- School of Arts and Aesthetics,
Jawaharlal Nehru University
New Delhi 110067
India - + 91-11-26717518, 26741301
- Parul Dave-Mukherji is a professor and former dean (2006-2013) at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru... moreParul Dave-Mukherji is a professor and former dean (2006-2013) at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She holds a PhD in Indology from Oxford University where she worked on a critical edition of The Citrasutra of the Visnudharmottara Purana (Motital Banarsidass, New Delhi, 2002). She has lectured worldwide. As a recipient of the British Academy award, 2011, she was affiliated with Goldsmiths College, London to conduct research on globalization and Art Theory.
Her publications include Towards A New Art History: Studies in Indian Art (co-edited), New Delhi, 2003; “Putting the World in a Book: How Global Can Art History Be Today,” in Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence, ed. J Anderson, Melbourne, 2009. Her recent publications include “The Making of Sakuntala: The Erotica and the Paradox of Representation” in Revisiting Abhijananasakuntalam: Love, Lineage and Language in Kalidasa’s Nataka, eds. Saswati Sengupta and Deepika Tandon, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2011; “Popular Festivals, Populist Visual Culture and Modi Masks” in Democratic culture: historical and philosophical essays, ed. Akeel Bilgrami, New Delhi: Routledge, 2011; InFlux- Contemporary Art in Asia, (co-edited) New Delhi, Sage, 2013; “Art History and Its Discontents in Global Times” in Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn, eds. Jill H Cassid and Aruna D’Souza, Massachusetts: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2014.
She is a member of the College Art Association, USA and was on executive committee of International Association of Aesthetics (2002-2010); editorial board of Journal of World Art (East Anglia University); Journal of Contemporary Thought (India); and International Journal of Visual Culture (USA).
Her publications also include an ASA volume Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World, co-edited with Ramindar Kaur, London: Bloomsbury, 2014; 2; “Entangled Temporality: Contemporary Indian Artists and Their Retakes on the “Golden” Age in In the Shadow of the Golden Age: Art and Identity in Asia from Gandhara to the Modern Age, ed. Julia Hegewald, Berlin: E B Verlag. As a recipient of the Clark fellowship (December 2014), she focused on Anukrtivada or theory of performative mimesis found in a 10th century CE Sanskrit commentary, Abhinavabharati by Abhinavagupta , which was overlooked by nationalist art historians for its alleged affinity with Greek theory of mimesis. 20th Century Indian Art, a massive volume on more than 100 years of modern and contemporary art in India (coedited with Partha Mitter and Rakhee Balaram), will be published by Thames and Hudson, London by the Fall of 2021.edit
<jats:p>Any critical history of modern Indian Art must take into account the key difference between Indian and Euro-American modernism: the distinct absence of an avant-garde in Indian modernism. No Hegelian dialectics or Kantian... more
<jats:p>Any critical history of modern Indian Art must take into account the key difference between Indian and Euro-American modernism: the distinct absence of an avant-garde in Indian modernism. No Hegelian dialectics or Kantian autonomy impelled Indian modernism along the same historical lines plotted in Western art historiography, nor was there a distinct classical tradition to be disregarded and to start anew from.</jats:p> <jats:p>India's distinct origins of modernity stem from the fact that it was under colonial modernity that modernism first made its appearance in India. If the beginnings of modernism in India are traced to the late nineteenth century, Raja Ravi Varma can be considered as India's first Salon artist, who acquired a mastery over the medium of oil painting and the genre of portraiture. Any neat dichotomy between the colonizer and the colonized becomes blurred when considering the close nexus between the two. It was the Western Orientalists and their investment in disciplines such as Indology, for instance, whose arduous discovery of the past fed the Indian nationalist imagination and its desire to return to the precolonial past.</jats:p>
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This article explores how the intersection of mimesis and labour may open up another perspective on the much-theorized relationship between practice (prayoga) and theory (śāstra) in dance and painting. Labour or śrama, a loaded term by... more
This article explores how the intersection of mimesis and labour may open up another perspective on the much-theorized relationship between practice (prayoga) and theory (śāstra) in dance and painting. Labour or śrama, a loaded term by itself, will be taken in its complex sense of not only involving labour as skill that informs acts of painting, acting-dancing but also as a thematic of representation. Interspersed into these two senses is ritual labour or the labour involving acts of propitiating the divine— a domain not sufficiently thought out beyond the truism that religion pervades all spheres of Indic life. What this mode of inquiry aims to bring out is a tense relationship between manual/artistic labour and ritual labour both as a site of complicity and conflict amongst the actor-dancers and the authors of the treatises.
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The question of authorization and global hierarchy of value becomes meaningful when raised alongside that of discursive equality between the Euro-American art world and that of the nonwest.2 Discursive equality refers to certain parity of... more
The question of authorization and global hierarchy of value becomes meaningful when raised alongside that of discursive equality between the Euro-American art world and that of the nonwest.2 Discursive equality refers to certain parity of conceptual tools used by artists, art
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This article explores how the intersection of mimesis and labour may open up another perspective on the much-theorized relationship between practice (prayoga) and theory (śāstra) in dance and painting. Labour or śrama, a loaded term by... more
This article explores how the intersection of mimesis and labour may open up another perspective on the much-theorized relationship between practice (prayoga) and theory (śāstra) in dance and painting. Labour or śrama, a loaded term by itself, will be taken in its complex sense of not only involving labour as skill that informs acts of painting, acting-dancing but also as a thematic of representation. Interspersed into these two senses is ritual labour or the labour involving acts of propitiating the divine— a domain not sufficiently thought out beyond the truism that religion pervades all spheres of Indic life. What this mode of inquiry aims to bring out is a tense relationship between manual/artistic labour and ritual labour both as a site of complicity and conflict amongst the actor-dancers and the authors of the treatises.
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The paper attempts to raise certain methodological issues concerning the study of Indian aesthetics. It seeks to draw attention to the need for conceptual rigour in the usage of related terms derived from western aesthetics through a... more
The paper attempts to raise certain methodological issues concerning the study of Indian aesthetics. It seeks to draw attention to the need for conceptual rigour in the usage of related terms derived from western aesthetics through a critique of the comparative method in the study of Indian aesthetics. In particular, this method, predicated upon a certain binarism (east/west, culture/nature, practice/theory), offers a disciplinary coherence to comparative aesthetics even as it renders it open to criticism. Body as a central trope gets caught up in the polemics concerning the representation of Indian art and philosophy, either as a marker of difference or sameness, in relation to western art and philosophy. It underlines the importance of contextualizing aesthetics in its emergence as a discipline within a specific intellectual history of the West and of understanding the circumstances of its entry into the non-West under the aegis of colonialism.
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This chapter revisits a documentation project in 1985, when the artists N. Pushpamala and Ayisha Abraham and the author visited Naya Village in Midnapore district of West Bengal in India as postgraduate students of the Faculty of Fine... more
This chapter revisits a documentation project in 1985, when the artists N. Pushpamala and Ayisha Abraham and the author visited Naya Village in Midnapore district of West Bengal in India as postgraduate students of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India. This documentation project was conceptualized by Professor Gulam Mohammed Sheikh to address the wide gulf that existed between folk artists and art school-trained artists and art historians. Subsequently, the photographs that were made as part of the project got immersed in archival oblivion. Only recently did they get excavated by Pushpamala who scribbled on the back of one of the photographs, ‘Visiting Anthropologists!’ This is a parody that has been turned into a heuristic device in the chapter to stage a larger conversation across anthropology, art history, and contemporary art practice.
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Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World investigates arts and aesthetics in their widest senses and experiences, from a variety of perspectives branching from the metaphysical to the political. Moving beyond art as an expression of the... more
Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World investigates arts and aesthetics in their widest senses and experiences, from a variety of perspectives branching from the metaphysical to the political. Moving beyond art as an expression of the inner mind and invention of the individual self, the volume bridges the gap between changing perceptions of contemporary art and aesthetics, and maps globalising currents in a number of contexts and regions. The volume includes an impressive variety of case studies offered by established leaders in the field and original and emergent scholarly talent covering areas in India, Nepal, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Rwanda and Germany as well as providing transnational or diasporic perspectives. From the contradictory demands made on successful artists from the south in the global art world such as Anish Kapoor, to images of war and puppetry created by female political prisoners, the volume compels creative and political interpretations of the ever-changing ...
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The emergent debate on public culture is making its presence felt across many disciplines offering new perspectives on the notions of the &quot;public&quot; and &quot;culture.&quot; In this chapter, I would explore the... more
The emergent debate on public culture is making its presence felt across many disciplines offering new perspectives on the notions of the &quot;public&quot; and &quot;culture.&quot; In this chapter, I would explore the concept of public culture as it emerged in the context of visual practices of colonialism and post-colonialism. While the feminine body has been central to the formation of nationalist imaginary in the West, its career in India moves by its specific dynamics. I will examine the image of the goddess across modes of representation from colonial/ nationalist (Abanindranath Tagore), secular/nationalist (M.F. Husain) and diasporic moments (Rikesh Boodhun); and finally in the post-secular/post-colonial moments (popular posters of Gujarati Garba). In this chequered journey of the goddess from the sacred realm of high art to the public sphere, she moves between two poles of representation, one that is governed by regimes of representation aligned to the patriarchal system (as in Abanindranath Tagore&#39;s Bhārata Mata or the Garba posters from Gujarat), and the other constituted by its transgression when the goddess becomes a dangerous supplement (as in Husain&#39;s Hindu goddess series) exposing the fragility of secular-modernism; or as in Rikesh Boodhun&#39;s naked Kali, where it touched upon the diasporic imaginary of the Hindu identity. The four moments located within colonial, nationalist, diasporic and post-colonial cultural representations emblematize shifts in the constitution and reconfiguration of public culture across the national, regional and global spaces and their corresponding modes of visuality.
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This essay focuses on the Gujarat government&#39;s promotion of popular festivals like Garba and the Uttarayana, primarily addressed to NRIs the potential investors in the state&#39;s economy. The essay is located in the period of... more
This essay focuses on the Gujarat government&#39;s promotion of popular festivals like Garba and the Uttarayana, primarily addressed to NRIs the potential investors in the state&#39;s economy. The essay is located in the period of post-Akshardham and post-Godhara riots and studies state sponsored programmes to analyze the state&#39;s anxiety and its efforts at recasting public memory by projecting peaceful and vibrant Gujarat as a success story. It also looks at the emerging iconophilia of the Modi masks which exceeds the electoral strategy, continues to capture the public imaginary and their implication for democracy in India.
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A review of the Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art by J. L. Garfield
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“Drawing” has reinvented itself in contemporary art globally (Butler and de Zegher 2010). Its return in the age of technological dominance is riddled with irony. No longer merely an index of artist’s skill, drawing has expanded its fields... more
“Drawing” has reinvented itself in contemporary art globally (Butler and de Zegher 2010). Its return in the age of technological dominance is riddled with irony. No longer merely an index of artist’s skill, drawing has expanded its fields of operation in numerous ways. The term “drawing” in its new avatar lends itself to wide ranging definitions from three dimensional form, wire assemblage, performance, photography, collage, print making, to conceptual line drawings. The latter in its classical function of figure‐ground demarcation, has shown its capacity to carry out most rigorous theoretical functions ‐ to reflect back on representation itself, and show its limits as well as to suggest unthought of possibilities. Drawing in this sense has powerfully informed the practice of many Indian artists recently and has acquired a critical edge‐ Shilpa Gupta, Tejal Shah, Praneet Soi, N. S. Harsha, Mithu Sen, Jitish Kallat, Atul Dodiya, Surendran Nair, to name a few. Each one of them has shown a strong inclination to conceptual art in varying degrees. In this paper, I will draw a connection between drawing and the turn to conceptual art in India with a focus on Shilpa Gupta’s work. In my interview with her, it is this conjunction of drawing with conceptual art that comes to the foreground.
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This chapter broadly and summarily maps the modern and contemporary art scene in South Asia with a focus on India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It places the art of this region within its political, social and institutional context... more
This chapter broadly and summarily maps the modern and contemporary art scene in South Asia with a focus on India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It places the art of this region within its political, social and institutional context tracing its link with the colonial period on the one hand and the current globalizing times, on the other. The Modernist World is an accessible yet cutting edge volume which redraws the boundaries and connections among interdisciplinary and transnational modernisms. The 61 new essays address literature, visual arts, theatre, dance, architecture, music, film, and intellectual currents. The book also examines modernist histories and practices around the globe, including East and Southeast Asia, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and Oceania, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and the Arab World, as well as the United States and Canada.
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Razprava skusa odpreti nekatera metodoloska vprasanja, ki se nanasajo na preucevanje indijske estetike. Prizadeva si, da bi pri preucevanju indijske estetike s kritiko primerjalne metode usmerila pozornost na potrebo po konceptualni... more
Razprava skusa odpreti nekatera metodoloska vprasanja, ki se nanasajo na preucevanje indijske estetike. Prizadeva si, da bi pri preucevanju indijske estetike s kritiko primerjalne metode usmerila pozornost na potrebo po konceptualni strogosti, ko gre za rabo sorodnih izrazov, ki izhajajo iz zahodne estetike. Ta metoda, ki je temeljila na doloceni binarnosti (vzhod/zahod, kultura/narava, praksa/teorija), vnasa v primerjalno estetiko disciplinatorno koherenco, cetudi se prikazuje kot odprta za kritiko. Telo kot osrednji trop se ujame v polemiko o reprezentaciji indijske umetnosti in filozofije, bodisi kot znamenje razlike ali istosti, v razmerju do zahodne umetnosti in filozofije. Obenem poudarja pomembnost kontekstualiziranja estetike kot discipline znotraj dolocene intelektualne zgodovine Zahoda in razumevanja okoliscin njenega vstopa v nezahodne kulture pod vplivom kolonializma.
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Comparative aesthetics in India has its roots in the postcolonial movement of the 1950s when comparing aesthetic concepts and practices across cultures seemed to resonate with the aspirations of a new nation and its conception of cultural... more
Comparative aesthetics in India has its roots in the postcolonial movement of the 1950s when comparing aesthetic concepts and practices across cultures seemed to resonate with the aspirations of a new nation and its conception of cultural sovereignty. In the wake of globalization, assumed to entail reduced distance between cultures and concomitant contestation of the nation-state, world literature and art studies have emerged as new areas of research and inquiry within which the discipline of comparative aesthetics may be placed. The comparative aesthetics of the mid-twentieth century, however, was driven by a different agenda. In the 1950s, comparative aesthetics enjoyed popularity in a newly decolonized India as a field that was expected to bring to light an alternative knowledge system that the West had overlooked in its desire to colonize the world. After a decade and a half, the euphoria came to an end, since the discourse of comparative aesthetics could not extricate itself fr...
Art History as a discipline arrived in India by the late eighteenth century under the aegis of colonialism. This historical fact has far-reaching philosophical implications for the way the discipline has taken shape in India even in the... more
Art History as a discipline arrived in India by the late eighteenth century under the aegis of colonialism. This historical fact has far-reaching philosophical implications for the way the discipline has taken shape in India even in the postcolonial era. The cultural nationalists who appropriated Art History turned that which had started as a colonial enterprise—to discover the forgotten past of the colonized and inculcate a sense of history into its subjects—into the recovery of native civilizational pride. This chapter revisits the overlooked theory of anukaraņa vāda via critical historiography, the problematic of translation and examines its contemporary relevance. It aims to recover the debates and discourse surrounding this theory found in the Abhinavabharati (circa 11th CE) through the lens of comparative aesthetics.
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With our focus on twenty-first-century art history, we asked John Clark, Professor of Asian Art History, University of Sydney, to convene an email Q-and-A on the topic of world art history. The possibility of such a history has been... more
With our focus on twenty-first-century art history, we asked John Clark, Professor of Asian Art History, University of Sydney, to convene an email Q-and-A on the topic of world art history. The possibility of such a history has been thrown up in the wake of the seeming decline of the Euro-American art history that dominated twentieth-century thinking about art. For an overview of the world-art-history idea, readers are referred to James Elkins's book Is ART HISTORY GLOBAL? Clark invited four respondents: Parul Dave Mukherjee, Professor of the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; Omuka Toshiharu, Professor and Vice-Provost of the Graduate School of Comprehensive Human Sciences at the University of Tsukuba, Tokyo; Patrick Flores, Professor of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines, Quezon City; and Woo Jung-ah of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, South Korea.
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General Introduction - Geeta Kapur I: CONTESTED TERRAINS AND CRITICAL RE-IMAGININGS - Parul Dave Mukherji The Illusions and Antagonisms of Civilizational Exchange: Critical Reflections on Dismantling Asian Empires - Rustom Bharucha The... more
General Introduction - Geeta Kapur I: CONTESTED TERRAINS AND CRITICAL RE-IMAGININGS - Parul Dave Mukherji The Illusions and Antagonisms of Civilizational Exchange: Critical Reflections on Dismantling Asian Empires - Rustom Bharucha The Elephant and The Ant: Chinese and Thai Art in the 1980s and 1990s - John Anthony Clark Worlding Asia: A Conceptual Framework for the First Delhi Biennale - Arshiya Lokhandwala Cartographic Necessities: Contemporary Practices and the Making of a Brave New World - Gayatri Sinha Curating Barbarians: Descriptions of a Visual Practice - Marian Pastor Roces II: TROPES AND PLACES - Naman P Ahuja Miniature, Monster, and Modernism : Curating Terror or Terror of Curating - Quddus Mirza An Honest Engagement with the Pitfalls (and Perks) of the Ethnic (Rubric) - Negar Azimi Retrieving the Far West: Toward a Curatorial Representation of the House of Islam - Ranjit Hoskote Interrogating the Sacred: Storylines for the Self - Nancy Adajania The Art of Kazakhstan as a...
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It may be simplistic to draw an arc from Gandhi’s valorization of a broom in 1945 in his portrait of an ideal artist to Arvind Kejriwal’s embrace of a broom as a political logo for his Aam Admi Party in 2013.2 But it cannot be denied that... more
It may be simplistic to draw an arc from Gandhi’s valorization of a broom in 1945 in his portrait of an ideal artist to Arvind Kejriwal’s embrace of a broom as a political logo for his Aam Admi Party in 2013.2 But it cannot be denied that the jhadoo or the broom emerges as a powerful allegory touching a raw nerve in the country’s politics and cultural politics. Exploring its absence or presence in museums has the potential of laying open a repressed site in the critical discourse in art history and museum studies.
Museums in India, a legacy of European enlightenment and colonisation, are facing a crisis of irrelevance. Rather than arising out of lack of patronage and infrastructure, among the hurdles in framing relevant narratives, is an incomplete engagement with the challenge of decolonising the museum. If museums have to reinvent themselves for the future, decolonising involves more than a rejection of colonial thinking and cultural nationalism. To think of a museum of the future is also to envisage “a modern future in which community may be imagined again.”3 In India, as elsewhere, no imagination of this community can happen without a critical engagement with equality in aesthetic and political representations, a theme that an aesthetics or museumising of a broom potentially opens up.
Museums in India, a legacy of European enlightenment and colonisation, are facing a crisis of irrelevance. Rather than arising out of lack of patronage and infrastructure, among the hurdles in framing relevant narratives, is an incomplete engagement with the challenge of decolonising the museum. If museums have to reinvent themselves for the future, decolonising involves more than a rejection of colonial thinking and cultural nationalism. To think of a museum of the future is also to envisage “a modern future in which community may be imagined again.”3 In India, as elsewhere, no imagination of this community can happen without a critical engagement with equality in aesthetic and political representations, a theme that an aesthetics or museumising of a broom potentially opens up.
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This paper sets out to interrogate the notion of authenticity in a domain where it has played a particularly important role -- that is visual arts in India, specifically its early theorization around the first quarter of the twentieth... more
This paper sets out to interrogate the notion of authenticity in a domain where it has played a particularly important role -- that is visual arts in India, specifically its early theorization around the first quarter of the twentieth century. It attempts to situate the question of authenticity within the charged cultural politics of the period via the career of a "discovered” text -the Citrasūtra of the Vişnudharmottara Purāņa.
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An in-depth interview of Raqs Media Collective, a Delhi based group of three documentary makers, curators and media artists that has been active in the international art scene since the 2002 Documenta.
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The central objective of this paper is to rethink representation in art not in terms of conventional mimesis but in terms of performance. My attempt is to formulate a theory of performative mimesis to perform a number of functions : (a)... more
The central objective of this paper is to rethink representation in art not in terms of conventional mimesis but in terms of performance. My attempt is to formulate a theory of performative mimesis to perform a number of functions : (a) to question binary logic and euro-centrism under-girding art history and performance theory (b) to construct critical tools to examine notions of visual representation in Sanskrit texts on visual arts and performance (c) to deploy the Derridean concept of new mimesis to understand traditional mimetic terminology and theory in texts such as the Citrasutra of the Vishnudharmottara Purana and the Natyasastra. (d) to explore the possibility of engaging with theoretical framework implicit in the traditional Indian texts of aesthetics and visual arts.
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1. The Corner that Sees: At the Centre of the Edges: Anita Dube The author explores the practice of Anita Dube and places it between the two poles of sexuality and death. She also views it through the lens of Indian feminism. 2.... more
1. The Corner that Sees: At the Centre of the Edges: Anita Dube
The author explores the practice of Anita Dube and places it between the two poles of sexuality and death. She also views it through the lens of Indian feminism.
2. “Visible Chemistry” : Plumbing Immersive Aesthetics : Sheba Chhachhi
The author views photographs and multimedia installations by Sheba Chhachhi through the lenses of feminism, activism, and ecology.
The author explores the practice of Anita Dube and places it between the two poles of sexuality and death. She also views it through the lens of Indian feminism.
2. “Visible Chemistry” : Plumbing Immersive Aesthetics : Sheba Chhachhi
The author views photographs and multimedia installations by Sheba Chhachhi through the lenses of feminism, activism, and ecology.
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The emergent debate on public culture is making its presence felt across many disciplines offering new perspectives on the notions of the "public" and "culture." In this chapter, I would explore the concept of public culture as it emerged... more
The emergent debate on public culture is making its presence felt across many disciplines offering new perspectives on the notions of the "public" and "culture." In this chapter, I would explore the concept of public culture as it emerged in the context of visual practices of colonialism and post-colonialism.
While the feminine body has been central to the formation of nationalist imaginary in the West, its career in India moves by its specific dynamics. I will examine the image of the goddess across modes of representation from colonial/ nationalist (Abanindranath Tagore), secular/nationalist (M.F. Husain) and diasporic moments (Rikesh Boodhun); and finally in the post-secular/post-colonial moments (popular posters of Gujarati Garba). In this chequered journey of the goddess from the sacred realm of high art to the public sphere, she moves between two poles of representation, one that is governed by regimes of representation aligned to the patriarchal system (as in Abanindranath Tagore's Bhārata Mata or the Garba posters from Gujarat), and the other constituted by its transgression when the goddess becomes a dangerous supplement (as in Husain's Hindu goddess series) exposing the fragility of secular-modernism; or as in Rikesh Boodhun's naked Kali, where it touched upon the diasporic imaginary of the Hindu identity. The four moments located within colonial, nationalist, diasporic and post-colonial cultural representations emblematize shifts in the constitution and reconfiguration of public culture across the national, regional and global spaces and their corresponding modes of visuality.
While the feminine body has been central to the formation of nationalist imaginary in the West, its career in India moves by its specific dynamics. I will examine the image of the goddess across modes of representation from colonial/ nationalist (Abanindranath Tagore), secular/nationalist (M.F. Husain) and diasporic moments (Rikesh Boodhun); and finally in the post-secular/post-colonial moments (popular posters of Gujarati Garba). In this chequered journey of the goddess from the sacred realm of high art to the public sphere, she moves between two poles of representation, one that is governed by regimes of representation aligned to the patriarchal system (as in Abanindranath Tagore's Bhārata Mata or the Garba posters from Gujarat), and the other constituted by its transgression when the goddess becomes a dangerous supplement (as in Husain's Hindu goddess series) exposing the fragility of secular-modernism; or as in Rikesh Boodhun's naked Kali, where it touched upon the diasporic imaginary of the Hindu identity. The four moments located within colonial, nationalist, diasporic and post-colonial cultural representations emblematize shifts in the constitution and reconfiguration of public culture across the national, regional and global spaces and their corresponding modes of visuality.
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It is not unusual for any two Indian art traditions separated by time and place to share certain details. On the contrary, it is symptomatic of a consistency in style, technique or mode of expression which any living art tradition... more
It is not unusual for any two Indian art traditions separated by time and place to share certain details. On the contrary, it is symptomatic of a consistency in style, technique or mode of expression which any living art tradition retains. What is perhaps striking in the present context is this: The style of Ajanta cave paintings is more on par with the plastic tradition of Amaravati than the Ajanta sculptures located in the same site.
This observation is drawn purely on historical grounds of art i.e. the visual data presented by the surviving examples. This has been noticed by the art historians in the past. Except for Sivaramamurti, who attempted to compare the points of similarity in terms of ornaments, hairstyles, architecture details etc. only a cursory interest has been shown in this direction.
The similarity between the two is more global than specific. Amaravati style as a whole, in its fundamental articulation of bodily rhythms, for instance, approximates that of Ajanta. A piecemeal matching would be defeating the purpose.
This observation is drawn purely on historical grounds of art i.e. the visual data presented by the surviving examples. This has been noticed by the art historians in the past. Except for Sivaramamurti, who attempted to compare the points of similarity in terms of ornaments, hairstyles, architecture details etc. only a cursory interest has been shown in this direction.
The similarity between the two is more global than specific. Amaravati style as a whole, in its fundamental articulation of bodily rhythms, for instance, approximates that of Ajanta. A piecemeal matching would be defeating the purpose.
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This paper attempts to examine the early modernist discourse concerning Indian art via the paintings of Amrita Sher-Gil in order to set a critique of a facile appropriation of Sher-Gil as a marker of the originary moment in the history of... more
This paper attempts to examine the early modernist discourse concerning Indian art via the paintings of Amrita Sher-Gil in order to set a critique of a facile appropriation of Sher-Gil as a marker of the originary moment in the history of feminist art in India. With the emergence of women artists around the 1970s acknowledging their gendered identity as constitutive of their subject positions, there has been a sharp rise in literature concerning women artists. There has been a tendency among the contemporary writers on women artists of India to privilege Sher-Gil's intervention into the Indian art scene as an inaugural moment of Indian feminist art.
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In this paper, I will reflect upon two moments of re-reading Coomaraswamy's contribution to the study of Indian culture in which philosophy remains one of the strands. One of the moments coincides with Coomaraswamy's centenary in 1977... more
In this paper, I will reflect upon two moments of re-reading Coomaraswamy's contribution to the study of Indian culture in which philosophy remains one of the strands. One of the moments coincides with Coomaraswamy's centenary in 1977 when Lalit Kala Akademi organized a conference to mark this passage of time and subsequently brought out a volume of seminar papers titled Parokşa.? This publication was preceded by important publication of Coomaraswamy's papers edited by Roger Lipsey in three volumes, one of them being Coomaraswamy's biography. While Parokşa was largely hagiographical, it opened some space for a critical appraisal and assessment of contemporary relevance of his writings in the 1980s. After these two remarkable sets of publications on Coomaraswamy, there seems to have been a lull in interest in his works.
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The paper presents the theory of Anukrti (Performative Mimesis) as an overlooked discourse of Art Theory in India. It revisits this theory and explicates it through the lens of Comparative Aesthetics while critiquing the nationalist... more
The paper presents the theory of Anukrti (Performative Mimesis) as an overlooked discourse of Art Theory in India. It revisits this theory and explicates it through the lens of Comparative Aesthetics while critiquing the nationalist suppression of this discourse.
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This chapter aims to revisit the paintings of Sakuntala by Ravi Varma and raise the question of representation in visual arts in India. It high a central paradox in art history around the status of naturalism' in Indian art. The case of... more
This chapter aims to revisit the paintings of Sakuntala by Ravi Varma and raise the question of representation in visual arts in India. It high a central paradox in art history around the status of naturalism' in Indian art. The case of Ravi Varma and the manner in which he has painted Sakuntala dramatises the recurring problem of visual representationis the historiography of Indian art, While the literary sources from Sanses literature are replete with notions of verisimilitude in art, no entantes works seem to substantiate the textual criteria of realism. Ravi Varma’s paintings of Sakuntala present themselves as an inaugural case in the history of modern Indian art that bring together ancient mytholos, colonial visuality. It must be stated that this paradox is not unique to Indian context but concerns the transition from pre-modern to move visuality or cultural grids of viewing.
Kalidasa's Abhijnanasakuntalam has an iconic status in the history of Indian literatures. It is a tale of love found, forgotten and restored between Dushyanta, the hero king and Sakuntala, an innocent maiden. Bringing together linguists, literary critics, historians, Indologists and Sanskritists. Revisiting Abhijnanasakuntalam analyses the play as more than just a figment of imagination-as a rich terrain for exploring links between culture, history and politics, as an interplay of memory, desire and languages.
Kalidasa's Abhijnanasakuntalam has an iconic status in the history of Indian literatures. It is a tale of love found, forgotten and restored between Dushyanta, the hero king and Sakuntala, an innocent maiden. Bringing together linguists, literary critics, historians, Indologists and Sanskritists. Revisiting Abhijnanasakuntalam analyses the play as more than just a figment of imagination-as a rich terrain for exploring links between culture, history and politics, as an interplay of memory, desire and languages.
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In this paper, I will focus on the way notions of ethnicity travel across space within the dynamics of the local and the global cultural politics. My entry into the debate is a form of critique of neo-Orientalism that governs visual... more
In this paper, I will focus on the way notions of ethnicity travel across space within the dynamics of the local and the global cultural politics. My entry into the debate is a form of critique of neo-Orientalism that governs visual representation of ethnicities and nationalities in the alobal fora. How do ideas about ethnicity and cultural representation traverse different spaces and how do technology and mass media mediate their dissemination? If, as Michel Foucault points out, space has a preeminence over time as a fundamental marker of our age, how do we theorize and come to terms with contemporaneity via this newly emergent global space of information technology and inter-cultural encounters among national identities?
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The paper attempts to raise certain methodological issues concerning the study of Indian aesthetics. It seeks to draw attention to the need for conceptual rigour in the usage of related terms derived from western aesthetics through a... more
The paper attempts to raise certain methodological issues concerning the study of Indian aesthetics. It seeks to draw attention to the need for conceptual rigour in the usage of related terms derived from western aesthetics through a critique of the comparative method in the study of Indian aesthetics. In particular, this method, predicated upon a certain binarism (east/west, culture/nature, practice/theory), offers a disciplinary coherence to comparative aesthetics even as it renders it open to criticism. Body as a central trope gets caught up in the polemics concerning the representation of Indian art and philosophy, either as a marker of difference or sameness, in relation to western art and philosophy. It underlines the importance of contextualizing aesthetics in its emergence as a discipline within a specific intellectual history of the West and of understanding the circumstances of its entry into the non-West under the aegis of colonialism.
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Global art history has made enormous strides in questioning nation-based art history and rethinking many disciplinary questions in the wake of globalization. Here, the format of the exhibition has proven to be a laboratory for exploring... more
Global art history has made enormous strides in questioning nation-based art history and rethinking many disciplinary questions in the wake of globalization. Here, the format of the exhibition has proven to be a laboratory for exploring new ways of thinking about time, value of artifacts and cultural difference. In this practice, the figure of the curator/s zooms into prominence as an agent of disciplinary rethinking. The paper will focus on two major shows: The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds after 1989 at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany (2011), curated by Andrea Buddenzeig and Peter Weibel; and The India and the World at the CSMVS Museum, Mumbai, India (2018), curated by Naman P. Ahuja and Jeremy David Hill. Though poised very differently in terms of temporality and region, these exhibitions will be compared in order to explore the shifting hierarchy of value in our globalized times which facilitate an extraordinary mobility of capital, artifacts, museum collections and curators across nation states.
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What becomes of art history when the world shrinks into a planet? Art History in the wake of globalization has become more a matter of traversal of space than teleology. This broadening of the field owes a lot to the disciplinary crisis... more
What becomes of art history when the world shrinks into a planet? Art History in the wake of globalization has become more a matter of traversal of space than teleology. This broadening of the field owes a lot to the disciplinary crisis in the west of the 1980s. While global art history has emerged as a major field of study, it has brought art histories from other regions into new visibility. In this paper, I intend to also draw attention to disciplinary crisis in art history in India around the turn of the 21st century with the advent of the cultural studies turn and with that, highlight another crisis in global art history that revolve around the use of comparative method to address cultural difference.
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Obituary of Ebrahim Alkazi (1925-2020)
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This essay is an attempt to locate women artists in India within the cultural politics of today, and problematize the relationship between their political intent and their cultural interventions. In this, the domain of visual culture... more
This essay is an attempt to locate women artists in India within the cultural politics of today, and problematize the relationship between their political intent and their cultural interventions. In this, the domain of visual culture assumes significance as an important site for alternative visuality, a possible meeting ground for the private and public spheres, an alternative visuality that goes beyond the postmodernist celebration of visual culture so as to reclaim the public sphere at an experiential level away from the dominant visual regime. However, alternative visuality raises certain theoretical concerns about locating the space of activism vis-à-vis institutions of high art, and countering the binary logic of artistic praxis and aesthetic autonomy. How current notions of public sphere get inflected ifattention is given to the practices of contemporary women artists in India is one of the major concerns of this essay. This inevitably leads us to the relationship between public sphere and the visual arts. In the context of public sphere, are the visual arts totally subsumed by popular culture? Is it possible to grasp the dynamics of public sphere solely in terms of popular culture?
Deriving its insights from methodological moves made in the fields of art history/criticism, culture studies, and visual culture, the book foregrounds the links between the practice of art and the urgencies of the public world trying to bridge, in the process, the space that reaches across the academy and all that is known as activism in our time. The different sections in the book explore the complex relationship between art-producing practices and frameworks of viewing that seek alignment with the various struggles around caste, community, gender, and sexuality.
Deriving its insights from methodological moves made in the fields of art history/criticism, culture studies, and visual culture, the book foregrounds the links between the practice of art and the urgencies of the public world trying to bridge, in the process, the space that reaches across the academy and all that is known as activism in our time. The different sections in the book explore the complex relationship between art-producing practices and frameworks of viewing that seek alignment with the various struggles around caste, community, gender, and sexuality.
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This book documents 80 artworks and projects by New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) from 2002-2012. The collective executes a wide spectrum of projects, ranging from full-scale... more
This book documents 80 artworks and projects by New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) from 2002-2012. The collective executes a wide spectrum of projects, ranging from full-scale curatorial works to discrete objects such as prints. It also invites reflections on Raqs' practice and theory from art writers, curators and contemporary artists.
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Art’s separation from quotidian life has increasingly come under critical scrutiny even as Eurocentric notions of its autonomy continue to have an enduring presence both within and outside of Europe, in spite of them being entangled with... more
Art’s separation from quotidian life has increasingly come under critical scrutiny even as Eurocentric notions of its autonomy continue to have an enduring presence both within and outside of Europe, in spite of them being entangled with wider notions of the ‘arts’ as multifaceted activities embedded in diverse practice and cultures of interpretation. Our emphasis in this volume on the arts in the plural is to include this transnational nexus of artworlds but also to those that are ordinarily not seen as art as per salon or gallery definitions (Becker 1984; Bundgaard 1999; Jain 2007). If anthropology has powerfully shaped art history’s broadening into cultural terrain, the latter has compelled a closer engagement with sensuality of perception, aesthetic affect and the centrality of visuality in a mediatized world. The increasing migration and mobility of people, objects, ideas, images and other sensory data compels a globalizing perspective, one that has not come without its oppositions in the (re)entrenchment of borders, physical, cultural and epistemological.
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"Whither Art History?" is a question that, potentially, the discipline, like every other discipline, is capable of raising in a moment of self-critical reflection. But what marks this question raised today, around the end of the first... more
"Whither Art History?" is a question that, potentially, the discipline, like every other discipline, is capable of raising in a moment of self-critical reflection. But what marks this question raised today, around the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, as different is the very directionality that it poses. "Whither art history" addresses as much the future scope of the discipline as the past from which it emerges. Perhaps it is a sign of contemporaneity that today it is impossible to separate these two questions about art history's future as well as its present. With many art histories and many art practices in the south gaining visibility, not only the sense of where we are going but also who "we" encompass become germane to our discussion. Many terms have been coined to register this growing plurality of practices, such as "posthistorical," "postcolonial,""postracial," and "postethnic," all of which have gone hand in hand with the proliferation of new disciplinary terrains, such as world art studies, world art history, and global art history. My point of entry into the debate will be through one of the salient terms used to theorize contemporaneity: postethnic.
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The 409 Ramkinkers, a unique joint venture among the project conceptualizer, Vivan Sundaram, theatre directors Anuradha Kapur and Aditee Biswas, scenographer, Deepan Sivaraman, and text and script writer, Belinder Dhanoa. Where the... more
The 409 Ramkinkers, a unique joint venture among the project conceptualizer, Vivan Sundaram, theatre directors Anuradha Kapur and Aditee Biswas, scenographer, Deepan Sivaraman, and text and script writer, Belinder Dhanoa. Where the collaboration works most persuasively is in the interplay of the artistic representation and performative presence: While recreating sculptural assemblages after Ramkinker’s iconic works, Sundaram is attentive to the materiality of this re-inscription so that the decision to work with wood, clay, plastic or metal as well as the scale is seminal to its re-creation that often results in a new artwork itself. Conversely, theatre’s art historical encounter with Ramkinker’s modernism induces experiments with new modes of presentation: Ramkinker’s deep passion for theatre further allows for the slippage between art and performance.
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In this paper, I propose to examine the constitutive role played by the notion of cultural otherness in some of the contemporary art historical writings and what implications they have, direct or indirect on my pedagogic as well as... more
In this paper, I propose to examine the constitutive role played by the notion of cultural otherness in some of the contemporary art historical writings and what implications they have, direct or indirect on my pedagogic as well as cultural practices as an art historian in India. By the latter, I broaden the scope of impingement of these hegemonic constructs to include the political immediacy given the communally charged cultural politics in the post-colonial realities in India. This paper consists of two sections - the first part largely conceived as a response to another paper presented at a recent international conference on Aesthetics by Chantal Maillard, an authority of Indian aesthetics from Malaga University, Spain. The second part sets out to focus on the particular use that Norman Bryson's now famous dyad, the gaze and the glance is put to in his art historical project.
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When, in 2015, students at the University of Cape Town in South Africa demanded the removal of a statue of British colonial and diamond merchant Cecil Rhodes from their campus, they initiated what was to become a global call to... more
When, in 2015, students at the University of Cape Town in South Africa demanded the removal of a statue of British colonial and diamond merchant Cecil Rhodes from their campus, they initiated what was to become a global call to ‘decolonize the university’. In the same year, students at University College London began to ask the question: why is my curriculum white? Other public sector cultural institutions soon joined the chorus in an overdue acknowledgement that unspoken colonial legacies had for too long upheld and promulgated white privilege. The role of public sculpture as a catalyst for political debate and change has a long tradition within art's histories. It serves to remind us of the centrality of the discipline in promoting and maintaining dominant cultural values; and yet it also enables us to interrogate them as historically located and subject to inevitable temporal mutation. Whilst postcolonial studies and critical race studies have been informing and challenging the shape of art history for several decades, new generations of students, scholars, critics, curators, collectors, artists and audiences are seeking radical re‐evaluations of the academy and those cultural institutions who hold themselves up as standard‐bearers of our collective cultural heritage. But, what, if anything, is specific about the current moment's demands to reassess how universities, museums, and galleries teach, research, collect and exhibit? How can art historians, curators, collectors, museum directors, artists and writers respond to the call to decolonize art history? How can we draw from the rich legacy of postcolonial, feminist, queer and Marxist perspectives within art history, and what are the new theoretical perspectives that are needed?
Book Review of 'At Home in the World: The Art and the Life of Gulammohammed Sheikh', Edited by Chaitanya Sambrani, Designed by Sherna Dastur Tulika Books in Association with Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2019, 480 pp., ISBN... more
Book Review of 'At Home in the World: The Art and the Life of
Gulammohammed Sheikh', Edited by Chaitanya Sambrani, Designed by Sherna Dastur
Tulika Books in Association with Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2019, 480 pp.,
ISBN 978-81-939269-0-1
Gulammohammed Sheikh', Edited by Chaitanya Sambrani, Designed by Sherna Dastur
Tulika Books in Association with Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2019, 480 pp.,
ISBN 978-81-939269-0-1
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“Drawing” has reinvented itself in contemporary art globally (Butler and de Zegher 2010). Its return in the age of technological dominance is riddled with irony. No longer merely an index of artist’s skill, drawing has expanded its fields... more
“Drawing” has reinvented itself in contemporary art globally (Butler and de Zegher 2010). Its return in the age of technological dominance is riddled with irony. No longer merely an index of artist’s skill, drawing has expanded its fields of operation in numerous ways. The term “drawing” in its new avatar lends itself to wide ranging definitions from three dimensional form, wire assemblage, performance, photography, collage, print making, to conceptual line drawings. The latter in its classical function of figure‐ground demarcation, has shown its capacity to carry out most rigorous theoretical functions ‐ to reflect back on representation itself, and show its limits as well as to suggest unthought of possibilities. Drawing in this sense has powerfully informed the practice of many Indian artists recently and has acquired a critical edge‐ Shilpa Gupta, Tejal Shah, Praneet Soi, N. S. Harsha, Mithu Sen, Jitish Kallat, Atul Dodiya, Surendran Nair, to name a few. Each one of them has shown a strong inclination to conceptual art in varying degrees. In this paper, I will draw a connection between drawing and the turn to conceptual art in India with a focus on Shilpa Gupta’s work. In my interview with her, it is this conjunction of drawing with conceptual art that comes to the foreground.
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Pushpamala's works never cease to surprise the viewer with their spectacular juxtaposition of iconoclasm and spectacle. In her current show titled Body Politic being held at gallery Nature Morte, she brings together these two ends of... more
Pushpamala's works never cease to surprise the viewer with their spectacular juxtaposition of iconoclasm and spectacle. In her current show titled Body Politic being held at gallery Nature Morte, she brings together these two ends of visual representation with characteristic panache. Photo-performance, a genre that she introduced in contemporary Indian art since the 1990s, continues to provide a productive trajectory and centrally informs this show. At the same time, it is equally apparent from that the artist does not wish to restrict her practice to only photo-performance and has included video works and even sculpture, a genre with which she had begun her career in late 1980s. While the video works resonate with wry humour and a biting critique of the institutional control of human bodies, the sprawling sculpture in the form of simulated copper plates scattered in heaps, as if at an archeologist's site harks back to a past and yet slips out from the overall framing of the exhibition.
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In this first critical edition of the Citrasutra of the Visnudharmottara Purana, the author offers a more analytical take on the study of the Silpasastras. Contrary to the received opinion that the past is directly accessible to us via... more
In this first critical edition of the Citrasutra of the Visnudharmottara Purana, the author offers a more analytical take on the study of the Silpasastras. Contrary to the received opinion that the past is directly accessible to us via the sacrosanct fragments of the texts, the author argues that they only make sense within a framework, which is necessarily contemporary.
In the introduction, the Citrasutra, comprising nine adhyayas or chapters of the third khanda of the Visnudharmottara Purana, is posited as a much "discovered” and interpreted text. As a result, it has a long history of interpretation by pioneering art historians of the 20th century like A K Coomaraswamy, Stella Kramrisch and C Sivaramamurti. Interest in the text is triggered by a set of concerns of the art historians, which tied up with questions of Indian identity and the construction of an authentic past. The author locates her own interpretation of the text within the tradition of hermeneutics forming around this text.The second section, divided into three parts – Text, Translation and Notes, takes up the nine adhyayas from 35-45.
The Text puts together a critical apparatus which incorporated fresh evidence from two new manuscripts from Nepal and Bangladesh, hitherto not considered by the earlier editors. The Notes are detailed and bring in the interpretations by the earlier scholars to indicate important deviations from the official line of interpretation. It is followed by a detailed Glossary, the first of its kind, which focuses on the technical and context-specific sense of the terms.
In the introduction, the Citrasutra, comprising nine adhyayas or chapters of the third khanda of the Visnudharmottara Purana, is posited as a much "discovered” and interpreted text. As a result, it has a long history of interpretation by pioneering art historians of the 20th century like A K Coomaraswamy, Stella Kramrisch and C Sivaramamurti. Interest in the text is triggered by a set of concerns of the art historians, which tied up with questions of Indian identity and the construction of an authentic past. The author locates her own interpretation of the text within the tradition of hermeneutics forming around this text.The second section, divided into three parts – Text, Translation and Notes, takes up the nine adhyayas from 35-45.
The Text puts together a critical apparatus which incorporated fresh evidence from two new manuscripts from Nepal and Bangladesh, hitherto not considered by the earlier editors. The Notes are detailed and bring in the interpretations by the earlier scholars to indicate important deviations from the official line of interpretation. It is followed by a detailed Glossary, the first of its kind, which focuses on the technical and context-specific sense of the terms.
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Intersections of Sociology, Art and Art History: A Conversation with Parul Dave-Mukherji is the second instalment, following Debating the Ancient and Present: A Conversation with Romila Thapar, in the publication series, 'Conversations... more
Intersections of Sociology, Art and Art History: A Conversation with Parul Dave-Mukherji is the second instalment, following Debating the Ancient and Present: A Conversation with Romila Thapar, in the publication series, 'Conversations on/for South Asia' launched by the Department of Sociology at South Asian University in 2015. This is based on the conversation which was organized by the Department of Sociology on 29 August 2014 at the Akbar Bhawan campus of South Asian University. The process that entailed preparation towards this conversation was the same as the first conversation in this series. It meant inviting interested scholars to submit questions in advance, arranging them thematically, and executing the conversation. The questions were formulated in the light of some of the publications of Prof. Parul Dave-Mukherji although not in a restricted sense.
This book-length conversation with Parul Dave-Mukherji, located in the above scheme, is a humble beginning and contribution to the explorations of disciplinary intersections. This is the first formal event along the lines of intersections on art, sociology and art history , among many of our informal endeavours. She affirmed our faith that disciplinary boundaries are not too tight to prevent dialogues.
This book-length conversation with Parul Dave-Mukherji, located in the above scheme, is a humble beginning and contribution to the explorations of disciplinary intersections. This is the first formal event along the lines of intersections on art, sociology and art history , among many of our informal endeavours. She affirmed our faith that disciplinary boundaries are not too tight to prevent dialogues.
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A review of the Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art by J. L. Garfield
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In Memoriam of Bhupen Khakhar (1934 - 2003)
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Aesthetics of repose in modern art brings to mind paintings of languorous odalisques and reclining women by artists like Henri Matisse. In Indian aesthetics, there is a term for figures that strike such postures called the ālasa kanyā or... more
Aesthetics of repose in modern art brings to mind paintings of languorous odalisques and reclining women by artists like Henri Matisse. In Indian aesthetics, there is a term for figures that strike such postures called the ālasa kanyā or the indolent girls who often adorn the walls of medieval temples. Is the aesthetics of repose only about the poses and postures of the languid figures depicted in visual arts or does it concern the viewer, the spectator, the aesthete, the rasika? In other words, does the aesthetics of repose a matter of concern for the making of art or is it chiefly about reception of art? Classical Sanskrit aesthetics waxes eloquent on the pleasure experienced by the connoisseur or rasika. Alas, there is not much on ālasa kanyā doubling up as rasikā or a woman connoisseur. Aesthetic pleasure emerges as one of the key sites of the formation of selfhood in early medieval India. This figure of the aesthete or rasika comes into prominence between 9th -10th CE in Kashmir and in the process, raises many questions about the rights to experience aesthetic pleasure. Such an inquiry inadvertently lays open many vectors of social and political inequalities.
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Co-edited with Santosh Gupta and Prafulla C. Kar How does visuality or the regime of seeing and making visible impinge upon the “story” of Indian modernity and how does this open up possibilities of its rethinking? I will place... more
Co-edited with Santosh Gupta and Prafulla C. Kar
How does visuality or the regime of seeing and making visible impinge upon the “story” of Indian modernity and how does this open up possibilities of its rethinking? I will place particular emphasis on the visual/textual practices of embodiment in which a tradition acquires corporeality. What is remarkable is that this body or bodies around which dense historical, art historical and ideological meanings are fleshed out happen/s to be gendered and marked by class, caste and communitarian identities. I would, in the end, argue that the articulation of visual images under discussion is not a secondary activity, which simply responds to the political and social ideology of the time but that it is a primary act, which helps to constitute and maintain particular and partial interpretation of culture and society.
How does visuality or the regime of seeing and making visible impinge upon the “story” of Indian modernity and how does this open up possibilities of its rethinking? I will place particular emphasis on the visual/textual practices of embodiment in which a tradition acquires corporeality. What is remarkable is that this body or bodies around which dense historical, art historical and ideological meanings are fleshed out happen/s to be gendered and marked by class, caste and communitarian identities. I would, in the end, argue that the articulation of visual images under discussion is not a secondary activity, which simply responds to the political and social ideology of the time but that it is a primary act, which helps to constitute and maintain particular and partial interpretation of culture and society.
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This paper is an attempt to give serious consideration to gender issues in Indian art and that at the same time draws attention to the need for criticality in addressing these issues. In the context of new Art History which welcomes any... more
This paper is an attempt to give serious consideration to gender issues in Indian art and that at the same time draws attention to the need for criticality in addressing these issues. In the context of new Art History which welcomes any serious consideration of gender as a critical component in analysis, it is important to be alert to the theoretical implications of abstracting gender from other relations of power. It seems appropriate to bring into sharp focus a recent work Representing the Body: Gender Issues in Indian Art edited by Vidya Dehejia, particularly her article in the book titled "Issues of Spectatorship and Representation."1 While gender issues have been acknowledged in modern Indian art owing to the presence of women artists since the 1970s, their recognition in the traditional or pre-colonial context is quite recent and crucial for rethinking the disciplinary framework of Indian Art History.
Before proceeding further, it is important to be aware of the editor's location both disciplinary and geographical. Most of the contributors teach Art History in the west specifically in the US and seem to engage with the recent debates on gender within the discipline. Dehejia appears to draw from and at the same time differ strongly from certain concepts within the feminist Art History in the west. My critique of Dehejia's project is located within my interest in the problem of visuality in early Indian art and its relationship with the interpretation of the Silpa Šāstras or the technical treatises of art.
Before proceeding further, it is important to be aware of the editor's location both disciplinary and geographical. Most of the contributors teach Art History in the west specifically in the US and seem to engage with the recent debates on gender within the discipline. Dehejia appears to draw from and at the same time differ strongly from certain concepts within the feminist Art History in the west. My critique of Dehejia's project is located within my interest in the problem of visuality in early Indian art and its relationship with the interpretation of the Silpa Šāstras or the technical treatises of art.
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What do we mean by the term 'Contemporary Asian Art' and how are we to represent it? With its varied histories, traditions and cultures, Asia can hardly be bracketed into one entity, yet the reception of its art is ridden with... more
What do we mean by the term 'Contemporary Asian Art' and how are we to represent it? With its varied histories, traditions and cultures, Asia can hardly be bracketed into one entity, yet the reception of its art is ridden with essentialisms and tropes.
Meanwhile, the region's longstanding engagement with Modern and Contemporary art, globalisation and rapid economic changes has seen Asia's arts scenes change irrevocably. Influx - Contemporary Art in Asia explores the trends in and circulation of, contemporary art from Asia in the many International Expos, Biennales and Art Fairs that seem to be focusing increasingly on this region.
Illustrated with works of leading artists from India, China, Pakistan, South-East Asia and the Middle-East, it brings together essays by 19 critical writers. They reflect on the diversity of Asia's self-perceptions, the historical bases for a category such as Asia and its political and cultural exigencies which inform various curatorial interventions.
Meanwhile, the region's longstanding engagement with Modern and Contemporary art, globalisation and rapid economic changes has seen Asia's arts scenes change irrevocably. Influx - Contemporary Art in Asia explores the trends in and circulation of, contemporary art from Asia in the many International Expos, Biennales and Art Fairs that seem to be focusing increasingly on this region.
Illustrated with works of leading artists from India, China, Pakistan, South-East Asia and the Middle-East, it brings together essays by 19 critical writers. They reflect on the diversity of Asia's self-perceptions, the historical bases for a category such as Asia and its political and cultural exigencies which inform various curatorial interventions.
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This monograph puts together both 'classical and 'contemporary' understanding of aesthetics within a pervasive space, beyond the fixed stereotypes. In doing so, it also tends to view the question of power and hierarchy without undermining... more
This monograph puts together both 'classical and 'contemporary' understanding of aesthetics within a pervasive space, beyond the fixed stereotypes. In doing so, it also tends to view the question of power and hierarchy without undermining aesthetics as cultural activity that engages with beauty, sensorial experience and epistemic frameworks, which all have resonated through the essays that together update Indian aesthetics within a contemporary frame.
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The figurative mode of story telling is deeply entrenched within the civilizational discourse in India, like anywhere else. Most of the artists included in this show occupy a curious place in the history of modernism in India, where the... more
The figurative mode of story telling is deeply entrenched within the civilizational discourse in India, like anywhere else. Most of the artists included in this show occupy a curious place in the history of modernism in India, where the right to tell stories took on multiple connotations, viz., can the narrative mode register some shared collective cultural memory? Can history be retold via the trope of story telling? Does the compulsion to form a visual analogue to this collective memory impinge upon another mode of representation?
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Catalogue of solo exhibition INTERTWININGS at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi (2009)
with catalogue essays by Prof. Parul Dave Mukherjee and Avijna Bhattacharya.
ISBN 978-93-80001-09-8
with catalogue essays by Prof. Parul Dave Mukherjee and Avijna Bhattacharya.
ISBN 978-93-80001-09-8
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Eyes Re-Cast is a catalogue essay that accompanied Savi Sawarkar's solo exhibition at Rabindra Bhawan, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi in 2008. It takes up the politics of representation in Savi's paintings and the manner in which he... more
Eyes Re-Cast is a catalogue essay that accompanied Savi Sawarkar's solo exhibition at Rabindra Bhawan, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi in 2008. It takes up the politics of representation in Savi's paintings and the manner in which he foregrounded his identity as India's first Dalit artist. The essay critically engages with the question of caste and specially untouchability as addressed by the artist.