar. Two fabric works, Naach (2021) and Charu (2020) are suspended from the walls, while a disco ball hanging overhead reflects the various surfaces. This space serves as an opening chapter to the exhibition, wherein Banerjee invites the audience to enter, be seated, relax and reflect as they listen to the soundtrack featuring her sister’s voice singing Tagore and Baul songs.

The exhibition speaks of a spectacular re-mythicisation of remembrance—wherein Banerjee layers existing myths with her memory and recollections of those very stories, creating new myths and narratives in the process. Her works draw on nostalgia and the memory of a historical and imagined landscape of India, where she experiments with and presents a range of mixed-media works stemming from different moments in her life, dreams, experiences and memories. Through an ambiguous interweaving of reality and mythology, she chooses characters—primarily that of women from her family, or films and stories she was exposed to while growing up, who served as luminaries within patriarchal and racialised systems. She draws on themes of fascination, allure, mundanity, curiosity and introspection, further conveying emotions through humour and subtle playfulness.

The second room in the exhibition is a reimagined personal landscape dominated by a large applique tapestry that weaves together fragmented stories from the Mahabharata. The room has several quilted tapestries hanging on walls and free-standing wooden shrine-like structures holding clay and ceramic figures, which are ornamented with stray pieces of jewellery and colourful fabrics cascading from these works—amongst other elements. Banerjee integrates traditional Indian craft motifs and materials, elements of pop culture and Hindu iconography, alongside characters from the children's TV series such as cheese (Cheese on shelf, 2023) and British consumer goods such as Henry the Hoover (Henry Cobra on plinth, 2024). Some of these visuals even morph into coiling serpentine forms, embodying her simultaneous fear and fascination with the image of the snake.

Jalsaghar is further rooted in the political and geographical context of Banerjee’s upbringing, where she had to navigate dual identities as an Indian Bengali woman growing up in the diaspora in a Britain that was being shaped by post-colonial dynamics in its relationship with a newly independent India. Excerpts from a conversation with STIR below.

Shalmali Shetty: The title Jalsaghar comes from Satyajit Ray’s film of the same name. But the exhibition further interweaves various elements and snippets not just from Ray’s films, but also Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata, and stories from your life growing up in Britain—all of them foregrounding female figures in various instances. How have you approached and envisioned this project?

Debjani Banerjee: I have been thinking about these themes for a long time. The project is an acknowledgement of the many incredible cultural references and personal experiences I had growing up in the UK with Bengali parents and reflecting on these now. It has been through the process of listening to family stories, revisiting films, TV shows, music, dances and painting and absorbing all that information that the works slowly started to take shape.

The project started during a residency I did at the CCA two years ago, when I began to rewatch Satyajit Ray films and a version of the Mahabharata that we watched as a family on television in the late 1980s every Saturday morning. My father recorded all 94 episodes onto VHS tape. I didn't know what was going on in the story, but I remember there were gods in the sky, in the clouds, people dancing on lotuses, melodramatic eyebrow acting and a lot of gold. I then started exploring the many versions of the Mahabharata, including Peter Brook’s film [from 1989]. There are two scenes I vividly remember—one of Putana and the other of Draupadi, both leaving a lasting impression more than anything else. Being so young and being a woman, both scenes induced a real fear in me. Taking from here, I began to research other female characters from the epic.

A piece in the exhibition I would like to speak about is the quilted textile work That floats on high o'er vales and hills [2023]. The title is taken from the second line of the Wordsworth poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, a poem that explores humanity's relationship to landscape. The image is taken from a photograph of my ma, which when I found [it], told me so much about her; but I also projected so much into the meaning of this photograph just from piecing together stories that I had heard. The photograph is of my ma wearing a sari with a cardigan over it, sitting in this very English landscape and drinking a Pepsi. The photograph means so much because it tells me about this person who had come to Britain in her 20s, wondering about everything that is ahead of her.

So those figures stem from that space of waking, dreaming and writing from many different places. It's a reflection of childhood and growing up and being aware that I was different to others at school. When I became a teenager, I wanted to hide this part of myself, to assimilate and fit in. For a long time, I didn't feel a connection, but now I would like to go to India and spend time learning more about the culture and the crafts and hear my family speak. It’s something my cousin describes as a hawa or wind, that once you catch [it] in Kolkata, it won't let you go. I felt a real longing for this place that is part of who I am, but also is not me.

Shalmali: Community engagement and collaboration are at the heart of your creative practice. Some of your works have been fabricated through workshops, especially the large tapestry that was created through open studio days inviting people to contribute to its making. This collaborative approach is also reflected in the idea of a jalsaghar—a music room, where people can gather, sit, listen and engage with each other. How do you see this as having shaped your exhibition?

Debjani: I have always enjoyed workshops because something is exciting about the liveness of making with people and I wanted to bring this element of my practice into the work and exhibition. The Jalsaghar space comes from reflecting on sharing spaces with others to listen to music. I remember at Bengali social gatherings, how the harmonium would come out after the food and everyone would gather to sing, bringing the tradition from Bengal into these houses in Oxford where I grew up. So it's that idea of singing, listening and appreciating music.

I was also thinking about music and dance and the importance of that for me, growing up. In the 1990s, there was a big movement that happened in Britain called the Asian Underground Scene and it was for the first time that I felt I could relate to something. So for the first room [Jalsaghar, 2024], I was working on this idea of somewhere between a club, an Indian traditional ‘jalsaghar’ and a workshop within the exhibition space, where people could sit, move, dream, think, listen. The music room is not about the film itself, but it's taking that concept of a space for the appreciation of music. And that's how the music came about in collaboration with my sister [Mita Pujara] and brother-in-law [Kavi Pujara], who performed on the opening night. The soundtrack continues to play in the background with my sister singing two Bangla songs—Bujhi oi sudure, a Tagore song from the Mahabharata and Kali Kamaliya Wale, a Baul song. This is accompanied by a textile wall hanging in the backdrop [Naach, 2021] of me dancing; and an image of Charulata [from Ray’s 1964 film], framed on the back of a reflective jacket [Charu, 2020] and staring back at the viewers.

In the second space, we have the large applique tapestry [Mahabharata, 2024] worked on collaboratively by inviting people to open studio days to help stitch the work and share their stories while making it. This work foregrounds five female characters from the Mahabharata—Draupadi, Gandhari, Satyavati, Hidimbi and Shikhandi. A Ganesh mask replicating the one from Brook’s Mahabharata hangs adjacent to this, along with the other two wall hangings—the one of my ma and another of myself [Absolutely fit for the UK, 2024]. This particular work for me is about transforming and escaping reality, dreaming of another place. The imagery is a synthesis of Indian and European art where Jamini Roy meets Matisse.

When I was in Kolkata recently, I was also fascinated by the roadside shrines, or even the wardrobe shrines in our homes, where we would go and pay our respects to various gods. So in the exhibition, the adorned painted structures [collaboratively worked on with artist Bernie Reid] are like ad-hoc shrines. They hold my clay figures of various characters from my memories and dreams or imaginary depictions of movement and dance. Until recently, I had never really made my ceramics, but I had been working with primary school children through workshops and making ceramics with them. Their approach was so inspiring that I wanted to try out some of their ways. The first sculpture I made was a figure of the rakshasi Putana presented inside one of these shrines. It was from a memory of an incident when I was really young and thought I saw her through a train window in India. These things influenced my thinking about how to recreate this in my exhibition.

Shalmali: Growing up, you have been exposed to the idea of an India through the lens of so many other people's stories. What aspects of your own history were, if at all, taught in British schools, while still upholding the narrative of colonial triumphs?

Debjani: At the time I was studying at school in the 1990s, our history lessons covered the kings and queens of England from the 16th century onwards but nothing about the Empire, the slave trade, or Britain's hand in that, and it's only through my own education and learning after I left school that I started to understand these things. I'd heard a few stories from my grandparents about the Partition, but a lot of it wasn’t spoken about. I was apprehensive to talk about politics in India because I didn't feel like I had the voice or the experience, or was even in a position where I could comment on it, unlike my feelings about British politics. But for this generation with access to the internet and all these histories, we can start to explore new ways to address and talk about these issues. In making this work, it's not through a religious lens that I am looking at the Mahabharata or reading the Gita, but maybe finding my own spiritual connection with India through stories, myths and the beauty of some of the ways that we think about the world through these philosophies. Stories are told, retold and interpreted, and people receive this in so many different ways.

Debjani Banerjee's exhibition 'Jalsaghar' is on view at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, UK, until November 30, 2024.