How Edinburgh can face up to its colonial history through art – Nava Rizvi

Edinburgh-based Indian artist Nishi Chodimella’s reimagined geography sees Scotland and India share a border

It’s no secret that Edinburgh very largely benefitted from its colonial ties and slavery, but its discriminatory past is just beginning to come under the spotlight in the 21st century. There is more dialogue now than ever, especially amongst the arts and culture sector. Through art exhibitions, research programmes and events, there is hope to diversify, rewrite and amend Edinburgh’s history to make it more inclusive of colonial rule and the atrocities it caused in other cities and countries around the world.

Edinburgh-based Indian artist Nishi Chodimella reimagined Scotland’s ties with India through her works in a recent three-part installation at an Edinburgh Printmakers’ exhibition entitled From Where I Stand. Exploring the imperial legacy of Scotland, especially to India, Nishi used jute paper to create collage prints that contain language from books found within the city’s Royal Botanic Garden.

The prints highlighted phrases used about ‘invasive’ species, reflecting on populist rhetoric towards migrants and refugees. Additionally, on the ground, lay a rangoli installation made from coloured powder. These traditional artworks often represent prosperity and luck in Hindu traditions. Through this, Nishi created a speculative, other reality where south-west India and east Scotland share borders. The rangoli installation was recreated for each of the venues of the traveling exhibition with prompts provided by the artist, making the work organic and dynamic, shifting around, as boundaries and borders have done in the past.

Tolerance and acceptance

She reflected on the economic, shared pasts of the two countries through this artwork – looking across colonies, migratory birds, boat-racing cultures, a history of the jute trade, an ocean – and perhaps a hope of a reimagined history. With her artistic rendering of Scotland and its many islands creating bubbles between the two nations sharing land and water, the merging and co-existence of different accents, foods, smells, and architecture seem like a utopian bond to a reconsidered past.

It makes one rethink a shared heritage in a progressively diverse Scotland today, while acknowledging what India went through during its imperial history. Creating such a piece, to reimagine and question where one comes from, doesn’t eradicate the atrocious past the country has been through, but perhaps acknowledges it, allowing everyone to move forward, creating tolerance and acceptance towards one another while living together, even if it means having come from different pasts.

The multimedia exhibition featured existing and commissioned works by a total of seven contemporary international artists: Anupa Gardner, Claire Barclay, Swapnaa Tamhane, Sonia Mehra Chawla, Shiva Nallaperumal, Sushanta Guha and Nishi, the youngest artist of the group. By rejecting a linear perspective on history and addressing a difficult past, From Where I Stand was a result of a year-long curatorial and research fellowship realised by Edinburgh Printmakers and Flow India.

Co-curated by a collective of young, emerging curators and art workers – half based in Scotland and the other half in India – the relationships between the two countries are explored through this project with the aim of instigating conversation amongst the various communities that we live in. The group show looked at themes of materiality, cultural identities and linguistics while analysing the shared cultural heritage and interpersonal relationships between Scotland and India.

A spine-chilling performance

With a hope of bringing marginalised stories and conversations to the forefront, the exhibition had an additional component in which the public were asked to submit their personal stories to a ‘living archive’ to continue important yet difficult dialogues on the country’s colonial past, a subject that is often overlooked.

Previously, in August 2023, Edinburgh Art Festival took a chance on covering similar themes, putting imperial and colonial narratives under the spotlight. The programme included a musical performance at Parliament Hall in Edinburgh by Alberta Whittle entitled “The Last Born – making room for ancestral transmission”, which openly addressed racism, violence and grief. The piece was performed alongside Black women who had experienced institutional racism, underlining in particualr the barbaric history of Scottish education and the judicial system.

Part of the performance included chants of “respectability will not save you”, echoing widely across the hall. With chills running down the spine, one couldn’t help but contemplate their presence in a place with Parliament Hall’s history, particularly as large portrait paintings of great white (of which the majority are) men looked down upon everyone in the room.

There certainly needs to be more room for dialogue in addressing Edinburgh’s past, despite these themes recurring recently within the arts and culture sector. When reviewing the Edinburgh festival season, Susan Mansfield wrote about how colonial histories were taking over the contemporary art world as an overarching theme, wondering “how much longer these concerns can claim to be ‘marginal’”.

It’s unfortunate it has taken this long, well into the 21st century, to be able to finally have platforms that amplify and reshare histories of contested pasts. Having spaces to represent certain historical topics does not change colonial legacies, and certainly does not instantly remove marginalised groups out of the bubbles they have been encapsulated in. Under-represented voices will no longer be considered so only when everyone is educated about their past and about the pasts of those with whom they share living spaces amongst the diverse communities that make up Edinburgh.

Fortunately, these discussions are becoming more prevalent in the arts and culture sector, where there will always be space for conversation, especially when it is difficult to do so. I hope that addressing and re-writing history will continue, as it is important that these conversations trickle down to future generations so they are aware of their pasts. Edinburgh’s efforts to re-evaluate its colonial legacy are more important now than ever, and this is only just the start.

Nava Rizvi is an artist based in Edinburgh, an art historian, and an implementation group member for the Edinburgh Slavery and Colonialism Legacy Review Group