Bani Abidi’s latest work is like a step back 100 years into history, reliving the horrors of the World War I in the most poignant fashion. It is a sound piece that is part of the Edinburgh Art Festival’s Commissions Programme, which comprises seven projects looking at society’s inherent need to memorialise. The fact that the work is only to be heard and not seen turns it into a transient memory, giving voice to those who were silenced in more ways than one all those years ago.

Presented during the 100th anniversary of the World War I, the work stirs up a number of controversial sentiments of colonial heritage. As audiences walk in and occupy the benches of the debating chamber of the New Parliament House in Edinburgh, the space reverberates with two melancholic tunes that act as odes to the unsung. There is an old Punjabi folk song sung during the war and since forgotten, which has been sung by Ismet, Zainub and Saleema Jawad of Harsakhian, along with a new song written by poet Amarjit Chandan, composed and performed by Ali Aftab of the Punjabi band Beygairat Brigade.

The words being sung are pregnant with meaning and historical baggage, but for non-Punjabi speaking audiences they take their true hauntingly-sublime appeal once the translations are read from the two lecterns in the debating chamber, giving these buried voices centre stage.

Bani Abidi’s latest work, ‘Memorial to Lost Words’, a part of the Edinburgh Art Festival’s Commissions Programme, is a sound piece on the lost voices of the soldiers from the subcontinent who served in the British military in WWI

The women singing their war songs plead with their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons not to leave for war — in essence it’s the antithesis of a war song. The male voice sings Chandan’s song, which is kind of a tribute to countless letters written by the Indian soldiers to their families back home, describing the horrors of war and longing for return. These letters never reached the intended recipients due to censorship of the anti-war sentiments being expressed.

Together these are the unheard voices being finally released in this debating chamber built in the 1970s for a Scottish Assembly that was never devolved and so was never used. It is quite poetic of Bani to use this space that never served its purpose, providing an audience to those who were never heard.

The work is meant as a memorial, but Bani, in typical Bani fashion, defies the norms of memorialisation and champions the underdog. She feels that traditional memorials too often serve someone else’s purpose, twist history in favour of those in power and fail to truly encapsulate reality. Nobody remembers the people who experienced the war and died for someone else’s glory; their narratives are quite literally edited out and they are only ever remembered for their bravery and loyalty to the crown, their complexities overshadowed and discarded. “Seventy thousand Indians died in the war and didn’t even make it as a footnote in the Imperial War Museum’s World War I exhibit,” says Abidi.

Even though this work is unlike what Abidi usually does — being her first sound piece and dealing with such heavy subject matter — it still has those subtle qualities that make her work so interesting and relatable. Her focus on individual stories to highlight broader issues and themes makes us look at their real-world manifestations. Her musings are then not superficial but become more three- dimensional, much like the characters she creates. We also find here elements from her previous works such as comments on the politics of power and authority in relation to the common man, as in pieces like ‘The Address’, ‘Death at a 30 Degree Angle’ and ‘Reserved’.

What is most striking about this piece is how it reveals the ugliness of war beyond the battlefield in subtleties hidden among the heartbreaking words of the letter poem. The soldier expresses the trauma of both facing death, and taking life without reason, highlighting the fact that they were forced to fight a war they had nothing to do with. He talks of the fallen soldiers and wonders what might have been their last thoughts; not big accomplishments, but sublime sensory moments from back home, such as “his mother’s earring, dangling”; random memories and fleeting emotions that define the essence of life.

The soldier expresses the trauma of both facing death, and taking life without reason, highlighting the part that they were forced to fight a war they had nothing to do with. This memorial is not romanticising war, speaking of their sacrifice and bravery, but remembering them and the injustice done to them.

It also evokes the realisation that these men died away from home, away from the people they loved and the land they longed for, all for something they did not even comprehend. This memorial is not romanticising war, speaking of their sacrifice and their bravery, but truly remembering them and the injustice done to them.

The touching words of the letter and the idea of creating a memorial from the voices of these ghosts of colonial past raises certain moral and ethical questions about using authority to play with lives. These issues are still relevant in the present, however, where human lives are snuffed out by the millions in the brutality of war, and subsequently forgotten. As Abidi says in an interview, “We live in times of expediency where histories, peoples and places are discarded when they become inconvenient.” It is still someone else’s war and those they control are made to fight to serve their own agenda, hailed as brave and loyal patriots who died for their country, their loved ones longing for them to return, their actual stories edited out of the textbooks. These songs from 100 years ago could as well have been sung today.

‘Memorial to lost worlds’ was on from July 28 till August 28 and was a part of the Edinburgh Art Festival 2016’s Commissions programme.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, September 11th, 2016