Dhuwã
2021 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
4:45 minutes
Sancintya Mohini Simpson
Dhuwã (term used by indentured people of Natal for ‘smoke’), is a single-channel film by Sancintya Mohini Simpson that traces back to the lived experiences of indentured labourers taken from India to Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa) to work on sugar plantations during the late 1800s and early 1900s. This often-overlooked chapter in colonial history is close to the artist, as her maternal family were contracted to a sugar plantation in Natal. Filmed originally in 16mm film, Dhuwã captures sugarcane plantations in North Queensland, initially in moments of stillness that are gradually disrupted by a crescendo of repetitive sounds and fast camera movements that culminate in the fields being engulfed by flames. These scenes, together with the soundtrack (scored by her brother Isha Ram Das and Lawrence English, a celebrated Australian composer and experimental sound artist), have an inherent darkness that evokes the trauma and strong emotional and psychological charge of the sites that Simpson portrays. At the same time, Simpson provides a sense of relief and healing as the fire dissipates into clouds of smoke, and we see the ocean tide moving back and forth – the calm after the storm.
Sancintya Mohini Simpson is an artist, writer, and researcher whose work addresses the impact of colonization on the historical and lived experiences of her family and broader diasporic communities. Simpson descends from indentured laborers sent from India to work on colonial sugar plantations in South Africa during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Working between various mediums, including painting, video, poetry, and performance, Simpson pays particular attention to the gaps and erasures within the colonial archive that fail to acknowledge (or make invisible) the lives of over two million Indian indentured servants. Simpson traces the movements and passages of these laborers and her own familial past, giving voice to these often omitted histories, many of which are passed down orally through generations, including by her own mother. The complexities of memory, migration, and intergenerational trauma that she unearths serve as a means of reconciling with a violent past. What she proposes is a new speculative archive where loss and healing can coexist.
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