Collaborative survival: the body and the botanical by Cleo Roberts-Komireddi The dazzling and gregarious rich-yellow weaver birds, which Shiraz Bayjoo sensitively sketches in Village Weaver (2026), once made their way across the Indian Ocean from Southern Africa to the island of Mauritius. It was the late nineteenth century, and the species landed on an island long subjected to botanical, bodily and ecological interventions. At the hands of the country’s successive Dutch, French and British colonists, swathes of forests had been hacked down to make way for sugar and tea plantations, cultivated primarily by enslaved people; deer had been imported from Java along with bananas from China, among many other alien species. These introductions and extractions were transformative. Aside from the ramifications for the populace, the island’s ecology was dramatically reshaped, often with disastrous consequences that threw habitats into new cycles of growth and depletion. This was an age when, as Anna Tsing has noted, ‘progress […] unselfconsciously framed the study of landscapes’.1 The British predilection for advancement through the expansion of both territory and knowledge is intimated in Muhanned Cader’s soft charcoal landscape on newsprint. The snippet, shaped like a cloud, appears like an idyll or mirage. It depicts Sri Lanka, the teardrop-shaped island brutalised by colonial activity and years of civil war, now under mounting pressure from overdevelopment and intensive mineral mining. Specifically, Cader’s lush setting depicts Horton Plains National Park, a flat, verdant expanse ‘discovered’ by British colonial huntsmen and renamed after the nineteenth-century Governor of Ceylon, Robert Wilmot Horton, displacing its original name, Maha Eliya Thenna. These plains were a popular resort where officials would roam, hunting elk and elephants. As the explorer Samuel White Baker relished, ‘It makes a man feel in reality one of the “lords of the creation” when he first stands upon this elevated plain […] and takes a survey of his hunting-
ground.’2 Such recreational jollies significantly decimated the wildlife population before the area was eventually protected by a preservation order prompted by the campaign of a colonial botanist. This historic catalogue of events and perspectives exemplifies the fluctuating terms of human relationships with the non-human world. While we exploit nature’s resources, we also conserve them. We are purveyors of the environment’s destruction and are simultaneously at its mercy, as Huma Bhabha’s post-apocalyptic, scorched figure may suggest. Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah considers a similar form of conflict in his delicate watercolours, in which strangely familiar yet fantastical plants and anatomical parts fuse in biomorphic constellations. A heart chamber seems to blossom into a crop of mountains; veins and fingernails meld with the flesh of tropical fruits in Internal Echo, External Truth I (2025). As though in a stage of metamorphosis, the image advances the interconnection and interdependency between worlds. Despite the propensity to objectify the environment, these works seem to assert, ‘we are nature’. Extending this perspective, Prajakta Potnis’ diptych 3:35 (2025) – comprising a drawing of a simple room, the floor of which appears on the precipice of eruption, and an isolated grater – draws parallels between the ransacking of land resources and, as she says, ‘the laboured breath of an overburdened body’.3 In particular, the work highlights female experience within the domestic realm, honing in on the kitchen – a broader area of investigation – as a site of demanding practices that often weaken, harm and exhaust the body. The idea of the home, less as a place of nurturing and security than a fragile, volatile space is also explored by Saad Qureshi. A spider is shown dangling from a dishevelled web that glistens in light rain. The individual silk threads sag and almost buckle in the weather, exposing what Qureshi describes as ‘the tension between protection and exposure, resilience and fragility’.