IN BLACK AND WHITE: A photograph by Shahidul Alam

From a submissive to a subversive vocabulary ? perhaps that’s how one can best sum up the photographs by Shahidul Alam and Shadi Ghadirian, recently on display at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture. On the surface, each photographer tells distinctive tales of women from disparate geographic locales. Yet, a strong undertow of defiance in both Alam and Ghadirian’s works joins these stories into one powerful narrative.

Iranian photographer Ghadirian’s works are a candid representation of the times in her country ? where the pace of a future is restrained by the reins of an invincible past. In one of her series, Returning the Gaze, the photographer recreates the Ghajar dynasty using the costumes and make-up prevalent in those times. But against this backdrop of antiquity, Ghadirian adds a defiant air by juxtaposing elements of modernity to her frames, making her subjects hold a vacuum cleaner or a bicycle. When one’s everyday living codes are reduced to an entanglement of censorships, what else can Ghadirian do, but skillfully resort to a personal dialect that is at once self-regulatory and subversive.

The other series, Like Everyday, is only a contoured suggestion of women in burqa, where the fabric versions ? used as a metaphor ? keep changing. The women’s faces are sometimes replaced by a cup and a saucer, while at other times, their eyes are replaced by an iron, a teapot, a broom or a sieve. Ghadirian encloses her subjects within these frames of submission, while concurrently, challenging the limits of the burqa and the meaning of the women’s lives behind the veil.

In a strong contrast to Ghadirian’s veiled women wrapped in elusive imageries, Bangladeshi photographer, Alam’s women are dauntless. Alam, who began his photojournalism with the documentation of the democratic struggle to remove General Ershad, offers a powerful theme ? Stories of a Class Struggle: Bangladeshi Naxal women. The role of these women, in keeping with the traditions of a male-centric political history is largely unrecorded even in party literature. This is where Alam steps in. He records individual recollections to offer an insight into the lives and concerns of the Bangladeshi Naxal women.

Be it Bhanu or Arifa Begum, Rita or Sufia, Lotika or Chapa ? a collage of experiences helps the viewer acquire an understanding of a ruthless political past. On one occasion, it is Arifa Begum who did organisational work for the party before she went to fight with the party’s army-wing. Rita’s is another story. In 1971, her father was killed and in 1973-74 she registered as a party member. While all these photographs represent a stark political scenario, there are others like Lotika who ask a straight question ? when she was young and beautiful, she wasn’t allowed by the party to photograph herself. Today, when she is just a shade of her physical past, she fails to make any sense of a photo opportunity.

Alam, as a photographer, leaves his subjects to speak for themselves. Rarely does he deter the images by any external interference. On the contrary he plays the role of an observer, an onlooker trying to catch the strains of a ruinous past. And perhaps that is what makes his images and their stories so convincingly truthful.