The Concentric Fictions of a Generous History.

Hypertext and other annotations to memory.

The library at Matsyapur does not exist.

Its absence from the documents of record, is not remarked upon because it was never there.

No one walks the aisles of its forlorn shelves and no one creases the spines of its books, for none were ever kept. 

No land was acquired to build the cloister and no workmen employed to make repairs to it’s crumbling colonnade. The wooden alcoves with their delicate Flemish tapestry that faded over time, never existed.

In 1947 when the Gwalior protectorate was rescinded, and the Nawab of Junagadh laid claim to the lands of Matsyapur, his surveyor made no mention of this structure or its collection.

But one may still ponder the existence of the library as if in an attempt to recollect something long effaced from History.

For the library may never have existed, but there is now a record of our having remembered it.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1fJK-uV6JLMLDU0TsDopSdepdcj3NCZLwReYv-silKJI

A transcript of our talk from the EyeMyth Festival 2019, Mumbai.

A new exhibition of our work opens at the VGA in Chicago today. It is called :

Notes in the Margins of History.

https://www.videogameartgallery.com/events/studio-oleomingus-notes-in-the-margins-of-history

Come and visit some peculiar places, eat buildings, read never ending stories and ponder the munificent forms in which we record the various histories of our lives.

Wishing everyone a Strange and Wonderful New Year!

And a gentle reminder, after a long interlude - that we are working on a game called : Under A Porcelain Sun, which is coming out this year.

Hello! We are releasing a new game tomorrow. It is called :

a Museum of Dubious Splendors.

Some images from our build, for the India Foundation for the Arts.

We drew a map to the contain the wanderings of our characters in Somewhere.

A map to illustrate the movement of events, to position the cities and the deserts, the palaces and Sarais, the highways and the highwaymen.
To give shelter to the narrative vagaries that had begun to proliferate from our writing the game.

It was a simple map, and you can see it in the final image that illustrates this essay. An outline of the terrain across the bay of Jumbali.

But little did we realise  that our map in it’s precise and characteristic form had invited other explorers into it’s newly found spaces. These explorer were all Cartographers, traversing the extent of all that we had created and charting the locations of cities, ponds and deserts and streets with exactitude so that we may find them again.

I resented this intrusion. After all I had only just created the map.

Why did my imaginary map have to correspond to it’s imaginary source, as ordained by my imaginary cartographers?

The cartographers, who within minutes of my having made the map had now formed a collective body, sent me a representative to argue their side of the case. And this representative, who said his mane was Hoja, declared :

Map making Dhruv Sahib, is an act of deletion, it not as you mistakenly assume an act of creation at all. You do not build maps from the nothingness of space,
instead you delete all that should not be on the map so that it might resemble only that which already is.

I nodded my head as this declaration was made, but unmoved by his rhetoric, I narrated a chapter from Connington’s Journal to articulate my side of the argument. This is what I told Hoja :

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Charles Henry Conningtion.
Magistrate of Matsyapur.

There were map makers and printers on every street corner.

Their small shops, with a decorated wooden lintel on their doorways, would be found in garrets above the groundnut ovens or leather Karkhanas or across the street from kite-makers and carpet weavers.

Of the parts within the city that I was most familiar with, and within the streets that I had permission to wander, I knew of at least seventeen different cartographers all gainfully employed in these map making offices run by the guild.

It was 1802 by my reckoning, and it had been ten years since I accompanied James Renell on his expeditions into the great Bengal heartland, but the Cartographic ideals still fascinated me.

To find meaning in the laborious turns of the land, to position in exactitude, on some imaginary absolute plane, the location of each construction,
felt like an act of defiance against the vagaries of nature.

The maps were to be my rational enunciation of Kayamgadh. A way I could perhaps glimpse at the scaffolding that held together this strange city.

And so I obtained a few maps from the offices and made a careful study of their representations. They were wonderful creations, charting out for example the oil sellers district, where I could see, the bathhouse and the bread ovens and the shoe makers shop delineated with distinct calligraphic flourishes.

But even to my untrained eye, I noticed inaccuracies, in the positions of buildings or the misspelled name of a street, or even an omission of a lesser tributary of some canal.

These were small errors but they surprised me for the guild of cartographers was held in great esteem by the Pasha, and I was certain that such ineptitude would not be looked upon with favor.

I will admit, I had selfish motives too. For here was an aspect of administration, I was familiar with, once that I could improve upon. A demonstration of the value of my own culture and learning, little enough of which, I believed, was known or understood here.

And so I appealed to the old master cartographer who lived in the basement of the wax makers house, demanding an audience and an explanation for the errors.

He looked upon the map momentarily and nodded in agreement as I pointed the various inaccuracies, I had discovered :

“Here”, I would say, “The medicine man’s house is on the other street ” And he would say : “Yes yes, Sahib, I remember it was Habu who drew that street.”
“It was drawn at the time of the Pasha’s wedding, and he must have rendered the error when distracted, by the magnificence of the fireworks.”

Or when I would say, but what about this canal, it is not called Yam but Ygar
And he would say : Ah! that canal, Yes Sahib I remember, that was Fridul, completing the map when still stricken with grief, at the death of his beloved wife in the last plague that afflicted the city.

And thus for each error there was a story, a story for why a mapmaker had been forced by the passions of the moment into commiting the inaccuracy.
Till exhausted by the stories but elated at a chance to demonstrate my superior skills, I rushed to the palace to offer my services in rectifying the various errors riddled maps of the city.

I met the chief astronomer UmarFaruk, outside the audience chamber, where I laid bare all my findings only to have him softly laugh at my effort and thus declare  :

It is true Kannigton Sahib, that the maps are a beloved possession of our Pasha, may his reign be forever glorious.
But did you not wonder why so many errors all allowed to live within our maps when the master cartographers know already of their existence?

Could it not be that instead of the distractions that Kayamgadh possesses, which pollute our maps, it is the errors in our maps that give permission for these passions to occur?

Of what use is an accurate map, if it cannot record the overwhelming joy of the mapmaker as he looks upon the thousand parrots released from the palace cage in celebration of the Pashas victory?
Of what use the width of the canal or the boundary of bakers mansion, if small errors in their representation do not remind of us of the immense sadness that came upon the city when it mourned the death of the countless soldier lost to the wars at Bhir.

Of what use, Sahib, is it charting of empty space, if all those who are to live within it’s confines are forgotten?

And saying thus he retreated to his chambers, leaving me with sheets of parchment filled with maps now made ugly by the corrections I had drawn over them.

The periscope city.

People in the periscope city have become used to the idea of looking at places that exist in a plane above them.

To the retired military man, sipping tea on the balcony of his fourth floor apartment, a glimpse inside the window of an airplane flying by, is ordinary. Much as the tinkerer who is working in bowels of the factory, and looks around, can see the mason on the roof laying tiles.

People here have always seen the world a little removed from the plane they find themselves existing upon.

Like the cycle-rickshaw fellow who peeks into the houses on the first floor seeking commission. Or the people who sit underground to view the trapeze artist in the circus. Or the chemist who brews his medicine, while perusing books in the library above his shop.

But even in the periscope city, people do need to visit the basement. Where they might have stored that old collection of newspapers or those spare switches.

And since they cannot see into this bottom-most chamber they are required to dig a room right below it. And as time passes, this new room, the one below the basement, gets filled with clever buttons, and television remotes and spools of twine and

a broken spade and old cassette players in various stages of disrepair. And much that the people would not want to possess but cannot yet discard.

And then someone must once again dig a chamber below.  

And so the city continues ever downwards. Deeper into unending basements built with the refuse of a civilization above. Till those who could peek into the stars can now only recollect in faint memories,the color of the sky.