Saline Notations
2023 – 2024
10-minute single channel video
Saline Notations draws on a 1962 British-era directory, The Daily Gazette, which listed Hindu residents of Karachi, who most likely left Sindh during
the Partition of India. The work reflects on the mass migrations that followed and the resulting crises of identity and belonging set into motion by this
historic rupture.
Kallat employs salt as both medium and metaphor to inscribe the professions and addresses of Hindu migrants, subtly referencing their past roles as
lawyers, landlords, or merchants, while deliberately obscuring their names. In the adjoining frame their names are revealed but professional and
residential details are effaced. The work invites deeper reflections on the erasure of identity that accompanies mass migration and the necessity of
rebuilding lives elsewhere.
Salt, a recurring element in Kallat’s work, carries resonances of sustenance and transience, as it dissolves back into the sea, emphasizing the frailty
of human life and the shifting nature of our individual and collective memories. It also recalls salt’s historic role in protests during the freedom
struggle. Its significance as a preservative, aligns with Kallat’s oeuvre in preserving fading memory and resisting the tide of historical erasure.
Acknowledgements
Aruna Madnani, Sindhi Culture Foundation; Video Production: Kiran Keshav, W.M. Films
Poem: ‘Blind Smoke’ by Arjan Shad Mirchandani from Freedom and Fissures: An Anthology of Sindhi Partition Poetry, translated by Anju Makhija and Menka Shivdasani, (Sahitya Akademi, 1998).