How do the living commune with the dead? Kahaani.

In Shivanjani Lal’s monumental memorial Aise Aise Hai (how we remember) (2023), the living and the dead come together in an immersive field of ghanna and kahaani. The ghanna has been rendered to account for us, the Indo–Fijian community, as living representatives of a bittersweet history.

The ghanna is made of plaster, haldi, and kumkum, and planted in brass base plates. Most of the ghanna was sourced from Western Sydney, where the artist lives. One stalk was given by an aunty who lives two streets away. One stalk was from her sister. Three stalks were from the ‘Cabramatta Vietnamese Aunty Mafia,’ courtesy of the artist James Nguyen. One of the ghanna moulds was made in London with ghanna from Jamaica, another sugar colony. There are 87 ghanna stalks in the memorial. This accounts for 87 voyages made from the subcontinent to Fiji. Eighty-seven ships full of our ancestors, the girmityas, Indian indentured labourers bound to Australian-owned sugar plantations in the South Pacific. Eighty-seven also conflates to 1987 – the year in which the military coups d’état took place, which saw thousands of demoralised Indo–Fijians flee Fiji.

Each ghanna is an access point to kahaani. Kahaani is the pulsing, otherworldly vein through which memory releases from the spirits of the girmityas to the hands of living descendants, whose kahaani is a composite of bhaat, song, and ritual of the spirits who crossed the kala pani.

It is by the hands of descendants that the kumkum will be poured into the memorial. The artist has made kumkum with haldi, limestone powder, and chalk. The haldi used carries a history of its own, being the same powder from Lal’s previous exhibitions. Aise Aise Hai (how we remember) is ritual ambience, a field of dreams, visions, and memory. This is a memorial by us, for us.

Aise Aise Hai (how we remember) acknowledges that ātman is in every living being. The inflorescence of the ghanna is also known as arrow. Each arrow is composed of a thousand tiny flowers, and each flower can produce one seed. Each seed is a spirit. The ghanna field is a site of ghosts, of hauntings, of memory, and forgetting. We meet the spirit of the woman who hid British pounds in woven sugar bags with longing for escape, the bare-backed, lacerated wrestlers from Kanpur, the gangs of women who hunted down their backbiting overseers, the men who hulled rice with curses in their hands.

Each of the 87 ghanna stalks is a syllable that is old and sacred. The ghanna itself is a location for kahaani, which moves the plant to transcend its allocated function as a commodity for mass consumption under the colonial capitalist regime. The artist invites descendants of girmityas to transcend our ancestors from the concept of the human commodity, from being bought, sold, and exploited in paradise, as part of the largest human trafficking movement since the transatlantic slave trade.

Aise Aise Hai (how we remember) shows that memory is not always heavy. It is warm. It is palpable. It is for the living and the dead. We are here. What do we want to remember?

Glossary
kahaani - story
ghanna - sugar cane
haldi - turmeric
kumkum - powder used for social and religious markings
girmitya - Indian labourer who was indentured in Fiji between 1879 and 1919
bhaat - talk
kala pani - the literal translation of this phrase is ‘black water.’ This refers to a cultural proscription of crossing the seas, which was believed to signify a loss of customs, character, and posterity
ātman - soul