Indian Visual Culture and its Discontents

album cover : Axis-Bold as Love

Originally written and published as Art&Deal Magazine's 36th issue's editorial

Yesterday a young girl died during Richard Davis’s presentation at the “Conquest of THE WORLD AS PICTURE- Indian Visual Culture and its Discontents” at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. The way the present art historian community reacted to the death threatened to take away all meaning from this issue. She was a young student from somewhere faraway, by the time she was taken to the hospital, we all knew that she was on the verge of death. The seminar promptly resumed and in an appalling moment of human history the organizers apologized for the inconvenience and we all took a deep breath and carried on. We needed to be informed by the hospital that the young girl had died… and thankfully that made us stop. The entire Art&Deal editorial team was attending the seminar and in the recent past we have been writing, thinking and reading about death, tributes and obituaries. It’s at that point the (suppressed) truth finally dawned…linkages between tribute and cultural capital and how it functions in today’s contemporary arts…

Coincidently at that point Richard Davis was talking about Euro-American interests in collecting Indian popular culture and was dwelling upon the linkages between Indian popular, tantra and psychedelia. The two neo-tantric artists who passed away this month represent the Indian voices of this hippy-orientalism and it’s on that wave that both Biren De and Sohan Qadri found acceptance and dialogue in/with the west.

cover -art&deal 36th issue

When we got the news of Sohan Qadri passing away the first reaction was that one should not lose the stories associated with this reactionary character, so in that sense this issue embodies an archival instinct. The cover story almost sealed and ready was “Art in Society” and we realized that the individual and the socio-cultural aspect of neo-tantra in visual culture have largely been un worked upon and forgotten. Ajit Mookerjee's giant tome Tantra Art in 1966  (he was the then director and curator of the Crafts Museum — artists like GR Santosh, Biren De, KCS Paniker and J Swaminathan were ‘influenced’ immensely by this philosophy) is an wonderful exception. However, Ajit Mookerjee sits in the intellectual fringes of the intellectual landscape that informs the mainstream of contemporary art.

Geeta Kapoor’s momentary inability to understand and narrate neo-tantric impulses within modernism began the process of these artists slipping out of ‘public memory’.  I mentioned Geeta Kapoor because one feels that she is the only person with the intellectual ability to understand the formulation of neo-tantra in the 60’s in the larger narration of Indian modernism.

The intellectual environment that dominates art writing and gallery practices move from the Marxist ‘religion is foolish’ to the neo-liberal definition laced with consumerism, identity and terrorism. We have forgotten that people can engage with art through religion and vice versa. In fact we have forgotten that at a certain level there can be zones when difference between art and religion does not exist. Within the sub-continental context how can we understand art and society if we don’t start looking at art and religion in a different way.

More than anything else we decided to do this as a Sohan Qadri Special because he was an absolute rock-star, and his tantric practices challenge the monopoly that Hinduism enjoys over tantra in contemporary imagination. The deep influences of Sufi and Sikh mysticism in Qadri’s practice forces us to challenge our notions of neo-tantra in post-partition India.

Taken from - Light of the Sufis: The Mystical Arts of Islam that was held at the Brooklyn Museum of Art The painting depicts three sufi mendicants and one Buddhist yogin

Mysticism and art were very central to Qadri’s life not only informing the art he ‘produced’ and how he produced but also informed how he lived and how he engaged with the forces of capitalism. However, let us not be hedonistic and assume that knowing a person’s life is one way traffic of knowledge.  Speaking to a young gallerist whom i has known Qadri for a long time I learnt that though he stayed in Denmark and Canada for above 40 years he did not speak a word of Danish or French, though he was married to a Swedish lady and has a son who speaks only English and Swedish, Qadri did not even pick up that language. He ate Indian (Punjabi home cooked food) and never connected with the cultures of the countries he stayed. Over a meal of parathas and accharwhen asked he not simply come and stay in India, Qadri felt that India could not offer him the quite meditative space he needed. He preferred to stay in a small house and paint in a government studio. I wonder we will know about ourselves through this story.

Just as the Qadri tribute cover story was closed we received the news of Biren De passing away. With a little more time in our hand we would have done a neo-tantric special. Maybe sometime in the future…Soon.