Arpita Shah’s Nalini
By Lodoe Laura
One of the most bodily childhood memories I have of my maternal grandmother is helping her deadhead her garden. We would sit together in the sun and pull off faded flowers from their plant. I can still feel in my body the ‘snap’ of the flower separating from its shoot, and the tactility of the dried blossoms that would crunch slightly in my little hand. It didn’t take much tension to remove the dead flowers; just a little pull would release the bud from its stem. My grandmother explained to me that removing the dead flower heads helped the plant nourish itself and that it would birth new flowers in their place.
Something in Arpita Shah’s Nalini brought up this memory. The series is a family album that follows Shah’s matriliny. Photographed over several years, the series was made in India, Kenya and the United Kingdom. The photographer combines images of the women in her family with her familial ephemera and still lives containing the petals and blossoms of various brightly saturated flowers.
On one level, the obvious connection to my memory is the floral treatments and the familial nature of the photographs. The flowery motifs show up in the textiles of the women’s clothing, printed on to their bedsheets and springing up in their environment. One image from Nalini depicts a woman in magenta standing against the backdrop of a flowering bougainvillaea. A still life combines a long grey and brown braided lock of hair with four bright pink floral buds.
The objects in the pictures are tactile. A black and white photograph of Shah’s great grandmother standing next to a vase of cut flowers has its edges torn, perhaps from years of passing it around to admire the woman’s portrait.
“ …in viewing the photograph, I feel the weight of my own chest pressed up against my grandma’s.”
But the images are also deeply somatic. A particular frame depicts Shah embracing her grandmother. There’s a visceral intimacy rooted in the way the women’s heads rest on each others’ shoulders. Granddaughter and grandmother are mirrored images of one another, and in viewing the photograph, I feel the weight of my own chest pressed up against my grandma’s. In Shah’s image of two hands grasping another, I can feel the way the skin draped elegantly over the veins and small bones in my grandmother’s hands. I can feel the coolness of her slim fingers slipped in between my own.
Maybe what I relate to the most in the series is the engulfing sense of dislocation it evokes in me. This sense is hinted to in Nalini through the inclusion of official photographs – the types used to apply for passports necessary for international travel. It’s also present in the images of the women taken in an ordinary white room devoid of distinct features.
This sense of displacement I feel was passed down to me from my grandmother, who spent most of her life an ocean away from the place where she grew up. Drawn away from her home for her husband’s work, my grandma lived an adult life a far distance from her own mother, twin sister and her motherland.
But my grandma’s garden was filled with flowers from the places she came to be. She taught my mother and me how to snap off dead blossoms from plants we would find while out walking together. The buds contained seeds which she would bury into the dirt of her garden. These seeds rooted in the new soil, and every summer, my grandma’s garden would become pregnant with the buds and blossoms of new flowers, forming a living archive assembled from the movements of her personal history.
Like my grandmother’s garden, Nalini embodies a maternal memory. Gathered together, Shah’s images entwine the kinship and distance that exists between the generations of women in her family and evoke a personal tale of migration, interrelation and femininity.