Riyas Komu’s Undertakers. What shall one make of tombstones on wheels? This eerie train of memorials suggests bodies and souls that will not rest in peace. On encountering this installation, one first sees Komu’s carriages from the rear. Each headstone is carved with an anatomically accurate depiction of a human heart. Below each headstone lies a wreath, also carved of wood within each wreath lies the carving of a skull imprinted with a star.

Walk around the train to see house-like coffins marked with crucifixes. Above these rise the flame-shaped headstones, in each of which a glossy-painted red star seems to pin down photographs1 as a thumbtack might pin a butterfly to a board. These are photographs of a heartbreaking optimism. Faces that bear the innocence and collective goodness one seems to see only in the 1960’s or before: bright-eyed children1 clean-faced leaders, young idealists grouped under the Cuban flag. Mingled with the iconography of Communism is also the iconography of Christianity as seen in the crucifix on each coffin. Komu’s own home in Kerala is a land where both Christianity and Communism have deep roots.

It is now common knowledge that Christianity was adopted in Kerala long before it reached England’s shores. And like Bengal and Tripura Kerala has elected Communist governments over the past several decades. The joint presence of the cross and the star bring to mind the journeys of both of these great1 transnational faithsi their promise of brotherhood and, possibly, the betrayal of these dreams. Komu’s work is perhaps an elegy for Communism; or perhaps is its bitter denunciation; or perhaps, in its evocation of the unquiet dead it suggests the promise of an ideology that is quiet but un-dead, one that will resurrect, unbeknownst to us.