3: Amphibian Journeys: Art, Event, and Environment in Assam

In 2014, a bamboo raft named the Amphibian set sail on the Brahmaputra River for a six-hour journey from Uzanbazar Ghat to Sualkuchi in Assam with 32 people on board, including artists, musicians, folklorists, teachers and environmentalists. This raft was intended to embody an itinerant bard, evoke the past and future of the river, and create new ways of relating to the environment. Conceived by Indrani Baruah, an architect and visual artist who lives and works between Guwahati and Berkeley, California, the Amphibian was part of a multi-year project Cultural Reimaginations (2011-2014) supported by the India Foundation for the Arts in Bengaluru. It was social sculpture, sustainable habitat, temporary art space, and a venue for discussions, exhibitions and performances on the ghat (river bank) as passengers traveled by ferries to and from the north and south banks of the city on everyday commutes. In this paper, I consider the aesthetics and politics of such a project in Assam, and Northeast India more broadly, a region where citizens live under the shadow of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, initially passed in 1958. The affect and duration of the Amphibian’s journey attests to a shifting relationship between land and water, city and country, insider and outsider in the Northeast, and a wider turn to site-specific, socially engaged and collaborative art in India over the past decade