Jalsaghar
Debjani Banerjee at Mimosa House, London 27 June - 30 August 2025
‘the dreams which aren’t dreams but conversations, visitations from absent friends, a raucious procession behind your closed eyelids, your awake and dreaming eyes, and sometimes a voice wakes you, your own voice talking to someone who isn’t there.’ - Narcropolis, Jeet Thayal
It’s been some time since I spent the summer with my grandfather. I remember the small one room bedsit he lived in when I was much younger. Occasionally my brother and I would stay with him during the summer holidays and despite our plea for ice lollies he would insist chai was the best way to cool down. Some 20 years later I sit in his flat trying to find relief from the heat again. This time it’s by propping the front door open with his walker and keeping the balcony door ajar with an old milk carton filled with water. The afternoon breeze slips through the corridor of the estate, carrying the hum of the city as it catches the wind chimes and home-made kites that decorate the living room, extending its song.
It’s with such beauty that air is animated and animates. Like a single breath being carried through a bansuri. The movement as it passes through a space, brushes up against the edges of its surrounding and utters a unique expression. So, as the winnowing wind finds its way through the living room it makes itself known, a gentle force of memory and motion.
This estate in the centre of London now boasts two bedroom flats for close to a million pounds while council tenants live in disrepair. I watch swathes of tourists buy union jack souvenirs(?!) from the balcony we should be “grateful” for as people queue hours for the chance to see stolen objects housed in museums built on the back of slavery and imperialism. These suffocating contradictions make my grandfather’s home a safe space nestled in the middle of it all. An alternate universe of temporal hybridity existing between 1950s Hyderabad and London 2025.
The walls are filled with family photos, snow globes, statuettes, plants, unwound clocks, decorative vases covered in plastic bags to keep the dust from settling. In the past few years my grandfather started to draw landmarks from his home city and stick them to the walls. He makes kites like he did in his childhood and attempts to craft flowers with crepe paper the way his brother in-law (my great uncle) has done since they were teenagers. My grandfather’s blossom out of egg boxes and toilet roll tubes, rougher but no less tender than the ones of his teenage years. The breeze, as it dances through the small flat enlivens all these fragments of time(s), space(s), home(s) that co-exist. This clutter is not chaos but memory as it is pieced together and rearranged. A kind of rhizomatic ecology in its own right.
Perchance, I hear the night breeze beckoning me from faraway […] opening the door to my thoughts…
Buhji Oi Sudure, Rabindranthan Tagore
Translated by Joya Banerjee
I keep returning to these words on the wall of Jalsaghar - The Music Room in Debjani Banerjee’s exhibition currently on view at Mimosa House. As the voice of Banerjee’s sister Mita Pujara curled around my ears, it became clear the breeze had been my guide to this resting place. I recounted my journey from the flat, past my old nursery, my grandfather’s former bedsit, the community centre where he was probably just finishing lunch, the flat my mum and I once called home…
Walking became an exercise in weaving time, blurring past and present until reaching Jalsaghar felt like passing through a threshold and returning to a place inscribed in my memory.
Re-encounter: in the gallery - a former Georgian townhouse - I’m greeted by Henry the Hoover not dissimilar to the one in my own home, I wonder if it followed me here? As we lock eyes I notice the curvature and hand craft of its construction. Later Banerjee tells me she began exploring clay as a material quite recently, after introducing it in sculpture classes she teaches to children and young adults. Here, Henry sits on a rug made of lino, the pattern woven with spray paint, its nozzle curved and snake-like hovers upright and alert, not in defense but in service to the incense burning from the end of its tongue, emanating a familiar scent across the space. A hoover and incense, a cleansing ritual, where the domestic meets the spiritual.
Banerjee poetically explores how the mundane and the mythic coexist in memory and domestic space, at once nodding to the ingenuity of objects re-appropriated in immigrant and diasporic homes. Shrines made with clay, enamel paint, jewellery. On an ornate stencil-painted shelf lays the cartoon character Cheese made in black clay, upturned eyebrows with its unmistakable pout. Banerjee and I talked about rooms and household items that served unexpected purposes. The incense spouting from the clay cobra’s mouth reminds me of the way my granddad wedges incense between packs of medication, under a cassette tape or an old container of Saxa salt. Banerjee tells me “I would open a cupboard as a kid and a collection of gods would be inside.”
Duality unfolds along a continuum, dancing from one pole to the other. It is in this space in-between that the material expressions of our lives manifest. Jalsaghar feels like entering that vast continuum that stretches from Banerjee’s childhood to present adulthood and within it we are introduced to memories that arise as she re-encounters them.
Vomiting Marjaryasana on a yoga mat, 2024, Crying Bitilsana on a yoga mat, 2024, Mudra, 2024 and the video work In this world my dear, 2025 are all beautiful examples of how memory is made and remade. Sometimes hand-stitched, fused with clay, or cut together in the edit suite. They form the layers of coexistence and co-creation, ones real, imagined, passed down or dreamed up. From the small examples that hide behind cupboard doors to the larger ones we grapple with inside ourselves as diasporic folk.
Large wall works like That floats on high o’er vales and hills, 2023, Naach, 2021 and Absolutely fit for the UK, 2024 combine cotton, linen, sequins, beads and jewellery. Lovingly made with textures and materials that honour Indian craft. They feel like both photographic collages and blankets that could lay over the beds of our childhood homes. Each stitch traces the story it is telling.
Banerjee re-imagines the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata as a tapestry come visual ode that spans almost two-thirds of the lower gallery space. She tells me about watching the television series aired on BBC2 in the early 90s with her family. Mahabharata was 94 episodes on mainstream British television in Hindi which seems somewhat unimaginable now. In particular Banerjee focuses on the story of Draupadi, who was dragged to the court to be disrobed in an act of public humiliation. Thanks to divine intervention Lord Krishna transforms Draupadi’s saree into one that infinitely unfurls and it’s in this spirit that Mahabharata, 2024 was made as a collective endeavor through workshops Banerjee held at her studio, inviting other people into the creation of the work.
Walking along side it feels like floating on air. Saree materials drape and seep out of a fluffy clouded sky. They remind me of the overflowing organza and old sarees that spill out of a cupboard at my great uncle’s home. You could visit his flat multiple times in one month and he would have changed the curtains, dappled light giving the room a particular orange, red, baby blue glow. Revealing and obscuring the daily scenes on the estate, much like the cut-out of a pot of ghee that peaks through the arm of a saree in Mahabharata, 2024.
In Indian traditions, epic tales and performances disperse faith, politics, community. Stories overlap and entwine: beginnings become endings, endings beginnings, individuals merge into the collective. Memory is cosmic, communal, and unfinishable. It is forged through the poetic alliances within formative spaces our families cultivated for themselves from a myriad of contexts, conditions, and positionalities. Piecing together fragments of time and experience, much in the way Banerjee does in her own studio practice.
These fragments of life become moments where spatial and temporal boundaries blur. Time bends, memory is re-appropriated through different material forms leaving space for imagination to join the dots. This all becomes clearer as Banerjee tells me she is an art-making facilitator for children and young people in her community. You can feel a sense of play, imagination and expansion in her work that is akin to the fearlessness and daring imagination of the child that is often calcified by adulthood. As it communes with the surrealness of adult life we can recognise the pieces in the exhibition as parts of Banerjee endlessly unfurling like a saree billowing in the breeze. Perhaps awoken by the curiosity and creativity of the very children she works with , as well as her own child. We are all of intergenerational making, we contain multitudes.
Contemplating our cultural dissonances and hybridities comes together in Jalsaghar - The Music Room installation in the upper gallery space. A neon pink ‘Jalsaghar’ glows like a nightclub sign. I remove my shoes, walk across the mirrored floor and sink into cushions made of hi-vis fabric as sound envelops me. To my right is a shisha pipe with a ceramic chillum, two eyes and a mouth - these objects have souls too. I laid in that room for over half an hour, first in complete stillness listening to the reinterpretations of Bengali songs (sung by Banerjee’s sister Mita Pujara in collaboration with her partner Kavi), then writing out notes for what would be this piece. There is not a lot more I can say about the experience of being in that room other than encouraging you to spend time in it yourself. You will be opened up and the fragrance of a memory, thought or feeling may arise and transport you somewhere else entirely. What a gift.
Jalsaghar takes its name from Satyajit Ray’s 1958 film. Coincidentally my partner had suggested we watch it a few weeks earlier but I had not put two and two together until I sat in there excitedly messaging him about the experience I was having. I had to watch the film before writing this, I knew something more would emerge. Jalsaghar, 1958 frames the music room as a sanctuary of tension between tradition and change. The film is beautiful and I recognise subtle motifs that appear in Banerjee’s work; the hookah, floor cushions, the instrumentation that fills the room.
Historically the spaces depicted in Ray’s film were reserved for elite members of society to gather and enjoy music. For the first time in Indian cinema, Jalsaghar offered everyday people the opportunity to listen to Indian classics played by legendary musicians and performers. As Ray reimagines the possibility of the music room, so does Banerjee who stretches it even further and makes space for the informal music rooms that are created in domestic spaces of Bengali households like the ones from her childhood. Hi-vis fabric, pops of neon, the mirrored floor all nod to clubbing and South Asian party scene of the 90s and early 00s.
Banerjee’s music room speaks to the fluidity of the home space and reclaiming the sacred within it. Where living room becomes music room, cushions may be used to lay and listen to the sound of a harmonium or slipped under auntys head as she dozes off after lunch. In this space (often one room) food is eaten, conversation is had, TV is watched, music is played. It is a container for the hybridities, contradictions and knowing of our lives.
I was interested to hear about Banerjee’s bodily practices (dance, performance and yoga) and as I laid there in the music room I attuned to the somatic practices that opened up the sensory dimensions of Jalsaghar. No longer an exhibition but a temporal practice of remembering. Jalsaghar becomes metaphor for the layers of our identity. A space of where sound, scent and body create new thresholds of being, opening the door to the listeners mind. We become seekers on the path attuned to the signs and stories layered within each work. Here life breaks out and is carried along the breeze as an eternal epic poem. Picking up and laying down parts of us as it goes. Changing speed, size, shape. A single breath becomes an expression of our existence animating all our parts into being.
The poetics of remembering is a music room - an interaction between public, private, individual and collective. Much like Ray, Banerjee is not universalising an experience but expanding a note and telling its story through layers of stories within stories. It is thanks to her generosity that I also find space for my own.
Visit Jalsaghar: https://www.mimosahouse.co.uk/jalsaghar