Tarun Bhartiya

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Productions will create a series of photographs that will examine notions of identity and contestations around questions of faith and nation-making among the Niam Khasi people of Meghalaya. Tarun Bhartiya is the Coordinator for this project.

Tarun is a documentary imagemaker, a Hindi poet, and an activist based in Shillong. As an editor he has worked on notable award-winning films. He was a founder member of alt-space, an independent cultural and political space in Shillong. He has been a consultant on the British Library Endangered Archives Project and research consultant to The Northeast India Audio Visual Archive in Shillong. His photographs and image essays have been published widely. His poems and their translations have appeared in various anthologies. Given his experience, he is best placed to be the Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

Christianity set foot in the Sohra/Cherrapunjee region of Meghalaya around 1820. The new religion enabled the Khasis to connect with modernity through a script, printing press and schools. Over the past 175 years, the religion has grown in the state of Meghalaya, making it a state in India which has a Christian majority. However, there are also the Khasis who did not become Christians. Known as the followers of the Niam Tynrai (Original Faith), this minority section of the Khasi community is practitioner of a faith from a pre-Christian past. Their stories and practices are replete with myths, metaphors and deities linked to nature that have been passed on through generations, making the Niam Khasis a community with a distinct identity.

In the recent years, there have been contestations between the Niam Khasis and Khasis who have embraced Christianity. One of the present-day criticisms of the missionary enterprise is that it destroyed the traditional cultural life of the Khasis. In the 1890s, the followers of Niam Tynrai started Seng Khasi (Khasi Association) a socio-cultural movement that wanted to save the Khasi indigeneity from western and colonial influences. It is in this challenge to colonial and missionary project that the Indian Hindu right saw an opportunity to intervene. They started to claim Khasis as Hindus. These interventions have accentuated the community’s search for their own ‘Khasi-ness’.

Simultaneous to this search for identity within the community, the Khasis have also had to assert their identity in the larger context of India’s nation building agenda.  In what Tarun calls the ‘accidental cartography of India’, its Northeast has always remained unpacified regions of anger, mistrust and danger. Their defiant refusal to be the ‘diversity’ of ‘unity in diversity’ has been perceived by the Indian state as pretentious, and the state’s response has include various pacification campaigns – military, legal, cultural and developmental. This anxious relationship continues where faith and faith based social and cultural practices become key triggers for everyone involved.  More recently, under the current regime the question of faith has gained fresh currency with new conversion laws being put in place in states like Uttar Pradesh. The already complex relationship between faith, people and the state has become more complicated and insidious.

For over 14 years, Tarun has been investigating into these contestations of faith and identity – both within the Khasi community and between the community and the rest of India. He started his journey through his practice of photography and shot images over 14 years which is now a large repository. Through this project, Tarun will take more photographs through field trips, especially on the encounters and debates between the indigenous faith, the Hindu right, Christianity and the lost history of the Islam mission in the region. The project titled Niam/ Faith / Hynniewtrep would locate the signs and meanings of the transformative encounters of the Khasis – not through biographies or a chronology of events but through images and their circulation.

Once the images are ready, Tarun will juxtapose them with texts from colonial and more recent conversion laws, to create a set of picture postcards. He will distribute these postcards amongst various sections of people from the Khasi-Jaintia hills and have them write their responses to these postcards with insights from their lived experiences.

The outcome of the project will be the images, picture postcards and a book. Tarun will also put together an exhibition of images, sounds and the picture postcards in Shillong in March-April 2023. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be the photographs, the picture postcards, the book, and still and video documentation of the exhibition.

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme as it seeks to negate linear narratives of the Khasi people’s encounters with faith and attempts to offer a nuanced understanding of historical and contemporary contestations.  

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees. 

This project is supported by Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund.