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Works and Curations

Monday, May 25, 2015

ON PUJA CHAUHAN'S SCULPTURES


Written in the summer of 2005, one can say this was my forst writing on contemporary indian art - that time i was teaching Indian History is a law school, and Puja asked me to write for her .





“Have you seen 'Jism'. i would like my woman to be some like Bipasha Basu. How i tried to achieve all this in my work is by working on a big scale (mother figure) but the other figures are smaller because they are her children, i gave her a posture with her legs wide apart. Meri ma har bar uske dono per ko saath rakhne ki koshish karti rahti hai. I always tell my ma that she is a besharam ladki  aur thats how i want her to be.”
Puja Chauhan

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   Explorations within any medium of expression bear the imprints of the explorers urge to arrive at point where aesthetic values combine with articulation of locational experiences. Various artist, silpins, musicians etc try to arrive at various levels of this combination. However, we are more attuned to expecting such explorations in the realm of ‘Fine Arts’ or ‘Literature’. Often such expectations are impositions as each artist decides her own measures depending upon her location vis-à-vis of Aesthetics and notions of subjectivity.

     When someone actually decides to plunge headlong into the tight rope walk and tries to attain such a combination, the outcome usually lacks the ‘resolved’ quality which we are all so getting use to (especially as art is more and and more a ‘consumer durable’ and a late capitalist notion of ‘the finished’ is affecting consumer behaviour globally). Personally, this very struggle (also interpretable as rough edgedness), and the manner in which it manifests, is what really draws me to Puja’s work.

     Confronted with her work for the first time, I was very impressed, and struck by the amount of development that has taken place ever since she opted out of Faculty of Fine Arts MS University of Baroda (where she completed her graduate specialization in Sculpture and stayed on for the first year of her Masters course). Working from her home in Rajkot- on the fringes of the Indian mainstream- Puja has not only shows a mature ‘coming to terms’ with an unconventional medium, but also a refreshing critique of Patriarchy.

I don’t know how successful Puja’s works are as political strategies against Patriarchy, maybe the question itself, is but an imposition of the analytical frameworks that dominate us. Any experience which is not ‘post modernized’ is under the threat of being labeled invalid and unacceptable as knowledge. However, is post-modernism as a discourse (or a constellation of discourses) in sync with the experience of post-modernity? When the ‘Radical’ has been defined as a crusade against consumerism and  declared to be a leftist prerogative, can a work which invites consumtion of the female body with the artist asserting her right to be nude and sexy (especially within the context of a orthodox Indian family) ever hope to be accepted as knowledge?

However, it will be limiting to simply view Puja’s works as an assertion of sexuality and from a subaltern location. These works are very much a voice against the patriarchal disciplining of women’s bodies and body language. Language being a cultural construct is destined to be governed by norms. However the agency that disciplines needs to be questioned. The disciplining of a girl’s or a women’s body language that takes place within house holds mirrors the colonial disciplining of ‘native’. Just that this has happened over a much longer period of human history and is still the most dominant expression of patriarchy and is unquestioned in many dominant value systems. Frighteningly issues of ‘woman’s safety’ have got intertwined with this and thus we always live in a world where violence by men towards women allows men the right to discipline women’s right. The dominant voice says “She got eve teased because of the way she dresses”. Men not only violate the law, but also claim that it is the women’s faults that lead to the violation. Puja sends out a message that unless women discipline their bodies they are doomed to be violated upon.
 
Such an experience take a different context within a small conservative town……especially for someone how has experienced greater physical freedom within an art school campus. Sometimes one needs to experience freedom in order to know how suffocating it is to be denied freedom. Puja’s voice against the value system which dominates, suppresses and yet protects her is a voice that needs much clearer articulation….. an area the artist needs to develop in the years to come.
  
To me Puja’s works cut in two ways. She brings in a question which is increasingly becoming important for third world feminists to address. A question that was first fore-grounded by Spivak in her argument for the ‘doubly subaltern’. When we think of the political project of feminism in India we usually think of a project of resistance by a single layered subaltern. However the politico-demographical diversity of the Indian nation is wholly mirrored by the diversities in the manner women are dominated and disciplined. The varied nature of patriarchal domination calls a wide range of resistance. Puja’s work is resistance of a particular type, but her resistance speaks of an India which is increasingly being swept under the carpet post Rao-Manmohan era- ever since India has been celebrating its membership into late capitalism. An India which never really had a presense in art galleries unless romanticized.

Not that the sculptures being exhibited could not be formally more resolved. Indeed, they may come across to look a bit too much like caricatures, maybe odd, funny dolls. However for an up coming fresh artist I find a lot of potential in the formal indecisiveness and knowing Puja she will never relax and settle down. Looking forward to see her express with more flair, and cut with more passion.

Moreover, the process of being more formally resolved also encompasses the process of being more self-conscious about the ways in which her works are seen. Puja’s works, filter through her childhood experiences (of playing with dolls, learning codes of morality while playing, stitching their clothes and accessories). It is on this foundation, that her academic training in sculpture is enabling her to find her voice.

Puja has always shared an ambivalent relationship with institutionalized art education. She has found her passion and discovered her right to artistic subjectivity through her art school training, and yet (since any mainstream institution necessarily duplicates the control mechanism of the state) she has found it patriarchal, restrictive and orthodox. It is only an institution like ‘Faculty of Fine Arts, M S University Baroda that could give Puja the space to experiment with weaving, and cloth-cotton sculptures. However, it is only far away from the mainstream, that Puja found ‘her calling’, enabling her to move away from just making sculptures in the manner of stuffed toys, and introduce the ‘personal’.        

It is this development that has given her works a depth allowing them to have a voice, encouraging people to communicate, and inviting people to communicate with them.


  ...Happy Communiating.
Rahul Bhattacharya



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“I read Shabana Azmi's interview in the paper. She said art should be a medium of social change. I agree with her. i believe that most people are very uncomfortable talking about personal things . But when you do that its because you think that your story will help other people and because you think that people should change the way they think. i think there are a lots of woman who can identify with my work and it should give them a courage to say  I will not let this happen to me.Bye”.
Puja Chauhan


Friday, February 27, 2015

untitled - V

The unseen hunger for innocence
Could be a calling or a kill
Burning away more sugar than body can take
The brain sings itself an ancient lullaby

Monday, September 29, 2014

Archiving and Interviews



This installation is an archive from the workshop titled “Who will write the history of tears?” The workshop conducted by Vidisha Saini was held at Kathputli Colony(New Delhi) with support from Poornima Sardana , centered at Pearl Academy,Noida. A workshop about social practice and alternate history making had almost thirty student participants, and other co-narrators from the colony. The process followed learning from Vidisha’s previously initiated project “You LikeMr. Shekhar” which was a narrative from a rehabilitation project site in Hampi(Karnataka). Kathputli Colony,a large colony of artists and other migrants, is currently in the process of being rehabilitated. This archive as invited into 3 Sentences on the Curatorial by Prac forum at the initiation of Rahul Bhattacharya.



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The following is a email conversation between a curator and the keeper of a fleeting archive

Addressed to you
Questions presented by Rahul Bhattacharya

R: What does this archive mean to you?

This archive is a way of participating in history, by creating documents of a presence that may be forgotten in the near future. These are not only documents of existence of Kathputli Colony but also their erasure, or movement. What are the possible reasons for these rehabilitation projects: failed government policies?, unforeseen value of now squatted lands?, many other myths presented as reasons, or just greed?
Similar to other archives, this one too might have some fiction. What is important is that it plays a role narrating about communities being obliterated from our collective memories as well as stories beyond their victimhood.


R: What could it possibly mean to me?

In the installation of ‘record objects’[1]there is no guiding text except for location. The archive is performative, it is what every viewer makes out of it, curiosity is how one leaps into it. One might form a relationship through identifying the function of the objects, many we share real-time with or have consumed, and other subjective weaving of stories.


R: Isthis archive a story or a collection of stories?

Both. Many stories here become a single story on the tabletop. The story here doesn’t only have to be story of its previous owner but the ownership you take when you view them, the story you make. So its singularity or plurality depends on how much is one participating in it.
R: How were these objects chosen to represent the larger archive?

This archive is an outcome of a workshop that had almost thirtyparticipants. They worked in groups of 4-5 along with a co-narrator (a resident of the Kathputli Colony). During the workshop the participants chose to understand the community by using art form as their initial categories of engagement. They interacted with puppeteer and magician communities among others. After spending time, learning from each other’s experiences (groups sharing their narratives and correlating) and documenting oral histories, participants were asked to collect objects to speak about their learning.This archive though built as a part of the workshop, is not in isolation from personal biases as well as influence of the relationships participants built with the community and their perception of struggle. And also an outcome of decisions made while installing.

Archives are products of performances, before they start performing. They are also institutions. The restrictions of these institutions may easily be set by how big the bag in which you are carrying things is. Limitations also come with how one gains access: by being welcomed, taking permissions, buying or stealing.





R: What does Kathputli colony mean to you?

Kathputli Colony is a hub of vibrant communities that does not exist on the map of Delhi, like a living lore. This is the biggest artists colony in our country. We as contemporary art practitioners have to see, acknowledge and learn from the practices and social engagements of the artists coming from these age-old art practices, and how they have sustained and transformed over centuries.As our country is a becoming a more capitalist economy Kathputli presents a case of crossover where there is many times conflict in values of tradition vs capitalism. The collectiveness, humility, rhythm of life, co-existence, are among many other things to learn from this community.


R: What could Kathputli colony mean to me?

The first thing one of the workshop participants said about Kathputli was “not happening”; we still don’t know what it means. As they engaged more, they started questioning their own realities. Eventually they said, “these people are more traveled than us”, “Hindu and Muslim communities live together”, “neighbors jump over each others roofs to help and to meet”,“they have many wives”, “they know more languages”, and “they’re more talented then we are”. Initially some also said it’s better to remove such a dirty colony, but over time they humbled to appreciate these livelihoods and participate in them.

The communities that surround us give us our identity. We need to know our neighbor to know more about ourselves. We have to not let institutions of power control our identity, like governments dictating what your nation’s culture or religion is. One has to seek and share. Perhaps you could identify your own skillset on how to tell stories, and then study muted communities and spaces. It’s important for us to make “queerness” visible to challenge the hegemonic narrative.





[1]Record Objects’ is a vernacular archiving term. Here the record stands for what the archivist claims it’s a record of. Which in this case is of the community where it comes from, and events that surrounded it.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Touch

there are times when you forget
that they designed to kill you
waking up in a stormy lull
the ambiance highway
and the fleeting sunlight
memories...and staying alive
the fight to be in touch with destiny
to remember  is to protect
bursting horizons
dark highways
reflectors showing the path
breathing easy everyday
is just the beginning
falling in love with touch and destiny


Monday, September 22, 2014

A letter to the police force of India:

To
The Commissioner of Police
Kolkata
Lalbazar



                                  Re: Role of Police in today's politics and the democratic future of India.



Sir,
 I write this letter addressing you because the situation in Kolkata deserves such; but in spirit this letter is written to the police force of India at large.
For the first time since independence we are witnessing such wide scale police violence on civilians. It has come to such a scale that it is now like the police violence on Indians during the British Raj.
As a thinking individual you must be well aware that the political circle and the corporates are waging an economic and a knowledge war on the working and peasant class of India, including its adivasis. Gender, specifically the woman's body has become an important site of this conflict.

We have no option but to come out in non violent protest, it is our right, it is what the utopia of the independence movement was all about. We know you are doing your duty by obeying  your political masters, but i write to remind you that you are one of us and not one of them.

 When a police man is killed , his body does not go back to a palatial house like those of our politicians and our corporate masters. His body goes back to a normal working class house, his mother or wife will struggle for his pension just like ours.

It is important that at this historic moment in post independence history, the police force becomes the defenders of democracy and not politicians.
I will say no more to you.

If we die on the other sides of humanity, i will pray for your soul.


Rahul Bhattacharya
P-111 Block -F
New Alipore
Kolkata 700053
22/9/2014

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Within the Cycles of Time: Jaganath Panda’s 'Deep Time – Metamorphic Spheres'

‘Deep Time –Metamorphic  Spheres’ - installation view 


In ‘Deep Time –Metamorphic  Spheres’,  we encounter a work that transgresses the divides between ‘painting’ and mural , pulling us towards reading  a narrative- then trapping us into an encounter with the timeless;  a zone where time meets eternity. The narrative in Indian post modern tradition pictorial tradition has predominantly engaged with reclaiming of lore and mythology. Jaganath Panda occupies the zenith amongst contemporary master storytellers, carrying a long tradition with him that flows through Binod Behari Mukherjee, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Bhupen Khakhar, Atul Dodiya . However, growing up in Odhisa must have exposed him to the temple panels and the magic of pictorial narrativity in large scale. As Panda becomes more and more confident in his practice one can see him using scale as tool to envelope and seduce his audience as he creates settings for his contemporary myth making.  ‘Deep Time – Metamorphic  Spheres’  (re)members  Binod Behari in making the body a part of the viewing experience, and then inviting the eye to feast on the intricate designing and detailing.  This work marks a certain resistance to be ‘just a painting’. It seeks to be graffiti, a mural, an installation, and an epic, almost everything but just a painting. This desire to simultaneously be everything is a defining characteristic of contemporary experience.

Panda employs a certain Mattissian engagement with Beauty, using it as reason to make art and also using it as a device.   Beauty for him is an important trope, the 'finished', the 'sensual' and the 'rich' draw in the viewer and create that moment of pause.  The shades of cobalt, ultramarine and gold allure to the rich European renaissance frescos and the miniatures form Persia.  The exaggeration in the Persian style treatment of water is juxtaposed mediatic realism, hints of water color treatment, and a surrealist understanding of land /city scapes. This pastiche of styles enables Panda to stake a claim on ‘Beauty’ as a form of contemporary expressions. One is tempted to read into his intricate designing of the pictorial surface, his attention to lines and their rhythms is inspired by his early associations with the painting traditions in the villages of Odhisa.  (Compared the folk painting tradition of neighboring Bengal, in Odhisa one sees a very skilled use of line, a play with curvilinear rhythm, and dense surface detailing.) Even if that is true, what is more important is how the artist masks this inspiration, creating a bridge between traditional and globalised understanding of line and rhythm.

Deeply rooted in bramhanical history and mythology since childhood, Jagannath Panda has been exploring (t)his creation of parallel fantasies - exploring  these  mythologies  and exploring the metaphoric possibilities of  animals as witness- protagonists. However here we see a small but important shift here. Many of his works feature an animal bearing witness to contemporary urbanity and slow demise of 'nature'; resulting in a poignant confrontation with its own mute victimhood. 
Here we see the fish coming as an active witness to the cycles of change.  She is mute, but no longer a victim, a small change that transforms her muteness into silence. It (further) becomes clear that the silence is an active voice, the fish is full of dynamism and movement, bringing in the force and whims of the natural world, almost having the power to make us humans mute to the grand cycles of change. Gone are the tensions between the binaries between nature and culture.  There is a promise of a new existence – a metaphoric allure to the existing territories being swept away.  The fish comes from Vishnu Puran (A 5th-6th Century AD text, considered to be the most important amongst Vaishnavite Puranas), and alludes to the myth of Manu and the flooding of the earth.  At the moment of the grand deluge, the fish comes in as the audience-witness to the changing cycle of times. Is there a (possible) bemusement it feels while witnessing the (hu)man’s oblivion.

There are some definitions of contemporary and contemporanity that define this as a historic moment where history (imaginations of the past and future) is culturally useless. Lifetime now means five-ten years in various popular cultural contexts; and indeed ‘now’ and the immediate have become more important than any sense of the past or the future. As Zubin Mehta grandly orchestrates on the ruins of Nalanda, and the mythical Shivaji replaces the mythical Manu with his contemporary Hindu nationalistic masculinity, they transform into  protagonists of a magnificent celebration of ‘nowness’. This engagement with the moment does not only come from post capitalist desire generating structures, it has also been recurrent anchor for contemporary spiritual thought (s).  Nonetheless, Panda ambushes this ‘nowness’, constantly keeping it surrounded by references to the ‘infinite’.  The use of mandalas (as a constant recurring theme in), and deployment of Fibonacci numbers as the device of connecting the two walls effectively hints at a philosophical critique of this ‘nowness’. 


One can (still) see the some glimpses when the night time is brooding, and the city/land scapes carry an air of post humanity.  Yet they are just moments in the cycle of time, offset by various other moments in the constellation.  The clockwork and anti clockwork forces of the lines strike a zone between activation of tension and harmony. This perfect poise is ruptured through the use of graffiti, where the wall too becomes a site for pictorial depth, (possibly) reminding us of the layers of memory and forgetting that reside with the dimensionality of a moment. 



Monday, August 18, 2014

CONCEPTUALIZING THE ‘ARTIST’ -I (interpolating the premodern)


This article was written in 2004 as the concluding chapter of my Masters dissertation, and a version of this was published in the Nandan Magazine - Shantiniketan-  2005. I bring it here as the first part of a two part essay on Conceptualizing the artist) 


A good artist is one who reworks tradition and explores new territories.”
                    Lulu Singhania.

A small article may not be the best medium through which to challenge a maxim. Thankfully I am not even trying to be audacious. However, well settled maxims can be static theories waiting to be thrown into chaos in order to re ascertain their validity, specially in contexts out side the value systems where they originate from.

A hundred years have passed since a certain class of object from Indian antiquity got recognition as objects of art (if one takes E.B Havell’s Ideals of Indian Art –1905) as a landmark). However, the frames of the window and its location so often determine what we see. As a result of this, what objects constitute Indian Art, and what are the criteria for determining a great sculptor, architect or painter determined from view points rooted in frameworks rooted in Euro- American modernist locations. The great Indian middle class is its close and influential ally. A substantial part of this influence comes from our dominance over research institutions and universities. This article on one hand tries to chop off the branch the branch that supports me, and a plea to render such huge supporting branches obsolete.

 From early days of Indian art history, scholars have been looking at the roles of artists’ of pre- modern India (or trying to determine the roles). Works on brahmanical royal monuments have focused mainly on the royalty-religion combine (in most cases the focus has been on the ‘intrinsic development of style) in attempts to conceptualize and analyze stylistic changes in brahmanical royal monuments.

I propose to introduce ‘innovation’ as a category………… defining  ‘innovation’ as changes arrived at to meet the changes in the value system in which art is produced in a particular society. These changes may or may not be lead to anti hegemonic expressions .I this article I would like to briefly theorise on the role of silpins in the context of medieval Bramhanical royal monuments. This work is an attempt to dwell upon the complexity of bringing in the agency of the Sthapati (Architect*), Vardhiki(Sculptor) and the Takshaka(wood carver/ carpenter) in formulating the semiotic shifts in the royal temples.

 Though hegemony as a concept is considered to rest as much as in the ‘bottom’ as in the ‘top’ creating a dynamic interrelationship. In some villages in not very far from New Delhi people who have been voting on a regular basis, since the last thirty years, still think that Indira Gandhi is the Prime Minister. This view comfortably exists, even though in the context of the state not only is Indira Gandhi dead, the Congress-I was out of power for nearly a decade and there has been a tremendous shift in governmental policies, electoral equations and a new hegemonic order is struggling to be instated.

This is not an isolated phenomenon (though our urban educated sensibilities tend to urge us to dismiss it and consider the debate on American foreign policies). From Rajpath to remote interior villages, within a politically demarcated boundary across gender, class, caste, sexuality, ‘we are all subjects of the Indian State’. However, some have highly prized brown sugar delivered at their doorstep by the police with a quality assurance, whereas some have to flee at the very sight of the police just because they are born into the ‘denotified tribes’.

 It is quite possible to imagine that during a period of drought, a person from the village (which by and large still thinks that Indira Gandhi is the Prime Minister) will go to the city (lets assume Delhi), take up a job as a construction worker and work on the façade of India’s next parliament building. He returns home and still can’t enter the village moneylender’s house, crouches outside the choukhat his knees carrying the burden of his untouchability. Karan Grover wins the ‘Bharat Ratna’ for this architectural wonder. As a discipline how do we theorize it? At least hundred years from now, if a member of this discipline analyzes the parliament and finds the name of the carvers eulogized in the foundation inscriptions; he/she will not get a textual reference calling/assigning the carver/ stone mason as an untouchable.

The key to understand the agency of the Sthapatis and Shilpins in the construction of cultural forms, where innovation can be located as organized shifts in semantic value which embody and perpetuate the changing mechanisms of hegemony maintenance, is to develop an understanding about the location of the Shilpin guilds/workshops within the hegemony. I choose to collapse the Sthapati and the Takshaka primarily because I don’t have the methodological tools to analyze their agencies at a differentiated level. Moreover the kind of alienation I conjured (when I indulged in a bit of story telling about the hypothetical villager from a real village) was more polemical. Though the relationship of the peripheries with the center was equally (if not more) vast, the extent of ‘alienation of labour’ represented, has been definitely exaggerated if viewed in the pre-modern context.

The Varaha panel at the Udaigiri Hills , coming from the age of Bramhanical revivalism (5th Century A.D)

Another potent way of locating the agency of the Shilpin is provided by R.N. Misra in his under recognized ‘against the grain’ reading of the Udaygiri Varaha panel.[1] Reading the first recognized neo-Brahmanical articulation of political hegemony through plastic art, Misra argues for a political pun. The accepted art historical reading of the panel is in terms of a political allegory celebrating Chandragupta II’s heroic subjugation of the Sakas (fig:33). Citing the figures of Ganga and Yamuna, Misra proposes that the Shilpin purposefully locates Madhyadesha in eastern Malwa. The Shilpin suggests the shaky control of a vulnerable king, who was forced to leave his capital and extensively camp over a newly conquered territory for the sake of political hegemony.

Like in most cases both the methods (I can think of) will probably work best if used together. If one follows Guha’s model of dominance and subordination, then (by the available historical material) the Shilpin community by large would have to be located as the subordinated (in the context of the royalty and the Brahmanas). Further by his model collaboration and resistance together would affect the agency of the artist (though in the diagrammatic representation of the model Guha appears to structurally polarize the two).[2] Again I back out, using both the approaches together requires a methodological finesse, I am not capable of at this stage. Instead, I will try to locate the Shilpins within the hegemony, and explore their social mobility.

Any engagement with the pre-modern Sthapati-Shilpins has to negotiate through the questions regarding anonymity and the seminal contributions by R.N. Misra.[3] Important contributions by Misra, Bolon, Settar have gone a long way in lifting this veil of anonymity. If the alleged anonymity of pre-modern south Asian practitioners of Shilpa bothers us so much because we are hunting for Renaissance style masters, being ashamed that south Asian pre-modern history does not give enough recognition to the ‘individual artist’ which we have hegemonized as natural to a ‘high Civilization’, then I opt out of the quest. For me the inscriptional evidence naming or eulogizing artists is crucial in the context of an oral society where writing/inscribing was a highly contested terrain embodying and perpetuating contestations over knowledge.

The historical time, which this dissertation focuses on, is engaging for anyone interested in the location of Shilpa and its practitioners. Textual, inscriptional and material sources combine to give out completely confusing signals. The pre-Islamic medieval period witnessed a high increase in the number of sculpto-architectural projects undertaken under the expanding hegemonies of feudalism and neo-Brahmanism/proto-Hinduism. This period yields the greatest concentration of inscriptions mentioning Sthapati, Shilpins either by the patrons or by the practitioners themselves. It is in this period that all the major Shipashastric texts were authored. The spirit of the inscriptions and the texts contradict each other. While the inscriptional evidence clearly signals a growing notion of a ‘master’ and Sthapatis or Shilpins are sometimes mentioned (by the patrons or themselves) almost as ‘brand names’, the Shipashastras continue to follow the Dharmashastric practice of labeling the entire community as Shudras. Only when they took up an assignment of temple construction were they considered ritually pure.[4] (The villager working on the parliament facade had fallen down and broken his leg. This accident happened due to lapses in safety measures and he was given RS. 5000 as a compensation. A year later his brother killed his family and committed suicide due to repeated crop failure). I have already discussed in chapter-2 the kind of tight noosed dictations the Shipashastras preached.
 
The Mallikarjuna temple at Pattadakal built during the grand dynastic age of the Chalukyan Empire (7th Century A.D)


If one views the Virupaksha and Mallikarjuna inscriptions (eulogizing Gundacharya and Sarvasidhiacharya, conferring titles and giving a guild judicial autonomy)[5] against the spirit of the Shilpashastras then we clearly see a power struggle. This power struggle needs to be studied carefully. The monarchy, the Vedic Brahmanas, the Pujari Brahmanas, the Sthapatis were all parties and perpetuators of this conflict. Thus, we have Guha’s model being complicated, wherein dominance works in fragments allowing the subordinated to indulge in a shifting of collaboration and resistance for upward mobility of his social position. 

The department where I have received training in the discipline of art history (the Department of Art History, Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda), has in the recent years been giving a lot of attention to guilds and their movements in order to explain shifts in style. Though this is a liberating way of studying influences, at the same time we also need to theorize how does our understanding of ‘style’ and ‘guild’ work together. Are we to assume a model of a hierarchical authorial role joining the Sthapati and the Takshaka vertically? If so, is Gundacharya equivalent to Karan Grover? Unless we resolve the similarities and differences between Sthapatis and architects we shall never be able to equate the movement of styles with guilds, because such a notion inevitably attaches a signatorial value to style. Can we have stylistic differentiation of Lintas advertisements versus Clarion advertisements as we can differentiate Karan Grover against Louis Khan? However, we can have stylistic differentiation of Surf advertisements and Rin advertisements. This confusion is crucial to me when I attempt to locate style with guilds-patrons. However we will gain if we constantly keep in mind that neither ‘Karan Grover’ nor ‘Rin’ operate as free agents. They have their own subject locations, which limit and influence their actions.

In such a situation it is the notion of ‘value’, that we need to engage with. If one defines ‘value’ as ‘institutionalized’ social codes which are regarded as something that must be sustained (or sometimes contested), then the next step is to analyze the location of the notion of ‘authorship’ in the context of sculptural/architectural style in royal Brahmanical temple building. To be able to do that we also need to be able to imagine the ‘individual(s)’ in the time-space we are dealing with.

The Brihadeshwara temple and it's mighty dwarapalakas (Built during the zenith of the Chola empire - 9th Century A.D )

When the Chola court decreed to construct the Brihadeshwara, what kind of exchange must have taken place between the concerned agent of the court and the Sthapati?   . Did someone nearly pre fabricate the monument for the execution of the Sthapati? May be yes, may be no. If we take ‘yes’, then we have a model in which the Chola court would employ a temple planner who would be a hands off ‘visualizer’, and being close to the power center, would be a perfect articulator of hegemonic requirements of the center. Considering that the annual payment of the Sthapati was half of the amount received by the ‘assistant accountants’,[6] the ‘yes model’ seem useable. If we take ‘no’, then we could imagine that the Sthapati was close enough to the center to be able to imagine and articulate the hegemonic requirements of the center. In the context of the Chola time space it seems that the Shaivite Bhakti poet/singers occupied this space, may be not the Sthapati.[7]


Koranganatha Temple Srinivasanallur built during the early Chola period (8th Century A.D)

However the ‘no model’ may be more applicable to Virupaksha and Mallikarjuna. The court acknowledgement of the Acharya titles, the eulogizing, the heavy monetary rewards and the granting of jurisdictional freedom to the community (as a reward to the Acharya), definitely point to a much closer association with the court (than receiving half the salary of a temple clerk). The mention of the Sthapati in the Brihadeshwara inscriptions seem just for the sake of keeping administrative records, while the Virupaksha and Mallikarjuna inscriptions go much beyond records. Infact from the Chalukyan time space we have enough information to suggest that the value system allowed for notions of Sthapati/Shilpin authorship. Narsoab’s self-eulogizing inscription from Aihole and Baladeva’s from Mallikarjuna and Papanatha support this view.[8] There are no such evidences that comedown to us from the Chola time space (even though there is a greater density of epigraphical material).

The ‘no model’ is closer to the mainstream disciplinary notions about ‘authorship’; hence, I shall not elaborate on it. I am spending a little time over the ‘yes model’.

Before joining the discipline as a student, I used to work with a small advertising agency in Kolkata. After my small training period I was appointed as a ‘visualizer’. In those days (1994-95) only the big agencies had computers. We had a small studio where a very skilled gentleman would do a wide array of works. After meeting my client and working out a visual strategy with him/her I would come to the office and work out various basic layouts etc. I have a very bad hand-brain combination when it comes to writing, drawing etc. Eventually I would march up to the studio with a bunch of clumsy sketches in my hand and (try to) explain what I wanted. Communication was made easy by the visual culture we shared and a basic understanding of the market. However, when it came to slightly complex things like neon signboards a lot of my models had to be changed because of technical requirements. When it came to large commissions the technical feedback from the studio were more important. Technical feedbacks do not come without aesthetic suggestions. “Because of this, that is not viable, but if you want to retain the effect you might want to think on those lines”. Eventually what came out of the studio was ‘my design’. Our gentleman in the studio earned as much as our office clerk.

The dvarpalas of Brihadeshwara fall within the tradition of Chola dvarpalas yet have a monumentality that cannot be explained just by their size. Can we imagine that the Sthapati and his guild had to present a sample to the court for approval and make changes accordingly? Yes, we can imagine but I am not going to push for conclusions.

The archival material one engages with, often give multiple directional indicators …… almost as a message that no single interpretation should be privileged. The worth of the Sthapati’s salary and the casual administrative reference to him had allowed me to imagine a particular relationship with the activity at Brihadeshwara (a royal monument embodying and perpetuating a ‘new’ centralized mechanism of hegemony maintenance). However the temple clerk’s name is not mentioned in the inscriptions but the Sthapati’s is. Thus I need to admit that there is something beyond the ‘causal administrative’ in the reference to the Sthapati.           

          A monument like Brihadeshwara is not easy to construct. It is not just taking a monument like Koranganatha Swami or any previously built ‘middle Chola’ monument and enlarging it six to seven times. Complex weight bearing and structural articulation problems had to be negotiated.[9] A simple calculation can tell us that Brihadeshwara is about six times larger than Koranganatha Swami. However, can we imagine the complex calculations needed to ascertain how much the relatively proportionate projections and recessions needed to be, in order to retain the clarity of design? This is the terrain of knowledge and knowledge formation which must have been totally alien to a ‘hands off consultant’.
*****

          The difference between ideology and hegemony is the difference between formulating an idea discursively and experiencing a state of consciousness. The semiotic content of the monuments, I have engaged with, might be viewed as articulations of or ideologies of governance. Nonetheless they operate within ‘visual culture’ and hence are an interlocking space between the discursive and the lived. It is here that the role of a Sthapati, Shilpin becomes important as an agent of the interlock between ideology and hegemony. To view them as unintended social actors would not amount to a lapse back into the ‘anonymity’ zone. We are all unintended social actors in most of our day to day activities. However dominant groups seek to shape and dominate consciousness through the cultural production, legitimization, control and diffusions of values, symbols and meanings creating a sense of reality that reinforces, ethicizes and neutralizes social practices that position social actors in relation to each other. In the context of royal Brahmanical temples, the Sthapati becomes a key player in materializing attempts of the dominant to shape consciousness. Locating the Sthapati is crucial to our understanding of these monuments as expressions of hegemony maintenance.    
            
*******





[1]  R.N. Misra, Perceptions of India’s Past, Tradition and the Artist, (ed.) Catherine B. Asher and Thomas R. Metcalf, Perception of South Asia’s Visual Past, Oxford and IBH, Delhi, 1994. 
[2]  Ranjit Guha, Domination without Hegemony (ed.) Ranjit Guha, Subaltern Studies VI Delhi, 1999.   
[3]  R.N. Misra, Ancient Artists and Art Activity, Indian Institution of Advanced Study, Simla 1975. 
[4]  Stella Kramrish, Traditions of the Indian Craftsman, (ed.) Barbara Stoler Miller, Exploring India’s Sacred Art, Philadelphia 1983.
Vaijayanti Dilip Shete, Expressive Theory of ‘Catur Varnya’ Outlining the Texts. (ed.) Shivaji K. Panikkar, Abha Sheth, Art and Social Relations, Baroda (forthcoming).   
[5]  George Mitchell, An Architectural Description and Analysis of the Early Western Chalukyan Temples, London, 1975. 
[6] V Balambal, Chola Administration, : Administration of the Brahadesvara Temple at Tanjore during the period of Rajaraja I JOIH, Vol. LXII, Part 1-3.
[7]  R. Nandakumar Nair, The Bhakti Movement in South India. Its Impact on the Sculpture and Painting, M.A. Dissertation, Dept. of Art History, M.S. University of Baroda, 1980.
[8]  Carol Radcliffe Bolon, Op. Cit. 
[9]  Pierre Richard, Tanjavur Brhadisvara An Architectural Study, Delhi, Pondicherry, 1995. 
[*] Used in approximation 

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Secularism, India and Commonsense.


Posters for Anand Pathwardhan's Film, Ram Ke Naam

This is clearly not a research paper...so it has not been footnoted and referenced- but at the same time i would be happy to share references if you ask me to....
Uploading a combined version of two emails i sent to a friend during the election period answering some questions about religion, othering and secularism. Many conversations i overheard after the 16th of May made me want to share this...the mails are un edited.  


                     ***

I have seen my Muslim friends in Gujarat become more communal in their thinking ...and slowly very narrow minded communal...how it happened...how did my friends end up staying in large urban ghettos....and listing to hardcore Saudi Arabian version of fundamentalist Islam. 
India had been ruled by Muslim kings and since a child i was taught that even though some of them were 'great' but they destroyed Hindu temples and cultures...this was the commonsense we all grew up with...these stories then were strengthened through our history books as facts. 
as i grew up and started studying history i realized that all these 'facts' were completely fabricated....and the fabrication was not done through lies but by telling one part of the story.....and that fabrication was also made possible by us not asking too many question. 




During my studies i learnt few things that completely changed my understanding of Hindu Muslim history
  1. If one looks at history till the coming of British more Buddhist and Hindu temples have been destroyed by insiders (Hindus and Dalits) then the destruction done by Muslims. Large temples were looked at as storehouse of wealth and the pride of the king...so as a principle kings who own battles plundered temples or monasteries....or sometimes after the death of the king or after he becomes weak Dalits have plundered Hindu temples in acts of militant political resistance against the Bramhins. 
  2. What we know and celebrate as the Indian Hindu culture today is a result of direct patronage by Muslim kings...from Tulsidas's Ramayana and the Hanuman Chalisa to nearly all the books and music we cherish has developed after 1100 AD in Muslim ruled North India, often under the direct patronage of Muslim kings...almost all the support of translating Sanskrit verses to Bengali Guajarati, Hindi and Urdu...and publishing them as books happned under Muslim patronage.  The spread of Jainism in India was made possible by Akbar. We just read one line in history books that Akbar was a patron of Jainism...but we are never told to what degree he supported the religion. Akbar was the first king to have a 'all India' ban on animal slaughter on the birth anniversary of Tirthankaras. One year one such anniversary fell on bakri id...Akbar ruled that law was law and so no animal sacrifices would happen.The Muslim were so angry that there were riots!!!
  3. More than 50% soldiers of Prithwiraj chahan's army were Muslims and more than 70% soldiers of the invading Mulsim king’s army was Hindu...Babar was invited into India by Hindu kings. Could never understand why our so called neutral school history books hide these stories and by doing that they do they make it sound communal?
  4. it was the eurpeans not hindus who had a historic problem with the muslims..and for 400 years before coming to india, these europeans have been fighting muslims in the middle east (israle, palestine turkey iran iraq ) in the long war known as Crusades. when they came into india they came in with the cultural baggage and started supporting hindus against muslims. 
  5. when the british came in the muslims were the strongest political class..this along with the crusades lead to Britishers framing policies that went against the muslims...and also they actively recruited more hindus to work under them....western education became the norm to get jobs and in school all the kids read books written by the british...slowly generations of hindus and muslims grew up looking at each other increasingly in a communal manner. since the mainsteam history was only one sided, the muslims began slowly  to belive the history told by the mosque to be their true history. the hidus were very comfortable with the history the britishers taught them...it gave them a sense of victimhood...and made them feel that now 'your time has come to rise and shine' . 
  6. Traditionally islam in india has been resistant to maulabis and mosques and has spread more through sufi saints and dargas..and it is only after independence that slowly this is becoming reverse. 
  7. the partition brought out the worst communal nightmares and since then Pakistan and India were formed. Pakistan declared itself to be Islamic ..India chose to be secular...but the idea of secularism it was learning and practicing was the British idea...with the British gone...and Hindus ruling India again ..we did not rethink how silently carrying on with British polices and history will disturb the culture of secularism...by then our commonsense was so formed ...we had grown up understanding history in such a communal way...so much latent inter community distrust and anger.This inability to inculturise secularism is hurting many post colonial nation states. 
  8. from the 70's on congress stared playing votebank politics they never did anything for the befit of muslims...but they supported all the bad cultures within islam...from propeerty to education to marriage as a nation we went on passing laws pushing the hindus towards being modern and contemporary...but in the game of pleasing them...congress made the muslims completely backward. 
  9. the combined wave of Arab/Pakistani sponsored terrorism and RSS lead saffronistion (the sponsors and producers of both Ramayana and Mahabharata are businessmen with close bjp/rss connection and the ayodha temple movement was a rss master-plan) completely began to sandwich both the hindu and muslim moderate voice...slowly.
  10. the babri masjid controversy fully exposed how even normal middle class educated hindus had become narrow and communal. people easly made up their minds that babri masjid should be destroyed. they completely forgot that that is not how historical corrections are done. that way we will have to vacate our cities cause originally farmers used to stay there and have been sometimes violently displaced. before the babri masjid ramayan mahabhata wave...bjp used to always win 2-10 seats . the wave saw them jump to 82 in one election. it was actually a 80 seat jump just based one one large saffron wave. around this time they quickly judged that one can encash this congress created situation....muslims are unhappy and backward...hindus are not happy thinking congress in doing vote-bank politics and supporting muslims. 
  11. i used to stay in gandhinagar and just outside my house some late nights or early mornings there would be rss meets..apart of singing and exercise...and other stuff...there used to be be a section....what is the state of hindus...and what should hindus do? to my ears it sounded exactly like a hindu version of madrasa history. 
all these lessons gathered and made me realise that for India to be a sustainable culture we have to slowly rethink our commonsense and maybe the first step is by not justifying one position and justifying the others position..slowly creating space for the other to justify your position

i might not show it but i am a deeply patriotic man who is very proud of the culture of our land...love the country like my mother and i can fight with her if i am feeling that she is doing something wrong. 
also feel that we have really opened up a very disturbing window for radical islam to spread in india. 
What i dont like about the bjp is that having seen the crisis created by the congress they do not want to solve or address it...instead they are trying their best to be naughty...to play with the problem and gain by creating more mischief. 

As at the etichical level one can never forgive riots...but a politicaly cornered me, can forgive Modi after the Gujarat riots. every politician is a cold blooded murderer and Modi just encased upon a already communal Gujarat. i have now lived in many cities and it is only in Gujarat and in Bombay that which religion, which caste questions are asked so much. after marring into a Gujarati family even some friends hailing originally from other states went through a change. in bengal bihar assam we always say bengali, bihari, asames..and call call people by their culture...They have now started saying he is a Gujarati and he is a Muslim. ...this othering is increasing in Gujarat ..not going away...and it has become a part of commonsense...so any good politician will use it. 

what i am uncomfortable with the bjp is that the party silently creates and nurtures this commonsense...that little othering is there in all of us...but whether it is played up or played down by the leaders make a lot of difference . 

it has been 12 years since Gujarat riots..it is so easy for me to hold no grouse ... my opposition against Modi since the riots has been more of his development model then of anything else...in this 12 years the quality of government funded health care and education has gone very low in Gujarat...government electricity supply  has not become better at all.Only the privatized networks get little expensive but continuous electricity...Gujarat was already a prosperous state with good roads and hard working businessmen...also he as a style of working which is appealing in a leader...projects himself to be dictatorial  efficient...things that we as a nation need. but that alone is not enough...efficient at doing what is also a question. i first began to have doubts when he began to say that he will implement the Gujarat model in India. 

anyone with little understanding of the country and economics will know that laborer, working class,farmer, businessman ratio is very different in Gujarat compared to any other major state...in Gujarat there is hardly any opposition party.....and the funny part is in a 15-17 posts cabinet modi himself holds all the important portfolios...such style of working will not work. infact i always tell my pro bjp fiends if modi comes to power what will be the ministry!

but that really sent alarm bells ringing that Modi's first decision after being chosen as bjp's PM candidate was to nominate Amit Shah as campaign head of Uttarpradesh! believe me it was his first decision... even if one forgives Modi for 2002 one cannot forgive Amit Shah the chief mastermind. one knew amit shah was been sent to uttarpradesh to polarise it and spread trouble cause without at-least 40 seats from UP there was no hope. Sure enough within a month there was riots in muzaffarabad in western UP a key Bjp target area. 'Google why did modi send amit shah to up'

the last 10 years of the congress has been very bad for the country's middle class and the poor ...Modi is offering no new policies but saying will do same things more efficiently! that itself is also chilling. 

i don't think congress deserves a vote at all...in fact for me it is a slap on my face that congress and bjp are the only options...one party selectively communal another partly compulsively communal...both funded by corporates to further their interests.....looking at Manmohan as a good economist who likes american style pro corporate policies they funded the congress....finding him inefficient they are funding Modi. 

all news papers and tv channels are owned by them !
Map of Early growth of Islamic Kingdoms in India 

and you know how much we don't think!
we were always told that Muslims came from outside...we were also told that they were Mohammed of Ghor and Muhammad of Gazni ....we never even asked where Ghor and Gazni are...both of them are in Afghanistan re...very much a part of pre British north India...Afghanistan was known as Gandhar...in Mahabharata we also have a gandhari (queen from gandhar desh)....so now it seems history of muslim invasion as history books tell us is not invasion at all!..kings from our land only fighting other kings...
we just do not ask basic questions