I Inherit the Water
Leela, meaning “divine play,” describes how the sacred manifests through lived experience. Traditionally used to frame epic narratives of gods, this work repositions leela within the life of an everyday person. Drawing from personal archival footage and performance documentation, Aaji emerges as an ancestral presence who weaves past and future, water and land, history and mythology through embodied performance. She recounts the story of Ramsuki, one of my maternal ancestors, through a 2009 interview with my late grandmother. The work asks how ancestral trauma is carried, how resilience is honored, and what repair might look like.
This piece was performed at the opening reception for Home in a Space Left Behind at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India, a companion exhibit to the exhibition in Patna (part of the Bihar Museum Biennale).
Performance footage in Patna (projected on the wall behind the performer) captured by Ranjit Kumar and Saurav Suman
JNU performance footage captured by the artist and Mithul
Artwork info:
Multimedia live performance with sound (including interviews with the artist's mother and grandmother), video projection (including personal archival footage shot in Guyana, 2011 and performance documentation from I Inherit the Water: Initiation performed in Patna, India November 2025), headdress (welded steel, found fabric and objects, embroidery thread, beads, fabric flowers), jute rice sack, mosquito netting, fabric flowers, found objects, fabric embellishments