The Partition's Engine: Performance artist Nikhil Chopra’s 'The Blackening: 3157'

Some of the most poignant images of the Partition are of refugees on trains — spilling out of windows or sitting atop coaches, surrounded by bundles containing all their worldly possessions. The trains were, literally, a lifeline to safety and a new life for the millions forced to flee their homes, became death traps, easy targets for mobs who waylaid them and massacred hapless passengers.

One of these trains (only the locomotive actually) identified by a number, 3157, is currently pensioned off at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. It was the site, last weekend, of an intense, 48-hour performance by performance artist Nikhil Chopra, who brought alive the blood-soaked history of the Partition in a city that was intimately tied up with Britain's colonial project. For it was in Manchester, at the Vulcan Foundry, that 3157 was built in 1911, before being exported to India, where it served on the North Western Railways plying all over from Sindh to Punjab and Delhi. Was it one of the trains used to ferry passengers to and from Pakistan in August 1947? No, says Chopra, but those like it were. Anyhow, feels Chopra, it did not matter. "Let's not fetishise the object. It symbolises a shared history... that is of essence," he says.

After the Partition, 3157 remained in Pakistan where it continued to be in use until 1982 before the government of General Zia-ul Haq decided to gift it to the museum in Manchester where it has since been housed in an abandoned railway transit shed. It was here, on a large platform erected next to the locomotive that Chopra staged The Blackening: 3157.

Chopra's performances tend to be a mish-mash of theatre, role-playing, live art, installation and graphic art. (This time DJ Masta Justy providing live accompaniment to the performance.) Several of his artworks also draw on personal history. In this case, for instance, Chopra's own family, originally from north India but settled in Kolkata, was deeply affected by the Partition. "My mother's family was from Peshawar and came over at the time. They lost a lot of business when they left," says Chopra.

In order to unearth this 'personal' connection with the locomotive, the "blood beneath the technology", as Chopra calls it, his performance emphasised his "corporeal experience" of it. So, Chopra climbed over 3157, lay down on it, ate on it, and "put my face on it". A white cloth covered the platform-stage, on which were pinned photographs of the Partition and over which Chopra made charcoal sketches of, among other things, a dead tree, denuded of leaves — a symbol of the devastation that the Partition left behind.

"For the first time, my dad joined me in a performance," says Chopra. "On the morning of the second day, he began reciting the opening lines of Shakespeare's Richard III ('Now is the winter of our discontent...'). I then painted his face and hands white. With his white hair and beard it was moving — I could hear people around weeping. He then lay down on a gadda, like one of the bodies, and I drew him lying down like that."

The performance ended with Chopra draping the cloth that he sketched on over the locomotive, evoking the image of a shroud like those that must have covered the bodies at the time of the Partition.

This isn't Chopra's first performance in Manchester. Along similar lines was Coal on Cotton, Chopra's 2013 act at the city's Whitworth Gallery. For Manchester was a key city of the Industrial Revolution and it was to feed its cotton and other mills that the British needed the agricultural and other resources of India in the 19th century. In the end, as Manchester's factories grew, India's farmers and artisans grew poorer. In Coal on Cotton, Chopra brought alive this history, donning over the course of a 65-hour long performance, the persona of the Indian cotton farmer, the British mill worker and the mill owner, through a charcoal drawing over cloth.

Over the course of the next six weeks, as Chopra's shroud-painting covers locomotive 3157, visitors to the museum will have enough time to meditate on that history.