The lola-jhiva (लोलजिह्व) figuration of the tongue lolling out of the mouth—in reckless audacity or doubt, or a combination of the two—has been haunting our thoughts, our work, our dreams and our drawings of late.1 It hovers, incarnates, asks questions, offers answers, fades, and then returns. The loosened tongue is an ambiguous, ambivalent sign, embodying both an action and a reflex in the wake of an action—or, if you like, practice and theory.
The unfurled tongue can be read as both an involuntary gesture and a coded sign. Its contradictory loosening seems to offer up an insatiable desire to lick away and taste every residue of reality, to slake every thirst, even as it also admits to a reluctance or regret at such a frank expression of unbridled appetite.
The tongue is the organ of taste (a discerner of multiple perceptions from temperature to flavor to texture to danger) as well as an instrument of expression. It is a reader as well as an author of experience and sensation.
A tongue gives rise to language (a tongue set free), but also accords afterthought in the wake of language, or reproach at the occasion of free-flowing, unrestrained communication (a biting of the tongue).
The tongue superposes within itself the roles of an observer, a subject, an actor, an agent, or a transmitter who expresses an understanding or an affect, as well as the roles of the observed, the object, the acted upon, the receiver. It all depends on who’s looking, when, and why.
Einstein’s Tongue
One of the twentieth century’s most iconic images of a loosened tongue depicts Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out at the world.2 The image is now a T-shirt, a poster, a screen saver. Einstein, wide-eyed, wild-haired, sage and child, physicist and prankster, is caught in the spur of a moment of abandon, as if he were privy to some delightful secret that he was unembarrassed to share without revealing its sting.
The year 1951, when this loosened tongue was photographed, would turn out to be a special one for physicists. It was when the theoretical physicist David Bohm self-exiled to Brazil from the United States as a result of his political inclinations at the height of the era of McCarthyite paranoia.3 On his way, Bohm wrote Quantum Theory, which revisited a thought experiment proposed in 1935 by Einstein (together with his younger colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen) in a paper titled “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?”4
The substance of this paper is Einstein’s dissent. It insisted that, despite the “uncertainty” unleashed in 1925 by Werner Heisenberg and quantum mechanics, there remained a possibility that something could be said about physical reality independent of the presence of an observer.5 For instance, given two particles, “a” and “b,” separated in space, a measurement about “a” could lead us to infer the results of a measurement about “b” without actually conducting that measurement. This phenomenon—in which our understanding (however uncertain) about “a” certainly influences our understanding of “b”—is what Einstein famously referred to as “spooky action at a distance.” It was as if “a” was “spooking” “b.” Einstein wasn’t necessarily happy with this “magical turn” but did realize that it pointed towards an incompleteness in quantum physics. Science is more comfortable with the mysterious than it is with the incomplete.
Time Dilation
According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, time slows down for fast-moving objects, a phenomenon called “time dilation.”6 This goes against our common sense, as if Einstein were sticking his tongue out at how we understand something as basic as time.
Over the last three decades Raqs Media Collective has returned to the question of the meaning and affect of time as a theoretical challenge to cut our teeth on.7 Our work is a site where theories attempting to understand time collide regularly with practices and methods that engage with sensations of duration.
Time dilation implies that the same phenomenon (time) flows at different speeds for the observer and an observed entity traveling at a very high speed. This means that perception, depending on its vantage point, and the relative speed or rate of movement in space divided by the time of two bodies, is both objective and subjective, uncertain but not entirely unpredictable.
It is this phenomenon that is at the heart of science fiction narratives that can show an astronaut and her twin aging differently if the astronaut travels through space close to the speed of light.8 It is also this phenomenon that is at the heart of the repertoire of dancers in forms like Kathakali and Koodiyattam, which compress and dilate selected portions of time.9 At a more mundane level, the anxious maneuverings of today’s Silicon Valley elite who quantify time spent (or wasted) in terms of productivity and redundancy could be seen as an impatience with time dilation!10
A Gift
Time, in this sense, is a gift that the subjective observer gives back to an objectively existing universe that contains and simultaneously does not contain a distant star—a celestial object we can see from our perspective here and now, even when it has ceased to exist in the time its light has taken to reach our eyes. Living light from a dead star can illuminate the paradoxical nature of time, the vast difference between two moments, and their puzzling simultaneity.
As artists, we look to the cosmos, to the substances that enable life, to our bodies and their sensations, to the entries recorded in archives, to the stories that pass between generations, and to our own reading of the data we receive and sieve between ourselves, all to furnish materials between our thinking and our practice. And yet we know that to admit that “there are more things in heaven and earth … than are dreamt of in your philosophy” is not an impediment.11
Incompleteness and uncertainty function as incentives taking us from one work or process to another. Hindustani classical musicians call practice (riyaaz) the everyday cultivation of one’s musicality.12 It is an attempt to push the boundaries of what one can do on a regular basis and explore how the foundations of one’s senses undergo a daily renewal.
Bibha’s Glow
Recently, we have discovered a somewhat lost narrative of an instance of riyaaz in the practice of physics, which confirms the theoretical construct of time dilation.
A series of long-exposure photographs—spanning 150 to two hundred days—were taken between 1938 and 1941 on R2 half-tone Ilford photographic plates at three high-altitude locations overlooking the Himalayas: Sandakphu at the Bengal-Nepal border, Darjeeling in North Bengal, and Pherijang at the Sikkim-Tibet border.
Image of showers from Bibha Chowdhuri’s thesis, University of Manchester.
The images were recorded by a twenty-five-year-old woman from Calcutta named Bibha Chowdhuri.13 They trace the scatter of subatomic particles conveyed by cosmic rays hitting the very sensitive emulsion coated onto special photographic plates—a technique pioneered by another woman, the Viennese experimental physicist Marietta Blau.14 They offered the first empirical evidence of the subatomic particles known as mesons (specifically pi-mesons).
Mesons had been predicted by the theoretical work of the Osaka-based theoretical physicist Hideki Yukawa on the interaction between protons and neutrons.15 This was considered a theoretical breakthrough in the still-emerging field of high-energy particle physics.
This regular taking of photographic exposures at high altitudes is an instance of riyaaz. It involved repetition, attention to detail, and actions taken without any guaranteed outcome. Like an artistic practice might try out new techniques of image-making, Bibha Chowdhuri’s enterprise was primed for glitches, imperfections, and dissatisfactory images.
Working under the guidance of her mentor D. N. Bose in Calcutta, Chowdhuri noticed that some tracks on the plates she had exposed had a higher curvature compared to the relatively predictable straight-line traces left by protons. What could have been dismissed as an anomaly was diligently pursued by Chowdhuri, who deployed this slight curvature to measure the mass of the particle that left this trace. The results concluded that the particle had less mass than a proton, but much more than an electron. Chowdhuri and Bose deduced that this was the elusive meson, or mesotron, a “middle-mass particle” confirming Yukawa’s theoretical prediction. A young Bengali woman from Calcutta helped verify the speculation of a Japanese man from Osaka using an experimental technique proposed by a Jewish woman from Vienna. Four papers in Nature coauthored by Bibha Chowdhuri followed.16
Physics was shaped in this way during the late 1930s and early ’40s as the world careened towards a war that would change things in Calcutta, Vienna, and Osaka. Facing a shortage of half-tone Ilford film, Chowdhuri no longer trekked up and down hills in North Bengal and Sikkim on horseback with photographic plates in her backpack for observing the shy traces of cosmic rays. “Itinerant particle physicist chasing cosmic rays” was not a valid life choice for a young Bengali woman in the forties. Notwithstanding Bibha’s norm-defying desire to choose her own vocation and develop haunting images of starburst-like traces of subatomic particles, the wartime shortage of photographic plates did what patriarchy couldn’t, suspending work on mesons (or pi-mesons / pions) for the time being.
Since pions move very fast (close to the speed of light), their internal clocks run slower from our point of view on earth. That means they live longer in our frame of reference, allowing them to travel much farther than they would if time weren’t slowed down for them. This kind of data was essential in confirming Einstein’s speculations in his special theory of relativity. Bibha Chowdhuri’s careful experimental research on mesons contributed to the pool of evidence that helped verify relativistic effects like time dilation in high-speed particles.17
The photographs she exposed look strangely like images of clocks.18 The circular emulsion-coated photographic plates she used look like clock faces, and the radiating patterns of scattered mesons remind us of what an excess of clock hands could express. We realize that Chowdhuri’s images can be read hypothetically as indicators of the variability of time, much like the clocks that we have fashioned in our artistic practice can be read as indicators of indifference and ecstasy spread across the planet, of the moon’s surging demands on our emotional states, or of the stations of love and rapture. We could say that this form of image-making compels thinking towards hitherto unknown destinations.19
After the war, the film shortage ended and the better and more sensitive photographic plates used by a team of physicists led by Cecil Powell at Bristol University resulted in another experimental confirmation of the existence of mesons.20 Powell later acknowledged that he had first learned of this technique, and the resulting first-verified discovery of mesons, from the papers published by Bose and Chowdhuri.21 For this work, Powell got the Nobel Prize in Physics. Bibha remained a distant figure, as if she had never climbed up the mountain ridge at Sandakphu.
If Einstein’s tongue can be seen as a provocation, then Chowdhuri’s unrecognized stints on a mountain ridge can be read as counterpoint: a silence whose consequences are yet to be measured.
Khona’s Tongue
We could bear allegorical witness to Bibha Chowdhuri’s silencing by refracting it through the prism of the apocryphal story of Lilavati, also known as Khona, a wise young woman who lived in Bengal sometime around the tenth century CE.22
The lore around Khona maintains that she made a name for herself as an observer of celestial phenomena and the changing seasons. It is said that her father-in-law, the famous astronomer Varahamihira, grew envious of his daughter-in-law’s intelligence and eloquence, and in a fit of jealous rage, cut off her tongue. Since then, the colloquial Bengali word for a person unable to speak due to an injury to the tongue is “Khona.” Ironically, Khona’s observations, rendered in rhyming couplets called bachan (sayings), particularly on the conjunction between earthly and cosmic phenomena (like the timing for sowing crops and the alignment of specific planets as indicators of seasonal variation), are consulted in rural Bengal to this day, much as an almanac would be. Her speech may have died with her severed tongue, but her words are still heard a millennium or so later.
This other order of knowledge that apprehends realities in a way that is impossible to describe in language, that is pre- or trans-linguistic, borders on the ineffable. This order of knowing is also a form of not-knowing, or a form of knowing emptiness, because it permits extending connections out of certainty and uncertainty.
It is here that the question of nondominant and untested knowledge systems arises, of theories that are demanded by theory, that must be held in the practice of building models of thought and the imagination, regardless of their difficulty.
As we write this essay, news arrives of the death of Jayant Narlikar, the cosmologist famous for the advocacy of a “steady state” model of the universe, one that expanded through cumulative instances of the creation of matter, space, and time, and did not have to begin all at once, with the Big Bang. Narlikar would quip, “It takes three minutes to make a decent cup of tea, how do you brew an entire universe out of nothing in that time?”
Many years ago, we spent time with Narlikar while making a film on his memories of childhood.23 He had told us about listening to his mother sing the abhangs (unbroken songs) of the sixteenth-century mystic Tukaram, from today’s Maharashtra in western India.24 Narlikar told us that the memory of this music still stirred in him a sense of the wonder and immense mystery of the cosmos. Uma Chakravarty, feminist scholar of early Buddhism, saw our film and remarked that the maternal transmits a sensibility of life and cosmos through forms of mystical vernacular poetry that name themselves “unbroken” in their own quiet dissent against prevailing orders of knowing time.25
There is a continuous tense in the word abhang. The unbroken connects the person to the universe. Tukaram sang to the person in front of him, and to the entire universe. Jayant Narlikar’s cosmology might have wended its way in the unbroken cadence of Tukaram’s songs in his mother’s voice.
After Not Knowing
In the division we have grown accustomed to, theory is an account of how we come to observe, understand, think, or know. Practice is the action of being, doing, and making. In life, in living, it is hard to separate one from the other, because thinking is an action and expressing thought is an action, and action requires reflection. We have to know that we are acting.
As a collective of three people, we may have different ideas and uncertainties that constitute our arguments and differences, but we would not be able to act and make things without operating within an evolving, changing, mysterious, enigmatic substructure that we consensually agree is real. Without that consensus we would be caught within the gridlock of indecision, which in turn would mean our “practice” would have had no basis to stand on. We would not be able to ask questions forensically, distinguish the fabulous from the factual and deploy both, and be sensitive to questions of time and duration. Within this process, there is an evolving, spiraling process of dissensus and some consensus.
Contingent by nature, this practice shifts shape, surprising itself as much as it surprises others. Like a mycelial inhabitation it keeps expanding, indeterminate and unbounded. But it is not vague. It exists. It produces results. It changes reality.
It sticks its tongue out to exercise its insatiable appetite for the enigmatic and the mysterious, and at the same time, it clamps down on that same tongue, recursively, so as to undertake the restraint that comes with the understanding that the phenomenal world is not an idealist fantasy.
A Corrective
Finally, as recently as 2018, the International Astronomical Union honored Bibha Chowdhuri by naming star HD 8608 in the constellation Sextans “Bibha.”26 In Bengali, Bibha also means “ray of light.” Unrecognized in her lifetime because women could not be seen as contributing to theory, Bibha is finally a star shining in the night sky, sending out cosmic rays, beams of light.
Einstein’s tongue is laughing, Khona’s tongue has been severed but not silenced, and Bibha Chowdhuri is a beam of light high on a mountain. Theory and practice, art and science, are having a conversation in an artists’ studio in Delhi. Cups of tea are being made and consumed. All our tongues have come undone.
For more about Arthur Sasse’s 1951 photograph of Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue, see →.
See Martin J. Sherwin’s interview with David Bohm for more on Bohm’s treatment by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthyite wave of anti-communist paranoia →. See also F. David Peat, Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm (Basic Books, 1997), 191–93.
David Bohm, Quantum Theory (Prentice Hall, 1951); Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?” Physical Review 47 no. 10 (May 1935). The latter article is where the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox finds its first expression.
In 1925, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg formulated a theory of quantum mechanics based on the mathematics of matrices in a paper titled “Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen” (On the quantum-theoretical reinterpretation of kinematical and mechanical relationships), published in Zeitschrift für Physik, September 1925. Heisenberg’s mathematical insight into the operation of what were called “non-commutative operators” laid the bases for what would come to be popularly known as the uncertainty principle—formally expressed in his subsequent paper “Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik” (The actual content of quantum theoretical kinematics and mechanics), Zeitschrift für Physik, March 1927.
The phenomenon of “time dilation” elaborated in the special theory of relativity was first featured in Einstein’s paper “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” (On the electrodynamics of moving bodies), Annalen der Physik, September 1905.
See Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time (Penguin, 2024) for a detailed discussion of the twin paradox. For an instance where this may in fact have happened, see →.
Take the temporal expectation that a Kathakali performer has to deal with when playing the role of the comic antihero Kumbhakarna (from the Sanskrit narrative of the Ramayana). Crucially, he has to portray a warrior addicted to sleep—sleeping most of the year and enraged when awoken. The Kathakali Kumbhakarna has to compress a portrayal of a year of sleep into a few minutes and then dilate the moment of enraged awakening into an extended portion of time. The comic effect and drama are achieved through the contrast between the compression of the time of sleep and the dilation of the time of awakening. For an analysis of time and movement in the classical dance form of Kathakali, see Eugenio Barba and Simonne Sanzenbach, “The Kathakali Theatre,” Tulane Drama Review 11, no. 4 (Summer 1967).
The compulsion to “move fast and break things” (an internal motto used at Facebook until 2014) is an impatience with human lifespans that drives research into longevity, the extension of youthfulness, and approximations of immortality, as pursued by a number of tech barons in the valley. See Kevin Walker and Helga Schmid, “The Shape of ‘Computime’: How Silicon Valley Time is Becoming Everyone’s Time,” Leonardo, January 2025.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5.
“In Hindustani (North Indian Classical) Music traditions, riyaaz, or the everyday cultivation of one’s musicality is ultimately not only a repertoire of exercises to keep the voice or fingers or one’s ability to play an instrument in good shape. Riyaaz is as much about the cultivation of a set of attitudes and sensibilities as it is about the honing of a skill. It is an attempt to explore the boundaries of what one can do on a regular basis, and of pushing these boundaries, again on a regular basis, so that the foundations of one’s practice undergo a daily renewal, so that one keeps becoming an adept. Riyaaz is a practitioner’s meditation on his or her practice.” Raqs Media Collective, “How to Be an Artist by Night,” in Art School: Propositions for the Twentieth Century, ed. Steven Henry Madoff (MIT Press, 2009) →.
Bibha Chowdhuri is finally getting the recognition she deserves. Shohini Ghose, Her Space, Her Time (Jaico Books, 2024) profiles Chowdhuri as well as several other female physicists from Brazil, Mexico, China, Europe, and the United States whose contributions were overlooked during their working lives. Other publications on Chowdhuri include Rajinder Singh and Suprakash C. Roy, A Jewel Unearthed: Bibha Chowdhuri, The Story of an Indian Woman Scientist (Shaker Verlag, 2018) and “Bibha Chowdhuri Special Commemorative Issue,” Physics News: Bulletin of the Indian Physics Association 51, no. 1–2 (January–June 2021).
For more on Marietta Blau, see Ghose, Her Space, Her Time.
Hideki Yukawa was the first to posit the theoretical existence of mesons, winning the Nobel Prize in physics in 1949. See his paper “On the Interaction of Elementary Particles,” Proceedings of the Physics and Mathematics Society of Japan, no. 17 (1935). See also →.
Chowdhuri’s first photographic experiments with cosmic rays were published as “Transactions of the Bose Research Institute,” Calcutta 13, no. 61 (1939). The Bibha Chowdhuri and D. N. Bose papers in Nature, in their order of appearance, are: “Photographic Plates as Detectors of Mesotron Showers,” Nature, no. 145 (June 1940); “Origin and Nature of Heavy Ionization Particles Detected on Photographic Plates Exposed to Cosmic Rays,” Nature, no. 147 (February 1941); “A Photographic Method for Estimating the Mass of the Mesotron,” Nature, no. 148 (August 1941); “A Photographic Method for Estimating the Mass of the Mesotron,” Nature, no. 149 (March 1942).
The experimental confirmation of the phenomenon of “time dilation” by observing mesons was featured in David H. Frisch and James H. Smith, “Measurement of the Relativistic Time Dilation Using μ-Mesons,” American Journal of Physics 13, no. 5 (May 1963).
Chowdhuri’s photographic studies of cosmic rays are reportedly archived at the Bose Institute in Kolkata.
For a description of time devices and clockwork-related artwork by Raqs Media Collective, see →.
Cecil Frank Powell’s experiments with mesons were published in an article written with members of his research team in particle physics at Bristol University. See Cecil Frank Powell, Cesar Lattes, Hugh Muirhead, and Giuseppe Occhialini, “Processes Involving Charged Mesons,” Nature, no. 159 (1947).
Cecil Powell’s The Study of Elementary Particles by the Photographic Method (Pergamon Press, 1959) acknowledges Bibha Chowdhuri and D. N. Bose’s work: “In 1941, Bose and Chaudhuri (sic) had pointed it out that it is possible, in principle, to distinguish between the tracks of protons and mesons in an emulsion … They concluded that many of the charged particles arrested in their plates were lighter than protons … The physical basis of their method was correct and their work represents the first approach to the scattering method of determining momenta of charged particles by observation of their tracks in emulsion.”
For more on Khona/Lilavati and Khonar Bachan (Khona’s sayings) see Purabi Basu, Kingbodotir Khana O Khana’r Bachan (Khana of legend and her sayings) (Anyaprakash, 2015); Tahmina Ahmed and Mohammad Moniruzzaman Akhand, “Khona: A Silent Voice of Female Leadership in Patriarchal Hegemony,” Research Journal of English 8, no. 4 (2023); and Bani Basu’s fictional treatment of the Khana-Varahmihir relationship in the novel Khana-Mihirer Dhipi (The mound of Khana and Mihir) (Ananda Publishers, 2014).
“Jayant Narlikar: Steady State” is an episode in Growing Up, a documentary series by Raqs Media Collective broadcast on Doordarshan 3 in 1995–96.
For an accessible translation of the mystical poetry of the Medieval Marathi poet Tukaram, see Says Tuka: The Selected Poetry of Tukaram, ed. and trans. Dilip Chitre (Penguin, 1991).
Uma Chakravarty in conversation with Raqs Media Collective sometime in the late 1990s.
See →.
