Photo feature

Madrassa – between black, white and grey

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Tanvir Murad Topu and Naeem Mohaiemen debate Topu’s recent photography project on a madrassa in Bangladesh. Translated from the Bengali.

Mohaiemen: There is an othi, familiar, style of image production – one that freezes the madrassa into a source of obscurantism and violence. But when I look at your photographs, another position becomes apparent: one that romanticises and aestheticises the madrassa. The stylised presentation of light, shade, grass, clouds, water and smiles – is this the madrassa as a fetish?

Topu: Well, of course there is beauty, because there is the photographer’s aesthetic. I worked on all of these photographs over a period, and then selected a set. But it’s also true that I was looking for positives in the madrassa, as I was seeing so many negative portrayals.

Mohaiemen: So, we have one pole as in the work of G M B Akash, who took the much-publicised photograph of a madrassa student with his feet in chains – a photograph that landed him on the August 2006 cover of Himal. But now this seems like another genre of imagery – madrassa in a ‘positive light’. Is this a reaction to the other, older position, perhaps?

Topu: First, I wanted to work on a theme of religion. In our first year at Pathshala [the South Asian Institute of Photography], when we were supposed to work on ‘Children’, I chose as my topic Children in a Madrassa. Since we were directed to look for something outside the usual image, my story started there. It’s true, when editing, I removed the ones that seemed more open to misinterpretation. But my story has not yet ended. This was only the first stage. I don’t know what will come next.

Mohaiemen: So you ended up picking all the positive icons, particularly smiling children. There’s only one photo where there is an authority figure, a teacher. Motifs of age, authority, labour, study are all absent. How often are these children running around in fields full of grass?

Topu: Since someone is always representing other images, in a negative fashion, I wanted to get outside the usual images.

Mohaiemen: This conversation is reminding me of the time when our positions were reversed – you were commenting on a project of mine, “Muslims of Heretics: My Camera Can Lie”. But even after looping all your critique into the film, I found no space to complete that work without falling into stereotypes. I couldn’t find a way to rectify, balance or complicate the top-heavy images. Now extend this to your project. Yes, there are the positives of madrassas – they stepped in where the primary system failed, they provide an extended family (as in your images) and so on. But let’s assume that I have a critique of the madrassa, and I want to engage you on that critique. The cultural context is unfortunately structured in a way that forces us to veer into a framework defined by others, defined by the ‘war on terror’.

Topu: Well, there can be a critique of madrassas, of course. That can be a constructive critique, from inside; a reformer’s point of view, or what is being called‘modernisation’ of curriculum. But it’s not possible to understand madrassas through binary positions. This education system was very specific for a long period in the Subcontinent. It came out of a very specific context. And sometimes it was, and is, taken for granted for a very specific economic class – those who supposedly had no other economic options.

Mohaiemen: Can we talk a little about your decision to shoot in colour, and then convert to black and white? Your photo series on the Rakhain indigenous peoples, engaging in water sport – those were in glorious colour. Why are these photos of madrassas in black and white?

Topu: It was an aesthetic choice, well within the tradition of documentary photography. They were photographed in colour, but with a black-and-white finale in mind.

Mohaiemen: But we may excavate a subconscious politics at play. Isn’t there an idea somewhere in the ether that the madrassa should be black and white – austere? Why don’t we ever see puja pictures in black and white?

Topu: No, that’s not true. Abir Abdullah and other photographers have a whole series of puja pictures in black and white. This is photographer’s choice.

Mohaiemen: But now consider Tareque and Catherine Masud’s “Matir Moina”, or Abbas’s “Islam” series. I detect an unravelling idea of Muslim contexts as serious, dour, monochromatic, and Hindu cultural celebrations, as in “Matir Moina”, as a visible juxtaposition of colour.

Topu: Now take Abbas. He is a documentary photographer in the original tradition. He shoots everything in black and white, and on film, not digital. So it is not only because he was working on Islam that he shot in black and white. But if you look at his pictures of Qurbani, those are in colour, because there the sacrifice blood is the crucial aspect.

Mohaiemen: But there is a context of image production where Islamic iconography is pushed in this direction. No icons, black Kaaba, Haj pilgrims dressed in white, and so on.

Topu: And if you take a photo of the Haj, you see the grey surroundings. So in that sense, yes, there is no colour within that image. So it is important to shoot in black and white when your subject is black or white and its surroundings are grey.

Mohaiemen: An underlying theme of obscuring or covering differentiation, ornamentation and pride, perhaps.

Topu: But when mazars are photographed, those are in colour, and they are colourful.

Naeem: Yes, but the orthodoxy would reject mazars; they are completely at the margins of Islam. To the traditionalists, they are beyond the pale. Despite your argument about the use of black and white, I will continue to read a certain image politics into your choice. We don’t have to agree here.

Topu: Well, does everyone have to agree on everything?