The Plantation

Sancintya Mohini Simpson’s collaborative, research-based practice focuses on experiences of migration, memory and colonial exploitation. Simpson is a descendent of indentured labourers who were sent from the port of Madras in India to work on colonial sugar plantations in the colony of Natal, now KwaZulu–Natal, in South Africa. This history is recounted in Simpson’s paintings, poetry, videos and performances, which explore the traumatic past and present of indenture. By unpacking colonial archives and connecting with communities, Simpson addresses gaps and silences in official records through counter-narratives that create space for healing.

Since 2017, Simpson’s practice has focused on the experiences of her maternal ancestors and other indentured labourers from the late 1800s until the early 1900s. The system of indentured labour was established to meet the demand for cheap labour in British colonies after the 1833 abolition of slavery across most of the British Empire. This resulted in 1.3 million Indian people moving to sugar plantations in South Africa, Mauritius, the Caribbean and Fiji between 1834 and 1917.

Simpson’s suite of panelled paintings, The Plantation, The River and The Fire, tell a fragmented story of indentured Indian women working on a sugar plantation, featuring scenes that take place at a processing plantation as well as seasonal sugarcane field burning. Each work contains meticulous imagery that dramatises their complex experiences of oppression, resistance, and domestic and agricultural labour, instead of showing a stereotyped colonial portrayal. They are painted using Indian Miniature techniques that Simpson learnt when she was on a residency in Jaipur, India, in 2013 and undertook training with master miniature painter Ajay Sharma. Referencing the tradition of miniature painting in South Asia, which often recounts how privilege manifests through gender, caste, class and race, Simpson centres the stories and knowledge of casteless, indentured women. She intentionally paints in a simplified style and leaves the wasli paper rough and untrimmed, to acknowledge how these truths have been omitted from records and official histories.