Landless Tale (2023–2025) is an evolving film-based installation project that reflects on the adaptive and regenerative ecological processes of Chaura river communities in the shifting Teesta River basin in Nilfamari. Documented through immersive visuals and embodied testimonies, the film sits at the nexus of environmental imaginaries, displacement, and river-based resilience.
How do riverine communities maintain ecological and cultural continuity amid destabilizing landscapes? In what ways does land resist erasure through lived practices?
Landless Tale explores these layered histories of land dispossession and ecological precarity in Nilfamari, northern Bangladesh. Rooted in the Teesta River basin, once a fertile land with fluvial-diluvial characteristics now completely dried up, the work traces a continuum of extraction stretching from colonial indigo plantations to the Partition of Bengal and, more recently, hydro-dam interventions that reshape the land, water, and political ecology of the place.
In the 19th century, Bengal’s soil was violently reorganized under British indigo planters, whose monoculture systems displaced farmers and depleted ecosystems, leading to the Indigo Revolt of 1859. After 1947, Partition redefined borders and fragmented communities, producing new forms of displacement and landlessness. In the late 20th century, the construction of large-scale hydro-dams on the Teesta imposed another layer of dispossession, altering sediment flows and creating recurrent floods and droughts. These overlapping histories converge in Nilfamari, where land loss and resilience remain ongoing struggles. Farmers need to find adaptive measures to survive, often culminating in only monoculture maze production or being relocated to the cities for work, mainly in the garment industry.
Through sculptural interventions using soil, jute, and indigo pigments, field recordings of the river, oral testimonies of the farmers, and archival re-readings of maps, Landless Tale constructs a multisensory speculative narrative of how people and place carry embodied kinship and trauma. The project reframes land and water not as passive backdrops but as active witnesses to cycles of violence and adaptation.
Landless Tale seeks to connect colonial and postcolonial regimes of extraction, locate the power structures by foregrounding the resilience of landless communities while opening new artistic forms of ecological testimony through material, mapping, sound, and moving narratives.
