Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia: Decoding Visual Worlds [1st ed.] 978-3-030-05851-7, 978-3-030-05852-4

Taking South Asia as its focus, this wide-ranging collection probes the general reluctance of the cultural anthropology

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Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia: Decoding Visual Worlds [1st ed.]
 978-3-030-05851-7, 978-3-030-05852-4

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xvii
Intersections and Implications: When Anthropology, Art Practice, and Art History Converge (Sasanka Perera, Dev Nath Pathak)....Pages 1-46
Front Matter ....Pages 47-47
Mimicking Anthropologists: Re-Membering a Photo Archive via Pata Paintings, Performative Mimesis, and Photo Performance (Parul Dave Mukherji)....Pages 49-72
Reframing the Contexts for Pakistani Contemporary Art (Salima Hashmi, Farida Batool)....Pages 73-92
‘Art’ of Ethnography: Feminist Ethnography and Women Artists in South Asia (Pooja Kalita)....Pages 93-114
Front Matter ....Pages 115-115
Globalisation and Local Anxieties in the Art of Bangladesh: The Interface of History and the Contemporary (Lala Rukh Selim)....Pages 117-138
Between Anthropology and History: The Entangled Lives of Jangarh Singh Shyam and Jagdish Swaminathan (Sandip K. Luis)....Pages 139-179
Toward Blurring the Boundaries in Anthropology: Reading Jamini Roy Today ( Jyoti)....Pages 181-203
Imposed, Interrupted and Other Identities: Rupture as Opportunity in the Art History of Pakistan (Niilofur Farrukh)....Pages 205-219
Front Matter ....Pages 221-221
Transcending and Subverting Boundaries: Understanding the Dynamics of Street Art Scene in Nepal (Binit Gurung)....Pages 223-249
Ruptures of Rasheed Araeen in the Politics of Visual Art: Toward a New Art Discourse in Pakistan (Amra Ali)....Pages 251-269
Collectivism in the Contemporary Sri Lankan Art: The History of an Unusual Case of Artists (Anoli Perera)....Pages 271-296
Back Matter ....Pages 297-302

Citation preview

Edited by Sasanka Perera and Dev Nath Pathak

INTERSECTIONS OF CONTEMPORARY ART , ANTHROPOLOGY AND ART HISTORY IN SOUTH ASIA Decoding Visual Worlds

Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia “Contemporary art is a complicated terrain. Artists everywhere are motivated by a critical impulse to engage with the ‘here and now,’ and they work like under-cover anthropologists, sociologists, archaeologists, political scientists, etc. In a scenario like this, contemporary art demands to be examined, and engaged with protocols that are beyond art history, art theory and aesthetics. As Sasanka Perera and Dev Nath Pathak convincingly argue here, if the nuanced nature of contemporary works of art is to be mapped and the organizational apparatus that makes it possible in the contemporary world is analyzed, then it must be placed in a wider canvas of critical engagement informed by disciplines such as sociology and cultural anthropology, and further, such an approach will transform contemporary art as a necessary focus of those disciplines. This is a volume that can induce a covert intellectual and political intervention in to the workings of individual eccentricities and curatorial, institutional and community politics that govern the art world today.” —Jagath Weerasinghe, Artist and Founding Chair, Theertha International Artists’ Collective, Sri Lanka “This is an unusual and vivid account of art and art history where its parameters are broadened to map its intersections with anthropology, sociology and history. Art and its crossovers are mapped with a view to enhance its horizon and making it more nuanced and complex. One of the first of its kind, the volume of essays by well-known art historians, art practitioners and sociologists, covers the wide arc of South Asian art from countries, apart from India, like Pakistan and Bangladesh as well as Sri Lanka and Nepal. The honing of artistic practices to disciplines like anthropology and sociology makes a valuable contribution to the existing framework of art history.” —Yashodhara Dalmia, Art Historian and Independent Curator, India “Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia: Decoding Visual Worlds attempts to understand the necessary dialogues between artists and sociologists in the postmodern world. It brings to us contemporary debates, which interlink art history, sociology, social anthropology and the thinking of practitioners. The contributors construct a map of South Asia as one, which beckons towards intellectual liberation.” —Susan Vishvanathan, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

“This is a unique book that brings together scholars from sociology, anthropology, art history and art practice who critically discuss and debate contemporary art practices in South Asia. The essays in the book are rich, textured and evocative and they point to what the editors refer to as the ‘polyphonic intersections’ between art practice, art history and anthropology/sociology in South Asia. This book will be of tremendous value to not only students and scholars interested in visual culture, but also to anyone interested in contemporary art practices in South Asia.”

—Janaki Abraham, Delhi University, India

Sasanka Perera  •  Dev Nath Pathak Editors

Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia Decoding Visual Worlds

Editors Sasanka Perera South Asian University New Delhi, India

Dev Nath Pathak South Asian University New Delhi, India

ISBN 978-3-030-05851-7    ISBN 978-3-030-05852-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931025 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover painting © Dream 3 (detail) by Anoli Perera (2017; 12in x 12in, acrylic, ink, water color, and printed image on canvas) This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface and Acknowledgements

Coming from a formal background in academic sociology and saddled with a personal and scholarly interest in art, we have often wondered why our discipline has been so obviously disinterested in contemporary art. Much of our concerns and the politics of undertaking a book of this kind have been mapped out in detail in our Introduction. This absence and our anxiety over it together constitute the point of departure for this book. It was very clear to us that mainstream sociology in South Asia was unlikely to undertake such a venture given its almost collective and pervasive perception of art as a ‘soft’ resource devoid of value in terms of data or information in narrow sociological terms. In this situation, the question was how to bring into a mutually sensible and intellectually benefitting conversation a group of sociologists, art historians, and artists focused on the broad theme, ‘how art might make sense in sociology in reading society and its politics.’ It appeared to us, in institutional terms, this kind of exercise would only be tolerated in a relatively new academic department such as ours. That is, though this venture was not a departmental activity as such, the Sociology Department’s and South Asian University’s lack of an established conventional approach to knowledge offered the necessary intellectual space for us to ‘dabble’ in the unconventional. What we have attempted in the book is to locate contemporary art in South Asia in the intersections of sociology, social anthropology, history, biography, and memory in the study of society, politics, and culture. Obviously, this implies an engagement with works of contemporary art informed by various disciplinary sources and approaches. We believe the intersections we have facilitated to emerge in the constituent chapters of v

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

the book provide a more nuanced intellectual forum to discuss art practices, works of art, life-worlds of artists, institutional interventions, curatorial politics, and the ways in which these issues are embedded in the evolving politics of the place we call South Asia. In this conversation, our attempt was not to ‘convert’ our colleagues from diverse disciplines to the mainstream thinking in sociology to talk about contemporary art. Instead, we have brought their own perspectives—both disciplinary and political— to bear upon a broad-based sociological understanding of South Asia. All this is easier said than done. One of the main hurdles we had to deal with is the variety of approaches to and styles in writing and exploration this exercise has necessarily allowed to flow into its discursive space. The way sociologists or anthropologists would look at the world and write about what they see compared to how an artist or an art historian might do the same thing is significantly different. We have not attempted to impose a singular narrative approach in how to be a scribe of society’s travails and politics. We have instead taken these varieties of seeing and writing as a given, as long as they allow us to travel across the political and social landscape of South Asia in such a way that would provide us the space for an informed gaze upon the region’s politics through contemporary art. It was not so easy to convince colleagues in the practice of art history of the significance of the polyphonic intersections that this book envisaged unearthing. In the recent past, we had heard many exclamatory remarks from art historians about sociologists’ ‘interest’ in art. This may be due to the sacralized disciplinary silos, which do not allow an art historian and an anthropologist to engage with each other’s objects of enquiry. We would duly thank, in the midst of such challenges, some of the colleagues who allowed a dialogue, irrespective of the existing regimes of boundary policing. We have duly acknowledged our interactions with Iftikhar Dadi and Parul Dave Mukherji in the Introduction as well. And in the same breath, we would express our gratitude to Roma Chatterji, a fellow anthropologist who looks at art with adequate seriousness. Her work has deeply inspired us. In the difficult task of ensuring the successful completion of this book, we would like to thank all the writers who have readily contributed chapters as well as the artists and other colleagues who have very enthusiastically allowed us to use their works of art and materials from their archival collections. These include Ruby Chishti, Vibha Galhotra, Bandu Manamperi, Pushpamala, N., Ayisha Abraham and the extensive archives

  PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

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of the Theertha International Artists’ Collective in Colombo. Binit Gurung photographed the artworks referred to in his chapter himself as he traversed through the streets of Kathmandu. We are thankful to Anoli Perera for giving us permission to reproduce her work, ‘Dream 3’ from her 2017 exhibition, The City, Janus-Face, in New Delhi. Finally, we are grateful to Mary Al-Sayed at Palgrave, New York, for her interest in this book and for ensuring its publication with a very reasonable period of time. We also acknowledge the professional help from Poppy Hull, Kyra Saniewski, and other colleagues at Palgrave at different times in the overall production process. Finally, let us place on record our gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript commissioned by Palgrave. The words of appreciation as well as the critical suggestions of these colleagues helped considerably in tightening the manuscript. New Delhi, India Sasanka Perera 1 January 2019 Dev Nath Pathak

Contents

1 Intersections and Implications: When Anthropology, Art Practice, and Art History Converge  1 Sasanka Perera and Dev Nath Pathak Section I  Contours of Quest: Arts at Crossroad  47 2 Mimicking Anthropologists: Re-Membering a Photo Archive via Pata Paintings, Performative Mimesis, and Photo Performance 49 Parul Dave Mukherji 3 Reframing the Contexts for Pakistani Contemporary Art 73 Salima Hashmi and Farida Batool 4 ‘Art’ of Ethnography: Feminist Ethnography and Women Artists in South Asia 93 Pooja Kalita

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Contents

Section II Political and Aesthetic: Explorations of Intersections 115 5 Globalisation and Local Anxieties in the Art of Bangladesh: The Interface of History and the Contemporary117 Lala Rukh Selim 6 Between Anthropology and History: The Entangled Lives of Jangarh Singh Shyam and Jagdish Swaminathan139 Sandip K. Luis 7 Toward Blurring the Boundaries in Anthropology: Reading Jamini Roy Today181 Jyoti 8 Imposed, Interrupted and Other Identities: Rupture as Opportunity in the Art History of Pakistan205 Niilofur Farrukh Section III  Art for Public: Individual, Institutions, and Issues  221 9 Transcending and Subverting Boundaries: Understanding the Dynamics of Street Art Scene in Nepal223 Binit Gurung 10 Ruptures of Rasheed Araeen in the Politics of Visual Art: Toward a New Art Discourse in Pakistan251 Amra Ali 11 Collectivism in the Contemporary Sri Lankan Art: The History of an Unusual Case of Artists271 Anoli Perera Index297

Notes on Contributors

Amra  Ali is an independent art critic and curator based in Karachi, Pakistan. She has been contributing reviews and issue-based writings for newspapers and other publications in Pakistan and internationally since 1990. She was a co-founder and senior editor of NuktaArt, the first international bi-annual art publication from Pakistan. Her publications include Homecoming, Rasheed Araeen (2014, VM Gallery, Karachi), and she curated a retrospective exhibition of Rasheed Araeen’s works by the same name in 2014–2015 at the VM Gallery. Farida  Batool  is an independent artist who explores Pakistan’s political upheavals and tumultuous history. Her research interests are new media, masculinity, visual cultural theory, and city and public spaces. She is currently teaching and heading the Department of Cultural Studies at National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan, and is the author of the book Figure: The Popular and the Political in Pakistan (2004, ASR Publications, Lahore). She is an active member of Awami Art Collective, which works in public spaces. Parul Dave Mukherji  is Professor of Visual Studies and Art History at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She holds a PhD from Oxford University and has a parallel research interest in pre-modern Indian aesthetics and modern/contemporary Indian/ Asian Art. Among her recent articles on aesthetics is ‘Who Is Afraid of Mimesis? Contesting the Common Sense of Indian Aesthetics Through the Theory of “Mimesis” or Anukarana Vada’ (in, Arindam Chakrabarti, ed., Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, London: Bloomsbury, 2016). xi

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Niilofur Farrukh  is a Karachi-based art interventionist, whose initiatives have expanded the space for art publication, curation, and public art. She co-founded NuktaArt and served as its founder editor for the ten years it was in publication (2004–2014). Her book Pioneering Perspectives (1998) focused on pioneer women artists in Pakistan was aimed at countering the anti-women narrative of the 1980s in her country. She co-­curated four ASNA Clay Triennials to reclaim the craft-art continuum. In 2017, along with a group of colleagues, she established the Karachi Biennale to intrumentalize art to connect a fractured city to itself and the world. Her co-­ edited book with John MacCarry and Amin Gulgee The 70s Pakistan’s Radioactive Decade: An Informal Cultural History of Pakistan is scheduled to be published in 2019. At present, she is researching the undocumented art history of Karachi. Binit  Gurung teaches Sociology at Thames International College, Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, Nepal. He received his MA degree in Sociology from South Asian University, New Delhi, in 2017. Salima Hashmi  is an artist, curator, and contemporary art historian. She taught at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, for 31 years and was also the Principal of the college for 4  years. She was also the founding Dean of the School of Art and Design at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, and is at present Professor Emeritus. She has written extensively on the arts. Her book Unveiling the Visible: Lives and Works of Women Artists of Pakistan was published in 2002. With Yashodhara Dalmia, he co-authored Memories, Myths, Mutations: Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan (2006, Oxford University Press, New Delhi). She edited The Eye Still Seeks: Contemporary Art of Pakistan (2014, Penguin, New Delhi). The Government of Pakistan awarded her the President’s Medal for Pride of Performance for Art Education in 1999. The Australian Council of Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) nominated her as Inaugural International Fellow for distinguished service to art and design education in 2011. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by her alma mater, Bath Spa University, UK. Jyoti  received her PhD in Sociology from the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, and has an interest in visual arts. At p ­ resent, she is Assistant Professor in Sociology at Bharati College, University of Delhi, India.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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Pooja Kalita  is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi. She broadly works in the area of feminism in South Asia, politics of visuals in sociology/social anthropology, sociology of food, urban studies, and Assamese modernity. Sandip K. Luis  is an independent researcher and freelance artist based in Delhi and Kochi, India. He recently submitted his PhD in Visual Studies, to School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has taught Art History and Aesthetics at various institutions in India and has published articles on modern and contemporary art. Dev  Nath  Pathak  teaches Sociology at South Asian University, New Delhi, and is editor of Society and Culture in South Asia, co-published bi-­ annually by Sage India and South Asian University. Among his recent publications are Living and Dying: Meanings in Maithili Folklore (Primus, New Delhi, 2018), Culture and Politics in South Asia: Performative Communication (co-edited with Sasanka Perera, Routledge, 2017), Another South Asia! (Primus, 2018), and Sociology and Social Anthropology in South Asia: Histories and Practices (co-edited with Ravi Kumar and Sasanka Perera, Orient BlackSwan, 2018). Anoli Perera  is an artist, art writer, and curator based in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and New Delhi, India. Her work mostly focuses on themes of memory, female identity, and urban space. At present, she concentrates on installations, photo performances, and collage as her preferred means of expression. She is a Founding Director of Theertha International Artists’ Collective, Colombo, Sri Lanka, and is its General Secretary. Sasanka  Perera  is Professor of Sociology and Vice President at South Asian University, New Delhi. He is editor in chief of Society and Culture in South Asia, co-published bi-annually by Sage India and South Asian University. Among his recent publications are Artists Remember; Artists Narrate: Memory and Representation in Contemporary Sri Lankan Visual Arts (Colombo Institute, Colombo, 2011), Violence and the Burden of Memory: Remembrance and Erasure in Sinhala Consciousness (Orient BlackSwan, New Delhi, 2015), and Warzone Tourism in Sri Lanka: Tales from Darker Places in Paradise (Sage, New Delhi, 2016). Lala Rukh Selim  is a sculptor and Professor of Sculpture at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. She was editor of ‘Art and Crafts’ of the Cultural

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Survey of Bangladesh Series (Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, Dhaka, 2007) and Art: A Quarterly Journal (Dhaka, 1994 to 2004), and a lead partner for the Dhaka University in the seven-year-long (2010–2017) education exchange program between the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, UK, and the Faculty of Fine Art, Dhaka University.

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4 Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3

Fig. 2.4

Barrel Installation by Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Colombo, Sri Lanka. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha International Artists’ Collective Archives) I Dreamt a Space Without Me by Ruby Chisti, Gadani, Pakistan. (Photograph courtesy of Ruby Chisti) Breath by Breath. Photo-performance by Vibha Galhotra, New Delhi, India. (Photograph courtesy of Vibha Galhotra) Dead Fish. Performance by Bandu Manamperi, Colombo, Sri Lanka. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha International Artists’ Collective Archives) Ayisha Abraham and Pushpamala seeing a scroll on the local goddess Manasa, in the company of Dukhshyam Chitrakar on the left, Naya Village, Midnapore, 1985. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave Mukherji) Pushpamala and Parul Dave Mukherji sipping coconut water in front of a vegetable shop in Naya Village, Midnapore, 1985. (Photo Courtesy of Ayisha Abraham) Pushpamala and Parul Dave Mukherji seeing a scroll sitting in front of a thatched hut with two children from the patua community, Naya Village, Midnapore, West Bengal, India, 1985. (Photo Courtesy of Ayisha Abraham) Pushpamala and Parul Dave Mukherji sitting in front of a thatched hut with Dukhshyam and his extended family of scroll painters, Naya Village, Midnapore, West Bengal, India, 1985. (Photo Courtesy of Ayisha Abraham)

20 20 21 21

51 51

58

59

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.5

Fig. 2.6

Fig. 2.7

Fig. 2.8

Fig. 2.9

Fig. 2.10 Fig. 2.11

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3 Fig. 9.4

The documentation scroll painted by Dukhshyam in 2015. The opening frame showing Pushpamala holding the camera, Ayisha Abraham, and Parul Dave Mukherji in Gulam Sheikh’s Studio in the Painting Department, Baroda, taking his leave to embark upon the Train Journey to Naya Village, Midnapore, West Bengal, India, 1985. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave Mukherji)62 Dukhshyam Chitrakar, The documentation scroll. Our arrival in Calcutta and our negotiations with the city traffic to catch a bus to visit the Naya Village, Midnapore, West Bengal, India, 1985. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave Mukherji) 63 Dukhshyam Chitrakar, The documentation scroll. Our arrival in Calcutta and our negotiations with the city traffic to catch a bus to visit the Naya Village, Midnapore, West Bengal, India, 1985. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave Mukherji) 64 Dukhshyam Chitrakar, The documentation scroll. Parul Dave Mukherji taking a class on the story of a painted scroll or Pata Katha at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave Mukherji)65 Dukhshyam Chitrakar, The documentation scroll. The closing frame showing Parul Dave Mukherji, Pushpamala, and Ayisha Abraham, showing the photos of the documentation trip to Gulam Sheikh in his studio in the Painting Department, Baroda, in 1985. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave Mukherji) 66 N. Pushpamala, The Ethnographic Series, Native Women of South India, Photo-Performance, 2004. (Photo courtesy of N. Pushpamala)70 A detail of Pushpamala in front of a thatched hut with Dukhshyam and his extended family of scroll painters, Naya Village, Midnapore, West Bengal, India, 1985. (Photo courtesy of N. Pushpamala) 71 Dinner for Six: Inside Out by Anoli Perera. (Photograph courtesy of Anoli Perera) 102 I Let My Hair Loose: Protest Series (2010–2011) by Anoli Perera. (Photo courtesy of Anoli Perera) 107 Mural by Rupesh Raj Sunuwar. (Photography by Binit Gurung) 233 Mural by Dibyeshwor Gurung. (Photography by Binit Gurung) 238 Mural by Julien de Casabianca. (Photography by Binit Gurung) 241 Mural by Artlab. (Photography by Binit Gurung) 243

  List of Figures 

Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2

Fig. 11.3 Fig. 11.4

Dinner Table, 2004. Installation by Sanath Kalubadana, an artist who worked with Theertha. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha Archives) History of Histories, 2004. Installation by R. Vasanthini, K.S. Kumutha, K. Tamilini, S. Kannan and T. Shanaathanan in collaboration with people from Jaffna at Aham-Puram exhibition sponsored by Theertha in Jaffna, Northern Sri Lanka. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha Archives) The Barrel Man, 2004. Performance by Theertha artist, Bandu Manamperi. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha Archives) Snakes and Mikes, 2007. Painting by Theertha artist, Jagath Weerasinghe. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha Archives)

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CHAPTER 1

Intersections and Implications: When Anthropology, Art Practice, and Art History Converge Sasanka Perera and Dev Nath Pathak

Many insightful reflections from history and philosophy of art could be stitched together to engender an anxious train of thinking not only about art as a process and cultural product but also about its relevance in reading society and politics. Among numerous articulations on the commonsense of art, we often hear that there cannot be a formulaic vantage point to judge art, that art is essentially about a mode of experiential expression or an expression of blissful imagination and therefore is embedded in a field of subjectivism. Within this popular commonsense, a sociologist might deem these relationships and conditions too messy to decipher in a way that would make sociological sense. Such a pronounced absence of art in sociology and anthropology and anxieties about art’s reliability in reading society and its politics are the foundation of this book. At times, oscillating between the sublime and the ridiculous, the bones of dead and living ideologies and utopias begin to fall from studio

S. Perera (*) • D. N. Pathak South Asian University, New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 S. Perera, D. N. Pathak (eds.), Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_1

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c­ upboards; regimes of exhibitionism and commerce of culture too join in the list, and the tales of art and art practices, become more telling than one can anticipate. And in this wake, it becomes self-evident how some social science disciplines have successfully and adamantly remained distant from intellectually engaging with art in general and contemporary art in particular. Sociology, social anthropology, political science, international relations, and history stand testimony to this situation globally, barring a handful of exceptions. In this scheme of things, monopolizing disciplinary interest in contemporary art has become the preserve of art history and curatorial practices. As a result of this discursive void, art, and the politics, it generates stand in the gulf between class and mass, art and craft, studio and gallery, street and art fare. And in that gulf, what art can say and what art becomes in social and political terms beyond their aesthetics have become inaudible. It is in this kind of void that the anxious but simple questions posed on art and politics by Das provide an initial signpost towards what direction we should travel in our own thoughts. He wonders, “when we wedge ourselves between politics and aesthetics, bravely imaging that we have an enabling concept in such an art, what indeed do we want art to achieve?” (Das 2010: 11). Indeed, does art end with a sense of aesthetic and satisfaction and commercial success? Or, should it travel to the realms of cultural production and discursive practices such as sociology? Or, as Das further wonders, “if politics is about constraining the choices of others, what is art?” (Ibid.: 11). Indeed, art can be stifling too. But it is also enabling in reading society if one is adequately perceptive to work out how and when to situate contemporary art in reading the politics of contemporary social processes. It is in such a context of engagement with art and politics that Turner and Webb have attempted to make a case for art’s implication in discourses of human rights (Turner and Webb 2016: 15). Their argument is, whether artists opt to directly engage with evolving political crises or maintain a distance from such turmoil, they remain a part of a cultural system, “and in presenting a particular set of images and attitudes, will necessarily reflect something about the lived world” in which they are a part (Turner and Webb 2016: 15). Contemporary art of the kind we focus on in this book needs to be understood as fundamentally a secular discourse (Zitzewitz 2014: 15). But within discourse, the complexity of artists’ practice acquires different meanings in their dealings with various artistic, religious, and political subjectivities which in turn are also linked to their individual social identities as well as historical experiences (Zitzewitz 2014: 15).

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Seen in this sense, art can open up discursive possibilities beyond the delimiting aesthetics and commerce of art, which are of interest to us. Paradoxically, it is in the art world that a perpetual mutuality of class and mass unfolds in spite of curatorial politics of inclusion and exclusion. Then, why most dominant practices of social sciences shy away from the abundance of clues, data, narratives, hypotheses, and research questions that surface in the art world. This stands tall as an intriguing question worth dealing with. It is perhaps of the perceived “‘impurity’ of art” or due to the ‘excesses’ and or the possible ‘false movement’ of images that undervalue their truth and capacity to enhance experience” (Das 2010: 11). When we attempt to address this absence, we would mostly do so within our own disciplinary domains of sociology and social anthropology. It is a somewhat baffling question why the extended domain of contemporary painting, sculpture, performance art, and installation has not become an area of consistent interest for those who formally practice social anthropology and sociology. This is particularly the case in South Asia even though the situation beyond the region is only marginally different.1 One may wonder whether the reason for this absence is due to methodological or theoretical limitations that are inherent in the dominant approaches of anthropology and sociology.2 But a self-reflective exploration would suggest that any methodological limitation is the result of the self-induced fear of the visual rather than any inherent limitations as such in either sociology or social anthropology.3 With anthropology, the problem historically has been its evolution into what Margaret Mead has called 1  A sense of this divide exists in other parts of the world too. At times one hopes about a possible bridge across this divide that might lead to a hybrid field of art practice. See Schneider and Wright (2013). 2  We dwell upon a collective exploration on the limits and possibilities in sociology and social anthropology in South Asia in Ravi Kumar, Dev Nath Pathak, and Sasanka Perera eds., Sociology and Social Anthropology in South Asia: Histories and Practices (Orient Blackswan, New Delhi, 2018). 3  In our perception, the situation in academic sociology is no different. In fact, we do not find it useful to maintain the spurious division between sociology and social anthropology in the present project as well as in the way we see the world around us. The unison of sociology and social anthropology in postcolonial South Asia appears in some of our other pursuits, such as op cit Kumar et al. We have dealt with the anxieties of the visual in social sciences with a focus on visual, performance, and other cultural expressions more clearly in Pathak and Perera eds., Culture and Politics in South Asia: Performative Communication (Routledge, London, 2017).

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a “discipline” or “science of words” (Mead 1995: 3, 5). Even though her ideas were mostly articulated in the context of film, what she outlines in her essay, ‘Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words’ (1995) resonates with the broader context of visuality’s location in anthropology as well. Her critique had to do with what she perceived as the discipline’s resistance to visual approaches because it clung “to verbal descriptions when so many better ways of recording aspects of culture have become available” (Mead 1995: 5). The obvious limitation in Mead’s argument is that she saw visuality, and in her case photography and film, merely in a simple utilitarian manner as technical devices for data gathering, instead of seeing visuality as a possible central focus of research or a broader kind of discourse. Banks notes, though “social researchers encounter images constantly”, it is not an exaggeration that in social sciences in general and sociology and anthropology in particular, “there is no room for pictures, except as supporting characters” (Banks 2001: 1–2). In other words, images have become mere decorative icons or at best supportive secondary signs to what the written text alludes to. This emanates from the reality that visuality, as a matter of method, research, or discourse, has not been contemplated seriously enough in sociology and anthropology. What Mead and Banks have noted with regard to anthropology’s dealings with visuality reflects similarly upon sociology as well though sociology’s encounter with visuality is far more marginal. Anthropology at least had a longer encounter with imagery from the colonial period onwards, particularly with regard to film and photography and the discipline’s interest in ‘primitive’ forms of art in the larger scheme of ethnography. This kind of affinity with imagery or art is much less pronounced when it comes to sociology. Schnettler, writing with particular reference to sociology’s encounter with photography, notes that the discipline did not clearly “develop an intimate relationship with photography” (Schnettler 2013: 42). In the same sense, sociology’s relationship with other forms of visuality more generally is also less pronounced compared to earlier phases of social anthropology. It is in this kind of context that any interests in the visual in both sociology and social anthropology have been expelled to the subdisciplinary domains of visual anthropology and visual sociology. In effect, this expulsion and voluntary exile on the part of those interested in visuality within the two disciplines have kept the mainstreams of both sociology and anthropology ‘cleansed’ of possible pollutants from the ‘subjectivities’ visuality might have engendered in the course of research.

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It is in this kind of context, we learn from informal accounts of sociologists and anthropologists in the region about the dismissive gatekeepers ridiculing research proposals on thematic issues on art, cultural politics, performance, folklore, literature, and so on based on the somewhat liminal, reductionist, and unimaginative argument that these are not adequately “sociological” or “anthropological”. Particularly in the conventional academic landscape in South Asia, how many young sociologists and social anthropologists are encouraged to undertake research on cultural expressions, art practices, regimes of visuals, and visuality? In general experience, in the biographies of scholars, there comes a moment of realization of a clear existence of a not-so-discrete hierarchy of research areas and interests and resultant modes of scholarship in the mainstream of anthropology and sociology. Political sociology and studies on social stratification, issues of caste, class, ethnicity, violence, and gender, or for that matter other thematic areas popularized by national-international funding agencies that vary from conflict resolution to conflict transformation, ride roughshod over other areas such as culture in general and visual arts in particular despite a longstanding argument in social sciences on the integral relation of culture and politics. This predetermined and ill-debated understanding of what sociology and social anthropology ought to be has negatively impacted numerous possibilities for intellectual development in these disciplines in South Asia.4 That is, this inherent intellectual conservatism of the disciplines has stunted many potentially creative avenues of research. It is in this context we can understand why a more robust and a theoretically nuanced sociology of contemporary art and visual culture has not yet emerged in any degree of seriousness within contemporary sociology. And this state of affairs supports the seeming fear of the visual, coupled with a methodological uncertainty—on how to deal with the uncertainty or seeming instability of the visual and visuality in the relatively certainty-obsessed sociology and social anthropology. This is unfortunate since there has also been a realization through heated debates that sociology as well as anthropology entails poetics, particularly in the ways ethnography is crafted. In fact, as the ‘writing culture’ debate in the 1980s and its aftermath have indicated, anthropologists became “more self-conscious than ever before that they are writers” (Marcus 1986: 162). Here, being writers also meant 4

 See Kumar et al. (2018).

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carrying a certain self-conscious expression of imagination and creativity in writing within anthropology. In these general circumstances, the ­‘literariness’ of what was published in the name of anthropology became much more important than the processes of research itself including fieldwork, which enabled this discursive result. To be more precise, this situation in social anthropology came about due to two interconnected reasons. That is, the clear interest in literary approaches seen generally across human sciences on one hand, and the pronounced interest in literary theory and practice evident in the work of a number of important anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, and others (Clifford 1986: 3). In their own characteristic ways, they have “blurred the boundary separating art from science” (Clifford 1986: 3). But this sense of creativity, imagination, and ‘art’ with regard to writing clearly did not extend to the realm of visuals in anthropology. When it comes to South Asia, even this realization of sociological or ethnographic texts as carriers of a sense of imagination and creativity exists only in the margins of the mainstream disciplines. It is in the context of this methodological, thematic, and theoretical conservatism of sociology and anthropology in South Asia Perera had wondered, “can’t we re-visit our overdependence on Marx and Foucault as well as an almost pathological obsession with caste, class and now gender in sociology and social anthropology? Is it impossible to find new objects to interrogate which might allow us to rethink our theory as well as the nature of research and knowledge themselves?” (Perera 2014: xxii–xxiii). This conventional background provides us the reasons for “why visual culture and particularly painting, sculpture and installation in our region have not moved beyond art history into areas such as international relations, political science and sociology” (Perera 2014: xx). But this is not an absence peculiar to South Asia alone. It is also global, and is based on the subjectivities art and cultural products in general are supposed to be infected with. Speaking at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris in 1980, Pierre Bourdieu as an established sociologist noted, “sociology and art do not make good bedfellows” (Bourdieu 1995: 139). His explanation for this apparent lack of cohesion between art and sociology suggests that it was “the fault of art and artists” “because the universe of art is a universe of belief, belief in gifts, in the uniqueness of the uncreated creator, and the intrusion of the sociologist, who seeks to understand, explain, account for what he finds, is a source of scandal” (Bourdieu 1995: 139). In other

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words, in the field of apparent subjectivities and plains of imagination within which art supposedly operated, it was not possible for art to be reduced to reliable sociological facts. This was the ‘fault’ of art, which made it unreliable for sociology. This is why, in Bourdieu’s opinion, sociologists were affectively keen on expelling artists from the history of art if they were to deal with art (Bourdieu 1995: 139). That is, to remove the sources of seeming instability in analysis. But Bourdieu also explains this state of affairs as a lapse on the part of sociology as well. One of the most crucial aspects of his explanations suggests, “sociology and its favored instrument, statistics  – belittle and crushes, flattens and trivializes artistic creation” (Bourdieu 1995: 139). Though he was speaking with regard to sociology in particular, the way in which art is viewed by social sciences in general is not that different. Even though that perception may not only come from the reductionist analysis offered by statistics, it does come from a narrow understanding of ‘science’ or what might be called scientism. However, without concerning ourselves too much about the vexed margin and the overestimated strength of the core, we operate with the conviction of exploring manifold intersections in this book, in order to develop an understanding in the intellectual twilight where sources do not become sacred or taboo. In short, we do not ask about the sources of an understanding vis-à-vis disciplinary orthodoxy. Instead, we ask how various disciplines come together to aid in developing an understanding. It is in this contesting backdrop that this book attempts to stitch together discussions from scholars in sociology, anthropology, art history, and art practice to explore the politics and poetics, structures of interpretative possibilities, and discursive implications of contemporary art in South Asia. By doing so, the book locates artworks and art practices in the intersections of sociology, anthropology, history, biography, and memory in the study of society, politics, and culture. This implies an engagement with works of contemporary art and the multiple contexts of their production, consumption, and their embedded memories informed by various disciplinary sources. The book envisages these intersections to provide a more nuanced premise for discussions on art practices, works of art, life worlds of artists, institutional interventions, curatorial politics and so on. In the scheme of these intersections, as it were, each chapter in the book emphasizes, while deliberating specifics (cases, mediums, artworks, artists, and interpretative messages), the imperative of conversations beyond disciplinary boundaries. Each chapter, in this scheme, is thus in tangential yet

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vivid dialogue with others, enriching the understanding of contemporary art as well as the politics of the social formations within which they emerge. The relevance of this endeavor arises from manifold issues. One, as briefly mentioned above, is about a critical revisiting and reformulating of the disciplinary framework of sociology and social anthropology. This is a much-felt intellectual necessity of our times, but has so far manifested only in terms of exceptions, which are few and far between.5 Though there is acknowledgement of the imperatives for pushing disciplinary boundaries to engage with art, artists, art-networks, and artistic practices, there is little evidence of this being executed in any concrete sense in the sociology and anthropology of South Asia.

Triggers on the Terrain of Thought A clear realization of the need to make conscious efforts in this direction arose via two occasions of intersecting intellectual interests, crisscrossing disciplines at South Asian University. The first trigger was a talk at the South Asian University in 2013 on ‘Art and the Visual Public Sphere in Pakistan’6 by art historian and artist, Iftikhar Dadi. Dadi took the audience and interlocutors on a fascinating visual tour of Pakistan’s public visual landscape via the on-site street paintings by artist Naiza Khan7 in Karachi, and the proliferation of popular works in the form of posters and postcards carrying the image of deposed Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein.8 The theme and the talk stimulated the anthropologists in the audience to formulate 5  In the present scenario, Christopher Pinney and Roma Chatterji are among the exceptional few approaching visuals of aesthetic significance within an anthropological sensibility, among others, who have shown the relevance of arts as areas of investigation transgressing the works of art themselves and venturing into domains of social sciences. These others include Tapati Guha Thakurta, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Geeta Kapoor, Jagath Weerasinghe, Iftikhar Dadi, and Salima Hashmi. Interestingly, prior to ‘filed work’ becoming an anthropological fetish, one of the pioneers of Indian sociology/anthropology, Radhakamal Mukherjee wrote the interesting text, The Culture and Art of India (Mushiram Manoharlal Publisher) in the broader South Asian context. But Mukherjee’s interests have not been followed-up in the practices of post-independent anthropology and sociology in South Asia. 6  Lecture organized by the Department of Sociology, South Asian University as part of the ‘Reading South Asia Lecture Series 2013’ on 26 August 2013. 7  For more information on the work of Naiza Khan, please visit http://naizakhan.com/ (accessed 19 August 2018). 8  For more information on the discussion on Naiza Khan’s artwork in public space and the Sadam Hussein poster phenomenon, see Dadi (2009).

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some questions bridging what appeared to be disciplinary gaps between art history and anthropology. These questions were: why Naiza Khan had opted to venture into the turbulent streets of Karachi away from the safety and comfort of her studio, and how a figure such as Saddam Hussein, historically relatively unknown in Pakistan, had suddenly become so popular, and why his image was at times depicted in a religious context when Hussein was not known to be religiously oriented within the stream of politics he engendered as part of the political agenda of the Ba’ath Party, which he headed? Dadi had pushed open the windows on these questions for which the anthropologists in the audience sought comprehensive answers. In our mind, this seemed to offer the possibilities for a more complete, engaged and nuanced narrative about these artworks, the processes that enabled them as well as the broader contexts of their production and consumption and finally their narrative potential in terms of evolving local politics. The question that emerged in our mind sought to see art more clearly in conjunction with politics, culture, and other social complexities, to say the least, expecting a series of disciplinary departures. Prior to this encounter, in the context of the exhibition titled, Lines of Control, Dadi and Nasar (2012) has reflected on the intersecting biography of the artist, in this case Dadi himself and his works of art. With reference to his two works9 in the exhibition, which Dadi co-curated with Hammad Nasar, he underlines the ‘tangled legacies’ of the artists’, “undisciplined practice that refuse to be contained by institutional or disciplinary protocols and therefore able to provide new insights into our predicaments” (Dadi and Nasar 2012: 20). Some of these issues figure prominently in the discussions in the chapters in this book. What Dadi and Nasar has described as a thematic in Lines of Control (2012) is evident in reflections on contemporary visual arts in Sri Lanka too. The complex interplay of personal biographies and social and political history, individual and collective memories, cultural and political stimulus comes to the surface in discussions on contemporary visual art in Sri Lanka.10 It is in this context that Weerasinghe, with reference to ‘the art of the 90s’ 9  The works are titled Muslims are meat-eaters, they prefer food containing salt. Hindus on the other hand prefer a sweet taste and I at least, have never seen or heard of such wonderful people. For more details, see the essay by Iftikhar Dadi and Hammad Nasar, in the catalog, Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space. New  York: Cornell University Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 2012. 10  For more details on this, see Weerasinghe (2005) and Perera (2016).

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identifies two important thematic preoccupations. These are, “works that investigates the self, and the sense of being of individuals who have been victimized and frustrated as a consequence of organized violence” on one hand and “works that investigates the allure as well as the frustrations of the city as an artistic expression” on the other (Weerasinghe 2005: 15–40). One can argue, both these trends are biographical because these themes visually express personal experiences of artists as individuals in society as well as their more general collective experiences as a particular generation (Perera 2016: 212). Art of the 1990s are impregnated with politics, which goes much beyond their aesthetics and materiality with regard to meaning-­making. Besides, most of these artists considered themselves ‘political artists’ due to the somewhat obvious political and interventionist agenda of their work (Weerasinghe 2005; Perera 2016). It is this self-conscious engagement with politics that offer a specific identity to the artists of this period, which also marks this genre of art from earlier forms of art-making (Perera 2016: 212). Weerasinghe perceives these individuals as a “new generation of artists equipped with a range of new ideas and concepts of art, themes for artistic investigation and, especially, with an understanding of the idea of the artist as a political individual” (Weerasinghe 2005: 183). In a somewhat different way, the biographies as well as the artworks of women artists in Pakistan as described by Salima Hashmi (2002) further elaborate the narrative possibilities in the broader reading of politics in Pakistan. The history of women who received a training in art in the 1940s would indicate that this training was expected to “enhance the natural proclivities of women” that would make them better ‘home decorators’ and “nurture the finer sensibilities expected of mothers, wives and daughters” (Hashmi 2002: 7). It was in this context that the Department of Fine Arts at Punjab University was exclusively reserved for women. They were not expected to be independent and professional artists in this situation, but art teachers at best. And it took a considerable time for what was begun as safe educational conduit for women to transform into a “vehicle for communication and expression in the public domain, and paved the way for personal and cultural insurrections” (Hashmi 2002: 7). In other words, a biographical exploration of women in art in the 1940s and 1950s would clearly place in context the realities of gender relations in Pakistan as well as women’s position in these relationships. But between the late 1970s and late 1980s, women had not only become fully-fledged artists, but their work also creatively took on the challenges put up by martial law as evident in their personal biographies and work produced (Hashmi 2002: 91–144).

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The focus on biography of artists as well as art’s relationships with the broader world is crucial if art is to inform sociology. But it is also necessary to broaden this focus as well. As Bourdieu has noted, “the sociology of cultural products must take as its object the whole set of relationships (objective ones and also those effected in the form of interaction) between the artist and other artists, and beyond them, the whole set of agents engaged in the production of work, or, at least, of the social value of the work (critics, gallery directors, patrons etc)”11 (Bourdieu 1995: 141). For him, sociology of works of art needs to take the entire field of cultural production into account as well as the relationship between this field and the field of consumers. In other words, art would make sense in sociology if it can weave a narrative that would span beyond the limited frame of an artwork and embrace larger political and social situations within which they are created. This is what he means when he notes, “the social determinism of which the work of art bears the traces, are exerted partly through the producer’s habitus” (Bourdieu 1995: 141). Habitus, in this sense, extends from the artists’ personal circumstances to their location in society at a specific temporal moment. So despite Bourdieu’s suspicion of art as sociological facts in the way they are generally considered, what he outlines as ‘sociology of works of art’ (as outlined above) is an invitation to ensure that art becomes more legible and more reliable in sociological terms. That is, instead of looking at art and sociology in the conventional sense, which does not allow for a dialogue, he hints at a path, which might usher in art to the centrality of sociological readings of society, politics, and culture. But contemporary art everywhere, and as evident in South Asia as well, throws up a number of hurdles in communication and representation, which can be challenging to the discourse of meaning they are supposed to generate. As Ali has noted with regard to contemporary Pakistani art, visiting a gallery itself could be intimidating to a normal person, while “new media art forms like assemblage, performance, video and installation” could add to the complexity of viewing and comprehending (Ali 2011). Unlike much of pre-abstract modernist art or even pre-modern forms of art in South Asia like religious art, contemporary works such as installations can be “ephemeral, site-specific arrangements of objects that you can walk around, into and through to experience their message” Ali 2011: 7). But precisely due to the complexity of arrangement and their  Emphasis in the original.

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vast deviation from what is considered art generally, the meanings embedded in these could easily be lost. This becomes a significant issue if this kind of art is meant to go beyond aesthetics and the market into the realms of politics and social transformation. In other words, they can alienate viewers (Ali 2011: 7). Though Ali has described this seeming disconnect between contemporary art and ordinary people with regard to Pakistan, the situation is much the same in India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka with regard to the same kind of work. How does one deal with this rupture in representation when art at one level is not only supposed to make meaning but also transmit such meanings? If contemporary art is to inform the craft of sociology, then, in addition to taking into consideration the broader contexts of its production and consumption as suggested by Bourdieu, it will also be necessary to take into account the meanings embedded in a given artwork. And these meanings must be able to create a discourse; they cannot be imprisoned within an artwork, which would always need the mediation of its creator to decipher its meanings. This is why the biography and the habitus of an artist as well as the larger context in which it is located are of significant importance. Such a broad canvass would allow much more nuanced space for these meanings to manifest. Of course, one can argue, this is what art history already does to some extent. But if sociology or anthropology looks at art in this manner, the canvass that might unfold becomes much larger, and its analytic possibilities get further entrenched as social and political analysis inherent in these disciplines naturally flows into art. This kind of privileging of art and their creators however is not a matter of equalizing the agency of artists with regard to their work and their location in society and within discourse. It is in such a context that Preziosi and Farago argue for the re-consideration of the transformative power of artists when they suggest, “the agency assigned to the artist could vary according to who is speaking, to whom and to what purpose” (2012: 28). That is, the political power available to the artists considered in the reflections by Dadi, Weerasinghe, and Hashmi in Pakistan and Sri Lanka would be very different to yet others whose voices are less audible and their work less visible. However, it is conceivable that art as well as other forms of culture and forms of formal knowledge “has a crucial role to play in the realm of politics, in the domain of discourse and within the vistas of our conscience” (Perera 2014: xx). If so, they also can have a legitimate presence in the discourses of social sciences beyond art history. In this sense, what Dadi and Hashmi have described for Pakistan and Weerasinghe for

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Sri Lanka are clear examples of the discursive potential of contemporary art in the region, which ideally should be of interest to sociology and anthropology in their intellectual pursuits in reading society. The second trigger is a conversation with art historian Parul Dave Mukherji (one of the contributors to this book) on the intersections of sociology, art, and art history. One of the themes that emerged quite clearly in this conversation was the manner in which some contemporary visual artists have resorted to what has been termed an ‘ethnographic turn’ in art practice.12 As initially outlined in his important essay, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’ (1995), what Hal Foster referred to by the term ‘ethnographic turn’ in contemporary art were the intriguing similarities with anthropology in general and ethnographic research more specifically that was evident in selected post-1990s art practices. That is, such similarities manifested in the way artists as well as curators utilized research and theorization and the ways in which they dealt with cultural differences and politics of representation in their artistic endeavors. More specifically, as Rutten et al. have pointed out, Lan Tuazon, Nikki S. Lee, Bill Viola, Francesco Clemente, Jimmy Durham, Susan Hiller, and other such artists share with anthropologists a concerted interest in the ‘politics of representation’ (Rutten et al. 2013: 459). Similarly, the main aim of the 2003 conference titled ‘Fieldworks’ organized at the Tate Modern was to provide a space for artists and anthropologists to reflect “on their respective uses of fieldwork and to explore possible convergences” (Rutten et al. 2013: 459). In the same vein, in 2012, two exhibitions held in Paris brought the convergences between art and anthropology, enhancing the artists’ focus (Rutten et  al. 2013: 459). The exhibition, ‘Masters of Chaos’ dealt specifically with “anthropological artefacts” in the context of new artworks (Rutten et al. 2013: 460). Comparatively, the exhibition, ‘La Triennale’ was based on the theme, “intense proximity” and attempted to “unlearn the notion that ethnography is necessarily ‘bad’” (Rutten et al. 2013: 459). What became apparent to us was that the more dominant of these conversations had taken place within contemporary art, and to a much lesser extent in anthropology or sociology. In South Asia, these conversations had not touched sociology and anthropology at all, while a number of artists 12  See Pathak (2016). In the larger context, there has been a realization about the ethnographic turn in art practice and sharedness of what is typically called fieldwork in anthropology; see Schneider and Wright (2010).

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were actively engaging in these kinds of convergences in their art-­making without necessarily being aware of these debates. Their work seemed more an accident than the result of a self-conscious ‘ethnographic turn’. But how could anthropology itself reflect upon this specific trend? Can art inform the practice of anthropology or sociology in the same way other social facts such as caste, class, or politics do? That is, is it not possible to think of a ‘visual arts turn’ in sociology or anthropology? This is in addition to shared thematic issues between the art world and social sciences in general that could summon specific sharedness of enquiries even though such efforts are at present clearly absent on the ground. But these are questions that have not yet been posed in South Asian sociology. What this conversation made us realize more clearly is the nature of the deafening silence with regard to these issues in mainstream sociology and anthropology in the region. We suggest that part of the problem is that the region’s social sciences in general have not clearly understood the narrative and research potential of contemporary art because they have failed to understand the discursive nature of this art in the first place. Arts and aesthetics have been kept out of the domain of research and reflection in social sciences; contemporary South Asian social sciences have hardly ventured into thinking of what art actually looks like in contemporary contexts (Perera 2014: xxiv). In this situation, one can argue that the title of Donald Preziosi’s and Claire Farago’s book, Art is Not What You Think It Is (2012), can be an ideal provocation to South Asian social sciences to reinvent themselves from their conventional persona and critically reassess the less explored research objects at their disposal (Perera 2014: xxiv). Further, as suggested by Preziosi and Farago, the kind of art that is likely to emerge in the future ought to be ideally imagined as an “embodied knowledge practice that is flexible and susceptible to further re-­articulation and redefinition” (2012: 160). In other words, this kind of art has a narrative life that can be reborn beyond the artwork themselves and beyond art history, in the realms of other discourses such as of sociology, anthropology, and so on. Such art, offering possibilities of re-articulation and redefinition or‘re-reading’ is already in our midst as art trends in post-­ 1990s South Asia very clearly indicate. The problem is not the absence of such art, but the inability of region’s social sciences to recognize their potential. On a more pragmatic plain, Preziosi and Farago caution us that “articulating art-making practices as embodied forms of cognition will not in itself solve the dilemmas of the current commodified art system. But such a re-conceptualization of what art does and what that doing itself does,

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offers a responsible way forward on many fronts” (Preziosi and Farago 2012: 160–161). If this suggestion is taken as a signpost that indicates possible new directions, South Asian social scientists can traverse across a relatively uncharted intellectual terrain, if they opt to engage with art more systematically within their disciplines (Perera 2011: xxiv). All of the above suggest, if we are to seek answers to specific questions, particularly those that implicate culture and politics, it necessitates the shifting of methodological gears and intellectual orientations in various disciplinary domains. In short, it solicits engaging with works of art, artists, and practices while being mindful of the intersecting forces of politics, culture, and society. Observations from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, and Nepal allude to similar possibilities of interpretative understanding while we assume there might be space for the same in Bhutanese, Maldivian, and Afghan arts as well. Given such a gamut, the essays in this book are presented within a regional framework, though without reducing the idea of South Asia into a countable number of nations or a sum total of disparate cartographic territoriality. This is quite literally ‘another’ South Asia that is operationalized through shared ideas, socio-cultural networks, and fluidity of intellectual-emotional resources. This book, in continuation with our previous attempts, maintains this distinction when we employ the term, South Asia.13 And hence, the structure of the book avoids in presenting South Asia as eight countable modern national ­territories—as does SAARC14—despite the presence of cases from specific geopolitical contexts such as Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, India, and Bangladesh. In spite of these geopolitical contexts assuming significance for the cases under discussion, there is a tendency in each chapter to cross borders and connect with cases from one sovereign territorial entity (in the geo-­physical sense) with another, cultivating a trope of discussion that is more regional than national. In short, as one of the subtexts, this book chalks out the possibility of thinking of ‘another’ South Asia with the coordinates of art history, anthropology, art practices, and curatorial politics in reading the region.15  For more along this line, see Pathak (2018).  SAARC or South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation was established with seven nation states that make up South Asia in 1985 as a regional collective for cooperation in trade, culture, security, and regional cooperation. Afghanistan joined the group in 2007. Today, SAARC remains as a classic example of an ineffective regional grouping. 15  An effort of similar kind was accomplished in Perera (2018) and Rajendran (2018). 13 14

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Why Convergence? While we make these observations, there is a constant reminder of the prevalent intellectual gap due to un-reconciled methodological approaches of the two broader disciplinary perspectives, sociology and anthropology on one hand and art history on the other. These methodological differences, inclined to explore different facets of ‘truth’, prevent anthropology and art history to join in a shared debate. That is, what do we prefer to see due to our disciplinary orientation and for the same reason, what do we ‘not’ see? It is in this gap that anthropology of contemporary art must necessarily anchor itself and begin its explorations. It is by no means a matter of merely critiquing art history, but a process of attempting to use the methodological and theoretical approaches of sociology and anthropology to offer a wider reading and contextualization of society, politics, and culture while engaging with contemporary practices of art. And in attempting to do so, it is our conviction that cross-disciplinary conversations must necessarily take place among anthropology, art history, cultural studies, and so on, which would enhance anthropology’s ability to read society and its politics through art.16 This is particularly the case in a situation where borders of contemporary art have been so fundamentally transformed in recent times, as the practice of art has gone much further surpassing the parameters initially marked by both pre-modern and modern art.17 As a result, specific contemporary manifestations of South Asian art—such as installations and performance art—are flippantly called postmodern art. And often, in the words of conventionalists, such categorizations carry negative nuances such as ‘rootless’, ‘placeless’, ‘unaesthetic’, and so on. When it comes to culture in general and art in particular, postmodernity as a “strenuous new form of capitalist social organization” is expected to blur or destroy ­“distinctions between established cultural hierarchies”, which takes place as the result of “introducing themes and images from mass/popular/consumer culture into the prestige forms of high culture” that includes literature and fine arts (Wheale 1995: 10, 34). Clearly, certain manifestations of South Asian art show these tendencies as in the installations of Subodh 16  To reiterate, we have made an intervention along this line in Pathak and Perera (2018) unearthing the possible intersections of performance studies, art, cultural studies, anthropology, and communication studies. 17  For a glimpse of the transformations in art and its practices along the lines of social changes, see Turner (2005).

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Gupta18 (India), Rashid Rana’s19 (Pakistan) prints and installations, and Anoli Perera’s20 (Sri Lanka) installations with their feminist inclinations. However despite these thematic and material crisscrossings, whether contemporary South Asian art is in a clearly defined postmodern phase or not is not an issue for our consideration in the present context though it is certainly worthy of theoretical reflection. Suffice to say, some manifestations of art in the region are based on pre-modern considerations as in religious art, while others are still comfortably immersed in modernist practices. Yet others are more freely traversing across thematic, material and expressive boundaries, and comfortably combine pre-modern styles with contemporary themes and material.21 In this context, an issue worth scrutiny is that methods and materiality of art have significantly changed in recent times bringing ‘everyday’ and ‘politics’, which were once considered somewhat banal themes in modernist art practice, into the conceptualization and practice of art in the mainstream. At the same time, every artwork executed in a specific temporal moment does not have to reflect the politics or the social complexities of that moment. As such, simply because social or political calamities exist at a particular time and place, that fact itself does not necessarily ensure the visual inscribing of these times on the art of these times (Perera 2011: 7). The kind of political upheavals most countries in South Asia have experienced and the absence of safety in such situations could well mean some expressions of art would become self-consciously neutral or even aesthetically sedate, while others might be politically more expressive ­ (Perera 2011: 7). The art of the 1990s in particular in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka22 clearly shows this engagement with politics as 18  For more information and visuals on Subodh Gupta’s work, please visit https://www. saatchigallery.com/artists/subodh_gupta.htm (accessed 19 August 2018). 19  For more information and visuals on Rashid Rana’s work, please visit https://www. saatchigallery.com/artists/rashid_rana.htm (accessed 19 August 2018). 20  For more information and visuals on Anoli Perera’s work, please visit http://anoliperera.com/ (accessed 19 August 2018). 21  An unusual and path-breaking work in anthropology along this line is Roma Chatterji’s work on the transformation in folk art of Bengal. See Chatterji (2012). Besides, similar issues have been dealt with in the collection of essays edited by Ramaswamy (2003) suggesting a change in the technologically mediated regime of seeing and seen. 22  See Perera’s 2011 book, Artists Remember; Artists Narrate: Memory and Representation in Contemporary Sri Lankan Visual Arts for a discussion of art and politics with a focus on Sri Lanka (Colombo: Colombo Institute for the Advanced Study of Society and Culture and Theertha International Artists’ Collective).

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well as disengagement. As Landauer has suggested, the mere fact that cultural and political ferment is pervasive in a society does not simultaneously lead to the creation of artworks “affectively addressing that ferment” (2006: 1). It is in this context she points to the non-emergence of politically engaged art within the avant-garde art circles in New  York in the 1960s despite the fact that numerous socio-political crises were evident throughout the United States as well as in the world more generally (Landauer 2006: 1). It is their non-interventionist response to the Vietnam War that Susan Sontag referred to as an “aesthetic of silence” (quoted in Landauer 2006: 1). However, the only way to signify ‘politics’ as a process is not only by inscribing them through direct codification in the body of the artworks themselves. Politics can be entangled in arts in many other ways. As Sinha has noted with regard to Indian art, “building of modern art practices reflects many of the internal conflicts of the Indian polity” (Sinha 2009: 8). Similarly, art’s encounter with technologies such as mechanisms of massreproduction not only allowed transformations in the way art was produced, but also in the way social relations were conducted in the wider society. For instance, the expansion of photography in India was not only a matter of expanding the visual field in technological and aesthetic terms. It also bridged the “fissures of caste and community, and created an alternative base for the interplay of mythology, capital goods, and the nationalist message” (Sinha 2009: 8). With regard to photography, this played out in the way an elite taste such as photography rapidly became a more widely spread practice as well as in the way studios became transitory spaces where the social hierarchies in the wider society were momentarily erased. So the very act of studying art itself as a set of practices and as a matter changing approaches also allows for the study of society itself. For us, art’s engagement with politics, its reflection of politics, as well as its distancing from these phenomena necessarily makes art an important methodological ­vehicle to enter into a discourse on politics and social relations and ruptures of a particular moment and time. These kinds of themes are perhaps more squarely located within the routine academic purview of disciplines such as anthropology.23 It is in such a context that Nikos Papastergiadis has noted that the “contemporary art scene is not just being crisscrossed by different people with their 23  Dadi notes, in the context of arts in Muslim South Asia, “the exploration of the ‘popular’, or the ‘everyday’ (which) still awaits detailed study” (2010: 218).

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distinctive cultural symbols, but also presenting viewers with the challenge of acknowledging the multiplicity of perspectives for seeing the world” (Papastergiadis 2006: 14). That is, art is no longer a matter only for the artists who create the ‘symbols’ Papastergiadis refers to. But the ‘viewers’ in his formulation who obviously have considerable power over the different ways of seeing the world through works of arts and their interpretations of these works also include sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists. More specifically, Papastergiadis notes, when art is presented away from galleries in everyday locations and is crafted by using everyday material that may not be typically thought of as art material, it “has created the need for new critical tools to determine its aesthetic value and social meaning” (Papastergiadis 2006: 16). Sri Lankan artist Chandraguptha Thenuwara’s barrel installations using used asphalt and chemical barrels (1990s; Fig.  1.1), often meant for outdoor display, become powerful critiques of the country’s civil war when juxtaposed with the fact that barrels had become an obvious instrument of war (Perera 2011: 65–68). Similarly, I Dreamt a Space Without Me24 (2001: Fig. 1.2), the arresting installation by Pakistani artist, Ruby Chishti, made out of black plastic garbage bags is specifically meant for the outdoors and public interaction (Hashmi 2002: 6). It was installed at Gadani Beach in Pakistan. The installation consists of garbage bags filled with straw and stitched to look like crows perched upon elevated towers of garbage bags. As the artist herself explains, “the work was about the mounted garbage heaps from which human as well as crows find their food and livelihood”.25 Indian artist Vibha Galhotra’s environment-related performances and photo-­ performances (2016–2017; Fig. 1.3) are meant to instill a strong sense of anxiety, discomfort, and concern over issues of pollution and the ­degradation of the environment in India’s capital, New Delhi, and other urban centers. Sri Lankan performance artist Bandu Manamperi’s gruesome performance, Dead Fish (Fig.  1.4), in the streets of Colombo in 2016 was narrative “about facing death while being alive”.26 The artist’s argument was that in the multiple chaos embedded in Sri Lankan social and political realities, death itself does not end the cycle of suffering. As he notes, “we all are ‘dead’ in this society, and it is the dead that die in society,  In Hashmi’s book (2002), Chishti’s work has been identified as Gadani.  Text message by Ruby Chishti via Messenger, 15 August 2018. 26  http://theerthaperformanceplatform.com/index.php/performances/dead-fish-bandumanamperi/ 24 25

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Fig. 1.1  Barrel Installation by Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Colombo, Sri Lanka. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha International Artists’ Collective Archives)

Fig. 1.2  I Dreamt a Space Without Me by Ruby Chisti, Gadani, Pakistan. (Photograph courtesy of Ruby Chisti)

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Fig. 1.3  Breath by Breath. Photo-performance by Vibha Galhotra, New Delhi, India. (Photograph courtesy of Vibha Galhotra)

Fig. 1.4  Dead Fish. Performance by Bandu Manamperi, Colombo, Sri Lanka. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha International Artists’ Collective Archives)

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and the dead that get subjected to violence and torture. From a small exploration of death, we can learn a lot about life”.27 In all of these works, materiality in creating art had changed from routine art material to everyday objects and was meant for public viewing away from galleries. It is when reading the social meanings and nuances of such artworks as well as when locating them within the broader contexts of their production and consumption that anthropology and sociology become useful as a specific discursive practice dealing with human interactions and the work of culture. But this does not mean that people engaged in such a reading need to be formally trained anthropologists as such. But they have to traverse the landscape anthropologists usually do, and explore why a specific artwork is produced, what are the conditions that give it meaning, what are the politics of representation embedded in it, what kind of political transformations do they envisage, whether such works can be located in a discourse of social justice, social change, political critique and so on. Moreover, as we have already noted, art history is not the only legitimate discourse that can socially and politically situate art. In fact, some of the initial discussions on the social contexts of art were imprisoned within narrow empirical models of causality (Papastergiadis 2006: 16). Art history, as in the case of history itself, displays an inbuilt institutional nervousness in dealing with the present. Given the disciplinary purview of history in general, such nervousness is not surprising and is well within the mandate of the discipline as conventionally understood. On the other hand, art history has also been hesitant to enter in any serious manner the physical spaces of art production and the messy world of politics that extends beyond an artwork. This has conventionally been the purview of disciplines such as sociology and anthropology. These two institutionalized hesitations decontextualizes the overall narrative that an artwork might be narrating and thereby destabilizes its social meaning, if not aesthetic sensibility, if art history remains the only scribe of the social and political contexts of art and its narratives. It is with reference to this specific context that Janet Wolff has critiqued art history as a disciplinary practice that reifies the context and mystifies the process of art (quoted in Papastergiadis 2006: 14). And to return to our initial

27  http://theerthaperformanceplatform.com/index.php/performances/dead-fishbandu-manamperi/

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reflections on anthropology’s fear of the visual and its hesitation to critically engage with contemporary art, one hopes that anthropology could more creatively respond to Michael Taussig’s (1993) proposition that images might become engines of concepts. This may suffice to serve the challenges of alterity in the domains of the socio-cultural and the political that sociologists and anthropologists frequent. And thus, a qualitatively updated trajectory of sense could come to picture in anthropological pursuits of images.28 It is then within the general considerations outlined above that the book aims towards a holistic framework of contemporary art in South Asia. In sum total of implication, there is polyphony of intersections that characterize the book.

Polyphonic Intersections and Bearings of the Book ‘Intersections’ is an intellectual device that unfolds debates, propositions, arguments, and possibilities. The disciplinary intersections of art history and anthropology are one such instance. Centrally underpinning this book, such disciplinary intersections underline the complicity of historians and sociologists, as well as ethnographers and artists. Furthermore, these intersections resurface at other levels too. Politics and art, the global and the local, contextual and universal, modern and traditional and so on come together on the anvil of analyses in the essays in this book. The idea of ‘local’ underpinning art practices and artworks is central in the scheme of intersections. Various synonyms of local surface for attention, primarily alluding to ‘roots’. Curiously enough, the quest for ‘roots’ in South Asia as elsewhere acquires a cognate in ‘routes’, giving birth to both intersections and politics.29 Be it in postcolonial India, post-partition Pakistan, post-liberation Bangladesh, and ethnic clash torn (post-War) Sri Lanka, we witness the dialectics of roots and routes, authenticity and inventions, folk and mediation in the ways artists have opted to work. In the wake of such dialectics, it makes sense to recapitulate what the book posits as disciplinary intersections. Needless to say, disciplinary intersection is burdened with apprehensions of the disciplinary limitations, be it in art history or in anthropology and sociology. And as a way forward, each articulation

 For more along this line, see Taussig (1993).  On the dynamics of local, see Pathak (2017) and Pathak and Perera (2018).

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of apprehension points out the inherent tendencies in all three disciplines to engage with the artifacts by addressing shared interests as points of departure. More on a positive note, setting the temperament of the book is, Parul Dave Mukherji’s essay, ‘Crossovers between Art History and Visual Anthropology: A Visual Archive of a Patua Family Revisited’ which emphasizes the idea of ‘performative mimesis’ among artists and artistic practices. Unlike the formally trained anthropologists, artists tend to become ‘visiting anthropologists’, in general. And Mukherji supports this implication by presenting the elaborate artistic practices of India-based performance artist, N. Pushpmala. Moreover, Mukherji, a historian of art by training and practice, becomes one of the visiting anthropologists she herself alludes to. Though informed by classical anthropological discussions, visiting anthropologists understood in this sense also tend to add distinct nuances to the ethnographic spectrum by bringing in the experiences of artists in ways conventional sociologists and anthropologist would not. That is, artists, natives, and ‘visiting’ anthropologists unfold on one plane of reasoning. A conventional anthropologist might get an intellectual shock of sort at such performative mimesis vis-à-vis the practices of artists and art historians. For example, it may be slightly difficult for anthropologists to digest that artists do something called ‘participant observation’ in the way typified by Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the classical anthropologists who had to stay longer in the field due to the outbreak of World War I. And many believers in anthropological orthodoxy deem an instance of fieldwork of dubious merit if it was not for a span of a year or more. An artist with performative mimesis might deliver a thought-provoking rupture in the monolith of anthropological methodology. But our position is, the kind of ‘shock’ this kind of encounter might engender, should be internalized and routinized in the practice of anthropology of the present rather than expelling it for its alleged disjuncture with prevailing anthropological orthodoxy. This line of advancement is a crucial component in the epistemological and discursive undercurrent of this book. And it serves the mainstay of proposition, echoed in Parul Dave Mukherji’s stimulating act wondering: “In terms of disciplinary rethinking, art history had learnt many of its lessons about politics of representation from anthropology and redressed its own disciplinary blind spots. But can art history also offer tools to anthropology and enable it to get over its anxiety of the visual?” (pp. 54–55)

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This question haunts three young sociologists, namely, Pooja Kalita, Jyoti, and Binit Gurung, in the latter part of the book, seeking to overcome the disciplinary fear of visuals and objects of art anthropology and sociology suffer from. Classical anthropology and in some ways even classical sociology were not so much averse to visuals within limits. Hence Levi-Strauss promulgated a detailed position on primitive art, and Durkheimian totemic effervescence was a quasi-performative construction even though Durkheim himself did not locate his discussion in a specific performative context, as we understand the term today. Or for that matter, some rare sociologists such as Robert Nisbet in the United States and Radhakamal Mukerjee in India were keen to turn to art as a socially embedded reality. This line of thinking is picked up in the latter part of this introduction. Suffice to say, carrying forward from above, such a mode of doing art, documenting art practices, and being an anthropologist subsumed within the art scene in postcolonial South Asia at variant scales and manifestations offers countless possibilities. Gulam Sheikh’s elaborate and insightful plan to venture into the folk and primitive worlds of art, of which Pushpmala and Parul Dave Mukherji were participants, also had another very enormous steward, Jagdish Swaminathan. Sandip Luis’s essay in this collection, ‘Between History and Anthropology: The Entangled Lives of Jagdish Swaminathan and Jangarh Singh Shyam’, adds to the disciplinary anxieties in history as well as anthropology. A historian, an art practitioner, and an anthropologically informed thinker, Swaminathan embodied insights from a variety of sources. Equipped with a Gandhian orientation towards the rural, informed by structural anthropology, and particularly by Levi-­ Strauss’s readings of the primitive in the renowned classic, The Savage Mind, dialogues with the poet and Mexican ambassador to India, Octavio Paz, a particular variety of indigenism (akin to Latin American) ruled Swaminathan’s pursuits. A clear blend of history and anthropology, political awareness and art practice, constitute the frame in which Swaminathan became more than a mentor for his discovery, Jangarh Singh Shyam. While Shyam adds to the discursive framework with his artworks, subsuming history and anthropology, Swaminathan is one of the engines in the processes of reinvention of the local, the folk, the rural, the traditional, the primitive, the indigenous and so on. Disciplines in social sciences can benefit from the discussion that Sandip Luis eloquently presents in this essay. Further back in history of art, another episode of anthropological significance unfolds with the centrality

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of primitive myth in modern Indian art. Jyoti’s essay, ‘Towards Blurring the Boundaries in Anthropology: Reading Jamini Roy Today’, turns the anthropological gaze across the classics in modern Indian art, with a concerted focus on Jamini Roy’s works and methods. It amounts to a case of an anthropologist reading the works of art, while feeding on resources, from art history to anthropology, to rethink the idea of primitivism. In the same breath, it is befitting to read Salima Hashmi’s and Farida Batool’s contribution, ‘Reframing Contexts for Pakistani Art’. In their multiple capacities as artists, art historians, and teachers, the author duo underline the truncated and skewed art history in Pakistan, stating “the discursive formations of art history were further arrested by the state’s idea of modernizing the nation soon after its inception and that dream could only be fulfilled if one was connected with the ‘linear’ history and development of the west” (p. 75). The intrusion of marginalized women artists into the mainstream of Pakistani contemporary art practice offers new possibilities for both art history and art practices, and the consequent new manifestations in the works of art themselves. This also indicates the possibilities for a nuanced anthropological gaze and interpretation offered by an emphasis on women’s involvement in art and art practice in Pakistan since the 1940s. The essay underlines the imperative of answering the anxiety expressed by the renowned novelist, Qurratulain Hyder in Aag Ka Darya (River of Fire), a historical account of the Indian subcontinent. Hyder speaks through her protagonist Kamal and asks “how to write the history of this land where people did not give much weight to the names of the artists and writers?” (p. 74) Hashmi and Batool aid in understanding that women artists of contemporary Pakistan are bringing about a much-needed fusion of the public and the private. Hashmi and Batool hint at the turn to anthropological public, composed of communities, people with identities, and the local qua contextual pp. 73–92. In order to steer clear of the bias towards the alternatives to hegemonic models of art discourse, all across South Asia, it is imperative to add stimulus to the question, “do the academics engaged in the history of art making in Pakistan over several decades really understand the dynamics of public art?” (p. 90) If art history is a field of apprehension, so is sociology and social anthropology for reasons spelled out by young sociologists, Binit Gurung and Pooja Kalita respectively. In ‘Aesthetics and Politics of Street Art in Nepal:

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Artivism and Subversion’, Gurung chalks out a novel possibility for disciplinary intersections as well as domains of enquiry for sociology and social anthropology. Using sociological insights from classics such as C. W. Mills, John Dewey, Pierre Bourdieu, Janet Wolff, Howard Becker among others in his essay on contemporary Nepali street art, Gurung underlines the imperative of a new sociology of art in South Asia, with a specific focus on Nepal. This sociology of art is envisaged to be sensitive to aesthetics and politics, of artworks and practices, the relation of the personal with the public, and biography and history. Pooja Kalita, in her essay, ‘The ‘Art’ of Ethnography: Why Feminist Ethnographers of South Asia Need to Look at ‘Feminist Art’ from the Region?’ factors in a feminist perspective in making sense of the potential interface of anthropology and art practices vis-à-vis ethnography as a method of engagement and articulation. In this wake, Kalita enables us to wonder: if artworks of a select number of women artists from South Asia express concerns and interests which can be deemed ‘feminist’, why shall sociology and social anthropology not benefit from the texts embedded in the artworks as well as in the biographies of these women artists? (pp. 93–114) And likewise, Jyoti’s chapter, ‘Questions from History of Art: Revisiting with Jamini Roy’, emphasizes the greater role of anthropology of art in cultivating a local lexigraphy of artworks, suggesting “anthropological works also inspired art historians and art critics to question the western centric categories of art. Hence, anthropology has been very much a part of the art worlds defining the categories of art that have been applied globally” (p. 183). The second level of polyphonic intersections echoes the issues of local, global, cultural, and political and, more importantly, an interjection on curatorial politics prevalent in the domain of art practices. Elsewhere, covertly engaging with intersections, Gita Kapur (2007) promulgated a theory of modernism, emphasizing disjuncture in modern art. The theory holds true in the post-globalization context of art in South Asia too. Making the theoretical position simpler, Kapur noted in a conversation, I have argued (in my book When Was Modernism) that disjuncture as a concept-in-use allows me to interpret how Indian artists read, understand and participate in calibrating the language(s) of international modernism. That it makes me see the processes of alignment and disalignment ─ not as passively received contingencies but as strategies that are tangential and even possibly tendentious. They are disruptive of assumed selves, prescribed identities, and given (art) histories. So when you ask what is the valance of the

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term disjuncture now ─ in our increasingly globalized world ─ I will refer to what I quoted above: if context can be read as conjuncture, then surely disjuncture is its symmetrical counterpoint. The twin terms signal the time of now: context fractured by the volatility of historical forces.30

Though speaking very clearly as an art historian, the overall context described by Kapur is also very much a terrain of inquiry for sociology, which may vary from social change to political conflict. The point is issues such as conjuncture and disjuncture as deployed by Kapur are openings for sociological and anthropological readings of society despite the twin disciplines’ general resistance to such methodological departures up to now. Intriguingly, between conjuncture and disjuncture, a curious case of intersections unfolds that diminishes the usefulness of strict disciplinary vantage points, among other implications. The crisscrossing of art and politics, aesthetics and history, and biography and ideology, emerges sharply in most essays. The project of unearthing the roots, local idioms, what is thought of as traditional and authentic and so on and so forth are central to this crisscrossing. It manifests vividly in Parul Dave Mukherji’s depiction of the artist and art historian photographing themselves as ‘visiting anthropologists’ to document the art and life of folk scroll (patua) painter named, Dukhshyam Chitrakar (pp. 50–54). It was in the mid1980s which nearly marked the climax of the quest for roots that began in Nehruvian India, with a hallmark of national authenticity in the form of Mulk Raj Anand’s Marg (1946) in the background. The post-liberalization (qua cultural globalization) unfolds a dramatic situation in 2015, and an impoverished and aged Dukhshyam Chitrakar seeks a commission to make a scroll painting (p. 52). The character of art, art practices, and a visiting anthropologist’s mode of enquiry undergo transformation in the encounter with the historical-material and politico-cultural realities. This is even more emphatic with due tenor of critical analysis in Jyoti’s reading of the classics in modern art in India when she reads Jamani Roy’s work as a “gamut of practices, influenced by primitivism, but at the same time resulted from the particular cultural and political history of the region and the country” (p. 183).

30  For more in this conversation, see http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/interviewssp-837925570/756-to-be-partisan-unsettled-and-alert-conversation-with-geeta-kapur#ftn_artnotes1_7 (accessed on 31 July 2018).

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Looking at the Bengal School of Art in the light of nationalistic discourses, it divulges the artistic reinvention of innocent, rural, primitive, and ideal imagination of India. And giving more informative vigor to the idea of the reinvented, Sandip Luis elucidates the tragic travail of another significant signature, Jangarh Singh Shyam, a Gond artist, in the encounter with modernity’s quest for roots vis-à-vis primitivism and indigenism. An artist and a historian, Jagdish Swaminathan, the mentor of Shyam, operated with a clear sense of ‘civil war’ in India, a ‘discursive deadlock’, which gave birth to not only the reinvention of the concepts of primitivism and indigenism, underpinning the museum Roopankar, but also a mindset to perceive art, artists, and art practices in a more nuanced and inclusive manner (p. 150). Such crisscrossing of political and cultural in the artistic spheres is not typical of India alone. The surveys of art practices in Pakistan from various standpoints reveal a similar tendency. The story from inception to the formation of a postcolonial vantage, the modern art in Pakistan brings about various and very visible episodes of crisscrossing. A synoptic survey by Niilofur Farrukh in her essay ‘Imposed, Interrupted and Identities: A Survey of the Pakistan Art Scene’ presents a systematic testimonial, paving the way for two significant realizations. One is the radical art politics of Rasheed Araeen criticizing “Sadequain’s narcissim, Chugtai’s orientalism and pictorialism of modernity”. Similarly, Amra Ali in her essay, ‘Ruptures of Rasheed Araeen in the politics of Visual Art: For a New Discourse in Pakistan’, presents a thorough analysis of this kind of art politics, which also amounts to a significant critique of curatorial politics. Speaking of an appeal to universality in Araeen’s Shamiyaana, Ali notes, “his insistence on decommodifying aesthetics becomes a critique on the power politics and insularity of contemporary narratives in art. It insists on locating art outside of the production of commodities for Western art markets, or new global markets elsewhere” (p. 262). Elsewhere, Gita Kapur31 acknowledged the emergence of a third-world framework of aesthetic regime with Rasheed Araeen’s intervention. While Rasheed Araeen is hailed for ‘curatorial subversion’ entirely ignored by dominant art critics, Salima Hashmi and Farida Batool bring into focus another crucial turn in the art scene in Pakistan. It was during the savage military

31  See https://criticalcollective.in/ArtistInner2.aspx?Aid=0&Eid=207 (accessed on 31 July 2018).

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dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s that the women’s movement took off with support from women poets, writers, lawyers, journalists, and more importantly visual artists (p. 77). These encounters with the politico-historical milieu and the momentum generated by the interactions with civil society enabled a self-critical soul-searching among artists, resulting in a confession on the failures of institutions committed to an allegedly flawed question of ‘local’ in Pakistani art. Women artists made the idea of local more nuanced with their works being mounted not only in private spaces of galleries but also in public domains. Overcoming the divide of high and low art, stagnation of art history and art educators, and rigidity of state narratives inter alia, the women artists unearthed, a “liminal space between politics and art” (p. 82). In his essay, ‘Globalization and Local Anxieties in the Art of Bangladesh’, surveying the art scene in Bangladesh, Lala Rukh Selim offers insightful propositions about numerous artistic encounters crisscrossing between art and politics, and in the process challenges the conventional modes of art practice and curatorial politics. Emerging from the cauldron of cultural and language politics, Bangladesh witnessed the arrival of very specific art practices before the partition of the Indian subcontinent as well as its Liberation War of 1971, with Zainul Abedin as the prime mover. The motif of ‘folk’ assumed centrality since the beginning, returning to the discourse with a dilemma, whether art in Bangladesh should be international or indigenous in character, nature, and scope (p. 120). Akin to the historical moment in Pakistan, Bangladesh scene also seems to get a watershed moment in the decade of 1980s. A prominent divide between a ‘national art establishment’ of the older generation, committed to the idea of an essentially Bangladeshi identity, and ‘contemporary art’ of relatively younger artists who defy the conventions in styles, materials, and connections mark the trajectory. Against the odds of limited support and patronage, artists inclined towards more self-reflective contemporary art with an experimental sense of materiality and modes of presentation find possibilities away from the singular supporting agency, Shilpakala Academy (the state run institution for the promotion of art), as far as exhibiting the works were concerned (p. 124). In a sense, what Lala Rukh Selim describes is not merely the changes in the art scene of Bangladesh, but also the broader dynamics of social transformation taking place in the society in general as they were reflected in the artworks of the time and in the dynamics of the community of artists.

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Held in Dhaka, the Asian Art Biennale in 1981, South Asia’s first biennale, created a forum to exhibit artworks from across Asia along with the works of contemporary artists from Bangladesh. An international approach corresponded with the clear emergence of transnational networks of artists, an aspect that applies to the contemporary women artists in Pakistan too. By the 1990s and the beginning of the present millennium, these networks assumed a clear regional character, across South Asia, with the exemplary formation of the South Asia Network for the Arts. In a sense, these networks and the travel of artists within South Asia and beyond made possible the emergence of a very specific South Asian sensibility among many of the region’s artists who are now established. These networks and their associated events helped perceive the region as thematically and experientially connected.32 As a formal and funded network, South Asian Network for the Arts was in operation from 2004 to 2010. More informally however, other related conversations and activities had progressed from the late 1990s onwards. Before the formal inauguration of the network, Pooja Sood offered the following thoughts on such a network of which the main concern was: “developing deeper connections between art practitioners in the region” (Sood 2009: 36): Moreover, as she noted further, “the premise for success in any intercultural work is one of underlying mutual respect and trust between the partners and I would like to believe that the trust and respect is in place” (Sood 2009: 36). Different nationally located organizations came together to make the network functional by paying significant attention to this basic concern of mutuality and equality. The network consisted of Khoj International Artists’ Association in New Delhi, Britto Arts Trust in Dhaka, Theertha International Artists’ Collective in Colombo, Vasl Artists’ Collective in Karachi, and Sutra Artists’ Association in Kathmandu. Unlike the others, the latter did not last. In effect, the collaborative work, travel, and conversations of this network and its subbasement afterlives facilitated and ensured the emergence of a more responsive and connected South Asia in terms of ideas, experiences, and activities despite the more disconnected cartographic reality augmented by militarized borders of South Asian nation states the network’s partners had to work within. The 32   For more information on these networks and their politics, see Sasanka Perera, ‘Re-imagining and Re-narrating South Asia: Artists’ Travel and the Practice of Visual Art as a New Experiential Cartography’ pp.  251–274. In, Dev Nath Pathak ed., Another South Asia! (Delhi: Primus, 2018).

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book returns to the phenomenon of various artists’ collectives coming in contact in the last essay of the book authored by Anoli Perera. A critical proposition to ponder upon unfolds with these historically grounded developments post liberalization in various parts of the region. Selim however, becomes skeptical as he looks at the now routinely held Asian Art Biennale, and wonders whether it “lacks in the tools of curating, marketing, theoretical discourse, and other associated necessities” (p. 129). Indeed this is much more than the celebration of festive rupture, noted elsewhere in the discussion of Gita Kapur.33 No doubt, the transnational networks and opening of myriad possibilities have democratized the space of exchange of ideas, exhibiting, and selling, which also challenged the conventional curatorial politics, and changed the character of the commerce of art. But one joins in with Selim to wonder whether the spectacular shows presented today are more for the spectacles conducive for the sake of marketing gimmicks, rather than, for the conceptual depth, advancement in art history, resurgence of the experimental temperament and intellectual growth in both art and its potential encounters with other discourses such as sociology and anthropology and art history. Binit Gurung, however, in his contribution manages to uphold an optimistic reading, through understanding the limits of art coming to the streets or artists turning to community (pp. 223–250). Once again, the decisive decade is the 1990s that ushered in novel forms and mediums such as installation, performance art, video art, and so on in the art scene in Nepal. The encounter with economic liberalization, reinstatement of democracy, and surfacing of what now appears to be unbridgeable schisms in Nepal paved the way for a disturbance of the taken for granted in the conventional art practices. Departing from the familiar and institutionalized ways of producing artworks and exhibiting, some groups of young artists took to street corners, in a mode of quasi-­revolution, and subverted the known ways of doing art and communicating with the masses, with the messages that could not have been possible to ponder in the erstwhile monarchic regime in Nepal (p. 234). Sri Lanka’s ‘flag project’ of 1998 spearheaded by a group of artists who organized themselves under a loose and informal collective called ‘Artists

 Ibid.

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Against War’ resonates with the kind of artworks Gurung has described from the streets of Kathmandu. Suspicious of the lack of political agency of gallery-based art, the Artists Against War wanted to literally take art into the streets of Colombo and later throughout the country carrying a specific political message (Perera 2011: 87–89). With the involvement of a number of artists, the paper-based work initially executed by the artists were printed on cloth specifically meant for outdoor display. If the work in the streets of Kathmandu were on city walls and therefore site-bound, the ones in Colombo were mobile and were effectively designed as flags that could be displayed anywhere (Perera 2011: 87). The first public display of these works was outside the Railway Station in Colombo Fort on 13, 14, and 15 September 1998 (Perera 2011: 87). This location is known as a place for expressing political disagreement in public. As a result, the first edition of the flag project in this venue “had an air of opposition and protest directed at the political status quo and the consequences of war” (Perera 2011: 87). This oppositional sensibility of the display was recreated in other parts of Sri Lanka where it traveled afterward as well. On the other hand, though the theme of this artistic intervention was very clear, it was not a routine protest. Nor was it a routine exhibition. More specifically, it was “an attempt to change the direction and politics of art in order to bring a particular type of art into public space from the more restricted space of the conventional art gallery, and thereby transform art into ­political objects” (Perera 2011: 87–88). This was a self-conscious political art with the aim of social transformation. The final contribution in this collection is Anoli Perera’s essay, ‘Collectivism in Cotemporary Sri Lankan Art: History of an Usual Case of Artists.’ It is a survey of a very different kind when compared to the surveys of the art scenes in Bangladesh and Pakistan presented in this collection. Instead of looking at a country situation or a thematic survey by focusing on a number of artists, Perera zeroes in on the collective dynamics and interventions of a singular organization, the Theertha International Artists’ Collective in Sri Lanka (pp. 271–296). Taking as her point of departure the post-1990s transformations seen across the art world in South Asia in which Sri Lankan art was also implicated, Perera documents the way in which collective politics impacts not only the art-making in a specific country but also in the larger realms of politics. Moreover, this aids in understanding the transformations in art practices, artists’ roles, and emergence of a qualitatively different trope of art radicalism. Needless to say, the newfound radicalism in art subverts the curatorial

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schemes that prevent new stakeholders from emerging while it might also distance people from art. One of the more interesting aspects of Sri Lanka’s contemporary art situation is the attempt a number of artists have made to answer the kind of question that Timms has raised with regard to art in Australia (Timms 2005). And that is, “what is wrong with contemporary art?” (Timms 2005). Much of what Perera describes revolves around the politics that the artists and the organization she focuses on have done to deal with issues in the art world in their own circumstances. Again, a question raised by Timms in the Australian context provides an avenue to further explore what Perera describes. With a sense of angst, Timms asks, “why is contemporary art so in thrall to spruikers and promoters, for example and why do their lofty claims so rarely match the reality?” (Timms 2005: 10). It is as if in response to such a question that Theertha and individual artists linked to it have undertaken their self-­conscious politics ranging from curatorial practices to exhibition dynamics in addition to experimentation with the form and materiality of art itself. While attempting to answer this kind of question, these individuals have blurred the lines of separation between artists, curators, and gallery owners to some extent. Clearly, the polyphonic intersections embedded in these kinds of artistic interventions summon a certain kind of intellectual courage and passion to call for a disciplinary promiscuity, particularly with reference to art history and sociology and social anthropology. Each essay thus seems to be in tacit conversation allowing a reader to connect threads and fathom an intricate integration of art across the region, thematic proximity in society and polity that shape up artists’ historical subjectivity. The intellectual promises and fulfillment, of the book as a whole, indeed rests in the modes of conversation among narrators and reencounters from various parts of South Asia.

Consequence of Conversation As we have attempted to briefly articulate above, the book becomes a consequence of and an invitation to conversation allowing us to revisit the idea of intersection, flagged at the outset of this introductory essay, and to envisage an antidote to the mutual exclusion of art practice, art history, sociology, and social anthropology. The mutuality of interest is an abiding feature of the contemporary discourses in sociology and art history. However, the debilitating exclusion of each other’s ways of seeing the

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world, an equally significant reality, pertains to well-established epistemological divides, a fallout of the fortification of science against arts. This is as old as the days when social scientists imagined the arrival of a proverbial Newton to render social science disciplines more ‘scientific’ than perhaps they could be or should be. The emergence and subsequent bolstering of scientific epistemology rendered the seemingly ‘scientific as the only legitimate form of knowing’. Many philosophers and historians of science have debated against the phenomenon of scientism, a blind faith in science detrimental to multiple other equally legitimate ways of knowing.34 It is debatable whether it could make any difference in the prevailing fundamental attitudes, and hence there is an imperative to pronounce the question, of the relation between art and social sciences, again and again. The question holds significance at a time when the sub-discipline, ‘Sociology of Art’, is turning a new leaf and aspiring to become a ‘New Sociology of Art’ with novel promises and departures from erstwhile preoccupations.35 But the problem of a sub-discipline overtly dedicated to art means that all considerations of art in sociology and anthropology would be effectively exiled to this sub-disciplinary hinterland—away from the mainstream. This is precisely what has happened with regard to sociology’s and anthropology’s expelling of the visual more generally to the sub-disciplines of visual sociology and visual anthropology. In fact, it is in this epistemological rupture we can at least partly understand the continuing fear of the visual in the mainstreams of both disciplines. More importantly, the question that could ideally be explored in contemporary sociological scholarship in the region is: how is art in the interest of sociology? And perhaps the seeming innocence of this question could reveal the state of sociology, if not in universal at least in a particular sense. The state of sociology that derecognizes artworks, or puts them on disciplinary margins as a field of enquiry, is unfortunately oblivious of the history of the discipline in the region. The sociological problem with art also hinges on an epistemological problem, a contestation over the role of ‘experience’ in the domain of science. There have been sincere attempts to

 Along this line, pondering upon the disciplinary silos on the ways of seeing and knowing, and possible redemptions, see Dhar et al. (2018). 35  This important aspect is given a detailed deliberation in the latter part of this introduction. The mainstay of the idea behind New Sociology of Art comes from Eduardo de la Fuente’s (2007) detailed perusal of the developments in sociology and art history. 34

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contest this problem, at macro as well as micro levels of the disciplinary history. The contestation, and its epistemological implications, began to appear ever since the advent of the ‘positivistic dispute’36 in sociology. The latter aimed at puncturing ‘hypostatized configuration of science’ and thereby overcoming the delimiting impact of scientism. In short, it opened up the possibility of including ‘experience’ as an important category in the pursuit of knowledge. This assumed more radical articulation with the advocacy of ‘methodological pluralism’,37 as a kind of intellectual anarchy in social sciences. Experience, the most basic category in the debates on science and arts, was the muse for philosophers ever since the so-called beginning of scientific epistemology.38 However, a systematic and consistent separation of art and science, experience and aesthetics, emerges with John Dewey’s emphasis on the significance of ‘art as experience’ (Dewey 1934), and its indispensable location in the scientific (read rational and progressive) framework. Way back in 1934, Dewey critically noted, “art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from the association with the materials and aims of every other form of human effort, undergoing, and achievement…Mountain peaks do not float unsupported; they do not even just rest upon the earth. They are the earth in one of its manifest operations” (1934: 3). Dewey helped us fathom the problems of the so-called ‘expert knowledge on art’ by suggesting that any theory or philosophy of art is sterilized unless it makes us aware of the function of art in relation to other modes of experience. In this scheme, ‘aesthetic experience’ is not an esoteric realization. Instead, it belongs to everyday life of ordinary folks as well as artists. To deliver a blow to the arrogance of the art-experts (qua art historians!), Dewey argues, “it is mere ignorance that leads then to the supposition that connection of art and esthetic perception with experience signifies a lowering of their significance and dignity” (Ibid.: 19). In implication, Dewey underlined the necessity of engaging with artworks, arti-

36  For more on this dispute, particularly in the context of German Sociology, which runs the agenda of puncturing ‘hypostatized configuration of science’ and aids in overcoming the delimiting impact of scientism, see Adorno et al. (1981). 37  See Feyerabend (2010). 38  Bertrand Russell eloquently places a radically subjective notion of experience in the inception of scientific epistemology starting with Rene Descartes’s meditations. See Russell (2013).

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facts of cultural experiences in general, without succumbing to a sense of disciplinary arrogance. The very nature of aesthetic experience solicits an interdisciplinary approach, an inevitable need in understanding art and aesthetics as well as their location more broadly in society and culture. This is the insight, which enables a sociologist to ask critically as to why “prior to 1970s, most sociologists who dealt with the arts were ‘viewed as intellectuals in broad sense or as radicals, but not really proper sociologists’” (de la Fuente 2007: 410). However, from among those few radical sociologists with a broader disciplinary vision, there emanated a nuanced approach to the category of art too. In this regard, it is relevant to recall the propositions of Robert Nisbet, made at the time identified broadly as the ‘crisis in Western sociology’.39 Bolstering a case for ‘Sociology as an Art Form’, Nisbet suggests, how alike are the sociologist’s and artist’s efforts to endow subject matter with what Herbert Read, the art historian and critic, has called “the illusion of motion.” No mean esthetic skill is involved in Marx’s depiction of capitalism as a structure in motion, in Tocqueville’s rendering of equality as a dynamic process, or Weber’s of rationalization… We can not take away from Tocqueville, Marx, Weber and the other sociologists the visions for which they are famous…but we live in ignorance if we do not see clearly these same visions, albeit stated differently, in the earlier writings of such minds as Burke, Blake, Carlyle, Balzac. (1976: 7–8)

There is an essential unity of art and science, no matter how eclipsed it may seem in the wake of intellectual politics separating the two. Presenting a prophylaxis against scientism, rather than science, to emphasize the unity of science and art, Nisbet suggests, “when Kepler wrote, ‘the roads by which men arrive at their insights into celestial matters seem to me almost as worthy of wonder as those matters themselves’, it would never have occurred to him that there was any significant difference between what he, the theologian, the philosopher, and the artist were engaged in” (Nisbet 1976: 4–5). Nisbet enlists a few common thematic ideas in social sciences

39  This thought-provoking work of Gouldner underlined a crisis in the prevalent ways of doing (teaching, researching, and writing) sociology and advocated an imperative for a ‘new’, more reflexive, sociology, which could steer clear of the dominant ways. See Gouldner (1970).

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in the nineteenth century, such as community, masses, power, development, progress, conflict, egalitarianism, anomie, alienation, and disorganization. In this context, he suggests that there are identical themes in the world of art—painting, literature, even music. Social scientists have benefitted from their engagement with works of art and in comprehending thematic realities they might refer to. To make it more explicit, Nisbet surmises, “scientists Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel were without question. But they were also artists, and had they not been artists, had they contented themselves with demonstrating solely what had been arrived at through aseptic problem design, through meticulous verification, and through constructions of theory which pass muster in a graduate course in methodology of sociology today, the entire world of thought would be much poorer” (Nisbet 1976: 7). Turning geopolitically inward, the sociological inclination towards art was not absent in the practice of sociology in South Asia. To be more microscopic, and look at the Indian context for mere heuristic convenience, there were sociologists in India reasoning with the relation of art and society in the early phase of disciplinary development. It is relevant to briefly allude to the extensive deliberation of Radhakamal Mukerjee,40 one of the pioneering thinkers setting the temperament of sociology in India. It is curious to note that Mukerjee, mostly noted for presenting a sociological challenge to the predominance of positivism of economics, wrote a number of important essays on the issue of art and its relation with society, civilization, religion, and polity. One of the essays titled, ‘The Meaning and Evolution of Art in Society’ (1945), was published in the American Sociological Review with an unusual editorial note, which read: “The Editors think that American sociologists will be interested in the contemporary thinking of an eminent Indian sociologist in the eventful year of 1945” (1945: 496). It was evident that the world at large was ‘distantly’ curious about an Indian sociologist’s venture into the domain of art though they themselves preferred to keep their positivist hands clean. Indeed, it was only a couple of decades after this encounter that the ‘crisis in western sociology’, as mentioned above, was pronounced. However, before it was pronounced, Mukerjee in India had articulated, “art is at once a social product and an established means of social control…Modern

40  There have been a few noticeable attempts to systematically understand the contribution of Mukerjee to sociology in Indian context. See, for example, Thakur (2015).

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sociologists should now vindicate the importance of this fertile field – the study of art forms as the unchecked efflorescence and clarified utterance of culture, as its principal measure, directive force as well as means of control” (Mukerjee 1945: 496–497). Let us take a heuristic jump cut, and ask—then what happened? Did sociology in India or elsewhere in South Asia persist with its engagement with arts as suggested by Mukerjee? Perhaps, it is needless to answer such discomforting questions with detail within the limited space of this introductory essay. But the short answer is that opportunity was lost in India, in South Asia, and in the rest of the world simply because Mukerjee’s passionate plea was ill-understood then as it is now. It would be interesting however to briefly revisit a curious development in the contemporary discursive trope in India. Many years after Gouldner’s announcement of the crisis in Western sociology, some sociologists in India began to pronounce their own ‘crises’.41 This notion of crises was mostly characterized by the motif of ‘lament’ on the allegedly deplorable condition of teaching, researching, and writing in sociology in India. This was more succinctly underlined in Vasavi’s proposition that sociology in India is “fragmented and diluted, unable to forge an identity of its own, respond to changing times, and generate new schools of theory, methods and perspectives” (2011: 402). Did this announcement of crises in sociology in India lead to any call for a ‘new sociology’, as was done by Gouldner? Or, does it augur to any other optimistic consequence of the realization of the crises? Perhaps, the answer lies in the course of time. But then, there is a curious observation to share, which unfortunately speak of an ongoing and continuing separation of art and sociology in India and in the rest of South Asia. Take for example, some of the attempts by sociologists to recount the stories of the pioneer sociologists. Madan called it, while resurrecting an ‘edited’ version of the memories of Radhakamal Mukerjee, an attempt to rescue the pioneers from ‘disciplinary amnesia.’42 Curiously enough, this effort hardly takes note of Mukerjee’s sustained engagement with the artifacts of cultural articulations. Does it mean that there has been a strategy behind recounting the contributions of the pioneers, but do so by keeping arts and other civilizational entities away from the sociological

41  See, for example, Das (1993) and Deshpande (1994). We have dealt with these crises in the broader ambit of South Asia in Kumar et al. (2018). 42  See Madan (2003).

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framework? It appears at least in the case of Mukerjee that the interest in rescuing him from ‘disciplinary amnesia’ simultaneously meant perpetuating another amnesia, which has to do with his simultaneous engagement with art and sociology. In the broader scheme briefly presented above, we hope our argument for a candid conversation between sociology, anthropology, art, and art history becomes more tangible. Indeed, this is a modest beginning which solicits due perpetuity of bold ruminations and unhindered conversations among scholars from at least the two disciplines, sociology and art history. This beginning is also pertinent at this juncture as art history is stretching out for a novel realization: art interacts with society! Papastergiadis’s (2006) emphasis on artists’ social interactions and complex patterns of cultural exchange in the backdrop of their artworks is expressive of this new realization among art historians. Artists too are in the fold of everyday life, and hence they are not in a social vacuum. This realization too is located in a discursive trope. A systematic thesis on the interaction of social and aesthetic and therefore imperative of dialogue between sociologists and art historians appeared with the publication of Becker’s Art Worlds.43 Becker tilled the ground for mutual disciplinary interest by critically departing from the conventional dominant approaches in art history and art philosophy, arguing “the dominant tradition takes the artists and art work, rather than the network of cooperation, as central to the analysis of art as a social phenomenon”.44 Subsequently, the few sociologists interested in art also began to self-critically recognize the limitations of sociologists’ interest in ‘unmasking’ art. All the indicators of connections between art and society, such as class, gender, dominant ideology, capital interest, market, and so on, were handy tools in tearing apart what an art historian could have dubbed as stylized presentation of aesthetics. Nevertheless, there have been significant endeavors ever since to unravel a debate leading to an interesting realization. This has been summed up as a compelling message for both, sociologists and art historians: an object of art is both, social and aesthetic, at once. This emphatically underscores the indispensability of conversations between art historians and sociologists, appearing in a tangible form in a volume titled, Art from Start to Finish edited by 43  Many name Howard Becker’s Art Worlds and Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, both published in the 1980s (1982 and 1984, respectively), as two significant works underlining the common ground for art history, sociology, and cultural studies. 44  Becker quoted in Eduardo de la Fuente’s (2007: 411).

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Becker et al. (2006). This supports what de la Fuente has dubbed the New Sociology of Art and its confidence “to begin dialogue with other disciplines, such as art history and cultural studies, if and when these discourses share the assumption that art is a social construct, and its production and consumption are thoroughly social in character” (2007: 423). This proposition is also resonant with Jeremy Tanner’s (2003) endeavor to forge a relationship between sociologists and other scholars interested in art. And, importantly enough, this relationship, a kind of intellectual kinship, does not exist in a theoretical vacuum. Akin to Nisbet’s revisiting mentioned above, Tanner revisits from the classical to the contemporary, theoretical tropes in sociology, re-reading Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Simmel, Mannheim, Parsons, Elias, and Habermas. This enables him to propose that the best art history is, implicitly at least, sociologically informed, and the best sociology of art places questions of artistic agency and aesthetic form at the core of its research (Tanner 2003). What has preceded is our brief outline of the discursive context, mooting issues of shared concerns, which underlines the significance of the conversation between sociologists, anthropologists, and art historians. The book, a consequence of conversation, which invites additional possibilities of future conversations, flags the issues of shared interest and a pronounced possibility of continuity of conversation. It may reveal that at least some scholars in sociology and social anthropology are keen to unravel the phenomenon of art-making without being restricted to issues of style and material. This particular tribe of viewers and consumers of artworks tends to probe further into the constitution of meanings, going beyond the surface-value of style and materials. In a nutshell, the more we converse, the better we understand how sociologists and art historians are co-travelers on the same path. Finally, let us conclude our thoughts with reference to two sets of thoughts presented by Miguel Angel Corzo and Roy Perry on one hand and Angel Rama on the other. With reference to how artwork of the twentieth century might be remembered in the future, Corzo wonders, “if we accept the notion that art reflects history, then contemporary art is, in some way, a monument to contemporary civilization. It is the cultural heritage of our time” (Corzo 1999: XV). It is also in this sense of contemporary art’s burden as repertories of memories of our time, and therefore social and political products worthy of discourse that we have also suggested art be brought to the centrality of intellectual reckoning in sociology and anthropology. Similarly, when talking about the preservation of

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contemporary art held in the Tate Gallery, Perry noted, “if we do not preserve the art of today for tomorrow’s audience, their knowledge and experience of our culture will be, sadly, impoverished” (Perry 1999: 44). Indeed, what would sociology and anthropology be without a sustained interaction and engagement with art and culture when seen from the near as well as the distant future? Literary critic Angel Rama’s ideas expressed with regard to hierarchies of literatures and their legitimacy become important to us in a different way that has to do with our focus on South Asia. He noted, “European writers could address their audiences without worrying about the marginal readers outside Europe” even though writers from other parts of the world continue to “yearn for European readers and regard their readings as the true and authorizing one” (quoted in Cubitt 2002: 1). But this is not merely about legitimacy from Europe but from North America, and now also the affluent countries in East Asia. As we know, as a matter of quotidian practice, this situation applies quite well to South Asian artists, curators, and scholars of sociology and anthropology as well. That is, barring a few exceptions, their legitimacy is gauged by themselves and others on the basis of their ‘acceptance’ and ‘currency’ beyond the region in global centers of capital in Europe, North America, and East Asia. This is a reality of our time in the region. But we operate with a different scheme of logic. For us, in our intellectual pursuits, South Asia is of central importance. That is where we live and work, by choice. Much of our recent intellectual practice has begun by reflecting on the idea of South Asia, or we have returned to it after necessary detours. This is why, in this book, we have focused our attention on this region’s art and its sociology and anthropology as well as their lapses and where they might go. We continue to read and be inspired by ideas and writings that come to us from all over the world, and sometimes make them our own. But the legitimacy of our writings, our thinking or our postulations will not come from what gatekeepers elsewhere in the world think of our work. Instead, our work will only be legitimized if they make sense to us in our own contexts and if our intellectual cohorts find them worthy of discourse. But if these far flung ‘others’ fail to read what we write as we do theirs, their understandings of the world in which all of us live, will be sadly impoverished as suggested by Perry. In this scheme of things, the mutual interdisciplinary conversations we have suggested and have attempted to put together in this book are aimed to work as an exemplar towards halting this sense of impoverishment in the knowledge of our times, in our region, and in the world.

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Institute for the Advanced Study of Society and Culture/Theertha International Artists’ Collective. ———. 2014. Beyond History; Against the Present: Preliminary Thoughts on Reimagining ‘South Asia. In India + Sri Lanka- Sethu Samudram: Sethu Book Art Project, xvi–xxv. Bengaluru/Colombo: 1 Shanti Road and Theertha International Artists’ Collective. ———. 2016. Violence and the Burden of Memory: Remembrance and Erasure in Sinhala Consciousness. Delhi: Orient Blackswan. ———. 2018. Re-imagining and Re-narrating South Asia: Artists’ Travel and the Practice of Visual Art as a New Experiential Cartography. In Another South Asia! ed. Dev Nath Pathak, 251–274. Delhi: Primus. Perry, Roy A. 1999. Present and Future: Caring for Contemporary Art at the Tate Gallery. In Mortality-Immortality: The Legacy of 20th Century Art, ed. Miguel Angel Corzo, 41–44. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Preziosi, Donald, and Claire Farago. 2012. Art Is Not What You Think It Is. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Rajendran, Anushka. 2018. Re-imagining Communities: Contemporary Art from India and Sri Lanka. In Another South Asia! ed. Dev Nath Pathak, 186–201. Delhi: Primus. Ramaswamy, Sumathi, ed. 2003. Beyond Appearances: Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India. Delhi: Sage. Russell, Bertrand. 2013. History of Western Philosophy. London: Routledge. Rutten, Kris, An van Dienderen, and Ronald Soetaer. 2013. Revisiting the Ethnographic Turn in Contemporary Art. Critical Arts 27 (5): 459–473. Schneider, Arnd, and Christopher Wright, eds. 2010. Between Art and Anthropology: Contemporary Ethnographic Practice. New York: Bloomsbury. ———, eds. 2013. Anthropology and Art Practice. New York: Bloomsbury. Schnettler, Bernt. 2013. Notes on the History and Development of Visual Research Methods. InterDisciplines 4 (1): 41–75. Sinha, Gayatri. 2009. Introduction. In Art and Visual Culture in India, 1857–2007, ed. Gayatri Sinha, 8–23. Mumbai: Marg. Sood, Pooja. 2009. Six Degrees of Separation. In 6 Degrees of Separation: Chaos, Congruence and Collaboration in South Asia. New Delhi: Khoj Studios. Tanner, Jeremy, ed. 2003. The Sociology of Art: A Reader. London: Routledge. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. Thakur, Manish. 2015. The Quest for Indian Sociology: Radhakamal Mukerjee and Our Times. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advance Studies. Timms, Peter. 2005. What’s Wrong with Contemporary Art? Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Turner, Caroline, ed. 2005. Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific. Canberra: Pandanus Books & Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, the Australian National University.

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Turner, Caroline, and Jen Webb. 2016. Art and Human Rights: Contemporary Asian Contexts. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Vasavi, A.R. 2011. Pluralising the Sociology of India. Contributions to Indian Sociology 45 (3): 399–426. Weerasinghe, Jagath. 2005. Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka. In Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner. Canberra: Pandanus Books. Wheale, Nigel. 1995. Postmodernism: From Elite to Mass Culture. In The Postmodern Arts, ed. Nigel Wheal, 33–56. London: Routledge. Zitzewitz, Karin. 2014. The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

SECTION I

Contours of Quest: Arts at Crossroad

CHAPTER 2

Mimicking Anthropologists: Re-Membering a Photo Archive via Pata Paintings, Performative Mimesis, and Photo Performance Parul Dave Mukherji

In 1985, N. Pushpamala, Ayisha Abraham, and I visited Naya Village in Midnapore district of West Bengal, India, as MA students of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. The objective of the visit was to document the art and life of Dukhshyam Chitrakar, a folk scroll painter or a patua1 who lived in this village, located some 80 miles away from Kolkata. This documentation project was mentored by Professor Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, head of the painting department in India’s 1  A patua is a village scroll (pata) painter who paints on pasted sheets of paper backed by a cloth and performs by singing the story composed by him. The stories are usually based on Puranic mythologies, usually Mahabharata, Ramayana and often-local myths involving the snake goddess, Manasa. More recently, a new genre called the Babu scrolls have emerged. They are based on colonial times, which include stories of martyrdom of nationalist heroes who fought against the British Raj.

P. Dave Mukherji (*) School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India © The Author(s) 2019 S. Perera, D. N. Pathak (eds.), Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_2

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first postcolonial art school. Its aim was to address the wide gulf that existed between folk artists and art school-trained artists and art historians. While the textual and photo documentation were submitted to the painting department on return, the photographs got immersed in archival oblivion, as subsequently all three of us got dispersed pursuing our own career paths. Only recently did they get ‘excavated’ by Pushpamala when she chanced upon these old negatives in her collection and developed them. Once rediscovered, they elicited such an effect on us not only for taking us back in time to our younger selves but also for posing a shocking contrast between the (native) artist and his extended family on the one hand, and us, the anthropologists-like trio.2 The visual difference prompted Pushpamala to scribble on the back of one of the photographs—‘Visiting Anthropologists!’ This is a parody that I turn into a heuristic device to stage a conversation between ‘real anthropologists’ and us ‘brown anthropologists’. These photos also triggered a reflexive moment in us to see a possible connection between our ethnographic experience and our respective practices in the field of art history and art practice.3 How does one revisit this past moment through memory and visual trace and engage with the questions of difference across various registers like the urban and rural divide, folk artist/urban artist-art historian divide, among other differences? What does it mean to document folk art across different types of unevenness and also consider the impact that this encounter had on Pushpamala’s later project on Native Women of India and my interest in performative mimesis? (Parul Dave Mukherji 2006). Can this remembered encounter be considered as an event to stage a larger question about the nature of encounter between art history, contemporary art practice, and anthropology? (Figs. 2.1 and 2.2). The chapter consists of three broad parts. The first section attempts to set up a conversation between art history and visual anthropology via a specific genre of group photography that every anthropologist’s fieldwork photography would entail. This genre is further narrowed to group photos in which the anthropologist is also present posing with the ‘natives’. Using the lens of visual anthropology and art history, my focus is on a 2   On the back of one of the photographs, N.  Pushpamala has scribbled ‘Visiting Anthropologists!’ as a witty comment which has inspired the title of this paper. The three of us in turn took most of the photographs. 3  Decades later, when I joined the department of art history and aesthetics as faculty, I was part of the shift to New Art History which took the shape of a national conference and a publication: Towards a New Art History: Studies in Indian Art, 2002. Anthropology impacted us via Cultural Studies and opened up the vector of politics of representation.

Fig. 2.1  Ayisha Abraham and Pushpamala seeing a scroll on the local goddess Manasa, in the company of Dukhshyam Chitrakar on the left, Naya Village, Midnapore, 1985. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave Mukherji)

Fig. 2.2  Pushpamala and Parul Dave Mukherji sipping coconut water in front of a vegetable shop in Naya Village, Midnapore, 1985. (Photo Courtesy of Ayisha Abraham)

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close formalistic analysis of the group photographs to understand asymmetries between ‘them’ and ‘us’—something that we were not aware of at the time the photographs were taken. Only when we encountered them as recovered images after a time lapse of three decades, the image of an anthropologist haunted my effort to grapple with the effect that these photos had on us, and a set of visual differences that they posed before us. The second section deals with the more recent moment in 2015 when Dukhshyam Chitrakar, by now an impoverished and aged folk artist, contacted me in need of a commission to make a scroll painting. On learning about the resurfaced photos of our 1985 visit, he decided to paint a scroll on this very moment. This eventually turned out to be an occasion for him to turn his gaze on us and depict the kind of urban life he imagined us to be a part of, and in the process offered a subtle critique of the urban art world and its market for its marginalization of folk art. The third part relates these photographs with Pushpamala’s emerging art practice and her foray into photo performance. It was around the late 1990s that she moved towards this medium and produced her now famous Native Women Series in which she refashions her own appearance after a tribal Toda woman. How does her exploration of the colonial archives in which she places herself as the native compare with these photos and relate broadly with the ethnographic turn in contemporary art in India? Finally, I sum up by offering a critique of a particular strand of postcolonial discourse that disallows full visibility to the internal other, a problem that continues to haunt even the most politically engaged art discourse on India.

I Seeing the Genre of a Group Photo Anthropologically two uses of photographic archives: to provide ‘a record as complete as it can be made…of the present state of the world’ and to provide ‘valuable documents’ for the future. (Wright 1991: 43)

Taking Pushpamala’s humorous scribble on the back of one of the photos referring to both of us as ‘Visiting Anthropologists’ as a point of entry,4 let me ask the following question: what were the conditions of that 4  I draw from Elizabeth Edwards’ definition of a photograph as a material object that has a front and a back through which the scribble on the back is part of its contextual reality. Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Material Beings: Objecthood and Ethnographic Photographs’, Visual Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2002, 67.

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­ hotographic moment that prompted her to use this label? The folk art p documentation project that we were a part of was funded by the Cultural Ministry of the Indian government and it was mentored by Gulam Sheikh, an eminent artist and art teacher, to address immense disparity between the life-world and art that was practiced in the modern art school at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda and that of the traditional folk artists practiced in their native villages. The project was conceptualized in two stages. In stage one, the folk artists were invited for a residency to the art school and in the next stage, students from this art school were to travel to the native village of these artists to live with them, observe them at work in their ‘native’ environment and explore a possibility of a dialogue; quite in line with what anthropologists like Malinowski would call a ‘participant observation’ in field research. Compared to countries in Latin America where anthropology had a different status being enlisted in the nation-building activity (Lomnitz 2005), in India, cultural nationalism preferred to invoke its Indic-/ Sanskrit-based tradition that presided over the early phase of nationalism during the first quarter of the twentieth century.5 Folk and tribal art did play a crucial role in early nationalist art, as in the paintings by Jamini Roy, for instance, but quite often, it worked as a source of appropriation of a visual vocabulary by male urban artists as a way to indigenize western modernism. Seldom did the figure of the folk or tribal artist per se emerge as a legitimate maker of modern art; much like the way women artists remained confined to the margins of art history whereas they had a prominent presence in the symbolic realm such as the allegorical figure of Bharat Mata or India-as-a-Mother (Ramaswamy 2010). It was largely during the 1980s when folk and tribal art began to gain recognition, and turn into objects of scholarly publications, a belated acknowledgment from the state since Independence (Jayakar 1981; Shah 1985). At a time India was attracting international attention through its cultural intervention in the form of the festivals of India across the West, folk and tribal art best captured its Indianness and became the hallmarks of national authenticity. In fact, with the establishment of Marg in 1946, India’s first art magazine by the writer and poet, Mulk Raj Anand—who had a strong socialist leanings—folk and tribal art enjoyed as much visibility as the classical art. But the tension between these two categories, that 5  For instance, the first national anthem of India, ‘Vande Mataram’, was composed in 1937 in Sanskrit; it was originally a poem composed by the Bengali writer, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, in the 1870s, which was turned into a song by the poet Rabindranath Tagore.

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is, folk/tribal and Indic/classical, manifested in the opposing terms like the margi and the desi, first used by Coomaraswamy in a modern sense (Coomaraswamy 1957). The pedigree of these two terms has a long history in music and the arts traceable to twelfth century CE when the distinction was more along stylistic grounds than that of the social and cultural hierarchies underpinning them. From 1982, desi entered an institutional frame with J. Swaminathan’s setting up of the Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal—an art institute envisaged to bridge the gap between the urban, metropolitan art and the folk and tribal art in the heart of the country. So when Pushpamala and I got involved in the project in 1985, it was an extension of the desi project, so to speak, funded by the Cultural Ministry, and under its patronage, Gulam Sheikh encouraged students to experience and address the hierarchy between the urban and the rural. After the lapse of three decades, when I revisited the documentation project through these photographs, a set of differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ as encapsulated by the label of ‘Visiting Anthropologists’ did produce an effect that warranted a close visual study. The lens of ‘Visiting Anthropologists’ also allowed me to closely examine these distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ not in terms of skin color so much as our urban clothing (urban chic), our stance and tourist-like activity (like posing while drinking the coconut water in our tokas or local hats). Again, the parody of ‘Visiting Anthropologists’ led me to compare these photographs with those taken by the ‘real’ anthropologists. Comparing the Midnapore photographs of ours in which we posed with the patua families with the ones taken by the ‘real’ or field anthropologists with their ‘subjects’ led me to think of this special genre of photographs that would presumably be part of every anthropologist’s collection of fieldwork albums. How does one analyze the composition using the standard art historical tools of formal analysis? The field photographs taken by Malinowski, who pioneered participant observation, was an obvious starting point.6 It is at this point that it may be possible to stage a dialogue between anthropology and art history and move into visual anthropology by remaining within the vectors of the latter. In terms of disciplinary rethinking, art history had learned many of its lessons about the politics of representation 6  Malinowski applied his reflexive way of grasping the power relationship between an anthropologist and his subjects to photography, being particularly attentive to the eye level of the camera vis-a-vis the group facing the photographer. He rejected both the high and low angles in favor of eye-level shots to undermine a possible objectification of the natives.

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from anthropology and redressed its own disciplinary blind spots. But can art history also offer tools to anthropology to deepen reflexivity about selfrepresentation of the anthropologist and enable it to get over its anxiety of the visual? Taking genre7 as a way to understand the fashioning of a group photograph, I intend to visually read the photographs both in their specific ‘photographic moment’ (Pink 2007: 7) and in terms of their present reception by Pushpamala and me to make sense of their effect on us but also to closely examine its visual order. Our ‘anthropological’ photographs presented here were taken by Ayisha Abraham, an artist who is now well known for using photographs, especially family albums in her own practice as a contemporary artist. Given this fact, any rigid distinction between creative and realist photography (Edwards 2002: 57, quoted in Pink 2007) does not apply in this case. Let us look at the visual genre of a group photograph that anthropologists take of themselves with the natives in the photograph, taking as my point of departure the well-known photograph entitled ‘Malinowski with Trobriand Islanders, 1918.8 I will read this photo against the grain of the current anthropological reading of Malinowski’s photographs that swerves towards political correctness and ascribes the reflexivity of his participant observation methodology to his photographs.9 In this photo, despite its horizontal format, a format preferred by Malinowski for its non-­hegemonic implications, the anthropologist is centrally located, much like the figure of Christ in Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated painting, Last Supper. The natives sit on either side on a table-like seat and dangle their feet mimicking the posture of the anthropologist. The sharp contrast between Malinowski’s white skin is accentuated by his white shirt and the contrast 7  I take genre less to connote and classify, but more as a link between the genesis and the production of the group photographs. In Remembering the Present, anthropologist Johannes Fabian extensively engages with the category of ‘genre’ tracing its emergence to eighteenthcentury Europe, especially to Holland and its visual practices which, in a sense, anticipated the invention of photography. 8  The image is available at the following link: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2017/ 06/13/bronislaw-malinowski-lse-pioneer-of-social-anthropology/ 9  For example, see the following observation by Michael Young: “The height of the camera was commensurate with the height of the subject. Malinowski crouched when photographing children. He neither looked up or down at his subjects. The effect is one of directness… Vertical framing was foreign to Malinowski’s style, and horizontal framing massively predominates in the collection”. Michael. W.  Young, Malinowski’s Kiriwina: Fieldwork Photography 1915–1918 (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1998); p. 17.

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formed by the native bodies flanking him. His baldhead stands out amidst the dense black hair of the native heads. They are all men with their bare torsos. A further sign of difference between them is signaled by white shoes worn by the anthropologist as opposed to bare feet held at an angle to form a staccato of black dangling legs. Within the genre of group photograph that included the anthropologist is the sub-genre of anthropologists posing with native children. For instance, we can take as an example the well-known 1918 photograph in which Malinowski is photographed with native children in the Trobriand Islands.10 How different is this from the preceding one? The group formation in this photo follows a different logic where the bodies of children are gathered in one mass in the center flanked by the figure of Malinowski crouching down on one side and a native adult on the other. Much has been written about the anthropologist’s crouching on the ground to meet the eye level of the children and his preference for the horizontal format as a way to neutralize obvious differences in height and age. Curiously, in this photo, this posture of Malinowski further enhances his role as an anthropologist studiously observing the children who are instructed to pose as playing a game. Does the presence of children create condition for greater intimacy and proximity between the two? Even if he crouches to reduce the distance between him and the children, the posture accentuates the staged aspect of this photograph rather than highlight his being a participant observer. Quite strikingly different is his contemporary Brazilian anthropologist, Edgard Roquette-Pinto, in another part of the world, but also posing with native children.11 Here ‘native’ has a different resonance than in the context of Malinowski. As a scientist connected to the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro between 1905 and 1935, Pinto was involved in research on anthropology and ethnography of Brazil, to describe the formative racial characteristics of the country within the context of Brazilian nationalist activism. Pinto faces the camera held by his friend, Antonio Pyreneus de Souza, while holding the children in intimate and choreographed embrace: his arms go around in an ‘S’ shape forming two circles around the children on either side. Pinto shrinks the distance we noticed in Malinowski’s photo 10   Image is available at the following link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Bronis%C5%82aw_Malinowski_among_Trobriand_tribe_2.jpg 11  The photograph is available at the following link: https://alchetron.com/EdgarRoquette-Pinto

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by holding the children close to him, but he is still at the center acting as a pivot. What is striking is the manner in which the children are instructed to demurely cover their private parts. Closer home, and a couple of decades later, Verrier Elwin,12 an English, self-trained anthropologist, presents another set of examples. He, too, partakes of this sub-genre and gets himself photographed posing with the Gond and Pardhan children, belonging to tribes of Central India. Rather than crouching on the ground to reduce his height to be closer to the children, Elwin chooses to sit on a chair instead and surrounds himself with children. The two photos are remarkably similar in format with some variations: in the first, Elwin’s averted face meets the eyes of a little girl, and in the second, a smiling boy takes her place as he holds the youngest one in the group on his lap—the only among the group who looks out curiously at the photographer. In this case, the crouching position is taken up by one of the children in the front gazing up at the anthropologist and thereby closing the semi-circle around Elwin (Fig. 2.3). Let us compare these photos by the real anthropologists with our Midnapore documentation album.13 In this photo taken by Ayisha Abraham, where Pushpamala and I pose with the patua children, the gender dimension of the ‘brown anthropologists’ obviously enters the frame. 12  Verrier Elwin (1902–1964) was an ethnologist and tribal activist, who began his career in India as a Christian missionary. He is best known for his early work with the Baigas and Gonds of Central India. Inspired by Gandhi, he allied himself with the nationalist movement, and later Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru would continually seek his expertise for tribal and rural development. 13  All the photographs of the documentation trip referred to in this chapter were turned into artworks by Pushpamala and were on display at a show entitled India Re-Worlded: Seventy Years of Investigating a Nation curated by Arshiya Lokhandwala at Gallery Lakeeren in Mumbai that started from September 2017. This fact explains the black strips on the eyes of Dukhshyam and his extended family as part of the ethical use of photographs in the absence of written permission from them. Riddhi Doshi and Rachel Lopez write on them in Hindustan Times: “Artist Pushpamala N revisits old, found images from her 1985 trip to Naya village in West Bengal to reflect upon how she experiences the photographs now. Those casually clicked pictures now take on a different meaning and context. …‘The visual difference in the pictures between us and the villagers mimicked records of old European colonial anthropological expeditions, and yet the photographs possessed the familiarities that we could have as insiders’, says Pushpamala. The difference between the lifestyle of the artist students and villagers is stark. It almost looks like they are from different worlds, but the ease of the body language suggests the connect of being and experiencing the same nation”, observe Doshi and Lopez. https://www.hindustantimes.com/.../story-nTCgmKsnOuWje2tL2QMBFP.htm

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Fig. 2.3  Pushpamala and Parul Dave Mukherji seeing a scroll sitting in front of a thatched hut with two children from the patua community, Naya Village, Midnapore, West Bengal, India, 1985. (Photo Courtesy of Ayisha Abraham)

Squatting on the floor and resting our backs against a mud-thatched hut, Pushpamala and I examine the scroll held open by her. While Pushpamala obviously strikes a pose while intently gazing at the scroll, I glance at it while holding the attention of a child on my lap with a camera cap. The awkward posture of the bystander child on one side appears to be more of a happy coincidence captured by Ayisha’s camera, rather than a deliberate pose. My hand accidentally covers the seated child’s lower part of the body and so it is hard to tell if he had any covering but the standing boy gets captured as naked. It is this easy inclusion of the naked infant that led me to pay attention to careful orchestration of the little hands of children in the Pinto photograph that betrays an anxiety over this issue. The sight of naked village children causes neither discomfort nor embarrassment, being part of what one expects to see in an Indian village (Fig. 2.4). In this group photograph, the two genres combine. Here the ‘mimicking anthropologists’ quite easily blend with Dukhshyam and his extended family. Even in this frame, naked infants abound, but it is largely men who choose to pose holding their children. Notably, the artist Dukhshyam who poses standing in a white shirt has his son Rohin propped up on his

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Fig. 2.4  Pushpamala and Parul Dave Mukherji sitting in front of a thatched hut with Dukhshyam and his extended family of scroll painters, Naya Village, Midnapore, West Bengal, India, 1985. (Photo Courtesy of Ayisha Abraham)

waist. So while men proudly pose with their children, the women stand unencumbered but have their heads covered in a sari, a feature that will inform Pushpamala’s self-fashioning as a native woman a decade and a half later. Pushpamala and I are sitting on a raised platform on one side and are joined by one of the boys while the rest of the group either stands or squats on the mud floor. The eldest among the extended family are two patuas or scroll painters near in the foreground, one of whom holds a scroll in his hands and a couple of books that rests on an aluminum pot in which the songs are written down. As Ayisha took this photo, it is likely that we followed her instructions, which certainly did not aim at segregating Pushpamala and me from them. Rather, the group takes the shape of a triangle echoing the shape of the roofs of the huts, adding an aesthetic dimension to the photo. What creates a sharp distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are the black strips covering the eyes of the family members, whereas Pushpamala and I gaze back at the camera. How does one define the gaze of brown ethnographers? Does our gender make it possible to conceive of a category

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of a soft gaze? Verrier Elwin too softens his gaze turning to children with tenderness. Are the women who stand with their hair covered impacting Pushpamala’s gaze, and will they reappear in her Native Women Series when she refashions her body to mimic them?

II In this second section, we will jump cut to the present and focus on a recent scroll painting made by Dukhshyam based on what he could recall of our 1985 visit to his village, besides being driven by his need for making ends meet. Although he continues to live in his village known to be home of many patua families, he and many of his fellow painters are now finding it difficult to solely survive on their traditional practice of scroll painting. Lack of state patronage and ill health prevents him from traveling to nearby villages to earn his living. In 2015, he called me from his village asking me if I wanted to buy a scroll from him. On being informed about the rediscovered photographs of our 1985 visit to his village, he astutely came up with the suggestion of basing his commissioned scroll on our 1985 documentation visit to Naya Village. His proposition appealed to me. After three months, he completed the scroll and sent it by post to me along with a DVD recording of himself performing the scroll in his village. Unlike the traditional scroll paintings that drew the subject matter from old mythological stories about Hindu gods and goddesses, this scroll dealt with an unusual theme of narrating the travels of three women ‘ethnographers’ who had visited his village some three decades ago. While r­ emaining within the ambit of his traditional visual language, he found ways to telescope the past with the present. He not only depicted the moment we set out to travel to his village but also our current professional activity. The other remarkable feature of this scroll is his engagement with photography and its function in mechanical reproduction. In other words, the camera is inserted in the story both as an object and a form of representation. The best way I could make sense of this aspect of his depiction was through the idea of performative mimesis. It is performative also in a real sense as each scroll is meant to be performed before an audience, accompanied as it is by a song that is narrated by the folk artist while unwinding the scroll. The best way I could make sense of this aspect of his depiction is through the idea of performative mimesis, a concept that I have been engaging with for some time now. This notion also makes possible a critique of the standard

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notion of representation that is founded on a neat separation of the subject and object of representation.14 Here are some frames from this scroll for a visual analysis. The opening frame (Fig.  2.5) depicts the three of us, Pushpamala, Ayisha, and me getting ready to leave Baroda for his village in two sub-­ frames. On the left, we stand behind Professor Gulam Sheikh who is shown with his characteristic beard and mustache, seated on the floor, busy painting, and glancing up at us while we take his leave; incidentally, one of us holds a camera, a recording device for our documentation project which looks more like a video recorder, a familiar sight in his native village in recent times. On the right, three of us, clad in trousers and shoes ready to leave by train to our destination across the country from Western India to Bengal. In the next set of couple of frames (Figs. 2.6 and 2.7), the three of us are shown navigating the city with its high-rise buildings, taxis and buses, and an aeroplane passing overhead. In Fig. 2.8, Dukhshyam singles me out to depict me as a professor in JNU taking a class before a blackboard, and all the students are shown to be women! Was I singled out among us three having commissioned this scroll? But a close look at my activity as a teacher directed me to the blackboard that has two words written on it: Pater Katha or the Story of a Scroll written in larger-sized letters in English and a Hindi version in smaller font below. This was a remarkable insertion as it served two ends: By making Pata painting the main topic of my class, he was not only exercising his agency as a folk artist, but he also interwove his subtle critique of the mainstream art world’s neglect of his genre of painting. Is this what he thought the objective of our 1985 documentation trip was? Is this his way of framing a critique of marginalization of his folk art practice in the urban art discourse? The final frame (Fig.  2.11) shows our return to Baroda, to Gulam Sheikh’s very classroom from where our trip had started bringing the narrative to a full circle. Sheikh now witnesses our photo documentation, which is shown vertically much like a Pata painting itself, except now each frame repeats the same figure within it. It is here performative mimesis helps to explain how a scroll can comment on a photograph. Here, mimesis does not function as a one-to-one correspondence between an object 14  Performative mimesis builds on Derrida’s notion of mimesis, which he derived from the French Symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé. See Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).

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Fig. 2.5  The documentation scroll painted by Dukhshyam in 2015. The opening frame showing Pushpamala holding the camera, Ayisha Abraham, and Parul Dave Mukherji in Gulam Sheikh’s Studio in the Painting Department, Baroda, taking his leave to embark upon the Train Journey to Naya Village, Midnapore, West Bengal, India, 1985. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave Mukherji)

and its copy but rather captures the indexical repetition of a photographic image. In other words, his repetition of the same figure in five frames signifies photographic reproduction. Adding his own feminist touches, Dukhshyam shows the main gate of the Faculty of Fine Arts to be flanked by women guards, as his closing comment on a narrative, which remains largely woman centered.

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Fig. 2.6  Dukhshyam Chitrakar, The documentation scroll. Our arrival in Calcutta and our negotiations with the city traffic to catch a bus to visit the Naya Village, Midnapore, West Bengal, India, 1985. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave Mukherji)

The return of this folk artist’s gaze back at us in manner in which he depicted the differences that he perceived him and us may be at first be read less a question of his empowerment and more his desperate and creative effort ‘to be in the contemporary’. His mode of expression remains traditional, and yet he adapts the style to accommodate a radically different theme of an art school students’ documentation visit to his village. In

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Fig. 2.7  Dukhshyam Chitrakar, The documentation scroll. Our arrival in Calcutta and our negotiations with the city traffic to catch a bus to visit the Naya Village, Midnapore, West Bengal, India, 1985. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave Mukherji)

case of the university lecture room, a classroom in his village school appears to have worked well as a model. To what extent, does this reversal of the gaze turn him into an ethnographer of urban and city life? Or is the reversal of gaze an impossible position to occupy given Dukhshyam’s status as a disempowered village artist? (Fig. 2.9). Sonal Khullar has been the first art historian to draw attention to this encounter of us with the Bengali folk artists in the context of Indian modern’s worldly and regional affiliations. However, she refers to this moment as an example of a “translation between local and regional cultures that was a hallmark of modernism in India” (Khullar 2015: 226–227). Dukhshyam who had acquired a certain visibility in the Baroda art world during the 1980s being on a residency program now languishes in oblivion and is struggling to find buyers for his scrolls. The desi artist, once a symbol or token of postcolonial democratic cultural politics, is now pushed to the fringes of the contemporary art world.

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Fig. 2.8  Dukhshyam Chitrakar, The documentation scroll. Parul Dave Mukherji taking a class on the story of a painted scroll or Pata Katha at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave Mukherji)

When Pushpamala discovered the old photographs of our 1984 field trip and sent them to me, what seemed like a simple documentation pushed into the corners of our memory took another sense. Gulam Sheikh wanted us to live with patua painters and their families to connect their life with their work. What then appeared like an organic community in a village today appears like a community left behind. Dukhshyam’s subtle critique also alludes to the failed promise made to the rural artists not only by the state but also the very documentation project that we were once a part of. Despite immense research done on patua painting and institutionalization of museums such as Gurusaday Museum in Kolkata, cities and urban institutional sites hold the key to their visibility in the art world. It is during Durga Puja that some of them make it to the city and find patronage. Their relationship to the city is unidirectional, and so in that respect, our presence in their village was such a spectacle.

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Fig. 2.9  Dukhshyam Chitrakar, The documentation scroll. The closing frame showing Parul Dave Mukherji, Pushpamala, and Ayisha Abraham, showing the photos of the documentation trip to Gulam Sheikh in his studio in the Painting Department, Baroda, in 1985. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave Mukherji)

III Pushpamala and the Ethnographic Turn in Contemporary Art in India: Fashioning Herself as a Native South Indian Woman via Photo Performance “I remember that morning in Bastar vividly. I had woken up in a green haze. Shantibai had collected the intoxicating mahua flowers that had fallen on the ground and was laying them out to dry at the Dialogue Center. We had planned a trip to Chitrakoot Falls. Before motoring down to the Falls, we had walked through the clearing of gorgeous Sal trees, the air ringing suddenly with the laughter of children jumping up to cradle themselves in

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a tangle of vines” (Adajania 2016: 273).15 A decade and a half lapsed before N. Pushpamala was going to reinvent her practice as a photo performance artist around 2000 and launch into her Native Women Series. In this section, I want to explore a possible connection between the 1984 moment and Pushpamala’s Native Women Series, which I take to be aligned with the ethnographic turn in contemporary art in India. It was the Bombay-based artist, Navjot Altaf, who had pioneered a move in this direction by the late 1990s when she had “surprised many of her contemporaries in the Indian art world by walking away from a successful career in Bombay and retreating to Bastar, in the tribal heartland of Central India” (Adajania 2016: 11). Until the 1990s, the discourse on modern Indian art was largely driven by the continual pull and push between tradition and modernity. Geeta Kapur captures the dynamics of the Indian modern through the lens of Nehruvian modernity by creating a quadripartite equation among nationalism, secularism, tradition, and modernity: “nationalism in our experience is at the very least a foil to the universal modern. It helps resist imperial hegemony up to a point; it serves as environmental testing ground for unheeding modernism. Just as modernism, a cultural and specifically modern category, interrogates through its formalist means, through its negative dialectic and valourized transgressions, the dangerously totalizing ideology of nationalism” (Kapur 1991: 2805). The temporality implied in When was Modernism exploded around the 1990s just as a construct of postcolonial discourse that pitted the Indian modern against the West began to sound increasingly elitist. This construct left little room to address the internal colonization that was under way following Independence in 1947. After half a century of the postcolonial era, the terrain of contemporary Indian art grew far more complex with the impact of globalization on the one hand and the rise of communal/caste/gender politics on the other; the internal others found voices through the cracks that had set in the Nehruvian model. While art historians and critics were still reeling under the impact of these complicated developments, artists experimented boldly with new medium and materiality, which served to not only upturn the standard notions of time and space but even the very question of representation was put at stake: representation took on dual meaning as aesthetic and political at the same time. 15  This excerpt from the Epilogue best matches the ethnographic turn in art writing that we first had witnessed in art practice. It is reminiscent of field notes maintained by anthropologists.

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The pedagogic vision of Gulam Sheikh was as if applied to contemporary art practice by both Altaf and Pushpamala in different ways. Intertwined with the self-fashioning of the artist as an ethnographer was a disenchantment with the idea of history as progress, throwing open the question of archive and a creative anachronism in dealing with the past. If Pushpamala revisited the colonial photo archives that had objectified the tribal bodies, Altaf moved her studio to Bastar and aspired for a collaboration with the tribal artists.16 Therefore, ethnography and archive emerged as two key axes that undergirded the shift in contemporary art practice. Pushpamala’s Native Women Series combined both these concerns: of artist as an ethnographer and history as archive. I would locate Pushpamala’s foray into photo performance within these two conceptual markers.17 How does her exploration of the colonial archives in which she places herself as the native compare with these photos taken in 1985 in the midst of native men and women of a West Bengal village? At a time when postcolonial discourse was at its peak, Pushpamala revisited the colonial photo archives and found their representation of the native women a suitable subject of her fierce critique. Perhaps, the term that best encapsulates her careful move to photo performance is performative mimesis. This entailed a different mode of representation in which the artist literally stepped into the ‘shoes’ of a native woman and prepared her body and persona to represent this other. Here mimicry shades into masquerade. From being a mimicking anthropologist to an impersonator of a native woman (but with a qualification of a South Indian native), she drew her new mode of representation via the postmodern citationality from an already existing formal lexicon of colonial photography (Tharu 2007). However, unlike the casual snap shot of the earlier photographic moment, her Ethnographic Series are the result of a carefully orchestrated misen-scene.18 Moving beyond the formal differences, I want to engage with the political implications of this self-fashioning invoking Hal Foster’s formulation 16  Adajania voices Altaf’s concerns that seem to resonate with Sheikh’s radical pedagogy: “Can individuals belonging to different ethnic class and backgrounds communicate, work together, create a political solidarity, and produce shared cultural meanings?” (Adajania 2016: 11). 17  Apart from N. Pushpamala, there are many other contemporary artists in India who have shown deep concern with ethnography and the archive; Navjot Altaf being a pioneer, joined by artists like Nikhil Chopra, Naveen Mathews, Sharmila Sawant, and many others, despite their very diverse modes of art making. 18  Maybe this explains why in India anthropology was not enlisted in the nation making project because of the painful reminder of colonial photography and its objectification of the native body.

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of “artist as an ethnographer”: “art thus passed into the expanded field of culture that anthropology is thought to survey” (Foster 1996: 306). Having witnessed the expansion of the field of contemporary art in India in the post-1990s, there was no simple, celebratory return to the earlier photographic moment of 1985. Artist/art historian as an ethnographer19 has a longer history in India than the Euro-American world, given its diverse demography and the colonial interlude. In fact, the very career of the terms we alluded to early in this essay desi and margi captures deep social and cultural disparities across class as well as caste. Hence, Foster’s tracing of the ethnographic turn in the 1960s by displacing the Marxist, class-based model of avant garde practice with the activism of postmodern artists revolving around the cultural/racial alterity of the postcolonial subaltern is not applicable to the Indian context. However, there are two warnings sounded by Hal Foster that help in developing a critique of Indian artists’ engagement with ethnography: Does the project of ‘ethnographic self-fashioning’ fall into the trap of “promote[ing] a presumption of ethnographic authority as much as a questioning of it?” (Foster 1996: 306). It is a possibility that Pushpamala’s mode of photo performance work invites as does our retrospective glancing at the earlier moment. Perhaps, it is by showing Pushpamala as the artist in the making and by foregrounding the characters who would subsequently enter her repertoire that this critique can be preempted; as, for example, the ‘native woman’ clad in her sari with her head covered is among the photographed, potentially an object of Pushpamala’s future gaze but at the moment she is part of her own environment, gazing back at the photographer (Fig. 2.10). Pushpamala is not yet “gazing for her”. If narcissism is a possible trap that Pushpamala potentially faces, Altaf faces the danger of ideological patronage of the tribal/adivasi artists that she collaborates with. Take, as, for instance, Nancy Adajania’s otherwise brilliant book on Navjot Altaf that is entitled Navjot Altaf: The Thirteenth Place. Despite its evocative subtitle, the book ultimately succumbs to the logic of a monograph—inevitable fallout when the book project is commissioned by a private gallery. A monograph tends to place the author in a position of ideological patronage which defeats the aim of an artist like Altaf to commit herself to solidarity with the worker or tribal in her material practice. 19   Retrospectively speaking, today it is possible to understand Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy’s very entry into art history through the prism of cultural anthropology if we trace it to his first seminal work entitled Medieval Sinhalese Art (Broad Campden 1907). Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India, 1946, is another such example of salience of the ethnographic lens.

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Fig. 2.10  N. Pushpamala, The Ethnographic Series, Native Women of South India, Photo-Performance, 2004. (Photo courtesy of N. Pushpamala)

When we juxtapose the careers of Dukhshyam on the one hand and those of Pushpamala and Altaf on the other, it dramatizes a very sharp divide between the folk artists and contemporary artists in India—a matter that had deeply concerned Gulam Sheikh in the mid-1980s. At best, the bold moves by these urban artists to reach out to their social and cultural others affirm their political radicalism. While these artists have successfully reinvented their practice through the ethnographic turn, it is the postcolonial theory that also needs a reinvention which rather than foregrounding the East-West encounters needs to be more responsive to the history of internal colonization. Despite the radicality and the politics of inclusion that underpins Pushpamala’s turning this photographic moment into a contemporary artwork, the neoliberal ideology seeps in through the copyright rules in photography that disallows showing the face of the photographed ‘natives’ without permission. The black strips covering the eyes of ‘them’ may fulfill photography’s ‘ethical’ code, but visually they further enhance the asymmetry of our

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Fig. 2.11  A detail of Pushpamala in front of a thatched hut with Dukhshyam and his extended family of scroll painters, Naya Village, Midnapore, West Bengal, India, 1985. (Photo courtesy of N. Pushpamala)

positions, between them, almost anonymous members of a community, and us—an urban elite artist and an art historian. But despite the unevenness of our relationship with Dukhshyam it is in his scroll rather than in the photograph that he returns the gaze—with his clever inscription of Pata Katha on the blackboard, written not in Bengali but in English and Hindi, languages more audible in the corridors of the art world and maybe in a potential market. Thereby he also inscribes his desire to be in the contemporary. The scroll that I have commissioned ultimately became a site of a new pedagogic responsibility in the way Dukhshyam threw the ball back into my court, so to speak, by inscribing “Pata Katha” on the blackboard. What sort of anthropology of art to fashion that will make this impertinence from a folk artist legible? (Fig. 2.11).

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References Adajania, Nancy. 2016. Navjot Altaf: The Thirteenth Place. Mumbai: Guild. Coomaraswamy, A.K. 1956 (or 1957??). The Nature of “Folklore” and “Popular Art”. In Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, 130–143. New York: Dover Publications. Dave Mukherji, Parul. 2006. Towards Performance Mimesis. Theatre India  – National School of Drama Theatre Journal 13: 178–192. Edwards, Elizabeth. 2002. Material Beings: Objecthood and Ethnographic Photographs. Visual Studies 17 (1): 67. Fabian, Johannes. 1996. Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire. Chicago: University of California Press. Foster, Hal. 1996. The Artist as Ethnographer? In The Return of the Real. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Jayakar, Pupul. 1981. The Earthen Drum: An Introduction to the Ritual Arts of Rural India. New Delhi: National Museum. Kapur, Geeta. 1991. Place of the Modern in Indian Cultural Politics. Economic and Political Weekly 26 (49): 2803–2806. Khullar, Sonal. 2015. Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930–1990. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lomnitz, Claudio. 2005. Bordering on Anthropology Dialectics of a National Tradition in Mexico. In Empires, Nations and Natives: Anthropology and State-­ Making, ed. Benoit De L’Estoile, Federico Neiburg, and Lygia Sigaud, 167–196. Durban/London: Duke University Press. Pink, Sarah. 2007. Ethnographic Photography and Printed Text. In Doing Visual Ethnography. London: Sage Publications. Ramaswamy, Sumathi. 2010. The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India. London: Duke University Press. Shah, Haku. 1985. Votive Terracottas of Gujarat. Ed. Carmen Kegal. Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishers. Tharu, Susie. 2007. Notes for a Grammar of the Visual Vernacular. In Native Women of India: Manners and Customs (a project by Pushpamala N. and Claire Arni), ed. N. Pushpamala. Delhi: Nature Morte Gallery. Wright, Terence. 1991. Fieldwork Photographs of Jenness and Malinowski and the Beginnings of Modern Anthropology. Journal of Anthropology Society of Oxford 22 (1): 41–58.

CHAPTER 3

Reframing the Contexts for Pakistani Contemporary Art Salima Hashmi and Farida Batool

Some decades ago, art historian Griselda Pollock addressed the question of why it was important for “feminists to intervene in so marginal an area as art history” (Pollock as cited Bird 1996: 68). She argued that its definitions of art and artist reinforced bourgeois ideology, creating myths of individual genius unfettered by social obstacles and sheltered from analysis or socio-political contextualisation within the ‘magical sphere’ of art. These ‘ideologies of art history’ are then systematically perpetuated through TV documentaries, biographies, and popular art books. Pollock reasoned that art historical discourse portrays the artist as a central, idealised figure which supports the “bourgeois myths of a universal, classless Man” (Pollock as cited Bird 1996: 68). The novelist, Qurratulain Hyder, also speculated on this idea of universalization and the genius of the individual artists in 1959, a few years after the creation of Pakistan. In her seminal literary work on the history of the Indian sub-continent, Aag Ka Darya (River of Fire), Kamal, a traveller

S. Hashmi (*) • F. Batool Lahore, Pakistan © The Author(s) 2019 S. Perera, D. N. Pathak (eds.), Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_3

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historian during the times of Bhagat Kabir,1 is roaming around Ayodhya to document the history of India through the reading of 2000-year-old manuscripts (Hyder 2000). On one of his adventurous days out in the field, he notices a cluster of ancient temples and asks the old pundit 2 the name of the creator of the oldest one. The pundit looks at him with a strange expression and replies that this land had seen many an image maker, sculptor, and writer since and before the times of Chandragupta Maurya, but nobody knew their names as names were long since gone but humans were immortal. Kamal is flustered. He does not know how to write the history of this land where people did not give much weight to the names of the artists and writers (Hyder 2000). Art, in our present understanding of the term, is always born out of the desire to respond, articulate, and negotiate within religious and ritualistic practices, and is an extension of daily life. The overall aesthetics was dictated by the essence of the region, and the need to be connected to the Greater Being through creativity. Embracing and celebrating the ‘universal’ artist was a phenomenon that arrived in western art history much later, in the fifteenth century, and the European practices of art-making, especially, ‘art for art’s sake’, are a colonial construct and permeated the aesthetics of the region within the void created by the disconnect with its past. The greater need of the larger community for creative expression within the framework of religious or cultural practices stimulated the creation of the frescoes on Mughal architecture or their miniature tradition, the wall paintings of Ajanta Caves, the folk painting traditions of Warli3 and Madhubani4, the Dhokra5 metal sculptures, and the taazia6 of Lucknow and Hyderabad. Identifying what is ‘art’ and what is not has a history, and the colonial disconnect which was not aligned with reality has affected the course of art history in Pakistan, depriving it of an agency. It is the same 1  Bhagat Kabir was a sixteenth-century Indian mystic poet. For more information on his life and works, see http://www.sikh-history.com/sikhhist/events/kabir.html 2  A pundit is a priest in the Hindu tradition or a ‘knowledgeable one’. 3  For more information on the Warli tradition of painting, please visit https://www.craftsvilla.com/blog/warli-art-history-maharashtra/ 4  For more information on the Madhubani tradition of painting, please visit https://www. culturalindia.net/indian-art/paintings/madhubani.html 5  For more information on Dhokra sculptures and figurines, please visit https://www. craftsvilla.com/blog/dhokra-art-metal-casting-technique-from-west-bengal/ 6  Taazias are replicas of the shrine of Imam Hussain, taken out in a procession to mourn the tragedy of Karbala in the month of Muharram.

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strangeness with which the pundit evaluates Kamal’s question and tries to tell him of the distinct nature of the creative forces surrounding the region’s rich artistic and cultural heritage. The question posed by Qurratulain Hyder should have taken root in the restructuring of art history and the formulation of new methodologies after the Partition.7 The absence of such attempts led artists at the time to search for identity, which was as confusing and blurred as any attempts to articulate the aftermath of the bloodiest migration on earth that resulted from the Partition.8 The educational institution, Mayo School of Arts, was a colonial venture furthering the division of artist from the craftsperson by introducing curricula and methodological approaches alien to local students. The discursive formations of art history were further arrested by the state’s idea of modernising the nation soon after its inception and that dream could only be fulfilled if one was connected with the ‘linear’ history and development of the west. The questions that should have been part of the discourse remain unanswered even today in the face of much stronger and powerful art practices that have evolved over the last seven decades. The visually and materially innovative imagery continued to serve as defiance of the mainstream. The rich repository of the images became the documents of the time, recording what people did not dare to speak in public under many oppressive regimes. Even without the use of an indigenous methodological framework, reading and articulation of all these visual cultures will continue to produce knowledge if, as Foucault contends, objects of knowledge are formed from discourses (Foucault 1980). This raises a basic question: under which conditions are these discourses of art history produced? And what is the purpose of these discourses? Whose interests do they serve? Are they an attempt to transform the art institutions into mega economic corporations while marginalising and excluding other forces, which do not conform to the ‘Romantic Individualism’ of the western hegemonic model of art history? Within a politically unstable and dysfunctional national framework, contemporary art practices in Pakistan jostle for attention and patronage. The tumultuous economic, political, and social pressures notwithstand7  The ‘Partition’ refers to the division of undivided India into India and Pakistan in 1947 by the British colonial administration with the participation of the political elite in what became post-colonial India and Pakistan. 8  For more information on the Partition, visit http://www.1947partitionarchive.org

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ing, the environment continues to be intellectually and artistically fertile. Multiple legacies—visual, literary, and oral—find voice in academic studios, in artists’ backrooms, computer labs, garrets, courtyards, or simply in the artists’ imaginations and unending conversations. The opportunity to talk to audiences and find forums, however momentary and transient, are eagerly seized upon and utilised. Contemporary art practices continue to evade a comprehensive scholarly study or even discursive articulation. Studies provide only a cursory investigative structure for a systematic sifting of creative output. A satisfactory inquiry to clarify dynamic, diverse, and proliferating art production has yet to emerge. Seventy years as a nation state has not established a specific or identifiable Pakistani cultural identity although there have been both determined and desultory attempts by the Pakistani state to do so. Assembling the different regions, provinces, and ethnic groups into a homogenous, compliant, cultural entity has not been a successful endeavour except in a clearly ‘constructed’ manner. Iftikhar Dadi notes in his book, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia, that “the establishment of Pakistan introduced urgent new questions regarding the need for cultural forums specific to the new-nation state” (Dadi 2010: 123). The failure of this envisioned cultural enterprise might suggest that the questions with which it began were flawed from the very inception of the experiment. Today, those early contentious debates circulating around modernism, pan-Islamism, and national ideologies have faded into an irrelevant backdrop for practitioners, barely acknowledged or assimilated in the creative output of artists across the country. Having made the statement ‘across the country’, it is ironical that their artistic journey only begins on arrival in either Lahore or Karachi and, more recently, in Islamabad/Rawalpindi, or at the newly established art departments in universities in Faisalabad, Gujarat, Multan, and Bahawalpur. Older art departments in Peshawar and Jamshoro have yet to instigate serious artistic inquiry or energy. By contextualising the socio-political manifestation of art practices and history in Pakistan, this essay attempts to provide a brief survey of contemporary art and how it challenges the established traditional hegemonic model of art institutions. Furthermore, the creative ways, contexts, and approaches are reflectively re-framed in order to make more nuanced understanding of the aesthetic and political sensibilities of contemporary Pakistani art.

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Women Amidst Local and Trans-local So where did this innovative of transnational yet thoroughly local expansion originate? For want of scholarly research, one turns to empirical sources. The steady growth in art school admissions at the National College of Arts (NCA), from a single fine art graduate in 1971 to 40 plus in recent years, is part of the evidence. The mushrooming of art schools and departments in different cities, many of them employing professional artists as faculty, is another factor. The attempts at revamping the syllabi, primarily in studio teaching, commenced in the 1970s but proceeded in a critically different direction in the 1980s. Against the backdrop of the savage military dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq, the women’s movement took off, with great support from women poets, writers, journalists, lawyers, activists, and, most significantly, visual artists. The drafting and signing of a Women Artists of Pakistan Manifesto in 1983, although a secret document at the time, altered the focus of women’s art practices. By happy coincidence many of them were art educators, who transferred their socio-political interests into their classrooms. But this specific moment remained silent within the art history and theory departments in art institutions who were still figuring out methodological approaches to position art historical debates in Pakistan. The massive energetic movements had emerged from the desire to counter the political oppression of the military regime. The failure to include them in evolving discussions helped to further the vacuum within the art history field of study in Pakistan which continued to look into western canons of appreciating art, creating a wide gap between the practice of art and the location of its theoretical framework. Notwithstanding the powerful subversive nature of the women’s movement, the efforts to redefine the framework of the art history discourse were often maligned and limited to gender issues. The compartmentalising of such artists and their works acted as a catalyst to arrest the power of the forthcoming robust generation of artists. The terms ‘feminism’ and ‘social and politically motivated art’ located within the oppressive ­conditions witnessed by many, and the dismissal of such categorisation by mainstream art critics, was only a reaffirmation of the patriarchal hegemonic discursive formations. The intentions of such artists and their works were questioned, whereas the males conforming to the bourgeois ideals of practising ‘art for art’s sake’ continued to be celebrated. The inability of

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mainstream art historians to understand the political spaces that control and condition the practitioners is evident through the many whimsical narratives known best for compartmentalising art and artists. Image-making, in a country where drawing was abolished as a subject in public schools since the oppressive regime of Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s, is only possible when the discourse of patriarchy and imperialism is eliminated. Art historians failed to see image-makers as political agents of defiance. It was the collective times of rebellion, when cinema, print media, and graffiti chalking in the public space found new creative idioms to challenge the state. It is through the keen eye of the women artists and their demystification of western art historical canons that the gap between the local and mass practices was articulated. The public space, a harbinger of complex visual cultural expressions, kept on transforming as if in direct response to the changing and emerging issues. The impact of the practices and teaching of women artist activists in art institutions influenced the next generations to actively document, follow, and incorporate the visual narratives of the public space into their own art practices. The public space provided a canvas for liberal political resistance to counteract extremist agents. The cityscape crammed with advertisements about male sexual diseases, and the remedies to restore virility, is a complex social phenomenon, which objectifies the female body for male gratification, while simultaneously questioning masculinity and its power. That was the time when the first attempt was made to connect art history with the social and political realities faced by the practitioners. It really started the discourse where all the storytellers, narrators, and image-­ makers were considered significant in creating a social fabric appealing to everyone in this society. The major shift, which evolved out of the coincidental role played by women art educators, was the abandoning of materials, mediums, techniques, and scale associated with the Eurocentric art canons of the twentieth century. The probing of ‘domestic’ crafts and materials signalled a move towards informal methodologies of storytelling, autobiographical content, and multimedia collaborative works. It is important to note that despite this major shift in art practices, the terms and discourse which were articulated within Pakistani art history were again the binary of art and craft and the idea of community art as a minor practice. The struggle of those artists, who followed in the footsteps of women artists of the 1980s, continued for more than a decade before finally establishing themselves as serious art practitioners with alternate methodologies.

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Coming out from under the shadow of 11 years of military rule in 1988 provided the opportunity to rethink classroom strategies and curricula, most of which were leftovers from British art school rituals. The National College of Arts (NCA) led the change. Later, the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi followed, set up as a private initiative. The earlier decade had instilled an interest in gender issues concurrent with socio-political concerns alongside a rediscovery of traditional visual resources, long overlooked. The most serious, and eventually the most prolific and productive, was the genre of miniature painting. These artistic inquiries (led originally by Zahoorul Akhlaq) had been initiated in the early 1960s to introduce fine art students at NCA to the skills still within reach, since the old Ustad 9 such as Haji Sharif (from the princely state of Patiala in Punjab) and Sheikh Shujaullah (from the State of Alvar in Rajasthan) were still available on campus to demonstrate techniques and the use of materials they had learnt from their respective family traditions. Young art students evinced little interest in this, being sold on the polemics of modernism. The enthusiasm for the genre of miniature painting dawned almost three decades later, as Shahzia Sikander, Imran Qureshi, Nusra Latif Qureshi, Aisha Khalid and a host of other artists probed fresh, unexpected connections with their own disquietude and passion. The geographical location of Pakistan and its role in the Afghan War (which continues to this day in new avatars) brought a flood of refugees into Pakistan seeking shelter across the border, the Hazara community among them.10 Many of Pakistan’s prominent miniature artists have come from this community. Miniature painting embraced some of the thematic precepts already present in the work of mainstream artists. The sense of irony which imbues art practices in Pakistani art is often remarked upon by critics and the artists themselves. As Virginia Whiles states, “a sense of irony in the face of everyday chaos is undoubtedly the chief characteristic of the Pakistani people” (Whiles 2010: 33). As she further notes, “a tone of weary ambivalence haunts this generation, made despondent by a constantly deferred democracy. Their antidote is satire, as demonstrated in the intellectual reaction to the nationalist reclamation of another social activity: kite flying” (Whiles 2010: 34). Whiles’ observations were made in 9  An Ustad is an expert or a trained person, especially with regard to music or more generally in the arts. 10  The Hazaras are an ethnic community mostly from the Hazarajat region in central Afghanistan.

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2010, and the kite flying festival, known as basant, is yet to be allowed. Yet, every year, secretly, kites are made and flown by brave schoolboys who are chased across rooftops by hapless policemen attempting to enforce the ban.11 This desire to thwart authority indirectly, rather than through overt dissent or defiance, has encouraged nuanced outcomes in art-making. Metaphors in poetry follow similar pathways, allowing audiences to interpret and uncover multiple meanings over time. The female body has been central to so many visual deliberations over three decades. Zia-ul-Haq’s government regularly issued decrees about required dress codes in public life. Female parliamentarians, television newscasters, celebrities, and even actors were required to cover their heads. All female government employees were required to do the same. Female students from age 12 upwards were to wear chadors. The sari was frowned upon, and letters were circulated in government offices addressed to women employees and to public servants for compliance by their wives at official events. These dictates which emanated periodically from various ministries drew the ire of women from all walks of life, at all levels. The response of women artists, poets, and writers was sarcastic, ironical, and rebellious. Feminist poets in particular employed the symbol of the chador as an instrument of silencing and suppression as did visual artists. Zia’s disappearance from the scene did nothing to lessen this obscurantist trend. Years later, poet Kishwar in her poem ‘Woh jo bachiyun se bhi darr gaye’ (They who are afraid of little girls) referenced this patriarchal animosity to the female child. The poem came to be associated with the attack on the child activist Malala Yousafzai (Naheed 1998, 2008: 88–90). The popular and informal treatment of the female form in public spaces is in contrast to the representation of the female in high art. The fact that the state attempts to control and arrest the narrative constructed by the artists is only reflective of the efficacy of the image and its reception in the upper classes, whereas the popular practice continued to pander to male gratification in its representation of the female body and its objectification. In order to encapsulate the above-mentioned political debates in the contemporary art of Pakistan, we may refer to Gramsci’s hegemonic model as

11  The kite flying festival initially was banned in 2006 upon reports of several kite flyingrelated deaths by the sharpened string enforced with metal and glass powder. The government attempted to lift the ban a few times in the past many years, but incidents of deaths continued, resulting in permanently banning a very old festival tradition of Lahore.

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another methodical approach for a complex and nuanced understanding of the ‘high’ and ‘low’ art practices and their political ramifications (Gramsci as cited in Barker 2002: 55). The popular practices that include performances, visual, and material expressions, such as embroidery, popular cinema hoardings, graffiti, and so on, are considered ‘low’ in status, as these practitioners belong either to the domestic sphere, as in the case of women embroiderers, or the popular public sphere catering to popular consumption, as is evident in the case of rickshaw and truck art painters. The social status and location of these practitioners remain outside the four walls of the white cube, the established institution of ‘high’ art. In the Gramscian model of hegemony, the state takes the uppermost position from where it controls art and culture to construct its own ideology (Gramsci as cited in Barker 2002: 55). The artists recognised as the thinking and imaginative creative actors were the ‘high’ artist class targeted by the state during oppressive military regimes, by controlling the art education institutions, commissioning certain kinds of art, or sometimes through a direct attack on the exhibitions of those artists who did not conform to the state ideology. Within the hegemony of creative practices, the popular vernacular cultural expressions are relegated to the lowest level, and thus are not considered significant enough by the state to be controlled directly. That enabled the popular expression to continue its visibility in the public sphere during those tumultuous times where it withstood the oppression of the state. Hence, the state used the strategy of exercising control over artists, and society, as an attempt to curb the production of counter-narratives. In this attempt, women were initially targeted during the military rule of Zia-ul-Haq, since women were always regarded as the conduit of national sentiment and nationalist ideology. The state devised successful means of controlling the marginal, introducing laws, which aimed to regulate and restrict women’s involvement in the public sphere by reducing them to a sexualised object. With the introduction of the popular slogan, chador and chaar diwari (veil and the four walls of a house), several attacks on artists who portrayed women took place, and most importantly, the prohibition on using figure drawing in art institutions was also imposed. These were some of the strategies utilised by the state to control free expression. In contrast, the women represented in the popular domain, including popular cinema, continued to be portrayed in lascivious postures, for the fulfilment of male desire, embodying the absolute ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’, as argued by Laura Mulvey (Mulvey 1999: 833–844).

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It is yet to be articulated extensively within the hegemonic methodology that the sexuality discourse around the female body was generated primarily to control the women of the elite classes. It is within this framework that one needs to articulate the defiance of the state narrative by women artists which connected itself with the popular and traditional practitioners of Pakistan’s visual culture, otherwise considered ‘low’ in mainstream art history discourse of Pakistan.

Intruding Art History: From the Liminal to the Mainstream The reluctance of the art history discourse to recognise women artists’ movement in alignment with the popular cultural expression, an act of defiance in its own capacity, requires a review of the times of oppression through the above-mentioned model of Gramsci. It is important to take into account the production and consumption dynamics, the cultural spaces, the audience, and the contexts of display to understand which methods and systems of oppression were being questioned by women artists and, also, what strategies were being employed by popular practitioners which spared them the state’s wrath. The liminal space between politics and art was first recognised by women artists/educators, who aptly used it to write their own narrative and the new history of art-making. The mainstream art history discourse within the Pakistani context not only failed to provide alternate approaches, but also vehemently questioned the agency of the high art practitioners. The elite male artist’s relationship with the serenity of the landscape, whether rural or urban, is never probed, although it is a space outside his body. In contrast, the ‘intentions’ of artists engaged in issues of social and political nature are questioned, and they are required to justify their ‘sincerity’ towards the issues and subjects they deal with. The hegemonic institutions in the art world reduce the struggle of these artists by mythologising the historically gendered subject and escape the issue of institutional power. It is these same institutional powers that compel historian Akbar Naqvi to question the work of Salima Hashmi, one of the women artists active in dismantling the patriarchal approaches. “The crises that Salima Hashmi has painted did not happen within herself, but outside her paintings”, writes Naqvi (Batool 2004: 67). The rebellion and challenge these women artists posed eventually gave them space in the

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art history books to establish an edge over male artists. But the labelling of these artists as feminists refused them their connection with the centuries-­old historical struggle against oppression of the religious and political indoctrination and socio-economic structures, which nonetheless were formed and articulated actively through the means of poetry, craft, and other performative practices. As a young artist fresh out of the miniature studio, Aisha Khalid12 dwelt on the spaces a woman had to contend with, within the burqa that drowned her body, and the claustrophobic domestic space. References to textile coverings in her paintings metamorphosed into repetitive geometric patterns juxtaposed with embroidery and delicate tracings. Yet there is an edge of menace in even the most celebratory of her installations. As Nafisa Rizvi notes, “in fact these pretty flowers denote bullet holes and blood splatters, making the work dark and ominously disquieting” (Rizvi 2015: 99). In Khalid’s work, the tension of the spiritual beauty that is embedded in the notion of the illuminated manuscript or the Islamic architectural legacy is constantly subverted by a counter-narrative which embraces decorative and richly worked surfaces carrying traces of turmoil and intimidation. Imran Qureshi’s13 recent works are dramatic examples of gilded resplendent surfaces, both large and diminutive, sprayed with sinister, free flowing marks of deep crimson (called kaleji or the colour of the human liver in Urdu; in Urdu poetry, the liver is the seat of deepest emotion, not the heart!). These appear aloof from the visual strategies employed in the first part of Qureshi’s career. His early imagery was often autobiographical, laced with sardonic takes on militarisation, neo-colonial rituals, and ­cartography, rendered with the impeccable craftsmanship present in tradition, and then augmented by gestural, free flowing marks and showers. Imran Qureshi has consistently chosen to title his works with lines from Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry, which refer to people’s struggle in the face of oppression. The controversial laws enacted during General Zia-ul-Haq’s time were partially responsible for the containment of the female in the public space. Four decades later, they remain on the books, but, parallel to that, today

12  For more on Khalid’s work, please visit http://www.naturemorte.com/artists/ aishakhalid/ 13  For more on Qureshi’s work, please visit https://www.artsy.net/artist/imran-qureshi

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there are attempts by the civilian government to put women and child-­ friendly legislation in place. Most recently, laws governing sexual harassment in the workplace, domestic violence, and child sexual abuse have been passed by the Parliament. Over these years, a more diverse approach to the female body has also been noticeable. New concerns have emerged— the denial of inheritance, emphasis on traditional canons of beauty, the ‘feudal frame’ which determines status demarcations, sexual preference, popular culture, and much more. This probing and scrutiny needs to be looked at in conjunction with the prodigious rise in sectarian conflict, terrorists’ attacks, ethnic discord, and military operations in Pakistan. The fact that violence from diverse ‘players’ in the country has become endemic means that the artist’s imagination is challenged by the only too real threat to life and limb. Patriotism and canons of faith have to be gently analysed, nuanced visual negotiations carried out, and poetic outcomes opted for. The diversity of art practices in Pakistan reveals a strong movement, which does not demonstrate homogeneity or a distinctly ‘Pakistani’ identity or direction. It is marked instead by a rich assortment of discrete forms, materials, and processes. The women’s movement produced its own distinct trajectory, especially with younger artists who explored the incorporation of domestic materials and craft practices. For some, the analogies they discovered resonated deeply with their lived experience. This is what Jones refers to in another context: “For just as a metaphor of spinning, weaving or embroidery can be used to illumine literary tasks so it now recognised, many women have inserted in textile the text of their lives” (Jones 1997: 87). For Ruby Chishti, an emotional kinship with fabric evolved from looking after a paralysed mother. Trained as a conventional sculptor, she searched for a material “which would bring out the truth within” (Hashmi 2005b: 151). The doll-like figures she constructed from old fabrics accentuated the tradition of recycling which is deeply embedded in tradition, where nothing is discarded, not the materials nor its relationships with the maker. Not quite at a tangent to this unfolded the ‘high art, low art debate’ in the 1990s referred to earlier. The context was the exponential growth of urban centres, most specifically Karachi. Semi-skilled and unskilled labour brought with them, among other things, artisanal networks, which sought and found new forms and functions in the metropolis. The export of labour to the Middle East, Europe, North America, and West Africa brought in revenue accompanied by hitherto unfamiliar gadgets, washing

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machines, deep freezers, TVs, and, eventually, computers. At one time, these luxuries were displayed in rural homes which had no electricity! The influx of consumer goods in markets across the rapidly urbanising centres injected new images into the public consciousness. Even rural populations became accustomed to plastic, vinyl, and neon lights. The assembling of these materials to ‘decorate’ homes and public spaces was slowly transforming urban aesthetics, with a new visual vocabulary. The urban intelligentsia and initially the artist were oblivious to this sea change in their surroundings. These visual sub-cultures were apparent in trucks, tractors, rickshaws, donkey carts, street stalls, cinemas, billboards, posters, and greeting cards—a profusion of pictorial assemblages, which appropriated symbols, motifs, and processes in a freewheeling, almost spontaneous manner. Surprisingly, text was woven into these tapestries of colour and textures. ‘Surprisingly’, because a large number of the recipients were illiterate, yet the text employed quotations from Sufi poetry, invocations to the saints and to Allah, interspersed with homilies and local proverbs, as well as witty political insights. As noted by Hashmi, “on closer examination, the text/image repertoire illustrates beliefs and needs which cut across a wide cross-section of the population. A telephone is painted alongside a lion, the Dome of the Rock is juxtaposed with an F-16 jet fighter, the sufi saint Baba Farid decorates a mobile phone and Prime Minister Bhutto mounts a galloping white steed” (Hashmi 2005a, b: 172). While the scenes on trucks and buses are known for being reflections of the concerns of the time, rickshaws are at the moment going through a design evolution in Pakistan. The traditional rexine material used to make motifs such as fish, stars, and other geometric decorative shapes, is now being replaced with more figurative sticker material forms that adorn the back of the rickshaws. While travelling behind such rickshaws, one experiences the mindset/ideology or fantasies of the rickshaw driver or its owner. This new popular visual imagery in its formative stage is also subversive in nature. For instance, the government of Punjab has placed a ban on the use of shisha14 smoking in cafés. After the ban, quite a few shisha smoking images appeared on the roads. Images of a boy smoking a shisha and blowing several circular

14  Smoking a shisha, also known as narghile, hookah, or ‘hubble bubble smoking’, involves the smoking of tobacco (sometimes flavoured) or opium, whose smoke is passed through a bowl of water.

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clouds of smoke out of his mouth are frequently seen on stickers pasted on the back of rickshaws in Lahore. Some more daring drivers and owners of rickshaws have placed on their rickshaws images of dancing couples in traditional Pakistani clothes as well as in westernised attire. Some have images of a young couple hugging or holding each other while the female figure’s hand slips inside the back pocket of the male figure, indicating intimacy between the couple. At a time when the nation is aggressively debating a Women’s Protection Bill,15 and a powerful political minority as well as religio-political groups are proposing restrictions on the women’s movement in the public domain, the presence of these images on rickshaws is a sign of resistance to orthodoxy at the popular level. The populace do not feel the need to come out on the streets to protest in a predictable manner. Instead, they take advantage of their connections to the visual tradition of art and craft to make a statement against oppressive structures. Studio artists, becoming aware of the vitality of these peripatetic circuits, which spoke directly to many urban publics, began their first collaboration with urban artisans in the mid-1990s in Karachi. Thus began the Karachi Pop Movement. The artists that pioneered it with their students, Iftikhar and Elizabeth Dadi, David Alesworth and Durriya Kazi, have mostly moved on, leaving networks in place, transfigured by Adeela Suleman who maintains a full-fledged collaborative artisan-studio.

In Conclusion: Networks, Collectives, and Individuality Today, artists working all over Pakistan are evolving at a fast pace in terms of their creative approaches, and are using a variety of materials aided by advanced technologies, and using innovative applications with a markedly ‘local’ sensibility. Circuitous arguments pertaining to the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ have been heard, but are largely ignored in Pakistan. This might be a reflection of the confidence generated by the number of practitioners, together with the involvement of the international art world, which sporadically lobbies for a particular individual to be celebrated and recognised by the community. 15  For the complete text of the Women’s Protection Bill, please visit https://www.docdroid.net/y4j1wB8/download-women-protection-bill-in-pakistan-pdf-employeespkcom. pdf

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Apart from the names already mentioned, other dominant artists who have helped reframe the contexts of contemporary Pakistani art include Rashid Rana, Huma Mulji, Faiza Butt, Ayaz Jokhio, Naiza Khan, Mohammad Ali Talpur, Bani Abidi, Anwar Saeed, Lalarukh, Risham Syed, Ruby Chishti, Roohi Ahmed, and a host of others. An active younger generation is hard on their heels. It must be acknowledged at this juncture that the early pioneers of modernism paved the way for the generations above. Their role as educators, especially Zahoorul Akhlaq and his mentor Shakir Ali, was critical to providing the robust forum they emerged from. Numerous cross-currents fed into the rise of modernism which have been articulated by Iftikhar Dadi and Simone Wille, but it was mainly Shakir Ali’s association with the National College of Art which strengthened its affinity with international movements. Thus, there are unbroken networks of artists, practitioners, and their students who in turn stood on the shoulders of the generations before. As Dadi observes, “Shakir Ali’s trajectory of modernism, which advocated first discovering materials and processes and then exploring the turbulent inner self and finally seeking a more overt relationship with society, although not necessarily unfolding in stagist fashion, was prognostic for subsequent developments” (Dadi 2010: 131). The transition from the purely sculptural into installations which embraced more than one medium began to materialise in the 1990s as the country attempted to cope with the aftermath of General Zia-ul-Haq’s regime. The word ‘installation’ was yet to appear in the lexicon, but Nilofer Akmut’s sprawling works based on studious research into materials and history filtered into view. Zahoorul Akhlaq had paved the way in the 1970s, encapsulating street furniture and ready-mades16 on a large scale, reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois’ work. These and other works in a group show at the Lahore Museum in 1974 came under fire, and were removed from view by the Museum Director, citing reasons both of ‘taste and political content’. All the artists threatened to take down the complete exhibition and the museum relented. This was perhaps the first example of collective action by artists in a museum in Pakistan. The first formal artist collective however did not emerge until 2001. The Vasl Artists’ Association17 is based in Karachi, although it has been 16  ‘Ready-mades’ is a term used to describe artworks employing already manufactured everyday objects. 17  Vasl Artists’ Association functions as a platform for nurturing creativity and encouraging freedom to create experimental work. For more details on their activities, see http://vaslart. org

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sporadically emulated in Lahore and Islamabad together with other residencies and collections, which continue to appear from time to time. Vasl connected to the Triangle Networks, maintains a vibrant presence and brings artists from the region and other parts of the world for intense exchange, research opportunities, and art-making. It is now an important catalyst for young artists’ development outside the art school confines, and has instigated intervention in public spaces in Karachi. Mushroom groups have evolved from Vasl initiatives, supporting an increasing awareness of the artists’ role beyond their individual practices. The critical debates, which were part of the Vasl objectives, have fuelled these questionings and the imperatives for outreach into marginal areas in the metropolis. Adeela Suleman, the artist-educator, has pinpointed the need for artists to connect to the city and its infrastructures within the work programme of Vasl: Our workshops and residencies are catalysts not products, where ideas are activated for a stronger visual dialogue and for a more diverse field of visual art production in this country. While there is a strong emphasis on production during residencies and workshops, we are aware of the importance of distributing the positive outcomes of these activities through public programmes, outreach initiatives, research documents, and the creation of networks.18

The forays into the city by Naiza Khan predated the Vasl public interventions, but her association with Vasl in those years was informed by its stated objectives. Her series, ‘Henna Hands’, employed traditional henna paste, used for ornamenting the female body, as a drawing material, filtered through plastic patterned stencils, also used for the same purpose. With her team of young students, Khan chose her sites with care. The intervention took place at dawn before traffic built up or when they were less likely to be observed, interrupted, or intercepted. The henna stencils and paste were deployed to print images of female silhouettes onto city walls amidst graffiti, posters and calligraphic political messages, and advertisements. The appearance of the female, however symbolic in form, was a transgression in that it inserted the female into a space well-understood to be out of bounds for Khan. The artist was aware of the fact that the locality chosen was a mixed community of Muslims, Christians, Parsees, and Hindus, but all were equally inimical to this incursion into a gendered 18  Herman Bashiron Mendolicchio, in an interview with Adeela Suleman: https://culture360. asef.org/magazine/interview-adeela-suleman-vasl-artists-collective-karachi-pakistan

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space. The installation of this presence, although stripped of its usual physical attributes of allure and eroticism, still resonated. More than a decade later, the concerns of ‘silence and repression, domestication and confinement’ remain the focus of women practitioners. Khan had dipped into craft practices for this work, which was a fleeting component in the visual life of the neighbourhood, but its ramifications still linger on. The emergence of several collectives to create a discourse in the public realm has offered an alternative to the singular artists’ hegemony by coming together under the umbrella of addressing larger issues rather than the personal. These collectives have also provided a forum to ask the pertinent questions: what does the term ‘public’ mean when we view public art discourse; what are our realities; and how do we alter the gap between the perceived reality and the immediate environment, both social and cultural? The collectives in public space are moved by their desire to use the means and resources accessible to the larger masses and to speak the common language. The paradigmatic shift in our understanding of time, aesthetics, and space is a new vocabulary not familiar to everyone. In a discussion with the Awami Art Collective,19 a group of 14 such artists/activists/academics, Mariam Zulfiqar emphasises the importance of reviewing our conventional methodologies: “As new models for the production and presentation of contemporary art in the public sphere announce their arrival across South Asia in the form of Biennales and art that is exhibited in the public domain, the need for a more comprehensive understanding of the public sphere within this context has gained importance”.20 As she further notes, with a growth in the number of artists, writers, curators and those involved in the production and presentation of contemporary art engaging with South Asia, it is vital that new methodologies and modes of representation are developed. If an accurate and meaningful engagement, reflective of the region, its historic trajectory, its contemporary reality and the diversity of its communities and cultures is to be achieved, it is crucial that the implementation and relevance of pre-existing frameworks in this context is critiqued and alternative congruous approaches are developed.21

19  A group of artists and activists who consider it important to intervene in the public space for the cause of peaceful co-existence and celebration of diversity. See for more details on their works and activities https://web.facebook.com/pg/awamiart/about/?ref=page_internal 20  Excerpt of interview by Mariam Zulfiqar with Awami Art Collective via Skype, May 2017. 21  Excerpt of interview by Mariam Zulfiqar with Awami Art Collective via Skype, May 2017.

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The inability of newly formed art institutions to fully comprehend the notion of the public and public spaces was clearly evident in the recently much celebrated and long-awaited Lahore Biennale 01. The reluctance of the masses to enter gallery spaces urged the Biennale to take the artworks to the people for wider interaction. The removal of the four walls of the white cube to bring artworks into the public arena democratised art for the masses. The extent to which artworks are able to intervene in the public space, without succumbing to the lure of the ‘spectacle’ aspect and actually engaging with the public by making a strong statement, raised questions about the actual understanding of the term ‘public’ in the contemporary context of such acclaimed art institutions. The unpredictability of engaging with art in a public space, where it can capture the imagination and evoke emotive responses, is both feared and controlled. So art institutions continue to support the state by further stifling the voice of such projects within corporate-funded public art affairs. The reduction to a marginalised position in the Biennale for many internationally acclaimed artists, with patrons from major art institutes of the world, calls for a review of an alternative methodology for such collectives in order to reclaim the artists’ autonomy and counter all forms of compromised and controlled narratives in the contemporary art discourse. The continuous bias of the art academics/academies towards artists/ artists groups’ approach for creative expressions as an alternative to hegemonic models of art discourse in the much larger public space gives rise to a number of questions: Do the academics engaged in the history of art-­ making in Pakistan over several decades really understand the dynamics of public art? Is the framing of a collective force within the old doctrines of art history a technical mistake in addressing contemporary discourse? In a recent workshop hosted by an international museum and Habib University in Karachi, the Tentative Collective, another Karachi-based artists’ group, was asked to justify their practices and consider whether they actually ‘needed’ the international audience for their work which was based in Karachi. The Collective employs various research methods of archiving, interviewing, and intervention in the public sphere to create artworks that offer a nuanced reading of urbanity and the crises of rapidly growing cities. The issue of ‘international audience’ was raised by art historians to question the legitimisation of their work ethics because the Collective chose to exhibit their recent project for an international audience in the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The concern primarily arose due to the innate desire of art historians to eliminate all ‘other’ forms of art pro-

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duction to engage with the mainstream institutions and their audiences. This reminds us to connect with the old bias of the major art critics towards women artists a few decades ago, for representing and feeling an issue which took place outside their bodies and thus did not have ‘legitimacy’. The hegemonic patriarchal structures of existing art history continue to witness radical changes, as times have moved on, but traces of prejudices still remain. Until these are eradicated, the task of developing new methodologies will remain within the auspices of practitioners. It is imperative to include visual anthropology with a focus on material and object study in relation to transforming societies, in both urban and fast-changing rural lives of Pakistan. All this, while creating a space that allows inclusion of articulation and translation of new context, defining new terms of writing, researching, and producing an alternative art history specific to this region. As with the bold and free spirit of the rickshaw painters who continue to reform, reconstruct, and reinvent new designs, the new art history needs to be similarly radical, open, and expansive to equal the efforts of its counterpart.

References Barker, Chris. 2002. Making Sense of Cultural Studies: Central Problems and Critical Debates. London: Sage. Batool, Farida. 2004. Figure: The Popular and the Political in Pakistan. Lahore: ASR. Bird, Jon. 1996. Art History and Hegemony. In The Block Reader in Visual Culture. New York: Routledge. Dadi, Iftikhar. 2010. Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Faiz, Ahmed Faiz. 2009. Pabajaulan. Trans. S. Hashmi. In A Song for This Day. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Ed. Colin Gordan and Trans. Colin Gordan, Leo Marshall, John Mephan, and Kate Soper. New York: Vintage Books. Hashmi, Salima. 2005a. Tracing the Image – Contemporary Art in Pakistan. In Art & Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner, 164–179. Canberra: Pandanus Books. ———. 2005b. Unveiling the Visible: Women Artists of Pakistan. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel. Hyder, Qurratulain. 2000. River of Fire. New York: New Directions Books.

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Jones, Dorothy. 1997. The Floating Web. In Craft & Contemporary Theory, ed. Sue Rowley, 87. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin. Mendolicchio, Herman Bashiron. 2018. Interview with Adeela Suleman, January. https://culture360.asef.org/magazine/interview-adeela-suleman-vasl-artistscollective-karachi-pakistan Mulvey, Laura. 1999. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 833–844. New York: Oxford University Press. Naheed, Kishwar. 1998. I Was a Night When Last Born. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel. ———. 2008. Malala. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel. Rizvi, Nafisa. 2015. The Feminine Construct. In The Eye Still Seeks: Pakistani Contemporary Art, ed. Salima Hashmi. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Whiles, Virginia. 2010. Art and Polemic in Pakistan: Cultural Politics and Tradition in Contemporary Miniature Painting. London: I.B. Tauris & Co.

CHAPTER 4

‘Art’ of Ethnography: Feminist Ethnography and Women Artists in South Asia Pooja Kalita

In the light of omnipresent scepticisms, apprehensions and at the same time enthusiasm for doing feminist ethnography in South Asia, this chapter makes an initial attempt to consider art by women in the region as a significant ethnographic material. Especially in a region like South Asia, there can be no one definition of feminism, and yet, the common thread of gender discrimination and exploitation binds women, feminists and women artists of the region alike. Thus, art by women in various genres, which are often overlooked and ignored in the domains of sociology/social anthropology, can serve as an important material for feminist ethnographers. This chapter sheds light on the possibilities of such camaraderie between feminist ethnography and art by women in South Asia concurring with the ideas of intersections highlighted in the editorial introduction. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the South Asia Conference: Cultural Productions from a Gendered Perspective, Colombo, Sri Lanka, November 2017. I am extremely indebted to Prof. Sasanka Perera for being a constant source of inspiration and providing his invaluable guidance throughout every stage of this chapter. P. Kalita (*) Department of Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi, India © The Author(s) 2019 S. Perera, D. N. Pathak (eds.), Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_4

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Tracing the Path: An Initial Attempt Feminist ethnography, in spite of being a popular methodology, especially in the disciplines of sociology and social anthropology has never been devoid of questions, concerns and at times scepticism and cynicism regarding its very nature. Even though it has been around for quite a while now, the why’s and how’s of such a methodology still do not fail to evoke new answers and often shoot out further questions. From Judith Stacey’s 1988 popular article, ‘Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?’ to Lila Abu-­ Lughod’s 1990 article with the same title, feminist ethnographers have been constantly dealing with and attempting to answer the unresolved or at best partially resolved questions of feminist ethnography. As noted by Schrock, “these dilemmas weighed heavily in the minds of feminist ethnographers a quarter of a century ago, and the difficulties of navigating their fault lines still haunt us today” (Schrock 2013: 48). What is the conceptualization of South Asia in the backdrop of this chapter? It is one way to take the region comprising of eight countries, that is, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and divided by concrete as well as imagined borders. However, it is a relatively reductionist and statist approach. Equally valid are our shared histories, pasts, presents and futures within the region. The failure of introspection of these commonalities has been the result of an overly bureaucratized imagination of the region based on a nation-state model. On the other hand, the disciplines of sociology and social anthropology have also been guilty of the same lack of imagination in dealing with the region. In an unusual attempt to rethink the region, it has been acknowledged “Sociology and Social Anthropology across the region exhibit grotesque indifference to the idea of South Asia…There has been nearly no inkling of doing Sociology and Social Anthropology in the regional framework, even though a few social scientists have echoed this aspiration” (Pathak 2018: 3). While sociology and social anthropology need to work out self-­ reflectively what South Asia means in cultural and intellectual terms, it is pertinent to think of feminism in South Asia as one ideology that has been shared, especially by the women in the region, owing to their shared experience of subordination, discrimination and fight against all forms of ­patriarchal oppressions. Hence as noted by Murthy, “Southasia, with its long and interwoven histories of colonialism, national movements, and women’s struggles, as well as contemporary mobilization around com-

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mon concerns such as religious fundamentalism, sexuality, migration, exploitation of labour, globalization, and neo-imperialism, has immense potential to evolve feminist theorizing and activism at the regional level” (Murthy 2018: 137). In other words, Murthy is not simply thinking of feminism as such, but of a feminism that is tempered with the political and socio-­cultural experiences of the region. As she further notes, “it is through such linkages that the hitherto impregnable fortresses of impunity-at the family, community and state level- can be breached and ultimately broken down” (Murthy 2018: 137). Feminist activists, scholars and women artists in South Asia have perpetually tried to argue that feminism in this region is not merely a by-­ product of Western feminist movements and theorization. As Mohanty writes, “a homogenous notion of the oppression of women as a group is assumed, which, in turn, produces the image of an ‘average third world woman’” (Mohanty 1984: 337). And as she further points out, “this average third world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and being “third world” (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-­ oriented, victimized, et cetera)” (Mohanty 1984: 337). Jayawardena (1986) while elaborating on feminism in what can be referred as the ‘nonwest’ or the third world, puts forward the fact that feminism was not simply an alien category to South Asia, imported from the west. It has an existence beyond the shadow of Western Feminism and the image of the ‘passive female victim of the Third World’. Feminism in this part of the world is rather complex, diverse and plural with ever-­evolving challenges and questions. Both art and feminist scholarship in South Asia thus have been challenging over a considerable period of time, the universal category of ‘women’ as standpoint theorists such as Nancy Hartsock, Dorothy Smith and Sandra Harding have conceptualized.1 Coming back to sociology/social anthropology, there has always been an uncomfortable relation with visual art within these disciplines, and thus it has not been able to bring forth the usefulness of the medium of art by women under its domain of inquiry, and consequently in the domain of feminist ethnography to be specific. In terms of ethnographic practice, it

1  For more details on Feminist standpoint theory and its criticisms, please refer to Heckman, S. (1997). ‘Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited’ Signs Vol. 22 (2): 341–365.

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is almost common sense knowledge today that ethnography is an integral part of sociological/social anthropological research as these disciplines are understood in South Asia. But, what exactly is ethnography? Brewer notes that “ethnography is not one particular method of data collection but a style of research that is distinguished by its objectives, which are to understand the social meanings and activities of people in a given ‘field’ or setting, and its approach, which involves close association with, and often participation in, this setting” (Brewer 2000: 11). Moreover, ethnography understood in this fashion, “is premised on the view that the central aim of the social sciences is to understand people’s actions and their experiences of the world, and the ways in which their motivated actions arise from and reflect back on these experiences” (Brewer 2000: 11). Ethnography as a method of research received immense popularity with classic stints of anthropological fieldwork, such as Malinowski’s work amongst the Trobriand Islanders. Later, Clifford Geertz’s conceptualization of ‘thick description’ (1973) and his text Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988) brought to light questions on the authority of the ethnographer, the critical nuances of conducting and writing ethnography and understanding the contexts of actions while doing so. The ‘writing culture’ debate posed further questions on what it means to ‘do’ and ‘write’ ethnographic accounts of cultures (Clifford and Marcus 1986). But if the central aim of ethnography is to understand people and their actions, then can art be ignored from its purview? Which has always been a product of life in societies with diverse socio-political-economical-­ cultural connotations? It does constitute immense ethnographic value. However, before delving on this issue further, I would like to point out here that it is not the intention of this chapter to argue for the replacement of artworks as the primary ethnographic material at the cost of other mediums and sources. Instead, it argues that artworks when carefully selected are as equally important and have considerable narrative potential as all other materials, mediums and methods that ethnographers usually and conventionally look at. It is in this broader scheme of concerns, questions, answers and reflections that this chapter would present selected works of art by women in South Asia as a significant body of feminist ethnographic materials. Visual art by Anoli Perera from Sri Lanka, Tayeba Begum Lipi from Bangladesh and Naiza Khan from Pakistan have been mostly ­highlighted in this chapter. Though this list is not exhaustive, a focus on their work and approaches certainly aids in building up the central proposition in this chapter.

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Navigation Beyond Highs and Lows To reiterate the earlier stated point on feminist ethnography, the pertinent question that still remains is ‘can there be a feminist ethnography?’ (Stacey 1988; Abu-Lughod 1990; Schrock 2013). This question has been a perpetual concern for ethnographers claiming to undertake feminist ethnography. The quest has been to answer questions such as the following: How do we conduct feminist ethnography? What are the materials we should look into? How to look into them? Hence, if we analyse the relation between art by women in South Asia and feminist ethnography in the region, two issues demand our immediate attention. The first one being that of the disciplinary practice of sociology and social anthropology in the region and the second issue would concern the feminist art practices of women artists in South Asia. In regard to the first issue, Pathak and Perera note, “by and large, it seems to us that Sociology in South Asia and in many other parts of the world has become a somewhat sedate comfort zone for received wisdom, for ruminations on what is known…new domains of possible research such as visual art, music, photography and certain kinds of performance have been expelled to the margins of intellectual activity” (Pathak and Perera 2018: 23). In this general context wherein sociology and anthropology have not seriously engaged with art as a matter of ethnographic relevance, Roma Chatterji’s book, Speaking with Pictures: Folk Art and the Narrative Tradition in India (2012), for instance, is an exception in the context of South Asia where she takes folk paintings as a point of departure to work out complexities in contemporary social formations. Nonetheless, barring such few exceptions, Perera (2012) argues that “academic tracts that do explore these issues, by the very nature of academic exercises, tend to make such narratives clinical and generally aloof and detached from the popular domain (Perera 2012: 15–16)”. There seems to be a perpetual reluctance or rather an aloofness and detachment in our disciplines to consider art in ethnographic endeavours. This has further resulted in immobility from the sedate disciplinary comfort zones. Pathak (2016) attributes this disciplinary aloofness and detachment as a matter of ignorance towards the history of our disciplinary practice in the region that makes some ‘de-recognize’ artworks or puts them into the category of ‘softer’ practices (Pathak 2016: 16).2 While evoking Dewey and Nisbet 2  Further, Parul Dave Mukherji in her conversation with Sasanka Perera while aptly recognizing the disciplines of sociology and art history as ‘natural allies’ elicits examples such as

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from the Western context and Radhakamal Mukerjee—one of the pioneers in Indian Sociology—Pathak (2016) makes a case for a conversation with art in sociology. Sociology and social anthropology need to go beyond the temptation of comfort-seeking disciplinary practices, including art in ethnography. Therefore, it makes sense to take such art into account in feminist ethnographic efforts. But how does one do this? Art has never been produced in a vacuum, especially the kind of art I refer to in this chapter. Turner (2005) has depicted the linkage between art and the socio-political changes in Asia and the Pacific region. Both sociology and art in many instances respond to socio-political changes encompassing economic and cultural dimensions. This convergence can be thought of as a point of departure to work out a meaningful ethnographic intervention involving art. Therefore, those who still believe that art is an elite practice meant only for a certain audience, isolated from socio-political contexts, need to rethink their position. For example, it seems to me, even at a superficial level, artworks such as Three Girls (1935), Bride’s Toilet (1937) and Woman on Charpai (1938) by the late Indian artist, Amrita Sher-Gil, provide us with excellent ethnographic material to historically reflect and understand the lives of Indian women, especially from a feminist ethnographic lens. Therefore, in terms of feminist ethnography, there have been various attempts to respond to its questions and concerns which never cease to emerge and re-emerge, giving rise to newer questions, demanding newer answers. Visweswaran, while reflecting on the diverse issues related to feminist ethnography remarks that, although feminist ethnography has an alliance with the writing culture critique of anthropological representation, yet there still needs to be more nuanced analysis of what is ‘feminist’ in a particular genre of ethnography (Visweswaran 1997: 591). But as Schrock (2013) puts forward, “feminist ethnography does not have a single, coherent definition and is caught between struggles over the ­definition and goals of feminism and the multiple practices known collectively as ethnography” (Schrock 2013: 48). However, what binds feminist ethnographers and women artists alike in South Asia together is in their attempt feminist art historian Griselda Pollock and her reflections on the canons of her discipline to Susie Tharu’s essay on N. Pushpamala’s photo essays, which serve as a reminder about the interdisciplinarity of these disciplines that can come together to enrich each other (Pathak 2016: 37–45).

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to decode and challenge what Murthy (2018) terms as the ‘impregnable fortresses of impunity’ which are the family, community and state (Murthy 2018: 137). This common thread that binds feminist ethnographers in the region brings us to the second issue which deals with the art practices of women here. The crucial factor that needs to be asserted is that besides ethnographers and artists, what brings us together at this point is we are also part of the larger community of feminists in the first place, dedicated to the women’s movement in South Asia and beyond. However, I will make no attempt in this chapter to detail the numerous bodies of art produced by women in the region. Rather, my attempt is to elaborate on their ethnographic potential for feminist ethnographers in South Asia. The women artists I refer to in this chapter also work with similar concerns and frameworks that move beyond representing women as victims of the patriarchal societies of South Asia. In relation to women artists and their artworks informed by feminist concerns, Sinha writes: “Looking back at the late ’80s and ’90s, women’s practices compel us to believe that just as nations on the periphery are now accepted as representing other modernisms, women artists of the South or the third world, may represent ‘other feminisms’” (Sinha 2016: 29). Equally as crucially, “other than issues of gender and sexuality, issues of religious and class conflict filter through and colour their work” (Sinha 2016: 29). By looking at feminist interventions in art and art history in South Asia, we do get a clear sense of our broader aim of liberation from all sorts of patriarchal domination. Pollock (1987),3 much like Linda Nochlin’s 1971 famous essay on the question: ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ in ARTnews, argues for a paradigm shift in art history when it comes to locating art by women. This paradigm shift is much required as the disciplinary criteria by which greatness is defined in art history is malechauvinistic (Pollock 1987: 5). Zemel (1990) while reviewing Pollock’s work comments, “the task for feminist art and art history is to destabilize the fixed visual categories of difference, to reinscribe women’s sexuality where it has been erased, and to visualize signifying systems of sexual agency and relationship in that eroticized field. Pollock’s essays organize the ­project with theoretical frameworks, analytic models, and usable strategies” 3  Pollock, G. 1987. ‘Feminist Interventions in Art’s Histories,’ pp.  4–14  in Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art. https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg. de/index.php/kb/article/viewFile/10930/4793 [last accessed on 25 September 2018].

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(Zemel 1990: 341). Pollock adds that, “In writing Old Mistresses, Women, Art and Ideology (1981) Rozsika Parker and I formulated the issue thus: To discover the history of women and art is in part to account for the way art history is written. To expose its underlying values, its assumptions, its silences and its prejudices is also to understand that the way women artists are recorded is crucial to the definition of art and artist in our society” (Pollock 1987: 11). The concerns raised by Pollock, Parker and Nochlin still echoed in the art by women in South Asia. In the specific context of our region and Pakistan in particular, Hashmi’s (2003) work on women artists in Pakistan has eloquently brought to light the much-needed feminist intervention in art history of the region. Hashmi (2015) in an alternate version to Nochlin’s famous question brings forth her apprehension in the contemporary art scenario as: “What, or where, is feminist art in 2015?” This question, she says, although might sound naive at the first instance today, however, is still relevant. Since “While feminist art historians and critics altered the course of art disciplines for all times to come, the label is constrained by its own branding. A circuitous route has to be adopted to re-open the discussion on the torturous space inhabited by women. Their lives may have marginally altered, their aspirations matured and grown stronger, but is it enough? Each day brings news of greater violence, discrimination, and state negligence”.4 Perera (2008) in one of her essays sheds light on the importance of bringing the issues related to ‘women’s burden’ as the core concerns of artistic endeavours. Although her essay is set in the context of Sri Lanka, nonetheless is well relevant for our entire region. She argues that works of female artists express their concerns regarding the ‘main’ issues of the country “while in their life worlds” (Perera 2008: 74). These artists, rather than being victims of the discriminatory patriarchal structures of our societies are acting as agents for their liberation from these very structures. This is something, which also echoes the agenda of feminist ethnographers working on the region. She further narrates her experience of curating an exhibition which displayed artworks exclusively by women. She narrates a conversation with one of her artist friends who raised a concern about putting herself and other ‘hobby’ and ‘sundry’ artists at the same level playing field. However, for her bringing in all of these women artists under one 4  Hashmi, S. 2015. Guerrilla Girls: Feminist Art, Then and Now: http://www.artnowpakistan.com/guerrilla-girls-feminist-art-then-and-now/ [last accessed on 25 September 2018].

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common umbrella of ‘artists’ was much more of the feminist intervention in practices of art. She states that: “To understand the strength and logic of the exhibition, it has to be viewed as a starting point to look at the art practice of women artists and to systematically study the social and cultural conditioning that defined their ways of art-making and their participation and non-participation in the larger discourse of art” (Perera 2008: 58). Art by women as such is not devoid of the socio-political-cultural-­ economic formations that make up our societies. Likewise, the practice of quilt-making by women in Bangladesh, which they design themselves, is not merely a mundane practice for survival. Engulfed within the patriarchal gender roles, norms and duties of the Bangladeshi society, they use it as a means of resistance to the discrimination and domination they face in their lives, in addition to being a means of survival as well. Parker (2010) argues that, “the art of embroidery has been the means of educating women into the feminine ideal, and of providing that they have attained it, but it has also provided a weapon of resistance to the constraints of femininity” (Parker 2010: ix). This form of art, which acts as a means of subversion to patriarchy also acts as a medium to challenge the elitist notion of art that considers such works by women as ‘low’ art or craft. This division can be attributed to the renaissance thinkers such as Immanuel Kant who made the distinction between high and low art on the basis of utilitarian value of art, wherein ‘high’ art is produced for its aesthetic value and ‘low’ art or craft has a direct interest or purpose beyond aesthetics (Ługowska 2014: 286). Nonetheless, this distinction and the marginalization of craft from the category of high art is a political one. According to Ługowska (2014), this categorization has played an important role in the marginalization of art by women. “This new body of knowledge about women’s exclusion from high culture was extended to the analysis of craft/art relations and women’s place in this discourse. The marginalization of craft to art gave rise to other marginalizations, namely these between the genius artist vs. an anonymous maker, the uniqueness of an individually made object vs. the collective production, intellectual vs. nonintellectual, non-utilitarian vs. Decoration” (Ługowska 2014: 293). However, as this issue came under the purview of the feminist art movement of the 1970s, artworks by women have made explicit attempts to oppose and expose the artificiality of this binary between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. In South Asia, the blurring of this line has been quite beautifully depicted by contemporary women visual artists who have been making their presence felt beyond the boundaries of their

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nations to move into a more shared regional space. Anoli Perera is among the prominent women artists to have done that. Weerasinghe (2008) while referring to Anoli Perera’s work comments, “in the contemporary art scene of Sri Lanka, it is Anoli Perera who has contributed most, unbridled for the past 12 years to formulate the idea of a ‘woman artist’, who is consciously engaged in the construction of an artistic personality/identity by way of themes, materials, techniques and issues that are embedded in the discourse of ‘the feminine’, ‘the beautiful’ and ‘the family’”.5 The installation, Dinner for Six: Inside Out (Fig.  4.1), is a testimony of this fact. Stitching, embroidery and making doilies which have been usually left out from the canon of high art are being given its due respect and place as an artistic expression by a woman within a patriarchal set up as clearly evident in her work. The first reaction this artwork by Anoli Perera invoked in me was “it’s stunning”. Yet on a closer look, it gives the viewer

Fig. 4.1  Dinner for Six: Inside Out by Anoli Perera. (Photograph courtesy of Anoli Perera) 5

 http://anoliperera.blogspot.in/ [last accessed on 9 July 2018].

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a feeling of unease, of getting entangled in a mess of emotions, roles and materiality of a women’s existence not only in Sri Lankan society but all over South Asia. She draws out from her own personal experiences of viewing women in and around her while dwelling in a patriarchal, often constrained and yet negotiated, space. Her extraordinary talent lies in her ability to connect the personal with the political while bringing out the most mundane experiences of women such as cooking, dusting, making doilies and so on. Her skill thus lies in bringing forth the memories, desires, wishes, anxieties and myriad of other emotions experienced by women in a ‘stunning’ fashion with even the most ordinary materials of everyday existence. Dinner for Six: Inside Out (see Fig. 4.1) shows a beautifully laid out table with six chairs placed perfectly for a family of six members to have dinner together. Having food together by a family is a ritual symbolizing strong family bonds and the value of togetherness. However, this work also brings to light the ‘burden’ that is frequently termed as the responsibility of the women in the family to act towards this togetherness. She is trapped in repeating the daily rituals for this performance on togetherness. The use of the dinner setting and the use of corseted doilies as cobwebs should make any ethnographer especially a feminist one question the why’s and how’s of it. These materials and the setting are simply not used for aesthetic appeal alone, but rather are placed in a context that is oppressive to women, and as such Anoli Perera tries to recover these oppressed voices. Hashmi (2005) elaborates on the way Pakistani artists, which include a host of women artists, have attempted to cross the fuzzy boundary of ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of art; “they also hang on to the dream of being the interpreters of the ‘people’s voice’, a role traditionally reserved for poetry and music” (Hashmi 2005). An artist from the Pakistani context who has moved beyond the gallery space is Naiza Khan. In relation to one of her provocative series of works, Henna Hands (2003), Hashmi (2005) writes: “Irony is a major ingredient of art-making, together with an inclination towards ‘low-tech’ materials to serve as content of the work” (Hashmi 2005: 173). As Hashmi further notes, combining both irony and low tech, “Naiza Khan’s Henna Hands are done directly on the walls of the city of Karachi. Stencilled figures in henna paste, they stemmed from a desire to move away from the pristine gallery space into the strife-ridden neighbourhoods of Karachi…The figure has always been central to Khan’s work, and in Henna Hands the women walk in majestic procession. In a

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milieu in which depicting the nude, male or female, is generally unacceptable, Khan probes the way the body serves as a site for many contradictory messages of identity, submissiveness, desire, constraints and freedoms” (Hashmi 2005: 173). Naiza Khan has been a powerful voice both in the streets of Karachi and in the national and international gallery spaces. I would like to shed some light on her work which was exhibited during her first solo exhibition in Europe, The Skin She Wears (2008). The exhibition which had the use of metal as the primary highlight showcased the existence of the female form delving within the ideals of fragility, protection, strength and seduction. The armour-like garments that she created were a by-product of the violence embedded in Pakistani society and politics, from where she originally hails. The use of metal in her work invoked an unsettling gaze and often an uncomfortable sight of the female body. It was unsettling as on one hand, it is the female body that the viewer sees, and yet does not see. On the other hand, the entrapment of the female body, which is perceived as delicate, gives a feeling of being trapped in the corsets of the society she is part of. Dadi (2010) also refers to Khan’s art within in what he terms the art of ‘Muslim South Asia’. According to him, Khan with her use of varied sensibilities, materiality and style has put the figure of the female in a discursive landscape (Dadi 2010). Her depiction of issues related to gender and particularly women, is highlighted through the intractability of the female body through the use of metal-wear. While unearthing her sensibility, materiality and the context in which her works are situated, one can decipher that Khan is also part of the legacy of female artists who have raised their concerns not only about women, but many other aspects of particularly Pakistani society and politics by focusing on the body of women. From raising concerns against Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship to discriminatory laws against women, the body of feminist art that Khan’s work can be identified with has dealt with women’s vulnerability, sensuality and agency in the broader sphere of Pakistani society and politics. Tayeba Begum Lipi from Bangladesh has been another provocative contemporary visual artist who has produced her work with an u ­ napologetic feminist sensibility. She is also the co-founder of Britto Arts Trust in 2002. It is an artist-run non-profit network in Dhaka. In one of her latest works, she has produced a series of sculptures with razor blades as her primary

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material.6 The sculptures of bikinis are the most prominent among them. At one level, the bikini that for most people would simply be perceived as an item of fashion, offers much deeper meaning for her. In her perception, the bikini is a sign of how unsaid, implicit rules of the patriarchal society shape and dictate women’s lives. The bikini installations indicates her desire as well her anxiety over wearing a bikini during her visits to Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh, which is the longest natural sea beach in the world. The disapproval of this thought was implicit, yet there was always an acknowledgement of it. One of her sculptures in this series is captioned, I Do Not Wear This (2015). It comprises a set of three life-size bikinis. However, instead of using the usual delicate material for women’s lingerie, she uses fabricated stainless razor blades. This particular sculpture demonstrates the feminist sensibility of her work that indicates patriarchal rules, whether implicitly or explicitly stated, seeping into every aspect of a woman’s life in our society including dressing. A bikini as she views it has been an unapproved form of dressing by women, particularly in Bangladesh. Moreover, as far as using razor blades as her material is concerned, she attributes the reason to her childhood memory where such blades would be used during delivery to detach the baby from the mother. The razor blade, as she sees it, serves both as a masculine object and a symbol of women’s entrapment in a society like that of Bangladesh’s, and at the same time, perhaps they might serve as a shield. She has made many such provocative artworks that defy patriarchy as well as the stereotypical notions about women’s lives in South Asian societies. In Love Bed (2012), Comfy Bikinis (2013) and so on, she uses objects from the daily lives of women.7 N. Pushpamala from India, a Bangalore-based visual artist, has moved from sculpture to photography and performance art. She interweaves the dynamics of gender, race and the dimension of ‘the gaze’ in much of her work. The medium of her art which she refers to as ‘photo-romances’ has 6  These details about her work have been taken from her interview available at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1pS5j_6EiQ [last accessed on 9 July 2018] and https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzgjM8KeoIc [last accessed on 9 July 2018]. More details can be found at https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/tayeba-begum-lipi [last accessed on 9 July 2018]. 7  For more details about her work, please refer to http://www.piartworks.com/english/ sanatcilar_det1.php?recordID=Tayeba%20Begum%20LIPI [last accessed on 24 September 2018].

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traversed subjects from the colonial ethnographic obsession of ‘native women’ to The Phantom Lady, where she was photographed as a fearless female gangster and an adventurer. In 2004, Pushpamala’s ‘Native Women of South India’ challenged the colonial stereotype of ‘native’ women. She herself enacts as the subject and object of her ‘photo-romances’. The issues she deals with have been diverse. Indian colonial history, contemporary politics, culture and religion are the most apparent among them. Yet, a similar kind of sensibility throughout her work can be seen in the context of which she uses her own body as a medium to express her concerns.8 Some of her well-known works are Golden Dreams or Sunhere Sapne (1998), The Anguished Heart or Dard-e-Dil (2002) and Paris Autumn (2005). Anoli Perera’s photo performance series, I Let My Hair Loose: Protest Series (2010–2011; Fig. 4.2), throws a hurdle against the relentless male gaze on women’s lives, thereby disrupting it. She depicts how a sense of bourgeoisie femininity is imposed on women and the everyday expectations from women in Sri Lankan society. This kind of feminist consciousness has been quite prominent in many other works by women belonging to different locations within South Asia. Thus, they bring in a unique angle to the experiences of women in their work and have overcome a male-dominated perspective on art. There are many such works that are reminders of the social, political, cultural and economic tussles that women have to deal with in patriarchal South Asia. Even though such works might not lead to liberation from the multiple bondages women routinely experience, they are nevertheless powerful vehicles through which such desires can be expressed. Perhaps, until the time real liberation from patriarchal structure of our societies is achieved, these works by women serve as significant material to understand and unearth the voices, which are often muted. This desire for liberation serves as the crucial base for feminist ethnography as well. The ‘everyday’ that has been the muse of sociologists and anthropologists has been very effectively appropriated by these women artists as something that is much more than the trivialities of the mundane world. Therefore, shouldn’t we be convinced to use art by women for 8  For more details about her work, please refer to http://naturemorte.com/artists/ pushpamalan/ [last accessed on 9 July 2018] and https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=4z1Hos6dU_g [last accessed on 9 July 2018] and https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sNvAqktHl_I [last accessed on 9 July 2018].

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Fig. 4.2  I Let My Hair Loose: Protest Series (2010–2011) by Anoli Perera. (Photo courtesy of Anoli Perera)

feminist ethnography in South Asia, which might offer a more nuanced, and filler picture of social realities and politics in the region? In that sense don’t we need to re-define the very canons of comfort-seeking conventional ethnographic endeavours in the region then? In the next section, I would reflect upon how to go about such an interaction.

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How to Traverse This Path? Moving Beyond the ‘Fear’ Schneider (2008) with reference to art and anthropology has noted that “Discussing work usually classified as belonging to different historical periods and genres of contemporary art and anthropology bears a certain risk, and at the same time offers the potential for exploration, precisely because it allows us to challenge previous borders and categorizations across the two disciplines” (Schneider 2008: 171). He further attributes the reluctance on the part of anthropology to include visuals in its disciplinary domain as indicative of a general reluctance that exists within anthropology when it comes to dealing with visuality. In addition to anthropology, this reluctance or rather the ‘fear’ of the visual has also plagued sociology in South Asia, as already mentioned. While Foster’s (1999) concern about artists not following the appropriate methodological canons of ethnography is a valid one, nonetheless, it should not discourage the collaboration between the two disciplines. Methodological constraints are nothing novel or unique to ethnographic endeavours. Including or excluding visuals do not make it any more or less ‘safe’ from these constraints. What is required are ethical reflexivity, mutual respect and learning from criticisms. When viewing artworks, ethnographers need to accept that ethnography today is a practice not exclusive to the disciplines of social anthropology and sociology. Artists too engage in ethnographic introspection and are integral to artistic practices. Desai (2002) has aptly articulated: “Situating the move to ethnography in art requires at the very least a momentary glance back to the 1970s and 1980s; a time when critical theory was linked to art” (Desai 2002: 308). That is, the ethnographic turn in art has come via an engagement with critical theory and the space for reflection on both theoretical and methodological issues it allowed. As Desai further adds, “this turn to critical theory in art was fuelled by the social movements of feminism, civil rights, and gay liberation, which encouraged artists to confront the hegemony of art institutions” in the context of which “the artist no longer worked in isolation but moved into parks, hospitals, prisons, community organizations, streets and neighbourhoods to produce artworks in collaboration with people in these various communities. Art became a forum that opened public dialogue on issues of concern to people” (Desai 2002: 308–309). What Desai is attempting to articulate is the move of art into everyday spaces in which it came to be associated with some of the same

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issues that sociologists and anthropologists were also interested in. Then partly at least, this ethnographic turn in art also empowered and reconfigured public and collective art as well. In spite of this partial reconfiguration of disciplinary boundaries between art and anthropology, art by women has hardly become primary ethnographic material. At best, even if they do, they are just referred to as secondary or supportive texts to the main ethnographic writing. On the other hand, Desai (2002) elaborates on the ways artists have taken recourse to the ethnographic methods for their own work, which should further probe ethnographers to look into art. According to her, “the ethnographic process has certainly gained currency in art education. In recent decades, there has been an increase in reflective and critical inquiries on the part of art educators on the ethical and political responsibilities of doing ethnography, the issues of power involved in the written representation of culture, collaboration, the complex relationship between insider and outsider…photographs, drawings, and video as tools in qualitative research, art educators have broadened the boundaries of ethnography to include the visual as primary data” (Desai 2002: 307). Some of the artists already mentioned have acted as ethnographers at various points in their production process. For instance, Naiza Khan describes her experience of creating the artwork which was part of her solo exhibition, The Skin She Wears (2008), as a by-product of the realization that violence and disturbing political events either elicit a feeling of it being usual, bringing them under the umbrella of ordinary happenings of the everyday or a distant emotion of extreme discomfort and anxiety about life in Pakistan, from where she hails (Qureshi and Khan 2011: 82–83). Her creation of metal vests for the exhibition transformed such realizations on her part to imply sensuality, seduction, hardness and protection at the same time (Qureshi and Khan 2011: 82–83). She further elaborates on the production of this feminist artwork as she dealt with male artisans while producing her work as a women artist. Khan herself narrates her experience and the way she dealt with her male artisan partners. These male artisans had a ‘traditional’ worldview unlike her ‘feminist’ worldview. She describes the process in which the rigid fluidity of the metal-worked sculpture mirrored the unlikely, boundary-crossing yet boundary-maintaining collaboration between the female artist and the male artisan, which the artwork both prompts and remains a lasting record of (Qureshi and Khan 2011: 88). Thus, as Desai (2002) indicates, artists have started to become aware about ethnography as an effective methodology

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not only in academics but also in their artistic endeavours. Nonetheless, a similar realization on the part of ethnographers has not occurred. The ‘writing culture’ debate of the 1980s has already shown that the norm of ethnographic writing has never been about presenting some absolute truth. In this context however, visuals have not been seriously included in the critical debate (Wolbert 2000: 321). Hence, the important issue that should be reflected upon is that visuals too are potent enough to be considered in the same way written texts representing partial truths have already been taken into account. Schneider (2008) remarks that David MacDougall, coming from a visual anthropology background, was perhaps most sensitive to art and believed in visual anthropology becoming an alternate to written anthropology (Schneider 2008: 172). Just like written texts, it should be realized that the authority of the ethnographer and the representation of her subjects could be challenged on the basis of the fact that images or any kind of visual material, including art can be subjected to varied interpretations and cannot represent an entire truth. Such a gap in anthropological and sociological endeavours in dealing with art is thus a consequence of the earlier anxieties regarding the ambiguity of dealing with visuals. Sociologists and social anthropologists have to learn to see artworks not as mere visuals, but also read them as primary texts. Uncertainty is an integral part of the very nature of ethnography. In this atmosphere of anthropological and sociological reluctance lies the anxiety of feminist ethnographers to use art by women as a major material in their work. Feminist ethnography as a methodology for most part of its existence has been perpetually dealing with concerns related to representation. The issues of representation and power-dynamics between the ethnographer and her participants have been omnipresent since the inception of feminist ethnography. However, the effective way to address these issues is by being aware of one’s limitations in representing the ‘truth’ while conducting a research based on ethnographic methods. Reflexivity, that is, being aware of one’s subjective and mostly privileged position as an ethnographer, the relevance of the context in which the ethnographic process takes place and an ethnographer’s awareness of her limited ability to represent the ‘truth’ constitute the key to dealing with these criticisms. Rather than debunking a particular approach in research, we need to engage with it while being critically reflexive. As opined by feminist ethnographers, Mohanty and Ong, it is rather preferable to have ‘partial truths’ rather than all-encompassing theories, which become hegemonic and thus do

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not leave any scope for any alternate perspectives (Schrock 2013: 50). In this framework, feminist ethnography on one hand suffers from the same limitations typical of ethnography more generally while on the other hand has the same potential to present ‘partial truths’ as does mainstream ethnography. In this sense, there are no reasons to doubt the veracity of either feminist ethnography or its potential to use artwork by women artists within its narrative possibilities. Pink (2010) offers some thoughts on the possibilities of more seriously dealing with imagery in anthropological practice: “As we have moved into the twenty-first century, at least three factors – the crisis of representation of the writing culture debate and insistence on subjectivity and reflexivity that go with it, a new willingness to engage with both the visual and new types of anthropological narrative, and new technological developments – have given the visual an increasingly prominent place in anthropological research and representation” (Pink 2010: 191). Pink’s (2010) hopeful remark should definitely inspire us to use art in the process of ethnography.

Reflections on an Inconclusive Conclusion There can be no denial that any ethnographic endeavour has its own limitations. One cannot clinically remove ethnographers’ subjective positions, especially when working from a feminist lens in South Asia or elsewhere. The issues of subjective sensibilities and specificities of locations do arise while taking in art by women in South Asia for a feminist ethnography. As feminist ethnographers and women artists share similar concerns of challenging homogeneity, and passivity of women in the region, by not looking into the possibility of camaraderie between these two similar groups, a rich source of discourse is at the risk of getting ignored and lost forever. The academic disciplines of sociology and social anthropology have to include artists and their works from the region as mainstream ethnographic material rather than just making them exclusive to the sub-­ discipline of visual anthropology or art history. Moreover, Fine (1993) while commenting broadly on the limitations of ethnographic methodology argues that, “my argument is not that we can avoid these choices because occupational truth is unattainable and perhaps not even entirely virtuous” (Fine 1993: 268). At the end of the day, human beings do succumb to their own subjectivity. He further asserts that, “though I do not call for us to abjure all methodological or textual practices that lead to these dilemmas, I do believe that it is crucial

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for us to be cognizant of the choices that we make and to share these choices with readers” (Fine 1993: 268). Hence, as Peshkin (1988) asserts, while subjectivity is an inevitable part of research, the researcher should systematically seek out their subjectivity, not retrospectively when the data have been collected and the analysis is complete, but while their research is actively in progress (Peshkin 1988: 17). This is a crucial point to be adhered to by feminist ethnographers as well. Hence, if the question arising at the moment is Can there be a feminist ethnography which considers art by women in South Asia as the primary ethnographic material?, the answer should be invariably an affirmative one. Nonetheless, in the present scenario of the rigid and conservative disciplinary practices of sociology and social anthropology, such an endeavour has not been conceptualized in a fruitful manner. Feminist ethnography also cannot claim to be inclusive if art by women produced in the region is not given its due position within its practice.

References Abu-Lughod, L. 1990. Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography? Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 5 (1): 7–27. Brewer, J.D. 2000. Ethnography. Buckingham/Philadelphia: Open University Press. Chatterji, R. 2012. Speaking with Pictures: Folk Art and the Narrative Tradition in India. Delhi: Routledge. Clifford, J., and George E. Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dadi, I. 2010. Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Desai, D. 2002. The Ethnographic Move in Contemporary Art: What Does It Mean for Art Education? Studies in Art Education 43 (4): 307–323. Fine, G.A. 1993. Ten Lies of Ethnography Moral Dilemmas of Field Research. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 22 (3): 267–294. Foster, H. 1999. The Return of the Real. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hashmi, S. 2003. Unveiling the Visible: Lives and Works of Women Artists of Pakistan. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications. ———. 2005. Tracing the Image: Contemporary Art in Pakistan. In Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner, 164–179. Canberra: Pandamus Books.

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———. 2015. Guerrilla Girls: Feminist Art, Then and Now. http://www.artnowpakistan.com/guerrilla-girls-feminist-art-then-and-now/. Last Accessed on 25 Sept 2018. Heckman, S. 1997. Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited. Signs 22 (2): 341–365. Jayawardena, K. 1986. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London: Zed Books. Ługowska, A. 2014. The Art and Craft Divide – On the Exigency of Margins. Art Inquiry. Recherches sur les arts XVI: 285–296. Mohanty, C.T. 1984. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses. Boundary 2 12 (3): 333–358. Murthy, L. 2018. Silences and Solidarities: Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia. In Another South Asia, ed. Dev Nath Pathak, 125–139. Delhi: Primus Books. Parker, R. 2010. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. New York: I.B. Tauris and Co Ltd. Pathak, D.N. 2016. Intersections in Sociology, Art and Art History: A Conversation with Parul Dave Mukherji. Conversations on/for South Asia Series. Delhi: Department of Sociology, South Asian University and Aakar Books. ———. 2018. Introduction: On ‘Another’ of ‘South Asia. In Another South Asia, ed. Dev Nath Pathak, 1–25. Delhi: Primus Books. Pathak, Dev Nath, and Sasanka Perera. 2018. Culture and Politics in South Asia: Performative Politics. Delhi/London: Routledge. Perera, A. 2008. Women Artists in Sri Lanka: Are They Carriers of a Women’s Burden. South Asia Journal for Culture 2: 56–86. Perera, S. 2012. Introduction. In Artist Remember; Artist Narrate: Memory and Representation in Contemporary Sri Lankan Visual Arts, ed. Sasanka Perera, 11–16. Colombo: Colombo Institute for the Advanced Study of Society and Culture and Theertha International Artists’ Collective. Peshkin, A. 1988. In Search of Subjectivity—One’s Own. Educational Researcher 17 (7): 17–21. Pink, S. 2010. Interdisciplinary Agendas in Visual Research: Resituating Visual Anthropology. Visual Studies 18 (2): 179–192. Pollock, G. 1987. Feminist Interventions in Art’s Histories. In Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art, 4–14. https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/kb/article/viewFile/10930/4793. Last Accessed on 25 Sept 2018. Qureshi, I., and N. Khan. 2011. Women Artists and Male Artisans in South Asia. South Asian Popular Culture 9 (1): 81–88. Schneider, A. 2008. Three Modes of Experimentation with Art and Ethnography. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14: 171–194. Schrock, R.D. 2013. The Methodological Imperatives of Feminist Ethnography. Journal of Feminist Scholarship 5 (1): 48–60.

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Sinha, G. 2016. Making a Subject Space. Art India: The Art News Magazine of India, Quarter 2016, XX (1): 28–37. Stacey, J.  1988. Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography? Women’s Studies International Forum 11 (1): 21–27. Turner, C. 2005. Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific. Canberra: Pandamus Books. Visweswaran, K. 1997. Histories of Feminist Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 591–621. Weerasinghe, J.  2008. Comfort Zones: Art of Anoli Perera. http://anoliperera. blogspot.in/. Last Accessed on 9 July 2018. Wolbert, B. 2000. The Anthropologist as Photographer: The Visual Construction of Ethnographic Authority. Visual Anthropology: Published in Cooperation with the Commission on Visual Anthropology 13 (4): 321–343. Zemel, C. 1990. Reviewed Work(s): Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art by Griselda Pollock. The Art Bulletin 72 (2): 336–341.

SECTION II

Political and Aesthetic: Explorations of Intersections

CHAPTER 5

Globalisation and Local Anxieties in the Art of Bangladesh: The Interface of History and the Contemporary Lala Rukh Selim

This essay attempts to view the effects of globalisation on the contemporary art practices of Bangladesh. It will traverse areas where the local and global seem to converge, and yet contain an element of tension, and examine whether this tension is reflected in the works of contemporary artists. Questions of ‘identity’ and ‘tradition’, which seem to interfere with the seamless coming together of the global and local, will be discussed within the broader framework of the history of Bangladesh. In the process, the essay will sift through the history of fragmentation and transformation that led to the birth of Bangladesh that may have influenced the contemporary trends of Bangladeshi art. Bangladesh has gone through many phases in its history where diverse peoples have come to play a part in its complex aesthetic heritage. ‘Globalisation’ has a long history and has an epochal development over thousands of years including regional and continental patterns of migration, trade, conquest and cultural borrowings (Harris 2011: 2). It has

L. R. Selim (*) University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh © The Author(s) 2019 S. Perera, D. N. Pathak (eds.), Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_5

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been an important element of the culture of Bangladesh. Conquest, migration, trade and commerce, particularly of textiles and the wondrous muslin of the region, have a long history of export, all of which have resulted in the exchange of culture. Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity have been practised in Bengal in the last two millennia. It has gone through a long process of political struggles leading to fragmentation and massive migrations, not to mention the shift in the focus of what should be the common unifying element of the people who are contained within the boundary of Bangladesh. The boundary itself has shifted. Bangladesh was once part of the united state of Bengal, which is now divided into the sovereign state of Bangladesh, with a Muslim majority and the state of West Bengal in India with a Hindu majority. In 1947, with the independence of the subcontinent from British rule, two separate states, namely, India and Pakistan, came into being on the basis of the Two Nation Theory. The present-day Bangladesh then became a part of Pakistan as East Pakistan together with West Pakistan, separated by many hundreds of miles to constitute a separate homeland for Muslims. Bangladesh finally gained independence from Pakistan after the War of Liberation in 1971. The four fundamental principles of state policy of the first constitution of Bangladesh adopted in 1972 were nationalism, socialism, democracy and secularism. With time and changing political contexts, these too have been revised. As a colonised nation, modern art evolved around the discourses of ‘tradition’ and ‘identity’ in the subcontinent. ‘Tradition’ has been used as an oppositional force in the struggles of nineteenth-century nationalism in the process of decolonisation. During the phase of Bangladesh’s history as part of Pakistan, debates ensued among the proponents of abstraction and those who opposed its facile adaptation. Considered an imported element, a section of artists refused to embrace it as a universal form. Islam has suggested that painters took up abstraction not only because it represented their artistic, emotional and intellectual understanding of art, but also social compulsion provided an additional incentive as abstraction seemed to be consistent with the Islamic aversion to figuration (Islam 1999: 20–21). Nonetheless, ‘identity’ and the ‘traditions’ which created that identity, were again put into play by Bangladeshis against the hegemony of West Pakistan, as an oppositional force of resistance during the movement for autonomy and finally, independence. It was a strong weapon as Bangladesh had little in common with West Pakistan from which it was separated by a vast geographical distance, culture and, most importantly, language. The Language Movement sparked off almost as soon as Pakistan was born and Urdu was

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proclaimed the only state language of Pakistan. The movement peaked in 1952 when lives were lost in the struggle to establish Bengali as a national language of Pakistan. A common secular culture was imagined by Bengalis struggling for their language and cultural autonomy, which led to conceptualising the nation state. This brought about the long struggle that finally led to the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. As Bangladesh emerged as an independent nation, ‘identity’ and ‘tradition’ have lost their significance as weapons against a colonising force. But because art has been so concerned with these notions in the past, the discourses of ‘identity’ and the adaptation or appropriation of ideas and forms from the ‘Western’ or globalised world are still perhaps not free from dilemmas for the Bangladeshi artists navigating in a space thick with unsettled ideas of the indigenous and the imported. Concerns of homogeneity and loss of ‘identity’ plague the art world divided into the senior generation of artists who work within what may be termed as a national art establishment, wary of the notion of ‘contemporary art’, and the mostly younger generation of artists treading the global platform. Born decades after the violent and blood-smeared liberation war, in tune with the technological and economic realities that has turned the world global, the global and local being no longer polarised but interwoven, they seem more comfortable surfing the global wave. Contested notions of ‘identity’ and ‘tradition’ have played an important role in defining the art of Bangladesh. The politics of identity formed through a process of selection and manipulation of ‘tradition’ is notable in its art. At present, ‘globalisation’ and ‘contemporary art’ are terms that feature strongly at least in a section of the art world of Bangladesh as it moves to carve out a space on the global platform which is more accessible than ever before. Within the global platform, the question of identity is challenging. International and local political, economic, environmental and social concerns are common throughout the globalised world, and these concerns come to feature in the work of Bangladeshi artists. ‘Traditions’ are often brought into use as markers of ‘identity’ rather than politically charged symbols. They are offered to the global art world eager to promote diversity and plurality.

Dilemmas and Inheritance of Art-Politics Why do we deal with dilemmas when we discuss the art of a postcolonial nation, which Bangladesh is? Art has been strongly associated with politics in Bangladesh and has rarely in the past been disengaged from the national

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context. As mentioned above, modernism in art has been debated and contested with artists researching ways of integrating it with ‘tradition’. The root of the debate can be traced to the British colonial period when art education institutions were established by the British in the subcontinent to train drawing masters, draftsmen and modellers, surveyors and engravers, to provide a new kind of vocational training. In Kolkata, an art school was founded in 1854 with this goal. Though the art institutions were established to teach ‘applied art’ and not ‘fine art’, the confusion in Britain itself about art education, particularly in the policy for India as well as the taste for academic art which had grown in the subcontinent, the art schools were transformed into academies (Mitter 1994: 29–60). The rise of nationalism in Bengal saw the growth of the Bengal School under the guidance of Abanindranath Tagore. The ‘Indian style’ paintings produced bore the romantic and idealistic values that the orientalists recognised as the essence of ancient Indian art (Guha-Thakurta 2007: 155). Certain elements from the art of the past were selectively deployed to make art that would challenge Western mimesis, which had become vastly popular. Thus the politicisation of identity and the appropriation of ‘tradition’ were at play here to differentiate it from the art that was promoted through the colonial institutions. The debates that ensued about the Bengal School paintings and its eschewing of naturalism, the challenging of its ‘Indian-­ ness’ by Indian nationalists at that time and the vociferous support of it by orientalists have been chronicled and analysed by Tapati Guha-Thakurta (1992). Thus what is considered to be the beginning of modern art in the subcontinent itself was not free from dilemmas. Zainul Abedin who is the pioneer of modern art in Bangladesh was active and acclaimed in undivided India. He was a teacher at the Calcutta Art School and gained immense stature in the subcontinent through his Famine series on the Bengal famine of 1943. With the partition of India, he and a number of other Bengali Muslim teachers of the Calcutta Art School opted to move to East Pakistan. It was their intention to found an art education institution in East Pakistan. By that time the Bengal School had lost the limelight. Rabindranath Tagore’s ideas of assimilation and exchange had begun to affect the art world since the founding of the ­Kala-­Bhavana of Visva-Bharati in 1919. Artists had begun to travel to different parts of the world and were exposed to different ideas and practices in art and art education. At the end of the 1930s, the art schools were showing signs of change and the influence of modern European art movements was being felt. Global eclecticism was a predominant feature

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of these movements in their early phase and many Indian artists who had gone to Europe came back with a new enthusiasm for local arts (Subramanyan 1987: 29–30). Undeniably ‘the flexible revolutionary syntax of Cubism became synonymous with the global avant-garde’ (Mitter 2007: 8). Zainul Abedin, Safiuddin Ahmed, Quamrul Hassan, S.M. Sultan and other pioneers of the art movement in Bangladesh, who had studied in the Kolkata Art School during and after the 1930s, were removed from the ideas that governed it at the founding, or the ideals of the Bengal School. Nonetheless, all of these diverse streams of ideas continued to play a part in shaping the form of the art that they produced as well as their ideas on art education. After Partition in 1947, Abedin and the other artist-teachers who had opted to move to Pakistan focused on the founding of an art education institution in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan. The subject of the first exhibition, to inspire the Pakistani rulers to establish an art school in Dhaka, was strategically chosen, a series of posters portraying the conquest of India by Muslims to the birth of Pakistan. Here, the intention for selecting this particular subject was highlighting a common Pakistani ‘identity’ based on religion. In 1948, an art school was established in Dhaka. There were many dissenting ideas about the identity of the Bengali Muslim prior to the Partition (Anisuzzaman 1993: 91–96). But with the Language Movement, the common identity of religion was put to the test. The language and cultural heritage of Bengal became the elements unifying the people of this land and the realisation that religion could not supplant culture (Umar 1967: 1–12). This directly affected the art movement of the region, which has been carefully secular. This was possibly because the birth of Bangladesh as the result of religious affinity had not worked as a cementing factor for Pakistan and had to be challenged to create an independent Bangladesh. Abedin’s work had always dealt with the rural life and people of Bengal. The art school in Dhaka was deeply influenced by the ideas of art that Abedin and his colleagues held. According to Jahedi, they ‘try to instil into the hearts of their students a sense of pride and love for the traditional artistry of the people, particularly the folk tradition’ (Jahedi 1961: 7). It must be added that the art school founded in Dhaka still held at its core the fundamental principles of the Calcutta Art School with its stress on skills training and mimesis with theoretical courses being included after 1963 (Khabir 2007: 16). In 1951, Abedin went to the Slade School of Fine Art in the UK and visited galleries and museums in Europe. After returning in 1952, he

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turned to ‘folk art’ for inspiration. Both global eclecticism and the Language Movement with its associated ‘indigenism’ had a part to play in this. He began experimenting with various ‘folk’ elements in his painting. This was probably an attempt to hearken back to a remote past before religions had taken their present form and presented an undivided Bengali identity. Not only did he himself pursue experiments with folk forms, he also exhorted Quamrul Hassan to do so in the 1950s (Huq 2007: 313). Safiuddin Ahmed, another pioneer of the art movement, also showed a transformation after the Language Movement, and the people and nature of Bangladesh became the subject of his work. S.M. Sultan, who entered the art scene rather late, was completely committed to excluding all perceived foreign elements in his paintings. A difference is seen between the four pioneers of the art movement when compared with the generation of artists who were the early students of the art institution in Dhaka. This was perhaps due to the fact that quite a number of the latter artists went to Europe and the United States to study, and this became a turning point for them and for the art of Bangladesh. They were exposed to various art movements of the West not as mature artists already established in their own fields as were Abedin or Safiuddin. Instead, they went as students and were eager to experiment with the formalism of modernism. Most of them returned to East Pakistan at the end of the 1950s. Cubism, abstract expressionism and other movements in art transformed their work. They show a greater desire to become part of the international art world they had been exposed to, rather than to bridge the international and local as had been the case with the earlier artists at work. They were less concerned about contextualising modernism in the sense that they were more comfortable with borrowing elements from the Western art world without having to look for local forms for parallels or inspiration. According to Mansur, concerns about indigenism were washed away in the powerful tide of internationalism (Mansur 2007: 40–41). However, their work also reflected local subjects and a number of them continued the efforts of Abedin to unite modernism with folk art. Abedin himself was not beyond problematising the new kind of art practice as he spoke in an interview in 1974. He said that a phase of his art practice had, possibly subconsciously, been influenced by the struggle for Bengali language and culture and was a rebellion where he had had to uphold the folk art of the Bengalis, had to be free from the influence of the West and to deny the supremacy of West Pakistan. But later, in the past decade when he felt that Bengali culture could not be repressed, he felt

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free to paint some abstract expressionistic paintings like those of the younger generation. He went on to say that these artists were young and impressionable when they went to the West and painted in the trends that they saw there, which he said were good paintings too. But as they became more mature, they would return to their own environment and express it in their work because true art had to be based on life and real experience (Islam 1994: 105–106). The art world was not without debates and discourses on what the course of art should be and whether art was becoming a facile imitation of the Western world or if it connected to viewers. This plaguing doubt has been voiced by a number of authors who have tried to analyse the phenomenon and put it into perspective (Azim 2000: 100–101; Islam 1999: 20–21; Jahangir 1974: 2–3; Mansur 2007: 51). With the War of Liberation in 1971 an independent Bangladesh was born and with it the hope of a secular, democratic, socialist country where Bengali culture would flourish. As an independent nation, it began to build its institutions and new relations in art, education and culture. Artists had greater opportunities to travel, participate in international exhibitions, and view the art of foreign nations. Art students travelled to foreign nations to study. Contacts grew with the Western art capitals and also with India, Japan and China. The positive spirit of the early 1970s evaporated with the political and economic crises that engulfed the new nation. The killing of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman1 in 1975 was followed by a prolonged military dictatorship; religion again came to play a part in politics. Major General Ziaur Rahman,2 the founder of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party

1  Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is the visionary founder of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. He was the driving force of the Liberation Movement and the War of Liberation of Bangladesh in 1971. He is popularly known by the title Bangabandhu (“Friend of Bengal”). He was an important figure of the Awami League founded in 1949, later becoming its leader. He served as the first President of Bangladesh and later as the Prime Minister until his assassination in August 1975. 2  Ziaur Rahman, then a major in the Pakistan army, was a sector commander of the Bangladesh Liberation War. He came into prominence after a military coup in 1975 in which Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was killed. Followed by several shifts in power in the army, he finally became the Chief Martial Law Administrator in 1976 and later the President of Bangladesh in 1977. In 1978, he formed the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). He reinstated religious politics and rehabilitated anti-liberation elements and passed the Indemnity Ordinance which gave immunity from legal action to the persons involved in the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, coups, and other political events between 1975 and 1979. In 1981, he was assassinated by a group of army officers.

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(BNP), assumed power in 1976 and made constitutional amendments that facilitated the political rehabilitation of elements that had collaborated with the Pakistani forces and committed crimes against humanity during the War of Liberation, namely, the Jama’at-e-Islami. In 1988 Ershad’s3 pseudo military government declared Islam the state religion of Bangladesh raising furore from the intelligentsia, further promoting ‘communal politics’. Ershad was forced from power in 1990 in a huge movement for democracy. In the elections of 1991, the BNP came to power and Jama’at leaders became ministers in the two BNP-led governments of 1991 and 2001. The government elected in 2008 led by the Bangladesh Awami League, set up an International Crimes Tribunal which has tried and convicted Jama’at leaders of crimes against humanity during the War of Liberation. The two major parties that have taken turns at the helm of the government since the fall of Ershad are the Bangladesh Awami League, the party that headed the Liberation War under the leadership of Sheikh Hasina, daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and the BNP which has been responsible for making changes in the constitution to reinstate religion in politics, founded by Ziaur Rahman and now headed by his wife Khaleda Zia. Through all of these turbulences, artists were active participants in political movements as part of the intelligentsia, producing visual material for the movements. At present, Bangladesh has gained self-sufficiency in food and is advancing on different economic and human development indexes. Export from the garment industry and remittance are major contributors to the economy. Generally speaking, times have changed. Both major political parties follow neoliberal economic policies. It is now becoming a lower middle-­ income country from a lower income country. Bangladesh is not the ‘bottomless basket’ anymore and the character of the art world is keeping pace with this. Till the 1980s the only exhibitions that were held in Bangladesh were organised by the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, the government institution for the promotion of the arts. There were no private galleries or big investors in art. But an important event that helped transform the art world of Bangladesh was the Asian Art Biennale, which was organised 3  Lieutenant General Hussain Muhammad Ershad came to power through a military coup in 1982 and served as President of Bangladesh from 1983 to 1990. He founded the Jatiya Party in 1986. Ershad resigned in 1990  in the face of national protest and international pressure.

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for the first time in Dhaka in 1981, bringing part of the international art world to Dhaka. It brought in art from different parts of Asia for Bangladeshi artists and art viewers. Perhaps the most important was the kind of art the Japanese artists exhibited in the Biennale of 1983, introducing art trends that had transformed the art world of Japan in the 1970s. This was in response to the trends of minimal art and conceptual art in the United States and Europe from the end of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1970s (Yasunaga 1983). The subsequent Asian Biennales continued to exhibit Japanese installations and these were appreciated and awarded by the jury. Bangladeshi artists did not immediately respond to this by making similar work. With the growth of information technology and public media, artists were exposed to the variety of art being practised around the globe. The influence of conceptual art such as installations, performances, videos, photography became evident in the 1990s. By then a number of private art galleries had started to operate. The scattered efforts of the 1990s became more concerted in the twenty-first century. Increased foreign travel and the facility of networking with foreign organisations facilitated the trend and brought foreign and local artists together in residencies and workshops. This was also a result of the Western world’s attempt to be pluralistic and polycentric. According to Clarke, the mid-1990s saw a growth of interest in contemporary Asian art by Europe and North America through curators, not as in the past, through the engagement of artists in premodern Asian art and the aesthetic and metaphysical frames within which the art developed. This interest is reflected in Asian art exhibited in contemporary art exhibitions. Western master narratives of modern art have been discredited, but even today it is hard to find European or American artists who feel they have anything to learn from contemporary Asian art. The asymmetry of knowledge of the past continues to exist. An Asian artist working today is more likely to have a detailed understanding of Western modern and contemporary art than their European or American counterparts have of modern or contemporary Asian art. Though it may seem that in the ‘postmodern’ era that the ‘old boundaries are crumbling’ with its lack of mainstream or belief in artistic progress, Asian art is still being reclaimed within a Western-centristic vision. It is placed as a ‘further temporary novelty for western palates’ or being viewed as proof that the non-Western world is becoming more like the West (Clarke 2011: 245–246).

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Networked Art Practices: Invitations and Impacts Since the 1990s Dhaka has developed an art market and galleries with the associated circuit of curators, critics, collectors and artists. The state-run Shilpakala Academy has gradually come to play a minor role as an institution as the free market economy has gained ascendency. Private entrepreneurs, industry owners and multinationals are seen to become more important in the art world. The state funds their activity through partnerships with the Ministry of Culture directly or through the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy or the Bangladesh National Museum which are both under the Ministry of Culture. Whereas in the 1990s it was almost solely through the Shilpakala Academy that artists could participate in international exhibitions, the Bengal Foundation, a private foundation, began to play a major role in promoting artists in the beginning of the twenty-first century. The focus of Bengal was then more on modern art rather than the ‘contemporary’. The Britto Arts Trust set up in 2002, part of the Triangle Art Network, was one of the first artist-led initiatives which began to promote contemporary art with the support of international agencies, most importantly the Triangle Arts Trust, UK, and Khoj of India. Khoj itself was founded with the support of the Triangle Arts Trust in 1997. It sought to address the lack of dialogue within the subcontinental neighbours as well as seek ‘a non-Euro-American tilt within cultural discourse, more connected with contemporary art practices/practitioners in Africa, the Asia Pacific, Latin America, China, Australia, etc.’ (Sood 1998: 8). Guided by the Triangle Arts Trust based in London, the international workshops brought together artists from different regions and backgrounds including Euro-­Americans. ‘Its direction is towards an empowerment of third world artists and their multicultural bonding outside a white bias, for an exchange and flow of information along other lines’ (Sood 1998: 9). Established in 1982 in the UK, by the collector Robert Loder and the sculptor Anthony Caro, the aim of the Triangle Arts Trust was to build an international artists network promoting exchange of ideas and innovation within the contemporary visual arts (khoj.workshop.org). It can be asserted that Britto Arts Trust took off with the mission to promote and popularise ­‘contemporary’ art practices ‘outside a white bias’. Ironically, the initiative was launched through the support of an organisation in the UK. The first workshop of the Triangle Arts Trust held in 1982 had artists from Canada, the United States and England, hence the Triangle

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(author’s conversation with Robert Loder: 2003). Also it must be noted that the activities did not exclude artists from Europe or North America. They have been present in all the international workshops and other activities providing interaction with local artists. Recalling orientalism as it emptied itself of colonial content and created an anti-colonial proIndian image to exercise its greatest power ‘in the authority it commanded over representation itself – in its ability to shape, define and fix the image of Indian art in both the Western imagination and nationalist perceptions’ (Guha-Thakurta 1992: 148). Was it a new way of intervening, trying to give direction to the art of the non-Western by seemingly pushing them to turn their gaze to ‘themselves’ and to take up ‘contemporary art’ while supplying them with models and structures to follow? During the era of modernism, the orientalists told the ‘others’ to look at their own ‘tradition’. While modern artists of the subcontinent did appropriate and assimilate elements of Western art, this was ‘influence’ in the disapproving view of Western art history, a term which cut both ways. If the work was too close to the original, it reflected ‘slavish mentality’, and if it was an imperfect imitation, it represented failure. While borrowings by European artists from non-Western sources were approved either as affinities or dismissed as inconsequential (Mitter 2007: 7–8). Though interest in contemporary expressions in art were gradually growing among some artists in Bangladesh, Britto gave it a strong push and a kind of legitimacy through its dynamic activities that literally connected to the globe, not to mention the impressive international network of organisations that supported it. No doubt the growth of such art practices was evolving and inevitable, but their evolution may have been different without the intervention of the Triangle through the agency of Britto. Contemporary art has been, for a large part, subsumed by social issues raised by Western media and the heated issues of local development activities undertaken by donor agencies (Khabir 2007: 264). Additionally, Britto Arts Trust has introduced and organised an impressive number and variety of activities. The issues they have dealt with go beyond, while including, the preoccupations mentioned earlier (http://www.brittoartstrust.org/). Some of these activities may show the ‘artist as ethnographer’ according to Hal Foster where artists have taken to the field of the other, the postcolonial, the subaltern or the sub-cultural (Foster 1995: 302–309). Making the claim of broadening the exhibition spaces beyond the walls of the galleries and museums, Britto artists sometimes conduct performances on the streets of Dhaka or in the Bangladeshi countryside

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(Chowdhury 2008). Britto claims that it has taken on the responsibility of promoting alternative modes of art production of Bangladesh to the globe (Lipi 2008). But the following discussion may show that what is promoted as alternative is now, and has been for some time, the mainstream. The anti-establishment radical rhetoric is hardly supported by the fact that it has espoused a new establishment in favour of the old. Contemporary art has been consciously promoted by Britto, the Samdani Art Trust and Drik4 in the recent past as they have collaborated in various ways to further its cause. 2011 seems to be a significant year for Bangladesh as initiatives to enter the global arena of ‘contemporary art’ appear to become a priority. Bangladeshi artists have been participating in the Venice Biennales since 2011 and in 2017 for the first time in the documenta 14. Curators from important global institutions have been coming to Bangladesh since 2011. The Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) was founded in 2011 in Dhaka. It is a private arts trust which aims at supporting the contemporary artists and architects of Bangladesh and ‘seeks to expand the audience engaging with contemporary art across Bangladesh and increase international exposure for the country’s artists and architects’ (Samdani Art Foundation website). The Dhaka Art Summit (a SAF initiative) has drawn curators from many important international institutions in 2012, 2014 and 2016. Though the first Summit did not have an international participation, the second one featured artists from South Asian countries and the third one held a global flavour with renowned artists participating under curators from prestigious institutions. The usual somewhat slapdash display in the gallery that Bangladeshi viewers are used to seeing, show restraint and a global chic in the Summits. A critical view of such curated exhibitions may be that they may compel artists to make a certain kind of art to exhibit and present to the same set of curators operating across the world (Harris 2011: 2). Noël Carroll implies that contemporary art has developed its preferred idiom and transnational exhibitions show a dominance of video, film, photography, installation, conceptual art, performance art and digital art with painting and sculpture losing ground. Many of the art forms are

4  Drik Picture Library was founded in 1989; in 1998 it set up Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography and Chobi Mela in 2000, the largest photography event in Asia and a regular biennale. Considerable numbers of Pathshala students are currently participating in art events and exhibitions.

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constructed on the technologies ‘transforming the wide world into a small world’ suggesting film, video and photography are the mechanically and electronically reproducible media that make them possible to be everywhere at once. Thus the overcoming of space by these media instils conviction that globalisation is upon us. Thus these media are emblematic of the emerging cosmopolitan art world as they are themselves cosmopolitan (Carroll 2013: 138–139). It may also be said that the use of these media themselves simulate the notion that the artist is in the global flow. Also as Clarke says, recirculation of known Asian artists rather than introducing new ones is a common phenomenon as relatively few curators have detailed knowledge of more than one part of Asia, if any at all. Therefore they are not equipped to find emerging talents. He points to the familiar role of informants needed to shortlist potential artists and necessary information for such jet-setting curators lacking contextual knowledge (Clarke 2011: 247). The recent wave of heavyweight curators from highly reputed foreign institutions coming into Bangladesh is sniffing out the work that will ‘work’ within the taste, preoccupations and framework of the ‘global’ institutions. It is very unlikely that they have a great sense of the history or context of the particular nation that is Bangladesh. Thus artists who make an effort to make their work palatable for the global platform perhaps have to keep in mind a particular formula for success. The Samdani Art Foundation is at present the portal through which young, aspiring artists get the opportunity to reach the global space. Connecting with organisations in the Western world, they provide opportunities to jump-start artistic careers through participation in prestigious international exhibitions, residencies, fellowships and production grants. Not to be outdone, the Bengal Foundation has also revised their policy and in the last few years and have begun to engage in the promotion of contemporary art. For the Bangladeshi art world with very limited access to modern or contemporary art, the Summit has created a window into the global. The Summit is not a biennial. It is ‘the world’s largest non-­ commercial art festival dedicated to South Asian Art’ (Samdani 2014), or ‘the world’s largest non-commercial research and exhibition platform for South Asian Art’ (Samdani 2016). The Asian Art Biennale, now being held routinely, lacks the tools of curating, marketing, theoretical discourse and other associated necessities, without which it has lost much of its significance as an institution in the global world. The Summit, as an art fair, is focused on promotion. ‘Success’ is a matter of sales for an artist as well as critical acclaim, as some artists may sell work but never have them

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bought by museums. Institutions, particularly some international networks of institutions, are far more important than others as ‘gatekeepers’ in the contemporary art world (Harris 2011: 19). The Summit plays a role in connecting to this circuit without which ‘success’ as critical acclaim is unattainable. As Geeta Kapur notes, the biennale is not beyond playing into vested interests, being a mixture of state spectacle, cultural hegemony, market interests and tourist commerce. They also create professional channels of communication where they are held, erect bridges between state and private finance, between the public and elite spaces, and artists and other practitioners (Kapur 2013: 182). According to Peter R. Kalb, the twenty-first century has seen the biennale, the art fair and auction circuits being interconnected. Works of artists shown in biennales are later sold in auctions and fairs. Galleries paying equal attention to emerging economies are opening strategic branches far from their traditional European bases and selectively importing artists. The London auction house, BRIC5 sales in 2010 and 2011 ‘has reinvented the capital/periphery model, bringing the cultural products of far-flung and culturally diverse economic powers to a single venue for exhibition and evaluation’ (Kalb 2013: 17). The art market, like artists and art historians, has established its own network of interests unhindered by the earlier art world cartography, but not indifferent to it (Kalb 2013: 17). Noël Carroll suggests that the transnational contemporary art circuit is held together by a set of shared artistic and critical discourses. Artists, presenters, critics and connoisseurs share certain conceptions and hermeneutical strategies that foster transnational understanding. The artist can presume, with regard to certain types of work, featuring a certain kind of iconography, that the viewer will be able to explore the work in the light of certain concerns, ideas and preoccupations. ‘Often, these hermeneutical posits are articles of progressive politics, such as postcolonialism, feminism, gay liberation, globalization and global inequality, the suppression of free expression and other human rights, identity politics, and the p ­ olitics of representation, as well as a generic anti-establishmentarianism’ (Carroll 2013: 140). The related political concerns grow perhaps because artists find themselves in many of the same contexts in the urban centres around the world which include capitalism in particular and modernisation in general. These concerns are fostered and circulated perhaps through critical 5  ‘BRIC’ is a term used by economists and investors to designate the four emergent markets of Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

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discourse and highlighted by international art world events through interdisciplinary lectures and conferences. Since these assumptions that create meaning are so widely circulated, it is possible to have a transnational ‘conversation’ between ‘artistic senders and receivers who speak different languages’ (Carroll 2013: 140). James Meyer notes that now it is the curator who is most connected to and well-informed about practice and has the greatest impact on it. This is why criticism is so feeble because, for now, critical debate has shifted from discourse to curation. The curator is now the best informed and most able to articulate what is important in art practice (Carroll 2013: 138). It may be added here that the curator is also thus authorised to circulate the preoccupations and language or iconography of transnational contemporary art through the constant exchange of information with artists. Umberto Eco holds that this historical epoch is dominated by repetition and iteration dominating the world of artistic creativity in which it is difficult to distinguish between the repetition of the media and the repetition of the so-­called major arts (Eco 2005: 363). Geeta Kapur notes that with the scale of twenty-first-century globalisation, the curatorial project entails a mandatory inclusiveness of difference and a decentralisation of cultural power in discourse and practice after the dissolution of the first, second and third world in 1989 and the rise of the new Empire. The interdependence of regions and nations and the overlapping of ‘local’ cultures within global capitalism, the deterritorialisation of peoples and cultures through mass migrations, and electronic communications have brought into play transnational transculturalism. Transculturalism is not a matter of free choice but a condition of global exchange. Within this transnational public sphere, a large part of the world population lives outside of communities and nations where citizenship includes the experience of exile. The aesthetic and ethical impact of this is statistically a huge increase of third world artists in international exhibitions. Translation then becomes a key point for transcultural aesthetic (Kapur 2013: 182–183) and ‘­cultural criticism appoints the diasporic artist as a trope and a norm – the one who constructs both the grammar and the discourse of global contemporaneity, and conducts the process of negotiation/confrontation to this purpose’ (Kapur 2013: 183). There is the presence of Bangladeshi diaspora artists in the various global spheres on which Bangladesh is operating. This may simultaneously read that many local artists are still not empowered with the grasp of the globalised idiom of contemporary art to be able to operate within it, as it may be that the Bangladeshi diaspora benefits from the stamp that the

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Bangladeshi identity gives them and provides them entry into transcultural spaces which would elude them bereft of that identity. As Araeen observes, young postcolonial artists of African or Asian origin are part of Western society and not separated from their white/European contemporaries. They are active within the same globalised space and are legitimated by the same institutions. Yet, though equal, the white/European artists are not obliged to the multicultural society and require no recognisable identity sign for their work (Araeen 2011: 372–373), ‘the “other” artists must carry the burden of the culture from which they originated, and they must indicate this in their artworks before they can be recognized and legitimated. Their works must carry identity cards with African or Asian signs on them’ (2011: 373). Thus it may work both ways for the diasporic artist, the artist though denied a space if the identity card is not used in their work, can use the card to gain entry into the strongholds of the globalised art world. Jonathan Harris notes that art produced ‘in’ Asia analogises the fate of art produced anywhere outside Europe and North America. The international markets for contemporary art have been created and are dominated by Western institutions. This global art world power nexus needs art to come ‘from’ somewhere ‘outside’ and show signs of ‘authentic difference’ to brand it in the international market. This ideological projection is organised by the players in the market (2013: 440–441). ‘And sometimes, to complicate matters further, the players themselves actually believe in the ideology. This suggests that the idea of authenticity, at the very point of its invention or coinage, was actually ideological tout court’ (Harris 2013: 441).

Conclusion Amidst Anxieties The ‘local’ artists, bound to the nation, have enormous anxiety. They are not part of Western society and have little access to a different structure of education; their language skills in English, the world’s ‘business language’ (and also the language of most academic discourse), are limited; most importantly they do not have the ‘taste’ or know the idioms and aesthetics of the transnational transcultural sphere of the globalised world. Ulf Hannerz comments on the elitist nature of contemporary cosmopolitan culture which offers specific authority to those who travel from the peripheries to the metropolises. Those who do not are considered passive agents of the peripheries. The influence and exchange between the peripheral to the metropolitan is not equal and tends to turn the former to receivers

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rather than managers of meaning (Seppä 2010). Raising the anxiety that contemporary art will enter the local in a similar fashion as modernism, without the artists being able to claim authorship over representation as they are not ‘managers of meaning’. For just as in the past, the establishments that validate and promote art are still entrenched in the West. And the sobering thought that globalisation that is indispensible to the making of contemporary art is a term which names forces that have shaped the globe but have originated in the West and have achieved dominance beyond Europe and the United States through the prolonged history of colonialism and conquest (Harris 2011: 1). The art education institutions of Bangladesh are still clinging to the objectives of the art schools founded during the colonial era where the focus is skill development and mimesis. All the art education institutions in Bangladesh roughly follow the basic structure of the first institution founded in Dhaka by Zainul Abedin. Thus art education may still be considered, in many cases, as vocational training. The visual language or grammar of art is not the focus and critical theoretical discourse is almost nonexistent in the current framework of art education institutions. The syllabi of most art institutions focus on Western art history and theory while the regional is peripheral. Media art is not encouraged and mimetic skill is considered the most desired of all attributes of an art student. Articulation and critical awareness are not expected. This environ hardly prepares the art student for a globalised art world where communication skills are absolutely necessary. Thus they are not equipped with the skills and sophistication that is necessary in the contemporary art world. In many ways this leaves them seriously on the back foot in the complexities of the contemporary art world where the artist must be able to situate work politically and in the idiom demanded by ‘global’ taste which is still very much determined by the institutions of the West. In Bangladesh today practitioners outside the art school background are often better equipped than art school graduates as they are not educated within a skill-­ based system, they are students of some other disciplines and take up visual media which yields interdisciplinary results. They can communicate their ideas and have a wider worldview than what is imparted within the narrow confines of an art school focusing on making skills and out-of-sync art history courses which have little relevance in the world today where the image can be mediated and circulated with a very different set of skills and concepts.

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The greatest fear of all for artists in Bangladesh is the fear of being out-­ of-­sync, of being left behind. Geeta Kapur notes, ‘despite incomplete modernization a unitary logic of advancement, as this was conceived of in nineteenth-century Europe, continues to be imposed so that someone or the other among the peoples of the world is always seen to be out of step’ (Kapur 2001: 276). Taking authority over representation in art has to be accompanied by textual support and there is much ground to be covered in this field. The lack of texts has led to borrowing the support of texts that have developed in some other context and needs to be trimmed and fitted to Bangladesh. This translation of theoretical referents to local context can be highly frustrating and often unsuccessful. Clarke notes that though the sense of confidence of the Asian diaspora is encouraging, diasporic writing is unable to speak adequately for places of origin that are changing rapidly and have as much cultural hybridity as the ‘third spaces’ of Western metropolises. These localities and the art made there need deeper study and explanation to the international audience by those who live there, or stay long enough to become more than observers but participants to expand possibilities (Clarke 2011: 250). Kapur also speaks about the radical discourse of the expatriate intelligentsia which tends to be the privileged voice of the diaspora. The diaspora voice is the mode of speech suitable to address the white world. Thus this proxy rhetoric forecloses ‘praxis on site, where it may matter most’ (Kapur 2013: 281). In Bangladesh, as the feebleness of art criticism and theoretical discourse is bemoaned, already the role may seem redundant as it has been superficially appropriated by the curator. Now the need for local ‘insider’ curators is felt to present the ‘true’ picture. Though ‘identity’ and ‘tradition’ have played central roles in the making of modern art in Bangladesh as an oppositional force against colonial hegemony, how does the identity marker stand in the present global art world and in contemporary art? Harris notes, ‘If globalization implies the creation of a single system within the world, one that erodes pre-existing though still active localized systems, then the same must be true of the contemporary art world if it has become a part of this system’ (Harris 2011: 9). Following this logic, how do artists navigate their course through the intricacies of entering the global space? Do they retain the identity card or do away with it? Here we see dual currents in motion. The contemporary art of Bangladesh shows artists using identity in their work because it gives them entry into the global art world which makes greater effort to accommodate plurality and difference. Identity itself has become

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a passport to enter the global art space. In fact, as mentioned earlier, Araeen suggests that it is a must for non-white diaspora artists. It is almost as much a must for all artists outside Europe and North America. There are artists who are doing away with the ‘identity’ sign and blending in with the tide of global culture. Carrying no flagpoles, they take up the disinfected politically correct stand. This is made possible by the common idiom of contemporary art. Even when the identity card is used, it has to be modulated to be ‘legible’ for the transnational sphere. Identity that was used by nationalism against colonialism or against local dictatorial regimes had turned to tradition, the nature of Bangladesh, rural or working people as subjects and mostly folk art for formal inspiration and carefully selected a secular path because of the reason for the existence of Bangladesh. According to Geeta Kapur, ‘Rather than distancing alternative civilizations into objects to be processed by western subjectivity, the nationalist intelligentsia makes some genuinely anxious, and responsible appropriations within their own societies’ (Kapur 2001: 278). Although we speak about globalisation, the world is far from being homogenous with strong local cultures within geographic regions and the associated history, politics, aesthetic taste and manifold issues forming the priorities of artist. The world now is interconnected through economic, political, cultural and biological factors as never before, but there are pitfalls in thinking that this makes the world homogenous. To the Bangladeshi artist, the local provides much of the subject matter for art and, in a sense, such subjects play into global preoccupations such as the environment, exploitation of labour, feminism, fundamentalism and so forth. These preoccupations and most prominently the War of Liberation and the genocide and other crimes against humanity during it continue to play a prominent part in the discourse of artists. In fact, sometimes artists seize upon tragedy for subject matter and human tragedy or natural disaster can become another signifier that identifies Bangladesh. As Dipesh Chakrabarty posits (Chakrabarty 2008: xii): No country… is a model to another country, though the discussion of modernity that thinks in terms of “catching up” precisely posits such models. There is nothing like the “cunning of reason” to ensure that we all converge at the same terminal point in history in spite of our apparent ­historical differences. Our historical differences actually make a difference. This happens because no human society is tabula rasa. The universal concepts of political modernity encounter pre-existing concepts, categories, institutions, and practices through which they get translated and configured differently.

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Contemporary art, it may be argued, seeks to find interesting forms of quotidian objects and popular art to make images which almost seem to exoticise the local. The hybrid results of synthesising contemporary idioms with local aesthetic heritage can and does yield fruit. The responsibility and consciousness (or unconsciousness) in borrowing from the local so as not to distance it, but to let it appear as it seeps into the consciousness or subconscious as part of the lived environment (be it a jumble of interjections of the local-global hybrid space artists inhabit), and not to colour the artwork to simulate contemporariness is perhaps the greatest challenge. Guasch speaks of the political responsibility in the aftermath of colonial modernity and how it opens up questions of how to be literally and metaphorically cosmopolitan in one’s own place of origin and analyse the various relationships between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ without one dominating the other (Guasch). Geeta Kapur exhorts Indian artists, ‘rather than allowing ourselves to be theorized into political homogeneity, we must engage in a dialectic that takes into account the material factors within our own histories’ (Kapur 2001: 282). This dialectical engagement is also necessary for artists in Bangladesh and building true alternative institutions may be one way of counteracting ‘political homogeneity’. This is easier said than done with the pressure of globalisation upon us. In the context of Bangladesh, contemporary art is perhaps one of the most critical issues to deal with. Globalisation, which is still unfolding, is taking a particular form and significance for Bangladesh. Contemporary art is still a nebulous term, yet to be analysed, verbalised, criticised and understood in terms of the complexities of the local and also its imbrications with the global. Only perhaps with the passage of time and distance from the present will it be possible to put it into any perspective.

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Kapur, G. 2001. Detours from the Contemporary. In When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India, 267–282. New Delhi: Tulika Books. ———. 2013. Curating in Heterogeneous Worlds. In Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present, ed. A.  Dumbadze and S.  Hudson, 178–191. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Khabir, N. 2007. Conceptual Art and New Trends. In Cultural Survey of Bangladesh Series-8 Art and Crafts, ed. L.R. Selim, 254–269. Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh. khoj.workshop.org. http://khojworkshop.org/supporters/triangl-arts-trust/. Last Accessed 18 Nov 2017. Lipi, T.B. 2008. Preface. In Off the Beaten Path: South Asian Exhibition 19+1 Artists from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, ed. T.B. Lipi. Dhaka: Britto Arts Trust. Mansur, A. 2007. Painting: Colonial Period to the Present. In Cultural Survey of Bangladesh Series-8 Art and Crafts, ed. L.R.  Selim, 23–73. Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh. Mitter, P. 1994. Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007. The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947. London: Reaktion Books Ltd. Samdani, N. 2014. Nadia Samdani. In Dhaka Art Summit. Dhaka: Samdani Art Foundation. ———. 2016. Welcome. In Dhaka Art Summit 2016 Exhibition Guide. Dhaka: Samdani Art Foundation. Samdani Art Foundation Website. https://www.samdani.com.bd/our-story/. Last Accessed 4 Dec 2017. Seppä, A. 2010. Globalisation and the Arts: The Rise of New Democracy, or Just Another Pretty Suit for the Old Emperor? Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 2 (1). http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3402/jac.v2i0.5410?scroll=top& needAccess=true. Last Accessed 4 Dec 2017. Sood, P. 1998. Khoj: The Search Within. In Khoj 1997 International Artists Workshop, ed. P. Sood. New Delhi: Khoj International. Subramanyan, K.G. 1987. The Living Tradition: Perspectives on Modern Indian Art. Calcutta: Seagull Books. Umar, B. 1967. Sanskritir Sankat [Crisis of Culture]. Dhaka: Abu Nahid. Yasunaga, K. 1983. 2 Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh 1983. Dhaka: Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy.

CHAPTER 6

Between Anthropology and History: The Entangled Lives of Jangarh Singh Shyam and Jagdish Swaminathan Sandip K. Luis

Introduction The exceptional relationship between Jagdish Swaminathan (1928–1994) and Jangarh Singh Shyam (early-1960s to 2001) remains understudied in Indian art history; though there are a few separate writings on them individually.1 One of the reasons behind this relative omission could be the extreme difficulties in bringing together two personalities as divergent and idiosyncratic as Swaminathan and Shyam, despite their more than a decade-old collegial career at the government art institution, Bharat

1  There are still confusions regarding Jangarh Singh Shyam’s actual year of birth, which is roughly calculated as being between 1960 and 1964. For a discussion of this problem, see Das (2017: 36).

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Bhavan, Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh).2 To get a sense of this impasse, it will be sufficient to note that Swaminathan, a Tamil Brahmin by birth, was a highly influential modernist artist, writer, and the founding director of Bharat Bhavan; whereas Shyam, the originator of the ‘Pardhan-Gond painting’, was an Adivasi artist who is often said to have been ‘discovered’ by the former.3 Furthermore, both personalities appear to be equally enigmatic in their art and life alike. For example, whereas Swaminathan had the unique public persona of a “mystic-maverick” (Kapur 2012: 18) and “anarchist-hero” (Kapur 1995: 61)—because of his bohemian lifestyle and elusive use of language driven by a self-contradicting spirituality— Shyam is often said to have been an “introvert” (Akhilesh 2001: 106, translation mine). Yet, he never stopped surprising, if also shocking, the world of art—first with his original and sublime iconography of Gond deities and, finally, if we go by the existing records, by killing himself in a land as distant as Japan, for still mysterious reasons. To make the relation between these extremely different characters thinkable, I introduce a historiographical distinction between primitivism and indigenism here, by taking the collapse of ‘the Nehruvian regime’ in general (mid-1960s to mid-1970s) and the declaration of the Emergency (1975–1977) in particular, as the historical marker.4 I see primitivism as a cultural fantasy characteristic to the colonial powers,5 as opposed to indigenism as a political project shaped by the national intelligentsia for addressing the alienation of subaltern communities.6 But 2  Contrary to the conventional preference for the first name ‘Jangarh’ in mentioning Jangarh Singh Shyam, I am using his last name throughout here. 3  The term ‘Adivasi’ literally means ‘autochthon’, referring to India’s tribal communities. Pardhan is a clan (gotra) of the Gond tribe, India’s second largest Adivasi community. 4  The phrase ‘Nehruvian regime’ refers not only to the tenure of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) but also to the continuation of his top-down centre-left policies by subsequent leaders, especially his daughter Indira Gandhi (1917–1984). Though the period clearly starts with India’s national independence in 1947, there are three major interpretations about when it ends: first, with Nehru’s death in 1964; second, with the brief but crucial electoral setback faced by the ruling Congress between 1977 and 1980 following the Emergency; and finally, with the liberalisation of the Indian economy in 1991. This chapter follows the second periodisation. 5  For a psychoanalytical account of primitivism as a fantasy unique to the colonial powers, see Foster (1993). 6  A useful survey of the idea in the context of the Latin American nationalism is given in Tarica (2016).

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what ­complicates such a neat division in our discussion is the importance of primitivism in the discourses of the national intelligentsia and the process of nation-building (where the nation itself is the ‘new coloniser’), and with their failure, the late origin of indigenism as a new technique of governmentality.7 Since the key issue here is the relationship between Swaminathan and Shyam as the subjects of the post-Nehruvian cultural politics, we will focus more on the latter part of this story, where indigenism provides the central thematic. My arguments start with a discussion of Swaminathan and Shyam in the first and second sections of the chapter respectively. The concluding part will provide, along with a brief critique of existing scholarship, a few conceptual linkages to grasp the complicated relationship between these two artists. Two disclaimers: A study of completely dissimilar personalities like Swaminathan and Shyam—that too by placing them against a historical background as extreme as the Emergency—cannot be undertaken without making a few radical speculations and hyperbolic conclusions. As the title of my chapter suggests, and for the reasons which will be evident soon, these arguments are made in an interstitial space suspended between the discourses of history and anthropology. If anything, these are philosophical reflections (hence the importance of speculations and hyperboles), emanating from a concrete, if also bleak, understanding of the present; of which Shyam’s painful departure provides the immediate context and provocation. The second disclaimer is about my unconventional representation of Swaminathan and Shyam, especially in the concluding section. Though I rely on a few existing anecdotes about these artists’ lives for making certain generalisations, let me make it clear that, in the final analysis, these personalities appear not as individuals but as configurations of two mutually opposed, yet largely overlapping, historical subjectivities operating in a much larger discursive domain. Thereby, any attempt to extend my concluding arguments to the individual lives of these artists should be taken with great caution and care. 7  The belatedness of indigenism in India is understood in comparison to the Latin American political history where indigenismo has been the binding force as early as the Mexican Revolution of 1911, and an official policy of many of the newly independent countries. I will explain this difference in historical time below.

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From Primitivism to Indigenism, and the ‘Civil War’ Time is denuded of its progressional ballast: it goes haywire. (J. Swaminathan 1987: 28)

If the metropolitan experience of ‘exile’ had been the defining problematic of different modernisms in the west, then what we find in India and other third-world countries is its diametrically opposed counterpart, often identified as ‘indigenist’.8 Yet, this centrality accorded to the concept made it into academic common-sense and even a perennial cultural value of the national-modern, receiving little historicisation or critique thereby. The price we have paid for this critical lack of alertness is the eventual obliteration of differences between the two discursive configurations as different as ‘primitivism’ and ‘indigenism’—the considerations of the subaltern as a primordial population and a contemporary individual respectively.9 Thereby, as a preliminary attempt to compensate this lack, I will offer a brief account of Swaminathan’s career, in which one can see how these two different notions provide the basic dialectics behind much of his interventions and ideas. It is intriguing to note that in the discussions on indigenism in Indian art, arguments always oscillate between the intellectual and institutional contributions made by Swaminathan and K.  G. Subramanyan (1924–2016)— another Tamil Brahmin artist and a state functionary, enjoying more visibility than the other.10 Whereas Subramanyan, a staunch Gandhian and an artist 8  The dialectical connection between the two is based on a larger modernist imaginary of exile, outside which indigenism has no aesthetic or political relevance. However, it should also be noted that the experience of exile is much more profound and political in the postcolonial countries, than it had been in the west (where exile is primarily a side-effect of economic advancement). In the Indian context, Geeta Kapur has grappled with these issues from her earliest publications onward: for example, see her (1971–72) In Quest of Identity: Art & Indigenism in Post-Colonial Culture with Special Reference to Contemporary Indian Painting. 9  For instance, otherwise rich in its documentation of the pre-1947 South Asian art, art historian Partha Mitter provides a confusing narrative of primitivism, indigenism, and ‘revivalism’ (the project to retrieve elite cultural pasts), in his book, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde 1922–1947 (2007). 10  For example, the two book-length surveys of Indian modernism, Kapur’s When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practices in India (2000) and Sonal Khullar’s Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India 1930–1990 (2015), dedicate one chapter to Subramanyan, whereas Swaminathan is reduced to a few occasional observations and footnotes. Yet, none of these writers juxtapose one against the other, or seem to consider Swaminathan as an unimportant figure (in fact, wherever he is mentioned, Swaminathan’s charisma and appeal is duly acknowledged).

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trained by the stalwarts of the Santiniketan School,11 found inspiration in folk traditions and village cultures, Swaminathan took an extreme and more politicised position. Following a long political career as a member of different leftist and communist organisations, Swaminathan came to the Indian art-scene as a critic in the late 1950s (by when Subramanyan had already established himself as an important artist and pedagogue based in Baroda, Gujarat).12 Unlike Subramanyan’s Gandhian valorisation of rural cultures which has been criticised as ‘feudal’ and ‘paternalistic’,13 Swaminathan, as we will see, was more drawn to primordial pasts and their contemporary remnants, with an extraordinarily ‘egalitarian’ outlook. As an artist and writer, Swaminathan’s fascination for the primordial cultures began as early as the 1960s, by when he had already relinquished his Communist Party membership and had become a fierce critic of the Marxist ideology.14 In 1967, he was awarded the Nehru Fellowship for the research topic ‘The Significance of Traditional Numen in Contemporary Art’, to study the pastoral and tribal communities in Kinnaur (Himachal Pradesh), Bastar (Madhya Pradesh), and Kutch (Gujarat).15 However, it is

11  As Mitter notes (2007: 78, 90), a primitivist project (“environmental primitivism” to be more precise) centred on the Santali-Adivasi culture of Birbhum was one of the most intriguing hallmarks of Santiniketan artists, based in the Visva-Bharati University founded by Rabindranath Tagore in 1921. As an alumnus of this institution, Subramanian’s ideas appear to be more primitivist than indigenist in the final analysis. 12  Swaminathan was part of the Congress Socialist Party till Indian independence, after which he joined the Communist Party of India (CPI), which declared national independence as inefficient and considered the leading Congress party as their prime enemy (this position was reversed in 1951). 13  This was the principal allegation made by the Indian Radical Painters’ and Sculptors’ Association, a highly influential but short-lived Marxist collective which originated in Baroda (in 1987) and was majorly composed of Malayali artists. See their manifesto-like catalogue essay written by the collective’s only woman and non-Malayali member, Anita Dube (1987). 14  By the mid-1950s, at a time when the Soviet Union was widely criticised for its mishandling of the Eastern European political crises, Swaminathan started distancing himself from the communist ideology (he had already relinquished his party membership in 1953). The disagreement that he had with official Marxism, as it is explained in later writings (Swaminathan 1990), is regarding its stifling conception of historical progress. However, this did not stop him from appreciating and citing the ideas of Marxist intellectuals like Ernst Fischer and Herbert Marcuse. 15  ‘Numen’ is a mystical idea, originally formulated by the British artist and curator, Philip S. Rawson, which provides the linchpin of Swaminathan’s entire philosophy.

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also worth remembering that his first encounter with India’s tribal communities happened in 1955, during his honeymoon days at Betul, Maharashtra.16 As Swaminathan recollects it in his autobiography: At Betul I began to draw tentatively again […]. One day Bhaiyyaji Kulkarni, an old trade union hand, and I were roaming in the forest when we happened upon a Korku tribal village. A young boy had been bitten by a snake and the witch doctor was reviving the boy by continuous chant and throwing pot-full of water on him. We watched in rapt fascination and soon enough the boy recovered […]. This early encounter with tribal life was to have a deep impact on my later life as an artist. (Swaminathan 1995: 9)

It is compulsive to read this excitement of the young Swaminathan as a proof of certain primitivist fascination for the ‘irrational’ and the ‘unexplainable’ (if we thus interpret the above-described shamanism), which would cast a long shadow in his later career. Yet, what we see in him is an attempt to explain and rationalise this apparently absurd event, by looking into the deeper logic of the ‘savage mind’—an idea that he would later borrow from the French structural anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss (1908–2009). The latter plays an important role in the idealistic arguments of ‘The Significance of Traditional Numen’, because of the anthropologist’s interest in symbolism and language, which significantly differs from the materiality of practice emphasised by someone like Mary Douglas (another structural anthropologist, but leaning more on the Anglophone functionalist school, and occasionally mentioned in Swaminathan’s later writings). In fact, more than an explicator and demystifier of primitive life, Levi-Strauss also appears in Swaminathan as a theoretician of modernism. For example, Swaminathan affirmatively quotes a footnote from Levi-­ Strauss’ Savage Mind to argue that non-representational art, be it of modernism or primitive culture, are “realistic imitations of non-existent models”, with “style as [their] subject” (Swaminathan 1980: 10). This helps Swaminathan to make the self-consciously paradoxical point that nothing escapes reason and representation in the final estimation. This is because, for him, everything denotes, in one way or the other, the presence of an Absolute Idea or Knowledge which needs to be intuitively, if 16  Swaminathan married Bhawani Pande, the sister of a fellow cadre, in 1955. Disowned by their respective families, the couple approached the CPI leader S. A. Dange, and it is he who arranged their trip to Betul, where the party was engaged in trade-union activism.

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not conceptually, grasped (creating further confusion and even embarrassment, he goes on to equate this ideal with the Vedantic or Upanishadic notion of Brahma) (ibid.: 11). Aside from such obscure and self-fulfilling ideas—of which function, if not meaning, we will discuss at the end—the research on Indian tribals made Swaminathan arrive at certain politically relevant conclusions. In the note titled ‘The Cost of Progress’ and written as an afterword to his research in 1969, Swaminathan says: What is the price that civilization extracts from the so-called backward communities for the dubious benefits it forces upon them? Everywhere, excepting for pockets where they have been able to offer organised resistance through achieving a degree of self-consciousness in their culture, the tribal and pastoral communities in India have been subjected to the most ruthless exploitation by the onward march of money economy. Free and democratic India has not been able to defend and safeguard the lives and cultures of these children of nature. (Swaminathan 2012: 110)17

Arguing that it is in these communities that one can still find “all the colour, the uninhabited laughter, [and] the sheer childlike joy” that has been snatched away from the urban working class; Swaminathan goes on to discuss how the members of these communities, including children, are economically and sexually exploited by the privileged classes and “caste Hindus” (his term). Undercutting these words of sympathy and affection is the presence of certain familiar primitivist tropes—like “children of nature” or “childlike joy”—with the very effect of infantilising and depoliticising the subaltern subject. But before discussing this crucial problem in detail, a final note on early-Swaminathan’s intellectual formation will be helpful to get a sense of the larger political picture of the time. It is important to note that Swaminathan greatly admitted the ideas and friendship of the renowned poet Octavio Paz, who was the Mexican ambassador to India between 1962 and 1968. And it was during this period that Paz published his book-length critical introduction to Levi-­Strauss’ anthropology (albeit in Spanish). Though direct references to Paz’s writings, including Labyrinths of Solitude ([1950] 1961), a poignant reflection on  Emphasis added.

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Mexican indigenismo,18 is largely absent in the early-­Swaminathan; Paz was often mentioned by the artist as his mentor and intellectual ally.19 In fact, one may even assume that it was through Paz that Swaminathan realised the importance of Latin American indigenism as well as the French intellectual discourse (as Paz was actively involved in the French Surrealist circles before coming to India). The familiarity with the latter leads the young artist to positively consider contemporary figures like Levi-Strauss, the doyen of French Structuralism, despite the lifelong aversion to ‘isms’ (including even ‘indigenism’) that Swaminathan shared with Paz. Now, let me come to the central problem of locating the discursive shift to indigenism proper, as different from the existing primitivist ideology, in the cultural and political history of post-independent India. It should be admitted that despite their common political interests shaped by the Cold War conjecture, the Indian state hardly had a well-articulated indigenist programme like that of its Latin American counterparts, to which Paz was essentially responding. But as I have already suggested, this situation radically changed as the Nehruvian regime fell into severe political and ideological crisis by the mid-1960s and completely collapsed within a decade; thanks to its aggressive modernisation and other top-to-down policies by overlooking subaltern populations (Kaviraj 1988). As the marginalised were gradually mobilising themselves into a new political and even militant subjectivity—remember different calls of ‘revolution’ in the late 1960s and early 1970s, given in the Naxalite and J. P. movements, for instance,20 one 18  Paz’s take on indigenism in general and Mexico’s state-sponsored indigenismo project is rather critical, recognising the problems of intra-colonialism and cultural stereotyping. Yet, its empathetic reflections on the antinomies of Mexican identity provided a helpful point of departure for many post-colonial intellectuals of the time, including Kapur. 19  Paz wrote the catalogue essay for the exhibition ‘Group 1890’, an art collective venture organised by Swaminathan in 1963, and contributed to as well as co-edited a polemical little magazine called Contra’66, briefly ran by the latter between 1966 and 1967. Swaminathan’s intellectual indebtedness to Paz is clearly mentioned in the former’s autobiographical essay ‘The Cygan’ (Swaminathan 1995: 7–14). 20  The left-extremist Naxalite movement originated in the armed peasant and tribal uprisings in the Naxalbari village (1967, W.  Bengal), and was organisationally connected with similar contemporary developments in Srikakulam (Andhra Pradesh). With the formation of the CPI (Marxist-Leninist) in 1969, the movement spread all over India by the mid-1970s. Though the J. P. movement—also known as the ‘Bihar movement’—was originally initiated by the students of Bihar in 1974; it came to the centre stage of the North Indian politics with the leadership of the veteran Gandhian socialist, Jayaprakash Narayan (1902–1979) and his call for “Total Revolution” against the Indira Gandhi government. Both the Naxalite and J. P. movements were severely repressed during the Emergency, and only the former survives today, albeit in a highly fragmented and marginalised form.

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might postulate that the sudden return to indigenism by the state and its intelligentsia during this period was very much a strategy of containment. Three points could be noted here in support of this hypothesis. Though the history of modern Indian art has often been read through the lens of indigenism, especially after the art critic Geeta Kapur’s intervention in the early 1970s, historians often overlook the fact that it was only from the 1960s that indigenism became a central issue. Artist and poet Gieve Patel calls the issue of “‘indigenism’ the great issue of the 1960s”, and explains, here I quote the Rebecca M. Brown’s summary of his observation, “[t]hat the debate is not about painting villagers at a well or about looking to one’s immediate backyard for subject matter. […] Indigenism is important because it frees artists to work in different idioms, and Patel’s realization in his essay is that India’s chaotic diversity can either be brought together through unity or represented in multiplicity” (Brown 2009: 151).21 It is not difficult to see which historical juncture is marked by the adjective “chaotic”. Though Patel is clearly biased to the figurative painters who sought inspiration from different narrative traditions, one should remember that the actual representatives of indigenism during the 1960s and the 1970s, enjoying state support and promotion, were from the opposing camp made of those loosely described as “Neo-Tantric” painters (censured by Kapur, in her Vrishchik essay, as mere “revivalists”).22 As Tantric cultures had more often than not developed from the heterodox subaltern Hindu traditions— as suggested in the paintings of K. C. S. Paniker and G. R. Santhosh—23they also inspired Swaminathan and Paz to find a spirituality which could be  Emphasis added.  It is helpful to remember that the centrality that indigenism acquired during this time was first and foremost a reaction against modernism internationalism in Indian art, with its centres in Paris, New York, and even Mexico (represented by the artists like Biren De, S. H. Raza, and Satish Gujral respectively). The earliest expression of this discontent was the Group 1980 exhibition in 1963, publicly supported by Paz and Jawaharlal Nehru. The group lost its unity as many of the artists later split into Neo-Tantric and Narrative styles of painting, with their mutually challenging stakes in the ideal of indigenism. 23  In the case of Paniker and his Madras School of painting, their references to Tantric and other forms of subaltern spirituality—however weak they soon proved to be in resisting the larger dynamic of ‘Sanskritisation’—also became inspirational for a highly militant and subversive poetic expression, as it is later acknowledged by the celebrated Malayali poet and communist activist, Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan (1935–2008). His one particular poem, Kurathi (Tribal Danseuse, 1977–1978), was extraordinarily popular among Kerala’s ultraleftist cultural circles. 21 22

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both indigenous and subversive.24 But in the case of early-­Swaminathan, this typical indigenist quest for native spirituality and one’s own racial roots took a more extreme and polemical edge, as he started to endorse and glorify India’s allegedly ‘Aryan’ past.25 And as we will see soon, the radical revision of this highly problematical position, through a detailed study of anthropological and archaeological evidences of the time, is the most interesting chapter in Swaminathan’s later intellectual development. Secondly, though the government institutions like the National Academy for Fine Arts (Kendra Lalit Kala Academy) initiated a quasi-­ ethnographic survey of folk craft traditions as early as 1956 (under the leadership of the Marxist art critic and poet, Bishnu Dey); it was only by the mid-1960s that the already well-developed painting traditions of Mithila (Bihar) and Warli (Maharashtra) started to receive some state support and recognition. In 1966, during a severe drought in Bihar, the Handicraft Board under the directorship of Pupul Jayakar sent the artist and researcher Bhaskar Kulkarni, to encourage local rural women who drew murals on their walls to transfer their paintings onto paper for marketing and earning financial stability.26 And in the mid-1970s, the ­ritualistic mural tradition of the Warli tribe, a community which was already fighting against the Nehruvian regime (Parulekar 1975), also entered the national art discourse, again through the similar efforts made by Kulkarni.27 Individual members from both the communities started receiving awards and grants from the central and state governments, especially after the fourth Five-Year Plan (started in 1969) which had a policy-based programme to systematically survey and integrate craft traditions. For example, in 1975, the Indira Gandhi government honoured Sita Devi (Mithila) 24  Paz’s fascination for the metaphors of spiritual-sexual union (Paz 1997), a central theme of Tantric mysticism, is widely noted by the critics. Swaminathan’s experiments with NeoTantric art in 1963 lasted only for a year, as he moved to more abstract and lyrical forms of expression. 25  “[The] new art cannot be a departure. It has to be a beginning. […] It requires, above all, that the artist stands in front of the canvas as the early Aryan stood facing the morning sun” (Swaminathan 1995: 23). 26  It should be noted that Sita Devi (1914–2005), one of the first recognised artists of the Mithila painting tradition, belonged to the Mahapatra Brahmin caste. Because of the community’s association with funeral rituals, Mahapatras are considered to be the lowest caste of Mithila Brahmins. 27  The art world entry of Warli ritual painting, traditionally a female practice, was also made possible by the exceptional and transgressive life of Jivya Soma Mashe (1934–2018), the first male artist from the community.

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with the National Award for the Master Craftsperson, and gave the same to Jivya Soma Mashe (Warli) the following year. The subaltern started to be recognised as an individual and citizen, not as an extension of a primordial and unruly population. This overlapping shift in the art world discourses and the tactics of governmentality, read against the larger political crisis of the time, may be seen a mere coincidence. However, the concluding passage of Swaminathan’s ‘The Cost of Progress’—an “impassioned plea to Indira Gandhi’s government”, as it is later put by his son S.  Kalidas (quoted in Hacker 2014: 208)—clearly suggests an underlying connection, by providing our third and final argument: From the Nagas in the North-East to the Bhils in Madhya Pradesh, and parts of Maharashtra, we have an almost continuous tribal belt […]. Naxalbari and Srikakulam are early warnings of what could develop into a raging forest fire if our ‘socialistically’ oriented government does not take heed. The tribal and pastoral communities in India are too numerous to be liquidated in the “natural” process of economic evolution. If a rigorous policy of protection […] accompanied with genuine aid and consonant with their cultures is not pursued, these people may well become the spearhead of a prolonged and bloody civil-war. (Swaminathan 2012: 111)28

We have seen from the previously quoted passage from the same writing as to how Swaminathan juxtaposes the figure of primitive innocence and vulnerability against that of a “self-conscious” subaltern agency capable of “organised resistance”. As we reach the end of the writing, it gets clear that the particular figure which Swaminathan is defending here is first and foremost a cultural and economic category, whose immediate political manifestations as they are seen in Naxalbari and Srikakulam are an excess that has to be contained on an urgent basis. In 1975, when the country was reeling under the Internal Emergency declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to curb the same civil war that Swaminathan is talking about in the above passage29; two ambitious projects  Emphasis added.  Though numerous factors are cited for the implementation as well as the withdrawal of the Emergency (varying from India’s economic and structural crises to the characteristic traits of Indira Gandhi), I take the civil war led by the Adivasis (along with the Naxalites) to be the threshold point, given the centrality of indigenism in India’s political and cultural fabric. 28 29

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were pursued under the impetus of Jayakar (who was also an advisor to the Nehru-Gandhi family)—the launching of the multi-arts complex Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal and the reinvigoration of the National Crafts Museum in Delhi (Garimella 2013: 75). In addition to it, in 1977, an anthropological museum began functioning in Bhopal, which would later be converted to the Indira Gandhi National Museum of Mankind (or simply, the Museum of Man). With the return of Indira Gandhi in 1981 after a brief electoral setback, Bharat Bhavan was finally opened in 1982, with Swaminathan as its founding director, who also later served as the chairman of the Museum of Man. It is from his experiences with these institutions—among which the establishment of the Roopankar museum of ‘contemporary folk, tribal, and urban arts’ at Bharat Bhavan in particular—that the philosophy of the laterSwaminathan develops. To enter the idiosyncratic thoughts and institutional practices of later-­ Swaminathan, as they culminate in the 1987 book, The Perceiving Fingers: Catalogue of Roopankar Collection of Folk and Adivasi Art from Madhya Pradesh, India, it is important to closely understand the discursive deadlock within which he is operating. We have already seen how his note, ‘The Cost of Progress’, concludes with a plea to economically empower the tribals for ameliorating their cultural and political alienation. Symptomatic here is Swaminathan’s enthusiasm for tribal cultures and art with certain indifference, or even apprehension, towards their political agency (which had its contemporary examples in the Naxalbari and Srikakulam movements). In her article, ‘Culture/Politics: The Irresoluble Double-Bind of the Indian Adivasi’, historian Prathama Banerjee (2006a) elucidates this tension in great clarity. There she traces the emergence of the Indian Adivasi through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a political figure (freeing itself from the derogatory designations of ‘primitive’ and ‘tribal’), and the parallel and reactionary attempts ‘from above’ to gloss over the same as a purely cultural entity. The demand and assertion of ‘autonomy’, the distinctive feature of Adivasi politics, is reduced here into an aesthetical ideal, waiting to be materialised through different institutions of art and culture. What makes Swaminathan’s indigenism in general and his Roopankar project in particular unique is the following feature. Unlike other stakeholders in the discourse like Subramanyan or Kapur, it is only in him that we see Indian indigenism revealing its true meaning and purpose, with all its internal contradictions—thanks to Swaminathan’s readiness to take the project to its extreme limits by directly engaging with India’s aboriginal

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populations. We can also see that in doing so, that too as a state representative, he reproduces what Banerjee accuses as the “culturalisation of Indian tribes”. Yet, such a reading has to be qualified by at least two further observations. Firstly, in the catalogue of essays written for The Perceiving Fingers, Swaminathan vociferously rejected appellations like ‘primitive’ and ‘tribal’ because of their connotations of underdevelopment.30 Instead, being a true indigenist, he consciously promoted “the Hindi term ‘Adivasi’” for its literal meaning of “autochthon” (Swaminathan 1987: 9). We can see that whereas ‘primitive’ and ‘tribal’ were the ossified categories of historicist and anthropological discourses respectively, the term ‘Adivasi’ has been vibrantly political from its moment of inception. It was first used in a political context in the Jharkhand region of eastern India, with the formation of the Adivasi Mahasabha in 1938; and one does not have to ­reiterate its contemporary political connotations.31 Though Swaminathan does not refer to this particular political genealogy of the term, let alone its contemporary resonances, he presents it as a critical category from a different direction. Swaminathan does acknowledge that the tribe-caste distinction is historically porous and never sociologically static. Yet, he asks us to “identify [Adivasis] as those who have not been inducted, horizontally or vertically, into the Varna/Caste system, and who through a process of atavism, have remained or been rendered into the limbo of the ‘Uncivilized’” (Swaminathan 1987: 22). Swaminathan gives this consciously counterfactual argument through two other related assertions. On the one hand, he

30  “The problems attendant on any approach to Adivasi art are varied and complex. Apart from the pejorative echoes which the term ‘tribal’ evokes when applied to certain communities and peoples, it also seems to contaminate their art with notions of being ‘archaic’ and ‘primitive’. In fact, the term primitive has often been used for the art of peoples living at a certain level of ‘arrested’ technological development considered to be backward in comparison to those with ‘advanced’ technologies” (Swaminathan 1987: 13). 31  The Adivasi Mahasabha, originated from its discontent with the Indian National Congress, alleged that such a nationalist party was representative of ‘outsider’ (diku) interests. This line of criticism would later become the defining idea behind the formation of the Jharkhand Party in 1950. Coming to the contemporary context, D. J. Rycroft and Sangeeta Dasgupta note how the term ‘Adivasi’ is used in such a way that it resonates with the “transnational Indigenous movement, which situates tribal specificity and local autochthony in directly political relationships to statehood, globalization, sub-nationalism, etc” (Rycroft and Dasgupta 2011: 2).

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tries to foreground the Adivasi as an autonomous or self-governing subject; whose power of emancipation he counter-intuitively finds to be allegorised in the origin myth of the Gonds—India’s largest Adivasi community.32 On the other hand, by radically deviating from his earlier indigenist fascination for Aryan and Vedic pasts, he now contends that the meaning and purpose of indigenism cannot be looked for in any bygone past, be it Aryan or Dravidian. In the context of discussing linguistic and racial categorisations of tribal communities—only to reject them later for being too rigid and limited—Swaminathan says: “it is not material whether the Indo-Aryans were indigenous or not. What matters is the relationship which developed between various ethnic groups, resulting an hierarchical system […] and others left out of its pale” (ibid. 12). And he concludes this argument by noting: “We cannot by any device of mental gymnastics relegate our Adivasi communities to the past. Their artistic expressions cannot be treated as curio objects, things of interest only because of their ‘primitive’ character. They are living expressions of living peoples and if at all we are to be enrapport with them, we cannot but treat them as contemporary expressions” (ibid. 13). This is the second, and the most significant, feature that complicates Swaminathan’s ‘culturalisation of tribes’: an assertion of contemporaneity between the primordial and the modern. Elsewhere, in a manifesto-like passage, he defines the concept as follows: “We will, therefore, try to define contemporaneity as a simultaneous validity of co-existing cultures, as is the validity of the simultaneity of events on a matrix of infinity. We are therefore treating adivasi art as contemporary art, whatever be the motivations behind it” (ibid. 30). The relevance of this position, of which antecedents Swaminathan finds in Paz’s Labyrinths of Solitude,33 can be explained by taking a cue from 32  Confronted with the two alternative accounts of the myth as they are recorded by the anthropologist Christoph Von Furer-Haimendorf and the missionary Rev. Hislop, Swaminathan says: “Whatever reservations sociologists may have regarding these two versions, whatever be the allegations regarding the Hindu influence on them, it cannot be denied that both the versions deal with the liberation of the Gonds in unequivocal terms. In these versions, the Gonds do not emerge as another addition to the caste system or as being absorbed into it. On the other hand, they reemerge from captivity as free people” (Swaminathan 1987: 25). 33  The Labyrinth of Solitude contains an important passage about the philosophy of time, which Swaminathan also quotes in detail: “there was a time when time was not succession and transition, but rather the perpetual source of a fixed present in which all times, past and future, were contained. When man was exiled from that eternity in which all times were one,

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Prathama Banerjee. She has noted that the strategies of exclusion to which Adivasis have historically been subjected to are ultimately shaped by certain techniques of time and temporality—designed to contain or displace the ‘threatening contemporaneity’ of the subaltern. In her words: “‘Tribal’ culture, and therefore ‘tribes’ themselves, are almost always invoked as a noncontemporary, almost lost, moment  – and therefore, in need for recording, conservation and special display. The Adivasi, it seems then, needs to be treated, even in her contemporary form, in the historian’s caring and classifying ‘archival’ mode” (Banerjee 2006a, b: 116). Despite the conceptualisation of Roopankar as a ‘museum’ with separate sections for ‘tribal, folk and urban arts’, and Swaminathan’s erudite knowledge of anthropological and historical texts, he repeatedly emphasises that the real driving motto behind his curation is neither historical nor anthropological—let alone ‘archival’. In Swaminathan’s words: 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 emphasise the numinous function of art, neither to replace nor to subordinate it. […] Our purpose here is not to contest the vast store-­ house of knowledge and understanding, but an attempt to de-mystify the mind so that it is in communion with the limitless world of wonder. (Swaminathan 1987: 18)

Based on such a deliberately obscure and ahistorical conception of art as “numinous” and a symbol of “the infinite” (another favourite notion of Swaminathan), the Roopankar sought to provide a platform where “a symbiotic approach to art as related to anthropology” will be formulated, and no community, be it modern or primitive, would be treated as a closed or static system (ibid. 37). For Swaminathan, Roopankar was a unique space where simultaneity and juxtaposition would reign, with a purpose of creating a new humanity and submerging the existing “archipelagos” that divide each of us. Arguing thus, Swaminathan arrives at the most startling he entered chronometric time and became a prisoner of the clock and the calendar. As soon as time was divided up into yesterday, today and tomorrow, into hours, minutes and seconds, man ceased to be one with time, ceased to coincide with the flow of reality. When one says, ‘at this moment’, the moment has already passed. These spatial measurements of time – separate man from reality  – which is a continuous present  – and turn all the presences in which reality manifests itself, as [Henri] Bergson said, into Phantasms” (Swaminathan 1987: 28, emphasis in original).

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passage of The Perceiving Fingers where a fundamental equality is declared as the precondition of universal fraternity and freedom: [I]n their [Adivasis’] freedom lies our freedom, […] in their self-respect lies our self-respect, […] in their self-identity lies our self-identity, that perhaps we have to learn much from them than they have to learn from us […] A symbiotic approach which could possibly be the catalyst for both the so-­ called tribal communities and us to emerge into a new world of freedom. (ibid. 9)

The ambitious and daunting work of The Perceiving Fingers testifies to the zenith of Swaminathan’s indigenist investigations as well as Bharat Bhavan’s institutional history. Just as the arguments of The Perceiving Fingers dealt with different topics of discussion—varying from Octavio Paz’s majestic contemplations on time and infinity to the prosaic governmental records of tribal demography—Bharat Bhavan demonstrated an impressive record with multiple exhibitions and workshops, subverting the existing canons of art and culture. Yet, in 1990, Swaminathan resigned from his post of directorship in protest, as the newly elected right-wing government under the Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP) reduced the autonomy of Bharat Bhavan and changed its administrative structure by alleging ‘elitism’ (Hacker 2014: 208). He passed away in 1994, while serving as the chairman of the Museum of Man (Kalidas 2012: 152). Let me conclude this section of my chapter with a few remarks. One will definitely find many loopholes and problematic features in an extremely eclectic and elusive thinker like Swaminathan. His lifelong fascination for Vedantic spirituality, in spite of his critical understanding of Vedic and post-Vedic cultures, is one among them.34 Also important is to what extent his indigenist project is freed from primitivist fantasies. Swaminathan’s positive and frequent references to the widely criticised exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern— curated by William Rubin at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York in 1981—can make most of the radical claims of The Perceiving 34  One could see these continuing references to Upanishadic mysticism, that too in the context of discussing Adivasi art, as a personal testimony of the “symbiotic” life that Swaminathan was looking for. For example, a passage from the Perceiving Fingers states: “the sense of unity with all nature that the so-called tribal achieves through anthropomorphic transformations at a ‘physical’ level, Upanishadic thought achieves the same at a spiritual or philosophical plane” (Swaminathan 1987: 8).

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Fingers incongruous.35 The same is the case with his indigenist take on Adivasi creativity, based on an unwarranted presumption about its distinctive ‘organic’ and ‘sensuous’ unity with nature that have to be intuitively, rather than conceptually, discovered and appreciated by modern civilisation. In this sense, Swaminathan reproduces many of the early primitivist fantasies of the anti-colonial national bourgeoisie (cf. Banerjee 2006a, b). Yet, as we have seen, what makes Swaminathan impervious to any easy critical dismissal is his radical idea of contemporaneity (very much in the fashion of the anthropologist Johannes Fabian’s [1983] famous notion of ‘coevalness’). Moreover, grounded on a quintessentially egalitarian presumption to programmatically neutralise the historically constituted differences between the modern and its other, the ‘aesthetic regime’ of Swaminathan’s modernism resonates with many of Jacques Rancière’s later ideas (among them, the latter’s anarchic ideas of ‘contemporaneity as anachronism’ and ‘presupposition of equality’ in particular [Rancière 2017]). As ‘the contemporary’ is now globally valorised to be an all-­inclusive art historical marker (Belting and Buddensieg 2013), Swaminathan’s visionary takes on the idea, however elusive and cryptic they are, have become more relevant than ever. But it is from these conclusions, laudatory as they sound to be, that my investigations actually take their critical departure. I have already suggested that there could be a structural connection between the dark days of the Emergency when the ‘subaltern question’ took its most extreme and subversive form, and the Indian state’s indigenist project which was extended and legitimised by its national intelligentsia (including Swaminathan, irrespective of the artist’s ‘anarchist’ persona). Even though it will be highly simplistic to assume that indigenism was a solution designed to address the national crisis of the time, its appearance as a new problematic, that too with state support, gives a case for serious introspection. After all, the actual persistence of power lies in creating and legitimising new problems, rather than solving, let alone repressing, the old ones. If this is the case, then one has to test the scope and purchase of Swaminathan’s ideals against their real addressee itself—the Adivasi artist-subject. With this purpose in mind, let us look at the fascinating, if also ultimately disquieting, career of Jangarh Singh Shyam—a young Pardhan-Gond Adivasi who was an intrinsic part of Bharat Bhavan from its opening in 1982, until his untimely death in 2001.  For a critical review of the exhibition, see Foster (1985).

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From Forst to the Capital, and a Campfire I want to draw the figures of my desires, and I want to infuse them with my desires. (Jangarh Singh Shyam [quoted in Das 2017: 126])

Jangarh Singh Shyam was born into a Pardhan-Gond family in the forested village of Patangarh, located in the Eastern Madhya Pradesh. His first name ‘Jangarh’ originally meant ‘census’ (jana-ganana) in the native Adivasi language, as he was born on the very day when the government census officials visited the village. As a member of the Pardhan family, he was supposed to be a bard—to memorise and sing the Gond history. However, the extreme poverty typical to his community made Shyam quit his school education to do random menial jobs from his early childhood itself. At the age of 16, he married Nankusia from a nearby village (who would later become a fellow artist). Ahead of Bharat Bhavan’s opening, Swaminathan sent a few groups of young artists and students to explore the interiors of Madhya Pradesh for its barely recognised folk and Adivasi art. With the assignment of c­ ollecting and documenting these art practices, and if possible, also to invite these Adivasi and folk artists to be part of Bharat Bhavan’s Roopankar project, one of the talent scouts reached Shyam’s Patangarh village in October 1981. It is now assumed that Swaminathan deliberately sent his assistant and artist, Vivek Tembey, to lead this group, as there was information about a villager who made clay sculptures (Vajpeyi and Vivek 2008: 81). Swaminathan got this knowledge from the wife of Shamrao Hivale (1903–1984), a Gandhian activist and anthropology enthusiast. It is important to remember that Hivale was the long-term associate of Verrier Elwin (1902–1964)—a British missionary later turned anthropologist, Gandhian, and an advisor to the Indian government on tribal affairs. Elwin, interestingly, was also a distant relative of Shyam. Arriving in India in 1927, Elwin, along with Hivale, established an ashram in Patangarh and settled there by the late 1930s. Elwin consecutively married two Gond women, among whom the latter, Lila, was Shyam’s cousin (in addition, Shyam’s father was Elwin’s house cook, and had the village headship as Elwin’s brother-in-law).36 36  Like Swaminathan, Elwin also considered the Hindu caste system as highly detrimental to tribals, and eventually distanced himself from Gandhian ideas. But unlike the former, he recommended an isolationist and protectionist approach towards the tribals (even to the

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Nankusia Shyam later recounted the story of Shyam being ‘discovered’ by Swaminathan’s team as follows: [Shyam] used to do mitti ka kam [terracotta reliefs] on the walls, as well as make statues out of clay. He was also very fond of playing the flute and other instruments […]. Seeing one of his paintings on the wall […] they [Vivek Tembey and his team] asked the villagers about who had done it. Jangarh was out at work somewhere, so they left a canvas and paints and said that they’d come back in fifteen days and that meanwhile he should paint something. [F]ifteen days later – when they came back – they told my mother-inlaw: ‘Give this boy to us’. (Quoted in Bowles 2009: 22)

John H. Bowles, to whom Nankusia Shyam narrates this story, offers certain corrections however. According to him, only Shyam’s paintings were taken to Bharat Bhavan for its inaugural exhibition. But impressed by his individual genius, as the Pardhan community did not have a tradition of painting other than that of drawing abstract ritual diagrams, Swaminathan personally went to Patangarh within three months of the exhibition, to invite Shyam to Bhopal to work as an artist at Bharat Bhavan. Although the 21–22-year-old Shyam had never left his homeland before—let alone visit a big city like Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh—he immediately accepted the invitation and hopped into Swaminathan’s jeep. As the anecdote goes, when Swaminathan urged him to inform his family about his departure, Shyam found it as unnecessary and insisted that they could just leave (ibid. 23). Along with another boy Tirath Singh Merawi, Shyam set off to Bhopal for pursuing his fortunes in art. (Marawi, however, soon returned to his village because of homesickness and the cultural shock of migration.) At Bhopal, Swaminathan arranged a job for Shyam at Bharat Bhavan’s graphic arts department, and accommodation at his own home in the Professors

ridiculous extent of proposing ‘National Parks’ for them). Elwin published The Tribal Art of Middle India: A Personal Record (1951), roughly a decade before Shyam was born. It may also be noted that at the time of publishing Elwin’s book, the appellation ‘art’ was still uncommon in discussing tribal and folk art practices. As if giving a disclaimer, Elwin hints at this problem in the introduction: “I do not know how this book will appeal to artists. I offer it to them with real humility. They will not find here discussions on the philosophy or criticism of art, which I am ill-qualified to give. I hope that they will be content to accept the book for what it is, as part of the record, as an infinitesimal moment in the history of man” (Elwin 1951: 8).

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Colony. Eventually, Shyam and his family shifted to a modest place of their own, in the back alley, right behind Swaminathan’s house. Winning much critical applause—though not without the allegations of making an indigenous culture ‘inauthentic’ and ‘impure’37—Swaminathan had already introduced Shyam’s sample paintings at Bharat Bhavan’s inaugural exhibition, and presented his works as the manifestation of an original and individual mind. Shyam was encouraged there to use modern pigments and other latest art materials, along with finding new imageries and ways of representation foreign to his culture. After merely five years of being ‘discovered’ (a word Swaminathan always uses under quotes), Shyam was conferred the Shikhar Samman (the Summit Award), the highest civilian award bestowed by the Government of Madhya Pradesh. He was subsequently commissioned to do the exterior murals for the new Legislative House (Vidhan Sabha) building in Bhopal, a modernist ­architecture designed by Charles Correa. And in 1988, Shyam showed his artworks in London and Japan, as part of the Bharat Mahotsav exhibition. Among all these works, the murals he had done in the Vidhan Sabha, with their images of a zoomorphic aeroplane and a majestic leaping tiger, achieved the greatest deal of critical attention (more on them later.) However, the real breakthrough in Shyam’s career came with his participation in the French international exhibition, Magiciens de la Terre (Magicians of the Earth), curated by Jean-Hubert Martin in 1989. (As one of Martin’s consultants in India was Swaminathan, the Indian representation included both tribal/folk art and Neo-Tantric painting.38) This exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou—conceived in its time as the French response to Rubin’s ‘“Primitivism”’ exhibition at the MOMA—is now appreciated as an original yet controversial moment in the post-1989 western, and later global, art history.39 And recognising the importance of

37  Swaminathan addresses these criticisms, calling them “purist’s prejudices”, in his essays, ‘Art and Adivasi’ (1992) and ‘Pre-naturalistic Art and Postnaturalistic Vision’ (1990). 38  The other three artists who participated with Shyam were Bowa Devi, Raju Babu Sharma, and Acharya Vykul (except Devi, a Mithila artist, the other two were Neo-Tantric painters). There were two more Indian artists whom Martin could not include due to logistical and technical difficulties: Jiva Soma Mashe and Jogen Chowdhury. (Mashe was mentioned in Martin’s first curatorial note—in fact, the only artist mentioned by name—as well as the final exhibition catalogue.) 39  It should be noted that almost all of Martin’s ideas—be it a universal spiritual function of art verging on mysticism and magic, an ethic of all-inclusive contemporaneity, or the

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the event and giving his full artistic power thereby, Shyam stunned his international viewers with the majestic murals of his tribal pantheon as well as the flora and fauna of his land. In the exhibition catalogue, Martin quotes Shyam saying: I passed my childhood in the company of mountains, forests dense with trees, birds, animals, insects and terrifying deities. […] I was so frightened of these deities that I thought I should try and represent them in forms that would be personal to me. I was trying to crystallise fear in the form of beauty. […] My ancestors painted in squares of black and white in our courtyards. Me, I use colours. […] For me, art and life are unceasing silences. […] I remember the forests. That memory makes me paint what I paint. (quoted in Das 2017: 126)

After Magiciens de la Terre, Shyam had four solo exhibitions in India, of which three were in Delhi and Mumbai; and he could participate in three group exhibitions abroad (one in Paris again). He was represented in many group shows in India, among which the exhibitions held at the National Gallery of Modern Art (New Delhi, 1990), Jehangir Art Gallery (Mumbai, 1990), and National Crafts Museum (New Delhi, 1998) are noteworthy. But from sources close to Shyam, it is now reported that he was becoming increasingly disturbed and reclusive by this time (and Swaminathan, his mentor and supporter, was already dead in 1994). Akhilesh, a friend and colleague of Shyam, says that as too many people from his community would now stay with him as assistants and trainees; he became financially vulnerable.40 This led Shyam to succumb to the pressures of the art market by making more commitments beyond his capacity, that too for relatively profitless returns. In addition, he was tormented by his chronic backache and asthma, as well as a few other deeply personal issues—all leading him to take medications for depression and anxiety (Bowles 2009: 24–5). It was

importance of individuality and nationality even in the most communitarian or archaic forms of expression—can already be found in Swaminathan and his Roopankar project. This suggests that when Shyam successfully made his inroad from Swaminathan’s fundamentally ‘national-modern’ framework to that of Martin’s ‘global-contemporary’, the basic assumptions behind him being ‘discovered’ were more or less the same. 40  Akhilesh, an urban artist, prefers to be known only by his first name. According to Das (2017: 38), this was a trend prevalent in Bharat Bhavan in the 1980s.

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during such a difficult and desperate situation that, in 1999, Shyam accepted the residency programme offered by the Mithila Museum in Japan for the meagre remuneration of 12,000 rupees per month. His threemonth-long stay at the museum left serious psychological effects on him, since it was located in a remote village and there was hardly anyone capable of communicating in Shyam’s language. However, he accepted the same offer when the museum authorities again approached him in 2001. While being there and when the residency programme was almost over, Shyam sent a letter to his wife, desperately informing her that his visa had now been extended for another three months (Shyam had already communicated with her that he had been cheated and made to work 18 hours a day). However, before Nankusia could receive the letter, a fax from Japan arrived at Bharat Bhavan, informing them about Shyam’s death. It was later reported that he was found hanging in his kitchen. Despite the lack of veracity of this information, it is now widely concluded that Shyam committed suicide out of depression and anxiety.41 Deviating from the Gond tradition of entombing untimely deaths and other related rituals; Shyam’s body was cremated in Bhopal, and his ashes were buried in Patangarh. The only available intimate and detailed accounts about Shyam’s life and death were from Akhilesh. His elegiac writing ‘Pardhan ki Mautein’ provides an important observation that no matter if Shyam’s death was an act of suicide or not, his life as an artist was a series of deaths, many of them wilfully enacted by Shyam himself (Akhilesh 2001, translated by Das 2014). According to Akhilesh, by leaving the traditional occupation of the Pardhan community, Shyam first died as a musician, but only to emerge as an artist. With a likely exaggeration, Akhilesh says that “In this Pardhan family of musicians, no Pardhan had ever been a visual artist before Jangarh, and no Pardhan was ever a musician after Jangarh” (quoted in Das 2017: 77). Akhilesh coined the term ‘Jangarh Kalam’ to address the latter group of Pardhan artists who followed the pathway 41  However, an opposite assertion is made by Nankusia and Shyam’s friend, Ashish Swami. They believe that an extraordinarily brave and pragmatic person like Shyam would never take such an extreme step, and his untimely death could very well be a case of homicide, for which the first culprits should be the museum authorities in Japan (Nankusia in personal communication with the author, 23 August 2017, Bhopal). These allegations are almost ruled out by both Akhilesh (in personal communication with the author, 22 August 2017, Bhopal) and Bowles (2009: 25, 101).

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opened up by Shyam (kalam literally means pen, but it metaphorically suggests ‘school of art’).42 Interestingly, Shyam had his second death as a Pardhan, that too by identifying himself as an Adivasi—a knowledge that he acquired, according to Akhilesh, only after moving to Bhopal. Though one could question this argument for its fraught opposition between Pardhan and Adivasi identities (as if one is natural and the other artificial); we should remember that the term ‘Adivasi’, unlike ‘Pardhan’, is relatively a political and modern category.43 In fact, it may even be assumed that the need to supplement oneself with such designation comes only when the existing identity is proven to be insufficient (or even dead). Thirdly, Shyam had already died as an artist, long before his actual physical death. Akhilesh notes a certain decline in Shyam’s style, both at the level of content and form. The sublime and raw presence of tribal deities in the early-Shyam was later replaced by kitschy images of flora and fauna, designed for easy reproduction and urban consumption.44 The bold colourist in him gave way for painstaking draughtsmanship, which, however intricate and original it initially was, gradually deteriorated to mere doodling and surface decoration. As Shyam started taking more assignments beyond his individual capacity, he began to share the workload among his assistants and trainees, ending up only doing finishing touches and signing the paintings. And whenever Shyam made original compositions in his later life, Akhilesh writes, they were suggestive of violence and death: “Now, snakes, mongoose, eagles, fish, spiders and birds were the chief inhabitants of the world that had survived. These creatures prowled around the world of [Shyam’s] imagination, waiting to ambush or to be ambushed” (Das 2014: n.p.). 42  After quoting Swaminathan’s doubt in using the appellation ‘Gond or Pardhan art’ for referring to a practice as individualistic and original as Shyam’s, Akhilesh says (in Das’ translation): “In reality, was Jangarh still a Pardhan? His music and song had as good as died. The subject matter of his paintings had moved far away from Gond deities. His paintings had essentially begun to be regarded as an elaboration of Jangarh’s own talent. Many who met him were not even aware of his roots as a musician. Possibly, Jangarh himself no longer felt that his Pardhan identity was important. […] As a Pardhan, he was dying a slow death. In the environment of an unknown city, he was instead emerging as an adivasi, but we would soon observe that he would also begin to lose his ‘tribal-ness’” (Das 2014: n.p.). 43  Different from ‘Adivasi’, the name ‘Pardhan’ is much more primordial and culturally grounded, as the undated folklores and origin-myths of the community suggests. 44  Also see Akhilesh quoted in Bowles (2009: 24).

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Akhilesh’s problematic phrases like “excessive consciousness” and “burden of consciousness” (in Das’ translation) for referring to the deterioration in Shyam’s ‘natural’ talents demand a closer scrutiny. In addition, his grim reading of Shyam’s career cannot be seen as something that he independently and retrospectively arrives at; as if provoked only by the intimate and original knowledge that Akhilesh has regarding Shyam’s life and death. In order to have a comprehensive account, one needs to see that even the most intimate forms of experience and knowledge such as these—be it Shyam’s suicide or its reflections by Akhilesh—exist only within a larger and impersonal discursive framework. To illustrate this argument, let me turn to the most scholarly and detailed appreciation of Shyam’s art ever producing during his lifetime, published only three years before his death: Gulammohammed Sheikh’s catalogue essay for the 1998 exhibition, Other Masters: Five Contemporary Folk and Tribal Artists of India, curated by the anthropologist and art historian, Jyotindra Jain, for the National Crafts Museum, Delhi. Sheikh’s unique interpretation of the internal complexities in Shyam’s art is shaped by the former’s experiences as artist and pedagogue at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda (which undertook quasi-ethnographic field trips into interior places as part of its art curriculum). He presents Shyam’s oeuvre as a testimony to the assumption—which Jain also affirmatively quotes in his introductory essay—that “not only it is possible for an unselfconscious mind to survive in an alien, if conducive, environment, but to grow as well; differently, but creatively nonetheless” (Sheikh 1998: 20).45 As an extension of this view, Sheikh finds the following question to be most crucial in understanding Shyam’s art. Referring to the artist’s early Patangarh murals, Sheikh asks: “How does an ‘unselfconscious’ mind reared on free-flowing forms on village walls  – not thought of as art  – respond when faced with challenges of the consciously created art of framed pictures?” (ibid. 18). Before unpacking these observations, it should be kept in mind that Sheikh, like his long-time friend Swaminathan, is very aware of the risks in constructing ossified and puritan oppositions. For example, considering the infamous ‘pure/corrupt’ binary in “relative rather than absolute terms”, he suggests that there is “the dialectics of a willed interaction that Jangarh has entered into – where the very fact of extracting a ‘pure’ image  Original emphasis.

45

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from its genetic locale is an act of transgression from its norms – hence subject to ‘pollution’ or ‘corruption’” (ibid. 21). The examples that Sheikh discusses here are Shyam’s zoomorphic ‘Aeroplane’—an apparently ‘corrupt’ imaginary depicted in a ‘pure’ form of expression—and the famous ‘Leaping Tiger’—both are painted on the walls of the Madhya Pradesh Vidhan Sabha (Legislative Assembly) building. Whereas the former explicitly illustrates the dialectical reversibility of oppositions that Sheikh has in mind, the latter mural provokes a much more subtle and interesting interpretation. Arguing that the “‘leaping’ tiger” embodies “the complex tensions of empowerment and vulnerability in Jangarh’s journey from Patangarh to Bhopal”, Sheikh notes: The diagonal thrust with an upturned head and even light and dark patterns on the body of the beast indicate […] naturalistic persuasions. The ­‘fish-­scale’ patterning of the body […] is in immediate contrast to an obviously naturalistic prototype used for the head. The non-naturalistic patterning works simultaneously to accelerate and contain the movement of downward thrust, whereas the head seems to blandly perform a ferocious act like a mask: its stereotypical visage of wildness serve in fact to counter body animation and ironically halt the assault of the tiger. And that brings us close to the persona of the beast. (ibid. 27)

Bringing the reader’s attention to the mutually opposed ways—the “naturalistic” and the “non-naturalistic” stylistic means—by which Shyam visualised the head and the body of the represented image, Sheikh then provocatively puts forward the following question: “Does not the grand, leaping posture of the tiger disguise the hidden suggestion of a sprawled-­ out skin and the ‘life-like’ head as a trophy of a hunt? Perhaps it suggests both simultaneously. And then, could one ask the question: is it the self-­ image of the persona of a tamed savage?” (ibid.). There is no reason to assume that Sheikh uses the primitivist metaphors of ‘beast’ and ‘savage’ without knowing their troublesome history. After all, the emphasis here is just on “the persona of a tamed savage”, not the ‘savage’ as such, the infamous trope of primitivist imagination. In addition, Sheikh’s appreciation of the possibility of the artist presenting his “self-image” itself is a radical step; since it does away with the dominant tendencies to see such art practices only as intuitive and expressive, never as self-reflective. Yet, we can see that this presence of consciousness and its figuration (the “self-image” and its ‘beast-head’ respectively) do not

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appear as an affirmation of life, rather the opposite. The artist in Shyam becomes ‘self-conscious’ only by demobilising and decapitating himself, at a moment of losing his very consciousness; and his modern identity is nothing but a lifeless death mask, however ferocious and attractive it is. And it is by keeping this grim equation between self-consciousness and the destruction of oneself—or, to put it more bluntly, art and suicide (cf. Blanchot 2010) – that we have to counter-intuitively understand Sheikh’s earlier statement that, “not only it is possible for an unselfconscious mind to survive in an alien, if conducive, environment, but to grow as well”. It is no surprise that Shyam’s growing self-consciousness as an artist came at the cost of his own survival—first in art, and then in life. One may wonder as to why Shyam’s oeuvre has to be read only through the analogies of loss and death—where an alternative paradigm of a­ ffirming creative powers of art and life is also available.46 Though such an approach remains attractive, two reasons can be cited against its immediate possibility. First, by all likelihood, this non-dialectical and affirmative reading would be insufficient to explain the reported evidences of ‘negativity’ in Shyam’s art and life—varying from the artist’s periodic depression to the ultimate act of self-killing (if we go by the existing consensus). Second, such an approach has the danger of glossing over the most crucial problem at stake here: the unique historical regime within which these particular discourses and subjectivities are emerging and operating. Shyam’s tragic career has occasionally been compared with the similar story of Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)—the Dutch painter was fond of rural themes and committed suicide at the zenith of his career. Whereas Akhilesh, in his ‘Pardhan ki Mautein’, had noted numerous parallels between the two artists—varying from their success as brilliant colourists to introversion and depression—the literary critic Rashmi Varma (2013) has recently brought to fore the larger ideological context within which

46  The celebrated examples of such an affirmative philosophy are Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. However, even they come under the rubric of nihilism that we are addressing here, perhaps in a much more profound and unsettling manner (for it is not just coincidental that Deleuze committed suicide and Foucault tried the same numerous times, a point which I will discuss below). An equally important alternative approach, but with the aforementioned risk of negativity, is by understanding how life and death are articulated in Shyam’s own culture, and how he negotiates with them. However, due to space constraints, and the importance given to the artist’s departure from his indigenous identity, I cannot address this crucial question here.

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they work. Trying to address the most embarrassing feature of the art of later-Shyam and his ‘school of art’—that is, their penchant for sleek and decorative images of rural and wild lives—Varma cites the following passage from Fredric Jameson’s reading of van Gogh: “[Paintings like these are] to be seen as a Utopian gesture: as an act of compensation which ends up producing a whole new Utopian realm of the senses […] which it now reconstitutes for us as a semi-autonomous space in its own right  — […] some new fragmentation of the emergent sensorium which […] seeks in precisely such fragmentation a desperate Utopian compensation for them” (Jameson 1984: 59).47 Commentators on artistic modernity, varying from Renato Poggioli (1997) and Al Alvarez (1990) to Alain Badiou (2007), have repeatedly showed that how this ‘desperation for Utopia’—a self-obsessed “culture of negation” (Poggioli 1997: 107) in search of artistic and political autonomy— had become a nihilistic project by ultimately engulfing the very lives of its advocates themselves. One should note that in the anecdotes of Indian art history, Swaminathan himself appears as a “self-destructive” personality—as it is later recalled by Kalidas (2012: 124) with reference to his father’s bohemianism and alcoholism—and a “cultural bastard”—to use Swaminathan’s own self-description (quoted in Tully 1991: 270). From the time of his 1967 thesis onwards, Swaminathan started his philosophy of art with a moribund equation between consciousness, language, and death—“the self as word as death” as he (1980: 29) cryptically put it—juxtaposed against the mystical, if also impossible, prospect of a completely free and autonomous image (called “the Numinous”).48 Moreover, Swaminathan’s 1963 manifesto written for the Group 1980 exhibition, in which Sheikh was also a member, could be seen as a prelude to this philosophy—bluntly negating all the existing artistic languages in search of a mysterious “image proper”, that which will be “unique and sufficient unto itself ” (Kalidas 2012: 70). As Swaminathan had

 Emphasis added.  Swaminathan’s obsession with the theme of mortality is explicit in the following unusually long string of questions: “What happens when a sparrow dies? What happens when a colony of ants is buried and crushed underground by a landslide? What happens when a yellow steak of power in the jungle ends the life of an antelope in the jaws of a tiger? What happens when a star dies? How many stars are there? How many dead, how many dying at this very moment? How many yet to die? What happens when a man dies? How many have died since man was? […] What happens when death comes? What is death and where is it?” (Swaminathan 1980: 6). 47 48

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never disowned these fundamental ideas, it is no surprise that ‘the figure of Adivasi’ —with its radically different yet ultimately elusive originality and autonomy—later came as a place-holder as well as the last resort of his high modernist imaginations. Interestingly, it is not only modernism which is centred on the ideal of autonomy, but Adivasi politics as well. The notion of autonomy appears, especially in the latter, as a demand for ‘self-governance’ (auto-nomos) with inevitably fraught definitions of ‘the self’ as opposed to an equally evasive understanding of ‘the other’ (or diku, a term popularised during the Jharkhand movement). And just like how modernism grappled with the ideal of autonomy in a self-defeating and ultimately nihilistic way, indigenist movements also meet the same fate, as their political notion of autonomy and identity are aestheticised by different modern and national institutions. As Prathama Banerjee notes with reference to Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s (1998) studies on the Australian indigenous communities: “the culturalist reduction of the autonomy question, which founds modern liberal governmentality, […] demands an impossible authenticity from the indigene and in so doing inhibits claims of political transformation” (Banerjee 2016: 10).49 Even though Swaminathan had a radicalised understanding of indigeneity and authenticity as opposed to the purist ideas maintained by his forerunners like Elwin, it is important to note that he never disowned them either. If anything, his obscurantist interpretations only elevated them into a much more metaphysical plane, inevitably making their any real-world materialisation, be it in art or life, perpetually incomplete and unsatisfactory. For the privileged artist this may provide an impetus for perennial self-renewal and creative expression; but for an Adivasi artist like Shyam, this is nothing but a frustrating affair, especially when it comes with the price of halting his political transformation. Two anecdotes would substantiate this argument.

49  To quote Povinelli (1998: 588): “Aboriginal traditions [in Australia] had no legal standing; they were allowed to exist only as nostalgic traces of a past, fully authentic Aboriginal tradition. As traces, neither fully forgotten by law or public, nor ever fully present to them, these prohibited practices continue to haunt all contemporary representations of Aboriginal tradition, casting an aura of inauthenticity over present-day Aboriginal performances of their culture. […] Aboriginal Australians express at their own risk their engagement with the democratic form of capital and governance within which they live; the memorial forms of their own histories; and their ambivalences towards these traditions, identities, and identifications”. Also see Errington (1994).

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In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue of Other Masters, the curator, Jyotindra Jain, recounts a conversation he had with Shyam as follows: He [Shyam] was in Delhi and I requested him to pose for a photograph which I wanted to include in this book. In a matter-of-fact manner he asked me whether he should shed his T-shirt, pullover and trousers in favour of his tribal loincloth. Seeing me astonished by his offer, he clarified that a few days before an art gallery in Delhi had held an exhibition of his paintings and for a blurb photo he was made to pose as bare-bodied tribal wearing a mere loin-cloth, hence his offer to bare himself. (Jain 1998: 8)

Jain goes on to detail how artists like Shyam are mistreated by the art world elites, a highly important issue no doubt, yet there is little about the artist’s ‘matter-of-fact’ attitude and apparent callousness towards the humiliation he was subjected to. Was it an example of Shyam’s innocence, or his internalisation of the larger structural violence around him? But through posing this problem, are not we actually eschewing his agency in a patronising gesture? Perhaps a more important question might be this: Was Shyam thinking that, as a ‘matter-of-fact’, he remains a ‘tribal-in-­ loincloths’ in his real self, and there is nothing to be ashamed about it? When the politics of identity is increasingly deferred for the sake of a never satiable aesthetics of the same, the subaltern may even desperately resort to the clichés of identity, just to escape from its culturalist mystifications. (In such a context, the central question is no longer about the true definition of an authentic self—let alone that of a hybrid self—but the pragmatic ways in which a particular identity is performed, with a subversive value that can only be retrospectively evaluated.) The second anecdote reveals what is missing in the first: Shyam’s violent reaction to this frustrating double-bind of identity. Akhilesh, in his recent article on Shyam, remembers a particular incident which happened just after Shyam came back from Paris, after participating in the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition: To save himself from the cold climate of Paris, he [Shyam] had bought a costly and fashionable jacket. After he came back, I arranged a get-together […]. As it was a December-night, all of us were sitting around a campfire and talking random subjects. Meanwhile, Swaminathan cracked a joke: “Now you also have become a shahari [city-dweller], Jangarh.” The sentence was not finished. He [Shyam] quickly got up from his seat and threw

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his jacket into fire. As it was made of aadhunik [modern] synthetic material, the jacket succumbed to flames in no time. He came back to his seat and continued conversing, as if nothing happened. (Akhilesh 2017: 35, translation mine)

It is reported that in his later life, Shyam was being increasingly “anxious about ‘losing’ his indigeneity” (Das 2016: 29). The strange destructiveness mentioned in the above anecdote may be cited as a further testimony of this observation (as Akhilesh himself later notes in the same writing). Yet, it is important to note that being modern is not a process, where one would still find remaining traces of indigeneity within him. Rather, it is a decision and declaration, an event after which nothing remains the same (including the very individual who effects and undertakes this change). Therefore, Shyam’s very sense of “losing ‘indigeneity’” itself marks the artist’s existence as a modern subject, and hence, his frustrating experience of an indigeneity already lost. In other words, it is not the indigenous subject who is here trying to save the remains of authenticity within him (which would be tautological), but the modern subject—therefore, the extreme desperation and urgency in his actions. And what makes this subject a tragic figure of history is that in his heroic desire to be ‘authentic’—as we see Shyam burning his foreign-made jacket—the artist undertakes a self-­ purifying ritual, eventually ending up in immolating himself at the altar of history. “The destruction of semblance [in search of authenticity]”, says Badiou (2007: 64), “is identified with destruction pure and simple”; because “at the end of this purification, the real, as total absence of reality, is the nothing”. But to the ultimate question as to why such a self-devouring negativity typical of high modernism should engulf a radically different subject as contemporary and political as Shyam, I can provide only a highly condensed and speculative answer—a provocation with which I conclude this section. I have already suggested that being the children of modernity and finding ‘autonomy’ as their supreme ideal, modernist aesthetics and Adivasi politics exhibit an intriguing correlation. In his lectures on Immanuel Kant’s essay, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Michel Foucault (1997: 73) admits that his definition of autonomy, the “art of governing oneself ”, also suggests, in its extremes, the anarchist idea of the “art of not being governed at all”. If one approaches indigenist history through such a fundamentally Foucauldian understanding—as it is done by James

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C. Scott (2009) and Bhangya Bhukya (2016) in their respective studies on Upland Southeast Asian tribes and the Gond Adivasis—then the following conclusion appears to be inescapable. One of the most embarrassing and controversial aspects in Foucault’s interventions is that, despite all his affirmation of life, he greatly admired the idea of suicide and the individual’s “readiness to die” (he even tried to kill himself numerous times).50 For Foucault, death provides the privileged moment of escaping power’s hold over life, and even guarantees a way of “discovering the original moment in which I make myself world” (quoted in Miller 1993: 351). In fact, the “aesthetics of the self ” that Foucault was advocating at the end of his career was a high modernist practice, where one contemplates and even realises his or her death. If this is the case, then the ultimate micro-political meaning of the ‘art of not being governed’ needs to be found in the suicidal practices of the subject themselves.51 Following this logic, we can see that the narrative of Shyam’s gradual death as an artist and Adivasi is just one end of this deeply nihilistic politics and aesthetics. Its other end, needless to say, lies in what could be called “the path of nihilistic terrorism” (Badiou 2007: 64)—the ferocious and almost self-destructive civil war that the Adivasis populations have heroically been waging against the Indian state—the daunting problem from which Swaminathan’s indigenist project took its legitimacy and point of departure.

In Conclusion: The Sovereign and the Subaltern The maze, however, is so convoluted that unless like Theseus we keep hold of the unwinding thread to point the way out of it and unless we know that there is a Minotaur – the Minotaur of historical time – to be killed in the centre of the maze, we will not be able to re-emerge and will only meet the fate of an Abhimanyu. (J. Swaminathan 1987: 17)

50  Foucault is reported to have said: “I am committed to a veritable cultural combat to remind people that there is no more beautiful form of conduct which, as a result, merits reflection with such great attention, than suicide. It would be a case of working on one’s suicide for all of one’s life” (quoted in Osborne 2005: 284). 51  For a post-Foucauldian theorisation of politics as the power of death over life, see Mbembe (2003).

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In discussing Shyam’s death, I deliberately stayed away from the existing discourses on ‘aboriginal suicides’, for their relative disregard for the historical and philosophical problems surrounding the topic.52 Contextualising Shyam’s death within the discipline of art history, and treating his creative career with the same conceptual categories by which one would approach Swaminathan’s art and aesthetics, I tried to extend the latter’s egalitarian assumption, but only to reveal the larger nihilistic philosophy lurking behind. The connection between autonomy and nihilism as noted above— the destructive search for what the idea of the ‘self’ means in the ideal of ‘self-governance’—is a problem as much of the last century as it is of the present, for the simple reason that it is a foundational aporia of modernity.53 In other words, there is nothing particularly ‘modernist’ in the issues we have discussed so far, other than in the heroic determination of these historical actors to look straight into the real face of our epoch, resulting in their immediate mortification. Yet, it will be simply ridiculous to assume that in their determination to address this fatal question of modernity, Swaminathan and Shyam were equally exposed to the danger of self-­ destruction. In fact, in presenting the lives of both the artists as equally determined by an essentially nihilistic philosophy, my intention has been to unravel a much more profound and sinister operation of power. Recognising this final point will prove that the idea of egalitarianism as we have been discussing here is not as egalitarian as it sounds and the problem of nihilism is much more deep-rooted than what we have seen so far. The French anthropologist, Denis Vidal (2011), has recently offered a periodisation of the Pardhan-Gond art, which is intriguing for a certain historical leap it explicitly advocates, in direct conflict with what I have proposed here. Dividing primitivism in Indian art history into two, and placing Shyam and his followers in the latter, Vidal suggests a “primitivist” period in Indian painting from the 1920s to the 1950s—driven by the quest for national culture—and a “post-primitivist” period from the 1980s onwards—with new individual artists enjoying “trans-cultural” exposures (“artists with name and passport”, as it is pithily put by JeanHubert Martin). Interestingly, regarding the threshold decades caught

52  For example, see Al Evans (2004) for the suicide of the Canadian Ojibwa artist, Benjamin Chee Chee (1944–1977), and Elwin (1943) for a pioneering study on aboriginal suicide in India. 53  A critique of modernity in this direction is provided by Mcloughlin (2009).

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between his periodisation, Vidal simply says: “It is not necessary here to deal, for this topic, with the sixties and seventies, when it became progressively clear that modern Indian artists and their sponsors would never reject completely one form or another of cultural nationalism” (Vidal 2011: 652). On the contrary, my argument has been that if there is any “post-­ primitivist” moment as it is suggested by Vidal, it has to be located exactly in the interim period which he overlooks. One of the purposes of this suggestion was to historically confront the Emergency—the ultimate crisis-­ moment of national sovereignty and the real historical marker of the 1960s and 1970s—so that it will not pass ‘again’ as a ‘non-event’ without provoking any epistemic break or ethical question.54 Thereby, naming this “postprimitivist” shift in the 1960s and 1970s as ‘indigenism’, my argument has been simply the following. Indigenism is a strategic response envisaged by the national intelligentsia in order to address the deepening sovereigncrisis—the crisis that the state faces from other contesting forms of sovereignty within—among which, Adivasi sovereignty in particular.55 Moreover, 54  Vidal is not alone in offering such hyperopic narratives, as his omission is a symptomatic feature of much of the Indian art historical scholarship. Let me give a quick and condensed overview. Commentators on Indian modernism have often discussed a peculiar ‘paradox’ that makes its history a textbook case study of post-colonial dilemma—it is modernism’s contradictory drives to be internationalist and indigenist at the same time. For example, whereas Rebecca M. Brown (2009: 1–11) foregrounds this problem through her somewhat clumsy expression “modern/Indian art” or “modern Indian paradox” (suggesting the inherent internationalist and indigenist tendencies of the ‘modern’ and the ‘Indian’ respectively); Geeta Kapur (2000: Ch. 10) has identified similar problems, but in less paradoxical terms, as that of a troubled national ‘sovereignty’ during the times of cold war internationalism and contemporary globalisation (where indigenism would provide a repository of critical tools in the national intelligentsia’s fight against imperialism). However, what is more telling is not what these writers discuss from their different but ultimately complementary perspectives, but what they choose not to discuss at all. The centrality that the heuristic notions of ‘sovereignty’ (of the nation) and ‘paradox’ (of indigenous modernism) enjoy in Kapur and Brown is based on their shared interest to conceal the real paradox of sovereignty that haunts the nation from within—a paradox for which the Emergency provides the ultimate historical expression. Hence, Brown’s discussion of a paradoxical indigeneity without raising the question of sovereignty at all and Kapur’s presentation of a national sovereignty as if it is an indigenous development—all leading to hyperopic narratives about the western baggage of international modernism or the neo-colonial onslaughts on the nation, with the effect of externalising the real questions that haunt our collective history from within. 55  Considering Adivasis as political sovereigns is the most important challenge in dismantling the primitivist representations of them as ‘pre-political’ communities, especially in a

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it is from this threshold period of crisis and its subsequent state of exception that the historical subjectivities of Shyam and Swaminathan have taken their shape, and remain so even in their posthumous representations. Both the artists, through their extraordinary relationship, together embody what has been called the “paradox of sovereignty” (Agamben 1998: Ch. 1). Let me explain this concept as follows, starting with Swaminathan as the exemplary and sovereign subject of the national-­ modern art history.56 The immediate reasons for this consideration can be given as the artist’s privileged caste and class identity, not to mention his long professional career as a charismatic ‘statesman’. However, keeping in mind Swaminathan’s idiosyncratic yet universalistic ideas (such as “the Numinous”), we need to see that the “anarchist-mystic” attains this exemplary power ‘within’ the national-modern only by paradoxically ‘excluding’ himself from its every normative and everyday manifestation (which he goes on to criticise as Hindu casteist and developmentalist). Rather than remaining bewildered by the self-mystifying elusiveness and obscurantism in Swaminathan’s otherwise assertive and forceful language, and instead of unproductively looking for its real meaning or intention, we should see what its real function is: to enforce one’s presence as a sovereign, the subject capable of deciding when everything is left undecidable. Shyam, in contrast, and in a much more complex way because of his subaltern origins, appears to be an exceptional case. For example, in an article published soon after his death, historian Kavita Singh notes, “All this [the personal qualities and fortunes Shyam had] propelled a young untutored tribal boy to an important position in the art world, a position both inside and outside of the usual ‘reserved’ category for folk and tribal artists” (Singh 2001: 62).57 Swaminathan, in his The Perceiving Fingers, makes this observation much more explicit by saying that “there is no doubt that he [Shyam] is an exception and herein lies our point” (Swaminathan 1987: 48). Whereas Singh notes this exceptionality as an effect of Shyam’s possession of a name—in her words, he “had become known not as a representative of a group or tribe, but as an individual, context where their demands and assertions are explained in non-political (read “culturalist”) terms. 56  The figure of the ‘sovereign-subject’ is central to the historical narratives that Kapur offers in her When Was Modernism (2000). For an attempt to critique Kapur in this respect, with a few misleading arguments, see Dhareshwar (1995). 57  My emphasis.

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name” (Singh 2001: 62)58—Swaminathan finds its reasons in the ­Pardhan-­Gond community having no traditions of icon-making or figurative painting. But a more pertinent question in our context is whether this outsider status with respect to his original community automatically becomes a reason for considering Shyam as an insider of the Indian art community. To answer this, let us consider how his death was understood by the art world. In almost all the accounts of his alleged suicide—including Singh’s and even Akhilesh’s—he appears as a ‘victim’ of psychological depression and economic pressures, and hence, deprived of any agency or capacity to resist. Even if one assumes this to be the case, it is important to see that this is an understanding which is in stark contrast with the way another similar incident, the suicide of K. P. Krishnakumar (1958–1989), is recorded in Indian art history.59 Interpreted as the ‘heroic’ and ‘tragic’ gesture of a free rebellious subject, his suicide easily attained an exemplary status in the later narrativisations of Indian modernism and the periodisation of the post-modern contemporary art in India (Kapur 2000: 394, 343; Dube 2014).60 This begs the question of what it is that prevents these writers from considering Shyam’s so-called suicide in similar terms.61 Banerjee has convincingly noted that the historicisation of the Adivasi has to be unsuccessful as long as the historical discipline is governed by its chronological and enumerative apparatus (often known as historicism), within which the subaltern appears only as an aberration or a case of ex-­centricity. This outsider status with respect to the historical paradigm seems to suggest that the proper disciplinary location of the Adivasi could only be anthropological. Yet, due to the subject’s extreme proximity

 Original emphasis.  Krishnakumar was the founding member and the main organiser of the short-lived but historic art collective, Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association (1987–1989). Mainly composed of Keralite artists working in Baroda (Gujarat), the Marxist collective vociferously rejected the burgeoning art market and sought to introduce an alternative method of art making and sharing. 60  For a periodisation of the global contemporary in the Indian context by taking Krishnakumar’s death as the point of departure, see Parul Dave Mukherji (2012). 61  The argument is not that there is no representation of Shyam as a ‘heroic’ or ‘legendary’ figure. For the most recent example in this respect, see Dutta (2018). Rather, the question is for whom Shyam appears to be heroic: the contemporary art world or the Pardhan community? This is an important issue when we note that ‘the age of heroes’ are said to be over in the narratives of the former (if not the latter)—“love the pixel, not the hero”, says Hito Steyerl (2012: 57). 58 59

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influencing the everyday affairs of our modernity, the Adivasi produces a serious “primitive within” problem (Banerjee 2006a, b: 8–11), by destabilising the very basic principles of anthropological enquiry (an original weakness of the discipline which the western anthropology has only started to recognise). However, for the reasons just given, this unfitting position of the Adivasi within the anthropological paradigm does not constitute her as a historical subject either. Shyam’s art and life further complicates Banerjee’s critique of historicism, which is more relevant in the context of the primitivism of the early nationalist bourgeoisie (as in Tagore’s Santiniketan project [Mitter 2007: 78–81]). We have seen that in the post-Nehruvian era where the charm of nationalism and nation-building had completely withered away, power operates in much more individuating and intimate ways. Shyam’s life began with the enumerative discourse of an originally colonial anthropology—as his first name ‘Jangarh’ (census) itself suggests. Yet, this mere life as a numerical index of a population was soon left behind, as the new nominative apparatus—which we identified as ‘indigenism’—took the centre stage for interpolating the subaltern in his name (as we see in Swaminathan’s Roopankar project). Yet, this privilege of having a name did not automatically convert the subaltern into a historical subject, as the conditions of its emergence were already defined by the very suspension of historical time itself (“the Minotaur of historical time” in Swaminathan’s words). And for the reasons already given by Singh and Banerjee, this subaltern cannot be seen as an anthropological subject either. This is the paradox of subalternity, a symmetrical counterpart to that of sovereignty—as both the figures operate in an ambiguous zone inside and outside of history and the science of man. In such a ‘zone of indistinction’, where one can enter only by suspending normal forms and norms of knowledge, the subjectivities of Swaminathan and Shyam appear to be radically indistinguishable from each other. For a liberal and even anarchic mind, this will be a profoundly egalitarian affair, as it was presented by Swaminathan himself. But taking into account the actual historical dynamics behind the formation of this extraordinary relationship—the Adivasi civil war and the subsequent Emergency declared to restore India’s liberal sovereignty—one has to expose the real inequality lurking behind.62 If we 62  In the final estimation, Swaminathan’s unconventional usage of the term ‘civil war’ instead of “revolution”—a widely used word while he writes ‘The Cost of Progress’—itself suggests a subtle but more far reaching operation of power, casting a long shadow over our

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do not do that, then any assumption of equality between the two, with its necessary suspension of existing disciplinary norms, will only point to our own identification with the existing sovereign power. I have already suggested how remote the chances of Shyam being considered as a proper historical subject are; an issue that someone like Swaminathan would never face.63 These persisting forms of inequality are not simply an issue of continuing disciplinary prejudices that, in the case of presenting Shyam as a historical subject, can be easily be overridden by giving the subaltern a name and a place. ‘Abandoned’ by the historical disciplines and the sciences of man in a profound sense,64 and living in an exceptional state as a Tiger or a Minotaur that needs be decapitated (metaphors used by Sheikh and Swaminathan), the beastly subaltern is now ‘humanised’, ‘included’, and even ‘contemporised’, only through the ‘exclusive’ power of the sovereign; at the latter’s mercy and through the forms of indebtedness created thereof. In the zones of indistinction such as this, the lives of the two get entangled only by making the subaltern ever more vulnerable and perishable (unless and until there is a complete inversion in the logic of sovereignty). In being exposed to power in its extreme immediacy, that too in a zone away from the normal modes of understanding and governance, the subaltern becomes an exceptional death-­ bound subject, in his art as well as life.65

reflections themselves. For a discussion of these two terms with reference to Hannah Arendt, see Agamben (2015: 2–4). 63  In fact, in the case of Swaminathan, the difficulty lies in the exact opposite, and thereby, privileged sense: the impossibility of presenting him as a subject of anthropological, rather than historical, discourse. 64  Understanding exception as “the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending it”, Agamben says: “we shall give the name ban […] to this potentiality […] of the law to maintain itself in its own privation, to apply in no longer applying. The relation of exception is a relation of ban. He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable” (Agamben 1998: 28). 65  However, let me repeat, the figuration of death in discussing Shyam’s art and life need not be seen as something that exists only as a result of the arbitrary decisions made by the sovereign-interpreter (including this author). Rather, as it is in the case of any other modern subject, this sense of death could also be seen as the sign of the artist’s increasing awareness of his own unique situation. For in modernity, it is not only that everyone is a potential subaltern (though its actualisation varies in degree), but also a potential sovereign, at least in their moment of death.

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By this time the Jupiter Royal cocktail had made Jangarh talkative too. He turned to Iyer [an artist known just by his caste name] and said, ‘Don’t mind if I tell you, but I think you are wrong. I think it’s your fate and what you do with your own strength which makes you a success or a failure. I’ve told Swami [Swaminathan] to his face that I’ll stand on my own two feet and whether I eat chicken and eggs or only dal is my fate, not in your hands or the government’s.” ‘Come on,’ said Iyer. ‘You know you owe everything to Swami.’ ‘That may be so, but I can look after myself. […] I know nobody really cares about the poor, although the poor are polite. Everybody goes and pays attention to the rich, although the rich are rude. As for these government officials who are meant to do good to the poor, well, I’ll tell you my experience of them – they are just blood-suckers’. (Tully 1991: 282)

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2015. Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm. Trans. Nicholas Heron. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Akhilesh. 2001. Pardhan ki Mautein. In Bahuvachan: Sahitya Bhasha Shodh aur Vichar ka Hindi Traimasik 3 (9). New Delhi: Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Viswavidyalaya. ———. 2017. Seershak Nahi. New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan. Alvarez, Al. 1990. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. New York: W.W. Norton. Badiou, Alain. 2007. The Century. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Cambridge: Polity Press. Banerjee, Prathama. 2006a. Culture/Politics: The Irresoluble Double-Bind of the Indian Adivasi. The Indian Historical Review XXXIII (1): 99–126. ———. 2006b. Politics of Time: ‘Primitives’ and History-Writing in a Colonial Society. New Delhi/New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016. Writing the Adivasi: Some Historiographical Notes. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 53 (1): 1–23. Belting, Hans, and Andrea Buddensieg. 2013. From Art World to Art Worlds. In The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, ed. Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel, 28–31. Karlsruhe/Cambridge, MA/ London: ZKM/Center for Art and Media/The MIT Press. Bhukya, Bhangya. 2016. The Roots of the Periphery: A History of the Gonds in Deccan India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Blanchot, Maurice. 2010. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln/ London: University of Nebraska Press.

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Bowles, John H. 2009. Painted Songs and Stories: The Hybrid Flowerings of Contemporary Pardhan Gond Art. Bhopal: INTACH. Brown, Rebecca M. 2009. Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980. Objects/Histories. Durham: Duke University Press. Das, Aurogeeta. 2014. The Many Deaths of a Pradhan – Translation of ‘Pardhan ki Mautein’ by Akhilesh. 2001. Unpublished manuscript. ———. 2016. Walking a Tightrope: Indigenous Indian Art and Its Reception. Wasafiri 31 (3): 21–31. ———. 2017. Jangarh Singh Shyam: The Enchanted Forest: Paintings and Drawings from the Crites Collection. New Delhi: Showcase/Roli Books. Dave Mukherji, Parul. 2012. How Global Is the Global Contemporary? Persistence of Ethnicity Then and Now. Presented at the After Midnight: Modern and Contemporary Indian Art, 1947/1997, organized by the Queen’s Museum, October 27. New York. Dhareshwar, Vivek. 1995. Postcolonial in the Postmodern or, the Political After Modernity. Economic and Political Weekly 30 (30): 104–112. Dube, Anita. 1987. Questions and Dialogue. Baroda: Faculty of Fine Arts Gallery. ———. 2014. Midnight Dreams: The Tragedy of a Lone Revolutionary. Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 36 (June): 40–53. https://doi. org/10.1086/678338. Dutta, Amit. 2018. Invisible Webs: An Art Historical Inquiry into the Life and Death of Jangarh Singh Shyam. Shimla: IIAS. Elwin, Verrier. 1943. Maria Murder and Suicide. Bombay: Oxford University Press. ———. 1951. The Tribal Art of Middle India: A Personal Record. London: Oxford University Press. Errington, Shelly. 1994. What Became Authentic Primitive Art? Cultural Anthropology 9 (2): 201–226. Evans, Al. 2004. Chee Chee: A Study of Aboriginal Suicide. Montreal: McGill-­ Queens University Press. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Foster, Hal. 1985. The “Primitive” Unconscious of Modern Art. October 34: 45–70. ———. 1993. “Primitive” Scenes. Critical Inquiry 20 (1): 69–102. Foucault, Michel. 1997. The Politics of Truth. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Garimella, Annapurna. 2013. Aboriginalisthan in the Gallery. In Sakahan: International Indigenous Art, ed. Candice Hopkins, Christine Lalonde, and Greg A. Hills, 72–84. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada.

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Hacker, Katherine. 2014. “A Simultaneous Validity of Co-Existing Cultures”: J. Swaminathan, the Bharat Bhavan, and Contemporaneity. Archives of Asian Art 64 (2): 191–209. Jain, Jyotindra. 1998. Introduction. In Other Masters: Five Contemporary Folk and Tribal Artists of India, ed. Jyotindra Jain, 8–16. New Delhi: Crafts Museum and the Handicrafts and Handloom Exports Corporation of India Ltd. Jameson, Fredric. 1984. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. New Left Review 1 (146): 53–92. Kalidas, S. 2012. Transits of a Wholetimer, J. Swaminathan: Years 1950–69. New Delhi: Gallery Espace. Kapur, Geeta. 1971–1972. In Quest of Identity: Art & Indigenism in Post-Colonial Culture with Special Reference to Contemporary Indian Painting (Serial). Baroda: Vrishchik. ———. 1995. J. Swaminathan: The Artist the Ideologue the Man His Persona. In Lalit Kala Contemporary: Special Issue on Swaminathan 40, ed. Amit Mukhopadhyay, 61–62. New Delhi: Kendra Lalit Kala Academy. ———. 2000. When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practices in India. New Delhi: Tulika. ———. 2012. An Indian Critic and the Bard’s Puzzle. In Richard Bartholomew: The Art Critic: 6–27. Noida: Bart. Kaviraj, Sudipta. 1988. A Critique of the Passive Revolution. Economic and Political Weekly 23 (45/47): 2429–33+2436–41+2443–44. Khullar, Sonal. 2015. Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930–1990. Oakland: University of California Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Trans. Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. McLoughlin, Daniel. 2009. In Force Without Significance: Kantian Nihilism and Agamben’s Critique of Law. Law and Critique 20 (3): 245–257. Miller, Jim. 1993. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon & Schuster. Mitter, Partha. 2007. The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-­ Garde 1922–1947. London: Reaktion. Osborne, Thomas. 2005. “Fascinated Dispossession”: Suicide and the Aesthetics of Freedom. Economy and Society 34 (2): 280–294. Parulekar, Godavari. 1975. Adivasis Revolt: The Story of the Warli Peasants in Struggle. Bombay: People’s Publishing House. Paz, Octavio. [1950] 1961. The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico. Trans. Lysander Kemp. New York: Grove. ———. 1997. In Light of India. Trans. E. Weinberger. London: The Harvill Press. Poggioli, Renato. 1997. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 1998. The State of Shame: Australian Multiculturalism and the Crisis of Indigenous Citizenship. Critical Inquiry 24 (2): 575–610.

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Rancière, Jacques. 2017. Dissenting Words: Interviews with Jacques Rancière. Ed. and Trans. Emiliano Battista. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Rycroft, Daniel J., and Sangeeta Dasgupta, eds. 2011. The Politics of Belonging in India: Becoming Adivasi. Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series 43. London/New York: Routledge. Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sheikh, Gulammohammad. 1998. The Tribal World of Jangarh Singh Shyam. In Other Masters: Five Contemporary Folk and Tribal Artists of India, ed. Jyotindra Jain, 17–27. New Delhi: Crafts Museum and the Handicrafts and Handloom Exports Corporation of India Ltd. Singh, Kavita. 2001. Jangarh Singh Shyam and the Great Machine. In Marg: A Magazine of the Arts 53: 60–64. Mumbai: National Centre for the Performing Arts. Steyerl, Hito. 2012. The Wretched of the Screen. E-Flux Journal 6. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Swaminathan, J. 1980. The Traditional Numen and Contemporary Art. In Lalit Kala Contemporary 29: 5–11. New Delhi: Lalit Kala Academy. ———. 1987. The Perceiving Fingers: Catalogue of Roopankar Collection of Folk and Adivasi Art from Madhya Pradesh, India. Bhopal: Bharat Bhavan. ———. 1990. Pre-Naturalistic Art and Postnaturalistic Vision. In Lalit Kala Contemporary 40:50–56. New Delhi: Lalit Kala Academy. ———. 1992. Art and Adivasi. India International Centre Quarterly 19 (1/2): 113–127. ———. 1995. Lalit Kala Contemporary 40: Special Issue on Swaminathan. New Delhi: Lalit Kala Academy. ———. 2012. The Cost of Progress. In Transits of a Wholetimer, J. Swaminathan: Years 1950–69, ed. S. Kalidas, 110–111. New Delhi: Gallery Espace. Tarica, Estelle. 2016. Indigenismo. Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Latin American History, March. New York: Oxford University Press. http://latinamericanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.001.0001/ acrefore-9780199366439-e-68. Accessed 14 Jan 2018. Tully, Mark. 1991. No Full Stops in India. New Delhi: Viking. Vajpeyi, Udayan, and Vivek. 2008. Jangarh Kalam. Trans. Teji Grover and Rustam Singh. Bhopal: Vanya Prakashan/Tribal Welfare Department. Varma, Rashmi. 2013. Primitive Accumulation: The Political Economy of Indigenous Art in Postcolonial India. Third Text 27 (6): 748–761. Vidal, Denis. 2011. Primitivism and Post-Primitivism in Modern Indian Painting. In India Since 1950: Society, Politics, Economy and Culture, ed. Christopher Jaffrelot, 644–656. New Delhi: Yatra Books.

CHAPTER 7

Toward Blurring the Boundaries in Anthropology: Reading Jamini Roy Today Jyoti

Introduction Social Anthropology employs ethnography as its primary methodological tool to study a society or culture where the emphasis is given upon particularities of experiences (Desai 2002). While studying artists or artworks, it is these specific experiences that help us derive meanings from relevant art processes. However, we are faced with a methodological challenge when we have subjects of interest that are no longer ‘live’. How do we then study these subjects? Perhaps we get our answer in what Bradford R. Collins once wrote: “History, we understand, is the living past, that is, the past in the present tense” (Collins 1991: 59). I suggest here that we take help of biographies, autobiographies, and historical accounts of artworks and artists. Hence, this chapter presents itself as an effort to read anthropologically the already existing historical accounts on the artist Jamini Roy and his artworks. I am interested in two aspects related to anthropology of art. First, areas of anthropological concern that can inform art history in having a more nuanced understanding of its subjects,

Jyoti (*) Bharati College, University of Delhi, Delhi, India © The Author(s) 2019 S. Perera, D. N. Pathak (eds.), Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_7

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and second, questioning the very language and position acquired and practiced by the anthropology of art. Art history focuses on the objects (majorly defined as ‘art’) for their ‘more than utilitarian’ or esthetic qualities. It employs visual (subject matter and style) and contextual analysis to study its objects. On the one hand, visual analysis tends to overlook the relationship between the visual and its spectator; on the other hand, contextual analysis functions as a ‘humanistic inquiry’ based on one’s subjective interpretation (Collins 1991). Is art history then about visual representation and individual appreciation by those who practice it? While art history recognizes the importance of relationship between art and various aspects of social sphere, it is very much concerned about how art interrelates with its period of production, leaving less attention to the web of social relations. Anthropology of art, according to Alfred Gell (1998), “is the ‘way of seeing’ of a cultural system, rather than a historical period”; it “focuses on the social context of art production, circulation, and reception” (Gell 1998: 2–3). Commenting on esthetics that is the dominant determining factor celebrated in art history, Gell maintains that esthetic judgments in art are ‘interior mental acts’, while the production and circulation of art objects is to be sustained by certain social processes which are further connected to other social processes like politics, religion, kinship, exchange, and so on (ibid.). A critical analysis of reception of art works also tells us why certain ‘social agents’ responded in a particular way to specific art works in given conditions. Response to a given artwork depends upon one’s capacity and understanding to appreciate it. This takes us to the second point I want to make about the practice and positioning of anthropology. During much of its disciplinary history, anthropology of art (as originated in the West like art history) has been complementing Western art institutions. It employed (and continues to employ) the vocabulary and concepts of ‘art’ in order to understand and explain its subject matter. George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers (1995) in their work on Western art worlds suggest us to look for a new relationship between anthropology and study of art while recognizing the historical boundaries and affinities between the two. According to them, “anthropology itself is implicated with the very subject matter that it wants to make its object of study: art worlds” (Marcus and Myers 1995: 1). Traditional anthropology of art, which considered art traditions and esthetics cross-culturally, itself developed within the Western art worlds. At the same time, anthropological works also inspired art historians and art critics to question the Western-­centric categories of art. Hence,

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anthropology has been very much a part of the art worlds defining the categories of art that have been applied globally. The above description invites us to be self-conscious of the concepts of art as has been taken from the West and applied to other non-Western countries. While taking the example of India and discussing the artistic journey of Jamini Roy, I plan to reflect on the concepts like ‘primitivism’, ‘individualism’, ‘myth’, ‘tradition’, ‘authenticity’, and ‘universalism’. Primitivism that is said to have shaped much of Roy’s artistic journey was initially seen as an example of ‘cultural appropriation’ by art historians. However, I propose what existed in India and specially in the case of Roy was a gamut of practices (parallel to primitivism), influenced by primitivism but at the same time resulted from the particular cultural and political history of the region and the country.

Vocabulary of Art Western art movements have instilled their practices as well as vocabulary in non-Western world. I shall take the example of primitivism because of its influence on Jamini Roy’s artistic practices as well as its connection with the very origin of the discipline of anthropology. The relations of power, hierarchy, and hegemony have long history in both theory and practices in art history as well as anthropology. In the West, primitivism1 emerged in opposition to the trends of life and thoughts developed by the Enlightenment and coming of industrialization. Artists inspired by the primitive ideal focused on certain attributes of the artworks of ‘simple’ societies. This tendency toward primitivism can be seen in the works of Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso in the West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Primitivism is the valorization of certain esthetic values in artworks such as the flat rendering of color and non-illusionistic representation. It emerges from an endeavor to locate what is most basic in human nature,

1  As the term itself indicates, ‘primitive’ means something that is not derived from something else (primary or basic). Primitivism celebrates the attributes of primitive art, for example, flatness in color and form, simplicity, and symbolic representation. Here, in the case of the Indian art, it has been seen as a movement to find the universality of Indian art through indigenous people and their culture. Artists have picked up particular characteristics of the so-called primitive art suitable to their quest, for example, Jamini Roy focused primarily on ‘purity’ and ‘simplicity’.

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that which is universal to the human race, in simple, less developed societies. Richard L. Anderson (1979) has talked about the debate concerning the use of the word ‘primitive’. It is based on a perspective that assumes a linear and progressive time line from simple to complex. Primitive societies are seen as naïve, simple, and undeveloped. Anthropologists like Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown have argued that primitive societies are also based on complex and sophisticated structures of living (Anderson 1979: 27). Shelly Errington (1998) says that ‘primitive’ art is not a ‘timeless’ category but a ‘constructed’ one. It should, therefore, be noted that the category ‘primitive’ is a construct based on a simplistic notion of otherness. The art of primitive societies is actually the art of these ‘other societies’ that became an area of attraction for the ‘Western art world’. However, anthropological understanding of complex primitive societies did not inform art practices and art history because of their overemphasis on the material quality of art work that also had to do with its ‘untainted’ or ‘authentic’ elements. Marcus and Myers (1995) inform us that anthropology was challenged for its detailed ethnographic accounts in order to understand human activity and products on the grounds of avant-gardist emphasis on ‘unmediated’ experiences, that is, the thing itself had the potential to bring in the ‘shock of the new’ (Marcus and Myers 1995: 4–5). This ‘shock of the new’ or ‘discovery’ element was the basis of avant-­garde movement. Christopher B. Steiner (1995) in his work on African art market gives us a detailed account of how value and authenticity in art were created through processes of presentation, description, and alteration of these objects. Very interestingly, Steiner mentions that “the more difficult the search the more authentic the find” (Steiner 1995: 152–153). This ‘illusion of discovery’ not only guided the African art practices and market functioning but also other countries like India in different capacities. And in the West, primitivism continued to influence other art movements through the elements of autonomy, representation, and symbolism. William Rubin (1984) in the introduction to the catalogue of an influential exhibition titled ‘Primitivism in 20th Century Art—Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern’ notes that “modernist primitivism ultimately depends on the autonomous force of objects, and especially on the capacity of tribal art to transcend the intentions and conditions that first shaped it” (Rubin 1984: x). On the one hand, it is the power of the art objects to go beyond their cultural boundaries and, on the other, the ability of a culture to reformulate its existing art forms by learning from

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other cultures. Tribal art here is seen and described in relation to modern art; it is so basic and raw that it can be easily replaced and built upon. Artists from different art movements like Surrealism, Cubism, Impressionism, Post-impressionism, and Fauvism were inspired by primitive artworks and borrowed some of their attributes. Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), for example, shifted from the ‘perceptual’ to ‘conceptual’ representation. He borrowed his flat decorative effect and stylized form from Egyptian, Medieval, French, and Peruvian folk paintings and from the Cambodian, Javanese, and Polynesian sculpture. Pablo Picasso’s (1881–1973) African carvings were also less realistic and ‘unfinished’ as he liked to see the traces of the ‘hand’ of the sculptor on the work (Rubin 1984). John Berger noted that for Picasso, “Painting is the art which reminds us that time and the visible come into being together, as a pair. The place of their coming into being is the human mind which can coordinate events into a time sequence and appearances into a world seen. While this coming into being of time and the visible, a dialogue between presence and absence begins. We all live this dialogue” (Berger 1993: xvi). His sheet-metal guitar was inspired by the Grebo (Ivory Coast) masks of Africa as he used a hollow cylinder to project the hole in the plane of the guitar. The ‘faces’ in Grebo masks, according to Picasso, did not ‘illustrate’ but ‘represent’ the face. The cylinders and parallel horizontal bars in these masks did not resemble human eyes and mouth but represent them ‘ideographically’ (Rubin 1984). Hence, there was a clear shift from ‘realism’ to ‘symbolism’. This is an example of change in focus while determining art in the Western art world.

Western Art, Local Politics, and the Idea of Nationhood Discourses around art and art production circulate through art world and its institutions. Western conceptions of modernity and modern art came to India through the British Empire. Art schools, museums, and other ‘Western’ art institutions became the vehicles for the dissemination of Western art. However, such institutions also gave Indian artists the knowledge needed to critique it and to reflect on their own traditions. They acquired a language which, according to Mitter (2007), gave them a medium to start their anti-colonial resistance. Since Jamini Roy came from Bengal, I specifically discuss Bengal School of Art in the light of nationalistic discourse. Also, the region has become a space for critical reflection

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on nationhood in the light of “a specific conjecture of language, politics, and culture” (Chatterji 2016: 377). Western academic styles and techniques were taught in Government art schools but at the end of the nineteenth century, E.B. Havell, who was the principal of the Calcutta School of Art, made some radical changes and chose to focus on the spiritual and esthetic dimensions of Indian art. He said that “the Hindu artist believes that the highest types of beauty must be sought after not in the imitation or selection of human or natural forms, but in the endeavor to suggest something finer and more subtle than ordinary physical beauty”. Indian artists “must use traditional themes, express traditional sentiments, [and] employ traditional styles. They must, in other words, understand Indian art and more especially its spiritual and ethical purpose” (quoted in Joshi 1985: 41, 92). However, he was opposed by the students and their parents as they felt that he was denying them the requisite tools necessary to become professional artists. In my view, apart from his position as an art historian, we cannot simply see this proposal by E.B.  Havell an impact of primitivism. Instead, his focus on the spiritual and ethical purpose of art is very much in Indian art tradition. As noted by Radhakamal Mukerjee (1959), “[t]he art of India, like her philosophy and religion, is mythical and metaphysical rather than representational; generic and social rather than individual” (Mukerjee 1959: 20). According to Mukerjee, Indian art cannot be understood without understanding the history of the country; it is to be studied in the social, religious, spiritual, and political lives of its people. However, less has been done in this context both by artists and scholars writing on art. During the time of nationalist struggle in the country, Indian artists started using ‘art’ for depicting nationalist thoughts. There was an effort to create an ‘Indian art’ and artists were in search of new media as well as themes of expression. Also, the search for a primeval source of inspiration led modern artists to explore ‘primitive’ and ‘folk’2 art. Rabindranath Tagore portrayed the Indian village as the antitheses of the colonial city— hence his art school (Kala Bhavan) at Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, fostered cultural critiques of imperialism. It was later joined by Nandalal Bose, Benode Behari Mukherjee, and Ramkinkar Baij (Mitter 2007). At Santiniketan, “primitivism as the repudiation of urban colonial culture permeated all levels of education. It drew upon Tagore’s environmentalism, Gandhi’s critique of Western capitalism, the elite valorization of 2

 Here ‘folk’ art refers to indigenous Indian art forms.

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village India, and finally the nationalist myth of the ‘innocent’ adibasis (aboriginals)” (ibid., 79). The ideas conceived by the Bengal School were seen as a kind of revivalism because of its search for the forgotten cultural heritage of the country. Revivalist art was deeply influenced by the idea of a glorious past—epics, philosophy, and art such as the murals at Ajanta and Mughal Rajput miniature paintings that were supposed to be a part of India’s heritage. However, it is not as if the teachers at Kala Bhavan repudiated all Western ideas and techniques. The purposes of art production during the nationalist struggle varied and it presents us a complex picture of an artist. The artists had learnt and were employing many Western art concepts and techniques; they were opposing the colonial culture and hence Western art practices; they were, therefore, searching for art expressions suiting their nationalist ideology; however, they still possessed Western individualistic values and style and were seeking to be a part of the global art world. Hence, Indian art practices cannot be simply seen as following ‘primitivism’ as defined in art history. Each artist presents a different trajectory and his artworks should be seen in the light of their purpose and understanding of art. However, nationalism and political struggle can be seen as one common thread amongst them all. Nandalal Bose, who played a major role in shaping the ideology of the Bengal School, believed that ‘nature’ should not be represented mimetically but in communion with its myriad forms. Although, he was a part of the nationalist rebellion against academic art, Bose still maintained a respect for the basic art techniques, geometrical principles, and scientific anatomy practiced by colonial artists. He studied Kalighat pat paintings but did not wish to return to traditional art as he believed that ‘originality’ and ‘progress’ were colonial concepts. Also, according to Bose, patuas3 were ‘backward’ and their conventional work could only be improved with ‘scientific’ art education (Dutt 1990: 82). Modern Indian artists moved to ‘folk’ art because of their form, the imagination they embodied, and the employment of flat panels of color and bold expression. Mukherjee and Baij also explored indigenous art forms but what distinguishes their approaches from that of Jamini Roy was the latter’s emphasis on collective myths. Whereas Roy focused on traditional organization of work and local traditional stories to

3  Patuas are traditional painters from rural Bengal who do scroll paintings based on traditional legends and chant ballads related to the subject of the painting (Dutt 1990: 48).

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cater to the definition of collective myths, Radhakamal Mukerjee’s (1959) explanation of India’s transience of life is apt to consider here. According to Mukerjee, all the people of India, irrespective of their migration history fall into “the all-pervasiveness of her moral law of Karma and transmigration, the belief in an organic and spiritual hierarchy of society, the sacredness of family life and obligations, the ideal of human brotherhood and compassion to fellow creatures, and the aesthetic attitude towards life, with its emotions (rasas) and sentiments treated abstractly, and hence concentratedly” (Mukerjee 1959: 24). This description becomes the base of what we may call ‘collective myths’ explained in the form of stories and narratives. The essence of life is important to be considered here which contributed to the idea of authenticity for Roy during his artistic journey. It is worth mentioning here that modern Indian art did not focus on primitivism per se but in, what Partha Mitter (2007) calls, ‘ruralism’, that is, the traditional art and craft forms and indigenous art techniques found and employed in villages. Jamini Roy tried to preserve not the artworks in particular but the ‘collective myth’ from which they emerged by adopting traditional art techniques. He in fact moved a step forward and tried to do what Andy Warhol and other avant-garde artists were trying to achieve through their adoption of the ‘ready-made’ and ‘found object’; he was trying to close the gap between art and artifacts. Roy, unlike Bose, believed in the supremacy of the traditional art of the patuas. He focused on the universality of myths and searched for purity and authenticity. He combined both the virtues of simplicity and primitiveness in his paintings. Roy not only adopted their traditional art techniques but also focused on the traditional organization of work. This is why he was considered to be one of the most creative modern artists of his time. Various essays written on Jamini Roy during the first half of the twentieth century, both by Indian and foreign scholars such as Stella Kramrisch (as noted in Mitter 2007: 244), John Irwin, and Bishnu Dey (1944), focus on formalism,4 folk tradition, nationalism, realism, timelessness,5 creativity, and so on. I shall also discuss these ideas in relation to style and the art world through which they circulate. 4  Formalism is the concept in arts that believes that the artistic value of any artwork is determined by its form. The focus here is given to its shape, color, texture, and so on. 5  The idea of timelessness is attached to primitive artworks. Since these societies do not have written historical records on the artworks they produce, these artworks are seen as circulating myths without any time dimension attached to them.

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Roy and Academic Realism A Picture is what it is: Man creates it. And whatever man creates reflects his character, his daily life, his inmost thoughts, indeed everything. – Jamini Roy (quoted in Mookerjee 1956: 49)

Jamini Roy was born in the year 1887 in a village called Beliatore in Bankura District of West Bengal in a land-owning family. At the age of 16, he went to the Government School of Arts and Crafts, Calcutta, to get an education that was typical of the Western art tradition based on Victorian academic ‘realism’. After completing his studies, Roy worked as a professional painter. He painted portraits and landscapes, and copied photographs to make a living. Krishna Chaitanya (1994) says that, even when Roy was painting in the Western tradition, his portraits reflected the simplicity which became the hallmark of his mature style. He gave special emphasis on space, texture, and light. Separate brush strokes were easy to notice in his works and there were no human figures in his landscapes, even in the street scenes. Bold outlines, diffuse light, and tonal gradations were some of the characteristic features of his works. Unlike some other revivalists, such as Abanindranath Tagore, Roy presented folk culture and tribal women instead of elite culture and famous people (Chaitanya 1994: 176). Nevertheless, he realized that he could not continue with the European tradition and felt a need for ‘freedom’.6 Experimentation, according to him, was not possible for an artist unless he shared something of the social consciousness of the tradition in which he was painting. By the 1930s, he had completely changed his style. It is believed that the national spirit of the time contributed to his attitudinal change (Irwin and Dey 1944; Chaitanya 1994; Mitter 2007). His criticism of revivalism was based on the problem of defining a national art for India, in terms of historical and mystical themes, on the one hand, and aristocratic traditions such as Mughal and Pahari Schools, on the other. Jamini Roy believed that it was impossible to understand the real significance of an art form without being a part of ‘that’ art tradition. As Partha Mitter notes “[for] one may learn a language that is not one’s own but one cannot enter its inner thoughts”

6  Modern artists like Vlaminck, Picasso, Matisse, and others discovered African sculptures and went to ‘primitive art’ for visual freedom. They preferred ‘symbolic’ instead of ‘natural’ representation (Fraser 1962; Rubin 1984).

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(Mitter 2007: 104; Sinha 2003: 81). Although, like other artists of the Bengal School, Roy was also concerned with artistic authenticity. The idea of purity was central to his ‘discovery’ of Indian art. Sunayani Devi7 who was a self-taught artist and was influenced by Kalighat pat painting suggested that Roy learn local techniques from these artists. Jamini Roy was dissatisfied with the idea of artistic individualism and was espoused with the collective expression of art. In the quest for a collective and communitarian approach to art, he moved first to Kalighat and was fascinated by the bold sweeping and curvilinear lines used in Kalighat pats. However, he was not satisfied with the overall painting ‘style’ employed in these pats. Consequently, he decided to move to his village in order to learn from traditional Bengali patuas. On the one hand, Roy was in favor of rural collectivism as against urban individualism, and on the other hand, his rejection for academic realism and the emergence of a distinct personal style of painting was an indication of the modernist aspiration for individuality (Sinha 2003: 81). I shall discuss this point in detail later in relation to the issue of anonymity. Here, I discuss the attributes of both the Kalighat and traditional pat painting of Bengal.

Roy and Bengali Traditional Art We need to be conscious of the fact that the terms employed by modernism like ‘primitive’, ‘rural’, ‘tribal’, and ‘folk’ are not absolute categories. They have been invented and used in the modernist discourse to oppose certain attributes in the civilized, urban world. They may all have similar characteristics associated to their definition, but their origin and use is subjective and contextual. The category of ‘folk’, for example, is rooted in the romantic Indian nationalism and has been employed to represent various ethnic groups during regional movements in the country. It has played primary role in the cultural politics in the colonial India. Folk that was seen to be regional, religious, and vernacular acted as a new esthetic alternative as against the Western Art. Recently, the term ‘folk’ has come to present subaltern subjects with the help of ‘expressive’ genres like dance and graphic novels (Chatterji 2016). Roma Chatterji suggests the

7  Sunayani Devi belonged to the Tagore family and started painting at the age of 30. Her paintings were inspired by Bengali pat paintings, which drew their subjects from Indian mythology.

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transformation of the category of ‘folk’ in Bengal from that of a subject of domination to the one having a rich repository of subaltern history looking at the region as a political space in a particular historical juncture (Chatterji 2016). However, in the light of the fact that the term ‘folk’ is used differently in different discourses and disciplines, I am not using the term ‘folk art’8 for Bengali pat paintings and prefer to call it a ‘traditional art form’, because it follows a conventional style of painting that is embedded in a local storytelling tradition. Partha Mitter tried to answer the question—why did Roy focus on traditional Bengali pats—in relation to the ideology of the painter and also in terms of the political situation of the country at that time. When artists were trying to define nationalism in their own way, Roy focused on indigenous Bengali art which he thought was untainted by colonial culture in the time where almost every art was losing its ‘essential form’ to the ‘deception’ of illusionism9 (Mitter 2007). Hence, Roy’s search for an untainted art was not a result of his quest for primitive or authentic in the real sense but a result of nationalist ideology. Jamini Roy first turned to the Kalighat style but soon he realized that it had lost its ‘purity’ in order to serve the urban masses. While talking about the Kalighat style, Roy said that it ceased to be “strictly patua” because the form as well as the content of art had changed due to its contact with urban life (Centenary Volume 1987). After Roy moved to traditional patua art and learned the techniques of painting from rural artisans, he started calling himself a ‘patua’. Mitter (2007) calls this move a political act done in order to demonstrate his anti-colonial stance. To this extent, Roy’s endeavors were part of the search for a nationalist ‘grand narrative’ of Indian art. What did Roy mean by ‘pure’ patua art? Why did he move from the Kalighat style? Did it have anything to do with the origin, the context, or

8  Scholars like Fraser equated ‘folk’ with the popular. But others like Jain and Banerjee distinguish the two. According to Fraser, folk or popular art is usually a ‘provincial’ style of a minority or peasant group. Jain on the other hand sees Kalighat style as the outcome of transformation of folk into popular genre. Banerjee also traces the similarity between the two in terms of a common contact between audience and performer and says that popular art is individualized art, ‘the art of known performer’ (Fraser 1962: 13–14; Sinha 2003: 9; Banerjee 1998: 2). 9  Illusionism is a technique of using pictorial methods in order to deceive the eye.

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the themes employed? To address these questions, a brief discussion of this genre of painting is in order. According to Jyotindra Jain (1999), the Kalighat style of painting started at the beginning of the nineteenth century (1820 approximately) when Bengali patua artists10 moved from villages to the city of Calcutta near the Kali temple at Kalighat. According to W.G. Archer (1953), it was mainly British influence that led to the birth of Kalighat style of art, whereas B.N. Mukherjee, as noted by Jain (1999), criticizes Archer and says that indigenous techniques and styles, the socio-economic conditions of artists, and market demand shaped the Kalighat style. It has also been noticed that the subjects, themes, and techniques of painting were different at the beginning of the twentieth century from the time when it originated. Calcutta was changing and so were the art forms that were practiced there (Archer 1953; Jain 1999). The period of Kalighat painting is also a period when technologies of mechanical reproduction became available in Calcutta, which in turn affected techniques employed by the Kalighat painters. Some of the factors that shaped the Kalighat style of painting are traditional rural style and techniques of painting, religious iconography, introduction of proscenium theater, coming of photography, introduction of water color and mill-made paper, changing socio-economic condition of the artists, British policies regarding trade, education, and so on (Sinha 2003: 9; Banerjee 1998; Guha-Thakurta 1992: 11–17). All these forces coalesced in the city of Calcutta which became a fertile space for criticism of Western modernity, imitation of the Western styles, and the techniques of painting. Although there is no dated ‘pat’ that could help us to clearly determine the age of traditional scroll paintings, Jyotindra Jain (1999) traces the ancestry of Kalighat painting to the scroll paintings and pottery of Bengal. According to him, there has been ‘give and take’ of styles between scroll painting and pottery. Painters who migrated to Kalighat used to make and paint clay dolls and transferred the technique to paper in the form of shading to suggest volume. According to Jain, the Kalighat genre is the outcome of the transformation of Bengali ‘folk’ art into a ‘popular’ art form (Jain 1999).

10  Jyotindra Jain (1999) says that some of the paintings in this style were painted by kumhar and sutradhar artists. Kumhar is a sub-caste in traditional Hindu social system. They are primarily dependent on pottery as a source of livelihood. Similarly, Sutradhar is another Hindu sub-caste involved in carpentry.

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Studies done by various scholars, for example, Benoy Bhattacharya, R.N. Ganguli, and Prabhat Kumar Das, indicate that there was a strong link between the creation and painting of clay figures and scroll paintings (Sinha 2003: 12). However, none of these can be dated before the birth of the Kalighat style. Thus, both Bengali scroll paintings and Kalighat pat paintings were developing side by side and we cannot say that the former came before the latter. Moreover, the technique of shading was also used in some Bengali scroll paintings. Was this due to the impact of the Kalighat style? Did village artists adopt any of the Kalighat techniques? There are no clear answers to these questions. Drawings in the Kalighat style depicted Hindu gods, goddesses, heroes of Indian legends, mythology, Islamic subjects, and other secular motifs, which were said to be the ways of ridiculing the British way of life and a comment on the societal changes taking place in nineteenth-century Calcutta. Secular subjects included important events, for example, the well-known Tarakeshwar affair11 or the depiction of Laxmi Bai,12 scenes of daily life, portraits of babus and bibis,13 European way of life, sacred Islamic subjects, Indian flora and fauna, and pictures based on Bengali proverbs or sayings—at times portrayed through animals—or originating from epic stories14 (Knizkova 197515; Rossi 1998: 58). The Kalighat style followed a particular mode of depiction using bold lines and brush strokes, a sense of volume and light through the use of shading, and ideal figures of man and woman shown with attributes specific to the particular character depicted in the painting. These figures

11  These paintings depict a murder that took place on May 27, 1873. A young Brahmin, Nabin Chandra Banerji murdered his wife Elokeshi because she had an illicit relation with the priest of a temple. Kalighat genre contains a series of paintings based on the causes and consequences of this event (Knizkova 1975; Guha-Thakurta 1992: 0–7). 12  Laxmi Bai was the Queen of Jhansi, situated in North India. Kalighat paintings selected her among some of the heroic characters of India. She is often depicted well clad in her traditional attire, holding up high an uncovered sword in her hand, while sitting on the horse. 13  Babu is a term used in Hindi in place of the suffix Mr. specifically used for bureaucrats or people in power. Similarly Bibi is a term used in place of Ms./Mrs. 14  For example, a cat shown eating rat or lobster is a symbol of a tapasvi (saint) who was pseudo-ascetic and hypocrite, taken from a legend in Mahabharata (Knizkova 1975). 15  Hana Knizkova’s book, The Drawings of the Kalighat Style: Secular Themes (1975), is the revised version of the PhD theses submitted by Knizkova on the ‘subjects’ of Kalighat paintings in 1968 on the basis of Kalighat patas found at a number of selected museums around the world.

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were not realistically drawn but every single detail that was considered important was painted and at the same time details of secondary significance were suppressed. These paintings represented very basic and typical ‘forms’ unlike traditional Bengali paintings that preferred to communicate through formal symbolism and decorative rhythm16; they employed certain conventional features such as level surfaces, central focus, and flattening out of design-in-depth (Centenary Volume 1987). The Kalighat style was born in the bazaar and developed to serve a primary purpose, that is, of sale in the market. Due to the construction of the railways in Calcutta, there was an increase in the number of tourists visiting Kalighat, which led to the demand for Kalighat paintings. However, the emergence of Battala wood block prints posed competition for Kalighat painting. The development of lithography destroyed the Kalighat tradition and painting spaces got converted into places akin to industrial production (Sinha 2003; Jain 1999; Rossi 1998). The Kalighat pats portrayed stories in a piecemeal fashion; there was no background in these paintings, only figures,17 whereas traditional patuas used to sing or recite stories and myths while unfolding the painted scroll. Roy gave special importance to patua art because, according to him, this was similar to primitive art,18 on the one hand, but more developed like the former, on the other—because it was embedded in a tradition of myth. According to Roy, the primitive art of other countries do not have any developed cosmologies that could relate people in coherent worlds (Centenary Exhibition 1987). In contrast, Kalighat style was a mirror of what was happening in Bengali society. It imbibed influences from the wider social milieu. Its

16  Rhythm is a continuance, a flow, or a feeling of movement achieved by the repetition or regulated visual units. 17  According to Jain (1999), the reason for the absence of any background in Kalighat paintings was their relationship with clay modeling and impact of miniature paintings, where minimal signs were used for depiction (e.g., a green line on the base and blue line on the upper side of the painting were used to show exterior). Knizkova looks at it as the part of their project of ignoring any secondary information. 18  Primitive art does not have a historical frame of reference. Therefore, it becomes difficult to compare one piece of primitive art with another. The feature of timelessness was also an inspiration for many primitivists. Errington labeled primitive art according to its purpose of creation (i.e., not made for market) and explains that it is viewed as an ‘other’, opposed to modern, civilized forms of art in today’s culture (Fraser 1962: 12; Errington 1998: 137, 147).

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subjects and themes, their depiction, ideas of color, beauty, and form were all an outcome of interaction with the clientele. It reflected the shifting realities of the city and was not anchored in a coherent universe of myth. Kalighat painters, according to Roy, had to modify their art due to market demands. Therefore, “it ceased to be strictly patua”. “The form and content ceased to cohere and the art lost its ideal” (Centenary Exhibition 1987: 12). Roy’s idea of authenticity is inspired by the Western concepts of ‘authentic’ ‘primitive’ ‘art’. For Rubin, as noted by Errington (1998), “an authentic object is one created by an artist for his own people and used for traditional purposes. Thus, works made by African or Oceanic artists for sale to outsiders such as sailors, colonials, or ethnologists would be defined as inauthentic” (Errington 1998: 172). On the same lines, Roy considered Kalighat paintings to be inauthentic as it was affected by the Western art tradition. Brian Spooner talks about the notion of authenticity that a consumer has before buying an artifact. The fact that the artifact is made by a particular individual, from special raw materials “in particular social, cultural and environmental conditions with motifs and designs learned from earlier generations” gives it authenticity (Bundgaard 1999: 60). Therefore, in both the definitions of authenticity, the emphasis is on the overall production of artworks—the artist who produces it, the motive behind its production, the raw material that is used, the process of its making, the themes employed, and so on. In short, the collective organization of its production is given importance. And it is the circulation of myths and legends in a society that binds these works to society. Perhaps, this was the reason why Roy focused on each and every aspect mentioned above in relation to the patua art of Bengal. Another important feature of Kalighat paintings was that the depiction of gods and goddesses was not very different from that of common Bengali men and women. Images of Sita, Parvati, and Annapurna were like courtesans if their crowns, halos, specific emblems, and vehicles are substituted for English chairs, pipes, and more seductive gazes and stances. For example, in one of the Kalighat paintings made on Lord Shiva with wife Parvati and son Ganesh, Shiva is shown as a common man carrying his son and trying to please him by playing his damru (Pellet Drum), whereas Parvati looks like any other Bengali bride following her husband and clapping her hands in order to play with the child. The scene looks like a family on an outdoor trip (Sinha 2003: 16).

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Coomaraswamy (1974) has talked about the various indigenous traditions differentiating between the highway (marga) and byway (local or desi), in music, visual art, and so on. He noted that in Sukranitisara IV.4.73-76, images of deities are seen as heavenly (svargya) and images that appeared human are non-conducive to heavenly light (asvargya). Music has been divided into sacred and profane types in the Satapatha Brahmana, III. 2.4. According to Coomaraswamy, marga means ‘to chase’ and in the most simplest terms ‘margic’ is related to chasing the god or divinity, whereas ‘desi’ means ‘to indicate’, that is, that which is mundane and human (Coomaraswamy 1974). Therefore, marga versus desi would be equal to sacred and traditional versus profane and sentimental. Perhaps, this was the reason why Roy moved from Kalighat to the patua art of Bengal. The reason that satire was used in Kalighat paintings—the reason that it cannot be seen as sacred. We have already seen that there was no demarcation between religious and secular in the themes painted at Kalighat. Traditional, sacred, and primitive art is supposed to be produced for religious purposes. In contrast, the Kalighat style of painting was influenced by the clientele it was serving—broad thick lines were the outcome of the method of execution that emphasized speed in order to meet the demand for cheap souvenirs (Jain 1999). This challenged the notion of authenticity employed by modernism and takes us to the established link between visuals and collective myths together making an art work. Furthermore, it has to be noted that there has not been a detailed account of the condition of artists in the rural areas from where they migrated to Calcutta. Also, there is no clear picture regarding the purpose of production of artworks in villages.

Style and Self-consciousness In order to know what constituted the style of Jamini Roy and how it was different from other prevailing styles, we should first ask what style means and what are its characteristic features? ‘Style’ helps us to classify artworks. In general, it is a particular way of doing something (Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary 2005). ‘How’ a thing is done. Nelson Goodman (1975) says the ‘how’ and ‘what’ (of something) cannot be easily separated and they have an effect on each other. It is the way of doing, which sometimes helps one to say ‘something’ (subject). Therefore, the subject is not always pre-decided in its totality. The ‘how’ would refer to features in relation to statements made, structures displayed, or feelings conveyed.

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For instance, every aspect of the ‘how’ would not make up a style—it can be one thing in one case and combination of two or three things in other cases. Moreover, if not in each case, the subject at times does influence the mode of doing or expression. According to Goodman, style is not totally separate from the subject; the subject constitutes a part of the style, but at the same time not every aspect of the subject is style. Moreover, apart from the subject, style also has to be related to a given author/painter, period, region, and school (ibid.). I should begin by saying that the style of Kalighat painting changed over time. But how do we discuss the intentions of the artist in relation to style? Can somebody choose a style? On this question, Goodman says that style does not depend upon the artist’s intentions; it exists even if the artist is not aware of it (ibid., 808). But Jamini Roy seems to disagree. With reference to some Bengali patuas, he said that wisdom is not acknowledged until it is self-conscious (Centenary Volume 1987). Then, how do we recognize style? And above all ‘who’ recognizes it? I try to find answers to these questions through a discussion on Jamini Roy’s style. Roy was a formalist,19 so the focus was more on the arrangement and appearance of things. He forsook many European techniques and methods in order to make his art more simple and pure. Through his experimentation with Kalighat and traditional patua art, he learnt rhythm and a sense of poise evident in his picture of Krishna and Balram.20 He went on searching for purity of line and abstract form, reduced his palette to primary colors, and also experimented with brush drawings in lampblack (Irwin and Dey 1944). Goodman says that style does not depend upon the artist’s conscious choice among various alternatives available. He disagrees with Stephen Ullmann for whom there is no point in talking of style if the artist does not have any choice of alternatives. According to Ullmann, in order to determine style, one needs to be self-conscious about it (Goodman 1975: 799). When we talk about traditional artists, we may call what they are practicing ‘their style’, but they may not be conscious of this. 19  Roy was a proponent of formalism at a time when the dominant fashion was toward realism. Formalism is a concept that determines the value of any artwork on the basis of its form—the way it is made, its visual aspects, and its medium. Formalism emphasizes on compositional elements, for example, line, texture, color, shape, and so on. 20  Krishna is a Hindu mythical character believed to be a reincarnation of Lord Vishnu. Balram was his elder brother. The two found a place in Roy’s paintings.

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Goodman further notes that the way we perceive things is determined, in part, by our knowledge of certain facts about their history of production, ongoing discourses, and so on. A neophyte cannot decipher style. Hence, we can say that style is something in relation to theme of the artwork, that is, the subject matter, technique (how the theme is depicted or expressed), and above all it has to be seen in relation to the author, region, and time period. I do not agree either with Roy or Goodman. In my view, there may be cases where artists are painting images in a style that they have inherited from their ancestors without having full knowledge of the stories or events related to those images. But we can surely see that it is in relation to knowledge about the subject and the same images have been painted differently by different artists. The themes may be the same but artists may use different textures and colors. They may use lines differently or apply other techniques which allow their works to be seen as belonging to a particular community. Artists know what they are painting and how it is different from the paintings of other artists; they can even recognize paintings done by each other. They may not be using the same conception of style as we do but they are self-conscious of it, in their own ways.

Anonymity and Recognition The fact that there were other local artists who used to paint for Jamini Roy and he just put his signature on these paintings (often after giving a final touch to the paintings), is disconcerting. To make matters worse, Roy sometimes did not even sign his works. On this, I follow Goodman who says that style stands for signature but a signature is not a part of style (Goodman 1975: 807). Therefore, it is not his ‘signature’ that created confusion about the authorship of these paintings, but his style of painting that is copied by others. Moreover, since signatures can be forged, we have to ask what is it that enables us to recognize whether a particular work is by a particular painter or not? What is ‘his/her’ style of painting? Again, I need not overemphasize the fact that style can count for different things depending on the context. Here, I will also talk about the ‘intentions’ of the artist. Jamini Roy wanted his paintings to be available to ordinary people. This led to the mass production of his paintings. Roy allowed the use of his ‘signature’ by other painters and also the mimicking of his style. In the case of Jamini Roy, it was his focus on the line and purity (which was evident in his bold treatment of line, choice of themes, and method of distribution of his

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paintings). He consciously sold his paintings cheaply in order to bridge the gap between the rates of artworks done by local patuas and his own paintings. The notions of purity and simplicity, Roy aspired to, are complex and needs to be explained. If it is about giving up costly colors for naturally made cheap colors then we find various options being used even within traditional art forms. It is an unspoken assumption that something that is seen as more sophisticated and known as ‘art work’ is the product of academic art institutions. The attributes associated with one art form provide the defining criteria for aspiring candidates to the category of art. By signing artworks of other artists, Roy blurs the boundaries between art and artifact. This can be seen as similar to what Andy Warhol did when he created the simulacra of Brillo Boxes. But at the same time, these two cases are not identical because the two art forms were part of different art worlds (Becker 1974). Nevertheless, the effort was similar, that is, to challenge the existing notions of art in their respective art worlds. The art world is constituted by the discourses formed and modified by various actors in it. These include art colleges, professors, artists, art critics, art historians, curators, dealers, galleries, journal publishers, museum directors, art collectors, patrons, and donors— all with vested interests. Thus, the art world is a field of power. The context in which the prefix high or low is attached to an art object today has to do with a system of knowledge. Those who are in power define the field of knowledge and expertise. We should not forget anthropologists in this world who either influence or get influence by the very categories of art. This consciousness of art worlds being platforms of power contestation should inform our quest and inquiries; leaving us to question even the most basic concepts. Following Ratnabali Chatterji, I realize that the very movement of objects from the home to the museum marks its entry into the world of high art. Here we are again faced with the problem of defining high and low. It, as in the case of style, depends on the context and the actor who is responsible for determining the classification. The efforts made by Roy to bridge the gap between the high and low art have not achieved full success. As we saw, Roy himself was criticized when experts found it difficult to distinguish between his original work and copies of it. The issues of originality and signature as a mark of individual authorship play an important role in this discourse. The very attachment of the name ‘Jamini Roy’ with a particular style of painting and his signature on an artwork makes it desirable as high art.

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The fact that we know Jamini Roy’s name and not that of the other artists painting in a similar style shows that this division still exists. Though he was thought to be eccentric and was criticized for copying himself, he at the same time got recognition as a creative artist only because his work was considered to be high art. He learnt painting techniques from rural artists and even changed the repertoire of painting material, treated paper in the rural way with clay and lime and even reduced his palette to a few natural colors. This mode of painting was new in the history of the modern Indian art. Stella Kramrisch calls this a “conscious and productive home going”. In 1931, Roy held an exhibition where he displayed this ‘new’ genre of painting—among these were also paintings made by other village artists, but were signed by Roy. He learnt simplicity of form, bold line, and sweeping brush strokes from Bengali patuas but what were displayed in the exhibition were ‘his’ artworks. The patuas remain anonymous (also see Coomaraswamy 1974). While tracing the history of Bankura District, Irwin and Dey talk about various movements in Indian history that gave the Indian arts and crafts their special quality and flavor. Influenced by religious movements such as Vaishnavism and Shaktism, folk culture acquired a rebellious character. This district developed sophisticated local culture due to the confluence of diverse communities (Santhal, Mallas, and Hindus of mixed heritage and Sanskritic culture) (Irwin and Dey 1944). Therefore, we see that there was no pure culture of ‘one’ community. Hence, Roy’s quest of purity is in question. Moreover, the influence of patrons as discussed by Ratnabali Chatterji or the impact of communication with the outside village communities has been totally ignored. Roy believed that his art was not something unique and it should be reproduced in order to be available to everybody. Does this easy availability make his art identical to Bengali patua art? We should also take into account that there is a controversy surrounding the artworks created by him. However, at the same time his works are also treated as national treasures. The idea that we need to preserve Indian heritage by preserving artworks came from the British administration and not the Indians in the first instance. They later internalized the British prejudice. Western influence on modern Indian artists, for example, impact of cubism on the work of Gaganendranath was ignored. A center-periphery relation between the metropolis and backward colony existed in the realm of art. Subsequently, after independence, the Government of India reproduced this structure of prejudice determining the way that art was produced, circulated, and awarded (Mitter 2007).

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Conclusion Irwin and Dey (1944) considered Jamini Roy as the most creative painter of his time. Several other artists went to traditional Bengali pats for inspiration, but they usually invited the patuas to urban art centers and were content to learn the methods and techniques of painting from them. They did not try to learn their collective myths or replicate their organization of work. Roy tried to emulate their mode of organizing work and to imbibe the social consciousness of the community in his artworks. He developed his own style and like him, village artists also did so. But in the case of latter, it happened primarily only after the intervention of outside art world. Roy through his efforts tried to close the gap between high art and traditional artifacts. He was successful up to a point but then his experiments became too radical for the art world to accept. I find his radical experiments with art production quite unique among artists of his generation. I conclude by proposing the possibility of having a more local vocabulary of art in the collective myths of the region or country. It’s time that disciplines like art history and anthropology of art work together to question the established notions and hegemony of a particular art world and look for a more locally informed understanding of art beyond any similarities or differences. The separation of art (esthetics) from culture should be avoided with an acknowledgment that art can happen anywhere in any ‘institution’ or sphere irrespective of its nature. A more holistic approach, both in various dimensions of ‘life’ retaining and perpetuating art and the disciplines dealing with art, should be able to do so. In short, boundaries based on power, hierarchy, and dominance should be blurred.

References Anderson, Richard L. 1979. Art in Primitive Societies. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Archer, W.G. 1953. Bazaar Paintings of Calcutta: The Style of Kalighat. London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office. Banerjee, Sumanta. 1998. The Parlour and the Street. Calcutta: Seagull Books. Becker, Howard. 1974. Art as Collective Action. American Sociological Review 39 (6): 767–776. Berger, John. 1993. The Success and Failures of Picasso. New  York: Vintage International. Boas, Franz. 1955. The Mind of Primitive Man. New York: Macmillan.

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Bundgaard, Helle. 1999. Indian Art Worlds in Contention: Local, Regional and National Discourses on Orissan Patta Paintings. Great Britain: Curzon Press. Centenary Exhibition. 1987. Jamini Roy. New Delhi: National Gallery of Modern Arts. Chaitanya, Krishna. 1994. A History of Indian Painting: The Modern Period. New Delhi: Abhinav Publications. Chatterji, Roma. 2016. Scripting the Folk: History, Folklore, and the Imagination of Space in Bengal. Annual Review of Anthropology 45: 377–394. Collins, Bradford R. 1991. What Is Art History. Art Education 44 (1): 53–59. Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. 1974. Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd. Desai, Dipti. 2002. The Ethnographic Move in Contemporary Art: What Does It Mean for Art Education? Studies in Art Education 43 (4): 307–323. Dutt, Gurusaday. 1990. Folk Arts and Crafts of Bengal: The Collected Papers. Calcutta: Seagull. Errington, Shelly. 1998. The Death of Authentic Primitive Art. London: University of California Press. Fraser, Douglas. 1962. Primitive Art. New York: Doubleday. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Goodman, Nelson. 1975. The Status of Style. Critical Inquiry 1 (4): 799–811. Guha-Thakurta, Tapati. 1992. The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art. New  York: Cambridge University Press. Irwin, John, and Bishnu Dey. 1944. Jamini Roy. Calcutta: Indian Society of Oriental Art. Jain, Jyotindra. 1999. Kalighat Painting: Images from a Changing World. Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd. Joshi, O.P. 1985. Sociology of Indian Art. Jaipur: Rawat Publications. Knizkova, Hana. 1975. The Drawings of the Kalighat Style: Secular Themes. Prague: National Museum. Malinowski, Bronislow. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Marcus, George E., and Fred R. Myers. 1995. The Traffic in Art and Culture: An Introduction. In The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, ed. George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers, 1–54. London: University of California Press. Mitter, Partha. 2007. The Triumph of Modernism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mookerjee, Ajit. 1956. Modern Art in India. Calcutta: Oxford Press. Mukerjee, Radhakamal. 1959. The Culture and Art of India. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1935. On the Concept of Function in Social Science. American Anthropologist 37: 394–402.

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Rossi, Barbara. 1998. From the Ocean of Painting: India’s Popular Paintings 1589 to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press. Rubin, William. 1984. “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art-Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. MOMA Catalogue, vol. 1. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Sinha, Gayatri, ed. 2003. Indian Art: An Overview. New Delhi: Rupa & Co. Steiner, Christopher B. 1995. The Art of the Trade: On the Creation of Value and Authenticity in the African Art Market. In The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, ed. George E.  Marcus and Fred R.  Myers, 151–165. London: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 8

Imposed, Interrupted and Other Identities: Rupture as Opportunity in the Art History of Pakistan Niilofur Farrukh

This chapter attempts to contextualize two significant moments of discontinuity in the art history of Pakistan which can also be read as moments of opportunity. The first rupture, centered on modernism, created a tension between artists and a society that could not access its seemingly alien esthetic. Modernism however became an important discursive space where new ideas could be tested against existing epistemologies, and this phenomenon, which was common to all postcolonial nations, can be seen as an important period of both departure and embracing the new. The relationship between modernism and socialism and the impact of Cold War politics on the early art scene discussed here for the first time gives art history of Pakistan a new lens to examine the complicated influence of overlapping ideologies. The second rupture was heralded by forces of religious extremism. These two moments of rupture shifted the axis of entrenched values in art and opened up opportunities of critical reflection through new frameworks. They became sites of negotiation around issues of identity, and

N. Farrukh (*) Karachi, Pakistan © The Author(s) 2019 S. Perera, D. N. Pathak (eds.), Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_8

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altered the way art and society engaged in a dialogue of change in political and cultural crises. The debates provoked by art also created an awareness mechanism through a complicated and often repressive postcolonial landscape. The outcome of these ruptures that stand almost half a century apart has created a realization to de-link art from imperialistic ambitions and build a South-South cultural unity of equal partners. The first separation between art and people took place in the early decades after the independence of Pakistan when the influence of the School of Paris heralded modernism. The new idiom was perceived as a metaphor for freedom and a connection to the world by a group of artists though it found little traction in a society that lacked references to access it intellectually or esthetically. To understand modernism both as a social and political phenomenon, it’s crucial to revisit the role of colonial art education in steering artists toward modernism despite a fierce will to be independent. It led to the perception of modernism as a liberating force as opposed to moribund traditionalism which made it attractive to a generation of artists who yearned to connect with the world as free progressive citizens. This chapter also maps the journey of modernism from the early experiments under the strong influence of the School of Paris to an independent phase when the modernists began to confidently assimilate local influences. It must be mentioned here that postcolonial debates point to a problematic legacy of modernism. While it proved to be a crucial discourse to link decolonized nations with similar aspirations and gave artists the idiom to break from tradition, it was also an effective tool used by Eurocentric institutions to exclude subaltern cultures. The second challenge of the internal divide came from religious extremism in Pakistan after the Soviet-Afghan War was fought by the West with Mujahedeen, a global army drawn from orthodox militants trained to defend Islam from Communism. Instead of disbanding after the end of Soviet-Afghan War, this army collaborated with extremists within Pakistan to turn it into its ideological battlefield with violence and intimidation as its preferred modes of operation. A rupture within the collective identity took place when Islam and terrorism became deeply intertwined and the Pakistani nation found itself caught between two polarized positions, the moderate voices that espouse a personal and reformist Islam as opposed to the exclusivist and violent version created by extremists. This catastrophic shift brought upon by the polarization and violence mobilized artists. They joined progressive forces of resistance in a nebulous yet persistent movement that instrumentalizes art to unpack the fundamental narrative

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in Pakistan and the media rhetoric that has misrepresented Islam to a global audience. It also forced art into a new relationship with religion that transcends the sanctioned framework of reverence to one of criticality and activism.

Modernism: Disconnect, Discontent and Disillusionment Pakistan began its history with a focus on one collective identity for the nation, a religious one. This constructed identity soon proved to be more rhetorical than practical in a situation in which a culturally heterogeneous citizenry had yet to learn how to be a nation. Politically fragile after the demise of its founder, the country faced challenges as its democratic freedom came under attack. Repeated authoritarian regimes strangled progressive institutions and set up autocratic ones to serve them. When an organic national identity emerged out of this struggle, it reflected the tensions along class, ideological and economic lines. Art in Pakistan has been shaped by imposed and imagined identities spawned by conflicts and contradictions. In the early decades, the artists keen to make sense of their time could either choose the established path of the New Bengal School or experiment with modernism espoused by the Progressive Artists Group in Mumbai. Shakir Ali, Ali Imam, Sheikh Safdar, Moyene Najmi, Ahmed Perwaz and Anwer Jalal Shemza chose modernism and founded the Lahore Art Circle in 1952 modeled on the Progressive Artists Group. The monumental challenge facing them was to assimilate the new idiom into a personal expression, and develop an audience for their art. Both were equally difficult, as none of the modernists at this stage had formally studied modernism, and as a result, they pooled their knowledge and tried to address esthetic concerns at meetings held regularly at coffee houses. It’s not surprising that the reception to modern art was lukewarm and sometimes openly hostile because the context in which they set up their art practice was under the overwhelming influence of Abdur Rehman Chughtai, whose lyrical depictions of Islamic legacy reflected the popular notion of art. Historian Jalaluddin Ahmed in an interview with the author recalled the awe-inspiring spectacle when thousands turned out in Dhaka to welcome Chughtai shortly after 1947. They had come to greet their hero who had created a space for Muslim culture and history in the New Bengal School tradition.

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The form on the canvas that I thought was a pineapple I was told was a woman in the work of Modern Art When I asked what was the right side up of the painting I was told it could be viewed from any side, the work of Modern Art— S.M. Jafri circa 1960s

These humorous verses from a popular Urdu poem by Jafri, recalled from memory, reflect the dilemma of the audiences; the poem was in demand at mushairas (public recital of poetry) and on radio. It sparked general debate on modernism in the public sphere, which was seen as uncomfortable departure from the esthetic continuum. These harsh critiques of modern art were not uncommon, and first surfaced in 1949 when Zubeida Agha held Pakistan’s first modern art solo exhibition in Karachi and Attiya Faizi, the leading critic of the time, responded with a scathing review. Though sources of these debates are difficult to locate, it suffices to make a mention here in order to instigate an idea. The entry of modernism into South Asia can be traced to influential pioneers who are recognized for their individualistic contributions. F.N. Souza, who was one of these influential pioneers, saw modern art as part of his activism against colonialism and did not see adopting Western art as a betrayal of his strong support of the Freedom Movement. Souza, a founder of the Progressive Artists group, in an interview recalled the 1940s as a period of his participation in the anti-colonial protests and was quite impatient with the lyrical style of painting supported by the New Bengal School, which he found was unable to express the turmoil around him.1 The New Bengal School that began as a reformist art movement in 1850 to reclaim the traditions of Indian painting from the overwhelming Western influence had become somewhat parallel establishment with its patterns of conformity (Guha 1992). Souza was not the first to experience New Bengal School’s constraints as Gaganendranath Tagore had already begun to explore cubism and fauvism. Jamini Roy, who is also referred to as an early Indian modernist, looked to the folk tradition of ‘patachitra’ (traditional scroll painting from Bengal) for his innovative paintings. Calcutta hosted an exhibition of Bauhaus artists as early as 1922, which must have also given local artists an introduction to radical departures in European art. Souza who grew up in Goa experienced modern art via

1

 F.N. Souza’s interview with Niilofur Farrukh for Newsline, circa 1990s.

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printed reproductions of Picasso two decades later and was excited by its possibilities. At this time, Souza who had been suspended from J.J. School of Art for his political activism found in cubism, the idiom of defiance he had been searching, and explored it through his countless figurative works. Modern art, particularly cubism, which was an entry point for most pioneers, had grown out of a similar social and political upheaval to respond to a Europe rethinking its history and cultural norms. The artists in Europe had extended their gaze to non-European contexts of Africa, Japan and Arab cultural terrains to assimilate new ideas that led them to challenge rigid frameworks. They too had faced the hostility of the Art Saloon. As such, the pioneer modernists in South Asia could relate to the impulse to question and search beyond their immediate context for inspiration.

Modernism and Socialism: Strange Bedfellows in Art As Pakistan gained independence in 1947, the dominant ideologies in the country were socialism and modernism. The artists of the Lahore Art Circle were committed to both, and debated them in local coffee and tea houses, often with members of the group, Progressive Writers. These ideological allies were in search of a social and cultural vision for an egalitarian Pakistan. The writers and poets were engaged in social realism to foreground issues of class and economic inequality. The artists’ challenge was more complex as their modern art practice along the lines of the ‘Art for Art Sake’ dogma had created a gap between them and the people. They somehow managed to compartmentalize the difference between their experimental practice and socialist beliefs, and remained equally committed to both. The Progressive Writers were very supportive of the efforts of the artists, and the leading revolutionary poet of the time, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and others attended their exhibitions regularly and wrote favorable reviews. The First Manifesto of all Pakistan Progressive Writers in 1949 stated, “we wish to remove the contradictions that exist between our social system and the needs of the ordinary people because these contradictions are responsible for the fact that our society and along with it our arts and crafts have stopped developing in a progressive direction….this is only possible if we break down the existing capitalist and feudal system and establish a people’s democratic system based on a socialist economy” (Aslam 2017: 455). A crisis of leadership in the country and a lack of clear

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guidelines exacerbated the political struggle between the progressives and the oligarchy. The oligarchy, consisting mainly of the feudal class, aligned itself with the religious right and left Pakistan vulnerable to Cold War politics. Eventually, this group entrenched its power with the help of Western powers, and initiated its own brand of McCathyrism in Pakistan. The Communist Party of Pakistan with its network in all provinces was banned in the early 1950s, and its leaders, workers and sympathizers faced torture and incarceration. Censorship and divisive policies left little space for artists and writers with a people’s agenda. Some courageous groups like the Art Circle staged plays penned and acted by workers to stay connected to the ordinary people. But conditions worsened with the ban of literary magazines, theater productions and even companies were instructed not to hire ‘communists’. Parallel cultural bodies to expand the rightist agenda were established by the State, and culture became a site of ideological conflict. This problematic relationship continued and successive governments censored, manipulated and exploited visual art, literature, theater, dance and films to suit their political agenda. Ali Imam, an emerging modernist, was arrested thrice for his political activism, and went into self-exile in the UK, and many of his peers were forced to do the same. When he returned home after 11 years in the mid-­ 1960s, Pakistan was largely ‘purged’ of Communism, and he was left with little choice but to immerse himself in art. The growing influence of a proactive American Cultural Centre was pushing abstract expressionism with touring exhibitions and a wide circulation of glossy cultural magazines. Alliance Francaise, Goethe Institut and British Council played a very visible role in exposing the local audiences to modern art. Friendship House, the Russian Cultural Centre was all but forgotten in this scheme of things. Only when the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in the 1960s that it was briefly in the limelight. Even so, very few visited and the rumor that the place was under state surveillance did not help. Ideas of modernism in general had spread its tentacles in society, and most Pakistanis believed that they were on the global path to development by the 1960s. In the local print media of the time, there were frequent references to a ‘modern Pakistan’ with infrastructure development, global links, widespread education and a socially emancipated society, while there was a big question mark regarding human rights as one military dictator followed another.

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Experiencing Alternative Modernity: Localizing the Idiom By the mid-1960s, many Pakistani modernists, who in the early stages had confined themselves to narrow formalist experiments, gradually began to assimilate local influences in their oeuvre. This led to Pakistan experiencing an ‘alternative modernity’ as artists explored the personal and political with pre-Islamic themes, the esthetics of miniature painting, Islamic patterns and calligraphy. The engagement with calligraphy was the most robust as the modernist had at his/her disposal centuries of techniques and epigraphic forms. Shakir Ali,2 a leading figure of the Lahore Art Circle, was steeped in the literary tradition, and a frequent contributor of essays on art to Urdu journals. For his first foray into this genre, Shakir Ali chose to interpret Quranic texts in a mural. That is, in a sense, he managed to bring aspects of ‘religion’ into the midst of modern practices of art. With textures, marks and floral forms that were intrinsic to his iconography, he chose to be deliberately asymmetrical and opted to work within a loose structure. Shakir Ali’s calligraphies are respectful departures in which the painterly skills and a modern sensibility have successfully subverted the rigid protocols of tradition. Hanif Ramay,3 skilled in traditional calligraphy, came with both a technical advantage and an ingrained respect for the proscribed. This was negotiated by keeping the integrity of the form while destabilizing the optical balance. To accomplish this, Ramay isolated parts of the form, and turned them into color blocks. His ability to manipulate the space within the form to alter the perception with color became more experimental with time and is his unique contribution. Ramay served as the editor of several Urdu journals often printed the works on the covers which had considerable outreach. Ismail Gulgee4 found his inspiration in action painting when he did a large collaborative work with Elaine Hamilton, a visiting action painter

2  A popular and pictorial rendering of the work and life of Shakir Ali is available at: https:// nation.com.pk/12-Jul-2017/shakir-ali-the-maestro 3  For more information on Hanif Ramay, please visit the following Internet sources: (1) http://blog.chughtaimuseum.com/?p=1781; (2) https://www.revolvy.com/page/ Hanif-Ramay 4   For a brief biographic sketch of Ismail Gulgee, visit: http://artasiapacific.com/ Magazine/57/IsmailGulgee19262007

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from America. This led him to use wide sweeping brush strokes simultaneously loaded with many colors for cursive styles. Soon this was to become his signature style. His large works were sometimes layered with references to classic calligraphic styles punctuated with spheres stamped with what appeared like official seals that emulated Mughal ‘farmans’ or royal edicts. Among all the modernists, Sadequain5 was the only one to come from a family of professional calligraphers in Amroha, India. He, however, chose to stay away from it till he had established himself as a modern painter. His calligraphic corpus is the largest and most diverse among the modernists and has a lasting influence on popular calligraphy. In his ‘Cactus Series’ calligraphy entered his practice with a fluid interplay between vertical Kufic (Arabic script, also used for Urdu) alphabets, thorny arms of the cactus and human figures. Throughout the series, Kufic calligraphy is intertwined with the ‘cactus’ imagery. In the illustrations of his anthology of rubaiyats (short poems), Sadequain invents a free-flowing script that is whimsically guided by the rhythm of a verse. When he moves from the paper to murals, the leap is both in scale and conceptual development. The two murals at Frere Hall in Karachi and at Lahore Museum are boldly experimental and mark a new threshold in the modern art tradition—synthesis. The Surah-e-Rehman Series is his magnum opus in modern calligraphy. Based on hundreds of iterations of the Quranic verse, Sadequain pushed boundaries of materiality and explored leather and slabs of roughly cut marble in fusing countless calligraphic styles to evoke the essence of the spiritual message. The transition from self-referential experiments to a localized modernism saw artists cross boundaries with ease. At the same time, revisiting tradition with a new sensibility introduced a visual vibrancy that was received with enthusiasm. The 1970s saw the modernists come into their own after a long struggle. This was also the decade when the vision of a future of stability seemed to slip with the breakup of the country that led to the birth of Bangladesh in 1971. The democratically elected Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was hung by General Ziaul Haq, and Pakistan saw the country’s longest and most repressive military dictatorship in its wake.

5  For information on Sadequain and his contribution to calligraphic c modernism, please read Iftikar Dadi’s essay, ‘Sadequain and Calligraphic Modernism’: http://islamic-arts. org/2011/sadequain-and-calligraphic-modernism/

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Complicating the Narrative of Extremism Pakistani poet, Afzal Ahmed Syed in his poem ‘Hamain bohat saray phool chaheyen’6 (we need so many flowers, 2000) writes, We need so many flowers Many, many flowers To lay by the feet of corpses We need so many flowers To swathe the faces of the cadavers in sacks We need so many flowers

Clearly, what he talks about is the extreme levels of political violence that had engulfed Pakistani society that impacted everything from government to public and social life as well as modes of political and cultural expression. As he continues with his poetic narrative, between the lines of this powerful poem, what Syed unveils is a nation living with anxiety and fear in an existence over-shadowed by bullets, bomb blasts and other kinds of killing much of which were undertaken in the name of religious or ethno-cultural identity. Just as much as these forms of violence found poetic expression, they also found similar expression visual culture. These conditions created new metaphors and the flower, long associated with beauty, love and peace acquired a new meaning. A rupture within the collective identity took place when Islam and terrorism became deeply intertwined, and the Pakistani nation found itself caught between two polarized positions, the moderate voices that espouse a personal and reformist Islam as opposed to the exclusivist and violent version created by extremists. Interventions by poets, writers, journalists and artists offer a narrative to re-contextualize religion within a contemporary framework. There was widespread concern among moderate Pakistanis that an alternative narrative was needed to articulate how ideology and geography had drawn Pakistan into a conflict that was being constructed as a religious one. This made it imperative to foreground the historical context that linked the Soviet-Afghan War, 9/11 and the War on Terror to understand the exploitation of religion by global politics. Their efforts took on wider urgency when the press faced threats and dissidents were silenced with death. Pakistan, which was founded on the fault lines of tension between 6  While these are my translation of the poem (reproduced here in part), another version exists in the compilation of Urdu poems available at http://urdustudies.com/ pdf/24/16AfzalPoems.pdf (accessed on 13 October 2018).

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conservative religious groups and the moderate Muslim population of the Indian sub-continent, has for long experienced the impact of local politics on religion. The independence of the new country was opposed by leading seminaries for they distrusted Mohamed Ali Jinnah, the first Prime Minister of Pakistan, who as a secularist lawyer was not in favor of a theocratic Pakistan. More importantly, they feared being relegated to the political fringe. Their fears were realized when the biggest political party, Jamat-e-­Islami, was rejected at the ballot box several times. The popular verdict of the Pakistani voter was discarded in 1980s when the frustrated zealots of Jamat-e-Islami were entrusted by Western powers to recruit the Mujahideen army, which was the ideological genesis of Al Qaida and the Taliban. Throughout the 1980s, Pakistanis suffered under General Ziaul Haq’s military dictatorship and his forced Islamization drive that introduced laws against human rights, freedom of expression and tampered with the National Constitution to strengthen control. Western powers supported the dictator and gave Jamat-e-Islami a carte blanche to transform madrassahs, the traditional religious schools affectively into nurseries for the Mujahideen. According to Tariq Ali, the well-known author and social commentator, “symbiotic and perfidious relationships between many Islamic groups were spawned and indulged by CIA and Imperialism …. for decades the United States had clandestinely helped jihadi groups squash pro-communist and nationalist Muslims inside the Muslim world. By the end of the 1970s, this covert practice was visible and US had become a covert supporter of international Jihad” (Fateh 2008: 272). This historical chapter is aptly documented in the film, Charlie Wilson’s War. A bi-product of this intervention, which is lesser known, is how the forced introduction of the orthodox interpretation of Islam through the national school curricula, a parallel religious judiciary and religion-based constitutional amendments undermined human rights. The religious politics of General Ziaul Haq were rejected and actively resisted by writers, artists, journalists and civil society activists in a movement that was brutally crushed. National College of the Arts, Lahore, became a site of resistance where the faculty and students protested against state laws particularly the Hudood Ordinance.7 In Sindh, Nagori8 was the first to critique the 7  The ordinance was the controversial law, which was enacted in 1979 as a part of the forced Islamization during the period of General Ziaul Haq’s military regime in Pakistan. There were critical reactions against forced Islamization. 8  For more information on the work of Abdul Rahim Nagori, visit the website, Welcome to My World: http://welc0m2myworld.blogspot.com/2009/11/abdul-rahim-nagori-painterknown-for.html

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Pakistani army for its violence against the people. In his powerful painting of a totem pole, the new power structure is decided by the dictator. Nagori’s small paintings, the size of a child’s primer, phonetically connect the alphabet to instruments of violence and allude to grassroots pedagogic change and erasure of history, introduced by the Ziaul Haq regime via textbooks and curricula. In the madrassahs (traditional schools), the lessons of violence started early and “even the textbooks for the Jihadi madrassah’s came from United States. In these books, the Urdu alphabet consisted of jeem for jihad, kaaf for Kalashnikov, and tay for tope (cannon)” (Fateh 2008: 273). Years later, Khadim Ali, who escaped the Soviet-Afghan War as a child and grew up in Quetta while living among the subsequent waves of refugees from his country, created in a neo-miniature style an idealized page of a primary reader. Here, the Alif, the first letter of the Urdu-language alphabet, which traditionally stood for anar, the Urdu/Persian word for the pomegranate, mutates into a grenade, which the children after the Afghan War had become more familiar with as their gardens of pomegranate were being destroyed by ‘daisy cutters’ and cluster bombs.

Beyond the Sanctioned Framework In the socio-political context outlined above, contemporary art practice engages the controversies facing Islam with interventions that are personal, experiential and activist and treads into a territory previously closed by religious scholars that have discouraged critical ideas and debates in Islam, which would prevent it into petrifying into an orthodox tradition. These visual expressions of resistance transcended the historical frames of reference that previously connected art and Islam only through a precise and sanctioned format. These new works address both the personal questioning that tries to make sense of the multiple interpretations of religious injunctions and also challenges the extremist readings to extend social control. An attempt is also made by these critical artworks to deconstruct reductionist stereotypes constructed by the global media. Post-9/11, the shootings and bomb blasts throughout Pakistan have claimed some 50,000 civilian lives carried out by non-state actors. Their virulent hate propaganda from the pulpit and on websites has attempted to justify the violence. Muslim youth indoctrinated with de-­contextualized Quranic quotations on Jihad were conscripted to fight in Soviet-Afghan War, and later they regrouped to form the nucleus of the suicide squads

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for the Taliban and the Al Qaida. “The death cult of the jihadis evolved into a form of a death cult where the highest level of Islamic worship is to die and leave this world to its satanic existence”, explains Tarek Fateh (2008: 272). Tariq Ali goes on to add that these terrorists have no social vision as “their goal is to seek paradise, not in life but in death” (Fateh 2008: 280). Artists who have been a witness to this bloodstained history of bomb blasts and terror attacks have begun to challenge the extremist rhetoric with esthetic strategies that addressed issues of gender, social freedom and secular knowledge, and have brought into discussion the human cost of the War on Terror. Mahbub Jokhio’s9 installation of child-size graves at the first Karachi Biennale found people standing quietly around it. The bubblegum pink, yellow and blue small graves point to the 134 childhoods that were lost in a terrorist attack on Peshawar Army Public School in 2014. This work re-­ lives a tragedy that left a nation in mourning. Another work that draws attention to loss of empathy as the daily news of tragic deaths on the media becomes as routine as serving bread and invites the audience to introspect the brutalizing effects of violence is, Nausheen Saeed’s10 ‘Baked Delicacies’. The piece with its life-size truncated body made from baked dough served in wooden bakers trays is a haunting reminder of dismembered limbs collected from blast victims. Similarly, designed to discomfort, Abdullah Syed’s ‘Flying Carpet’ with drone-like forms crafted from menacing box-­ cutter blades invites visitors to walk under it, and brings alive the experience of villagers who live in constant threat of hovering un-manned predators. Syed’s aim is to bring into discussion both the psychological and physical impact of drone attacks on a civilian population, which the world only knows through media images of a target and a rising plume, without any human references. The madrassahs, run by charitable organizations, have long been a source of affordable education to impoverished millions in South Asia, which today have been demonized by the Western media, not unlike the

9  For more information on Mahbub Jokhio’s work, visit: (1) https://mahbubjokhio.weebly.com/about%2D%2Dbio.html and (2) https://www.gasworks.org.uk/residencies/ mahbub-jokhio-2017-10-02/ 10  For more information on Nausheen Saeed, visit, http://vaslart.org/nausheen-saeed/

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exoticization of the harem by Orientalists. Hamra Abbas11 in her installation ‘God Grows on Trees’ demystifies the madrassah with 99 portraits of madrassah students with whom the artist spent time. Presently an alternative narrative, the pre-teen school children in their uniforms smile at the visitor through their individual portraits. Amin Rehman12 who lives in Toronto focuses on global perceptions of the war on terrorism. He communicates the double speak of what has been called the ‘rhetoric of aggression’ in the media. The works deal with ‘looking both ways’, which is also the title of one of his works. A suicide bomber’s claim that his act is a ticket to heaven is over-laid with the Quranic verse that states, ‘the killing of a soul is equivalent to the killing of entire mankind’, in one of Rehman’s encaustic paintings. Rehman emphasizes how contradictory messages make truth a victim in the propaganda of war. Perhaps the most telling of his work is a sign stridently claiming in neon, ‘God is on our side – Allah on your side’. This body of work unpacks cultural, religious and political dichotomies quoted by extremists and media to support their agenda, and calls attention to the power of language, its presentation and accessibility. Many artists, by subverting the veil, the very garment used by the orthodox clergy to objectify and control women, transformed it into a potent symbol of autonomy and insubordination. Mediating the space between perception and reality and the way this is stereotyped is brought out in ‘Woman in Black’ by Hamra Abbas. Her larger-than-life black cast-­ veiled figure in an aggressive posture with a stick deconstructs the myth of the modest veiled woman. This work is inspired by the women students of the Lal Masjid seminary who took over a children’s library by force.13 When confronted by the state, hundreds appeared in black veils with sticks on the seminary roof. Later, many of them died when their seminary was attacked by the army in a bid to close it down. Mariam Agha’s installation, ‘72 Virgins for my Suicide Lover’ deals with the link between sexuality and extremism. The installation based on 72 swatches of cloth bear stitched line drawings of the vagina. Embellished with beads and sequins, they evoke the garments in a bride’s trousseau. 11  More information on the biography and work of Hamra Abbas is available at: http:// www.hamraabbas.info/category/news/ 12  For more information on Amin Rehman, visit: http://www.aminrehman.com/cv.php 13  Women students of the Lal Masjid seminary occupied the children’s library building in Islamabad in 2007 to protest against the official demolition of unauthorized mosques in the capital.

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Agha, a young woman who works with textile embellishments, often destabilizes the familiar fashion vocabulary with instrumentalist content. This objectification of her body underscores the message in training videos that brainwash suicide bombers with the promise of financial support to their impoverished families and a place in heaven, where according to a myth, 72 virgins await the martyr. Yet, another law under the extremist interpretation of the Sharia14 framework against blasphemy has fueled violence and bigotry putting both Muslims and non-Muslims at risk. Salman Taseer, the Governor of Punjab Province, after he publically declared support for a poor peasant woman on death row convicted under the controversial Blasphemy Law, was gunned down by his own police guard, a self-confessed religious fanatic. Amean J created a temporary memorial site with metal plates etched with bullets to convey the violence of his death, which resulted from 29 bullet wounds. It was shaped like a coffin and reflected its shape in mirrors. The visitor’s reflection in the mirror suggests a sense of everyday vulnerability when death threatened everyone who spoke out against the blasphemy law. Imran Qureshi’s site-specific work at the Sharjah Biennale, ‘Blessings Upon the Land of My Love’, covers the brick-paved courtyard with red pigment stains and splashes that seem to emerge from chrysanthemum-­ like flowers painted in the same blood red pigment. Standing over the painted surface, one is not sure if blood has drowned the flowers or flowers are emerging from the blood. Bizarrely evocative of a bomb blast site, it invites refection on the reality of public carnage sites. ‘Blessings Upon the Land of My Love’ was recreated years later on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and has now acquired an iconic status in Pakistani art that memorialize the victims of global terrorism. The societal rupture caused by religious extremism has also created an opportunity for art to develop a new relationship with religion that transcends the sanctioned framework of reverence to one of criticality and activism. Previously, art was created in celebration of the religious message and called upon the believer to pay homage. This new discourse with the same fervor contests fundamentalism and militancy that has polarized Muslims, and put them in conflict with the world.

 Sharia is the code of Islamic law.

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Conclusion Art has persistently underscored the need to re-negotiate the narrow ideological identity of Pakistan by extending the conversations on multiple identities. This has expanded the space for a nuanced expression of the collective self and an inclusive discourse of a pluralistic society. This chapter tried to elucidate that over the last seven decades, new linkages have been forged between art and people, the early disconnect caused by modernism was subverted by localizing the idiom to make it more accessible to a larger spectrum of people. As a social discourse, it complicated the rhetoric of modernity as an optimistic and inclusive vision of freedom and development in Pakistan. Resistance to General Ziaul Haq’s dictatorship and the rise of religious extremism created a common platform of dissidence for art. Contemporary artists that had been largely aloof from religious subjects because of the ambivalent relationship between visual art and Islam outside the proscribed space were left with no choice but to unpack distorted claims of the extremists and their sanctioned violence. This initiated a seminal interface between art and religion beyond reverence to one of criticality and activism. In this de-centered space where identities are constantly being re-negotiated, rupture and conflict can be plotted as turning points in Pakistan’s art history where interventions by artists subverted the narratives from within.

References Aslam, Khwaja. 2017. People’s Movement in Pakistan. Karachi: Kitab Publishers. Fateh, Tarek. 2008. Chasing A Mirage, The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State. Ontario: John Wiley and Sons Ltd. Guha, ThakurtaTrapati. 1992. The Making of a New Indian Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

SECTION III

Art for Public: Individual, Institutions, and Issues

CHAPTER 9

Transcending and Subverting Boundaries: Understanding the Dynamics of Street Art Scene in Nepal Binit Gurung

Anyone travelling to Nepal through the country’s only international airport would first find themselves in Kathmandu, the sprawling capital city where there are as many gods as there are people, as the cliché goes. One with an observant eye and a curious disposition would perhaps also notice the visual culture that characterizes Kathmandu’s public spaces. The visuals, one may observe, are not just out there. They speak to the audience without actually ‘speaking’ to them. The language is visual and the messages conveyed range from being subtle to in-your-face. From the commercial visuals to the political sloganeering on the city walls, different groups have used the visuals as a medium to reach out to the unsuspecting masses. Taking cue from these visual practices, Nepali street artists launched a series of street art projects in 2011, months apart, declaring the start of a street art movement in the country. The deepening political uncertainty at the time (as a result of political differences over constitution-making that

B. Gurung (*) Thames International College, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal © The Author(s) 2019 S. Perera, D. N. Pathak (eds.), Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_9

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was underway in the then Constituent Assembly)1 and the relentless use/ abuse of public spaces by commercial and political interest groups with impunity provided a strong impetus for the street artists to intervene in the public spaces. This visual intervention in the public spaces was motivated by their desire not only to contest the commercial and political interests but also to communicate to the masses. Street art historically evolved out of graffiti writing associated with vandalism. By the term ‘vandalism’, two interrelated things are to be considered. One concerns the intention of the graffiti writers and the other concerns the reception of their works. Graffiti writers, writes Lewison (2008), often want to ‘destroy’ the cities and make them uglier. They do not intend to communicate to the masses. On the other hand, since the graffiti writers prefer to use their own secret code or language, their works are largely incomprehensible to the masses (Ibid. 2008). Such works are therefore taken as acts of subversion and vandalism, more so because of their illegality in many places. Though street arts too may not enjoy the legal sanction, they however enjoy social and community sanction in most places (Ibid. 2008). Moreover, street artists not only seek to infuse the city with its aesthetics but also engage with issues that concern the city and thereby resonating with most city inhabitants. Street art has now come a long way since its beginning as a subversive art form (Irvine 2012). While examples of graffiti could be traced back much farther into the past in different civilizations, graffiti writing as a movement started off in New  York around 1970s as a subcultural movement. This movement soon paved way for the emergence of street art in the 1980s which was more at ease with the contemporary art forms unlike its predecessor (Waclawek 2008). By 1990s, street arts had already spread from New York to different cities of Europe and South America thanks to the advancement in communication media and technology (Irvine 2012). As urbanization scaled up across the world with the increase of population and international/ internal migration fuelled by the labour demands of the expanding neoliberal regimes, street arts were no longer confined to a few world cities by 2000 but were visible in most cities around the world (Ibid. 2012). 1  The first Constituent Assembly formed in 2008 was dissolved unceremoniously in 2012. This indicates the extent of political chaos that pervaded the country during the period between 2008 and 2012. Read more at: https://www.economist.com/banyan/2012/ 05/28/into-the-wild

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In the context of Nepal, street art scene emerged in Kathmandu—one of the oldest cities in South Asia whose history dates back to 200 BC and is said to have been founded in 723  AD (Throndsen 1989 cited in Sengupta 2011). The ancient city of Kathmandu is now a vibrant city inhabited by diverse communities where markers of modernity remarkably co-exist with those of tradition. It is no surprise when these varied influences are reflected in the artistic productions in the city. This particularly holds true for street art, which has been evolving through our own social, political and economic contexts. Street art in Nepal has been a turf of young artists. As many fresh graduates from art schools fail to find entry into the exclusive zone of gallery-based contemporary arts scene, they find street art scene welcoming for their fresh ideas and approaches unconstrained by the conventional curatorial politics. Nevertheless, the meaning of the term ‘street art’ has expanded over the years. Today, what we call as ‘street art’ encompasses stencil graffiti, modern graffiti, sticker art, art of intervention, artistic street installations and street poster art, among others (Alpaslan 2012). Street artists work with different mediums, materials, techniques and styles. Street art is clearly a broader category that includes different graffiti forms. However, this is not to suggest that graffiti no longer exists separately. Graffiti forms continue to co-exist with street art and are often mistaken for street art by those who are not aware of their respective histories. The distinctive feature of a street art is that the street artists use urban space as an open gallery and the masses as an audience. It has unmistakably anti-institutional and anti-commercial biases while being critical of the existing political culture. Nepal is not the only country where street art received impetus from the political change or tensions. In Egypt, for example, street arts first became visible in the cityscape as a protest graffiti coinciding with the Egyptian revolution in 2011 (Gröndahl 2012). This morphed into a full-­scale street art movement following the regime change triggered by the revolution (Ibid. 2012). As it was not possible to paint critical street arts during the rule of President Hosni Mubarak, his fall from power opened up a floodgate of self-expressions among the street artists in Egypt (Ibid. 2012). The use of street walls to challenge the powers-to-be is not unknown in South Asian Region too. The art protest movement started by Pakistani street artist Asim Butt in 2007 is a case in point. While mural painting in public spaces has a longer history in Pakistan, Butt’s intervention in the urban street walls to oppose the declaration of emergency by the military was particularly remarkable. His work, particularly the ‘eject symbol’,

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which called for the ouster of the military, quickly caught on and became a part of the pro-democracy movement in the country. As street art seeks to directly engage with the people while visually contending the dominant narratives of commercial and political interest groups in the public spaces, street art is—in this sense—always political even when street artists themselves may refuse to believe so. Turner and Webb rightly note that “Because art locates people in all their particularities and complexities, and most importantly, in their materiality, in a material world it is perhaps reasonable to assert that art is always at some level politically engaged: it always locates itself in a time and space, and responds to the local material context” (Turner and Webb 2016: 15). If this is true for ‘art’ in general, this is undoubtedly truer for ‘street art’ in particular because of its direct engagement with the material world. Irvine writes, “Street art inserts itself in the material city as an argument about visuality, the social and political structure of being visible” (Irvine 2012: 4, Italics in the original). Here, one should not lose sight of the role of the street artist. The personal merits as much attention as the political; the failure to do so could lead to a deterministic understanding of one completely dictating the other. Using some ‘sociological imagination’ (Mills 2000), one could say that the personal is always in-the-making shaped by the larger structures of society. Hence, the personal and the social are always implicated into each other. In this chapter, I attempt to analyse Nepali street art as a particular art form which embodies the interplay between, on the one hand, the personal and the political, and on the other hand, the local and the global. I look at street art as an art form where both aesthetical and political aspects of art come together. I maintain that street art is a social product shaped by the larger structures of society, economy and politics within which a street artist is located. Having said so, the agency of street artists can be located in their urge to communicate to the masses and thereby change the status quo. I seek to demonstrate this by discussing the themes of the street art projects carried out by three major art collectives in Kathmandu: Artudio, Sattya Media Arts Collective and Artlab and also by, drawing upon my interviews with the representatives of each collective: Kailash Shrestha (Artudio), Rupesh Raj Sunuwar (Sattya Media Arts Collective), Kiran Maharjan (Artlab) and Dibyeshwor Gurung (Independent artist). Towards the end, I attend to the questions of production and consumption of street arts with reference to globalization.

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Sociology of Art: Insights for Understanding the Context of Nepal Sociologists in particular, writes Bourdieu, have an uneasy relationship with artists for the former wants to banish “artists from the history of arts” (Bourdieu 1993: 139). In other words, sociologists tend to belittle the role of artists and give primacy to the social context to analyse a work of art. However, Fuente (2007), after having reviewed the latest trends in the sociology of art, declares the inauguration of the ‘new sociology of art’. Unlike the ‘old’ sociology of art that undermined the aesthetic properties of art, the new sociology of art shows commitment to take account of aesthetic attributes of artworks in keeping with social constructionism (Ibid. 2007). Long before Fuente (2007), DiMaggio (1983) saw sociology of art ‘coming of age’ with the publication of Janet Wolff’s Social Production of Art in 1981 and Howard Becker’s Art Worlds in 1982. The publication of these books, DiMaggio writes, “vanquish the ideology of artistic genius and internalist accounts of progress in art; provide a wealth of insight into the production of art; and suggest (Wolff explicitly, Becker by example) the manner in which we should approach art’s sociological study” (1983: 273–74). Wolff (1981) reminds us that art is ideological in nature for it carries the values, ideas and beliefs as espoused by the artist who himself is located in specific social and economic structures. Zangwill (2002) who is against the whole project of sociology of art nevertheless makes a valid point that aesthetic is not antithetical to the ideological aspect of the arts rather the latter ‘piggybacks’ on the former. According to Wolff (1981), the ideological nature of art is mediated by the prevailing aesthetic codes and conventions. However, these aesthetic codes and conventions are also historically constituted and hence, Wolff writes, “there is nothing sacred and eternal about the aesthetic, which a sociology of art profanes; on the contrary, sociology demonstrates its very arbitrariness in laying bare its historical construction” (Wolff 1981: 141). Since Wolff clarifies that her concept of ‘art’ used in the book is more or less generic inclusive of various art forms which are united by the fact that they are all a social product, one can safely extend Wolff’s idea to argue that street arts in Nepal too have strong ideological elements, as they are no less of social product, which are expressed through the aesthetics of the street arts. According to Allan Schwartzman, street artists aim to “communicate with everyday people about socially relevant themes in ways that are informed by aesthetic values without being imprisoned by them” (Allan Schwartzman quoted in Gleaton 2012: 15).

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While all street arts are located in a particular time and space, their implications are not circumscribed by geographical and temporal boundaries owing to the forces of globalization and advances in technology. While some denounce globalization as a cover for capitalism and imperialism, there are others who see huge potentials in globalization and welcome it as a force that can lead to modernization, democratization and progress. Kellner (2012) advocates a critical approach to globalization that suggests globalization per se is neither entirely oppressive nor entirely progressive. While acknowledging that there are oppressive aspects of globalization-­from-above characteristic of corporate capitalism, Kellner brings to our attention that globalization-from-above is always accompanied by globalization-from-below which allows marginalized and vulnerable groups to use the institutions of globalization including new technologies to pursue democratization and social change. In the context of street art, globalization has enriched the artistic palette as artists now have access to a wider pool of ideas to draw upon. In a way, globalization has liberated artists from the intellectual and conceptual boundaries imposed by the nation-state. Street arts are constantly experimenting, innovating and presenting before us works that are not just local or national or global. Hence, Nepali street art scene need not have parallel elsewhere for any movement feeds on the dialectics between the local and the global. Nepali street art scene is therefore unique in its own way and therefore merits serious scholarly attention which seems to be lacking at present.

Particular Amidst General: The Emergence of Street Art in Nepal One may locate the antecedents of the Nepali street art scene in the developments of Nepali contemporary art scene in 1990s. Novel art forms like installation, performance art, video art and so forth emerged in the ­contemporary art scene in Nepal in the decade of 1990s. These new art forms that emerged in 1990s, Uprety (2010) notes, were the result of the larger processes of economic liberalization, globalization and reinstatement of democracy in the country. The period was also marked by boom in media sector with the unprecedented increase in the number of private media outlets in the country. Meanwhile, there was a spike in the number of art galleries in Kathmandu accompanied by a greater movement of Nepali artists outside the country for exhibitions and residencies. All these

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played a significant role in shifting the contours of the contemporary art scene in the country. Turner and Webb (2016) characterize the 1990s as the decade when the very frameworks for art were being re-conceptualized at the global level owing to the rise of Asian art in general. In the case of Sri Lanka, the decade of 1990s saw significant changes in the contemporary art landscape. This has been attributed to the arrival of younger Sri Lankan artists in the visual art scene against the backdrop of the then civil war and rapid urbanization (Weerasinghe 2005). These young artists experimented with new ideas drawing on their immediate milieu and lived experiences (Ibid. 2005). Thus, to quote Perera, “they ruptured both artistic conventions and ideologies prevalent up to that time as well as redefined the meanings and politics of dominant aesthetics” (Perera 2011: 11). While visual arts in Sri Lanka took explicitly political turn in 1990s, it was only in 2000s that Nepali painters began to explicitly infuse politics into their artworks even though the fusion of politics and arts was already prevalent in other artistic pursuits like poetry, dance, drama and so on. Ashmina Ranjit was one of the earliest contemporary artists who explicitly tried to bring politics and arts together in the country. When Ashmina returned from Australia after finishing her BFA in 1999, she realized that there was a pronounced lack of conceptual and critical evaluation of artworks and that the art was primarily driven by aesthetic considerations (Bangdel n.d.). Moreover, she was also struck by the conscious detachment of art from politics in the country (Ibid. n.d.). Her foray into the contemporary art scene was therefore driven towards bringing change in art perceptions in Nepal. After the turn of the century, one could observe an explicitly political turn in the visual art scene in Nepal. In 2003, a number of artists came together including Ashmina Ranjit to establish an art collective called SUTRA. In its five-years of existence, the collective organized several exhibitions and workshops with an aim to influence public thinking about arts. In 2007, Ashmina Ranjit founded LASANAA as an alternative art space through which she sought to challenge the conventions of Nepali art including the way it was perceived. She advocated for ‘Artivism’ (meaning the reconciliation of art and politics) which was evident in her performance art and installations. The regime change in 2008 and the subsequent developments prompted a major shift in the visual art scene in the country. As the country became republic in 2008 triggering a new phase of political transition, it provided a conducive socio-political context for

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the proliferation of politically motivated art works. Contemporary artists like Arjun Khaling not only took membership of a political party but also pushed his political agenda in his art works (Kunwar 2014). This explicitly political turn in the contemporary art scene in the decade of 2000s heralded the emergence of street art in Nepal over the following decade. The street art scene in Nepal started off in Kathmandu around 2011. At the time, there was a remarkable surge in street arts in the city. From my personal experience, I remember the boundary walls of the Himalayan Hotel in Kupondole in particular would often catch my attention as I used to pass by that street almost every other day. Some distance away towards Thapathali, a mural depicting a giant Red Panda on the wall of a building facing the Thapathali bridge would also unfailingly draw my attention. Such encounters with street arts while going around the city sparked an initial interest in me on street arts, for they appeared to me as a powerful visual form of communication. Street art, as it is conventionally understood, has barely a decade-long history behind it. This being said, there is a much longer history of religious murals in the country. The history of religious murals goes as far back as mid-fifth century during the Lichhavi Period (Subedi 1995). The murals which decorated the walls of temples and monasteries of that period had even impressed the then Chinese Emperor Wang hsuan-tse to the extent that he praised them as great artworks (Ibid. 1995). No religious murals of that particular period exist today and only inscriptional evidences of their existence have been found. However, some centuries-­ old religious murals still exist on the walls of a number of very old temples and monasteries in the country such as the Shantipur temple in Kathmandu and Jampa Lhakhang monastery in Upper Mustang among others. In contrast, the street art scene that emerged after the turn of the century was largely influenced by the Western street art scene. It all started with a series of pieces by Invador, a French artist whose mission was to ‘invade’ the cities through his creative pixel designs, appeared in different parts of the city walls in 2008. However, it was not until 2011 that the street art movement as such began to take shape in Nepal. Foreign and Nepali artists using pseudo-names like Bruno Levy, Yeti, Rainbow Warrior and Mr. K made the initial interventions in the visual landscape of the city. Their street arts laid the ground for the beginning of street art movement in Kathmandu. Kailash Shrestha soon took the baton forward by launching a street art project called ‘We make the nation’ in the same year. Shrestha, whose aim was to be a mere ‘banner artist’ as a child growing up in his remote village of Dolakha, went on to attend an art school in

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Kathmandu. Upon graduation, he founded Artudio in 2010 as a space for like-minded artists to come together and share their respective works. Frustrated with constant political deadlocks and the increasing ‘visual pollution’ spread by political parties and businesses in the city, Shrestha decided to take to the streets not by organizing strikes but by registering a visual protest in 2011 painting on the boundary walls of Hotel Himalaya in Kathmandu. We initially wanted to paint the walls of Ratna Park in Kathmandu and so accordingly, we approached the concerned authority. However, our requests went unheeded. We then reached out to the Hotel Himalaya asking if they would allow us to paint on their boundary walls that faced the streets. They agreed as soon as we put across the idea. In this way, using whatever few resources we had, I along with some friends launched our first street art project which also happened to be the first street art project by Nepali artists.2

As a medium of expression, street art gained popularity in the country also because of its better accessibility for both the artists and the audience. Irvine writes, “Street art thwarts attempts to maintain … ‘non-art’ space and the institutional regime controlling the visibility of art” (Irvine 2012: 25). Nepali street artists are also not supportive of the controlled visibility of arts in the institutional spaces which are often exclusive to younger artists as well as to those whose works do not fit into the existing conventions. Younger artists who have just graduated from art schools have difficult time to break into the contemporary art scene. They lack access to avenues to display their artistic skills and talent. The street artists, I talked to, admitted that they wanted to show that the gallery scene did not hold the monopoly in the display of arts. Kiran Maharjan, a member of the art collective ‘Artlab’, joined the street art scene following his failure to get his works accepted by the commercial art galleries. Right after I graduated from art school, I looked for avenues to showcase my works. I approached several galleries and art shops but the owners did not show any interest in my works. This experience then prompted me to bypass the galleries and take my works directly to the masses through street art. Moreover, I was already involved in the skateboard scene in Kathmandu which has affinities with graffiti culture. All these later led me to street art.3

2 3

 Excerpt from the interview with Kailash Shrestha conducted in Kathmandu, 5 July 2017.  Excerpt from the interview with Kiran Maharjan conducted in Lalitpur, 6 July 2017.

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It should be noted that galleries are also commercial spaces. Such spaces, according to Becker (1982), operate through a network of people consisting of producers, distributors, dealers, promoters and critics among others. It is their co-ordinated activities facilitated by their common interest in art and their agreement on what constitutes ‘art’ enable the art world to function. By placing arts in everyday surroundings, street art has not only problematized the conventional place of art but, following Papastergiadis (2010), one may say that it has also transformed the authority of art by bringing it closer to the masses. Bourdieu (1993) reminds us that one requires some cultural capital as a means to appropriate arts. Such cultural capital, according to Bourdieu, is not accessible to the bulk of the population. According to Bennett et al. (2010), it is the educated middle class and elites who are likely to frequent art galleries and it is they and their children who are likely to develop knowledge about arts and thereby increase the cultural capital at their disposal. Bourdieu (1993) underscores the role of education in cultivating ‘taste’ for artworks. He likens the educational qualification to the title of nobility through which comes certain dispositions like patronizing museums and galleries and so on. By taking arts to the streets and thereby to the ‘untrained’ public who were not supposed to lay their eyes on arts in the first place, Nepali street artists like their counterparts in other parts of the  world have defied the conventions of art production and consumption. Rupesh Raj Sunuwar who started off as a painter moved to street art scene after he was emotionally affected by the massive destruction caused by the massive earthquake of 2015 in Nepal.4 As he wanted to spread a positive message to the people in distress, he painted a mural with a theme ‘We will rise again’ following which he got connected to ‘Sattya Media Arts Collective’. Sunuwar was of the opinion that street art democratizes ‘art’ significantly (Fig. 9.1). Arts are not just for the expatriates who can afford to buy and hang them on the walls of their fancy living rooms and offices. An artwork should not be taken merely as a decorative item rather it calls for serious engagement. This engagement is possible only in the street arts where people encounter arts in their everyday life.5

 Nepal was hit by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in 25 April 2015 which took the lives of thousands of people and injured many more. More can be read at: https://www.pri.org/ stories/2015-04-25/devastating-earthquake-leaves-more-thousand-dead-and-rising-nepal 5  Excerpt from the interview with Rupesh Raj Sunuwar, 7 July 2017. 4

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Fig. 9.1  Mural by Rupesh Raj Sunuwar. (Photography by Binit Gurung)

The Personal and the Political: Locating Aesthetics in Street Art While it is quite apparent that the works of the artists are shaped by the prevailing socio-political and economic issues, the agency of the artists can be located in the intentionality of their artworks, which manifests in the contents of their artistic expression. Stating that arts are expressive in nature, Dewey (1994) likens objects of arts to languages. He writes, “Each art has its own medium and that medium is especially fitted for one kind of communication. Each medium says something that cannot be uttered as well or as completely in any other tongue” (Dewey 1994: 211). Street art therefore is a unique art medium in which the personal and the political come together. As the personal and the social are implicated into each other, the personal doesn’t necessarily mean ‘private matters’ of an artist. Following Mills (2000), it may be useful to bring up the distinction between ‘troubles’ and ‘issues’ in relation to street art. Mills insist that the ‘troubles’ are private matters of individuals which they can address themselves from within their milieu whereas the ‘issues’ are matters of public

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concern which pose threat to the values cherished by a large number of people in the society. As street art is a form of visual language to communicate to the masses, what is expressed by the street artist is not his private ‘troubles’ but the ‘issues’ that most people can relate to. The personal that prevails in street art is the self of the artist that is moulded by the society. On the other hand, the political is the expression of the street artists which maybe confrontational or instructive serving to bring certain issues to prominence and influence public discourse about them. Shrestha, in one of my extended conversations with him, explained to me that it was his surroundings that would mostly influence the content of his street arts. What goes around the city is what reflected on the walls of the city. Street art can be a personal expression of the artists but it is ultimately social because we are communicating with the society about something most people can identify with.6

Dewey makes a similar point when he writes, “the material out of which a work of art is composed belongs to the common world rather than to the self, and yet there is self-expression in art because the self assimilates that material in a distinctive way … The material expressed cannot be private … But the manner of saying it is individual” (Dewey 1994: 212). What is distinctive about street art is, writes Irvine (2012), its direct engagement with the city. He explains, “The artists and the works presuppose a dialogic relationship, a necessary entailment, with the material and symbolic world of the city” (Irvine 2012: 10). It is this very dialogue that Shrestha sought to make explicit when he initiated his street art project. At the time of starting our street art project, I was also annoyed by the advertisement banners and hoarding boards that cluttered the urban space. I could see that this indiscriminate onslaught of commercial and vested political messages/information in the public spaces was making people visually insensitive and uncritical in their thinking. I wanted people to think about current issues critically and not take things for granted. To that end, we believed no other medium can reach out to the masses as effectively as street art.7

6  Excerpt from the interview with Kailash Shrestha conducted in Kathmandu, 10 July 2017. 7  Excerpt from the interview with Kailash Shrestha conducted in Kathmandu, 10 July 2017.

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The intentionality of the street artist aiming to break the status quo is out-and-out political. However, we should not lose sight of the question of aesthetics here. For many, the political edge in art comes at the expense of aesthetics as if both cannot co-exist. This line of thinking comes from a view on “art as a second reality alongside the world in which we live day to day, rather than as one of the powerful social instruments for the creation and maintenance of the world in which we live” (Donald Preziosi quoted in Turner and Webb 2016: 16). Kemal and Glaskell (2000) note that politics, aesthetics and arts could co-exist together in a meaningful relationship. This is also how most street artists in particular would like to view their works. Street artists in Nepal aspire for aesthetic depiction of their ideas on the city walls and thereby speak to the masses. Following Irvine (2012), one may say that street art ‘de-aestheticizes’ ‘high art’ and meanwhile ‘aestheticizes’ the hitherto non-art spaces like the city walls. This itself makes street art political in nature. Though individuality is not overlooked in street art, many street art works in Nepal have been projects where different artists came together and worked out their ideas in a team before translating them into visuals on the city walls. Artudio’s I’M YOU project led by Shrestha was a case in point. Under this project, they painted man, objects, human apparition with the words ‘I’M YOU’ in different parts of the city to urge people to think critically and not take anything for granted. They basically wanted to convey to the people that they all were connected and shared enough common ground to make collective actions. In one of their notable art works under the project, they painted activist Dr. Govinda KC in a sitting posture with the caption I’M YOU. Dr. Govinda KC is a well-known orthopaedic surgeon and a professor of orthopaedics at Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu. The particular artwork in question emerged in the context of Dr. Govinda KC’s repeated hunger strikes since 2012 to protest against the irregularities in the medical sector such as political appointment in national medical institution, exorbitant fees for medical education, undue universities’ affiliation given to private medical schools lacking adequate infrastructures and the unholy nexus between medical mafia and politicians among others.8 By painting 8  A broad summary of Dr. KC’s demands and activism can read at: http://archive.nepalitimes.com/article/from-nepali-press/what-govinda-kc-wants,3869

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Dr. Govinda KC’s portrait on the wall, Artudio artists wanted to communicate to the people that his fight against the irregularities in the medical sector is indeed a public cause that should concern all Nepalis. By lending support to Dr. Govinda KC’s activism instead of sitting on the fence, the artists have taken “on the challenge of the political in their work” (Turner and Webb 2016: 16). Turner and Webb rightly note that “artists make work as responses to the events that have touched them, that have crossed their paths and their consciousness” (Turner and Webb 2016: 17). This is exemplified by the works of street artists in Nepal. The Kolor Kathmandu street art project done by Sattya Media Arts Collective in 2012 is a case in point. Under this collaborative project, the artists painted a little more than 75 murals in all the 75 districts of the country, each of them depicting a unique identity of the place. The artists were critical of the urban consumer culture which, they believed, made Kathmandu not only ugly with all the commercial sign boards but also disconnected the capital city with other largely rural parts of the country. The aim was therefore to connect the capital city with the rural far-flung districts of the country with artistic imagination. The project was also an initiative on the part of the street artists to reclaim public spaces from the political parties which have long been taking liberty with public spaces, virtually monopolizing them with their political slogans. The attempt to reclaim the city by the street artists itself is a political act. Molnár aptly notes, “The real political significance of street art lies not so much in the direct political messages carried in the artwork but in the very practice of street art itself ” (Molnár 2011: 9). As a part of Kolor Kathmandu project, Dibyeshwor Gurung painted a mural in Baluwatar, Kathmandu depicting the transformation of urban landscape due to rapid urbanization in recent times. It depicts the implications of urbanization and rapid migration of Nepali youths outside the country. Gurung in this noted mural wanted to highlight the mess that characterized today’s urban landscape which could only be smoothened if the youths stayed back in the country. As someone who had spent some years abroad, the mural certainly represented fragments of his own experiences of leaving the country. His experiences and observations in the city were not entirely his. They were also shared by people in the city to a varying extent. However, Gurung was of the belief not all people would be receptive to the ideas depicted on the street walls. As street arts are placed in public spaces, they attract attention of people from different walks of

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life and some might even take offence. Though Gurung never experienced direct hostility because of his works, he nevertheless remained wary of such a possibility. Aesthetics, according to him, plays an important role to add nuances to the ideas that can be politically blunt. When I want to project something that is politically sensitive or controversial, I make sure I do not translate my ideas explicitly in my works. Some people in the streets can take exception to certain political works and hence, may create obstructions while working. Therefore, one needs to have a nuanced approach in projecting political ideas of potentially controversial nature.9

Artlab, a Kathmandu-based art collective which specializes on street arts, first launched a street art project called ‘Prasad’10 in 2013 which raised the issue of labour migration and brain drain to foreign countries. Under this project, they painted over-sized portraits of national figures in public spaces not only in the capital city but also in other cities like Birjung, Pokhara, Beni, Dharan and Tansen with an aim to inspire the local youths to stay back and contribute to the society as per their capacities. By painting murals of mostly non-political figures, the artists appeared to have avoided touching upon the contemporary political issues. Kiran Maharjan, for one, believed that a street artist needed to have mainly ‘street art aesthetics’. However, Turner and Webb remind us that “whether artists choose to focus on their own aesthetic and maintain a distance from sociopolitical concerns, or engage energetically in current troubles, they are part of the culture, and in presenting a particular set of images and attitudes, will necessarily reflect something about the lived world” (Turner and Webb 2016: 15). By encouraging people not to succumb to the culture of migration through their works, the street artists working under the ‘Prasad’ project are implicitly politicizing what appears as personal. In practical terms, it is impossible to draw a clear boundary between the personal and the political in the realm of street arts. Rather, street art embodies the interplay between the personal and the political (Fig. 9.2). 9  Excerpt from the interview with Dibyeshwor Gurung conducted in Lalitpur, 12 July 2017. 10  ‘Prasad’ is a Nepali term for devotional/religious offering in the form of edibles made to God during religious occasions. It may also be loosely understood as an embodiment of blessing from God.

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Fig. 9.2  Mural by Dibyeshwor Gurung. (Photography by Binit Gurung)

The Local and the Global: The Production and Consumption of Street Arts Street artists in Nepal have not only represented the local issues and themes pertinent to the everyday life of the people in their surroundings but they have also raised issues of global concerns which may have direct or indirect impact on the lives of the people at the local level. The depiction of urbanization, depletion of environment and haphazard pursuit of development among others are themes of global significance and relevance which the Nepali street artists have depicted on the city walls. The street artists may draw on ideas and styles originating in other parts of the world but all their imports are tempered by local experiences and concerns. The colours I’m using are not produced here, the paint brushes were imported from some other country, the techniques and styles were invented elsewhere too. If the use of foreign materials make an art less Nepali or non-­ Nepali, there cannot be a truly Nepali art in today’s interconnected world …

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I was inspired by not only by foreigners and their works but also by my own tradition and religious murals of the past. Besides, I was very much influenced by our own philosophical movement like Thaha Movement.11

The Nepali term ‘Thaha’ refers to a state of ‘knowing’. The Thaha movement led by Rup Chandra Bista (1934–1999), in the second half of the twentieth-century Nepal, emphasized on the need to develop criticality in perception and thinking. To that end, Bista experimented with new ideas and approaches while assuming several roles in his life as a teacher, a local administrator and a political activist among others (Baral 2014). As a teacher, he experimented with initiatives like labour-based education, informal education and education for girls in his community (Ibid. 2014). As a VDC chairperson, he established development-oriented institutions like Palung Bikas Samiti, Bikas Ghar and Bikas Bari (Ibid. 2014). As a political activist, he practised and advocated for a people-centred politics under the influence of communism (Ibid. 2014). Bista mainly encouraged people to cultivate critical awareness and knowledge about one’s milieu as a means to achieve social justice and development. Shrestha from Artudio believed that art can help develop this criticality as advocated by Bista. Similar observation has been made by Papastergiadis when he writes, “the critical work of art is related to its ability to expand the contours of perception and experience” (2010: 19). The expansion of perception, experience and thinking is also aided by the globalizing forces which have spared no region in today’s times. Globalization has both supporters and detractors (Kellner 2012). However, it would be erroneous to characterize globalization with broad brushstrokes typical to each camp. While globalization transforms the local culture or practices to an extent owing to the influx of new ideas and practices from elsewhere, globalization is still not a juggernaut that destroys the local culture and tradition completely. Rather, all local cultures are adept at picking up elements from outside culture without posing threat to their own tradition. Nepali street artists capitalize on globalization while being critical to it. Their works are informed by both the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ perspectives. The spread of Internet and wireless technology around the world has facilitated interactive communication in real time. This has allowed street

11  Excerpt from the interview with Kailash Shrestha conducted in Kathmandu, 10 July 2017.

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artists in one part of the world to get in touch with fellow artists in other parts of the world and be abreast of each other’s latest works. Many street artists travel to different cities around the world and work independently or in collaboration with the local artists. Italian street artist Riccardo Ten Colombo, for example, collaborated with Sattya Media Arts Collective in the aftermath of the great earthquake of 2015 to do a street art project in Kathmandu. Together, they painted coloured equilateral triangles, as a symbol of strength and resilience, on the walls of those structures destroyed by the earthquake. Similarly, French visual artist Julien de Casabianca’s Outings Project launched in 2014 brought him to Kathmandu after the earthquake. The Outings Project is driven by the idea that the arts confined to the museum spaces should be made available for the wider audience. To that end, Casabianca employs street art and has brought images out of the local museums to public spaces in various cities of the world. Considering the loss suffered by people of Nepal due to the recent earthquake and people’s unshaken faith on god, Casabianca pasted a large image of Mahākāla, an old painting of a deity, to the side of the building where Artudio is housed. Casabianca believed that the deity could be a source of hope and courage to some onlookers (Fig. 9.3). An example of similar exchange in the South Asian region is the collaboration between Indian street artist Shilo Shiv Suleman and Pakistani women’s rights activist Nida Mustaq in 2015 to work on Fearless Pakistan project which took them to cities like Karachi, Rawalpindhi and Lahore in Pakistan. At a time when the issue of women’s security in public and private spaces was being discussed in India and Pakistan, they wanted to make murals with the theme of fearlessness depicting the stories and experiences of Pakistani women. To that end, they organized interactive workshops for the local women and engaged the latter thoroughly in the process of making murals in different cities. In all these instances, we could see that the ‘local’ figures prominently in every street art project even when the artist in question is a foreigner. Irvine rightly notes, “A street work can be an intervention, a collaboration, a commentary, a dialogic critique, an individual or collective manifesto … Whatever the medium and motives of the work, the city is the assumed interlocutor, framework, and essential precondition for making the artwork work” (Irvine 2012: 3). The works of foreign street artists have not always gone down well. There have been instances when the visiting artists were not sufficiently sensitive to the local context or worse, paid no attention to the historical and religious significance of the local structures. One such instance was

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Fig. 9.3  Mural by Julien de Casabianca. (Photography by Binit Gurung)

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when Franco-British street artist Seb Toussaint and French photographer Spag came to Nepal with ‘Share the Word’ project to work in the slum located on the banks of the Bagmati river at Teku in Kathmandu (Thapa 2014). Though Toussaint’s initial plan was to paint in the slum by engaging the slum dwellers, he wrapped up his project by painting the facade of a nearby nineteenth-century Shiva temple in multiple colours (Ibid. 2014). This triggered an uproar in the art community in Nepal which particularly put the Nepali street art artists in a tight spot raising ethical questions around the practice of street art for the first time in the country. Recalling this incident, Shrestha criticized Toussaint for his insensitivity and the younger Nepali street artists in particular for not having a sense of history. Shrestha gave premium to a proper sense of history and tradition in street art. His I’M YOU project was motivated by the same belief where he wanted to talk about local identity in a global context. We often talk against imitating other culture but then, we forget our own identity and tradition. Our education system is shallow. Our history is uncritical and we often take it for granted. Art can be a critical way of talking about identity and history. For example, we painted Karuwa12 in the streets of Tansen in Palpa district because Palpa is known for its Karuwa but youngsters are not aware of that. We made the intervention to remind people of their local identity without which we lose our unique identity in today’s globalized world.13

Webb (2005) celebrates globalization pointing to its ability to reinvigorate tradition. It is the hallmark of all dynamic cultures to take in ideas from other cultures as much as necessary without threatening their own traditions (Ibid. 2005). However, every tradition is syncretic in the first place (Gellner 1997). In the context of Nepali contemporary art since 1990s, what contemporary artists are doing are not just local, national or global. Their works are rather informed by a mix of ideas, symbols and images drawn from different cultures. Commenting on the emerging novel art forms since 1990s, Bangdel writes, “a new movement towards experimentation, social engagement, and socially-conscious alternative art

12  ‘Karuwa’ is a Nepali term for a type of brass jug. Tansen city of Palpa district is known for its traditional brass jugs. 13  Excerpt from the interview with Kailash Shrestha conducted in Kathmandu, 5 July 2017.

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practices often served as reactionary voices that responded to local issues” (Bangdel 2017: 60). By the late 2000, Nepali street artists, many of whom were trained in art schools in Kathmandu, built upon these developments in the contemporary art scene even while breaking away from it to enter the hitherto non-art extramural spaces. However, it would be naive to assume that people perceive the street arts the way the street artists wanted them to. The street artists, I talked to, shared that they were not much bothered when people understood their works differently. Dibyeshwor would find it amusing whenever people randomly approached him with their interpretations of the mural which he painted at Baluwatar in Kathmandu. This would not have happened, he argued, if the encounter between his art and the people had happened inside a gallery. Maharjan admitted that the artist would lose the ownership of his art once it was there in the public domain. However, he maintained that one needed to have ‘street art aesthetics’ to make it visually appealing and meaningful. Otherwise, the work would be meaningless and perhaps ugly (Fig. 9.4).

Fig. 9.4  Mural by Artlab. (Photography by Binit Gurung)

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If aesthetical value seeks to evaluate arts, aesthetics of street art serves to differentiate between what may be considered the real street art/artists and the lay ones. By stressing that one needs to have a sense of ‘street art aesthetics’ to be a street artist, one can sense an existence of kind of a gate-­ keeping mechanism in place in the street art scene even though street art is theoretically open to anyone who can paint as the public space is owned by no one in particular. For Becker (1982), the question of aesthetics is not some abstract question but it is something that has real consequences in the form of allocation of rewards and opportunities. What rewards and opportunities can a street artist possibly have? There have been cases of street artists cosying up to commercial enterprises in clear contradiction of its anti-commercial spirit. Some street artists in the West like British-artist Banksy and American-artist Shepyard Fairey among others are also ­commercially successful and have been featured by contemporary art galleries and museums. Such contradictions are not lost on street artists. Despite its short history, Nepali street art is clearly growing and seems to be moving gradually towards commercialization. Artlab, which Maharjan is affiliated to, now focuses exclusively on street art and commercial graffiti “due to its high demand in the market”, as Maharjan would say. As more owners of restaurants and hotels in the city are increasingly interested in having their spaces painted with colourful murals and graffiti, offers for commissioned works are no longer difficult to come by. The street artists also work with a variety of NGO/INGOs and embassies based in Kathmandu. While Nepali street artists are aware that the commercial turn in street art can go against the very spirit of street art, they also argue that opportunities for commissioned works are in fact important for them to sustain themselves professionally in the city. They also justify their commercial stints as a way to fund their non-commercial art initiatives. Besides doing some funded projects and commissioned works, Nepali street artists have continued wrestling with the social and political issues. Some street artists not only switch between commercial and non-­ commercial works as and when needed. They also freely traverse across the boundaries between the contemporary gallery scene and the street art scene, thereby blurring the boundaries altogether. There have also been instances of collaboration between the street artists and the government in executing street art projects in South Asia. Street art groups in Delhi like St+Art India Foundation and Delhi Street Art, for instance, have worked with Delhi government agencies to paint on the walls of public institutions/structures. Such co-operative relation-

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ship has obviously contributed towards gradual mainstreaming of the street scene in the city. Wherever the visibility of art is tightly controlled within the walls of institutions, street artists paint surreptitiously in the streets evading the attention of the authorities. In the case of Nepal, the local authorities do not give permission to paint in the public spaces but they do not go about stopping anybody from painting the public spaces either. When private properties are involved, the artists in question often take prior permission with the property owners before painting their walls. However, street arts are ephemeral in nature. They may wear off naturally over time or could be removed by local authorities or property owners any time. The competing political graffiti of the political parties add to the ephemerality of the street art in Nepal. However, the artists also capture images/videos of their artworks and share them in different social media platforms. Art collectives like Artudio, Sattya Media Arts Collective and Artlab regularly archive their street arts in the form of images and videos in their Facebook pages, Instagram, blogs and websites.14 Though several works done by the artists in the past no more have physical presence, people still continue to encounter them in the online media. This has somewhat contained the temporality of street art and has further democratized its consumption.

Conclusion One cannot appreciate the street art scene in Nepal without taking into account the contexts of its emergence. The developments of the contemporary art scene in 1990s in Nepal and elsewhere in South Asia and beyond entailed significant reconfiguration of the very conceptualization of ‘art’. In the case of Sri Lanka, the contemporary art during the period embraced the personal and political sentiments of the artists for the first time ushering in a fresh breath of air in the contemporary art scene in the country. Nepali contemporary art in the 1990s saw the coming of many new art styles and forms like performance art, video art, installation and so forth  Selected works of Artudio can be seen at: http://artudio.net/project/street-art/ Selected works of Sattya Media Arts Collective can be viewed at: https://www.facebook. com/KolorKathmandu/ Selected works of Artlab can be seen at: https://www.facebook.com/artlablife/ Selected works of Dibyeshwor Gurung can be viewed at: https://www.instagram.com/ iamdib/ 14

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which expanded the contours of Nepali contemporary art landscape. The liberalization of the economy, the reinstatement of democracy and the context of globalization provided conducive environment for the contemporary artists to go beyond the established conventions of Nepali art. This soon led to an explicitly political turn in the contemporary Nepali painting in the 2000s. The changes in the contemporary art scene in 1990s paved way for the development of street art scene in Nepal over the following decades. While building upon the developments in the contemporary art culture in the country, young street artists attacked the elitism of the gallery-based contemporary art scene which was exclusive not only to them but also to the ordinary masses who supposedly did not hold the cultural capital to consume art works. Nepali street art received impetus not only from the developments within the contemporary art scene but also from the economic and socio-political contexts of the country, not to mention the trends prevalent in the street art scene beyond its nation-state boundaries. The themes taken up by Nepali artists were not dissimilar with the themes taken up by their counterparts in other parts of South Asia and beyond. Be it Egypt, India or Pakistan, the common thread connecting the street arts in all these places is their conversations with the prevailing social, political and economic issues via the city walls which function as the open canvases. As is apparent, street artists are ever-vigilant members of the society who are abreast of the prevailing social, political and economic issues of the country and beyond. Being a member of society, artists are also located within the larger structures of politics, economy and society. Hence, artistic ideas are not independent of the existing social and material conditions. However, a deterministic reading of arts by reducing them to the social and historical contexts in which they were produced would fail to explain the important role of the individual artists. It is true that individual artists often draw on their personal experiences while making art. However, the personal is always in the process of being shaped by the society. The personal and the social are therefore implicated into each other. One is not subordinated to the other, rather both are mutually inseparable. The street art projects described in this chapter show that the artists were motivated by their belief that that they could make some difference via street art. By taking arts to the public spaces, the street artists are making a political statement in a number of ways. First, the practice of street art is in itself political. Breaking away from the gallery scene, Nepali street artists have introduced arts to the hitherto non-art spaces. To quote

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Papastergiadis, “when art challenges the boundaries by which we understand the aesthetics of the everyday, and combines this experience with a new understanding of connection to our surrounding world, then it could be argued to have expanded the sphere of politics” (Papastergiadis 2010: 19). Second, the contest for visibility in the public spaces with commercial and political interest groups lends street art a political edge. Third, the visuals laced with social and political connotations make street arts political in sentiment because they are aimed to provoke people into thinking. Hence, street art is an art form which embodies the interplay between the personal and the political. This relationship is mediated by the aesthetics of street art which facilitates and constrains the practice of street art. Since communication with the masses is at the heart of any street art initiative, a street art is not an expression of personal ‘troubles’ of the artist but an initiation of a dialogue related to some public ‘issues’ that most people can easily identify with. Instead of passively resigning to the public ‘issues’, in the Millsian sense of the term, they tend to make artistic intervention in the public spaces. While artists cannot possibly change the world through art, they can however employ art to “protest against injustice, war, racism, oppression, human rights abuses, environmental degradation, cultural loss, poverty and all forms of discrimination and exploitation” (Turner and Webb 2016: 16). The agency of the street artists can be located in their intentionality to change the existing state of affairs. As discussed above, Nepali street artists position themselves in their own tradition and culture while appealing to the global discourse. They have engaged with a range of issues like environmental degradation, animal conservation, urban consumerism and so forth which are also the issues of global concern. Even though their works are physically located in a particular time and space, the images of their works pass across the nation-state boundaries freely in the world of Internet which helps to contain the ephemerality of street arts and democratize its consumption. The online archiving and sharing allow street artists based in different parts of the world to give their local arts a global audience. Street art becomes an avenue where the local meets the global mediated by the intentionality and experiences of the artist rooted in a particular time and space. One could safely conclude that the street art scene in Nepal is characterized by the interplay between, on the one hand, the personal and the political and on the other hand, the local and the global. This is quite evident in the street art projects surveyed in this chapter.

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References Alpaslan, Zeynep. 2012. Is Street Art a Crime? An Attempt at Examining Street Art Using Criminology. Advances in Applied Sociology 2 (1): 53–58. Bangdel, Dina. 2017. Post-Earthquake Art Initiatives. In Breaking Views, ed. C. Brosius and S. Maharjun, 50–70. Kathmandu: Himal Books. ———. n.d. Glocalization of Art: A Nepali Context. Kathmandu: Lasanaa Publications. Baral, Roshan Raj. 2014. Experiment with Education, Development and Politics: Interrogating Rup Chandra Bista’s Life. Nepali Journal of Contemporary Studies XIV (1–2): 43–70. Becker, Howard S. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bennett, Tony, et al. 2010. Culture, Class, Distinction. Oxon: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. Sociology in Question. London: Sage Publications. de la Fuente, Eduardo. 2007. The ‘New Sociology of Art’: Putting Art Back into Social Science Approaches to the Arts. Cultural Sociology 1 (3): 409–425. Dewey, John. 1994. Art as Experience. In Art and Its Significance: An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory, ed. S.D.  Ross, 204–220. Albany: State University of New York Press. DiMaggio, Paul J.  1983. The Sociology of Art Comes of Age. Contemporary Sociology 12 (3): 272–274. Gellner, David N. 1997. For Syncretism. The Position of Buddhism in Nepal and Japan Compared. Social Anthropology 5 (3): 277–291. Gleaton, Kristina Marie. 2012. Power to the People: Street Art as an Agency for Change. Master’s Diss., Submitted to Faculty of the Graduate School, University of Minnesota, The US. Gröndahl, Mia. 2012. Revolution Graffiti: Street Art of the New Egypt. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. Irvine, Martin. 2012. The Work on the Street: Street Art and Visual Culture. In The Handbook of Visual Culture, ed. B. Sandywell and I. Heywood, 235–278. London/New York: Berg. Kellner, Douglas. 2012. Theorizing Globalization. New Delhi: Critical Quest. Kemal, Salim, and Ivan Glaskell. 2000. Contesting the Arts: Politics and Aesthetics. In Politics and Aesthetics in the Arts, ed. S.  Kemal and I.  Glaskell, 1–10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kunwar, Niranjan. 2014. Nepali Artists on Socio-political Dimensions on Art, July. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/niranjan-kunwar/nepali-artists-onsociopo_b_5608648.html. Last Accessed on 30 July 2017. Lewison, Cedar. 2008. Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution. London: Tate Publishing. Mills, C. Wright. 2000. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Molnár, Virág. 2011. Street Art and the Contemporary Urban Underground: Social Critique or Coolness as Commodity? https://nuclireflexiu.wikispaces.com/file/ view/molnar_street_art_ces_2011.pdf. Last Accessed on 25 July 2017. Papastergiadis, Nikos. 2010. Spatial Aesthetics, Art, Place, and the Everyday. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Perera, Sasanka. 2011. Artists Remember; Artists Narrate: Memory and Representation in Contemporary Sri Lankan Visual Arts. Colombo: Colombo Institute for the Advanced Study of Society and Culture/Theertha International Artists’ Collective. Sengupta, Urmi. 2011. The Divided City? Squatters’ Struggle for Urban Space in Kathmandu. In Urban Navigations: Politics, Space and the City in South Asia, ed. J.S. Anjaria and C. McFarlane, 105–137. New Delhi: Routledge. Subedi, Abhi. 1995. Nepali Art: Nepali Utopia. Contributions to Nepalese Studies 22 (2): 113–130. Thapa, Rabi. 2014. Whose Art Is It Anyway? http://nepalitimes.com/article/ Nepali-Times-Buzz/krishna-temple-wall-painting-kathmandu,1625. Last Accessed on 16 Nov 2017. Turner, Caroline, and Jen Webb. 2016. Art and Human Rights: Contemporary Asian Contexts. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Uprety, Sanjeev. 2010. Cultural Aesthetics of the Contemporary. Bodhi 4 (1): 100–110. Waclawek, Anna. 2008. From Graffiti to the Street Art Movement: Negotiating Art Worlds, Urban Spaces, and Visual Culture, c. 1970  – 2008. Doctoral Diss., Submitted to The Department of Art History, Concordia University, Canada. Webb, Jen. 2005. Art in a Globalised State. In Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific, ed. C. Turner, 30–43. Canberra: Pandanus Books. Weerasinghe, Jagath. 2005. Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka. In Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific, ed. C. Turner, 180–195. Canberra: Pandanus Books. Wolff, Janet. 1981. The Social Production of Art. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Zangwill, Nick. 2002. Against the Sociology of Art. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 32 (2): 206–218.

CHAPTER 10

Ruptures of Rasheed Araeen in the Politics of Visual Art: Toward a New Art Discourse in Pakistan Amra Ali

The reading of contemporary narratives of art in their broader connection to sociology and anthropology is a welcoming opportunity of discussion within a South Asian context. This understanding of the complexities of narratives would be relevant within a holistic view, inclusive of the local and global contexts in which they have been made, shown, and written about. The ground reality in Pakistan is that the value of art is still predominantly gauged within the dynamics of making and selling of objects in the commercial gallery circuit, and by a close network of buyers. The discursive space that would allow for ideas to develop otherwise exists somewhere in the periphery, and it is not a cohesive base. It is dispersed unevenly, often in its own insularity. This is an engaging time in Pakistan, as writers and artists function within the dynamics of appropriation, misappropriation, and colonial mindset. If there has to be a movement beyond, past the current situation, toward a more critical base, it needs to pull itself outside the insularity and

A. Ali (*) Karachi, Pakistan © The Author(s) 2019 S. Perera, D. N. Pathak (eds.), Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_10

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exclusivity of the gallery circuit, as well as the art academia, which seems to be closely interrelated. It is, therefore, necessary to shift the conversations elsewhere. The aim of this chapter is to discuss two works by Rasheed Araeen1 (1935‑), whose esthetics constitute of their socially productive intervention within a public space and connect to a historical frame. Araeen’s Theory of Nominalism was presented in Karachi, in 2003, and his work, Shamiyaana: Food for Thought, Thought for Change, was installed at Documenta 14, in Athens, in 2017. Araeen’s larger trajectory of subversion and confrontation is well-documented. However, his proposals for land and alternate solutions to potential ecological imbalances and problems of food deprivation and distribution of resources have yet to come under discussion in Pakistan. His esthetics challenges the status quo of inclusive circles, and insists on a broader connection based on an equal access and participation by the public. The nature of Araeen’s collaboration goes beyond its consumption as a commodity or an object of fetish. It locates art within an ethical and social frame, rather than as spectacle or embellishment. Of course, the inherent contradiction may seem to be the recent presence, or canonization of Araeen in the most important art fairs, such as Documenta 14, the Venice Biennale 2017, Frieze Art 2017, Sharjah Biennial 2014, and at least two recent additions of Art Dubai. The projects outlined in his book, Art Beyond Art, Eco-Aesthetics: A Manifesto for the 21st Century, can become significant models for social change, and could cross disciplinary interventions. Araeen raises two significant points that become important in understanding the ethos of his modernity. First, he locates his process of work that evolved over many years as being a multilayered discourse in which he views Third Text, the journal he published, as a collaborative work. Second, the obstacles he saw resided in the “prevailing knowledge or dogmas of the established order” (Araeen 2010a, b: 56). He discussed at length what he saw as the problems perpetuated by “modernism’s historical genealogy” (Araeen 2010a, b: 56). On a note of despondency, which rarely surfaces in his narrative in such a tone, he writes, “My path was thus obstructed not by the narcissism of my own ego, but the self-delusion of a powerful ego which had conquered the world and was still trapped in its dehumanized vision. When I  For more information on Rasheed Araeen, visit: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/ rasheed-araeen-2364 1

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insisted on my own self, defined by my own liberated subjectivity and the freedom of my own imagination, I became invisible. The darkness of (neo-) colonial mist was still there to obscure you” (Araeen 2010a, b: 59). In his book, Art Beyond Art, Eco-Aesthetics: A Manifesto for the 21st Century, Araeen begins his chapter, ‘Return to Baluchistan, Nominalising the Bourgeois Aesthetics’ with a photograph of a dried riverbed with the following caption: “This photograph was taken from a bridge in Balochistan which is about 30 feet high, but during the monsoon flood water flows over the bridge” (Araeen 2010a, b: 68). Baluchistan appears to be the core of Araeen’s modernity, which is also a critique of globalization and contrary to the aspirations, the anti-esthetics of contemporary art and its structural framework of commodification and appropriation. On February 8, 2001, Araeen delivered the first draft of his manifesto, ‘The Art of Resistance: Towards a Concept of Nominalism’ in Karachi.2 It was apparent that the audience, which comprised of artists, writers, and friends of the art community, were unable to understand the relevance of a social project to their making of ‘art’. Araeen’s esthetics was located art outside of the prescribed norms of painting the landscape or even deriving inspiration from it. For example, it was very different from the imagery and its linearity that Sadequain derived from the cactus, during the artist’s stay in Gadani, also in Balochistan in 1957. Artists may have looked beyond the art gallery since then, but the engagement has been cursory, without a visible direction or discussion. It is still predominantly about the making and acquisition of objects (and hence remains for and within elitist circles). Araeen’s intervention was more of a form of resistance to global power structures, aimed to connect the artist to the social context. His approach was neither local nor global, but cosmopolitan. That in itself was a problem for those receiving the idea of this work, because there was no prior example of such a collaboration within the art community. There was a deafening silence during and after Araeen’s talk, making it clear of its irrelevance to that particular context. The lack of discussion was 2  See Amra Ali, ‘Stranger at Home’, Dawn, February 18, 2003. This article was originally titled, ‘Dr. Rasheed Araeen: A Profile and Some Thoughts on His Art of Resistance’, and was changed by the editors. This was published a few weeks after Araeen’s presentation in 2001, hosted by Anwar Rammal at Suman House. However, in his book, Araeen has noted it being presented in December 2001. The final version of ‘Nominalism’ was published in Third Text in December 2002 (issue 61), after it was presented in London in April 2002.

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perhaps also due to the inaccessibility of Araeen’s wording, language, and historical references. He rejected Western models of land and conceptual art on their colonial eye: fetish, and romanticized notions of foreign lands. The real problem seemed to be the lack of connection of Pakistani artists and to these issues. In retrospect, it is apparent that there was no historical context within Pakistan to base this work on, except, of course, if the artist extended his role to do social work and not as an artistic exercise. Araeen’s project itself was a proposal for a land art project looking at alternative solutions to cultivating land in Baluchistan, to be self-sustained by the local people. He proposed using local infrastructure and rules, and for its full ownership to be transferred from the artist to the community upon completion. Araeen’s emphasis was on “collective farming by people themselves” that “would increase the efficiency of land”. This was a particularly significant critique of the local governments that invited multinationals for developmental projects, dislocating, dislodging, and disrupting the natural social order, environmental balance, and integrity of the land and its connection to its inhabitants. He wrote: “It is with the imaginative power of art that I want to move forward; with a proposition that may lead to a new kind of thinking and produce a new kind of critical practice, out of which may also emerge a revolutionary concept of art based on the nominalism of everyday work carried out by people themselves or their material production” (Araeen 2010a, b: 65). His practical solutions responded to the exploitation of natural resources faced by domination. Araeen was aware of the idealism of his project, and the high amount of funding that would be required (Ali 2003). But his resilience seems to have become stronger and more determined, especially in the face of obstacles. In a recent exchange of email conversations, he expressed the need to (re)initiate the idea of this project.3 In Art Beyond Art, he discussed the multilayered and reconnected aspects of his directional change from his confrontational works of the 1970s, done in the UK, such as Paki Bastard (Portrait of the Artist as a Black Person), in 1977. In this performative work, he was “blinded by dark glasses, gagged, holding a broom or mop or handle to suggest labor as a cleaner” (Araeen 1979: 120). Araeen’s subjectivity was always rooted within a humanist perspective that disregarded the material gain of art making; his subversion later turned into collaborations and collectives that 3

 Email communication between the author and Rasheed Araeen, January 2018.

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were indeed far, beyond Art. He writes about his shift to ‘eco-aesthetics’ especially in the context of the Third World, whose resources have continued to be depleted by land grabbing and global ambitions. He was ­looking desperately towards establishing an art discourse that would shift away from the neocolonial mindsets of capitalist agendas; the discourse that had “become trapped in a self-serving decadent paradigm of the worst kind” (Araeen 2010a, b: 64–65). Araeen differentiated his project from the conceptual artists of the 1960s, seeing their work as the blunders of “bourgeois altruism” (Araeen 2010a, b: 69). He further wrote in the manifesto, “their self-centered discourse offered a fantasy, which they could manipulate conceptually and present as a work of art. If a land appeared, particularly through the camera’s eye, as a wilderness, it was only because they did not want to see or allow their eyes to penetrate beyond what they wanted to see/ the people who inhabited the land either disappeared from their gaze or became object” (Araeen 2010a, b: 62). He was referring here to Richard Long’s collection of specimens of objects such as rocks and earth from distant walks and showcasing in museums. However, he lauded the “transformational function of [Joseph Bouys’] art project” of planting 7000 Oak trees in Kassel for Documenta 7 in 1982 (Araeen 2010a, b: 71). He discussed the example of Guatemala and Honduras where farmers discovered the ‘magic bean’ called Mucuna. The use of this bean in cultivation raised the quality of maze to the extent that “erosions of land halted, destruction of the rainforest curtailed, and migration to cities reversed” (Araeen 2010a, b: 70). In the prelude to his solutions of land problems in Baluchistan, he described the context in which the work was conceived. He was very direct in his attack on early modernists in Pakistan: of ‘Sadequain’s narcissism’ and ‘Chughtai’s Orientalism’; a ‘modernity imported on the “pictorialism of Picasso, Klee, Chagall, Matisse”’, as he called it (Araeen 2010a, b: 58). This was another important subtext in Araeen’s narrative, for his work has not been studied or contextualized within the art historical narratives of modernity in Pakistan. This is an unresolved subject, and there are sensitive links, especially as we are now studying the earliest connections of the artist to land and water, and the period before 1964. Araeen’s sensitivity to the environment and vision of nature, particularly to land, earth, and water, in pursuit of a more equitable balance with nature and the distribution of resources in the interest of the collective, seemed to have been shaped by childhood experiences.

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This land of Baluchistan has been of special significance to Araeen, where he has dreamed of building a dam to store water for cultivation. His earliest connection to water was of his living in Sonmiani, a sea-side town in the southeast of Baluchistan, near Karachi. He remembers it as a beautiful town, where he lived from his birth in 1935 till 1944 (Araeen 2010a, b: 14). As he narrates, “my father sent us (my mother, a brother and sisters) to our parental villages regularly every two years, and in 1941–2, we lived in these villages. Just around my grandmother’s hawaili (family home) was a rahat (Persian wheel) to draw water from the well. The wheel, which was connected to the mechanism comprising a number of buckets which went down the well and came up full of water, was moved by two bullocks who went around a circle. I was fascinated, particularly by the up-and-down movement of the buckets, the water they brought up and released in the turf. One day when there was nobody to sit on the seat behind the bullocks, they put me on the seat, and I had to run the whole thing. There are many other things from my childhood which have played a role in my aesthetic sensibility”4 (Ali 2003). As a young boy in Karachi, he would try to escape the cruelty of the teacher, would often skip classes, and with three or four fellow students, he would wander around the city, often going to the Netty-Jetty Bridge of Karachi harbor where he says that he would sit for hours looking at the water. It seems that the memory of this experience in Karachi was also connected to his experience from his East London studio at St. Katherine’s Docks, which were large abandoned warehouses surrounded by water. There was a small wooden bridge over the water that he crossed every day that triggered his imagination, resulting in the Chakra Series of works: ‘It was the memory of this experience which perhaps went into my perception of a landscape with water in Baluchistan’ (Ali 2003). Two of his sisters still live in Uthal, a town about 100 kilometers from Karachi. “I would probably go and visit them when I’m in Karachi. I didn’t live in Uthal, but visited it in the summers of 1949 and 1959 and

 Rasheed Araeen revisited the Netty-Jetty Bridge with this author on the eve of his retrospective, Homecoming, in Karachi, in 2014. The Netty-Jetty Bridge has now become a food street. This subtext refers to Araeen being part of the history of Karachi, especially his link to the 1950s–1960s. 4

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spent two months there with my family every year. I’ve however many memories of my childhood and boyhood in Baluchistan”.5 Returning to Baluchistan was an important turning point also because perhaps this project was a symbolic gesture of embrace to his roots, a gift and a call for collaboration with unknown participants in the future, who would cultivate the land, and build the infrastructure of housing and amenities; generations who would benefit. The artist would thereby relinquish his ownership of the project. The irony, of course, has been that it remains unrealized to this date, and he writes, “it is better to day dream with a hope for a humane future than allow oneself to be dehumanized… by the greed for money and power”.6

Araeen’s Shamiyaana: Departures and Destinations Newman makes the following observations about the esthetics and structural features of Araeen’s works at the Documenta 14 in 2017 which are centrally implicated in the politics of the works: “Two works by Rasheed Araeen for Documenta 14, 2017 involved participation by the public, incorporating paintings and structures with abstract designs. In both cases, the effect was celebratory and welcoming. For Kassel, he installed a reading room for a complete edition of Third Text under his editorship with the table and chairs made using his module cubes with diagonal braces, thus bringing together his structures, with his path making intervention in the critical discourse of post colonialism and globalization through writing and editing” (Newman 2017: 65). Shamiyaana, Food for Thought, Thought for Change was installed at Kotzia Square in Athens. Locally grown fresh and organic produce from the nearby Greek food market was used by Organization Earth to cook and serve free meals at the Shamiyaana for one hundred days of Documenta 14. Shamiyaana is the ceremonial cloth tent, usually supported by bamboo poles on the sides, commonly used for the gathering of family, neighbors, and friends in Pakistan, to celebrate a marriage or any significant milestone of a family that includes the cooking in outdoor tamboos (large  My email communication with Araeen, February 8, 2018. On each visit to Karachi, Araeen visits his sister in Baluchistan and has extensive photographic documentation of the land. 6  The Theory of Nominalism was presented in 2002, Karachi. Araeen’s intervention was neither debated nor entertained in the local art circles, except for an article by this author in Dawn, and Niilofur Farrukh in Newsline magazine. Araeen was always seen as if distanced and removed from the local circles. 5

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cooking ware) and serving meals to the collective. In such gatherings, there is always an informality, inclusive of children, and far and distant relatives, even the poor who happen to pass by. There is discussion on every subject, and almost always on the state of the country and politics and a great bonding of community. Shamiyaanas can pop up overnight or anywhere there is a need by a family, where the road is blocked off and traffic diverted without any notice given or permission taken by the city municipality. It is perhaps because of this kind of engagement that he has grown up with, that has allowed Araeen to conceive of the Shamiyaana, at Documenta. From the readings of it, it seems that it happened very organically. It also made one reflect on the bridge that Araeen created effortlessly between the private and public, the local and global.7 In Athens, “120 people were served food daily. After the first few days of people fighting to get in, they were asked to get color coded coupons. Some people became the regulars and others would come again after the first visit. Araeen did not intervene to stop or alter the natural gathering of people, who eventually became a community, even beyond the work and Documenta 14. [He] wanted people to spend at least a set time frame eating and exchanging conversations”.8 Kotzia Square, which had been run down and abandoned for many years, was revived by immigrant families, with a food market started nearby, in the 1980s. Marina Fokidis, one of the curators at Documenta 14 in Athens, who saw the project through, remarked on the fragility and criticality of the work. It was installed right in front of the municipality 7  Sometimes the Kanaat (white tent), as the Shamiyaana is also called, is used for seating mourners outside the house for the reciting the Quran, and sharing grief, that concludes with a communal meal. These are culturally expected norms, and wherever these are installed, the neighborhood manages its own traffic diversions in an informal manner and comes together. The Shamiyaana pattern referenced by Araeen is historically significant and also refers to his own structural work, such as Sharbati, and to his recent paintings of flat color bands, with interconnected geometric designs that were first shown in the exhibition, Homecoming, 2014–2015. So, there is a meeting of these histories, in the most unusual intervention in Athens. 8  Excerpt from Skype conversation between this author and Marina Fokidis (January 2018). Fokidis is one of the curators who witnessed the process of the Shamiyaana project at Documenta 14, 2107. She is a curator and writer based in Athens, founding and artistic director of Kunsthalle Athena, and founding and editorial director of the biannual arts and culture publication, South as a State of Mind. Her interviews around the connection of Athens can be seen online at http://myartguides.com/posts/interviews/documenta-14-aninterview-with-marina-fokidis/

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building and the Greek National Bank on the other side, making visible the precarious economic condition of Greece, its growing number of homeless: “Rasheed Araeen approached Athens and its perplexity in the most sensitive way. He seemed to be able to hear the city’s voice, its needs, and its possibilities. His Shamiyaana, in its four colors and patterns, as it stood critically in front of the town of Athens, invited a multiplicity of subjectivities to mingle freely-beyond restrictions caused by a set of factors and the configurations of power as we know them. Rasheed probably thought that time, interaction and the return of lost dignity is what people needed to co-exist in profound ways. The food was cooked fresh and served for over three months in the wounded space of Athens. And offered a possibility for this special meeting-between different constituencies, lonely souls, people carrying different urgencies, that do not necessarily meet. The experiment worked. By approaching the city, in its platonic sense, the polis- not as a mere site but as a body of fluctuating citizens, Araeen brought back, the warmth and security of the broken domesticity, that used to be an essential force in the location-and an alternative to the western idea of the welfare state. Shamiyaana was a gesture that continues beyond time and space as was embodied by all its participants, and beyond art of course”, deliberates Marina Fokidis.9 Fokidis is quoted on the curatorial vision on the Documenta 14 website: “In Szymczyk’s words, Documenta 14 might become a lesson in breaching the normative economic, political, and geographic divisions, and attempting a shared experience mediated by culture and, more specifically, the contemporary art exhibition. Athens stands metonymically for that ‘rest’ of the world that has not become (and could not yet become) a part of Documenta 14 in a proper sense, due to lacking privileges”.10 What Fokidis is referring to, in quoting Szymczyk, the curator, is the essence of Araeen’s narrative. His ‘idea’ of finding resonance in the context of Athens and the single-most significant art exhibition in Europe seems to be an important lesson in the curatorial dynamics of the world art exhibition, as it continues to play an important role in influencing Biennales all over the world. The Shamiyaana, sitting apart from the rest of the exhibition, seeks inclusion on its own terms of representation. The magnitude of Araeen’s  This author’s email communication with Marina Fokidis, February 9, 2018.  http://myar tguides.com/posts/inter views/documenta-14-an-inter viewwith-marina-fokidis/ 9

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gesture at Athens stems from a critique of the larger structures in society, of which art is a part. We see Araeen reinventing himself as he absolves himself the rights over his art, toward a space of sharing. This rupture within the context of Documenta 14 can become a strong anchor in influencing and determining the direction of future exhibitions especially in the context of South East Asia. There can be lessons and immense possibilities in reinventing the biennial regionally. Karachi held its first biennial, KB 17, in October‑November 2017. The connections to the city that KB seeks can alter the dynamics of art and esthetics, without appropriating Western models. As an example, the cultivation of land on a long-term/ self-help basis, or even more urgently, the crisis of untreated solid and toxic waste being dumped into the Arabian Sea can be a focal point of artistic and social collaboration. Those benefitting from and participating at the Shamiyaana did so regardless of their interest, knowledge, or previous connection to Araeen. The work cut across nationalistic and cultural boundaries. Divisions of art/ non-art would seem like irrelevant clichés, as the artist inverts the nature of Biennale, which still has the semblance of a fair and spectacle. Imagining the Shamiyaana in Karachi, for example, would bring a totally different esthetics than Athens. This can be a curatorial challenge worth exploring, if we are to allow ourselves to listen to the voices from around us, amidst us. Katerina Lygkoni, an invigilator at the Shamiyaana at Kotzia, narrated her experiences of peoples’ exchanges of giving and sharing. One lady, she said, would come every day and tell people not to waste food. She would bring tissues and extra food just in case they were needed. “Irini, one of the lady cooks at Shamiyaana, (you, [Rasheed] had met her), married her husband (both at Organization Earth) at a civil wedding (a) few days ago. I saw photos at Facebook. And I was happy to see that one of the people who signed for it and escorted them was Nike, one of the invigilators at Kotzia Square! They met under Shamiyanna of course”, wrote Katerina in one of the email exchanges between this writer and Rasheed Araeen. She wrote of the ways people who had met there kept the connection with visiting each other in different cities, or through phone messages, and so on.11 11  This author’s communication with Katherina and Rasheed Araeen in December 2017 and January 2018. Katerina Araeen relates many conversations and exchanges at Shamiyaana. These are some of the links in the media on Shamiyaana: https://www.hna.de/kultur/ documenta/nur-5-62-statt-9-euro-aerger-um-documenta-loehne-in-athen-8448758.html, photos.app.goo.gl, https://photos.app.goo.gl/xLHJpluRU0baiZjv1

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The testimonials from Kotzia gave a similar sense of bonding of community. Marina stresses that this was meant to be a place for genuine exchange, and not a spectacle, or a charity. With a huge budget that was to feed simple and fresh quality meals for up to a 120 people per day, each person, many of them immigrants, was treated equally. She gave the example of participants who wanted to give back, such as a person who took permission to start free lessons on language and teach hundred words of Greek to visitors at the Shamiyaana.12 The participatory nature of the work weaves beautifully the intricacies, structure, and ethos of Araeen’s esthetics. His architectural drawings of the 1970s on grid formations, colorful diagonals in structural works in wood such as Sharbati (1973–2013), and his large paintings Ibn Sina, Al Ghazali, Al Faraabi, Al Kindi (2012), executed in Karachi, in the limitless possibilities of color formations of interconnected diagonals and grids; most importantly, Shamiyaana, as ‘structure’ specific to Araeen, reflects a space that holds as a space for forging human bonds; his island of resilience, always clearly separated from the establishment. On a more personal note, it resonates with the warmth and humbleness of his own link to family. In the family home that he designed and got built in the 1960s in Karachi, the rooms were structured in keeping with the needs of his family members, him being the eldest son who took care of them after his father’s death. This writer has visited Araeen in his Nazimabad home since 2001, and on each visit felt this to be the core, his earliest ‘structure’. This was the second house designed by him in Karachi, also for the family. As you approach it, turning into the lane where the studio of Ansari Photographer has stood for decades, you see rows of grills on windows and gates. The grills in linear geometric patterns, designed by Araeen at the time of construction of the house resonate in his earliest works in black ink, and the later structural work in grid formations. It is at these moments one becomes aware that there appears no separation between the engineer and his creativity that responds to his social context. The structure holds the family, the history, and its bonds. Shamiyaana seems to evoke a similar sense of bonding, as Marina Fokidis relates about the Greek culture of close family ties. At Documenta 14, Araeen’s Shamiyaana sits outside the frame of ‘art’, literally on the street, where the discussion seems really about forging  Marina Fokidis. Op.cit.

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bonds between people of all races and social backgrounds, free from the exchange of money. The universality of Araeen’s vision and his insistence on de-commodifying esthetics becomes a critique on the power politics and insularity of contemporary and historical narratives in art. It insists on locating art outside of the production of commodities for Western art markets, or new global markets elsewhere. Araeen has, though not in published writing, but on different occasions, has conveyed his rejection of the new miniaturists of the National College of Arts, Lahore, and more specifically of work that has found inroads to new markets in the West. The directions in these works no doubt created and sought market approval/patronage of Western museums as their prime audience. Ironically, Araeen has shown almost exclusively in the West through the mid-1960s till the present, so this is the inherent contradiction in his narrative. Having said that, one is also aware of his subversion of racist and colonial biases of Modernity in the West. He continues to contest established norms. Always the outsider, Araeen remains at home, in a place between the east and the west, between art and non-art. It is a difficult situation to be in, and there are fewer models available that would support the understanding of his innovation and dissent. On the occasion of Homecoming, he remarked about the difficulty of being understood in Europe and Pakistan in a holistic manner. It seems that there are different aspect of his work crossing some 60 years, from his earliest interest in art, and his subsequent migration to the UK, where he approached the three dimensional as a non-artist/engineer. How one is to connect this long sojourn into a whole is a daunting task, especially as the study of modernity is itself an issue to be read in its interface with the artistic developments on the ground. So, reading Araeen is a problem; he poses difficult questions to the history and values of art. Araeen recounts the aspect of collective sharing of food with an earlier work. In 1978, at his parents’ house in Karachi, Araeen and his brother Majeed slaughtered a goat, the meat of which was cooked at home and shared by the family. Muslim families follow this tradition to commemorate Prophet Abraham’s sacrifice of the lamb in lieu of his son Prophet Ismail. He narrates the feeding and taking care of the male goat at home until its sacrifice. The meat is then distributed to relatives, and the needy. One part is eaten by the family as gratitude. This was photographed by Araeen’s sisters Najma and Nasreen. The documentation became the

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work, I Love It; It Loves I (shown at Pentonville Gallery in London, 1983), which is also a reference to Joseph Buoys’ I Love America; It Loves Me.13 The wide span of his career is punctuated with complexities of different cultural and historical contexts. In 1975–1976, he narrates cooking regularly for the Sunday events at Artists for Democracy (AFD) in London. He writes: “This group was founded by a group of artists and led by David Medalla; they were involved in working class struggles in the early 70s, and then turned to art activities in support of antiracist and anti-­imperialist struggles worldwide. After successfully organizing an art festival against the brutality of Pinochet’s military regime in Chile, at the Royal College of Art in 1974, they established a squat for events, meetings …I joined the collective on the invitation of Medalla, and held my first exhibition there. AFD had no money and the Sunday gatherings needed some kind of refreshment. So, I decided to cook food. People would bring their own drinks and I provided ‘curry n’ rice’ for a small sum of money”.14

Reception and Curatorial Critique: Ways of Reading Art In Pakistan, Araeen has been generally viewed, often from a distance, as solving someone else’s problem. He has, however, presented many important works, such as his Theory of Nominalism (2001–2003), and delivered lectures (such as the key note speaker at the AICA conference in 2004), in Karachi. His most important works, such as his famous cycle tire burning on a walk home from college, and recognizing the round rim as his first ‘sculpture’ (1959), took place in Karachi. This solitary walk was recently recreated in Karachi (2015–2016) and its documentation has been part of the work at Araeen’s retrospective at the Van Abe Museum, Holland (2017–2018). His Dancing Bodies, from the Hoolahoop Series of drawings in pastel and ink (1959–1962), were done after the artist was mesmerized by the movement of the hoola-hoop when he saw some children doing it as he sat in the gardens at Frere Hall, in Karachi. His iconic 13   Rasheed Araeen, Notes on Shamiyaana for Documenta. Email correspondence, December 2017. 14   Rasheed Araeen, Notes on Shamiyaana for Documenta. Email correspondence, December 2017.

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Disk throwing performance in the 1970s, at the Jheel Park in Karachi, is remembered by many senior artists who witnessed it. Some of the photos from the second disk throwing performance at St. Catherine’s docks a few years later were exhibited at Homecoming, yet there was no question, no query, no investigation on the nature and purpose of this performative work, either in the reviews or panel discussion held along the show. Araeen, in his own writing, speaks about the freedom of the idea to travel, in his own words, ‘towards infinity’. The disks symbolic of the (his) ‘idea’ were released in the water in a performance in a public space which ordinary people could witness, hence making it a collective collaboration. They were then received in London and then Paris in similar performances. We see Araeen seeking audiences across the globe, oblivious of nationalistic or cultural boundaries, in many such conciliatory gestures. But the reception to his ideas has been ignored, at best. One can safely conclude that this was due to a lack of interest in any work that looked outside the boundaries of depiction through image making. The earlier artists set certain conventions of patronage that remained within a tightly guarded space. For example, Bashir Mirza was supported by ZA Bhutto and despite his early Lonely Girl Series, he made several large-scale portraits of the Bhutto family onboard. Ismail Gulgee, as Araeen recounts in an unpublished paper, copied the work of Eleaner Hamilton, an American artist who lived and worked shortly in Karachi, setting up studio at the Metropole Hotel. This is when he stared using acrylic, like her. Besides, Gulgee was also commissioned by the state to make portraits of visiting heads of state, such as the Shah of Iran, Raza Shah Pahalvi among others. Araeen is perhaps the only living artist whose trajectory overlaps with the artists working in the 1950s and 1960s in Karachi. It extends to different forms including performative work, and a vast amount of theoretical critique (Third Text), as well as a curatorial work. He curated, ‘The Other Story: Afro Asian Artists in Post-War Britain’ at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1989. The work of 24 artists included his own as well as the works of Saleem Arif, Sonia Boyce, Frank Bowling, Eddie Chambers, Ayanish Chandra, Avtarjeet Dhanial, Ugo Egonu, Iqbal Geoffrey, Mona Hatoum, Lubaina Himid, Gavin Janties, Balraj Khanna, Li Yuan-chia, Donald Locke, David Medalla, Ronald Moody, Ahmad Parvez, Ivan Peries, Keith Piper, Anwar Jalal Shemza, Kumiko Shimizu, Francis Newton Souza, and Aubrey Williams. These artists were grouped into four sections: ‘In the Citadel of Modernism’; ‘Taking the Bull by the Horns’; ‘Confronting the System’; and ‘Recovering Cultural Metaphors’. Araeen’s

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approach was ahead of its time then, as no other artist of Pakistani origin was willing to speak out, let alone confront the art establishment and the politics of racism in Britain. Araeen curatorial work was necessitated by his discourse, whereas today curating is a specialized area of study and practice. There is a difference between professional ‘curators’ who bring a set of appropriated values in mounting exhibitions, with disregard to the social and artistic context of viewership and exhibition dynamics in Pakistan. These are new systems being established and most certainly geared for new markets in the Middle East and Asia. There is documentation of brochures, press clippings, and art magazines, published in Karachi in 1950s and 1960s that are being studied by this writer. One brochure, which was a form of catalogue of today, lists a painting by Araeen that was sold for (PK)Rs. 300, and works by Chughtai, Zubaida Agha, Jamil Naqsh, all under Rs. 500. The Artists’ Club, Karachi, of which he was a member, took out a magazine called Art & Life. The first issue (Vol. 1, No. 1) was published in March, 1956 and priced at As. (Annas) 8, with an annual subscription of Rs. 5 Its official address was Turab Studios, on Elphinston Street, now Zaibnnissa Street in Saddar. Araeen dealt with the public relations and A.R. Qureshi was the Editor. These histories are significant to the development of the art discourse in Karachi and Pakistan and important documentation of Araeen’s early years. The disconnect to these reflects lack of continuity in relating to the past, because the ‘discourse’ has been established by those who have either been ignorant or selectively censored/altered the facts or both. Araeen launched Third Text Asia, an extension of the journal that he edited in the UK, in Karachi in the early 2000s. One of the subtexts here is that his writing, performance, sculptural, and other works are all part of one narrative, but due to the conventional division of text and image, his work has not been understood holistically. Many issues of the Third Text and other publications that he has edited were on display as well as on sale at his mini retrospective Homecoming, in Karachi (2014–2015), but these texts including Art Beyond Art, which carries his manifestos on Eco-­ Aesthetics was not read as a work of art. This is an inherent problem of reading art, and for which one can naturally address the nature of teaching at the art institutions. In Araeen’s case, there might be disinterest, ignorance, and censorship on the part of the art establishment. Disinterest because his narrative does not offer the glamorous spectacle of contemporary concerns, ignorance because there is little desire to engage within a discursive space, and censorship because his work deconstructs the appro-

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priation of Western models of making and viewing art. At some point, it threatens the power structures that support the influential galleries in Karachi. Incidentally, Karachi happens to be the economic center from where artists from all over the country, and especially from the National College of Arts, Lahore, have launched their careers. At Homecoming (VM Gallery, Karachi), more than a hundred works included ink, pencil, watercolor, oil and early photographs by Araeen done between 1952 and 1963, some being shown for the first time anywhere. Audiences expected more of the iconic work such as ‘Paki Bastard’, or more of the structural work done abroad. There was that subtext of local audiences, especially the gallery going art community, always in awe of something foreign. There was a disconnect between the expectations and informality in which Araeen adapted to the curved and irregular architecture of the VM. A very important curatorial concern at Homecoming for this writer was the choice of its venue. To the disappointment of the elite gallery crowd, Araeen’s retrospective was decided to be held at the VM Gallery that is part of a community center. It is located in the older, less prestigious part of PECHS Society in Bahadurabad in Karachi, whereas all the affluent galleries are located on the ‘other side of the Clifton bridge’.15 While visitors had flown in from Europe and North America for this, the Clifton crowd were visibly inconvenienced to be out of their comfort zone. Araeen also refused to change the existing tube lights or other structural issues while installing the work. He filled the walls with work that was to be ‘read’ in its connect to the past, decided to provide no information in the conventional gallery or museum-labeling pattern. Without any slick effects of lighting, or use of space, Araeen, the post-modernist, was also subverting contemporary concerns/canons; and he was deconstructing himself as someone who had achieved great success in the Western mainstream. The success of it was that it became an antithesis to current curatorial work, which is modeled and appropriated on the frame of accepted Western museum standards. There appear many levels of curatorial subversion, none of which were picked by the art critics who viewed the work. For example, the audience was greeted by Araeen’s earliest water colors of the 1950s and 1960s. At a time when artists have moved beyond the depiction of boats and sails, here was Araeen, showcasing these works after having kept them locked for 60 years. The audience did not know how to 15  The Clifton Bridge has been a mark of social divide in Karachi, separating the more upscale and affluent areas of Clifton and Defense Society from the rest of the city. Incidentally, two of the city’s art colleges are also located on either end of this area.

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read Araeen. As always, his movement was in the opposite direction of the mainstream. The irony that remains, however, is that Araeen has been seen as a ‘diasporic’. It is the very idea of categorizing that has been part of his resistance in the West. The issue of exclusion, and lack of understanding of the complex interface of his narrative, is an unresolved area of Pakistan’s art historical context. Always the outsider, Araeen remains at home, in a place between the east and the west, between art and non-art. His move to first Paris, then London, in 1964 was a break away after being disillusioned with the commercialism and narrow approach to art in the circles in Karachi. At that time, his work was seen as unconventional and disturbing. He wrote, “I showed my work of hula-hoop series at Pak-­ American Centre in 1961, but no one could understand it. The reason for this was the limited understanding of modernism. In Pakistan then – and even now – modernism meant that which could be referred to the already established modernism, in the West and then it’s somewhat second-degree expressions in rest of the world. In my work the audience could not find any reference to any of the work which was already known and recognized”.16 As he notes further, “when I showed my Hyderabad series in 1963 at the Arts Council gallery, I did have more audience and it was well-covered by the press. But I think there was little understanding of its significance. I had no supporter or buyer, and I sold only one small painting. It was a big disappointment because many of my young contemporaries were selling their works (Kohari sold almost his whole exhibition in 1963); it was this situation that made me leave my country and go to Paris”.17 The times, circumstances, and anxieties referred to by Araeen above, are articulated by the art critic, Sultan Ahmed in the brochure for Araeen’s first solo exhibition held at the Arts Council of Pakistan, Karachi, in July 1963: “What is young Rasheed Araeen seeking? Does he feel so suffocated amidst the crass commercial values of Karachi and its philistine pursuits that he desperately yearns for an escape from them? He is a painter on the road to somewhere; but what exactly will that place be neither he or we can say now. A young man who respond forthrightly to his environments cannot be easily predicted when he is at the center of contradictory forces”.18  The author’s email exchange with Araeen, September 18, 2014.  The author’s email exchange with Araeen, September 18, 2014. 18  From Rasheed Araeen’s extensive collection of brochures and documentation of his shows and art writing from the 1950s and 1960s, in his home in Karachi; also in exhibition catalogue of solo exhibition of Rasheed Araeen published by the Arts Council of Pakistan, Karachi, in 1963. 16 17

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Between 1958 and 1959, there began to appear an uncontrollable energy and restlessness, perhaps even anger, with hurried diagonal lines in stark black, watercolor, and black ink; its geometry is extracted from the shapes of boats, was articulated in what may be Araeen’s first abstract work, Boats at Rest, 1958 (part of Boats Towards Abstraction, 1958–1962). Araeen recalled that at one point, the image of boats, no longer in front of him, become abstract shapes. In Floating Boats, 1962, they appeared like migratory birds whose movement is outwards. Apart from Araeen’s own physical displacement to another continent in 1964, this was also metaphorically significant to his modernity, located outside what he saw as the hierarchal formalism of artists such as Anthony Caro, William Tucker, and Philip King. Sultan Ahmed wrote of Araeen’s wind-catchers, painted in one afternoon visit to Hyderabad (Pakistan): “The wind-catchers are not mere wooden structures whose geometrical forms captivate him. They are a world in themselves to him. He sees them as excellent pieces of architecture, as symbols of freedom for the stifled and suffocated, and as men, women and more often as peasants”.19 Homecoming was envisioned to take place at the VM Art Gallery due to the proximity to Araeen’s family home and studio, located in Nazimabad. In 1971, (late) Mohammad Aly Rangoonwala started the Zuleikhabai VM Gany Rangoonwala Community as a vocational center for women as a philanthropist Trust of the Rangoonwala family, and added the gallery in 1987. One of the three galleries of the VM was once a marriage hall and one of them, a verandah, later closed off to accommodate the art. The interaction of people of diverse economic and social background come here for courses in painting, needlework, cooking, and so on, and the Rangoonwala family, headed by their elderly mother, still eat at least one meal weekly with less privileged children of the neighboring communities. It was natural to pay tribute to Araeen in this community space that had an inclusive meeting point of art and the communities who lived in this relatively older part of the city. Tariq Rangoonwala, CEO of the Rangoonwala Trust, honored Araeen by opening and dedicating an entire new gallery wing with his name.

19  Excerpted from the exhibition brochure of Rasheed Araeen’s solo exhibition, published by the Arts Council of Pakistan, Karachi, July 1963.

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It is essential to have a longer and self-reflective exploration to reveal the structural biases of the art establishment in Pakistan. However, the preceding discussion will explain how Araeen has been by and large excluded from these forums. One may see a glaring example of this continuing trend in Araeen’s exclusion at the First Karachi Biennale, held in 2017. It is also ironic that this Biennale that was spread across some 12 public and non-art locations across Karachi, excluded Araeen, who had simultaneously set up his ‘tent’ at Documenta 14, in Athens (2017). It is also ironic that Shamiyaana was based on the social and cultural life and esthetics in Karachi, as a strong link to Araeen’s upbringing in that city. There cannot be a more explicit demonstration and example of his continued exclusion in the Pakistani art establishment than this incident. This subtext is important in reading Araeen, which simultaneously becomes a reading of contemporary art narratives and structures that support or excludes them.

References Aikens, Nick. 2017. Rasheed Araeen: A Retrospective. Zurich: JPR Ringer. Ali, Amra. 2003. Stranger at Home. In Dawn, February 18. ———. 2014. Rasheed Araeen, Homecoming. Karachi: VM Art Gallery. Araeen, Rasheed. 1979. Making Myself Visible. London: Kala Press. ———. 2010a. Art Beyond Art, Eco-Aesthetics: A Manifesto for the 21st Century. London: Third Text Publications. ———. 2010b. Obstacles, Obstacles and More Obstacles: Art Beyond Art, EcoAesthetics: A Manifesto for the 21st Century. London: Third Text Publications. Areen, Rasheed. 2002. The Art of Resistance: Towards a Concept of Nominalism. Third Text 16 (4): 451–466. Newman, Michael. 2017. Equality, Resistance, Hospitality, Abstraction and Universality in the Work of Rasheed Araeen. Catalog Essay, Rasheed Araeen: A Retrospective, 2017.

CHAPTER 11

Collectivism in the Contemporary Sri Lankan Art: The History of an Unusual Case of Artists Anoli Perera

This chapter1 is an attempt to understand the nature of art collectivism through a close exploration of the work of one particular collective run by a group of artists. This is, the Theertha International Artists’ Collective in Sri Lanka in the post 1990s, an epoch that witnessed the radical transformation of much of South Asian art within national contexts, particularly visible in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Through Theertha’s vision and mission that translated into a major constellation of programmes insistently executed for nearly 18  year, the artists’ collective was able to

1  An initial version of this chapter was published under the title, ‘Theertha: A Journey by a Collective of Restless Artists,’ pp. 117–139. In, Pooja Sood, Ed., South Asian Network for the Arts. New Delhi, Dhaka, Colombo and Karachi: Khoj International Artists’ Association, Britto Arts Trust, Theertha International Artists’ Collective, Vasl Artists’ Collective.

A. Perera (*) Colombo, Sri Lanka New Delhi, India © The Author(s) 2019 S. Perera, D. N. Pathak (eds.), Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_11

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establish a particular brand for their art activities within Sri Lanka, and beyond. The intention of this chapter is to explore the socio-political and ideological manoeuvrings and the grounding of the artists within the larger landscape of art, back-grounding the culture and politics of Sri Lanka. Art collectivism has a long and illustrious history within modernism and in postmodern as well as contemporary contexts of art. Such collectivism has emerged within specific contextual and temporal dynamics, sometimes as an appendix of a social movement or as resistance to orthodoxy and, at other times, as a cathartic or an empowerment strategy. The historical trajectories of art across various parts of the world are punctuated and enriched frequently by such collectivisms. Among many, there have been Dadaists, futurists, surrealists, the Fluxus, the California Beats, Guerrilla Girls, to name a few from the Euro-American centres of art. They are well documented and have been global signifiers for anarchic and anti-establishment stances in art, and some of them have also been sources for critical engagement with contemporary society. In order to understand the collectivisms within South Asia, and particularly in Sri Lanka within which the artists have organized themselves for socio-political as well as aesthetic purposes, it is necessary to look beyond their engagements with Euro-American modernism. Also, it is imperative to reason with the artists’ collective in Sri Lanka, beyond the trope of resistance to cultural hegemonies of dominance. For decoding the collective behaviours of artists, there is necessity to create a premise that could be sensitive of the contexts fraught with socio-political constitutions. Describing the context for change within India for Indian artists, Geeta Kapur describes it as “a civil society in huge ferment, a political society whose constituencies are redefining the meaning of democracy and a demographic scale that defies simple theories of hegemony” (quoted in Turner 2005: 3). This can hold true for many of the Asian countries and their artists’ restless need for finding and redefining their own parameters for making their art contemporary. And this is intrinsically connected with the way these nations’ politics and cultures played out in their own turfs as well as outside. For instance, the economic transformations happening at the end of last millennium in India and China, the two largest countries in Asia, as well as elsewhere in the Asia pacific, had their own impact within the region. The socio-cultural and political impacts of such changes together with the newly emergent ideologies de-centred the older centres and challenged the established hegemonies of dominance. As Turner has observed, “the turn of the century has witnessed the beginnings of an

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astonishing alteration in the balance of power towards Asia, militarily as well as economically” (Turner 2005: 1). This transformation signalled “the impending close of five centuries of global domination by first Europe, then the United States” (Turner 2005: 1). At the same time, the initial years of the new millennium facilitated the rethinking of the ways in which world relationships had been fathomed so far, and many of these relationships had to be “transformed by globalisation” and the so-called war on terror (Turner 2005: 1). South Asia in particular had undergone regime changes, economic expansions and restless political environments in most of its constituent national regions, while globalization, consumerism and materialism played into their social fabric bringing in new cultural dynamics to reckon with. As Turner eloquently reasons, “artists can, through their work, reflect the values and aspirations of their own society, and of humanity. While some react with cynicism and even despair, others produce an art of resistance. Over the past decades, many artists in the Asia Pacific region have protested colonialism and neo-colonialism; global environmental degradation; cultural loss; illness due to poverty; sexual exploitation; social and political injustice; war; violence and racism. Their work is in the broad area of social justice” (Turner 2005: 4). The art of 1990s within South Asia and later decades implicitly mirrored the anxieties and the triumphs of the regional as well as global changes referred to earlier. And in this context, a number of artists and art movements in the move towards affecting transformations within the field of art, sometimes facing resistance and reticence from the art establishments at home and sometimes the sustenance for transformative energy of artists, came from sources outside of their home countries.

Post-1990s Sri Lankan Art The 1990s can be seen as a decade that stirred collective energies within the Sri Lankan artists’ community that changed the course of art history in many ways. This was the decade of ‘90s Trend’, an art movement that thoroughly contemporized Sri Lankan art, and impacting the art community which changed the way visual art was thought of, made and consumed. The 90s Trend can also be seen as providing the defining energy that fuelled many attempts of collectivism within Sri Lankan art scene and its ideological positions, and it certainly had much to do with the formation of Theertha, an artist’s collective that supported and propagated experimental and socially critical/interventionist art of the 90s Trend.

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Insightfully, Kapur notes, “once we admit history – over and above art history – as the matrix from which the notion of avantgarde arises, then there are always plural histories in the reckoning” (2005: 57–58). Taking into account Kapur’s words on the avant-garde and the complexity of the 90s Trend, it cannot be understood only within an art historical discourse of Sri Lankan art. To assume the purpose of its evolution as a contestation between formalism and aesthetic structures of the previous art practices or as an anti-art establishment ploy is reductionist. Rather, the 90s Trend and its collectivism reflected a historicism that was rooted deep in Sri Lanka’s socio-political moment of the time. Kapur cautions us further on the Afro/ Asian avant-garde by stating that two events should take place simultaneously for Asian and African avant-garde to come to its own (Kapur 2005). The first of these is a “move that dismantles the hegemonic features of the national culture itself ”, while the second is “a move that dismantles the burdensome aspects of western art, including its programmatic vangardism. That is to say such an avant-garde has to treat the avant-garde principle itself as an institutionalized phenomenon, recognizing the assimilative, therefore sometimes the paralyzing capacity of the (western) museums, galleries, critical apparatus, curators and media” (Kapur 2005: 58). In many ways this holds true for the 90s Trend art and its sense of vangardism. The 90s Trend certainly came out of a situation of political anarchy and social chaos. Sri Lanka was grappling with its own legacy of post-colonial problems. In 1988, a violent youth uprising in Sri Lankan society took hold of the southern part of the country, and long-drawn armed conflict due to ethnic issues terrorized the north and northeast. These dynamics allowed many thinking segments in the country and a number of vocal artists in particular to question the identity, authenticity of national political and cultural practices as well as the legitimacy of and nationhood itself. If there were a sense of stability and assurance of a new national identity for a few decades following Independence in 1948, by the 1990s it was disintegrating irrevocably. Therefore, whatever art collectivism that emerged as an avant-garde was heavily critical about the state and its reflections of national culture, its interpretations of national history, its handling of ideas of nationhood and the way the economy was handled, other than the critical outlook on the existing practices of art formalism which was seen as an introvertive exercise still heavily dependent on modernist art practices introduced by the colonial masters. The new art of the 90s reflected an insistent interest in socio-political narration, witnessing and documenting what artists saw, heard and reacted to. It also treated subjectivity as a casualty of urban myth while it enter-

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tained approaches with a sense of feminist criticality and identity politics. The unbridled globalization of the post-1970s period and its consequences, its bastardized capitalism, extreme consumerism and the emerging youth culture were intense topics for socio-cultural critiques. If the 90s art decentred art from its existing sense of formalism, it did so by the critiquing art formalism’s aloofness or distance from the larger-than-life socio-political narratives circulating at the time. The critique also targeted art formalism for its ‘past bound’ ideological anchoring that refused to recognize the ‘now’ or ‘contemporary moment’ where multi-layered multiple histories collided as a source of credible narratives for artists to work on. Its evolution into the next decade saw a complex set of dynamics at play within the visual art field, popularizing of the idea of ‘alternative’ as the ‘critical other’ to the conventional and established art. Within this, many attempts were made by artists and individuals to support the newly emerging radicalism and corresponding ideologies of contemporary art. This was possible since they sought to establish alternate art spaces, alternate art educational institutions and alternate group efforts. The 90s Trend was thus seen as a serious epistemic break in Sri Lankan visual art history and practice. If one were to locate Theertha in this contemporary art history temporally, then it would be placed at the point where the 90s Trend completed its first phase as a movement, where its primary ideological positions were firmly established and the art of the future—and the new millennium— awaited new interpretations and directions. Theertha thus emerged as an ‘alternative’ to explore possibilities within this new ideology. As such, it was an entity that combined art management, philanthropic entrepreneurism, art activism and art education, all in a combination that supported a highly experimental, critical and out-of-the-box, cross-border germination of art.

Theertha2: A Pilgrimage of Radical Artists Theertha was initiated in 2000 by a congregation of 11 artists, many of whom had spearheaded the 90s art transformation. As such, these individuals and Theertha automatically became the bearers of the 90s art 2  In Sanskrit, Theertha refers to a port to which things come and from where things depart. The group was named Theertha with the notion that it was a place from where ideas would originate and to which ideas and practices can come from elsewhere that might be adopted and localized.

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legacy, with Theertha’s vision invariably holding the same liberating stance of the 90s art that leaned towards the experimental contemporary. The collective worked with a mission to stimulate the art community into engaging with the broader spectrum of creative possibilities that were opened up with the shift in thinking with 90s art. Theertha was also the logical next step in the culmination of activities by many restless artists who were interested in finding ways to deal with their own socio-political dilemmas, the anxieties of taking a different position to that of officially sanctioned art and an urgency to connect with the outside art world. With reference to the stimulus and orientation of the collective, Perera notes of the violent politics that emerged in Sri Lankan politics since the 1970s (Perera 2011: 11). The more specific of these were “the two anti-­ state rebellions launched by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in 1971 and in the late 1980s, and the Tamil separatist rebellion that emerged in the early 1980s which ended in 2009 with the military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)” (Perera 2011: 11). Despite this widespread and institutionalized political violence since the 1970s, “the artists of the 1990s were too young to remember the violence of 1971, even though some artists active in the 1970 such as W. Nayanananda used art as a medium of expression for their experiences and memories as rebels and political prisoners as well as to represent what they thought were the ills of society” (Perera 2011: 11). However, as the art of the 1990s with their pronounced interest in politics dawned, “initial efforts of artists such as Nayanananda were taken to a much more conscious, interventionist, vocal and consistent visual extreme by the new generation of artists who became active at the time” (Perera 2011: 11). There have been number of important moments when radical artists rallied together to demonstrate their stance. Such collectivism can be understood within a larger history of students’ resistance in the Sri Lankan socio-political landscape. As Perera has pointed out above, most 90s artists were too young to remember the early resistance and rebellions by university students such as in 1971 and before. However, the legacy and memory of resistance and protests for social justice were articulated within the universities’ students’ movements. At least since the 1950 and right up to the present, the country’s university system has been an active ground for dissent and rebellion against a number of causes. The majority of the artists affiliated to ideas of collectivism mustered the memories of student movement bringing forth personal experiences, as some of the artists were victims of the state’s violent repressions either as political activists or university students involved in politics, or both (Figs. 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, and 11.4).

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Fig. 11.1  Dinner Table, 2004. Installation by Sanath Kalubadana, an artist who worked with Theertha. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha Archives)

In many ways, the 90s Art Trend and its politics of resistance and collectivism is different from yet another well-known collective movement, the 43 Group’s collectivism. The latter premised upon impetus for ­resistance and change largely in a colonial context, without factoring in the discontents of socio-economic and political conditioning that the students’ movement had propelled. The 43 Group,3 a collective of artists during the 1940s, organized themselves to bring in a modernist ideology as an alternative to the prevailing academic visual art tradition at the time introduced by the British during the British colonial rule in Sri Lanka. They became influential in propagating the modernist aesthetics and corresponding formalism in the following decades up to contemporary times.

3  For a good description of the constructions of the 43 Group read, 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka by Neville Weeraratne. Melbourne: Lantana, 1993.

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Fig. 11.2  History of Histories, 2004. Installation by R. Vasanthini, K.S. Kumutha, K.  Tamilini, S.  Kannan and T.  Shanaathanan in collaboration with people from Jaffna at Aham-Puram exhibition sponsored by Theertha in Jaffna, Northern Sri Lanka. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha Archives)

The artists that were involved in the 43 Group are Lionel Wendt, Justin Daraniyagala, Ivan Peries, George Keyt, Aubrey Collette, Richard Gabriel, L.T.P. Manjusri and Harry Pieres. The idea of resistance in the 43 Group relied on the discontentment of the allegedly contrived art expressions. This is not to say that the 43 Group artists’ engagement in art stemmed only within an environment that eluded politics. The 1940s was a crucial time in the political history of Sri Lanka, a time leading to Independence in 1948, and the anxieties of the freedom struggle were felt within the artists’ community as well as the whole country. Lionel Wendt’s photography and his heavy involvement in the well-known documentary film The Song of Ceylon presents his conscious celebration of what is ‘native’ contrary to the ‘Western’ values circulated. The group was noted for its attempts to renew and revive what is traditional in the arts. Aubrey Collette was well known for his cartoons that articulated political satire at the time.

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Fig. 11.3  The Barrel Man, 2004. Performance by Theertha artist, Bandu Manamperi. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha Archives)

And the George Keyt’s4 transformation from a European lifestyle to one of simple living in the village is one of the critical stances taken by 43 Group artists against the socio-political and cultural environments at the time. Having stated these actions of the 43 Group members, I have to reiterate that the 43 Group’s intervention was mostly about art knowledge and their art was not about a critique of a socio-political burden or its economic reality. 4  For a substantial reading on the life, times and contributions of George Keyt read, Buddha to Krishna: Life and Times of George Keyt by Yashodhara Dalmia. London: Routledge, 2017.

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Fig. 11.4  Snakes and Mikes, 2007. Painting by Theertha artist, Jagath Weerasinghe. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha Archives)

As such I would like to argue, the 90s Art and the subsequent collectivism resulting in group formations such as Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts and Theertha has its genealogy in the student resistance and their political struggles in Sri Lanka. Both were alternatives to what were in place. Vibhavi initiated in 1992 concentrated on teaching, providing an alternate forum for teaching from what was offered by the state-controlled Institute of Aesthetic studies, which later became the University of the Visual and Performing Arts. Theertha on the other hand focused on many more activities including providing forums for experimental and collaborative art-making, exhibition spaces of critical art, artists’ travels in South Asia and beyond, training of art teachers, publishing and so on. Many of the key leaders in both organizations, and particularly of Theertha, had an intimate relationship with university-based politics briefly referred to above. One of the main proponents of the 90s art as well as a founding member of Theertha, Jagath Weerasinghe’s seminal exhibition Anxiety (1992) illustrated his grappling with social injustice in the background of the violent 1983 inter-ethnic violence. The exhibition illustrated the divided nation along ethnic lines (Tamil and Sinhala). Himself a student leader

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during his university years, victimized by the state-sponsored violence, Jagath Weerasinghe grew up in a background with a Marxist orientation. His father was an ardent Marxist and trade unionist. Another 90s artist, Chandraguptha Thenuwara, had his advanced art education in the then Soviet Union. He brought in its socialist nuances to his art activism within the art education programme he initiated with the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts he established. Well known for his series of work, ‘Barralism’, he cultivated an artistic perspective on the war and its consequences on a nation’s landscape. Commenting on Thenuwara’s work, Perera writes, “he has identified his entire discourse as ‘barrelism’, which has transformed the image of an ordinary empty barrel into a series of artworks through paintings and installations imbued with political meanings directly linked to the political violence of the immediate past as well as the uncertainties of the present”, which “probed contemporary Sri Lankan politics” (2011: 65). As an avid activist against the war, he played crucial role as an artist and activist for human rights. Although the initial ideas and energy for 90s Trend came from individuals who graduated from the Institute of Aesthetic Studies, its archaic curriculum and cumbersome structures were too slow to respond to emerging ideologies and new practices of contemporary art. Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts was formulated as an ‘alternative’, representing the desire to garner this contemporariness in the visual art practices, teaching and learning. The genesis of Theertha also has to be understood in a similar socio-­ political context. For instance, the other founding artists of Theertha beyond Weerasinghe, namely, Pradeep Chandrasiri, Koralegedara Pushpakumara, Bandu Manamperi, Pala Pothupitiya and Sarath Kumarasiri, were active participants and leaders in the students’ protests during their respective years in the Institute of Aesthetic Studies. Chandrasiri’s well-­known photo series and installation of ‘Broken Hands’ was based on his personal experience of an abduction and torture during his involvement in the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurrection of 1988.5 And Manamperi’s penchant for resistance to state-sponsored violence and critical stance in his performances factors in his memories of the army detention camp where he was incarcerated as a 16-year-old teenager for his involvement with JVP ‘subversive’ activities. He played an active role as a student leader in his subsequent years at the 5  As with its first insurrection in 1971, the JVP’s second insurrection in 1988 involving mostly rural Sinhala youth aimed to topple the elected government which they considered both capitalist and unresponsive to the needs of youth and the downtrodden.

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Institute of Aesthetic Studies where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in sculpture. All these artists contributed to the establishment of Theertha. They added their own particular collective histories and idea of ‘transformation’ with a broader sense of political experience. One could posit Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts as the first instance of collectivism to emerge in the 90s informed by the socio-political anomalies of the time and with a spirit of resistance through art. If Vibhavi was interested in art teaching to shape the ideologies of the new generation of art students as proponents to carry on the transformative art of the 90s, Theertha’s larger intentions were to build a base and structure to sustain as well as propagate the products and producers of this knowledge. For Theertha, transforming the taste and then nature of art consumption was of utmost importance. The primary concern for Theertha was to build its own art audience and to expand its ideology so that a large support base for its kind of art could be established. As mentioned earlier, a clear gap developed between conventional art patrons, largely from the English-­ speaking and Colombo-based cultural elite and contemporary artists, who mostly come from non-elite, non-English-speaking and unprivileged economic backgrounds. These artists went on to produce art that were alien to the prevailing aesthetic norms that guaranteed a disconnect between what they produced from the dominant art-buying audiences. In 2009, artists closely associated with the 90s Trend and Vibhavi formed the ‘No Order Group’, which organized a seminal exhibition of their work to establish their position on art. Writing on the criticisms and rejections bestowed on their art, I have noted elsewhere, “for the 90s Trend artists, one of the biggest challenges was to move the attention of the art patronage and audience from Keyt6 inspired aesthetics, to notice the grim ambience of their art, to convince their audience to read the new narratives beyond the conventionalism of 43 Group’s modernism, overtly established within what Keyt’s art presented” (Perera 2018: 308). It is in this context where contemporary practices, sensibilities and tastes in art-­ making clashed somewhat violently with the conventional that I recall the discomfort expressed by a well-known archaeologist and art historian after he had seen my 1997 exhibition, ‘the Vehicle Named Woman’, “which was a body of work dissecting the woman’s subjectivity that included

6  George Keyt, a modernist painter and a member of the 43 Group had an enduring stylistic influence of Sri Lankan art.

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painted car doors hung on the gallery wall” (Perera 2018: 308). The main source of his anxiety was that unlike the work of modernist painters such as George Keyt and others of the 43 Group, “my work apparently did not reflect a rooting to Sri Lanka”, and as he proceeded to critique, “when one relooks at them in 50 years’ time, in the absence of its present context, it will not able to present itself as an authentic Sri Lankan art or as a body of work emanating a sense of Sri Lankan-ness” (Perera 2018: 308). This was not a simple isolated comment on my worn work alone. Instead, it was also a comment that was expected to identify the general trends manifest in the art of the 1990s (Perera 2018: 308). The unequivocal insistence of 90s art and its proponents did not go unnoticed despite the state’s as well as the established art patrons’ distaste towards their activities. In the mid-1990s, the philanthropist and patron of the arts, Ajitha de Costa, initiated the alternative art space, the Heritage Gallery, which showcased the experimental art of the 90s for several years. The Gallery practically became a place where radical artists congregated. Yet another space that was open to the 90s art was Barefoot Art Gallery, earlier known as the 706 Gallery. The patrons, Dominic and Nazreen Sansoni, hailed from a traditional elite background and became the initial collectors to acquire 90s artists’ work. Their endorsement was welcome by the artists’ community in Sri Lanka. The 706 Gallery, before it changed into Barefoot, became one of the early contemporary art galleries where most of the artists from 90s Trend exhibited regularly. These were important factors in the art history of Sri Lanka, particularly for sustaining the enthusiasm of the radical artists to some extent. However, there was a larger share of rejection of the aesthetics (and therefore its art and artists) of the 90s Trend by the conventional art patrons and art audiences. There was a major discontent within Theertha towards the Colombo’s art audiences and the cultural elite that showed a lukewarm attitude towards their art and their collectivism. Therefore, Theertha’s collectivism ought to be understood in this complicated scenario both as platform to react to these rejections creatively and also as a comfort zone to sustain this kind of art, which was not generally popular.

Cosmopolitan Collectivism It is worth initiating a discussion on one of the many characteristics of the collectivism that Theertha manifests, with an observation by Strathern and Biedermann. With reference to Sri Lanka’s pre-colonial past, Strathern

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and Biedermann note, “well before the arrival of the first European interlopers, a multitude of different peoples engaged in exploits of long-­ distance travel, trade and pilgrimage, and it was not only ports but also vast areas of the Asian mainland that interacted across the waters. Sri Lanka sits exactly at the centre of the Indian Ocean: an excellent laboratory, one might think, in which to test any ideas about the connected and the cosmopolitan. But it has barely been visible in the resurgence of world history” (Strathern and Biedermann 2017: 1–2). Despite this sense of ‘barely visible’ of Sri Lanka’s cosmopolitanism within world history, it is evident in many aspects of Sri Lankan culture, including its cuisine, music and dance forms. But today, much of this cosmopolitanism is forgotten or ill-­ understood locally as well within prevailing dogmas of cultural hegemony. However, from the beginning there has been a self-conscious sense of cosmopolitan connectedness at Theertha. Theertha, from its inception, strived to maintain a cosmopolitan view that cut through racial, economic, regional and cultural politics. The collective aspired for and worked towards the fusion of ideas and blurring of boundaries. Therefore, imagining a larger and integrated art world that could transcend national and geographical boundaries was both utopian and a tenable dream. This was an existential and intellectual prerequisite and also a factor in sustenance. Theertha began its journey with the intention of securing this vision. The idea of Theertha’s cosmopolitanism is of a particular kind, often found within Asia historically. Cosmopolitanism has been defined in many ways, but mostly as something that transcends notions such as national, local, cultural and political boundaries. It underlines the idea of being citizen of the world, with emphasis on a larger sense of ‘humanity’. While there are variations in the definitions of cosmopolitanism, one that I am interested in is Sheldon Pollock’s idea, which underlines “being translocal, of participating  – and knowing one was participating  – in cultural and political networks that transcended the immediate community” (quoted in Strathern and Biedermann 2017: 4). Strathern and Biedermann elaborate on the idea of Pollock’s translocal as “a conscious participation of people within a very grand ecumene: the Sanskrit cosmopolis, a swathe of societies from Peshawar to Java that used Sanskrit literature to formulate their vision of the world” (Strathern and Biedermann 2017: 4–5). Admittedly, while there is a large temporal distance between 1200 when the kind of ideas referred to by Pollock prevailed and the 1990s, the cosmopolitan ideals described above had a fluid and absorptive character and hence travelled through time and space to resurface at different times,

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including in the present. As such, a similar sense of cosmopolitanism binds and enthuse artists of Theertha for further exploration of cosmopolitan ideals. These artists cherished the ideal and idealized art world that would work within the ‘now’, a world that would not be restrained by the shackles of mono-cultural anxieties or the residues of a colonial or pre-colonial past. The art world that Theertha envisaged is expressed in Pollock’s idea of cosmopolitanism vis-à-vis the expansion of Sanskrit within South Asia. As Strathern and Biedermann explain, “for Pollock too, the concept of ‘cosmopolitanism’ promises to convey a sense of community or commonality that is not structured by any particular kinds of power relationship” (Strathern and Biedermann 2017: 5). But importantly however, the expansion of Sanskrit was “not the by-product of some Sanskrit-peddling empire” (Strathern and Biedermann 2017: 5). Instead, as outlined by Pollock, “adopters of the Sanskrit literary culture used it not to acknowledge the superiority of India as a centre but to reconfigure their own sense of centrality in more impressive terms” (Strathern and Biedermann 2017: 5). This consisted of “an endless string of self-conceived centres” (Strathern and Biedermann 2017: 5). In this imagination, the “vision of the Sanskrit cosmopolis was free not only from empire, but also from the strident universalism of religion…And it is free from ethnicity” (Strathern and Biedermann 2017: 5). Like this ancient sense of cosmopolitanism that prevailed in South Asia of the past, Theertha’s sense of cosmopolitanism also recognized no hierarchies within the country based on language, ethnicity religion, or regionalism. In its dealings with the world beyond Sri Lanka’s national borders, within South Asia and beyond, this sense of equality guided Theertha’s dealings irrespective of the fact whether others reciprocated this sensibility or not. One of the crucial contributions that founding artists of Theertha made ensured local artists to venture into the outside world, forging new connections and evolving new networks. Khoj International, a Delhi-based artist-run collective, came into existence in 1997 as an “alternative in contemporary art practice” (Sood 2014: 32). As the art historian Nancy Adajania writes, Khoj, a product of its time however did not come into being as a need “of a group of local artists or in response to the challenges of an art-historical moment; rather, it presented itself as a prognostication and possibility” in the context of which “it looked forward to a utopian situation of dialogue among artists from different contexts, who would not otherwise have come into contact with one another” (Adajania 2014).

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Khoj’s7 annual artists’ workshops were crucial players in propagating group initiatives as a way forward in contemporary art in South Asia and played a catalytic role at the initial stage in the evolution of Theertha. A number of Sri Lankan artists were invited to these workshops including myself in which the need and the urgency for artists’ collectives to do collaborative, cross-border and cross-media art projects were discussed frequently. Furthermore, as noted by Khoj, “the idea of Khoj began in 1997 as a gift of possibility given by Robert Loder (the visionary founder of the Triangle Arts Trust). At a time when Indian artists felt isolated and unsupported, Khoj provided the possibility for young practitioners to create an open-ended, experimental space for themselves on their own terms. Khoj would be a space where they could make art independent of formal academic and cultural institutions and outside the constraints of the commercial gallery.”8 The initial ideas that explain the genesis of Khoj are also applicable to the genesis of Theertha even though their subsequent trajectories were very different in response to local conditions. Khoj was a creative and enabling response to the alienation felt by artists not only within India, but also within the larger context of South Asia. The formation of artists’ initiatives was not exclusive to Sri Lanka and India. Similar interventions into contemporary art and the tendency towards collective activities of artists within the South Asian region became a phenomena in the last decade of the twentieth century spilling over into the new millennium. In this, Theertha’s emergence is intrinsically connected to the art fervour and transformations happening particularly within India and the region in general. The need for artists’ mobility as a way of art exchanges were called upon to counter or to overcome limitations at the home turfs in these countries in South Asia. Khoj, being one of the first artists’ groups to envision a different format for artist exchanges in the 90s contemporary art scene in South Asia, played an inimitable role in mobilizing artists in the region. Khoj managed to harness the group energies of the artists’ collectives from across South Asia, namely, Theertha (Sri Lanka), Vasl (Pakistan), the Britto Art Trust (Bangladesh) and Sutra (Nepal). These were all alternative art initiatives that came up in the new millennium, with assistance and camaraderie of Khoj, to work towards creating a collegiality and cooperation that later became known as the South Asian Network for the Arts 7 8

 More information on Khoj can be accessed via its website: www.khojworkshop.org  http://khojworkshop.org/khoj-legacy/ (accessed 3 June 2018).

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(SANA).9 With SANA in place, Theertha found its own peer community within a regional/international setting that understood artists’ anxieties, frustrations and aspirations and which in a way was being misunderstood in its own country. Its art found endorsement and appreciation within these groups. With eruptive geo-politics and developmental anomalies sweeping across South Asia, most of the experiences of groups within SANA had similar bearings. Art that was produced by them engaged in parallel themes and approaches. The initial years with SANA intensified Theertha’s energy and credibility. Activities such as international residencies and workshops increased, and international art exchanges strengthened within member groups. The international art residencies and workshops regularly held at Theertha as well as at sites facilitated by other SANA members showcased its experimental approach to art. Performance art, earth works and installations, which were relatively new art forms in Sri Lanka, also had the opportunity to expand and evolve at Theertha-sponsored events. What is particular to Theertha is its aspiration to be de-centred from the supposed ‘West’ and relocate itself within South Asia and within the country itself. Often, Theertha was seen to be critical and resistant to undertakings that had a Euro-American bias. This became more pronounced in later years where its attention became more intensely engaged in sustaining the local art scene and when international curatorial projects were presented with a Euro-American interest. It is in this context that many of the Theertha exhibitions were curated by artists themselves developing a home-grown curatorial expertise within the country that was within the purview of practising artists. Weerasinghe, acknowledging the important role played by artists in the Asia region in ushering in a new era of contemporary art in the 1980s and 1990s, which was also evident in South Asia at the same time notes, “while it was artists in the Asian countries who brought in the new era, it was not they who defined and managed the new era into the future” (Weerasinghe 2007: 84). Instead, he further notes, this “directional guidance for contemporary art was set by art curators from the developed world, funded by wealthy museums and galleries” (Weerasinghe 2007: 84). Weerasinghe acknowledges that given the relative lack of exper9  For more information on artists’ mobility in South Asia, read, ‘Re-imagining and Re-narrating South Asia: Artists’ Travel and the Practice Visual Art as a New Experiential Cartography’, by Sasanka Perera, pp.  251–274. In, Dev Nath Pathak ed., Another South Asia. New Delhi: Primus, 2018.

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tise and critical discourse on matters such as curatorial dynamics in Asia at the time, “international art curators played a pivotal role in consolidating the radical developments in art in Asia during the 1980s and 1990s” (Weerasinghe 2007: 84). The problem however is due to these curators’ locations, training, obligations to their patrons and relative lack of knowledge about evolving and constantly changing local art situations, there were vast gaps in the curatorial decisions they made with regard to art not only in Asia but in South Asia as well as in individual countries. David Clarke, with reference to this specific curatorial dynamic notes, “few curators have a detailed knowledge of more than one part of Asia (if that), and thus are rarely in a position to ‘discover’ relatively unexposed artists” (quoted in Ali 2011: 9). As Clarke further notes, “those who possess local expertise will be familiar with the role of informant they are often called upon to play, providing jet setting curators lacking contextual knowledge with shortlists of potential artists and other necessary information” (quoted in Ali 2011: 9). Theertha was quite sensitive to these lapses from its very inception. Theertha worked with many international curators and were willing to expand their knowledge when it felt there were serious lapses in situations these curators were receptive to informed and nuanced local input. But it is clearly within this context that Theertha ­self-­consciously and successfully developed its own curatorial expertise which it has by now used widely in Sri Lanka itself and to a certain extent in other parts of South Asia as well.

Redefining Artist’s Role Within the collectivism of the 1990s, the conventional role of the artists got radically remoulded. Theertha evolved from a mere organizer of international workshops in 2001 to an all-encompassing art organizer by 2018 that ran a gamut of activities including training for art teachers, colloquiums for women artists, community art projects, art publishing, running an art gallery and using art projects for heritage management. In such activities, artists critically engaged with the ideas, such as conception, management and execution of art. Given the manifold transformation of artists’ role, it demands us to look for redefinition of artists within its collectivist vision. The role that Theertha defined for artists had a built-in phrase which was often quoted by Jagath Weerasinghe as “Personal is Political”.10 It  Personal communication from Jagath Weerasinghe, 1 August 2018.

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evolved around the idea that artist cannot be removed from his/her social responsibilities, and that the artist cannot be dislodged from this equation because they themselves are part of the whole. Weerasinghe elaborating on the artist persona emerging in the 1990s declares that “an artist who was conscious of his or her intellectual and political powers and possibilities. It was this radically new identity, which can be identified as an ‘enlightenment’ in its own right” (Weerasinghe 2005: 188). Seen in this sense, if one cartographs how the artist’s persona was framed within Theertha’s activities during its 17-year history, one would see this persona as one that was quite broad which combined managerial and curatorial roles while also amalgamating with these educationist and interventionist aspects at the same time. To postulate this particular brand of artists’ role, let me look at some of the key activities that Theertha has undertaken during its existence. To reiterate a point made earlier, Theertha is completely an artists-run organization. Every aspect of its activities has been conceptualized and executed by artists. This is somewhat different from the model of Khoj, where its structure incorporated an art manager who undertook to m ­ anage what the core group of artists decided. As mentioned earlier, Theertha was formed by a group of 11 artists. All of them happened to be friends with a shared idealism to promote the changes that took place in the 90s. Furthermore, these artists felt the stifling ambience of the local art scene and were driven by the urge to be part of the larger art scene beyond Sri Lanka that could give them more opportunities to be innovative, experimental and also to be acknowledged for their art. It was a personal quest as much as it was a societal one. Collectivism that proceeded with Theertha in the following years got moulded into what is seen today by the virtue of numerous activities, response to various needs and demands of certain moments in its trajectory. The artists at Theertha organically stepped into the roles, in the spirit of collectivists, as art managers, curators and educators. It ought to be noted that it had many pitfalls and disappointments. It took the group considerable effort and time to consolidate its first international workshop so much so that Robert Loder, the founding member of Triangle Arts Trust, introduced by Khoj to support Theertha, nearly gave up his belief in the group’s credibility to organize anything. If not for Khoj’s director Pooja Sood’s intervention and insistence on group-­ synergy, the connection would have been lost at the outset. Eventually, Theertha became a part of the Triangle Network’s South Asian partners with a large portfolio of activities of significance to its credit.

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Theertha’s first encounter with the funding of culture and art came with the International Art Workshop in 2001, which had received a substantial grant from the Prince Claus Fund that supported art exchanges across artistic, geographic and ethno-religious borders. The workshop was held at the Lunuganga Estate of the renowned Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa hosted by the Geoffrey Bawa Trust. The success of this workshop propelled Theertha to continue the cause for a more engaged practice of art. Theertha managed to attract funding from HIVOS and later from Arts Collaboratory, Netherland-based funding bodies and Ford Foundation, for larger part of its programming. In this wake, it was evident that artists had to also work towards the exploration of funding opportunities for the sustenance of the art practices that they as a collective strived for. Although Sri Lankan art had changed ideologically by adjusting to contemporary anxieties and the art community had expanded over the years, the infrastructure, art education and the overall perceptions and attitudes towards the visual arts did not change to accommodate the demands of the new art. Neither the government nor private patrons were ­forthcoming in a progressive way. State sponsorships were embroiled in parochial politics and corporate attention was directed at high-visibility events such as cricket matches. A handful of art galleries had emerged since the 1980s, although they mostly functioned as retail shops to sell art rather than representing artists in an organized manner. At the same time, the state was not interested in art other than what was defined as ‘traditional’ or related to what it perceived as ‘heritage’. Burdened with the long-drawn armed conflict in the North and North East, education had a very low priority within the state’s education and cultural policies. Within this complex context the new art being produced in the 1990s, presenting a different aesthetic sensibility, did not find enthusiastic endorsers. Theertha’s art activities were shaped and defined in an attempt to navigate within this regressive environment, and therefore the role of artists was more complex than ever before. The primary concern for Theertha was to build its own art audiences and to expand its ideology so that a large support base for its kind of art could be established. One of its key programmes included art teacher training around the country. The argument for this was to change the way art teachers think about art, so that a change of perspective was set in the minds of art students. The other purpose of this endeavour was to create a network of artists across the island enabling them to become propagators of Theertha’s ideas of contemporary art. Theertha went on to engage

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in a more holistic approach to facilitating art exchanges. Operating with the ideal of democratizing the art knowledge and access to training, it consciously located the teacher training programmes in the regional and economically backward areas. Sometimes using their university peer group connections, Theertha artists purposefully linked with regionally located art teachers, government educational officials and so on. With a background in students’ politics and their ideological commitment to the idea of ‘contemporary art’, the Theertha artists became savvy in ‘selling’ their training format to school administrations in different parts of the country. Teachers allowed Theertha to hold the training workshops at various locations across the island, which came to them free of charge. Theertha art teacher training programmes caught the attention of educational zonal offices of the state in some of these regional areas, and Theertha started receiving invitations to organize art teacher training sessions with government help in some locations. As such, teacher training was held in Dehiattakandiya, Kegalle, Kandy, Ampara, Matara and Aludeniya. While Theertha did not associate with political regimes either as an endorser or opponent, it was concerned with the effects and affects of the Civil War. The artists were mindful of the repercussions of the war, the divides it had created and the day-to-day conflicts and anxieties the war had embedded on society and its human predicament. Coming from the south of the country, and with predominantly Sinhala and Buddhist membership, Theertha was burdened with the same guilt that most progressives and liberals in the country were feeling in the face of the intense violence inflicted by the conflicting parties, Tamil insurgent groups and the Sri Lankan military. The guilt was more intense with no real solution in sight. The emergence of extreme ideologies of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism in the south, general socio-political intolerance towards Tamils as ‘enemies’ within the dominant ‘national’ psyche and the virulent forms of Tamil nationalisms that groups such as the LTTE propagated demanded counter-discourses with a more nuanced understanding. The artists within a group such as Theertha, critical of chauvinist politics and their representations in the cultural domain, had to be intellectually awake in this wake. Well aware of the divisive politics during the war, Theertha initiated its series of publications, sometimes through partner organizations, on the issues of art and culture with a critical edge. Published in Sinhala, Tamil and English, much of the content of these publications focused on the arts and ‘culture’, such as Patitha (in Sinhala), Panuwal (in Tamil), Artlab (in Sinhala and Tamil) and South Asia Journal for Culture (in English). These

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publications became key texts presenting alternative readings on culture and art for students at the university level and beyond. The long-term associations with members of the Tamil artists’ community in Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka and the sympathies towards the predicament of Tamils as a besieged ethnic community in the country ensured that Theertha continuously maintained collaborative art programmes with Jaffna artists. These collaborations allowed Theertha to organize the seminal exhibition, ‘Aham-Puram’, in 2004 at the newly rebuilt Jaffna Public Library. Seventy-two experimental artworks were shown amidst the war-torn area partly run by the state military and partly by the Tamil Tigers in the backdrop of a faulty and short-lived ceasefire. While such attempts were seen by some as anti-patriotic, and Theertha and its members were castigated as traitors by extreme elements in the artist community and elsewhere, these remain among Theertha’s intensely cherished, ambitious and most impacting activities. In the same breath, it is also pertinent to mention the emergence of a feminist stance among Theertha artists. The feminist criticality in art that started to emerge with the ‘90s Trend in particular found continued support through Theertha. The exhibition, ‘Reclaiming Histories: Retrospective Exhibition of Women’s Art’ (2000), curated by myself and showing the works by 50 female artists under the patronage of the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Art, can be seen as one of the early attempts at building awareness of women’s art influenced by the ‘90s Trend. While the feminist lobby in Sri Lanka was active for a long time, their involvement with visual art remained somewhat aloof. As such, even if artists attempted thematic investigations of women’s issues, there was no consistent discourse or an orientation within the larger feminist sensibility. It was difficult to find role models for women’s art, guidance or cues to indicate a particular direction to a locally rooted feminist approach. Due to this, during the initial period, some women’s art reflected ad hoc appropriations of theoretical elements from Euro-American feminism without really reworking these to merge with local experiences. It has to be acknowledged that the ideological liberalization that came with 90s Trend allowed feminist discourses to be absorbed into the thinking processes of art, artists’ conceptualization of artworks and overall art practices. This liberalized approach also gave rise to the radical use of imagery, art methods and narrations with a high sense of criticality that needed a certain boldness and an element of risk-taking. This added extra pressure on women artists to go beyond their conventional roles, as artist and as woman, and to be radical and work within the art discourse of

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90s Trend. Theertha’s contribution to the evolution of contemporary women’s art has been to provide the much-needed intellectual basis and the subaltern/localized approach informed by feminism. The artists had to go beyond the theoretical definitions presented by Euro-American feminism and its art trends. The personalities and works of female artists associated with Theertha and its overall support for women’s art through exhibitions and art publications have also helped to establish a certain identifiable particularity associated with women’s art. Many female artists of the younger generation are influenced by this particularity and the thematic of such art. Between 2005 and 2008, Theertha’s art programmes emphasized supporting young female artists who were graduating from art colleges to continue their practice and experiment with new ideas. This allowed them to initiate a process of forming their own identities as artists. The Women Artists’ Colloquiums and the International Women Artists Residencies were initiated during this period. In 2007, frustrated with the lack of flexibility in private galleries and their inability to understand contemporary art needs, Theertha transformed part of its office building into an exhibition space that was called the Red Dot Gallery. Since then, Theertha has been concentrating on establishing Red Dot Gallery as an experimental art venue and to build its audiences and patronage. With an eye on standards in its gallery practices, it introduced the annual gallery season Pradarshana Wasanthaya (the summer of exhibition) in 2007 for three years to showcase innovative solo exhibitions and present new and cutting-edge works of young and mid-­ career artists.

Conclusion, as Theertha Continues In many ways, Theertha’s numerous activities have managed to propel the 90s art into other directions. Many of its members, some of whom were instrumental in initiating the 90s Art Trend, have been active in sustaining the criticality and experimental nature of their art-making, presenting extremely innovative and seminal exhibitions. Jagath Weerasinghe’s exhibition, ‘Celestial Fervor’ (2009), presented a deeper and more sophisticated elaboration of the thematic he has engaged with since his 1994 show ‘Anxiety’ that essentially provided the new parameters for 90s art. Similar attempts have been seen in exhibitions by other Theertha artists such as Sarath Kumarasiri (‘Kovil-Pansal’, 2009) and K. Pushpakumara (‘Goodwill Hardware’, 2009) as well as the younger generation of artists, Anura

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Krishantha (‘Chairs’, 2007), Bandu Manamperi (‘Numbed’, 2009), Sanath Kalubadana (‘My Friend the Soldier’, 2007) and Pala Pothupitiya (‘My Ancestral Dress and My ID’, 2008). After the end of the armed conflict in May 2009, that had continued for 30 years, Sri Lanka experienced a sigh of relief despite the immense losses. The end of the massive human and material destruction that had gone on for so long, which paralysed as well as brutalized the entire islands society, was a landmark political moment. While this was a major change that allowed artists to connect and work together much easily with the North and North East, it also ushered in unbearably nationalistic political rhetoric from the victors that seemed superficially and patronizingly inclusive. But in reality, these remained racist, anarchist and violent. Some of the exhibitions mentioned above such as ‘Numb’, ‘Celestial Fervour’ and ‘Goodwill Hardware’ by Theertha artists responded to this post-war socio-political situation in the South and recorded their suspicion, anxiety and frustration. While its preoccupation with supporting contemporary art continues intensely in the post-war period, Theertha’s activities also focused on interpreting the artist’s role in a broader platform for intervention to include heritage management as art projects. Bordering between community art, heritage management and archaeology, through programmes such as Ape Gama (Our Village) and Let’s Take a Walk, artists worked with selected communities to rediscover their own contemporary heritage and proceeded to make cultural maps of their own localities. These programmes brought to the surface issues such as ethnicity and religion, how different groups have spatially integrated within their localities and so on, which were no longer aspects of quotidian conversations. In other words, they were means to understand a community’s own history as well as the present more inclusively. These programmes appealed to the same interventionist sentiments of Theertha which inspired it to undertake projects such as ‘Aham-Puram’ exhibition in Jaffna in 2004. Such projects involved negotiating with many government and private institutions, individuals and groups in the communities where the work was done. This role of the artist as a negotiator, educator and heritage manager was something that came out of long-term engagement with a spectrum of art activities that Theertha was engaged in during the 18 years of its existence. The evolution of contemporary art in the post-1990s decade has also seen this particular role emerging for the artist, a role that is combined with a sense of social responsibility and a belief that art is a civilizational tool, and therefore that artists have the power to transform and intervene in the perceptual process of art audiences. The massive emotional and physical destruction of a long-drawn-out

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ethnically coloured civil war that ended in 2009, as well as the extensive need for developmental activities and a heightened awareness of human rights and cultural rights have dictated the overall public debates in Sri Lanka. Being inheritors of an art ideology that equated ‘personal’ with ‘political’ and by considering critical engagement as an integral element in its art, Theertha has been highly receptive to the nuances of these debates. This receptivity is reflected in Theertha’s myriad activities where it has combined certain aspects of social services with art, thereby producing a unique image of the artist as a socio-cultural entrepreneur. Colombo held its first biennale in 2009 (Colombo Art Biennale) with the theme ‘Imagining Peace’, inviting artists to think beyond the initial ‘relief’ of ending the civil war and the much-celebrated ‘victory’. The second Colombo Art Biennale held in 2012 February titled ‘Becoming’ ­continued this attempt of contextualizing art within the current mood of the country. The initial ideas for the biennale as well as the selection of themes for both events were formulated by Jagath Weerasinghe, and a number of other Theertha artists were members of the Biennale’s Artistic Advisory Board. This has allowed Theertha to be closely affiliated with the Colombo Art Biennale and its activities. By now, the local art scene has grown to include new patrons and galleries even though the need for more is still acute. Other groups such as COCA and Colombo Artists have emerged taking visible stands in terms of presenting current inclinations of contemporary art and connecting with other art communities in the South Asia region. At the end of 18 years since its inception, Theertha’s initial purposes for establishing itself as a platform to allow art exchanges to take place across geographic, ethnic, religious and artistic borders have been overtaken by other priorities such as art knowledge production and dissemination, need for effective art educational programmes for higher learning, gaining visibility for Sri Lankan contemporary art to be represented in international forums and opening of interesting platforms for contemporary artists internationally to undertake collaborative work and so on. Such needs require an approach with different emphasis and forging of new partnerships. Colombo Art Biennale, Theertha’s long-term art initiative, ‘Sethusamudram Art Project’ and with No. 1 Shanthi Road, Bangalore, and ‘Tale of Two Cities’ with Gallery Espace, New Delhi, have been few such ‘new’ partnerships. Theertha which started in 2000 as a young artist group remains at present a matured and well-seasoned group of artists with much more personal commitments and priorities in their lives than earlier. Their art is

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constantly scrutinized for maturity and innovation by their peers. Therefore, Theertha’s future existence depends on its ability to get the continued support of its senior members, understand new demands of contemporary art in the country and beyond, sustaining fresh energy and finding new relevance in an art scene that has the potential to boom.

References Adajania, Nancy. 2014. Probing the Khojness of Khoj. In South Asian Network for the Arts, ed. Pooja Sood, 3–36. New Delhi/Dhaka/Colombo/Karachi: Khoj International Artists’ Association/Britto Arts Trust/Theertha International Artists’ Collective/Vasl Artists’ Collective. Ali, Salwat. 2011. Preface. In Making Waves: Contemporary Art in Pakistan, ed. Salwat Ali, 8–10. Karachi: Fomma Trust. Kapur, Geeta. 2005. Dismantled Norms: Apropos Other Avantgardes. In Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner, 46–100. Canberra: Pandanus Books. Perera, Sasanka. 2011. Artists Remember, Artists Narrate: Memory and Representation in Sri Lankan Visual Arts. Colombo: Colombo Institute for the Advanced Study of Society and Culture/Theertha International Artists’ Collective. Perera, Anoli. 2018. Reading George Keyt Within the Practices of Contemporary Sri Lankan Art, (Book Review of Buddha to Krishna: Life and Times of George Keyt). Society and Culture in South Asia 4 (2): 308–312. Sood, Pooja. 2014. Mapping Khoj: Idea/Place/Network. In South Asian Network for the Arts, ed. Pooja Sood, 38–61. New Delhi/Dhaka/Colombo/Karachi: Khoj International Artists’ Association/Britto Arts Trust/Theertha International Artists’ Collective/Vasl Artists’ Collective. Strathern, Alan, and Zoltán Biedermann. 2017. Introduction: Querying the Cosmopolitan in Sri Lankan and Indian Ocean History. In Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History, ed. Alan Strathern and Zoltán Biedermanneds. London: UCL Press. Turner, Caroline. 2005. Art and Social Change. In Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner, 1–13. Canberra: Pandanus Books. Weerasinghe, Jagath. 2005. Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka. In Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner, 188. Canberra: Pandanus Books. ———. 2007. Asian Art Today: Exploiting the Code. South Asia Journal for Culture 1: 83–89.

Index1

A Aag ka Darya, 73 Abedin, Zainul, 120–122, 133 Abraham, Ayisha, 49, 51, 55, 57–59, 62, 66 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 94 Activism, 207–210, 218, 219 Adajania, Nancy, 67, 69 Adivasi, 140, 140n3, 149n29, 150–156, 151n30, 151n31, 154n34, 161, 166, 168, 169, 171, 171n55, 173, 174 Afghan War, 79, 206, 213, 215 Agha, Mariam, 217, 218 Akhlaq, Zahoorul, 79, 87 Altaf, Navjot, 67–70, 68n16 Anand, Mulk Raj, 53 Anarchist-hero, 140 Anthropological paradigm, 174 Anthropology, 1–42 Appropriation, 251, 253, 265–266 Araeen, Rasheed, 132, 135, 251–269

Arjun Khaling, 230 Art, 1–42 collectivism, 271, 272, 274 history, 1–42 history, Sri Lankan, 273–275, 283 practice, 117, 122, 126–132 Art Beyond Art, Eco-Aesthetics: A Manifesto for the 21st Century, 252, 253 Art Dubai, 252 Art for art’s sake, 74, 77 Artists for Democracy (AFD), 263 Artist’s role, 288–294 Artivism, 229 Artlab, 226, 231, 237, 243–245, 291 Art-politics, 119–125 Arts Council of Pakistan, 267, 267n18, 268n19 Artudio, 226, 231, 235, 236, 239, 240, 245 Aryan, 148, 148n25, 152 Asian Art Biennale, 124, 129

Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 S. Perera, D. N. Pathak (eds.), Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4

297

298 

INDEX

Authenticity, 183, 184, 188, 190, 191, 195, 196 Avantgarde, 274 Awami Art Collective, 89 B Balochistan, 253 Bangladesh, 12, 15, 17, 23, 30, 31, 33, 94, 96, 101, 104, 105, 117–136 Bangladeshi art, 117, 129 Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), 123–124, 123n2 Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, 124, 126 Banks, Michael, 4 Baroda, 49, 53, 61, 62, 64, 66 Barrelism, 281 Bastar (Madhya Pradesh), 143 Becker, Howard, 27, 40 Bengali, 190–197, 200, 201 Bengali art, 190–196 Bengal School of Art, 185 Betul (Maharashtra), 144 Bharat Bhavan, 139–140, 150, 154–158, 159n40, 160 Bharat Mata, 53 Biennale, 89, 90 Bourdieu, Pierre, 6, 7, 11, 12, 27 Britto Arts Trust, 104, 126, 127 Butt, Asim, 225 C Calcutta School of Art, 186 Carroll, Noël, 128–131 Casabianca, Julien de, 240, 241 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 135 Chandrasiri, Pradeep, 281 Chatterji, Roma, 97 Chisti, Ruby, 20 Civil society, 272

Cold War politics, 205, 210 Collectivism, 271–296 Collins, Bradford R., 181, 182 Colombo, 271n1, 282, 283, 295 Communism, 206, 210 Communist Party of Pakistan, 210 Contemporary art practices, 75, 76 Contemporary narratives of art, 251 Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 54 Cosmopolitan Collectivism, 283–288 Criticality, 207, 218, 219 Cubitt, Sean, 42 Cultural fantasy, 140 D Dadi, Iftikhar, 8, 8n5, 9, 12, 76, 87 Death-bound, 175 De-commodifying esthetics, 262 Demystifier (of primitive life), 144 Dhaka Art Summit, 128 Diasporic, 267 Discontent, 207–209 Disillusionment, 207–209 Documenta 14, 252, 257–261, 258n8, 269 Dravidian, 152 Drik, 128 Dukhshyam Chitrakar, 28, 49, 51, 52, 58–66, 70, 71 E East Pakistan, 118, 120–122 Eco-aesthetics, 255, 265 Ecological imbalances, 252 Elwin, Verrier, 57, 57n12, 60 Environmental balance, 254 Ephemerality, 245 The Ethnographic Series, 68, 70 Ethnography, 181, 184 Eurocentric, 206

 INDEX 

F Faiz, Faiz Ahmed, 209, 210 Faizi, Attiya, 208 Farago, Claire, 12, 14, 15 Feminist ethnography, 93–112 Fluxus, 272 Folk artist, 50, 52, 53, 60, 61, 63, 64, 70, 71 Foster, Hal, 68, 69 43 Group, 277–279, 282, 282n6, 283 Frieze Art 2017, 252 G Gadani, 253 Galhotra, Vibha, 19, 21 The gaze, 105 Geertz, Clifford, 6 Gell, Alfred, 182 Globalisation, 117–136, 273 Governmentality, 141, 149, 166 Govinda KC, Dr., 235, 236 Graffiti writing Nepal, 224 Guerrilla Girls, 272 Guha-Thakurta, Tapati, 120, 127 Gulgee, Ismail, 211, 264 Gupta, Subodh, 16 Gurung, Dibyeshwor, 226, 236–238 H Hamra Abbas, 217, 217n11 Hashmi, Salima, 8n5, 10, 12, 19, 26, 29 Hawaili (family home), 256 High and low art, 81, 84 Hyder, Qurratulain, 73–75 I Identity, 117–122, 130, 132, 134, 135 Indigenism, 122, 140–155, 141n7, 142n8, 142n9, 146n18, 147n22, 171, 171n54, 174

299

Indira Gandhi National Museum of Mankind, 150 Individual, 141, 142, 148, 149, 157, 158, 161, 168–170, 172 Individualism, 183, 190 Instagram, 245 Intersections, 1–42 J Jama’at-e-Islami, 124 Janata Vimukti Peramuna (JVP), 276, 281, 281n5 Jangarh Singh Shyam, 139–176 K Kalighat painters, 192, 195 Kalighat pats, 187, 190, 193, 194 Kalighat style, 191–194, 191n8, 196 Kapur, Geeta, 67, 130, 131, 134–136 Karachi, 252, 253, 256, 256n4, 257n5, 257n6, 260–267, 266n15, 267n18, 268n19, 269 Karachi Pop Movement, 86 Kathmandu, 223, 225, 226, 228, 230, 231, 231n2, 234n6, 234n7, 235–237, 239n11, 240, 242–244, 242n13 Khalid, Aisha, 79, 83 Khan, Naiza, 8, 9, 87–89, 96, 103, 104, 109 Khoj, 126 Khullar, Sonal, 64 Kinnaur (Himachal Pradesh), 143 Kolkata Art School, 121 Kumarasiri, Sarath, 281, 293 Kutch (Gujarat), 143 L Lahore Art Circle, 207, 209, 211 Lal Masjid, 217, 217n13 LASANAA, 229

300 

INDEX

Lenin Peace Prize, 210 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), 276, 291 Lipi, Tyeba Begum, 96, 104 Local, 117–136 Local vocabulary, 201 M Maharjan, Kiran, 226, 231, 231n3, 237, 243, 244 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 53–56 Manamperi, Bandu, 19, 21 Manifesto of all Pakistan Progressive Writers, 209 Marcus, George E., 182, 184 Mead, Margaret, 3, 4 Midnapore, 49, 51, 54, 57–59, 62–64, 71 Misappropriation, 251 Mitter, Partha, 120, 121, 127, 188 primitivism, 188 Modernism, 205, 206, 209–210, 212, 219 Mughal architecture, 74 Mujahedeen, 206 Mujibur Rahman, Sheikh, 123, 123n1, 123n2, 124 Mukerjee, Radhakamal, 38–40, 98, 186, 188 Mukherji, Parul Dave, 24, 25, 28 Mushairas, 208 Muslim(s), 207, 214, 215, 218 Myers, Fred R., 182, 184 Mystic-maverick, 140 Myth, 183, 187, 188, 188n5, 194–196, 201 N National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore, 77, 79, 87, 262, 266 National Crafts Museum, 150, 159, 162

Nation states, 210 Native, 50, 52, 53, 54n6, 55, 56, 59, 61, 68, 68n18, 70 Native Women series, 52, 60, 67, 68 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 57n12, 65 Nepal, 15, 27, 32 Nepali street artists, 223, 231, 232, 238, 239, 242–244, 246, 247 The New Bengal School, 207, 208 90s art transformation, 275 The 90s Trend, 273–275, 282, 283 Nisbet, Robert, 25, 37, 38, 41 O Outings Project, 240 P Pakistan, 8–10, 12, 15, 17, 19, 20, 23, 26, 29–31, 33, 94, 96, 100, 109, 205–219 Pakistani art history, 78 Pala Pothupitiya, 281, 294 Panuwal, 291 Papastergiadis, Nikos, 18, 19 Paradox of subalternity, 174 Pardhan-Gond painting, 140, 155, 156, 170, 173 Participant observation, 53–55 Pata Katha, 61, 65, 71 Pathak, Dev Nath, 94, 97, 98, 98n2 Patitha, 291 Patua (scroll painting), 49, 54, 57, 59, 60, 65 Patuas, 187, 187n3, 188, 190–192, 194–197, 199–201 PECHS Society (in Bahadurabad, Karachi), 266 Perera, Anoli, 17, 32, 33, 96, 97, 100–102, 106, 107 Perera, Sasanka, 6, 10, 12, 14, 15, 17, 19, 33, 34, 97, 97n2

 INDEX 

Performative mimesis, 49–72 Photo performance, 49–72 Picasso, Pablo, 183, 185 Pink, Sarah, 55 Political project, 140 Pollock, Griselda, 73 Post-1990s Sri Lankan art, 273–275 Postcolonial problems, 274 Preziosi, Donald, 12, 14, 15 Primitivism, 140–142, 140n5, 142n9, 158, 170, 174 Primitivist fascination, 144 Programmatic vangardism, 274 Progressional ballast, 142 Progressive Artists Group (Mumbai), 207 Public spaces, 223–226, 234, 236, 237, 240, 244–247 Pushpakumara, Koralegedera, 281, 293 Pushpamala, N., 49–52, 54, 55, 57–59, 57n13, 61, 62, 65–72 Q Qureshi, Imran, 79, 83, 218 Qureshi, Nusra Latif, 79 R Radicalism, 275 Rahat (Persian wheel), 256 Rahman, Ziaur, 123, 123n2, 124 Ramay, Hanif, 211 Ranjit, Ashmina, 229 Red Dot Gallery, Colombo, 293 Religious extremism, 205, 206, 218, 219 Resistance, 206, 214, 215, 219 Roopankar project, 150, 156, 159n39, 174 Roquette-Pinto, Edgard, 56 Roy, Jamini, 26–28, 181–201 Rubin, William, 184, 185, 189n6, 195 Rupture, 205–219 Ruralism, 188

301

S Saeed, Nausheen, 216, 216n10 Samdani Art Foundation (SAF)/Trust, 128, 129 Samdani, N., 129 Sanctioned framework, 207, 215–218 Sattya Media Arts Collective, 226 Schneider, A., 108, 110 School of Paris, 206 Schwartzman, Allan, 227 Self-consciousness, 196–198 Shamiyaana: Food for Thought, Thought for Change, 252, 257 Share the Word, 242 Sharjah Biennale, 218 Sharjah Biennial 2014, 252 Sheikh, Gulam Mohammed (Gulam Sheikh), 49, 53, 54, 61, 65, 68, 70 Shrestha, Kailash, 226, 230, 231, 234, 234n6, 235, 239, 239n11, 242, 242n13 Shyam, Jangarh Singh, 25, 29 Sikander, Shahzia, 79 Sinhala, 280, 281n5, 291 Social anthropology, 181 Socialism, 205, 209–210 Sociology, 1–8, 11–14, 16, 22, 23, 25–28, 32, 34–42 Sociology of art, 27, 35, 41 Sood, Pooja, 126 South Asia, 3, 5–8, 11, 13–15, 17, 23, 25–27, 31, 33, 34, 38, 39, 42, 271–273, 280, 285–288, 287n9, 295 South Asia Journal for Culture, 291 South Asian, 251 South-South, 206 Spag, 242 Sri Lanka, 9, 12, 13, 15, 17, 20, 21, 23, 32–34, 94, 96, 100, 102, 271, 272, 274, 277, 278, 280, 283–289, 292, 294, 295 Stacey, Judith, 94, 97 Structuralist anthropologist, 144

302 

INDEX

Subaltern cultures, 206 Subjectivities, 141, 146, 164, 172, 174 Sunuwar, Rupesh Raj, 226, 232, 232n5, 233 SUTRA, 229 Swaminathan, Jagdish, 25, 29, 139–176 Syed, Afzal Ahmed, 213, 216 T Tagore, Abanindranath, 120 Tagore, Rabindranath, 120 Tamil, 276, 280, 291, 292 Taseer, Salman, 218 Tharu, Susie, 68 Theertha International Artists’ Collective, 271, 271n1 Thenuwara, Chandraguptha, 281 Theory of Nominalism, 252, 257n6, 263 Third Text, 252, 253n2 Third Text Asia, 265 Third World, 255 Toussaint, Seb, 242 Tradition, 117–121, 127, 134, 135, 182, 183, 185–190, 187n3, 196, 197, 199, 201 Triangle Art Network, 126 Triangle Arts Trust, 126 Triangle Networks, 88 Tribal communities, 140n3, 143, 144, 152, 154 U Universalism, 183 Unmediated, 184 Upanishadic, 145, 154n34 Urdu poetry, 83

V Valorization, 183, 186 Vandalism, 224 Vangardism, 274 Vasl Artists’ Association, 87 Vedantic, 145, 154 Venice Biennale 2017, 252 Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts, 280–282, 292 Visiting anthropologists, 50, 52, 54 Visual anthropology, 4, 35, 110, 111 Visuality, 226 Visual practices, 223 Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, 186 Vocabulary of art, 183–185, 201 W War of Liberation, 1971, 118, 123, 123n1, 124, 135 Weerasinghe, Jagath, 8n5, 9, 10, 12, 102, 280, 281 Women artists, 93–112 Women Artists of Pakistan Manifesto, 77 Writing culture, 96, 98, 110, 111 Y Yousafzai, Malala, 80 Z Zia-ul-Haq (General), 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 87 Zubeida Agha, 208