Show · 2016
Drawings, photographs and fieldnotes
Millions of people follow their unique paths from womb to tomb on the streets of Kolkata, the overpopulated capital of West Bengal, which rots and blossoms on the carcass of the British colonial metropolis. Hundreds of volunteers come every year to this den of bare life and social suffering to devote themselves to humanitarian work. Many of them end up at the Kalighat Home for Dying Destitutes run by the Catholic order of the Missionaries of Charity.
The Home is a place where borders are transgressed, where dirt is seen as an attribute of sacred life, where young fair skin touches the crippled, suffering dark body of the Other, where death is an everyday routine. The collision of worlds, languages, bodies and souls under the roof of an old Hindu shrine turned into a Home for the Dying, in the heart of the “blessed hell” of Kolkata, doesn’t leave anyone who once entered it intact.
The works and captions in this series were produced as part of an anthropological study of international volunteering at the Kalighat (Nirmal Hriday) Home for the Dying Destitutes, founded and run by Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. Aimed at knowledge production through visual artistic means, the project leaves aside moral evaluation and studies its object as a neutral reality, abstaining from both condemnation and praise.
The sketches portraying residents of Kalighat Home for Dying Destitutes were made in April 2016. In some cases upon seeing their own portraits usually apathetic severely ill residents came out of their desperate indifference and showed strong positive emotions, almost frightening in their irregularity.
The patients are stuck between life and death while staying in the shelter from where they basically have 3 ways out: death; another bigger shelter for chronic patients; back to the street or to their distant homes if they recover.
The residents spend days in the shelter from sleep to meal, from medication to sleep and so on. After being abandoned at the verge of death they might find their experience here as a kind of afterlife suddenly finding themselves in a place where they don’t have to and actually cannot do anything. Nuns and novices enfold them in the totality of Christian charity while western volunteers give them care, attention and warm human touch.
MD Sapakul (#50) was picking on the disabled old man I fed today. MD was pinching his hand, then his foot and waiving his head, like - 'what?' - and laughing. He seems to be enjoying his days in Kalighat. The old man was upset and complained to me without words. I told Sapakul to stop it nicely. He did after third warning.
Fieldnotes from 17.04.2016
Manyram was asking to show the sketches again and again whenever he saw me carrying the journal. I never could understand what he was saying about those.
Richard was one of the few baptised residents of Kalighat, and one of the few who could speak English.
A French volunteer Brieuc:
- Richard, what music do you like?
- I like English music.
- Beatles?
- Yes.
- Hey Jude, don’t make it…
- …bad.
Fieldnotes from 22.04.2016
The old man used to talk with passion and rich intonations for long minutes to those who would listen. Usually they were volunteers who couldn’t understand a word he was saying. An Indian volunteer who understands Bengali said that the man speaks nonsense. Sometimes before sleep the old man with a skinny body of a yogi was sitting motionless on his bed #21 in the lotus position.
Following a call from Virgin Mary Mother Teresa founded female monastic order “Missionaries of Charity” in India in 1950. She started bringing critically ill people from the streets of Kolkata to an old shelter for Hindu pilgrims belonging to a big Kali temple complex in 1952, which was the beginning of the Home for Dying Destitutes.
The old man is a former patient who recovered and stayed in the shelter, he checks passes of the volunteers at the entrance writing their names into a thick copybook. Today the Kalighat Home gives place to almost a hundred of local people in critical health condition. About ten nuns and novices, a dozen of volunteers and a few paid workers provide daily care to the residents.
After a few months of religious self-cultivation and service in the shelters of the Mission novices can join the international community of MC sisters. The sisters take vows of celibacy and poverty and move around the world from mission to mission every 3-5 years refusing worldly life for religious self-neglecting service to the poor and suffering.
The main building of the Catholic female monastic order of Missionaries of Charity known as Motherhouse is the center of the network of missions established by the sisters all over the world. Mother Teresa lived, died and was buried in this building. The order remains one of the most known symbols of religious charity in the world. For decades it has been an object of both criticism and veneration. Mother Teresa is to be canonized by Catholic Church in fall 2016.
Novices of the order of Missionaries of Charity and volunteers are waiting for a bus to bring them to Kalighat after a breakfast at the Motherhouse.
A western volunteer on her way to Kalighat squeezed between novices of the Missionaries of Charity and local Indian women.
Dwellers of different social realities, western volunteers and novices of the Mission follow same path in their daily work and trips to the shelter.
The first day of work in Kalighat home for Dying and Destitute started for me with accompanying two deceased human beings to a Muslim cemetery. Stefano, the ambulance driver and me, were their only company in the last trip across Kolkata, while we never even saw their faces. The only thing we knew about them beside their religion was the insignificant weight of their apathetic bodies.
Volunteer Fabio about delivering the bodies to a crematorium:
"It is a strange feeling because they have nobody close to them and even you don’t know their names usually. But for me it felt good to go with them. It is a complex feeling, part of it is the respect to the dead that you have. Also it seems good that the person finally stopped suffering. Probably, the shelter is the best place they could get to before death but still it is like a prison where you are just waiting for death".
Every week volunteers accompany deceased residents of the Home to their last destination according to their religion: a crematorium for Hindus and cemeteries for Muslims and Christians. Often the volunteers barely know the deceased, but in other cases they already have personal relations with those passed away.
The day starts with 2 deceased again, one is #15 who I washed together with Fabio. He died at 7 am. Always happy MD Sapakul pointed at him when I came into the ward and gestured: “dead”. #15 was as always lying on his back under the dropper with his mouth open, but not breathing anymore. Soon he was washed, dressed in white and wrapped into a winding sheet. I asked the old grumpy worker: ‘Muslim?’ The worker looked into the pants of the dead man: ‘Hindu'.
Fieldnotes 22.04.2016
My three weeks of work in the shelter ended with the death of two other residents. This time I knew one of them and had seen him faintly expressing gratitude for giving him one of the last relieving moments of his life. The memory of which invoked a complex of feelings: fear of the inevitable mixed with a hope for mercy, satisfaction of fulfilled moral duty, a worm of pride for the tiny self-sacrifice, and for the significance of a gesture to a human being already imprinted onto eternity.
With over twenty millions of population the former colonial capital of India is an assemblage of decaying Victorian splendor, droplets of prosperity of the developing Asian mega-state and omnipresent poverty reaching the very bottom of existence.
The sense of uncertainty and fluidity soaks the whole volunteer community of Kalighat and other Kolkatan homes of the Missionaries of Charity. Distant and pretty much isolated from the familiar rational western life they are thrown into the turmoil of concentrated Otherness which doesn't leave any of their senses intact and relaxed. Being exposed to transgressive experiences volunteers spend their days in an essentially uncertain, liminal being.
Streets of Kolkata are inhabited by thousands of people. Volunteer scout squads pick up those in critical health condition or with severe injuries and bring them to the Kalighat Home for Dying Destitutes or to a hospital for urgent treatment.
Many of the poorest street dwellers make their living searching in the piles of rubbish throughout the city for reusable and exchangeable waste.
Sidewalks of Kolkata are not easy to walk on as the street dwellers and poor citizens often make their living by establishing a small trade, a tea stall or a service shop right on the pavement.