Art , Nation, Representation on the Edge of Desire

A Reworked version of an essay written in 3 years after the fall of the 1st NDA government - at that point was appalled to see  an young scholar repeat the mistakes of the old. After the 1st year of the 2nd NDA government, feel the need to push for a new liberalism one that celebrates the heterogeneous, the global and the local but works outside nationalism and global capitalism. 

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A critique of  Chaitanya Sambrani's ‘Edge of Desire’ - Recent Art in India'. An that has recieved a lot of fame and aims to take stock of the country’s contemporary cultural heritage, traversing conventional divides between urban, fine art and folk tradition art, and between high culture and popular culture. 

Subodh Gupta, Bihari, 1998, Handmade paper, acrylic, cow dung in PVA solution, LED lights with timer and transformer127 x 96 x 8cm

The ‘Edge ofDesire’ came to town after it had already travelled to England, Australia and the US. One had heard so much about it, a major show curated by Chaitanya Sambrani, co-presented by the Asia society and the Queens Museum. The works span several professional, material, and disciplinary boundaries, extending across urban, gallery-based practice and Adivasi, folk and popular visual cultures. There are clearly visible links, dialogues and arguments across this spectrum. The exhibition seeks to contribute to a contemporary understanding of the multiplicity of the ‘image culture’ in contemporary India. A show of this stature, showcasing Indian art had allegedly never been give shape before. When one encounters such accolades, it is always useful to run it down memory lane. Geeta Kapur’s Bombay/Mumbai at Tate Modern immediately comes to mind.

How useful is it to get into a scale comparison; it never is able to evaluate the impact. On the contrary, it might be right to ignore Geeta  Kapur for the moment and visit ‘Edge of Desire’ through an article written by Arindam Dutta titled  ‘The Politics of Display: India 1886 and 1986 (Journal of Arts and Ideas, Nos. 30-31), and Tapati Guha’s Thakurta’s ‘Marking Independence’, which scrutinises the policies that inform the setting up the inaugural display of the National Museum and defines itself as “the first serious attempt towards stock-taking of the nation’s heritage through the event of an art exhibition.” (Cited from ‘Marking Independence: The Ritual of a National art Exhibition’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, Nos. 30-31). Especially of relevance is the part where Tapati concentrates on the setting up of the (rather small) ‘contemporary’ section and the politics behind the selection of Bendre, Abanendranath Tagore, Hussain, Amrita Shergill and some others.

Edge of Desire claims to be the first serious stocktaking of the country’s contemporary cultural heritage. Positioning itself as a show that traverses conventional divides between urban, fine art and folk tradition art, and between high culture and popular culture, it claims to represent a time of socio-political transformation in India. The exhibition addresses contemporary political, social, and environmental realities existing in India. The selection, (of 36 artists and three collectives from both urban and rural India produced from the early 1990s to the present) explores the role of place and desire in the creation of visual art in contemporary India, at a time defined by economic globalisation and political fundamentalism. (In an oxymoronic way, the show operates by seeking to generate desire around contemporary Indian art.) The exhibition investigates the impact of these germinal forces on the work of a diverse group of artists who (according to the curator) represent different generations, regions and social contexts, and in Sambrani’s judgment reflect contemporary Indian society’s constantly shifting experiences of caste alliances, class structures, and global trends in localised settings. It is because the exhibition carries claims of such a representation that one is invited to interrogate the politics of representation informing the exhibition.


The way the show seeks to define and echo the many ethnicities, languages, religions, political ideologies, and social strata that define modern India betrays a ideological positioning, which would have been labelled hypocritical and pseudo-secularist not too long back when saffron was hounding the centre-left and had turned institutions of culture (visibly) into terrains of contestation.  Even tough we are more comfortable with this kind of outdated liberalism, it is important to remember this kind of seculirm has remained terribly insulated and failed to represent the larger heterogeneity of the Indian Subcontinent and (possibly) thereby loosing ground to populist Hinduvta. 

Of course, when one questions the politics of representation, then ‘who’ is representing in front of ‘whom’ assumes greater significance. The Edge of Desire needs to be seen from two perspectives, one a representation of ‘contemporary Indian art ’ to an audience abroad and the other as a show to challenge preconceptions of contemporary India, whose presence in Western culture is often limited to Bollywood, yoga, outsourcing and the curry. According to the Asia Society Museum Director Melissa Chiu. “This exhibition aims to do for contemporary Indian art what Inside Out: New Chinese Art did in 1998 for raising awareness of the vibrant art scene in China.” However, when the show travels to India and is showcased in the National Gallery of Modern Art, the shifts in the semiotic value become tremendous. It suddenly becomes hierarchical–invested with the authority of the state that claims to represent the nation.

Raj Kumar; Apne Zindagi Ka Khambha (The Pillar of My Life) I, 2002-2003

When the show first opened in Australia, it was arranged in five interlocking thematic categories. These thematic divisions suggest flows across porous boundaries rather than watertight compartments. In New York, Edge of Desire was presented at two locations, the Asia Society Museum and the Queens Museum of Art. The Asia Society Museum featured the categories ‘Unruly Visions’ and ‘Location/Longing’, and the Queens Museum of Art featured ‘Transient Self’, ‘Contested Terrain’ and ‘Recycled Futures’. Though there is a sequence in the way the exhibition was conceived, inherently, the viewer was invited to see it as groupings by thematic structure, offered as a way of entry into this rich, complex and varied body of work that is unflinching in its encounter with the contemporary world.

To a great extent, the exhibition addresses religion and politics (specially the part originally shown as Contested Terrain. Gulammohammed Sheikh’s works depict the obliteration of the Babri Masjid in 1992 that has in a certain way been a loss of innocence for Indian secularism (The loss of Babri Masjid becomes the dominat theme of this section) . NN Rimzon's moving installation, Speaking Stones, is an anguished scream reacting to the loss. And Nilima Sheikh's decorative-poetic large scrolls describe the Kashmir of her youth, before it became a site of communal contestation.  RUMMANA HUSSAIN's seminal Home/Nation  is poetic articulation of torment, which was disappearing from memory just because it was not being seen around. Nalini Malani’s installation, The Sacred and the Profane (1998), projects a play of shadows from images painted in acrylic on large, rotating Mylar cylinders. Her work challenges notions of separation and insularity. A series of works (2003) by Santosh Kumar Das respond to communal violence in Gujarat, referencing a figurative tradition of Madhubani painting of juxtaposing recent events with historical figures such as Mahatma Gandhi. 

Rummana Hussain; 

Home Nation, 1996  

Multipart installation including wooden planks, plastic folders, photographs, glass bottles,

 cloth; 5.6 x 4 m

In the last decade, it has become clear that the Nehruvian notion of secularism is struggling to find relevancy in the post-Babri Masjid times (read ‘Secularism and Its Critics’, edited by Rajeev Bhargava), and what is troubling about the exhibition is that none of those lessons seem to have been learnt, and its claims towards heterogeneity seem to have been lost in an homogenous articulation of political concerns. The absence of K. P KrishnaKumar, Manjit Bawa, Akkitham Narayanan and some other voices hint that the ‘Contested Terrain’ is very narrowly understood, and such a show coming in during Congress rule is temptation to return and continue this piece….trying to decode the Edge of Desire….what is the desire? 

N.N. Rimzon, Speaking Stones, 1998, Photographs (laminated), stones, resin fiberglass, marble dust (on figure)
90 x 500cm (diameter)

When one came across, the Director of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Rajeev Lochan’s quote in the Hindu: "By bringing this highly acclaimed, cutting-edge exhibit to India, the NGMA hopes to facilitate a meaningful engagement between artists and their works, and to understand how the art resonates in its own environment”, one could not help wondering as to whether it would have been possible for the NGMA to bring in a show like this when the NDA government was in power. Of course we always use timing as a political stategy to bypass censorship, but the point is that is Chaitanya Sambrani is self reflective about how the nation is imagined and showcased and how his imagination simply  echos Geeta Kapur's and Jyotindra Jain's scholarship...and theby the politics of their imagination. 

Nataraj Sharma; Freedom Bus or A View from the 6th Standard, 2001-2004, Iron, wood, electrical moto, oil and enamel paint on paper, ink jet prints, rubber tyres, electroplating
103 x 237 x 76cm