Book Review: Channelling the Mahabharata

Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean
Via Amruta Patil
Harper Collins, Rs 799
Pages: 276

Adi Parva is the richly imagined and stunningly executed first volume in Amruta Patil's forthcoming Parva trilogy, a pictorial retelling of the Mahabharata. As different as Adi Parva's jewel tones and lush forest glades are from the spiky, angsty, black and white world of Patil's first book, Kari (2008), they would both be described as graphic novels. Yet the two narrative endeavours could not be more unlike each other. Kari's authorial voice is so intimate and personal that at least one reviewer felt it read "like a reconstituted memoir". In contrast, Adi Parva positions itself self-consciously as a retelling of what is perhaps our most enduring story — if one can refer to the innumerable nested narratives that make up the Mahabharata as a single story.

In an essay called 'The Storyteller', Walter Benjamin made a characteristically fertile, provocative suggestion: that the rise of the novel marks the end of storytelling. "What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature — the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella — is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it," wrote Benjamin. In a 1977 lecture, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss made a similar throwaway reference to the moment "when myth disappeared as a literary genre and was replaced by the novel." Both Benjamin and Levi-Strauss gesture to a binary in which myth — and its community of oral re-tellers — form one end of the spectrum, while the novel — and its solitary, textual originator — forms the other.

Adi Parva is fascinating, first of all, because it attempts to marry these two apparent binaries: to enshrine the oldest stories in book form, to put her stamp on them not just verbally but visually. There's no denying that this involves freezing that which was meant to be perpetually retold, to be imagined differently each time it was heard. But in a world where less and less of us will hear these stories from a grandmother or a village bard, this book is a precious gift.

And Patil understands this clearly: the place of her book, and the place she must clear before she begins. Adi Parva is not "by" her, but "via" her. And when her preamble invokes the sutradhar —"Trust the humble storyteller who knows how to unravel thread. Beware the braggart who embellishes and confuses" — one can hear the echo of Benjamin's words — "it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it".

Her telling does steer clear of unnecessary explication. But the storyteller's voice is a very particular one: cool, wry, but always just this side of dramatic. The narrator is Ganga, "queen of celestial and earthly rivers", a central character in the origin-myth of the Kuru-Pandavas. She first appears here as a mortal in a white sari, telling her tale to a rapt street side gathering, even as passing men gather to challenge this woman "sitting brazenly talking to strangers in the middle of the night". Ganga and her listeners form a kind of Greek chorus, their comments and questions helping clarify the main narrative. Choosing a female narrator (rather than Ugrashravas) is a simple but radical move, allowing Patil to focus on the women with natural ease and empathy. We think, perhaps for the first time, of whether the mountain princess we have always only known as Gandhari had a name except that of the kingdom she represented, and of how Kunti must have felt when her husband King Pandu died making love to her rival queen Madri. (And we wonder how this will change in the next volume, when the narrator, we are told, will be Ashwatthama.)

There are occasions when Patil's narrative feels too clever, too knowing, too full of backchat. But textual pleasures are the least of the joys afforded by this book. With artwork that ranges from black and white sketches (for Ganga and her audience) to magnificent textured collages, with Patil drawing on and reworking everything from Botticelli's Birth of Venus to Matisse's La Danse to ancient Egyptian motifs with delicious abandon, Adi Parva is perhaps the most beautiful book you can own this year.

Published in the Indian Express.

Pruning at the Roots: a book on British gardens in India

Flora's Empire: British Gardens in India

By Eugenia W. Herbert
Penguin Books India
400pp, Rs. 799

Eugenia W. Herbert’s history of English gardens in India is a vast but well-trimmed account.

The garden is perhaps as universal a symbol of civilization as possible: nature reclaimed from the wilderness, its unruly splendours tamed – or at least re-ordered – by human hands. And yet, as Eugenia Herbert’s book makes clear, the idea of what a garden is differs completely from one culture to another. Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India is an engrossing book, documenting in marvelous detail the British relationship with a landscape that seemed often recalcitrant, sometimes fascinating—but always unfamiliar. The book takes us felicitously across two centuries and a sprawling subcontinent: from 18th-century Madras and Calcutta to 19th-century Bangalore, from the various hill stations of the Raj to the 20th-century garden city of New Delhi. 

Herbert, an Emeritus professor of history at Mount Holyoke College, spent a quarter of a century studying African metallurgy before she switched to colonial Africa. She became interested in gardens about a decade ago “from reading colonial memoirs and advice books for wives going out to Africa”. When a chance to visit India arose, it struck her that Indian colonial gardens might prove interesting, “since Brits had a much longer history in India than in Africa, and in much greater numbers”. But she expected “variations on the theme of nostalgia”, and had no idea “how many other byways would surface.”

Most of the garden enthusiasts Herbert uncovered in the archives were indeed animated by a desire to recreate Englishness in an unfamiliar environment. Maintaining a proper English garden – one that was kept as free as possible of “lurid tropical flowers” and their ‘overpowering’ scent – was a way of establishing and reinforcing difference from the Indian world in which they lived, as well as deriving comfort from the sense of the long-lost and familiar. Edith Cuthell’s 1905 paean to her Lucknow violets is a classic of the emotional colonial writing about gardens that Herbert frequently uncovers: “You cannot think how one treasures out here the quiet little ‘home’ flower… Dear little English flower!”

But as with any neat model, there are all kinds of exceptions and qualifications to be made. First of all, British gardens in India did not remain static across time – they were influenced by changes in gardening fashions in England. The 18th-century garden houses of Madras or Calcutta (or Garden Reach and Barrackpore) were inspired by the British country estate, “with its sweeping park, copses of trees, and water,” while the bungalow “with its gravel paths, shrubs, flower beds and attempts at lawn” was a 19th- century creation.

Second, there were always individual Britishers who enthused over the new kinds of vegetation to be discovered in India. If James Forbes revelled in filling his Jardin a l’Angloise with Indian flowers and creeping vines, Lady Charlotte Canning thrilled more to the sight of the gorgeous foliage and tangled “curtains of great green leaves” in the Nilgiris than to the rose-covered cottages that her compatriots had created in Ooty. “The one cottage in Ooty that met with her approval,” writes Herbert, “was Woodcot… Mrs. Cotton, she noted… knows how to appreciate the things new to her instead of wanting what is not to be had, & her garden & collection of orchids show this.” There was also the polymath William Jones, who arrived in Calcutta as a judge in 1784 and immediately set about learning Sanskrit as well as cultivating his love of botany, bringing the two interests together by identifying his plant specimens by their Sanskrit names. Even those who did not have the dogged counter-intuitiveness of these examples were sometimes able to see the ridiculousness of the endeavour they had been engaged in. As one wife lamented: “We could have had the most marvelous gardens with orchids and all sorts of things, but, no, they must be English flowers.”

Finally, as Herbert concludes, even those colonials intent upon keeping India at bay did not quite succeed. “Like the mulligatawnies and curries that were not quite Indian and not quite English, colonial gardens, too, often ended up as creoles, their mix of familiar and exotic flowers growing under the shade of mangoes and palms and peepals in lieu of the stately elms and oaks of home.”

The reins of public gardens – whether the scientific botanical gardens established in Calcutta or Saharanpur, or the stately ones that emerged from British attempts at restoring’ Mughal gardens (the Taj) or creating imperial displays (Curzon’s Victoria Memorial or Lutyen’s Viceregal Palace) – remained in the hands of men. But a fascinating perspective the book throws up is how often it was the memsahib, not the sahib, who controlled the private garden. As Herbert told us over email, the garden had already become women’s domain in Victorian England, “so this is not surprising”. But it did bring British women into direct contact, and often conflict, with the mali. It probably didn’t help that colonial wisdom ordained that Indians and their knowledge systems counted for nothing. The influential Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, for instance, insisted that “native gardeners” had no real sympathy for flowers and that they must be trained to obey orders “and nothing more”. Linguistic and gender barriers were likely exacerbated by cultural differences, as Herbert says: “even the idea of picking [flowers] and putting them in a vase rather than making puja with them.” Reading this book, one can’t help being frequently accosted by the vision of an alternative history of colonial gardens—in the mali’s words. For however gently and humorously Herbert writes, the perspective of this book is entirely that of the colonial white person. “India was not for the fainthearted,” she writes, seemingly without irony. “...Flowers and people alike wilted after the first freshness of dawn.”           

Mostly, though, Herbert’s research is rich enough to suggest fresh and unsuspected angles even on familiar facts. Her account of Lord Curzon’s obsessive supervision of the Taj garden restoration, for instance, uses his complicated interplay between admiration and superiority as a window into the complexity of empire itself. Gardens may have been the most ephemeral things the British created in India, but the insights they offer are definitely not.

Published in Time Out Delhi.

Post Facto - Name, Place, Religion, Thing: Understanding Kai Po Che’s Gujarat

Decided I have more to say about Kai Po Che. So here's my Sunday Guardian column:

(My previous piece, written for the Indian Express, is here.)

Kai Po Che, Abhishek Kapoor's film about three young men coming of age in Ahmedabad circa 2002, has become the subject of an avid debate that seems to centre on how it adapts Chetan Bhagat's 2008 novel The 3 Mistakes of My Life. But somehow the fascinating questions of what the film version leaves out, adds or changes have been subjugated to the seemingly all-important one of how these decisions relate to Bhagat's changing political agenda with respect to Gujarat.

Bhagat's alleged attempts to curry favour with Narendra Modi, though thoroughly depressing if true, seem unworthy of the attention they're getting. I have written elsewhere about why I think the changes from book to film (Bhagat is just one of four scriptwriters) make Kai Po Che a more powerful indictment of Gujarat's polarised society than the book was. By having one of the central characters actually enter into the madness of communal murder, the film forces us to engage with the possibility of violence as something within ourselves — rather than something that only certified villains are capable of.

It also seems clear to me that this film is more effective in reaching out to its audience—and potentially changing people's minds—than an imagined filmic naming and shaming of Modi could ever be. Why this is so is a complex question, and I shall return to it. But allow me first to speculate a little about a related question: why does the film feel so much better-etched than the book?

Many critics, including myself, have felt that Bhagat's characters – Govind Patel, Ishaan Bhat and Omi Shastri – seem more fleshed-out and well... characterful in the film than in his book. Of course, this is partly about wonderful actors, but might it also be because the film allows these people to be who they are at the most fundamental level – that of language? In The 3 Mistakes of My Life, these very middling middle class young men from Ahmedabad — one the son of a single mother who runs a small khakra-dhokla business, another the son of a local purohit — are made to speak in a slangy, American-inflected English that seems completely off-kilter: "Screw that, you were out of form, man," says Omi to Ish; "F**k your statistics, man," says Ish to Govind. And when the characters speak plain, unembellished prose, they sound unidiomatic to the point of being jarring: "No marble player ever became great," says Ishaan to the young Ali. Compare the flat dull thud of that sentence to the marvelously resonant version of it in the film: "Goti khel ke tu kya ukhaad lega?".

My point is not that the mixed-up, polyglot universe of our cities cannot be translated—after all, the film gives us these conversations in Hindi, where they might in the real world take place largely in Gujarati – but that it takes a special talent to be able to recreate it in English. That talent is not one Bhagat seems to have. Or perhaps his decision is a deliberate attempt to fuse identification with aspiration. Perhaps his dialogue for his characters is based not on how they might actually speak, but on his astute sense of how they — and his readers — might want to? Whichever it is, watching Kai Po Che, it is hard not to feel (as someone once said about Gopal Gandhi's translation of A Suitable Boy into Hindi) that it has been translated back into the original.

There are other changes that ground the narrative more firmly in its locale. The film does away with a free trip to Australia that felt more like a cricket fan's wish-fulfilment than any possible reality for three guys running a local sports shop. It excises political conversations that seem too wordy and too sensitive to actually be conducted. It replaces the Govind-Vidya romantic birthday-with-fancy-cake with a garba moment that has both sexual frisson and charming gawkiness.

The film also does away with the somewhat artifical gambit of having Govind be an agnostic, through whose narratorial voice religiosity is questioned and clunkily debated. Instead it lays out a world whose everyday Hinduness is remarkable for being unremarked, just as it often is in Indian life: the Ganesh statue on the dashboard, the instinctive gesture of touching new ground to one's forehead, or writing Om to inaugurate a new blackboard.

But this last might also be the most profound expression of the Hindu matrix within which Kai Po Che operates. Unlike a Firaaq or a Parzania (one superbly elegant, the other hamhanded), this is a Gujarat through Hindu eyes: the friends set up their coaching-centre-cum-shop in a temple complex, knowing that non-Hindu customers are unlikely; Ali, the cricketing prodigy whom Ishaan befriends, is their only window into a Muslim milieu. But — and here I return to why it might reach out to its audience — the film does not judge them for it. They are creatures of their milieu. If Kai Po Che's segregated universe has a message for us, it is not to applaud the fractured society it mirrors. It is to force us to see what exists – and grieve for how it came to be.

Read the whole piece on the Sunday Guardian site.

Film Review: Sahib, Biwi Aur Gangster Returns doesn’t have a boring moment

With 2011’s Sahib Biwi Aur Gangster, Tigmanshu Dhulia gave us a fascinating contemporary take on Abrar Alvi’s Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam. Like the 1962 film, Dhulia’s narrative revolved around the titular trio of a dissolute nawab, a neglected alcoholic wife and a rustic young man who gets increasingly embroiled in the intrigues of the haveli. The stark villainy and innocence of the older film had already been replaced, in the 2011 reimagining, by a loving embrace of gray. With Sahib, Biwi Aur Gangster Returns, Dhulia shakes himself entirely free of a desire for cinematic homage, setting his superbly etched characters free to roam. As free as they can be, that is to say, in the stifling universe he has created for them.

For this is a world of princely privilege, no doubt, but there is something rotten at its core—and even its proudest inhabitants cannot ignore the stench. In a scene about halfway through SBGR, the eponymous Sahib – Jimmy Sheirgill, absolutely stellar as the wheelchair-bound but still rakishly virile Aditya Pratap Singh – chances upon his more-or-less estranged wife – a voluptuous, bored Mahi Gill – displaying the treasures of their drawing room to a camera-wielding American and her Indian handler. This is my house, not a museum, he says angrily as he shows them the door – it is a mahal, not yet a maqbara. But even the incandescence of his rage cannot prevent us from seeing that while the Sahib may be alive, the world his haveli represents is in its death throes.

Dhulia does an even better job than in the previous film of mapping this murky new universe, where a hereditary claim to royalty is no longer enough to run things, and power must be grabbed by the scruff of the neck, even if it gets one’s hands dirty. The Sahib may wish to be continued to be called Raja sahab, but he is most definitely on his way to becoming a neta—and finding the word distasteful does not prevent him from being a very clever one.

Set in the fictitious ex-principality of Devgarh, in the poverty-ridden badlands of Uttar Pradesh, SBGR unfolds against the backdrop of a political move to partition the state into four (something actually suggested by real-life Chief Minister Mayawati in 2011). And like in the previous film, Dhulia allows himself the luxury of a buffoonish neta – Rajeev Gupta in a masterful performance as the blue-film-watching Prabhu Tiwari.

But the electoral politics of democracy has by no means succeeded in leaching this world of its fascination with lineage. And nowhere is this fascination more evident than in the figure of Inderjit Singh – the titular gangster, not born to kingly splendour but insistent on acquiring it. Played with brilliant insight and flourish by the incomparable Irrfan Khan, Inder exemplifies the strange stranglehold of India’s old world over the new. He may not be a raja, but his admirers call him Raja Bhaiyya – and he himself lives in the hope of recapturing the imagined lost glories of his royal blood.

Lineage, in fact, is the very lifeblood of Dhulia’s narrative universe. And while the masculinity of its men is tied irrevocably to their notions of caste pride and family honour (“Khamakha ek thakur ke haath ek thakur kam ho jaata,” goes one wry line), keeping a lineage going needs women. So it is the Badi Rani who actually sets the film’s plot in motion, by showing up one morning to incite her stepson to produce an heir—and when he bitterly dismisses the possibility of doing so with his current wife, by tempting him with the photographic vision of a new one. And even the romance between Irrfan’s rough-tongued Inder and Soha Ali Khan’s properly delicate Ranjana, for all its tender playfulness, cannot but be seen also as part of Inder’s plan to reacquire princely status – for what better way to do so than by marrying a princess?

But if princesses are made pawns in these carefully plotted games, they do not quite act as the willing footsoldiers their men might have liked. And in their desperate, unpredictable departures from the paths dictated to them lie the intricacies of Tigmanshu Dhulia’s plot.

It would be criminal to give away any of the multiple twists and turns that animate the film, but let me just say that SBGR doesn’t have a boring moment. It is aided by the almost uniformly high quality of its actors. Sheirgill and Khan may walk away with the honours, but Gill must get credit for having perfected the near-stumbling alcoholic’s walk and slightly unhinged flirtatiousness of her inherently over-the-top Madhavi. Soha Ali Khan does not have the world’s most mobile face, and she is often somewhat wooden here too. But she is perfectly cast, springing so superbly to life at one magisterial scene at the royal breakfast table that one cannot but think of her real-life princess-ness. There is also the pleasure of watching Raj Babbar inhabit a nicely written role as Soha’s father, the perfectly nicknamed Bunny Uncle.

If any complaint can be made about this film, it might be that occasionally there is too much going on – never too little. Between these murders and machinations, plots and counterplots, it affords its greedy audience the pleasure of vicarious glimpses into the life of the classy rajwara: polo matches and rifle practice, shairi and jazz bands. But – and this is where Dhulia shows how fine his grip is on both his material and tone – even the retro jazz crooner in her golden gown is not meant to provide an escape from this stifling world. In Dhulia’s measured, unforgiving vision, she can only be a lyrical medium for a cruel comment on thwarted dreams.

(Published on Firstpost.)

Framing the Divide: Kai Po Che and the politics of Gujarat

An opinion piece I did for today's Indian Express. 

Abhishek Kapoor’s recent film Kai Po Che, like the Chetan Bhagat novel on which it is based, revolves around the lives of three young men in Ahmedabad between 2000 and 2002. In both book and film, the personal trials of Govind Patel, Ishaan Bhat and Omi Shastri — and Ishaan’s young cricketing protege Ali — are tied to larger events that have shaped the history of our collective present: the 2001 Bhuj earthquake, India’s fabled cricketing comeback against Australia at Eden Gardens in 2001, the Godhra train burning incident of 2002 and the widespread communal killings that followed.

Revealing the power of Hindi cinema as compared to popular fiction in English (even a small multiplex hit versus a best-selling novel by India’s highest-selling English novelist), the film’s release — timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Gujarat killings — has led to a flurry of editorial commentary that takes more notice of Bhagat’s fictional politics than has probably ever been taken before.

The film, and Chetan Bhagat, have been accused of whitewashing Gujarat 2002, by excising those parts of The 3 Mistakes of My Life that might displease Narendra Modi, now the BJP’s unofficial prime ministerial candidate. These commentators argue that Kai Po Che is a feel-good Bollywood spectacle, that it steers clear of the damning references to the “Hindu party” that litter the book, that it rewrites state-sponsored killings into local-level, near-spontaneous vendetta, and lastly, that it provides justification for the post-Godhra violence by having a central character, Omi, lose both his parents in Godhra, rather than just a nephew.

Having watched the film and read the book, I must confess to being baffled by the conclusions these commentators have come to. To me, the film (whose script, it should be stressed, is the result of Bhagat’s collaboration with Pubali Chaudhari, Supratik Sen and director Abhishek Kapoor) is not just less clunky and better characterised than the book, but arguably also a more effective and affective comment on the politics of Gujarat.

In both book and film, for instance, the 2001 earthquake is shown as having a personal impact on the lives of the characters: when the new mall in Navrangpura, in which the three friends have staked a massive amount of borrowed money as deposit on the plush sports shop of their dreams, collapses before it can be completed. In both narratives, Govind is particularly destroyed, not just because the sum seems an impossibly large one to earn back, but because the risk he took has become the cause of their ruination, challenging his self-image as the one with a head for business. But the film adds new things. Before the quake, we see Bittoo Mama, Omi’s uncle and an up-and-coming politician of the Hindu chauvinist party, express reluctance to lend the boys the money for the shop deposit — because the mall owner is Muslim. And after the quake, the distribution of aid is shown as completely demarcated along community lines: so much so that when Ishaan tries to get Ali and his Juhapura neighbours access to the relief camp, he and his closest friend Omi nearly come to blows. These additions — sharp and cinematic moments that take the place of the long-winded political arguments in Bhagat’s book — establish the tragically polarised state of Gujarati society more powerfully than any political speechifying ever could.

Another thing the film does better than the book is to make a distinction that all too many secular commentators often fail to, between people who are religious, even orthodox, and those for whom a religious identity is the basis of socio-political action. Omi’s father is a deeply religious man, the priest of the local temple, but he is shown as clearly refusing to ally himself with Bittoo’s Hindu political party, and as being extremely reluctant to go to Ayodhya.

The “Hindu party” is certainly not excised from the film; in fact, its organised role in the post-Godhra attacking of Muslim neighbourhoods is personified in Bittoo Mama, who is if anything a more lethal figure here than he was in the book — armed not with a clumsy old-fashioned trishul, as in the book, but with a sleek, contemporary gun. He is not overwrought, drunken, debilitated by his son’s death (for it is Omi’s cousin, not nephew, who dies in the book), but completely in control, placing gleaming swords in the hands of those more easily swayed and propelling them towards murder.

But the most crucial thing that these critics fail to mention is how the film transforms the character of Omi, and through his altered fate, its addressing of the events of 2002. If Omi is emblematic of the slightly aimless, unemployed young man swayed by Hindutva because it gives him an easy, faux sense of belonging to a community, the film forces us to confront the fatal path down which that blindness can lead. The young man whose confused longing for a Hindu-majoritarian politics made him a sacrificial victim in the book, becomes in Kai Po Che the person responsible for violence. Omi’s complicity points to the dangers of our own. If this is a feel-good spectacle, let us by all means have more.

Art Review: A Sense of Belonging

I wrote about the British Council's ongoing Homelands exhibition, for Open.

From David Hockney's A Rake's Progress

Just before beginning to write this piece, I went to speak to the new people who had moved in on the first floor. They had been leaving the building’s grill door ajar, thus enabling the black dog that owns our street to come up and chew its way through a portion of our doormat every night. I explained the situation to the pleasant young man who opened the door, in a mixture of Hindi and English. An elderly man with a long beard came to see who was at the door. He was given a précis of the conversation in what sounded like Pashto. He sympathised with my dog crisis. Then he asked, where are you from?

Since the conversation was premised on the fact that I lived upstairs, I said, upstairs. Third floor. Yes, yes, he said, but where are you actually from? Umm, I live here, I said. I’ve lived in the neighbourhood for six years. No, no, he said, I don’t mean that. Oh, you mean city, I said, smiling in relief: I’m from Delhi. Ah, but this is where you’ve married into, said the old man, where’s your parental home? And what about your husband? And his parents, where are they from?

When I managed to extricate myself, leaving behind a terribly dissatisfied old gentleman, I realised what I ought to have done—asked him where he was from. But I had assumed I knew the answer. Even if my guess was right, it seemed to me that I had failed the basic test of neighbourliness. I’m not sure which was worse: having refused to satisfy his curiosity, or having denied him the pleasure of satisfying mine.

Latika Gupta, curator of the British Council’s ongoing exhibition, Homelands, has described the show as an attempt to answer that constantly encountered, hard-to-answer question: ‘Where are you from?’ Homelands, which just completed its Delhi run and re-opens on 1 March in Kolkata, before going on to Mumbai and Bangalore, contains 80 works by 28 contemporary artists from the British Council collection, united by a shared concern with questions of belonging, with the relationship between selfhood and place.

The biggest name here is probably the British artist David Hockney, represented by his eight-part series, A Rake’s Progress, a wry and personal homage to William Hogarth’s 18th century series of the same name. Hockney’s etchings in black and red and aquatint are a far cry from Hogarth’s paintings. Hogarth’s view of the Rake’s decline was both salacious and righteous—we watched as he skittered away the family fortune on prostitutes and drink, as he married ‘an old maid’ for her money, went to prison and then gradually descended into insanity. Hockney replicates some of these things, such as the old maid, the prison, and the decline in fortune—there’s a memorable image, for instance, of the drooping Rake making his way down a staircase with the legend ‘The Wallet Begins to Empty’—but he is far less judgmental. Hockney’s Rake is autobiographical, inspired by his own time in America as a young gay artist in the 1960s. It is about being at home in a new milieu, and beginning to be at home in one’s sexuality.

Another kind of being at home in one’s body is achieved by Lisa Cheung’s I Want to be More Chinese (1997). Cheung’s series of posed photographs superimposed on china plates depicts her friends exaggerating the slantedness of their eyes. She takes a physical characteristic usually picked on as a racial slur, and subverts it with sly humour. Cheung’s work is an act of reclaiming, using a playful gesture to make a serious point. It involves a positive ownership of racial identity— and yet to insist on enacting the ‘Chinese’ body is a way of refusing its supposed naturalness.

In the four untitled images from Suki Dhanda’s 2002 photographic series Shopna, we move from an identity defined by the body to the external signs that are often read as the language of identity. Shopna, a Bangladeshi-British girl, was 15 when Dhanda photographed her and her family over the course of a year. In one image, she sits primly on a chair in a salwar-kameez, her legs folded up; in another, she plays at a pool table; in a third, she eats a piece of fried chicken at a fast food chain. It is when Shopna is outside her home that she wears her hijab, using it to distinguish herself from the other British girls who may be playing pool or getting a bite with friends at a chip shop. The most interesting image here is of Shopna at her bedroom window. The white lace curtain is drawn shut, and Shopna puts her head under it. It is as if the curtain is a veil with which she covers herself—but it is also a way in which she emerges from the darkness of the room’s interior to look out at the world beyond.

The idea of home is most commonly defined in terms of space—a space in which one is comfortable, in which one feels able to be oneself. The aspirational home is the subject of Gillian Wearing’s Melanie and Kelly (1997), in which two adolescent girls describe in their childish way the details of their dream home. A bedroom with purple tiles with pictures of animals, an ashtray by the bedside ‘for my husband’, a cot for an imagined future child—the imagination of home fuses objects and persons into a fictitious whole.

Objects and people also come together in Anthony Haughey’s photographs from his 1991 series Home, which are part of his documentation of the Ballymun housing estate in Dublin, where he encouraged young residents to photograph the lives of their own families and community.

Steep Lane Baptist Chapel Buffet Lunch, Yorkshire, 1976. Martin Parr.

Family and community also form the subject of the two photographs here by Martin Parr. These stunning black-and-white images are both of the Steep Lane Baptist Chapel in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, taken in 1976 and 1978. Part of Parr’s earliest work, they already reveal his interest in everyday life in Britain, though here the prism is not the weather, or consumption, as it would be later, but religion. The image of Baptist Chapel Buffet Lunch, in which a reproduction of Michelangelo’s The Last Supper is juxtaposed with an old lady spooning some sugar into her cup of tea, is a masterpiece, an ordinary moment somehow transformed into a tableaux.

A different kind of evocation of religious spaces is contained in Langland and Bell’s embossed prints on satiny white paper of the architectural plans of mosques around the world: the Great Mosque in Cordoba, Spain, the Q’ala of the Banu in Algeria, the Friday Mosque of Yazd and the Great Mosque in Samarra, Iran. These geometrical white impressions on white paper manage to produce a strangely empty, echoing effect—a sense of both presence and absence that is beautifully evocative of the idea of space itself. Space only acquires a shape by something surrounding it—but then it becomes something that can shape us.

Two exhibits evoke childhood, but then appropriate that evocation for rather grim adult purposes. Bob and Roberta Smith’s Concrete Boats (1996) look like enlarged toy boats, tugging at our nostalgic selves—and yet the fact of their immovability weighs us down. They cannot float, and neither can we. Jimmie Durham’s Our House (2007) is even clearer: the childlike simplicity of his scrawled separation between ‘Our House’ and ‘Others’ is a powerful indictment of the unreconstructed ‘us versus them’ emotion that governs the behaviour of most adults, whether as individuals or in communities.

The Lebanese-British artist Mona Hatoum is represented here by three works. The most hypnotic of these is a kinetic sculpture called + and –, in which a stainless steel brush in a sand box creates furrows in the sand on one side, while smoothening them out simultaneously on the other. It is a work of almost unbearable beauty, gesturing to the infinite and unending process of engraving and erasure, creation and destruction. Prayer Mat (1995), made of thousands of upturned pins glued on canvas, with a compass to tell the direction of Mecca, seems to point to the ambiguous sense of belonging that faith offers in the world today. A video work called Measures of Distance (1988) overlays images of Hatoum’s mother taken on a rare trip back to Lebanon in 1981 with the spiky Arabic text of letters written by her, unravelling the idea of home in a time of war and enforced exile. Even as the work speaks of a hard-won intimacy between mother and daughter, it can seem to lock someone else out: Mona’s father feels threatened and excluded by their conversations about the body.

The family and language both recur in Zineb Sedira’s well-known work Mother Tongue (2002), where three consecutive videos capture the limits of communication between three generations of a family: Sedira, her Algerian-speaking mother, and her English-speaking daughter. If the limits of our language are the limits of our world, then these women inhabit different universes: their homelands barely intersect at all.

The most haunting work in the exhibition, Susan Hiller’s The Last Silent Movie (2007–08), is also about languages. Hiller brings together sound recordings of 25 languages that are either already extinct or on the verge of dying out, providing the name and current status of each language as well as English translations of the recordings: Kora, Manx, Xoklang, the cheerfulness of Jèrriais, the whistling beauty of Sibo Gomero. As you sit in that dark curtained room and listen to a voice say, “Now we are going to speak Comanche again. From now we will speak Comanche for ever,” the hair on your arms stand on end at that hopeful enunciation of a patent untruth, the act of speech by which the speaker hopes to turn it into truth. “I can speak my language. I am a fluent speaker,” says another voice. Then, throwing down the gauntlet, gently but firmly turning the tables on us, the listeners, the voice says: “Can you speak your language?”

It’s a question even harder to answer than ‘Where are you from?’