Shouting Needham from the Rooftops

Shouting Needham from the Rooftops
A Sound Thought Experiment
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Single Channel Video, Sound Performance, Calligraphy, Chinese-English-Bengali Translation,
Linguistic-Religious Confusion
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2008 (initiated during a residency at Gasworks, London and exhibited later in a solo show at Gallery SKE, Bangalore)

Keywords:
+ A Bengali speaking person in London: Indian or Bangladeshi?
+ Bengali = Bangladeshi = Islamic ?
+ Is the Islamic prayer call a ‘sound pollution’ in Western cities?
+ British Marxism and China: interconnected histories
+ Popularity of Chinese Literature in Indian communist states

The final form of this work assumes the shape of a video that integrates the audio documentation of a spoken word performance done in London (March, 2008) with an uneven scrolling shot of Bengali calligraphic text.
The performance essentially involved me shouting out extracts from volume 5 of “Science and Civilisation in China”, part of Joseph Needham’s monumental, multi-volume survey of ancient Chinese science.

The extracts that I shouted out were however the Bengali translation of Needham’s text. I positioned myself on the streets of Vauxhall, a south London neighbourhood, and intermittently shouted out these extracts at times that roughly coincided with the Islamic call for prayer. These ‘shout-outs’ were recorded from various points in the neighbourhood. A collage of these audio recordings formed the sound track for the video.

The visual in the video was a long scrolling shot of a calligraphic text that was a Bengali transliteration of a newspaper headline about ‘safety fears’ over an important Bangladeshi festival that’s held every spring in East London. The newspaper was a London based English language daily, published by and for the local Bangladeshi community. The calligraphic style was a reference to the conspicuously celebratory exhibition of Chinese Design that had been put up at around the same time by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Taking the misreading of Bengali as only a ‘Islamic’ language as its starting point, the work reflects on the politics of language and ‘otherness’ and the ambivalent histories of nation-state making in South Asia. In its delineation of the interconnected histories of this region, it revisits the intellectual legacy of the British Marxist scientist turned historian of science, Joseph Needham and his engagement with history of ancient and medieval Chinese science. Joseph Needham (1900-1995) was a British biologist who is remembered today for his encyclopaedic work on the history of ancient and medieval Chinese Science and its significant achievements in chemistry, metallurgy, printing and other areas. Needham was also a Marxist and an active supporter of Chinese Communism. In the photograph above he is seen with Zhou Enlai, a leading figure in the Chinese Communist Party, who played a major role in the Chinese Revolution and later in the conduct of China’s foreign relations.