Memory, history and location come together in a video installation by British artist Said Adrus.

At the centre of the video installation, collectively titled ‘Lost Pavilion’ at  at Mumbai based FSCA (March 2009), was a forgotten event – the presence in Britain of Indian soldiers wounded and convalescing in the Royal Pavilion Brighton during the First World War.

The archival footage edited by the artist to a slow pace marks the melancholic register of the exhibit as a whole. It was shot on the occasion of a Royal visit, later used as propaganda to encourage recruitment for the war. The same offers an indexical register, giving faces, and bodies to a presence marginalized in British collective memory but in this propaganda film briefly flickered into collective consciousness.

The contribution of Indian and other colonial officers, unlike the European soldiers of the First World War has rarely been remarked upon. By contrast, the scattered presence of Indian soldiers in Britain, arriving to be hospitalized were imperial subjects and therefore very unlike the immigrants in London, largely eastern Europeans Jews fleeing persecution from pogroms.

This project, ongoing for some years now, is an invaluable process of excavation that unearths from the layers of time, accumulated between the past and the present, the complex history of Indian participation in the First and Second World Wars.

The physical presence of Muslim soldiers’ bodies marks the collective presence of their fellow soldiers, Sikhs and Hindus, who were cremated after their deaths but Muslim funeral rites necessitate a burial that allows the deceased to face Mecca, a fortuitous consequence that allows us to mark the Indian contribution to the British effort during the First World War.

In Said Adrus’ project, it takes on a particular form, because the burial of these Muslim soldiers on English soil has required the British nation-state to become a custodian of this history and to preserve them from attacks on their graves.

It is this sad fact and the subsequent efforts to preserve and safeguard these graves that has marked and shaped Adrus’ project. Initially these deceased Muslims were moved from Brighton and buried in a cemetery near the Shah Jehan Mosque in Woking but following numerous desecrations of the graves, they were moved once more to a Commonwealth burial site at Brookwood Cemetery that included the graves of fallen soldiers from Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

Adrus’ use of the word ‘lost’ is evocative here it suggests an attempt to recover something that can only be found in traces giving the sense of a missing presence marked by photography’s historic role as witness.

The stark appearance of the grave stones in the Muslim section of the Commonwealth burial site is reflected in the stark forms of the images.  Dividing up the horizon line, they reinforce a sense of communal identity between otherwise different individuals.

Compare these graves to those found in Muslim sections across cemeteries in Britain and the contrast between the civilian and the army becomes striking. In the light of current events and the many lives that have been lost in distant lands, both Muslim and Christian, it seems preposterous to suggest that there is any such thing as a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West, as some intellectuals might have us believe.

If we examine the microcosms of life lived by people from day to day in Britain, we see considerable evidence of connections between people of different religious and ethnic constituencies. One of the enduring legacies of the Black British Arts of the 1980s is the diverse and cosmopolitan nature of those who were part of it.

This cosmopolitanism embraced ‘black’ and white alike in recognition that race and racism was a product of imperial ideology and of power that encouraged conflict and difference by propagating dubious ideas of biological difference.

This conflict is now present in a different way, as we are encouraged to adopt a neo-Orientalist view of Islam and the Middle East as imbued in a violent tradition antithetical to the West and yet, as Adrus’ project indicates Muslims and Islam have long been a part of European consciousness and vice-versa.

In ‘Lost Pavilion’ the collective impulse of the Black Arts movement of the 1980s continues in his attention to the collective contribution of Indian soldiers of diverse ethnic and religious constituencies, marked by the presence of these graves of Muslim soldiers that implies the absence of others who fought alongside them.