Recently at Broken Frontier we chatted with the Kutty Press team of Bhavani Bala and Deepesh Sangtani about their minicomics and zines; work that is “rooted in South Asian identity and community-led histories, and weaves together visual storytelling, political reflection, and the tactile joy of printmaking and bookmaking.” One of their publications which most sums up that philosophy is today’s subject, Bala’s Ghost Trains: Quotes from Partition, a collection of accounts from those who experienced the trauma of the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947.
Ghost Trains looks to give a visual representation of the stories of those refugees forced to embark on the resulting greatest mass migration in history. The short passages come from accounts researched by the Partition Museum and Project Dastaan, supplemented by images that are either illustrative or sequential in nature. It’s powerful material and, given the themes of communal violence, fear and displacement that are covered within its pages, comes with a content warning on the opening pages.
The ghost trains of the title are the ones which spirited away the zine’s subjects, arriving at their destinations with passengers both alive and dead. The testimony is harrowing: Sudershana Kumari forced to leave the family home in the middle of preparing the evening meal forever parted from her dolls; Ishar Das Irora who recalls a happy village life followed by a contrasting childhood in refugee camps and the spiralling violence there; and, among others Mussarat Abrar who speaks of angry mobs and terror replacing a world of communal co-operation.
Bala illustrates each person’s story with haunting, fractured images that speak to us of the dread, oppression, confusion and dislocation involved. It’s deeply affecting in presentation, with the use of screen printing, charcoal and hand-carved lino-cut stamps providing a highly atmospheric visual embodiment of each story. The realities of the human cost of Partition are, like most of British colonial history, much suppressed by the official narrative. Work like Ghost Trains provides a vital insight into the chaos and violence that followed and is a reminder of how the autonomy of the self and micropublishing world brings to life stories that could otherwise go largely unacknowledged. Important and crucial work from Kutty Press.
Bhavani Bala • Kutty Press, £8.00
Review by Andy Oliver
