Dhiraj Rabha will never forget his conversation with Malati Rabha, a former member of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA). “As a child, she wanted to be a nurse because she would see a nurse wearing a white dress visiting her village, and wanted to wear one too,” says the Assam-based artist, who is in Bengaluru to set up Reminiscences of Home, a multi-media installation that reflects on the notion of home and the memory of the community residing in a Goalpara camp for former ULFA members.
That is why she joined ULFA in the first place: she heard the organisation was offering free training for doctors and nurses because they needed medical professionals. “So, she didn’t think twice; just ran away from home and joined them. She wasn’t aware of anything about the movement,” he says, adding, however, that reality played out differently: Malati never ended up wearing a white dress, only camouflage gear. She now lives alone in a tree-flanked small house on a hill at the very end of a village, he reveals. “She is a very strong woman.”
Dhiraj Rabha
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
Malati is one of the 45-odd people whose stories are included in his installation, which he originally assembled in 2024 at a camp for former members of ULFA in Goalpara, Assam, where Dhiraj grew up and still lives. According to a release issued by the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), which implemented the project under its Arts Practice programme, it “recreates the idea of ‘home’ for the community members through their memories and narratives”, by combining archival material, interviews, audio-video, and physical structures to give “voice to the untold stories, bridging the gap between the insiders and the outsiders.”
Dhiraj’s own childhood memories were instrumental in creating this installation. He was born in Assam’s Barali Gaon, but moved in 1999 to a residential camp in Goalpara for former ULFA members like his father, who had chosen to surrender their arms after peace talks with the Indian Government. “I was four years old when we moved from the village to the camp,” he says. Life was highly surveilled, of course, but he remembers thinking of it as normal. “I never felt that I had a different kind of childhood,” says Dhiraj, who went on to do an undergraduate degree in Political Science, followed by both an undergraduate and postgraduate degree in Painting from Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan.
He was in the final year of his BFA at Santiniketan when the COVID lockdown happened, and so, he moved back home in 2021. “At that time, I realised a lot of things about home, and started thinking about how the notion of home is very different for different people,” says Dhiraj, who got to spend a lot of time with his family during this period, listening to the stories of their past. He also realised that many other people had had similar experiences, so “I wanted to revisit these stories and understand them from different perspectives,” he says.
At a previous edition of the exhibition
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
So he began interviewing people, “not for a project or any artwork, but to know them better,” he says. As the stories piled up, coupled with data and documents, he began thinking of ways to archive them. “I thought of making a book or documentary at first,” he says. Then, “multiple disciplines came into my practice as well, so I allowed that,” says Dhiraj, who went on to apply for an IFA grant to support this research project. “I created many things with this information.”
The project was first showcased at the camp itself, before travelling to the Serendipity Arts Festival (2023), Bengal Biennale (2024), and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2025), among others. In Bengaluru, it will be exhibited at Sabha BLR between August 27 and 29, with Dhiraj conducting walkthroughs of the installation multiple times each day. “This project is a research project, but I didn’t want it to consist of just documents. I wanted to make it surreal and poetic,” he says of the project, which he hopes could play a role in subverting dominant narratives. While his work does not defend or glorify ULFA, he feels it is important to understand other perspectives as well. “Many of these people have shared their story for the first time, and, for me, it is important to understand their story, too.”
Dhiraj decided to turn to multiple media to tell these stories
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
He is now working on a new “completely different” project, he says. “I am engaging with different kinds of folk tales from the Northeast.” The idea of death, says Dhiraj, is fascinating to him, given that most tribes in this part of India believe in reincarnation. “It is never a final stop, but a loop.”
He compares this to the environmental destruction being wreaked in the region in the name of development. For Dhiraj, “this death, that of a river or a jungle, is permanent, so I am exploring this idea in a very different way. I am doing the research for that now,” he says.
Reminiscences of Home will be held at Sabha BLR between August 27 and 29. To know more, log into indiaifa.org
Published – August 28, 2026 07:16 am IST
