This multimedia installation explores the notion of home and memory

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Reminiscences of Home was created in Assam’s Goalpara camp for former ULFA members. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

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.”

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.