To celebrate last month’s Glasgow Mela, we partnered with Glasgow Life and Creatives of Colour to platform three South Asian Scottish writers. Each writer delivered a workshop at the Mela and created a response piece based on their experiences.
We’re publishing those responses on our guest blog. Please enjoy this reflection on tactile archives and how colonialism fragments memory in the diaspora, written by Shalmali Shetty!
This text emerges from a writing workshop delivered during the Glasgow Mela 2026. Based on the ancient Indian parable of the Six Blind Men and the Elephant, the session invited participants to reach into fabric pouches and encounter concealed objects through touch alone. They were then prompted to write what transpired in the dark: inventing and imagining stories, excavating memories, or dwelling in tactile description. What follows are reflections born from those encounters.
I’ve placed ten different objects in ten separate pouches, carrying my own ten stories to return with ten more.
Fingers trace the contours of an object, of a memory.
“It’s a lamp! Aladdin ka Chirag!”
“A delicious lentil dessert my aunt used to make!”
“A ceramic bell that shattered at the Christmas dinner table during an argument on politics!”
“… dolls from different countries given as presents… a wee doll from Bulgaria…”
My own memory from when I was young surfaces. Always being asked to reflect on the moral of a story, this time it was:
…truth only emerges when we piece our partial views together…
Hands trace the contours of the elephant, as the six blind men gave way to their imaginations –
“It’s a wall!”
“More like a fan…”
“A tree!”
“A spear?”
“No, a rope…”
“…feels like a snake!”
Is there an elephant in the room?
More hands reach into the pouch. Some remember, others invent:
“A pink plastic flower I wore on my lapel to a wedding six months ago…”
“Sasha makes a dress for her friend with four spools of thread and seven buttons…”
“…a pine cone that was acting as a secret agent, lost in the Mela, and crushed to pieces…”
“Searching for a torchlight in the darkness with a hint of moonlight… “
No archive can capture the full measure of history. Established through Western Enlightenment models of collecting and classifying, archiving prioritises the visual, the textual, and the legally or scientifically verifiable — excluding embodied and spectral experiences that cannot be catalogued or preserved within a vitrine. The more these frameworks force lived experience into rigid categories, the more fragmented our realities become.
In her work on material and photographic cultures, Elizabeth Edwards articulates the concept of the tactile archive, positing that objects are rarely static visual records; they are tactile, relational encounters that operate through direct physical engagement.
The archive is felt before it is understood. By concealing objects inside fabric pouches, I strip away their visual surfaces, forcing touch to become an active mode of excavation — a mnemonic conduit that bypasses formal record-keeping.
“Sensations are different depending on the hand of the beholder… it’s a cloud!”
“A china doll? No, a bottle of ittar!”
Is there an elephant in the room?
To ask if there is an elephant in the room is to ask what we are refusing to name. The “elephant” represents the collective reality of structural collapse, political strain, and ecological fracture that none of us can articulate alone, but all of us feel together.
In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin dismantles the loud, violent “killer story” of the mammoth hunters — the men who shoot, thrust, and conquer, telling tales of triumph and victory that demand a pedestal. “It wasn’t the meat that made the difference. It was the story.” The story of the weapon, the spear, the arrow is the only story that matters.
The beloved Sir Roger is that hunter’s story.
Captured from Southern India as a calf, Sir Roger was torn from his elephant herd, displaced, isolated, paraded through travelling circuses in Britain, ultimately confined to a zoo in Glasgow, and shot dead upon becoming “uncontrollable” and “aggressive”. His mammoth body was taxidermied and erected on a pedestal under the vaulted glass of Kelvingrove Museum — a grand monument to colonial conquest and spectacle. We are instructed to stand back, forbidden from touching the preserved subject — the object. Do you see it in parts, or the whole?
Sir Roger is the story of the hunted.
Who are the blind men surrounding the elephant — touching, remembering, imagining?
Perhaps they are the hunters, driven by a desire to measure, dissect, and claim. Having never known the living whole, they seize upon small, isolated parts: a tusk, a trunk, a tail.
Perhaps they are the hunted, uprooted and blinded by the trauma of severance, holding tightly onto whatever they can touch in the dark: a spear, a snake, a rope.
Perhaps neither the hunter nor the hunted can perceive the elephant in its entirety anymore, because our realities are shattered into incomprehensibility.
The elephant becomes the weight we all carry, the stories in our carrier bags. As we leave; as we arrive.
Yes, there is an elephant in the room!
Shalmali Shetty is an independent curator and writer based in Glasgow and working between the UK and India. A graduate of the MLitt Curatorial Practice at the Glasgow School of Art, she currently serves on the Board of Scottish Contemporary Art Network (SCAN), contributes writing to various arts platforms, and curated ‘Alia Syed: The Ring in the Fish’ at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow in 2025. Her research interests include themes of archives, memory, hauntology and material culture studies. She intends to coalesce her backgrounds in art practice and theory in the production of the curatorial.
Instagram: @shalmali9