Students' Biennale 2021: Dialogues on Coal Labors: Atanu Bakshi

The open coal fields offer a treacherous yet patterned view of earth that has been dug. The patterns trace human comprehension of nature, at times effective and at times not.

As the reserves are dug out, the geography alters. Landscape becomes a variable, accounted merely by time. 

The ground of Jharia is most often a shield to the terror below it. Raging fires and smoke constantly knock from beneath, and the land at times can’t hold onto its promise.

Even when seemingly stable, what is happening beneath the surface weakens the basic definition of ground. The elaborate machinery and coal trails that extend in all directions gives the underground a spectacularly ominous identity here. 

Atanu Bakshi represents a bird’s eye view of open-cast coal mining. The machines cut open the Earth here, square by square. The open-cast fields are in fact inferior in size as well as numbers, compared to the underground ones. 

But these are the ones visible to the eyes of a layman – a glimpse of the unfathomable horror.

The residents of Jharia, who include a significant number of mining labourers, are subjected to pollution of the highest degree. Moreover, they are seasoned to anticipate land subsidence due to abandoned coal fields and continual fires underground.

Hope was provided in the form of a relocation programme, but it was never materialised. The deteriorating state of life is captured on embossing print by Bakshi, who essays the story in white, which he describes as the non-existence of colour in the life of the residents there.

Jharia, a mining town in Jharkand, has been synonymous to an inferno for over a century. The large-scale coal mining – both open-cast and underground, has left the town and its people in a state of malignancy, with uncontrolled pollution and unsafe living conditions.

There are undying fires beneath the grounds of Jharia, waiting to purge through fissures – new and old. 

Bakshi has cut the horrors on wood. Jharia is burning above and beneath the surface here. It’s a century-old tale, but the heat never recedes.