Painting Dream Sequences For Collective Healing

Ancestral spirits are roaming around the graveyard. God, the omnipresent protector, is a grandmother. She is seen with her halo. There are hills in the background. The stunning backdrop looks ethereal. Is this a dream? Well, these are videos that depict dream sequences.

At a time when Adivasi communities across the globe bear the pangs of dispossession, Nepal-based artist Mekh Limbu’s videos, archival documents nad digital paintings are on display at the fifth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

Limbu’s work titled ‘Mangdem’ma’ (an invocation for the healing of Adivasi spirits and lands) deals with despair. It calls for the restoration of stories that are lost in the midst of modernist development and the capitalist aspiration of individualism. The paintings invoke indigenous ways of healing and make us ponder: How do we heal collectively?

“We only talk about the sufferings and suppressions but there must be conversation on the process of healing. In our community, we have rituals to heal collectively,” says Limbu, who belongs to the Adivasi Limbu community that has a formidable presence in Darjeeling and Sikkim, besides Nepal.

The use of dream sequences is prevalent in their culture. “Our ancestors used to get knowledge from dreams, so I used such sequences in my paintings to display the intergenerational journey of knowledge,” notes the artist whose childhood was spent during the monarchy.

Migration and Loss of Tradition

‘Mangdem’ma’ is about remembering the spirits—the forest spirits, the land spirits and the ancestral spirits. “In our sermons, we invoke the spirits of our ancestors. We believe that our ancestors are staying with us and roaming around as guardians taking care of our children. It is a collection of all those sermons and rituals that make us,” he says.

The series that he calls ‘deeply personal and spiritual historiography’ contains several artworks ranging from a short video to paintings, archival documents and maps. The video talks about migration and dispossession.

“In my childhood, we used to live in a joint family. I learnt about our rituals and culture from my grandparents. With globalisation, the family system broke down. People left their houses and migrated for work,” says Limbu.

He feels to understand the past, one needs to know the history of resistance. It was during the Gorkha regime that people started losing their land and migrated. “We started losing our glorious traditions. Thus, by remembering our ancestors, we safeguard our culture,” he adds.

The archival document contains land records before the land reforms of 1964 that changed the tradition of collective landholdings among Adivasis. The previous generations wrote several letters to the then monarch to abolish the policy as the idea of private land did not appeal to them. For them, land was God.

“We can’t buy or sell land. In our land stay our ancestors and their spirits,” laments the artist. He displays several letters written by community leaders to the king that were published in the Nepal Gazette to make people recall the days of collective living.

Pain of Forgetting Language

In the series, a painting of the grandmother God is sparse with some letters. “This is the Sirijanga script of Limbuan—our language that we were forced to forget. Nepal had 126 different indigenous communities and 123 languages. However, the three-decade-long policy spanning from 1960-1990, known as the ‘One Language, One Costume, One Religion’, attacked the existing heterogeneity of Nepalese society.

These concerns received bold representation in his series ‘How I forgot my Mother Tongue’ displayed in 2019 at the International Artist Residency Exchange Program in Waley Art Taipei, Taiwan. From the posters of the past representing Nepal radio’s promotional policy of ‘One Language, One Costume, One Religion’ policy, to the schoolbooks in Nepalese written in Devanagari script that made him forget his Limbuan language and its Sirijanga script, this exhibition was a challenge to the hegemony of homogeneity.

“My grandparents taught me Limbu, but when I started going to school, I forgot the language. My family speaks a hybrid version of Nepalese. Because of the state policy, the new generation does not even know Limbu as the authentic language,” he says.

The pain of forgetting their own language is reflected in his installation of the Limbu dictionary where he blurs the Limbuan words and writes in the Sirjinaga script with a whitener. “I learnt the script and the language at a community learning centre. They used to bring books written in the language from Sikkim and Darjeeling through an ongoing underground movement to save the culture and the language,” says Limbu.

The fate of Sirijanga, the man, was very similar to the script that is known by his name. In the early eighteenth century, he was expelled by the Gorkha empire for reviving the Limbu script and resisting monarchic suppression. He was then allegedly murdered by the Buddhist monks in Sikkim. One of Limbu’s paintings in the series shows Sirijanga being tied to a tree with arrows all over his bruised body squeezing blood out.

Loss of Access to Medicinal Plants

With the lands, Adivasi communities also lost their rights to collect herbal medicinal plants for their own use. “The industrial medicinal giants use the herbal plants for producing costly medicines while we are not allowed to collect them,” he says.

This loss of access to traditional medicines led him to come up with the series titled, ‘Indigenous Knowledge of Herbs/ Industrial Medicine’ in 2018. In this series, he displayed the herbal plants within jars that were illuminated from inside. He also pasted the names of the herbal plants on the body of the jars. “It was to show that we can easily produce our own medicines through these herbal products. But we export them for processing and then import the costly medicines that affect the average Nepalese and their health,” he says.

Missing Home

In all his works, the idea of home has been prevalent. His ‘Home’ series of 2017 reflects his pain of experiencing migration. “My father and uncle went to Doha to work in the construction company in 1996. I was in class four. They used to send their pictures and letters. Those were the only memories of my childhood,” says Limbu.

In 2017, when he received a residency programme in Doha, he went and met his father. “I took him to all those places that he constructed and even clicked some photos at the same places from where he used to send his photos,” he adds. Thereafter, he juxtaposed the condition of his home and his father’s stay together to create the narration of migration and pain.

“Thousands of people from Nepal migrate to the Gulf countries for a decent living. But those who are left out are the parents, grandparents, children and women,” he says.

Perhaps Limbu’s emotion and yearning for home could only be realised in a Limbu song:

Are you standing on this soil?
Or did you fly away?
I searched for you in our village,
but did not see you.
in our hills, I couldn’t even find you.
Are you well? or in woe?
oh, Yakthung,
where are you lost now?
dispersed in all directions, where did you reach?
perhaps you’re alive? I did think of you.
alas, to seek you,
was all in vain.