High Culture, as we understand it is largely founded on the work of the old elites. (I use this term to denote the pre Industrialization European aristocracy in the post Industrialisation set up.) The old elites engaged in the process of cultural entrepreneurship by founding art museums and symphony societies, which were used to entrench their cultural values and thereby defend their social positions. They in conjunction with the upper middle class developed qualitative distinctions to dramatize and defend their exalted status. Conditions were created for autonomy of high cultural values, and initiatives were taken to propagate it. Such conditions survive due to a particular way in which freedom of speech and thought are understood. Prima facie, Enlightenment celebrates the unhindered right of an individual to engage in exercise of reason and the pursuit of knowledge. Nonetheless the rise of experts and specialists has effectively neutralized the ‘freedoms’. We live in a situation where it is important to spell out that even though modernity can boast of ‘secularising’ knowledge and freeing it from various pre modern taboos that restricted its circulation, a new set of values have been imposed by a new set of authorities effectively giving us ‘secularised’ restrictions to knowledge[1]. Academics has been an important guise, which constantly embeds high culture within the purview of ‘knowledge’.
During the early colonial period, we know that privileged Indian classes took to westernization as a tool towards retention and consolidation of their social positions. 19th century was characterized by the Indian elite privileging ‘modern’ over ‘traditional’. Hinduism itself was ‘reformed’ and redefined in accordance with enlightenment norms and its version of Hinduism during the ‘golden era’. Someone like Ravi Verma would choose European Naturalism and oil paints, to paint Indian mythologies. In this case, one may read a certain hybridity. However, upon closer examination, we see that the mythologies he painted were valorized by European scholars, used by them to construct an Indian culture. As it turns out Ravi Verma was then an active reinforcer of orientalist constructs. We see that by the end of the 19th century European high culture, or culture with a capital ‘C’ became perpetuated amongst the Indian middle class and the elite. One phenomenon aptly illustrates the growing roots of European Enlightenment in India. The early part of the 19th century ‘Enlightenment societies’ like the ‘Society for Acquisition of General Knowledge’ were essentially nurtured and encouraged by ‘ friendly Europeans’. Few ‘enlightened’ Indians were members of such institutions. The latter half of 19th century saw new ‘Enlightenment societies’ exclusively for Indian members and devoted to impart knowledge about modern sciences and arts among Indians in their languages. Spaces, which were essentially created to nationalize modernism[2].
Like in the west, 19th century India witnessed a proliferation of academic institutions, which under the guise of ‘impartiality’ and ‘imprecision’ sprayed ‘inculturated’ enlightenment upon the Indian masses. Here I quote Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir and Vivek Dhareswar from their introduction to the volume ‘ Interrogating Modernity’.
When sociologists, whether Indian or Euro-American study how the great tradition modernizes, or try to explain the nature of social change, there is an astonishing amount of consensus on how to characterize this transformation, the favorite catch-all terms being ‘Sanskritization’ and ‘Modernization’. This monolithic view of culture (as concept or as practice) precludes the possibility of seeing tradition constantly in the making, as strenuously contested and redefined by different communities. The investigators position themselves within disciplinary conventions in a way that exempts their own location as from scrutiny. Their attitudes towards ‘Indian culture’ are formed not only by the discipline but also by their class background. The distinction between ‘high and low’ cultures, for example, underpins a whole host of academic disciplines and institutional practices, so much so that when the object of study is constituted, the basic assumptions about culture and ‘Indians’ in general are unreflectively reiterated. What seems to happen is that as a result of the class/caste biases of their practitioners, the very configuration of the disciplines (whether humanities or social sciences) is shared by the assumption of the dominant culture.”[3]
Much has been made of the Anglicist – Orientalist divide. The anglicist’s have been the ‘villains’ however one can’t ignore that the ‘orientalists’ played a key role in masking the violence of colonialism. The Orientalists relied heavily on a textualised notion of Indian culture to propagate the vision of a glorious Indian civilization in the distant past. The Anglicists on the other hand constructed Indian history as that of an irrational, immature, depraved and lazy lot. Their contradictions disappear in their assumptions that the immediate pre-colonial state of India was pathetic, and western intervention was the only solution to the problem. It was discoursed that only through scientific rationality could India progress and the future be salvaged.
When India began to articulate its anti colonial Programme, the socio-political location of its leadership began to reflect heavily on the movement. It is well known that the leaders of the anti colonial programme were largely from the bourgeoisie and were exposed to western education. This very class had initiated the ‘nationalisation of modernism’. Nationalist modernism perpetuated a myth about the historical necessity of colonial rule, arguing that the British rule in India was a double-edged sword, destructive as well as regenerative[4]. Brutal economic and political suppression was juxtaposed against the modernist, scientific and socio cultural revolution that was being brought about in India. The nationalist movement aimed at getting rid of the brutal economic and political suppression so that the ‘now modern’ Indians could freely continue the Enlightenment revolution. The Indian bourgeoisie owed too much to newly emergent modernist institutions and to capitalism at large to seriously rethink or challenge the implications of modernism on the Indian social fabric. Thus Indian nationalism redeployed the Orientalist constructs of India’s past, asserting the antiquity, authenticity and continuity of ‘ Indian culture’. It propagated a historical need to modernize the nation and at the same time to preserve and valorize its golden past[5].[6]
When Havell and Coomarswamy exposed ‘Indian Art’, they were essentially adding another block to the construction of India’s great cultural heritage. The documentation of European Reactions to Indian art by Partha Mitter, doesn’t take into account the problems inherent in the glorification of ‘Indian Art’. He seems to take ‘Indian Art’ as given, and simply documents its taxonomical journeys. Early 20th century S.Asia might have been historically ill placed to reject Arnoldian cultural relativism, because the very essence of the anti-colonial discourse was embedded in it. However why does Mitter applaud this success? Is it because his class/caste position gains by this success?
Infact no scholar in the post-Havellian epoch has questioned the attribution of Art with a capital ‘A’ to a category of objects produced in Pre-modern India. Some scholars have voiced objection, arguing that attributing art hood to religious objects decontextulise them, negating the religious in favour of the Aesthetic. However, they largely go on to deduce that Indian Art is largely religio/spiritual in nature romanticizing it in the process….. further strengthening the ‘Other’ aspect of the orient. Dr. Parul Dave Mukherjee’s critique of (Spanish Indologist) Chantal Mallard’s location is extremely useful to understand this particular point of view, its problematics and is a powerful argument against the use of such binaries.
Having critiqued Partha Mitter’s ‘celebration’ of India’s attainment of art hood … having used quotes to implicate Indian academics of a class/caste bias, and continuous affiliation with orientalism, having made it clear that I subscribe to the theory of an overbearing imprint of ‘high culture’ on the construct of ‘India’ and its ‘India hood’. What am I trying to further? Am I at any juncture contesting Indian’s claim for an artistic heritage? No…. hoverer I am extremely uncomfortable with the construct of India and Indian Art which chiefly rests on the celebration of Art (with a capital ‘A’)
Griselda Pollock in her 1988 essay “Feminist Interventions in the histories of Art: An introduction:” argues that art history was a discursive practice, a form of making meaning that was imbedded within the attitudes of those- namely men- who as the dominate gender had inaugurated and supported it as an cultural institution. Her conclusion was that feminist scholarship no longer had a place within Art History, as it had been traditionally defined. She argues that the existing cannon is inappropriate and one needs a fresh cannon to find place for feminist art historiography within the mainstream.
This kind of a project to make the mainstream more inclusive, by incorporating cannons of the dominated shams from Foucault’s emphasis on the repressed of the west. I agree with Gayatri Spivak’s critique of Foucault on the grounds that he ignores the great power relation of repression and domination that ultimately connects west to the non-west. Infact Foucault’s such ‘ignorance’ makes me assume that the very project to make the mainstream more inclusive is to gain greater foothold within the dominant culture. However being a part of the dominant culture, implies being a part pf the cohesive mechanism that seeks to ensure the continuity of domination. ….and domination does not exist without ‘dominated’ . I am more comfortable with projects, which intend to attack/weaken the dominant culture, at the same time work towards a heterogeneous existence of locations.
From Coomarswamy to R. N. Misra, questions of authorship in Buddhist and Bramhanical art of ‘Pre-modern India’ has been extensively written upon. Textual sources such as the Mayamattam reveal that the Sthapti, Sutragrahins, Vardhaki and Taksaka worked together. Does the question of authorship rest upon the Sthapati or the Taksaka? Both Coomarswamy and R. N. Mishra have dealt exclusively with the Sutradhar / Sthapati. Of course any study of the position of Art and Artists has to be based on empirical evidences. Our obsession with empirical evidences seem to make us forget that it is only a particular class/caste, that would / could leave behind empirical evidences for our academic consumption. Can I deduce that the class/caste positions of the scholars interrogating this aspect of Indian Art didn’t / do not call for the destruction of the existing methodological cannons, or the class/caste sensitivities of the scholars do not provide enough motivation in this direction.
It is refreshing when Prof. R. N. Misra in “Art and Religion: A Study of Relations in Early India” (1992) questions whether the artists were allowed to enter the temple after their job was done. The post-vedic labeling of Silpins as sudras, prompts him to ask the question. But clearly the Sthapatis were not sudras. They seem to have had free access to religions texts……… and seem to be the ones who executed the crowning of the temple. When Prof. Misra is concerned whether the Shilpins were allowed inside a temple, he promptly assumes that they in fact wanted to. However one must note that we know alarmingly little about the religious practices of the sudras. Is it possible that they cared little about entering high brahminical temples. Like many of us who care little about visiting the temples of modern nation states, i.e. museums.
The nature of ‘Shilpin’ in the various stages of Indian history far exceeds the boundaries of art. R. N. Misra in his seminal ‘Ancient Artists and Art – Activity’ shows that the Vedas the Brahmanas, the Sutras, Samhitas and Buddhist texts such as Vinaya Pitaka and Digha Nikaya, carry so much contradictions regarding views on silpa and silpins that it became very difficult to draw a hard and fast line on their positions in the social hierarchy. None the less he asks “How did the sculptors and architects fare in this general class of silpins, and when did they came to have a distinct class of their own…”[7]
Why does Prof.Misra especially seek out sculptors and architects in his volume titled ‘Artists and the Early Art Activity’. Subsequently in the same paragraph Prof. Misra makes it clear that he specifically talking about stone carvers and masons. Are we witnessing the European post enlightenment bias for stone sculpture and architecture underlining his quest to place the artist in ancient Indian art activity. Maybe it is the same bias that leads him to claim that sculptors and architects were a “distinct class in the general class of silpins”. Prof. Misra is definitely operating within the dynamics of ‘high culture’. Here I feel the need to step back and clarify that my critique of both Coomarswamy and R. N. Misra is not o their personal scholarship …… but on the kind of discourse each of them embodies and have embodies and have perpetuated through their seminal works.
In contemporary academic thought there has been a significant concern on how contemporary needs and experiences ‘colour’ our readings about our past present and future. Our contemporary nations of art keep us away from even discussing elements like hair dressing and flower decorations within the context of pre-modern Indian art. We are simply content with looking at the hair dresses as motifs in sculptures or paintings, most often to ascertain stylish genealogies and iconography. If at all such studies do take place……. they are ethnographic in nature and even struggle to be art historical. (Even without a capital ‘A’ and a capital ‘H’).
At no point am I trying to argue that the list of 64 kalas should be unreflectively reiterated. Nonetheless one has to be constantly conscious of what one chooses to underline and what one chooses to undermine. The act of calling a particular list bogus and another one (even relatively) accurate, tells a story about privileging certain discourses.
I am using a quote by Gayatri Spivak to elucidate my location. In her 1989 essay ‘Who Claims Alterity’ Spivak states-
“For the moment let us hold decolonization does quite seriously represent a rupture for the colonized. It is counter intuitive to point at its repetitive negotiations. But it is precisely these counter intuitive imagining that must be grasped when history is said to be remade, and a rupture is too easily declared because of the intuition of freedom that a merely political independence brings for a certain class. Such grasping will allow us to perceive that neo colonialism is a displaced repetition of the old lines laid down by colonialism………… Cultural communal and class heterogenity native to the subcontinent has been asserting itself inspite of the unifying hopes based on those assorted concept – metaphors: Nationalism, Secularism, Internationalism, Culturalism.
Any extended discussion of remaking history in decolonization must take into account the dangerous fragility and tenacity of these -concept metaphors. Briefly it seems possible to say that an alternative and perhaps equally fragile made of resistance to them can only come through a strategic acceptance of the centrifugal potential of the plurality and heterogeneous native to the subcontinent.”[8]
Lack of materials about pre-modern Indian art has always been a prime excuse our obsession with dynastic/cultic art with near refusal to look beyond painting, stone sculpture and architecture. Certain questions have to be answered. This excuse becomes difficult to defend if one points out, that the largest category of surviving artifacts of the pre-modern period- namely potteries, find no place in art historical writings. Clearly it is not the material availability, but the dominant framework which results in the homogenous ‘History of Indian Art’ that is taught and studied.
Prezoisi is a key critic of Art History’s traditional alliance with Museology and connoisseurship . Following his key arguments many of us feel the need to drastically review the cannons of the discipline. What makes me uncomfortable is this question. Working within academics (the holy cow of elitism) how far is it possible for us not to work for the system that gives us our grants, scholarships, libraries, and salaries.?
also in continuation http://theblackyellowarrow.blogspot.in/2013/05/caste-inand-history-of-indian-art.html
------------------------------------------------------
[1] Partha Chatterjee, A Possible India, OUP New Delhi 1997.[2] Partha Chatterjee , A Possible India , OUP New Delhi 1997[3] (ed) Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir, Vivek Dhareshwar, Interrogating Modernity, Seagull Books , Kolkatta 1993.pp 4-5.[4] Partha Chatterjee, A Possible India, OUP New Delhi 1997[5] (Ed) Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir, Vivek Dhareshwar, Interrogating Modernity, Seagull Books, Kolkatta 1993.[6] This problem arising out of the interlinks between colonialism and nationalism is comprehensively looked into in Partha Chaterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? OUP. Delhi 1986.[7] R N Misra, Ancient Artist and Art Activity, IIAS Simla 1975.pp[8] (Ed) Barbara Kruger, Phil Mariani, Remaking History, DIA Art Foundation, Discussions in Contemporary History, no.4, Seattle 1989,pp292.
During the early colonial period, we know that privileged Indian classes took to westernization as a tool towards retention and consolidation of their social positions. 19th century was characterized by the Indian elite privileging ‘modern’ over ‘traditional’. Hinduism itself was ‘reformed’ and redefined in accordance with enlightenment norms and its version of Hinduism during the ‘golden era’. Someone like Ravi Verma would choose European Naturalism and oil paints, to paint Indian mythologies. In this case, one may read a certain hybridity. However, upon closer examination, we see that the mythologies he painted were valorized by European scholars, used by them to construct an Indian culture. As it turns out Ravi Verma was then an active reinforcer of orientalist constructs. We see that by the end of the 19th century European high culture, or culture with a capital ‘C’ became perpetuated amongst the Indian middle class and the elite. One phenomenon aptly illustrates the growing roots of European Enlightenment in India. The early part of the 19th century ‘Enlightenment societies’ like the ‘Society for Acquisition of General Knowledge’ were essentially nurtured and encouraged by ‘ friendly Europeans’. Few ‘enlightened’ Indians were members of such institutions. The latter half of 19th century saw new ‘Enlightenment societies’ exclusively for Indian members and devoted to impart knowledge about modern sciences and arts among Indians in their languages. Spaces, which were essentially created to nationalize modernism[2].
Like in the west, 19th century India witnessed a proliferation of academic institutions, which under the guise of ‘impartiality’ and ‘imprecision’ sprayed ‘inculturated’ enlightenment upon the Indian masses. Here I quote Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir and Vivek Dhareswar from their introduction to the volume ‘ Interrogating Modernity’.
When sociologists, whether Indian or Euro-American study how the great tradition modernizes, or try to explain the nature of social change, there is an astonishing amount of consensus on how to characterize this transformation, the favorite catch-all terms being ‘Sanskritization’ and ‘Modernization’. This monolithic view of culture (as concept or as practice) precludes the possibility of seeing tradition constantly in the making, as strenuously contested and redefined by different communities. The investigators position themselves within disciplinary conventions in a way that exempts their own location as from scrutiny. Their attitudes towards ‘Indian culture’ are formed not only by the discipline but also by their class background. The distinction between ‘high and low’ cultures, for example, underpins a whole host of academic disciplines and institutional practices, so much so that when the object of study is constituted, the basic assumptions about culture and ‘Indians’ in general are unreflectively reiterated. What seems to happen is that as a result of the class/caste biases of their practitioners, the very configuration of the disciplines (whether humanities or social sciences) is shared by the assumption of the dominant culture.”[3]
Much has been made of the Anglicist – Orientalist divide. The anglicist’s have been the ‘villains’ however one can’t ignore that the ‘orientalists’ played a key role in masking the violence of colonialism. The Orientalists relied heavily on a textualised notion of Indian culture to propagate the vision of a glorious Indian civilization in the distant past. The Anglicists on the other hand constructed Indian history as that of an irrational, immature, depraved and lazy lot. Their contradictions disappear in their assumptions that the immediate pre-colonial state of India was pathetic, and western intervention was the only solution to the problem. It was discoursed that only through scientific rationality could India progress and the future be salvaged.
When India began to articulate its anti colonial Programme, the socio-political location of its leadership began to reflect heavily on the movement. It is well known that the leaders of the anti colonial programme were largely from the bourgeoisie and were exposed to western education. This very class had initiated the ‘nationalisation of modernism’. Nationalist modernism perpetuated a myth about the historical necessity of colonial rule, arguing that the British rule in India was a double-edged sword, destructive as well as regenerative[4]. Brutal economic and political suppression was juxtaposed against the modernist, scientific and socio cultural revolution that was being brought about in India. The nationalist movement aimed at getting rid of the brutal economic and political suppression so that the ‘now modern’ Indians could freely continue the Enlightenment revolution. The Indian bourgeoisie owed too much to newly emergent modernist institutions and to capitalism at large to seriously rethink or challenge the implications of modernism on the Indian social fabric. Thus Indian nationalism redeployed the Orientalist constructs of India’s past, asserting the antiquity, authenticity and continuity of ‘ Indian culture’. It propagated a historical need to modernize the nation and at the same time to preserve and valorize its golden past[5].[6]
When Havell and Coomarswamy exposed ‘Indian Art’, they were essentially adding another block to the construction of India’s great cultural heritage. The documentation of European Reactions to Indian art by Partha Mitter, doesn’t take into account the problems inherent in the glorification of ‘Indian Art’. He seems to take ‘Indian Art’ as given, and simply documents its taxonomical journeys. Early 20th century S.Asia might have been historically ill placed to reject Arnoldian cultural relativism, because the very essence of the anti-colonial discourse was embedded in it. However why does Mitter applaud this success? Is it because his class/caste position gains by this success?
Infact no scholar in the post-Havellian epoch has questioned the attribution of Art with a capital ‘A’ to a category of objects produced in Pre-modern India. Some scholars have voiced objection, arguing that attributing art hood to religious objects decontextulise them, negating the religious in favour of the Aesthetic. However, they largely go on to deduce that Indian Art is largely religio/spiritual in nature romanticizing it in the process….. further strengthening the ‘Other’ aspect of the orient. Dr. Parul Dave Mukherjee’s critique of (Spanish Indologist) Chantal Mallard’s location is extremely useful to understand this particular point of view, its problematics and is a powerful argument against the use of such binaries.
Having critiqued Partha Mitter’s ‘celebration’ of India’s attainment of art hood … having used quotes to implicate Indian academics of a class/caste bias, and continuous affiliation with orientalism, having made it clear that I subscribe to the theory of an overbearing imprint of ‘high culture’ on the construct of ‘India’ and its ‘India hood’. What am I trying to further? Am I at any juncture contesting Indian’s claim for an artistic heritage? No…. hoverer I am extremely uncomfortable with the construct of India and Indian Art which chiefly rests on the celebration of Art (with a capital ‘A’)
Griselda Pollock in her 1988 essay “Feminist Interventions in the histories of Art: An introduction:” argues that art history was a discursive practice, a form of making meaning that was imbedded within the attitudes of those- namely men- who as the dominate gender had inaugurated and supported it as an cultural institution. Her conclusion was that feminist scholarship no longer had a place within Art History, as it had been traditionally defined. She argues that the existing cannon is inappropriate and one needs a fresh cannon to find place for feminist art historiography within the mainstream.
This kind of a project to make the mainstream more inclusive, by incorporating cannons of the dominated shams from Foucault’s emphasis on the repressed of the west. I agree with Gayatri Spivak’s critique of Foucault on the grounds that he ignores the great power relation of repression and domination that ultimately connects west to the non-west. Infact Foucault’s such ‘ignorance’ makes me assume that the very project to make the mainstream more inclusive is to gain greater foothold within the dominant culture. However being a part of the dominant culture, implies being a part pf the cohesive mechanism that seeks to ensure the continuity of domination. ….and domination does not exist without ‘dominated’ . I am more comfortable with projects, which intend to attack/weaken the dominant culture, at the same time work towards a heterogeneous existence of locations.
From Coomarswamy to R. N. Misra, questions of authorship in Buddhist and Bramhanical art of ‘Pre-modern India’ has been extensively written upon. Textual sources such as the Mayamattam reveal that the Sthapti, Sutragrahins, Vardhaki and Taksaka worked together. Does the question of authorship rest upon the Sthapati or the Taksaka? Both Coomarswamy and R. N. Mishra have dealt exclusively with the Sutradhar / Sthapati. Of course any study of the position of Art and Artists has to be based on empirical evidences. Our obsession with empirical evidences seem to make us forget that it is only a particular class/caste, that would / could leave behind empirical evidences for our academic consumption. Can I deduce that the class/caste positions of the scholars interrogating this aspect of Indian Art didn’t / do not call for the destruction of the existing methodological cannons, or the class/caste sensitivities of the scholars do not provide enough motivation in this direction.
It is refreshing when Prof. R. N. Misra in “Art and Religion: A Study of Relations in Early India” (1992) questions whether the artists were allowed to enter the temple after their job was done. The post-vedic labeling of Silpins as sudras, prompts him to ask the question. But clearly the Sthapatis were not sudras. They seem to have had free access to religions texts……… and seem to be the ones who executed the crowning of the temple. When Prof. Misra is concerned whether the Shilpins were allowed inside a temple, he promptly assumes that they in fact wanted to. However one must note that we know alarmingly little about the religious practices of the sudras. Is it possible that they cared little about entering high brahminical temples. Like many of us who care little about visiting the temples of modern nation states, i.e. museums.
The nature of ‘Shilpin’ in the various stages of Indian history far exceeds the boundaries of art. R. N. Misra in his seminal ‘Ancient Artists and Art – Activity’ shows that the Vedas the Brahmanas, the Sutras, Samhitas and Buddhist texts such as Vinaya Pitaka and Digha Nikaya, carry so much contradictions regarding views on silpa and silpins that it became very difficult to draw a hard and fast line on their positions in the social hierarchy. None the less he asks “How did the sculptors and architects fare in this general class of silpins, and when did they came to have a distinct class of their own…”[7]
Why does Prof.Misra especially seek out sculptors and architects in his volume titled ‘Artists and the Early Art Activity’. Subsequently in the same paragraph Prof. Misra makes it clear that he specifically talking about stone carvers and masons. Are we witnessing the European post enlightenment bias for stone sculpture and architecture underlining his quest to place the artist in ancient Indian art activity. Maybe it is the same bias that leads him to claim that sculptors and architects were a “distinct class in the general class of silpins”. Prof. Misra is definitely operating within the dynamics of ‘high culture’. Here I feel the need to step back and clarify that my critique of both Coomarswamy and R. N. Misra is not o their personal scholarship …… but on the kind of discourse each of them embodies and have embodies and have perpetuated through their seminal works.
In contemporary academic thought there has been a significant concern on how contemporary needs and experiences ‘colour’ our readings about our past present and future. Our contemporary nations of art keep us away from even discussing elements like hair dressing and flower decorations within the context of pre-modern Indian art. We are simply content with looking at the hair dresses as motifs in sculptures or paintings, most often to ascertain stylish genealogies and iconography. If at all such studies do take place……. they are ethnographic in nature and even struggle to be art historical. (Even without a capital ‘A’ and a capital ‘H’).
At no point am I trying to argue that the list of 64 kalas should be unreflectively reiterated. Nonetheless one has to be constantly conscious of what one chooses to underline and what one chooses to undermine. The act of calling a particular list bogus and another one (even relatively) accurate, tells a story about privileging certain discourses.
I am using a quote by Gayatri Spivak to elucidate my location. In her 1989 essay ‘Who Claims Alterity’ Spivak states-
“For the moment let us hold decolonization does quite seriously represent a rupture for the colonized. It is counter intuitive to point at its repetitive negotiations. But it is precisely these counter intuitive imagining that must be grasped when history is said to be remade, and a rupture is too easily declared because of the intuition of freedom that a merely political independence brings for a certain class. Such grasping will allow us to perceive that neo colonialism is a displaced repetition of the old lines laid down by colonialism………… Cultural communal and class heterogenity native to the subcontinent has been asserting itself inspite of the unifying hopes based on those assorted concept – metaphors: Nationalism, Secularism, Internationalism, Culturalism.
Any extended discussion of remaking history in decolonization must take into account the dangerous fragility and tenacity of these -concept metaphors. Briefly it seems possible to say that an alternative and perhaps equally fragile made of resistance to them can only come through a strategic acceptance of the centrifugal potential of the plurality and heterogeneous native to the subcontinent.”[8]
Lack of materials about pre-modern Indian art has always been a prime excuse our obsession with dynastic/cultic art with near refusal to look beyond painting, stone sculpture and architecture. Certain questions have to be answered. This excuse becomes difficult to defend if one points out, that the largest category of surviving artifacts of the pre-modern period- namely potteries, find no place in art historical writings. Clearly it is not the material availability, but the dominant framework which results in the homogenous ‘History of Indian Art’ that is taught and studied.
Prezoisi is a key critic of Art History’s traditional alliance with Museology and connoisseurship . Following his key arguments many of us feel the need to drastically review the cannons of the discipline. What makes me uncomfortable is this question. Working within academics (the holy cow of elitism) how far is it possible for us not to work for the system that gives us our grants, scholarships, libraries, and salaries.?
also in continuation http://theblackyellowarrow.blogspot.in/2013/05/caste-inand-history-of-indian-art.html
------------------------------------------------------
[1] Partha Chatterjee, A Possible India, OUP New Delhi 1997.[2] Partha Chatterjee , A Possible India , OUP New Delhi 1997[3] (ed) Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir, Vivek Dhareshwar, Interrogating Modernity, Seagull Books , Kolkatta 1993.pp 4-5.[4] Partha Chatterjee, A Possible India, OUP New Delhi 1997[5] (Ed) Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir, Vivek Dhareshwar, Interrogating Modernity, Seagull Books, Kolkatta 1993.[6] This problem arising out of the interlinks between colonialism and nationalism is comprehensively looked into in Partha Chaterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? OUP. Delhi 1986.[7] R N Misra, Ancient Artist and Art Activity, IIAS Simla 1975.pp[8] (Ed) Barbara Kruger, Phil Mariani, Remaking History, DIA Art Foundation, Discussions in Contemporary History, no.4, Seattle 1989,pp292.
