Memorial to Lost Words 

Memorial to Lost Words (2016)
8 channel audio | 12 minutes 

This work is an anti-monument in memory of more than a million Indian soldiers who served in the First World War (1914-1918) but are remembered – if ever – only for their valour and loyalty to the British Crown. 

The sound installation is a looped call and response between male and female voices. The male song – a specially commissioned piece by poet Amarjit Chandan - draws from soldiers’ letters that were censored and never reached India because of their candid condemnation of the war. The female voices are a contemporary arrangement of an old resistance song sung by the soldiers’ wives, mothers and sisters at the time. Through these voices, Abidi conjures up a complex world of longing, fear and displacement as experienced by these young men and their families back home.

Commissioned by the Edinburgh Arts Festival, it was originally shown in the ‘debating chamber’, a historical building restored in anticipation of Scotland’s post-referendum independence, but abandoned without being used. It has since been shown in different iterations all over the world, often with reproductions of a selection of the soldiers’ letters.

Here, as a guest in Ibrahim Mahama’s Parliament of Ghosts, and in simpatico with Mahama’s intention of enacting a ‘reverse restitution’, Abidi finds a way for these voices to be heard close to the Westminster Parliament, where the fate of these young men was determined.   

Male Song: Amarjit Chandan, based on letters taken from the book Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914-18 (1999) by David Omissi
Female Song: Punjabi folk song
Male Voice: Ali Aftab Saeed
Female Voices: Harsakhian
Arranged by: Ali Aftab Saeed