Basu shares the story of Nirmala, who mastered reading after being the first woman to join the guerrilla squad of Gadchiroli district in Maharashtra, and taught politics to the people. She was shot at close range on 13 August 1998. Or that of Kamindla Shobha, who, amongst other things, arranged for women to work making thin cigarettes, known as beedi, to counter their exploitation by the company owners. She was killed on 23 February 2005 by state forces, says Basu. She also features women fighters today, such as a 26-year-old, also called Nirmala, who saw her village burned. After the attack and the rape of three of her friends, she ran for her life and joined the Maoists. “I met her when she was listening to the radio with her male comrade,” Basu recalls. “As they heard news of Hosni Mubarak’s downfall in Egypt, she told me, ‘I am from a very poor family and life was very difficult. I joined the guerrillas and now I understand and see what is happening in the world, and I think revolution is the only option’.” Through these women, we start to get a glimpse of the many battles they are fighting against the encroaching economic powerhouses and their allies in the state’s apparatus, against the patriarchal society and the unjust caste and class system.
At a time of renewed identity crisis for the photojournalism industry where debates over what constitutes a truthful account of reality are plenty, Basu, who is no stranger to these discussions − she was accused of staging some of the scenes that appear in A Ritual of Exile − is providing both criticism and answer.
“We have somehow arrived at a place where we are seeking to limit the meaning and nuance of visual imagery,” she says. “We have ceded responsibility to external forces, which seek to codify a form and practice that essentially defies codification. Sometimes we have to liberate the images from the oppression of specific city.” Centralia can be understood as a case study of the latter. In its current format, the book dummy repeats the same images multiple times with slight variations on scale, crop and how other superimposed images obfuscate some elements. There’s a filmic feel, as if we were witnessing the analogue splicing process involved in producing a movie. In this case the reader becomes the editor, reconstructing a narrative from fragments. “We must demand, or at least expect, a great deal from our audience,” says Basu. “In not doing so we risk patronising them, or oversimplifying situations and presenting a familiar narrative that imparts no information and doesn’t challenge their preconceptions of events, situation or people.”
Thus, the viewer should be put to task, required to analyse and enquire, not just merely receive information. This is exactly what Centralia demands. The images, words and found documents act as clues, unearthing the hidden details, tying them together and conducting supplementary investigation. Deciphering the situation is up to us. Besides offering insights into contemporary India, the project is, in the mind of its author, also a “forewarning of where, as a collective society, we’re heading. Centralia is the future.”
Understanding how message and medium work hand in hand, Basu is also hoping to engage the public with a short experimental film, a meditation on the themes and symbols within the work. “My work here is far from over and will continue to evolve,” she says. “I have never felt comfortable with one, linear way of working. The work has to evolve and change direction depending on what is the best way for telling of the story. One way to do that is to never assume a story has an ending.”