Nazrina Rodjan on Indian Survival Day, Queerness and BIPOC Representation
Nazrina Rodjan is a Dutch-Surinamese visual artist of Hindustani (indentured Indian) descent. Rodjan was born and raised in Rotterdam and holds a bachelor’s degree from St. Joost School of Art and Design.
Rodjan primarily works in graphite and oil. Her work represents themes of migration, queerness and diaspora, and a significant body of her work has focused on portraiture: portraits of people of colour, ancestral photographs and colonial postcards. She is committed to visually representing marginalised and invisible stories using traditional painting techniques. She spends her time painting between the Netherlands and the U.S.
What does survival day mean to you? What are your feelings about today?
I’ve been actively participating in Survival Day commemorations in the Netherlands for a few years now. It’s been turned into an entire month of events in June by Indo-Surinamese community organisers. We’ve been calling it Indian History Month. To me, this day has always meant coming together as a community to share knowledge and exchange stories. In a society where our narratives have often been erased or disregarded, it is very important, especially on days like this, to find each other and to make sure our voices are heard. Survival Day is also about honouring our ancestors and recognising our history of resilience and resistance against oppression. It's a time to reflect on how we can build solidarity with other marginalised communities.
How are you inspired by indenture in your artwork?
The history of indenture has inspired most of my work since graduating art school. I found there was a lack of knowledge and visibility around the topic, even within the Hindustani (Indo-Surinamese) community. Topics like slavery and indentured labour were never talked about within the Dutch education system, and I myself didn’t know much about it until I started reading the few books published by Hindustani authors.
It was very important to me as an artist of indentured descent to address this topic in my work. I believed that by creating art based on the history of indenture I could draw more attention to ongoing issues our community faces as a result of colonisation. 2023 marked 150 years since the arrival of Indian indentured labourers in Suriname. To commemorate the lives of the women on these plantations, whose identities and stories have largely been erased, I decided to reclaim their images from postcards by painting them in oil on large canvases. I called the series KALA PANI: 1873-2023.
How does your queer identity intersect with your Dutch-Surinamese identity?
Queerness has always been central to my work. I have explored the intersection of my queer identity and my Hindustani identity by painting images of queer brown women expressing their love openly and fearlessly. Growing up, I never saw any positive representation of queer BIPOC people. Sometimes it came up in family conversations and Bollywood films, but only to be made fun of.
How is this identity translated in your artworks?
Through my work, I try to positively impact the way queerness is perceived within our communities. I paint kissing South Asian brides to imagine what better futures could look like, and I reimagine archival images of indentured Indian women from a queer lens to challenge the erasure of queerness in our histories.
Queer BIPOC individuals exist, have always existed, and will continue to exist, and my work centres on that idea. So what could that history have looked like? What does the present look like? And what does the future look like?
