EMERALD LEAF & GOLDEN FIBRE By Sonia Mehra Chawla

EMERALD LEAF & GOLDEN FIBRE By Sonia Mehra Chawla

October 15, 2026 – November 28, 2026

Artworks in Exhibition

The Ambiguity of Looking Back at Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives

— Nancy Adajania

Artistic research has had to face the twin challenge of mastering the knowledge that specialists spend decades refining, and then translating that knowledge through the enigmatic terrain we call artistic practice. I would invite the viewer to engage with Sonia Mehra Chawla’s exhibition ‘Emerald Leaf & Golden Fibre’, both for its freight of archival and contemporary testimonies and for the grace and vigour with which it tackles the challenges attendant on a research-based project.

Two globally traded commodities feature at the centre of Sonia’s current inquiry: jute and tea. She critiques the colonial histories of extraction associated with these goods through a layered narrative addressing the entanglements between capitalism, class, gender and empire. She deploys the documentary mode while also shaping hybrid composites from prints, paintings and archival fragments.

Alongside, Sonia questions the systems of representation and taxonomy that legitimised colonial power. She examines the exoticising tendencies in colonial-era landscape and portraiture while recording the epistemic violence unleashed by empire, as when colonial botanists like William Roxburgh appropriated the native plant knowledge and visual skills of Indian artists.

Sonia shifts our attention from the possessions of empire to the processes of political and economic dispossession that displaced and destroyed millions of lives. She valorises the labouring body that has been romanticised, erased or occluded both by the colonial enterprise and by the new postcolonial elite. Playing boldly with scale, she foregrounds the invisible labour of workers whose lives were and are swallowed by jute mills in Dundee and Kolkata, by tea plantations in Darjeeling.

A chronicler, Sonia registers every infinitesimal moment of the jute production process. Her slow aesthetic forces viewers to inhabit the centuries-old rust and biting dust of a claustrophobic jute mill interior, to feel the silkiness of the golden fibre as it perforates the workers’ lungs. In a telling moment, a woman working at a machine at the Hastings Jute Mill turns to look directly at the camera. To my mind, her gaze should not be glossed simply as a gesture of resistance defying colonial or continuing postcolonial oppression. Rather, I would argue that this encounter possesses a specific moral granularity.

The woman’s steady gaze questions us, as viewers: Where do we stand in relation to these histories? Does our awareness of them flare up into resistance or fade away into complicity? Or are we merely consumers of the images and narratives through which these histories are now available to us? Similarly, the glitch-error
patterns rendered by the artist on the colonial photographs of the tea plantations do not automatically decolonise the narrative or cause cognitive dissonance. We are conscious of the ruptures enacted by colonial powers, but also painfully aware of our own erasures as citizens of independent India.

More optimistically, the videos involving the women workers in the Makaibari tea plantation break through the cycles of alienation and interpellation with an agential power that greens the sludge of history. Their testimonies, both silent and verbal, exude the warmth of solidarity, the ‘mil jhul ke’ ethic of care and togetherness.

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