“Varanasi feels like a very queer city to me,” says artist Debashish Paul, speaking of his adopted home where he presently lives and works since finishing his Masters’ in sculpture from the Banaras Hindu University in 2021.

For his first solo exhibition, A Thousand Years of Dreaming, at Kolkata’s Emami Art, he channels “the playfulness, colours and ecstasy of living in Varanasi — its open landscapes, its crowded alleys, its grand ghats — its own special kind of queerness” into still performance images, sketches and sculptures.

Artist Debashish Paul | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

“I’ve seen the ease of boys holding hands, bathing together, and celebrating each other’s bodies in the River Ganges, and they aren’t burdened, they’re free with one another,” he says, during our telephone conversation. For him, these men don’t need “to translate their affections for each other” through a layer of queerness. And for Paul, his performance art practice allows for him to “slip” into his own sense of queerness.

It seems, his practice has always been a way for him to slip, slide and steal a path into himself. Growing up in Phulia in West Bengal’s Nadia District, the birthplace of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, one of the significant saints of the Bhakti movement, he remembers always being part of the jathras or temple fairs in his village.

“As a queer child, I found myself constantly curious about my body, and was drawn to dance, movement, and theatre. From my school days, I have participated in the mythological dramas that took place at these jathras,” he says. “There I saw other boys and men dressing up as gods and goddesses. Around this time, I also found myself becoming fascinated with dressing up as a woman. So, I would play only the female roles in these plays.”

‘Anatomy of a Dream’ | Photo Credit: Courtesy: Debashish Paul

Inside a performance

For Paul, these chances at embodying the flesh and bones of another has always been “a liberating playground for his imagination”. Occupying these events of religious and ritualistic rigmarole, he could “like Krishna become Mohini, or personify Shiva-Parvati as Ardhanareeshwara, half-man and half-woman”.

While the process of becoming these characters — applying the make-up or putting on the costumes — was like an exciting excursion into himself, over the years, he also began to notice that some of the other men were taking a similar pleasure in the performative aspects of these rituals, too. He began to see other queer men of his village, who were either married, were fathers or didn’t explicitly identify as such, “seemed to reveal themselves” while remaining hidden during the rest of the time. “I realised on these jathras that one could become anything: a man could become a god, a woman, a bird or an animal,” he recalls of his early epiphany. And his performance practice and the exhibition space allow this similar shift for him, observes Mario D’Souza, director of programmes and exhibitions at the Kochi Biennale Foundation and resident curator at HH Art Spaces in Goa, who curated this exhibition and has closely worked with Paul for over two years. “Interestingly, in the exhibition space, he [Paul] is an openly queer man talking about love and worship. I think this is what his performance body allows him to be — it allows him to be queer in public,” says Mario speaking to one of the constant themes in their conversations over these years.

The film work Hazaro Saalon ka Sapna (whose rough translation lends its name to the exhibition) grounds Paul’s show. In it, he pulls from all of these personal influences to comment on queer togetherness, its difficulties, its daring and its drama. “I come from a lower middle-class family and we live in a village. My boyfriend comes from similar circumstances, too,” he says. “Both our families aren’t educated, they don’t know about queerness or homosexuality. And they don’t know about my identity either.” Now, they are both 30, and are facing family pressure to get married to women.

A performance by Debashish Paul | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

“I’ve seen other gay men who have given in and married women but they aren’t able to celebrate their lives. They are bound to a societal structure that they didn’t want. This is something I’m resisting because we love each other,” he adds. As always, in wondering how he can escape from his reality, Paul turned to his performance art practice. In Hazaro Saalon ka Sapna, he projects this dream of queer marriage or togetherness. “Rather than focusing on the unfulfilled desires of a queer person, I wondered: what would the fulfilled dreams of a queer person’s desire to set up home to make a family look like?” In order to answer this question, Paul drew from his childhood memories of religion and rituals. As well as his life in Varanasi where he has found “a freedom and philosophy that goes beyond the body”.

Says D’Souza, “Paul isn’t reading Queer Theory, he’s literally responding to things from his experiences from a very simple place; it is supremely intuitive and very auto-narrative. His work thinks about shape-shifting, about mutating, about becoming things that you are — but it’s also about masking, hiding, and concealment” and the tensions between “Is he coming out? Or is he hiding under new forms of adornment?”

‘The Ancient Dream 2’ | Photo Credit: Courtesy: Debashish Paul

Who is afraid of who?

Paul doesn’t seek to glorify with his use of religious and ritualistic symbols, most commonly used to adorn his costumes (that stand as sculptures in the exhibition) or the composition of his storytelling. Instead, he radically employs these materials—the detritus of rituals, such as cloth, cowrie shells, threads, temple jewellery, and other decorations—and childhood memories of jathras to anoint his own queer body as sacred, too. And D’Souza reminds us of the striking significance of this symbolism in Paul’s work. “It works towards instilling a sense of holiness into the queer body that is invisible in Banaras and the society around him and his partner, and the other queer men that he knows who aren’t out, who are also closeted too,” he says. For D’Souza, Paul’s work “recalibrates his experiences through the sacred to make deity-like figures without alluding to any one thing—in a way creating his own pagan gods”.

A performance by Debashish Paul | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

His work is also grounded in moments of self-doubt and societal dissonance that plague queer people, shown more directly through his drawings of creatures—fantastical, fabulous, and fractured. “These creatures emerge from the moments of loneliness caused by society’s gaze on bodies like mine. Growing up in a landscape of hate and disgust, sometimes I felt like an alien,” Paul says.

The drawings “are a reflection of the times I feel like a weird, whimsical creature. And I’ve come to see that there’s beauty, there’s horror, there’s an otherworldliness to them much like my own experience of being queer in our society”. For him, these creatures aren’t meant to scare “but like similar creatures in temple architecture”, they coax us into imagining who is really afraid of who.

The exhibition runs till October 26 at Emami Art Gallery, Kolkata.

The author is a Bengaluru-based poet and writer.