Tokens of everyday lives and history of people of different South Asian countries are on display at the Liberation War Museum in a six-day exhibition titled
Lived Stories, Everyday Lives.
The show, a part of the Archives South Asia project of the Kathmandu-based Hri Institute of Southasian Research and Exchange, has been organised in Dhaka in association with the Liberation War Museum. The exhibition showcases around 35 photographs and other tokens of the 19th and 20th centuries set against the backdrop of different countries of the region, which had been collected from a number of personal collections of both professionals and amateurs.
The coming of camera in South Asia prompted many enthusiasts to photograph the everyday lives of people which can also be preserved as historical events in private collections.
A collage of stills taken from a simple instant camera – still in use in Afghanistan – proves the arrival of such a camera in Afganistan in the subcontinent. The photographs are preserved at Afghan Box Camera Project in Kabul.
The exhibition has a number of photographs taken during the liberation war of Bangladesh. One such photograph is The Dreamer that shows a freedom fighter posing with his rifle in July, 1971. This one is collected in The Haroon Habib Collection, Dhaka.
Another series of photographs showing a freedom fighter’s memory through his photographs of different stages of life, his letter to his mother from the war field, and even the photographs of the dead body of the freedom fighter is also on display. This series is from the liberation war museum.
The photograph of the famous Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s handwritten letter to his wife Alys written in 1951 during his stay in prison is also on display. The letter is colleted in Faiz Ghar in Lahore.
Images of Tibet are a collection of photographs taken by John Claude White and are collected in Threeblindmen Photography in Colombo. These images show the troubled lives of Tibetan people in the first decades of the last century.
One photograph shows the homeless people living in railway stations in groups after the division of India in 1947. Titled as Home is where the Train is, the piece was collected in Citizens Archive of Pakistan in Karachi.
‘We are working on creating and maintaining an active network of localised archives across the region. The aim is to garner greater recognition of the individual archives, as well as the importance of archiving in general,’ said Sarita Ramamoorthy, a researcher at Hri.
‘It is a wonderful idea to showcase the history through such an exhibition. However, as a visitor I expected more photographs,’ said Farhad Kanak, a student of fine arts at Dhaka University.
The same exhibition has previously been held twice in India and once in Nepal. The exhibition was inaugurated on September 21 and will end on September 26.
-With New Age input
