This work is from the Engine Oil and Charcoal: Works on Paper series. 

Quoting from Vivan Sundaram: Engine Oil and Charcoal: Works on Paper 1991,

'Who is the victim sacrificed? “The soldier of Babylon,” blown to bits, identified only by a uniformed, booted leg, or “The Akkadian King,” symbol of a vast empire, of a civilization and its glorious past. Or is it “The Land of the Euphrates,” fertile and beautiful, rocky and arid. Or humanity itself, this population of living beings with its layered history of deeds, memories, meanings. An ambivalence here, as in the very notions of life and death, negation and affirmation, love and war, self and other, it is this very dynamic that informs Vivan’s work: that of the desire (always unfulfilled, deferred) to invaginate these opposites, like a negative and positive pulsion.'

Exhibition history: 'Engine Oil and Charcoal: Works on Paper,' Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda; Rabindra Bhavan and LTG Art Gallery, New Delhi; Sakshi Gallery, Bangalore and Madras; 1991-92, Illustrated catalogue.