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Preface i
When Was
Modernism
ii P R E FA C E
Preface iii
When Was
Modernism
Essays on
Contemporary
Cultural Practice
in India
Geeta Kapur
iv P R E FA C E
Published by Tulika
35 A/1 (third floor), Shahpur Jat, New Delhi 110 049, India
© Geeta Kapur
ISBN: 81-89487-24-8
F o r Vi v a n
vi P R E FA C E
Preface vii
Contents
Preface ix
Film/Narratives 179
Articulating the Self in History: Ghatak’s Jukti Takko ar Gappo 181
Sovereign Subject: Ray’s Apu 201
Revelation and Doubt in Sant Tukaram and Devi 233
Preface
The core of this book of essays was formed while I held a fellowship at
the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library at Teen Murti, New Delhi. The project
for the fellowship began with a set of essays on Indian cinema that marked a depar-
ture in my own interpretative work on contemporary art. This was undertaken with
the purpose of exploring narrative (in narrative, genre and within genre, allegories)
and further, of opening out a theorized space for the cultural encounter. The essays
index three areas of my engagement: art, film and culture theory. The book maps a
terrain to situate these. In the course of the work every discursive detour has led me
back to selected forms of art and to renewed modes of artwriting. If I somewhat
circumvent the academic conventions of culture studies it is because my critical
mode arises from and returns to a primary involvement with creative practice.
‘I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because
my problem is my own transformation. . . . This transformation of one’s self by
one’s knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why
should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting?’ Trinh T. Minh-
Ha’s response to Michel Foucault goes on to say: ‘Recast in a critical light, the rela-
tion between art and theory does not lead to a simple equation and collapse of the
fundamental assumptions of the two. Rather it maintains the tension between them
through a notion of the interval that neither separates nor assimilates.’1
As this book is the result of work researched and written from the mid-
1980s through the 1990s—to be precise, the selected essays were published between
1987 and 1997—I need to indicate why readers familiar with earlier versions of the
essays may perhaps re-read them here.
All the essays have been revised: annotations come in the form of addi-
tional information, supporting quotations, extended notes and references. I have,
however, placed certain constraints on the task of revision. Except where I have
added a brief epilogue to the text or the notes, annotations fit the time-frame in
which the essay was written. Rather than leaping into the present through authorial
x P R E FA C E
privilege, I wish to maintain the doubts and even the ideological misapprehensions
that attend an argument and stress the authorial voice. I would like the reader to see
the work as definitely periodized precisely so that the conscious post facto inclu-
sions, the subtext retroactively woven into the text, can be seen to provide a reflex-
ive aspect to the initial proposition.
The selection of monographic essays on artists, interpretive essays on
artworks and film narratives, theoretical and polemical essays on cultural catego-
ries, work with different forms of address. The ongoing idea of the book was to re-
lay the difference and to structure arguments across the essays, to foreground through
revision the choppy sense of the historical in contemporary cultural practice. I hope
the reader will be able to mark the motives and gain, through cumulative pressure,
what one may call the book’s ‘conceptual topography’.2
The second major annotation of these essays comes via the text illustra-
tions. In their original published versions the essays carried few, if any, pictures.
Here there are more than 350 illustrations and each one is carefully placed in rela-
tion to the text, as indicated by illustration numbers on the page. The pictures
present something of a parallel argument to the one articulated in the text. This is
not only because illustration is crucial to any discussion of the visual arts but also
because I want to make a strong case for the remarkable visual narratives that cul-
tural practice in India throws up. And for the iconographic augmentation of con-
temporary life that emerges as a consequence. The domain of visuality established
by Indian cinema from the prewar studios to the great auteurs of the postindepend-
ence period as well as the more recently valorized status of modern Indian art can be
acknowledged through carefully chosen reproductions.
But while I would like to give visual culture its due attractions this is
not an art book—it has no colour reproductions, for example. It is also not a book
that chronicles modern Indian art, as even a glance at the table of contents will
make clear. It is a book of essays where the visuals go in and out and play different
roles. In the essays about artists and filmmakers there is what one might call an
internal game of putting complementary images in place. In the essays that discuss
polemical categories the pictures provide cues to scuttle foregone conclusions. Whether
the images have representational value or are abstracted and eccentric, I would like
to see them surface like alternative currents in the discursive scheme of the book.
The essays are arranged in three sections. The first section, Artists and
ArtWork, opens with an essay on women artists at work. This was for a long time a
speaking text illuminated by projected transparencies. In 1997 it was written up for
an anthology, now it has been further enlarged. I regard it as a slowly unfolding per-
sonal statement and it is placed at the head of the book as very nearly a testimony
Preface xi
to my efforts at saying things differently. Amrita Sher-Gil and Frida Kahlo, Nalini
Malani and Arpita Singh plot a work-scenario for women artists stretching across
nearly a century; I get the cues through the mediation of their very individual yet
paired and complementary personae and artworks, to articulate a well-calibrated
gender discourse. This peculiar morphing of female artists imbricates my own sub-
jectivity; the interpretive process pitches me into other narratives about the national
and the modern, about subjectivity and transcendence. I learn to test what Laura
Mulvey calls the ‘politics of authorship’ in relation to the teachings of feminist
discourse.3
Writing in this personal mode is pleasurable, useful, sometimes painful:
Nalini and Arpita are contemporaries and friends, so was Nasreen Mohamedi. The
text on Nasreen, posthumously written, becomes more allusive every time I work
on it. Perhaps I deflect the words from the straitgate of the vacant paradise Nasreen
entered a full decade ago. In contrast to the first essay, I have been trying to de-
authorize the writing on Nasreen by a selected excess of interlayered quotations
that gives the little sheaf of verse and prose the option of floating away beyond the
reader’s hands.
The monographic essay on Subramanyan remains more or less as it was:
an interpretive prose-piece with a premium on lucidity giving due respect to the
artist’s own style of articulation, except that there is now a short epilogue that gives
the sanguine story of the revered Subramanyan an edge—an eroticism that virtually
asks to be made explicit, a projectile shattering the narrative of pedagogy associated
with Subramanyan. The essay is included here to test its life in a new, more substan-
tial context of several other essays. Set along with Ravi Varma’s nineteenth-century
representational dilemmas, one can gauge the extent to which the issue of represen-
tation is stood on its head within a century. Subramanyan from the School of Santi-
niketan is naturally, historically, pitted against the Ravi Varma phenomenon. He
further inverts the heavy take on representation by a strategy of deferral, by the
formalist ironies of a mid-twentieth century modernist. Whereby he also gives a
new and crucial turn to his Santiniketan lineage, bringing out those linguistic fea-
tures that engage with twentieth-century art history as much as those that deal with
the cultural gestalt privileged by his mentors.
Ravi Varma is a figure of contradictions working out a professional
career within the terms of colonial culture; a typical eclectic who tries to synthesize
elements from the Tanjore tradition, from the Company School, from Victorian
salon painting and theatre, from the performative tradition of kathakali and from
neoclassical Malayalam poetry. Those reading this version of my essay will find that
it has been turned inside out. The notes are now in the main body of the text, there
is no longer a simple storyline, the farce implied in the discourse of high meanings is
read against the grain. However, the richness of material available since I last wrote
xii P R E FA C E
on Ravi Varma makes my claims relatively modest: the inventory of issues (what I
call dilemmas) are in the process of being reconstructed by scholars into a context-
ualized ideology, new strategies are being found to give this period of Indian art
history a semiotic reading. Even as Ravi Varma becomes the subject of many reviv-
als, shading from radical scholarship to rightwing sentimentality favouring reli-
gious kitsch, the seeming literalism in his work turns into a crucial decoding device
for the popular genres.
The film essays in the second section, Film/Narratives, have been worked
over mainly for the purpose of honing the argument and developing, from Sant
Tukaram to the Apu trilogy to Jukti Takko ar Gappo, and then back from Jukti to
Tukaram via Devi, a chronicle about selfhood. A quest that inscribes itself within a
particular social formation of nationalism yet exceeds it through the gift of cultural
heterogeneity. I am interested in mapping Indian modernity on to a civilizational
base and vice versa, in mapping civilizational rhetoric and its concerns on to the
modern. Thus, for example, I try to elucidate the carryover between authenticity
and the heterodox promise of the bhakti movement in a film like Sant Tukaram,
and authenticity as a mediating category for the pain of transition between the
country and the city in the films by Ray, starting with the Apu trilogy. A way of
positing the sovereign self also becomes a way of developing a contemporary icono-
graphy, and this in turn becomes the subjective style of the author–director who can
scarce return to the civilizational mode once he articulates himself into history—
like Ghatak in Jukti—bringing to history through a negative dialectic a hearkening
of the lost utopia.
‘And what is critical consciousness at bottom if not an unstoppable
predilection for alternatives?’ asks Edward Said at the very end of his essay, ‘Travel-
ling Theory’.4
If the art and film essays were scrambled and interlayered another kind
of calibrated narrative about modernity might emerge via the formal means of the
visual language: from Ravi Varma to Sant Tukaram to the Apu trilogy to K.G.
Subramanyan—particularly as Subramanyan shares with Ray the Santiniketan con-
cern for a cultural gestalt that keeps the country subliminally present in the visual
discourse—to Ghatak’s autobiographical narrative in Jukti. Once we have arrived
at a radical historicity the assumptions underlying the sovereign self are dismantled
and the first essay, ‘Body as Gesture’, becomes a signal presence. It tries out a poetics
based on styles of ‘masquerade’ and implicates other essays in a feminist subtext.
The six essays in the final section, Frames of Reference, attempt theo-
retical exegeses on contemporary visual arts. Written over several years, the essays
have been revised to make a sequential argument about the place of the modern in
Preface xiii
contemporary cultural practice in India and in the third world, to set up an ideo-
logical vantagepoint to view modernism along its multiple tracks.
Modernity, or in the more specific case of art practice modernism, is my
vocational concern and commitment. Even as it is hammered down as a vestige of
the last century the stake in it has to be secured. With the turn of the century the
vexed and valorous entwining of metaphysics and ideology in the condition of
modernity—of the self within the grand universal narrative—can be too easily squan-
dered as ‘mere’ utopia. But the modern is not an identical narrative in reckonings
across nations: it has to be held in place in India by a contextualized and increas-
ingly more critical stance.
Throughout the book I try to tackle the contestatory nature of Indian
modernity, pulling the concept away from its conservative version where it is seen as
emerging from a respectable lineage that becomes by some ideological miracle the
bearer of civilizational values. Equally, modernity has to be saved from the default
of underdesignation, that is to say from absentminded neglect of its revolutionary
forms of otherness that overhaul modernist principles. The essays suggest that in
India as in the third world national culture is the matrix in the fold of which the
secret energies and explicit boldness of modernity have abided. And I place the
modern within the troubled domain of the national that is now being turned inside
out in theory, historical understanding and democratic politics.
This placement already comes with a condition: today cultural pro-
duction simply requires that we introduce categories whereby cultural practice is
emancipated from the institutionalized status of the national/modern. Ironically, or
perhaps even logically, this is now a task for the postcolonial/postmodern con-
sciousness to tackle.
The essays that are expositions on artists and artworks, films and film-
makers try to inscribe forms of subjectivity within the heavier rhetoric of identity
which characterized the speech of the nationalist intelligentsia but which also sur-
vives in a problematic manner in postcolonial discourse that is now decidedly post-
national. Along with the textual I take up the visual inscriptions of subjectivity: the
image retains both the aura of the icon and the desire for profane exposure; it can
reinvigorate the exhausted protocols of the identity question and at the same time
help undo the overdetermined discourse of postcolonial theory. Indeed the rapid
academicization of the postcolonial experience via culture studies curricula leaves
the field bereft of the cause—praxis—that made the new mode of inquiry radical.
Thus the set of theses I propose in respect of the modern does a
doubletake: I use a retroactive device to critically engage and retrieve the national/
modern from the imbricated discourse of the postcolonial/postmodern.
Written during a period when the realpolitik of global capitalism threat-
ens to take over the discourse on culture, these essays propose polemical options, as
xiv P R E FA C E
discrepancies in the information obtained from even primary sources. I will be only
too happy to receive corrections and further information for inclusion in future
editions and other publications.
Acknowledgements and full publication details of earlier versions of the
essays have been given as a footnote on the first page of each essay.
I am grateful to friends and colleagues who have sustained my ideas
along the way. For almost thirty years now I have had a dialogue with Kumar
Shahani on the more elusive forms of creative desire. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Susie
Tharu and Paul Willemen have acted as my interlocutors in the field of film, theory,
culture studies. Paul ‘edited’ the first versions of my film essays. With Ashish and
Susie, my intrepid intellectual colleagues, I share a field of commitment as often on
tough as on sympathetic ground. Nilima and Gulammohammed Sheikh provide
me a considered response in areas of art and art history.
My family’s support is precious: this includes my late father M.N. Kapur
who set me out on my journey, my mother Amrita Kapur who still prods me when
I tarry, my sister Anuradha Kapur who is a critical reader of my writings. Navina
Sundaram did a penultimate read of the manuscript, my husband Vivan Sundaram
is my constant discussant. He is also the technical facilitator in diverse areas and has
given a great deal of his time to the production process of this book. Fortunately
Vivan is one of those artists who is not hostile to the operations of the intellect,
believing with me that critical writing supports the body of art, allows it mortality
and retrieves it from a premature condition of hypostasis. I believe with him that
art can still gain an aura and not lose its historical dynamic. To Vivan, friend
companion comrade, this book is dedicated.
Body as Gesture:
Women Artists at Work
This essay sets up equations between four women artists. The sections on
Amrita Sher-Gil and Frida Kahlo are dedicated to the female/feminist marking of
nationalism through what one may call the emblematic selfhood of a woman pro-
tagonist. With Nalini Malani and Arpita Singh I deal more specifically with the
transactions, on gender terms, between private fantasy and public concern. I try to
work out how these two contemporaries circumvent the heroic roles associated with
nationalism in order to claim, instead, a more ambivalently socialized subjectivity.
The subject in question is the artist herself as also her painted image, both
deliberately seen to be overlapping entities with complex iconographical intent. I
suggest that as a quartet these artists present bodily enactments where the gesture is
quite precipitate, drawing the whole body to a state of immediacy. They lay allusive
trails of fetish objects, they construct linguistic signs that convert play into reflexion.
Is this a feature special to women artists, is this feminist art practice?
Questioning the essentialist aspect of the feminist argument, I would like to propose
that if something like an ‘authentic’ female experience is sought to differentiate the
feminist rendering of reality and truth, the criteria have to be taken away from the
existentialist frame. Rather than duplicate and ‘correct’ the hegemonic overtones of
humanist notions such as (male) sovereignty, feminism may propose a more didactic
and tendentious aesthetic within a historicized context of cultural production.
Our stress is on what forms the grain of these women’s struggles. How were
their worlds shaped? we ask. How have they turned figures, plots, narratives,
lyrical and fictional projects set up for different purposes to their use? With
what cunning did they press into service objects coded into cultural signi-
fications indifferent or hostile to them? How did they tread their oblique paths
across competing ideological grids, or obdurately hang on to illegitimate
pleasure? What forms did their dreams of integrity or selfhood take?1
This essay was first presented at a conference, On Subalternity and Culture, organized by Anveshi Research
Centre for Women’s Studies and Subaltern Studies Collective at the Central Institute of English and Foreign
Languages (CIEFL), Hyderabad, in 1993. The first published version appeared in Representing the Body: Art
History and Gender, edited by Vidya Dehejia, Kali for Women, Delhi, 1997.
4 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Amrita Sher-Gil
Artist Persona
Modern Indian art is distinguished for having at its very inception a
brilliant woman artist, Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941).2 Her paternal family was part
of the landed gentry of the Punjab. They were British loyalists. The father Umrao
Singh Sher-Gil was, lone among his family, a nationalist. An enlightened dilettante, he
engaged himself with scholarly pursuits and photography of remarkable merit. The
mother Marie Antoinette belonged to an artistically inclined Hungarian middle-class
family with orientalist interests. The elder daughter of the Sher-Gils,3 Amrita, lived
barely twenty-nine years but she had already made some remarkable paintings, raised
key questions for Indian art and developed a compelling persona (Illus. 1).
Positioned as Amrita Sher-Gil is, at the beginnings of Indian modernism,
we must on her account reckon with an inadvertent ‘feminization’ of modern Indian
art. It is significant that another woman artist of fabled charisma, Frida Kahlo of
Mexico, is a virtual contemporary of Sher-Gil. Like her, she is marked by tragic destiny.
There is therefore some purpose in setting up a relationship between them to signify
Body as Gesture 5
Split Allegiance
Amrita Sher-Gil appeared on the Indian art scene in the mid-1930s when
a handful of distinguished artists were making certain basic choices pertaining to
sovereignty in modern Indian culture. The artists in Santiniketan (Nandalal Bose,
Rabindranath Tagore, Ramkinkar Baij and Benodebehari Mukherjee) were pitching
the values of inspired vocation and cultural pedagogy. Jamini Roy in Calcutta was
exploring the market. A professional exhibition circuit was sought to be set up on a
6 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Inspite the fact that till now my special favourite has been Gauguin, I
sometimes feel that Van Gogh was the greater of the two. The Elemental versus
Sophistication (no matter how sublime) is apt to make the latter look flat by
comparison.7
Oriental Body
Apropos representation, Amrita Sher-Gil had also as if to act out the
paradox of the oriental subject in the body of a woman designated as Eurasian—a
hybrid body of unusual beauty. This vexed solution to the problem of identity must
be inscribed into her stylistics. She articulated a woman’s prerogative to deal with a
sexually immanent self equally through her persona as through her art. This is her
unique role, to bring to bear what I call the feminization of modern Indian art.
8 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
ethics from the nineteenth century when an intense attachment to oil and easel
painting takes hold in several regions of the country.
Although Sher-Gil, with characteristic arrogance, dismissed Ravi Varma,
the juxtaposition is very instructive. We have a male and a female painter, both
possessing an aristocratic view, both devising the indigenous body from oil paint and,
further, both wanting to materialize (and thus naturalize) the selfconscious presence of
oriental women within a reconstructed local context.
Indeed Ravi Varma’s and Amrita Sher-Gil’s paintings taken as paradig-
matic pose a series of rhetorical questions. What happens to the mutual address of
subjectivities in the figural field of an easel painting; what happens to the ‘meeting-of-
the-eyes’ dictum of oriental aesthetics? What happens when the pictorial presence
moves out of the traditional (non)frame of the mural, the miniature, and enters the
easel format; when it becomes so heavily materialized in the medium of oils; when it is
made contemporary and contiguous to the real-life viewer and before the alien gaze of
the male/colonial presence?
What happens, among other things, is that a new history of the corporeal
image develops. It substantiates itself through the indigenous body, through a kind of
ethnographic allegory. At a specific level what happens with Ravi Varma is that you
get an oddly embarrassed but dynamic exchange of pose, glance and gesture, as in his
A Galaxy of Musicians (ca. 1889). With Sher-Gil female subjectivity takes a narcissis-
tic turn. In her Woman Resting on Charpoy (1940, Illus. 4), for example, the subject
portrayed is conspicuously passive, sunk in reverie.
If you map a Sher-Gil on to a Ravi Varma image the first feature that
appears is the degree of condensation in the Sher-Gil image. With all her realist lean-
ings Sher-Gil composes with a mannerist stress characteristic of the modern. From her
exploratory bid on modernism she gleans this one important characteristic, of com-
posing with (metaphorical) brevity. She is perspicacious enough to resituate this within
the lyrical ambience of Indian art. She thereby attempts the kind of symbolic gestalt
that would place her, belongingly, within the oriental aesthetic. Thus her quasi-
nationalist, quasi-realist sentiments towards rural folk are matched by an aesthete’s
preference for classical (Kushan and Ajanta) and medieval (Mughal and rajput
miniatures) references in Indian art.
In September 1934, just before returning to India, she writes to her
parents from Budapest:
Indian Imagery
Amrita Sher-Gil made an extended tour of India in 1937.9 Immediately
afterwards she attempted a summation of several indigenous traditions of painting,
foregrounding the voluptuous organicity of Ajanta—where gender identity is poly-
morphous, bisexual and sanguine. She then worked towards an amazingly compact
formal resolution, as in her 1937 paintings: Banana Sellers (Illus. 5) and the south
Indian trilogy, South Indian Villagers Going to Market, Bride’s Toilet, Brahmacharis
(Illus. 6, 7). Yet she soon accepted the difficulty of dealing with a classical tradition,
with the immanent energies of Ajanta, and turned to work with the more structured
universe of the domestic and the divine in the medieval art of Mughal and pahari
miniatures. She came to understand how a historical or an everyday anecdote inscribed
within an ornamental structure gives medieval miniatures their moments of wit, relief,
pertinence—and the possibility of direct address that turns them into contemporary
chronicles. Indeed despite their precious aesthetic they are very nearly systematic social
paintings. Sher-Gil was astute enough to privilege her contemporary needs by drawing
Body as Gesture 11
Above: 6 Amrita Sher-Gil, Bride’s Toilet, 1937. Below: 7 Amrita Sher-Gil, Brahmacharis, 1937
12 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
on this strain—running all the way from the Akbari to the Sikh school in the
nineteenth century, when the tradition virtually converts itself into a popular genre. In
fact she suggested a way to translate the miniatures into a form of genre painting in
oils, a genre that is able to record within the terms of a modernizing consciousness an
ambiguous balance in the feudal/feminine world. In paintings like Siesta (1937),
Resting (1938), Verandah with Red Pillars (1938) and Ancient Story Teller (1940,
Illus. 8) her representations alternate between indolence and pain, gossip and
romance, intermittent festivity and daily submission.10
Her project had just begun. She was struggling with a form for her chosen
subject-matter—Indian women in their secluded settings. She was trying to both
mimic and question the hold of eternity on their bodies. Her choice and under-
standing of means and ends coalesced remarkably even if it also shortcircuited the
historical into a flaring female (auto)biography.
Sher-Gil’s peasant and aristocratic women in a feudal setting seemed to
hold in their stillness a latency of desire that would appear to exceed the artist’s own
potential as a middle-class woman. But perhaps it was precisely the other way around:
that the artist’s (occidental/romantic, perhaps bisexual) sense of the erotic, as in Two
Girls (ca. 1939, Illus. 9), was actually delivered into the symbolic space of her 1940
paintings such as Woman Resting on Charpoy, The Swing and Woman at Bath (Illus.
10). Her othering process, at work through and beyond the frozen mise-en-scene,
filled the paintings with orientalist imagining. More critically one might say that the
women subjects of Sher-Gil’s paintings, contained within their feudal seclusion, were
not perceived to have a personal vocabu-
lary for sexual signification. They could
only appear like emblazoned motifs in
the erotics of a dream. Sher-Gil, who
clearly saw herself to be further evolved,
melded her sexuality with theirs and
relayed the imaginary process of a double
emancipation with a tantalizing, at times
almost regressive effect.
Sher-Gil tried in her short life
to overcome, all at once, the alienation
due to her class, her mixed race, her gen-
der. Seeing herself as a complex and evol-
ving subject she tried to mediate all the
way round, turning the wheel of devolv-
ing time in the lives of her imprisoned
subjects by the dynamic of her own rest-
8 Amrita Sher-Gil, Ancient Story Teller, 1940 less desire. At the same time there were, as
Body as Gesture 13
I have discussed, rules of representation that she worked at by scanning a range of art-
historical sources. Young as she was, she felt the need to disengage desire from a con-
fessional self, to disengage romanticizing reverie from the material practice of image-
making. Her art language involved the use of indigenous resource in the context of her
nascent sympathy for the modernizing nation; she hoped to use it as a critical reflex
against her personal narcissism.
When her life convulsed in inadvertent death the saga of desire she had
played out in her life was seen to congeal over and gloss her painted images.11 A death
that conferred youthful immortality left her stranded as one among modern India’s
cherished icons. This may be the very fate of the native woman of genius within a
nationalist context: to conduct a cultural catharsis through her own image.12
14 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Frida Kahlo
‘ Magic Spells’
If we compare Amrita Sher-Gil to her famous contemporary Frida Kahlo
(1907–1954),13 the forms of female valorization within national cultures may
become clearer. Indeed we may get to the motive and style of a particular kind of
female artist persona (Illus. 11).
In 1938 Andre Breton wrote poetically if predictably, and with acute
wonder and ambivalence, about this female icon of Mexico:
I had not yet set eyes on Frida Kahlo de Rivera, resembling those statuettes [of
Colima] in her bearing and adorned, too, like a fairy tale princess, with magic
spells at her finger-tips, an apparition in the flash of light of the quetzal bird
which scatters opals among the rocks as it flies.
While I was in Mexico, I felt bound to say that I could think of no art more
perfectly situated in time and space than hers. I would like to add now that
Body as Gesture 15
know that in countries like Mexico and India ethnicity wears exotic colours in
considerations of culture, especially when the bearer of that culture is a woman. For
that reason the double bind of otherness—as woman, as native—relating to the
ubiquitous look of the male/European is put to scrutiny. Female or feminine masks are
flaunted by the artist who plays alive her roles one by one, as woman, as native.
In an invented style of Mexicanness/Indianness Kahlo and Sher-Gil made
themselves up into vivid artifices, asking to be fetishized.16 The mask from behind
which the protagonist gains an exquisite if also at times suicidal advantage, is
construed narcissism. Thus the feminine as masquerade, as a game of alternate subject-
ivities, becomes not only an interrogation of illicit desire for the exotic, it becomes its
obverse: an interrogation of female narcissism itself.
Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, taking off from Breton, write in their
important coauthored article on Kahlo:
With Frida Kahlo beauty was inextricably bound up with masquerade. In her
self-portraits . . . her face remains severe and expressionless with an unflinch-
ing gaze. . . . The ornament borders on fetishism, as does all masquerade, but
the imaginary look is that of self-regard, therefore feminine, non-male, and
narcissistic look. There is neither coyness nor cruelty, none of the nuance nece-
ssary for the male eroticization of the female look.17
Body as Gesture 17
I would like to suggest that there was in the very masquerade an undoing
of the fetish. There was something like a voluntary barter where the selfconscious
subject (the artist) offered herself as the desired object to the viewer in lieu of the
images she painted and whose autonomy she was keen to secure. The creative act could
then be freed, the freedom entailed both a gift and a sacrifice that was demonstrably
performed by the artist. As self-construed fetish she took it upon herself to contain and
hold the erotics of pain of a sexualized body. One may call this a female artist’s defence
of her productive interests, even nascent feminism.18
Affliction
Kahlo offered an extravagant conflation of beauty and affliction. A street
accident at the age of eighteen damaged her spine, pelvis and foot and left her a semi-
invalid. She suffered from intense physical pain throughout her life. Her body was
subjected to numerous operations and finally in 1953 an amputation of her right
leg.19 This very twist of destiny made a predictable but riveting icon of Frida Kahlo.
She adorned herself—in posed photographs and in compulsively repeated self-
portraits—with disinterested care, as indeed befits an icon. The adornment even
turned into a cosmology of the painter’s stellar self. Or into the form of a witch-dryad.
Braided in her great crown of hair were snails and butterflies, she was adorned with
bouquets and parrots, a praying mantis climbed her shoulder. Clasping her neck were
clusters of delicate spider monkeys—she seemed to like multiplying her own simian
appearance. A hairless dog (the Mexican itzcuintli) pressed against her bosom. In her
famous Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird of 1940, a black cat
and her pet monkey menace/caress her delicate incandescent head (Illus. 14). Thus
Kahlo celebrated her metaphoric self-image, her face often glistening with large
streaming tears.
In other pictures there was a symmetrical inversion of this visage. Her
prone body, cut and sutured, would be surrounded by the disgorged parts of her own
anatomy. Especially the fleshy parts, her heart (which she held bleeding over her dress),
her womb, her aborted foetus. These evolved round her, making her the site of an
organic catharsis, as in Henry Ford Hospital (1932, Illus. 15). She made her body an
inside-out metaphor for the same life that was iconographically replete in the self-
portraits. In the magnetic portraits her masquerade or what it stood for, an allusive
subjectivity, was erotically alive and attracted other creatures to itself. In the
masochistic pictures, such as What the Water Gave Me (1938) and Without Hope
(1945), the feminine was attacked, the good objects in her body were ejected. Yet she
was idealized once again—through the enactment of murderous suffering Kahlo
resumed her iconic status, as in Tree of Hope (1946). In this successive act of conden-
sation and displacement she was demonstrating, ironically, how the woman’s body
might attain apotheosis after all, but by an act of will, not the gift of grace.
18 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Allegories
As if each designation must yield to another, her other works showed the
body-image loosened. Its too-stretched organicity, its masochistic sexuality gave way
to a narrative, the truth-content of which was deliberately displaced by an allegorical
format. Here she could identify with saints who were inscribed into peoples’ everyday
lives including, crucially, their political struggles.
site for testing the possibilities of iconographical rendering as such. And a criterion for
the complex configuration of attributes demanded of the martyred subject within a
nationally active culture.24
If the native woman of genius be only part-native, the entire discourse of
national culture gets a twist. In the case of both Kahlo and Sher-Gil, the dilemma of
racial hybridity tugged at the unifying dream of a nation and catapulted an anxious
definition of identity wherein virtual worlds were at stake. There were the worlds of
important men (for example, Leon Trotsky among others in the life of Kahlo,
Jawaharlal Nehru fleetingly in the life of Sher-Gil). Inversely, what was also at stake
was the world, variously defined, of the people. It is as if on account of their mixed
blood and personal sovereignty, not uncommon in aristocratic circles, the women in
question would have a higher stake in destiny. And that they would therefore carry off
subaltern personifications on behalf of the community. This would be the last act, as it
were, within the complex scenario of their gender masquerade.
Body as Gesture 23
Nalini Malani
Self-Representation
peculiar ways. She started to embed some part of the imagery in the gessoed surface
(white gouache and gum-arabic). She then treated the body like an unfolding embryo
starting with a blob which while it gained shape was already imbued with the attitude
of the potential figure. She elaborated the blob with the movement of the soft sable-
hair brush to gain a morphological ambiguity. The figure was not drawn; she lifted the
edges of the blob of pigment with a thin brush making channels for tiny rivulets of the
watered pigment to flow in and form a contour round the quivering mass of the body.
Reinforced by her use of other mediums like glass painting, monotype and photo-
copying, the conventions of good drawing and descriptive surfaces were repudiated
and her inverted virtuosity came to characterize her figures as a species apart. In sets of
watercolours about eccentric men, depressed women, mutilated beggars, lumpen boys
contorted in play-fights, she developed an iconography in which standards of anthro-
pomorphic elegance were rejected. Yet these representations were in no way
primitivist. The body-gesture of the figures suggested at once the oddity of the human
species and the desire of her draughting hand to make the body easy in its chores but
avoid giving it too civilizational a bearing. Nalini held to the ambition of quizzically
testing Michel Foucault’s proposition: ‘The soul is the prison of the body.’28
Female Roles
From the start there was no doubt about the fact that Nalini’s paintings
are those of a woman. This was first evidenced in the way she played at representing
the world on an ‘as if’ ticket.29 As if she were a haunted girl; as if she were a matriarch;
as if she were a betrayed beloved; as if she were an alley cat; as if she were a lesbian; as
if she were a beggar-woman; as if she were, like Javer Kaki, One-time Actress (1991),
an ageing actress. You realize of course that these are ‘false maturities’ which include
the acts of mimicry of a little girl. Testing out a tendency to conflate and idealize, she
stages the charade of an actress engaged in the life-and-death act of incorporating
people who impinge on her. There is at work an ingenuous sincerity that makes her feel
beholden to the world; at the same time there is a desire to subvert the gratitude into
sly abuse. By testing different skins it is as if she hopes to break the yolk-bag of her
narcissism, to start up a dialectics of identification. She also hopes to break the mould
of social roles assigned to women.
Women are socialized into containing roles. The pain of death is acted out
on the site of women’s bodies; they are given the responsibility to grieve and reconsti-
tute the social order that has been disturbed by a death in the community, especially a
violent death. This containing act involves a ritualized projection in the form of
mourning—which is a dramatization of their body-selves.
In one of her large tableaux in oils titled Love, Deception and Intrigue
(1985–86, Illus. 23), Nalini adapts a conventional European format for the present-
ation of grief. She poses her figures in a frieze but turns them about to face/evade each
other with an acid and insinuating comment about dissembling. The painting is about
the motivation within all contrived ensembles like tableaux/paintings to first block
and then release psychic energies into narrative effect.
In paintings like Woman Destroyed and Signs of Depression (both 1986),
Nalini proposes that if the woman in question cannot play an assigned role her
resistance will often take the form of ‘hysterical’ behaviour, which is in effect a form of
intransigence. ‘They rage against their bodies that have to bear pain within, rather
than just disintegrate in the face of such
tragedy’, Veena Das says, and adds that
grief is not seen as something that will
pass; indeed ‘the representation of grief is
that it is metonymically experienced as
bodily pain and the female body as one
that will carry this pain within forever’.30
Iconographical variations of
the female figure have been hammered
by Nalini in recurrent images. Eunuch
angels serve as mischievous chorus. They 24 Nalini Malani, The Degas Suite, set of 30 books, 1991
Body as Gesture 27
help you read against the grain the events of life and death acted out in the main text
of the picture. A flying female, like a superwoman in the mocking form of a giant
phallus, rolls over the city. There are obsessive multiplications of the same body, as in
The Garden of Earthly Delights: Self-Absorption (1989), drawn, painted, or repro-
duced as print or copy. Bodies of women in states of injury, abandon and anxiety are
worked through repetition towards an inalienable sympathy for the female body—
and its survival beyond the demands of the male gaze. In The Degas Suite (1991, Illus.
24), a set of monotypes is turned through the process of photocopying into thirty
books, where each page is worked upon and handpainted. She mimics the voyeuristic
eye but then supplants it with a gender affiliation whereby female eroticism may be
received more ironically, as both gift and provocation.
In the seminal watercolour Re-thinking Raja Ravi Varma (1989, Illus.
25), Nalini Malani sets up a quarrel with the nineteenth-century artist (and with me
over my interpretation of his work) and offers a virtual summation of her icono-
graphic serial on women up to that moment. A supportive mother-figure is shown
blessing and metamorphosing youthful bodies and recomposing them in a heraldic
sign of female solidarity. The swooping angel points at debilitated female personae in
the history of images (the musician figures painted by Ravi Varma in his Galaxy are
pushed to the margin in Nalini’s watercolour) and, arm outstretched, proclaims her
28 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
protective project on behalf of her young protegees. The melded bodies, live, full-
bottomed, alert, are positioned to take an intrepid stand against the burden of tradi-
tion, representing women outside the frame of history.
This merciful woman swooping into several of Nalini’s pictures is, to my
mind, the great imaginary redeemed from the archaeology of the self and retrieving in
her wake female pain so as to bless it—like/unlike the angel’s enunciation before which
the human Mary shrinks. But perhaps all supernatural enunciations have a cruel tone,
perhaps all speech is already thus imbued with fear, belonging as it does to the symbo-
lic order. Even as Nalini’s angel points and projects she takes on a mediatory presence;
even as she compounds female subjectivities in her body she chastens the desires of the
‘primal self’ and conveys it into an apprehension of the real.
Scheherezade
The real is held in abeyance in Nalini Malani’s work. Or, one might say,
action is quickly exhausted in the cathartic move while meaning is continually
deferred. And one of the devices for doing so is storytelling. Nalini works with the
language of narration as in an allegory, where meaning is always sought to be
reclaimed because meaning is always at the risk of being lost. Allegories, as we know,
are a particularly disciplined, almost mechanical form of narration. Objects, charac-
ters, events work within preordained options of meaning but this meaning can be
decoded to obtain opposite messages: the surrealist’s evil dream as well as the didact’s
good parable.
It is significant that psychoanalysis in the Kleinian tradition regards dream
as allegory. Nalini, who is familiar with that tradition, conducts her dreamwork for all
to see, as a strained but dogged act of pictorialization. In paintings like Fragment of a
Past Retold (1989) and Wuthering Heights (1995), the story will slip but the didactic
props and cliches are cleverly positioned and help to peg it back on to the allegorical
framework. Thus, assuming the role of dreamer and analyst alike, she treats the un-
conscious as a language-in-narration by means of which the other, also always at risk
of being lost, is engaged.
Think of Scheherezade of the Thousand and One Nights. With
Scheherezade we find a double allegory that treats of a woman’s desperate bid to save
herself and her sisters from the prince who will behead all the women he marries in
revenge for his beloved wife’s betrayal of him with his own slave. If his is a displaced
act of castration then Scheherezade’s nightly story to the disconsolate prince is a way of
turning him into a child once more. And not only a child but a sibling, complicit with
Scheherezade and her sister who together contain his anxiety by telling him stories that
play out his great fear while yet swaddling him in a continuous narrative. This saves
Scheherezade and her unknown sisters; it also restores the prince to a state of
adulthood and love. Thus the narrative form is signified at two levels. The story of the
Body as Gesture 29
splendid Scheherezade and the romance of the further stories she tells which are so
constructed that they always yield—keeping reality itself in abeyance.
In Scheherezade-style, Nalini’s storytelling involves restoring the
relationship between herself and the loved object in such a way that reality is tackled—
whence the iconography of a doomed beloved and mock-mother who protects
womankind at the same time as she restores, through fictional means, balance in a
world ruled by male megalomania.
Men/Androgyny
The male presence, in so far as it is add-
ressed by Nalini, is tackled in several
different ways—for example by the
known trick of androgyny. Even as sex-
uality renders itself through theatrical
means we see in her work the emergence
of the vulnerable figure of an acrobat
who is always, as in the Picassian mode,
a little androgynous. Indeed many of
Nalini’s figures turn out to be in the guise
of acrobats. These tender creatures who
mimic the more properly mystical beings
legitimize the healing role of the uncon-
26 Nalini Malani, Watering Man, after Rembrandt scious. In continuation of such bisexual
(or, Small Joys), 1991 ambiguities her over-realized creatures, as
in Of Angels and Monsters (1989), could be sexless.
Paradoxically, Nalini is capable of bestowing upon her male represent-
ations a sublimity seldom found in her female figures. The Boy Dressing series (the last
image of which was painted in 1989) is a simple but strangely allusive image worked
on a white sheet of paper like a repetitive trial sketch. It records a repertoire of gestures
signifying sex/labour/reverie in the working-class male body. The undressing gesture,
which often occurs in her work, hints alternatively at liberation from the day’s labour
and weariness from the night’s sex. The boy’s head smothered in the half-worn shirt
resembles the receded neck of a turtle—a castration image—and yet the upraised arm
in some of the pictures, with the fist still inside the sleeve, is the avenging emblem of an
anonymous worker. On the other hand, the cameo refers also to profound signifi-
cations, as for instance the representation of Christ taking off his upper garment for
the baptism. Painted as if in slow motion, such images are a study in devolution: a
body so self-involved as to resemble an animal licking itself. In the same bracket
consider her Watering Man, after Rembrandt (or, Small Joys) (1991, Illus. 26): here is
a man urinating with the pleasure of a beatific child, a village idiot, a bemused city
30 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
tramp with his belongings in a bag on his back. What is the meaning of this daily bliss?
Two aspects of Nalini’s representational regime about men require further
attention: the ideology of the subaltern figure she persistently portrays, and the
meaning of the city-street as a site for the parade, pilgrimage, procession of life. While
she has a desire to identify with the common man/woman, her sense of responsibility
is ambivalent. There is more a need to get out of her own skin to get into another’s,
to find a common corporeal web. The membrane of paint is a loose mantle wrapped
round the body and easily sloughed for the body to appear anonymous in some
longed-for collectivity. Is it perhaps to find an ontological security that she so iden-
tifies with otherness of all variety?
This existential intrigue informs Nalini Malani’s social vision and her pic-
tures of the poor—mostly labouring men, sometimes a female scavenger, often idling
lumpens and performing beggars—should be read a little ironically. Images of
wrestling, labouring, contorting, turn into play-fighting, which unfurls into the motif
of a humped beggar, poised like an ungainly dervish, dancing! There is among the
working-class and lumpen figures so much alternation between balletic combat, leap-
frogging alacrity and sheer weariness, it is as if she had herself tried and tested the
other’s will and then, almost by default, annihilated it. Spurred by a voluntarist, often
reformist purpose, larger human agency is however subverted by the artist’s own hand.
Her unconscious harbours tragic denouement.
Left: 28 Nalini Malani, Hieroglyphs: Lohar Chawl, 1989. Right: 29 Nalini Malani, City of Desires, 1991
The City
The city Nalini paints is the city of Bombay: Lohar chawl at Princess
street, where she has her studio, bustles with commercial and working-class activities.
From this vantagepoint she tries to elicit an affirmative vision of a mixed population
made into a community by urban compulsions, a population of immigrants made
into a society by work equations. She extracts a language, a hieroglyphic script as it
were, from the street (Illus. 28). There is a stake in putting Bombay on a par with the
metropolitan dream/nightmare that haunts the visual imagination of twentieth-
century artists, putting it on a par with say Berlin, Paris, New York. There is what she
herself designates in one of her titles, A Gross Idealization of Lohar Chawl (1989).
She has also been painting the secret city, the city by night, the city turning
into a dim and muddy cosmos. In The City and Its Ghosts/The City and Its Phantoms
(1988) she can insert her own personae, shades dogging the all-too-real characters of
an alien world. There are people on the move like somnambulists. There are male/
female figures carrying loads, carrying people who are lame or selfish, carrying them on
their backs or in trolleys, into the maze.
There are pictures with spatial metaphors for distance often personified by
figures actually walking away or tipping out of the frame and running. Beyond the
vagabondage, the private madness, the public spectacle, this circus becomes an
allegorical description of the social ground. City of Desires (1991, Illus. 29), a small
painting, heralds this allegorical turn. People traverse infernos and fall like martyred
heroes, preparing the ground for historical upheavals. Through this visual entropy
Nalini’s political sense draws out images of social abominations—of rape and riot—
stepping up the vocabulary and power of the narrative means, working out a social
chronicle based on the pain of individual and collective survival. If all this is a form of
medievalism the consummation of it is in the watercolour The Sufi and the Bhakta
32 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
(1991, Illus. 27), where the protagonists in the figural ensemble bear anonymity
without alienation and find grace through everyday transactions on the street.
The Gesture
From 1989 Nalini Malani has demonstrated what may be called an anti-
aesthetic. She dehomogenized the picture surface making it smudged and erased,
scarred and pitted. She started dragging, lifting, floating the figures through her white
primer substance which appeared translucent but glutinous, like a kind of sludge.
Then she slapped together images one upon another to make up a palimpsest, except
that it tended to read, in the tradition of Francis Picabia, like graffiti: a jumble of
contours rudely running into each other and flattening/fracturing the surface.
To break the pact with the viewer Nalini has devised her own ‘alienating’
methods. Images are keyed in and retried in different registers; they are tampered with
and defaced to break the taboo of taste and sanity. The framed picture that normally
coalesces the mirror with the window on the world is disjointed. Nalini shatters the
mirror and takes off the frame—so that the view never jells.
Once we focus on the gestalt we see that though Nalini deliberately
inscribes the sign of chaos across the surface, the gestalt retains a textual coherence:
disarticulate surface and anarchist choreography are clues to interpret the dream. They
are the means for the disidentification of the protagonist in the melee; and for a
rereading of the image in terms of a pictorial trick of displacement corresponding to
the operations of the unconscious, and with a similar purpose.
What is foregrounded in the blurred and unstable view is the gesture,
heavily borrowed from the great art of the east and the west. Nalini elicits the gesture
from the masters with passionate exactitude and then desacralizes their aesthetic. She
breaks the taboo at the sexual level (giving frequent hints at obscenity), and also at the
level of the art-historical referent. She overrides the rules of modernist aesthetic that
say you may borrow but not filch, that you must not mix and meddle, that you must
keep to visual integrity.
However gratuitous they may at first appear, her improvisations/
quotations from the European masters, from the Siyah Qalem, from Akbari minia-
tures, are friendly and grateful, clever and teasing. She uses quotations in a variety of
ways. First, to insert the image/ideology of an artist and make a direct comment on
it—as for example, the quotation from Amrita Sher-Gil and Frida Kahlo in Old
Arguments about Indigenism or from Degas in The Degas Suite. Second, to use the
image as an impersonation, as with Re-thinking Raja Ravi Varma, where the very
iconography provides the masquerade and slowly unmasks other meanings. Third, she
quotes drawing conventions to gain her own; she ‘copies’, one might say, and then
improvises the shape and content for her own purpose. Whether this is Rembrandt’s
etching of the pissing man in her own Watering Man, after Rembrandt, or Delacroix’s
Body as Gesture 33
seated figure in Women of Algiers in her own The Sufi and the Bhakta, she is giving
herself a wonderfully rich art-history lesson.
With Nalini Malani pushing her work into excess, improvisation,
eclecticism and indulgent sexuality, the obvious context of postmodernism has to be
considered. The excess has clearly to do with transgression; with saying all, and more.
And this in turn has to do with being a woman and being an artist from the periphery,
both at once. Her eclecticism does not figure as free appropriation but as ardent desire
to gain speech, to gain through the masquerade the key gesture. To gain through train-
ed invention of types the body whereby to handle the self, to recover the lost sense of
compassion and dignity—but by engaging, even tempting herself, with social chaos,
with nihilist dissolution.
Medea
In the 1990s Nalini Malani introduced the dimension of installation,
theatre and video in her work. In 1992 she drew and painted on the walls of Gallery
Chemould in Bombay a scenario which she called The City of Desires, and on the basis
of which she made her first artist-video.31
At the same time she entered theatre and started working with the
remarkable actress Alaknanda Samarth on Heiner Mueller’s dramatic reinterpretation
of the Greek myth of Medea (Medeaspiel, a synoptic theatre of images, written in
1974; Despoiled Shore, Medeamaterial, and Landscape with Argonauts, an elabora-
tion of the theme, written in 1982).32 When the project started Nalini seemed set to use
theatre for the bodying forth of her own obsessions: to appropriate the performer, to
distend her figure repertoire by theatrical identification. By the end of 1993 Nalini
Malani’s Medeaprojekt (as she named her sustained work on the theme) exceeded her
impulse. The performance space was extended to the foyer and the street. Nalini inclu-
ded painting, objects, artefacts, reproduced images on slide, TV and video in the
theatre/installation. Under the spell of Mueller’s speech and Samarth’s voice she
learned to let go, to disaggregate her overtly expressionist imagery. With Samarth act-
ing out in a controlled cathartic style an inherited myth of female insanity, Nalini was
as if free to move in and out of the charged scenario through a transference strategy
sanctioned, even facilitated, by theatre.
Why Medeaprojekt so engages Malani can be seen by scanning the
calibrated form of text/performance/imagery that Heiner Mueller’s recreated Medea
presents as a dramaturgical montage. Unlike the ethics of mourning that Antigone
upholds Medea devolves into monologic speech, into howls, into a voice split in
several registers across the landscape that is her grave. In the interstices of the writ-
ten word, in the hiss of the chorus, in the debris after the holocaust, her memory of
love as it is transposed into murder persists: of her natal family, of her children killed
by her own hands.
34 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
30 Nalini Malani, The Betrayal of Medea, from the Despoiled Shore series,
Medeaprojekt, 1993
31 Nalini Malani’s theatre installation for Mueller’s Landscape with Argonauts: Alaknanda
Samarth performs as Medea, Medeaprojekt, 1993
36 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Mutants
I want to break mankind apart in two
And live within the empty middle I
No man and no woman
At the time of the Medeaprojekt Nalini did drawings and paintings that
culminated in her Mutants series. At once obscene and pathetic in their display of
malformed limbs and mixed genitals, the mutants bring sexuality to naught. This
series culminated in 1996 in a set of life-size images (in chalk, charcoal, dye, acrylic, oil
paint on paper and wall). A shadowy pageant of medieval grostequeries (or phantoms
in Tarkovsky’s forbidden zone), they are also a kind of apotheosis styled by a grand
deformation of the human body (Illus. 33, 34).
Erotic, murderous and profoundly pitiable, the mutants stand at the
threshold guarding allegories of contemporary civilization. In the shadow of these
implosions of limb and soul there is a strange, sanguine state of abjection; you
Body as Gesture 37
surrender to morbidity and to the seduction that goes with it. Acknowledging this
abjection, Nalini defers the quest for selfhood—the beggared body of the mutant
alerts us, as in the sublime moments of a wake, to a state of endurable mortality. She
cathects this ‘hope’ first in a woman’s body, now in a mutant’s body that bares as it
were the enigma of nature’s travesty: a stigmata that is indeed beyond representation.
The relationship between the figure and ground has still some of the
gestalt with which Nalini started her small work on paper in the 1980s. When she
enlarges these to life-size figures there remains a sense of bodily immanence. It is as if
she produces her figures by rolling, coagulating, smudging balls of visceral matter,
body fluids, molten blood. And they leave their impress on the beholder. The mutant
has a dismembered body—loose spine, jellied flesh, sprung limbs, sheathed genitals. It
is draped on an armature much like that of a puppet but with a fierce head, shrinking
torso and soft, prominently exposed buttocks, it still has a provocative expressivity,
an uncanny grip. Human rage is plucked from the romantic/realist repertoire ranging
from Goya to Degas to the great roll-call of high expressionism, to contemporaries like
Ron Kitaj and Nancy Spero. Possessed by the act of figural delineation and modelling
of flesh, she presses up a wail as if to bring soul to mouth—and in the dark, shimmer-
ing profusion of breath all the cross-references, even the deliberate pastiche fade into
an intensely private sigh.
33 Nalini Malani, Mutant IV (V-Sign), ‘A’ series, 1994 34 Nalini Malani, Mutant II, ‘A’ series, 1994
38 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Global Parasites
A series of paintings in oils and watercolour produced since 1996
announces Nalini Malani’s social concern for environmental abuse she thematizes it
after the title of her currently favourite book, Global Parasites.33 Social concern not-
withstanding, it is the condition of degeneracy evoked by the objective presence of
parasites in nature and the social environment that she now doggedly pursues. While
parasites are a scientifically verifiable category she projects into it the fantastical figure
of the vampire, the bloodsucking bat that is the allegorical sign under which the uni-
verse of evil is realized. Nalini sees herself engaged in a critique of imperialist exploit-
ation, while in her choice of inherited symbology one can also see her as always
probing the wound (Illus. 35).
Yet there is objectification that comes from the range of artistic devices:
acetate sheet, photocopying, screens, monotype, frottage, photos, neon, animation
and video. She builds up what is by now not only a huge cast of characters but a
body of pictorial quirks for a mythology of doom. She works like a doomsday oracle
who spells out destruction to rid the populace of its unknown sins and all-too
intentional crimes.
If there is reparation it comes unobtrusively, in the form of a new icono-
graphy of gentle beasts—several species of animals trembling in small flocks. Needing
to be saved, they help recall the tenderness that all great traditions of paintings invest
in the animal form: think especially of Mughal and early renaissance painting, both
inaugurating a new humanism and a reign of reason and yet offering, as in the work of
Antonio Pisanello or Miskin, a state of spiritual attentiveness, a condition of grace
within the animal stance. Nalini makes the sheep, hare, antelope, birds and beached
whales into innocent creatures eliciting our ultimate compassion. It is through the
body of the humble beast driven by global pollution that compassion (re)enters her
world of cruel follies.
Body as Gesture 39
Arpita Singh
Female Solidarities
Arpita Singh (b. 1937)34 is heir to the burden of female ennui and erotic
reverie of the Amrita Sher-Gil pictures which were among the first she admired and
emulated at art school in Delhi during the late 1950s. She is at the same time a worthy
sequel to Frida Kahlo in that she breaks the cycle of female masochism by an act of
profound reparation and makes the woman’s body whole again. She helps herself to
this wholeness by the imaginary gift of a girl-child. Late in life, all over again the
matronly protagonist of her paintings bears a child. She transforms the solitude of
mature desire to a state of magnificence. Yet, as if in desperate remembrance, this
mother holds her child in the manner of a phallic substitute. This double image
sublimates the envy and cruelty and grace and confusion of being a woman. Her
continuing series since 1994 are variations on the theme of a woman with a girl-child.
Exhibiting together during 1987–89,35 Arpita Singh, Nalini Malani,
Nilima Sheikh and Madhvi Parekh found ways to deal with women’s proverbial
melancholy, to give it a comic/tragic face, to open it out into narratives. I make an
exemplary case of the value of communication between these artists to show how they
established through each other intertwined contours of a life-process, of a life in
process. Nalini, by taking the high risk of complete disintegration, by her growing
preference for formal disunity, by her unresolved subjectivity that teeters on the edge of
gross dramatization, provoked in the work of Arpita the will to life. At the same time
a tenderness blossomed in Arpita’s work whereby she could circumvent the theatri-
cality that Nalini upholds to meet up with Nilima’s abiding belief in the poetics of
affection. Even as she complemented the wit of Madhvi’s naive painting with the
phantasms of her own infantile reverie. In communion with the other women artists,
Arpita pushed aside her fabulously cultivated garden of images to expose the volatile
inner life of the female protagonist who breathes and expands.
Modernist Language
Before we go on to the transformations in Arpita’s work as a result of
these (post-1987) female solidarities, a brief review of her consistent thirty years’ work
is in place. Since the 1960s she has been among the committed modernists in Indian
art, understanding the terms of reference down to the details: impasto brushwork,
irradiating hues, informal design, chance encounters, erased dreams (Flowers and
Figures, 1972–74, Illus. 37). Set within an overall ornamental structure replete with
images of memory and romance, her earlier paintings recall Marc Chagall.
In her 1975–79 drawings the see-through nets knitted over the skyspace
make playful allusion to illusionism’s insubstantial support (Illus. 36). Like her exact
contemporary Nasreen Mohamedi, she fused the structure and support through the
manifest use of a grid—the ultimate trope of the modernist preoccupation with form.
40 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
But unlike Nasreen, Arpita got around mainstream modernism shaped through male
hands by the use of decorative patterning. She participated in the reconstitution by
women of the function and form of art via ornament within/without modernism.
As for the medium of oils, she knows better than most Indian painters
how to use it to sumptuous effect. Working with pure pigment and little oil, the artist
is bold in her patisserie, kneading colour, building up a dry cake with sweet stuffings,
layer upon layer. She is a cook and mason at once: she squeezes the tube on the canvas
and makes the pigment adhere like plaster or cement; she cuts and layers little shovel-
loads of congealed pigment into waves cradling an object moulded from the same
substance. She works out the figure-ground with a deeply embedded contour and then
lifts off the figure like a body hypnotized. I am referring to paintings like Sea Shore
(1984, Illus. 38), Munna Appa’s Garden (1989) and A Dead Man on the Street: Is It
You, Krishna? (1994).
Arpita distinguishes between a painterly and a graphic sensibility and uses
both in her watercolours of the last ten years. The image on paper is small; the material
immanence gives it magnitude beyond even the larger oils. She draws, erases, scrapes
down the surface with sandpaper making the surface resemble a ruined wall, making
the contour fragile to the point of being brittle. Then she draws again with red ochre,
building on the broken surface and obtaining the quality of a restored fresco. She
draws with a kind of inverse virtuosity undermining the ‘master’ draughtsmen. Then
she paints in the watercolour: she lays a ground, draws, lifts the contour with a brush
and lets a negative contour of thin white runnels crisscross the surface. While the
pigment in oil lies creamy thick—azure pink yellow vermilion white—the parched
watercolours float and shimmer. In a painting titled The Blue Water Sheet (1994), a
sleeping figure gains some kind of oeneiric deliverance.
Fabrications
The allusion to fabric has meaning. To start with, there are folds and
swirls of drapery and plenty of cloak-and-dagger stories in Arpita Singh’s repertoire.
There is a teasing aspect to the figures being like the women in purdah, secretly volup-
tuous. The cloth reference has also to do with weaving, with sitting on the loom like
Penelope, to prolong memory. And it has to do with the specific task of stitching,
suturing, embroidering with multicoloured yarns and with the blinding care that goes
into that female industry.
In the early 1980s her oil paintings sported fluttering flags as if she were
emblematizing the cloth support of painting. Then she introduced stitching in and
around the emergent figures whereby they appeared to be as if appliqued, cloth on
cloth, over the picture surface. If the watercolour Garden (1985) is like a piece of
42 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
embroidery, the Family Lily Pool (1994) is like a pichhavai, both cloth-based forms
that give a different materiality to the work. Gradually she has developed an aesthetic
whereby the material artifice of the painting is also a curtain/banner/mantle. Her work
is seldom about looking through and beyond with a perspectival vision; the artist–
spectator is ducking behind and under and over the painting, clutching at the motifs
that wave and tilt the undulating surface.
In her more recent work Arpita shows stretched hems which not only have
bitten-off floral borders as in old quilts, it is as if the phantasmagoric quilt itself is not
large enough. The secret is let out. The edge of the picture reveals a teeming under-
world of bodies and objects. It is a grown girl’s coverlet still fresh with her adolescent
pleasures, the pigment blooming, the surface cushioned thick with images. An Indian
viewer familiar with kanthas, the folk art of cotton quilting made exclusively by
women as part of their dowry in Bengal (Arpita’s home state), will recognize the
connection. The reference to kanthas works down to the delineation and disposition
of the figural motifs in all-round patterns, the figures standing on their heads when it
comes to the viewer’s/user’s relation to them. Seen from above and therefore always
ultimately two-dimensional, this mantle of delights produces the desire for a compa-
nionable huddle.
As is so frequent in the folk and popular art of Bengal, the pattern and the
iconography are open-ended. These quilts had embroidered trains and gun-toting
firangi soldiers or any other newfangled commodity the village women had
encountered. Likewise, Arpita’s repertoire of planes and cars and guns and sahibs is
like her great-grandmothers’ imagination, full of toy-totems that designate wishes and
taboos. It is a woman’s world view on the material reality of things that make up the
working substance of life.
Thus Arpita cues into women’s work, their rhythmics of labour, their
choreographic clustering of objects, their idiosyncratic formalism. This in turn con-
nects with the revival by women artists of patterning, or what came to be called
pattern art and included quilts, paintings, collages, in the western feminine/feminist
art practice of the 1970s.
The feminist point of view should however be reinscribed in Arpita’s case
into two earlier ideologies to which she owes overt allegiance. One should continue to
see Arpita’s work within the spectrum of modernist sensibilities. Her work makes the
kind of cross-reference that modern artists have throughout made to native con-
ventions, the more so when these are living traditions of folk icons, textiles and
handicraft in their midst. We know from the example of, say, Natalia Goncharova or
Frida Kahlo (belonging respectively to the movements of Russian futurism and
Mexican cultural renaissance in the first two decades of the twentieth century), how
this move helped nonwestern avantgardes to derive a fresh gestalt—to float or conceal
or find figural elements too ‘well made’ in the western/realist realm of pictorial
Body as Gesture 43
Alice
Ideology apart, Arpita’s dec-
orative imagery contorts into the beauti-
ful and the grotesque alike. It makes up
codes for desired objects. It is a terrain of
heavy condensation. Metaphoric images
are mapped one upon another but the
artist’s hand subverts firm positionings
and the objects do not find their sub-
ject. And therein lies the nightmare, as
in the surrealist experience. It produces
both the burgeoning image and the
simulacrum of dysfunctional signs (Illus.
39, 40).
Older than most currently
working women artists, Arpita Singh has
played Alice for close to thirty years and
has become a veritable little mistress of
Indian art. Through the decade of the
1980s she introduced a whole array of
fetish objects and decoys in her images—
cups, cars, guns and aeroplanes, shoes
and ducks, deep sofas and cushy flower-
beds—which were, in the sexual sense,
tokens of bonafide/malafide desire.
Repeatedly since she has put out picture-
pantomimes where cats, dolls and nym-
phets begin to speak, after which it was
the turn of the goddesses and then of the
beloveds and the little mothers of Bengali
lore. Thus she prepared herself to subject
the great imaginary to a reality test; to
Above: 39 Arpita Singh, The Child Bride, 1984. Below: 40 Arpita Singh, objectify it and find a language in nur-
Woman with Car, 1987 sery rhyme, pictorial alliteration and
44 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
decorative motif. And then slowly, in a more complex gestalt. The dysfunctional
signs, as I call them, graduated to the order of the symbolic by baiting reality.
Compositionally her pictures are made up of a huddle of men and women
and children at the tail-end of the fairy tale tradition. Gesticulating figures in a
perpetual cycle of innocence, anxiety and menace, you can see them pick up their
thickset limbs and sock you in the face to gain reality. The more than life-size objects
composed around and about these figures are toys of erotic play but discarded as
though in a state of sorrow. There has always been a charade at work, the viewer is
seduced and abandoned. And the pictures too have this funerary aspect, the space
between figure and object is choked with large, fat flowers in posies and bouquets
meant for the dead. An obituary, is it?, to the girl-child living out centuries of
childhood.
Doll-Soul
At a time when everyone was still intent on giving us a quick and reassuring
answer, the doll was the first to inflict on us that tremendous silence (larger than
life) which was later to come to us repeatedly out of space, whenever we
approached the frontiers of our existence at any point. It was facing the doll, as
it stared at us, that we experienced for the first time (or am I mistaken?) that
emptiness of feeling, that heart-pause, in which we should perish did not the
whole, gently persisting Nature then lift us across abysses like some lifeless
thing. Are we not strange creatures to let ourselves go and to be induced to
place our earliest affections where they remain hopeless? So that everywhere
there was imparted to that most spontaneous tenderness the bitterness of
knowing that it was in vain? A poet might succumb to the domination of a
marionette, for the marionette has only imagination. The doll has none, and is
precisely so much less than a thing as the marionette is more.
But that, in spite of all this, we did not make an idol of you, you sack, and did
not perish in the fear of you, that was, I tell you, because we were not thinking
of you at all. We were thinking of something quite different, an invisible Some-
thing, which we held high above you and ourselves, secretly and with fore-
boding, and for which both we and you were, so to say, merely pretexts, we
were thinking of a soul: the doll-soul.
O doll-soul, not made by God, you soul, asked for capriciously from some
thoughtless fairy, thing-soul breathed forth by an idol with mighty effort, which
we have all, half timidly, half magnanimously received and from which no one
can entirely withdraw himself, O soul, that has never been really worn.36
Body as Gesture 45
Lamentation
Here it is important to make an aside. Notwithstanding the apparent
attractiveness of her work, Arpita’s pervasive theme is death. The explanation of why
it might be so seems in its recounting similar to many an artist’s biography. It has to do
with her father’s early death when she was only six. She was exceptionally close to
him, she says; he was her primary, even sole friend. Her imaginary influx draws her
into a state of perpetual play but not on account of that customary source of
plenitude—the mother. It is in memory of her father, to compensate for his irrevocable
loss. Indeed it is compensation for a double loss. For not only did she lose her father as
playmate, her mother went into an obsessively orderly mode after his death. Providing
for her children in the face of social odds, she became a stoical figure, a middle-class
working woman in a regulatory cast (My Mother, 1993, Illus. 41).
Arpita was left with simulating plenitude that veiled a deathlike narci-
ssism. If her adult behaviour is distinctly girlish at times, it is as if she must play to
mourn and reclaim the father; only if she plays can she make her imaginary conform
to the real. Yet, deprived as she has been of the properly symbolic transformation, she
mocks the law of survival. The more her pictures bloom (Mourners’ Bouquet, 1993),
the more she signals her withdrawal (Funeral Urns II, 1995).
Since the 1960s a traumatized sexuality, placed preciously within pro-
grammed play, has gone through visible autobiographical and pictorial transmu-
tations. During the decade of the 1980s when her daughter was an adolescent, the
rich surface of the painting showed masked juliets, frigid lolitas, ophelias of cruel
patriarchies, little cassandras. Sometimes these became transposed into the ambiguous
identity of a girl-boy, as in Ayesha Kidwai against White, against Grey (1985). From
the 1990s Arpita’s representations include beloveds, mothers and ordinary women
subject to assault, subject to anguish, subject to death. She began finally to share the
task of mourning that includes one’s own lost beloveds, as it includes the martyred
members of society. The mourners, mostly women, present a staged and ceremonial
performance, a community image where the sense of belonging is stressed by the
physical togetherness of clinging bodies. Now the woman’s figure demonstrates both
its ability to couple as well as courage in its large and ample singularity, as in
Afternoon (1994), Woman Sitting—The Dissolving Body (1995).
At the very least these scenes of violence constitute the perhaps metaphysical
thresholds within which the scenes of ordinary life are lived.
In the genre of lamentation, women have control both through their bodies and
through their language—grief is articulated through the body, for instance, by
infliction of grievous hurt on oneself, ‘objectifying’ and making present the
inner state, and is finally given a home in language. Thus the transactions
between body and language lead to an articulation of the world in which the
strangeness of the world revealed by death, by its non-inhabitability, can be
transformed into a world in which one can dwell again, in full awareness of a
life that has to be lived in loss. This is one path towards healing—women call
such healing simply the power to endure.37
Charades of Death
And instead of the simplified images of healing that assume that reliving a
trauma or decathecting desire from the lost object and reinvesting it elsewhere,
we need to think of healing as a kind of relationship with death.38
Women may signify their life as work, as labour which includes nurturing
the child, loving, mourning, but also reading, fending for themselves, witnessing the
destruction of false and feminine utopias one after another. The female reader is a well-
known motif in western art; it is a signifier for the inner life of the protagonist as also
her modesty before the workaday world of the male. In Arpita Singh’s paintings as
they develop the book alternates with the child, both are substituted by a weapon. A
gun places her female protagonist in the world of men with a vengeance that is never
quite specified.
The mode changes as well: there is a shift from the lyrical to the dramatic,
precisely via the metaphoric double-take. Arpita proceeds from a puppet-pantomime
type of performance to the higher absurd. Consider the naked woman facing the
Body as Gesture 47
uniform and the sense of active terror practised on a woman through the sly manoeu-
vres of a game. The screams and the songs in a prayerlike chant about the seasons with
simpleminded words and gestures. And then the sleight-of-hand in Pina Bausch’s
choreography: the collapse of the standing figure, the murderous slapstick movements
of death and dying and the regathering of the limbs to life.
Arpita’s work always displays flowers that shroud and embellish. They set
the stage for the quiet gesture of grief, funeral postures with the offering of a bouquet.
Soldier-drills, wrestlers grappling hand-to-hand, thigh-to-thigh (the postures taken
from wrestling manuals), figures scrambling on the ground in proxy for sexual love:
these dummies in combat are about life and death, raising the moot point about who
survives, and the mockery of decoys that do survive. There is always, again and again,
the gesture of collapse, the prone figure, someone felled, someone in an epileptic faint,
someone mimicking death.40
Holding Out
The gesture of the woman holding a gun, holding it with a terrible
confidence, mocks the phallic weaponry that comforts men in their sexual insecurities.
There is also mimicry, as in her Durga (1994, Illus. 46), of the goddess with many
weapons.41 These icons, deeply embedded in the Indian psyche, are not without irony
—why do men hand over to the mother-goddesses these castrating weapons?
Yet the goddess herself is vulnerable. Like the flowers Arpita insistently
paints, like the luscious magnolia, the golden goddess is forced open, her hands curled,
her crotch showing. Expressly social, expressly public. The subject, moreover, of inner
motivation that needs multiple limbs to launch itself into a struggle in the busy world,
as in Devi Emerging from the Wednesday Market (1990, Illus. 45). Equally, the
goddess who has been torn open folds in like a lotus, she composes herself in a posture
of erotic absorption. Built compactly, with packed flesh and self-protective crouch, she
47 Arpita Singh, A Tired Woman and Men Against the Wall, 1992
50 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
is sanguine but infinitely sad and, yes, defends herself from the blows of the world. In
the watercolour titled A Tired Woman and Men against the Wall (1991, Illus. 47) the
aggressors are absent but the woman rests her poor head on one of her six rotating
arms, and the men line up with the hope of climbing over the wall whence they will
probably be shot.
In the gesture of the mature woman holding a girl-child who is already
herself a woman (Illus. 48), the goddess is actually transcended. Revived from private
oblivion, held by her fierce and benign mother, the daughter grows up, she faces life,
she endures. The narrative relay now allows, as in My Daughter (1995, Illus. 49), this
moment of becoming.
Thus do Arpita’s figures survive. The recent nutlike female body clinches
the message. From 1996 her reverse paintings in acrylic and her little watercolours
offer a pop-out parody of a series of kitsch icons that would be charming if they were
not a little crazy: half-clothed girls seem to revert to a nursery-rhyme world with,
50 Arpita Singh, Feminine Fable, 1996 51 Arpita Singh, Feminine Fable, 1996
finally, a hard note of mockery about innocence, about modesty, and about the
claimed verity of the world (Illus. 50, 51). Framing the feminine with goddesses
and these stubborn little marionettes, Arpita makes an even more reclusive space
for the female body. A body for sustaining trauma and some rare moments of efful-
gent grace.
Meanwhile the artist, herself a firm atheist, tends her home like a priest
‘her’ temple. In the studio the priestess turns into a lonely witch-mother. Arpita alters
the gestalt of her pictures so that she can contract, expand, invite, expel the world—
and reassemble its debris. She waves her wand in a virtuoso gesture while self-doubt
manifests itself in the very process of her obsessive work. It leaves an all-over trace as if
to say the figures brought to life with whispering, rubbing, scratching, redrawing, are
in the end her flesh-and-blood progeny. Saved after so much cruel and caressing
erasure, they are endowed with the pressing desire and dogged stamina to hold out.
Dostoevsky. She chose the forceful Hungarian poet Andre Ady as her contemporary reference.
She brought the same aesthetic to her painting and openly scorned sentiment in art. She
embraced high passion as a vocational necessity and made an arrogant display of her tempe-
rament. This can be gleaned from letters published in Vivan Sundaram, K.G. Subramanyan,
Gulammohammed Sheikh, Geeta Kapur, Amrita Sher-Gil.
5 To briefly sum up Sher-Gil’s western sources: taught by the postimpressionist painter Lucien
Simon, she adopted that aesthetic. Sher-Gil’s decision to take her postimpressionism towards
greater realism should also be seen in relation to her art school contemporaries, Boris Taslitzky
and Francis Gruber, who became well-known leftwing artists in late 1930s’ France. (Sher-Gil
repeatedly painted Boris Taslitzky at art school—he is the elegant model for her Young Man
with Apples, 1932. Taslitzky speaks about Amrita as a friend in his autobiography Tu Parle.)
Many of her classmates including Gruber became part of the Forces Nouvelles Group (1935–
39) that aspired to launch a renewed realist–humanism. Though Amrita herself was not a left-
ist, nor even particularly political, her choices were vindicated by the ideology and aesthetic
of interwar realism. She spent her summers in Hungary—in Zebegeny—where she would
have met well-known painters like Istvan Szonyi, working in the realist genre. As against the
fascist version of neoclassical realism of the same period, such realisms were based on a
compassionate allegiance to the people within the broad frame of European humanism.
6 Sher-Gil’s letter to Karl Khandalavala, dated 30 April 1941, in Vivan Sundaram, K.G. Subra-
manyan, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Geeta Kapur, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 134. Khandalavala, a
close friend, introduced her to the wealth of Indian miniatures. With him she exchanged
precise insights about Indian art that make up an annotated chronicle of a painter’s encounter
with her tradition. This account remains remarkably illuminating to this day. Khandalavala
published a fine book on her paintings posthumously (Amrita Sher-Gil) and played a major
role in the development of art-historical studies in postindependence India.
7 Sher-Gil’s letter to Karl Khandalavala, dated 16 May 1937, in Vivan Sundaram, K.G. Subra-
manyan, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Geeta Kapur, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 112.
8 Letter to her parents, in ibid., p. 92.
9 Intent on seeing the great art of India that she had glimpsed at Musee Guimet in Paris, Sher-
Gil travelled in 1937 from Shimla to Bombay, Ajanta, Ellora, Hyderabad, Mysore,
Trivandrum, Cochin, Mattancheri, and then back to the north via Allahabad to Delhi. For
part of the trip she had as a travelling companion the Bengal School painter Barada Ukil, with
whom she also exhibited in makeshift shows.
10 In 1939 Amrita Sher-Gil spent a year in Hungary. There she married her Hungarian doctor-
cousin Victor Egan, who had seen her through her student adventures in Europe and was
acquainted with her ‘promiscuity’. Sher-Gil and Egan came away from Europe just before the
second world war engulfed Europe, bringing the nazis to Hungary. They were given a niche
in the Majithia estates in Saraya where Sher-Gil painted her next set of important pictures
based on her growing acquaintance with Indian miniatures.
Two sets of influences determine her approach to miniature paintings in their
genre aspect. Educated to glean their representational protocol and stylistics by Khandala-
vala, she underpinned this with her lived experience in the feudal setting at Saraya. Surround-
ed by landed families of uncles and cousins, by tenant farmers, by workers at the sugar factory
and by domestic servants, she took to posing her clan and the retainers in tableaux. These
resembled miniature tableaux, sometimes in a sentimental, mostly in an ironic or playful way.
On the aspect of the popular and generic aspect of pahari miniatures, see Lawrence Binyon,
54 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
The Spirit of Man in Ancient Art, Dover, New York, 1965. The researches of B.N. Goswamy
on this subject are definitive; see B.N. Goswamy and Eberhard Fischer, Pahari Masters: Court
Painters of Northern India, Artibus Asiae Publishers Supplementum XXXVIII and Museum
Rietberg, Zurich, 1992.
11 Amrita’s last years in Saraya were a period of severe retraction into a life that was still, in the
strict sense of the word, feudal. And while this allowed her some idle pleasures with her exten-
ded family it also led to a sense of privation—monetary and intellectual. Her letters speak of
her isolation and suicidal depression. In 1941 she determined to return to a more stimulating
life and moved to Lahore, which was at the time the cultural capital of north India—here the
liberal elite, the leftwing and the nationalist intelligentsia formed an inspiring context. She
arranged to show her work in a major exhibition in December 1941. A few days before the
exhibition Amrita Sher-Gil, not yet twenty-nine, died suddenly. The exact cause of her death
has never been confirmed but it is believed to be either a mishandled abortion or an abscess
caused by a dormant venereal disease contracted in Paris. She was in the care of her doctor-
husband. When her family and friends entered the house they found Amrita lying deathly pale
amidst blood-soaked sheets. She had been haemorrhaging for three days and was too far gone
to be saved.
12 Amrita Sher-Gil had made a brief but intense connection with Jawaharlal Nehru who she first
met through the Congress leader Dewan Chamanlal and his Eurasian wife Helen, Amrita’s
closest friend. Nehru and Amrita met in Lahore in 1936, then in Delhi in 1937. They exchang-
ed letters (most of which her mother destroyed after Amrita’s death). In 1940, just before
going for a prison sentence, Nehru went specially to meet Amrita at Saraya, Gorakhpur.
Her tragic and untimely death became a public, nearly national-scale
mourning to which figures like Gandhi and Nehru responded with messages of condolence to
Madame Umrao Singh. (See Gandhi’s letter, dated 24 April 1942, in Usha, Vol. III, No. 2, p.
3; and Nehru’s letter, in ibid., p. 5.) Immediately after independence Umrao Singh Sher-Gil
presented about a hundred (from a total of about 150 paintings known to exist in public and
private collections) of Amrita’s paintings to Nehru as a gift for the nation. Treating it as a
precious legacy, Nehru turned it into the core collection of what was to become, in 1954, the
National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.
13 There is a substantial body of literature on Frida Kahlo. I include here a selection of readings
that I have extensively drawn upon. First, Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida
Kahlo, Harper and Row, New York, 1983; and Frida Kahlo: The Paintings, Bloomsbury,
London, 1992. For a theoretical framing of her elaborate persona and self-made iconicity, see
Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti, exhibition catalogue, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London,
1982; specifically the title/curatorial essay by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, ‘Frida Kahlo
and Tina Modotti’. (The catalogue also includes short essays by Andre Breton and Diego
Rivera.) Further, see Charles Merewether’s curatorial essay, ‘Embodiment and Transfor-
mation: The Art of Frida Kahlo’, in The Art of Frida Kahlo, exhibition catalogue, Adelaide
Festival, 1990.
14 Andre Breton, ‘Frida Kahlo de Rivera’ (reproduced from his Surrealism and Painting,
Macdonald, London, 1972), in Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti, pp. 35–36.
Breton welcomed Frida Kahlo into the ranks of surrealism and this advanced
her career. She was invited to have a show by New York’s surrealist-oriented Julien Levy
Gallery in 1938. Following her New York debut, Frida travelled to Paris in 1939. Andre
Breton had promised her a show. When she arrived in Paris she discovered that nothing had
Body as Gesture 55
been organized and she found the business of the exhibition ‘a damn mess’. Hayden Herrera
quotes Kahlo: ‘Until I came the paintings were still in the custom house, because the s. of a b.
Breton didn’t take the trouble to get them out. . . . So I had to wait days and days just like an
idiot till I met Marcel Duchamp (marvellous painter), who is the only one who has his feet on
the earth, among all this bunch of coocoo lunatic sons of bitches of the surrealists. . . . Well,
after things were more or less settled as I told you, a few days ago Breton told me that the
associate of Pierre Colle, an old bastard and son of a bitch, saw my paintings and found that
only two were possible to be shown, because the rest are too “shocking” for the public!! I
could kill that guy and eat it [sic] afterwards, but I am so sick and tired of the whole affair
that I have decided to send everything to hell, and scram from this rotten Paris before I get
nuts myself.’ (Herrera, Frida Kahlo: The Paintings, p. 119)
Duchamp rescued Frida’s paintings from customs and arranged to present
the show, Mexique, whose curator was Breton. She was delighted with the vernissage on
10 March 1939. ‘There were’, she wrote to friends, ‘a lot of people on the day of the opening,
great congratulations to the “chicua”, amongst them a big hug from Joan Miro and great
praises for my painting from Kandinsky, congratulations from Picasso and Tanguy, from
Paalen and from other “big cacas” of Surrealism.’ (Ibid., p. 122)
15
Frida Kahlo (6 July 1907–13 July 1954) was born in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City, and
lived there in the famous ‘Blue House’ nearly all her life. Her father Guillermo Kahlo,
Hungarian Jew from Baden-Baden, migrated to Mexico in 1891 and was a successful photo-
grapher in the Diaz era. Her father taught Frida to use the camera, to retouch colour photos,
to give attention to minute details. The father’s studio portraits influenced how Frida
positioned her subjects and herself, as if posing for the camera. Frida was close to her father.
When she had polio at age seven her father helped her to gain strength—and she learnt the
power of a sick person to attract attention and control people—even as she helped her father
who was an epileptic. Her mother Matilde Calderon, Mexican of mixed Indian and Spanish
ancestry, did not know how to read and write. Although she was a lively companion, there
was no close bonding between Frida and her mother.
16
Both Sher-Gil and Kahlo dressed in ethnic style, flaunted their beauty, unleashed a cruel
humour and dramatized desire. At the same time they cultivated a degree of self-absorption
that came probably from bisexuality but also from a reclusive sense of self that produced in
the end an oddly compact identity for the female subject.
Frida Kahlo developed her own sense of ‘rootedness’ and ‘Mexicanness’ to an
extreme degree. She wore Mexican dress and Mexican jewellery, transforming herself, so to
speak, into a Mexican artefact. She was noted especially for her use of the Tehuana costume—
the long dresses of the women of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico who enjoyed a mythic
reputation for their personal and economic independence (Mulvey and Wollen, ‘Frida Kahlo
and Tina Modotti’, in Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti, p. 18).
17
Ibid., pp. 26–27.
18
‘As in so many cases, the fascination of Kahlo’s work lies in this sense of fragility, dependence
and loss, countered by a mesmerizing portrait of herself on display. And, like a fetish object
herself, she both celebrates and uncovers the aspiration towards and impossibility of an
autonomous self.’ Charles Merewether, ‘Embodiment and Transformation’, in The Art of
Frida Kahlo, p. 17.
19
On 17 September 1925 Frida Kahlo’s body was smashed when a street car ran into her school
bus. Frida’s spinal column was broken in three places. Her pelvis was fractured; her collarbone,
56 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
two ribs, right leg and foot were all broken; and her left shoulder was dislocated. She would
say in her characteristic manner, ironical and allegorical at once, that the steel rod had entered
a hip and come out through her vagina, which explains why she lost her virginity in the
accident. Her life became one of unrelenting struggle against illness: the travail included bone-
grafts, abortions, a dangerous miscarriage, and eventually amputation of her injured foot.
The spinal fusion of 1946 has been called the beginning of ‘the calvary’ that led to Frida’s
death. Although she consulted numerous, perhaps too numerous, doctors, her condition grew
steadily worse. Perhaps she chose to have unnecessary operations as a peculiar form of narci-
ssism. Towards the end she made several attempts at suicide. On 11 February 1954 she wrote
in her diary: ‘They amputated my leg six months ago, they have given me centuries of torture
and at moments I almost lost my “reason”. I keep on wanting to kill myself.’ (Herrera, Frida
Kahlo: The Paintings, p. 218) Her diary’s last drawing is a black angel rising, the angel of
death. ‘I hope the exit is joyful—and I hope never to come back—Frida.’ (Ibid., p. 219)
20
‘Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti’, in Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti, pp. 26–27.
21
In 1937 the Riveras received Leon Trotsky when he began his Mexican exile; between 1937–
39, Frida lent her house to Trotsky. She had a brief love affair with him. On 24 May 1940 the
house Trotsky was then living in was machine-gunned by a group of Stalinists and Rivera,
whose friendship with Trotsky had declined, came under suspicion and left for San Francisco.
Following the attempt on Trotsky’s life Frida became gravely ill; three months later, when he
was assassinated by an agent of the GPU (the Soviet secret police at the time), she was interro-
gated by the police and jailed for two days.
After Frida had rejoined the orthodox Stalinist flock in the late 1940s commu-
nism became a religion for her. ‘Now I am a communist being’, she wrote in her journal. ‘I
understand clearly the materialist dialectic of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse. I love
them as the pillars of the new communist world.’ Portraits of these pillars hung like icons at the
end of her bed (Herrera, Frida Kahlo: The Paintings, pp. 211, 212).
The in and out with the communist party continued. On 2 July 1954, recupera-
ting from bronchopneumonia, she left her bed to participate in a demonstration against the
fall of the leftist government in Guatemala which was brought about by CIA intervention. In
this, her last public appearance, she made a heroic spectacle: holding a banner calling for
peace, she found the energy to join in the crowd’s cry: Gringos, assassins, get out! Home again,
she confided to a friend, ‘I only want three things in life: to live with Diego, to continue
painting and to belong to the Communist Party’ (ibid., pp. 218–19). Frida Kahlo died a few
days later.
22
Mexico gained its independence in 1821; the Mexican revolution took place in 1910, followed
by a decade of civil war. The Mexican mural movement began in 1914 (under Dr Atl) and
took on its full momentum from 1922 under the patronage of Jose Vasconcelos, rector of the
university and minister for education in the revolutionary government of President Alvaro
Obregon. Of the three major muralists, Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David
Alfaro Siqueiros, Rivera was seen to be the leader of the movement. ‘Rivera set his stamp on
the Mexican renaissance. . . . He set about creating an art which would be modern, monu-
mental and American, worthy of the revolution and with the ideological and political aim of
impelling it further forward. . . . As far as content was concerned, Rivera revived the lost genre
of history painting, on an unprecedentedly vast scale—the scale of the Revolution and
eventually the history of Mexico from its first beginnings, through every period up to the
present, combined in one massive composition.’ (Mulvey and Wollen, ‘Frida Kahlo and Tina
Body as Gesture 57
Modotti’, in Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti, p. 12) Consider the scale of Rivera’s monumental
murals: The History of Mexico—From the Conquest to the Future (1929–30, 1935), fresco on
three walls at the National Palace, Mexico City, on completion measured 275.17 m2. The
work of Frida Kahlo resembling the retablos or other forms of popular, applied and minor arts
of Mexico, were conspicuously small: for example, a painting like The Broken Column (1944)
measured 42 x 33 cm.
23
In 1923, while at the National Preparatory School, Frida Kahlo used to watch (and romanti-
cize about) the huge and already heroic Diego Rivera painting the ministry of education
murals nearby. Having joined the Mexican communist party, she properly met Rivera through
the famous communist photographer, Tina Modotti. Frida and Diego were married in August
1929, and she accompanied him on his big mural projects to San Francisco in 1930 and to
Detroit in 1933. In 1939 she divorced Rivera, but they were reconciled and remarried the
following year. In a tempestuously famous love relationship, Rivera was constantly unfaithful
and Kahlo occasionally so, but it was she who made almost a vocation of her suffering. A
masochistic acting out of love and pain gave her a romantic aura, reactivated in the early
years of feminism.
24
Following the Mexican revolution the arts, especially mural painting, celebrated the invention
of a new culture: an avantgarde charged with utopia. In this affirmative ethos, the figure of
woman assumed a crucial symbolic value as figuring the birth of a new national culture.
Indigenous woman, la indigena, symbolized both the pre-Columbian earth-mother, who was
succeeded by Guadalupe (a Spanish mestizo Virgin who became patroness of Mexico at the
time of the Spanish conquest), and the contemporary Mexican woman who becomes a symbol
of the ideals of the revolution from 1910. The work of Frida Kahlo is both part of this ethos
and critical of such forms of cultural nationalism.
‘Unlike most of her contemporaries, Kahlo addressed the question of identity
both as a national subject and as something fundamentally to do with the self. That is,
subjectivity was raised as a condition constituted within the context of broader represent-
ations of national identity. She did this by consistently quoting, transferring, or mimicking
already existing iconographic models and representations, from pre-Columbian (Aztec
primarily), colonial Spanish, Independence (Portfirio Diaz) and postrevolutionary sources.
This method exposed the relations and tensions which exist between mythic constructions of
origin and profane allusions to the everyday: between the iconic reification and fetishization
of the subject, be it woman or la indigena, and its desecration.’ (Merewether, ‘Embodiment
and Transformation’, in The Art of Frida Kahlo, pp. 11, 12.)
25 Nalini Malani belongs to a Sindhi family. Her father came from a zamindar family, her mother
from a professional lawyers’ family. Displaced at the time of partition from Karachi, the
Malanis finally settled in Bombay. Nalini studied painting in Bombay’s Sir J.J. School of Art,
and in Paris during 1970–72. She came very quickly into prominence and has participated in
most of the important exhibitions of Indian art in India and abroad. Her artistic career is
pegged to some important collective ventures such as the Place for People exhibition, 1981,
and the exhibition of four women artists during 1987–89 in several cities of India. During the
1990s she collaborated on theatre projects and made installations for the same, as for example,
Mueller’s Medea and Brecht’s The Job. Her video work includes the installation Remembering
Toba Tek Singh (1998) and deals with the global theatre of war. She lives and works in
Bombay, is married to a psychoanalyst, Shailesh Kapadia, and has two daughters.
The contours of her biographical and artistic career can be gleaned from essays
58 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
and exhibition catalogues. A select bibliography of articles and catalogue texts include the
following. (i) ‘Nalini Malani’, Art Heritage, No. 2, New Delhi, 1980–81; Critical Difference:
Contemporary Art from India, exhibition catalogue, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, UK, 1993;
‘Body as Gesture: Women Artists at Work’, in Representing the Body: Gender Issues in Indian
Art, edited by Vidya Dehejia, Kali for Women in association with The Book Review Literary
Trust, New Delhi, 1997 (included in this volume)—all authored by Geeta Kapur. (ii) Arpita
Singh, Madhvi Parekh, Nalini Malani, Nilima Sheikh: exhibition of recent watercolours,
exhibition catalogue, Roopankar Museum, Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, 1987; ‘City of Desires’, in
Nalini Malani, exhibition catalogue, Sakshi Gallery, Madras/Bangalore, 1991–92; ‘On
Mueller’s Medea’, in Heiner Mueller’s Medea: Alaknanda Samarth/Nalini Malani, exhibition
catalogue, Max Mueller Bhavan, Bombay, 1993; ‘Nalini Malani’, in Second Asia-Pacific
Triennial of Contemporary Art, exhibition catalogue, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane,
1996—all authored by Ashish Rajadhyaksha. (iii) ‘Missives from the Streets: The Art of Nalini
Malani’, in ART and AsiaPacific, Vol. 2, No. 1, Sydney, 1995; ‘Nalini Malani’, in Inside Out:
Contemporary Women Artists in India, exhibition catalogue, Middlesbrough Gallery, UK,
1995; ‘Memory, Stress, Recall’, in Evocations and Expressions, edited by Gayatri Sinha,
Marg, Bombay, 1997—all authored by Kamala Kapoor. Also see Nalini Malani: Medea-
projekt: 1992–96, edited by Kamala Kapoor and Amita Desai, Max Mueller Bhavan,
Bombay, 1996.
26 The conscious inscription by women artists of self re-presentation, whether in a biographical
sense or as allegory for the feminine, has been a rare phenomenon. However, once it is a peg-
ged to a forceful example in western art history, the neopolitan painter Artemesia Gentileschi
(1593–1653), there is a growing discourse on the subject. As women artists make their
appearance in the nineteenth century, among them Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, there is
a flowering: Natalia Goncharova, Sonia Delaunay, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kaethe Koll-
witz, Suzanne Valadon and Leonor Fini, enlarged the vocational range in the early twentieth
century. At which point, the presence of Frida Kahlo appears to become emblematic, some
reasons for which are thematized in this essay. Mention should be made of a Brazilian artist,
Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973), whose cosmopolitan life in Brazil and Europe could become
another point of reference in the ongoing discourse of women artists in the third world. Hereon
several trajectories open up: a growing number of nonwestern women artists, including the
ones under consideration in this essay, add to the now highly differentiated field of contem-
porary feminist art.
It would be true to say that Indian women artists now identify with the
emancipatory agenda of feminism personally and socially; they are taking recognizably
contestatory positions within the mainstream discourse of art history in more recent years.
They have transformed two aspects of Indian art practice since the mid-1970s. The ideological
underpinning of all pictorial representation hitherto taken as universally human (humane)
have been revealed through new narratives that tell suppressed or marginalized stories of
female otherness. Today in India women artists lead the vanguard in many ways; this is true
for other Asian countries as well. Aside from representational/narrative painting, non-
representational artworks by women attempt to work out the balance between plenitude and
economy in a peculiar way, staging the playful and menacing eroticism of the imaginary with
different sets of material devices. They replace the self within the object-world in such a way
as to introduce a different metonymic reading of the real itself. This essay is dedicated to the
groundswell of artworks by contemporary women artists from the south who will contribute
Body as Gesture 59
in redrawing the disciplinary ideology of (feminist) art history and within that, questions of
subjectivity, history and the language of art.
27 Lisa Tickner on Nancy Spero, quoted by Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women
and Culture, Polity Press, Oxford, 1990, p. 132.
28 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Pantheon, New York, 1977,
p. 30.
29 I wish to acknowledge the help received from Shailesh Kapadia, psychoanalyst from Bombay,
in understanding Nalini Malani’s (and other artists’) impulses, motivations and forms of self-
representation in life and work. Psychoanalytic concepts have served as analogical extensions
to my interpretational devices; they have helped to decode simultaneously the artist’s persona
and the image. However, there is no formal or normative adherence to the schools and cate-
gories of the discipline of psychoanalysis in my essay, and shortfalls, if any, are entirely my
responsibility.
30 Veena Das, ‘Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain’, in Daedalus, Vol.
125, No. 1: Social Suffering, Winter 1996, p. 80.
31 ‘City of Desires’, video directed by Nalini Malani (shot on U-matic by Alok Upadhyay, 18
minutes, 1994), based on Heiner Mueller’s Medea, presented as a theatrical production by
Alaknanda Samarth and Nalini Malani.
32 Heiner Mueller (1929–1995) wrote the play Medea over a number of years. Medeaspiel
(Medeaplay), written in 1974 and published in 1975, was the first published exploration of the
theatre of images. The Medea theme was elaborated in Despoiled Shore: Medeamaterial:
Landscape with Argonauts, completed in 1982 and performed in 1983. The verses quoted by
me are from this text.
33 Winin Pereira and Jeremy Seabrook, Global Parasites, Earthcare Books, Bombay, 1992.
34 Arpita Singh belongs to a middle-class Bengali family settled in Delhi since her childhood. She
grew up in straitened circumstances: her father died when she was little; her mother worked in
an office to bring up her children. Arpita went to art school in Delhi, is married to the painter
Paramjit Singh, and has a daughter Anjum Singh, also a painter. Arpita first exhibited her
work with The Unknown Group in 1960 and has had a very prolific career since. She has come
to the fore especially since the mid-80s and is today recognized to be one of India’s most
established artists. Though not a feminist in ideological terms, Arpita took the initiative to
make a statement about women’s art practice in the mid-1980s, and is now identified with the
women’s art movement in India.
A select bibliography of exhibition catalogues comprising biography, art-
works and critics’ texts includes: Deepak Ananth in Arpita Singh, exhibition catalogue,
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1986; Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Arpita Singh, Madhvi Parekh,
Nalini Malani, Nilima Sheikh: exhibition of recent watercolours, exhibition catalogue,
Roopankar Museum, Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, 1987; Nilima Sheikh, Arpita Singh, exhibition
catalogue, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 1994; Ela Dutta (interview with the artist), in
Arpita Singh, exhibition catalogue, CIMA Gallery, Calcutta, 1996; Geeti Sen, ‘Woman in
Red’, in Image and Imagination: Five Contemporary Artists in India, Mapin, Ahmedabad,
1996; Yashodhara Dalmia, ‘Arpita Singh’, in Evocations and Expressions, edited by Gayatri
Sinha, Marg, Bombay, 1997; Geeta Kapur, ‘Body as Gesture: Women Artists at Work’, in
Representing the Body: Gender Issues in Indian Art, edited by Vidya Dehejia, Kali for Women
in association with The Book Review Literary Trust, New Delhi, 1997 (included in this
volume).
60 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
35 Rajadhyaksha, Arpita Singh, Madhvi Parekh, Nalini Malani, Nilima Sheikh. Many of the
questions raised in this essay were first cued by Rajadhyaksha in his introduction to the
catalogue.
36 Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Some Reflections on Dolls’, in Rodin and Other Pieces, Quartet Encoun-
ters, Quartet Books, London, 1986, pp. 122–25.
37 Veena Das, ‘Language and Body’, in Daedalus, pp. 68–69.
38 Ibid., p. 78.
39 Nilima Sheikh, Arpita Singh.
40 Susie Tharu (in Women Writing in India, Volume II, pp. 19–32) offers a critical analysis of
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Guber’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1979). They
bring up the question of loss/release as a framing argument for women’s creativity. Tharu is
critical of overdetermining the vast terrain of women’s literature/creativity by the high sub-
jectivist notions of nineteenth-century Europe. She critiques expressive realism coloured by
woman’s ‘anxiety and rage’ as the most suitable form for eliciting an essence struggling to find
its way out of patriarchal strictures. My interpretation of the women artists’ work goes in and
out of the emblematic ‘madwoman’ frame—indeed the iconography of angels and monsters
in Nalini and of beloveds and mourners in Arpita is elaborated precisely in order to find a way
of getting past binaries. If behind the angel lurks this menacing woman (the female grotesque)
and behind the child a doll-soul, then behind that is the author herself, doubling with prodi-
gious intent and confirming her difficult survival. These women artists make the entire
counterproject of seducing/stealing male energy for their own generative purposes an ironical
act. It is a step in the more dialectical understanding of their ‘reality’ which is not some unique
secret but a continual act of comprehension of the social forces at work in the forming of their
own complex subjectivity.
41 Arpita Singh has included among her female figures ambiguous and identifiable goddesses
with many arms. In 1994 she bent the iconography of the goddess Durga and put a gun in her
hand. Printed on the cover page of the Puja number of Desh, the popular Bengali magazine,
this caused some outrage. Arpita has remained undaunted in her ironical and profane repre-
sentation of the ‘feminine’. Human, vulnerable, naked and provocative, there is an undeclared
taboo-breaking politics in her oeuvre.
Elegy for an Unclaimed Beloved 61
Elegy
for an Unclaimed Beloved:
Nasreen Mohamedi 1937–1990
Desert Birth
And then there are those who received the desert in the cradle . . . the
terrible gift granted to some, a sort of curse that is a blessing, a natal
desertion, and that condemns and brings them up to poetry. The desert is
a lack of origin, a lack of engendering. . . . It is the primal scene in which
the infant wakes to perfect absence; to the absence of milk, which is light.
. . . Desert, desert birth.1
Nasreen was not born in the desert but she knew and loved the deserts
of Arabia. ‘. . . the strong aridity of the desert. It makes one detached in a tiny way,
in a clear and vital way’, Nasreen writes in her diary.2 The desert is a lack of origin, a
lack of engendering, a natal desertion, Helene Cixous says. The infant awakens to per-
fect absence.3
I want to make the proposition that Nasreen’s work, founded on
absence, is about the self (Illus. 1). That through a series of displacements she touches
and transcends death, but that the insistently elided questions about the self are
precisely such that offer up meaning in her work. That she is therefore within a great
lineage of metaphysical abstraction in a way that no other Indian artist is. Also that
she is without the tradition, being a woman artist working in India at a time when
there were few others of her kind citing this benign and immense negation.
That the self should be hidden denied evacuated is part of a possible
proposition about selfhood. This must be true of women saints in particular whose
person is as if disembodied even when desire is embodied: the fourteenth-century
saint-poet Janabai transposes the self through poetry of praise and labour:
Earlier published versions of this essay are: ‘Elegy for an Unclaimed Beloved’, in Nasreen in Retrospect,
edited by Altaf, Ashraf Mohamedi Trust, Bombay, 1995; ‘Dimensions Out of Solitude’, in Evocations and
Expressions, edited by Gayatri Sinha, Marg, Bombay, 1997.
62 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Making a daily ritual of the mundane tasks of washing and cleaning, Nasreen writes in
her diary:
(But isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent?
Isn’t the object always absent?)8
The being I am waiting for is not real. Like the mother’s breast for the
infant, ‘I create and re-create it over and over, starting from my capacity to
64 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
love, starting from my need for it’: the other comes here where I am
waiting, here where I have already created him/her. And if the other does
not come, I hallucinate the other: waiting is a delirium.9
Nasreen’s work, speaking contrarily this time, conceives of the full cycle of
self-naughting to begin all over again with desire: it identifies with the mystical body,
the female body, the body in pain, the broken body, the body in art. Finally it
identifies with the body of the beloved which carries the gravity of the mortal dream.
There is nothing further than separation; nothing there is to hold on to but the last
grip of bondage to the other; and the measure of bondage is a measure of strength.
One of the books Nasreen borrowed from me and kept was the translated
love letters of Peter Abelard and Heloise, the French medieval scholar and his beloved
committed to a nunnery, both living through carnal love and castration, living
through pain beyond belief and what can only be read as unwilling surrender before
god in the shape of Christ. In a contemporary poetic rendering of their tragic lives,
Heloise writes to Abelard:
...
deeply embedded narcissism. It was the last wager on the imaginary and the more
lustrous for it. Nasreen was Echo to Narcissus; both were in her. The drawings reflect
the visage in the sky and catch the echo on the ground below (Illus. 2). There is an
othering in the echo, and the other is always, in the freedom of longing, negated/
recovered. Perhaps the other exists within the logic of phenomena and carries all in its
wake. However you elide the encounter, as Nasreen did, her evacuated body blanched
with the hope of recall.
The body hovering and possessed of a view from nowhere that is a view
from everywhere: a kind of phenomenological wonder. The world is subsumed by the
view but it produces a heartsickness, a giddiness from unrealized excess.
‘“I am engulfed, I succumb”’, thus Barthes emblazons his mortal trust:
We know that Nasreen’s body was losing its motor functions from the
1980s, becoming gradually dysfunctional. There was at the end an oddly splayed
movement of the limbs that could develop into the dance of a flying puppet. I am per-
haps too tempted to take Nasreen’s physical affliction that made her limbs jerk
disobediently as some kind of a destinal sign: a fatal sign. It was like mortality in cruel
play to see this elegant woman in an inadvertent display of the body-soul, stubbing
66 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
knocking tapping hitting lunging through space. Yet maintaining under the greatest
stress a control of the hand.
Barthes says:
among them V.S. Gaitonde, much older to Nasreen, acts as her Indian mentor in the
early 1960s. The Bombay legacy also includes her longtime friend and colleague Jeram
Patel, who after much wandering settles down to teach in Baroda, where Nasreen
gravitates too in the early 1970s, becoming a rare presence for successive batches of
students. If in the Indian situation we want to find a single complementary (also in a
paradoxical sense, contradictory) artist vis-a-vis Nasreen, it should finally be Jeram
Patel. Because of his passionate excavation of the negative image which signals a new
direction in Indian abstraction beginning with the Group 1890 exhibition in 1963.
Because he turns the materiality of the object inside out, literally, by the use of blow-
torch on wood. Because also of the paradox of complementarity itself: for Jeram Patel
68 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
works out this controlled transaction between the erotic and the macabre in his ink
drawings, setting up an explosion in the prehistoric assembly of bone and tool
conducted through a single devolving morphology—even as Nasreen, also working
with ink on paper, is engaged in clearing the great debris.
Nasreen’s intention apropos Indian art, if she can be said to have one, is to
core the palpitating heart of the matter. Her target is the overweening romanticism of
Indian art. Notwithstanding her youthful inclination for the existentialist sentiment
of Albert Camus—the texture of that voice saturated with anguish is found in her
diaries—her art practice systematically denudes the seductive fruit of metaphysical
paradoxes so abundant in romantic modernity, western and Indian alike.
Nasreen’s aim is even more severe: to disengage representational ethics
derived from the artist’s gaze. Indeed she deliberately cancels or defies the regime of the
gaze, sensing the appropriative and exploitative aspects of it. And she takes up the
conventions of the glance as in eastern aesthetics—fleeting, evanescent, always at the
point of vanishing and taking the view with it.14 Further, she works with a sense of
shadow: recalling Christ’s imprint on his mantle, or indeed the shadow of the
Hiroshima victim on the wall. She replaces the icon with the indexical sign that is
always determinedly against the symbol as well.
Elegy for an Unclaimed Beloved 69
Utopian Modernism
Nasreen should be seen to be aligned to two art-historical lineages. Her
vocabulary comes from a lyrical, expressive, spiritual source in high modernism—
about which more later. It comes also from the utopian dimension in twentieth-
century art which provides the metaphysics and ideology to her strongly modernist
inclinations (Illus. 5, 6, 7).
First, the lineage of utopian abstraction. Emerging from revolutionary
socialism (especially from the Soviet Union in the 1920s), it is suprematism and
among the suprematists Kazimir Malevich, whose influence on Nasreen must be
acknowledged. And we know that Nasreen admired Malevich. Not nature but human
destiny is at stake with him, and it is posited through geometrical propositions. The
flat picture plane, a cubist injunction, develops into the diagonal as a preferred form.
Then a chevron, a triangle, a cross come to dominate the visual vocabulary, making
geometrical abstraction stand proxy for a symbolic language. Further, an interest in
The constructivists, again in the 1920s and in the Soviet Union, also use
geometrical means. Their intent however is to celebrate a futurist plan of the world
along with the victory of the autonomous mental realm. The aesthetic premise of
constructivism is different from that of both lyrical and suprematist abstraction in that
there are no refracted epiphanies. Accessible forms of the spiritual and the symbolic are
proposed. Energies of the mind seen as geometrical forms stand for energies of human
praxis. Concrete elements from a hypothetical architecture are floated and positioned
to give the sense of a dynamic order in the world, but the planar disposition of forms
is strictly nonillusionistic. The act of balancing is both a measure of cognitive adjust-
ment and a matter of environmental equilibrium. In some cases the constructivists
offer actual designs for living, whether in architecture proper or in the domain of the
product. And in so far as this visual vocabulary works as a kind of valorized analogy to
the object-world, it favours an active encounter with the viewer—the body is a volatile
entity positioned among objects. Here then is a utopian demand for perfection that is
material and dialectical. It extends to the entire range of industrial products, exhibi-
tion design and architecture—one of the famous examples being the 1919–20 design
and model by Vladimir Tatlin of the Monument to the Third International.
Nasreen does not come from a dialectically thought-out interest in the
utopian, nor from some ordering system or futurist blueprint of the world. But there
are certain odd connections. She is committed to abstraction from the start; she is
attracted to modern technology; she makes nearly a fetish of good design. She is
interested in industrial production: cars, modern buildings, water-storage tanks, tele-
graph apparatus, the urban street, airplane runways. Her photographs, about which
more later, capture these material forms. She feels comfortable with cameras, photo
laboratories, precision instruments, architectural drawings. She traverses a variety of
architectural spaces with a sense of exact measure—the paved courtyard at Fatehpur
Sikri as also the concrete sidewalks of Bombay and the asphalt highways in Europe.
She is a metropolitan person, she travels worldwide. She starts to travel abroad in the
1950s, as a very young student of art, by which time the futuristic projections of the
Soviet avantgarde are a part of contemporary technological achievement. The expe-
rience of speed and light, transmission and tension, and such technological extension
of the senses are by then common experience. Therefore what Nasreen does with the
utopian language of abstraction figuring subliminally in her imagination is to give it
over to a lofty sense of design.
One day all will become functional and hence good design. There will be
no waste. We will then understand basics. It will take time.
But then we get the opportunity for pure patience.16
72 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
thinned turpentine, tinted with ochre pigment. The surface is a tracery of insect
footprints, dry grass throwing invisible shadows in the desert breeze. ‘In the midst
of these arid silences one picks up a few threads of texture and form’, she writes,18
and then adds a characteristic self-instruction: ‘A spider can only make a web but
it makes it to perfection.’19
Acute in her use of language, Nasreen stretches the by-then-familiar
Klee legacy to catch the American advance in abstraction. She comes to stand in
direct relationship to an ascetic peer-figure in the late modernist period—Agnes
Martin (though she actually sees Martin’s work late in her own career).
Modest though her work is, Martin carries the aura of self-sufficiency;
she proclaims the oracular nature of art. She makes a philosophic trek across the
Judaic scriptures to the Greeks and Plato; and across Asian thought to zen and
tao. Then she returns every time to con-
temporaries like Ad Reinhardt, Barnett
Newman, Mark Rothko, John Cage.
Coming from the milieu of an original
version of abstract expressionism in
north America, she speaks in her prose
poems about Platonic notions of beauty
and form but from a conspicuously ega-
litarian point of view.20
Marking the space of the
sublime, her work is a form of prayer,
utterances spreading over the surface of
a lake, field or desert. Martin quotes
from a biblical passage: ‘. . . make level
in the desert a highway for our God’,21
10 Nasreen Mohamedi, Untitled, ca. 1968
and complements it with a taoist
thought: ‘If water is so clear, so level, /
How much more the spirit of man?’22
A cross-reference to a contemporary artist like Agnes Martin illuminates
Nasreen’s work, especially her humility before nature, her interest in the anonymous
language of geometry. Martin’s work is not about nature, only the experience of
being before nature. It may even be antinature counting on what is forever in the
mind. Like Martin’s, Nasreen’s classicism evolves gradually and transforms the
substratum of biomorphic forms into a system of graphic marks. What is important
is that each of them works out a geometry that provides optical clarity, and a
paradigm for attention.
Nasreen could well join Agnes Martin in saying that ‘Classicists are
people that look out with their back to the world’.23
74 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
The Grid
The floor in the house of Agnes Martin, as in Nasreen’s house, was
polished stone: no prints of the bare foot, no illusion, only the surface.
It is worth pursuing the comparison with Martin: she worked with simple
found objects; she painted dots of atmospheric colour; she drew people, grass, as little
rectangles; she worked out spaces between drops of rain. She made an airy matrix. She
was interested in weaving, which led to the open form of the lattice. Her parallel lines
and grids were undulating, following a pencil along a string or measuring tape; and
they were nearly invisible—‘luminous containers for the shimmer of line’, say Rosalind
Krauss and Marcia Tucker.24 Even when she returned to painting after a period of
renunciation, it was still subliminal expression in the shape of pale hard paintings. It
the grid announces among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its
hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.
The physical qualities of the surface, we could say, are mapped on to the
aesthetic dimension of the same surface. And these two planes—the
physical and the aesthetic—are demonstrated to be the same plane: co-
extensive, and . . . coordinate. Considered in this way, the bottom line of
the grid is a naked and determined materialism.25
is finally translated into a purely optical sensation, an eminently visual form devoid of
any kind of illusionistic reality, and even of linguistic meaning. Nasreen’s work may be
read in terms of these late modernist manifestations—but not entirely in those terms
either, as I shall indicate.
Nasreen’s reason for adopting the grid is familiar enough. So that a
natural phenomenon may be opened out to reveal its inner matrix; so that the subtle
sensation that the dismantling of the great visible structures of nature creates would
surface. So that the inflected face of water or invisible wind currents from the desert
plains as these are computed on to a notationally marked graph can become pure
thought (Illus. 11, 12).
The logic is precisely that nature as referent is inducted into the ideal
structure of a grid that becalms the vision into disinterested/undifferentiated states of
rest. Considered in this way the grid, a structured surface, acts like a support for
appearance; it is at the same time a refutation of the simulacrum.
In the 1960s Nasreen writes: ‘The new image of pure rationalism. Pure
intellect that has to be separated from emotion. . . . A state beyond pain and pleasure.’
And adds: ‘Again a difficult task begins.’26
In art-historical terms, it would be correct to place Nasreen at the juncture
(in the 1960s) when artists become interested to resolve visual language in favour of
structures with no contesting and no hierarchical balancing of parts. When they are
intent on adducing a neutral format in which all compositional units are equal and
inseparable from the whole and the surface is in perfect unity. Nasreen acknowledges
this moment and takes a firm step into graphic formalism in the early 1970s. She
works, alone among all Indian artists, with small-format, strictly ruled drawings in
ink/watercolour/pencil on paper. But just as she moves away (in the 1970s) from the
delicate tracery of her grey-and-ochre paintings to develop drawing-grids, she moves
away (in the 1980s) from the ruled surface to diagonals, in what I call an aspiring
mode (Illus. 13, 14).
Thus Nasreen is quite like Agnes Martin and not so too. In continuation
of Martin’s position, she may have said that an artist simultaneously seeks compa-
ssion and rational poise in the choice of structures, that is to say, in her formal aesthe-
tic. That in the very sentience of such solitude—she writes in her diary, ‘One creates
dimensions out of solitude’27—the artist excavates a mystical vision of the world so
that she need never be found wanting in an egalitarian world view such as the mys-
tics proffer. But while Agnes Martin says that ‘in the diagonal the ends hang loose’,
or that ‘the circle expands too much’,28 Nasreen goes on to use both the diagonal and
the circle. In the aspiring mode Nasreen prefers graphic movement—the lure of sound
and lightning:
there is no subjectivity at stake. When the viewer walks away the moment (that carries
the existential burden) will be erased. This is a conspicuously neutral space—a parti-
cular place, framing mere objects, or massive structures (as I said earlier, water tanks
and highways). Further, the space can be reduced to a skeletal pattern of vertical/
horizontal/diagonal lines: disembodied from the urbanscape, tilted down like a two-
dimensional flat-bed picture, it is a map with(out) substance. Printed in a mediating
grey, Nasreen’s photographic ‘language’ is fully articulated to denote a degree zero of
space and time, a conjunctural moment of illumined negation. This is further
specialized through her interest in ghost images of material objects—photograms.
If Nasreen’s photographs provide a material basis for her formal code, it
explains how remote she is from her Indian compatriots who are all set to figure
meaning. That remoteness is captured in an odd encounter between Nasreen and, of
all people, Carl Andre. In 1971 Andre came to India (as a participant in the Second
Triennale India) and found this much-loved, modest-seeming artist in an anomalous
position within a voluble art scene in Delhi. Doing very spare work, she seemed to
belong nowhere, and that was precisely perhaps the point. Nasreen, given her
committed location in India, provides cues to several (still accessible) mystical tradi-
80 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
tions whereby we may speak of a ‘democratic space’. This connects her to what was
called in the case of Agnes Martin, an egalitarian viewpoint, and to Andre’s own pro-
ject: to pave the way, quite literally, in order to achieve a nonhierarchy of space.
Nasreen, in Andre’s conceptual context, proposed a neutral traversal of the perceptual
field: she could be seen to be interested in a similar equanimity of nonreference, in the
plane without any fixed vista, in the infinite point of view of the exemplary road.30
On that note we can conclude Nasreen’s art-historical detours. By the
1980s she had touched on several antecedents: from a sublimating nature-based
abstraction where nature is treated as metaphor in the expanded field of the lyric
image, to the conjunctural aesthetics of Russian abstraction in the 1920s, to the
minimalists who take the object-world of the constructivists—their formal propo-
sition that signals a utopian image—and return it to a grounded experience, develop-
ing a phenomenology of space at once concrete and theatric. This is where Carl Andre
comes in, and also Richard Long, who turn vast bodily navigation of earth, water, sky,
into a meditative act through walking.
Only subliminally aware of the minimalist proposition, Nasreen’s own
astute concern for the spatial dimension tells her how all spatial encounters are privi-
leged: you walk in the shape of your body and measure the paces as a neutral act that
is also, in an experiential sense, full-bodied. In the pragmatic manner of a peripatetic
monk, there is nothing more to see than there is to do beyond the multiple positioning
of your body-self in the infinite prospect of the universe—but that it translates mate-
rially into the real and even the everyday with strange ease.
Asian elements—tao and zen—are suffused in Nasreen’s life. Like
31
Barthes she is haunted by an inventory of the states of dearth with which zen has
encoded the human sensibility: solitude, the sadness that overcomes one because of the
‘incredible naturalness’ of things, nostalgia, the sentiment of strangeness. The posi-
tioning of the body within such an everyday void, that too is a zen instruction. As is
the choosing of an ordinary object as target of absolute attention. Deeply attracted to
zen, Nasreen’s ambient references are metaphysical and mystical, her sympathies are
serenely secular.
Nature is so true.
Such truth in her silence.
If only we would listen to her intricacies.
Then there is no difference in sound and vision.33
Circular depths,
Texture of edges
To study circular depths and depression.35
Break
Rest
Break the cycle of seeing
Magic and awareness arrives.38
Elegy for an Unclaimed Beloved 83
Above: 18 Nasreen Mohamedi, Untitled, 1987. Below: 19 Nasreen Mohamedi, Untitled, 1987
84 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Whenever the Secrets of Perception are taught to anyone His lips are sewn
against speaking of the Consciousness.39
Passing On
If Nasreen’s graphic trajectories are like angels lifting time off the
texturally rich body of the planet with its surging oceans, they also decontextualize
what is through secret condensation already too textually replete. She replaces it with
spiritual graffiti, like the footprints of the selfsame angel speeding to its last post in the
skies—then she wipes away these footsteps, and even space itself.
Brushing off the matrices of the self like so much scum on the face of light
which is her white sheet of paper, Nasreen draws with her steel instruments, with
pencil, ink and brush. I said that the angel lifts off time but she then reinscribes it in
reverse. This is like a script for the future: ‘A curved line across the page’.41
When the moon wanes the landscape disappears. The morphological
Elegy for an Unclaimed Beloved 85
process, the process that produces form, is liquidated like an obsolete ontology. A
displaced self, an objectivizing act, a nonobjective art: Nasreen shuts the sadistic eye/I,
renounces subjectivity, folds up the memory of love, accepts the poverty of means,
embraces humility. She exposes her need and takes on the mantle of a self-mocking
female fool.
There is a persistent image of Nasreen as the unclaimed beloved, wander-
ing and empty on the beach as the tide goes out. Nasreen’s self-image was of one
always waiting—gathering attention.
One morning of May she was sitting not far from her sisters in her shack
beyond Bombay, at Kihim, a still vacant shore of the Arabian Sea. Sitting as if in
preparation when she passed on suddenly, without a sound.
12
Ibid., p. 44.
13
‘Diaries’, 1st February 1974, p. 96.
14
See Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, Macmillan, London, 1983,
pp. 87–131.
15
Kazimir Malevich, ‘Futurism–Suprematism, 1921: An Extract’, in Kazimir Malevich 1878–
1935, exhibition catalogue, The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Centre, Los
Angeles, 1990, p. 177.
16
‘Diaries’, 1980, p. 97.
17
Ibid., 30th September 1970, p. 93.
18
Ibid., 12th March 1971, Baroda, p. 93.
19
Ibid., 13th March 1970 [?], p. 91.
20
All statements by Agnes Martin about life, thought and art are taken from Agnes Martin,
edited by Barbara Haskell, Whitney Museum of American Art/Harry N. Abrams, New York,
1992. The book includes essays by Barbara Haskell, Anna C. Chave and Rosalind Krauss.
21
Biblical reference (Isaiah 40) by Agnes Martin quoted by Anna C. Chave, ‘Agnes Martin:
“Humility, the Beautiful Daughter . . . All Her Ways Are Empty”’, in ibid., p. 144.
22
Chave, quoting taoist sage Chuang Tzu (from Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu,
New Directions, New York, 1965/1969, p. 80 ), in ibid., p. 145.
23
Agnes Martin, ‘The Untroubled Mind’, in Agnes Martin, p. 15.
24
Chave quoting Rosalind Krauss and Marcia Tucker (from ‘Perceptual Field’, in Critical
Perspectives in American Art, exhibition catalogue, Fine Arts Centre Gallery, University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, 1976, p. 15), in ibid., p. 106.
25
Rosalind Krauss, ‘Grids’, in Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths,
MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1986, pp. 9–10.
26
‘Diaries’, May 22, 1964 [?], p. 85.
27
‘Diaries’, 3rd September 1967, p. 87.
28
Agnes Martin, ‘The Untroubled Mind’, in Agnes Martin, p. 14.
29
‘Diaries’, 3rd June 1968, On the train from Baroda, p. 88.
30
See Chave, ‘Agnes Martin’ (in Agnes Martin, p. 143), for a discussion of the commonality
between Agnes Martin and Carl Andre (from which I develop the tripartite relationship with
Nasreen).
31
See Barthes, Lover’s Discourse, p. 170.
32
‘Diaries’, 21st July 1969, London, p. 91.
33
Ibid., 1980 [?], p. 97.
34
For example, Amir Khan, Bhimsen Joshi, Gangubai Hangal.
35
‘Diaries’, May 10th, 1971, Kihim, p. 94.
36
Ibid., 25th November 1971, p. 95.
37
Gleaned from ‘Diaries’ by me.
38
‘Diaries’, 17th July 1973, Baroda, p. 96.
39
Jalal ad-Din Rumi, quoted by Idries Shah, in The Way of the Sufi, Penguin, Harmondsworth,
1968, p. 114.
40
See Ramachandra Gandhi, in Artistes indiens en France, exhibition catalogue, Centre
National des Arts Plastiques, Paris, 1985, p. 34.
41
‘Diaries’, 1971 [?], Delhi, p. 94.
Mid-Century Ironies 87
Mid-Century Ironies:
K.G. Subramanyan
Artist as Artisan
Skills
There is some pleasure in the mere listing of the materials and methods an
artist uses. You sense the concrete basis of image production. K.G. Subramanyan has
worked in the technique of fresco buono, brushing pigment direct on to wet plaster.
He has made monumental murals in terracotta tiles and others in cement relief by
means of sand-casting. He has designed an entire menagerie of wooden toys and
woven rope sculptures on a specially devised loom. He has made use of woodcut print-
ing for designing textiles. There are stacks of little ink-and-brush drawings in his
studio, along with gouache sketches in preparation for future paintings. In addition
he has of course done his share of oil and easel painting. After this there is a significant
shift. Several series of the most sensuously sculpted terracotta reliefs distinguish his
work through the 1970s. From the 1980s sets of flamboyant little glass (or acrylic
sheet) paintings backed with gold where he uses colour as never before give his picto-
rial language a dazzling turn.
A celebrated pedagogue and writer, Subramanyan feels quite at home with
theoretical formulations so long as they do not suppress the material ebullience of the
art-object. A conceptual scheme will, I hope, serve to identify the very modalities of
form in his varied work. Two surprisingly symmetrical sets of concepts can be derived
from Subramanyan’s practice.
I begin with his understanding of the craft tradition of India which is
supplemented by an acquaintance with corresponding worldwide traditions. His
curiosity about techniques and motifs in primitive terracottas, in peasant embroi-
deries, in the intricate tie-and-dye weaving of the ikat fabric, may or may not enter his
own work. It extends theoretically into an understanding of craft as practice, as syste-
matized process and convention. Thus to an understanding of art as language.
As much as he is interested in putting things together, in making objects
with all the deftness of a craftsman, he is interested also in analysing an object (an
An earlier version of this essay was published as a monograph under the title K.G. Subramanyan, Lalit
Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1987.
88 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
image, a surface) in terms of its structural units. He does this in his work for all to see;
he also talks about art-objects in this way. Subramanyan would like to see art, modern
art too, as language. As a conventional system of pictorial signs where these signs in
turn transpose a universe of meanings upon the material world, including the art-
object. ‘The importance of an artist is to be measured by the number of signs he has
introduced into the language of art’, Matisse says to Louis Aragon in 1943.1
the follies of men and women in Kalighat paintings. At yet another level twentieth-
century art, placing itself in a volatile relationship to both high and low art and to the
anthropologically ‘available’ world cultures, is replete with examples of such wit. Take
for example Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Miro, Klee—the list is long.
In a twentieth-century rout of holy cows wit is a handy weapon. Subra-
manyan is interested in all three aspects: the oriental–classical, the popular and the
modern. He will use wit as a way of amending the conservative system of signs that
is a feature of all art inheritances; he will use it also to introduce sheer comedy after
the rout. Like the modernists, Subramanyan uses wit with the desire to remake the
world in play.
of wood comes to be tonally textured. To this is added the device of spotting and
branding the body of the animal so that the diminutive monkey, goat, donkey, lion,
the big fish and rhino are daintily or royally tattooed. The rhino, 6 x 4 x 10 inches in
size, is the child’s zoological tanker with two hard white knobs, clues to its invinci-
bility on its behind.
The toy has to have a materiality in optimum relation to its many
4
fictions. Which is to say it should be manipulable, fitted with bobbing, wheeling,
levered parts, or otherwise sufficiently absurd or incomplete to invite the amused
extension of its parts by the child. For that very reason, the simpler the toy the better.
Its life is anyway in good hands. The child needs only a paper windmill to set all the
coloured flags of the universe awhirl.
The toy, a perfect play-object, is also a seductive sign; the possibilities of
the signifier always exceed the limits of the signified, and you test your improvisatory
capacities through it. For of course the toy has no function or meaning beyond what
the imagination brings to it. After the wane of magic the only object that can be called
magical is a toy; an object that is the sum of its parts demonstratively put together, and
that is also almost infinitely more because the parts, the signifying elements, are always
in permutation at least for the child. And for the gameful adult as well, who will let
each configuration escape a simple computation.
Modern artists have looked to the artefacts of the primitives to invent
what one might call nonsense totems, a cross between a toy, a maquette, a secret object
of desire; compact little semiological units for the purpose of encoding secret messages.
Strictly speaking, of course, the moderns only simulate the primitives whose objects
have dire purposes. But given the ingenuity of primitive totems it is hard to gauge
exactly how much imaginative dissembling the maker allows in the ritualized belief
system to produce the kind of artefact we are speaking about. Dire purpose and
modernist iconoclasm could have complementary and corresponding motivations.
If you give to a contemporary tribal in Papua New Guinea, or in India, a
free run of new materials, bits and pieces of industrial waste for example, what does
s/he do with it? The totem or ritual object thus produced is different from the modern-
ist found-object collage, but there is comparable irony at work. Where ‘primitive’
artists invest material objects with belief, the dadaists deconstruct them, exposing the
transference of use into exchange value in the overall process of reification. And this
s/he does by openly dissembling, indeed by making what is to all purposes a fetishist
object and posing a paradoxical dis/similarity between commodity and totem.
Through this cunning translation of the terms of fetishism the moderns introduce a
new category of object, one which detaches itself from use as well as exchange value
and conveys the jouissance embodied in the sign of its dysfunction.
Picasso as always gives us the links in the chain, the morphology of the
new object, starting with the cubist collage, going on to cubist relief and dadaist
Mid-Century Ironies 91
Murals
I should like now to take Subramanyan’s artisanal practice to another
plane of the relationship between craft and play. During 1962–63 Subramanyan
designed and installed a monumental terracotta tile mural on the front wall of the
Lucknow Rabindralaya. It marks the first most important achievement of his career
and it reinstates in Indian art the close connection between sculptural relief and archi-
tecture. (The more publicized glazed-tile murals by M.F. Husain and Satish Gujral
were done in 1966, in Delhi.)
One of a series of theatres set up all over India, the Lucknow Rabindra-
laya is named after Rabindranath Tagore. Subramanyan decided to make the subject
of the mural Rabindranath’s allegory, The King of the Dark Chamber, making a
reference to the ambiguity of absence and presence in the magic-box of the theatre.
92 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Subramanyan had already worked on the stage and costume design for this play on the
occasion of Tagore’s centenary in 1961. Reckoning that the mystical meaning of the
play could have no direct pictorial transcription in the mural tableau, Subramanyan,
in proxy of the poet’s symbolism, reduced the story to a set of emblematic encounters
while giving through the rich density of design a play of shadows (Illus. 3, 4, 5).
The mural is placed at the height of the second storey on a wall that faces
a busy road and the Lucknow railway station. The length of the mural is 81 feet, the
height 9 feet: the format is therefore emphatically horizontal. There is a compound
alongside the theatre and you must look up and walk the length following the
generally left-to-right orientation of the mural composition. The figures are bedecked
and set within ornate pavilions, balconies, pillared facades, so that even before you
have identified them you know this is a royal entourage. It includes the queen, her
attendants, her soldiers. Profiled and stiff, the figures have an archaic classicism. The
tableau format, its puppetlike figures and gestures, recalls several Indian antecedents.
The relief is built up from 13,000 terracotta pieces, approximately 1-inch
square and up to 6 inches thick. There are discs, squares, strips, triangles, knobs and
cones, most of them decoratively inscribed. While the details are not visible from so far
below, a thickly indented figural pattern surfaces in the changing light.
There are units that are more semantically complete, larger pieces up to
10-inch square that make up the face and hands, the bird and crown and tassles,
plaited hair and flowers. The patterned tiles are made from moulds designed in bulk
by Subramanyan. These are prefabricated units. The completed units are individually
handcrafted.
The project, as one can see, was ambitious. Subramanyan made a small
team including his former students and young colleagues at the Baroda faculty. The
work of making and firing tiles was conducted at a government pottery works at
Chinhat near Lucknow. The pieces were fired with a transparent glaze which gives the
terracotta surface a slight highlight and protects it from weathering. The first phase of
the work was completed during the summer vacation of 1962.
The installation was completed next summer, in 1963. This phase of the
work was done on site. It included, first, the actual integration of the detailed scale
Mid-Century Ironies 93
Photo 3 (contd.)
Above: 3 K.G. Subramanyan, The King of the Dark Chamber , 1963. Below: 4 The King of the Dark Chamber (detail)
drawing and the terracotta bits. This took fifteen days. A scaffolding was erected and
the basic contours were transferred from the cartoon to the wall surface by the method
of pouncing. Stone ledges were embedded in the wall at crucial points to support the
heavier clusters of tiles. Up on the scaffolding the main operation was in the hands of
Gyarsilal and his mason brother, Kishore. Subramanyan would pick up the numbered
tile from the numbered box and hand it to the masons, and the glazed tile was fixed to
the wall with lime-plaster. No changes were permitted at this stage. The team worked
almost twelve hours a day for a month and the mural was complete.
If you want to make a terracotta relief there are certain technical alternat-
ives. It can be the kind of mosaic I have already described, and the closest traditional
equivalent is a relief form called Sanjhi, ritually made in and around Delhi. Or there is
the method of preparing terracotta tablets sculpted in relief and fixed edge-to-edge on
94 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
the architectural facade. The basic unit and the nature of the image will be quite
different in each case. The mosaic piece being small and neutral, you can use it addi-
tively to make a decorative and/or monumental image. The tablet is a self-contained
sculptural unit larger than the tile-mosaic, though never too large owing to the fragi-
lity of the medium. It presupposes a compact image and a sequential extension from
one unit to another. In the terracotta temples of Bengal where the architectural unit is
itself compact like a hut, the entire surface is covered with these relief tablets, the
imagery is carried across several tablets in the form of a pageant or narrative. The basic
sculptural unit and the temple architecture have a relationship that is based at one and
the same time on exuberant multiplicity and structural homogeneity.
All the artists of Santiniketan, which is situated within a ten-mile radius
of the finest temples of the Birbhum group, were familiar with the late medieval tradi-
tion of terracotta temples. The stylistics of these reliefs amply influenced the visual
vocabulary of the School of Santiniketan. Interestingly, however, it influenced their
painting. Is it perhaps because the possibility of the evolution of new forms is greater
in translation? Subramanyan used the strategy of such transference, an alienation
device so to speak, while executing the Lucknow mural by switching mediums and
traditions: he referred to pictorial rather than terracotta relief traditions. The con-
struction of The King of the Dark Chamber reminds one quite unexpectedly of the
printed and painted templecloth of the goddess from Gujarat, Mata ni Pachedi.
What is directly relevant to Subramanyan’s choice of reference is the fairly
elaborate repertoire of images that goes into the iconic presentation of any of the seven
manifestations of the goddess; and even more important, that these images are in a
sense prefabricated. An assortment of wood blocks are kept at hand by the printers to
fulfil the iconic necessities of the sacred cloth, but also to improvise upon the idea of
the goddess in majesty. A great many of the ancillary images are meant simply to add
to the festive display and therefore the auspiciousness of the primary image: musi-
cians and dancing devotees; graceful animals like deer, fish and birds; temple domes
and pennants; and, of course, decorative interludes like floral and geometrically pat-
terned borders.
More express for use in my analysis of Subramanyan’s work is the fact that
even the prefabricated wood-block images are not complete and intact in themselves.
If, for example, the goddess figure is quite large, her torso with two truncated arms
makes one block. The other six arms holding the weapons which spring from the back
in bunches of three, but fit formally along the curve of the elbow of the first set of
arms, make two flanking blocks. And the body waist downwards, with the truncated
forearms plus the beautifully rounded hips and legs and feet, make the fourth block.
And there may be a fifth one if, say, the neck of the peacock in the throne stretches too
far out and needs functionally to be detached. The icon is thus formed by the sharp
and even clarity of the carved ridges which make up the contour of the image. It is
Mid-Century Ironies 95
formed by the placing and composition of all the images and finally, by the art of
aligning parts, the way the printer fulfils a line, encloses a shape, mechanically but
with the instinct and skill of a draughtsman. Indeed he is a painter as certain of the
more attenuated lines and arabesques have to be painted by hand.
As for the stylistic resemblance between these temple hangings and the
profiled and decorative figures in Subramanyan’s composition, it is to the piecemeal
way in which these large and intricate hangings are made that I draw attention. What
is significant is Subramanyan’s continuing preoccupation with visual structures which
guides his choices across different materials, techniques and styles of imagery, more
specifically the methodology he works
out for transmuting parts into a whole.
Subramanyan is interested in
the way a visual unit, reduced according
to some functional constraint (the type
-of material and tools: here the size of the
wood block, but it could be the length of
the yarn, the size of the loom and yet
again the feasible size of the clay pieces
and the nature of the kiln), encourages
the craftsman–artist to programme the
design with intelligence and precision. In
the case of the terracotta mural it encour-
aged him, for example, to design a face–
hand–bird–flower such that they can at
once be standardized and variegated, the
form working as a sign that is semanti-
cally versatile. Second, it induced him to
give even the decorative units a notatio-
nal value. A flower may not only appear
5 K.G. Subramanyan, The King of the Dark Chamber (detail)
on the skirting border of a picture, it may
be a device for constructing the patterned bodice of the beloved, it may be woven into
the garland of the deity or it may become an offering in the hand of the principal
devotee. The distinction between the significant and the ornamental is obliterated.
Third, even such pieces as a disc, square, strip, knob, will be assigned formal respon-
sibilities—they constitute a figure, form a snaky contour, embellish the palace facade.
The image is a computation of what we may equally consider neutral/significant/
narrative parts.
Subramanyan is especially interested in ornamental image structures that
sustain iconic conventions on the one hand, and allow narrative facilities on the other.
Mata ni Pachedi to which we have just referred, Pabuji ka Phad from Rajasthan and
96 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
the scroll patas of eastern India serve his interests in such a way. But equally I believe
this to be a modernist preoccupation, this telescoping of the iconic and narrative by
means of an essentially ornamental structure, which in turn is projected into what one
may call a metastructure, of play.
Terracotta Reliefs
Subramanyan did several mural projects after Lucknow, the most import-
ant of which is a set of sand-cast cement constructions at Gandhi Darshan, Delhi,
executed in 1969. There are carry-overs even while making toys and designing large
murals—the craft practice itself and the puppet and pantomime traditions come in
handy in both activities. It is, however, in his terracotta relief tablets done in sets since
1970 that the concept of the artist as artisan is fully realized, as also the performance
aspect in the making of art. He demonstrates that if sculpting is a mimetic act con-
trived by the virtuosity of the hand, the hand is a conspirator in subverting the very
mimesis through metaphoric transformations of a figural language. It is in this
complex role, maintaining over and above the craftsman’s tricks every aspect of his
modernity including sharp social accents and a sense of irony, that Subramanyan can
be said to be master.
The medium of clay simply blossoms in his hands. Subramanyan has
frequently used the earthenware clay from the Saurashtra region which fires to a
golden pink-red at about 1000 degrees centigrade. The early stages consist of cleaning
and stirring the clay in the machine, then submerging the clay in water until it has the
consistency of honey, as the potters like to say. The ancient orientals let their clays
decay and rot under water to mature like wine for their heirs. Then kneading it to
remove the air bubbles, you bring it to a point where it is gently humid, firm but
plastic. All this is usually done for Subramanyan by his colleagues in the art school.
Then he sits down on his haunches like a potter of all ages and puts together four or
nine tiles sculpted in relief to make a larger composition which is then fixed to a ply-
board frame.
But Subramanyan, it should be said, does not strictly speaking sculpt in
clay. Watch him use his little hands with their delicate fingers, now stiffened to part the
clay, now cupped to plump the dough: the clay patties are rolled out and cut into strips
with wire, then waved, arched and folded into bodies and attached to the clay base
with a smear of ‘slip’, the honeyed clay; and if the form is solid, by merging the edges
to the base. Watch him add the accessories: buttons, teeth, earrings, pockmarks and
decorative patterns. These are pressed, pinched and incised into the clay with the
simplest tools: his two fingers, a little spatula or a splinter of bamboo. There are also
knife-sharp slits in the body which leave frayed ridges; sometimes the slit clay curls into
fronds to make the pouting lips of a girl. The versatile working method puts you in
mind of a baker, a mason, a tailor, a primitive surgeon, a taxidermist, a doll-maker,
and last but not least, a potter. With compound craft he makes clay collages that are
astonishingly alive even as they are technically accessible.
What are the antecedents in the terracotta tradition for Subramanyan’s
work? There are the Harappan mother-goddess figurines (variations of which are
found all over northern and central India) with their flat backs and buttocks, pinched
birdlike faces, and bodies studded with discs and ribbons that are the breasts, and hair,
and ornaments. But the resemblance is limited to some simple techniques that
Subramanyan quite naturally borrows from the primitive origins of terracotta art.
One could look at the terracotta votive tablets from Molela, Rajasthan, but here the
craftsman builds up an armature of clay walls on the flat clay tablet over which
thinned slabs are moulded and smoothed so that the image has a convexity not unlike
conventional stone-carved sculpture. Although Subramanyan uses support and stuff-
ing to fill out forms the imagery is not built up, its solidity is everywhere contradicted
in the way he reveals through folds, perforations, cracks the fragility, even brittleness,
of the medium. There is the medieval tradition of terracotta temple reliefs in Bengal to
which I have referred, and one might say that the way the imagery aligns and extends
over joined tiles, the way the animate figures and decorative details fuse into what one
may call mime and metaphor in Subramanyan’s work, puts one in mind of the terra-
cotta temple reliefs. But then again the relief tiles in the temples are worked from
moulds and have a compact unity of surface spread over elaborate facades. This is
98 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
different from the stone-sculpted facades precisely in terms of their delicacy, it is true,
but different also from the freely improvised forms of Subramanyan’s reliefs.
I am inclined to recall very far-fetched, freely variegated references which
connect with the Bengal temples and Subramanyan at the level of improvisation: the
medieval bronze doors of San Zeno, Verona, and the bronze doors by Giacomo
Manzu, a modernist addition to St Peters’ in Rome, or rather, what would have been
the clay and wax prototypes of these doors. The spatial characteristics of the units of
narration which constitute the sum space of the San Zeno doors show that the artist–
craftsmen of the early medieval period were already trying to devise perspectival depth,
something that occurs ingenuously in the late Bengal terracotta temples as well.
Continuities are maintained from relief to three-dimensionality: the merest undu-
lation of surface becomes projected volume in San Zeno, as indeed in the terracotta
temples at Surul, Illim Bazaar and Ghurisa; a solid little head pops up or a whole torso
modelled in the round leans out of the surface and creates a pantomime vignette.
Telescoping from San Zeno to Manzu (one of the relatively few modern western
sculptors working in terracotta), one can see how these quite piquant spatial com-
positions become in his reliefs more subtle and glib. And ready to be cast, as in the case
of the Vatican doors, into bronze. Subramanyan’s terracottas play with voluptuous
dimensions but are in a sense untranslatable; the medium, the technique, the body-
forms are completely and simply the breathing forms of clay moulded by his hands.
The subject of Subramanyan’s terracottas is the polyvalent forms of the
human clay: the erotic play of limbs and with that the states of death and decompo-
sition of wounded bodies. We know that the analogies between earth and clay with
the human body abound in every tradition. The substance of clay is endowed with
qualities of immanent form that no other material possesses. The potter need only
touch his hands to the material for it to assume living form as delicate and lively as
god’s creations. Indeed it is often said in reverse that god made man like the potter
makes his pots and figurines, where the flesh is as plastic and vulnerable and as peri-
shable as a clay thing.
The analogies go on. Terracotta (which is baked earth in Latin) is the
result of compounding the two elements earth and fire (with the two other elements,
water and air, implied: fire whipped by the properties of air consumes the humidity of
clay). Earth and fire are to each other as life and sun, as body and soul. For the soul is
the enlivening heat in the inert substance of nature. Thus also the ritual aspect and the
alchemy of the ancient kiln where the earth is fired to a warm rosy hue as if to match
the sanguine tenderness of human bodies; and as a complementary opposite the ritual
of burial and cremation where the body is resumed by the elements of earth and fire to
become, as is so often said, clay unto clay, dust unto dust.
The first set of these terracottas, done in 1970–71, started at the end of the
story: with torture, death, decay (Illus. 6). Some of them directly related to news
Mid-Century Ironies 99
coming from Bangladesh of the slaughter of innocent women and children. Others
were made in response to pictures of flood victims in Gujarat. In both cases the trage-
dies were underlined by irony: war generals stalking the weak like game and counting
the dead as trophies; ministers grinning to the press over rows of bloated bodies.
Let me describe a comic strip shoot-out arranged in a format of nine join-
ed tablets (Illus. 7). Start from the right. The general cocks his gun; a headless corpse
lies with its little hands folded across the breast; the general grins. Start again. The
pistol is seen in close-up with a pair of eyes hanging on a ribbon of flesh from the
muzzle; this time it is a child’s body spread out like a crushed animal in front and back
views. Start again. The general’s profile wearing a gas mask with nozzle; the dead child
again; the general shows his shark teeth. Another tablet. The uniform of a much
decorated general is perched in the top middle of the nine tiles. Placed symmetrically
below is an upside-down corpse, its parts disjointed over six tiles in two rows. From
the torn trunk of the body emerge six penises ranged like fat bullets. But behold, these
are also little baby-heads, unformed orphans crawling out into the world. Another
tablet. A soldier with his gun stands up on three tiles in vertical arrangement, his body
decorated with a double row of phallic medals, each with a tiny bull’s head and a
different style of horns. Hanging by their tails on either side are the hunter’s trophies,
floppy hides with the heads sticking out, empty jaws foremost. A bearded ‘pharaoh’ in
the lower right-hand section shows his victorious profile to both hunter and game.
But these are just stories. I want rather to emphasize the deliberately posed
contrasts in the artist’s handling of the medium that make these stories tragic but in the
way of black humour. The contradictions work through sheer verisimilitude of clay to
flesh and how Subramanyan presses the likeness. There is the rich and slimy softness of
clay; when it is folded and fired the stretched clay flushes and cracks like weathered
skin, porous, sometimes pockmarked, usually tender. Contrasted with this is the aspect
of the artifice. Cutting and laying out slabs of clay in varying thickness to make
garments of skin, hide, felt, cloth, Subramanyan is a veritable expert in the sartorial
business, a clever designer, except that he also then rips the garments and scoops out
the inner stuffing of dolls and effigies. Indeed the construction of these clay images
resembles the toy project conspicuously. Solid knobbly heads sit on soft limbs, the
arched back of a graceful animal ends up in the open jaws of the human shark.
Subramanyan becomes the witch-doctor cobbling human flesh, conducting a wholly
denatured business with clay, but also soothing and restoring its sanguine nature to the
wholesome medium.
This kind of contradiction between verisimilitude through materials and
artificiality of construction is further noticeable in the way the imagery is arranged
across the nine tablets. Parts are disaligned in a way that he was doing for some time
before in painting but much more conspicuously in relief, as the gaps are dimensional.
In rejoining they make narrow, deregistered contours that are sometimes filled with
serrated edges, fretwork strips placed edgewise and clicking into place like shutters.
Here then we are with Subramanyan’s continuing interest in pantomime, in windows,
and in peepshows.
Except, and this is important here, what you see is not the voyeur’s
customary game. Or rather the game is turned inside out in the very process of making
and unmaking. Think of the potter’s wheel, of the potter enfolding space by spinning
and plumping the clay to make round and cylindrical forms. Subramanyan, who has
never made pots as such, implies hollowed forms only to open them out. The smooth
contours of the artisan’s art are presented as gouged spaces—channels of limb, cleft
and crevice of bosom, vagina, open fly. The opening and closing of convexities, indeed
of the clay skin which is also the surface of the image, is a formal trick to displace
obvious meanings of the game. The provoking grottos of the body are also a gap, a
tear, a caesura; the corresponding stitch-up is a healing act, a suture, but also a suffo-
cating closure of the life-form. Here is a conscious contrariness, I should think, and an
Mid-Century Ironies 101
and subject. The earlier sets of terracotta are much more designed; they are ingeniously
cut-and-paste, stuff-and-rip, collage reliefs arranged in the conventions of comic
narratives. Now the human features are almost naturalistically individuated, even
expressionist in the way he allows himself a vigorous kneading, moulding, modelling
of clay. The result is a rich portrait gallery, memorial plaques that spell out simulta-
neously signals of life and death. By a mere iconographic shift erotically expressive
features turn into the sad grimace of the death mask and vice versa. There is the aggra-
vated sensuousness of the face crushed under wheels, the touching mockery of the girl
who peels off the skin-mask, the mischief of the smooth-faced little girl who puts her
wondering finger in the lovely cavity of her mouth. Plus the ambiguous signals of the
independent sets of hands that accompany the heads in the four-square format of the
tablets: tender, probing, mannered hands that are more mimetic than even the heads in
that they imply a language, combining the mudra of the dancer with the mime of the
deaf-mute.
Subramanyan’s terracottas are as much about language as about mate-
rials and, as we have seen, he constantly plays the one in relation to the other. They
are about modernist language but in so far as that has itself incorporated ‘primitive’
art forms. And in so far as primitivism now functions as a system of signs within art
history Subramanyan has a two-way advantage. Starting from sheer artisanal practice
he develops the ambiguity of the modernist sign, but then he upsets the given signifieds
of contemporary consciousness, its familiar world of subjects, by devolving to material
verities and received traditions once again.
In a sense the very use of the medium of terracotta is now a sign, it imme-
diately contextualizes the meaning of the actual, invented forms. Terracotta images
have been moulded from the earth and strewn all over it from the most primitive and
ancient times—pots, toys, magical and iconic figures, produced at minimal cost, used
and thrown away. Their very perishability reduces the commodity aspect to almost
nil. They are always, even in fun, use objects. Moreover, for all their perishability they
are not exactly ephemeral because clay forms are virtually immanent in the earth itself,
they are the earth’s manifestations. In this sense the terracotta forms are virtually the
repository of man’s artistic instinct and thus of primitive traditions—the ‘little
tradition’, as it is so often called, easily swallowed up and yet continuous at subterra-
nean levels. Not perennial but with a deft capacity to survive nevertheless. It is to this
tradition Subramanyan is committed.
Ideological Formation
Early Years
The artistic identity Subramanyan gains from his intelligent simulation
of the artisanal tradition can be traced to a specific ideological formation during his
youth. Subramanyan, we shall see, worries about the anomalous position of the
modern artist who stands at the end of the logic of postrenaissance art. The very
ideology that gains him his place in the living tradition of Indian art also poses a prob-
lem in relation to western representational art, especially in its conventional modes of
oil and easel painting. His doubt is focused on the state of the artist’s unbelonging
because it reduces the possibility of art functioning as a viable language within the
community. That this problematic can itself generate creative solutions will be seen
when we discuss his glass paintings. Meanwhile in a brief account of his biography and
education it is worth noting that the implicit ideology unfolds several facets that are
alternatively positive and negative in terms of artistic practice as such.
Born in 1924 into a Tamilian family living in Kuthuparamba, Kerala,
104 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Subramanyan was the youngest of eight children of whom only two brothers and one
sister survived. His father, a revenue officer with the Government of India, admired
Annie Besant and was inclined toward theosophical values. Subramanyan’s boyhood
was marked by a high level of literacy, a fairly frequent feature in Kerala. This was
especially the case in the French-administered toy-town of Mahe, where he did his
schooling. Subramanyan spent a lot of time at the well-stacked public library of the
town where he could browse through French magazines which frequently featured art
essays. Here he also came across The Modern Review and became acquainted with the
writings of Indian intellectuals.
Before he was thirteen Subramanyan was a member of what was known
as the Rationalists’ Society, which attracted the more radical youngsters of the area.
Already in his adolescence he knew some of the Marxists working to build a peasant
and labour movement in the region. The charismatic peasant leader A.K. Gopalan was
known to his family. At the same time Subramanyan knew the Gandhians working in
the independence struggle. There was, we should recall, still a meeting point between
the two ideologies in the Congress Socialist Party.
By the time he was fifteen Subramanyan’s political inclinations were
clearly marked by Gandhian ideas. He joined the Constructive Work Group promul-
gated by Gandhi; he worked in the Charkha Club, learning and then teaching
spinning; and he talked to student groups engaged in national rejuvenation pro-
grammes. This was in 1939. It was these modest social work groups spread over the
towns and villages of India that were to be the nuclei for political action when the
ultimate call for freedom came.
While he did his Intermediate at a Jesuit college in Mangalore his political
activities were limited, but his political reading widened to include, besides Marx and
Gandhi, Lenin and the Fabians. He had been reading Indian philosophical and literary
works, including their twentieth-century exposition. Now he went farther afield and
read works on anthropology, psychoanalysis and, in time, modern literature, includ-
ing contemporary masters like James Joyce. In 1941 he joined Presidency College,
Madras, for an honours course in economics.
At the very instant of the 1942 Quit India call, Subramanyan led a march
of Presidency students and became a well-known student leader in Madras. Later the
students picketed the secretariat and the police rounded up the activists and took them
to jail. Subramanyan spent six months in the Alipuram Camp jail in Bellary district
(originally the Haidar Ali stables, converted in a hurry to house the Mopla rebels and
now meant exclusively for political prisoners). Except for the convict warders who
provided strange but welcome diversion, this was an elite group, including prominent
members of the Quit India movement like C. Subramaniam and Gopala Reddy. An
underground library and clandestine discussions kept the community of prisoners
active. On his release in July 1943 Subramanyan worked in Madras as part of the vast
Mid-Century Ironies 105
we must know that there is no such thing as absolute caste restriction in human
cultures; they ever have the power to combine and produce new variations, and
such combinations have been going on for ages, proving the truth of the deep
unity of human psychology. It is admitted that in Indian Art the Persian element
found no obstacles, and there are signs of various other alien influences. China
and Japan have no hesitation in acknowledging their debt to India in their
artistic and spiritual growth of life. . . . Our artists were never tiresomely
reminded of the obvious fact that they were Indians; and in consequence they
had the freedom to be naturally Indian in spite of all the borrowings that they
indulged in.6
tization. The quality of work that goes into a village product and its subsequent
manner of consumption cannot, Subramanyan would like to believe, be computed in
terms of wage labour or exchange value. Thus the product is not, strictly speaking,
commodity proper. For the very reason that its aesthetic is far from superfluous it is
complementary to its function.
Let me add that Subramanyan understands full well how the future of
the artisan is part of a set of major and deeply troubled issues along which the entire
political and economic orientation of the country can be debated. Even in the planned
future of independent India the dilemmas have remained unsolved. Subramanyan has
himself been involved for over three decades with the planning of handicraft and
handloom sectors, and not just as an enlightened artist–designer (a capacity in which
he has been associated with the Indian, Asian and World Crafts Councils). He has tried
to intervene at the level of infrastructure, to reinfuse it with the Gandhian conviction
in village self-sufficiency. Having worked with government agencies like the All India
Handloom Board, his critique points precisely to the degree of disalignment in plan-
ning: paths of industrial development between small and big industry, between village
and urban markets diverge to such an extent and to such disadvantage to the rural
sector that there is no choice but to feed craft artefacts into an alienated market
system. And then to hope that some benefit percolates through middlemen to the
craftsmen whose substantial basis of survival has otherwise been eroded. Subra-
manyan’s sense of satisfaction that the government does at least take official cogniz-
ance of the problem—in a way that relatively few third-world societies have done—is
tempered by a sense of defeat. The peasant–artisan’s positional identity in the village
hierarchy and that of the village in the national economy continually dwindles.
experience through Orissa which opened his eyes to the vastly variegated forms of
what was too generally called the Indian tradition.
Gradually a pedagogical method was devised at Kala Bhavana for the
Indian artist seeking to define her national and artistic identity. Tradition yielded the
possibility of a communicable language that in turn assumed an empathy with envi-
ronment and community. These organic structures nurtured the individual whose
praxis, so to speak, furthered the tradition. The triangle was thus activated. It should
be added that many great poets and artists in the early part of the century, and not in
the orient alone, were preoccupied with these questions.
Notwithstanding Nandalal’s artistic failures (as in the smaller of the
mythological pictures painted in pseudo-classical modes and produced intermittently
through his career), it is evident that he understood quite early in his development the
liberating effects of contemporary environment and of vernacular vocabulary and
skills. How vividly this was transmitted to his students is further evident from the way
Subramanyan retells it decades later:
The curriculum at Kala Bhavana was in this respect radical. Students were
introduced to craftsmen at work, they were encouraged to rework traditional mate-
rials and techniques, and the objects produced were exhibited and sold in local fairs
with the hope of recycling the taste and skills of craftsmen–artists in the urban middle-
class milieu, with the young artist forming a double link. A new Indian sensibility was
to be hypothesized, created, designed.
Popular art animated the visual sense of the Bengal artists in another way.
In terms of actual imagery it inclined them to visual narratives (derived from the great
myths as well as from tribal fables), to hybrid figural iconography and swift stylistic
abbreviations. These ideological choices, at least on par with the more sentimental
revivalist trends, were made possible by the fact that in Bengal there continued to be,
110 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
until well into the twentieth century, an extraordinarily active popular tradition in the
pictorial arts. This tradition had constantly responded to the social and economic
changes that came with colonialism, industrialization and urbanism—the Kalighat
paintings and the woodcut prints and illustrations of nineteenth-century Calcutta are
a case in point. This made it expressly available to modern artists.
Nandalal’s own translation of this popular resource can be seen some-
what later and most succinctly in the large set of pictures he did for the Haripura
Congress of 1938: I am referring to the gouache-on-paper pictures that decorated the
pandal and have come to be known as the Haripura posters. These emblematic images
of the working people of India, composed in the styles of figuration in the patas and
the relief sculpture of the terracotta temples of Bengal, came across as a viable art form
of great vivacity. I emphasize this here because this was, like the developing oeuvre of
Jamini Roy, a most felicitous use, in the context of Indian visual art, of images derived
from popular sources. Further, he exceeded Roy’s objective by serving political pur-
poses directly and with radical effect on nationalist culture.
With Subramanyan this lineage finds its most articulate expression. If
earlier Bengal artists took their cue from the avid eclecticism of popular Bengali culture
as it developed from the nineteenth century, Subramanyan learnt to privilege this
eclecticism of ideas and forms in terms of the theory and practice of twentieth-century
art. He demonstrates how the hierarchical range of an art tradition is significant pre-
cisely in the way the chain can be playfully interlinked and continually transformed.
Forms which are discretely categorized can be synthesized almost unaccountably in
the perception and hands of the artist so that if you pick up one pictorial element—
one sign, one gesture—a twin etymology unfolds, revealing on the one hand the envi-
ronmental source and on the other the formal and iconographic code. The plurality
of meanings in a language is always a happy bonus for an artist; for Subramanyan,
who is especially engaged with the problems of devising a pictorial language, this
double etymology of forms is especially fruitful. Popular and sophisticated, ambi-
guous and accessible, playful and mocking, obvious and self-parodying, Subraman-
yan’s eclecticism extends the living tradition into an artistic practice with a distinctly
modernist end.
Meanwhile, to complete the Santiniketan story ruled by the ideology of
cultural indigenism, artistic practice at Kala Bhavana saw the living or popular tradi-
tions fuse with what I have already designated as Indian naturalism. But what was this
Indian naturalism to be?
There is no specific landscape genre in the Indian pictorial tradition but
because of the pervading orientalism in Bengal the far eastern approach to landscape
was enthusiastically adapted. As for Nandalal, his own response to nature was empha-
tically extrovert; he responded to the animation suffusing nature with a matching
exuberance. And in the two decades after he moved to Santiniketan, where the natural
Mid-Century Ironies 111
10 K.G. Subramanyan, Figure and Mask , 1978 11 K.G. Subramanyan, Hanuman, 1979
16 K.G. Subramanyan, Woman at Tap, 1949 17 K.G. Subramanyan, Woman with Lamp-II, 1951
In the next phase, during 1961–64, the paintings are almost exclusively
still-lifes: tables piled with objects of a leisurely repast or with the bric-a-brac of a
studio. These fit his preferred brief, being demonstrably genre pictures with decorat-
ive possibilities. Following this he takes another logical step and goes on to paint a
whole series of interiors, mostly studio interiors, with idling figures. Consider him in
the context of Braque’s late studio paintings where he foregrounds the structuralist
basis of the modernist image; the sublimity of pictorial space; the (invisible) presence
of the self-in-the-studio—a pictorial hermiticism that turns into an allegory for being
in the world. Braque offers the terms of modernist autonomy and indeed a modernist
poetics. However Subramanyan’s straight and steady ‘progress’ places him in the
lineage not only of the great Braque, but also among already conventionalized picture-
makers in the European, but especially English, art milieu of the time. It must also be
said that this academicism is not the inevitable result of choosing a genre. Even so
modest an artist as Giorgio Morandi, who paints bottles all his life, will prove that
the image can be construed to remain elusive to simple subject categories by a meta-
physical vision.
While anonymity is a virtue Subramanyan would like to establish in his
work, sublimity is not. This begins to be clear around 1966 when his still-life and
studio pictures become not studies from objects as such (nature morte as in French)
but forms animated by the quizzical eye of the artist. The content is more camouflaged
Mid-Century Ironies 117
18 K.G. Subramanyan, Sitting Woman, 1951 19 K.G. Subramanyan, Seated Woman, 1958
but the colours are gaudy and the shapes wag and beckon. What these are, in fact, is a
voyeur’s version of the interior, a kind of subgenre one might say, and I am including
here all the pictures up to the end of the 1960s he titles variously as ‘studio’ and
‘interior’. It is only around the mid-1970s that the content shifts significantly. Pic-
tures titled ‘windows’ are a reduction of the interior to a passing peepshow; the
‘terrace’ paintings are an extension of the interior, an extension of the everyday space
into what the oriental tradition sees as lovers’ space, the very contours of the objects
within it metered to cradle lovers’ dalliance. In the mid-1970s Subramanyan breaks
with his own constraining parodies and transfigures the European genre of the interior
by the very alternations of rhythm and space.
modes of fresco painting. Add to this the peculiar fact that by and large Bengal
painting, the Santiniketan school in particular, is not inclined to a variegated use of
colour, and it is clear that Subramanyan inherits some handicaps.
The Bengal painter who can be called a colourist is the Calcutta-based
Jamini Roy. The Santiniketan painters virtually dismiss him as misguided. The set of
gouache pictures Nandalal paints in 1937–38 for the Haripura Congress where he
makes overt reference to the pata traditions using colour with great vivacity are a brief
and brilliant deviation. But not only are these a mere episode in Nandalal’s own career,
Subramanyan refers to them much later in his glass paintings.
In this respect Santiniketan gives Subramanyan a mixed sense of guilt
and challenge vis-a-vis oils and its modernist uses. Matters are not helped by the fact
that his second schooling takes place in England. During 1955–56 Subramanyan is
on a scholarship at the Slade School, London. The English tradition is not strong
either in oils or in colour, J.M.W. Turner notwithstanding. While Subramanyan is in
England he likes Victor Pasmore and Ceri Richards; the early work of Roger Hilton
and Patrick Heron make relevant reference; William Coldstream is the Slade professor
at the time. The options—one abstract and austerely formal, the other loose-limbed
and graphic, another literal but reticent—do not encourage a particularly sensuous
response to painting.
Here it is worth reminding ourselves how different the watercolour
process is from that of oil painting. First, with watercolour or gouache you work
constantly with the white surface of the paper which acts as blank space but also as
luminous foil; the colours scatter and converge, never losing reference to the white
heart of the rainbow, so to speak. Second, you have to work quickly in watercolour
and with infallible skill because the image bears no reworking. Subramanyan tries to
bring the watercolour technique into a kind of equation with oils but to the latter’s
disadvantage. The medium of oils allows for surfaces that are matt and opaque,
transparent and iridescent, but above all plastic: you build up the image from the tone
and depth of the hues and in the process evolve the relationship between ground and
image. Subramanyan tries to work on a contrary principle. Disliking the viscous gleam
of oil paint, he mixes white with the pigment and succeeds usually in making it chalky
and brittle. (He also tries, in the still-lifes, to use encaustic and gritty materials like
sand.) Third, rather than work out the image from the density of pigment and
medium he tries to keep an improvised look in the painting while often painfully
reworking it. So that you have this slightly artificial animation of gesture against what
are often plain, lifeless colour ‘backgrounds’.
Not that he is not aware of the problems. His very choice among
European painters points to a need to enrich and elaborate the painted surface: Braque
and Matisse, and then Nicolas de Stael who provides a rather more obvious tactility of
colour and surface. And indeed there are a few paintings in the middle period where
Mid-Century Ironies 119
Subramanyan does achieve what would be called a confident and relaxed painter-
liness, as for example in Seated Woman (1958, Illus. 19) and the Studio picture of the
mid-1960s. But the real change comes about in 1966–67 during his stay in New York
and it is accounted for by a new command over design.
In considering Subramanyan’s disposition of mark, line, edge and shape
within the picture-frame, one must remember that while he is astute in the matter of
design in several other media and techniques such as toys and terracottas and the later
glass pictures, in oil painting he has to overcome yet another prejudice: against the
easel format as such and what it recapitulates of the western tradition of painting.
The picture on the wall is an object of gratuitous dimensions where the
frame conspicuously determines the compositional principle (in a way that it does
not in a miniature or a fresco). Where, moreover, the format corresponds to that of the
window and the mirror, thus setting up analogic functions vis-a-vis the viewer’s
subjective and objective worlds. Is it a frame for looking out into the world and look-
ing into oneself and thus more than a frame, a paradigm? The easel picture is indeed an
aspect of the western world view where you find this precisely matched development:
the ego not only reflects but is constituted by the narcissistic gaze, hence the import-
ance of the mirror; and rationality is, as it were, the perspectival threshold, the horizon
of the perceived world, hence the window. The language that develops with and for
120 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
reverberate, the image coming to life by this precisely formulated contour. Even
Mondrian may be seen to maintain this quality; certainly his successors, for example
Barnett Newman, work on the principle that line, shape, colour must be grounded,
that they should butt against each other so as to make live contact along the edge.
Subramanyan’s concern with the problem is seen in a fairly large set of
paintings done between 1960–65. These are straightforward still-lifes where he
replaces the stiff grid with a more fluid one, bringing to the surface his enduring
interest in devising an ornamental principle of construction based on loosely inter-
locked contours (Illus. 20). His chosen mentor during this period is undoubtedly
Braque. The line now loops around the objects, gradually taking on the characteristic
of automatic writing. When the motif moves on to studio interiors the gestural line,
usually white, is rapidly brushed over so that it screens the image. In the ambiguity of
positive and negative space, in the depths of the studio, between the grids and above
the surfaces, figural signs disport. Then, through the 1960s, the brushing is further
stylized and the design of the picture comes to be ruled by a calligraphic hand.
When Subramanyan moves to New York his canvases are frequently put
together as polyptichs (Illus. 21). Two or four or six or eight units are joined together,
initially for convenience as the New York studio was small, then this becomes a design
proposition with an implied motif. Aligned along the right edge of each joined panel
are bunches of curled forms which uncurl against the flat colour space across to the left
frame. Like confetti. But the confetti is
too animate and it is thickened at the
edges. You think in amusement of a
lavishly tossed octopal salad decked with
fruit crescents and flowers. Then you
notice how the tentacles twine so that
the ensemble looks like a dance of limbs,
assorted girl-legs tangled with the male
counterpart of tusk and hook. What we
have now is a parody, or proxy, of life-
forms in a coupling game.
As much as the subject is
camouflaged, the design becomes vivid.
And as soon as Subramanyan is able to
achieve this visual double-take all the
other elements in the picture become
articulate. The colours become rich, the
problems of graphic rigidity and the
uneasy edge are nearly overcome. The
21 K.G. Subramanyan, Red Dormitory (polyptich), 1967 brushing-in of the pigment, the dark-
122 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
ening and brightening of the brushmark by overpainting leaves the contours active
against the colour surface.
I have suggested earlier that this change is connected with his stay in New
York. It would be more correct to say that a breakthrough was already indicated, but
that while working in New York he produced some very accomplished abstract
pictures not unrelated to the current New York scene. A dominant feature at the time
was precisely the design of a picture. Clement Greenberg, we must remember, was still
a force in the 1960s; painters like Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland and Ellsworth Kelly
worked conspicuously with principles of symmetry, with negative and positive
alignments of shapes against flat, bright, hard surfaces. Without identifying with any
of the current movements as such, Subramanyan derived one lesson from all—from
abstract as also certain pop painters. He became unapologetically formal, allowing
himself to do flat, decorative paintings like Figure in Interior and the succeeding
Windows I, II, III, done after his return to India in 1968–69.
It seems as though Subramanyan needed to free himself from the
overwrought culture of oil painting as it is practised in Europe and to take on the
boldness of the Americans. The framing and compactness of the easel picture had, as
we have noted, always troubled Subramanyan. The first step was to allow the formal
iconicity of the image to disintegrate; now he broke up his own mode of ornamental
clustering as well. In the polyptichs the image is fragmented, repeated, serialized. These
are in a sense murals miniaturized, or rather, they transpose the values of the one upon
the other to subvert in the bargain the easel format.
In describing genres I have already mentioned that Subramanyan’s
Windows suggest a cartoon strip narration; they help the viewer to take the imagery
ironically. This is not only by way of the thematic aspect of voyeurism but by a trick of
design: by alternating figurative and nonfigurative elements in equal measure; by
variegating negative and positive shapes; by shifting the horizon line in each window-
space to provide different viewing angles into an interior, the goings-on in which have
been abbreviated to mock signs and bring the narrative sequence to naught.
The modernist principle of design with its stylistic abbreviations often
gives way in the second part of the century to reductionist propositions. Late modern-
ist painting as well as pop art demonstrate this tendency. There is this side to
Subramanyan’s New York connection: given his inclination to detach himself from
subject, and subjectivity, he finds a way of construing the image with a chancy and
wry sense of humour. This is the brittle end of modernist art before which the great
modernists always stop short; where you attenuate art practice to become reified as
retinal stimuli, visual sensation, kitsch and fetish.
The three paintings of the mid-1970s that have been mentioned before,
Terrace-I, Terrace-II, Interior with Figures, bring to a fruitful conclusion Subraman-
yan’s formal manoeuvres. Terrace-II (Illus. 22) in particular ties up the oeuvre into a
Mid-Century Ironies 123
bouquet. Held out in confidence and quite lovely to behold, it makes sense of virtually
twenty-five years of what I call the modernist pros and cons Subramanyan has posed
in his paintings.
The face of Terrace-II is a bright fresh ultramarine blue, a fully saturated
blue which changes in parts to turquoise green, and grey. Complementing the blue
there is orange, a bright lozengy hue turning to pink and citrus yellow by the addition
of a flaky, softly brushed-in white. White is the common denominator—cream-white
of the canvas, zinc-white from the tube—this very vivid painting is both drawn and
modelled in white. From the point of view of design this implies the conversion of
negative into positive space; also the conversion of picture space into picture surface so
that the structural problem becomes essentially a matter of decorative layout, a visual
spectacle presented frontally.
124 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
pedagogy. Splendidly displayed in phase after phase of his glass paintings, this is a kind
of cultural wit, abundantly nourished by the popular art forms of India but also by
the modernist initiative to construct and then deconstruct the image in full play. It is
finally with the reverse pictures on glass that the inhibiting aspect of Subramanyan’s
problem-solving project is overcome.
The relevant question is, what modernism does Subramanyan adopt?
During this entire century there is, counterposed with the romantic position, a
structuralist–semiotic enquiry into the meaning of reality. And if ontological consi-
derations have led to one kind of truth the investigation of reality down to its method
of fabrication, its intricate sign systems, has led to another. The truths coincide when
investigation leads to a recreation of meaning.
With these alternatives in view it should be possible to see the positive
aspect of the problematic Subramanyan poses. If it is from an antipathy to the more
flamboyant expression of self that he prefers to be reserved to the point of seeming
disengaged, it is from an active engagement with the linguistic aspect of art that he
prefers the more anonymous style of expression. The implications of this are manifold.
Enquiry into the language of art leads automatically to anthropological questions:
about the function of art as a symbolic system, about art as sign in primitive and tra-
ditional societies. Looking at it the other way round, an anthropological interest in the
art of other cultures leads to linguistic concerns and thus concern about significances
within one’s own culture. This finds evidence in the development of modern art.
Subramanyan’s choice to work out an impersonal system of pictorial signs
makes him both demonstrably Indian and modern. His modernity is linked to the
semiotic option and his indigenism is reinforced by precisely this choice as it gives him
access to the premodern cultures of India. Where tradition is still alive to the extent
that a collective system of significations can be encountered—as in peasant and tribal
communities of India, art can be said to equal language. Further, the key for the lan-
guage of construction in traditional societies is craft practice and its differentiated
technical systems. Subramanyan is devoted to this learning process.
In an analogous sense cubism may be seen to be the intellectual pun, the
abstracting game, the process of fabrication deployed to build up a linguistic structure
for modern art. Subramanyan’s work clearly acknowledges this. The moment he
succeeds in making a synthesis of the concepts involved in the seeing and making, in
the contructional devices of one convention against the other, he overcomes the merely
demonstrational efforts at synthesis to produce a uniquely integrated art.
The Indian artist exults in the visual world with a knowledge of its variety,
impermanence, and changeability; he reacts to it in an internal way, looking
for its visual constituents, not its immediate facts. He brings his exultation to
the object he creates in a midway fusion, his terms of reference contained
within the nature of the object, and so relative and semantically variable.17
130 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
are stylistically in fact closest to the Kalighat pictures whereby he brings to our
attention not only the similarities between two popular art forms but also long-range
continuities in Indian painting (Illus. 29). Continuities in painterly conventions
stretch over centuries, across genres, and between hierarchies of art forms: popular,
medieval, classical.
Let me elaborate a little about the Kalighat pictures. Loading the brush
with black pigment, the Kalighat painters draw out a long, springy, unerring line that
has a flexibility more nearly like oriental calligraphy than English watercolours from
which supposedly they learnt their techniques. The black line describes the contour,
fills out the luxuriant tresses and emphasizes the border of the saris wound round the
bosoms and hips of ample women. Set within these looped lines there is an astonishing
display of broad, flat, sparkling brushmarks. They are notations or patterns on the
objects and on the bodies of birds, beasts and fish that feature in the pictures. These are
taken to another level of skill in the delicate treatment of human torsos bedecked with
ornaments. Thus the image is constructed at these three decorative levels: a linear
rhythm, free patterning, and sharp ornamental focus on wide open eyes, kiss-curls,
silver strings, pendants and plumes—the headgear of a peacock feather for Krishna
with its glittering heart and flying tendrils.
But the decorative construction of the picture as we have just described it
is in a sense deliberately contradicted when the Kalighat painters, using the usual
device of a double contour to round off the figures, give them explicit volume. The
imagery is thus voluptuous without being naturalistic, ornamental without being flat.
Further, the language so devised being contrary and crossed, it allows for transfor-
mation of subject and motif. Flat, iconic images give over to portrayals of boun-
teous women, and these to city scandals in the manner of genre paintings. The
repertoire of plump animals could belong to myths and fables; they could be part
of natural history portfolios; and not least, they could be meant for the watering
palate of some connoisseur.
Delineated with a mixture of accuracy and whim, there are all manner of
animals, rats and jackals, fish and prawn, pigeons and cats, in the Kalighat pictures.
The yellow Kalighat cat is of course the most famous of all. A satirical symbol for
mock holiness, it has a look of smug wellbeing. Big bow-tie ears, quizzical eyebrows,
sad eyes, it holds a prawn hanging like a fat tassel from the mouth. The delineation is
deft and sumptuous, the contour traces the spine and swells into cloud-black scallops
ending in a voluminous tail. The cat has an obvious resemblance to the tiger of the
goddess which is a larger, more ferocious version in the mythological pictures from
Kalighat. Just as indeed there is a family resemblance between the whore, housewife,
goddess in these pictures. Eclecticism in language allows a kinship of forms and more,
a repertoire of jaunty creatures that is replete with clues to their own transformation.
What I believe draws Subramanyan most of all to nineteenth-century
132 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Cf. Matisse
Perhaps a reference to Matisse will provide further clues. The likenesses are
obvious at the level of the motif, in the manner of delineation, in the construction of
the pictorial image. The differences are equally crucial. Matisse enters the realm of the
134 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
woman, she has a subjective life. If she is apparently reticent, even indolent, there are
other hints to her deeper subjectivity: in the wayward, delicately stressed contour, in
the ever-changing colour surfaces so richly worked and at other times evanescent like
her appearance. If the woman is languid and active by turn, it is not an ambiguity
gained from male regard, nor is the female dynamic foreclosed by erotic anticipation.
It is the vicissitude of feeling, or the intersubjectivity between artist and model that is
being recorded.
Matisse, who was very nearly a misogynist in actual life, makes the image
of woman strangely confessional. Subramanyan, on the other hand, is finally closer to
the orientalist conception where typology and subject coincide. Even when he is
deliberately provocative and parodies the iconic aspect of the woman portrayed he is
scarcely ever personal, nor is she ever entirely individual. Except for a few rude and
ravishing tokens the girls in Subramanyan’s pictures are encased in a design. At a
critical level one may call this an ornamental closure of form and meaning.
Or perhaps we should say that Subramanyan stands midway between
oriental conventionality that includes a manoeuvrability but as of a game, and
Matissian freedom that commits the artist, for all the gleaming arabesques and grace-
ful design, to an iconoclastic principle through the very exercise of desire. Subra-
manyan links the options by way of a stylistic cartwheel. He sets up a lively circularity
whereby Matisse’s borrowed orientalism turns round and about into an actual oriental
option once again, spiralling in its wake a handful of sparkling signs.
The moderns have taken liberally from primitive pictorial notation and
pictographic language. They have imbibed the ironic abbreviation of pictorial signs
from the oriental tradition and given to the image an empirical basis through a
structure of correspondences, as in western art. To this eclecticism the moderns add
individual style: this is a way of calling attention to self, to the vanity of a private ges-
ture. And it rests, precariously, on an existential assumption to always signify.
Subramanyan goes on from here and lets his eye traverse and his hand
touch a variety of things—in confirmation of a sense of belonging, in order to context-
ualize art, as a way to grasp the design of the world. There is informal affiliation with
the world and a formal translation of it into a pictorial grid.
‘[T]he sign is . . . a sensuous idea’, says Roland Barthes.20 Equally, the sen-
suous idea, with which the Indian imagination is replete, is to be captured in visual
inscriptions as sign.
Recognizing the problematical—desiring, symbiotic—relationship bet-
ween art and life, between nature and language, Subramanyan would like to exorcise
the near-metaphysical proposition of ‘representation’. To arrive instead at a gemlike
compression of the figural motif. And with this motif to light up the environment, to
make it sanguine, to give it vivacity—make it more intelligible.
Mid-Century Ironies 135
Epilogue
The Decade of the 1990s
There is a sharp turn in Subramanyan’s iconography and pictorial lan-
guage during the 1990s.21 I will supplement this study of his work until 1987 with
an epilogue.
In the decade of the 90s Subramanyan has produced scores of little and
large paintings. The outcome of this hectic pursuit is a redundancy which allows the
select successes to appear like jumping genii from the witch’s cauldron. Subramanyan
thinks of his work as ‘magic in the making’.22
emaciated body. I conjured up the figure of Inayat Khan, adapted from a Jehangiri
drawing, to symbolize this.’25
While he does not paint autobiographical pictures, one can, as with most
artists, read off an almost visceral obsession in the images. There are figural corres-
pondences between the self and iconographic representations of the demonic/pathetic
masked in mythological terms. There is as if an acknowledgement of a coarsening of
the sensuous impulse, a hardening of ephemeral desire, a deadening of innocent
pleasure. The panic and pain that come with it turn into a mocking hide-and-seek, a
chase between glance and object, between self and the world.
As he has grown older Subramanyan has had the courage to make what
would be considered ugly and even in a sense abusive paintings. Allegories of strange
couplings, suggested sodomies, all manner of cruel and mocking intercourse abound.
The creature-world is animated—pantheistically suffused, but in a denatured world.
Volleys of gestures invoke the animus, evacuate the numen, spray the surface with zest:
he apprehends images like bitter epiphanies.
A brilliant draughtsman from the start, he had wavered along the moder-
nist axis on the material relationship of contour to form. Even more so on the degree
of autonomy of the brushmark and the depth of pigment on the surface of the canvas.
He has achieved a most precise relationship of the pictorial elements in his reverse
paintings brought to a culmination in 1994–98. And as never before he has achieved,
in the decade of the 1990s, a painterly surface in the large oil paintings. Bringing depth
of hue and plasticity to figure and object, these can now take up myriad lessons of art
history in one sweep (Illus. 31).
Subramanyan’s recent paintings recall in their painterly maturity Braque
and Matisse, his modernist mentors. Braque, in his last paintings, began to virtually
draw with white, highlighting the material surface built up with translucent hues,
proposing a peculiar form of concrete immanence based on the rigours of modernist
painting. But the recent paintings by Subramanyan also recall the tryptichs of Max
Beckmann and later paintings of Ron Kitaj: the complex, interlocking iconography of
Beckmann in a state of historical wakefulness, and of Kitaj when he paints pictures of
a present foreboding—represented by ‘perverse’ encounters, concealed motives, covert
violence and a vision of disintegration. Thereby, and not unlike these modern masters,
Subramanyan mythologizes his own body-self.
Bringing to fruition the bitterness and envy of ageing, he pitches it into
states of nemesis so that you can gauge the magnitude of the artist’s loss, his high
stakes in painterly compensation. Bordering on the grotesque, these paintings tickle
desire by allowing a glimpse of the exhilaration that comes, like a shudder, from the
touch and twist and modelling and scraping of pale, bright, murky pigment. From a
flurry of brushstrokes resembling the physical, somewhat devilish touch of fur and
feather on the body.
Mid-Century Ironies 137
And now a spiral gaze, turning between a family photograph and a phantom
cat. So they ask, ‘Do you like cats?’ You can’t say you do. They come from the
neighbour’s garden. And move like they own your house. Have kittens on your
chairs. They pin you with their gaze and claw you for attention. Eerie hairy
things. But fascinating when they leap or slide.26
Like sly cats, Subramanyan’s brushwork leaps and slides and claws,
leaving dead birds fluttering in the picture-window.
From Matisse, Braque, Beckmann and Kitaj, Subramanyan can go to
cartoon and comic strips, and thence to the patachitra traditions of Bengal with which
he made an advanced alliance. One can hardly overestimate the importance of the arts
of Bengal in the pictorial language, in the packed and scrambled narratives of
Subramanyan. These range from the richly ornamental patas from Murshidabad and
Midnapur to the naive and spare jadupatas of the santals, to the voluptuous icons and
tantalizing modernity of the Kalighat patas, to the saura and myriad doll-forms of
Bengal. Not to speak of the unique medieval heritage of the terracotta temples. Subra-
manyan comprehends and physically manipulates the life of these forms like an
ancient master with a youthful desire to vocalize, visualize and grasp the vivacity of
life’s exuberance through the living (/dying) arts.
the clown-capers of the bahurupee is itself a form of cultural choice and has its
repercussions on the actually existing pictorial language available to a contemporary
artist. It is a decision to disabuse ourselves of a precious aesthetic as also of the iconic
bodyguards from tradition. It leaves us insecure in the bad world, facing fear in and
through a relentless masquerade of the self in the street, in the nation, in the world.
The assault on the body in later imagery has ultimately to do with the
worsening social situation in India: the politics of an ascendant rightwing based on
religious and ethnic aggression, a conflictual state where public murder in the form of
communal riots escalates all the time. Subramanyan has depicted this aggression
directly and deflected its impact into fables, parables, myths.
Since 1991 he has deployed mythological figuration and recognizable
iconography, especially that of Durga. He has brought into play all manner of revenge
with the heraldry of triumph associated with Mahishasuramardini. There is here a
subversive crossover of human and beast, taking off from the encounter between the
goddess and an assortment of asura figures—all choreographed into a balletic spree,
brutal chase. While picking up the cues of social violence he turns it into a kind of
pictorial conflagration, a bursting forth of bodies often as if at gunpoint—sprouting
limbs triggered by the explosion of a human bomb (Illus. 33, 34).
But to return to the body at stake: Subramanyan’s figuration, featuring
for the most part the female image, has always suggested a form of sexual discom-
fiture. Now the female body and its modes of coupling, its creature existence, its
pathetic states of ravagement, produce a subtext. At a compulsive level the female
body is a plucked and frenzied sign signifying in reverse the fear, the attenuation, the
washing away of (male) desire. At a more conscious level he seeks a linguistic style for
his persistent attraction towards sadistic frictions in daily exchange of human love; for
an allegorical denouement of human passion (Illus. 35, 36). Like some fabled
chameleon Subramanyan moves through the pictorial maze of his own increasingly
cruel vision. By courting the companionship of death he gains an almost terrifying
energy in his paintings.
their obligation to produce something that can be labelled as Indian Art, according to some
old world mannerism. Let them proudly refuse to be herded into a pen like branded beasts that
are treated as cattle and not as cows.’ Ibid., pp. 60–61.
7
‘The art historian is less of a whole man than the anthropologist. The former is all too often
indifferent to themes, while the latter is looking for something that is neither in the work of art
as if in a place, nor in the artist as a private property, but to which the work of art is a pointer.
For him, the signs, constituting the language of a significant art, are full of meanings; in the
first place, injunctive, moving us to do this or that, and in the second place, speculative, that
is, referent of the activity to its principle. To expect any less than this of the artist is to build
him an ivory tower. . . . There can be no restoration of art to its rightful position as the
principle of order governing the production of utilities short of a change of mind on the part
of both artist and consumer, sufficient to bring about a reorganization of society on the basis
of vocation.’ Coomaraswamy 1: Selected Papers, edited by Roger Lipsey, Bollingen Series
LXXXIX, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1977, p. 319.
8
Okakura Kakuzu, a militant spokesperson for pan-Asian solidarity, came to India in 1902 and
remained a close friend of the Tagores. His book Ideals of the East, published in English in
1903, was an important influence in defining the unity of Asian religion, art and thought.
9 K.G. Subramanyan, ‘The Drawings of Nandalal Bose’, Art Heritage, No. 2, New Delhi, n.d.,
p. 58.
10 Ibid., p. 68.
11 K.G. Subramanyan, ‘Binode Behari Mukherjee’, The Visva-Bharati Quarterly, Vol. 46, No.
46, 1–4, May 1980–April 1981, p. 23.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., p. 20.
14 John Berger, ‘The Moment of Cubism’, in Selected Essays and Articles: The Look of Things,
Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1972, p. 150.
15 ‘Apotheosis of the Ordinary’, Art Heritage, No. 4, p. 50.
16 K.G. Subramanyan, ‘Religion and Art in India’, Moving Focus, Lalit Kala Akademi, New
Delhi, 1978, pp. 99–100.
17 Ibid., p. 106.
18 See Jaya Appasamy, Indian Paintings on Glass, Indian Council of Cultural Relations, Delhi,
1980; and Thanjavur Paintings of the Maratha Period, Abhinav Publications, Delhi, 1980.
19 See W.G. Archer, Kalighat Paintings, Victoria and Albert Museum, Her Majesty’s Stationery
Office, London, 1971; and Mildred Archer, Indian Popular Painting in the India Office
Library, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, 1977. For a new perspective on Kalighat
painting see Jyotindra Jain, Kalighat Painting: Images from a Changing World, Mapin,
Ahmedabad, 1999.
20 Roland Barthes, ‘The Imagination of the Sign’, in Critical Essays, Northwestern University
Press, Evanston, 1972, p. 209.
21 Biographical material furthering the study of Subramanyan includes the following. (i) His
own writings in addition to his first book of selected essays, Moving Focus, two other collec-
tions are important reference—The Living Tradition: Perspectives on Modern Indian Art,
Seagull, Calcutta, 1987, and The Creative Circuit, Seagull, Calcutta, 1992. (ii) The writings
of R. Siva Kumar in Subramanyan’s exhibition catalogues, especially ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’,
in K.G. Subramanyan: Recent Works, CIMA Gallery, Calcutta, 1994. (iii) For Subramanyan’s
role as artist–teacher, see Nilima Sheikh, ‘A Post-Independence Initiative in Art’, in Con-
144 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
temporary Art in Baroda, edited by Gulammohammed Sheikh, Tulika, Delhi, 1997. (iv)
Subramanyan’s own, more personal notes and verses appear, along with his exhibitions, in Art
Heritage, Nos. 11 (1991–92) and 15 (1995–96); and in Drawings of K.G. Subramanyan,
edited by Naveen Kishore, Seagull, Calcutta, 1998.
22 Also the title of a documentary film on K.G. Subramanyan (Magic in the Making) directed by
Riteban Ghatak (and produced by External Publicity Division, Ministry of External Affairs,
Government of India).
23
K.G. Subramanyan, ‘Excerpts from a Notebook’, Art Heritage, No. 11, 1991–92, p. 156.
24
Ibid.
25
K.G. Subramanyan, ‘Bahurupee: A Polymorphic Vision’, in K.G. Subramanyan: Recent
Works, exhibition catalogue, CIMA Gallery, Calcutta, 1994, p. 11. The figure of Inayat Khan
featured in a set of paintings: see David Elliott, ‘K.G. Subramanyan: An Indian in Oxford’, in
K.G. Subramanyan: Fairytales of Oxford and Other Paintings, exhibition catalogue,
Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1988.
26
K.G. Subramanyan, ‘The Paris Paintings: Pages from a Notebook’, Art Heritage, No. 15,
1995–96, p. 70.
27 Subramanyan, ‘Bahurupee: A Polymorphic Vision’, in K.G. Subramanyan: Recent Works, pp.
11–12.
28
Subramanyan, ‘The Paris Paintings’, Art Heritage, No. 15, p. 68.
Representational Dilemmas 145
Representational Dilemmas
of a Nineteenth-Century Painter:
Raja Ravi Varma
Irregular Modernism
Ravi Varma (1848–1906)1 is an early protagonist in the Indian artist’s
passage to the modern (Illus. 1). He is at the same time a turn-of-the-century anachro-
nism. Born in the village of Kilimanoor into a feudal family with a small fiefdom and
ties of blood with the royal house of Travancore, Ravi Varma was nurtured in a
household imbued with a remarkable culture. From childhood he was committed to
scriptural learning, the orthodox aspect of which was complemented by his love of
epic and classical literature. Growing up within the paradoxical ideology of the Indian
renaissance, at once traditionalist and modern, he brought himself on par with the
more enlightened princes of his time as also with the educated elite that was convert-
ing a diffuse patriotism into a national purpose. A natural boldness of imagination
made him a progressive. He became the most celebrat-
ed professional painter of his time, casting himself in
the role of an autodidact, of a gentleman artist in the
Victorian mould and, paradoxically, of a nationalist
charged with the ambition to devise a pan-Indian
vision for his people.
For, in retrospect, it is time to realize that
Ravi Varma was striving to achieve in
Indian painting what the new learning of
Europe accomplished in Indian literature
and philosophy. Ravi Varma struggled to
introduce a great many new elements into
Indian painting, elements that were pertinent 1 Photograph of Raja Ravi Varma
Earlier published versions of this essay appeared under the title ‘Ravi Varma: Representational Dilemmas of
a Nineteenth-Century Indian Painter’, in Journal of Arts & Ideas, Nos. 17–18, 1989; and in Indian Responses
to Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Alok Bhalla and Sudhir Chandra, Sterling, Delhi, 1993.
It was published under the title ‘Ravi Varma: Historicizing Representation’, in Indian Painting: Essays in
Honour of J. Khandalavala, edited by B.N. Goswamy, Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi, 1995. The last section of
the essay, ‘Epilogue’, was published as ‘An Unframed Allegory: Ravi Varma’s Galaxy’ in Raja Ravi Varma:
New Perspectives, exhibition catalogue, edited by R.C. Sharma, National Museum, Delhi, 1993.
146 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
only to the world of seeing, the world of the visual image. He introduced per-
spective, having studied its laws according to the new science. European draw-
ing, construction and composition and a new medium altogether: oil. He tried
to wield the new tools in the Indian context and what he produced was not
European painting at all but a new way of seeing. He introduced large bright
areas of colour in his portraits and landscapes, adapted oil to the Indian light.
It would be a mistake to regard his work as only a cheap or pointless imitation
of the European technique. He was all the time struggling to look around
himself through his European equipment and in doing so modified it to suit his
vision. He was doing very nearly what Rajendralal Mitra or Bankimchandra
Chatterjee were trying to do in the field of philosophy. He possibly attempted
what Amrita Sher-Gil of a later age tried to do in reverse.2
Asok Mitra’s candid placing of Ravi Varma within the nationalist project
takes forward the opinion of a Bengal modernist, Ramananda Chatterjee. He too saw
Ravi Varma as a protagonist in the task of nation-building and recounting the ancient
Indian ideal of healthy beauty and enjoyment of life, hoped that Ravi Varma’s popu-
larity might be an indication of the returning interest of the nation in mundane
existence.3 However, the difference between Chatterjee and Mitra is that while the
former echoes the need of his times by approving of Ravi Varma on the criterion and
the ethics of nation-building, the latter, writing after independence, puts both Ananda
Coomaraswamy (the most celebrated and often-quoted detractor of Ravi Varma) and
Ramananda Chatterjee (his defender) in perspective by a brief and plainspeaking
reference to the cultural history of the late nineteenth century. Of particular import-
ance is the reference Mitra makes to Bankimchandra Chatterjee. The point about
embodying in a material sense the message of a great civilization is exemplified by
Bankim’s Krishnacharitra where, with a clear hermeneutic purpose, the author realigns
the epic features of a divine hero and sets him up as omnipotent male/ego and histori-
cal agent for a militant nationalism.4
Thus Ravi Varma joins the ranks of other anomalous figures in India’s
nineteenth-century renaissance who see their task in similar terms: of materializing
through western techniques the idea of a golden past and then inducting this into a
national project. Along with certain pervasive notions about India’s civilizational role,
national ideology brings to bear a whole range of bold and tantalizing questions
about modernity that are being lived out to this day. For example, the modernizing
impulse of the nineteenth century led by a movement such as the Brahmo Samaj treats
historical self-consciousness as a didactic programme of reform. Here the modern
serves as an emblematic category on the basis of which a polemical confrontation
takes place between revivalists and progressives. The fact that the modern never pro-
perly belongs to us as Indians, or we to it, does lead to anxieties of misappropriation.
Representational Dilemmas 147
But these are often pragmatically resolved. In visual art, for example, eclecticism
becomes a preferred option and the sense of aesthetic difference begins to be resolved
to our advantage.
In the context of a national culture the story of modern Indian art can be
told like an allegory—in the conscientious manner of the pilgrim’s progress. It can also
be told as a series of experimental moves where ideology and practice are often at odds
and force unexpected manoeuvres. Indian artists still go riding on the backs of
paradoxes, with the more adventurous among them turning this into an original act of
self-definition. Sometimes, with the necessary elan, the ride becomes a critical exercise
prodding the modern itself or, rather, the fixed notions of that category to diversify its
possibilities outside the western mainstream.
Modern Indian art is in consequence a tendentious affair and though the
cause of this is precisely our colonial history, the consequences may lie far afield. We
may be inclined to develop an aesthetic of contradiction. This may happen through
pictorial choices—for example, by adapting narrative means so discredited by modern
art. On the other hand, our modernism could also be redefined via such linguistic
disjunctions as occur in the course of the most literal adaptations, thereby opening up,
even by default, figural devices that match the very exigencies of colonial, excolonial
and cleft identities.
It is precisely in such matters that Ravi Varma is the indisputable father-
figure of modern Indian art. Naive and ambitious at the same time, he opens up the
debate for his later compatriots in the specific matter of defining individual genius
through professional acumen, of testing modes of cultural adaptation with
idiosyncratic effect, of attempting pictorial narration with its historic scope.
mythology in the making: to say that a native, once he has been initiated into western
techniques, proceeds with the redoubled pace of a prodigy and overcomes all hurdles.
What is at stake is not only native talent but national destiny.
From the very first decade of Ravi Varma’s professional career the
narrative is packed with success.10 He wins the governor’s gold medal in the 1873
Madras exhibition and is said to have gained a certificate of merit in an international
exhibition in Vienna. A second gold medal in the 1874 Madras exhibition is topped
by royal appreciation. When the Prince of Wales visits Madras in 1875, the Maharaja
of Travancore presents him Ravi Varma’s painting. In 1876 Ravi Varma enters
Shakuntala Patralekhan at the Madras exhibition which not only wins him another
gold medal but gives him his breakthrough at the iconographical level as well,
recommending him to the educated elite of India—orientalists and nationalists alike.
This painting is acquired by the Duke of Buckingham, then governor of Madras. Sir
Monier-Williams uses one version of Ravi Varma’s many Shakuntalas as the frontis-
piece to the fifth edition (in 1887) of his 1855 translation of Kalidasa’s Abhijnana-
sakuntalam. In 1878 Ravi Varma paints a life-size portrait of the Duke of
Buckingham and the patron declares that the painter has equalled, even surpassed,
European portraitists. In 1881, through the initiative of Sir T. Madhava Rao (former
dewan of Travancore state, now dewan and regent of Baroda), Ravi Varma is intro-
duced to the ruling Gaekwads of Baroda and invited to the investiture ceremony of
Maharaja Sayaji Rao III (reign 1881–1939). From this ruler, who set up the modern
institutions of Baroda state, Ravi Varma receives recurring patronage. In 1888 Sayaji
Rao invites him to embark on a set of fourteen pictures depicting puranic themes.
Following Baroda’s lead, the states of Mysore and Travancore commission mytholo-
gical works in the coming decades and, until his death, Ravi Varma remains master of
the mythological genre.
In 1893 he sends ten paintings and wins merit at the International
Exhibition of the World Columbian Order at Chicago, one of the grandest exposi-
tions of the nineteenth century (and also, as it happens, the occasion of Swami Vivek-
ananda’s famous address to the Parliament of World Religions).
Every subsequent decade of Ravi Varma’s life is packed with more and
more success. Ravi Varma moves among the elite ranging from Lord Curzon to royal
patrons in many states (prominent among them Travancore, Baroda, Mysore and
Udaipur), to progressives like Gopal Krishna Gokhale. He becomes an odd genius of
his times celebrated by colonizers and nationalists alike. In 1904 he is given the
imperial Kaiser-i-Hind award (at which time his name is shown as ‘Raja’ Ravi Varma
and gains currency thenceforth). At the same time he is befriended by Congress leaders
including Dadabhai Naoroji and regarded as a visionary for a prospective nation.
Patrons and clients, both Indian and foreign, princes and literati are eager to acquire
his work until finally the middle class can acquire it as well, but in the form of
150 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Surrogate Realism
While Ravi Varma has the advantages of aristocratic confidence, charm,
talent and ambition that account for his unique success—placing him ahead of all his
contemporaries engaged in a similar project—there are objective circumstances at this
juncture that he, above all, reckons with and masters. As an artist of his time he
recognizes what is at stake for all concerned: the rich density of oil paint, its
exceptional plasticity, promises a greater hold on reality. The paint-matter of oil and
pigment is conducive to simulating substances (flesh, cloth, jewels, gold, masonry,
marble) and capturing atmospheric sensations (the glossiness of light, the translucent
depth of shadows). Flowing from such material possibilities of oil paint is the lure of
appropriating the world, of appeasing the acquisitive impulse, of saturating the
consciousness with the profit of possession.
Set in the easel format, representation develops laws about framing and
within the frame, about proximity and distance: the laws of perspective. Justified by
the science of optics, perspective has the profound implication of assuring continuity
between subject and object and therefore, no matter what the motif and style, an
existential contiguity of the beholder with the painted image.
Initiated in the late seventeenth century, this is realism inalienably related
to bourgeois desire, to bourgeois ideology and ethics. Despite its more obvious
seductions, this realism offers a complex and often paradoxical phenomenon that has
a run of several hundred years before its culmination with the realist master, Gustave
Courbet. Realism proper is distinguished for establishing the material presence of the
subject in an equation with the objective world through embedded structures and their
transforming logic.
Among the several faces of realism manifest in the nineteenth century it is
salon painting shading into a second phase of neoclassicism that offers the canon
and, with it, a conservative idealism. An artist like Ravi Varma adapts this conservative
representational mode of European painting. Just as prose fiction, especially the novel
and its narrative project, comes to be regarded in India as per se realistic (the realist
novel is queen of genres), representational painting in oils is construed to mean an
enabling technique that stands for an accredited realism (Illus. 3). That is to say, while
Ravi Varma’s adaptations that range all the way from iconic portraits to narrative
allegories fit better as nineteenth-century salon paintings, the circular logic persists and
they are seen to promote this much-regarded realism.
And even given the misapprehension, the somewhat false aura and some
distressing consequences of appropriating ‘alien’ conventions/ideologies, this surrogate
Representational Dilemmas 151
realism achieves definite ends. It fulfils the mission of the Indian elite to adapt
European means to Indian needs, to become historically viable through the use of the
realist genre.
Ravi Varma’s first success in the realist mode is, predictably enough, as a
professional portrait painter (Illus. 2). His aristocratic sitters often have the remote-
ness of memorial painting as also of painted photographs (his paintings are sometimes
done from photographs). They are, in an almost literal sense, mirror images: they
transfix the refracted gaze that joins the past and the present in the interface of the
framed canvas. There are superb portraits of the Gaekwad family by Ravi Varma.11 Of
special note are the portraits of handsome, richly adorned women of the maratha clan
who are at once iconic and bold in their peculiar status as consorts of a progressive
royalty, portraits that seem to check the easy seduction that the endemic illusionism of
oil portraits encourages.
Another kind of portrait appears when Ravi Varma paints nair women of
aristocratic lineage from his own milieu (Illus. 4, 5). Socially permitted liaisons with
higher-caste men give the matrilineally positioned nair women ambivalent erotic
significance. As coded icons they are paradoxically thematized in Ravi Varma’s oeuvre:
these are his Malabar beauties. In the genre pictures with narratives (such as the 1892
Here Comes Papa), he develops conventions that are pictorial equivalents to social
custom and local etiquette in an as yet nascent modernity.12
A systematic portrayal of the Indian people is an ongoing project
everywhere in India and the rules are
similar to those hypothesized for the
larger question of national identity. The
paradigms position the binaries racial/
universal, regional/national, individual/
typical in place. It is within these terms
that an iconography and also, in stylistic
terms, a typology for Indian represent-
ational arts is developed by Ravi Varma.
And though the rules are rudimentary
the pictures have some claim to being
realistic. The figures are based on live
models occasionally from amongst his
own aristocratic family and otherwise
drawn from professional models—pros-
titutes, dancers, singers, actresses, as for
example Anjanibai Malpekar whom he
met in Bombay. When live models are
difficult photographs come in handy. 3 Ravi Varma, Man Reading a Book, ca.1898
Representational Dilemmas 153
4 Ravi Varma, Amma Tampuran of Mavelkara, ca. 1883 5 Ravi Varma, Woman with a Fruit, 1890s
tification, using an intermediate theatrics of a posed tableau. Other artists played their
part in devising the mythological portrait, based on the actresses of the day playing
star roles.15 This suggested easy intercourse between figures of mythology, aristocratic
clients and plebeian seductresses, all treated to the European grand style of painting.
In the matter of clever transfigurement and theatric intervention the
Dutch-born Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912), who settled in London and
became a favourite painter of Victorian England, may be mentioned. Alma-Tadema
specialized in the archaeological reconstruction of the ancient world, providing a
thrilling glimpse to his nineteenth-century viewers of a Greco–Roman world but in
terms familiar to contemporary Victorian high society. Thus even to sustain a sensual
reverie of a golden past the mirror was focused on their own bourgeois lifestyles.
Further, in the rapidly changing world of the bourgeoisie, not only myth and legend
but also the operatic spectacle served a role, giving nineteenth-century painting
elaborate stage sets and a strained loftiness of style and purpose.16 Ravi Varma
paralleled many of these features: the ideology and the melodrama, the flats, drapes,
proscenium, cyclorama and all.
156 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Theatricality
Ravi Varma grew up in a family richly connected with kathakali.17 From
his childhood he is said to have indulged himself watching theatrical performances at
home and in the court. What influenced him equally were performances of Parsi and
Marathi theatre which he and his painter-brother C. Raja Raja Varma, his constant
travelling companion, saw in Bombay and in different venues in the south.18 Parsi
theatre, playing myths and romances, gave Ravi Varma a readymade repertoire of
legendary figures. It also helped him devise the postures and gestures of figures within
a given format. One may set up a studio tableau for the purpose of formatting
pictures. But proscenium theatre is a more useful model in that the director/
choreographer has already devised a mise-en-scene and placed figures and props in it.
Each narrative episode has its compositional solution, good or bad, worked out from
start to finish. The part of the painter is to pick out the most succinct moment from
the sequence for pictorial rendering.
The matter of course is not so simple, nor are the actual terms of trans-
lation so rudimentary as between realist theatre and narrative painting. For one thing,
while the dress, the posture, the gesture of the figures allow imitation, the layered gaze,
motivating the dynamic of realist theatre, eludes painterly transcription. Ravi Varma
senses the problem and reverts to an ingenious solution: precisely because Indian
narrative painting and theatre need not conform to the cumulative logic of time,
because they work through spatial repetition/displacement of the figural image, Ravi
Varma simply circumvents the pitched logic of a realist encounter. While his figures
interact with something of a realist protocol, he breaks the spell of interlocked gazes
and allows a kind of abstract gaze to surface. Simultaneously he annuls the one aspect
of time that narrative arts of the west in particular favour—climax and denouement—
and disperses the action.
For all their staginess Ravi Varma’s narrative paintings have the figures
address not each other nor the viewer but that ideal spectator who prefigures rather
than follows events. If we look for antecedents at least one of these is classical Indian
theatre (from kudiyattam to kathakali), where the mode of address between
characters as also their gaze is directed along a distant, divergent scale, complementing
plural action in the performance. With Ravi Varma there is no such grand design; the
means at his command make the narrative procedure eclectic and contrary. The event
depicted may suggest a climax but the congregated figures create a distracted effect and
the denouement, if there is one, becomes a transcendent affair by default.19
On the other hand, the imitation of proscenium theatre itself releases a
shorthand solution in lieu of realism proper. The proscenium arch supports a fourth
wall which is supposed to separate the viewer from the actors, making them invisible
to each other. In actual fact this wall, notated by the arch, frames the stage providing
an even more focused visibility. In adapting theatric presentations Ravi Varma
Representational Dilemmas 157
7 Ravi Varma, Shri Krishna Liberating His Parents, 1905 8 Ravi Varma, Shri Krishna as Envoy, 1906
inadvertently, but also artfully, substitutes the more conceptually remote analogue of
the mirror/window frame (used in renaissance painting) with the more open theatric
solution of the threshold (used from baroque to realist painting). This helps him avoid
the ideological problems of perspective and the practical problems of its correct
rendering. At the same time it gives him the possibility of making the viewer a closer
participant in the noble (or pathetic) enactment at hand. A low threshold introduces a
pause marking the moment of privileged, or tabooed, access. But it is also a way of
aligning the real with the imaginary where the two become contiguous. The ideal
character in mythology and epic is realized by Ravi Varma through an act of imper-
sonation at the level of common theatrics, the low threshold being entirely convenient
to the identificatory desires of the beholder.
The artist as dramaturge irons out the excesses of pathetic fallacy by the
more logical theory of mimesis learnt via nineteenth-century European painting and
theatre (Illus. 9, 10, 11, 12). Manifold mimicry helps render the world of appearances
familiar and spectacular at the same time. The dramatic impulse gives the erotic
metonymy in the Nala–Damayanti story a form of apotheosis.20 Shakuntala, the
forest maiden and virtual dryad in form and spirit, becomes a plump dreamer against
the ghat landscape; in another painting she appears to be an elegant and self-confident
actress, perhaps because a Parsi actress of Ravi Varma’s acquaintance is said to have
posed for the portrayal.21 An epic figure like Draupadi becomes a pitiable figure in a
melodrama. And Sita is shamed by a common abduction.22 A human-size frame is put
158 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
on the narrative that disturbs the space–time conjunction on the basis of which Indian
epic encounters take place; the disturbance amounts to a virtual betrayal of Indian
aesthetics in both its perceptual and theoretical particularities.
Mixing techniques and genres and styles with a kind of benevolent uni-
versality of intentions, Ravi Varma creates a re-vision of Indian civilization for his con-
temporaries. It is as if he is destined to fulfil the ‘prophecy’ delivered in 1871 by the
governor of Madras, Lord Napier, who suggested that Indian artists deploy their
modern skills and new techniques learnt from European painting to present not only
the rich pictorial potential of India’s everyday culture but to incorporate ancient
Indian mythology. The advantage of a ‘national pencil’23 that renders an ‘ideal and
allegorical’ vision gains them, along with a national memory, a national voice. Given
that lineage an artist like Ravi Varma succeeds in obliterating the forms in which the
past has come to us. Henceforth the past is mediated not by metaphoric forms. The
past is a pastiche of present desires clad in flesh and blood and costume.
figure that dominates text after text in Manipravalam (a language tissue rich in
Sanskrit words selected for their sensuous and musical qualities) produced
during the period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century and paying
homage to numerous beautiful courtesans.27
By the time we come to the period at hand this image of the past has
become subject to the lure of orientalism. A product of romanticism in the imperialist
age, orientalism is a way of first alienating and then eroticizing cultures of the east so
as to fulfil at once the sense of western primacy and the longing for the unknown
other. Ravi Varma’s choices, narrowly defined, are also in every danger of becoming
elaborate misunderstandings: conservative, kitsch and orientalist by turn.
Unity in Diversity
The homogenizing project imbued with
patriotic zeal encourages native imagery
to gain attributes that will recommend
the race to the alien gaze. This raises an
endemic problem: in recommending the
race you accept the terms of others’ fan-
tasies. Ravi Varma painted ten pictures
during 1892–93, for an exhibition in
Chicago. The paintings depicted women
from different parts of India, women of
different physiognomy, class and dress,
the idea being to present a compound of
the voluptuous, wistful, self-possessed
Indian woman for universal approba-
tion. The project had an anthropological
aspect, an aspect of oriental seduction.
Venniyoor offers a descrip-
tion of the subject-matter of these paint-
ings.28 There were paintings of upper-
12 Ravi Varma, Jatayuvadha, 1906
caste Kerala women (Here Comes Papa,
Malabar Beauty); of a Muslim woman
from a courtly zenana and a north Indian
girl awaiting her beloved (Begum at
Bath, Expectation); of a Parsi bride
(Decking the Bride); and of a maratha
girl with her deity (Sisterly Rememb-
rance). There was an unusual painting of
162 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
13 Ravi Varma, Lady in Moonlight, ca. 1890 14 Ravi Varma, Madri, oleograph
gypsies of south India called Gypsy Family (Illus. 15, also variously called Mendicant
Singer and Her Children, Beggars, Poverty). There were portrayals of domestic south
Indian brahmin women (At the Well, Disappointing News) and there was, in contrast,
The Bombay Singer, the conventional nautch girl often portrayed in contemporary
Company School paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The paintings were sent with a commentary which spelt out this self-
taught artist’s motivation to paint the major social types of his country: to show to the
American public the charm and sophistication of the apparel of Indian women. Not
only were all ten paintings accepted but they also won him two medals, each
accompanied by a diploma and a citation. One of the diplomas said: ‘The series of ten
paintings in oil colours by Ravi Varma, court painter to several presidencies in India, is
of much ethnological value.’29 The diplomas go on to mention how well the faces of
high-caste ladies, the costumes of ceremonial life and current fashions are painted, not
to speak of the paintings’ truth to nature in form and colour.
The terms of cultural diversity are pegged to the ideal of a nation that will,
for all its good intentions, subsume differences and camouflage hierarchies. It is
Representational Dilemmas 163
interesting that when Ravi Varma gets his first major commission in 1888 to do a set
of fourteen paintings based on puranic stories and later, in 1894, when embarking on
the project to produce lithographic prints of his iconographical images, he goes on an
extensive tour of India.30 He looks for the physiognomy that will satisfy his represent-
ational needs. He also looks for the common costume that will unify appearances into
an Indian type. It is interesting too that he travels mainly (though not exclusively) in
the north for the purpose. Is it that he unconsciously assumes an aryan basis for Indian
civilization—even his favourite model, as the story goes, is a Parsi actress of ‘Indo–
Persian’ stock. In any case there is the evidence of his paintings wherein ethnic
appearances are more or less subsumed in the name of an Indian synthesis and in the
hegemonic interests of national unity.
But although the self-image of eastern cultures in the nineteenth century
reflects sentimental morality with a full measure of hypocrisy tuned to orientalist
expectations, Ravi Varma is a purposeful man. With his knowledge and sophistication
he is able to draw on resources within his own culture and so to round off his repre-
sentational project. Compare him with the other contemporary options. For all its
inventiveness in terms of mixed techniques and hybrid elements, the Company School
(an eclectic mix of folk patas, provincial miniatures and English/amateur water-
colours) does not develop a viable icono-
graphy or figural type. Full of pictorial
oddities after the desires and memories
of the sahibs, it is construed on the native
side as a trick of technical circumven-
tions. The Indian artists’ graphic dis-
alignment of anatomy and perspective in
the process of imitating naturalistic skill
produces wonderful pictures.31 But there
is not what one may call a successful
mediation of social curiosities into histo-
rical form, a reflective statement on
behalf of selfconscious Indians.
I have already mentioned
that Ravi Varma is part of the project of
nineteenth-century India to appropriate
and devise an identity, and to thus tran-
scend western privilege in the repre-
sentational project. Added to that is a
grander design of the artist: to aspire to
a universally attractive human ideal
through an Indian manifestation. What 15 Ravi Varma, Gypsy Family, 1893
164 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
distinguishes Ravi Varma’s project of Indian depictions is his curious ardour for a kind
of iconographic augmentation of the contemporary whereby the quest for identifying
indigenous models turns into a nationalist pedagogy: a cultural synthesis for esta-
blishing ‘unity in diversity’, but more—to approximate a living subject (Illus. 16).
(Re-)Production of Images
For all its high-mindedness there is an aspect of farce in the project of
impersonation as undertaken by Ravi Varma. There is, as I have already said, pastiche
involved in his undertaking to translate western classical modes to eastern ends.
Secondly, the assumption that one can establish an innocent equation between
commonplace types and imaginary personages of a divine nature (though it cannot be
dismissed as mere folly when you consider that it produces great painting in
seventeenth-century Europe) produces mostly charades for the upper classes here and
elsewhere. In Ravi Varma’s India there is, in the balance of the farce, something
progressive as I have also suggested: a surrogate realism. Ravi Varma’s assumption that
real men and women, even plebeian actors playing the roles of gods and goddesses,
may bring to classical aspirations in the Indian renaissance the full force of attraction
of a live/actor’s body, helps to desanctify tradition.
There is a pragmatic aspect to this intention as well. In the latter half of
the nineteenth century the Indian aristocracy is itself turning part-bourgeois through
material changes in social production. Through the influence of western taste it is
‘losing’ its aesthetic. To this is added the negotiating culture of an ever-increasing
urban middle class. While its members are indifferent devotees of the Hindu pantheon,
they require a new iconography that reinforces their self-image.32 This new cultural
clientele is a motivating factor in the Ravi Varma project. An aristocrat himself, he is,
by a democratic extension of his artistic ambitions, beginning to appreciate the needs
of the middle class; indeed he is willing to devise a well-endowed iconography that
serves a new class culture.
The elements of pastiche and charade and the acknowledgment of class
transpositions within the civilizational effort produce a stress on form. This is what I
call a farce and the farce has its uses. The past is now merely a sign, the rich tradition is
an anthropological residue of a lost culture. There is a disjuncture between motif and
meaning, between models and effect. This is a cultural counterpart of the larger social
disjuncture we call the alienating attribute of modernization.
A comparative study of ‘western-style’ painters from the mid-nineteenth
century onward will help to set the parameters of a popular realism and its attendant
charade. Consider the Bengali painters Bamapada Banerjee (who comes close to Ravi
Varma’s intentions) and others like A.P. Bagchi, S.K. Hesh, J.P. Gangooli and
Hemendranath Mazumdar. Consider the somewhat younger Bombay painters
Pestonji Bomanji, M.V. Dhurandhar, A.X. Trinidade and M.F. Pithawalla. Ranging
Representational Dilemmas 165
from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, these artists contextualize the
peculiar painterly qualities of Ravi Varma. Even when they make genre images from a
local culture, they construe the bodies according to classroom conventions of
portraiture, figure-studies (from plaster-casts and live models), and make a standard
application of oils, perspective and composition. Ravi Varma is self-taught and boldly
eclectic; he can be kitsch but never dull. He is a little like the Company School
painters, haphazard and informal in inventing technique, body-style and figural
convention but for an avowedly historicist project of cultural representation.
The Bengal School painters (leaving aside brilliant moments in the oeuvre
of Abanindranath Tagore) attempt to fashion an ideal but interpret a medievalist
aesthetic by so diffusing the body that often only the aura surrounds the ideal gesture
which is located, like all ornamental art, at the point of stasis. I would like to add
further that there is perhaps no other way in which the golden past survives in the
modern age except as pastiche—and farce. The Bengal School and even Nandalal Bose
in Santiniketan could scarcely do anything to lessen the absurdity of so much mythic
Epilogue
Ravi Varma’s Galaxy: An Unframed Allegory
Ravi Varma’s A Galaxy of Musicians has contrary virtues (Illus. 18). The
ensemble of accomplished women is awkward and tender and quite superbly
ornamental in the way the artist composes light and contour and colour from face and
shoulders to turned hip and thigh to feet, and in the way the delicate arms and hands
are arranged in relationship to the musical instruments. Resembling figures in majesty,
168 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
this picture also testifies to the dilemmas in Ravi Varma’s admirable project: that of
working with orientalist preconceptions toward a national identity. Compounding
this is the dilemma of turning male ardour into a woman’s subjectivity.
In the otherwise grand historical project of united India in whose name
the superb galaxy is arranged for all the world like a conference of goddesses, the artist
gives himself over to the prevailing orientalism: the group of eleven oriental women
representing different regions of India (including muslim nair tamil parsi anglo-indian
women) make up a perfect anthropological vignette. The vignette resembles conven-
tions ranging from the grouping of divinities to courtiers and courtesans; also con-
ventions for grouping ethnic types that continue right up to Company School compo-
sitions. But it lays out this mannered group with its uneasy glances as a testimony for
a nascent modernity.
Iconographically, Galaxy compounds Ravi Varma’s splendid portraits
with his genre and national–allegorical pictures. Formally, Galaxy overlaps the iconic
image with the tableau. The iconic image is formatted to converge spiritual energies
through inviting the devotee’s gaze upon a condensed motif, thus establishing hypo-
stasis. The tableau, a theatre fragment of a larger whole, also invites the viewer’s gaze,
but by framing it. The image-tableau acquires an imminent (not manifest) narrative. It
is, as Barthes says:
a pure cut-out segment with clearly defined edges, irreversible and incorrupt-
ible; everything that surrounds it is banished into nothingness, remains
unnamed, while everything that it admits within its field is promoted into
essence, into light, into view . . . [it] is intellectual, it has something to say
(something moral, social) but it also knows how this must be done.35
The tableau format in western painting has contained (literally drawn the
edges of) an extended allegory which does indeed have something moral, social to say.
From the great seventeenth-century tableaux (of Poussin) to those of the eighteenth
century (notably those of Jacques Louis David), these tableaux become the models for
simulated classicism in the more academic and salon art of the nineteenth century. As
I have already mentioned, salon art serves in turn as the remote and much-mediated
model in the colonies.
If Ravi Varma’s image offers first the tableau with an underpinning of the
iconic format, it offers in the second look an active style of staging whereby the frozen
vignette comes to have an allegorical import. In the subsequent take we have to
accommodate the fact that the seemingly classical devolves into the category of a
popular realism—which is other than the realism of great European art although that
too is being distantly emulated—and settles into the making of a genre. That in turn
paves the way for reproducible pictures through printing technology. In other words,
we have to deal with mixed or even muddled pictorial conventions and techniques.
Representational Dilemmas 169
This leads one to believe that Ravi Varma does not in fact know, intellectually or
pictorially, the import of the classical tableau picture; and that Galaxy is an example
of the somewhat naive effort, revealing in the process the vulnerabilities of the
incomplete subject.
Thus Ravi Varma’s pictures, derived from varieties of high and low art
can, in their sensuous presence, give the satisfaction that the figures in their
iconographic personae are tokens of the doubly desired world—ideal and yet accessi-
ble, real. This is indeed the basis on which mass culture works out its illusions or,
rather, its inversions: ‘Popular taste applies the schemes of the ethos, which pertain in
the ordinary circumstances of life, to legitimate works of art, and so performs a
systematic reduction of things of art to the things of life.’36
In this medley of contradictory conventions is to be found pictorial
gratification in the guise of reality: demonstrable evidence that the world is governed
by the bourgeois tenet of a materiality; that the empirical, knowable world-as-image
is also at the same time an object easily subsumed within the world of exchange
values. Things of art become things of life and then both may become commodified.
Ravi Varma’s oeuvre covers this social terrain; our retrospect however can help to mark
reverse readings whereby we can see how reified images regain their aesthetic.
The clue to the interpretative process starts from the fact that the portrait,
a privileged form of European and later colonial Indian art, is mapped over an
indigenous albeit popular iconicity. To reiterate briefly the steps: Ravi Varma’s
references come from Tanjore paintings with their more elaborate Mysore antecedents.
These are superseded by what he learns of the western manner in the easel format as an
adolescent in Trivandrum, first via the apprenticeship of the court painter
Ramaswamy Naicker and then by watching a Dutch painter, Theodore Jensen, who is
with the Maharaja of Travancore in 1868. Thereon Ravi Varma continues with his
assiduous self-training and talent. Further individuation in the manner of staging a
person is provided by an introduction to western (Parsi or Company) proscenium
theatre. The concept of the mise-en-scene and the mimetic aspiration in the newer art
forms come from that source. The portrait-into-theatre presentation foregrounds
certain aspects of realism, exemplified still further in the newer regimes of the visual by
the photograph. All these aspects together—easel painting, proscenium theatre,
photography, and ultimately the cinema—determine the meaning of the tableau in
Indian art with and after Ravi Varma (Illus. 19).
The tableau delivers what Barthes calls the essence (presumably the iconic
essence) of the image into the arena of the narrative. This is particularly relevant for
Indian pictorial traditions as these transit into the modern. This process of deliver-
ing the iconic makes the image appear contiguous with the ‘truth’ of life and there-
fore ‘realistic’, but the realism is in fact subsidiary to the act of deliverance and not a
virtue in itself. This is the premise not only of pictorial art as exemplified by Ravi
Varma but also, as I have already mentioned, of contemporary Parsi theatre and the
first major examples of Indian cinematography worked out by Dadasaheb Phalke
precisely along this icon–tableau–narration axis.
painted image that is a woman’s by right. If Galaxy allegorizes the beauty of the
legendary land of India through the lush, lithe, glittering presence of eleven women,
then Sher-Gil enlarges the allegorical reach by attempting to make the woman’s sub-
jective presence the model for the developing subject-in-history. This is the history
which is being ‘discovered’ by compatriots and in which Sher-Gil makes a brief
aesthetic intervention, introducing, with all the force of her young intelligence, a
morphology that takes Indian art firmly towards the modern.
7
Partha Mitter, ‘Raja Ravi Varma: The Artist as a Professional’, in Raja Ravi Varma: New
Perspectives, p. 38, n. 4; Venniyoor, Raja Ravi Varma, p. 8.
8
See Jaya Appasamy, Tanjore Paintings of the Maratha Period, Abhinav Publications, Delhi,
1980.
9
See Venniyoor, Raja Ravi Varma, pp. 3–8. It should be mentioned that there were many
painters in Ravi Varma’s family: his uncle Raja Raja Varma had learnt the Tanjore style of
painting from Alagiri Naidu, court artist in Travancore; his younger brother C. Raja Raja
Varma (a very accomplished painter who however subordinated himself to Ravi Varma’s
career); and their sister Mangalbai Tampuratty. Ravi Varma’s son Rama Varma also became
a painter.
10
Ibid., pp. 14–16, 19–21, 24, 30. The story of Ravi Varma’s success has been laid out by
Venniyoor and repeatedly recounted: a synoptic paraphrase is presented here for emblematic
use in the larger Ravi Varma narrative.
11
Besides Sayaji Rao III, there are resplendent portraits of his consorts (Maharani Chimnabai I
and II), of Prince Fatesingh Rao, Princess Putlaraje and Princess Tarabai, housed in the
Maharaja Fateh Singh Museum Trust at Laxmi Vilas Palace, Baroda.
12
See Nandakumar, ‘The Missing Male’; also see Venniyoor, Raja Ravi Varma, p. 24.
13
See Anthea Callen, Technique of the Impressionists, Orbist, London, 1982, pp. 8–10.
14
See J. Thuillier and A. Chatalet, French Painting from Le Nain to Fragonard, Skira, Geneva,
1964, p. 124.
15
See examples of paintings by Jean Baptiste Santerre, 1658–1717 and Jean Raoux, 1677–
1734. Ibid., pp. 138–40.
16
See Robert Rosenblum and H.W. Janson, Art of the Nineteenth Century: Painting and
Sculpture, Thames and Hudson, London, 1984, pp. 430–31.
17
The House of Kilimanoor cultivated performing arts like kathakali and thullal. Ravi Varma’s
mother Uma Ambabai Tampuratty wrote a thullal—Parvati Swayamvaram (Venniyoor,
Raja Ravi Varma, p. 2), and Ravi Varma was a great kathakali enthusiast.
18
C. Raja Raja Varma’s diary (1895–1904), quoted in Venniyoor, ibid., pp. 43, 49, 56, and in
Krishna Chaitanya, Ravi Varma, p. 9.
19
Shri Krishna as Envoy (1906) shows Krishna in his role as an envoy of the Pandavas to the
Kaurava court, treating Duryodhana’s evil design to take him hostage with cold contempt by
revealing his divinity to the courtiers.
20
See Nala Damayanti, ca. 1888, in the Maharaja Fateh Singh Museum Trust, Laxmi Vilas
Palace, Baroda; Hamsa-Damayanti, 1899, in the Shri Chitra Art Gallery, Trivandrum; Swan
Messenger, ca. 1905, in the Shri Jayachamarajendra Art Gallery, Mysore.
21
See Shakuntala Patralekhan, 1876 (only available in an oleograph version); Shakuntala, ca.
1888, in the Maharaja Fateh Singh Museum Trust, Laxmi Vilas Palace, Baroda; Shakuntala,
1898, in Government Museum, Madras; and Shakuntala Looks Back in Love, 1898, in Shri
Chitra Art Gallery, Trivandrum.
22
Draupadi is depicted in her moments of humiliation in several paintings. Sita’s abduction,
shown in Ravana Slaying Jatayu, in Shri Chitra Art Gallery, Trivandrum, and Jatayuvadha,
1906, in the Shri Jayachamarajendra Art Gallery, Mysore, is among the more mimetically
pictorialized images in Ravi Varma. Using narrative gesture, he confirms the subtext of
theatricality in the popular aspects of the realist genre.
23
The Fine Arts in India, Madras, 1871, quoted by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, ‘Raja Ravi Varma
and the Project of a National Art’, in Raja Ravi Varma: New Perspectives, n. 11.
Representational Dilemmas 177
24
Both Krishna Chaitanya (Ravi Varma, p. 8) and Venniyoor (Raja Ravi Varma, p. 56) confirm
the belief that Ravi Varma would have seen the Padmanabhapuram and Mattancheri
paintings of the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries. Transactions between the courts of Tanjore
and Travancore in matters of culture and especially painting are well known. The more iconic
paintings from the seventeenth–nineteenth centuries (see Jaya Appasamy, Thanjavur
Paintings of the Maratha Period), the popular paintings on glass during the eighteenth–
nineteenth centuries which spread across the present Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra,
Andhra Pradesh and Kerala (see Jaya Appasamy, Indian Paintings on Glass, Indian Council
for Cultural Relations, Delhi, 1980), and the hybrid but sprightly drawings of the Company
School from the Tanjore region (see Mildred and W.G. Archer, Indian Painting for the British
1770–1880, Oxford University Press, London, 1955) would have been familiar to, indeed part
of, the immediate milieu of Ravi Varma.
25
‘The performing arts (Thullal and Kathakali) favoured literalism and the concrete image. In
the interpretation of a metaphoric image like elephant-gaited (dantigamini) already a little
ungainly and recherche, the elaborate and repeated gestural mimesis of Kathakali is not
content to suggest the slow, swinging gait but brings before you the prodigious animal with
trunk swaying, fan-like ears waving.’ Krishna Chaitanya, Ravi Varma, p. 8.
26
‘If the Sanskritic acculturation of Kerala was extensive, it is very essential to remember that
it was not the lyricism of Vedic poetry or of Valmiki’s epic that moulded literary sensibility and
creation so much as the neoclassicism of later epochs, the Kavyas written according to the
prescriptions of Dandin who went all out for literalism, concrete imagery, exhaustive
delineation instead of allusion and suggestion, the systematic description from head to foot
(kesadipada) instead of the sensuous silhouette of the feminine figure. In Sanskritic
neoclassicism, the form and style of the panegyrics of kings (narasamsa) had annexed the
description of the gods even in hymns and for the obvious reason that the Puranic stories about
the exploits of gods were modelled on the valorous deeds of kings. Likewise, the literary
manner of the descriptions of woman in her various moods (nayika lore) had been
uninhibitedly extended to the hymns about goddesses. There was a landslide of this tradition
in Kerala.’ See Krishna Chaitanya, ibid., p. 7. For a further location of Ravi Varma in
Malayalam literature, see also R. Sivakumar in Raja Ravi Varma: New Perspectives.
27
Krishna Chaitanya, Ravi Varma, p. 9.
28
In Raja Ravi Varma, p. 31.
29
Quoted in ibid., p. 32.
30
He makes a virtual pilgrimage, or is it more the gentleman’s grand tour, of the subcontinent.
See Venniyoor, ibid., p. 27 and p. 34.
31
For an overall idea see Mildred and W.G. Archer, Indian Painting for the British 1770–1880;
and Mildred Archer, Company Drawings in the India Office Library, Her Majesty’s
Stationery Office, London, 1972.
32
See Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern
Technology’, in Journal of Arts & Ideas, Nos. 14–15, July–December 1987. Rajadhyaksha’s
conceptual framework for inscribing Ravi Varma’s iconic images into technological forms is
illuminating.
33
Executed in 1946–47, this 100-foot fresco is situated in Hindi Bhavana, Visva-Bharati,
Santiniketan.
34
The project of the printing press begun in the early 1890s, situated in Bombay/Lonavla,
suffered many vicissitudes. Difficulties of business forced the Varma brothers to sell the press
178 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
to one of the German technicians in 1901, giving him the right to reproduce 89 pictures by
Ravi Varma. See Venniyoor, Raja Ravi Varma, pp. 30, 33–41.
35
‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, in Image, Music, Text, Fontana Paperbacks, London,1982, p. 70.
36
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1984, p. 5.
37
The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess,
Columbia University Press, New York, 1985, p. 48.
38
James Clifford, ‘On Ethnographic Allegory’, in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, University of California Press,
Berkeley, 1986, p. 98.
39
I am referring to Sher-Gil’s South Indian Villagers Going to Market, Brahmacharis and Bride’s
Toilet, all done in 1937.
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Film/Narratives
viii P R E FA C E
Articulating the Self in History 181
Author–Actor–Character
Jukti Takko ar Gappo (1974) is the last film made by Ritwik Ghatak
(1925–1976)1. It is about a failed life and an argument that goes beyond it, beyond
Ghatak himself who acts out the life and death of a communist intellectual. The text
reclaims, through its severally replayed discourse, the absent subject in conjunction
with the question of praxis; it makes subject and history properly partisan within a
larger utopian project.
Taking himself as primary material Ghatak puts himself on screen as the
principal actor, demonstrating how a subject is formed by his emphatic presence
(Illus. 1). And the sensuous mobility, the plasticity of his body-presence is rich material
for the purpose. This presence is however composed into a triangular motif by its two
flanking aspects: the author/director on the one hand and the narrativized character
on the other. Both aspects function in a historical dimension so that while a sheer
This essay was first presented at a conference, Third Cinema, organized by the Edinburgh Film Festival at
Edinburgh, in 1986. Earlier published versions appeared in Arguments and Stories: The Cinema of Ritwik
Ghatak, edited by Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Screen Unit, Bombay, 1987, and in Questions of Third Cinema,
edited by Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, British Film Institute (BFI), London, 1989.
182 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
presence is foregrounded in the film it is also a means for testing models of self-
representation. In the sense that the author enacts ‘his life’, Jukti is a mock-
autobiography. However, as it calls into play evidence from the symmetrically com-
posed but alternative histories that have been condensed into the fictive character, the
effect is to turn the confessional, nearly nihilist strain of the narrative into an
ideological testimony of the subjectivity at stake.
In Jukti Ghatak makes the invisible and therefore covertly manipulative
voice of the author expressly visible by acting in the film, and moreover by acting the
role of a historical twin called Nilkantha Bagchi. In this sense the authorial voice
comes to us in double register but for that very reason its hold is loosened. Once
provided with a body the author is available for anatomical operation; the various
pitches, the strains and stresses of the voice can be didactically laid out and examined.
So that if ever there was an ideal author-subject that asked, like a metaphysical voice-
over, ‘Who is it who thus lives and dies?’, it is now returned to a volatile actor-subject
always ontologically incomplete in the narrative process. But for that very reason it is
also invested with a more concrete immanence within the historical realm. Ghatak’s
play along the author–actor–character equation is thus a kind of hermeneutic exercise:
he is interpreting for his own generation metaphysical questions that have a historical
function.
There is, in other words, the testimony of Ghatak as author with a means
through his art of interrogating his lived history, and of Ghatak as the protagonist of
a contemporary story who recounts in third-person narrative a tragic destiny. The pro-
jective ego of Ghatak is undone in the full equation. It becomes a signifier in the orbit
of an overarching historicity held up by the two intentionalities of author and
character. Both belong to the first adult generation after Indian independence. Both
examine narratively the choices of the Indian left.
Ritwik Ghatak’s biography is marked by a lifelong relationship with the
communist movement and with its cultural front to which a large number of
intellectuals and artists owed allegiance until the mid-1950s. Simply signposting the
context, we should note his reckoning from the left position of the national struggle
culminating in the simultaneous declaration of Indian independence and the tragic
partition of the nation on communal grounds; his deeply sceptical evaluation of the
gains of Indian independence in the hands of what he would call a bourgeois–landlord
ruling party; and finally his anguish at the disarray and sectarianism of the Commu-
nist Party from the 1960s onwards. When he made Jukti in 1974 he was at the end of
his tether and his health was failing him. But he was astute enough to realize that the
nation, polarized between agents of political expediency and ultraradicalism, was on
the brink—and if it was the last thing he did he would intervene as an artist. To this
purpose he became madly energetic, proving the degree to which he was engaged with
contemporary politics. But more importantly the degree to which his intellect and his
Articulating the Self in History 183
imagination had internalized the dialectic, so that his desperate testimony was also
ultimately a project for the future. Jukti, along with trying to pose the correct political
choices, works out the problematic of praxis. This is, as we shall see, the explicit note
on which the film ends.
About Jukti Ghatak said the following:
I have emphasized that the genesis of all our present-day problems is that great
betrayal, the so-called Independence. But I did not specify the current phase as
strictly neo-colonial.
I can visualize only two alternatives: either straight Fascism or some way out
of it along Leninist ideology. If you are aware of German youth during 1929–
33, you will understand the tensions in our present-day youngsters, fast turning
into lumpens. . . . The entire structure is crumbling down and I believe that
some drastic turn is bound to come soon.2
The Story
The prime character in Jukti Takko ar Gappo is first set up grandly with
the name Nilkantha, a name acquired by Siva in a moment of awesome generosity
when he swallows the poison that comes up with the ambrosia in the great churning of
the ocean by gods and demons. This establishes Siva’s omnipotence; he is nevertheless
marked by the event: his throat is stained blue, hence the name Nilkantha. But having
set up the protagonist in this mythical framework, Jukti’s narrative proceeds to
devolve his iconicity.3 Mockingly, affectionately, a transcendent figure is turned inside
out into a man filled with grand illusion but also marked by the fallibility that distin-
guishes the martyr.
184 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
2 Nilkantha the alcoholic: ‘representative of an irresponsible middle- 3 Bangabala (Shaonli Mitra), Nilkantha and Nachiketa (Saugata Barman):
class intelligentsia’ (Jukti Takko ar Gappo) homeless ‘exiles’ (Jukti Takko ar Gappo)
contemporary: how to construct a figure that is truly in the process of becoming, in the
process of making choices while baiting death; how to figure the archetypal into the
contemporary so that it burns with the mortality of the historical subject.
In Jukti he demonstrates—and indeed the film is a kind of pedagogical
exercise—the immense condensation (in symbolic and linguistic terms) that must take
place in such a figural construction. And then the series of displacements that must
proceed so that in the narrative as such the destinal figure detaches itself sufficiently
from the claims of metaphysical sovereignty through the game of masks. Having
already distanced itself from the given forms of realism (the standard representational
correlate to the historical), the figure stands somewhat tendentiously in the narrative
as a ‘free’ signifier. But it is precisely as free as Ghatak himself. It is part of Ghatak’s ico-
noclastic strategy that the covert mythology of the author is deconstructed along with
that of the martyred hero in that both are contained in the person of Ghatak who
demonstrates the falling apart.
Ghatak as Image
Returning to the assertion that Jukti’s meaning derives from Ghatak’s
presence in it, I now backtrack to ask: what is the special quality of this presence?
The first thing to note is that Ghatak was a theatre activist before he
became a filmmaker. During the years 1948–54 he participated constantly as both
actor and director in the Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association (IPTA), a cultural front
of the Indian Communist Party active from 1943 in several regions in India, especially
Bengal.5 And in the way Ghatak plays the protagonist, in the way he uses his body, his
voice, his gesture, theatrical experience is more than evident.
IPTA activists used several models ranging from the realist to the Brechtian
to Bengal’s living folk and popular forms. In Jukti Ghatak provided himself with a
repertoire of acting devices to make a compelling theatrical personality which is, more
than the ‘real’ Ghatak, the legendary mock-iconic figure he had by then become.
He uses the trick of dismantling body gestures, the head and limbs
working separately, puppetlike, with the slightly caricatured but endearing postures of
mime. It could be a reference to the chhau dance-dramas, a form he loved and (like the
oraon tribal dance) inscribed significantly within his films.6 This is no doubt because
of the way chhau combines the heroic aspect of puranic gods with the comic aspect of
all heroism; the way the virtuosity of the dancers topped with majestic masks may be
lit up by the mischief of an accompanying band of masked monkeys leaping between
the trees and the audience. The ensemble of legendary men, gods and beasts make
game of the mythological battles and the status of the victor by the typical cartwheel
of the playfully absurd on which such performances turn. One scarcely knows whether
the performers are appropriating the Hindu gods humbly or subverting the pantheon
in the process of adapting them to their own iconographic and ritual ends. Ghatak
186 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
9 Nilkantha quotes poetry to Bangabala sitting on a Calcutta street bench (Jukti Takko ar Gappo)
ality trait but at a more advanced level we know that he makes this a self-parodying
act which becomes, as part of the larger design of the film, a provocative practice.
Take the aspect of himself in the form of the actor’s head drawing
attention to itself for its inimitable expressivity. The mechanism by which this
seduction takes place is the camera and behind the camera is presumably Ghatak as
director, the focusing eye and ideal spectator. Ghatak, in other words, is face-to-face
with himself, and this encounter where the subject confirms its existence has obvious
psychoanalytic and archetypal antecedents (the mirror according to Lacan and the
myth of Narcissus). I bring this up to emphasize the powerful impact of the mirror
encounter: the encounter between the ideal ego with the promise of mastery and
control over life’s performance, and the ego experienced as still awkward, insufficient.
Although Ghatak in this last film made at the very end of his life, is accused of
regression, quite the contrary is true. He actually tackles the narcissistic element in the
processes of self-identification. He examines the narcissistic relationship, measuring
the gap between self and mirrored self, transferring the weak sense of history that it
implies into a cinematic form which initiates an explicit discourse on it. In that sense
the narcissistic relation becomes precisely the pretext for a discourse about the social,
raising questions of identity on both imaginary and symbolic levels, levels at which a
subject simultaneously articulates itself while being articulated into history.
The Fool
The hybrid, even contrary figure that
emerges in the process of self-encounter
is the figure of the fool (Illus. 10). The
holy fool belongs to all mystic tradi-
tions and, in the more comic guise of the
wise buffoon, to all ancient literatures,
especially dramatic literature. (Consider
for example the cunning figure of the
vidushaka, clown and didact, in classical
10 ‘Actor’s head’ (Jukti Takko ar Gappo)
Indian drama.) Complementing the fig-
ures of the zen monk and the sufi fakir, the mendicant and minstrel of medieval India,
the holy fool is a mediator of spiritual discourse. In Europe he gains a historical posi-
tion of another order with Cervantes, catapulting aristocratic chivalry into madness;
and with Shakespeare, fascinated by the inquiry into the secret terrain of mortal
melancholy, we get the existentially developed figure of the poor fool reading and
rebutting, with the mere talent of speech, destiny’s signals on behalf of his compa-
nion, the hero.
Ghatak is often called an expressionist. This is correct and he accepts the
responsibility. What I should like to emphasize is that with Ghatak expressionist art in
190 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
its full dimension includes the remote antecedents of mannerism and the more pro-
ximate prerequisites of romanticism.8 It includes working out such contradictions as
mannerism threw up between the uncharted aspiration of the individual and an
investigation of social anomie. It includes the dilemma of romanticism: a glorifica-
tion of the folk—of their mythic fantasy and so-called authenticity, with an under-
standing of the development of capitalism and the rise of an advanced working-class
consciousness. And it includes, finally, an examination of middle-class conscience (the
problem of bad faith) and revolutionary utopias, as in the literature of the modern
period. Ghatak’s expressionism finds further reflexivity in Marxism: appropriately, he
is an admirer of Bertolt Brecht, and like Brecht he works on historical contradictions
as such, formally and ideologically, for all to see.
To pick out some mannerist–expressionist components in Ghatak’s work,
let me look at his style of figuration. I have already spoken about the odd close-ups
where the head floats and wobbles, and of the tilted compositions. Consider again
how the extremely angled shots—top angles or very low angles—distort not only the
interior space (for example the lines of the walls, the bars in a window, an open door)
but also the figures, so that they are tilted forward or back. See how he combines this
with the use of lighting, with well worked-out artificial shadows and a wide-angle lens
which emphasizes the depth-of-field, and you have an almost perfect description of a
mannerist image.
I want to emphasize here that it is usually his own figure that the camera
distorts, most remarkably when you see him at the end as the police bullet hits him in
the stomach. You see a distorted figure and the implications are various: if in manner-
ism such attenuation signifies alienation, a quotation from the convention can
become in the Brechtian sense an alienating device. The distorted figure is seen to be at
variance with our sense of gravity whether we are positioned with the camera or in
defiance of it; however when we are positioned in our seats such a figure displaces our
contractual stability of space. This leads to a double conclusion: the tilted figure seems
to be about to fall back or forward not to reinforce the depth of field, not for a greater
reality effect, but for the purpose of forcibly pulling the viewer into the frame. The
viewer clutches at a figure that seems to be falling out beyond even as Ghatak falls
forward upon us when he dies, splashing liquor over the actual lens.
Now one might say that to make the shadow on the screen and the
spectator clutch each other is objectionable in that it makes identification physical,
visceral. What I am arguing, however, is that Ghatak does the opposite—he breaks the
pact by going too far, by defying the spectator’s optical expectations of figures in
space, expectations concretized by the renaissance that cinema has internalized. If I feel
dizzy or awestruck sharing the inhospitable space the character inhabits then, for all
the exhibitionism, he is breaking the voyeuristic spell, making me conscious of the
relationship induced in cinematic viewing.
Articulating the Self in History 191
11–12 Street discourse (Jukti Takko ar Gappo). Above: 11 Bangabala, Nilkantha and Nachiketa: a drunken Nilkantha declaims, walking down
a Calcutta street. Below: 12 Jagannath Bhattacharya (Bijon Bhattacharya), Bangabala, Nilkantha and Nachiketa: a conversation at dawn
Articulating the Self in History 193
such as Ajantrik, Komal Gandhar, Subarnarekha and Titash Ekti Nadir Naam. I
would like to suggest that this is a deliberate formal device that corresponds to the
anecdotal mode in which Jukti Takko ar Gappo is made.
Fully conscious of the epic form of narration (just as he is of melodrama),
Ghatak obviously understands how the epic proper comes to be inducted into the
picaresque and dramatic forms of narration, then into romantic realism, and finally
into Brecht who virtually draws the tail-end of realism back to its source in the epic.
Ghatak speaks frequently of the epic form and of Brecht.9 But if we want to deal with
the anecdotal aspect of Jukti and the narrative space in which it functions we have to
understand his interest in the documentary form of cinema10 and not surprisingly, his
affinity to aspects of Jean-Luc Godard.11
Ghatak uses what could be called Godardian techniques in Jukti—the
interspacing of neutral images of the city and the landscape, the insertion of documen-
tary footage, the abruptness of frontal address over and against the fictional narrative
so as to privilege the present. Indeed Ghatak adopts the logic of the cinematic present
in Jukti and he does this as much by the narrative style, the seemingly spontaneous
performative aspect of the actors, as by the way the series of scenes are laid out. The
exiled group (Nilkantha, Nachiketa, Bangabala, the impoverished Sanskrit teacher
Jagannath Bhattacharya) meanders through perfunctory, nearly amateurish settings.
They are seen wandering the Calcutta streets punctuated by derelict tea stalls and
liquor shops, at the river front and on park benches (Illus. 11, 12). They go across the
outskirts of the city and beyond into the countryside where they tarry with Panchanan
Ustad, an exponent of chhau. Then through parched fields and peasant-land till they
come to the symbolic crossroads where they meet a drunken cart-driver who directs
them to their destination by saying go right, then left, then right, then left. Nilkantha
does make his way back to his son and estranged wife, now working as a schoolteacher
at Kanchanpur, only to be compelled to set out once again.
Indeed the most politically motivated sequences function in a narrative
space that is conspicuously unoriginal, even indifferent. This is to be seen in the carica-
tural, very Eisensteinian montage sequence. Outside a factory lockout an incoherent
trade unionist is shown barking out his harangue in unison with a street dog. In
another episode the anarchic nature of tribal peasant insurgency is presented by
Ghatak in some sketchy, long-shot, high-contrast takes with little figures running
helter-skelter threatened by the landlord’s gun-toting henchman shown in distorted
close-ups. Here Jagannath is killed. Similarly the grand finale of prolonged crossfire
between the Naxalites and police offers, in its inter-cut suspense, a mock-battle, as if to
say that the meaning of the event lies not in the mise-en-scene or in the dramati-
zation but in the sheer encounter, as it is always called in police reporting. It is an
abbreviated, notational record of the mortal struggle in lieu of which the peremp-
tory death of the hero is pushed up and enlarged into a rhetorical question: how do
194 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Death Problematized
Through the cleverly arranged narrative in Jukti Takko ar Gappo Ritwik
Ghatak embodies the process of acting out, of enactment, and of political action.
There is quite certainly a psychological acting out process in the film; Ghatak is acting
out his own unresolved romanticism and he uses a well-known marker for the cause:
alcoholism. It is also true that this acting out process involves a degree of infantilism
along with adult idealism. But precisely because he is also conscious of the inner core
of romanticism, Ghatak is able to contain its excess; as master of the melodramatic
form he can handle the dysfunctions of both infantilism and of idealism so as to arrive,
narratively, at a political resolution.
While the alcoholism is to be put down as a means of acting out, other
characteristics like his childish play with a stoical wife, vagabond companions, rene-
gade colleagues, and finally with the militant youth and the police he encounters at
the end of the film—all these should be seen in terms of a conscious enactment of the
many aspects of the fool. If he is the eternal child in the film, making up to its mother
after every act of irresponsibility, turning her admonishments into more lavish appeals,
he is so in an especially Indian context where the pranks of the child Krishna and man’s
childlike supplication to the goddess Kali
provide a kind of cyclical energy pattern
for the male consciousness. The motif of
the mother, so central to the Bengali con-
sciousness, is always present in Ghatak’s
films; here we have the wife-mother
who is literally called Durga and the des-
titute girl, a substitute little mother, who
is equally significantly called Bangabala
(Illus. 13, 14). Ghatak places this cruel
and compassionate mother-figure in her
iconic form within an even larger matrix
of myths (after Jung, whom he admired),
thus converting what may be myth as
mystification, a specifically construed
superstructural value in Bengali culture,
into the perennial source of the human
unconscious. This conversion can be seen
as an ideological operation with which
one may be out of sympathy. But so far
as the playfulness of the man-child in the
13–14 Female personae (Jukti Takko ar Gappo ) film is concerned, he enacts it with suffi-
Above: 13 Durga: schoolteacher, stoic survivor. Below: 14 Bangabala
with the chhau mask of the goddess cient irony to refute any charge of false
196 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
consciousness. He enacts the child in order both to appease the mother and to sub-
sume her powers within the more existentially complex figure of the fool. This is the
subject, archetypal and historical at the same time, who possesses by sanction of all
tradition the prerogative of speech. And since speech is volatile and always in excess,
he is impelled into provocation within the social.
While Ghatak’s alcoholism is presented in the film as an empty marker of
an impossible desire for plenitude, or rather for the lost object of plenitude which is the
mother, the relationship between two forms of infantilism is established to the
advantage of the adult subject: he is able to counterpose himself vis-a-vis the mother in
the ironical figure of the wise buffoon. If however even this figure must suffer
dissolution in death—and the death is greatly played up in the film—then there is the
transferring of a sensuous object of desire to a more abstract one, which is utopia.
What is important is that it is not transference at a psychological level alone; the
supreme dissolution enacted in dying is immediately preceded by a hardheaded
evaluation of his own failed life in terms of contemporary history. In a night vigil with
a group of Naxalite youth, Nilkantha/Ghatak evaluates the terms of revolutionary
politics envisaged in figures like Marx, Lenin and Che Guevara, and puts himself at
stake. As this self-evaluation is addressed to a young radical in turn evaluated by him
as suffering from an infantile disorder, the concept of utopia is reaffirmed through
discourse as a historical project yet to be fulfilled.
In this penultimate discourse Ghatak is at one level absolving himself,
transferring his own kind of infantile disorder into Lenin’s historical category where it
is truly to be critiqued. He is transferring and also perhaps transacting between an old
man and a boy the pain of alienation, the alienation of the political exile. He is
attempting to split this alienation into what could be called its defensive and reflexive
parts, so that the tragedy of the young Naxalite becomes disembodied idealism while
his own tragedy becomes, in exchange, a historical suicide, a full-bodied intervention
(Illus. 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20).
Nilkantha dies an exaggerated death, standing in the way of the crossfire
between the Naxalites and the police. As he is hit in the gut he lurches forward. He is
foreshortened because the camera is set at a low angle and he appears almost horribly
comic; as if to confirm his own absurdity, he stretches an arm and spills the liquor in
his bottle, pouring it out over the lens. If emptying the bottle is an ironic comment on
the futile dream of plenitude, the splashed and dirtied lens, the interface between our
reality and his, appears to be a comment on the impossibility of positive viewing on
our part as well. The veil drawn over the lens is an antididactic gesture to say that even
as the truth slips between the Naxalite and the old man, it slips between the image and
the viewer, and that there is no definitive access to the outreaching utopianism.
There is a good deal of demagogy in Jukti, as also vanity and caprice. But
what Ghatak presents in the moment of death is the coda which holds compacted in it
Articulating the Self in History 199
both the discourse of the speaking subject and that of contemporary history. For the
dying speech, as brave as it is enigmatic, modulates the tragedy of a historical suicide.
To his wife who appears at the site on a brief mission and becomes a witness to his
death, he tells a story by the contemporary writer Manik Bandyopadhyay: a weaver
admonished by his comrades for running the loom while they were on strike against
the moneylender’s exploitation, replies—I run an empty loom so as not to let my limbs
rust, so as to keep in practice. And then adds of himself, as he actually dies, one must
do something. One must act irrespective of gain, irrespective even of the result. Pessi-
mistic as this may seem, this is an injunction to act, and to act politically.13
Like death praxis too is problematized. It is wrenched from the rhetoric
both of the philosopher and of the militant. Paired with death in one instance, in the
next praxis is shown to transcend even death. As a prime figure of metaphysics death
is thus prevented from fulfilling its function of closure: it is emptied of its conventional
existential meaning and given an indeterminate status. Thus death becomes a retro-
active sign weaving a dialectical notion of time into the narrative; it is made to stand
proxy for action. This, in a sense, is a special cinematic privilege: to enact and replay
the tragedy-and-farce axiom of blocked history.
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1986. The age of manner-
ism brings with it the slow and incipient process of individuation evolving in consonance with
the material history of the renaissance and the development of early capitalism. But this soon
reaches the psychic condition of alienation such that the individual now sees himself as in
charge of his destiny but unable to fulfil it within the terms of the society, economy and polity
that have simultaneously evolved. Henceforth the very relation-ship between subject and
object will snap and the bereft subject will see himself mirrored in a fantastically distorted, if
surreally elegant world which mocks even as it mirrors the figures and forms of an unattained
selfhood. Mannerist art forms generate and contain excess—as emotional resource and lin-
guistic oversupply of signifiers—and out of this excess the tragic-comic character is construed
as a pervasive presence taking unexpected twists and turns in the unconscious. This is the
prefiguration of the romantic, which in turn prefigures the modern in its expressionist form.
9 See Ritwik Ghatak, ‘Music in Indian Cinema and the Epic Approach’, in Cinema and I,
pp. 41–43.
10 See Ritwik Ghatak, ‘Documentary: The Most Exciting Form of Cinema’, in Cinema and I,
pp. 46–59.
11 Ghatak had seen some Godard films; he occasionally speaks about this in his writings: ‘You
see I agree with Jean-Luc Godard that anything which seems to an artist to be able to [sic]
conveying his message is entirely valid—be it song or dance or newspaper headlines or
commentaries or just about anything.’ Cinema and I, p. 72.
12 See A.K. Ramanujan’s ‘Introduction’ (to his translations of Virasaiva vacanas, Kannada free
verse) in Speaking of Siva (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973), where he speaks about the
opposition between the standing and the moving in the Virasaiva religion, where ‘a Jangama
is a religious man who has renounced world and home, moving from village to village
representing god to the devoted, a god incarnate’ (pp. 20–21).
13 One must do something, one must act. This constitutes the individual and his svadharma in
a specific space and moment of Indian epic construct and history.
S o v e r e i g n S u b j e c t : R a y ’s A p u 201
but the dilemma is quite spurious: ultimately the movements invariably con-
tain both elements, a genuine modernism and a more or less spurious concern
for local culture. By the twentieth century, the dilemma hardly bothers anyone:
the philosopher kings of the underdeveloped world, all act as westernizers and
all talk like narodniks.1
This essay was first presented at a conference, The First Decade of Indian Independence: 1947–1957, organized
by the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, St Anthony’s
College, Oxford University, and Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Texas at Austin, and held at all
the three venues, in 1990. An earlier version was published under the title ‘Cultural Creativity in the First
Decade: The Example of Satyajit Ray’, in Journal of Arts & Ideas, Nos. 23–24, January 1993. It also appeared
in Mapping Histories: Essays in Honour of Ravinder Kumar, Tulika, Delhi, 2000.
202 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
up for promoting the arts after independence reveals that the cultural policy favoured
a centralized and integrationist functioning.4
Culture was sought to be institutionalized precisely in order to carry out
the overall mandate of modernization. In fact this institutionalizing process was
conceived of as a way of disentangling the modern from the nationalist polemic. The
latter had often to speak in the name of tradition even if it covertly strengthened the
desire for the modern. While the national struggle had attempted to simulate a
civilizational quest, the national state was bound to privilege culture as a means of
cohering contemporaneity. In fact it would privilege culture above art as well, precisely
because the intrepid claims of art always exceed, or subvert, even the more progressive
rhetoric of institutionalized culture.
In India, as in other postcolonial countries (Mexico for example), artists
have taken this institutional support for granted, nurtured as they have been through-
out the anti-imperialist struggle on the idea of a benign national state. The nation’s
artists are provided with a sanctioned space in which they struggle with and resolve the
riddles of language and sovereignty. For their part the artists seem to assume, even
unconsciously perhaps, their responsibility to decode these terms and reconstitute
them in what would be a national/modern art. By the same logic Indian artists, while
testing the existential implications of the modern in the context of the nation, have
been facilitated by state patronage to gain a metropolitan identity.
If we extend the argument about the consequence of what has been called,
after Antonio Gramsci, the ‘passive revolution’5 to analogous developments in the
realm of contemporary arts, we find that Indian modernism has developed without an
avantgarde. A modernism without disjunctures is at best a reformist modernism. The
very liberalism of the state absolves the left of confrontational initiatives on the
cultural front. Similarly, the very capacity of newly independent India to resist up to a
point the cultural pressures of the cold war era makes it less imperative for artists to
devise the kind of combative aesthetic that will pose a challenge to the Euro–American
avantgarde. We know that cinema, literature and the visual arts in Latin America have
revolutionized the very forms of the modern they inherited from old and new
colonialisms. Whether this derives from a particular kind of civilizational legacy, from
the politics of liberalism adopted by the Indian state, or from peculiar accommo-
dations made by the Indian middle-class intelligentsia when it moved from colonial to
independent status, Indian artists have tended to avoid radical encounters with
contemporary history.
All the same there is nothing to be gained from the kind of cynicism that
Ernest Gellner for example uses to designate culture in the postcolonial countries. Even
if art practice is ostensibly harnessed to the operation of the ideology and cultural
policy of the new national state, creative practice is usually heterodox. There is a
certain rebellion and also a dissembling radicalism among artists. Quite often there
S o v e r e i g n S u b j e c t : R a y ’s A p u 203
may be utopian formulations or, on the other hand, subversive symbols that have poli-
tical import. Complemented by even an episodic intransigence on the political front, it
is enough to confound generalized theses on politics and culture.
Cultural Creativity
It is worth recalling that in Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan the
romantic section of the nationalist elite led by the poet himself had encouraged an
idealized aristocratic–folk paradigm for propagating a universal culture. The Santi-
niketan ideology in the practice of the arts was anti-industrial; with its strong craft
orientation it was also obviously antiurban and emphasized environmental, ecologi-
cal concerns.6 Its vocational definition of the artist favoured a guru–shishya etiquette
where the student idealized the master (Rabindranath was Gurudev, Nandalal Bose
was the incontrovertible ‘master moshai’). It abhorred the professional artist who
was seen to demean himself by resort to the market. The modern was treated as the
troubled feature of something like a civilizational project to which India, as part of the
orient, would contribute its unique dynamic. This was the agenda of Benodebehari
Mukherjee and Ramkinkar Baij. Indeed it was this indigenous romanticism combined
with the canonical aesthetic of Ananda Coomaraswamy and the artisanal basis of
Gandhian ideology which gave us the contours of a nationalist cultural discourse in
the area of the arts. With the later alumni the aristocratic mentality of Tagore vanish-
ed. It had been transfigured already by the tribal persona of Ramkinkar Baij; now
K.G. Subramanyan opted in favour of a transaction with the popular to arrive,
through a series of modernist mediations, at a strategic notion of the contemporary.
By 1947 the course of Indian art was set away from Santiniketan. But if
this phase of national culture was left behind in the irreversible process of post-
independence modernization, the very abandonment gave rise to a permanent nostal-
gia for indigenist life-forms. It also led to a project for creative compensation fulfilled
by an array of invented traditions.
What also got sidestepped with the advent of independence was the
experiment of the cultural front of the communist movement, the most important
aspect of which was of course the Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association (IPTA).7 This
left another form of nostalgia, even a fierce regret, which led in turn to some major
statements in art. It characterized for example the self-reflexive form of Ritwik
Ghatak’s cinema: the loss of a radical dream is actually thematized in his Komal
Gandhar (1961) and Jukti Takko ar Gappo (1974). Ghatak, positioning himself to
go beyond the so-called intermediate phase of bourgeois democratic culture, claimed
modernism to be part of a logic beyond reform; indeed he positioned the logic of
twentieth-century revolutionary socialism against reformist modernism. In this
somewhat voluntarist exercise he provided the impetus, rather like the unorthodox
genius D.D. Kosambi,8 to see Indian tradition turned inside out, to question the
204 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Modernizing Project
Ray’s choice of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novels Pather Panchali
(1928) and Aparajito (1931),9 his choice of a story—set some time in the early years of
the twentieth century—of the growth, travail and transformation of a young brahmin
boy in the mainstream of the modern, has obvious allegorical value. The footsteps of
the brahmin boy mark the transition of an impoverished but literate and gracefully
poised culture of perennial India, as also the transition of ‘the people’ towards a
subliminally perceived destiny. Narrativized with appropriate pathos, each discovery
of the boy is accompanied by loss and the discovered self carries the weight of familial
and social responsibility. This is a responsibility, however, that is displaced in various
registers of consciousness, dodged and deferred through various stages of life. This is a
story about the romance of the self and the world in the heart of Apu who passes
through urban anomie like a sleepwalker, and who gains in the balanced aesthetic of
Ray’s cinema a life that will stand testimony as a realist document for numerous lives-
in-the-making.
I will argue that by virtue of its universal success Pather Panchali con-
firmed that an Indian cultural creativity was at work to link civilizational memory
with the sense of sovereignty that independence brings. There was in the making and
receiving of Pather Panchali a hope that this cultural creativity would overcome the
painful alienation of the colonial experience by turning it into a rite of passage to
modernity. The colonial experience could then be marked with a before and an after:
the before would be designated in terms of memory, or more properly as civilizational
S o v e r e i g n S u b j e c t : R a y ’s A p u 205
plenitude that yields the great imaginary. The present would move on to the destined
point of arrival where the process of self-reckoning with otherness and authority,
which is to say the symbolic order, has been tackled. Reality, contemporary reality,
would now surface, materially replete, from its nourishing matrix. But it would also
be indelibly printed with the structures of rationality gained at the collective level in
the struggle for independence and revealed in the new national formation.
Pather Panchali served to provide a gloss on the civilizational trauma
caused by progress; it sublimated (and displaced) the threat of modernization into a
dream of autonomy. And it fulfilled the need for a newly self-regarding middle-class
intelligentsia to channel its conscience. Pather Panchali became in the process some-
thing akin to an ethnographic allegory (built on a promise of plenitude) which denies
and even seemingly undermines the politicality of a national formation (an artifice for
social authority), but in fact served by deliberate default as a national allegory. That
default may be seen as a way of reading one thing for another, a structure of narration
corresponding to a structure of feeling. In a reticently existential film sovereignty
corresponded to what one may call the political unconscious of the expressly con-
scious artist in postindependence India. It led ‘logically’ to a narrativization of the self
via the nation—the most determining political paradigm delivered to the modern
consciousness by the nineteenth century. Therein the nation tends to appear less as a
societal struggle and more as an evolutionary trace in the consciousness, which is pre-
cisely the paradox at the heart of such a discovering mission.
The Apu trilogy is replete with symbols of colonial India in which it is
temporally placed, but the colonial (like the national) consciousness is not really
addressed. The village as a pristine community of precolonial India is linked directly
with the sense of the historical present, Ray’s own contemporary India, where the
nation is the determining but invisible trajectory in the wake of which the individual
can at last be valorized.
1 Upendrakisore Ray: grandfather 2 Sukumar Ray: father 3 Satyajit Ray at age eleven, 1932
is internationally received which makes Ray India’s emblematic national artist in the
decade after independence. At the biographical level the actual inscription within
national culture of his first film Pather Panchali (1955), followed by Aparajito
(1956) and Apur Sansar (1959), makes of itself a runaway story. With all the diffi-
culties of finance Ray faced during the three years he spent making Pather Panchali,
it was finally the West Bengal government, on the personal recommendation of the
chief minister Dr B.C. Roy, that bailed the film out. No one, however, knew very
much about why they were supporting the project and found justification in it being
a kind of documentary. The money was granted from the account of a rural uplift-
ment programme of the government because the film was called ‘The Song of the
Little Road’!
Jawaharlal Nehru had to intervene to allow the film to circulate abroad
as there were objections from Indian diplomatic missions that it was too stark and
pessimistic.12 It had a prestigious opening, first at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York (1955)13 and then at Cannes (1956), where it won an award for the ‘best human
document’. In 1957 Aparajito won the Golden Lion in Venice and this confirmed
Ray’s international reputation. Pather Panchali opened commercially in London
(1957) and then again in New York (1958), where it achieved huge popularity.14 All
of this was superimposed on the quick success of the film in Calcutta itself with high
praise from Ray’s compatriots everywhere. Thus traversing regional/national/inter-
national contexts, Pather Panchali became independent India’s gift to the confluence
of world cultures. ‘Each race contributes something essential to the world’s civilization
in the course of its self-expression’, Marie Seton quotes Coomaraswamy from the
Dance of Siva at the head of her biography of Satyajit Ray.15
On seeing Pather Panchali and Aparajito Stanley Kauffman wrote that he
believed Ray was determined to preserve the truth about his people and that, para-
phrasing James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, he was ‘forging in the smithy of his heart the
uncreated conscience of his race’.16 The Indian intelligentsia too held it in similar
S o v e r e i g n S u b j e c t : R a y ’s A p u 207
4 Outdoor shooting of Pather Panchali: Satyajit Ray with film crew and actors.
Subrata Mitra and Bansi Chandragupta are behind him.
regard and in terms that were not dissimilar. On the one hand it was seen as a testi-
mony of individual conscience, and on the other as a civilizational expression mediat-
ed by some form of ‘racial’ memory, producing symbols with contemporary aesthetic
affect. This was the cultural discourse that the Apu trilogy enriched—a romantic, even
orientalist discourse, shared by resurgent nationalities of the east in the first decades of
this century with Coomaraswamy and Tagore as its key figures.
Above: 13 Aparna’s mother shields her daughter from marriage to an insane man: ‘Who are
you giving your daughter away to?’, she asks her husband (Apur Sansar). Below: 14 Apu’s
friend Pulu (Swapan Mukherjee) asks Apu to marry his cousin Aparna to save family
honour (Apur Sansar)
initiates the viewer into a magical pact with the real whereby s/he comes to believe that
the paradoxes of fantasy and perhaps even historical contradictions can at the least be
visualized. The viewer moreover is led to believe that by virtue of this privileged parti-
cipation in an inviolate perceptual model, a pristine cognition is also as if at hand and
possibly also a universally valid resolution between nature and culture.
Ray is valorized for authenticating, in so contemporary a medium as film
but yet with a commitment to the conscience of his ‘race’, a reforming will that befits
the prevailing human conditions in India (Illus. 11, 12, 13, 14). He is also believed to
have authenticated with an aesthetic modesty, the progressive aspirations of the liberal
middle class. For the Apu trilogy enacts with its ‘poverty of means’ the painful entry of
212 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
24–25 From Ray’s sketchbook: wash drawings of possible film scenarios for Pather Panchali, sketched in the manner of comics
have used the train to cut up framed space and dislocate time, creating in the wake of
its disappearance primitivist nostalgia, totemic fear, sheer anticipation. But in Pather
Panchali the train produces the kind of epiphany Ray is peculiarly capable of con-
juring, an epiphany springing from a simple mise-en-scene and a stereotypical symbol.
There it is, the train, invoking rustic, childish wonder and turning into the paradoxical
symbol of imposed yet desired modernization. There it is, the classic cinematic miracle
of the train, transposed on to the landscape in such a way that nature itself seems to
herald history. And Apu witnesses this open-mouthed until the camera, now on the
near side of the train, shows the speeding hulk cut across his little body, leaving him
momentously and forever charged.
It is at this point that Apu first comes into his own. Here he recognizes his
yearning, in the thrumming of the poles and in the silence preceding the apparition of
the train. Still in thrall of his sister, he finds a signal for becoming in the passage of the
train and advances to take responsibility, as far as possible, for his own destiny. Ray
invokes a mesmeric potency in nature to gain the reality effect. Apu first tarries in the
landscape and then flies like an arrow in the heart of time, signifying in both move-
ments that here, at this spot, the child’s soul and the phenomenal world fuse and
become lucid, self-revealing. This is also Ray’s own realization, in terms of a perfectly
chosen mise-en-scene, of cinema’s privileged relation to phenomenological veracity.
But equally in this early sequence Ray is at pains to translate his sense of
the real so that it might, even given the epiphany, remain on the right side of realism.
Everything that follows this scene in the kash field will build up to Durga’s death,
giving her a permanence of being and thereby a trace of the iconographical memory
that illuminates her name. And yet at the end of Pather Panchali when Durga is dead
and the bereaved family prepares to leave the village of Nischindipur with its
destroyed ancestral home, the otherwise impractical poet–priest, Apu’s father Harihar
Roy, declares that this must sometimes be done. That departure is necessary. Moreover,
while the last shot of the family departing in the bullock-cart recalls the almost
ubiquitous melodramatic conventions of Indian cinema (which coincide with and
S o v e r e i g n S u b j e c t : R a y ’s A p u 217
26–30 The kash field. Above left: 26 Durga and Apu hear a mysterious hum (Pather Panchali). Above right: 27. Apu puts his ear
to the electric pole (Pather Panchali). Middle left: 28 Durga is screened by kash flowers (Pather Panchali). Middle right: 29 Apu
runs towards the train (Pather Panchali ). Below: 30 The train with a plume of smoke appears on the horizon (Pather Panchali)
218 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
sometimes assimilate what one may call Indian realism: recall similar scenes in Devdas
and Do Bigha Zameen), in Pather Panchali it is the steady gaze of the little prota-
gonist that recognizes, however bleakly, the inward journey of his life.
Having signalled the crossing over of the hero in Pather Panchali, having
indicated Apu gently pushing fate into a space for becoming, in the next film,
Aparajito, Ray puts tradition itself in the balance. He puts the idea of tradition as well
as its generic modes of the mystical and the melodramatic in balance with the self-
creating subject, the invisibly inscribed subject-in-history that is Apu.
The journey on which Apu thus embarks, moving from Nischindipur to
Benares to Calcutta and then possibly to some unknown shore, illustrates precisely
like the neorealism of Italian provenance the journey that countless young men will
make in India. It does so in a way that allows to be heard, like a faint but insistently
repeated undertone, the rhythm of their distant figuration. It does so in a way that
allows to be seen the remote emergence of these countless young men in a narrative
evocation of the national story. This is what makes the Apu trilogy something of an
allegory—except that if the allegory at the national level has the express purpose of
exorcising superstition so as to replace it with necessity (specifically economic nece-
ssity), there is in the novel and equally in the film a further transcending step. Apu
rejects the supposed perenniality of village life; he abandons the rigours of his brahmin
identity but also the bondage of labour in the city, so that on the realm of necessity is
mounted an ordering principle of freedom.
The Apu trilogy, then, has two overlying motifs, one devolving and the
other evolving. If the first motif is a kind of sublime fatalism, the second involves the
rites of passage for a modernizing young adult. Ray establishes a perfect synchrony in
these two primary motifs, pivoting them on childhood adventure but seeing them
prefigure the demonstrably allegorical extension to Apu’s quest for knowledge and
sovereignty. What I shall go on to argue is that this notion of freedom itself may pro-
duce a condition of hypostasis.
Secular Imagery
‘With apparent formlessness Pather Panchali traces the great design of
living’, Lindsay Anderson said at the time of the Cannes award in 1956, adding that
Ray does this while giving the impression that ‘he has gone down on his knees in the
dust’ and ‘worked with complete humility’.21 On another occasion, as if pressing
the point, Ray commented: ‘I direct my films in harmony with the rhythm of human
breathing.’22
Nearness and distance are almost as if metrically composed and then
intoned by the breathing life of forms. Ray places much of his work within the formal
lyric mode. At the heart of the lyric is the desire for the numen, or to put it the other
way round, the lyrical is an expression of the numinous and thereby haloed. Even the
S o v e r e i g n S u b j e c t : R a y ’s A p u 219
Above: 31 Aunt Indir: inquisitive, gaping (Pather Panchali ). Below: 32 Durga holds a guava
to the old aunt’s nose: a shared moment of childish greed (Pather Panchali)
occasional irony within the lyric mode must work itself around the numen and not
subvert it. For that very reason I should like to see the numen residing first and fore-
most in the ancient aunt Indir who is, for all her little wickednesses and folly, treated
with utmost tenderness.23 She is numinous because she is the last breath, the ultimate
waif of traditional society. Here is also the irony and the very mischief in it turns into
grace because the errant hag’s breath goes out just like that, suffusing the phenomenal
world with unfinished desire. But then Indir is compressed into the soul of the younger
waif Durga, whose breath is high with the passion of pure childish greed. Free from
accretions, it wafts across the village ponds and groves. Taken together in intimate
moments of eating and laughing, these two give us the confirmed image of the
220 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
numinous in Pather Panchali (Illus. 31, 32). Then at the end of the film there is some-
thing like an apotheosis. Soon after the old aunt dies Durga dances ecstatically in the
torrential monsoon rain for all the world like a mad little demon. Or an adolescent
goddess. When she dies she is reclaimed by the stormy night. And yet Durga is not
really canonized; indeed she is nearly forgotten as the narrative proceeds and she leaves
behind only a melancholy resonance, that small excess of unfinished desire which is
the very attribute of lyric naturalism (Illus. 33).
In all this Ray takes his cue from his immediate literary sources, Rabin-
dranath of course, and Bibhutibhushan who may have had a less developed notion of
generic options in literature but who could, as we see, elicit from material details a
fully experiential world. Ray follows Bibhutibhushan in his reproduction of splendid
imagery that just stops short, deliberately, of iconographical complexities. In fact he
even inverts the icon, as in the old aunt, and yet retains the numinous as simply a
breathing figure imaged forth with cinematic persistence.
Ray relies on a certain romanticist faith in the image as such: the image as
against symbol and icon. I have already spoken about Ray’s cinematic image with its
phenomenological veracity, its breathing form and numinous grace; the image in
more generic terms as a focus of his lyric naturalism. I should now like to argue how,
given Ray’s liberal and reformist ethics, this kind of image is imbued with a secu-
lar sensibility. By disallowing any mythic overload or excessive condensation or
S o v e r e i g n S u b j e c t : R a y ’s A p u 221
Ray does not valorize historical change either in his early classics or later.
Nor does he introduce narrative disjuncture whereby the unconscious may find its
formal manifestations, a language and speech which interrogate historical change
itself. In other words, Ray does not stake out the contemporary as a contested space
for historical forces to act in—he simply lays the ground.
It should be remembered that his mentor Rabindranath Tagore had
already problematized these issues in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Consider the question of Hindu male militancy in his novel Gora; consider the high
stakes he places on the creative spirit of his female protagonist, Charulata, in Nashta-
nir. In Ghare Baire Bimala literally acts out the turmoil of nationalism from her
niche in the home. Ray gives these protagonists a vexed consciousness that detaches
itself from civilizational determinates to engage with the more ambiguously placed
promises of history.
Indeed it is somewhat inhibiting to Ray’s position that in cultural dis-
course, as in particular forms of aesthetic resolution, Tagore has already bestowed so
much more complex and even painfully contradictory meanings on self and subjecti-
vity, on love, language, race, community, people and nation—on all those emancipa-
tory epithets of the modern which derive from the double heritage of reason and
romanticism. Ray, on the other hand, can only work with the deliberate use of ana-
chronisms, as in his early films Jalsaghar (1958) and Devi (1960). The passing away of
feudalism, for instance, is established through a negative denouement of a seamless
tragedy. Historical insight is in this way elided in favour of an existential truth and cul-
tural authenticity.
Ray is not only a prime exemplar of the authentic and authenticating
artist, he lays to rest the vexed debates on tradition and modernity. I refer to these
debates as they have proceeded from the Indian renaissance in the nineteenth century,
debates engaged in by Tagore, Gandhi, and also Nehru beginning with the Discovery
of India. For a society undergoing rapid change after independence authenticity
becomes once again the redemptive sign—an illusory redemption even, but expressly
functional in sustaining a national discourse. More specifically, the consolidated aspi-
rations of the liberal middle class have to be fulfilled, and they need an art form that
will emancipate them not only from the tradition/modernity debates but also from the
ensuing bad conscience into which they are cornered by traditionalists and radicals
alike. The middle class, favoured by the nation-state, need moreover a demonstrably
secular and sufficiently classical (or classicized) art form; a ‘high’ art form to gain
parity, via the national, with universal (international) cultural discourse.
Ray certainly gives his class an existential basis for authenticity. Deferred
and even elided, the wager on the contemporary surfaces as a vestigial presence in the
Apu trilogy. The contemporary becomes a pressure on the cinematic figuration of his
narratives; it leaves traces which allow themselves to be read as secular, modern, yet
224 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
systemic enough to gain a classical profile. He does this, to reiterate in a sentence the
argument that has run through the essay, by handling directly and to his advantage the
relation between civilizational motives and historical affect. Letting the one and then
the other outpace each other, he fills the ‘ideal’ role of an Indian artist within the pro-
gressive paradigm of the ‘first decade’.27
Allegorical Account
We have already seen how the Apu trilogy touches a notion of authen-
ticity that is existentially ascertainable. More specifically, it provides a measure of
authorial credibility: a nonwestern artist in the best moment of his own historical self-
regard, the moment of national independence, claiming individual sovereignty. I want
to conclude by moving into the more vexed area of interpretation and suggest that the
Apu trilogy is, and has been taken as, or perhaps should be taken as, a kind of ethno-
graphic allegory.28 It answers the continuing need of the liberal imagination, western
as well as Indian, to comprehend ‘otherness’ on humanistically coeval terms. It
answers the need to work out a system of equations within a cultural matrix that is
finally, inevitably, universal and in that universality committed to a destinal narrat-
ive—inventing that term to mean at once destiny and destination, immanent life and
a metanarrative that proxies for transcendence.
Ethnographic writing is allegorical, James Clifford says, at the level of its
context: in what it says about cultures and their histories, and of its form: in what is
implied by its mode of textualization.29 He goes on to say that to shift focus from
ideology to ethnographic allegory in readings of culture is to suggest that the more
convincing and rich realistic portraits are, the more they serve as extended metaphors,
patterns of associations that point to coherent theoretical/aesthetic/moral meaning.30
Further, as a rhetorical trope ‘allegory draws special attention to the narrative character
of cultural representation, to the stories built into the representational process itself.’31
This is the point I want to stress: the allegoric/narrative character of cul-
tural representation in a film like Pather Panchali. Representation interprets itself in
the narrative of the film, it opens out moments of moral insight or, rather, categories of
‘truth’ (fictional, cinematic and social) that fulfil the most wide-ranging cultural
expectation, beginning with the local and culminating in the national.
Ray decidedly belongs to an intellectual climate that respects what
Clifford calls positivism, realism, romanticism32—nineteenth-century ingredients of
twentieth-century cultural studies. But, as Clifford goes on to say, studies in rhetoric
(understood in my argument to mean figures of expression and more precise linguistic
decodings) have disrupted the assumption of ‘presence’ that underpinned the
positivist–realist–romantic consensus. Meaning does not flow through seamless dis-
course nor does it emanate from it as numinous presence. Indeed the recognition of
rhetorical moves in the quest for meaning has disrupted the inclination to valorize the
S o v e r e i g n S u b j e c t : R a y ’s A p u 225
symbolic (underwritten by an elaborate realist project) over allegory.33 And the doubts
generated by this disruption help us to understand that culturalist/humanist alle-
gories34 stand behind the fiction of ‘difference’ deploying exotic symbols in aesthetic
discourse, even as at one time spiritual explanations used to mobilize the interpret-
ation of other cultures towards a norm of transcendent sameness. If most ‘descriptions
of others continue to assume and refer to elemental or transcendental levels of truth’,35
if there is a continuing need to establish through a nexus of symbologies, human
similarities over and above cultural difference, then we can know that a definite elision
is at work. ‘This synchronic suspension effectively textualizes the other and gives the
sense of reality not in temporal flux, not in the same ambiguous, moving, historical
present’,36 but in retrospection that encourages the recovery of the other by way of a
redemptive psychology.
Ray allows the protagonist of the Apu trilogy to redeem himself. He
stands extra tall at the crossroads with his child on his shoulder at the end of the last
film of the trilogy, Apur Sansar. But there is in the very courage of this verticality a
break between the past and the future, and a deep-rooted regret at the alienated space
of the present. This alienated space concretizes the sense of pervasive social fragmen-
tation, the sense of a constant disruption of ‘natural’ relations. This, Clifford says,
after Raymond Williams, is characteristic of a subjectivity inducted into city life
and suffused with romantic nostalgia for a happier place elsewhere in the past, in the
country.37 The self cast loose from viable collective ties is an identity in search of
wholeness; having internalized loss it embarks on an endless search for authenticity, a
sign of wholeness which becomes by definition, however, a thing of the past—rural,
primitive, childlike—accessible only as fiction and grasped at but from a stance of
incomplete involvement. Thus there is a withdrawal from any full response to an exist-
ing society. ‘Value is in the past, as a general retrospective condition, and in the present
only as a particular and private sensibility, as individual moral action.’38
If Ray is part of the positivist–realist–romantic framework, then it is my
purpose to show how ‘presence’ is in fact used to symbolic effect; how so-called empi-
rical evidence in the form of realism and, on the other hand, artistic spontaneity desig-
nating longing, desire, aspiration, characteristic of the romantic/lyric mode, are drawn
out and yoked. So much so that the rhetoric of ‘presence’ is established and becomes
the inescapable truth of all expression.
There has been unmitigated trust extended to Ray’s conscience story via
Apu. But there is also the methodological ruse one can elicit from it: the truth-effect in
the inadvertent form of an ethnographic allegory that will give us the clue to ramified
cultural meanings—through reverse allegorical readings that work the text against the
grain with political intent. While likening the Apu trilogy to an ethnographic allegory
it becomes possible then to ask what significant displacement, what civilizational
subversions it introduces in our notion of the contemporary.
226 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
38 Apu daydreams while reading (Pather Panchali) 39 Apu, Sarbojaya and Harihar leave Nischindipur for Benares in a
bullock-cart (Pather Panchali )
possibilities and historical change. An imaginary plenitude that nurtures and sub-
sumes, evokes and concretizes the ‘presence’ we referred to above, also in a sense loses
the future.
Village boys still grow up and move from the country to the city; they
suffer loss and disaffection, poetic inspiration and bruised praise for their courage. If at
the end of his life in 1992 Satyajit Ray were to tell the Apu story again it could never
be the same as when it was told in 1955 or else it would appear entirely disingenuous
(as indeed his late films often do). The substantive element of the story is never
transparent; it is better seen as a material amalgam with different levels of density and
opacity and (to pursue the metaphor) with geological faults in the bedrock on which
the realist narrative pattern, or the conventional form of it, is constructed. Today,
when the question of identity is thrashed about on various occasions—on grounds of
regional authenticity, religious fundamentalism, national culture and the hegemonic
universalism of advanced capitalistic polities—life-narratives have perhaps to be
denatured to be even seemingly realistic. In other words, with the concept of identity
so thoroughly problematized the fictive form itself must be subjected to the disruptive
demands of reflexivity.
The sublimating ethics of the Apu trilogy notwithstanding (indeed
precisely because of the cultural creativity that it so appropriately puts into place in
postindependence India), we must test its cutting edge along the lines of the liberal
ideology on which its aesthetic is based. If on the narrative impulse of that identity
there could at one time be a transference between a person’s and a people’s sovereignty,
today it would be difficult to find a social promise (or a trope) on which its formal
(that is allegorical) transfer can be conducted. Today liberal ideology itself has to
construct a narrative that includes the loss of that social promise, and along with that
a methodological doubt about a coherent storyline. It would have to include the
absence, and through fictive reversal and retake it would have to work towards an
indefinitely delayed denouement, whether in the form of tragedy or, on the other
228 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
hand, some unaccountable jouissance perhaps. But the discreet optimism which Ray
could once command, the aesthetic of gentle closures and unstressed beginnings, that
kind of narrative ease would no longer suffice.
The very progressivism in the Apu trilogy can be seen in the paradoxical
form of this conclusion to become diffused, to settle into a splendid hypostasis of
hope. How then shall we read the allegory that the Apu trilogy evokes: as an indelible
imprint on the national conscience not yet consciously elaborated or perhaps already
vanishing in that remarkably optimistic first decade?
privileged Tagore and Ray families as you could get in the city of Calcutta. A village boy,
he managed to get a degree in Calcutta but lived the impoverished life of a schoolteacher just
outside the city and then, from 1924, in Calcutta, where he came to know other writers,
among them Nirad Chaudhuri. Generous and unembittered by his hard life, he became a
widely popular writer and attained the status of one of Bengal’s foremost authors.
When Satyajit Ray started dreaming up his filmmaking career in the late
1940s he chose Pather Panchali right away, recognizing that the novel was a classic in its
own right and linked with the literary traditions of the world in terms of its generic structure.
Pather Panchali, the first film, corresponded to the novel of the same name; the two subse-
quent films, Aparajito and Apur Sansar, were a two-part extension of the novel’s sequel titled
Aparajito. The three films were together called the Apu trilogy.
10 Biographical material on Satyajit Ray is widely available. See especially, Marie Seton,
Satyajit Ray: Portrait of a Director, Dennis Dobson, London, 1978; Chidananda Das Gupta,
The Cinema of Satyajit Ray, Vikas, Delhi, 1980; and Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The
Inner Eye, Rupa, Delhi, 1990.
11 Satyajit Ray’s family, among the most distinguished in Calcutta, were prominent Brahmos,
beginning with his grandfather, Upendrakisore Ray, who was a pioneer in the Calcutta
printing industry and the author of several articles on printing technology, published in the
London-based Penrose Annual. He was also a writer–illustrator of children’s literature
including, most prominently, Mahabharata for Children and Ramayana for Children. Rabin-
dranath Tagore, a family friend, was an enthusiastic advocate of Upendrakisore’s writings.
Sukumar Ray, Upendrakisore’s son and Satyajit’s father, began writing early, producing
children’s illustrated literature like his father and also criticism in the fields of photography,
painting and literature. Returning from his studies in printing technology in London in 1913,
he started a magazine for young people, Sandesh. This made him a household name in Bengal
with nonsense rhymes such as Abol Tabol elaborated over several years. Although Satyajit
never knew his father, the latter exerted a great influence on him. Satyajit edited, illustrated
and designed Sandesh and made several children’s films throughout his career, occasionally
quoting his father’s nonsense verse as in his film Parash Pathar (1958), even as he has filmed
his grandfather’s story Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1968). He also made a fictional short on
his father, Sukumar Ray (1987).
Sukumar Ray, who was a close friend of Rabindranath Tagore, travelled
back with him from London in 1913. He involved himself in passionate debates within the
Brahmos—the Ray family belonged to the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj—as for example on the
question of Rabindranath’s affiliation to Hinduism and the objections it raised among the
Brahmos, as also his alleged equivocation on nationalist issues. Sukumar Ray, prone to pre-
monitions of death and wrapped in pessimism on the issue of faith, withdrew from the
Brahmo Samaj towards the end of his short life. Tagore deeply mourned his premature death
at the age of 35 in 1923, when Satyajit was only two years old. For a detailed chronicle of
Satyajit Ray’s family, see Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, pp.13–55.
12 Nehru authorized the showing of Pather Panchali at Cannes at the express suggestion of
Marie Seton. It is also worth mentioning that Nehru invited Roberto Rossellini to make his
India films in the 1950s, that he knew John Grierson personally and that he invoked the
tradition of the British second world war documentary in starting the Films Division (1949).
Nehru’s support for Pather Panchali could possibly be placed with other efforts to engage
Indian cultural practices with those of European contemporaries in a reciprocal way. Indeed
230 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
one can conjecture Nehru’s seeing Pather Panchali from a precisely nonorientalist point of
view, wishing to show before the world that a self-emancipating India existed in the con-
science of a confident auteur such as Satyajit Ray.
13 The film was invited to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, by Monroe Wheeler on the
strength of some stills he saw in 1954 while the film’s shooting, begun in 1952, was in
abeyance due to lack of finance. The film was to be shown in New York in 1955; in between
Wheeler asked John Huston, who was coming to India, to be his emissary and check out the
progress of the film. On the basis of a silent rough-cut Huston approved the film and later
wrote glowingly about his early encounter with Ray.
14 Among the numerous stories connected with the early success of Satyajit Ray it is worth
mentioning that both at Cannes and Venice it was the English critics and filmmakers who
supported him; the French in both cases found him by and large incompetent, as one can
gauge from Rene Clair’s comment—that as he had now won the award at Venice he should
go away and learn how to make films. There is also the widely quoted comment by Truffaut
that the film was merely ‘pad pad pad about paddy fields’. However, the commercial release
of the film in the Academy Cinema and the Fifth Avenue Playhouse, in London and New
York respectively, was a clear confirmation of its international success. The explanation of
this success in terms of the film’s universal humanism and liberal progressivism is discussed in
a very finely articulated evaluation of the Apu trilogy by Robin Wood (The Apu Trilogy,
Praeger, New York, 1971). A compendium of worldwide comments on Ray (and by him) is
to be found in Film India: Satyajit Ray: An Anthology of Statements on Ray and by Ray,
edited by Chidananda Das Gupta, Directorate of Film Festivals, Delhi, 1981.
15 Seton, Satyajit Ray: Portrait of a Director.
16 Stanley Kauffman, ‘World on Film’, quoted in Film India, p. 27.
17 Satyajit Ray had met Rabindranath Tagore only a few times while he was a student at
Santiniketan. But Tagore’s aesthetic continued to be an all-pervasive influence in Bengali
culture long after his death in 1941. For a collection of Tagore’s relevant essays, see Rabin-
dranath Tagore on Art and Aesthetics, edited by Prithwish Neogy, Orient Longman, Delhi,
1961. Apart from Tagore’s aesthetic as available to Ray through his family connections in
Santiniketan and via his philosophic essays, there is the whole world of Tagore’s literature
which is in fact the basis of several of Ray’s films—Teen Kanya (1961), Charulata (1964)
and Ghare Baire (1984). Devi (1960) was based on a story inspired by Tagore though writ-
ten in fact by Prabhat Kumar Mukherjee. Ray also made the documentary Rabindranath
Tagore (1961).
18 Ray studied art in Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan, in 1940–42. He left without completing the
course because he did not feel he had it in him to become a painter, and he joined an adver-
tising company in Calcutta. But the experience had a lasting influence on his sensibilities and
indeed on his loyalties, as his film on the artist–teacher Benodebehari Mukherjee, titled The
Inner Eye (1972), shows.
19 Ray knew Kurosawa and held him in deep admiration. It is interesting that Ray considered
Kurosawa—regarded the most western among his compatriots in Japan—in terms of an
affirmative orientalism, an ideology Ray derived from Santiniketan. Indeed he placed his
love of Kurosawa in particular, and Japanese cinema in general, within the principles of an
art practice learnt from Nandalal Bose, and on the ideological rendering of the eastern ima-
gination by Okakura Kakuzu. See Satyajit Ray, ‘Calm Without, Fire Within’, in Our Films,
Their Films, Orient Longman, Delhi, 1976.
S o v e r e i g n S u b j e c t : R a y ’s A p u 231
tude, he was quite extraordinary. But as a man . . . I always understood what Nehru was
doing as I understood what Tagore was doing because you can’t leave Tagore out of this, it’s
a triangle.’ (p. 138)
‘But you have to have the backing of your own culture very much. Even
when I made my first film the awareness was there. I had a Western education, I studied
English, but more and more over the last ten years I have been going back and back to the
history of my country, my people, my past, my culture.’ (p. 138)
‘I can understand and admire Mao’s revolution which has completely changed
China and achieved—at a cost—the eradication of poverty and illiteracy. But I don’t think
I could find a place in China, because I am still too much of an individual and I still believe
too strongly in personal expression.’ (p. 137)
‘Well, go to Benares. Go to the ghats and you will see that communism is a
million miles away, maybe on the moon. There are such ingrained habits, religious habits. I
am talking of the multitude now, I am not talking of the educated, the young students, and,
of course, everything falls back on education and the spread of education. . . . Only through
education could it happen.’ (p. 139)
28 This term and the ensuing argument is taken from James Clifford. See James Clifford, ‘On
Ethnographic Allegory’, in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited
by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1986.
29 Ibid., p. 98.
30 Ibid., p. 100.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 James Clifford refers to De Man’s critique of the valorization of symbols over allegory. See
ibid.
34 Ibid., p. 101.
35 Ibid., p. 102.
36 Ibid., p. 111.
37 Ibid., p. 114.
38 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, quoted in ibid.
Revelation and Doubt 233
A Hermeneutic Task
In an interpretation of the two films Sant Tukaram (Marathi, directors:
V. Damle and S. Fattelal, 1936) and Devi (Bengali, director: Satyajit Ray, 1960), I
wish to suggest how the movement for national emancipation provides a double-take
on given iconographies. There is a desire to invest faith in tradition as well as an incli-
nation to dismantle cultural codes from a position of profound suspicion. Discrete or
transposed, these opposing attitudes define a ‘living tradition’; more pertinently, they
facilitate contemporary cultural practices.
A living tradition may be taken to be derived from the material substra-
tum of a civilization; it is what may be considered its immanent form. When Ananda
Coomaraswamy designates tradition as a perennial resource its implied plenitude is
at once a utopian concept, a material base and an attribute of aesthetic production
(sacred or mundane) that is manifest in use. This notion of a living tradition aspires
to a continual transformative process. The question is how in that process historicity is
structured, and with what forms of reflexivity.
I want to emphasize that this is not merely a programmatic operation; it
has to be realized in aesthetic terms. Even while the synchronic structure of a myth may
be opened up and its symbology set out as a series of motivated signs within the
dimension of contemporary history, we must also be able to recognize in the process
the ingenious use of genre, the inflexion of motifs, their formal deconstruction. We
should recognize above all the narrative strategy of such transformations whereby an
inherited iconography is decoded and sometimes radicalized. For the narrative move is
most closely analogous to, indeed interchangeable with, human action. ‘When men
produce their existence in the form of praxis they represent it to themselves in terms of
This essay was first presented at an Indo–Soviet conference, The Indian Revolution: Retrospect and Pros-
pect, jointly organized by the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library,
New Delhi, and the Soviet Institute of Oriental Studies, at Leningrad, in 1987. Earlier published versions
are: ‘Mythic Material in Indian Cinema: Investigating Sant Tukaram and Devi’, in Journal of Arts & Ideas,
Nos. 17–18, 1989; ‘Revelation and Doubt: Sant Tukaram and Devi’, in Interrogating Modernity: Culture
and Colonialism in India, edited by Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir and Vivek Dhareshwar, Seagull,
Calcutta, 1993.
234 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
fiction’, Paul Ricoeur quotes Marx as saying, and further: ‘The referent of narration,
namely human action, is never raw or immediate reality but an action which has been
symbolized and resymbolized over and over again.’1
With the rising tide of nationalism there is a tendency to bring myths and
legends, structures of feeling embodied in symbols and revelatory icons to the surface;
to make them eminently visible so as to take on new or newly adapted forms in the
various arts. Tradition is thus mobilized, it shows itself to be a living tradition by
fronting itself. This is particularly relevant to the visual and performing arts (as also
cinema). By a certain formal positioning of the body/image, the ubiquitous pheno-
menon of tradition shows up and seeks beholders, native and foreign, who have
hitherto turned away from it in ignorance and embarrassment.
There is some defiance and also naivete in the way visibility is thus esta-
blished. But taking the figuratively worded proposition about the surfacing of tradi-
tion a little further, I should like to see it in terms of a formal category of frontality
variously manifest in Indian popular arts: frontality of the word, the image, the
design, the performative act, in several systems of address. This could mean for exam-
ple the appearance of flat, diagrammatic and simply contoured figures (as in Kalighat
painting), and the setting up of a tableau in a figure-ground design with notational
perspective (as in the Nathadwara pictures and the photographs which they often
utilize). It could mean in performative terms the repetition of motifs within ritual
‘play’ (as in the lila) or, at the more popular level, the deliberate evacuation of space
to foreground actor–image–performance (as in the tamasha). Frontality is also esta-
blished in an adaptation of traditional acting conventions to the proscenium stage as
in Parsi theatre, where stylized audience address is mounted on an elaborate mise-en-
scene. Even a quick review of these characteristics provides, as we can see, a schematic
rendering of an aesthetics of the popular arts in India.
Although every aspect of the artistic tradition may be pressed into use in
the affirmative urge of nationalism it is often the popular that comes in most handy.
The popular will include fragmented (or sometimes bartered) aspects of the classical, as
it will urbanized versions of the folk and the tribal. Although the popular is a catchall
category it can be reasonably well defined in art history as an urban, eclectic impulse
accompanying social change.2 Eclecticism in this motivated context conveys an artistic
wit and nerve to construe a hybrid form that is at least potentially iconoclastic.
Contrasted with this desire to advance the archetype and induct it into a
nationalist history, there is in the later nationalist and postindependence phase a need
to question, differentiate between, and even alienate traditional beliefs and forms. To
consciously imprint a new normative structure on the imaginary; to deconstruct the
actual symbols in the tradition making the critique itself a basis of what we have been
calling the living tradition. The hermeneutic of suspicion, in other words, must follow
the hermeneutic of affirmation. Whether it is portrayed sentimentally or with dignity
Revelation and Doubt 235
and rigour, reality in the art practice that ensues from this negative commitment is now
handled by realisms of various persuasions.3
This essay deals with the successive inscription of revelation and doubt,
faith and dissent. I make, first, an investigation of the affirmative idiom of Sant Tuka-
ram, seeing its iconography and devotional narrative transmuted into a contemporary
rendition of the tradition. I then place it face-to-face with the realist interrogation in
Devi where Ray patiently unmasks a pathetic illusion of the holy. I deal deliberately
with discrete modes to see how in the transitional decades of national self-definition
alternating strategies are used to recoup and critique traditions; how contempo-
rary cultural practice evolves in effect by compounding these alternatives to form
the modern.
Sant Tukaram
‘Saint’ Films
In filmic classification Sant Tukaram,4 along with other ‘saint’ films, may
be placed in the category of the mythological.5 However it belongs more correctly to a
subgenre of special significance. The saints’ lives are quasi-biographical material. Their
message of spiritual equality makes these lives legendary as well as expressly adaptable
to historical ends. We know of course that in the nationalist ethos saints’ lives were
especially valorized and made to light the way to social justice. The need to publish
new editions of Marathi bhakti poets was emphasized as early as the mid-nineteenth
century by M.G. Ranade who, like other middle-class nationalists of the period, saw
materialized as cinema via Phalke. However, by the time we come to the mid-1930s
the cinematic image itself was gaining a self-regard and a language of its own. Sant
Tukaram is a prime example of this early fulfilment.
Let us look at the characteristics of the image as it comes across in Sant
Tukaram to recognize how religious iconicity is mediated to secular effect in the filmic
process (Illus. 3, 4, 5). Repeated over-the-shoulder shots of the devotee first put god
and the viewer in contact. But even as Tukaram the saint adores the black-faced
Vithoba and witnesses his miracles in wonder the cinematic image is construed to
symmetrically reverse the gaze: the saint turns around to let the viewer ‘adore’ him and
witness his sublime speech and song. It is his generosity of address towards all
phenomena, real and divine and, with it the alertness and dignity of sacred protocol
that help the film in transmitting a nonvoyeuristic gaze to the viewer. But if in this per-
formative about-turn there is a transfer of affect between god, saint and viewer con-
ducted through the very body of the saint, there is also a cinematic rhythm in the
reversed gaze which makes for reciprocity, an intersubjective truth-effect that is
ultimately secular.
The film Sant Tukaram succeeds among other things precisely in the way
it develops an iconic sign. The iconic in the language of cinema derives its character-
istics from painting. Figurative images, especially portraits, rest not only on likenesses
or resemblances but equally on an economy of representation, and with that an
autonomous logic of positioning and structure. This inevitable distancing between the
pictorial image and the real world acquires additional virtues in the transfer between
painting and cinematography. The iconic sign, peculiar to cinema, denotes precisely
this transfer (of icon–image–sign) and helps in breaking down a rigid assumption: that
the cinema upholds ultimate verisimilitude.
monumental, severely stylized, close-up images of Saint Joan and her interrogators.13
Bazin writes how Bresson, like Dreyer, was concerned with the countenance as flesh
which, when not involved in playing a role is a man’s true imprint, the most
visible mark of his soul. It is then that the countenance takes on the dignity of a
sign. He would have us be concerned here not with the psychology but with the
physiology of existence.14
One might say that if Pagnis is memorable as Tukaram (just as Marie Fal-
conetti is as Joan), it is because he becomes transparent in his soul and is yet opaquely
present as image. Or, to put it the other way round, Tukaram is realized in the material
countenance, in the features and stance of this unique performer, Vishnupant Pagnis—
but it is by subverting the actor as actor that the sign surfaces.
The point I want to raise via Bazin is how privileging the countenance as
flesh, or the player’s physiognomy, allows an extension from the pure icon to what
may be called the indexical sign.15 Here the image refers to the object in the real world
by virtually pointing to it, by establishing a direct link, by a contiguous and thus
existential relationship. Bazin regarded this indexical function of the photograph,
where the ‘truth’-content of the image is supposed to be manifest, to be its proper
and supreme function. By extension this function applied to the cinema. By
Tuka the humble actor Vishnupant Pagnis finds his own existential force. Tuka says,
‘Listen to Tuka preaching—like a shower from a cloud descending’,20 and the recipient
here is a dedicated actor–devotee. Pagnis’s presence extends beyond his fine, nearly
beatific countenance, beyond his actor’s reverie, beyond even his being, into becoming
through discourse a reflective symbol within a political situation already conditioned
by a contemporary ‘saint’, Mahatma Gandhi.
It is sometimes said that Gandhi’s discourse was analogous to or even
derived from that of the bhakti saints; he himself was most attached to Tulsi, Kabir
and Narsi Mehta. But take the figure at hand, Tukaram, and the analogies will be as
easy to establish. Consider how Tukaram demolishes bogus claims to religious power
by his own spiritual intransigence; a sudra by birth, he claims that his lord makes no
distinction between castes. But consider also how he hesitates, indeed declines to up-
turn the social hierarchies of the day and opts for stability in the face of an imperial
power that would uproot the entire tradition.21 The common cause Gandhi makes
with this attitude is self-evident. It is Gandhi’s belief in balancing voluntarist change
with a containing symbolism (or, on the other hand, heretical utterances with cautious
action) that brings him close to a certain aspect of the saint tradition and thus to large
sections of the Indian people educated through this literature.
Gandhi’s presence is said to have had a quality of humour and intimacy, a
swift grasp of reality and attendant grace. Similarly, his speech took the form of direct
address. The factor he himself put forth as the source of this address was what he called
his ‘inner voice’. Received directly from god in the manner of mystics, it was trans-
mitted to the listener by way of actual enunciation—the choice of words, the tone, the
length of the sentence, the duration of speech—to become ‘unmediated’ discourse.
As much as the message it is in the style of being and form of discourse
that there is a resemblance between the Mahatma and his saint forebears. Gandhi is in
a sense the actor–pedagogue on the nationalist stage. This has less to do with any banal
notion of communication than with the ability to present aspects of spiritual being:
the distantiation that comes from sainthood (especially as a sanyasi, which the
peasantry perceived Gandhi to be) and the intuitively correct and quick yielding before
the force of conscience in a moment of praxis.
For that very reason, of course, Gandhi did not present causally structured
arguments drawing on history. He was not interested in history, he would claim, nor
even in politics, except to concede that it so encircled modern man that he must
inevitably deal with it in order finally to annul it. Consequently Gandhi preferred not
to speak of nationalism as such, not at least in the way it was spoken of by the west
and its colonized opponents alike. This, he believed, showed a process of corrupt
symbiosis that would lead India to the same malaise: the nation-state and its material
structuring on a monstrous scale that would then destroy individual dignity, commu-
nity values and spiritual truth. Instead he put his faith in such utopian communities as
Revelation and Doubt 243
ashramas, constituting them as models for the truth-seeking polity of the future.
I need only reiterate this transfiguring procedure in Gandhi’s leadership to
configure the argument about sainthood: the body, the utterance, the word, the mira-
cle are instantly relayed, making the personality in question open to quick and change-
ful manifestations but equally to intransigence and praxis. What remains elusive and
intractable is the ‘rumour’ of sainthood; when judged in terms of historical causality it
gains forms of peculiar transcendence.22
Narrative Movement
I have spoken about the nature of the image in Sant Tukaram and the
cinematic signs it yields. I have also discussed the discursive aspect of the film and how
speech and song may be existentially conveyed in person, but how these also belong to
a cultural language and its norms of meaning production which constitute what we
may call the living tradition. I shall now look at the narrative procedure of the film as
the means by which it takes account of all these aspects and becomes what I have
indicated by cross-referencing to Gandhi, a socially symbolic construction.
It is in the narrative that the content of the discourse, the meaning of the
words as they are uttered in passionate verse, is mobilized. In so far as the saints’ lives
are perceived in the Indian tradition as historically ‘true’ but also emblematic (closed
off by the self-realization of the saint through voluntary death, suicide, samadhi, or
some form of mythic assumption), the retelling or replaying of these lives will tend to
follow the allegorical mode. This is true for Sant Tukaram. Consequently, as compared
with the phenomenologically rich but overdetermined and unitary ‘realism’ that
Andre Bazin seeks in cinema, we can place Sant Tukaram in the genre of the Indian
‘mythological’ and see in it a different constructional principle. The miracles, for
example, are so embedded in the story as to be seen not only as motivating points of
the narrative but even, one might say, ideal prototypes of human action (Illus. 9, 10,
11, 12, 13, 14). The question of realism is thus always kept a little in abeyance though
never quite eschewed, since the pedagogical aspect of the life of a saint requires con-
stant reference to reality. What is interesting is that the social is introduced, as in the
realism of Bresson and even Rossellini, by opening out the subjectivity of the elect
protagonist within the historical. This entry is by way of a saint’s acts of transgression;
they may be in a political context those of a rebel or a revolutionary.
‘Can metaphysics be converted into action? And can action have meaning
beyond itself? These are the questions that have haunted filmmakers who do not stop
at naturalism.’23 Kumar Shahani poses this with reference to the saints of Prabhat,
going on to say that if the answers are in the negative neither these saint films nor post-
Rossellini cinema would have been possible. In Sant Tukaram it is the unselfconscious
simplicity fusing thought and action which makes for this particular form of didactic
narration. Shahani adds that such simplicity can rarely be repeated even by the authors
244 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
24–25 Tuka’s children play with the precious gifts sent by Shivaji to test Tuka’s sainthood (Sant Tukaram). Left: 24 Tuka’s son Mahadeo dresses
up like a prince. Right: 25 Kasbi (Kusum Bhagwat) is ravished by the silks
jerky movements of the tamasha actor (Illus. 18). One might also compare the
pragmatic, uncouth but vulnerable Jijai, Tuka’s wife (Illus. 17), in her attempted natu-
ralism or spontaneous ‘expressionism’, with the seductive stylization of the courtesan
after the hybrid mannerisms of Ravi Varma’s pictorial compositions (Illus. 19), and
note how a diverse stylistics is consciously used to set off the integral being of Tuka.
The second mobilizing feature of the film is the childlike, indeed childish
set of miracles. The stiff idol of Vithoba comes alive smiling as he dances on his little
feet, arms akimbo. The wheatstalks in the ravaged fields shoot up of themselves as
Tuka sings with his eyes closed. Child Krishna pours grain from the sky with his own
two hands to save Tuka. The goddess emerges from the depths of the water with
Tuka’s bundle of verses intact. Vithoba multiplies the person of Chhatrapati Shivaji,
a hundredfold, at Tuka’s request, to fool the invading armies. Tuka ascends to Vai-
kuntha in a chariot flown by Garuda (in the shape of a great hairy bird). The miracles
make happy omens for the magical aspect of the cinema since its very inception; there
is a never-fading thrill in the technical transformation of contours, substances, bodies,
and there is a special thrill in the kinetic transformation of hitherto static iconography
(Illus. 20, 21, 22, 23).
The fabulous, even where it appears ephemeral, has a narrative function.
This brings me to the third aspect of the movement in Sant Tukaram. Because the
magic is inducted into the everyday life of the little community at Dehu it becomes a
motivating impulse towards a materially plentiful existence. The first signs of this are
the wholly generous acts of Tuka himself, as for example when he walks through the
village like a divine somnambulist letting the plundering army of little children take
their pick of his great bundle of sugarcane until by god’s grace there is but one each left
for his own two children, the poorest of the lot, but made happy so easily.
Then there is Tuka’s gracious effect on his community as shown in the
sequence where his priestly interrogator, Pandit Rameshwar Shastri, an authority on
the vedas, comes to Dehu to indict Tukaram for defiling the scriptures. Riding into the
250 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
village, the priest is bewildered to see the villagers engrossed in artisanal tasks by virtue
of Tuka’s supportive verse and song (Illus. 26, 27, 28). There is a wonderful tracking
shot parallel to the priest on the horse but taken from the near side, so that you see bet-
ween the camera and the priest an entire pageant of working people engaged in their
craft, trade and domestic chores. Singing all the while, they give rhythm to their daily
life. The film here achieves (through remarkable use of a depth-of-field and sustained
lateral movement which prolongs the penetrating view) a shift in the viewer’s percep-
tion—the priest and his cohorts rather than the poor in their hovels are the objects of
the viewer’s voyeuristic interest and derision. This sequence also achieves a retake on
the viewer’s attraction to the spectacular miracles. Here is evidence of real emancipa-
tion shown to be immanent within a community of unalienated labour. Here life, song
and work combine to attain the sustained rhythm of reverie we associate only with
leisure. This gift to his people is the saint’s true miracle.
The actual miracles in Sant Tukaram are naive to the point of being crude,
just as the image and its iconography are construed cursorily and simply signpost the
event. But it is also as if the moments of fallibility suggest complementary moments of
identification, just as the moments of material want and suffering recall moments of
plenty. Take for example the scene where Jijai and her two children succumb to greed
and play unabashedly with Shivaji’s nazrana but at Tuka’s rebuke willingly surrender
Revelation and Doubt 251
the ruler’s wealth (Illus. 24, 25). In another scene the village poor loot god’s boon to
Tuka, the piles of grain at his door; and in that upsurge you see, inadvertently almost,
the glistening energy of muscle and movement mounting up to revolutionary effect.
The energy born of need becomes, through the saint’s encouragement, a virtual pre-
figuration of peasant insurgency (Illus. 29, 30, 31, 32).
If the film has a Melies-like magicality (via the example of Phalke), the
miracles also initiate a sensuous gain in the daily life of the community and become
the mode of social transformation in the film. Ultimately Tuka’s ascent to heaven is
fairly matched by Jijai’s pathetic but real claim to see him back home for his daily
meal. We can see the other part of the cinema, the early realism of, say Pudovkin,
already moulded into this saint’s life on film.
Through the materiality of the miracles and the precise conflation of faith
and labour, through a cinematic narrative that interweaves magic and realism, through
the physiognomy of Vishnupant Pagnis as Tukaram and the phenomenological ela-
boration of a life-in-poverty in peasant India—through a propitious combination of
these factors given dignity by the national struggle, Sant Tukaram becomes a reve-
latory text conducive to a hermeneutic of affirmation.
Clockwise: 29–32 Tuka happily watches as the villagers collect and carry away the grain bestowed by divine grace (Sant Tukaram)
252 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Devi
Patriarchal Sin
Satyajit Ray’s Devi is a classically constructed narrative.26 Somewhat as in
a suspense drama where the viewer anticipates the next stage and slips into it the
sequences in the film move imperceptibly. The plot is attuned to the young Dayamo-
yee’s destiny, her life runs swiftly into madness, she is dead at seventeen. The plot-time
is tuned to the brief life of the quarry which, once marked, runs on giving fleeting
measure of reality but in the foreclosed form of tragic denouement.
Real time is absorbed by the real space in which it functions. In the grand
household of the feudal patriarch, in the large dark rooms and resounding corridors,
life moves but slowly, blocked by heavy furniture, hidden behind doors and screens.
The shriek of Daya’s pet parrot lifts the gloom; the clatter of the old man’s wooden
sandals subsides into the shadowy magnitude of the place. Ray is of course famous for
creating a mood and an atmosphere (to which art director Bansi Chandragupta and
cameraman Subrata Mitra contribute greatly). We see this in Jalsaghar and will see it
again in Charulata: how the mise-en-scene and the camera movement coincide to esta-
blish a perfectly integrated setting.
In this sense Ray fulfils the conditions of realism quite perfectly: he
offers a seamless narrative and uses to maximum advantage the elements of perspec-
tival depth, of sound and shadow, of rich chiaroscuro, of a spatial dimension designed
to harbour a strange intentionality. In deference to a noble rationality wherein the
investigations of man-in-society become scientifically viable, he not only fulfils the
conditions but reiterates the equation between narration, realism and tragedy. By
embedding human destiny in an interposed map of nature and culture (heredity and
environment) he also examines the contours of psychic distortion—a manifestly
modern preoccupation.
In Devi the rationalist project in the double register of realism/modernism
strikes at the hidden note of perversion. Thus the core of this film is revealed when
unintended eroticism unwinds in the heart of the ageing aristocrat, Kalikinkar Roy,
passionate devotee of goddess Kali. This destroys the old order, sacrificing neverthe-
less a young couple to it. As he watches Dayamoyee, his beautiful daughter-in-law,
perform the ritual puja before the goddess and as he receives her devoted attention, we
see a visible conflation of patriarchal motives with the cruel deification of a desired
object. The dream that is forming in the old man is still, in terms of the plot, to be
revealed; in terms of the image it is already established in the body and performance
and cinematographic capture of Kalikinkar. There is an exhibition of sensuality which,
in Ray-fashion, is discreet enough but it should not be missed: the crumpled brocade
clothes of the aristocrat; his delirious love of the goddess; his covert, almost spying
glances at Daya; and his freely surrendered limbs as he relaxes on the tiger-skin chair
while she washes his feet. There is submerged obscenity in the discreet representation.
Revelation and Doubt 253
The faint repugnance towards the floundering old man is set against
sympathy for the clear-eyed younger son, Daya’s husband Umaprasad, who studies in
Calcutta in a liberal environment. And though Umaprasad is in no way heroic or even
fully emancipated, his body, his direct compassionate smile, his voice and words have
a firm contour (of which you get manifest proof in his well-articulated handwriting as
he writes his name several times over with fine bold penstrokes). The difference is not
just between old age and youth; it is also between the way images are formed and
positioned. Even the dandyism of the young man riding with a friend in a horsecab in
Calcutta has a poise that signals the making of a selfconscious, perhaps imitative but
also progressive, middle class in nineteenth-century Bengal.
The figural contrast of the aristocrat and his son is of course ideologically
dictated. Ray is speaking in class terms about the degeneration of feudal patriarchy. If
there is some sympathy towards the aristocrat suggesting also sympathy for the dying
order (in Jalsaghar it is the very motif), it is only as much as is necessary to maintain
the balance of realism. The terms of criticism are clearly in favour of the enlightened
bourgeoisie and its urban middle-class extension. And they are precisely those
formulated by the Brahmo Samaj movement: the rational, liberal progressivism which
Ray’s family inherited as Brahmos and which Ray saw modernized into a universalist
aesthetic via Rabindranath Tagore—a close friend of the family in whose university at
Santiniketan Ray studied art. I would in fact emphasize that in this film Ray does deal
with false consciousness in its more-or-less precise meaning as class ideology which
functions most prominently through religion. Regrettably, critics harping on Ray’s
subtlety sometimes shy away from placing Ray in a political context, denying him
even his own reticent manner of ideological critique and social intervention.27
While we can see the dream-thoughts in Kalikinkar’s imagination, we
have little premonition about the quickness and finality of the dream: he sees Daya-
moyee as Kali and rises in the morning crying out in ecstasy that she is goddess incar-
nate come to bless his house and the community. A monstrous process of condensation
in the aristocrat’s psyche culminates in the dream-content, all the mixed-up elements
of the old brain find ‘truth’ in a flash and he achieves via cunning displacement the
projection of his desire in a socially consecrated space.
‘I do not think it is necessary . . . to form a plastic conception of the psy-
chic condition at the time of dream formation’, says Freud.28 But the cinema since its
inception has been doing precisely this, providing a plastic conception of the psychic
condition at the time of dream formation by a virtual stream-of-consciousness relay of
images. How the transparency, the overlapping density and transposition evolve into
ghostly mutation in the darkened cinema-hall that simulates in turn conditions in
which dream formation takes place, this has been long theorized. In terms of authorial
choice it means that you can either achieve a collapse of the conscious subject or, if the
filmmaker intends to encourage reflection, use the cinematic apparatus to retrace and
254 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
thesis was to be used polemically by Ray’s supporters against Ritwik Ghatak’s use of
mythic material and melodramatic form in the coming decades.
broken. When the husband returns they exchange an intelligent, complicit look of
adult understanding but he is able to do nothing against the father. When you see her
next the camera is moving above the pressing crowds, following the husband’s gaze as
he watches her from the privacy of an upstairs window while she is being converted
into a public spectacle.
Again, how small she looks wearing her sari pulled over her face as she
hurries into the night, intending to escape with her husband to Calcutta. But she
stops among the giant weeds by the riverbank whispering ‘I’m afraid, I’m afraid’, and
returns to her awesome status at home. Finally when he comes again she has just gone
mad, having failed to produce the miracle for her own dying nephew. Her face and
clothes are in disarray and she runs out into the fields. Silhouetted against a warm
bright light, she runs with her body stiffened like a wooden puppet, hopping
Reformist Conscience
Prabhat Kumar Mukherjee situates his story around 1860. Tagore’s Ghare
Baire (where rationalism in the figure of Nikhil is well developed) is placed four
decades later. Ray in his turn decided to make his film long after Tagore, in the Nehru-
vian era. Indeed for Nehru, who released the film to foreign audiences, it must have
seemed in the nature of a proclamation declaring the old order dead.
Where should we position the young husband in Devi, the preferred
protagonist who fails so miserably but nevertheless becomes emblematic of a not-yet-
realized consciousness? In 1860—or in 1960? The discussion of Devi can be context-
ualized if we take up the question arising from the point just made: is the film an
intended anachronism?
Chidananda Das Gupta suggests that Ray’s work traces the social evolu-
tion of the middle class in modern India, suggesting that in some of his films even post-
Tagore characters are observed from a Tagorean moral viewpoint. Ray, he argues, is ill
at ease when this literary mediation no longer suffices, so that the period after Charu-
lata (1964) shows a spiritual exhaustion which he overcomes but only after he has
replaced passionate identification with his immediate past with a contemporary
political project.29 But what is this project? And doesn’t the past continue to feature
Revelation and Doubt 259
poignantly in it so that Ray’s oeuvre can be said to be a continual retake? He maps the
past on the present in a subtly overlapping arrangement; he repeatedly foregrounds
what he regards as perennial values; he encircles the nodal points of desired reform
and then, in a realist manner, lets the ‘truth’ surface. Is this reflective project meant to
redeem a universalist model of humanism, or the autobiography of his class and his
culture, or the progressive conscience of a modern Indian artist?
Here we can only ask how usefully Ray establishes the anachronism of a
‘period’ film within contemporary reality. And the question easily splits into two
parts, the ideological and the aesthetic. It is possible to argue that some of the social
issues he represents in the first phase of his films (from Pather Panchali to Charulata,
including Devi) are not only located in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, but
also that they are most keenly felt and examined in that phase of Indian nationalism
and not to the same extent since. There is the question of religious reform and ‘moder-
nization’ of the Hindu religion (or indeed its replacement, as propagated by a section
of the Brahmos, with a variety of alternatives including atheism). It may be argued
that as nationalism advanced the question of reform was left behind or even overtaken
by its opposite force, revivalism; and that however progressive Nehru’s own position
was in this matter, the Congress Party and even the communists let the problem of
religion (along with that of caste and community) subside before other declaredly
more vital goals. If this is so, Ray’s insertion into the contemporary of a period drama
where the collusion between feudal ideology, religious superstition and senile delusion
are presented may be a profoundly intended anachronism. It can serve to cause dis-
junction, to force upon us a fresh look at our deeply anomalous contemporaneity.
Realist Aesthetic
Does Ray’s aesthetic also function through active recall and reflection?
Take the narrative form. If with the end of foreign rule the Indian middle class, among
them artists, felt the need to face up to cultural contradictions (with a scepticism
which at times even queried the gains of political freedom), it is not surprising that this
need was conditioned by a bourgeois literary preoccupation: that of introspecting
about subjectivity, society and the limits of rationality in fictional narrative. In this act
of introspection the choice of genre, style, form does come from the nineteenth century
(from Ibsen or Chekhov). It extends via existential morality into the twentieth cen-
tury. Nor is it surprising that an Indian filmmaker chose to ‘go back’ to this narrative
form as late as 1960. Each medium has its own history and cinema, still young, solves
its own problems along a time-scale and routes different from those of literature and
the other arts. Italian neorealism itself proves this. Andre Bazin is at great pains to
show how it needed the transition from silent films to talkies and from a primitive to
a sophisticated technology of lensing, lighting and outdoor shooting, before cinema
could lay claim to a phenomenological rendering of reality qua reality where even the
260 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
aesthetic factor may surrender itself.30 Only then, argues Bazin, is the image you see on
the screen not reality artificially ‘framed’ but reality imperceptibly ‘masked’. The plot
is simply set in the theatre of life, the mise-en-scene coinciding with nature itself. The
photographic image and cinematic realism have an intertwined ontology as also a
technological and formal logic, and in Bazin’s view it finally goes much further than
any other form of realism in the arts.
In India the development of cinematic realism by Satyajit Ray has to do
with a long process of gestation which includes precisely the contributions of Jean
Renoir and Andre Bazin. Not until after Ray made his Apu trilogy, supplementing it
with four more ideologically oriented films (Jalsaghar, Devi, Mahanagar and Charu-
lata), could we have even recognized the promise of an Indian version of cinematic
realism that is concretely in place—in India. That is to say, Ray is the very artist who
extends, through the use of modern technology and cinematic means, the psyche and
the creative grasp of the middle-class Indian artist. The goal is to place the author in a
particular position with regard to the real: to endow him with a commitment to
veracity, intellectual equanimity and a language to enunciate the ‘truth’.
However it has to be said that while Ray cleans the mirror of reality,
retrieving whatever nobility we may yet find in contemporary life, he leaves us
meagrely equipped to handle conceptually and through art the further complexities,
the intransigences of cultural phenomena including myths. If it is because of Ray’s
conserving classicism that the pain of Daya’s tragedy is drawn straight and clean, like
a thread from its cocoon, then it is for the same reason that the finespun story of Devi
is contained within the cocoon of a domestic environment. And though he does, to a
point, succeed in presenting the tricky problems of religious distortion, there is a thera-
peutic aspect to this. Ray is not at his best in handling the malaise of the social body
but he is at showing the seamy side of a familial complex which, once exposed, may be
restored to health. However mythologies, as also travesties of the divine, are so struc-
turally embedded in social practices that it needs a many-pronged narrative to loosen
their hold. Short of that realism can become a reformist procedure for sifting the
accumulated bad conscience of society.
One may conclude on the note that Satyajit Ray’s humanism and its
attendant realism are placed within an eminently liberal model. Furthermore, his
belief in empirical perception and in an evolutionary logic where heredity, tradition
and environment are taken as crucial determining factors fit nineteenth-century lite-
rary positivism where, in the spirit of science, the human is amenable to rectitude
though often through tragedy. On this Ray superimposes the ethical regime of
authenticity. Recall that in the first decades of the twentieth century a true-to-the-soil
ethics inspired varied endeavours within the secular domain of identity formation; the
authentic leads on to a perennialist ideology, likely at times to be ahistorical. So too,
for all its valuable rationality, Ray’s cinema stops short of effecting an upheaval in the
Revelation and Doubt 261
structural formations designated as the Indian civilization and making a radical inter-
vention in the historical process on hand.
But this is precisely the point. The polarity I set up with two examples,
Sant Tukaram and Devi, provides a good indication of the range of emancipatory dis-
courses that dominate Indian cultural and artistic practice in the crucial transition
from the colonial period. Within the hermeneutic of affirmation and suspicion a radi-
cal thrust is present, but it remains inevitably outside. Signposted with Ritwik Ghatak,
it provides a pressing tendency, a tendentious view, that later marks the trajectory of a
cultural avantgarde.
13
Bazin, one of the foremost film critics from France, produced his major writings in the 1950s.
See Andre Bazin, ‘Le Journal d’un cure de campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson’, in
What is Cinema?, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1971.
14
Ibid., p. 133.
15
Taking C.S. Peirce’s division of the linguistic sign into its three aspects—the iconic, the
indexical and the symbolic, film theoreticians have shown how especially appropriate this
definitional procedure is to cinematic language and effect. See Peter Wollen, Signs and
Meaning in the Cinema, Secker and Warburg/BFI, London, 1982.
16
See A.K. Coomaraswamy, ‘Akimcanna: Self-Naughting’, in Coomaraswamy 2. Selected
Papers: Metaphysics, edited by Roger Lipsey, Bollingen Series LXXXIX, Princeton University
Press, Princeton, 1977.
17
Bazin, What is Cinema?, p. 133.
18
See Anuradha Kapur, Actors, Pilgrims, Kings, Gods: The Ramlila at Ramnagar, Seagull,
Calcutta, 1990, pp. 233–35.
19
‘We possess the wealth of words/With weapons of words we will fight/Words are the breath
of our life/We will distribute this wealth of words among the people/Tuka says, look! the
meaning of word is God/With Word, we will extol and worship.’ Translation of Tukaram’s
verse quoted in Tradition and Modernity in Bhakti Movements, edited by Jayant Lele, E.J.
Brill, Leiden, 1981, pp. 119, 123.
20
Translation of Tukaram’s verse quoted in G.B. Sardar, The Saint-Poets of Maharashtra: Their
Impact on Society, Orient Longman, Bombay, 1969, p. 128.
21
For a fine discussion on the subject, see ibid.
22
(i) See Sarkar, Modern India, pp. 328–30; (ii) Regarding the deification of Gandhi from the
point of view of historical deconstruction, see Shahid Amin, ‘Gandhi as Mahatma:
Gorakhpur Distt., Eastern U.P., 1920–21’, in Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian
History and Society, edited by Ranajit Guha, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1984; (iii) I am
grateful to Gyanendra Pandey for a discussion on Gandhi in the context of the present paper.
23
Kumar Shahani, ‘The Saint Poets of Prabhat’, in 70 Years of Indian Cinema (1913–1983),
edited by T.M. Ramachandra, Cinema India-International, Bombay, 1985, p. 201.
24
Ibid.
25
Ibid., p. 202.
26
The film Devi was made by Satyajit Ray in 1960; it was his sixth film and though he was
already well established as an international figure, this film did not have any great success in
Bengal and had some difficulty in obtaining export permission owing to its critical handling
of Hindu orthodoxy. Significantly, Nehru intervened and released the film to foreign
audiences.
The film is based on a story by Prabhat Kumar Mukherjee (1873–1932), a
well-known short story writer beholden to Rabindranath Tagore for his literary
achievements. The actual idea and motif of the story were in fact given to Mukherjee by
Tagore. The story is set in late nineteenth-century Bengal in the grand zamindar household of
Kalikinkar Roy who is a devotee of Kali and, after the recent death of his wife, somewhat
besotted by the ritual of worship. He has two sons and two daughters-in-law (and a great
retinue of relatives and servants) in his house. While Tarapada the elder son is a weak man
dependent on his father’s wealth, the younger son Umaprasad, studying in a college in
Calcutta, is already attuned to the progressive ideas of the nineteenth-century renaissance in
Bengal. He is encouraged to question his father’s feudal and religious superstitions by his
264 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Frames of Reference
viii P R E FA C E
Detours from the Contemporary 267
The true picture of the past flits by. . . . For every image of the past that is not
recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear
irretrievably.
In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a
conformism that is about to overpower it.
Walter Benjamin1
This essay was first presented at a conference, Tradition and Modernity in Third World Fine Art, organized by
the Havana Bienal at Havana, in 1989. Earlier published versions under the title ‘Contemporary Cultural Prac-
tice in India: Some Polemical Categories’, appeared in Social Scientist, Vol. 18, No. 3, March 1990, and in Third
Text, No. 11, Summer 1990.
268 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Gandhi. It has the power to transform routinely transmitted materials from the past
into volatile forms that merit the claim of contemporary, even radical, affect.
Cultural scholars of this century, foremost among them being Ananda
Coomaraswamy, excavate the past to provide the present (in their opinion an errant
and impoverished century) with perennial life-symbols. In conjunction with the ideal
tradition, the manifestos of swadeshi produce in the first decades of the twentieth cen-
tury, an aesthetic that is clearly didactic.
For Coomaraswamy tradition provides not only the canon of the master-
craftsman, it assumes via the very order of language a form of paternalism and the
authority of law:
But whereas the Occidental conscience operates only in the field of ethics, the
Oriental conscience, pramana, chih, etc., orders all forms of activity, mental,
aesthetic, and ethical: truth, beauty, and goodness. . . . Just as conscience is
externalized in rules of conduct, so aesthetic ‘conscience’ finds expression in
rules or canons of proportion (tala, talamana) proper to different types, and in
the physiognomy (laksanas) of iconography and cultivated taste, prescribed by
authority and tradition: the only ‘good form’ is sastra-mana.3
If we have so far considered only the case of what is commonly known as the
major arts, let us not forget that Sankaracarya is reported to have said, ‘I have
learnt concentration (samadhi) from the maker of arrows.’ Not only in fact
does the ordinary workman, weaver, or potter, work devotedly, but . . . he
always forms mental images, which he remembers from generation to genera-
tion. . . . Preeminently of this kind, for example, are on the one hand those un-
lettered and obscure women of the villages, whose drawings executed in rice-
powder and with the finger-brush in connection with domestic and popular
festa (vratas) represent an art of almost pure form and almost purely intellect-
ual significance.4
If it is a fact that some standard of invariable formalism has for ages been
following the course of the arts in India, making it possible for them to be
classified as specially Indian, then it must be confessed that the creative mind
which inevitably breaks out in individual variations has lain dead or dormant
for those torpid centuries. All traditional structures of art must have sufficient
degree of elasticity to allow it to respond to varied impulses of life. . . . There
are traditions which, in alliance with rigid prescriptions of rhetoric, establish
their slave dynasty, dethroning their master, the Life-urge, that revels in endless
freedom of expression. This is a tragedy whose outrage we realise in the latter-
day Sanskrit literature and in the conventional arts and crafts of India, where
mind is helplessly driven by a blind ghost of the past.5
hitherto buried. Received like a patrimony, tradition has a heroic and authoritarian
aspect. On the other hand, the affiliation to tradition understood as a nurturing body
can become overweening. It is more difficult to shed, leading to softer options in
aesthetics and art practice. These personifications are therefore tricky and it becomes
necessary to demystify the figures of father/law and mother/matrix through less tena-
cious ones that nevertheless sustain the engendering function, at once masculine and
feminine. We can, for example, take tradition as an androgynous figure to empower it
differently but also to subvert its conventional and normative hold. Part of the politics
involved in the handling of tradition is to subject it to phantasmal as well as func-
tional transactions.
Transacting Traditions
There are other broadly sociological ways of looking at the Indian tra-
dition as it has come to us since the nineteenth century. The social matrix yields at least
two distinct art histories, the aristocratic and the middle-class, each with its own way
of interpreting cultural nationalism. The princely attributes of ‘Raja’ Ravi Varma of
Travancore make up one part of the lineage. His art offers to restore, with the help of
western/bourgeois mediations, civilizational pride to its people. We must understand
how this representational masquerade in the quasi (neo) classical mode can set up
allegorical scenarios and how it provides a kind of valour to contemporaries, helping
them play out with unintended irony odd but emancipatory roles.
On the other hand, the ambience of the landed gentry of nineteenth-
century Bengal inclines them, as for example the Tagore family, towards a pastoral
nostalgia. This is part of a larger sociological context—a nineteenth-century alliance of
the progressive gentry with the folk in
matters of culture is precisely the princi-
ple on which romanticism in Europe and
realism in Russia develops. Against the
neoclassical kitsch of Ravi Varma, the
Tagore family bequeaths poetic referen-
ces from upanishadic to medieval mysti-
cism to the perennial resource of peasant
songs. Combining noble learning with
dilettante experimentalism within the
framework of the new national enlight-
enment (the Indian renaissance), they
bring into this frame of reference the art
of the folk. There is a strongly pedago-
gical aspect to this project, particularly as
it is carried out in Tagore’s university at 2 Nandalal Bose, Ear Cleaner, Haripura poster series, 1937–38
Detours from the Contemporary 271
Santiniketan from the 1920s. In this lineage there is, then, a definite democratic urge
which Nandalal Bose (Illus. 2) and his pupil Ramkinkar Baij, the intrepid subaltern
from Santiniketan, exemplifies (Illus. 3, 4).
Indeed it is this aspect of real (and positional) subalternity in Santiniketan
that combines in the first half of the twentieth century with the artisanal basis of
Gandhian ideology and the craftsman’s canonical aesthetic of Coomaraswamy, to give
us a threefold composition of nationalist culture in the area of art and craft. In the
actual practice of artists like K.G. Subramanyan, heir to this nationalist culture in the
postindependence era, the residual romanticism vanishes completely. His practice
accommodates, selfconsciously and with considerable wit, a series of modernist medi-
ations so as to arrive at a strategic notion of the contemporary.
The paradigm I propose for this invented Indian tradition is of course
extremely schematic. There are several cross-references. The appropriation of the folk
as an indigenist project could be a way of deferring the drive for a westernizing
modernism until it can be handled by a more independent, properly middle-class
272 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
modernism that tests the historical efficacy of culturally replete images, elaborates
them into new iconographic schema? And pushes them towards more reflexive struc-
tures as in the elliptical narratives of Kumar Shahani’s cinema (Khayal Gatha, 1989)?
Third-World Alternatives
The term contemporary gives a definitional ambiguity to the present.
We can ‘correct’ the situation by giving contemporaneity an ideological mantle of the
modern, but this does not solve the matter either.
Modernization is a social and economic process now applicable mostly to
underdeveloped/developing societies (of the third world). It is a term full of ideological
import, even overdetermined one might say by sociological theory and usage. Non-
western nations, while struggling with the processes of modernization, are excluded
from the claims of modernism. While modernity stands in a transactional relationship
with its two companion terms, modernization and modernism, it easily gives up the
ghost in postcolonial discourse as far as its ontological drive is concerned. One is left a
little uncertain with a bare term like contemporaneity.
Modernism is a cultural term strictly relating to the arts and situated at a
particular point of western history—the late nineteenth century and the first half of
the twentieth century. Imposed on the colonized world via selective modernization,
modernism transmits a specifically bourgeois ideology. With its more subtle hegemo-
nic operations, it offers a universality while obviously imposing a eurocentric (impe-
rialist) set of cultural criteria on the rest of the world. Yet, as modernism evolves in
conjunction with a national or, on the other hand, revolutionary culture, it becomes
reflexive. Through it one is able to mark historical disjunctures in western art, to
expose its ideologies and thus to encourage national vanguard initiatives.
Meanwhile, despite incomplete modernization a unitary logic of advance-
ment, as this was conceived of in nineteenth-century Europe, continues to be imposed
so that some one or the other among the peoples of the world is always seen to be out
of step. In view of the critique mounted by the third world on the euphemistic pro-
jection of bourgeois culture as the ‘universal modern’, there has been a tactical move
by western ideologists. The same linear model assumes, in the metropolitan concen-
tration of culture, other geometrical figures like the centre and the periphery which
camouflage the crude progressivism of the linear model. Backwardness is not spelt out
as such but questions of otherness (marginality, minorities, ethnicity, religion) spiral
up in its stead. Can our modernity survive this particular form of forced regress along
the identity question?
A good deal is being said about the abandonment of the centre–periphery
model as well. The new system for perceiving difference, the key word, is to project
cultural phenomena into an infinite series. A problematic universe is mapped on to a
differential system that is, as system, considered neutral. There is in consequence a
Detours from the Contemporary 277
reduction of the world into sameness. It looks like the cultures of the third world can
hardly gain from one or the other model.
If, however, the third world is polemically construed to chastise the first
and second worlds, it must by definition be volatile. Third-world politics wedges into
the global bind established between the first world and the second world. Thus
telescoped by history, the third world becomes a succession of actual alternatives and
even a dialectical option. It has at least hypothetical efficacy. Issues are confounded
only when the term is used not as a lever but substantively, when it attempts to con-
dense the past struggles and present crises of a medley of postcolonial societies.
Matters are far from simple in societies designated as postcolonial. Here,
if anywhere, capitalism and socialism contest one another; here is the world arena for
ideological battle. This generates deeply vexed identities in terms of class and language,
race and gender. Individual destinies are at stake as much as new collectivities. Indeed
the profoundly paradoxical nature of existence in the societies newly inducted into
world history offers fewer rather than greater possibilities of generalization. If we must
in any case undertake to bring the anarchy of differential practices (including custom,
knowledge, art) into some kind of a recognizable order, one frame for which is the
third world, it also means that the theorizing must be so much more complex.
National Allegories
While the political truth of colonial experience and of the anti-imperialist
struggle is self-evident, its logic excludes several other political truths. Even funda-
mental categories like production systems and class relations are bracketed. Nor do
third-world countries yield comparative cultural formations. Historically invented in
the process of decolonization, tradition is governed in each case by a national ideology
that emphasizes difference; national tradition becomes a sufficiently variegated sign to
merit close and special attention. Once independence has been gained nationalism
itself poses ontological questions: what is at stake in being Indian? And though the
question may easily devolve into rhetoric, there is a burden of it that rests on a parti-
cularly fraught class and its individuals. This is the urban middle-class intelligentsia,
which includes artists.
Even after a century of self-identification within the nationalist paradigm
this cultural elite rests most uneasily on its privileges. When nationalist truth and un-
realized socialism no longer suffice this class must cope with the further states of social
entropy. The responsibility of reckoning falls less on the aristocracy, less on the peasant
or proletarian classes, because none of these is premised so exclusively on questions of
self and identity. It falls on the middle-class intelligentsia. This is the sort of burden,
perhaps fictitious, that Rabindranath Tagore envisaged during the early decades of
the twentieth century for the activist-intellectual and artist in India. Recall the self-
ordained responsibility assumed by Gora and Benoy in his novel Gora, by Nikhil and
278 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Sandip in Ghare Baire—the responsibility to evolve his own subjectivity into an exem-
plary selfhood that indirectly but surely fulfils the demands of an exemplary nation-
hood. Recall also Sucharita in Gora, Bimala in Ghare Baire and later, in the 1930s, Ela
in Char Adhyaya, and their exemplary demonstration of doubt, precisely so that the
bind between self and nation is radically refashioned.
Third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with
a properly libidinal dynamic—necessarily project a political dimension in
the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is
always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture
and society.6
Beyond Tagore this equation becomes the formula for a collective identity
that may come to resemble, through the paradox of liberal consensus, a form of social-
ism. So Nehru hoped. The more developed left constituency can envisage totalities of
another more egalitarian kind, but it is precisely these that are under post-Marxian
scrutiny. Third-world narratives, biographical and literary, in their recounting become
national allegories. What is to be remembered in the Indian and larger third-world
context is that contradictions are rife and one has to put up all the fights at once.
Along with the fight against imperialism one has equally to fight the antidemocratic
forces of local dynasties and dictators. The fight is also against reactionary forces
especially aggressive in traditional societies; indeed against such antimodern forces that
use tradition, which served a useful function in the national struggle, to regress into
communal and religious fundamentalisms.
Against Conformism
At the beginning of this essay I quote Walter Benjamin as saying that in
every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism
that is about to overpower it. We have seen how definitions of tradition and modern-
ity are constantly repositioned in the discourses of the third world. The relationship
between the two has to be thought through at every point so as to avoid replicating
the exploitative relationship the west has established towards traditional societies. At
the same time the nationalist bind in which tradition and modernity have hitherto
coexisted has to be brought into a larger, more open discourse.
The point is to tackle the very problems that western cultural hegemony
suppresses or neglects, and this requires above all that the two concepts tradition and
modernity be disengaged from the abstracting ideology of capitalism. It requires resto-
ring to tradition a material–historical affiliation, and to the modern a self-reflexivity
necessary to bring about change. We have to bring to the term tradition the concrete-
ness of extant practice; to make a genuine extension of small particularities, resourced
from ancient and contemporary practices, into new configurations. At the same time
Detours from the Contemporary 279
we have to bring to the term modern a less monolithic, less formalistic, indeed less
institutional status so as to make it once again a vanguard notion leading to a variety
of experimental moves. Only with such initiatives can third-world cultures begin to
justify their worth as alternative cultures.
Nor is this an entirely hypothetical proposition. Already in the nationalist
phase the colonial intelligentsia contextualizes the terms tradition and modernity via
patriotic norms of belonging. For the early Coomaraswamy tradition covers anthro-
pological terrain in a richly material sense. It stands in opposition to the anthropology
adopted by western modernists when they make formal correlations with primitive
cultures. Even though nationalism as ideology introduces its own measure of abstrac-
tion into the concept of tradition it also, at the very moment of inventing it, poses the
problematic in urgent, contemporary terms. It thereby sees it as process, as tradition-
in-use. Consider again Tagore’s Santiniketan and the aesthetic project as realized by
the three luminaries at Kala Bhavana: Nandalal Bose, Benodebehari Mukherjee,
Ramkinkar Baij. If we supplement the Santiniketan artists with Jamini Roy on the one
hand and Amrita Sher-Gil on the other, we will see how the western discourse about
oriental (including primitive) cultures is confronted. Rather than distancing alternat-
ive civilizations into objects to be processed by western subjectivity, the nationalist
intelligentsia makes some genuinely anxious, and responsible appropriations within
their own societies. If, then, in the postcolonial ethos all third-world texts appear to be
national allegories, all national allegories attempt to restore conceptual wholeness to
lost communities through the process of decodifying precisely the canonical images of
an inherited tradition (Illus. 12, 13, 14, 15).
Appropriated tradition may indeed resemble the endemic form of eclecti-
cism that the contemporary western imagination encourages. But this is without the
280 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
extremity of otherness that produces forms alienated from function and meaning.
Furthermore this eclecticism can yield, as with the moderns, acts of transgression that
lead to cultural radicalism. Thus, positing a tradition-in-use in third-world societies
encourages an effective method of politicizing culture. It must in addition find a way
to resist the business of reification to which the artefacts of ‘other’ civilizations suc-
cumb. It is true of course that capitalism everywhere produces commodification for
which correctives are not easily at hand. It is also true that in societies like India moder-
nization after the capitalist mode has produced a commodification not only of tradi-
tional artefacts that serve the state and the market, but of the idea of tradition as such.
Tradition must therefore be continually redefined to defy conformism.
Present Choices
Like the traditional, the political mode of aesthetic anarchism followed
by the moderns may be ineffectual in the context of the culture industry operating
under multinational capitalism. The postmodern vanguard tries to propose other
means of politicizing cultural practice—by a more strategic form of ‘minority’ (ethni-
city/race/gender) transgression and resistance—so that the question arises whether in
the era of globalization postmodern strategies are useful for us as well.
Indian artists must derive the norms of their actual practice from specific
aesthetic and generic issues and indeed such material considerations as they find press-
ing in their geographical environment. Just as the first world continues to use the prin-
ciple of primacy quite literally to subsume the polemic into a larger appropriative
project—sometimes through theory, sometimes through consumer tactics—the num-
ber of Indian artists who mark their local affiliations as the ground of their speech,
Detours from the Contemporary 281
increases. If this is positioned against the recognized hegemony of the national and the
modern, the question arises: is this a postmodern proclivity?
Postmodernism, while it seems to accommodate otherness as never before
in the history of capitalist culture, does so through a process of such infinite differ-
entiation that all questions of identity are shredded along with the normative func-
tion of culture and even the necessity of choice. We need to negotiate the terms of
cultural devolution very carefully. Still needing to coalesce individual identity with
living collectivities at the social level, we have learnt to question the tendency towards
a unitary and machismo formalism within modernist art. On a similar basis, we must
question the careless and aggressive laissez-faire of postmodernism which throws entire
cultures to the gambler’s wheel, treating cultural artefacts like so many fetishist pawns
in the game of global exchange.
Although the Indian intelligentsia must engage in transnational discourse
on the question of third-world and alternative identities, it may help to resist letting
the postmodern categories of discourse coincide entirely with the political entities that
arise as a consequence of decolonization. Third-world peoples should not lend body to
the stripped phantoms of the deconstructionists’ art. By not allowing too neat a fit
between the dilemmas of decolonized cultures and postmodern theorizing one may
safeguard the material and political struggle, save it from appearing subordinate to
categories within the western academic discourse. It is however in our interest to recog-
nize one thing. The sea change created by the emergence of other cultures, our cul-
tures, in the role of historical protagonists has required western intellectuals to fashion
different perceptual and theoretical models. The postmodern phenomenon may be the
consequence, not a description, of a universe realigned by social praxis within dis-
rupted societies, necessitating in its turn a theory of displacement.
Even the discourse set up by the expatriate intelligentsia tends to become
too much the privileged voice of the diaspora (arguably so called). Its members, posi-
tioned in the western academic world, are inclined to establish canons of radical dis-
course for the rest of the world. It is true that there is a certain urgency in the task of the
third world inside the first. Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, current
exponents of the privilege of exile, make up a distinguished lineage. But there is also
the temptation to establish a hierarchical superiority for a culture-in-exile and to
designate it as more militant. The diaspora voice is a mode of speech suitable precisely
to address the white world. This is not the only call for militancy, though we should
hark it all the same. Meanwhile we have to beware a third-worldist mentality as well.
There is now a third-world rhetoric surpassing third-world solidarity and overdeter-
mining the representations of radical issues for us. This radicalism by proxy preempts
and forecloses praxis on site, where it may most matter.
We have to, in other words, look at the peculiarly structured interrefer-
entiality of Indian national culture as a continuous formation. To look at ourselves as
282 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
National/Modern: Preliminaries
This essay was first presented at a conference, The Centre–Periphery Model, organized by the Adelaide Festival
at Adelaide, in 1990. It was published under the title ‘The Centre–Periphery Model or, How Are We Placed?:
Contemporary Cultural Practice in India’, in Art Monthly Australia, No. 38, March 1991, and in Third Text,
Nos. 16/17, Autumn/Winter 1991. It appeared under the title ‘Place of the Modern in Indian Cultural Practice’,
in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXVI, No. 49, Dec. 1991, and in Creative Arts in Modern India: Essays
in Comparative Criticism, Vols. I and II, edited by R. Parimoo and I. Sharma, Books and Books, Delhi, 1995.
284 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
that while asking where we are placed in the cultural geography of the globe we
examine, simultaneously and more substantively, the place of the modern in Indian
cultural practice.
aesthetic in its international accreditation and global form, but also with regional
diversions in which so great a writer as Marquez is looped.
India. Moreover, we have a modernism without an avantgarde. Does this spell serious
retardation? Indian artists have been buffered by a national and progressive state, so
model and strategic action are perhaps less acutely positioned vis-a-vis each other;
there is less dramatic confrontation than has been the case in Latin America, and
indeed no declared avantgarde politics. We work with a benign cultural nationalism
and hope to tackle new encroachments, for example American neoimperialism, on the
same basis, whereas it was the need among other things for strategic interaction with
ongoing US imperialism that made Latin American artists so politically forthright.
As for what our regional identification might be on the world map, this
has gained hardly any cultural significance beyond the rhetoric of solidarity. We are
well aware of the claim of regionalism internally, as a way of constituting a multicul-
tural national state. The entire premise of the national state, with its centralized
administrative and cultural operations, involves such questions as the definition of
regional integrity based on vernacular cultures and the definition of organic intellect-
uals as against mere ethnic intransigence. And then, in the light of these issues, we
require to come to terms with what it means to define cultures ethnically, linguistically,
communally. Does it mean that all the potential consciousness of a community must
work itself out through multiplying nationalisms?
While a great part of social science scholarship, especially studies of Indian
nationalism, takes up these questions systematically, the cultural implications of the
nation-state ideology are not worked out at the same level of complexity. All the same,
and more significantly, they come up in current cultural studies debates and actual
practices. There is, for example, a good deal of polemic on the claimed superiority of
regional literatures; cinema, especially in Bengal and Kerala, continues an extended
discussion on the greater authenticity of vernacular cultures.
when in fact it should be historicized and placed in precise relationship with social and
economic conditions. But if we recognize that there is in any case a discursive extension
of such terms and therefore a fair degree of ideological manoeuvrability from one
society to another, then the ambiguous position of modernism in the Indian cultural
context makes for certain advantages.
I have already indicated how this allows something like the Indian
modern to evolve with its own set of canons. These serve to signal in the direction of
the western (towards the high or canonical) modern but encourage living traditions to
flourish as well. This historically displaced logic is, I should like to assert, as politically
relevant for us as some hypothetical absolute into which western modernism has
evolved. This displaced logic will often be anomalous and bold, providing revisions
and corrections to an overarching internationalism (Illus. 5).
This locational ideology in an archaic and mock-ironic form of ancestor
worship is institutionalized in Calcutta and Santiniketan and carried as current legacy
in Bengal by an artist like Ganesh Pyne (Illus. 6). It is given a southern contestatory
model at Cholamandal during K.C.S. Paniker’s pedagogical influence in the 1960s
and 70s. It takes on the aspect of everyday narration among artists from the School of
Baroda, like Laxma Goud (Illus. 7). It motivates individual artists in every region of
India to create necessary chinks in the armour of modernism. The lineage of artists
committed to their location shows up abundantly, as for example among the Kerala
artists, from Kanayi Kunhiraman’s monumental Yakshi (1971) to A. Ramachandran’s
mural Yayati (Illus. 8), to a fierce sense of identification with a mythologized land and
its people among the younger generation of Kerala radicals touched by (vexed by) the
narrational pedagogy in Baroda.
Indigenist genres make for located knowledge and this, in Gramscian
terms, is the source for the strategy of interference. Anthropologists and cultural theo-
rists will now privilege such interventions in order to argue in favour of partisanship
on the homeground of culture and politics.
I wish to reiterate this because the sovereign ‘subject’ (derived from the
enlightenment and transmuted into romantic reverie on the self) undergoes so much
existential pressure through the nineteenth century, and subjective intentionality is so
enlarged in the rebel figure of the modern age, that the founding equation between
subject and history may be jeopardized. The category of history tends to be reduced
to a condition of stasis in modernist discourse with the result that the very narrative
of the self may also be grounded. ‘Modernism is indeed fixated on the experience of
“the” subject (radical or otherwise), always postponing or ignoring questions of the
way that experience is implicated in, determined by, specific dynamics of social
change.’4 But not, as Paul Willemen goes on to say, any old social change. The urgency
of where this change takes the world is greatest in the erstwhile ‘native’ who is now
the displaced subject of history. Potentially at least, it is this embodied consciousness
294 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
9 Bimal (Kali Bandyopadhyay) the taxi driver with his wayward 10 Nita (Supriya Choudhury) comes across her brother Shankar (Anil
1920 Chevrolet, ‘Jagaddal’, now in a state of ruin (Ritwik Ghatak, Chatterjee) practising a raga on the riverbank (Ritwik Ghatak, Meghe
Ajantrik, 1958) Dhaka Tara, 1960)
performance, into the historical present. It must then reconsider the historical mode
in terms of ethical options elicited, hypothetically at least, from a polity made alert
through the colonial experience and its acute divisions. In the postcolonial transition
artists have to evolve structures for reflexivity that have at best the possibility of an
epic alignment of several historical trajectories, at the very least the layered semantics
of allegories. A material and generic change is required. Kumkum Sangari elaborates
on this transformative mode via Marquez:
Marquez’s marvellous realism not only emerges from the contingent, simulta-
neous, polyphonic contours of his material world, it is also a transformative
mode. . . . Though he digs beneath the rational encrustations of colonialism
. . . he avoids the familiar ‘Third World’ bind, the swing from disillusionment
with an inadequate rationalism to an easily available mysticism—in some
sense mutually constitutive categories brought into play by colonialism. Mar-
vellous realism answers an emergent society’s need for renewed self-description
and radical assessment . . . questions the Western capitalist myth of moderniza-
tion and progress, and asserts without nostalgia an indigenous pre-industrial
realm of possibility.5
It may, however, be true to say that it is only after the hierarchy of high
modernism comes into question that the possibilities already articulated in alternative
cultures come to be recognized. The monolith has to be dismantled. But even as these
indigenous forms gain visibility they may, in the process, be appropriated unless the
case for an alternative, interventionist history is pressed. And while this is partly strate-
gic action, its value lies in rescuing the very subject that was modernism’s prerogative
and that postmodernism buries declaring as it does ‘the death of the subject’.
In western discourse the aesthetic of the 1990s is seen to devolve into a
new decadence—less from an end-of-the-century despair than from an enormously
self-satisfied sense of omnipotence that is designated as global multiculturalism. World
cultures have been ethnicized once again and are now made to yield batteries of signs
which are then reconstituted into an international, or universal, culture. Peter Brook,
brilliant as he is, comes to grief in handling The Mahabharata, the more so in making
it into an epic film. This is because among other obvious misrepresentations he
believes performance ‘signs’ will suffice as ‘message’ while he changes entirely the
epic structure into a dramatic narration of high destinies. Brook’s belief that culture
296 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
[T]he innovations of what is called Modernism have become the new but fixed
forms of our present moment. If we have to break out of the non-historical
fixity of post-modernism, then we must search out and counterpose an alter-
native tradition taken from the neglected works left in the wide margin of the
century, a tradition that may address itself not to this by now exploitable
because inhuman rewriting of the past but, for all our sakes, to a modern future
in which community may be imagined again.
Raymond Williams1
Material Conditions
Taking the cue from Raymond Williams’s ‘When Was Modernism?’, there
is need to reiterate that we in the third world continue to commit ourselves to the
immanent aspect of our complex cultures. We persist in trusting the material status of
meaning manifest, in Williams’s words, as a ‘structure of feeling’.2 We commit our-
selves to relating forms of art with social formations, for this kind of a grounded relay
of cultural history will help the process of survival within the new imperialism that the
late capitalist/postmodern world sets up.
Whatever the chances of that survival, it may be worth mentioning that
modernism as it develops in postcolonial cultures has the oddest retroactive trajec-
tories, and that these make up a parallel aesthetics. It is crucial that we do not see the
modern as a form of determinism to be followed, in the manner of the stations of the
cross, to a logical end. We should see our trajectories crisscrossing the western main-
stream and, in their very disalignment from it, making up the ground that restructures
the international. Similarly, before the west periodizes the postmodern entirely in its
own terms and in that process also characterizes it, we have to introduce from the
vantagepoint of the periphery the transgressions of uncategorized practice. We should
This essay was first presented as the Ashby Lecture, ‘When Was Modernism in Indian/Third World Art?’, at
Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, in 1992; and at a conference, Theories of the Visual Arts, organized by
Institute of Higher Studies in Art, Caracas, in 1992. Earlier published versions appeared in South Atlantic
Quarterly, Vol. 92, No. 3, Summer 1993; and in Journal of Arts & Ideas, Nos. 27–28, May 1995.
298 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
turn prefers epiphany to materiality and process and thus leaves out historical repre-
sentation, considered to be too grossly accountable within something so local and
involute as national cultural identity.3
Given this obstacle race of history it is possible to argue that Indian artists
have only now become fully modern—in what is characterized as the postmodern age.
I mean this in the sense of being able to confront the new without flying to the defence
of tradition; of being able to cope with autonomy in the form of cultural atomization
by invoking and inverting notions of romantic affiliation. That is to say, the mytho-
logy of an indigenous ‘community’ and the lost continent of an ‘exile’—both alibis
borrowed from the grander tradition of the romantic—are allowed to shade off into
the current form of identity polemics. This already mature modernism means accept-
ing the ‘dehumanization’ and decentering of the image. It means being self-conscious
through an art-historical reflexivity; that is, through overcoming the anxiety of
influence by overcoming the problem of originality itself. It is not surprising that in a
country like India with its cultural simultaneities, its contradictory modes of produc-
tion, modernism should have been realized through the promptings of postmodern-
ism. For, in economic terms, modernization declares its full import when it comes to be
propelled by global capitalism.
This is not unrelated to the fact that India is now, after five decades of
protective nationalism, opting for integration in the world economy via what is called
liberalization—the stage and style of capitalism which the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank dictate to the developing world. It is an internationalism
under duress in that its first condition is the delinking of growth from any form of
nationalism. With this precipitate internationalism the Indian artist is now, for the
first time, shocked out of the nationalist narrative of identity that makes certain overt
demands for authenticity in the existential and indigenous sense. The very achieve-
ments of the modern Indian artist can begin to appear too conscientious: first, because
they are secured by forms of realism instituted like a reverse mirror image within the
modern; second, because this euphemistic modernism keeps in tow a notional ideal of
a people’s culture. Folk/tribal/popular art becomes a heritage that can stand in for,
even usurp, the vanguard forms of the modern.
As the national/modern moves in tandem into the late capitalist age this
double bind of authenticity is virtually abandoned. The grand narrative of civiliza-
tional transformation which haunts the progressive sections of the Indian modern
now appears to the younger generation of Indian artists as simply anomalous. Not so
surprisingly they echo Lyotard4 who, in a rhetorical manner, designates realist criteria
as pernicious. Even if Lyotard’s moves are equally pernicious to our cultural consider-
ations, it is possibly true that these older terminologies of representation and identity
connected with the modernizing function have become seriously problematized.
Moreover, by maintaining, even in rhetoric, the notion of a people’s ‘authentic’
300 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
and practice of Indian leftwing movements in the arts through their very forms
(especially in theatre) and through their participation as an alert audience, the Indian
left produces its own conservatism, even an incipient Stalinism. Something like a
slogan of national in form, socialist in content is built into the programme. Thus while
it is modern and in the Indian context also avantgarde, the movement represents itself
as realist and progressive and tilts the definitional balance of Indian modernism. This
obviously prevents it from trying out more daring formal innovations.
Caught in the cold-war division between freedom and commitment dur-
ing the first decade of independence, the progressive movement tends, as it proceeds, to
ground aesthetic discourse. For, if in the heyday of socialism we do not designate art
practice in avantgarde terms, we cannot in postmodern times so readily invent a van-
guard discourse that has an appropriate historical import. We should have to use the
term radical rather than avantgarde, but do we thereby scuttle the diachronic model
with free signifiers; do we beg the question of modernism itself?
Bombay Progressives were the most ‘correctly’ modernist: they worked with a
mandatory set of transfer motifs of the dispossessed but they offered a formalist mani-
festo that was to help the first generation of artists in independent India to position
themselves internationally.
The two enactments of modernism are seen developing together in India.
In the romantic antecedents of that term the heralds and witnesses to social change
ought to be carrying the flag of modernization (and thus also of modernism), which
includes expressionist realisms of different shades. Thus in India M.F. Husain, K.C.S.
Paniker, the Mexico-trained Satish Gujral (Illus. 4) and Ram Kumar, briefly inspired
by the French left, held that position until the early 1960s. Just as artists with a
commitment to social transformation set the terms of revolt each in his/her context of
community or nation, the outriders created the necessary disjuncture: the artists who
established themselves in India became cultural emblems within a progressive national
state, and those who left for Paris and London became equally emblematic outsiders
of modern fiction. They embodied the modernist impulse of choosing metropolitan
‘exile’—the first criterion of modernity, according to Raymond Williams.10
and Ambadas responded to the informal aesthetic (of Antoni Tapies, Lucio Fontana,
Alberto Burri, for example) and this showed up in the Group 1890 exhibition of
1963. The exhibition manifesto was written by Swaminathan and the catalogue was
introduced by the then Mexican ambassador to India, Octavio Paz. The attraction of
the eleven-member Group 1890 to material/ritual/occult signs reissued the modernist
enterprise in the coming years. It came to be situated with peculiar aptness in a visual
culture of iconic forms still extant in India. This indigenism produced a playful
modernist vocabulary replete with metaphorical allusions. Nagji Patel is an example
(Illus. 12). But the surrounding rhetoric of Indianness also grew apace in the 1970s
and 80s. It acquired official support both in the National Gallery of Modern Art and
the Lalit Kala Akademi with artists like G.R. Santosh gaining national status. This
institutional aesthetic tended to shortcircuit some part of this enterprise, leaving a
pastiche in the form of an overtly symbolic art proffered as neotantrism.
One is tempted to plot a tendentious narrative of oriental transmutation
during the decades 1960–80: to show how the Parisian aesthetic was surmounted by
the hegemonic American notions of freedom in the matter of world culture, how this
was questioned by the liberationist rhetoric of the Latin world, and how all this con-
tributed to form a distinct (rather than derivative) entity called modern Indian art.
And how it acquired a national seal. For at the level of painterly practice many
Above left: 10 Himmat Shah, Untitled, 1965. Above right: 11 Jyoti Bhatt, Manhole, 1962. Below: 12 Nagji Patel, Animal, 1974
W h e n Wa s M o d e r n i s m i n I n d i a n A r t ? 309
tendencies were recycled within the Indian sensibility. Exuberant forms of abstraction
blazoned forth in Raza (Illus. 19), Ram Kumar (Illus. 16), Padamsee (Illus. 14), V.S.
Gaitonde (Illus. 15). Abstract artists of the erstwhile Group 1890 and the so-called
neotantrics held sway, especially the freer among them like Paniker (Illus. 21) and
Biren De (Illus. 20), who contributed a subliminal, even ironic symbolism. At the same
time, the work of artists with an informal sensibility, like Mohan Samant and Bal
Chhabda, surfaced. Finally, artists with an indelible ecriture shone out: I am referring
to Somnath Hore’s inscription in paper pulp of the social wound (Illus. 17) and
Nasreen Mohamedi’s capture of private grace in her ink and pencil grids (Illus. 18).
These complex developments are only signposted here to fill out the con-
tours of the larger narrative of the modern. By 1978, when the relatively old-style
modernist Harold Rosenberg was invited by India to sit on the jury of the Fourth
Triennale India, the more strictly modernist style in Indian art, especially abstraction,
was on the wane. Rosenberg saw what he was to describe in his generously mocking
manner as a ‘much of a muchness’ of representation by younger artists. He was refer-
ring to artists positioned against modernist formalism: late expressionists with a social
message and artists trying to tackle the problem of reification in art language and the
objects/icons of late modernism who had moved into popular modes and narratives,
turning objects into fiction, icons into discourse.
310 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Above: 14 Akbar Padamsee, Sun-Moon Metascape, 1975. Below left: 15 Ram Kumar, Flight, 1976. Below right: 16 V.S. Gaitonde, Untitled, 1974
W h e n Wa s M o d e r n i s m i n I n d i a n A r t ? 311
Above left: 17 Somnath Hore, from the Wounds series, 1977. Above right: 18 Nasreen Mohamedi, Untitled, ca. 1980.Below: 19 S.H. Raza, Rajasthan, 1983
312 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Above: 20 Biren De, June 1967, 1967. Below: 21 K.C.S. Paniker, from the Words and Symbols series, 1965–66
W h e n Wa s M o d e r n i s m i n I n d i a n A r t ? 313
Narrative Extensions
Noting that an interest in allegory had developed across the board but
especially in the third world—from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Salman Rushdie—
Fredric Jameson provides an ideological twist to the impulse:
During the 1970s not only third-world writers but also filmmakers and
artists moved into magical realism, courting narrative abundance for deterministically
motivating desire. In India this form of quasi-historical representational practice led
equally deterministically to a variety of social realisms featuring artists as varied as
Krishen Khanna, A. Ramachandran, Gieve Patel and Bikash Bhattacharjee. By the end
of the 1970s an affiliation was formed with what was at the time the School of
London after R.B. Kitaj—anathema indeed to Paris and New York but seen by several
Indian artists of this generation as an antidote to the formalist impasse of late modern-
ist art. This move also tried to take into account the lost phases of twentieth-century
art: Mexican muralism, German new objectivity, American regionalism. That is to say,
all those artists left in the wide margins of the twentieth century that a too-narrow
definition of modernism ignores. This was the virtual manifesto of the 1981 exhibi-
tion Place for People, featuring Bhupen Khakhar (Illus. 23), Gulammohammed
Sheikh (Illus. 24), Jogen Chowdhury (Illus. 26), Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malani and
Sudhir Patwardhan (Illus. 22).
The narrative move activated the strong traditions in Indian art itself,
including its revived version in the nationalist period. At this juncture K.G. Subraman-
yan, the wise and witty father-figure linking Santiniketan with Baroda, took up genre
painting (on glass) as a form of parody of the high modern. Parodying as well the
ideologies of the popular, he slipped over the cusp—beyond modernism—and made a
decisive new space for Indian art. This was extended by subversive tugs in social and
sexual directions in the hands of an artist like Bhupen Khakhar. A regionalism deve-
loped in Baroda and it combined with the urban realism of Bombay. A representa-
tional schema for cross-referencing the social ground was realized. A reconfiguration
also took place of the realist, the naive and the putatively postmodernist forms of
figuration. Indian art, even as it ideologized itself along older progressivist terms, came
in line with a selfconsciously eclectic and annotated pictorial vocabulary.
If we argue that Indian efforts at finding an identity were reinforced by a
314 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
kind of ethnographic overspill into fabulous narratives and new ideologies of narra-
tion, it can also help position the interest in pictorial narration in Indian contempo-
rary art during the 1970s and 80s in a more provocative stance. To the traditions of
K.G. Subramanyan and Bhupen Khakhar add Gulammohammed Sheikh, and we
can see how these artists moved via pop art into a representational excess of signs to
renegotiate several traditions at once. The intertextuality of their images, the art-
historical references, the popular idiom serve as a more confident avowal of a regional
and properly differentiated national aesthetic. Art language now affirms its multi-
valence, opening up the ideology of modernism to the possibility of alternative
realities. By its transgressions what is retroactively called the postmodern impulse
opens up the structure of the artwork, too-neatly placed within the high culture of
modern India. The new narrators rattle the bars of national tradition and let out the
parodic force suppressed within it.
During the 1980s a number of Indian artists assume the authorial confi-
dence to handle multifarious references, to deliberately disrupt the convergent philo-
sophy and language of Indian modernism. Prominent among them are women artists
of a figurative turn. Arpita Singh (Illus. 25), Nalini Malani, Madhvi Parekh (Illus. 27)
and Nilima Sheikh are active in the 1980s. Anupam Sud, Arpana Caur and Rekha
Rodwittiya (Illus. 28) reinforce the turn. These artists introject a subjectivity that is
existentially pitched but does not devolve into the currently celebrated schizophrenic
freedoms. Gender interventions come to mean that the narrated self is inscribed into
the social body through allegorical means with a secret intent that exceeds its textual
character. For there is always in our unresolved modernity and in our postmodern
retroaction the haunting need to release a repressed consciousness, and in the case of
the more politically inclined artists, to introduce a mode of intervention.
well. This is the position of the third cinema protagonists, the crisis in modernism itself
being attributed to revolt by cultures outside the west. We also know for a fact that
black ideologues and feminists have found the possibility of conceptualizing a far
greater degree of freedom through an understanding of postmodernism, through an
understanding of the operations of power in relation to which their own art activity is
inevitably positioned. It is precisely the task of the politically inclined artist to make
this conjunctural moment more profoundly ironic; to once again question the existen-
tial status, the indexical ramifications of signs in the politics of our times. This has to
do, as Hal Foster points out,
At this point it becomes more than a polemical strategy to say that with
the advent of the postmodern there is a release of new productivity in India and that it
provides a relief from Indian modernism developing according to its so-called inner
logic. It is worth noting, therefore, that this entire discourse might mean something
quite precise within a continuum of Indian art: strongly imagist and almost always
covertly symbolic, Indian art may have already come into crisis through the too-easily
assimilated modernist principle of metaphoricity. Since the pop divide took in surreal-
ism and dada—specifically their critique of representation and reification—the image
has been persistently questioned (by the forms of theatricality in minimal art for exam-
ple, and by the ‘idea’ in conceptual art) in the west. Not so in India. It is worth asking
if our own fixation with the past as image, with the heavy claims for cultural conden-
sation, does not require a sorting out of the over-signified image.
The postmodern aesthetic now plays with the image of images, the simu-
lacrum—it plays through parody and pastiche. With the market entering Indian art
practice on an institutional plane the factor of commodification is firmly on hand. In
fact Indian artists may be nearer than they know or acknowledge to postmodernist
kitsch through ‘instrumental pastiche’ and exploitation of ‘cultural codes’. In India,
now, one may find a mock-surreal confrontation between the protagonists of the real
as against those of the simulacra over the live body of the modern—a confrontation to
claim the very sublime that Lyotard attributes to the postmodern avantgarde.14 All
avantgardes have to take account of the market now; all art practice has to reckon
with forces that sully the sublime. Which is why, in place of Lyotard’s illusory account
of transcendence, the term ‘interference’ may be more correct.
For myself I hope to find affinities for Indian art beyond the simulacra
and towards a historically positioned aesthetic. There is a strong glimpse of this possi-
bility: if postmodern art, preferring the spatial over the temporal dimension, produces
320 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
a flattened version of time and narrative, a cut-out image of the contemporary with-
out its historical referent, there is already in Indian art an appreciation of these prob-
lems. There is an attempt at a radically different ordering of the part to the whole so
that the different ordering of the relationship between metaphor and metonymy is
worked out as a form of ‘cognitive mapping’.15 A utopian vision is sought to be work-
ed out by structures other than the overworked ground of mytho–poetic symbolisms
favoured in indigenist versions of modern art. The immense imaginary, always seduct-
ive to the Indian psyche, is now consciously transfigured by a handful of Indian artists
into open structures, paradoxical signs.
The cue for a complex handling of the postmodern may come, more than
anywhere else, from cinema. The cinema of Kumar Shahani, for example, uses the fic-
tive device of epic narration not only to keep a hold on history, on the dimension of
time and memory which the postmodern age is determined to displace; it also poses
the question of aesthetics and reification within the narrative itself. The conditions of
hypostasis are staged precisely to resist the unadmitted stasis of the commodified
image. Thus the image that Shahani so sumptuously nurtures as a cinematic privilege,
or rather as cinema’s privileging of the imagist realm that constitutes the unconscious
itself, this image is made profoundly ironic in its very beauty in films such as Tarang
(1984) and Kasba (1990).
Ground Realities
At this juncture I would like to reverse the argument. Having gone
through the logic of art history in an optimistic mode—anticipating further complex-
ities within what I called the modern–postmodern conjuncture—it is worth asking
if all questions of aesthetics might not be mocked out of discussion at the level of
ground realities and in the current play on lifestyles as differential culture. The post-
modern has as many cosmopolitan conceits as the modern ever had and requires over
and above that a command of technology and media and of international market
transactions far exceeding the modern. We do not, in the third world, have command
of the mechanisms that may be used to undo the terms of this reified culture which
offers so many seductions. We do not even have the backing of the historical avant-
garde that Europe conceived as its dialectical method for battling reification and other
vagaries of capitalist culture.
The political discourse of the postmodern promises to undo the totaliz-
ing vision of the historical universe and with that the institutionalizing of the modern.
But it subsumes nevertheless the politics of actual difference based on class, race,
gender into a metadiscourse of the one world order rivalling, despite its protestations
to the contrary, any global hegemony sought or established by the modern. This post-
modernism supersedes the kinds of cultural praxis historically possible in different
parts of the world to such an extent that one might say that our cultures in the third
W h e n Wa s M o d e r n i s m i n I n d i a n A r t ? 321
world do not at the moment stand a chance. Thus the cultural manifestations of the
postmodern may be something of a false gloss on the hard facts of the political eco-
nomy to which these are related.
All this is further contextualized by the fact that India has now been
pulled into the logic of multinational capitalism, a fact only lately declared and now
openly celebrated. The Indian government now puts out posters showing a great
elephant breaking free of his chains. It is not clear whether the elephant is the people,
the nation, the state, or the big bourgeoisie, but perhaps that is the whole point. There
is this deliberately conflated representation of an Indian identity hitherto signified
entirely, even defensively, in nationalist terms, terms that are now seen as fetters.
The Government of India has accepted ‘solutions’ for its economic crises
in full accord with the IMF/World Bank prescriptions for ‘stabilizing’ the less deve-
loped countries, when in fact the experience of a majority of the countries that have
accepted ‘structural adjustment’ packages has been disastrous.
What metropolitan capital demands via the IMF and the World Bank . . . [is]
an ‘open-door policy’, namely that it be treated on a par with domestic capital
itself, which inevitably entails encroaching upon the latter’s extant economic
territory. The transition demanded and enforced is not one from Nehruvian
state intervention to an alternative regime of state intervention in favour of
domestic monopoly capital, as in the case of the metropolitan economies, but
to a regime of state intervention in favour of monopoly capital in general, both
domestic as well as foreign, in which the foreign element inevitably constitutes
the dominant component.
We thus have a switch: of the state acting as a bulwark against
metropolitan capital . . . getting transformed into a defender of its interests
against the domestic working masses.16
What we are doing under the tutelage of the IMF and the World Bank
involves not only anti-poor, proconsumption policies but also the virtual surrender of
national sovereignty—operable only on the basis of a welfare state. It predicates
surrender on all fronts including the basic right inscribed in every anti-imperialist and
nationalist agenda: the right to make our own economic laws. The specific pressure by
the USA (via GATT and Intellectual Property Rights legislation) commoditizes all
knowledge. Discussion of the cultural logic of late capitalism thus has to be context-
ualized so that the new imperialisms are kept fully in sight. For whether or not nation-
alism as such can any longer be upheld, the new globalism has to be seen for what it
does. It seeks the disintegration not only of socialism but also of postcolonial national
formations.
Ironically, even contemporary radicals will say that what is happening to
the Indian nation is what ought to happen to national formations in good time: they
322 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
ence, even in a democratic country like India, can quickly bring us to the brink of
fascism—precisely perhaps if we capitulate on the national. Whatever else it may have
failed to achieve, the national is still constitutionally (and experientially) predicated
on modern, secular values and produces, therefore, a democratic polity.
Metaphoric Recall
Not so long ago socialism, its history interwoven with that of bourgeois
culture and therefore with modernity, transmitted strength and hope from its different
registers of radical opposition. Without the socialist narrative and without national
allegories, what is it that will sustain a symbolic order of collectivities in our imagina-
tion? And how shall we oppose the collectivities forged in the name of the holy by the
religious bigots of the day? Nationalism along with socialism may for the moment be
a lost cause, but as for the more dangerous forms of totalization—racism, religious
fundamentalism—these grow apace and will not be contained by postmodernism’s
preferred metaphors of schizophrenia, the unassimilable feature of nihilist freedom.
The terror of religious revivalism is very real. However, when the east is demonized it
should be placed face-to-face with the rise of reactionary conservatism, indeed of neo-
fascism in the west and the terror that it spells. With the politics of emergent ethnici-
ties, with the noncontextual appropriation of traditions and the obscurantism of
religious militancy, we are increasingly held to ransom by a fundamentalist or racial
consciousness.
In an age of political retrenchment it may be useful to place nostalgia for
socialism to the fore and designate it as properly symbolic. There is good reason to
recall that the modernist project was engaged in an affirmative act of desacralization;
it was engaged in a decoding and a secularization of works of the past and the present
(Illus. 31, 32). This is of the greatest importance in evaluating today the significance of
that modernism.17
In India for the moment it looks as though there is a modernism that
almost never was. The more political among Indian artists may be right after all in
believing that the as yet unresolved national questions may account for an incomplete
modernism that still possesses the radical power it has lost elsewhere. Positioned as an
intrepid form of the human, signified in an order of verticality, thus John Berger intro-
duced Picasso into the arena of the modern: as a vertical man.18 Despite this male ima-
gining of the modern it may be useful to place, like an archimedean point, a stake on
an anthropomorphic truth of the modern revolution. For the Indian artist this stake is
beyond irony, and beyond also the proclaimed death of the subject. Mapping the
chronological scale of realism/modernism/postmodernism on to the lived history of
our own deeply ambivalent passage through this century, it may be useful to situate
modernity itself like an elegiac metaphor in the ‘new world order’.
324 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
New Internationalism
Vexations
The first world has entirely appropriated the term international for its
own perceptions and exploits. The experience of internationalism has to be claimed by
the immigrant inch by inch. Here is both a strength and a problem: the need to nego-
tiate with powerful cultural elites within the western world and the inevitability of
measuring success in terms of the positions gained in the control of culture and media
that attend on it. If the aim is to turn the centre–periphery model inside out then the
gained positions may not change the model. We should continue to question the
radical import of this. Australia has achieved something of this status: from being the
provincial periphery of the Euro-American aesthetic it has moved, through strategic
alignments along the periphery, into the centre. But as this is the postmodern world’s
ideologically evacuated centre, the Australians must reinforce themselves through the
physical presence of a periphery. In keeping with their own interests they are calling
upon Asia-Pacific regional solidarity—with more imagination and goodwill than the
Euro-American aesthetic ever allowed, it should be added.
The immigrant’s identity is formed within the western metropolis; the
emigre forms the core of the modern—the modern being a consciousness of exile, as
Raymond Williams argues, speaking about the politics of modernism.1 Edward Said
also increasingly privileges the exile’s perspective.2 One might even say that the west-
ern, the modern and the international form a relay that is ontologically, if not mate-
rially, compounded within exile consciousness. But precisely because of this slippage
between immigrant (emigre), exile (diaspora) and voluntary migration, because of the
deployment of this ambiguity for a ‘free’ discourse on identities, it may be useful to
sort out a definitional schema for differences.
Third-world polemicists located in the first world take the national not
only as a lost cause but also as a negative hypothesis. World affairs are conducted
This essay was first presented at a conference, New Internationalism, organized by the Institute of New
International Visual Arts (inIVA) and the Tate Gallery in London, in 1994. The first published version
appeared under the title ‘A New Inter Nationalism: The Missing Hyphen’, in Global Visions: Towards a New
Internationalism in the Visual Arts, edited by Jean Fisher, inIVA/Kala Press, London, 1994.
326 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
to locate the ‘structure of feeling’ model of Raymond Williams within the very display
of comparative cultural phenomena, to seek in the slow temporal moulding of forms
an annotated morphology to reveal thereby the hidden moment of reflexivity.
As international exhibitions become overworked ground for identity
made easy, there is reason to believe that variations of primitivism may be the defi-
nitional core of a new internationalism. From the point of view of participating third-
world artists this is the persona they may adopt to enter the international arena.
Primitivism is a kind of masquerade and within such terms a theatric
mode is entirely valid. Ritual is one such theatric mode: it allows and encodes the
rite of passage or a transgressional entry. As entry into the citadels of white cul-
tures is so difficult such simulations will thrive in the forthcoming art of the third
world—sometimes in a complex allegorical unfolding of identities, sometimes as
tactics. Simulation is very likely to become a simulacrum, a copy of that which is
nonexistent—what orientalism, for example, or primitivism are about: copies or
models of that which does not exist. And it is worth cautioning ourselves lest the joke
turn on us.
Southern Avantgardes
I will speak about three international exhibitions outside the Euro-
American orbit: the third Havana Bienal (1989), the first Asia-Pacific Triennial of
Contemporary Art in Brisbane (1993) and the first Johannesburg Biennale (1995).5
I went to the Havana Bienal in 1989. The country, though besieged, still
saw itself as a true communist outpost with a cultural vanguard that could represent
not only the radical elements in Latin America but also those of the third world.
Indeed Cuban curators toured many third-world countries on low budgets to compile
lively national shows. These were exhibited thematically within non-national group-
ings. There were in addition ancillary shows of great vivacity, highlighting aspects
of contemporary art, craft and popular kitsch production in hybrid postcolon-
ial (arguably also postmodern) cultures. The dynamic director of the Havana Bienal
Llilian Llanes, whose own preference is American minimalism, seems to have been
prompted to see the presence of a simulated icon, fetish and ritual altar as a legitimate
extension of phenomenological encounters that a constructed exhibition space fore-
grounds. The Havana Bienal offered theatric presentations of body, object and soul
that postmodernist art practice, especially Joseph Beuys’s avantgarde ironies, promi-
ses. It had, in addition, a thick layering of collective cultural meanings that are accre-
tions of a postcolonial politics (Illus. 2).
To this curious subversion of American minimalism Havana added a sense
of primitive/primitivist materiality that was in a sense ingenious. The aim may have
been to deconstruct the object within modern art practice into its semiotic aspects and
to call into question identity politics, especially Afro-Caribbean roots, through the
New Internationalism 329
4 Willi Bester, Homage to Bixo, 1995 5 Doris Bloom and William Kentridge, ‘Heart’, 1995
New Internationalism 331
ive art-historical readings that are sufficiently political to merit the title of a new
internationalism.
the newly liberated economy comes to be enshrined as the very essence of the
nation. This is the Nehruvian era of socialism, secularism and non-alignment,
when ‘the task of nation building’ is quite literally taken to be the objective of
state policy. During the eighties and more so the nineties, with the erosion and
finally the sweeping away of all three pillars of the Nehruvian utopia, we are
at a juncture when the economy is being evacuated from the collective concep-
tion of the Indian nation.16
ethnic and caste subversions. There is a typical leftwing radicalism along with a strong
communist movement from the 1940s. From the 1960s, Maoist or Naxalite articu-
lations in literature, theatre and film are produced in several parts of the country,
especially in Bengal and Kerala. Taken together these form an alternative culture that
drives a wedge into the otherwise sanguine existentialism of modern Indian art. There
is, in other words, more radical art practice than we may acknowledge in the normal
course of recounting our national modern (Illus. 6, 7). And only after we have taken
these into account shall we know the nature of our own modernity. How far is it
classical and conservative? How far is it dissident, radical, perhaps nihilist? The sort of
internationalism we envisage will be predicated on these historically posed and
continually questioned hypotheses.
Meanwhile we need to shore up all the arguments whereby the national
334 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
can be made rational and humane. This involves a recognition of the many-nations-
in-one argument. This also requires a full articulation of the ‘nation and its fragments’
with urgent attention paid to the ‘truth of the victim’. We should, I believe, be
committed to a world that has understood the dangers of a grossly progressive ideo-
logy. However, this should be a world which stands corrected in a way to be able to
resist the religious revivalism, ethnic bigotry and market pluralism activated by the
conjuncture of backward capitalism and neoimperialism.
Even as the international net of debt and bondage and the unequal exchange of
commodities grow ever tighter, the intellectual resources whereby such a world
might even be comprehended, are inhibited and paralysed by the fear of
ethnocentricity. While the real world in which people live and work slips irre-
sistibly into the homogenizing maw of international capitalism—one world!—
the ability of contemporary intellectuals to even conceptualize this world
except in terms of an infinite and incommensurable plurality is fast disappear-
ing down the vortex.18
Rushdie were far more in error in giving credence to the much-mediated and thereby
equally reified categories of belief, reverence, faith. How did the sacred, indeed reli-
gious sentiment, suddenly surface in cosmopolitan diaspora consciousness, and even
more militantly than in ‘underdeveloped’ national cultures?
Alok Rai, one of the few who supported Rushdie from India, argued:
Some protest there was, against this surrender to religious bigots. . . . But this
was drowned, on the one hand, by the clamour of the faithful, and on the other,
by sneers at ‘armchair liberals’. These much-reviled creatures had, it was
alleged, once again displayed their ‘western’ affiliation, their insufficient root-
edness in indigenous mental realities, their inadequate awareness of the depth
of the people’s religious emotions. . . . In a frenzy of narcissistic guilt, the elite
indigenists simply volunteered the pass to those who claimed to speak on behalf
of ‘tradition’ and a mythical ‘people’ to the Shankaracharyas and the Imams.19
Living in India, I oppose such regression. Like Rai I do not believe in the
concept of blasphemy and cannot commit myself to such anachronisms in contem-
porary cultural discourse. Faith in the emancipatory spirit of the imagination and
acute reflection on human contradiction suit the intellectual temperament, religious
sympathy does not. I learnt this during recent manifestations of Hindu funda-
mentalism (Hindutva) when artists and intellectuals on a common cultural platform
tested the courage of the secular position in India—in the face of some ugly mani-
festations of faith.20
As a political and cultural proposition within Indian nationalism, secular-
ism is in many ways unique—including the fact that it is enshrined in the constitution
of the Indian state in a way that it is not in other countries of the subcontinent. Its tri-
vialization, its unrealized potential and its further erosion are a matter of trauma and
grief, and of determined action. An entire polity depends upon it for its very life. Nor
is this secular a political abstraction as many people have too readily argued; it is
inscribed not only in the constitution but within the experience of tradition and in the
ethics of modernity in India. And therefore it is to be defended as a major criterion for
national survival and international cultural discourse.
Reflexive Practice
New internationalism should be a project that both creates and disman-
tles cultural hegemonies; that offers in fact the possibility of reading off quite naked
allegories of the national as some Indian political philosophers are passionately
engaged in doing.21 We should not be content with reviving plural ethnohistories in an
aggregative form or with reterritorializing arenas for cultural practice across the globe
on cue from the balance of power enshrined in the new world order.
There are strong contrary motivations at work everywhere across the
336 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Above: 9 Vivan Sundaram, House/Boat (installation view), 1994. Below: 10 Pushpamala N., Labyrinth, 1994
338 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Globalization:
Navigating the Void
Global Capitalism
Silvering and fragile, Noam Chomsky stands in the footlights, speaking
like an angel in profound rage. His unremitting data on capitalism and his indefatiga-
ble act of stripping the liberal myth down to its brutal form is matched by his detached
way of calling the bluff of futurist propaganda spinning from the profits of the TNCs
that glorify globalization. There is among intellectuals and activists an impassioned
backing of Chomsky’s analyses. But even as he reveals the Corporate Gulag that des-
troys through redoubled deceit and in the name of freedom sectors of life inimical to
the single aim of profit, his loneliness on the world stage deepens.1
Current capitalism (that no longer merits the hope that it is the late, or
last, stage of capitalism) can be reduced, despite the rhetoric of liberalization, to hard
statistics about slashed wages, massive unemployment and increasing destitution in
the heart of the metropolitan north. As for the south, even facts shrivel before the
bitter farce played out against its interests. As large parts of its population drop from
the purview of the globalists, the ‘one world’ and its media-fed population celebrate,
in however schizophrenic a manner, a consumerist utopia.
The terminology of globalism refers unblushingly to an ideology of the
market dictated by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, G-7 and GATT; to
a global market of which the United States, having ‘won’ the cold war, is the moral
conductor. It sets the norm not only for free trade but also (in the same universalizing
mode) for human rights, for historical and cultural studies. What is being globalized
therefore is American-style capitalism and its implicit world view.
Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism ends on the theme of American
domination and delivers its rebuttal in a spirit of sustained opposition to imperial
power that newer terminologies like globalization will not be able to pronounce.
‘There are far too many politicized people on earth today for any nation to readily
This essay was first presented at a conference, Globalization and Culture, organized by Duke University,
Durham, USA, in 1994. An earlier version appeared in Third Text, No. 39, Summer 1997. It was published
under the title ‘Navigating the Void’ in The Cultures of Globalization, edited by Fredric Jameson and Masao
Miyoshi, Duke University Press, Durham, 1998.
340 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
accept the finality of America’s mission to lead the world’, Said writes.2 To that I
should like to add, as an inhabitant of the third world (and a little removed from the
internecine wars in the American academy about the ontological status of anticolonial
histories and the transcription of these on to a condition of postcoloniality), that there
is not only ‘an internationalist counter-articulation’ stemming from the resistances in
the ‘underlying world map’.3 This map is in fact the politically alive geography of the
south where ancient ground heaves to change continental relations through economic
competition, through the power of anticolonial discourse, through the forceful
heterogeneity of cultural practice.
issue, nor is this the place to go into the possibilities of survival of national economies
and national cultures. Leading Indian Marxists are rearticulating key issues about the
economy in terms of the nation and the state.4 From other points of view along the
ideological spectrum there is interrogation underway concerning the ethics of the
nation-state in relation to the polity, the people and communities.5 Accompanied by a
cultural discourse and practice that differ both from that of the west and of other post-
colonial countries, this is worth examining in its own terms and not only as a differen-
tial device for theorizing postcoloniality. As Partha Chatterjee says:
the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa are positive not on an identity
but rather on a difference with the ‘modular’ forms of the national society
propagated by the modern West. How can we ignore this without reducing the
experience of anticolonial nationalism to a caricature of itself?
more complex than his fuzzy universalist enunciations would indicate. Along with his
close yet vexed relationship with the west, he devises an Asian version of international-
ism, he communicates with contemporaries in Japan and China, he receives adulation
and rebuffs.9
It may be useful to retroactively elaborate the motif of sovereignty (as it
derives from the nationalist discourse) and see it in the richly polyvocal literature of
Tagore. He is already, at the start of the twentieth century, writing novels both
intensely introspective and polemical about the definition of the nation in terms of its
people. He links this up with the question of subjectivity: in Gora in the transposed
identity of a white man who grows up as a foundling in a Hindu home; in the volatile
woman protagonist from a feudal household in Ghare Baire. He steeps these
characters in the great vortex of contemporary nationalist history, making them inte-
rrogative figures of mixed portent. He prefigures a historically shaped subjectivity
with a potential consciousness actually realized in the later narrative of the nation. To
the Tagore lineage may be added the motif of sovereignty worked into an ethnogra-
phic allegory in Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, where the protagonist Apu lends both
sublimity and catharsis to the quest of a postindependence nation.10
On the other hand there is the culture of the left. In balance its project of
modernity is not very different from that of the liberal intellectual stream: not denying
the progressivism it promotes, the promise of daring new forms that break through the
realist conscience is often absent. But daring forms do exist. In Santiniketan itself, a
tribal persona with radical affect is already assumed in the mid-1930s by the artist
Ramkinkar Baij. He positions his tribals as migrant labour in Santal Family in the
compound of Kala Bhavana at Santiniketan. From the next decade the history of the
Bengal IPTA (Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association) testifies to major theatric achieve-
ments like Nabanna. From the heart of this vortex the revolutionary filmmaker
Ritwik Ghatak brings to bear the left ideology as witness to moments of advance and
regression in postindependence India. His last film, Jukti Takko ar Gappo (1975),
becomes an occasion for him to reflect autobiographically on the interposed meanings
of revolutionary practice in art and politics. Not surprisingly, the mode is tragic.11
During the same period Mahasweta Devi, the radical feminist writer from Bengal,
devises the role of a surrogate mother in monumental proportions, stretching the gen-
dered subject to allegorical attenuation and thus to the ends of historical narrative. As
Gayatri Spivak says, Mahasweta Devi offers to the young Naxalites of the time a
‘history imagined into fiction’.12
We may continue with the radicals of subsequent generations who favour
a dialectics of the modern and the primitive/subaltern, who seek to elicit from it a poli-
tics of the local—as against national—community. Certainly in the valorized mode of
contemporary ethnography the local is a place of knowledge; the local in India often
signifies vernacular culture, tribal authenticity. The local is also the site for politically
G l o b a l i z a t i o n : N a v i g a t i n g t h e Vo i d 343
honed sets of choices at a given place and time. Both the peasantry and the proletariat
must take the local as immanent ground for a politics of revolt, a concept that was
used to the bitter end in Mao’s cultural revolution and matched in India through the
1960s and 70s as a ground for militant action by the Naxalites. This created a radical,
nihilist poetics that marked the ground of Indian art, but its politics often shortened
the life of the protagonists. Witness the case of two Kerala artists of exceptional talent:
filmmaker John Abraham and sculptor K.P. Krishnakumar, both of whom died pre-
maturely in the 1980s signalling the desperation—economic, existential, political—of
producing art in our times.
They may or may not have subscribed to the common view of several CPI(ML)
groups that the Naxalite movements were a continuation of the nationalist
independence struggle, but the consequences of such a view were clearly
applied to them. In effectively assigning to the nation’s nationalist bourgeoisie
a colonial identity, which therefore provided no useful precedents to the prac-
tice, the Kerala Radicals’ vanguardism . . . [assumed] the highly contradictory
responsibilities of having to ‘introduce history into a land that knew only
memory’.13
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, while discussing the short life of the Indian Radical
Painters’ and Sculptors’ Association (1987–89) and its otherwise generally tragic
history that ended with Krishnakumar’s suicide, argues that the terms of individual
action and collective struggle and the invoking of a grand tradition of left discourse
mean that the
The preceding trajectories with some key cultural markers show why
Fredric Jameson’s formulation about the national allegory being the preeminent para-
digm for third-world literature continues to be valid.15 This view of the national can be
complemented by James Clifford’s reformulation of the local in terms of ethnographic
allegories—the narrative means for a grassroots recuperation of lost identities.16 In
both cases the allegorical breaks up the paradigmatic nature of the cause: in the first
case it questions the immanent condition of culture taken as some irrepressible truth
offering; in the second case it splits the symbolic homogeneity of the people (from
whom a whole series of organic metaphors is drawn) into its differentiated parts.
There may be good reason to break the metaphoric mode suitable to a romantic
344 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Postcolonial/Postmodern Entanglement
As a consequence of the historical determinants coloniality imposes one
can see that codes are still available in staggering variety to the postcolonial artist.
These offer strategic choices and benign practice ranging from the high to the low,
from the centre to the periphery, from the local to the global. The postcolonial artist
may be seen as navigating the void between these seductively posed polarities, sustain-
ing a romance by turning exoticized otherness into social realignments.
Is there in the third world today a historical commitment to national
selfhood and collective cultural praxis? Or is it a pragmatic undertaking, an interpret-
ive process, a sorting out of the representational dilemmas of postcoloniality? At one
level of discourse this question devolves to a rather simple political preference. With-
out going into detail I should like to position myself, as I hope I have already indi-
cated, in favour of a conflictual rather than negotiating stand on the question of post-
colonial culture.18
Consider in this context what Homi Bhabha is theorizing. ‘Driven by the
subaltern history of the margins of modernity’, he wishes to ‘rename the postmodern
from the position of the postcolonial’.19 And to thus assert alterity through a valoriz-
G l o b a l i z a t i o n : N a v i g a t i n g t h e Vo i d 345
ing of the other who is now so demonstrably the speaking subject. Bhabha’s politics of
cultural difference favours the short manoeuvre and the subtle negotiation. There is
also the longer navigational pull—to borders, frontiers, horizons, which are all defer-
red to postpolitics and pitched beyond the fin-de-siecle present: ‘Our existence today is
marked by a tenebrous sense of survival, living on the borderline of the “present”, for
which there seems to be no proper name other than the current and controversial
shiftiness of the prefix “post”.’20 And further:
The present can no longer be envisaged as a break or a bonding with the past
and the future, no longer a synchronic presence: our proximate self-presence,
our public image, comes to be revealed for its discontinuities, its inequalities,
its minorities. Unlike the dead hand of history that tells the beads of sequential
time like a rosary, seeking to establish serial, causal connections, we are now
confronted with what Walter Benjamin describes as the blasting of a monadic
moment from the homogenous course of history, ‘establishing a conception of
the present as the “time of now”’.21
Consider in this light the chaos that was stirred within Asian communities
in relation to the Rushdie problematic.28 Religious and nonreligious members reacted
with defensive rage to the ideological provocation The Satanic Verses was seen to pose.
Secularists, whether they were ranged with white intellectuals or with the ‘hurt senti-
ments’ of their Asian fraternity (including fundamentalists), lost the opportunity to
wrest the terms of the debate from the western liberal intelligentsia. They surrendered
the right to discuss the matter of self-representation at the cutting edge of ‘blas-
phemy’—to discuss, for instance, whether or not an allegorization of painful moments
in a people’s history leads to a new reflexivity. Whether or not a relentless parodying of
grand moments in a national charade of representations leads to a sharpening of real
difference; and whether this difference involves, besides fictive characters, embattled
collectivities that elude the politics of exile. These were some of the questions worthy
of Rushdie’s audacity. Instead, as fundamentalist sentiment overtakes the metropo-
litan world ‘the third world liberal intelligentsia—in some sense, citizens of the world,
out of sync everywhere—have to pay its cost in their daily lives’. Thus Alok Rai argues,
pitching the postcolonial trauma beyond Rushdie and back to the intrepid Fanon.
As Frantz Fanon was to discover, for all his keen sense of himself as a unique
individual, he was ineluctably burdened with the experience of his people: ‘I
was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors.’
. . . Quite apart from the comprehensive material damage, one carries the cod-
ed inscription of the unequal colonial relationship in the deepest recesses of
one’s being. Thus, Fanon was an eloquent analyst of the twists and turns of the
dialectic of the post-colonial consciousness, in which betrayal and inauthen-
ticity are a constant danger, and appear in bewildering and unsettling dis-
guises.29
Let us concede that it is the privilege of those who live their lives within
the format of a national culture to resist globalization, as against the privilege of those
who live more global lives to seek its emancipatory features. Let us concede that it is
pointless setting up a symmetrical hierarchy of belonging and unbelonging that works
like a seesaw. Even conceding these, my disagreement with the exile rhetoric of
Bhabha, and even Rushdie, is predictably that I want the location of self and culture to
be less shifty, less a matter of continual displacement of categories one to another. In
Bhabha’s view, ‘The contingent and the liminal become the times and the spaces for
the historical representation of the subjects of cultural difference in a postcolonial
criticism.’30 I would argue for a greater holding power of the historical paradigm where
differences are recognized to have real and material consequences, where agency is
neither ghost-driven nor collapsed into a series of metonymically disposed identities
that are but fragments spinning their way to entropy.
There are societies that have undergone a long period of decolonization
348 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
and developed, beyond the terms of hybridity, a sustained postcolonial vision that has,
along with concrete manifestations, the ability to theorize on societal conditions.
These societies have devised, moreover, styles of historical praxis and futures beyond
postcoloniality. This may be kept in view to arrive at a more dialectically worked-out
politics than a perennially inbetween position allows.
‘[T]he post- in postcolonial, like the post- in postmodern, is the post- of
the space-clearing gesture’, says Kwame Anthony Appiah.31 Claiming greater location
and agency for the African artist, he goes on to elaborate:
Sura Suleri has written recently, in Meatless Days, of being treated as an ‘other-
ness machine’—and of being heartily sick of it. Perhaps the predicament of the
postcolonial intellectual is simply that as intellectuals—a category instituted in
black Africa by colonialism—we are, indeed, always at the risk of becoming
otherness machines, with the manufacture of alterity as our principal role. . . .
This is especially true when postcolonial meets postmodern. . . . The role that
Africa, like the rest of the Third World, plays for Euro–American postmodern-
ism—like its better-documented significance for modernist art—must be
distinguished from the role postmodernism might play in the Third World.
For all the while, in Africa’s cultures, there are those who will not see them-
selves as Others. Despite the overwhelming reality of economic decline; despite
unimaginable poverty; despite wars, malnutrition, disease, and political insta-
bility, African cultural productivity grows apace: popular literatures, oral
narrative and poetry, dance, drama, music and visual art all thrive.32
Clearing Space
Global culture could be a less suspicious enterprise if it became clearer
which is the culture that equates with marketism and how it can be critiqued. Can glo-
bal culture still be critiqued in the terms Theodor Adorno used, as culture industry or
the ideology of mass culture within capitalism?33 To this an ample ‘answer’ is already
provided from the same context by Fredric Jameson.34 Writing about the peculiar
dilemma of cultural reification within the citadel of the modern itself, he places con-
sumerism on the cusp of the modern and the postmodern and offers ideological
safeguards in the wake of the historical and systemic changes underway. He does this
through a generous yet relentless exercise of critical reason that leaves little scope for
nostalgia but helps check the despair about the market from evolving into ritual
manoeuvres and mean survival. Thus he saves cultural praxis from moving into reverse
gear, crushing in the process what remains of the emancipatory imagination. With
Jameson, as always, critical reason and cultural praxis are pegged together to form a
utopian discourse—but whether or not that discourse, given its historical antecedents,
tends to exclude the third world remains a difficult question. The third world so
G l o b a l i z a t i o n : N a v i g a t i n g t h e Vo i d 349
of the other that is best reclaimed by that other. This is proved by the avantgarde now
sweeping through the south, including Asia.
In India of the present, where the national formation is disintegrating,
there is an uncomfortable relationship between the public and the private, the state
and commerce, the national and the global. With the new links between the Indian
and global markets, international ramifications are surfacing across the board in the
culture industry (the electronic media, film, advertising and art) and this cannot but
have an emancipatory result—even if in the form of unbottled genii and quick inno-
vation. Moreover, globalization allows for the first time freedom from the national/
collective/communitarian straitjacket; freedom also from the heavily paternalistic
patronage system of the state. It allows freedom from the rigid anti-imperialist posi-
tion in which postcolonial artists find themselves locked, and the freedom to include
in postcolonial realities other discourses of opposition such as those of gender and the
minorities—discourses that question the ethics of the nation-state itself.
It is possible then that in India, as in various parts of Asia—Thailand,
Indonesia, Hongkong, South Korea, the Philippines, China—the positively post-
colonial avantgarde in film and art will come now: a reflexivity posed as some form or
other of countermodernity, made possible by the changed norms of cultural hospi-
tality in the postmodern age. The initiative to hold international film festivals and
biennials with a third-world, southern or regional focus is but a symptom of more
substantial change in the actual political conditions building up to a breakthrough in
the contemporary arts. With the older institutional structure built up during the
nationalist or revolutionary phase in flux, with the not so hospitable economic real-
ities of the postmodern age (the naked expropriation of the south by the trade and
labour laws of the north), and with growing disparities mocking the unity of the
nation itself, a new battleground for cultural action opens up. If it seems that this
avantgarde will be a postmodern affair it will not be so without a serious challenge to
the terms of that phenomenon, precisely where these become baldly global.36
The local–global, a geopolitical proposition, can be turned into a spatial
metaphor for what I call navigating the void. The natives’ (by now) multiple passages
beyond involve a progressively more precise signalling procedure on each shore and
threshold: a performative or even properly theatric gesture that marks these as a series
of disjunctures. This is propitious ground for the emergence of a historically positioned
avantgarde. Let me take a quick example from India. If there is a sudden spate of
installation art in India (raising the question: why now?), we have to look first to the
appearance of an art market for an answer. Installation is an art of presence in the field
of the object; it is a form of the deconstructed object where it invokes the dynamics
of presence but in an unhomely, indeterminate setting. I choose the work of three
Indian artists to make the point. The first is a female act of passion staged (in Bombay,
in 1993) by Nalini Malani and Alaknanda Samarth: an installation/performance of
G l o b a l i z a t i o n : N a v i g a t i n g t h e Vo i d 351
Heiner Mueller’s Medea, the barbarian princess who murders her children to avenge
her exile, her betrayal, her redundancy in the superior civilization (Illus. 1). The second
is an installation that gives evidence of public murder: Vivan Sundaram’s Memorial
(Delhi, 1993), a ceremonially laid out site to bury the victim of communal carnage
during the 1993 Bombay riots—the documentary image of the sacrificed Muslim
providing by its presence the mise-en-scene for national mourning (Illus. 2). The third,
N.N. Rimzon’s Man with Tools (Delhi, 1993) provides a recuperative symbol for self-
sufficiency, the artist’s commitment to the ethics and poetry of use-objects producing
an icon out of the dedicated body of labour (Illus. 3).
These examples propose intrepid stands in the tragic mode: the first offers
a kind of ecological nemesis on man’s greed from a feminist position; the second con-
structs a renewed space for political affect where historical anchoring is marked as
different from national belonging; and the third attempts a transposition of the hiera-
tic into the human—the humble figure adorned with a ground-halo of tools from a
poor smithy becomes an icon with an aura. Contrapuntally these works propose a
1 Nalini Malani’s theatre installation for Mueller’s Despoiled Shore: Alaknanda Samarth performs as Medea against Malani’s painted panels,
Medeaprojekt, 1993
352 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
utopianism precisely on the ground of the national and the regional, securing these as
sites for political battle. With allegories of home and journey, departures and death,
work and apotheosis, a subjective quest becomes a politically measured space for tran-
scendence. It also involves a strategic doubling of identity where no authority holds.
Thus, when we speak on behalf of postcolonial countermodernity we
should be speaking not just about identity, as that can appear from the vantagepoint
of postmodernism as a reflection of dead realisms and of an unreconstructed reality.
We should be speaking about psychic and formal sublimation as one finds in the
avantgarde heritage of surrealism, for example, where the quest for selfhood combines
with libertarian freedoms. Also of a practice based on epiphanies of language under-
stood not only as a grammatical proposition but as something that springs from pur-
poseful intransigence and lost utopias. We should be speaking about the structure of
potential consciousness (after Lukacs) from a ‘blasting of a monadic moment’ (after
Benjamin), both of which are still able to render the historical experientially—one on
a sustained diachronic scale, the other as a hermeneutic revelation.
The modern is charged with the energy of revolutionary struggle; it is
replete with the memory of ‘native’ transgressions. Today it is the secular cultures of
2 Vivan Sundaram, Memorial (installation view with Mausoleum in the foreground), 1993
G l o b a l i z a t i o n : N a v i g a t i n g t h e Vo i d 353
the postcolonial era that are premised on a countering impulse. It is this heritage that
is to be carried over into the present postmodern to evolve a more definite commit-
ment to praxis. This will incur perhaps a dispersal of the regimental movement of the
Euro-American avantgarde into more differentiated moments that we can now begin
to see as radical interventions in the ideologically regressive one-world system.
If the national is broken up, so is the male collective of the working class:
both are disciplinary concepts and in their later, more abstracted phases, often authori-
tarian. They are broken through futurist projections into states of plenitude, through
the sheer beauty of image, among other devices, the excess of which allows imagist
cinema to signal a surplus attraction and break open hermetic constructs. Shahani’s
brief is precisely to not let the one subsume the other; to not privilege the symbolic
over the imaginary, or vice versa. He keeps a hold on the ‘real’ by demonstrating a con-
dition of concrete immanence in the actual work. This is done through a materialist
semiology, if one may call it that: first, by a systematic signification of the sensuous in
the structure of the film; second, by the image turning itself inside out through chosen
contraconventions of cinematic narration. In Maya Darpan the female protagonist
barely escapes; there is a didactic closure tolling the literal end of the feudal family. In
Tarang, which is like a chronicle foretold, the exploitative male protagonist slips into
a position of mythologically sanctioned defeat and exposes himself.
G l o b a l i z a t i o n : N a v i g a t i n g t h e Vo i d 355
Above: 5 Janaki (Smita Patil), a working-class woman, with Rahul (Amol Palekar) the entrepreneur: a fateful transaction of vested interests (Tarang).
Below: 6 Hansa (Kawal Ghandiok) gives Janaki a gift: sign of complicity in the sexual relationship between Rahul, her husband, and Janaki (Tarang)
356 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Above: 7 Taran (Prabha Mahajan) walks through the pillared veranda of her father’s feudal haveli: an alienated life in a provincial environment
(Maya Darpan). Below: 8 Tejo (Mita Vashisht), ambitious daughter-in-law in a family of hill-town traders, broods in the privacy of her bedroom (Kasba)
G l o b a l i z a t i o n : N a v i g a t i n g t h e Vo i d 357
metaphysical moment of self-naughting that a dialectical move into the third alter-
native is made. Shahani uses this dialectic to arrive at the figure of the ‘true beloved’, a
hypothetical figure who embodies the erotics of pain and resurrects herself in the
uncharted space of transfigured knowledge.
In Khayal Gatha (1988, Illus. 13, 14) and Bhavantarana (1991, Illus.
12), films based on classical Indian art forms (the first on the musical mode of north
India called khayal; the second, shorter, film on the person of the great odissi dancer
Guru Kelucharan Mahapatra), Indian aesthetics, usually offered as a rhapsodic means
for deliverance, is treated through cinematic iconography to metaphoric narration.
There is an extreme condensation of art forms in their continuum through the
centuries. At the same time a displacement of one art form into another is introduced
so that each of these becomes part of the metonymic chain that reconfigures Indian
poetics as a vastly imbricated and structurally replete system that is still fully alive.
Khayal Gatha is consciously about excess, further complicated by an
involute form-within-form structure. It makes each of the traditions of Indian art,
from music to painting to film itself, dovetail to constitute a great formal riddle. (On
the question of formalism one may mention that Khayal Gatha is followed by Kasba,
a succession that suggests an ironic retake on modernist formalism, specifically its fixa-
tion with consistency and semantic opacity. For, Kasba is once again about transpa-
rency and translatability. From Russian story to Indian film, it is about economy in
the literal and formal cinematic sense to which economy of the self in the renunciate
mode is tendentiously added.)
The context for these condensed interpretations of traditions is a narrative
space where there is also a sublimation of material cultural history to the pure cine-
matic time of now. This is an undeclared avantgarde gesture where traditions are
disengaged from the national past (and so turned into a critique of that kind of appro-
priative configuration) but where the cinematic text, as in Khayal Gatha, proves the
limits of translatability before the foreign viewer and thereby obstructs the way to
any easy process of internationalist assimilation. This then brings the question of the
national, or a larger category such as civilization, once again into the discussion.
Through these series of films there is a conversion of pleasure into excess,
then into greed, then into instructive pedagogies about true plenitude and redemp-
tion. The inner core of compassion is probably the universalizing principle that
Shahani gains from the Indian civilizational matrix. He has learned to complement
Marxist rationality with the Buddhist double paradigm of logic and compassion
drawn from the imbricated discourse of the anthropologist–historian D.D. Kosambi,
Shahani’s Marxist mentor.
We have talked earlier about the problems of self-othering. What does
Shahani do with the question, persistent in third-world art practices, of the artist as
ethnographer? Compared with those of Satyajit Ray and of his other more intimate
G l o b a l i z a t i o n : N a v i g a t i n g t h e Vo i d 359
challenge, for the projected scenario stakes India’s place in world civilization through
manufacture and trade. This he then transforms into a universal poetics of produc-
tion—even as there is proof today of the most vicious tariff systems coming into global
operation to destroy these productive capacities.
The Soviet Union collapses. The USA begins to make final thrusts to control all
audio visual production through a market-directed production process. Even
the earlier ‘collaborators’ of capitalist design, like Zanussi, protest and are
aghast at the complacency of their American colleagues.
Against this background, the GATT negotiations: the gradual
subtle shifts of production, distribution etc. which make for a nearly complete
take-over of European cinema. . . .
Yet, there are people who seem to want one to try and move out of
the increasing marginalisation in a uni-polar world which has reduced
Bertolucci to a slick craftsman and Straub into an eccentric. But we still have to
find ways of striking out—through institutions and individuals whose voices
may be heard above the din of the market-place, with the kind of material and
spiritual resources that such initiatives need.39
been touched by technology and seen through the sophisticated lens. Having done
that, he constantly produces the kind of metonymies that require inverse forms of
reading. Turning what has been made technologically available into coded relays of
archetypal/classical forms once again, he creates an elliptical relationship between
medium and meaning.
Secularizing tradition also means that the key to the hermeneutic is not,
ironically enough, in the hands of the occidental viewer enthralled by oriental
tradition or the mystique of ethnography. Nor is it in the hands of the authentic
Indian seeking immanent truth. It is in the hands of the one who will allow the
metaphysic of universal discourse to abide while being able to differentiate the nodal
points within the historical; to elicit, in consequence, not universal culture but a uni-
versal meaning out of the widely varying cultures of the world—in the more advanced
anthropological sense of the term ‘culture’. We are then back to a utopian promise
that does away with the solipsism of presentday aesthetics through a negative dialectic.
Adorno’s words recall this best:
masses, not only transitionally but over a protracted period. A neo-mercantilist strategy is not
easily replicated nor as workable in the context of world recession, nor necessarily desirable in
the context of India’s extant democratic structures. Is it possible then for an economy like
India to evolve a response of its own?’ See Prabhat Patnaik, ‘International Capital and
National Economic Policy: A Critique of India’s Economic Reforms’, in Economic and Politi-
cal Weekly, Vol. XXIX, No. 12, 19 March 1994, pp. 686, 688. See also Prabhat Patnaik,
Whatever Happened to Imperialism and other essays, Tulika, Delhi, 1995. See, further,
Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Democracy and Development in India’, in Democracy and Development,
edited by A.K. Bagchi, St Martin’s Press, London, 1995.
5
Anthropologist Veena Das writes: ‘The emergence of communities as political actors in their
own right is related in India to changes in the nature of political democracy. We know that the
anticolonial struggles, as embodied in several local, regional, and national-level movements in
the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were about the sharing of power. Yet by the
end of the twentieth century the nature of representative democracy has itself been put into
question, for it has become clear that even when power is exercised in the name of represent-
ation it tends to become absolute, and “to speak in the name of the society it devours”.’ She
continues: ‘It is this political context of the state’s assertion and arrogation of authority which
explains why so many social scientists have raised powerful voices in support of “tradition”,
and why they have expressed the hope that alternative visions of life may be available in the
form of traditional ways of life, of which diverse communities are the embodiment.’ See Veena
Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India, Oxford
University Press, Delhi, 1995, p. 14.
6
Partha Chatterjee’s continuing interrogation of the nation-state in relation to the polity finds
recent elaboration in his Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories,
Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1995, pp. 5, 13 respectively.
7
For an elaboration of this Gramscian concept in the Indian context, see Sudipta Kaviraj,
‘Critique of the Passive Revolution’, in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXIII, Special
Number, 1988; and Partha Chatterjee, ‘Moment of Arrival: Nehru and the Passive Revo-
lution’, in Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative
Discourse?, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1988.
8
For the Gandhi–Tagore debate, see Truth Called Them Differently, edited by R.K. Prabhu and
Ravinder Kelkar, Navajivan, Ahmedabad, 1961. For a recent interpretation of the signifi-
cance of this debate see Suresh Sharma, ‘Swaraj and the Quest for Freedom—Rabindranath
Tagore’s Critique of Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation’, in Thesis Eleven, No. 39, 1994.
9
For a brief evaluation of Tagore’s international engagement, see Tan Chung, ‘The Rabindra-
nath Thunder of Oriental Dawn: A Sino–Indian Perspective of Tagore’; and Swapan
Mazumdar, ‘The East–West Colloquy: Tagore’s Understanding of the West’, in Rabindranath
Tagore and the Challenges of Today, edited by Bhudeb Chaudhuri and K.G. Subramanyan,
Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, 1988.
10
For an elaboration of this argument, see Geeta Kapur, ‘Cultural Creativity in the First
Decade: The Example of Satyajit Ray’, in Journal of Arts & Ideas, No. 23, 1993 (included in
this volume under the title ‘Sovereign Subject: Ray’s Apu’).
11
See Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic, Screen Unit, Bombay, 1982;
and The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, edited by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen,
BFI/Oxford University Press, London/Delhi, 1994, pp. 95–96. For a further exposition on
Ghatak’s last film, see Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘Jukti Takko ar Gappo’, and Geeta Kapur,
G l o b a l i z a t i o n : N a v i g a t i n g t h e Vo i d 363
‘Articulating the Self in History: Ritwik Ghatak’s Jukti Takko Ar Gappo’, in Questions of
Third Cinema, edited by Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, BFI, London, 1989 (included in this
volume).
12
Gayatri Spivak, ‘A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman’s Text from the Third
World’, in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, Methuen, New York, 1987, p. 243.
13
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘The Last Decade’, in Contemporary Art in Baroda, edited by
Gulammohammed Sheikh, Tulika, Delhi, 1997, p. 258. Read Rajadhyaksha in relation to
Anita Dube, Questions and Dialogue, exhibition catalogue, Baroda, 1987; and Shivaji
Panikker, ‘Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors: Crisis of Political Art in Contemporary
India’, in Creative Arts in Modern India: Essays in Comparative Criticism, Vol. II, edited by
Ratan Parimoo and Indramohan Sharma, Books and Books, Delhi, 1995.
14
Rajadhyaksha, ibid., p. 248.
15
Fredric Jameson, ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, in Social
Text, No. 15, 1986. This should be read in the context of the reply by Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Jameson’s
Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory’, in Social Text, No. 16, 1987.
16
James Clifford, ‘On Ethnographic Allegory’, in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, University of California Press,
Berkeley, 1986.
17
See Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 377.
18
Homi Bhabha’s elusive track of postcolonial discourse is critiqued from a position that asserts
the continuing validity of the anticolonial struggle by Benita Parry: see ‘Signs of Our Times:
A Discussion of Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture’, in Third Text, Nos. 28–29, 1994.
19
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994, p. 175.
20
Ibid., p. 3.
21
Ibid., p. 4.
22
Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition’, in
Remaking History, edited by Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani, Bay Press, Seattle, 1989.
23
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 241.
24
Ibid.
25
Parry, ‘Signs of Our Times’, Third Text, Nos. 28–29, p. 13.
26
Quoted in Alok Rai, ‘Black Skin, Black Masks’, in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.
XXVII, No. 39, 26 September 1992, p. 2103.
27
For a polemic on the travails of otherness, see Rustom Bharucha, ‘Somebody’s Other’, Third
Text, No. 26, 1995.
28
See special issue titled ‘Beyond the Rushdie Affair’, Third Text, No. 11, 1990.
29
Rai, ‘Black Skin, Black Masks’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXVII, No. 39, p. 2100.
30
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 179.
31
K.A. Appiah, ‘Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?’, in Critical Inquiry,
No. 17, 1991, p. 348.
32
Ibid., p. 356.
33
Theodor Adorno and Mark Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso, London, 1979,
pp. 120–67.
34
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, London,
1991, p. 317.
35
Nestor Garcia Canclini, ‘Memory and Innovation in the Theory of Art’, in The South Atlantic
Quarterly, Vol. 92, No. 3, 1993.
364 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
36
For a discussion on the conditions for a historical avantgarde that not only accommodates but
derives from the conditions of radical disjuncture in the three worlds alike, see Paul Willemen,
‘An Avant-Garde for the 90s’, in Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film
Theory, Indiana University Press/BFI, Bloomington/London, 1994.
37
Born in India in 1940, Kumar Shahani graduated from the Film and Television Institute of
India, Pune, in 1966, where he had been a student of Ritwik Ghatak. He went to France for
advanced study of cinema and spent the tumultuous years of 1967–68 in Paris. Here, he
gained the experience of an apprenticeship with Robert Bresson while the latter was shooting
Une Femme Douce (1969). Back in India, Shahani became famous with his first feature film
Maya Darpan (1972), following which all his major films, Tarang (1984), Khayal Gatha
(1988), Kasba (1990), Bhavantarana (1991), have won awards and been exhibited in a range
of mainstream and avantgarde film festivals all over the world. Problems of commercial
release make his films rare to see. He has been designated a difficult filmmaker, intellectual
and ideological in ways that make him controversial and at the same time seminal in the
Indian cultural context. A film based on a Tagore novella, Char Adhyaya (1997) is supple-
mented by a whole series of unproduced films: these include scripts in various stages of com-
pletion on the psychoanalyst W.R. Bion, on the Indo-European woman painter Amrita Sher-
Gil (1913–1941), on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and on the world history of the production of
cotton. A theoretician of cinema, Kumar Shahani has written and published extensively. For
a selection of his essays, see ‘Dossier: Kumar Shahani’, in Framework, Nos. 30/31, 1986. For
further information, see Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, edited by Rajadhyaksha and Wille-
men, pp. 197–98.
38
Kumar Shahani in an unpublished letter to the historian Ravinder Kumar (Bombay, Septem-
ber 1994).
39
Excerpts from an unpublished letter from Kumar Shahani to the author (Bombay, 14 October
1994).
40
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, Verso, London, 1974, p. 60.
Dismantled Norms 365
Dismantled Norms:
Apropos an Indian/Asian Avantgarde
The Norms
Indian art reflects the cultural agendas of the last fifty years in its forms of
modernity. At one end there is a sustained attempt to give regard to indigenous, living
traditions and to dovetail the tradition/modernity aspects of contemporary culture
through a typically postcolonial eclecticism. At the other end there is a desire to dis-
engage from the overarching politics of the national by a reclusive attention to formal
choices that seemingly transcend both cultural and subjective particularities and enter
the modernist frame.1 My intention here is to step outside this by now familiar para-
digm and recognize alternative forms of self-designation by the artists, as also non-
conventional attributes for the artworks. At an empirical level it means attending to
the changing art forms in the current decade. At a theoretical level it means that we
foreground disjuncture and try to name the possible avantgardes. But first a count-
down on the norms as these have characterized the decades preceding the 1990s.2
Secular Identity
Given the variety of well-appointed actors in the theatre of Indian art
there was, until recently, an aspiration for the artist to become a central national
figure. It was hoped that the artist would articulate in work and speech a historical
position that would clearly demarcate a hospitable national space. This ideal of an
integrated identity had something to do with the mythic imaginary of lost communi-
ties. It had to do with nationalism, third-world utopias and postcolonial culturalism.3
Between the 1940s and 1960s, the integrated identity of the Indian artist
was, in an anti-imperialist sense, political. Somnath Hore was part of the communist
movement, J. Swaminathan was a communist–anarchist, and K.G. Subramanyan a
Gandhian. Most contemporary artists, prominently M.F. Husain and Satish Gujral,
were privileged members of the Nehruvian liberal ethos. Until recently the identity of
the Indian artist was largely modern and secular. While there might have been
conservative artists, there would hardly be a fundamentalist among them. And if that
The first published version of this essay appeared under the title ‘Dismantling the Norm’, in Contemporary
Art in Asia: Tradition/Tensions, Asia Society Galleries, New York, 1996.
366 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
identity questioned modernity it did so on the basis of a tradition that was, despite the
invocations of sacred myths and symbols, ‘invented’ during a nationalist resurgence
and was therefore sufficiently secularized.
Or this seemed to be so until we began to interrogate this past. In doing so
we recognized in hindsight a bad faith in some of the terms of nationalist cultural dis-
course. In particular that the sectarian pulls of religion had not been fully considered,
making both the modern and the secular well-meaning but recalcitrant ideals.
In the postindependence ethos Maqbool Fida Husain characterizes the
‘function’ of the national artist: he marks the conjunction between the mythic and the
secular and then between secular and aesthetic space (Illus. 1, 2). Husain, along with
some of his peers (F.N. Souza, S.H. Raza and other members and associates of the
Progressive Artists’ Group of 1947), has helped to give modern art in India an auto-
nomous status—an autonomy that was however already institutionalized in the west
a century before. At the same time, because of a socialist register in the liberal society of
postindependence India, an artist like Husain has occupied a converse status—that
of peoples’ representative. The two contradictory modes of formalizing the Indian
artist’s identity—as autonomous and as spokesperson of the people—are held toge-
ther by an idealized notion of the artist’s
access to internal and cultural plenitude.
To further facilitate this utopian identity
Husain invokes a pantheon of benign
gods in a reworked iconography. They
are the artist’s mascots in the ideological
terrain of national culture.
Above: 1 M.F. Husain, Three-headed Man with Two-headed Bull, 1954. Below: 2 M.F. Husain, The Last Supper, 1991
Dismantled Norms 367
Living Traditions
At an ethical level, the votaries of a nationalist position will expect to ful-
fil the responsibility of always contextualizing their artistic choices, situating them
within the continuum of a living tradition. This is felicitous. Sensitive handling of
living traditions helps maintain the sense of a complex society which informs and
368 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
sometimes subverts the modernization that the very institution of the nation-state
inaugurates (and the market promotes).
Ritual arts and crafts are part of perennial life-processes until today. They
are also part of daily drudgery, as they are now part of an openly exploitative capi-
talist economy. In economic terms this phenomenon provides a lesson in humility
because the terms of survival are so hard. It is a lesson that Meera Mukherjee lived in
her life and art, using tribal metal-casting techniques, using imagery from the everyday
and the iconic in humanist traditions—from Buddhism to the bauls. Furthermore, she
found a personal stylistics, going ‘beyond’ the matrix of tradition and technique to a
contemporary vision of the working people. In cultural terms this can be understood
through a radically revised ethnography as well as from within the imaginative uni-
verse, by using the sympathetic sensors of art language itself.
In continuation with his Santiniketan training K.G. Subramanyan has
conducted something like an ongoing workshop without walls around artisanal prac-
tices. His pedagogical role in fine arts faculties in M.S. University, Baroda and Visva-
Bharati, and his status within the Indian government’s policy initiatives on the hand-
loom and craft sector are well known. As a practising artist he has evolved modes of
interaction with the polyvocal languages of the folk, especially the terracotta and pata
traditions; more importantly, he has found a new syntax for the material vocabulary
of artisanal forms. Thus he has contributed to extending this living tradition into and
beyond the closed circuitry of traditions—and I refer to both repetitive craft traditions
as well as the repetitive ‘tradition of the new’ in western modernism.
Another kind of relationship was nurtured by artist–critic J. Swaminathan
with the primordial, the adivasi (in terms of ethnic designation, the tribal) artist: this
was first offered as a speculative possibility when he formulated the manifesto for
Group 1890 in 1963. Later, in 1982, he institutionalized this into policy on becom-
ing director of Roopankar, the twin museums of contemporary urban and tribal art in
Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal. Swaminathan claimed existential continuity with the pri-
mordial imagination in the creative act itself. His kind of metaphysical formalism
involved a conversion of cultural symbols and formalized icons into the more elusive
numen; it led simultaneously to a pristine aesthetic, to structural readings of the sym-
bolic in tribal communities, to linguistic play in modernist art:
It would seem that there is nothing which comes in the way of our direct appre-
ciation and apprehension of what is commonly termed as tribal art. . . . Further
if . . . we take recourse to ethnological or anthropological methods, or if we
refer to archaeology and history, our aim and intention should never be lost
sight of—to emphasize the numinous function of art, neither to replace, nor to
subordinate [it].5
are decidedly different, yet each of them implies that modern artists in India must
start from degree zero of their existential ambitions as they stand at the threshold of a
culturally rich and materially pauperized hinterland. A hinterland that holds living
traditions with a vast number of differentiated skills and vernaculars which it must
somehow be their ambition to know and decipher. This requires not just ethnogra-
phically correct answers but a generosity that can encompass and contain the loss of
‘superseded’ culture.
It needs to be noted, however, that living traditions are now subject to the
ever-revised categories of anthropology. The tradition-versus-modernity argument was
high on the common agenda until recently; later, structuralist assumptions about
conceptual commonalities between cultures came to the fore. All these are subject to
new critiques. Artistic choices, once globalized, enter the new (or non) ethics of post-
modernism. This celebratory neotraditionalism is based not so much on material prac-
tice as on the appearance of simulacra. This has to be taken on board in any further
discussions on the subject.
Eclectic Choice
The more polemical aspect of the ethical proposition about living tradi-
tions (or the perennial contemporaneity of all creative expression) is the ideology of
cultural eclecticism. Artist-teachers in India (going back from Gulammohammed
Sheikh to K.G. Subramanyan and K.C.S. Paniker, and further back to Benodebehari
Mukherjee, Ramkinkar Baij and Nandalal Bose) have persuasively argued that colo-
nial cultures achieve a synchronous complexity by intricately weaving local, vernacu-
lar and ethnic strands around a ‘standard’ heritage.6 By extension, national cultures in
their postindependence status achieve certain lost parities with other civilizations.
Further, eclecticism serves to emphasize the democratic right of politically
subordinated cultures to invent new syncretic traditions of their own and thus to
participate in an international discourse of modernism through such (usually nation-
alist) mediations.7 Decolonization is an especially propitious moment to open the
floodgates of the national/modern imagination, rupturing its too-conscientious
project of identity with heterodox elements from the rest of the world. It is this dis-
mantled identity that then enlarges the scope of contemporary art practice.
Within the terms of a colonial–postcolonial transition, artistic eclecticism
corresponds to the polemic around an Indian identity. There are artists who make free
use of tradition by proffering mythic attributes and invented ancestral origins in their
work—A. Ramachandran, Ganesh Pyne, Laxma Goud, Manjit Bawa, Manu Parekh,
S. Nandagopal are examples. Thus eclecticism can be a defensive rearguard action. It
helps to balance nostalgia and derivativeness up to the point where sources are trans-
formed into independent creative expression and serve to define difference.
Conversely, the use of iconography can become an act of subversion.
370 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Sustained at an ironical level by older artists like M.F. Husain, F.N. Souza, K.C.S.
Paniker and K.G. Subramanyan, iconographical devices continue to be generative
among the next generation of artists. Consider the infusion of the erotic in the fabled,
miniature-inspired narratives of Gulammohammed Sheikh. Consider Jogen Chow-
dhury’s attenuated representations, his ever more provocatively staged encounter with
figures from his own Bengali middle class and their peculiar body-language mediated
through the stylistic conventions of the Bengal pata. Consider the homoerotic
tableaux of Bhupen Khakhar who takes Indian popular art from the nineteenth cen-
tury across the modernist crucible of forms and arrives at a kitsch-sublime of his sexual
fantasies. Almost more than any other Indian artist, it is Khakhar who has helped to
dismantle the incumbent norms.
Bhupen Khakhar, Jogen Chowdhury and Gulammohammed Sheikh were
three among six artists (the other three were Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malani and
Sudhir Patwardhan) who presented a seminal exhibition titled Place for People in
1981. They made urban narratives/representational fantasies, an ideological choice.
Creating a combustion in the heart of Indian modernism, they set apace in the 1980s
many pictorial (auto)biographies along the Baroda, Bombay, Kerala trajectories.
Modernist ‘Integrity’
The terms national, secular, modern are so familiar in Indian cultural dis-
course that modernism as such is not always examined. The formal logic, the stylistic
dovetailing and contending ideologies of modernism are not systematically investi-
gated in the sometimes fortuitous, sometimes passionate syncretism of contemporary
Indian art. The modernist enterprise is made up of aesthetic choice, existential tempe-
rament, recognizable style and the auteur’s characteristic signature. But that these
modernist assumptions, when placed in a nationalist paradigm of authenticity, may
present a paradox becomes evident only when the formal regimes of modernism are
foregrounded.
In the context of these developments, it is important to emphasize that
Indian artists do occasionally work with developed adaptations of expressly modern-
ist canons and, indeed, with a modernist poetics. There is a short but intense history of
Indian modernism that is perfectly consonant with economic and political moderniza-
tion: it does not require a hermeneutic of tradition, nor a demonstrable nationalist
purpose, nor even the alibi of postcolonial eclecticism.
The first phase of self-declared modernism in India dates from the 1940s
(triggered, as I mentioned, by the formation of several ‘progressive’ groups). It coin-
cides with the immediate postindependence decade. Typical of several mainstream
modernists from this generation is an expressionist aesthetic. Let me take Tyeb Mehta
(a later associate of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group) as an example to examine
the representational procedure of these artists. Mehta accepts the necessity of art-
Dismantled Norms 371
Satish Gujral (Illus. 9), Himmat Shah (Illus. 8), Nagji Patel, Latika Katt and Valson
Kolleri convert formalized objects into contemporary icons and back again into con-
crete entities, thereby emphasizing the significance of material immanence in mod-
ernist art.
Modernism has valorized the near-autonomous logic of the hand, sign
and metaphor in the making of artworks. This connects the modernist with the ‘primi-
tive’ or tribal artist by a looped argument, giving the former the privilege of possess-
ing a visual language and the latter that of contemporaneity. This universalized notion
of the image can be positioned as the common norm of modernist formalism, also
often standing in for ‘integrity’.
For a younger generation of artists it is precisely the displacement of these
three authorial elements—hand, sign, metaphor—on to other more problematic levels
of materiality and semiotics that is important. It causes a disjuncture of meanings and
loosens out new chains of meanings. It is in this manoeuvre within the conceptually
open, half-empty space of modernity that the more fraught social identity of the
contemporary Indian artist abides. And it is in the moment of historical mortality, in
the death-act of making and destroying the (art) object that the new politics of art
practice takes hold.
374 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Avantgarde Alternatives
In his formulation of the historical avantgarde, the German theorist Peter
Burger identifies some key characteristics, one of which is anti-institutionalism—
including opposition to the institutionalized autonomy of art. The establishment of
autonomous art within bourgeois culture is interrogated, a reconnection between art
and life and an integration of high and low cultures is encouraged.8
I will argue that if the avantgarde is a historically conditioned phenome-
non and emerges only in a moment of real political disjuncture, it will appear in
various forms in different parts of the world at different times. To develop this point,
I extrapolate from the American critic Hal Foster’s reflections on the subject. Although
indebted to Burger’s concept of a historical avantgarde, Foster takes issue with Burger’s
sectarian position on the avantgarde of the 1920s:
[H]is very premise—that one theory can comprehend the avant-garde, that all
its activities can be subsumed under the project to destroy the false autonomy of
bourgeois art—is problematic. Yet these problems pale next to his dismissal of
the postwar avant-garde as merely neo, as so much repetition in bad faith that
cancels the prewar critique of the institution of art.9
Clearly, a historicism that conflates the before and after and designates
cause and effect on the presumption that the prior event produces the later one is not
acceptable to Foster, and he goes on to say:
hegemonic and conservative features of the national culture itself. Two, a move that
dismantles the burdensome aspect of western art, including its endemic vanguardism.
That is to say, such an avantgarde would have to treat the avantgarde principle itself as
an institutionalized phenomenon, recognizing the assimilative capacity of the (west-
ern) museums, galleries, critical apparatuses, curators and media.
America have knocked peremptorily at the gringo citadels since the 1960s. Enough has
been produced in the visual culture of the neighbourhood to break any notional
monopoly of the American avantgarde. Other parts of the world find their own cultu-
ral equations and make precise linguistic choices. Clement Greenberg’s aesthetic, for
example, meant very little in Asia; there was always a greater attraction for eccentric
and excessive acts of art-making and therefore other models served the purpose. In the
post-1960s period, for example, pop art and the attenuated forms of narrative reflexi-
vity that R.B. Kitaj and David Hockney developed apropos what came to be known as
the School of London find reverberations among the narratively inclined Indian paint-
ers. The new image painters of the 1980s, like Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Sigmar
Polke in Germany, or the more florid Italians like Francesco Clemente and Enzo
Cucchi, strike a chord in Afro-Asian postmodernisms, given the expressionist bias of
the first-generation modernists in several of these cultures. On the other hand, the
mythic–romantic aspect of the conceptual art practised by Joseph Beuys and his follo-
wers has fascinated artists in many parts of the world, including younger Asian and
Indian artists. Feminists have learnt from each other across cultures and this brings
into the orbit of imagination artists as disparate as Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse,
Nancy Spero, Mary Kelly, Cindy Sherman.
An Indian/Asian artist does not aspire to be part of the monumental trans-
avantgarde of Europe; for the same reason the American avantgarde is seen as a dis-
crete phenomenon within mainstream internationalism. Even renegades from the
American canon—from the painterly to the minimalist, from the postpainterly to the
conceptual—gain other meanings in other contexts. The continuing debates on the
avantgarde, invigorating as they are, cannot—precisely because the avantgarde is not a
moral or academic but historical force—claim a determining discourse on the avant-
garde elsewhere. Once they are unstrung from the logic of a Euro-American master-
discourse on ‘advanced art’, third-world vanguards can be seen to be connected with
their own histories and mark that disjuncture first and foremost.11
It is true that in the (still operative) imperialist phase of internationalism
plural histories are hierarchized in terms of effective agency. But this view has been
repeatedly challenged since liberation politics came on the agenda. The discourse of
decolonization has staked the claim that these cultural alternatives, positioned as they
are at the cutting-edge of poverty, are as valid as any criterion that we recount in
conventional art history. Contemporary Euro-American cultural discourse cannot
function without a recognition of the major shake-ups that have taken place in its
hegemonic assumptions: just as Mexico and the Soviet Union challenged Europe in
the prewar era, and Cuba and Vietnam challenged the United States in the 1960s, Asia
may well be the economic rival and cultural nemesis of Euro-American power in the
coming decades.
Dismantled Norms 377
from the social to the familial to the subjective takes place through a relay of melan-
choly metaphors that can be seen, together with artists like Susan Victor from Singa-
pore, Chen Yan Yin from China and Bul Lee from South Korea as a corporeal and
immanent language of dissidence. Asian feminism stakes claims as a contemporary
intervention, revealing culturally rich female self-knowledges where family, self, social
abandonment and the erotics of pain are all put out for scrutiny.
Dismantled Norms 381
Facing page:
Above: 14 Chen Zhen, Jue Chang–‘Fifty
Strokes to Each’ (installation view), 1998.
Below: 15 Cai Guo Qiang, Bringing to Venice
What Marco Polo Forgot Project (performance
view), 1995
This page:
Left: 16 Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Girl Says
‘There Is Always the Night’ (installation view),
1993. Right: 17 Nindityo Adipurnomo, The
Burden of Javanese Erotica (detail), 1993
Nindityo Adipurnomo (Illus. 17) who welds ancient and new eroticism through the
use of exquisite craft, making the act of handcraft itself a voluptuous, if also ironical,
‘gift’. And of Soo-Ja Kim from South Korea, using traditional silk and brocade textiles
as ornamental flourish and floating arabesques, as deliberately devalued stuffings in
migrants’ bundles.
There is here a question of skill as paid labour and the problem of exploit-
ation of indigenist art practices. There is also a question of authenticity—not an issue
of being within a tradition but of possessing a language that transcends it while res-
pecting the material conditions of artisanal practice. It is not enough to fabricate in
order to textually deconstruct an art-object for its own sake. We have to find new
ways of speaking about the material predispositions of Asian artists as well as their
382 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
Heterogeneous/Heterodox
By confronting these [historical] issues, perhaps we can understand more
clearly the cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of transition and trans-
mutation. In the process, the concept of homogenous national Asian cultures
seen through consensual art traditions can be redefined. Indonesian installa-
tions that represent the violence and burden of postcolonialism can be con-
trasted to Korean history painting of resistance during the colonial period;
Philippine mural painting that makes allegorical reference to the Roman Cath-
olic faith can be compared to a Buddhist-inspired medicinal-herb installation
from Thailand or a cow-dung painting from India; the native female body is
examined as the focus of sexual desire and physical abuse in works by Indian,
Philippine, and Korean artists. This is not the ‘clash of civilizations’ . . . it is the
chink and clang of the heterogeneities and hybrids that make contemporary art
from Asia so full of surprises and expectations.14
To put it in more ideological terms, we must look not for hybrid solutions
to the tradition/modernity dichotomy but for a dialectic. The heterodox elements
from the national culture itself—which is to say the counterculture within it—must
first be put into the fray: the visual inputs of the popular, the marginalized cultures of
tribal communities, of minorities and dalits, of women. A space for contestation has
to be recognized within the national/modern paradigm so that there is a real (battle)
ground for cultural difference and so that identities can be posed in a far more acute
manner than postmodern notions of hybridity can accommodate.15
This may be the precise time to reconsider why postcolonial artists may, in
fact, refuse the passport of cultural hybridity into the postmodern. That is, of the post-
modern that promotes simulacra based on attenuated cultural mediation of the con-
temporary. It may also be the time for these artists to treat plurality as a means of pos-
ing a series of alternatives that have some bite left from the earlier, more dialectical
notion of contradiction.16 Modernism has (a still unrealized) revolutionary history—
even if it is at present in retreat; postmodernism, even if it is ascendant, coincides with
a retreat of all anticapitalist ideologies. I would like to revert to a historical dialectic
developed in the radical strains of twentieth-century avantgarde art and to link moder-
nism and postmodernism by that means.
Geopolitical Tremors
Globalization and its contingent ideologies make up the kind of post-
modern space that requires new mapping strategies. Multiple places and plural histo-
ries are yanked together as sites of speculation, as sites of operation for the TNCs, and
for their sheer exploitability in the labour and consumer markets.
Moreover, the TNCs force a form of multiple interference that dislodges
the earlier international stake and splits it into the local and the global. It thereby also
reinscribes artists into an anthropological discourse and gives them a command over
otherness that is, by now, largely emblematic. It is this that is prone to be trivialized
both by postmodern discourse and by the kind of postcolonialism that reduces itself to
ethnic banalities. We have to make sure that otherness has less to do with the fancy-
dress of multiculturalism and more to do with political reflexivity and cultural action
of a kind that opens the possibility of direct, democratic address.17
Even anthropology—the most located of all disciplines—makes sense in
its excessive forms at the brink: of subjectivity in extremis. Indeed if otherness is not to
become another kind of an ecriture you have to position the self and art practice in a
critical dimension: where linguistic investigation remains distinct from yet another
indigenist style and cultural translation foregrounds its political agendas.18
The possibilities of redefined location are coming to be better under-
stood by artists of the third world as they stake their position within the terms of a
new global culture. In that respect it is not surprising that Asian art has come into an
386 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
avantgarde aspect at a point of double reckoning with old and new imperialisms and
at a moment when the fruit of the economic miracle begins to taste bitter at the core.
If the Asian avantgarde is based on a sense of the future, as it must be, this lies in the
enlarged theatre of political contradictions.
The question, then, is not of reinventing discrete national traditions nor of
manufacturing something like an integrated Asian/global tradition. This politics
requires the harnessing of countercurrents—currents that carry and sublimate civiliza-
tional values crisscrossing those that painfully desublimate them.
Nor is such transgressive energy to be nurtured in the raw; the aesthetic is
elaborately coded in Asia and the recoding requires adequate formal means. It requires
an understanding of the classicizing principle; it requires considerations due to surviv-
ing artisanal practices in the commodified context of globalized economies. There has
to be an ethics of identity in Asian societies that requires not only posthumous retri-
bution on behalf of destroyed cultures but also devalorization of the self, of subjective
indulgence, in an act of living solidarities with the cultures that survive. To reiterate an
earlier proposition: acts of radical desublimation that avantgarde art practice require
are that much more complex in cultures based on a sublimation of civilizational ideals
through centuries.
A hermeneutic must be put to work in the art of Asia today; it is a major
excavation of precisely the geopolitics of place that includes tradition and the TNCs.
Marion Pastor Roces dramatizes this to excellent effect:
economically backward and socially oppressed sections of the polity: dalits, religious
minorities, women. These volatile forces threaten to pulverize the centrist state and
throw up styles of identity which shake the certitudes of its progressive nationalism.
Stepping back along the tracks of change, it may be worth mentioning the
two prominent approaches deployed to deal with the stress of change in Indian cul-
tural history. Terms like continuity, eclecticism and reinvention all try to work through
the more elastic substances of old civilizations—from tradition to modernity. The sub-
alternist’s response privileges transgression, subversion, hybridity, and proposes
another style of (or even exit from) modernity.
Once norms like cultural sovereignty, (autonomous) high art forms and
an institutionalized aesthetic devised alongside the compound canon of the national/
modern come to be dismantled under pressure from globalization, the transformative
and the transgessional approaches break down. Once the state and the national bour-
geoisie begin to play out the game of economic liberalization, the Indian artist is cer-
tain to have to shed ‘his’ singular identity, to arrive at a more polyvocal presence. It is
no longer a matter of pitching into an indigenous identity (frequently hijacked by cul-
tural conservatives), nor of self-representation through existentially authenticated art
forms. Even the strategies of subversion will need to be worked out into a new style of
making, of placing, of reconstituting the world of objects and values in the fragmen-
ted gestalt of our times.
Is there a substantive aspect to cultural differences within a changing
India? How do production values supersede the demands of conservative elites and
avid consumers—as also conventions of third-world radicalisms established elsewhere?
How do we relate with the radicalisms immanent in the social terrain at home, how
should we recognize and name an avantgarde in India?
The argument I want to introduce is that the model for an avantgarde in
Indian art could be part of the same dialectic that is motivating social theory. Consider
how Indian historians further the methodology that breaks down the national narra-
tive, the cultural paradigm, the object of attention and the very subject of history.
How they seek to replace teleologies (which happens to be the mode of projecting
modernist art) with phenomenological encounter and discursive analysis (which coin-
cide with the mode of apprehending the historical avantgarde).
Developing the analogy further: Indian social historians now frequently
work with the idea of the fragment, accepting that it provides a part-for-whole signi-
ficance in the moment of loss—the loss of a humanist utopia, for example, the very
evacuation of which has to be sustained by historical vision.21 The fragment may be
seen as something split off because of an ideological disengagement from the pressure
of a given hegemonic culture. Or it may be an element that was never integrated and
which further devolves to withstand assimilation. This could be the point at which the
feminine transforms itself into a feminist position, or at which the dalit consciousness
388 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
21 Bhupen Khakhar, An Old Man from Vasad Who Had Five Penises Suffered from a Runny Nose, 1995
a particular contribution to the relation between the icon and narration; and as con-
temporary artists of a progressive turn they translate the mythic into the allegorical,
allegories into contemporary, secular encounter.
There is an aura of hidden meaning with Surendran Nair; there is a play of
chance encounter with Atul Dodiya. What happens at the level of a hypostasis with
Nair is, in the case of Dodiya, montaged in the form of contingency. Both, as we can
see, are surrealist devices to enrich the image. They give the high modern vocabulary of
images (from surrealism) a second level of irony associated with postmodernism, and
yet remain committed to the meaning of the picture puzzle.
The Gandhi project taken up by Dodiya and Nair is a way of coming to
terms with the prime representative phenomenon of twentieth-century India (Illus. 23,
24). At the end of the century it involves a re-vision of a destinal life. In order to do this
both painters in their own ways not only paint Gandhi like a contemporary icon, they
inscribe themselves in the tradition of dedicated image-makers and, adopting the
popular mode, mediate the passage to the ‘sacred’ and beyond—where the calendar
image may be seen to serve the purpose as well as a ‘good’ painting in dispersing the
message. There is here a contrary semiotic charge: the reinstatement of the aura for the
image dismantles the actual sign, exposes its vulnerability: Nair’s Gandhi stands on
what looks like a weighing machine, his body studded with little crystals of salt and
Dismantled Norms 391
25 Atul Dodiya, Gabbar on Gamboge, 1997 26 Surendran Nair, Auto Da Fe, 1995–96
sand that spangle his back but also pierce it like nails. He is a martyr. Nair weighs him
with the salt of the earth and finds him floating—like an ascending avatar.
In their courage to re-present Gandhi, Nair and Dodiya’s ongoing repre-
sentational project grips the ethical over and beyond the merely semiotic game-plan
offered in postmodern art. The artists seem to position themselves as exemplary
citizen-subjects: in the choice of their iconography they are both conscientious and cri-
tical, and they evaluate its worth through the twist and turn of meaning in the still
available repertoire of cultural symbols within the social domain.
Both take up the Vishnu myth. Nair’s recumbent figure, whose body-line
is also the horizon, sprouts a whole herbarium from the navel; flowers, fireworks, a
forest of symbols shoot out and hang like luscious pendants, like instruments of
torture in the night sky. Mimicking the myth of origins, he gains this jouissance spiral-
ling from the male belly even as he screws down the pristine body with the unicorn’s
horn and, with perverse pleasure, fixes the godhead like a svelte dummy.
Alongside this recumbent figure Surendran Nair has made a succession of
erect torsos referencing occult iconography (Illus. 26). Featured as the cosmic body, the
torso becomes a framing device for more secret signifiers: towering like a silhouetted
mansion, the body is cut open by little windows in the tiered niches of which are
placed objects of ritual, torture, propaganda, provocation. While the protocol of the
icon is maintained (corresponding as it were to the flat picture-plane/ fixed frame, held
392 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
‘sacred’ in modernist painting), the icon is punctured and its numinous body deflated.
This kind of profane iconicity houses, literally, an arsenal of gratuitous devices and ite-
mized symbols; it spells out a vocabulary for a counternarrative about art and religion
alike. This is a kind of hermeneutic where an abstruse allegory is recoded without it
being demonstrably decoded in the first place.
Atul Dodiya’s Vishnu is surrounded by a zoological spectacle: the coiled
serpent, sheshnaag, lifts its reptilian head and smiles along with a chorus of devo-
tees, one of whom might be the redoubtable artist–creator—Brahma/Picasso/Dodiya
himself, blooming at the end of Vishnu’s abdominal gut. The myth of origins is here
returned to the sporting ground of a bunch of benign denizens; but it is the sly fox in
a vignette that gives the picture its title, Grapes Are Sour. The picture itself a mockery
of mythology in the spirit of an agnostic who, moreover, puts his origins at stake: he
openly recognizes himself to be the grandchild of modern art and is engaged in a life-
and-death struggle with the masters to escape their aura and project his own.
Thus Dodiya pushes on: he takes the postmodern penchant for pastiche
head on and tests the painting conventions of the high modern vis-a-vis the popular
Indian (Illus. 25). He inscribes the surface with lessons of art history—turning on a
sharp irony to camouflage the full force of genuine pedagogy. In his actual practice he
argues the case for painting with whoever will denigrate it as a sentimental relic of high
modernism; it is as if he is ready, singlehanded, to prolong the life of painting. And in
India, where there is no fear of its disappearance anyway, he incorporates the object-
nature of painting, objectivizing the painted surface, making of it a tough support that
receives the cryptic sign of disaffection. It softens to act out existential dilemmas and
hardens again to display, as on a billboard, the political travesties enacted in the every-
day. As painted surface and as the provocative iconography of a motivated self,
Dodiya’s work is brilliantly polemical.
Full-bodied Sculpture
A host of new avatars descended quite suddenly on the sculptural ground,
and ahead of their painting peers. The decade of the 1990s saw the rise of a new repre-
sentational tendency towards the iconic among young sculptors. These sculptors—
mostly from the art schools of Trivandrum and Baroda—made a dramatic rupture
with modernist conventions and offered a retake on classical Indian traditions. With
amazing figural skills, they began to redefine contemporary sculpture in terms of a
theatric ensemble of modelled, cast (from clay to plaster and fibreglass), painted, and
frontally posed figures in a somewhat kitsch and parodic mode.
The first retakes on the sculptural tradition came from Dhruva Mistry and
Ravinder Reddy; over the years, Reddy has found a way of further monumentalizing
the iconic form in classical Indian sculpture, making the gilded icon a voluptuous
object of contemporary delight.
Dismantled Norms 393
Another, different trail was blazed on the sculptural front in the 1980s: it
was first configured in 1985 in the exhibition Seven Young Sculptors, and then bet-
ween 1987–89 it developed into The Radical Painters’ and Sculptors’ Association.
This Kerala–Baroda group hammered out a militant agenda, arguing that Indian art
required a radical interrogation of political and aesthetic issues. K.P. Krishnakumar
adopted a heroic agenda in his tragically brief career. He used the figural gesture, often
profoundly comic, to taunt the viewer and also to signal faith in the sculptural pres-
ence itself. In an act of Brechtian double-take he hoped to reinscribe a lost humanism
in the local liberationist politics of his home-state of Kerala, and thenceforth perhaps
in (what he might have called) the betrayed map of the nation.
It needed a sculptor like N.N. Rimzon to mediate the aforesaid stances
with the choice of a reflexive language. Rimzon makes traditional icons a noble pre-
text for radical deviation. When conceiving the male body in the archaic–classical
mode, his antecedents are quite apparently the heterodox traditions of Jainism and
Buddhism. It is a body chastened by yogic austerities; it makes possible an apotheosis
(as in Inner Voice, 1991 and The Tools, 1993). But as an atheist Rimzon creates a
scriptural elision whereby other texts can appear in the discourse of the body.
He directs the image, anthropomorphic or symbolic, toward a material
asceticism that reinstates the aura of the artwork but challenges the processes of its
29 N.N. Rimzon, Far Away from One Hundred and Eight Feet (installation view),1995
Dismantled Norms 395
reification: through the suppressed ritual of carnal love, the concealing of the sacred,
the violence and purification of art. In a series that represents complete lovers, ideal
labour, upright ascetic—the last, the ascetic, becomes a portal. If you step back,
beyond its threshold, the ego reverts to the primordial. You can also step forward, as in
Speaking Stones (1998), into the historical. This classically composed ensemble is of
topical relevance. Rimzon encircles the seated figure with newspaper cuttings on
communal violence in India. Weighed down by stones that obscure the news but
assimilate the information, the seated man performs a profound act of mourning and
expiation as part of the responsibility of the retracting citizen-subject.
Formally, Rimzon’s work is a considered retake on phenomenological en-
counter, it is a contribution to the minimalist aesthetic of appropriate bodily regard in
the realm of the material/metaphysical objecthood. To the extent that it is the chasten-
ed body of sculpture that propels the viewer, this is a controlled encounter; and it is this
level of precision in finding a formal analogue for the activity of circumambulation,
for a meditative ambience, for spiritual protocol, that contemporary art gains a real
iconographic charge and the aspect of an incarnation in secular space.
Further, the indigenous tradition of dissent and locally pitched politics
takes Rimzon into the area of transgression, as in his work Far Away from One Hun-
dred and Eight Feet (1995), referring to dalit discrimination and the punishing rituals
of a caste society (Illus. 29). At that juncture, cultural exile from within the surviving/
stagnating communitarian structures is seen to be almost inevitable. The profane is
structurally present in the sacred, and Rimzon’s obsession with essence implies anxiety
that is itself a productive possibility of the soul—its private precondition of praxis.
While both aspects in Rimzon’s work, the absolute and the material,
retract to a notion of the primordial that is in the process of shedding metaphorical
fuzziness, mythical excess, he is in no way a primitivist. He is interested in taking the
coded body of the archetype and turning it into a replete object of contemplation—
and contention—in historical consciousness.
We have to find further ways of conceptualizing this oddly symbolic, vari-
ously displaced art practice that manifests itself in the stark gestures of civilizational
avatars, dismantled. For it is here, in the structure of a seemingly tabooed space, that
there is also signalled the ‘loss’ of a monadic self that is conceptually male.
modes like photography and video to work with the feminine as masquerade. Those
who take feminist concerns into issues of materials, female labour, ethnography and
environment. And those that enter the domain of fetish.
The oeuvre of the senior painter Arpita Singh holds the ground in order to
sustain and survive socially generated traumas. During the 1990s her image of the girl-
child, traced through the successive phases of her life to motherhood, forms the core of
an allegory that contains explicit images of subjective and social violence. This is often
portrayed in the form of a direct combat of wrestling bodies, or as peremptory death.
However, the frame that surrounds the painting holds this played-out terror in a balle-
tic balance. The protagonist matures in the end with the naked grace of a saint and an
apotheosis is revealed not least in the painterly manner itself. Arpita Singh marks the
moment of female self-canonization in Indian art. The body is represented to act out
mortal pain and erotic self-absorption with an almost identical gesture of liberation.
Related in her poetics of affection to Arpita Singh, Nilima Sheikh offers
the coded inflection of a carefully crafted visual language. With their medieval/
oriental sensibility, her miniaturized paintings offer vulnerable representations of the
female self converging on the body that bears and brings forth the child. Then, in her
enormous tent-like hangings she introduces a sweeping orbit, a mock-infinite spatial-
ization, thus establishing a mise-en-scene for the staging of the beloved’s performative
32 Pushpamala N., Phantom Lady or Kismet (artist photographed by Meenal Agarwal), 1996–98
scale, is evidence of the concealed modes of violent expropriation; the mutant’s soul,
planted with a stigmata, offers ‘the truth of the victim’.
In the decade of the 1990s Nalini Malani enlarges her engagement with
the identity of the (female) victim into myriad phenomena under the somewhat ironi-
cal trope of nature. She invokes psychic horrors worked out in mythological structures
and fuses these with biological and environmental degradation (as in her installation
for the staging of Heiner Mueller’s Medea, in 1993). In Medeaprojekt Malani works
with a new allegory for an ancient tale, investigating exploitation and violence as poli-
tical categories. Through the Greek myth she tests the ground for an argument—what
happens when you go ‘against nature’. Further, she transfers the anguish of female
othering into theatric forms of catharsis and critical reflex (as in her installation/video
for a staging of Brecht’s The Job in 1997). Most recently, she elaborates this
proposition of othering in a video installation about ethnic violence and fullscale war.
Given that female personae are now up for persistent masquerade, the
possibilities of photography, video, installation and performance open out. Besides
Nalini Malani, these have been tried by Rummana Hussain, Pushpamala N., Ayisha
Abraham. Turning to the medium of photography/performance, the sculptor Pushpa-
mala has had herself photographed (by Meenal Agarwal) as Phantom Lady or
Kismet—a heroine from B-grade film noir (Illus. 32). Through this persona, she plays
out the cliche of the desired subject/discarded object. The narrative sequence played by
Pushpamala in costume has a foreclosed quest: she is reified in the image of the dange-
rously pursued heroine replayed as an ironical denouement. The artist acknowledges
pastiche and reveals the trick: the empty enigma. In her more recent work (cross-
referenced to Cindy Sherman’s photo-project, Film Stills), Pushpamala enters another
kind of melodrama and gets herself photographed as a middle-class heroine dreaming
Dismantled Norms 399
her existence through banal situations and mass-produced kitsch. In its give-and-take
of dreams a commercially hand-tinted photograph becomes a perfect artefact; it is a
symbolic thing but it is also a simulacrum—the copy of a copy, the original for which
does not exist. In initiating that empty enigma the person that is the openly masque-
rading artist refers to a kind of pristine self, a demonstrably false innocence, whereby
she can conduct, as if from ground zero, a retake on the arts of representation.
Stripping Bare
Besides the working of these symbolic alterities there are specifically
annotated relationships with materials and labour in the work of Indian women
sculptors like Meera Mukherjee. And now, a new phenomenology and function of
the object that reworks a formalist aesthetic towards ethnographic readings.
The work of Navjot Altaf and Sheela Gowda makes the point of cultural
deconstruction through ingenious relays of material signifiers in transposed contexts.
Navjot’s project is about elaborating the context of art production from village com-
munity to metropolitan gallery. Sheela’s work is honed to a minimalist aesthetic that
makes the message spare—like a life-sustaining parable.
An ethics based on collective creativity informs Navjot Altaf’s practice as
she struggles with the received orthodoxy of Marxism and definition of radical art.
Having worked earlier with schoolchildren and women’s groups, she now attempts a
much more ambitious project: of living and working with tribal artisans and ritual
image-makers in village communities of the Bastar region, sharing the experience with
an art writer and a video cameraman who record the nature of the interaction.
Navjot packs the nakedness of her sculptures with the rude resistance of
archaic goddesses positioned within invented traditions of feminism that are notated
with contemporary texts. Her own sculptural style is openly ‘primitivist’. She amal-
gamates in the truncated, totemic female figures elements of innocence and fertility.
Other elements in the installation resist fetishist closure. She encodes little wrapped
rolls (tied tight like tampons) of newspaper cuttings about the affairs of women. These
are stacked and framed in acrylic. Thus her dwarf-marionettes are motivated by a
contemporary concern and they will make it across the pedestrian crossing (painted
on the floor of the gallery) by an inner/outer propelling.
The recent installation called Modes of Parallel Practice is more disparate
in means, message, image: the first factor in the work produced in the process is an
‘earthing’ of the image through the use of materials—notably wood and brick and
fabric—that are basic to tribal economies and cultures (Illus. 33). The jointly/discretely
made forms hug the ground and clutter the surface (adding to organic materials, PVC
pipes and plastic bags) and shoot up as totem poles, all the while declaring their
material/magical/use-value. As productive bodies and linguistic signifiers of a material
culture that is still partly based on barter (at any rate not completely reified by money
400 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
33 Navjot Altaf, Modes of Parallel Practice: Ways of World Making (installation view), 1997–98
exchange), they have a rough-and-ready existence. The artist enacts her belonging/
unbelonging in the theatre of this environmental work.
This cross between an anthropological experiment and an art workshop
has to be informed today with all the hazards and calumny that earlier primitivisms
and newer, revisionist studies of interculturalisms have gone through. The premise is
shaky, but what Navjot seems to suggest is that the primacy of metropolitan creativity
is equally shaky and needs at least to be played out from different ends of the language
network. She seems to say in this work and the texts wrapped around it in a semi-
confessional mode of contemporary anthropology, that we live through an astonish-
ing continuum of representational and symbolic attitudes and that it may be an
affirming thing to try and inhabit this labyrinthine passage, whatever kind of charade
this entails.
Sheela Gowda’s commitment to material existence, environmental con-
cerns and women’s labour in rural India leads her to choosing materials like cowdung
(treated/combined with neem oil and kumkum). Besides being part of the everyday
economy of the Indian woman who must recycle excreta as house-plaster and fuel, this
gives her a malleable sculptural material that is replete with meaning and, indeed,
properly signified in the realm of environmental/cultural ethics. Even as the woman’s
material existence is signified by the use of this one raw material, an antiaesthetic is
also benignly signified, accepting ridicule and recoil as part of the regenerative process.
Dismantled Norms 401
The stuff is turned into cowdung pats, bricks and walls, plumped and
strung like blood pouches or, as she calls them: ‘gallant hearts’ (Illus. 35). This trans-
position of basic raw material, this reissue of ‘primitivism’ becomes also a way of
anointing female labour; formal discreteness references art history, leads to subtle
allusions, even as the object itself remains deceptively simple.
Recently Sheela Gowda has turned to another kind of labour-intensive
artwork: she makes two sets of 350-foot-long ropes by passing 700-foot-long
ordinary thread and doubling it through the eye of a needle. Then, gluing a handful of
these threads and adding blood-red pigment to the fevicol, she makes them appear like
great coils of disembowelled innards. The rope-end is tasselled with the clutch of need-
les that have performed their meticulous task and now droop and glisten like a prickly
ornament or a miniaturized object of torture. The ropes are looped all across the
white cube that can be up to 20 feet high (Illus. 34). They thus dissolve the strict right-
angle format: a little like Pollock’s single-surface, high-tension drips, the strung-up
drawing—deep red on white—seems to flatten out the wall and floor. In the next
moment the dematerialized space refers to the dominantly male aesthetic of minimal-
ism (much like Eva Hesse) so as to challenge it.
These ropes that are like umbilical cords and intestines and blood-trails
become the body’s extension/abstraction in longing. They ‘tell him of her pain’, as the
title says, but make of this pain a strange ritual of self-perpetuation. This is a visceral
work, but very far from being gory. The woman’s body is erotically signified through
its absence and the work involves you in a combined enticement: of her labour and her
narcissism which together turn into the act of doing, nurturing, being.
When you return to the formal proposition the ropes, laid out as loosely
knotted arabesques in the large white cube, are meant to challenge body-scale. Even as
you walk through the festooned space the body disentangles itself and the linear
pattern recedes into a spatial dimension set for a virtuoso performance that you prefer
to behold rather than reenter. So the particular route which finally takes Sheela Gowda
to her concern with the ethics of (female) creativity passes through a form of symbolic
theatre, tantalizing you by pulling out yards of her wound/womb and the very arterial
system that pumps blood to her heart.
This kind of metonymy that never recoups the body to which it refers,
what sort of a subject does it figure, what sort of an encounter is this? I would like to
present Sheela Gowda’s new work as a radical unframing of the exhibition space. Even
as she feels at home in the white cube of the gallery she has adopted the logic of the
parergon—the frame that disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away and leaves
just space. And even as she entangles the spectator’s body in imitation as it were of the
artist’s own body, it is to arrive at the experience of an unfolding structure—the
temporality of what appears to be infinite unravelling but it is clutched and
terminated at certain points on a metaphor of pain.
Historical Markers
There is now a transgressive spirit in the contemporary art scene that
includes a welcome polemic on the ‘correct’ application of the modernist canon. More
recently, there is a critical reckoning of global post-modernism through conceptual
manoeuvres: I now go on to certain installations that set out materials, process and site
in such a way as to embed them in a specific social matrix. I am referring to projects
undertaken in recent years by Vivan Sundaram, Rummana Hussain, Nalini Malani.
Vivan Sundaram in his work of the last decade instals the historical motif
as a documentary/allegorical account of the contemporary. This is exemplified in his
1993 Memorial to the dead man on the street—victim of the carnage of Muslims in
Bombay in 1992–93. His successive installations unpack art-objects to become
metonymically linked signifiers. Then, in his public installation Structures for Memory
(1998, Illus. 41, 42), the object-world is conscientiously reassembled to become a
formal commemoration of the national journey.
A site-specific installation in the Durbar Hall of the Victoria Memorial in
Calcutta (a white marble monstrosity built by the British in the early twentieth
century), the Structures for Memory project is a workshop reconstruction of the
modernizing process in India. The installation disembowels the imperium by its
contradictory trajectories from floor to dome—as for example the 80-foot narrow-
gauge railway track that cuts through the middle and turns this ceremonial meeting-
place into a railway platform. A great symbol of British India’s modernizing project,
the Indian Railways (lauded by Marx, denounced by Gandhi) multiplies the meaning
of the space: place for transport and transit, temporary home for migrant labour and
refugees, burial ground for tragic journeys undertaken at the time of India’s partition.
A mammoth steel container on wheels encloses spoken verse from the partition.
In the first perspectival view, the cathedral-like space becomes a platform
or a lumber-yard; then the space becomes performative, with the sound input settling
406 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
in on rough-hewn objects such as the wall of jute bags inscribed with a hundred-year
history of (Bengal’s) peasant and labour movements. And then it becomes a museum
within museum for public pedagogy: 500 box-files with names and photos of eminent
Bengalis arranged like a bibliotheque. Each relayed element is notated and signified
through empirical data, displayed texts, voice-over and video images. Thus physically
montaged in space, the parts become mere signifiers, and the body navigates through
the structures of memory even as it steps into and across the obstacles scattered in the
project of recuperation.
Placed within a dome that is consecrated with verses by Rabindranath
Tagore and Jibanananda Das about the immanent forms of history, Sundaram’s instal-
lation is, by its very nature, overarching. In a transposed montage of many objects, the
imagined whole is a phenomenological experience that temporarily suspends historical
time. The interesting question is how the domed and perspectival (renaissance) space
of the Durbar Hall is also turned into a map, a flat-bed design for receiving informa-
tion, a crane-view of an urban ethnography archive, a fairground spectacle.
Inserted in the space is a consideration about the fragment: an installation
in so many parts is a lesson about how unfinished objects in a construed workshop
Dismantled Norms 407
constitute meaning. How, through recitations of names and dates and events narrati-
vized in time, they gain cumulative meaning. How, also, these objects reinforce the
contradictions, undo the need for condensation, refuse any closure of meaning. It is
through hands-on practice, through insistent proof of making and manufacture, that
Sundaram’s more ambitious installations—exposing methods and relations of
production—demonstrate a way of coming to grips with the material world, affirming
that it is still amenable to praxiological motives, future utopias.
Through foregrounding material process art history is specifically social-
ized. Formal devices are taken from minimalism and arte povera but the lay viewers,
walking here and there in a dispersed itinerary, make the fragments fall in place as post
facto historical design. Though the installation functions seemingly without authorial
presence, as a new kind of genre, the theatre of repeated encounters construes an active
spectator who tracks the space carrying a belief in the normative designation of the
citizen; a spectator who reconstitutes himself/herself through participatory presence
at the sites of knowledge production privileged by the ‘hidden’ author. If the possibi-
lity of reconfiguring the world by a conceptual recoding of the fragmented parts
requires utopian belief, a concrete form has to be devised to set apace, to motivate, the
408 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
lay citizen to become an inquiring subject. Dealing in public history, the artist creates a
mise-en-scene for discursive agency, ‘nominates’ himself as citizen-subject and stages a
democratic encounter whereby the author along with the sometimes recalcitrant spec-
tator reemerges as a political subject.
Rummana Hussain’s installation Home/Nation works through a set of
displacements where nothing adds up, neither the subject nor a place of belonging
(Illus. 43, 44). But the very unbelonging is specifically sited—in Ayodhya (later in
Lucknow). On offer are bits of body which make up in configuration a lived life of
pain, privation, longing and a strong compensatory faith. As for the nation, it is made
implicit through a negative commitment or, in the romantic sense, a negative capa-
bility to build an imaginary sense of wholeness through loss. Hollows of doorways
and mouth and fruit suggest the more wholesome convex forms that complete the
metaphors for life—full bellies, complete domes, lit halos and hands cupped in prayer,
not want. Rummana Hussain’s work is as much about material fragments in lieu of
historical evidence as they are about torn memory that is also emphatically historical.
Modes of self-inscription into the historical are worked out by the artist:
she proposes an aspectual engagement with the female body and devises personae that
fit each travail. After December 1992 she chooses a historically indexed masquerade
Dismantled Norms 409
about ‘the Muslim woman’. In The Tomb of Begum Hazrat Mahal (1997) the overlap
of female body (personally afflicted, always subject to intrusion and violence), histo-
rical site (Ayodhya, Lucknow, Bombay), traditional fetishes, wish-fulfilling objects
that help aestheticize pathetic and valiant prayer, produce a provocative montage.
This part-for-whole narrative about a Muslim woman’s identity in India
adds up in the installation to a kind of transcendent meaning so that while she speaks
of the fear of marginalization and social rupture, she confirms the intricate patterns of
a syncretic culture to which she contributes her own body—suturing the wound with
an autobiographical skill that translates into an act of social reparation. In her perfor-
mance piece Is it what you think? (1998) her own body is presented in a state border-
ing on apotheosis (she died in 1999). She asks crucial questions, as if from an Islamic
crucible, that return her to an immanent state of doubt about what is too easily theo-
rized as religious identity, female subjectivity/feminist protest.
And hereby she not only pitches her identity for display, she constructs a
public occasion to test the viewer’s gaze. She may not be equipped to signify the public
sphere which the citizen-subject inhabits but she knows how to polemically position
herself in the democratic space of a liberal society that consecrates the individual in the
fullness of her individuality and then narrows her political rights. She unframes and
then frames herself as icon, and evidence, on secular ground.
Nalini Malani, in a recent video installation, transfers the theme of sub-
jective masochism to systematically perpetrated ecological evil across the globe. She
has tracked down victims of chemical poisoning who stand as metaphors of old and
new imperialism including the vagaries of a globalized economy.
I used the word telescoping: it is as though Malani, focusing and refocus-
ing through a lens, spots the denaturing processes devolving earthly life into a conti-
nuous narrative of calamities. This world view has inevitably enveloped the theme of
violence and war: her end-of-the-century contribution to contemporary art is an
elaborate video installation titled Remembering Toba Tek Singh (Illus. 45). It features
twelve video monitors relaying scenes of religious terror/ethnic conflict, the undoing of
national boundaries, the migration of refugees across continents, the explosion of
bombs, the retraction into the womb of traumatized infants. The monitors are placed
in tin trunks on the ground with quilts pulled out like traces of fugitive lives. On three
walls there are large video projections: on the largest wall in front a video montage
shows simulated images of the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an
animation film by Malani where she draws, animates and bleeds humanoid figures
into the terrain of a guilt-ravaged universe. On the flanking walls two young women
act a charade whereby their iconic bodies unscroll themselves on the ground, gather
themselves and press against the imaginary surface of the screen. Distorting themselves
in the time-span of the bombing sequence, they suck the gaseous diffusion and
sublimate, as if, the lethal onslaught of bombs exploding on screen.
410 W H E N WA S M O D E R N I S M
45. Nalini Malani, Remembering Toba Tek Singh (installation view), 1998
The room with the video installation is bathed in a cold blue light. The
tin-encased monitors on a glassy (mylar-covered) floor reflect the flickering images.
The installation carries the name Remembering Toba Tek Singh, after Sadat Hasan
Manto. Heard at the site of the installation in voice-over, the story is excerpted to
focus on the death of the ‘lunatic’ Bishen Singh who stands between the new nations
of India and Pakistan in 1947. He is shot down by guards in the no-man’s-land bet-
ween the barbwired borders of the two countries. Nalini’s work is a response to the
nuclearization of India and Pakistan; the bombs make more belligerent the communal
call of ruling rightwing parties. The story and the installation, which includes archival
footage on India, Pakistan, Palestine, Bosnia, works as an allegory of the war victims
and refugees of the twentieth century.
In Conclusion
An avantgarde artist in India has to recognize that if the logic of modern-
ism is both syncretic and secular, it must also be radical; that while postmodernism is
semiotically diverse it must be pitched to the substantial message of history.
To that purpose we have to work out our relationship with the west-
Dismantled Norms 411
ern notion of alterity that is a form of absolute otherness as attributed to aliens, and
of a radical singularity in ethical and political terms as attributed to the self. For this
now produces a cynical, certainly bleak and abject construction of contemporary
subjectivity; and encourages alienation that dissimulates radical projects. On the other
hand alternatives—alternative positions in society—are quite visible in the southern
world. I believe that artists from the third world, from Asia/India are in a position to
still engage with historical options.
In the current conjuncture, then, there must be art at the cutting edge—of
community, nation and market. This art will differ from western neoavantgardes in
that it has as its referents a civil society in huge ferment, a political society whose con-
stituencies are redefining the meaning of democracy, and a demographic scale that
defies simple theories of hegemony. The national cannot, then, be so easily replaced by
the neat new equation of the local/global (as in so many ASEAN and other East Asian
countries), nor even perhaps by the exigencies of the state/market combine.
What we might look forward to, however, is not only emerging social
themes but a renewed engagement with art language, a radical compound of formal-
ism and history. A calibrated exposition of subjectivity through motifs from private
mythologies/interstitial images will match the task of grasping the shape of social
energies in their transformative intent. We know that it is in the moment of disjuncture
that an avantgarde names itself. It recodes acts of utopian intransigence and forces of
dissent into the very vocabulary and structures of art.
1993; and Journal of Arts & Ideas, special issue: ‘Careers of Modernity’, edited by Tejaswini
Niranjana, Nos. 25–26, December 1993.
4 For a recent account, see Michael Brand and Gulammohammed Sheikh, ‘Contemporary art in
India: a multi-focal perspective’, in Beyond the Future: The Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of
Contemporary Art, exhibition catalogue, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1999.
5 J. Swaminathan, The Perceiving Fingers: Catalogue of Roopankar Collection of Folk and
Adivasi Art from Madhya Pradesh, India, Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, 1987.
6 K.G. Subramanyan, one of the most eminent artist-teachers in contemporary India, has
elaborated on the uses of tradition in the making of art (especially as this was developed in
Rabindranath Tagore’s university at Santiniketan). He extends the idea of a living tradition
through an ever-renewed eclecticism. See the three compilations of his essays: The Moving
Focus: Essays on Indian Art, Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi, 1978; The Living Tradition: Perspect-
ives on Modern Indian Art, Seagull, Calcutta, 1987; and The Creative Circuit, Seagull,
Calcutta, 1988. His teaching methodology has been elaborated in Nilima Sheikh, ‘A Post-
Independence Initiative in Art’, in Contemporary Art in Baroda.
7 For a political historian’s perspective on the problem of colonial culture and derivative
discourse, see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative
Discourse?, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1988. I am also referring to the kind of mediation
conducted by Gayatri Spivak (In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, Methuen, New
York, 1987) and then Homi Bhabha (Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994) over the
past two decades on the question of the postcolonial consciousness. Reference should also be
made to works of fiction from the diasporic sphere that mediate by finding fictive spaces for
the denouement of the postcolonial imaginary, as in the inimitable Salman Rushdie.
8 The generative formulation of the problematic comes from Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-
Garde, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984. I am also indebted in the follow-
ing argument to related positions found in Peter Wollen, ‘The Two Avant-Gardes’, in Read-
ings and Writings: Semiotic Counter Strategies, Verso, London, 1981; and in Andreas
Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Indiana
University Press, Bloomington, 1986. See also the Introduction in Questions of Third Cinema,
edited by Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, BFI, London, 1994. Specific reference to the position
of plurality and cultural politics in the postcolonial era is developed by Paul Willemen in ‘An
Avant-Garde for the 90s’, in Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory,
BFI, London, 1994.
9 Hal Foster, ‘What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?’, in October, No. 70, Fall 1994, p. 8.
10 Ibid., p. 10.
11 It will be instructive to place the American discourse on the avantgarde as conducted, for
example, in the journal October, discussions of DIA Foundation and the New Museum of
Contemporary Art in New York, vis-a-vis the discourse on the avantgarde in the wake of de-
colonization and the subsequent postcolonial/third-world cultures in the journal Third Text
published from London.
12 There is growing literature on Asian art. For a comparative understanding of Asian art, see
Tradition and Change, edited by Caroline Turner. Also Modernity in Asian Art, edited by John
Clark, The University of Sydney East Asian Studies Number 7, wild peony, Sydney, 1993; and
John Clark, Modern Asian Art, Craftsman House, G+B Arts International, Sydney, 1998. For
a more popular review of Asian art, see issues of ART AsiaPacific, a magazine published from
Sydney since 1993.
Dismantled Norms 413
13 There is an extended polemic on these two shows. See, for example, Thomas McEvilley,
‘Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief’, in Artforum, November 1984, reprinted along with related
texts in Discourses: Conversations in Postmodern Art and Culture, edited by Russell Ferguson
et al., New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York and MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.,
1990. On Magiciens de la Terre, see Cesare Poppi, ‘From the Suburbs to the Global Village:
Afterthoughts on “Magiciens de la terre”’, in Third Text, No. 14, Spring 1991.
14 Apinan Poshyananda, ‘Roaring Tigers, Desperate Dragons in Transition’, in Contemporary
Art of Asia: Tradition/Tensions, Asia Society Galleries, New York, 1996, p. 28.
15 For discussions of popular culture, especially the cinema, see Journal of Arts & Ideas, Nos. 23–
24, January 1993; and Journal of Arts & Ideas, No. 29, January 1996. The discourse on mino-
rities commands a vast body of literature in Indian historiography: for the interlayered quest-
ion of caste and gender, see Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana, ‘Problems for a Contem-
porary Theory of Gender’, in Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and
Society, edited by Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakravarty, Oxford University Press, Delhi,
1996.
16 For a polemic on the necessity of working with contradiction as part of the project of anti-
colonialism, see Benita Parry, ‘Signs of Our Times: A Discussion of Homi Bhabha’s Location
of Culture’, in Third Text, Nos. 28–29, Autumn–Winter 1994.
17 For a perspective on the issue of multiculturalism in the visual arts, see Global Visions:
Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, edited by Jean Fisher, Kala Press/inIVA,
London, 1994.
18 Hal Foster complicates this issue to bring out its dialectic in ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, in
ibid.
19 Marian Pastor Roces, ‘Bodies of Fiction, Bodies of Desire’, in Contemporary Art of Asia,
p. 84.
20 I want to make a notational reference to two texts that can be seen to frame the question of
culture at this historical juncture. See Vivek Dhareshwar, ‘“Our Time”: History, Sovereignty
and Politics’, in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXX, No. 6, 11 February 1995. For a
dialectical response to the recent tendencies in social theory to supersede the discourse of the
nation, see Partha Chatterjee, ‘Beyond the Nation? Or Within?’, in Economic and Political
Weekly, 4–11 January 1997.
21 See Gyanendra Pandey, ‘In Defense of the Fragment: Writing About Hindu-Muslim Riots in
India Today’, in Economic and Political Weekly, annual number, March 1991. The concept of
the fragment finds elaboration in Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial
and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993.
22 I have developed this argument further in ‘The Centre Periphery Model, or How Are We
Placed? Contemporary Cultural Practice in India’, in Third Text, Nos. 16–17, Autumn–
Winter 1991; ‘When Was Modernism in Indian/Third World Art?’, in South Atlantic Quarter-
ly, Vol. 92, No. 3, Summer 1993; and ‘Navigating the Void’, in Cultures of Globalization,
edited by Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, Duke University Press, Durham, N.C., 1998.
(Later versions of these essays are included in this volume.)
viii P R E FA C E
List of Illustrations 415
List of Illustrations
I have tried to make the captions in this List of Illustrations as complete as possible.
Where dates of artworks are uncertain/unknown, I have followed a convention in art history and
used ca. (circa) as a means to allow up to a ten-year span. Thus I have attributed dates to all artworks
to fulfil the ongoing process of documenting Indian art. Similarly, in the case of artworks with uncertain
information regarding size and medium, I have included available/approximate details. While I take
responsibility for errors of information/judgement, this entire attempt, based on visual perception of
the artwork, art-historical crossreferences and consensus, is made in the belief that revisions will be
forthcoming when better evidence is available.
I gratefully thank the museums, galleries, institutions, private collectors and artists from
whose art collections I have selected works for illustrating the text in this book. These public and private
collections are named in the individual captions listed below. There are, however, some gaps and omi-
ssions in the acknowledgement of collections due to lack of information available to me. I regret these.
A large number of photographs and transparencies of contemporary artworks have been
made available to me over the years by artists. I would like to extend my grateful thanks to them for
helping me develop an archive from which I have drawn extensively in this book. I would also like
to acknowledge photographers whose photographs have been reproduced in the book. Among them
I have been helped to identify: Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, Edward Weston, Raul Salinas, Jorge Contreraschacel,
Marc Vaux, Jyoti Bhatt, Kishor Parekh, Prakash Rao, Prabjit Singh, Ravi Pasricha, Himanshu Pahad,
Meenal Agarwal.
All photographs from the following films reproduced in the book have been obtained
from the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), Pune: Damle/Fattelal’s Sant Tukaram, Dadasaheb
Phalke’s Kaliya Mardan, Ritwik Ghatak’s Jukti, Takko ar Gappo, Meghe Dhaka Tara, Nagarik, Ajantrik,
Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, Aparajito, Apur Sansar, Devi. I am grateful for their kind cooperation.
The filmmaker Kumar Shahani provided me with photographs from his films.
6 Amrita Sher-Gil, Bride’s Toilet, 1937, 88 x 147 cm, oil on canvas. Collection: National
Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.
7 Amrita Sher-Gil, Brahmacharis, 1937, 88 x 147 cm, oil on canvas. Collection: National
Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.
8 Amrita Sher-Gil, Ancient Story Teller, 1940, 90 x 74 cm, oil on canvas. Collection: National
Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.
9 Amrita Sher-Gil, Two Girls, ca.1939, 158 x 90 cm, oil on canvas. Collection: Vivan and
Navina Sundaram, New Delhi.
10 Amrita Sher-Gil, Woman at Bath, 1940, 92 x 70 cm, oil on canvas. Collection: National
Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.
11 Photograph of Frida Kahlo by Edward Weston, 1930.
12 Frida Kahlo, My Nurse and I, 1937, 30 x 35 cm, oil on metal. Collection: Dolores Almedo
Foundation, Mexico City, Mexico.
13 Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939, 170 x 170 cm, oil on canvas. Collection: Museo des
Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico.
14 Frida Kahlo, Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, 1940, 63.5 x 49.5 cm,
oil on canvas. Collection: Harry Ransom, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas
at Austin, USA.
15 Frida Kahlo, Henry Ford Hospital, 1932, 31 x 39.5 cm, oil on metal. Collection: Dolores
Almedo Foundation, Mexico City, Mexico.
16 Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column, 1944, 40 x 30 cm, oil on masonite. Collection: Dolores
Almedo Foundation, Mexico City, Mexico.
17 Frida Kahlo, The Little Deer, 1946, 22 x 30 cm, oil on masonite. Collection: Carolyn Farb,
Houston, Texas, USA.
18 Frida Kahlo, Marxism Heals the Sick, 1954, 76 x 61 cm, oil on masonite. Collection: Frida
Kahlo Museum, Mexico City, Mexico.
19 Frida Kahlo, Self-portrait with Cropped Hair, 1940, 40 x 28 cm, oil on canvas. Collection:
Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA. (Gift of Edgar Kaufman Jr.)
20 Frida Kahlo, Diego and I, 1949, 30 x 20 cm, oil on masonite. Collection: Mary-Ann
Martin/Fine Arts, New York, USA.
21 Nalini Malani, Old Arguments about Indigenism, 1990, 92 x 122 cm, oil on canvas.
Chester and Davida Herwitz Family Collection, Worcester, Mass., USA.
22 Nalini Malani, Grieved Child, 1981, 122 x 122 cm, oil on canvas. Collection: Vivan
Sundaram, New Delhi.
23 Nalini Malani, Love, Deception and Intrigue, 1985–86, 173 x 223 cm, oil on canvas.
Collection: Jaffer Islah, Kuwait.
24 Nalini Malani, The Degas Suite (after the monotypes of Degas), 1991, a set of 30 books
with 32 pages each, each book 23 x 28 cm, monotype/photocopy and watercolour on
sunlight buff paper.
25 Nalini Malani, Re-thinking Raja Ravi Varma, 1989, 51 x 74 cm, watercolour on paper.
Collection: Shikha Trivedi, New Delhi.
26 Nalini Malani, Watering Man, after Rembrandt (or, Small Joys), 1991, 51 x 35 cm,
watercolour on paper.
27 Nalini Malani, The Sufi and the Bhakta, 1991, 63 x 96 cm, watercolour on paper. Collection:
Devinder and Kanwaldeep Sahney, Bombay.
28 Nalini Malani, Hieroglyphs: Lohar Chawl, 1989, 76 x 61 cm, watercolour on paper.
List of Illustrations 417
51 Arpita Singh, Feminine Fable, 1996, 29 x 21 cm, watercolour on handmade paper. Collection:
Abhishek Poddar, Bangalore.
7 K.G. Subramanyan, March 1971, 1971, 62 x 62 cm, terracotta relief. Collection: Museum
of Fine Art, Menton, France.
8 K.G. Subramanyan, Wardrobe Drama, 1977, 55.5 x 55.5 cm, terracotta relief. Collection:
Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi.
9 K.G. Subramanyan, Mudras-I, 1977, 55.5 x 55.5 cm, terracotta relief. (Destroyed in
transit.)
10 K.G. Subramanyan, Figure and Mask, 1978, approx. 14.5 x 10 cm, ink on paper. Collection:
the artist, Santiniketan.
11 K.G. Subramanyan, Hanuman, 1979, approx. 20 x 16 cm, gouache on paper. Collection:
the artist, Santiniketan.
12 K.G. Subramanyan, Dog, 1956, 44.5 x 58 cm, gouache on paper. Collection: the artist,
Santiniketan.
13 K.G. Subramanyan, Monkey, ca. 1978, approx. 10 x 14.5 cm, ink on card. Collection: the
artist, Santiniketan.
14 K.G. Subramanyan, Goat, ca. 1978, approx. 10 x 14.5 cm, ink on card. Collection: the
artist, Santiniketan.
15 K.G. Subramanyan, Dog, ca. 1978, approx. 10 x 14.5 cm, ink on card. Collection: the
artist, Santiniketan.
16 K.G. Subramanyan, Woman at Tap, 1949, 91 x 61 cm, oil on canvas. Collection: the artist,
Santiniketan.
17 K.G. Subramanyan, Woman with Lamp-II, 1951, 91.5 x 66.5 cm, oil on canvas. Collection:
the artist, Santiniketan.
18 K.G. Subramanyan, Sitting Woman, 1951, 91 x 66 cm, oil on canvas. Collection: the artist,
Santiniketan.
19 K.G. Subramanyan, Seated Woman, 1958, 82.5 x 60 cm, oil on canvas. Collection: the
artist, Santiniketan.
20 K.G. Subramanyan, Studio, 1965, 84 x 114 cm, oil on canvas. Collection: the artist,
Santiniketan.
21 K.G. Subramanyan, Red Dormitory (polyptich), 1967, 123 x 92 cm, acrylic on canvas.
Collection: the artist, Santiniketan.
22 K.G. Subramanyan, Terrace-II, 1974, 166 x 168 cm, oil on canvas. Collection: National
Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.
23 K.G. Subramanyan, Girl with Cat-III, 1979, 36 x 29 cm, reverse painting on glass. Collection:
Mala Marwah, New Delhi.
24 K.G. Subramanyan, Girl with Cat-II, 1979, 39 x 31 cm, reverse painting on glass. Collection:
Vivan Sundaram, New Delhi.
25 K.G. Subramanyan, Woman with Pot of Flowers, 1981, 61 x 44.5 cm, reverse painting on
acrylic sheet. Collection: the artist, Santiniketan.
26 K.G. Subramanyan, Girl on a Settee, 1979, 39 x 31 cm, reverse painting on glass. Collection:
Gulammohammed and Nilima Sheikh, Baroda.
27 K.G. Subramanyan, Still Life with Flying Angel, 1980, 58.5 x 43.5 cm, reverse painting on
acrylic sheet. Chester and Davida Herwitz Family Collection, Worcester, Mass., USA.
28 K.G. Subramanyan, Pink Woman, Blue Man, 1980, 58.5 x 43.5 cm, reverse painting on
acrylic sheet.
29 K.G. Subramanyan, Still Life with Fishes and Cats, 1986, 85 x 59.5 cm, reverse painting on
acrylic sheet. Collection: Geeta Kapur, New Delhi.
420 L I S T O F I L L U S T R AT I O N S
30 K.G. Subramanyan, Training for a Bullfight, 1986, 85 x 59.5 cm, reverse painting on
acrylic sheet. Collection: National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.
31 K.G. Subramanyan, Figure on Sofa, 1994, 51 x 43 cm, reverse painting on acrylic sheet.
32 K.G. Subramanyan, Bahurupee-II (diptych), 1994, 104 x 64 cm, reverse painting on acrylic
sheet. Collection: Centre of International Modern Art (CIMA), Calcutta.
33 K.G. Subramanyan, Bahurupee-IV, 1994, 80 x 91 cm, reverse painting on acrylic sheet.
34 K.G. Subramanyan, Bahurupee-I (diptych ), 1994, 104 x 64 cm, reverse painting on acrylic
sheet.
35 K.G. Subramanyan, Yellow Street, 1997, approx. 152 x 152 cm, oil on canvas. Collection:
Karuna Khaitan, New Delhi.
36 K.G. Subramanyan, Annunciation, 1997, approx. 152 x 152 cm, oil on canvas. Collection:
E. Alkazi, New Delhi.
customers and a punished schoolboy (Pather Panchali). 12 Durga and friends at Ranu’s
wedding watch fascinatedly as a woman applies alta on the bride’s feet (Pather Panchali).
13 Aparna’s mother shields her daughter from marriage to an insane man: ‘Who are you
giving your daughter away to?’, she asks her husband (Apur Sansar). 14 Apu’s friend Pulu
(Swapan Mukherjee) asks Apu to marry his cousin Aparna to save family honour (Apur
Sansar). (Photographs courtesy National Film Archive of India, Pune.)
15–18 Death in the family. 15 Sister’s death: Sarbojaya embraces her dying daughter Durga
(Pather Panchali). 16 Father’s death: Apu helps Sarbojaya raise the dying Harihar (Kanu
Banerjee) so that he may sip gangajal (Aparajito). 17 Mother’s death: Nirupama (Sudipta
Roy) finds an ill and dying Sarbojaya sitting under a tree (Aparajito). 18 Wife’s death: Apu
receives news from Aparna’s natal home of her death during childbirth (Apur Sansar).
19–22 Bonds of affection. 19 Nature’s child: Durga with a calf (Pather Panchali). 20 The lovers:
Apu teaches Aparna English (Apur Sansar). 21 City friends: banter between Pulu and Apu
(Apur Sansar). 22 Father and son: Apu claims Kajal (Aloke Chakravarty), his son by
Aparna, and bears him away (Apur Sansar).
23 Apu gazes intently (Pather Panchali).
24–25 From Ray’s sketchbook: wash drawings of possible film scenarios for Pather Panchali,
sketched in the manner of comics.
26–30 The kash field. 26 Durga and Apu hear a mysterious hum (Pather Panchali). 27 Apu puts
his ear to the electric pole (Pather Panchali). 28 Durga is screened by kash flowers (Pather
Panchali). 29 Apu runs towards the train (Pather Panchali). 30 The train with a plume of
smoke appears on the horizon (Pather Panchali).
31 Aunt Indir: inquisitive, gaping (Pather Panchali).
32 Durga holds a guava to the old aunt’s nose: a shared moment of childish greed (Pather
Panchali).
33 Durga dances ecstatically in the monsoon rain (Pather Panchali).
34–37 The struggles of life. 34 Indir conducts her meagre chores (Pather Panchali). 35 Sarbojaya
calls out to Indir leaving the house in a huff (Pather Panchali). 36 Harihar gasps for breath
on the steps of a Benares ghat (Aparajito). 37 Apu prepares himself to meet his son for the
first time (Apur Sansar).
38 Apu daydreams while reading (Pather Panchali).
39 Apu, Sarbojaya and Harihar leave Nischindipur for Benares in a bullock-cart (Pather
Panchali).
4 Satish Gujral, Song of Destruction 1, 1953, 88 x 108.5 cm, oil on board. Collection: Jagdish
Kapur, New Delhi.
5 F.N. Souza, Nude Queen, 1962, oil on canvas.
6 Akbar Padamsee, Two Prophets, 1955, approx. 61 x 125 cm, oil on canvas. Collection:
private, Paris, France.
7 K.H. Ara, from the Black Nude series, 1963, 5 x 55.5 cm, oil and watercolour on paper.
Collection: Pundole Art Gallery, Bombay.
8 Tyeb Mehta, The Blue Shawl, 1961, approx. 122 x 91 cm, oil on canvas. Collection: E.
Alkazi, New Delhi.
9 Photograph of Jeram Patel by Kishor Parekh, 1961: the artist painting with a shovel in his
Baroda studio.
10 Himmat Shah, Untitled, 1965, 61 x 61 cm, sand, wax, plaster, pigment and silver leaf on
board.
11 Jyoti Bhatt, Manhole, 1962, black and white photograph. Collection: the artist, Baroda.
12 Nagji Patel, Animal, 1974, 60 x 46 x 23 cm, black marble. Collection: National Gallery of
Modern Art, New Delhi.
13 J. Swaminathan, Shrine-II, 1965, approx. 90 x 90 cm, oil on canvas.
14 Akbar Padamsee, Sun-Moon Metascape, 1975, 137 x 137 cm, oil on canvas. Collection:
H. Mallik.
15 Ram Kumar, Flight, 1976, 178 x 101.5 cm, oil on canvas. Collection: private, Bombay.
16 V.S. Gaitonde, Untitled, 1974, 177 x 101.5 cm, oil on canvas.
17 Somnath Hore, from the Wounds series, 1977, 49.5 x 69 cm, paper pulp.
18 Nasreen Mohamadi, Untitled, ca. 1980, approx. 48 x 48 cm, ink and pencil on paper.
19 S.H. Raza, Rajasthan,1983, 175 x 175 cm, acrylic on canvas. Chester and Davida Herwitz
Family Collection, Worcester, Mass., USA.
20 Biren De, June 1967, 122 x 173 cm, oil on canvas. Collection: Lalit Kala Akademi, New
Delhi.
21 K.C.S. Paniker, from the Words and Symbols series, 1965–66, 150 x 167 cm, oil on canvas.
Collection: K.C.S. Paniker Gallery, Trivandrum.
22 Sudhir Patwardhan, Ceremony, 1984, 127 x 107 cm, oil on canvas. Chester and Davida
Herwitz Family Collection, Worcester, Mass., USA.
23 Bhupen Khakhar, In a Boat, 1988, 170 x 170 cm, oil on canvas. Collection: Times of India,
New Delhi.
24 Gulammohammed Sheikh, Story of Aziz and Aziza, 1989, 167 x 122 cm, oil on canvas.
Collection: Devinder and Kanwaldeep Sahney, Bombay.
25 Arpita Singh, Woman Sitting, 1992, 40.5 x 30.5 cm, watercolour and acrylic on paper.
26 Jogen Chowdhury, Nati Binodini, 1975, 55 x 55 cm, ink, pastel and mixed media on paper.
Collection: Roopankar Museum of Fine Arts, Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal.
27 Madhvi Parekh, Durga,1993, 152 x 304 cm, oil on canvas. Collection: National Gallery of
Modern Art, New Delhi.
28 Rekha Rodwittiya, A Milestone on the Journey, 1989, 172 x 86 cm, charcoal on paper.
29 Photograph of K.P. Krishnakumar by Vivan Sundaram, 1986: Krishnakumar with unfinished
sculptures in Kasauli.
30 K.P. Krishnakumar, The Boatman, 1986–87, height approx. 183 cm, painted resin fibreglass.
(Destroyed in fire.)
31 Somnath Hore, Comrades, 1984, height 32 cm, bronze. Collection: E. Alkazi, New Delhi.
426 L I S T O F I L L U S T R AT I O N S
32 N.N. Rimzon, The Inner Voice, 1992, height of figure 207 cm, diameter of arc 456 cm, each
sword 71 x 17 cm, resin fibre glass, marble dust and cast iron. Collection: Foundation for
Indian Artists, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
New Internationalism
1 Krishen Khanna, Che Dead: Preparation for a Photograph, 1970, 184 x 125 cm, oil on
canvas. Collection: Ravi Rekhi, New Delhi.
2 Jose Bedia Valdes,What Have They Done to You, Mother Kalunga? (installation view),
1989, 300 x 300 cm, site-specific installation with wall drawing and objects on floor at The
Fort, Havana, Cuba.
3 FX Harsono, Just the Rights/Those with No Right to a Voice (installation view), 1993,
installation with fabric, cotton, plastic foam, doors, plants and natural materials.
4 Willi Bester, Homage to Bixo, 1995, 48 x 48 cm, collage. Collection: The Goodman Gallery,
Johannesburg, South Africa.
5 Doris Bloom and William Kentridge, ‘Heart’, 1995, 13000 x 7000 cm, whitewash-drawing
on fire-scarred veld at Walkerville, south of Johannesburg, South Africa.
6 K.P. Krishnakumar, Standing Nude with Outstreched Arms, 1989, height approx. 183 cm,
painted resin fibreglass. Collection: K.P. Ammalukutty Amma, Trivandrum.
7 Savi Savarkar, Untouchable with Dead Cow-I, 1996, 178 x 122 cm, oil on canvas.
Collection: the artist, New Delhi.
8 Nalini Malani, City of Desires (installation view),1992, six walls and floor, approx. wall
height 427 x floor width 366 x wall area 1830 cm, site-specific installation with drawings
in charcoal, watercolour, synthetic polymer paint with shaped drafting film and red oxide
on floor at Gallery Chemould, Bombay. (Work destroyed after the show; video film City of
Desires, directed and owned by the artist.)
9 Vivan Sundaram, Boat (installation view from House/Boat), 1994, approx. 750 x 300 x
175 cm, installation with handmade paper, wood, brass telescope, two video monitors.
Collection: the artist, New Delhi.
10 Pushpamala N., Labyrinth (installation view),1994, dimensions variable, charred wooden
sandals. Collection: the artist, Bangalore.
16 Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Girl Says ‘There is Always the Night’ (installation view), 1993,
350 x 720 x 60 cm., installation with metal boat, motor oil, hair, cloth and ‘sa’ paper.
17 Nindityo Adipurnomo, The Burden of Javanese Erotica (detail), 1993, 120 x 400 x 50 cm,
wood, photographs, jewellery and mirrors.
18 Xu Bing, A Book from the Sky (installation view), 1987–91, 4 banners approx. 1500 x 100
cm, 72 text pieces 103 x 6 x 8 cm each (folded), 19 boxes 49.2 x 33 .5 x 9.8 cm each
(containing 4 books), installation with woodblock print, wood, leather and ivory. Collection:
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia.
19 Montien Boonma, Sala of the Mind (installation view), 1995–96, 4 parts 270 x 100 x 100
cm each, installation with steel, graphite and tape recording.
20 Agnes Arellano, Vesta, Dea and Lola (installation view), 1995, 3 figures: 38 x 72 x 91 cm,
85 x 74 x 57 cm, 160.5 x 84 x 77 cm, cold-cast marble (life cast).
21 Bhupen Khakhar, And His Son Also Had Black Teeth, 1995, 61 x 45 cm, watercolour on
paper.
22 Bhupen Khakhar, An Old Man from Vasad Who Had Five Penises Suffered from a Runny
Nose, 1995, 116 x 116 cm, watercolour on paper. Collection: Ranjana Steinrucke, The Fine
Art Resource, Berlin, Germany.
23 Atul Dodiya, Sea-Bath (Before Breaking the Salt Law), 1998, 56 x 76 cm, watercolour on
paper. Collection: the artist, Bombay.
24 Surendran Nair, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Corollary Mythologies), 1998, 180 x
120 cm, oil on canvas. Collection: Nitin Bhaya, New Delhi.
25 Atul Dodiya, Gabbar on Gamboge, 1997, 214 x 152 cm, oil, acrylic and marble dust on
canvas. Collection: Centre for International Modern Art (CIMA), Calcutta.
26 Surendran Nair, Auto Da Fe, 1995–96, 244 x 183 cm, oil on canvas. Collection: Fukuoka
Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan.
27 Ravinder Reddy, Krishnaveni, 1997, 193 x 190.5 x 188 cm, painted and gilded polyester-
resin fibreglass. Collection: the artist, Vishakhapatnam.
28 Ravinder Reddy, Woman ’95, 1995, 166 x 84 x 60 cm, painted and gilded polyester-resin
fibreglass. Collection: Padmini Reddy.
29 N.N. Rimzon, Far Away from One Hundred and Eíght Feet (installation view), 1995,
approx. 2000 x 700 x 80 cm, site-specific installation with terracotta pots, straw brooms
and rope, at Buddha Jayanti Park, New Delhi.
30 Nilima Sheikh, Shamiana (installation view), 1996, 6 scrolls, 225 x 180 cm each, canopy
540 x 585 cm, hanging scrolls of casien tempera on canvas, canopy of synthentic polypaint
on canvas, steel frame, customwood hexagonal plinth with ramp. Collection: Queensland
Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia.
31 Anju Dodiya, Rose-fever, 1998, 71 x 107 cm, watercolour on paper. Collection: Sangita
Jindal, Bombay.
32 Pushpamala N., Phantom Lady or Kismat (artist photographed by Meenal Agarwal),
1996–98, set of black and white photographs in an edition of 10, 41 x 51 cm each.
33 Navjot Altaf, Modes of Parallel Practice: Ways of World Making (installation view),
1997–98, room size, installation with wood, paint, PVC pipes, cloth, feathers and brick.
Collection: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan.
34 Sheela Gowda, And Tell Him of My Pain (installation view), 1998, 2 sets of ropes 10,500
cm each, thread, needles and pigment. Collection: the artist, Bangalore.
35 Sheela Gowda, Gallant Hearts (detail), 1996, 366 x 30 x 15 cm, thread, cowdung, kumkum.
List of Illustrations 429
36 Mrinalini Mukherjee, Woman on Peacock, 1991, 214 x 130 x 77 cm, hemp. Collection: the
artist, New Delhi.
37 Anita Dube, The Book, from a 13-piece sculptural installation Silence (Blood Wedding),1997,
21 x 13 x 15 cm, bone, velvet, beads, thread,glass and lace. Collection: the artist, New
Delhi.
38 Subodh Gupta, Untitled (performance view),1999, performance by the artist at Khoj
International Workshop, Modi Nagar.
39 M.S.Umesh, Earth-work (installation view), 1996, time and site-specific installation on
one acre of uncultivated land at Kodigehalli near Bangalore with pigment, charcoal dust,
bamboo shelter, live cows, lights. (Work destroyed after the show.)
40 Sudarshan Shetty, Home (installation view), 1998, installation with life-size cow, paint,
wood, fibreglass, stainless steel and nylon rope. Collection: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum,
Fukuoka, Japan.
41 Vivan Sundaram, Structures of Memory (installation view), 1998, approx. size of hall
2000 x 3000 x 2000 cm, site-specific installation with 1500 cm rail track in the Durbar Hall
at Victoria Memorial, Calcutta.
42 Vivan Sundaram, Structures of Memory (installation view), 1998, approx. size of hall
2000 x 3000 x 2000 cm, site-specific installation with stacked gunny bags 500 cm high,
jute coils, velvet-covered objects in vitrine, in the Durbar Hall at Victoria Memorial,
Calcutta.
43 Rummana Hussain, Living on the Margins (performance view), 1995, at Chauraha,
National Centre for Performing Arts, Bombay. (Video of performance included in the 1996
installation Home/Nation at Gallery Chemould, Bombay.)
44 Rummana Hussain, Home/Nation (detail of installation), 1996, photographs by the artist
and Urdu text on handmade paper. Collection: Ishat Hussain, Bombay.
45 Nalini Malani, Remembering Toba Tek Singh (installation view), 1998, size of room 600 x
400 x 300 cm, installation with video projection on walls, 12 monitors with video clips, tin
trunks, quilts, mylar flooring. Collection: the artist, Bombay.
430 INDEX
Index
Captions to illustrations and the notes and refer- Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 348
ences at the end of each chapter have not been Apu trilogy, xii, 204; as ethnographic allegory, 224–
included in this index. 28, 287, 342; motifs in, 218. See also
Aparajito; Apur Sansar; Pather Panchali;
Abbas, K.A., 236 Ray, Satyajit
Abedin, Zainul, 272 Apur Sansar, 206. See also Apu trilogy; Ray,
Abelard, Peter and Heloise, 64 Satyajit
Abraham, Ayisha, 398 Ara, K.H., 303
Abraham, John, 343 Aragon, Louis, 88
abstract expressionism, American, 305 Arahmyaiani, 379
abstraction, 61, 71; American, 73, 74–77; and late Arellano, Agnes, 383
modernist poetics, 72–73; grid in, 72–75; Artaud, Antonin, 188
in Indian art, 67–69, 309; utopian, 69, 71, arts, state support to, 201–02
80. See also Martin, Agnes; Mohamedi, Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Asian Art,
Nasreen Queensland, Brisbane (1993), 328, 329
Adipurnomo, Nindityo, 381 Asian art, and installations, 383; and feminist
Adorno, Theodor, 294, 317, 348, 361 subjectivities, 379–80; contemporary aes-
Ajanta frescoes, 9, 10 thetic of, 383; cultural hybridities in, 384;
Akbari, miniatures, 32; school (of painting), 12 geopolitical influence on, 385–86; live
Akkamahadevi, 62, 397 artisanal practices in, 382; transcultural
Akkitham, Vasudevan, 390 signs in, 378
Alea, Tomas, 331 avantgarde, xiv, 7, 302, 329, 374–79; American,
Alma-Tadema, Sir Lawrence, 155 375–76; Chinese, 379; filmmakers, 353–
Altaf, Navjot, 399–400, 405 61; historical, 374; modernism, 115; south-
Ambadas, 307 ern, 328–31; western, 327, 375–76
Ambedkar, 332 Ayilyam Tirunal, Maharaja, 148
American, abstraction, 73, 74–77 (see also abstrac-
tion); avantgarde, 375–76 (see also avant- Bacon, Francis, 24
garde); minimalism, 75, 328 Bagchi, A.P., 164
Anderson, Benedict, 331 Baij, Ramkinkar, 5, 114, 117, 124, 203, 271, 279,
Anderson, Lindsay, 218 342, 369
Andre, Carl, 75, 77, 80 Bal Gandharva, 167
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 78 Bandyopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan, 204, 205, 220,
Aparajito, 204, 205, 206, 218. See also Apu tril- 222
ogy; Ray, Satyajit Banerjee, Bamapada, 164
Index 431
Baroda, 293, 368; M.S. University, 368 Brecht, Bertolt, 190, 273, 284, 35, 398
Barr, Alfred, 374 Bresson, Robert, 239, 240, 243
Barthes, Roland, 63, 65–66, 80, 134, 168, 170, Breton, Andre, 14, 15, 16
171 Brook, Peter, 295
Barwe, Prabhakar, 372 Brooks, Peter, 171
Baselitz, Georg, 376 Bruegel, 5
Baudelaire, 15 Buffet, Bernard, 120
baul singers, 186 Bul Lee, 380
Bausch, Pina, 35, 47, 48 Bunuel, Luis, 221
Bawa, Manjit, 369 Burger, Peter, 331, 374
Bazin, Andre, 221, 222, 239, 240, 241, 243, 259, Burri, Alberto, 307
260, 285
Beckmann, Max, 136, 139, 375 Cage, John, 73, 75
Bengal, popular tradition in pictorial arts, 109, Cai Guo Qiang, 379
110 Calcutta Group, 272
Bengal School painters, 166, 207 Calder, Alexander, 91
Benjamin, Walter, 267, 278, 345, 352 Camus, Albert, 68
Berger, John, 120, 323 Canclini, Nestor Garcia, 349
Besant, Annie, 104 Caur, Arpana, 314
Beuys, Joseph, 284, 328, 376 centre–periphery model, 284
Bhabha, Homi, 281, 344, 345, 346, 347, 349 Chagall, Marc, 39, 89, 285
bhakti movement, xii, 235–36, 242 Chakravarty, Jaishree, 397
Bhatt, Jyoti, 305 Chandragupta, Bansi, 252
Bhattacharjee, Bikash, 313 Char Adhyaya (1997), 278, 357. See also Shahani,
Bhavantarana (1991), 358. See also Shahani, Kumar
Kumar Chatterjee, Bankimchandra, 146, 255
Blake, William, 24 Chatterjee, Partha, 201, 341
Boehme, Jacob, 62 Chatterjee, Ramananda, 146
Bomanji, Pestonji, 164 Chekhov(ian), 221, 259, 357
Bombay Chronicle, 236 Chen Yan Yin, 380
Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group (1947), 124, Chen Zhen, 379
272, 304, 370 Chhabda, Bal, 309
Boonma, Montien, 383 chhau dance-drama, 185
Bose, Nandalal, 5, 105, 118, 168, 203, 20, 271, Chicago, Judy, 24
279, 302, 369; Haripura posters of, 110, Chittaprosad (Bhattacharya), 272
118; as head of Kala Bhavana, 108–09; Cholamandal, 293
response to nature of, 111. See also Santi- Chomsky, Noam, 339
niketan; Tagore, Rabindranath Chowdhury, Jogen, 313, 370
Bose, Santiago, 382 Christanto, Dadang, 378
Bouguereau, Adolphe-William, 148 Cixous, Helene, 61
Boulanger, Louis and Gustave, 148 Clemente, Francisco, 24, 376
Boullongne, Louis de, Bon de, and Louis de–the Clifford, James, 174, 224, 225, 343
Younger, 154 Coldstream, William, 118
Bourgeois, Louise, 23, 376 colonial culture, art in, 147, 148. See also Com-
Brahmo Samaj movement, 146, 205, 259 pany School
Braque, Georges, 116, 118, 121, 136, 139 communalism and the arts, 344
432 INDEX
radical conscience of, 226, 261; relation- Ibsen (Henrik), 258, 259
ship with communist movement of, 182, iconography, in films, 236–39, in miniature paint-
185 ing, 237; in oil painting, 237
Ghosh, Amitav, 334 IMF/World Bank, 299, 321, 339
glass painting in India, 130 Indian art, abstraction in, 67 (see also abstrac-
global culture, 339–40, 348–50; and avantgarde, tion); and present choices, 280–82; and
350; and indigenous traditions, 349 women artists, 3, 5, 399–402; artisanal
Godard, Jean-Luc, 193 forms in, 368; imagery in, 371; cultural ec-
Gokhale, Gopal Krishna, 149 lecticism in, 369–70; dialectic in, 386–87,
Goncharova, Natalia, 42 iconic in, 67, 69, 150, 371, 373, 367; inte-
Gopalan, A.K., 104 grated identity of, 365; modernism of, 370–
Gora, 277–78, 342, 357. See also Tagore, Rabin- 73 (see also Indian modernism); new figu-
dranath ration in, 388–91; pictorial allegories in,
Gordimer, Nadine, 345 389; representation of female body in, 395–
Goud, K. Laxma, 293 99; sculpture in, 392; secular identity of,
Gowda, Sheela, 399, 400–02 365–67; sited art works in, 402–10
Goya, 37 Indian cinema, as self-reflexive form, 203 (see also
Gramsci (Antonio), 202, 293, 300, 317 Ghatak, Ritwik; Prabhat Studios; saint
Greenberg, Clement, 75, 122, 285, 298, 305, 374, films; Shahani, Kumar); liberal aesthetic
376 of, 202 (see also Ray, Satyajit); mythic ma-
Group 1890, 67, 307, 368 terial in, 234–35; realism in, 226, 259 (see
Gruber, Francis, 6 also Ray, Satyajit)
Gu Wenda, 379 Indian cultural practice, and regionalism, 283, 289;
Guevara, Che, 198 and vernacular cultures, 289; place of the
Gujral, Satish, 91, 272, 304, 365, 373 modern in, 283
Gupta, Shilpa, 403 Indian modernism, xiii; and left front movements,
Gupta, Subodh, 404 298, 301; alternative culture in, 325, char-
acteristic features of, 298–99; development
Harappa, 91; mother goddess figurines of, 97 of, 8, 202–03, 287, 370–73; feminization
Haripura Congress, 110, 118 of, 4 (see also Sher-Gil, Amrita)
Havana Bienal, Third (1989), 328 Indian nationalism, 340–42; and left front, 342
Heron, Patrick, 118 Indian naturalism, 111
Harsono, FX, 378 Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association (IPTA), 185,
Hesh, S.K. 164 203, 204, 236, 272, 301, 342
Hesse, Eva, 376, 402 Indian postmodernism, 317–19; aesthetic of, 319–
Hickey, Thomas, 148, 171 20, and cinema, 320; political discourse in,
Hilton, Roger, 118 320–21
Hinduism, reform of, 258–59. See also Brahmo Indonesia, political art in, 378
Samaj movement Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 154, 171
Hitchcock (Alfred), 221 installational art, in Asia, 382–83, India, 405–09
Hockney, David, 376 international art, 284, 305–07, 327, 328, 331
Hore, Somnath, 272, 309, 365
Husain, M.F., 6, 91, 272, 303, 304, 365–67 Jalal ad-Din Rumi, 84
Hussain, Rummana, 398, 405, 408; and Muslim Jalsagar (1958), 226
woman’s identity in India, 408–09 Jameson, Fredric, 300, 301, 313, 343, 348
434 INDEX